Invisible

‘OK. Well, our Mr Randall was something of a ladies’ man in his youth, until well into his forties, it appears. Then, finally, he was enticed to the altar by Elizabeth Drummond, the sole offspring of a local magistrate. Croombe commissioned these paintings seven or eight years later. Though then in his fifties, Randall was still a handsome man, slim and with a roguish glint to his eye. His self-portrait is in the wedding procession. He appears as a friar, walking next to a somewhat muscular nun.’

‘Elizabeth.’

‘Precisely. Now, when Randall was here, a rumour began to spread that he had become involved with a local farmer’s daughter, a girl by the name of Lily Corbin, who was around twenty at the time. Tongues started wagging when Randall included a portrait of Lily in his painting: she’s a serving girl at the banquet table. Not only that. The friar – Randall – is holding a book in his left hand, and if you continue a line from the index finger of that hand it leads you straight to Lily. For some people this was a clear sign that something was going on. Elizabeth certainly thought something was going on, because one afternoon she stormed in here, accused her husband of being a heartless adulterer and a corrupter of young women, and proceeded to stab him with a knife she’d taken from the kitchen. It’s said that as Randall staggered back some blood from his hand got onto the wet plaster, and that he later disguised the stains by painting a bank of poppies around them. There was something of a scandal, and Randall’s wife never let him out of her sight after that. Every day she followed him to the winter garden, and sat in the middle of the room all day long. As for Lily, she protested that nothing improper had occurred between herself and Mr Randall. She always insisted on their innocence, but the taint of sin remained with her, and she never married.

‘Now, our night porter, Mr Naylor, his father was a grocer down in the town, and Jack, Mr Naylor, used to go with him when he made deliveries to the outlying villages. This was after the war. One of their customers was an old lady who lived in a cottage on what had once been her parents’ farm. And of course this old lady was Miss Corbin. Some Sundays, Jack and his mother would cycle out to visit her. Jack would play outside while the women chatted in the kitchen. By this time Lily lived almost entirely on the ground floor of her cottage. She had her bed in the parlour, and her bathroom was downstairs. But one day there was a rainstorm and water started dripping through the ceiling of the landing. It was Jack who noticed the water coming through, and he took a bucket from the outhouse and went up the stairs to put it under the leak. Being just eight or nine years old, an inquisitive age, he couldn’t resist having a look around. He pushed at a door, and what he found was a dusty, cobwebbed room that had nothing in it – nothing, that is, except pictures. Dozens and dozens of pictures. Leaning against the wall there were paintings that had gone baggy in their frames. Albums full of drawings were heaped on the floorboards, with loose sheets of paper strewn all over the place.

‘That night Jack told his mother what he’d seen. It was through Jack’s mother that we learned more about Randall’s last years. It was known that Randall had returned to the Oak towards the end of his life, in 1895, after Croombe had installed electric lights in the hotel. The new lighting caused a sensation, but it didn’t flatter the paintings, Croombe thought. On the contrary; the colours looked wan and flat. He made enquiries, and discovered that Randall was still alive, living in Bristol, still painting, but Elizabeth had died a decade before and he was alone now. He was almost penniless, and in poor health, so when Croombe invited him to the Oak to retouch the murals, it was like a gift from heaven. He came back, spent a month as Croombe’s guest, worked on his paintings, and then returned to Bristol.’

Mr Morton has eased himself lower in the chair. His eyes have been closed for some time, but from small movements of his lips it had been clear for a while that he was attending to every phrase. Now, however, there is no sign that he is listening. He may even be asleep.

He leans gradually towards the blind man, who now sits up and faces him, frowning. ‘Is that the end?’ asks Mr Morton.

‘Not quite,’ he replies, backing off, like a shoplifter accosted on the point of pocketing something.

‘I thought not. Go on,’ Mr Morton commands, reclining again.

‘Well, that was the story that everyone knew: that Randall did the job, went home to Bristol and died there,’ he continues. ‘In fact, Randall took a detour on his way home. He went in search of Lily Corbin, and found her living at the farm where she had been living when he first came to the Oak, though now she was in the cottage that used to be occupied by the herdsman. As Lily told it, she answered a knock on her door late one afternoon, and there was her younger brother, Alfred, standing in the drizzle beside a bedraggled old man, whom he shoved towards her as if he were some vagrant he’d found thieving from the henhouse. Alfred said the old man’s name was Mr Barlow, but she’d recognised him straight away. She wasn’t going to say anything, however, not with her brother there, because her family had always blamed her for the affair with the painter. It was because of the affair that nobody had ever wanted to marry her. And when she got him inside, out of the rain, she didn’t have a chance to say anything, because before she could get a word in Randall launched into a great speech about his love for her, how her face and voice had haunted him every morning and every night for these past twenty years and more, how he had reproached himself for his cowardice in not leaving his wife. He was a beggar now, he said, not merely in appearance but in his heart as well. He knelt at her feet on the cold stone floor of her kitchen, pouring out his heart while rainwater dripped from his straggly hair. He looked ridiculous, she thought, and he was talking nonsense. Perhaps he had indeed fallen in love with her in the course of that summer month, when they had walked along the river together. Certainly she had fallen in love with him. It was the one time in her life, that month, that she had been as happy as she had been as a child, but it was too many years ago. Her heart had withered. He told her that he had been back to the room where he had painted her portrait, that he had repainted the face of one of the shepherdesses, to make her the twin of the beautiful serving girl. He had painted a lily by her feet, in honour of her, as a sign of his love. She was no longer the beautiful serving girl, she pointed out, but he told her that she was wrong, and started quoting poetry at her. She looked at William as he knelt in a little puddle on the floor of her freezing kitchen, and what she saw was not the man she had loved when she was twenty, but a man she did not know, a lonely and fearful old man, and she felt pity for him.

‘Randall came to his senses, and learned to content himself with pity. He vacated his home in Bristol and went to live on the upper floor of Lily Corbin’s cottage, while she lived below. When Randall fell ill with pneumonia, nearly two years after he’d moved into the cottage, she nursed him until he died. In his will he left her everything, though there wasn’t much to leave, except the pictures he’d painted in her house. She stored them in the room in which Randall had worked and slept, and rarely looked at them, she said.

‘By the time that Jack and his mother were visiting Lily, the hotel had fallen into disrepair and was boarded up. During the war it was used as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen, having gone out of business in the 1920s. Randall’s paintings were whitewashed over and this room became a ward. In 1945 the Oak was boarded up again, so when Jack came up here, to take a look at the pictures he’d heard Lily talk about, the garden was wild and had started to invade the building. Vines were creeping across the walls and there was grass coming up through the floor. Armed with a torch, Jack would slip in here and try to find the portraits of Lily. Some faces could be seen through the veil of whitewash, but not many, and the whole room had grown a coat of fungus and moss. It was like a magic grotto, with the sun shining through the cracks between the boards, and the painted people lurking underneath the greenery and mould. He’d shine his torch across the walls, trying to find Lily, but he never saw any shepherdess and the only serving girl he could see looked nothing like the old lady at the farm. He described the serving girl to her, but she couldn’t say if he’d found her, because she’d never seen the room herself. All she knew was that the friar’s forefinger was pointing at her, so Jack went looking for the friar, but he couldn’t see him either. It wasn’t until long after Lily had died, when the Oak reopened and this room was restored, that he knew for a fact which of the girls had been Lily. And of course it turned out to be the serving girl he’d picked out with his torch.’

Mr Morton opens his eyes, blinking as if emerging from a daydream. ‘So she must have been in her nineties, when Jack was a boy?’

‘A month short of her hundredth birthday when she died in 1949. The farm was down on the Bath Road, a couple of miles from here. There’s a supermarket on the site now, and a DIY superstore.’

Facing the glass wall, Mr Morton raises his eyebrows as though at a screen on which a film had just been shown. ‘Quite a tale,’ he comments.

‘One I’ve told many times, as you’ll have gathered. But not always at such length. Sorry. I went on a bit.’

‘Not at all. Not at all,’ Mr Morton assures him. A smile begins to form and then melts, and his expression settles into thoughtful composure as he ponders the tale of Randall and Lily Corbin and Jack Naylor.

‘I’ll leave you to your music.’

His lips form an unspoken word, then he says: ‘Not music. Homework.’ Smiling, he places the machine on the arm of the chair. With a finger poised above the Play button, he asks: ‘Would you like to hear?’

‘By all means,’ he replies, and a woman’s voice comes out of the machine, speaking Italian. In a wistful lilt the voice recites four or five lines that sound like poetry, lines in which can be heard words that must mean ‘sun’ and ‘herb’ and ‘rose’.

Mr Morton turns off the tape and smiles in the way one would smile at a souvenir that has awakened ambivalent memories. ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole,”’ he repeats. ‘“Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano| Un mazzolin di rose e di viole,| Onde, siccome suole,| Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ Solemnly, holding the recorder between his palms, he translates: ‘“The girl strolls homeward from the fields|As the sun is setting, | With a sheaf of grass and, in her hand, | A posy of roses and violets | With which, tomorrow, | As every Sunday, she will adorn | Her bodice and her hair.” A poem,’ he explains, ‘by Giacomo Leopardi,’ and continues, intuiting the response: ‘An Italian poet, a great poet, but in Britain hardly known. Hence my vainglorious mission to translate his poems into English.’

‘You’re a translator?’

‘But not of poetry. More prosaic material, usually: essays, sleeve notes, memoirs, guidebooks, brochures, anything that’ll pay the bills. Leopardi is a private project.’

‘No one’s translated him before?’

‘There’s always room for more. Not that my versions will be better than anyone else’s. They’ll miss the target too, but differently. I miss, we all miss, but every missed shot is useful. Like arrows peppering the bull’s-eye. The poem is the shape in the middle,’ says Mr Morton, his fingers forming a circle of arrow shafts in the air.

‘What were the lines again?’

Evidently expecting the request, Mr Morton repeats promptly, with exactly the same intonation as before, ‘“La donzelletta vien dalla campagna, | In sul calar del sole, | Col suo fascio dell’erba, e reca in mano | Un mazzolin di rose e di viole, | Onde, siccome suole, | Ornare ella si appresta | Dimani, al dì di festa, il petto e il crine.”’ He rewinds the tape and plays it again, and the female voice recites the words, the same words, but in her voice they are changed, sounding not like a report, as they sounded when Mr Morton spoke them, but rather like a confession whispered in the dark, to herself.

‘Beautiful,’ he responds, and Mr Morton nods, gravely, as if this were not a fatuous thing to have said. ‘When was he born?’

‘Around the same time as your hotel. Born 1798, died 1837.’

‘A short life.’

‘Short and miserable. He was never a happy man, but he had a lot to be unhappy about. With Leopardi you get the full panoply of romantic suffering: poor health, unrequited love – though I have to say that he tended to fall in love after the event, as it were, or with women he knew would not reciprocate. I think his infatuations were essentially literary. There’s something artificial about them, something willed. For his poetry he needed to be unloved. And women weren’t the worst of his troubles.’

‘The worst being –?’

‘His body.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘His appearance was unprepossessing, to say the least. In Naples he was nicknamed “o ranavuottolo”, the little toad. He was very small, with a large head, and his upper body was badly twisted. His digestive system didn’t function properly. He was asthmatic. He had chronic bronchitis. The deformity of his spine and ribcage was so bad that it damaged his lungs and heart. Fatally damaged them. And as if that weren’t enough,’ Mr Morton goes on, ‘he was raised in a moribund little town, in thrall to the pious tyranny of his mother. Imagine this,’ he enjoins. ‘Giacomo is barely four years old. An infant. He enters the great room of the Palazzo Leopardi, the salone. In the centre there is a huge table, decked in red velvet. Giacomo crosses the room. He pulls himself up to peep over the top of the table. And what does he discover? The body of his little brother, laid out on a velvet bed. And how does his mother comfort him? She tells him that she is rejoicing in the boy’s death. She is rejoicing because his death has sent another soul to the ranks of the blessed.’ Incredulous, indignant, Mr Morton cites other instances of the Contessa’s pitiless devotion to God, of her severity towards Giacomo and towards her husband, the proud and ineffectual and kindly Count Monaldo, who once gave his trousers to a beggar and hobbled home wrapped in his cloak, terrified lest his wife discover his act of charity, and towards her daughter, Paolina, who was forbidden to meet her penfriends when they came to Recanati from Bologna, because her mother regarded friendship as a contamination of one’s love of the Almighty. ‘And yet,’ Mr Morton sighs, raising his hands, acceding to the argument of an imaginary opponent, ‘when Giacomo at last escapes from the prison of Recanati he is no happier. For the first time in his life he is free of his family. He is free of the backwater in which it was his misfortune to be born. For six days his carriage rumbles across Italy, and what does he do? He reads his books, barely glancing out of the window.’ He shakes his head with indulgent perplexity, as if he were a travelling companion of Leopardi, observing the eccentric young man seated opposite him. ‘Giacomo goes to Rome,’ he continues, ‘and finds the big city no more to his liking than life in the provinces. Unimpressed by the great monuments, unmoved by its ruins, irked by the people he has to mix with, he claims to find pleasure only in one small corner of the city, one tiny enclave of pleasurable misery: the tomb of Torquato Tasso, in the church of Sant’Onofrio, where he wept for the poor mad poet. In Pisa too he finds a refuge from the vexations of city life, not a chapel or a tomb on this occasion, but a simple lane, a spot that becomes dear to him because – wait for it – it reminds him of Recanati, his birthplace, the town in which he had passed his youth, a period he has now come to regard as his single fleeting episode of true contentment. An impossible person. Precious and self-centred. A dilettante. An inveterate adolescent,’ Mr Morton pronounces, pausing to flop his hands apart in exasperation. ‘And yet, and yet. Adolescents are very often right. And his voice is wonderful. Wonderful,’ he repeats, his eyes following a scribble in the air, as though tracking the flight of a butterfly. ‘So simple, so clear.’

He listens, a little unnerved by Mr Morton’s flittering gaze and by the urgency of his speech. ‘Like a fantastically wealthy man who has taken a vow of poverty,’ says Mr Morton, but the disturbance created by Stephanie, which had abated for as long as the story of Lily and William Randall lasted, has returned now, and become so obtrusive that the voice of his daughter and the voice of Mr Morton are clashing, the one extolling the virtues of an unknown poet, the other berating a woman he no longer knows. Over Mr Morton’s shoulder he looks askance at the garden, weakly ashamed of his inattention, and then, not without a sense of relief, he hears a third voice, calling his name from the doorway, telling him that Mr Grenville is on the phone again. ‘If you’ll excuse me?’ he says, standing up.

Mr Morton too stands up, and shakes his hand firmly. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

Leaving the Randall Room, he looks back and sees Mr Morton on the garden terrace, with his feet widely parted and his hands in his pockets and his head thrown back, like a man on a sea wall, taking the brunt of the wind. And that night, after supper, when he goes out into the garden, he sees Mr Morton standing by the hornbeam hedge, in exactly the same stance.

Becoming aware of his presence, Mr Morton turns and dips his head, once, as if greeting him for the resumption of the afternoon’s conversation. ‘I heard an owl,’ he grins.

‘Really?’ Side by side, arms crossed, they listen together. ‘I hear the road.’

‘Wait.’ Patiently Mr Morton waits, his eyes wide open in the moonlight. ‘There,’ he whispers, remaining perfectly still, as though the bird were so near that any movement might scare it.

‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

‘In that direction,’ Mr Morton tells him, pointing towards the town. ‘There,’ he whispers again.

‘Nothing but lorries, I’m afraid.’

‘Try closing your eyes.’

‘They were closed.’

‘Ah.’

‘I always hear the road. I have a grudge against it. The beginning of the end, the day they finished the bypass. It ruined the view, to say nothing of the din.’

‘The end of what?’

‘Of the Oak. It’s closing.’