The Disciple

Chapter II: Providence-1

Chapter II

ProvidenceThe following morning, John set out deliberately early. He wanted slowly to savour the entire world of Oltrarno – that little sliver of Florence, on the south side of the river, where Sir Christopher Noble-Nolan’s empyrean realm was to be found. He headed straight for Piazza Santo Spirito, washed his already clean hands in the square’s central fountain and then entered the church. He knew that Vasari had written that, if only Brunelleschi’s plans had been followed, this would have been ‘the most perfect temple in Christendom’. As it was, John still found the building staggering – the complete antithesis of the cinder-block barrack that had been his childhood church in Providence. He genuflected, opened his red missal-like guidebook and began intently to study every altarpiece, decipher countless inscriptions, light several candles and, just generally, to bask in the golden glow of a magnificence that he had hardly thought possible. Finally, in a daze, he stumbled outside and proceeded to wander up the via Maggio, inspecting one sumptuous palace after another, till he found himself confronted by the profligate grandeur of Palazzo Pitti, which enchanted him, but not more so than a modest dwelling en face bearing a plaque announcing that it was here that Dostoevsky had completed The i***t in 1869. It was not, however, till he turned in the most picturesque bend of the via de’ Bardi and was confronted by the severe rusticated elevation of Palazzo Vespucci that he felt that he beheld not just a vision to be treasured but a salvific realm to be lived in; here, he discerned, not just a goal, but the way by which that goal was to be reached.

John entered the dark and, to him, wonderfully suggestive courtyard of Palazzo Vespucci – at the behest of a now smiling portress – and stood in awe for several minutes. To his right, he beheld a fine Andrea della Robbia relief of the Virgin kneeling before the infant Christ, next to which was hung a large coat of arms, painted on leather, celebrating the alliance of the Vespucci and Cattaneo families, whilst ionic capitals danced all round him and uneven, presumably ancient, paving stones supported him.

After having caressed the neck of the marble sculpture of St John the Baptist at the foot of the staircase, he reverently began his ascent. On the first-floor landing, he halted again, staring at a genealogical tree of the Vespucci family frescoed on the far wall. This represented an enormous oak, from which dangled hundreds and hundreds of leaves, the inside of each one being filled with the name – an ever-recurring Amerigo or Buonamico marrying a predictable Cosima or Laudomia – and dates of Vespucci descendants. A distant view of Florence nestled at the bottom, whilst a large cartouche, bearing the inscription Vespucci Guerrieri Pacifici flew defiantly overhead.

John’s thoughts turned, naturally, to the celebrated navigator who, having trailed in Columbus’s wake, brazenly imposed his own name on the continent discovered by his predecessor. How utterly convinced, John thought to himself, must those such as the Vespucci, those who could trace their ancestry for hundreds and hundreds of years, be of their hereditary entitlement, how proud of their forefathers. He could but contrast them with himself: he, who had always been so keen to distance himself from his family in Providence; he, who had so often been embarrassed – embarrassed to the point of repudiation – by his descent from a herd of immigrant labourers. Discountenanced by the shame he felt for the very blood coursing through his veins, John girded himself to walk whither he would and rang Sir Christopher’s bell.

He was ushered in by an excited woman – undoubtedly, the much-maligned Rita, he thought – whose twittering manner and yammering voice would, John saw, instinctively rattle the stately Sir Christopher. He also had to admit that she did look as if she had just got off the last boat from Bombay, but he could see no harm in trying to make friends with her, and yet, before he could get very far, Sir Christopher came out to the hall himself and quashed any such possibility.

‘You will never guess what happened this morning!’ he said by way of greeting.

‘I have no idea. Nothing bad, I hope,’ John said, already feeling vaguely guilty.

‘On the contrary. It’s working now, it’s really working – the telephone.’ Sir Christopher beamed. ‘At about a quarter past eight this morning, a disreputable man appeared at the front door—’

‘Si, un uomo molto bizzarro,’ Rita chimed in.

‘Prego,’ Sir Christopher said harshly, pointing the woman back to the kitchen. ‘He said that he was sent here by Signor Masone.’

‘Missoni?’ John asked, clutching a bag with the, as yet unacknowledged, hose.

‘Exactly my first reaction. But then, when he said Signor Pietro Masone, the penny dropped. Don’t you see? It was Peter, Peter Mason, who sent the man here. He told me, before he went back to London, that he had met someone who works for the telephone company – Lord only knows how he met him – and that he asked him to come round here and see about the machine. Hence our new-found friend this morning. He was quite clever, I must say. He just twisted a few wires, climbed out on the roof for a moment, came back and played with a few more gadgets and then threw his hands up in the air joyfully, saying “Ecco fatto!” And by half past eight he was gone and the telephone was buzzing. It is strange this country, you know. All those people at Alice’s dinner last night, all those Marchese and Contesse, were perfectly useless when one explained the predicament of the telephone. At least one has learnt that it is no use trying to put on high-level pressure in this country, certainly not where practical matters are concerned. One has to go right to the source.’

‘Amazing,’ John said distractedly.

‘I’ve already rung up Peter to thank him. Woke him up, I dare say. Just as well. That’s really what he needs – somebody to spur him on. But one shouldn’t find fault, I suppose, as it is thanks to him that the telephone is actually working. Finally, one of these extraordinary creatures Peter’s in the habit of picking up has paid off.’

John smiled and made appreciative noises but, all the while, was thinking that, once on his own, he must discover who this Peter Mason was and where he fit into Sir Christopher’s life. Any such residual resentment he might have felt last night about not having been asked to come along to Arezzo and Borgo San Sepolcro instantly vanished.

The moment Sir Christopher left, John pounced on the address book he had noticed lying next to the telephone. He turned to the M section and found, the first name on the page, ‘Peter Mason, Esq’, with a London address that meant nothing to him and a telephone number. Unable to infer anything from this skeletal information, he went to Sir Christopher’s study and randomly opened the drawers of the different filing cabinets but found only official-seeming correspondence and masses of photographs.

After only a few moments of frantic rifling, he stopped abruptly, walked over to the French window and leant his head against the glass. He realised that, in his excitement, he was wasting time, precious time – a characteristic mistake, he thought, and one which he now was determined to avoid. He drew in his breath, concentrated on the view for a few minutes and then decided his course of action. First, he would devote the entire morning to ordering the books and setting up the makeshift study for Sir Christopher – just as he had claimed he was going to do – for he saw that, no matter how preoccupied he was with unravelling the mystery of Peter Mason, it was still essential that he carry out the work he said he would. Only now, he planned to operate at breakneck speed, so as to have finished what would appear to be an entire day’s work by lunchtime; then, he would have the afternoon, once the maid had gone, entirely to himself, to scour as he liked.

When he first stood in the via de’ Bardi, glancing up at the façade of Palazzo Vespucci, John had imagined Sir Christopher living, appropriately he thought, in an enfilade of grand, tenebrous and distinctly uncomfortable Renaissance rooms. He was, therefore, surprised, when he did penetrate the inner sanctum, to come into a long, elegant L-shaped hall, lined with grisaille neo-classical papier peint, leading to a series of light-filled rooms with dazzling views across the city and on unto Fiesole.

The first door on the left opened into a rotunda-like room, which, with its object-filled vitrines, its excised illuminations and its trompe l’oeil decoration, looked more like a princely Kunstkammer than the dining room it was. Beyond this was the drawing room, as John already revelled in calling it, the lemon-yellow walls of which were hung with a few minor quattrocento pictures and several important Baroque ones, pride of place being given to a magnificent canvas of John the Evangelist by Domenichino, with a celebrated provenance, which hung between the two French windows that overlooked the river. After lunch, once Rita had finally departed, he stared hard at this picture, thinking that, even if John the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence, the city of his dreams, he would much rather identify himself with the disciple whom Christ loved than with the hair-shirted ascetic who had had his neck lopped off for devotion to his master.

The few art-filled houses that John had contrived to penetrate in the past – always on some scholarly pretext – invariably left him with a dispiriting impression of desiccated luxury, but here, in Sir Christopher’s domain, he experienced art as the handmaiden of life – civilised life. There were no picture lights, no ostentatious frames, no little gilt name tags, nothing to call attention to itself – these works of art were not mere decoration but an ineffable element of the atmosphere. Such a seductive vision of an æsthetic and personal harmony was confirmed, for John, by an unusual, though restrained, juxtaposition – Italian bronzes and bindings next to oriental ceramics and textiles – such as he had never before seen. This afternoon, he wandered round, brushing his hand against one object after another, as a pilgrim might rub the surface of a relic in the hope of extracting some talismanic power, stopping finally in front of the fireplace.

He focused on a large, impressively stark bowl of bell metal, with scroll handles and lunar symbols cast in relief on the sides, which stood in the centre of the mantelshelf. He was woefully ignorant of, and not always very responsive to, non-Western art, but he found himself deeply struck by the delicacy and craftsmanship of this dish, the origin of which he could not divine. He also assumed, from its prominent position, that it must be quite important. Though he couldn’t be sure, he imagined that such a receptacle was meant to have served some ritualistic function, the sort of thing in which one might place a burnt offering.

He picked it up gingerly and, almost overcome, clutched it to his breast. Not long ago, he had read in a novel that when a man becomes a Hindu ascetic all of his former belongings – his clothes, even his shaved hair – are burnt as a symbolic gesture of his severance with the past, as if to say that everything he has ever done, everything he has been, is expunged, forgotten. He pictured the ashes from just such a cremation being offered up in a vessel like this one. And as he clung to the object, he wished that he too could expel his past, to set it all on fire and reduce the twenty-four years of his life to a handful of dust which could be contained in an urn on Sir Christopher Noble-Nolan’s chimney-piece. And yet, long though he might to reconfigure the contours of his life, he knew subliminally that, like the deposed king long before him, he could never forget what he has been or not remember what he must be now.