The Honeymoon (33 page)

How often she called herself “Aunt” to him. Was she careful to do that, she wondered, instinctively to reassure him that she saw him as a son, not as a handsome and sexual young man?

At the Crosses’ parties at Weybridge, she’d never observed Johnnie in close conversation with a young woman of his own age, other than his sisters. He was usually in a group, standing out among them because he was the tallest, laughing and merry.

She ventured once to ask Mary Cross, “Do you think that Johnnie will ever marry?”

It was New Year’s Eve, 1876, and there was a party at Weybridge with neighbors from across the county. She’d noticed that Johnnie had danced only with his mother and his sisters, not with any of the young women there. Mary scrutinized her brother across the room. “I’m not sure,” Mary said. “I guess Johnnie and Willie and I just aren’t the marrying sort. We’re destined to live together — forever,” she said with a smile.

One summer day at Witley, Miriam and Johnnie were sitting on the terrace having tea. He’d brought Albert Druce’s children, his nephew Eliot, whom the Druces had named in her honor, and Elsie, his niece, over for a visit. The children were attempting to play croquet on the lawn below. Elsie was older and ordering around little Eliot, who was toddling about carrying the heavy mallet.

George had gone upstairs to rest and she and Johnnie were alone watching them.

Then Elsie snatched the mallet from her little brother, and he burst into tears and began crying piteously.

Johnnie jumped up to intervene. “I’m afraid this was a bad idea. The mallet’s much too heavy for him.” She watched as he marched down, gently remonstrated with Elsie, and tenderly picked up little Eliot and patted him on the back till his tears subsided.

“You’re so good with little children,” Marian said when he returned. “It’s a shame you don’t have any of your own.”

“Mama keeps asking me about that.” He sighed. “But I don’t seem to be able to find the right person. Perhaps I’m lacking. No one’s seemed particularly interested in me, either.”

“I don’t believe that,” she said. “A handsome, healthy young man like you who’s done so well in life?”

He looked distractedly into the distance, as if this troubled him too. “Yes, it’s strange. I must have some deficiency. Something I’m not aware of …” He stopped, considering this. “… that I can’t find the right one.”

F
ollowing the incident at the Lido, Johnnie slept through the night with the aid of the laudanum. When he finally got up, he was sluggish and slow and unspeaking. She watched as he stumbled around the
sala
, tall and bent and painfully thin, like a stick figure, his hands shaking as he poured his morning coffee from the urn and then spilled it from the cup. Had he forgotten what had happened on the beach? That he’d pushed her? She was afraid to confront him, to make him angry. Perhaps it was better left forgotten. Perhaps he’d be all right now.

As he sat down with his coffee, in an effort to occupy him, to rouse him, to pretend that everything was normal, she suggested that they make the trip to Murano and Torcello, obligatory on any visit to Venice. He nodded assent, still stupefied with the aftereffects of the laudanum, but thankfully, calm now.

Outside, the sun had risen higher, a burning disk just visible behind the haze, spinning malevolently.

The gondolier, Corradini, rowed them out to Murano, past the cemetery island and the Church of San Michele. It was peaceful and quiet on the lagoon, the splashing of the water on the side of the boat rhythmic and restful. The gondolier, standing on the afterdeck, plowing the water
with his oar, kept his pale eyes ahead, aloof, as if wary of annoying Johnnie again as he had the night of the Malibran. Though the man lacked all manners, she thought, he had an animal sense of how far he could go without losing his employment. Johnnie seemed hardly to notice him.

She noticed again the sinew of the gondolier’s forearms, the strength of the muscles. As she sank back into the shade of the
tendalin
, she felt a kind of fear at the man’s quiet, his seemingly inhuman indifference to them. He had them in his power. She had a sudden sense of being rowed to her doom, of the gondolier, like Charon, unclean, with hollow eyes, rowing them across the river to the land of the dead. She felt a headache coming on from the heat and the jagged reflection of the sunlight on the water.

At Murano, as she stood up to disembark, the boat rocked under her feet and she was afraid she’d fall in the water. Corradini reached out his hand and grasped her arm to steady her. His hand was rough, like sandpaper. “Thank you,” she said. He didn’t acknowledge her, even to nod his head.

They set out on foot, leaving him behind, smoking his cigarette on the dock, looking away from them out at the water.

They toured the Church of San Donato and visited Salviati’s, the glassworks, where she bought gifts for his sisters. “Look, won’t Mary love this?” she said, holding up a vase of turquoise glass, hoping to excite him. It had a rim of gold acanthus leaves and gold handles in the shape of dolphins. “I want to take Mary home something nice.”

He smiled painfully, with effort, and nodded. “Very nice.”

“Good, we’ll take it,” she told the lady shopkeeper.

When they’d finished, Corradini rowed them onward to Torcello, which was bleak and windswept even in June. It was largely deserted of tourists, with a few fishermen’s huts, muddy flats, the canal lined with ruined brickwork. They walked to the crumbling old Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. A boy brought them the key and they went inside. It smelled of death and mold.

“See,” she said to Johnnie, “that’s the bishop’s throne.” She was the one with the enthusiasm and energy now. Johnnie was subdued, dazed from his long sleep, saying little as she pointed out the sights, eager to cheer him. “Those mosaics are from the eleventh century. See the Virgin, all the gold on the apse there?” She hoped to wear him out so that he’d sleep again, to give him the exercise he said he needed and had been so deprived of because of his old wife.

That evening after supper, he refused to take any more of the laudanum. “I can’t bear the way it makes me feel in the morning. It makes me feel sluggish. I’ll be all right,” he insisted. “I promise.”

T
he heat oppressed, the sky was thick, hazy, the atmosphere weighing down upon the city. There was no air in the
appartement
, and her face was covered with sweat. She tasted the salt on her skin. It was the sirocco coming, the great, humid wind all the way from the Sahara, bringing with it storms and high water.

In the afternoon, they made their way to the workers’ quarters in San Biagio to see John Bunney.

Number 2413 was a factory building with rough wooden doors. They rang the bell, and after a minute the doors flung open. “Welcome!” said Bunney. “Welcome to my humble abode.”

He led them up the stairs to the second floor, to a large, light-filled space with plank floors and big windows that looked out over the water. Waiting there in the background was a wan woman with protruding eyes, Mrs. Bunney.

The room had little furniture, and was strewn with canvases and easels. There was an iron bedstead, a long table and chairs, a wardrobe with its door hanging off, a woodstove, canvases leaning against the walls.

“Lizzie asks that you please pardon her,” Mr. Bunney said, “but she’s having one of her attacks of neuralgia today.”

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Bunney said, drawing her hand across her brow. “I’m rendered just incapacitated by these things.”

“That’s perfectly all right,” Marian told her. “I have them myself. We won’t stay long.”

“But some tea …”

“Please, don’t bother,” Marian told her.

“Mr. Ruskin said that I was to show you some of my work,” Bunney said.

In the middle of the room was a long carpenter’s table with paints and jars of murky liquid and brushes and stacks of drawings on it. Bunney began sorting through it. “This is for Mr. Ruskin’s project on Saint Ursula,” he said, holding up a watercolor of an hourglass, and another of a chair. “He’s in the process of copying Carpaccio’s
Dream of Saint Ursula
in the Accademia, and he’s asked me to work at his side. I’m just doing the secondary objects, the hourglass, the bookcase, the chair, and so on, and Mr. Ruskin’s doing the main figure, of course. But,” he said sadly, “Mr. Ruskin hasn’t been back in Venice for three years now. He’s been ill, I’m afraid.” Tactfully, he didn’t say what Ruskin’s illness was, but it was generally known that he’d gone insane.

“He says the saint reminds him of Miss La Touche, the young lady he loved so much and who died.” Rose La Touche had been Ruskin’s fourteen-year-old pupil when he became infatuated with her. Eventually, the girl had starved herself to death. It was said she was insane herself. Her death had apparently precipitated Ruskin’s own illness.

Mr. Bunney continued separating out his sketches for them. “Mr. Ruskin likes everything precisely as it really is, every line, every pediment, every shadow. He made me redo
the bookcase and the table. Ay, he’s a rough taskmaster. But he took me out of the Working Men’s College and gave me work. I’ve got Lizzie and the children to feed.”

Mrs. Bunney, in the background, spoke up sharply. “Mr. Ruskin is a harsh man. He drives him too hard. He looks so old,” she said. “Mr. Ruskin has aged him.”

“No, Lizzie,” Mr. Bunney said, “he is a perfectionist, that’s all.”

Mrs. Bunney said bitterly, “I can’t forgive him for not letting you come to Florence when little Frank died.”

Mr. Bunney sighed. “Yes, that was cruel. I was in Verona and Lizzie and the children were in Florence. She wrote that our —” Here he stopped, sat down on a stool, and shook his head, unable to go on. Then he took a breath and continued. “Our darling boy had … passed away. But Mr. Ruskin wouldn’t let me go to them. He said there was too much work to do.”

He collected himself. “Oh,” he said, “I almost forgot! These are Mr. Ruskin’s pamphlets. He says it’s very important that you see the things he’s written about, so you understand his whole campaign against the restoration, how precious these old things are.”