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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781495640148 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 396 |
| File size: | 930 KB |
About the Author
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CHAPTER 1
At thirty-five, Maxwell Mather counted himself a fortunate man. His health was excellent. His body was trim, his looks still unravaged. His bank balance was comfortably in credit. A prolonged sojourn with folk richer than himself had taught him frugality and given him a certain skill in the management of money. He had a modest reputation as a scholar, both in the study of ancient manuscripts and in the history of European painting. He had a generous patroness who lodged him in discreet luxury in an antique tower which was a dependency of her villa. He had an occupation which taxed him not at all: custodian and conservator of the Palombini archive; thousands of books, folios and bundles of yellowing files, stored tier on tier in the cavernous vaults which had once been the stables and the armoury of the household guard.
In the beginning the place had been called 'Torre Merlata', because it was built as a watch-tower with battlements and embrasures for bowmen and cannoneers. Over the centuries the words had been shortened and softened to 'Tor Merla' — Blackbird Tower.
The name was apt, because there was a big chestnut tree in the courtyard where singing birds nested — safe from the cold mountain winds, sheltered from the parching heats of Tuscan summer. In the mornings Pia Palombini would ride up in the electric inclinator from the villa below and settle herself on a chaise-longue in a sunny angle, whence she could watch him while he worked and share the tales recorded in the frayed yellow pages — the lawsuits and lecheries, cabals and conspiracies of the high families of Florence, the Palombini among them.
In the evening he would dine at the villa, in the vaulted refectory where the pine logs blazed in the great fireplace under the carved escutcheon of the Palombini ... 'on a ground azure, a cross gules, quartered with doves volant'. Afterwards, when the servants were dismissed, they would make love in the big letto matrimonio with its brocaded drapes and golden tassels and its long history of passionate encounters. Sometimes, without warning, Pia would tire of the pastoral rhythm of their days and whirl him away to Venice, to Paris, to London or Madrid, to shop extravagantly and entertain lavishly.
It was an agreeable existence, which Mather accepted without guilt and without question. He was good-tempered and good-looking, potent in bed, a well-mannered escort, an intelligent talker, an acceptable guest at any party. He fitted perfectly into the historic role of damigello — the squire, the scholar in residence, who earned his keep and kept his place, and posed no threat to the heirs because milady might love him but would never marry him.
Then one fine spring day Pia, who had been feeling poorly, went to consult her physician in Florence. He sent her to Milan immediately for extended clinical tests. The verdict was unanimous: motor neurone disease, a wasting and atrophying malady of the nervous system. There was no cure. The prognosis was emphatically negative. All that was in doubt was whether the end would be swift or slow in coming.
Either way the progress of the disease would be inexorable: a wasting of muscles and tissue, a steady failure of the nervous system, an increasing risk that the patient might suffocate or choke to death.
When Pia told Mather the news, she asked him bluntly whether he wanted to stay or go. He said he would stay. When she asked him why, he managed the most graceful lie of his life and told her that he loved her. She kissed him, burst into tears and hurried from the room.
That night he had a macabre dream in which he lay shackled to a corpse in the old four-poster bed. When he woke, sweating and terrified, his first impulse was to pack his bags and flee. Then he knew that he could never live with the shame of such a desertion. Indolence and self-interest added strength to the conviction. He was living in a hot-house. Why step out into the winter cold? Pia was lavish in her demonstrations of gratitude. It was not too hard to offer her the simple decencies of tenderness and compassion.
At mealtimes he sat next to her, instant to help if she had a choking fit, dropped a fork or became breathless. As the spasms became more frequent and the wasting more apparent, he would bathe and dress her, walk her in her wheelchair, read to her until she dozed off by the fireside. The women of the household, who at first had called him milady's lapdog, now gossiped his praises. Even Matteo the major-domo, crusty and ill-tempered, began calling him 'professore' and telling his cronies in the wine-shop that this was a man of heart and honour.
Pia herself responded with the desperate affection of a woman seeing her beauty ravaged, her passion numbed, her life reduced to borrowed months. She gave Mather expensive gifts: a Tompion watch which had belonged to her English grandfather, a signet ring of the sixteenth century with the arms of the Palombini engraved on an emerald, a set of cufflinks and dress-studs made by Buccellati. Each gift was accompanied by a note in her once-bold hand which now was becoming shaky and uncertain: 'To my dearest Max, my scholar in residence whose home-place is my heart ... Pia.' 'To Max, through whom I will continue to live and love ... Pia.' The notes were all dated by feasts — Ferragosto, Easter, Pia's name day, his own birthday. He kept the notes, squirrelling them away with other mementoes. Of the gifts themselves he protested to Pia.
'They're too many — and too precious! They put me in a false position. Look. You pay me generously. But I do work. I'm not a kept man; I don't want to be. When I came here the Palombini archive was a shameful mess. Now it's beginning to look respectable. Given time, I can make it something the family can be proud of. It's one way I can pay back some of the debt I owe you ... You're not angry with me, are you?'
Angry? How could she be angry? All he had done was provoke her to new expressions of attachment. There were days when she could not bear to have him out of her sight. There were nights when she begged him to take her to bed — not for sex but for simple comfort, like an ailing child. Then when he held her in his arms she would become petulant and tearful because he was not stirred as he used to be.
At weekends, mercifully, he was free. Pia's family came visiting — uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces, in-laws of every degree. They came to pay respect, show solicitude and make sure their names, deeds and kinship were remembered in her will. They had disapproved of Pia's scandalous follies, but now that the sexual association with Mather was clearly ended they were prepared to accept him as a family retainer, like a physician or a confessor. They approved the geography of the thing, whereby she kept to the villa and he was relegated to celibacy and solitude in the Tor Merla.
In fact, his weekends were neither celibate nor solitary. He had acquired a girl-friend in Florence, Anne-Marie Loredon, a leggy blonde from New York — daughter of a senior auctioneer at Christie's — who was studying in Italy under an endowment from the Belle Arti. She was lodged, expensively for a student, in a roof-top apartment behind the Pergola Theatre. They had met over drinks at Harry's Bar, found each other agreeable, spent a night together, found that agreeable too and — presto! — struck a bargain. Mather would install himself as weekend lodger and pay his bill with wine, food and scholarly instruction in the arts. The sex, they both agreed, was a bonus — no strings, no price-tag, no questions.
The arrangement worked well; they were a pair of acknowledged egotists openly using each other. At the end of her studies Anne-Marie would become a dealer and an auctioneer like her father. For the present, she had a good-looking escort and an entry into the folk world of Florence — the old craft families of sculptors, brassfounders, workers in stone, wood and leather, the painters, engravers and potters.
Mather for his part was offered safe sex, a base in the city, a message centre and a legitimate identity amongst his peers. With Anne-Marie he could shrug off the griefs of the Palombini household; with the Florentines he could present himself as a working scholar, librarian and archivist to a noble family. This identity would soon become vitally important to him. His patroness was dying; he would be forced to find a new place in the academic world.
So he chose his Florentine friends carefully. First among them was the Custodian of Autographs at the National Library, a white-haired savant who looked like Toscanini. To him, Mather paid special deference. Every Saturday he would bring an item or two from the Palombini collection and discuss its significance and its value with the old man, who had an affectionate regard for his younger disciple.
In the arts, his closest friend was Niccoló Tolentino, a small, gnomish man with a hump on his spine and a wonderful limpid smile. He was Neapolitan-born and had served a youthful apprenticeship to a fashionable artist who lived in Sorrento. Now he was the senior restorer at the Pitti and reputed to be one of the great copyists and restorers in the business. To him Mather brought one panel of a badly defaced triptych of the Dormition of the Virgin and asked him to restore it as a birthday gift for Pia. The little man turned in a beautiful imitation of Duccio — all gold leaf and heavenly blue. Mather was delighted and paid him instantly in cash. Tolentino responded by inviting him to dinner and regaling him with hair-raising stories of fakes and forgeries and the shadowy millionaires of Greece and Brazil and Switzerland who commissioned the theft of masterpieces and their illegal export.
Meanwhile, with Anne-Marie, he paid court to the senior scholars and connoisseurs of the town. They made assiduous rounds of the galleries. Mather let it be known that he was working on a small monograph: 'Domestic Economics in Florence at the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century'. This would be based on one of the less spectacular items in the Palombini archive — a set of account books kept by the steward of the villa from 1500 to 1510. These recorded sales and purchases of every conceivable item: wine, oil, cloth, cordage, tallow, livestock, furnishings, harness and ornaments for the horses. They were also the volumes which he displayed most frequently to the Custodian of Autographs, seeking his interpretation of archaic names and unfamiliar abbreviations. The nature of the task he had set himself matched perfectly with the image of the comfortable well-subsidised scholar, content to paddle quietly down a never-ending stream of historic trifles.
His liberty ended at eight o'clock on Sunday evening. Pia would be waiting for him, tired and fretful after the siege of relatives. He would share supper with her — tea and English-style sandwiches. She would expect a chatty little account of his weekend adventures and encounters, which had to be reasonably accurate because, in her more desperate moments, she was quite capable of checking the details through informants in the city. A family which had carried the gonfalon of the Medici was still a name to conjure with in Florence.
She knew that he lodged with Anne-Marie Loredon; she didn't like the idea, but accepted the fiction that Anne-Marie's father was an old friend and Mather had no sexual interest in the girl, nor she in him. Pia would not believe that he lived a sexless life, so he told her that he took his pleasures in a well-known and exclusive house of appointment, where the sex was clean but a whole world away from the passionate and selfless love he bore for Pia Palombini. Since there was no rival to shame her, she shrugged this off as a necessary indulgence. Sometimes she made him share the fun by telling her scabrous little stories of bordello life and practice. She would keep him talking until nearly midnight and then he would carry her to bed, settle her amongst the pillows and walk wearily to the tower, black and menacing against the night sky.
Once inside there was no need to lie any more. He was alone with what he was — a half-good scholar, a lazy, venal man working out his bond service to a dying lover and wondering how the hell he was going to organise the rest of his life.
Meantime, day by painful day, Pia Palombini declined towards death. She was still lucid, but the choking spasms and respiratory blocks were becoming more frequent. She was losing weight rapidly and when he took her in his arms she was fragile as a Dresden doll. Mather now insisted that the family arrange for her to be attended by a day and a night nurse and for her physician to make a daily visit. He hated to see her suffer, hated more to see her humiliated by her illness. He dredged up comfort for her from the most unlikely corners of his nature. When she pleaded with him to end her misery, he was tempted to it more strongly than he would ever have thought possible. He even went so far as to raise the question with her physician, who fixed him with a shrewd but sympathetic eye and warned him, 'This is not Holland, Mr Mather; we have much more Christianity and much less compassion in our law. So put any thought of mercy killing out of your mind. It would release her; it would put you and me in prison. Lend her your love a little longer. One day soon she will simply stop breathing.'
Which was exactly how it happened: one cold winter evening, while the night nurse was knitting at the fireside and he was seated on the settee cradling Pia in his arms, she reached up a tiny clawed hand to touch his cheek. Then, as if the effort were too much, she gave a small sigh of weariness, turned her face to his breast and died. He carried her upstairs, watched the nurse settle her decently in the bed, called the doctor and the family and the parish priest and then sat by the dying fire, lonelier than he had ever felt in his life. He had escaped her at last, as he had so long wished to do. The real irony was that she had escaped him . She had been the focus of his life for so long that now there was nowhere to look except inwards at the fragmented image of himself.
At the funeral he tried to spare the family embarrassment by joining the group of villa staff; but when the coffin had been carried into the vault and the bronze doors were closed and locked, he found himself weeping uncontrollably. Then he felt a protecting arm clasped around his shoulders and heard old Matteo's voice crooning a litany of comfort.
'There now, professore! You must be happy for her. She has no more pain. She is beautiful again. She wants you to remember her like that.' All of which was easy to believe. What he could not understand was the black desolation inside himself. When he had told her months before that he loved her, it was with the conventional reservation that had always attached itself to their relationship. They were in love, they were acknowledged lovers, they were everything else in the dictionary of the act. But love itself was experienced only in agony, in terrible wrenching at the heart-strings.
Back at the villa, he paid ritual respect to all the members of the family and then, as soon as decency permitted, returned to Tor Merla, poured himself a large brandy and sat in the courtyard, watching the small chill wind stirring the first autumn leaves. There, an hour later, he was visited by Claudio Palombini, the nephew who was the nominated executor of Pia's will. He was a cool-eyed, handsome Florentine who doled out words as carefully as if they were golden florins. He handed Mather a copy of Pia's will — a holograph document in the Italian style.
Then he announced gravely, 'It seems, Mr Mather, that you have more need of sympathy than my aunt's family.'
'I feel ...' Max Mather pieced out the phrases very slowly, 'I feel as though I am locked in the vault and Pia has flown away.'
Claudio poured himself a brandy and perched on the edge of the rustic table. He offered a formal apology.
'I confess, Mr Mather, that I have come reluctantly to admire you. You made my Aunt Pia very happy. You nursed her with a devotion few husbands would have displayed. We are all most grateful to you.'
Mather digested the compliment in silence and then told him coolly, 'You owe me no thanks. I loved your aunt. I shall miss her very much.'
'You know that she has made provision for you in her will?'
'I was not aware of it.'
'You receive two years' salary, you keep the automobile and any personal gifts. You have your choice of a memento from the archive material on which you have been working. The bequest is reasonable, I believe.'
'It's more than reasonable.' Mather's tone was brusque. 'I have been generously paid; I expected no other rewards.'
'It would please me — and help me greatly — if you would consider staying here to continue your work on the archive.'
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Masterclass"
by .
Copyright © 1988 The Morris West Collection.
Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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