The Bellini Madonna - Softcover

Elizabeth Lowry

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847243657 ISBN 13: 9781847243652

Publisher: Quercus, 2008

Synopsis

Thomas Lynch was once a brilliant young art historian. Now he is a disgraced, middle-aged art historian, overly fond of the bottle and of his fresh young students.

But everything will change now that he’s on the trail of a lost masterpiece, a legendary Madonna by the Italian master Giovanni Bellini. Insinuating himself into the crumbling English manor house where the painting may be concealed, Lynch attempts to gull the eccentric and perversely beautiful women who live there—though he himself seems to be the pawn in this elaborate game. A Victorian diary that draws Robert Browning into the painting’s complicated provenance might provide the key—if only Lynch can manage to beat his hosts in the search.

In the end, it will be Lynch’s own vulnerable heart that betrays the betrayer. Interlaced with complex clues and hidden jokes, The Bellini Madonna reels from the lush English countryside to the sternly lovely hill towns of the Veneto, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first. It is a spectacularly original debut.

About this title

About the Author:

Elizabeth Lowry has worked as an editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and as the deputy headmistress of a girls’ school. She contributes frequently to the London Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement, and has also written for Harper’s Magazine and Granta. She lives in Oxfordshire. This is her first novel.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Chapter One

 

I met Anna Roper last month while I was trying to rob her at her home, in the village of Mawle in Berkshire.

 

I write this. I write this to explain—no, that is not the beginning. Let me start again. I write this out of an overwhelming need to confess, to record, and, just possibly, to apologize. There. I have set down the first few strokes of the pattern. To apologize to whom? To Anna? To myself, for making such a hopeless hash of everything? Or to the universe? I feelthat it somehow deserves my most abject assurances of regret. I know that running away to Asolo now, at the end of this terrible summer, was a mistake. The stones of the buildings are still as ripe with sun as honeycombs, fat and warm with false promise. The Italian sun itself rises each day as though nothing has happened, awful in its innocence. Only the noonday shutters avert their faces, as if in sorrow or in shame. So this is what has become of my life’s ambition—

 

There was a moment, on the flight over, when it all seemed insignificant. As the plane flopped down through the crevasse ofsummer sky that opened sheer above Treviso, the true proportions of things were suddenly revealed: a toy cow; a child’s blue hair ribbon, negligently draped in imitation of a stream; a putty church. The last three weeks were erased. They belongedelsewhere, to another time and place. Here everything was newly hatched, blameless. I took a fierce gulp of airplane gin and peered down through the dusty doubled glass of the window at a landscape that, miraculously, did not contain me. If I could have held things there forever, with my maudlin, drunken self permanently suspended above the unsuspecting life below, Iswear I would have. But then the craft dipped and we were plummeting down toward the black lip of a reservoir, a looming farm, the un-scrolling tarmac of a landing strip. I had arrived in Italy, and within a few minutes everything was life-sized again.

 

My confession should begin here. My name is Thomas Joseph Lynch. I am fifty years old and until last year I was an art historian. In spite of everything, the term still suggests to me something harmlessly quixotic: a savant in a skullcap, a scholar in his robe; or at the very least a distinguished old fart with elbow patches, dedicated to the complex understanding ofsimple beauty. Simple beauty! As if the human eye is capable of perceiving any such thing! We cook up meanings, endless interpretations of what is. We smear and smudge everything with our quest for pattern, with our insane appetite for words—

 

Let me introduce a lapidary pause while the camera lenses sparkle and flash in the chilly shadows of the temple of justice.My reader, I know that you will be the jury in this case. Most certainly you will be my judge.

 

Why did I do it? Because I couldn’t help myself, of course. Because Anna stood before me so meekly, holding the front door invitingly open. Question: what do such innocents have in common? They never knew what hit them—casualties, all, of alethal convergence of apparently random currents, of an accumulation of old wrongs and hurts, not to mention old obsessions, gathering purpose in the fetid cockles of the human heart. A weal on tender skin. The cry of a child. In Anna’s case, a by now faded picture in a shilling book, many years ago.

 

Enough; I can’t bear it. Enough.

 

It is a shock to be here at last, in Asolo. What do the guidebooks say? "Town of a hundred horizons." "Renaissance gem of the Veneto." "Home of exiled royalty and poets." Originally home— did I dream the whole thing? No, the diary is lying here in front of me on Professor Ludovico Puppi’s writing table, torn but perfectly real—of my Madonna. It was naturally to Asolo, just a few miles north of Treviso, that I came when everything went belly-up at Mawle; can you see the connection? I had to run somewhere; I could no longer live with myself. Where better for the disappointed pilgrim-scholar to go? Home, then, yes. I admit that I was hoping for some sort of miracle; for a welcome, for redemption. Instead I merely found my own self lying in wait for me here, as the little shit always does.

 

So what now? This is the 1st of September. Puppi, my host and former rival, is holidaying in Switzerland and cannot be reached. It’s bound to be a matter of mere days before he and Maddalena discover that I am here. They’ll try to squeeze the truth out of Anna. What will she tell or not tell them? How will I explain my ungainly flight from Mawle and my lubberly presence in Puppi’s palazzo a full five weeks before the start of the autumn vacanze for which I was invited? And worse still, how am I going to account for my sudden indifference to Bellini and all things connected with him?

 

I am full of shame and pain. Asleep in bed at night I am troubled by dreams of a frightening delicacy and tenderness: an open sash window, a shadowed lake, a silver sandal, still bearing the impress of a woman’s foot, left out in the spluttering rain. I awoke this morning with a numbness cauterizing my left arm from shoulder to elbow, as if an invisible body had been pressing against it all night.

 

The other, physical and more unsettling, change in me continues, occurring just as regularly as it did at Mawle. Once or twice a day, for no apparent reason, all six-foot-two of me, lean and red-haired, starts to shake. During these fits I imagine that the mesh of fine lines on my hands and arms begins to blur, and the contours of my limbs themselves to dissolve in an electric trembling, until I resemble an enormous insect, a large fly perhaps, the last of the summer flies, twitching itswings and rubbing its forelegs together. But then, when I peer into the mirror in Puppi’s bathroom (the large oval mirror, gilt-framed but not too ostentatious; although this is a palazzo it is, in spite of its ornate stuccoes, its marble stairway, its courtyard and well, its stables and barchessa, subdued and shabby), I see that I am after all still the same middle-aged man I was before the shaking started, T-bone of sternum and clavicles in place, my weak heart thud-thudding in its tented ribcage that still insists on rising and falling; my offending organ asleep, finally, in its bed of coirlike hair.

 

The self-hatred I feel is never-ending.

 

Artemisia, Puppi’s housekeeper, goes about with as much commotion as possible during the daytime, hauling pots and pans to the cortile to be scoured, and beating assorted rugs and pillowcases with a rattan whisk. The transistor radio which her son bought for her is on in the chilly mornings, through the hazy orange afternoons, into the chirruping dusk, belting out "Buongiorno Tristezza" (Buongiorno . . . tristezza! Oggi ho imparato che cosa è rimpianto, l’amaro rimpianto, l’eterno rimpianto . . .) and other hits about unattainable women by Claudio Villa. They send a battery of fiery darts straight into my heart. The boy appears at midday on his scooter, forks down a silent plate of macaroni in the kitchen, and disappears in a cloud of rattling red dust.

 

Then I am fed. If I could just once cook my own food, dice a potato or peel a carrot, perhaps I would feel more like myself! But Artemisia has even the vegetal life of the villa under control.

 

Too afraid of what I might say if I were to use the telephone, I have begun two letters to Anna, one apologetic and firmly regretful and the other apologetic and tender, but the monotonous beating of rugs, so much like the pounding of a human heart, and the crooning, and the dust, make me feel like a fool.

 

All together it is, as my students would say, a bum deal.

 

To be frank, I think the heat is getting to me. Slumped between waking and sleep in the mornings I think again of the nighta week ago when I crept upstairs to my old room at Mawle and saw Anna through the chink of her door, head averted and dressing gown partly unbuttoned, trying to pull the elastic band from her hair. A small porcelain lamp burning on the dressing table threw a shadow into each tired fold of her body. She must have been reading: an open magazine lay in the indentation on the bed. She did not hear me and as I could hardly bear to look at her I stared instead at her elbows moving vaguely in their loose sleeves. The August wind, more heat than air, blew through the branches of the elms outside and lifted the curtain, exposing a moon as thick as a cheese. She got up to close the window and I left.

 

What can I say? She was radiant, heavy, impassable, and I waited for hours for the light under her door to go out so that Iwould not have to feel the weight of her wakeful presence across the corridor.

 

Time passes very slowly here. Getting through it is no mean feat. I either crawl about the town, my heart shuddering in theheat, or sit inertly at my north-facing bedroom window, breathing in the cool slope of the Dolomites. More often—and since my stay at Mawle this has become my real occupation, one which I try to put off but always give in to—I do somepurposeful snooping.

 

The palazzo is full of curious junk and old bric-a-brac: behind a sparse frontier population of sheeted winter coats and flaccid trousers every cupboard seems to conceal a secret interior life rich with yellowing sui...

About this edition

• Publisher: Quercus
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1847243657
• ISBN 13: 9781847243652
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304