‘Yes, I know, I know. But these rules are dependent on one thing. On me wanting to exist for ever in eternity more than I want to give myself a chance in life. And it is impossible to know everything ahead of you, because as soon as you know, it changes. He – me, Wilbur – would no longer be living with the knowledge of everything to come. Because as soon as you know what is to come you stop it coming. It’s like what you said with Wilbur and Maggie at the cemetery. When the train nearly went off course. Well, his life will take an entirely different direction if he knowseverything. So pretty soon he won’t know his future at all. My past will stop being his future.’
Agnes looked at him with shrewd, studying eyes. ‘But exactly’ – a man with a folded copy of theCorriere della Serawalked right through her, Richard Nixon’s troubled face on the front page staring out through her body – ‘you will be gone.’
Wilbur started to run towards the Hotel Proserpina.
‘There is no knowing he will survive all this’, said Agnes, calling after him. ‘There is no knowing he will ever wake up. There is no knowing anything!’
Wilbur kept running through the crowds, and tried to ignore Agnes as she called from the bridge. ‘You are a fool, Old Bean. You are pushing your young self into a state of extreme unpredictability. I have to tell you that.’
Like life, he thought.Like life.
Titian
Maggie had always loved art. Her inspirations were the great living artists, but she had a thing for the Renaissance. At thirteen in the library she had found a book calledThe Lives of the Artists.
In that tome she had learned that Leonardo da Vinci had designed parachutes and diving suits, that Michelangelo never had a bath, and that Caravaggio killed a man over a game of tennis. In the book there had been a print of Titian’sBacchus and Ariadneand she had been so mesmerised by its colours and composition it affected her breathing and made her skin prickle. Her dad had told her that art was for posh people, but she liked how she felt staring at art and wanted more of it. More of that feeling.
‘Just standing in front of big old paintings calms me down,’ she told Wilbur now, as they were about to enter the medieval church. ‘That’s why I used to go to the National Gallery, back when I was miserable in London. It’s the closest thing to time travel.’
‘How?’
‘Well, you stand in front of a Leonardo from, I don’t know, 1498, and it’s powerful because the painting is as it was then. The emotions and feelings of it are fresh. It hasn’t gone off. It is 1498 right there in front of you. The world grows old around art. But the art is still as powerful and fresh as it always was … if that makes any sense …’
The Ghost was right behind them as they entered the church. They found the painting of St John and stared up at it.
‘It’s a bit spooky,’ said Wilbur.
Maggie raised an eyebrow. ‘What’s spooky about it?’
‘It’s a dark painting, in a sombre and empty church, by someone who died four hundred years ago.’
‘Of the plague.’
‘What?’
‘Titian. Poor lad died of the plague. Then his son died of the plague.’
‘This isn’t making it less spooky.’
‘There was a lot of plague back then. In Venice.’
She smiled, consoled by awe.
Wilbur turned away from the bald saint in the painting. Looked around, as if someone was standing there. But he couldn’t see anyone. He thought of the hallucination he’d had in the heat, on the Rialto Bridge. The doppelganger. The words in his ear. The sound of a train.
He’d read Daphne du Maurier’s and Thomas Mann’s stories set in Venice, and knew it was a city that could conjure darkness. A city of labyrinths.
Yes, he told himself, it must have been hallucinations. But if so, the doppelganger was one he’d seen before, now he thought about it. He remembered tripping with Charlie and seeing him there in his flat. He remembered voices in his ear too. Not Venice, but Sheffield. And as far as he knew, Daphne du Maurier had never written a story set in Sheffield.
He looked at his watch. ‘Mags, I think we should probably get back to the hotel …’
‘All right, love. Are you okay?’
‘It’s just that we don’t want to be in a rush for the meal.’
‘No. You’re right.’
He felt bad taking her away from her favourite painter, but at the same time he wanted to get out of the church and into the light because his unease was growing.
