Art & Lies (23 page)

I would love even your love for another. I knew that I might lose you to love.

I did not guess that I could lose you to indifference.

Why did you not answer even one of my letters?

I stand still at the choir rail but it is not your voice I hear.

I have waited at the water’s edge but still you have not come.

I have kept your place beside me and still the place is empty.

Was there nothing in all that we were?

*

The man folded the letter into its envelope and put it back into the slip of the book. The book, that had been wrapped for him in Cloth of Gold woven for Louis Quatorze, and thrown about the shoulders of the Virgin. Madonna of the Reckoning. Too late now. The man had waited too long. His friend had waited as long as he could.

The Book; fabulous, unlikely, beyond wealth, a talisman against time, an inventing and a remembrance.

The Book. The handwritten word. The printed word. The word illuminated. The beacon word. The word carved in stone and set above the sea. The warning word in flashes that appeared and vanished and vanished and appeared, cutting the air with a bright sword. The word that divided nation against nation. The word that knits up the soul. The word spinning a thread through time. The word in red and gold. The Word in human form, Divine.

The Book was his but not his. The manuscript leaves had been saved from the sacking of the Great Library at Alexandria in
AD
642. The battered scripts had been sold off a Roman market stall by an urchin who claimed to have used them as stuffing for his bed. That, at least, was the legend, unlikely, fantastical, and the Cardinal and his boy had worked their own inventions to explain it. Handel remembered the long, dark Vatican afternoons, and his old friend chuckling over some Latin of his own devising.

‘Shall I attribute it to Seneca?’ he had said, his pen hanging over the silver words.

‘But it isn’t real.’

‘Darling Boy, do you know what is?’

The leaves had been cut and bound and new pages had been added to the book as it made its strange way down stranger centuries.

The work had not been arranged chronologically; those who had owned it, and through whose hands it had passed, had each left their contribution, as writer, scholar, critic, eccentric, collector, and each according to temperament and passion. The book owed nothing to the clock.

From Alexandria had come scattered stanzas of
The Odyssey
, drawings of Pythagoras,
The Trial of Socrates, Treatise on Poetry.
Ovid and his drama of
Psappho and Phaeon the Ferryman.
Papyri, in Koine Greek, of the
Gospel of St John.
‘Let not your hearts be troubled.’

Deeper in the book, in his handwriting, was King Alfred’s own translation of
The Consolation of Philosophy
, that fourth-century classic, still ahead of the schoolboy speculations of twenty-first century scientists and their Unified Theory of Nothing.

Handel turned the pages: Bede,
A History of the English Church and People.
From France,
The Romance of the Rose
, and beside it, crossing centuries, a minor poet of the Pleiad, recalling the great Loire and its long spaces of white sand.

What were those songs he heard? The dead lovers, Abelard and Heloise, Paolo and Francesca. The long moaning of Creseyde, and the miseries of Montague and Capulet.

Was he in the white streets of London with a fat knight? And later, alone, in a gilded tent pitched in mud, Henry of England at Agincourt?

The book did not pause, but continued its unsigned journey, before and back, and in the shadow of an obscure wood, the gate to another world opened, and Virgil waited for Dante to behold that blessed face.

What else was here? Three stories from Boccaccio that had belonged to Byron. Keats’s scribbled copy of Chapman’s Homer, and, in pen and ink, a line from Oscar Wilde on his pages of Goethe: ‘The secret of life is Art.’

The book did not pause but it had not been finished. Many of the sewn-in pages were still blank.

Handel looked at the book. The self-portrait, in pencil, of the Cardinal, his private telephone number written down his emblem, the sword. Handel’s own drawing of she whom he had loved. The rose he picked in the gardens of the Palazzo Rezzonico.

Where had the years gone, and being gone, why did they hurt him still?

They sat together, the three, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, sat together under the yellow rain. The sun, that had packed its things against the storm, had left behind a yellow cloth. One small square of light that the rain fell through.

Black sea yellow rain.

They talked, the three, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, talked together under the shelter of the rain.

HANDEL: Is that him? Red in the black boat that waits on the black water? I seem to see him, far off, unperished by the air that reeks of time. What has the clock done with the moments in between that last day and this?

Many times I heard him say, ‘Today, tomorrow, the day after’ and I did not understand what he meant.

The majority of things in the world are such, that one would not believe them if one were told about them. Only those who experience it believe and do not know how.

PICASSO: There was a baby. My father engaged a Spanish maid who came to live in the attic. Her body was the colour of the sun. In the dark house, where no light was, she spread threads of gold from her hair.

This woman, sun-brown, sun-lights in her brown hair, had one gift and her gift was life. Horror then, to find work in a charnel house, serving the needs of the dead.

My father in gaberdine, saw her body in its summer dress, and tore it until she was naked in the bleaching air. Naked under his panting clothes, naked under the caustic of his skin, naked he had her and naked he drove her away.

She asked his wife to ask the doctor to ask for an abortion. The doctor was a Catholic and the baby was born.

The day was cold in crenellations of snow when she walked to the house in her thin dress. She had wrapped the baby in the swaddles of a torn stiff shirt. Without knocking, she left the baby tenderly in a tiny heap in the big hall, and through the silent snow slipped away.

HANDEL: That which is lost is found.

SAPPHO: ‘What are the unreal things but the passions that once burned one like a fire? What are the incredible things but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things but the things that one has done oneself?’

HANDEL: Is it too late?

PICASSO: Not too late.

SAPPHO: The word returns in love.

The man stood up, and taking the book, began to walk down towards the sea. The storm sun poured down his shoulders in yellow rills.

He held the light about him.

The light fell out of the seamed sky in halos and cloaks. Squares and circles of light that dropped through the cut clouds and made single sense of all the broken pieces of beach, cliff, man and boat. His past, his life, not fragments nor fragmented now, but a long curve of movement that he began to recognise.

Still the light. The light in marvellous fabric, wrapping him, a quattrocento angel in unwoven cloth. At his hand, the spear-light unfewtered, his rod and staff that budded as he walked.

He began to sing. He sang from the place that had been marked; the book, his body, his heart. The place where grief had been hid, not once, but many times. His voice was strong and light. The sun was under his tongue. He was a man of infinite space.

From the cliff-head, the two women standing together, looked out. Or did they look in? Held in the frame of light, was not the world, nor its likeness, but a strange equivalence, where what was thought to be known was re-cast, and where what was unknown began to be revealed, and where what could not be known, kept its mystery but lost its terror.

All this they saw and the sea in gold-leaf and the purple and pearl of the cliffs.

It was not too late.

FIN.