"Still Life"

[fiefoe]

An attractive book cover and promise of a story about British people in Italy were enough to get me to pick up this novel. Sarah Winman is good at creating individual scenes, but the novel kind of just meanders through the years and until the flood happened there weren't many things that could make one sit up.

• * They were served a reduced menu but celebrated the Allied advance with large glasses of Chianti. Overhead, a low-flying bomber cast them momentarily in shadow. They picked up their binoculars and studied the markings. Ours, they said, and waved.
• The swallow is, of course, the Florentine bird, she said. It’s a Passeriform, a perching bird, but the swift is not. Because of its legs. Weak feet, long wingspan. It belongs to the order of Apodiformes. Apodiformes meaning ‘footless’ in Greek.
• He was a recent scholar, if I remember rightly. Covered in the afterbirth of graduation – shy, awkward,
• She tore the fruit in half and glanced down at the erotic sight of its vivid flesh. She blushed and would blame it on the shift to evening light, on the effect of the wine and the grappa and the cigarettes, but in her heart, in the unseen, most guarded part of her, a memory undid her, slowly – very slowly – like a zip.
• But his mother’s presence suffocated him. Every reprimand was pressure applied to the pillow.
• * We were an unconventional family. Scandal was a rite of passage. May I continue?
• Why are you talking oddly? <> In case you want to interrupt again. I’m leaving gaps. Between. Words. So you can slip in, and not disrupt the—
• Candles were on every surface and running down the centre of the tables were small tubs of Parma violets – so rare, that early in the season – and sprigs of rosemary and the smell was intoxicating... And the other guests followed and gasped at our moment of beauty, of bellezza. Our night, finally, of Italian authenticity and grace... And rabbit with white beans, and bitter greens that she would have collected from the roadside in Fiesole or Settignano, which she cooked ripassati style with garlic and oil.
• She could feel Margaret’s gaze haunting her. The blunt edge of her jealousy.
• His wife, Peg, said he should’ve been better looking seeing as he’d inherited all his mum’s best bits. She’d meant it as a compliment, but her words danced both ways, hot and cold, kind and cruel, but that was Peg.
• He passed different Allied divisions, young men like him worn old. The soft light moved with him across the groves and meadows, until the sky held only ripples of pink and the night chasing in from the west. He’d tried to practise ambivalence towards this country, but it was futile. Italy astonished him.
• Luca Signorelli’s masterpiece of the Last Judgement in Orvieto: Darnley said that Sigmund Freud had visited in 1899 and had somehow forgotten Signorelli’s name. This he’d called the mechanism of repression and it became fundamental in Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams.
• Find a Temper & Son globe and you’ll find my mum’s name hidden somewhere on the surface.
  A town called …? she asked.
  Nora.
• Thing is, it’s always been us when the others have left. Always that spark when the lights have gone out. Is that love? ...
  Once is enough. We just need to know what the heart’s capable of, Evelyn.
  And do you know what it’s capable of?
  I do. Grace and fury.
• The rest is folklore. Dog came in first, thus ensuring two things: enough money to set up a modest business in handmade globes, and a memorable name for his sole son and heir.
  You were named after a greyhound? said Evelyn.
  A winning greyhound, Evelyn. Winning.
• Sorry Miss Skinner, said Darnley, I should’ve warned you. The Germans like to shit everywhere before they retreat.
• And she went on to explain the difference between a deposition and an entombment. The dreamlike use of colour, the sparseness of the image, the dance. <> She said, It’s about feeling, Ulysses, that’s all. People trying to make sense of something they can’t make sense of.
• E. M. Forster: I bought him his first bombolone and lent him my Baedeker.
  Good God! People get engaged for less! and Darnley tapped out a cigarette and offered it over. What was he like? he asked.
  Rather sweet, said Evelyn. He didn’t like Rubens and was quite devoted to his mother.
• * It is just a picture. And you are right, said Evelyn. Art historians have made gods of men... The fuss, as you say, can certainly be exaggerated. But what it’s always about, for me, is response. It’s a painting that demands of us a response. All the best ones do.
• but art becomes a mirror. All the symbolism and the paradox, ours to interpret. That’s how it becomes part of us. And as counterpoint to our suffering, we have beauty... Beautiful art opens our eyes to the beauty of the world, Ulysses. It repositions our sight and judgement. Captures forever that which is fleeting... Art versus humanity is not the question, Ulysses. One doesn’t exist without the other. Art is the antidote.
• Open them, he said. So you know I’m serious about you.
  Peg felt other tables looking at her. She opened the larger box and lifted out an orange. It was the most perfect orange.
• She wanted out of here and American Boy was her out of here. California. New World. New Life. She was cupping that dream in both hands, careful not to spill not even a drop.
• It’s like a large grapefruit with thick skin and a lot of pith. <> Bit like Col then, she said
• ‘Luce intellettual, piena d’amore.’... Light of the mind, full of love... Dante. The belief that a combination of intellect and beauty can make the world a better place.
• Darnley shook his head. Jesus Christ! he said. Niccolò di Raffaello di Niccolò dei Pericoli would turn in his grave. <> Oh, I doubt he’d be able to move, sir, once they’d got his name in.
• * Forced to evacuate their homes before the retreating German Army blew up the bridges. All except the one, that is. <> The Ponte Vecchio was saved by a sentimental Führer, who’d visited the city in ’38, and formed an attachment to the famous landmark.
• No one back home could understand what occupation did to a people. The deprivation of body and soul. The daily choice to survive but at what cost and sometimes at what cost to others.
• There would be many versions of the stairwell dash that would be told later in the café... He was banging on our door, they said in unison. But not like when the Germans arrived, added the signora. Could you demonstrate? suggested the priest, and she made a fist and began banging on the counter. Everybody agreed that the tone was not angry but had a certain consideration to it.
• Bang, bang. All that was necessary, he said, was a small movement. A lean forwards, a slight crouch and an outstretched hand. An action that demanded nothing more than a bodily counterbalance. No more than you would do, say, to pull a child out of a pond. Nothing more. <> Down below, Michele explained to the crowd, The soldier’s gun barrel’s caught in the guttering.
• They shared the same simplicity of décor, a luxurious ease of taste and style, frescoes on the ceilings, but only curved lines and clusters of leaves, blue and white, or white and pink, washed out by age or a skilful brush.
• And for two hours the wine was poured, the cheese cut, and the two men talked. Of what? Who knows? Of love, of war, of the past. And they listened with hearts instead of ears, and in the candlelit kitchen three floors up in an old palazzo, death was put on hold. For another night or day or week or year.
• Night then Temps, and Darnley – without thinking – took his leave Italian style. There was a pause, however, before the second kiss and in that intimate space was a 1937 Brunello di Montalcino. Decanted. And in that intimate space was something unvoiced. No more sir. And war is over.

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• Every April, as thick clusters of white and pink blossom hung heavy and low and became the talk of the street, Cressy walked methodically, zen-like, with a glass of stout from Col’s and sat under the blossoming tree, knowingly enacting the Japanese ritual of hanami – something he’d read about in the library. People passed by and laughed, but Cress closed his eyes and listened to the song of the breeze through the flower heads.
• He could fix anything, find anything, and was everyone’s go-to man in need. Cress couldn’t read till he was thirty. Lot of shame in that empty space.
• Across the constellations, and the containment and hopes of all they were. And from gambler to philosopher, he said, I’ve lived under the fickle movement of planetary adventure. I’ve encountered long dark nights when the sirens sound. But the moment stars align, and the shift of sweet wind greets you of a morning, this is when mystery becomes knowing and fortune becomes love—... —and the arc of flight settles a small bird a thousand miles from home with heat on its wings and a calm delight at the mastery of navigation.
• Over by the bar, the large blue-fronted Amazonian parrot guarded the till with a glum weariness.
• Here it is, the only one to survive, and he carefully lifted out a globe the size of a football. He said, It was quite a night, Temps. I heard that all the globes shot into the air when the bomb landed. Hovered in the warm updraught and spun. A mini universe lit by flames.
• The scale of man – spatially – is about midway between the atom and the star.
• Peg – you only had to look at her to know she was born to better things. She knew it and he saw it. She was an upriver swimmer, struggling against a contemptible tide, but by God she tried. She sang to no one. Locked eyes with no one. Focussed on an empty corner of the room that held a ghost that’d haunt her till the end of her days... She had class. She may have stolen it, but she had it. And she told you so when she sang, because she sang for her life, and for yours too, because the world never turned out the way you wanted it to. It simply turned. And you hung on.
• he did it anyway because the music offered a skylight to another dawn.
• 1950: British national service conscripts were soon sent off to Korea and absence and heartbreak were back on the menu.
• * Alys's gallery day: She would remember how a morning became an afternoon, how people stared at the paintings on the wall and talked about them in serious tones. How the gentle murmur became white noise and calmed her. How Ulysses’ gaze made her think she was something, or something enough. How she was glad to be away from her mother. How she saw a woman dressed as a man and thought how interesting life could be, might be. The type of day that showed her where she ended, and the world began.
• * And it was this she would remember: his voice resonant in the stillness. People listening to him, not laughing. She stood up, marched over to him and held his hand. Her exquisite moment of ownership. The day when he became hers.
• What?
  A phylum. A phylum pori—
  Stop fucking saying the word phylum!
  That’s the lowest form of life, said Cress. A sponge.
  I don’t think I could feel any worse, said Col.
  Yeah, you could, said Peg. Ginny’s pregnant.
• * He brought down his dad’s globe and placed it on the counter for Claude to use as a perch. Cress made beef and potato stew and made enough for the evening punters too. Pete said Cress would’ve made a lovely life partner and everyone agreed. Cress took Peg and Ginny and the kid out and they came back with armfuls of cherry blossom. Must have hurt Cress but he didn’t let on. He’d have come to an agreement with the tree. Kid and Ginny decorated the shelves with jugs of pink and white flowers and Peg bandaged the stoat’s jaw and by 6.30 p.m., they all stood back in awe. They’d done it. The pub was ready to open. It looked wonky but loved, and loved it had never been.
• She’d always thought the Tempers were a daft lot with their dimples and eyebrows and ears, and their belief that life cuts you a break when you least expect it... Peg could be kind, but there wasn’t enough of it to be a regular thing with her. It was like her wage. Always ran out by Thursday.
• Col shuffled in, part invalid part Old Testament, with a blanket draped around his shoulders and a moth around his head. He parted the silence like an ancient sea.
• Col? said Ulysses, suddenly looking up. You know you said this was the perfect place to bury a body?
  Yeah. I did.
  Well, someone’s beaten us to it. There’s one here already.
• Her looking at his wonder, his boyhood wonder still there; bright eyes, sleeves rolled high, capable hands that could catch anything – a ball, a falling star – and she wishes she could say yes to him but her imagination won’t reach that far, can’t stretch that far, not since Eddie—
• Peggy Temper walking tall and proud through the streets of her dominion. Dismissing pain with a whiplash flick of her wrist and casting it into the gutter to join a thousand other heart-raw tales. Right left, right left, her hips sway like a dirty dream and orange embers flare at her unpainted mouth.
• Good advice, Cress. That way, your emotional state can harmonise with the landscape. Dover to Calais, Dijon, Poligny, St-Cergue, Lyon, Geneva – maybe a turn around the lake – Milan, Bologna. Then Bob’s your doo-dah.
• There are moments in life, so monumental and still, that the memory can never be retrieved without a catch to the throat or an interruption to the beat of the heart. Can never be retrieved without the rumbling disquiet of how close that moment came to not having happened at all. <> And when Cressy appeared in the rear-view mirror, that was one such moment for Ulysses.
• You too, said Cress. Will you be OK?
  I’m a tree. I’ve done this a thousand times before.
  Done what?
  Goodbyes.
  Really?
  Think about it. Leaves.
• He flicked the catches on the small suitcase and opened the lid. On top was an orange Shetland sweater, which he carefully lifted out. Underneath, either asleep or dead, was a large blue Amazonian parrot.
• I didn’t come here for school, she said. I could’ve got that at home.
• And to be sitting in the front passenger seat of an English car named Betsy with a parrot on his shoulder was as good as life got... he nodded and smiled at pedestrians who stared at him, as if to confirm their eyes were not deceiving them, and yes, it was he, Signor Massimo Buontalenti, popular notary and all-round legal expert, revealing his closeted bohemian side. <> They crossed the Arno on the cusp of evening; the water flared with colour and buildings surrendered their reflections to the untroubled surface.
• Massimo smiling at their delight. Massimo, one of life’s givers, soon to become a friend.
• They learnt that the ubiquitous back of a lorry appeared in the market after the carabinieri had left and shifted a whole lot of ecclesiastical reliquary and knocked-off radio sets. No different to home, then.
• Golden light edged around the dark grey clouds and Cress used the phrase ‘unconscionable beauty’ in describing the garden...  On the way down, he asked for a moment by himself in the limonaia, just him surrounded by citrons and sentiment. A nice sentence, one of Cressy’s specials.
• * It would be the first of many photographs taken over the years on Giglio. It would hang on the wall in the living room between two windows where white curtains billow on a salt-drenched breeze. Through the windows the eucalypts throw off a keen scent.
• * from this template would transfer the information in each square onto a similarly gridded gore, working scrupulously across the twelve sections of the earth. An instinctive and artistic understanding of the distortion that occurred from flat surface to curve.
• So, old fella, said the ornamental orange tree. Whatcha gonna do? It’s now or never.
  Is it?
  Go on – put a little cologne on those smooth cheeks of yours and show ’em what they’ve been missing. I’ll be rooting for you...
  Cress went to his room and did what the tree said. He positioned his new panama hat at a jaunty angle and changed his shoes. Unlike Ulysses, he was still a fan of the sock.
• Eventually, Ulysses would look forward to November when the majority of visitors left, and the weather became English for three months: a lot of rain, a little sleet and starry nights that brought a mantle of frost. The only guests, then, were loners or art enthusiasts, basically no trouble at all. <> But we’re ahead of ourselves.
• Santo Spirito: This square, I mean. Not according to Brunelleschi. It should have been built on the other side, where it would have extended down to the river. You’d have arrived at church by boat. How heavenly would that have been? Like Venice.
• Peggy Temper walking up the stone staircase as if she was in a film. Find your light, Peg, find your light. The echo of her heels, stair after stair after stair. The bewitching line of her stocking seam, like a musical digit, da dah da dah da dah.
• Peg singing ‘That’s All’. Pete, fag in mouth, down close to the keys, caressing them into another dimension. Col next to Cress on the sofa, their movements coordinated – hand to mouth with a cigarette, glass to mouth with the wine – and kid sitting on the floor, stroking the parrot.
• And he became aware of the universe, that endless canopy of chance and wonder. He leant against the statue of Dante Alighieri and lit a cigarette. He said, I was supposed to come and give you someone’s best a long time ago, so I’m doing it now. Evelyn is her name. Evelyn Skinner.

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• Mr Gunnerslake, Rome is the capital of all these eighteenth-century meetings. And Rubens in Rome changed everything.
• She suffered a heart attack on the Gotthard Railway on what would have been her final trip to Florence. Crossing the Kerstelenbach Viaduct was often cited as taking one’s breath away, and it did exactly that. They found her with a pen in her hand. Final thoughts on love, ultimately: ‘I shall remain astonished.’
• Soho Square: Queer identity hid itself in the shadows of these dark streets and both women had, at some time, left an imprint of their body upon some unfamiliar bed; an addendum of promises, made for a lifetime but meant only for a night.
• You were brought up by your father. <> She was a short umbilical drive away.
• Dotty’s penchant for young married women. The subterfuge gave a much-needed energy boost to the post-menopausal hinterland of creative repetition.
• Oh my giddy giddy God! Look who it is! screeched Margaret someone across the terrace, a sound that made the French hate the English a little more.
• * At a dull soirée of Muscadet and attribution. I was incredibly limp that night and Margaret was – she was – well, she was—
  A calliper? said Dotty.
• The ever-changing sight of mountains and ravines and meadows stunned them, pulled them into an interiority they would later share
• Pinocchio is a poor provincial Tuscan boy and he was forced to cast off the clothes of his identity in order to wear the same white gloves as Mickey Mouse. White gloves, Dotty. Sometimes I think I’m the only one who notices these things.
• Giambologna's Abduction of a Sabine Woman: He understood the erotic dance as much as he understood the response. The struggle between idealised man versus the mortal...  the long heavy hand of religion was everywhere. This statue, more than anything, represents the artistic freedom of the Renaissance. The freedom to think and feel outside of the Church.
• * She would have gone towards him and embraced him. They would have been momentarily speechless at the way fate had summoned them once again. They would have walked arm in arm towards Michele’s café... This was the version of events, had Evelyn gone south.
• Beauty and gratitude entwined forever in a closely woven fabric of sympathetic names: Constance, Dotty, Thaddeus Collins, H. W., Gabriela, Livia, and of course her mother. Her mother was the knot that stopped the fraying.
• * across trecento squares where she saw statues come to life and where the bells called the medieval dead to rise. A conspiracy of beauty everywhere...  It wasn’t being struck dumb by beauty per se, but the acknowledgement that if such beauty existed, then so did the opposite.
• We are approaching the time ‘when the fly yields to the mosquito. Come la mosca cede a la zanzara,’.. Dante’s Inferno.
• 44': What had been the heart of Dante’s Florence had been reduced overnight to mountainous piles of smoking rubble. An act of destruction purely to halt the Allied advance, which of course it failed to do... Occasionally, she collaborated with the art historian Berenson and his cabal,
• And then along came life. That priceless, life-affirming moment with a Renaissance masterpiece would have been nothing without him and the good captain. It was about the complete moment.
• That end sequence in I Vitelloni, you know when Moraldo’s on the train and the camera moves through his friends’ bedrooms? It’s how it is, isn’t it? Saying goodbye. All the people you leave.
• But it was only the convent, really, that provided space for self-expression. Creative women from good Florentine families often found their way there for that purpose. Here’s a name for you, kid: Plautilla Nelli. She was the first female Renaissance painter and was very successful. She, in effect, ran a school for female artists. She couldn’t sell her own work, but the convent could.
• The world of the domestic kitchen is a female world (she underlined this). It is a world of routine, of body and of bodily function. A world of blood and carcass and guts and servitude... often in the most ludicrous composition and yet, they succeed in what they intend to do – revoke the feminine space. Male triumph over the triviality of the scene... The power of still life lies precisely in this triviality. Because it is a world of reliability. Of mutuality between objects that are there, and people who are not. Paused time in ghostly absence. Who was it who prepared the food?
• 60s: He said the number of hostels had doubled over the decade, as a way to encourage young people to travel and engage with other nations. To heal the schism that war had caused, he said. We’re not so different.
• Pete climbing into the passenger seat. The car driving away, heading north. And then that airless bubble, absence.
• In the darkness, the fear lessened, and she was left with the quiet spill of sadness... She lit a match and held it by the map. That was when Peg rose in her, defiant and clear. Back that way and fuck anyone who says otherwise. Peg led the way for the rest of the night, head up and switchblade sharp. And fuck that Romy fucking Peller, said Peg.
• * She’s somewhere up there – and he pointed to the black hills – cradling a broken heart, attempting to understand the complexity of human emotion. Why it’s left her diminished when not long ago she felt like a conqueror. And here am I thinking what words can give the experience value. How to explain to her that the improbability of love, which she feels will last forever, will one day shine its light again... When Cress entered the square, Alys thought the police escort a bit much, but from then on events happened fast. She got up from the pavement and ran towards Cress, and the policeman stumbled out of his car and ran towards her. Told her about his first love, Giulietta, and for a while it became all about him.
• Coming here had been her idea. She let Col take the credit, but it was her because she knew what happened when the waves hit – that lurching shift when the ballast slides into empty space and you tilt so far over you think you’re gonna capsize, think you’re gonna drown.
• Alan Beantree acted as a short circuit for some of the energy in the lightning discharge.
  What happened to the dog? said Peg.
  Cinders.
  Dead?
  No, the dog was called Cinders.
• Peg winked at Ulysses. ‘Cress’ll be all right’ was what that wink said. He pushed his leg against hers under the table, their own little energy discharge.
• Cress would never forget them turning up for him for as long as he lived. All that love again. Cress thought he’d had more than his fair share, and that, for Cress, was as bad as having none at all. But the tree said, That can’t happen. Love’s the way. And its leaves quivered as the breeze came in from the southern hills.
• Flood: The grassy flatlands where the fishermen stood had been swallowed by the swollen current. Crossing Santa Trìnita bridge, the water raged through the stone arches only a few feet below. How could such a softly spoken green stream have turned into this?
• The street drew colour from the lightening hour and the undulation of the ground made the water shallower and his footing felt firmer. He was in the square, he was almost there, and his arms burned from the carry but home was up ahead. The globe achingly beautiful in the violet light of morning. Michele shouting to him from the top window. Ulysses looked up and nodded. Suddenly, a fierce brown surge rose behind him and threw him into the deluge.
• The Baptistery doors have been ripped from their frames – the mayor and a film crew are over there now – and panels from the Gates of Paradise are missing.
• * The first bucket came through and then the next and the next at a cracking pace. A book now blackened by sludge. Book after book after book, the written patrimony of Western civilisation. And sometimes through the mud, a glimmer of gold or a glimmer of blue stilled their breath. Made them humble, that shy glimpse of ancient holy.
• Old women light the porte-cocheres / Shut the grilles with thorough care
  And with that same maternal light / They close the city for the night.
  But like a child, un-keen to sleep, / The city rises from the deep …
• the carbonara delicious. Wholly authentic, said Evelyn. In what way? said Dotty. No cream whatsoever. No cream? But it’s so creamy! The creaminess, said Evelyn, is purely yolk with the faintest hint of egg white. With the addition of cheese, both parmesan and pec—
  I thought it was pecorino! said Dotty. And is the bacon bacon or another sleight of hand?
  Not bacon, my darling. But guanciale. Pig jowl.
  Guanciale, repeated Dotty. How I’ve missed Italy! A delicate crunch, and then your mouth floods with an oily saltiness—
  The only seasoning, said Evelyn, is a grind, perhaps, of pepper. And the whole ensemble brought together with a soupçon of pasta water.
• A friend, said Evelyn. But I don’t know where he is. I know he’s here, in Florence. Somewhere. But where? That is the question.
  The man picked up the newspaper clipping. After a beat, he said, Il Palazzo di Bianca Cappello.
  What? said Evelyn.
  Via Maggio. You see? he said. Just see here – this corner. The pattern is so distinct.
• And for Evelyn, there was equal sadness as there was delight at hearing how close they’d been to one another, how touchable, if only – the preciousness of time, you see. <> They heard the front door open. In here, Alys! said Ulysses. Oh my God, said Alys. Hello, kid, said Evelyn. Miss Skinner? said Jem. Jem Gunnerslake? said Evelyn. Fair to say there was more than a touch of farce to the reunion.
• * Alys sat on the floor of her mother’s room with a sketchbook on her lap. Her scrutiny was not loud and the sound of a pencil moving across the page was soft. Peg wouldn’t have agreed to this in waking life, but this was what Alys needed, not Peg, because in the space between artist and sitter could be found understanding and forgiveness and maybe love.
• Her beauty had been her currency. Always had been. No one talked about when the bank ran dry as it inevitably would. All those books she never read. All those museums she’d rubbished as brain-box boring. Cressy said it took effort to turn a page. Takes patience and care, Peg. Takes a leap of grace to say I don’t know.
• she realised London in wartime had been the star of that fateful show. Love and sex came fast and danced with the nearness of death and my God did it make life golden. Made it giddy and immediate. They clung to one another because the essence of life itself had been revealed to them, and it was as simple as a Californian orange grove with the sound of bees, and blossom, and heat as heady as existence itself. Eddie always looked at her as if the future was ripe. Ted looked at her as if the fruit had fallen.
• * Alys was alone in Ulysses’ workshop, pen in hand, radio on. She was putting the finishing touches to a globe that featured only cities more than a thousand years old: ancient names that became the ancient trade routes.
• from that study had come intricate sketches of a bridge, seen from all angles. And on this bridge, attached by struts overlooking the river, the solitary hermitages for worship – the world Evelyn had long ago described. Wooden slats. Abutments. A ladder. Closing in on a window and the woman inside. And Alys came to understand why women would seek refuge on a bridge and she drew their youth, their pain, their ageing. Their existence and worth given shape by a virgin who birthed a child. She drew the lives they’d given up in the microscopic study of a flower, a vase, a cup, a plate, a piece of fabric – lace intricate and fine – darned sheets on a bed, a sketchbook in the corner, a fine lock of baby hair hidden between two pages. On and on and on, she drew the details of undetailed lives.
• * She looked at the phrases he’d underlined in the book. Those early days of what had been important to him. ‘A stamp for a letter to England, please.’
• * When Ulysses returned to the globes, which he did at the beginning of April, he put Cressy in the heart of Italy. Gave him an ‘i’ at the end of his name instead of a ‘y’, and this would be the marker of the post-1970 editions. There was something noticeable about these globes. How sorrow ran tributary to beauty. There was a majesty to them, something delicate and precious and startling. Like the image William Anders took from space. They would be Ulysses’ finest.
• I read it! said Evelyn. How I laughed when the chandelier fell on him! <> It’s been optioned for a film, said Romy. Ali MacGraw’s pencilled to play my mother.
• She took a sip and said, You grew into your name after all. Took you a long time to get back from war, but you did it, Ulysses. I’ve left you the flat in Bloomsbury, by the way.
• A Room with a View: Small-minded snobs, she said. An endemic English quality, believing only the educated middle class know the secrets of art. <> But they come to love in the end, said Jem. <> But is that enough? said Dotty. <> Yes! they all said.

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• She said, I saw a lone rower carving across the Arno. The foothills were darkening, and the cypress trees around San Miniato were topped by a ghostly mist. Ochre walls appeared more golden as the sun softened. Lights appeared throughout the city and took their place on the surface of the river. The rower slipped through this spectacle of light. Water dripped off the blades of his oars, and momentarily, I was in that drip. Falling into the green twilight depths of history... You have caught the fever of Firenze! Oh, my dear Miss Skinner, there is no turning back. You shall die with those lights in your eyes. Miss Skinner has turned looking into loving! The first rule of art. Looking into loving! Oh welcome, my dear! Welcome!
• Reciprocal sentiments were scattered like sugar beads and in the midst of it all,
• Caravaggio came out of Mannerism and stepped right back into reformed classicism, full of rage and drama. He was a slap in the face to his peers. See here— <> Shadows, pain, dark, light. Repeat, Miss Skinner.
• The Sabine woman: Is it wrong to admire beauty when it is the subject of such horror?.. It’s calculated and erotic in equal measure. The male is enjoying her terror. The artist our discomfort... But it was commissioned for a civic square. This man knew what he was doing. A sculpture with no fixed viewpoint so we can walk around it, be part of the horror, part of the action, part of the dance. He knows the great dilemma he is presenting, Miss Skinner. He’s showing us what’s in us.
• He said, The Church doesn’t have a language for the variations of our humanness. We need to look at Freud for that. Psychoanalysis is the way forward, Miss Skinner.
• Santa Maria Novella is one, said Evelyn. It has rather a solemn atmosphere. I heard someone suggest it would be called stony-faced if it was a person.
• Evelyn woke first. Shafts of afternoon light cut through the shutters and it took a moment before she realised this was not her room at the Simi. On the floor lay dresses, drawers and chemise. A bowl of dirty water that had collected a rime of dust, the rags with which they’d washed one another, the silken trail of discarded desire. Curls of orange peel, too. An Italian dictionary. A nub of bread, rock hard now. She saw everything as if it was framed. The fall of light on the bowl told the greatest story.
• * They walked across the grass. The cemetery was beautifully tended and the lavender bushes brought in the bees and that little nudge of toil lifted the murmuring of sorrow. Swifts, yet to depart, darted joyfully overhead.

__ The Deposition from the Cross (Pontormo) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deposition_from_the_Cross_(Pontormo)
__ llis Larkins - A Smooth One (Ella Fitzgerald, ‘My One and Only’)