Avery's Mission, page 6
‘Did you find a tolerable hotel?’ I asked.
‘Quite decent.’ He searched for some commendatory remark. ‘Close to the railway station,’ he added.
I was conscious that a certain reticence was marking our exchanges. But I had established myself in Avery’s confidence, and it was my duty to take an initiative.
‘You’ve met your father?’ I ventured.
‘Oh, yes.’ Avery’s bright complexion had heightened, and his tone indicated that I could not properly have expected a different reply. He hesitated. ‘He looked in.’
‘He’d heard from your mother?’
‘I don’t know. I didn’t gather. I telephoned. Numerals are easy. And there was somebody very polite at the exchange.’ He had offered this information a shade spasmodically. ‘But it’s all right,’ he said suddenly. ‘I’m to move up there – to the Villa Buontalenti – in a few days’ time.’
‘Then we shall be quite near neighbours.’
‘Yes, I know. And my father said he’d written to you. He was very polite too.’
‘I look forward to meeting him.’ I hoped I hadn’t betrayed a sense that Avery’s last scrap of information sounded a little odd. ‘And, meanwhile, you can look around?’
‘That’s it. He said he knew I must have been looking forward to Florence tremendously. Of course that’s right. And that my first impressions mustn’t be complicated by mere family affairs. He’s very much an artist, really.’ Avery paused. ‘I suppose.’
The artistic soul of Jethro Brenton seemed to me as yet insecurely demonstrated, so I held my peace. And Avery, relieved at having got thus far in bringing me up to date, applied himself with renewed satisfaction to his polpettone alla fiorentina. He was also having unabashed if temperate recourse to the flask of wine between us. Whatever his anxieties, he was extracting something from the sense of growing up.
‘But of course,’ he said, ‘he’s a man of the world as well. And one has to be realistic. I’m glad I didn’t go straight up there and burst in on him. It mightn’t have been convenient. I mean, there may be a woman, don’t you think? And there are things he might want to arrange a little differently before being visited by a son. Not that a son’s like a daughter. A man can face these things straight, after all.’
I remembered that this possibility had cropped up in our conversation in the aeroplane, and that Avery had there said something about ‘low women’. I wondered whether between these and a mistress he drew some sort of moral line – and, if so, on which side he judged the worse licence to lie. But I felt it desirable to get away from this topic, since in the event of such conjectures proving to be without any relation to fact there would be embarrassment in remembering our having canvassed them.
‘Did your father,’ I asked prosaically, ‘suggest any particularly good things you should go and see?’
‘He told me not to start with the Uffizi, but to try the Carmine. I don’t know about that. Has it something to do with opera?’
‘It’s a church on the other side of the Arno, and not a particularly striking one. But your father’s right, as of course he would be. In one of its chapels there are frescos by Masaccio and Masolino which gave a start to the whole thing. To the great age of Florentine painting, I mean. Indeed, to Italian painting as a whole. So if you want to interest yourself in pictures, it’s a good place to begin.’
‘I see.’ Avery made a movement towards his guide-book, but refrained. ‘Is it mostly Madonnas and Children?’ he asked cautiously.
‘No, it’s Apostles – and chiefly Saint Peter. One thing and another that he and the others did.’
‘The Acts of the Apostles.’ Achieving this identification encouraged Avery. ‘I must remember that. Perhaps, sir, we could go there together one day? I mean, when you have nothing better to do.’
‘An excellent idea.’ I wondered whether Jethro Brenton’s endeavours after the aesthetic education of his son would be confined to directions to look at this and that, or whether they would take more companionable form. One couldn’t confidently say that he would have an apt pupil. But, of course, one never knew. Avery, once coaxed into the Brancacci Chapel, might find Masaccio knocking him for six. Stranger conversions have occurred. What one did know was that, in acquiescing in his mother’s plan for this Florentine journey, Avery had harboured no secret motive of his own which could be classed as of the cultural order. His next remark revealed, nevertheless, that he had at least been working dutifully through his guide-book.
‘You’ll be wanting to get back to your library,’ he said. ‘And I’ve put down the doors of the Battistero for this afternoon.’ Avery felt that the prominent monuments of Florence should be referred to under their Italian forms. ‘I don’t suppose they’ll take me long. But at least they’re in the open air.’
‘You prefer that to interiors?’
‘Well, the churches and places are a bit dark, wouldn’t you say? And they smell of incest.’
‘I suppose they do, rather.’ I hoped I showed no surprise at this horrifying announcement. ‘The Missal of the Roman Church enjoins incensation on a good many occasions. I’m not sure I haven’t developed a taste for it. But what are you going to do during the rest of the afternoon?’
‘I can walk about.’ Avery produced this resource promptly. ‘It’s enormous fun, really – although, of course, one wouldn’t want to do it for long. You see some very odd things. Do you know that, in one of the streets near the Duomo, there’s a shop that’s just called Snob? And, next door to that, there’s something that’s just called Hair House. In English, I mean. I wondered if it was a brothel.’
‘Yes, I see.’ I had been puzzled by this until I realised that Avery, stimulated by his Chianti, had achieved a bizarre and venturesome pun on Whore House. There peeped out of this, I told myself, thoughts not likely to be absent from the minds of normally constituted young Englishmen on their travels.
‘This morning I walked up to a place called the Belvedere. I was really looking for the house of Galileo, the man who discovered the moon—’
‘Or successfully spied on it,’ I said, ‘with what Milton calls his optick glass.’ Avery, I saw, was capable of spirited inaccuracies which must have militated against any notable success in pursuing what is whimsically called the General Certificate of Education. ‘Did you read the inscription?’
‘Yes – and it’s splendidly comical. One of that Medici crowd saying that he hadn’t judged it infra dig. to drop in and pay homage to genius. About the man who’d discovered the moon! Spied on it, I mean.’
‘It’s pompous, I agree.’ Whatever Galileo had precisely done or not done, there was nothing wrong with Avery’s general sense of values. ‘But the Belvedere is distinctly dreary, didn’t you think?’
‘Well, yes. It turned out to be an enormous fortress, with only one way out of it. But it seems to be where people go to make love. There’s a lot of grass, you see, and no policemen to tell you to get up and move on. Which makes it rather nice.’
‘Yes, of course.’ In Avery Brenton with his inhibitions slightly loosened up I saw nothing that wasn’t as it should be.
‘For that matter, I think people must be allowed to sleep rough there, too. Young people, students, hiking around, that is. There are a lot of little blind alleys and hide-outs, which may have been powder magazines, or something of that kind. And people have chalked up names and initials and things in them.’ Avery fumbled in a pocket. ‘As a matter of fact, I wrote one of them down.’ He had produced a crumpled scrap of paper, which he proceeded to smooth out on the table-cloth. ‘It wasn’t in Italian,’ he added apologetically, ‘but in French. And here it is. Listen. Ici j’ai vécu heureux mais le monde nous a separés. Patrick Blanche. Is Patrick a French name?’
‘Patrice is. But perhaps the writer had an Irish mother.’
‘It’s silly, I suppose. But it seemed a bit touching – just come on like that.’
I saw that Avery had made this sentimental graffito the occasion of some romantic reverie. Perhaps he felt that he himself had been separated by the world from the young woman who had got to Oxford before him. In any case, it would be prudent to bring our lunch to an end before Avery became more talkative than he might afterwards care to remember. So I paid up, and we left the restaurant.
‘That was marvellous,’ Avery said correctly. ‘Thank you very much. And I hope you’ll lunch with me one day, sir. I expect I’ll be down in Florence quite a lot.’
And on this brisk note – which implied that he was seeing his Italian sojourn as stretching some way ahead of him – Avery and I parted. I had no doubt that when he got to the Baptistry he would apply himself to the endless minikin labours of Andrea Pisano and Ghiberti as pertinaciously as I should presently be doing to the codex I was currently involved with in the Laurentian.
But as I made my way down the Via de’ Pucci it was the Brentons who were still in my head – and chiefly the Brenton I had not yet set eyes on, but whom I had so confidently crowned with that circular Panama. What was he up to – and was the young ambassador going to find his father, quite as much as his mother, tremendously ‘deep’? It wasn’t necessary to suppose so. Jethro Brenton appeared to be engaged in a fending-off operation which didn’t much suggest one in command of a situation. And the thought didn’t escape me that his deferring substantial encounter with his son was to have the consequence of his holding a prior confabulation with myself. An elaborate sense of courtesy and a predilection for making signs were perhaps not the sole occasions of the visit of ceremony I was to receive that evening. Jethro probably knew that his former wife had turned up at Anglebury from time to time, and he might be overestimating the degree of my acquaintanceship with her. He might even suspect that Avery’s travelling out with me had not been fortuitous, and that I was in fact implicated in some design. It was likely that designs came readily to his mind whenever Fernanda Brenton loomed on his horizon.
Perhaps he was in a panic. In any event, he was going to have a look at me. It was absurd to find this disturbing. But when I got back to San Lorenzo I composed myself by climbing once more the famous staircase, austere still but yet complicated and incipiently Baroque, and taking a look at Virgil as the fourth and fifth centuries had known him. And then I went and settled down to my book.
III
I had been wrong – for a start – about the hat. For what, at a good pace, gently bobbing in and out of sight above the ragged magnolia hedge, came winding down the Serena’s drive was a grey Homburg bound with a grey ribbon: the sort of headgear, it occurred to me, that Sigmund Freud and other savants of his generation had affected upon formal occasions. Nor was the wearer, presently revealed in full length, attired in white linen, threadbare or not. In deference to the evening hour – although it was far from chilly – he had assumed what used to be called a dust-coat, and beneath this was an unremarkable dark suit. Instead of the silver-mounted cane of my imagination he was equipped with a stout and unadorned walking-stick such as any English country gentleman might carry round with him upon his rural occasions.
I made my way up the drive to meet Jethro Brenton, and he offered no pretence of being uncertain of my identity.
‘How do you do?’ he said. ‘It’s good of you to let me call. I say, what a nice boy Avery is! A credit to Anglebury and his mother.’
The man who made me this unexceptionable speech was tall and upright, a well preserved fifty or thereabout, and quite strikingly handsome. I could see not the faintest resemblance to his son. The pallor of his complexion – a perfectly healthy pallor – was set off, and somehow rendered the more distinguished, by a carefully trimmed dark beard. He had a finely modelled aquiline nose, and grey eyes which were both deep-set and spaced far apart. It was possible, I thought, that his hat was the colour it was because his eyes were the colour they were – but in fact there was nothing about him to suggest such finical expedients. As he had swept off his hat upon greeting me – a permissible English gesture, but effected with an amplitude which was his sole present hint of habits continentally coloured – I saw that his appearance admitted one sign of age in a hair-line that had receded far towards the crown of his head. But as the brow and cranium thus exposed had the dome-like configuration conventionally associated with marked intellectual endowment this didn’t at all diminish the general impressiveness of his person.
I said something civil about his call and about Avery, and he fell into step by my side.
‘You do very well to put up here,’ he said, ‘and not in that showy place above. Galbiani knows his job.’
‘That’s certainly so. I’ve been putting up here for years, as a matter of fact.’
‘Then how foolish that we haven’t made each other’s acquaintance before.’ Brenton offered this without effusiveness, so that I began to feel a kind of credibility gap between the man I was meeting and the man who had penned me that pompous letter. ‘But, even so, scarcely so foolish as my not having met my own son since he was a child. You know, Bannerman, divorces are the very devil. But I don’t need to tell a headmaster that.’
The instinctive Englishness of that immediate ‘Bannerman’ impressed me, and I began to wonder whether I was going to take to Jethro Brenton, after all. Moreover after this bare word on his family situation he turned to polite enquiries about my work. From some source I couldn’t guess at he had got hold of its general orientation, and he pursued the theme for a little with an easy command of the way scholars on a first acquaintance get along together. We walked round the side of the massive villa – the Serena offers a profusion of heavily shaded paths, diversified by abandoned little fountains, mouldering statues, and uncomfortable stone benches – and sat down on the broad terrace overlooking the city. When I found myself presently remarking that I was going to challenge Signor Galbiani to open his cupboard and produce us a drink I realised how much – if provisionally – my attitude to Brenton had changed. I had in fact (although it sounds absurd) given preliminary thought to this matter of entertainment, and had decided that, on a formal call which had pretty well intimated itself as intended to last for ten minutes, it would be out of order to offer anything more substantial than receptive remarks. As it was, I sought out my host without more ado. It was with unusual speed that a bottle of red Cinzano was placed before us by a silently obliging lad called Gino.
‘I believe they all come from a village near Arezzo,’ my visitor said, his eye following Gino as he departed. ‘Galbiani’s staff, I mean. My own people come from farther afield: the Abruzzi.’ This sounded rather grand, but it was information offered unaffectedly. And Brenton added at once, ‘You’ll find the Buontalenti a pretty simple place. But perhaps we don’t do an unassuming cucina toscana too badly. And I have – see how I begin to boast – a little Castelnuovo Berardenga you won’t judge undrinkable.’
The hospitable implication of this was offered with a lightness of air that saved it from sounding precipitate. I poured the undistinguished stuff between us with proper humility, and reflected that Jethro Brenton, who had once written novels and had named his son out of a novel by somebody else, was a shade like something out of a novel himself. A rather elaborate Edwardian novel, it would be. But my own instincts are old-fashioned; I don’t readily rate a man too ‘civilised’ (as the young express it); and I continued to suspend judgement in face of the exhibition before me.
‘I’ve had only a glimpse of Avery, so far. It’s tough on a boy, being pitched at a missing parent, and I thought it might be a good idea that he should run around Florence for a day or two. It’s dull up here. And I’m most damnably preoccupied with my work.’
‘He looks forward to joining you.’ I hadn’t failed to mark that ‘pitched’. It might be counted, at least, for frankness.
‘We’ll get to know each other by degrees. And I can find somebody of his own age as an occasional companion.’
‘Avery has picked up a little Italian. I think he must have worked hard at it.’
‘He has some Italian?’ It was evident that this was news to Avery’s father, so I had to conclude that the boy had kept mum about it at that brief first interview. ‘I’d have supposed that, at school, languages weren’t much his thing.’
‘I don’t think they were.’
‘Has he ever been to Italy before?’
‘No, never.’
There was a silence, as if Brenton saw some occasion for trying to fit these facts together.
‘Do you think,’ he asked presently, ‘that Avery—well, sets store by coming out here?’
‘I think he sets store by coming out to you.’
‘I see.’
I had a momentary perception (if it was that) that Brenton precisely didn’t see. Then he asked another question.
‘Because of his mother’s wish?’
‘Avery is very loyal to his mother. But I don’t think that by any means covers it.’
‘Doesn’t cover it?’ It was almost as if the man before me had turned stupid – or, if not stupid, alarmed. I had wondered, earlier that day, if Jethro Brenton was conceivably in a panic. I wondered now whether the robustness of the man – for he had presence and a poise that struck one at a first glance – went very deep. But now he made a gesture as if to brush away the question he had just asked. ‘I must be attentive to him,’ he said. ‘He may be good for me, after all, if he has the effect of taking my nose a little out of my corpus.’ He glanced at me and smiled, perceiving that this might have sounded a bizarre remark. ‘I’ve been at the corpus for years, you know; and nowadays that sort of labour can no longer be a one-man job. Or so some of my kind friends tell me from time to time. It all comes to one, does it not – the little progress that one does make – so much by the flicker of one’s mortal taper? And one does so want to get it achieved – to get it done and be done with. Finis coronat opus.’’
This speech might have struck me rather as Brenton’s letter had: with some effect of posture, or the putting on of a turn. But it wasn’t so. I had, on the contrary, the feeling that, for a moment, I had been close to the real man. I found myself, however, without any rejoinder to offer, and I contented myself with refilling his glass.
