The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (4 page)

IN ARCADIA

Jason Willis had never imagined that he resembled Horace Walpole until his agent rang him up. Having looked at a few portraits in the reference books in his local library, he was still not convinced. Perhaps it was something about the jaw line, or the long thin nose that had decided them. Jason examined his photograph in the
Spotlight
actor’s directory, and realised that it was probably little more than a facial expression which had made him their choice. He had put in a picture of himself looking sideways with a half smile on his face. He had intended the smile to be charming in a reticent way, but he could see now that it was sly; and in all his portraits, from youth to extreme old age, Horace Walpole always looked sly.

The BBC History Channel was producing a series of programmes on
18th Century Men of Letters
, a mildly punning title since it featured some of the great letter writers of that epoch. Each hour-long programme featured two contrasting writers—Horace Walpole was to be paired with Lord Chesterfield—and was to consist of a few scholarly talking heads interspersing extracts from the letters recited by actors in costume. The series was intended to be elegant, prestigious and cheap. Jason was an actor in his thirties with a distinguished record at the National and R.S.C., but he was no household name. His agent told him that this television role would ‘really put you on the map’. Jason, who had long ago stopped believing in his agent’s manufactured optimism, was content to do an interesting job which would not harm his career.

There were moments, however—brief ones admittedly—when he wished he hadn’t taken the part. Letters are intended to be read silently and Walpole’s sinuous sentences were as hard to speak out loud as they were to learn by heart. Nevertheless, they had their fascination:
Shall I even confess to you what was the origin of this romance? I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the upper-most banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate . . .

As befitting Walpole’s fascination with the Gothic, the filming was to take place over two days at Charnley Abbey in Worcestershire. The building, which had begun life as a monastery, was handed over at the time of the Dissolution by Henry VIII to one Barnaby Gedge for unknown ‘services rendered’. The Gedge family began to rise in the world and took the more aristocratic sounding name of Gauge. In 1610 Nicholas Gauge, now a considerable landowner, had bought a baronetcy from James I, and the family saw the apogee of its splendour—if not its wealth—in the mid to late eighteenth century with Sir Augustus Gauge. Sir Augustus, known as ‘Gothic Gauge’, had taken the Grand Tour, bought art and antiquities, had himself painted by Batoni in Rome reclining pensively on a fallen column, and returned to beautify Charnley Abbey. But Charnley, being an ancient, rambling structure, did not take kindly to the Italianate Baroque, so it was a source of relief to Sir Augustus when Horace Walpole and his
Castle of Otranto
ushered in a taste for the medieval. The Abbey was refurbished in this fashionable style, and very charming and picturesque and expensive it all was.

Thereafter the Gauge family declined into undistinguished hard-hunting squirearchy. The Abbey became increasingly costly to maintain, and the National Trust did not think it sufficiently important to take on. In the late twentieth century various schemes had been tried to keep the building in the family (and vice versa) with varying degrees of success. Since the mid 1970s Charnley Abbey had been a gourmet restaurant, a religious retreat house, a garden centre, and an exhibition space for local crafts. Wedding receptions were held in its Great Hall and films were shot in and around it. As a result, the Abbey, despite its venerable antiquity, gave off an aura of scruffy impermanence. The Gauges kept themselves to a small and reasonably commodious portion of the West Wing which had been rebuilt after a fire in the 1920s, while the rest of the house, a wilderness of dusty chambers full of mildewed furniture and neglected pictures, was left to those who paid for the privilege of using it.

On the first day of filming Jason was summoned at five o’clock from his Fulham flat and driven down by hired car to Charnley. He slept most of the way and when he arrived, a little after seven on a fresh June morning, the Abbey was looking its best. It sprawled along a fold in the land, like an old grey cat sleeping out its remaining days in the sun. The park, laid out by Repton in 1790, with its lake and picturesque clumps of woodland, afforded a perfect setting. The rolling lawns flashed emerald in the sharp morning light and the high clouds chased each other across a blue sky full of lark song. This was immemorial England. Jason’s heart rose. A deep, romantic love of beauty was one of the beacons of his life, but he kept it hidden, believing that such things became fragile when exposed to the scrutiny of others.

The effect was a little marred when, as the car came down the drive, Jason could see a cluster of vehicles in front of the Abbey’s main entrance: a catering van, the Director’s Saab, a ‘people carrier’, and two BBC lorries vomiting cable onto the gravel. As soon as Jason got out of the car he was accosted by the Production Assistant, a dumpy girl with large breasts and an intense expression, called Mo. She immediately bustled him away to be dressed, wigged and made up. Jason would have preferred a few moments in the sun with a coffee and a bacon sandwich from the catering van, but he knew that the waiting would have to be done in costume. Production Assistants can be shouted at if their charges are not ready whenever the Director needs them. In the Production Assistant’s ideal world actors will be chained to railings ready for use, like bicycles.

Forty-five minutes later Jason came out of the scullery, which had been made into a temporary dressing and make-up room. He was wearing a powdered wig and a suit of plum coloured velvet with white stockings and diamanté buckled shoes. He strutted around a little muttering his lines and tentatively ate his bacon sandwich with a paper napkin covering the lace at his throat. Mo told him that the director would not need him for another half hour, as he was just getting some outside establishing shots, but that Jason was not to move. Jason smiled pleasantly at Mo and, as soon as she was out of sight, decided to take a walk.

The air was still and the sun was already hot even though it was just after eight. Jason had begun to itch and sweat in his velvet, so he wondered if he might not be cooler indoors. This was the case. He was soothed by the chill which pervaded Charnley Abbey even in the hottest months of the year. Outside on the gravel among the vans and the electric cable he felt out of place in his velvet; inside among the dusty remnants of the past his buckled shoes gave off an authentic echo. He wandered from room to room of the old Abbey, sometimes mumbling his lines, sometimes taking in the atmosphere, always alone. In one of the long galleries he got a shock as he inadvertently caught sight of himself far off in a dusky Venetian mirror. In the silvery archipelagos which still clung to the inside of the ancient bevelled glass, he saw a man with a long, clever face under a white wig, one hand holding his script in a scroll, the other resting nonchalantly on his hip. Unconsciously he had been imitating the pose of a grandee in some portrait by Reynolds or Ramsay. The very authenticity of his appearance gave him another start. It was as if he had seen a ghost, and then the ghost had turned out to be himself.

In his wanderings Jason found a small room at the end of the house which seemed even more dusty and neglected than the rest. A single window looked onto the back lawn where the director was filming an academic who was explaining how Horace Walpole had helped to usher in the Romantic movement.

Jason guessed that the room he had entered had once been a dressing room or boudoir since it gave onto a larger chamber which contained nothing but the grey carcass of a four-poster bed. The room itself was crammed with unwanted furniture and other objects, but not quite crammed enough to make it seem like a mere lumber-room. Jason could see that some of the objects so unceremoniously stored there were valuable and wondered how they had come to be so neglected. He knew a little about antiques because one of his part-time jobs when out of work was to help a friend with a stall in the Portobello Road market.

There was a Georgian tallboy and several elegant chairs whose upholstery had exploded. Some fine but faded damask hangings had been bundled carelessly into a corner; a packing case held a complete leather bound edition of Voltaire. Propped against one wall was a stack of framed pictures. They were mostly eighteenth century engravings and mezzotints, all of quality but most of them torn and foxed, but under these was a small oil painting in an elaborate gilt frame, no more than eighteen inches by twelve. Age had encrusted the canvas with grime and a small wooden plaque on the frame proclaimed its title:
IN ARCADIA
.

For all the dirt Jason could see that it was a good painting. The scene depicted was a woodland glade through which wound a serpentine path. To one side an old man in a brown tunic and sandals reclined, resting against a rock. A crook on the ground beside him indicated that he was a shepherd. He was staring intently at the other side of the path where stood a grey slab of stone on which something indecipherable had been written. The trees were restless and wild, and behind them a dark blue sky threatened by grey thunderclouds could be seen. The landscape, at once both idyllic and menacing, was clearly the work of a master.

Turning the picture over he found a label on which in faint sepia ink had been written the words:
Gaspr Poussin pinxit Roma Ao MDCLXXV
. The inscription puzzled Jason. He knew Poussin to have been a famous painter, but he had a vague recollection that his Christian name was Nicolas, not the mysterious ‘Gaspr’. But it was old. The Roman numerals gave him the date 1675.

A crack in the frame at the bottom and two broken lengths of wire attached to the back suggested that the painting had fallen off a wall and no-one had taken the small trouble to replace the wire and hang it up again.

Suddenly Jason heard his name being called. He put the picture back where it had been hidden behind the engravings and left the room. When Mo asked him crossly where he had been Jason replied evasively that he had been rehearsing his lines.

The first day went well. Most of the time Jason was filmed seated at a desk, chewing a quill pen and looking quizzically at the camera. He remembered his lines and made the most of his sly, sidelong glance. There was very little left for Jason to do on the second day except some shots of Walpole with a few extras showing them his cabinets of curios, expatiating on the delights of the Gothic and gossiping with dowagers.

As he was driven to the hotel where he was to be put up that night Jason ought to have felt complete satisfaction, but the painting he had discovered kept clawing at his mind. It annoyed him that something of such artistic merit should have been left, dirty and discarded, in an upper room. Perhaps he ought to tell the owners about it, but this would mean having to admit that he had been snooping around. His slender knowledge of the upper classes told him that such an intrusion would be treated with scornful resentment. It was at that point that the notion of taking the painting for himself began to form in his mind. (The word ‘stealing’ was kept at bay.) Nobody might ever notice that it had gone, or care if they did notice.

That was as far as his thinking went that night. He put the issue to the back of his mind and concentrated on enjoying the luxuries of his hotel. He would have liked to have spent some time making friends with the Director, but the Director was otherwise occupied. Jason had the unpleasant but fascinating experience of watching the Director make a long and affectionate mobile phone call to his wife and children in the bar, followed almost immediately by the successful seduction of Mo, with whom he soon disappeared for an early night. The actor-observer in Jason compelled him to watch, as, of course, did the prurient voyeur.

The weather held the following morning, but there was a good deal of waiting around. The extras, who had arrived late by coach, had to be dressed and grouped and regimented. For all the authenticity of their costume, there was something insistently twentieth century about their appearance. Jason took care not to wander off too far, but his thoughts kept returning to the picture. His overnight bag was stowed in the dressing room at the Abbey and there was room in it for the picture.

Everyone broke for an early lunch. The extras crowded up to the catering van, but Jason held back. He did not want to be part of the herd. His aloofness was rewarded because the Director, who happened to be passing, introduced him to a man in a tweed jacket and fawn corduroy trousers. The man was in his fifties, balding and run to seed, but he gave the impression of someone who still thought of himself as young and attractive. This, said the Director, was Sir Ralph Gauge, present owner of Charnley Abbey. Jason took an instant dislike to him.