The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (5 page)

Sir Ralph’s manner towards Jason was offhandedly condescending to the point of rudeness. When Jason explained that he had been speaking to the camera extracts from Horace Walpole’s letters which he had learned by heart, Sir Ralph laughed knowingly. He knew that television actors never learned their lines, they just read them off a screen—what was it called?—the ‘autocue’, that was it. Jason patiently told him that it was not the case, but Sir Ralph said that he couldn’t fool him. At this point, the Director, observing a rather dangerous look in Jason’s eye, intervened to say that, as a matter of fact, in this case, they weren’t using autocues on the production. Pretending to ignore the Director’s interruption, Sir Ralph then felt Jason’s velvet costume and said that you could really pull the girls wearing this sort of thing, couldn’t you? Very sixties. Jason smiled and said what a fascinating place Charnley Abbey was.

‘Bloody nightmare to keep going,’ said Sir Ralph, stifling a yawn. ‘Well, must be off to see a man about a horse.’ And he walked away. A few minutes later there was a roar and Sir Ralph wearing a tweed cap swept up the drive in an open-topped sports car. He must have been very dashing thirty years ago, Jason thought sourly.

It was this encounter, Jason decided later, that had compelled him to go and take the little painting. Sir Ralph was a philistine and he did not deserve it, whereas Jason, who had no intention of selling it, would cherish the object. So, before the lunch hour was over, Jason had fetched his over-night bag from his dressing room, slung it carelessly by the strap over his shoulder, strolled up to the little antechamber, taken the painting out from behind the pile of old engravings, put it in the bag with barely a glance at it and strolled downstairs again. As he did so, he found himself trembling violently, but otherwise he felt cool and collected. He returned the bag to his dressing room unobserved.

The last shots after lunch were so hectic that Jason barely had time to think of his acquisition until he was in the car being driven back to London. Then he was compelled to face the fact that for the first time in his adult life he had committed a blatantly illegal act. Jason tried to analyse his feelings dispassionately, as he often did in times of high emotional tension. He felt keyed-up, more than usually alive, but he also felt the fear of possible discovery and some guilt. There were plenty of arguments to be made against his feeling guilt, but he could not help feeling it. He had broken one of the commandments; he was a thief.

He would have liked to discuss the whole affair with someone, but he could not think of anybody suitable. Jason was going through a period of solitude having broken up with a girl two months ago. In any case, he knew what they would say. ‘Take it back,’ they would say, and he was damned if he was going to.

When he got home, he took the painting out of his bag, wrapped it carefully in some bubble wrap and put it in a drawer. He had thought too much about it and was not going to do any more of that until the next morning. That night he managed to distract himself with a visit to the pub and a film on television. He even slept well enough except that once he woke up with a phrase repeating itself over and over in his head:
Et in Arcadia Ego
. The phrase nagged at him as words do when they come at one from the other side of consciousness.

‘And I too am in Arcadia’: that was the literal meaning. The inner meaning, said Jason’s dictionary of quotations, was obscure, but this anonymous saying was to be found on tombs. ‘Even I am in Arcadia’, was another rendering. It was clear to Jason, if not the dictionary of quotations, who or rather what the ‘I’ was.

Jason took the painting out of the drawer and propped it up on his mantelpiece. He fetched some warm soapy water and with a damp cloth gently began to wipe away the dirt. Where the paint had been applied more thickly he used cotton buds in the same solution. The cleaning of the picture was a delightful, absorbing task which occupied the whole morning. Slowly the work revealed itself, gem-like in its vividness. Never had Jason seen such an intensely dark blue sky, such green and gold in the trees which sparkled in a slanted afternoon sun. (It could have been early morning, but Jason was sure it was meant to be late afternoon. There was something in the attitude of the old shepherd which suggested rest after a long day.) Jason’s apprehension and guilt were drowned in the wonder of holding in his hands an authentic masterpiece. The artist had captured a moment, not a single frozen instant, as in a photograph, but a fragment of time just long enough to contain a tiny vibration of real life. The watching mind oscillated within the picture between repose and anxiety.

One moment you felt the melancholy calm of an old man resting in a forest glade enjoying the rays of a declining sun; the next moment the twisted trees and glittering leaves suggested a sudden gust of wind and you saw the dark grey cloud in the blue sky beyond. The air seemed to crackle with the electricity of an approaching storm; then your mind reverted once more to melancholy calm.

Jason was glad now that he had appropriated the picture. Nothing would ever take away from him the intense experience he had just enjoyed with this three hundred year old piece of wood and canvas, not even a prison sentence. But there was one small frustration. He had hoped that careful cleaning would have revealed the inscription on the grey stone which the old shepherd was staring at in the picture, but he could not make it out. Tiny dark strokes of paint suggested lettering vividly without being in any way comprehensible.
Et in Arcadia Ego
perhaps? No, he could not make that fit.

In two weeks time Jason had a part in
The Bill
, so he felt entitled to a break, and he had decided that what he must do was to find out as much as he could about the picture and its painter. The desire came partly from guilt—if he knew more about it he would be able to persuade himself that he deserved the object—partly from a wholly unspecified compulsion which seemed to emanate from the picture itself.

As an actor, Jason was someone whose powers of concentration were above average, but he was surprised by the length of time he could spend simply looking at the picture. It began to alarm him that an hour or two might pass in this way, at the end of which he had only a very indistinct memory of what he had been thinking. After one or two of these sessions, he found that the picture’s image was etched onto his mind and formed an almost permanent background to his thought. It was like the tune that keeps playing itself inside one’s head.

Researches in the library of the Victoria and Albert Museum, revealed Gaspr. Poussin to have been Gaspard Dughet, sometimes known as Gaspard Poussin, who worked mainly in Italy and died at Rome in 1675. He had painted classical landscapes, somewhat in the manner of the more famous Nicolas Poussin, to whom he had been apprenticed, but often with stormy or overcast skies. The books spoke of him with respect, but essentially as a somewhat derivative minor figure. Jason could find no reference to
In Arcadia.

The information he had gathered did not satisfy Jason as he had hoped it would. The one fact which haunted him was that
In Arcadia
was, if the label on the back was correct, painted in the year of the artist’s death. Could it have been his last work? Could the old shepherd, sitting exhausted by the roadside have been Gaspard himself? Jason was aware that this was the kind of gloss an old-fashioned art critic might have put upon it, attributing all kinds of personal references to a public work with an accepted iconography. He had read that in the seventeenth century artists were not individualists as they are now, and therefore
In Arcadia
need not be Gaspard contemplating his own death any more than Prospero drowning his book was Shakespeare renouncing the stage.

He was aware of this intellectually, but he could not deny that the picture had a power of suggestion quite beyond that of conventional classical imagery. Was it perhaps his own state of mind which had induced the extraordinarily intense relationship he had developed with the painting?

On the evening of his return from the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jason sat down before the painting, much as, on another lonely evening, he might have sat down in front of the television. For the first hour or so, he contemplated the picture as he had before, his thoughts slowing almost to a standstill before it. Then something started to happen, something which, even in his hypnotic state, disturbed him. Though he remained seated, a part of him began to move towards the painting. He might have thought that he was dreaming except that his mental faculties seemed fully alive. In fact he felt more fully conscious of himself than ever before.

That consciousness presented him with a choice. He could either draw himself back into his body, his flat in Fulham and the twenty-first century, or he could move forward. He chose the unsafe option and drifted forward, as if pushed by a gentle breeze.

When he reached the surface of the painting, he halted. He had reached a two dimensional plane and he knew he could go no further. For a space of time which could not be calculated in minutes or seconds he studied the canvas in detail. Every brush stroke, every tiny gradation of pigment was revealed to him. But even as he studied these minutiae, he was conscious of waiting for something. A change was about to take place. Then it happened.

Slowly the varnished surface of the canvas began to soften. Jason was aware that the source of light had changed too. Instead of coming from outside the picture and striking its pigmented surface, the light now seemed to come from within. Colours glowed. The next thing he noticed was that objects on the surface of the plane had begun to move in a strange way, shifting somehow and yet remaining in the same place. He could not understand it until he realised that the two dimensional surface was being transformed into a three dimensional space. Very soon he would be able to walk into the picture.

Once again he was presented with a choice. He could stay outside looking into the picture like a spectator in a darkened auditorium gazing at a lighted stage set, or he could move forward. He chose the unsafe option.

The landscape into which he moved was absolutely familiar, except that it was solid and three-dimensional. It was quite static, but not as a statue is: Jason felt that the animation of its trees and the old shepherd, who was some distance away from him on the path, was merely suspended. It was an entrancing prospect. Moments in a normal life succeed each other relentlessly without pausing to allow themselves to be considered. Here Jason could bite this moment to the core.

Before he could do so he was made aware of his own state. Up till this point, he had thought of himself as a disembodied being, as when, in a waking dream, one seems to float bodiless over wide miles of vivid scenery. Now he appeared to be recovering some physical senses besides that of sight. He could hear, though a great way off, the sound of London traffic which pervaded his flat. He began to feel a faint breeze on what he thought was his cheek. A numb pins-and-needles sensation affected him, as if he had some kind of body. Looking down he saw a pair of bare legs, identifiably his, and feet shod with sandals, standing on the yellow dust of the road. He was dressed in a rough brown tunic, like the ancient shepherd in the picture.

As he took his first steps down the path two things happened. Firstly, the faint noise of London traffic vanished; secondly, he began to acquire sensation in all his limbs. His hands seemed particularly sensitive: he could feel a tiny speck of dust and roll it between his thumb and forefinger.

The silence was complete; everything about him was still unmoving. The only movement came from him, because, as he moved down the path, he began to see things from a different angle. The trees were bent and their leaves twisted as if in a wind but they were still. Only the glint of the low sun which Jason could now see had an animated quality to it. The beauty which surrounded him both entranced and oppressed him. He felt that it was his task to bring it to life.

The sheer oddity of what he was experiencing struck him and he turned round to see if his room in Fulham was still behind him. He saw nothing, only a white mist. How was he to get back? The question did not disturb him too much. Apart from his role in
The Bill
(of an ex-public school drug addict) he had little to return to. How puzzled people would be by his disappearance! The idea amused him.

He turned back to his landscape and walked quickly down the path towards the old man. The path snaked so that his journey took him longer than he expected. When he reached the old man he bent down to look at him. The man was motionless but his eyes shone. Jason touched the man’s tunic and immediately he began to stir. Jason, suddenly full of an almost unbearable fear, stayed quite still. All around him he could hear things stirring into life, wind blowing, branches creaking, leaves rustling, a distant murmur of thunder, the song of a strange bird. The old man blinked and stared at him without curiosity. The face was old and grey bearded, but the deep-sunk eyes betrayed nothing. Jason felt he could animate him by speech, so he addressed him:

‘Who are you?’

The old man stretched out a hand and pointed to a spot behind Jason, who turned round to see what was being pointed out. It was the grey slab, like a tombstone, on the other side of the path. He crossed over to examine the slab and saw the letters carved on it:

bouloimhn k eparouros ewn qhteuemen allw

h pasin nekuessi katajqimenoisin anassein

Though normally the letters would have meant nothing to him, in his heightened state he understood, but their inner meaning still baffled him:

I would rather be a serf working by the day for another

than be the prince of all the dead.

He looked back at the shepherd resting by the roadside, but the figure had gone. This disturbed him, because the old man had been a stable physical presence in this strange world that he had entered. Moreover when he looked behind him at the way by which he had entered the painting, there was no longer a white mist but yet more Elysian landscape. Twisted trees fluttered their golden leaves in the declining sun. The snaking path wound up a gentle slope to where stood a white marble temple on a mound before a grove of oak.