scissors.”
“No problem, honey,” she replied. “I have my dressmaking scissors in my room.”
Off she went to fetch them, and, on her return, sheared away, in a matter of moments, the four inches of material which had divided me from the presentable.
It was thus, after all, only a few minutes after half past eight that we arrived in the entrance hall to begin our excursion round Venice.
“Interesting,” said Ragwort.
“Interesting?” said Cantrip, almost choking on his steak Diane. “Interesting? Absolutely sickening is what I call it. I don’t know what it is about Julia. She only has to sit back and look helpless — which, God knows, I admit she is — and some misguided girl turns up and starts taking care of her. It’s just like a baby cuckoo. What a baby cuckoo does is get itself hatched in someone else’s nest. Then it just sits there with its beak open, looking hungry. And the birds the nest belongs to, instead of chucking it over the edge, get this irresistible urge to shovel food down it. Same effect as Julia has on girls. And what’s more, they’re usually jolly attractive girls, who ought to have something better to do than collect worms for Julia.”
“The ways of Nature,” said Selena, “are indeed very wonderful.”
“What I thought interesting,” said Ragwort, “was the dressmaking scissors. There are, of course, various sizes and types of scissors used in dressmaking. But one could not conveniently use a small pair to cut off the hem of a petticoat — it must have been a proper pair of tailor’s scissors. With long blades. Quite long and quite sharp. And pointed, of course, at the ends. You did say ‘stabbed,’ didn’t you, Cantrip?”
There were no defaulters among us except Ned’s large friend Kenneth. The rest of us, in a group which also included a score or so of foreign Art Lovers, followed obediently in the footsteps of Graziella. Graziella takes conscientiously her duty to instruct us in the general and artistic history of Venice: I feel that she may require us, at the end of the holiday, to take an examination in these subjects. I listen to her, therefore, with the utmost attention, for I would not wish in that event to disappoint her.
The excursion began in the Piazza San Marco, described by Napoleon as the finest drawing-room in Europe. This showed, said Graziella, that Napoleon was a very silly man, because the Piazza is not in the least like a drawing-room: in reality, though certainly spacious and elegant, it is the forecourt to St. Mark’s Basilica, designed to permit the visitor, before admiring in detail the church’s rich mosaics and luxurious columns, to appreciate as a single unity the grandeur of its incomparable facade. We duly appreciated the facade.
The Venetians, it seems, adopted St. Mark as their patron saint in the ninth century, at which time the mortal remains of the Evangelist were reposing in Alexandria. To demonstrate their piety, the Venetians sent out a body- snatching expedition, which abstracted the sacred corpse from its resting-place and brought it back through Customs packed between two sides of pork, so discouraging investigation by the fastidious Muslims.
This reminded the Major of a funny thing that happened to him in the Lebanon in ’52. I began to worry about Desdemona again.
Having secured the body, they spent three hundred years building a church to house it, during which time they pillaged the Levant for suitable building materials. In the meantime, they lost the corpse; but they did not allow this to discourage them. The opportunity to put the finishing touches to the masterpiece came in 1204, when they more or less hijacked the Fourth Crusade. The Crusaders had meant to go to Jerusalem; but the Venetians, who were providing the transport, said about halfway across the Mediterranean that it would be a better idea to go and sack Byzantium. So they went and sacked Byzantium; as a result of which the Venetians acquired an empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and the four horses of antique bronze which stand on the balcony of St. Mark’s Basilica.
From there we went on to the Doges’ Palace. Graziella instructed us to note the development, as thereby exemplified, from the Gothic to the Renaissance style, and gave us a little lecture on the Venetian constitution. She spoke of it tenderly: it had been, it seems, a splendid constitution, full of senates and committees and checks and balances and other things delightful to the political theorist.
“If it was that fine,” said Stanford, “why didn’t it last?”
“It lasted six hundred years, signor,” said Graziella. “And when it was quite worn out and would not work at all any more, it was exported, of course, to the United States of America.”
Stanford’s expression, as I have mentioned, is habitually that of a man who suspects that somebody is going to pull a fast one: it now became that of such a man finding his suspicions confirmed. Marylou looked at him as if judging him to have committed some regrettable public blunder; and further marked her displeasure by keeping to my side, rather than his, during the remainder of our time in the Doges’ Palace.
Regard for historical truth compelled Graziella, when we came to the room of the Council of Ten, to make some mention of the methods by which that body, during the Middle Ages, had preserved the security of the Most Serene Republic. She spoke rather vividly of the dark proceedings, the whispered evidence and unappealable judgements to which that graceful room must be presumed a witness. Marylou was much distressed — as I thought, she is an idealist.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “Julia honey, do you believe anyone could do such awful things in such a lovely room?”
“I can believe anything,” I answered, “when a young man with such a beautiful profile as Ned’s turns out to be a tax-gatherer.”
“Are you suggesting,” asked Ned — by whom, of course, I made sure to be overheard—“that my Department is to be compared with the Council of Ten?”
“No,” I said, with the bitterness of experience, “it is infinitely worse.”
You may perhaps feel, Selena, that I departed a little in this conversation from the policy you have recommended. My remark was made, however, with great severity — I hardly think you should count it as a compliment. Besides, since I have paid more attention to Marylou than to anyone else, I am rather hoping that both Ned and the Major may now suspect me of a certain unorthodoxy in erotic preference: the former will be lulled into a false sense of security and the latter will be discouraged. I feel I may risk a compliment or two.
“It’s too bad of Julia,” said Ragwort. “Her preferences, as is all too well known, are as orthodox as anyone’s. If not more so.”
“Absolutely,” said Cantrip.
“Never mind,” said Selena, “no one takes Julia seriously.”
The last visit of the morning was to a small glassworks, where we were to observe, said Graziella, the traditional and historic art of glass-blowing. I was feeling inclined, by this time, to take a keener interest in the traditional and historic art of putting bubbles into Campari soda; but I did not venture to say so.
Soon, however, like the first rumblings of a zinc thunder-sheet, there began to be murmurs of complaint from Eleanor. It wasn’t, she said, good enough: what we had been promised was a guided tour of sights of artistic and historical interest; instead of which, we were made to spend half the morning being dragged round a glass-factory. This was not mere incompetence, but contrived deliberately: the object was to make us buy at an inflated price the probably inferior products of the factory and so enable that woman
These complaints were initially addressed to me — we are, you will remember, as Ruth and Naomi. It seemed clear, though, that they represented merely a limbering up for a direct attack on Graziella. I considered the prospect of spending the next eight days caught in the crossfire between these two formidable women — its frightfulness spurred me to action.
“Eleanor,” I said, “I have not your stamina. I was thinking of slipping away and having a coffee in the Piazza. If you’re really not keen on the glass-blowing, perhaps I could persuade you to keep me company?”
Eleanor would naturally have preferred to stay and have a row with Graziella; but she could not, with much colour of politeness, say so. I bore her off in triumph, congratulating myself on my stroke of diplomacy. Buying Eleanor coffee, even in Florian’s, seemed a small price to pay.
Our conversation turned to the subject on which we are most in sympathy — that is to say, the wickedness of income tax. Such phrases as “penalizing achievement,” and “petty-minded persecution,” soon filled the air of the Piazza.
Descending, in due course, from the general to the particular, Eleanor sought my views on what might be done to mitigate her own liabilities. Her position is very pitiful: though her share of profits from Frostfield’s is received as director’s remuneration and treated, therefore, as earned income, and her other investments have been
