Free The Runaway Visitors by Eleanor Farnes Page B

the stage where vintage cars are much more interesting. Amanda hasn’t much enthusiasm and gets tired trailing round museums. I’m sorry.’
    ‘What about you? Do you get tired, Victoria, trailing around museums?’
    Was there a hope of relief in his question? she wondered. Was he thinking there was a chance that he could get back to his work? Victoria hardened her heart. He had invited her, and now he had to put up with her. She would not let him off.
    ‘Oh no, I’m most interested. I’m really looking forward to it.’ ‘Right then. Hop in, and we’ll be off.’
    He opened the car door for her and she got in. The roof was down, and the passage of the car allowed plenty of wind to cool them. She was glad she had tied back her hair. They sped into Firenze and Charles parked his car in the courtyard of the Contessa’s house. ‘We’ll thank her when we take it out again,’ he said, and led Victoria into the streets of Firenze.
    She soon found, as she had said to Sebastien, that it was much better to have a knowledgeable guide. It was a very different thing exploring Firenze on her own, from having Charles at her side, Charles’s hand on her elbow guiding her across the streets and through the short cuts, Charles to find all the best things to show her and pointing out their finer points. In the magnificent Duomo or Cathedral, in the beautiful Baptistry with its famous bronze doors in high relief, Charles could resolve her doubts or relieve her ignorance. In the Accademia museum, the original David, as
    opposed to the copy in the Piazza della Signoria, entranced her.
    ‘It’s fashionable nowadays to be patronising about it,’ Charles told her. ‘People pretend to believe it tedious. But one should never listen to fashionable people. ’
    ‘What do you think about it, Mr. Duncan?’
    He began to talk to her quite seriously about the work in the museum there, admitting that a lot of it was larger than life, but why shouldn't art be? and certainly a lot of modern art was; and told her that she must go to Rome and see the ceiling of the Sistine chapel to see what he meant; but also to look at the Pieta in Rome (which some lunatic had recently damaged) to discover the marvellous tenderness and purity of the work. And they looked at sculpture where the figure was half emerged from the block of marble, imprisoned for ever in it, and Victoria admitted that she could not imagine how sculptors could ever bring their vision out of the rough blocks: ‘It’s wonderful how it comes out of the stone. I don’t know how you can see to get it out. ’
    ‘In the same way as an artist gets his vision on to canvas.’
    ‘I think it’s much harder; and a painter can correct a mistake, but if a block of marble is wrongly split, it must be catastrophe. . . And you, Mr. Duncan, aren’t cutting out, but building up.’
    ‘Just two quite different techniques. Building up in clay is for casting in bronze. In marble or wood, one is hammering and gouging out the life and form that is there. Perhaps that’s the more satisfying. And the marble in this country, of course, is marvellous. One sees exactly why Michelangelo chose so carefully and why Henry Moore comes here to select special blocks of marble . . .’
    Victoria was so interested that she was surprised to find it so late when Charles said, looking at the flat gold watch on his wrist: ‘Well, that’s enough for this morning, I think. Let’s find a taxi. It isn’t worth going back for the car. We’ll find a place for lunch.’ He had the restaurant picked out. It was slightly up in the hills. It would be cooler, he said. Victoria thought she might have preferred to be in the city, where she could watch the Florentines at their lunch; but when they reached the restaurant, a great many Florentines had also decided it would be cooler in the hills, a great many of their cars were ranged on the car park, and it was obvious that Victoria would not be deprived of her treat. In