Or What You Will Read online

  “It is such things on which so much turns. You weren’t big enough to reach the table yet, and the things that made you who you are were just taking root.”

  “Strange to hear you talk about my grandmother’s house. Still, I suppose you have the right.”

  Because I came into being there, she means, in my own first and earliest origin. We have seen the back kitchen, with its heavy wooden table with cooling racks, and big oak chairs strong enough for a child to clamber onto and stand safely. It also holds a huge twin-tub washing machine—very old fashioned now, but new and up to the minute in 1950—and a huge wheezing refrigerator. There is a door to the backyard, where flowers and vegetables grow, a door into the huge larder, laden with jars and packets, a door into the tiny lavatory, and an archway into the main kitchen, where something is always baking or bubbling or being mixed. From there a door leads to the hall, with the front door and the stairs curving up out of it. There are two other doors opening off to the left side of the hall, first the door to the study and then the one that leads to the rarely used front room. The front-room door has a stained glass panel, checkered squares of ruby and sapphire glass, and when the sun shines they cast glowing coloured light onto the hall floor, which Sylvia glories in. They sit in there later on the day of the doily, eating cakes with Father McManus and Sister Dolores. Sylvia squirms uncomfortably on the horsehair sofa, where her legs don’t reach the floor. She likes to look at the piano nobody plays, and the framed photographs set squarely on it. She likes the framed print of Botticelli’s Annunciation that hangs over the sofa. But it is the study that was my place.

  Nobody studies in the study. Perhaps Fergus, Sylvia’s father, studied there once, and his brother and sister. Certainly some of the books there belonged to them and have their names written in them in crimson and faded black. “Catriona Harrison is my name, Canada is my nation, Montreal is my dwelling place, and Christ is my salvation” in The Daisy Chain and “John Angus Harrison, 1938” in Montaigne. Uncle John was killed in the war. It’s hard to imagine fat Aunt Cat writing so carefully. The books belonged to anybody or nobody when Sylvia read them indiscriminately, weeping for La Boétie and Harry May equally when she was eight years old. Because the Montaigne was Uncle John’s, she always imagines La Boétie with the face Uncle John has in the stiff black-and-white photograph on top of the piano, solemn in his sergeant’s uniform. In future years she squirmed at this recollection, and then later realised that nobody was harmed by it and perhaps all three men, if they could have known, would have enjoyed it. She imagines Montaigne and La Boétie, reunited and side by side in Heaven, welcoming Uncle John into their company, the three of them talking about their observations of life in eager but differently accented French.

  The study has something of the air of a lumber room. Things are stuffed into it to be out of the way. All the grandchildren play in there when they visit, and Sylvia sometimes finds treasures left by her cousins, Aunt Cat’s children: a wooden horse, a cherry-red hair ribbon, a toy soldier with a broken gun. Her cousin Ian, much later to become Con’s father, leaves a painted wooden sheep from a toy farm set, which Sylvia recognises and restores to him. If she climbs up on the big wooden chairs here, she can draw or write on the desktop, where there are more books and papers. If she drags a chair over to the window, she can look down into the garden, and see piles of snow. It is not always winter in her grandmother’s house, but it seems that way. She is always sent there to stay when her mother is having a baby, and all the children after Sylvia are born in winter: Matthew in March, Peter in February, Cecelia in December, and Maureen in January. She spends time with her grandparents in other months, but hours only, or a day or two when her mother screams that she can’t cope with her ruining everything any longer and sends her off. It is almost always winter when she is left there for weeks, months on end, and spends so much time in the study.

  It’s not that her grandmother wouldn’t let her play outside. She has a coat and snowpants. She does play outside, just as much here as she does at home. She also spends a lot of time helping her grandmother in the kitchen, learning to cook, though in later life she often can’t be bothered with all those elaborate cakes and pies and casseroles. In memory, though, it seems that whenever she is in her grandmother’s house to stay, when she sleeps in the little boxroom with a single bed and the pink stencilled horse on the door that they still call “Cat’s room,” she spends all her days alone in the study. Except—she’s not alone. That’s her secret. I am her secret.

  There would be no room for me at home, among so many siblings. But they stay at home, more secure in their mother’s love than Sylvia, the spiky one, the one who doesn’t fit. She never understands why it is she who is sent off, scapegoated always, when she is not, she doesn’t think, any worse than the others. Sean, who is two years older, is allowed to stay at home. The younger ones are occasionally sent to their other grandmother, at the tavern. But it is Sylvia who is taken to the Harrisons, time after time, so in memory it seems as if she spends as much time there solitary as she does at home with her brothers and sisters. It is always framed by her mother as punishment, as ostracism, but neither she nor her grandparents see it that way. Sylvia is always glad to have a haven, glad to escape her mother’s endless petty persecutions.

  Two walls of the study are covered with bookshelves, and one of the bookshelves is an ingenious pine device of individual shelves with glass doors, slotted together. Barrister’s shelves, they are called, though Sylvia doesn’t know that yet. The pale pine is stained dark red. There is a little drawer at the bottom, containing endlessly fascinating objects, and a curved wooden top, delightful to stroke, which she cannot yet reach except from a chair. Each shelf has a smoked glass door—Bristol glass, Sylvia has been told it is, and very fragile, so she must be careful. She doesn’t know that Bristol is a place, she believes it is a material, a special form of glass. The glass doors slide upwards, and then back into a carefully designed recess above the books, allowing access to the contents. The books in that cupboard are all old and heavy and dark coloured, with fine type. None of them have pictures and some of them are in Latin. There’s nothing to appeal to a little girl with two short black plaits sticking out at the sides of her head. Sylvia is perhaps four, if it is the time she was sent here for Matthew’s birth. But it might have been another time, she could have been three, or five, but it is before she starts school. It is winter, and she is in the study.

  She has been looking at the things in the drawer—old palm crosses, a little cracked leather purse with a picture of a goat, containing a nickel and two dimes, a black-and-white postcard of Valentin de Boulogne’s Abraham Sacrificing Isaac, an empty box with a velvet lining, a broken thermometer, a medal from the “Great War for Civilization 1914–1919,” and a scrawled copy of one of Prospero’s speeches from The Tempest. She tries to read it, muttering the words. She can already read fluently, but the curled and faded copperplate is too much for her. She leans forward, and sees in the smoky glass of the bottom shelf what ought to be her reflection, but it isn’t, it isn’t. It’s me, looking back out at her. She leans forward more, very slowly, until she is just barely resting her forehead on the cool glass. For the first time, we see out of each other’s eyes, simultaneously looking in and looking out.

  12

  HEY, HO, THE WIND AND THE RAIN

  Dolly is both more delighted and more confused than he has ever been. It reminds him of his first days at Oxford, not only suddenly thrust among people who care about the same things he does, but expected to live and learn in a language that had been until then almost entirely literary. There is the same sense, too, of being where he has longed to be, but finding it very different from his expectations. Almost as long as he can remember he has dreamed of living in the glory days of Firenze, the Renaissance. He has immersed himself in it as much as he can. But now that he is to all appearances really here, he can’t quite get his bearings. Language isn’t the problem, he is (like Tish)
utterly fluent in the language they speak here, though if he were to think about it he’d realise he can’t quite tell whether it is English or Italian. But everything is strange. It is odd enough to catch a stumbling girl and find yourself wrenched from a May afternoon to an October evening, from sunshine to storm, from crumbling old walls to well-kept ones, complete with pike-carrying guards and their eager challenges. But is this Firenze? Dolly doesn’t think so. He hasn’t been able to see very much as yet, but as far as he has seen, some of the buildings are the same, others very different. Strangest is the absence of Brunelleschi’s dome, the heart of his Firenze. He isn’t sure, being hurried through the streets the way he was, with the rain lashing down, what else is different. Some of the palazzi he passed were identical to those he knew, but others were not.

  If he has somehow found his way into the past, he thinks, it must be before 1439, when the dome was finished. But then he has been brought to the house of Marsilio Ficino, whose dates Dolly very well knows are 1433–1499. And his own family home, the Tornabuoni Palazzo, had never, he knew, been painted like that on the outside. It was a delightful fresco, as best he could make it out in the flickering torchlight as the guards hurried him along, between it and the huge loom of the Palazzo Strozzi on the other side. But he had researched the history of his family palazzo extensively, and there would have been some drawing, some mention in the family papers, even if the fresco itself were entirely worn away. So Dolly is bemused, and wildly curious.

  He isn’t quite as disastrously wet as Tish. His clothes were better designed to keep out the weather, and he was wearing a proper hat. Tish’s straw bonnet disintegrated in the first few minutes, whereas his chaperon served as both hood and cape. His jacket and trousers are wet, but not sodden. Still, when Ficino (there’s no question it is him, he recognises him from the fresco on the wall of Santa Maria Novella, and the sculpture in the Duomo) shows him into a room on the ground floor where he can change, and leaves him alone there to do it, he is delighted to dress himself in Renaissance fashions. The chest contains plenty of possibilities. He considers a red cioppa, which would mark him as a Florentine and a man of substance—he could wrap himself in the three yards of red cloth that traditionally make a gentleman, and this is a status that as a Tornabuoni he can legitimately claim. But Dolly too is still giovane, and glad to be. He sets the cioppa gently aside and finds a soft cream linen shirt, a blue scholar’s gown to go with his wet vermilion scholar’s cap, and dark blue hose to replace his damp and anachronistic trousers. He hangs up his chaperon to dry. The contents of his pockets he puts into a soft leather pouch which he fits on his belt—his original belt, which he bought in the San Lorenzo market just before he went to Oxford and has worn every day since. He thinks of the new clothes as Shakespearean, because he wore clothes just like them when he played Prospero in Oxford.

  Once dressed, he picks up a lily lamp, which he finds delightful, and takes the opportunity to explore the room, holding the lamp up close to examine the tapestries (dragons and unicorns listening intently to St Francis preaching, and a crowned man casting his shadow on a naked old man with a beard, which he identifies after some thought as Alexander the Great and Diogenes, though the scene is clearly taking place beside the Baptistery in Firenze) and the books on the table by the bed. They do not help his chronological perplexity. The first is Plato’s Summum Bonum, in Latin, a beautifully illuminated manuscript. For a moment he is struck with excitement thinking it is a lost dialogue, but when he reads the beginning he discovers it is only the Phaedo, which he knows well. The other book is a printed herbal, in Latin and French, Flora by Mabeuf. He runs his finger over the printed text thoughtfully. The printing press was invented in the easy-to-remember year 1450. This seems like a thorough and accomplished work, with multiple woodcut pictures of closely observed plants.

  He goes into the sitting room to join Ficino and Miranda by the fire only a few minutes before Tish and Giulia rejoin the company. He likes the room. It is paved in big stone flags, with a bright brocade rug covering most of the floor. A wooden table stands under the window, closed and shuttered against the storm, which is still raging loudly outside. There is a mosaic marble fireplace on the opposite wall, inlaid with tiny mosaic scenes of animals and starscapes. Miranda and Ficino, like an unmatched pair of bookends, are sitting on two comfortably curved padded armchairs on either side of the fire, and there are three other similar armchairs set enticingly nearby. Dolly takes the closest chair, beside Miranda, who grins at him just as the other door opens and the other two join them.

  He does not at first recognise Tish. Her silhouette has completely changed, and her hair. There’s nothing in the young man he sees walk into the hall to recall the girl who left it, except her features. He has seen men dressed as women in theatrical performances, but never in his life seen a woman dressed as a man—not, in any case, that he has discerned. There is more of it going on in his own world and time than Dolly knows. It is much easier for members of one gender to disguise themselves as the other when clothing is strongly gendered and full of clearly coded gender signals. If anyone had asked Dolly whether Tish had legs, he would have found the question most improper, but answered that of course she did, she must have. His awareness of her legs was unapprehended, entirely abstract and almost scientific—she walked, therefore there must be legs under her skirts—but he had paid the fact no conscious attention. When he realised as she came forward that this strange young man was neither strange nor a man, he felt both thrilled and horrified. It was not in any way a sexual thrill. Dolly likes Tish, but he hadn’t found her particularly enticing before, and there is nothing in the way she is dressed now to appeal to Dolly sexually, even though he can see the outline of her legs as clearly as he can see his own. The thrill is that of a broken taboo, as is the horror. Rosalind, he thinks, Viola, Portia, Nerissa, Imogen.

  Their eyes meet, then they look away in mutual embarrassment.

  “Where are we?” Dolly says, once they are comfortably seated with wine and cake. Dolly finds the cake both delicious and familiar, it is an autumn apple cake, a Florentine delicacy, vastly improved by being made with pears instead of apples.

  “You have stepped across from world to world,” Miranda says.

  “You are in the city of Thalia, in the duchy of Illyria,” Ficino says. “Let us introduce ourselves.”

  While they introduce themselves and exchange information which we already know, let us consider the place-names here. The city of Thalia may be named for the Grace of Abundance, or for the Muse of Comedy, or for the book of that title written by Arius to defend his position at the Council of Nicaea, but really it’s because Sylvia liked the word and it attached itself to the city without her thinking too much about why. This was her first book, remember, and often in first novels writers throw things in that more experienced writers would hesitate over. The idea of grace abounding, or flourishing, is similar to the meaning of Firenze’s name as flowering, or flourishing, and the city of Thalia is an echo or shadow of Firenze in this world. She wrote the first Illyria novel after a trip to Rome and Firenze in 1974. She took herself to Europe for her thirtieth birthday—to Jo March’s Europe, as she said. She was supposed to go to Venice as well, but she cancelled that part of the plan and stayed another week in Firenze instead, because she had fallen in love. In love with the city, that is, she was too raw from her divorce to love any human again yet. But she could love art and trees and architecture and little cafés where she could drink espresso and red wine, and restaurants where she could eat inexpressibly delicious pasta. And that was where she started to write, to imagine Illyria and start to scribble the beginnings of what would become the first Illyria book. So the city was called Thalia because it was always called Thalia, and she was on holiday with nothing to look anything up in and the internet was still decades away.

  The name Illyria came straight from Twelfth Night. And unlike Italy, Illyria is part of a peninsula that has never been united. The name as
she uses it sometimes means the duchy, sometimes the whole geographic expression that is the peninsula, and sometimes is a metonym for the whole world. The names of many of the other countries came from the Bible. Shakespeare and the Bible, what impeccable sources!

  Dolly and Tish gape at Miranda. It seems to them extraordinary to meet Marsilio Ficino, who they believed to have been dead for centuries, but quite a different kind of thing to be eating cake with Miranda, whom they know to be fictional. It is especially strange for Dolly, who has taken the stage as her father.

  “You’re that Miranda,” Tish blurts.

  Miranda looks quizzical.

  “You’ve heard of Miranda Ammanatini in your world?” Ficino asks, gently surprised.

  “Miranda, the daughter of Prospero, yes,” Tish says.

  “There’s a play,” Dolly says.

  “A play,” Miranda repeats. “In which no doubt all my closest held secrets are displayed on the stage to everyone who has the desire to laugh at them.”

  “What year is it?” Dolly asks.

  “It’s the year sixteen,” Giulia says, impatiently, having answered this question already upstairs.

  “It’s three hundred and forty-eight years since I left Firenze to settle here, and three hundred and fifty-three years since the Triumph of Pico,” Ficino says. “That would make it anno domini 1847.”

  “But that’s the same,” Tish objects.

  Miranda smiles. “The same as in your world? Is there some reason why you thought it wouldn’t be?”

  “Progress?” Tish says, tentatively. She waves her arm in a way that suggests, if it does not precisely invoke, steam engines, railway carriages, factories, gas lighting, photography, waterproof clothing, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, and all the rest of the relentless clatter which so often passes by that name.