In March, two noticeable things. He glued the last gore to a sphere and created a globe. He began to source carpenters who could make the stands. He also had sex with an American tourist in a hotel over by Piazza dei Ciompi. The experience was wonderful and long overdue. He said goodbye to her in the early hours and wandered back through an empty city. Somewhere a flower seller was setting up a stall. Twilight filled with scent, hard to beat. And standing in the wide expanse of Piazza Santa Croce, the first lights came on in a café, the first sound of donkey and carts rolling up through the streets with the new day’s produce. Sunrise breaking somewhere behind the Casentino, and the moon, the beautiful satellite shone white and full and entranced. 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.
The Most Unlikely-Looking Pair
1954–59
Evelyn Skinner, last seen in 1944 outside the modest albergo, was alive and well and positively thriving. Something she would put down to cold-water swimming and a daily dose of cod liver oil. She had, by 1954, long resumed her part-time teaching post at the Slade School of Art and had happily swapped weekdays in Kent for her studio flat in Bloomsbury （although the county had her back most weekends）。 She was seventy-three years old and looked ten years younger. Her mind was agile and her curiosity as keen as ever. She was a favourite with the teaching fraternity and her students adored her. She brought them to art in a way no one else had so far done— No, Mr Fitzgibbon, that’s not quite right. Goya picks up after Velázquez and runs with it.
Mr Gunnerslake, Rome is the capital of all these eighteenth-century meetings. And Rubens in Rome changed everything.
I’d also like to add, Miss Shaw, that there is an immediacy to art. One finds oneself abruptly in front of a moment of ecstasy. This is where art is effective. Art captures permanently— At the end of every term, she took lunch with her students at Beppe’s café, a short stroll away. Eleven of them took over the back four tables, Evelyn positioned as centrally as such an arrangement would allow. They ate the daily special – usually a plate of pasta cooked by Beppe’s mother – washed down with cups of strong tea.
Look in here, said Evelyn, dabbing her lips with a paper serviette. Look about you. It’s so harmonious, she said. This could be a painting. Crimson and cream stripes and wood. Everyone dressed in monochrome attire. Good manners and joy abound. Lunch and friendship. Perfection, I say. And she raised her cup of tea.
Incipit vita nuova, she said. So begins a new life.
When Evelyn had returned from war, life had been far from harmonious. She had been gripped by a startling loneliness that had propelled her to Battersea Dogs Home from where she’d adopted an old overweight Basset called Barry. Or he adopted her, wasn’t that how it went? But she always liked to tell the story as if it was a limerick （There once was a Basset from Battersea/Who met an old dear from Bloomsbury …）。 He was a wonderful companion for five years. Unashamedly lazy, he required little exercise to uphold his cynical nature. His modus operandi was to sit in front of the fire and drink condensed milk with whisky in it. He used to accompany her to the odd evening of attribution and liked to break wind when he was ready to leave, behaviour Evelyn told her friends she too would eventually adopt. They were good for one another. They were happy years. In her classroom at the Slade, he’d sleep on a blanket under the desk as slides of the High Renaissance sequenced above him. He died peacefully during a long and tedious talk on Giorgio Vasari. Evelyn was surprised more hadn’t succumbed. It wasn’t one of my best, she’d said. Midway through, even she had felt for a pulse.
An afternoon at the end of March saw Evelyn standing at the front of her class. She cut a dashing figure in pale blue linen slacks and white blouse.
Oh no no, she said. Michelangelo was an earthquake. He broke into Mannerism with his poses. Quite fey, really. Deeply irritating because we know so much of his personality. We still manoeuvre in the architecture of Vasari’s Lives. Vasari would have been delighted, of course. That sort of man.
Her students were enraptured. Their faces lit by the slide screen behind her.
So? she said, drawing out the vowel. We were where?
She had done it again. Had veered so spectacularly away from Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ that she glanced over to the door to make sure Bill Coldstream wasn’t hovering. She looked at her watch. Curtailed, once again, by the scythe of time.