Free Stone Virgin by Barry Unsworth Page B

home.
    Speculations crowded his mind as he walked back. Why had they chosen the sacristy? Did the element of blasphemy add to the pleasure? Was Barfield activated only in the near vicinity of his restoration project? Perhaps there were people for whom cluttered tables and cramped positions were essential preconditions. A sort of variant of bondage sex, he thought vaguely. His own experience provided little help; but no practice, however outlandish, could lack for devotees somewhere surely, sexual habits being in that respect like religious cults …
    These thoughts did not finally disappear until he found himself once more in his apartment, with the curtains drawn, looking at the notebook by the light of the table lamp. It was not a proper account book, the lines had been ruled by hand and the widths between them varied. It seemed more like a casual record of small incidental payments, perhaps made out of petty cash, which would be totalled and entered under a single heading in the official ledger. The writing was in ink, a spidery copperplate, much faded – and effaced altogether in places where there had been some friction in the pages. But the entry he was interested in was reasonably clear, except for a word in brackets in the cash column. The address was in San Giovanni Crisostomo: 5169 Calle Guanara. It seemed an improbably high number for the house …
    Raikes was gripped again by the excitement he had experienced on finding the notebook and which had been overlaid in the interval by the behaviour of the Tintoretto people. He tried to enjoin caution on himself. The entry in the notebook might not have anything to do with the Madonna. There was really only the date to go on and that could be – quite probably was – purely coincidental. But it was in vain. He thought of the circumstances in which he had found the notebook, the haphazard way in which it had come about, as if vouchsafed to his blundering fingers, revealed to his vague eyes. What if I have been chosen? he thought. What if I am the one chosen to clear up the mystery?
    Restlessly he got up and went to the window. He parted the curtains a little and looked out. It was high tide. In the light from the campo beyond the bridge he saw the water washing over the steps of the house gate opposite, almost at the level of the fondamenta – another six inches and it would be flooding right over. Water covered the top step, levelled for a few seconds in a translucent skin over the stone, slopped gently off again. There was to his sense in this brief steadiness of the water, its momentary unrufflement as it lay across the step with the pale stone shining through it, something devotional, something sacramental; though he was aware of that surprise, and even faint alarm felt before in Venice at the sight of water where water had no business to be, water creeping among the abodes of man in the silence of the night, disregarded. It was as if these steps and walls and the quayside itself, all this washed and accommodating stone, though seeming to be fashioned for man’s purposes, now in his absence had reverted to its own, which was the celebration of the beauty and supremacy of the brimming water, whose levels were rising year by year and slowly drowning the city …
    He returned to the table and stood looking down at the notebook. There was no other entry on this page, only three altogether for April and none at all for the previous month, confirming his belief that the sums were from some small fund for occasional expenses. But only this entry, as far as he could see, had a bracketed word in the cash column. This was difficult to make out, especially the first part of it, because the paper had worn smooth there. Denari he had taken it to be, the Italian word for money. But it seemed to have more letters than that. Lamplight reflected from the worn patch, making things more difficult. Acting on sudden impulse, Raikes went down on his knees and held the page up against