Anathema! Away with them, and leave the world clearer for Carteret standards to prevail. In the provincial city of Venice (though she did not regard it as such) it was easier to make her considerable weight felt than in the capitals of Europe. So when a well-known couple, whose relationship was irregular, but who had a letter of introduction to her, asked what day would be convenient to call, she replied ‘No day would be convenient.’
Snubs to you, and snubs all round, except to a few individuals who satisfied Mrs. Carteret’s exacting conception of what is comme il faut, and even they were liable to fall from grace. I remember an instance. A friend who had every qualification for enjoying Mrs. Carteret’s esteem appeared at dinner in a slightly décolleté dress (it wouldn’t have seemed so now) and Mrs. Carteret, a storm on the rugged terrain of her features, rose and asked the guest to put on a shawl. She was not received again, even if she had wanted to be.
Receive, receive!
She herself had been received first into the Jewish Church, then into the Anglican Church, then into the Roman Catholic Church. What a number of receptions, each inflating her ego. No more receptions were in sight, except from the Pope.
Meanwhile her rôle was to make reception, as far as she was concerned, a stumbling-block.
‘Procul O procul este, profani!’
The profane vulgar must be kept away, they would never climb the heights, or go through the initiations, that she had.
She rose to her feet, a rather formidable escalation, very unlike Venus rising from the waves, and supported by her husband’s fragile arm, said, ‘We will have coffee in the drawing-room.’
The drawing-room was well worth waiting for; it was the most beautiful room in the house and some might have said the most beautiful room in Venice. It stretched the whole breadth of the building and looked out, on one side, on the long crescent curve of the Fondamenta Nuove, with the slender campanile of San Francesco della Vigna dividing it; and on the other side, the Laguna Morta, with the sad but exquisite cemetery of San Michele, and Murano and Burrano somewhere behind it.
‘You mustn’t let your coffee get cold,’ Mrs. Carteret would say as her guests pressed their noses against the windows.
Thereupon they turned back into the room itself, which was painted or stuccoed in an indescribable shade of blue, at once dark and light, the changeful blue of the Italian skies, a perfect background for the tapestries and Chinese screens on the walls.
Sometimes Mrs. Carteret would say, when coffee and liqueurs were over, ‘Would you like to take a stroll in the garden?’ much as God might have said it of Eden, and the guests, already bemused by the heady qualities of the house, would follow her down the few steps that led to the garden, Mrs. Carteret preceding them, with careful footsteps. Dressed in beige, or some light colour with a tinge of pink in it (for in spite of her bulk she preferred light colours) she would lead the way, and someone said of her, a quotation I have never been able to trace, ‘She hath a monstrous beauty, like the hind-quarters of an elephant.’
When we reached the fountain (Sansovino? Palladio?) which was the centre of the garden, she might say,
‘I don’t expect you want to go any further. Further on you can see the usual mixture of sandole and bragozze, fishermen plying their trade. I don’t think they’re very interesting.’ And sometimes she would add, “We have a gardener, but there aren’t many flowers in the garden. Italians are not flower-minded. If you point to a rose and ask them what it is, they will say “É un fiore”—“it’s a flower”—but they don’t get any further than that.’
By then it was clearly time to go, although luncheon in Italy, with its aftermath, drags on for at least two hours before it is polite to leave.
How the Carterets acquired the Palazzo Contarini dal Molo I never knew. It must have been at some time when houses in Venice were cheaper than they are now. Also, it was far off the beaten track; from where I stayed, on the other side of Venice, the sunny side, it needed half an hour on foot or in gondola to get there.
James Carteret, I am sure, espied its possibilities; his was the artist’s eye; and its connection with the Contarini family, to whom it had once belonged, no doubt endeared it to him. The Contarinis, after having seven Doges to their name, against the Mocenigos’ six, were now extinct. Their last surviving member, at a party, claimed the privilege of going in last. ‘All Venice,’ he said, ‘is my house.’
The Carterets were nothing if not snobs—he a genealogical snob, and she a social one. His name had originally been Carter, of an esteemed New England family. He did not think it imposing enough and when he came to Venice he added the ‘et’ that turned it to Carteret, the name of a distinguished English statesman. As time passed he persuaded himself and tried to persuade others that he was collaterally descended from the Carterets, and had only omitted the ‘et’ in deference to New England democratic feeling. The Anglo-American colony, or what remained of it, and some of the Italians, who were in touch with it, made jokes about this—’Carter-et-, et quoi?’ or ‘Carter-et cetera, et cetera.’ His wife, who had been Hannah Filkenstein, followed suit by changing her first name to Anna. This too aroused ribald jokes in the select circles of Venice.
‘My dear, have you taken to dropping your h’s? You mean Hannah, not Anna.’
But none of these pinpricks pierced the Carterets, who were far too secure with their money and the beauty that they had bought and made for themselves, and that lay within and around them, and with the visitors to Venice who came with introductions and were received by Anna Carteret with varying degrees of welcome. I should never have been received in those hallowed precincts, but for my travelling companion, who had an introduction to her and who bore a well-known name, as a result of which a visiting-card inscribed in the most beautiful copper-plate, ‘Mr. James Carteret’, invited us both in an almost illegible handwriting, to lunch. We seemed to pass the test, at least he did, and when after some years he ceased to be a frequent visitor to Venice, Mrs. Carteret did not withdraw her favour (not her favours) from me, except on certain occasions.
I had formed the habit of lunching in my gondola in the lagoon—a picnic lunch—but it was delightful, and being young then, or comparatively young, I hated to forgo it. Mrs. Carteret, being old or comparatively old, much preferred having guests to lunch than to dinner. ‘À mon âge,’ she used to say, for the French language had then the chic which ours has not, ‘I would rather lunch than dine,’ and it is still a grief to me that I would not always fall in with her wishes. What did it matter, sacrificing a lunch on the lagoon by some dreary uninhabited island, when I could have had it with her and her guests (‘no one to speak of’) to the music of the plashing of the Palladio fountain? For she, like me, was fond of lunching out-of-doors, and the food appeared as though by magic still hot from the inside of the house.
But I did not always refuse these invitations to lunch, which were after all most acceptable and accompanied by amenities of company, food and service that I could never have provided for myself. But still I was unwilling to forgo my daily stint on the lagoon, on which I imagined my physical and mental health depended. During these exertions I worked up a tremendous sweat, and having been warned by my mother that it was dangerous to sit (possibly in a draught) in sweat-soaked clothes—when I was bidden to lunch with Mrs. Carteret I used to take a supply of dry garments, and ask if I might change in the gondoliers’ room.
‘But what do you do there?’ she would ask, having given me permission. ‘Wouldn’t you rather go upstairs and be more comfortable in a bathroom?’