Leonora (4 page)

Before the school year was out, she was expelled once more. Patricia Paterson accompanied her to the grille in the front door. ‘It was playing the saw that finally did it.'

Leonora is ten years old when the Carringtons, together with Nanny, decamp lock, stock and barrel to Hazelwood, a less opulent house than Crookhey Hall, and within reach of the salty sea breeze. It has fewer dark corridors and poky passages than Crookhey, making it impossible to play ghosts with Gerard, but the scent of the sea makes up for everything. Crookhey Hall's drawing room was impressive and a spinning wheel in one corner attracted unfailing attention. There was a quantity of mirrors and lances, but what attracted most attention were the suits of armour once again standing guard in the new living room at Hazelwood. There was even one occasion when Leonora and Gerard clambered onto the roof at Crookhey and viewed the whole of Great Britain. In Hazelwood, all they can do is ponder on the meaning of three dark, grand arches leading nowhere.

4

MISS PENROSE

T
HIS TIME THE BISHOP OF LANCASTER
declined to assist: ‘Not only did she take up smoking,' Maurie explains to Harold, ‘your daughter accused the Reverend Mother of having a wart sprouting two white hairs on her chin.'

‘Doesn't she?' enquired Harold Carrington.

‘Yes, but it is more polite to exercise discretion.'

‘What are we going to do with you?' Maurie regards her daughter with apprehension. ‘Your father is so livid he had one of his turns at the Club.'

‘All I want to do is paint.'

‘You are not in a position to decide your future life at the age of fifteen.' Harold Carrington is becoming annoyed. ‘Before your presentation at Court, we are going to send you to Florence so that Miss Penrose can teach you some proper manners.'

That evening, Leonora goes into her father's library.

‘Papa, will you please allow me to ask you a question?'

‘Yes, go ahead.'

‘Do you believe in God?'

Taken by surprise, Harold Carrington looks his daughter in the eye: ‘I have never seen Him.'

Her father is an intelligent man, no doubt about it. So why on earth had he sent her to those convent schools? Why is he so hard on her? ‘A proper preparation for marriage is a woman's salvation,' she overheard him say one evening.

Her mother stands by her and encourages her. She presents her with a box full of oil paints and brushes.

Leonora believes in apparitions, not like the Blessed Virgin at Lourdes, but those beings who suddenly appear from around a corner to either assault or take you by the hand. From the age of two onwards, from the time she woke up she talked about the visions she'd had in her sleep. Without thinking further back than yesterday, she had spied a figure walking slowly along the roof of Hazelwood, and who continued walking beyond the edge of the roof. He must surely have killed himself when he fell. Leonora hurried out to search for him, but couldn't find anyone there.

‘It's a ghost,' Nanny confirmed to her. ‘You are possessed of the gift of second sight, but this is something best not discussed, least of all with your father.'

Leonora is different, and nobody understands her, with the exception of her accomplices, Nanny and Gerard.

‘It is high time you left off playing with Tartar, you're too old still to be playing with him, he's a child's toy,' the head of the family cautions her.

Leonora bawls her protest.

‘It's for your own good, I've already told you that. Furthermore, that rocking horse is so old it's only good for burning in the fireplace. You've got all the use you can out of him.'

‘No, Papa, no! Not that! Not Tartar! Do anything else you want, only not Tartar!'

‘Tartar is for little children. I shall burn him myself until there's nothing at all left of him. You need to grow up, you are far too old for a toy like him.'

‘He's not a toy. Tartar is
me.
'

Leonora howls. Her teeth chatter. Harold Carrington covers his ears and orders the rocking horse to be burnt.

‘Bring her a cup of tea,' Carrington orders, and departs with his head held low. Where on earth did this girl come from? However could he get her to understand? How does one raise a wild mare? How is it possible for a wooden horse to so disturb a young girl in this manner?

‘Shame on you, Leonora.' The girl whinnies, paws the ground, kicks out and froths at the mouth.

At midnight, thin and ridden with shivers, she is racing to look for Gerard.

‘I heard some terrible neighing, I'm sure it was Tartar, they are dismembering him!'

‘Yes, I saw how Father sneaked upstairs carrying your rocking horse in his arms. He is clearly set on inflicting the vilest tortures.'

‘Do something, Gerard!'

‘The deed is already done! The head of Tartar has already fallen!'

‘I shall neither eat nor drink again.'

Gerard consoles her. ‘What goes on in your head, Prim, seems like waves of electricity suddenly being short-circuited.'

The school for aristocrats in Florence's Piazza Donatello is a manual of good behaviour and
savoir faire
. The teachers, headed up by Miss Penrose, instruct their charges in how to behave in society; how to be an efficient lady of the house, seating her guests according to rank at the dinner table; how to introduce and maintain an informed and intelligent conversation with the person on one's right, and then on one's left; how to suppress a sob or a giggle; how to behave exactly like everyone else; how to treat poor relations with compassion, assuming they fall into poverty through their inability to manage their lives better; how to train dogs and clean up their mess, and how to avoid stepping on the cat's tail. In addition, her education was to be complemented by training in the sports of horse-riding and fencing. Leonora, who in addition to English already speaks French, now acquires Italian and amazes herself by this mission of self-discovery.

‘What are you doing, Miss Carrington?' the headmistress enquires on seeing her crouched over her exercise book.

‘I am composing a manual of disobedience.'

‘Your mother informed me you were interested in drawing.'

‘Now it's writing.'

At break time Miss Penrose, who never leaves the building without first putting on a hat and gloves, studies her pupils through the window and observes Leonora instructing them: ‘We are now going to play horses.'

Most agree, and most of all Elizabeth Apple. They begin a kind of wild dance, stampeding in all directions, until the tea table is upended and its china tea set smashed. They continue on at a canter, out into the garden, manes flowing as tremulously as waterfalls, as they ride on one another's backs, whinnying.

‘Girls, what is going on? Have you completely lost your heads?'

Miss Penrose cannot believe her eyes. From the family home at Hazelwood, Carrington assures her that he will reimburse her twice the cost of the tea table and its shattered porcelain tea set.

‘My daughter will never do such a thing again. From now on, she is forbidden to play at horses.'

She is both Miss Penrose's youngest and most original disciple. The headmistress studies how she responds. Leonora's eyes open wide as she appears to be listening to a voice within her. The deepest depths of her eyes emit signals of light. She enters museum galleries with reverence, attempting to muffle even the sound of her shoes on the floor, keeping her hand over her mouth. Is she suffering palpitations? Since the museum guard allows nobody to cross the wire, she keeps her distance to admire the paintings, fearful of activating the alarm. She returns over and again to the same pictures, and Miss Penrose asks her:

‘Why are you so particularly impressed by the Sienese School of Francesco di Giorgio and Giovanni di Paolo?'

‘Because of their use of colour, especially their shades of vermilion, chestnut, gold – oh how I love that gold! I would like to use those colours in my own painting. How was it possible for Cimabue to be so ahead of his time?'

Her friend Elizabeth Apple shares her enthusiasm. The two take notes and repeatedly escape Miss Penrose, especially during lessons in etiquette or in learning how to date antiques. Neither of them are particularly interested in learning whether a piece of furniture belonged to the period of the Directory or to Louis XV.

‘Let's go to Siena, Elizabeth!'

‘They could expel us for that!'

‘How can you be so easily scared?'

Leonora decided they should take a bus there without first informing Miss Penrose. They go via Arezzo to visit the work of Piero della Francesca.

Elizabeth is a coward and attempts to restrain her. ‘Let's not go down this alley, it's very dark'; ‘I think there's a man following us'; ‘We'd better go back now.' The last thing Leonora wants to do is to go back now, and she enters an antique-shop-cum-cavern-of-delights covered in dust and cobwebs, the fibres of which form bridges between the hand of a metal charioteer and a porcelain plate before continuing on to envelop a Florentine dagger. ‘We recovered these books from a Venetian palace,' comments a different kind of shipwreck survivor, an old man, indicating a yellowing stack. Who knows what varieties of fungus are growing in this disturbing Aladdin's cave?

Leonora feels in her element, curious and confident in equal measure. In here, even the dust is magical. Suddenly, in the midst of all the objects, there shines a pair of yellow cat's eyes. There are quantities of cats in Florence, and in Rome their cradle is the Colosseum. Leonora wishes she could live out her days in just such a cave, for she knows she would feel secure there. She experiences a similar sense of exaltation in Florence when she crosses the Piazza della Signoria, the Ponte Vecchio, the Piazza del Duomo and the Lungarno.

Her veneration puts no brake on her audacity: she caresses the statues and climbs up to the altar in St. Peter's Basilica to view the tabernacle of the Holy Sacrament at close quarters. If anyone had seen her, she would have been shown the door. She acts without due circumspection, without bowing her head or crossing herself. She walks along the banks of the Arno, in the Oltrarno, through the Lungarno Serristori, where the green of the park reminds her of her mother's native Ireland. From a woody embankment on one side of the river she can see not only the opposite bank, but right into the city as far as the Uffizi Gallery.

One morning, torrential rain causes the Arno to burst its banks, covering the statues in mud. In response a different flood, one of young people from across the whole of Italy, gather at the National Library, to salvage the books at risk. There Leonora meets Giovanni, a young man in his twenties, with striking eyes and an easy smile who, together with the rest, is removing mud from the books, one page at a time.

‘I arrived from Rome by motorbike with my friends,' he tells her with a smile.

‘Where do you sleep? And where do you eat?'

‘I sleep in a fabulous
wagon-lit
train compartment parked on some dead rails, and people on the nearby street provide us with food and treats. I've never eaten so well in my life! As for you, what do you do?'

‘I write and draw with both hands, it's my special gift.'

‘It's a gift like being able to wiggle your ears.'

‘No, it's something only I can do. It's me who's special.'

‘I think you might be right,' Giovanni smiles broadly as he says goodbye.

Her friends suggest they go and have tea at the Giubbe Rosse. Leonora is keen:

‘Please may I bring Giovanni Proiettis? He's one of the students who came here from Rome to rescue the books from the library.'

‘Your parents wouldn't approve,' is Miss Penrose's response, from high above her twiggy legs.

Rather than offer her support, the fair-haired and languid Elizabeth Apple comments:

‘I wouldn't dream of embarking on a relationship with someone utterly unknown.'

‘But you and I were utterly unknown to one another when we came through the door of Miss Penrose's establishment.'

‘That doesn't count, since we belong to the same social class.'

‘I don't belong to any class at all. I am a horse.'

‘Oh come on, Leonora,
please
.'

‘I'm going to see this young man, whether they allow me or not. If you like, you can tell Miss Penrose that I've arranged to meet him in the Uffizi Gallery.'

‘Is that where you've been meeting up with him so far?'

‘Obviously, yes. And I like him better today than I did yesterday, and tomorrow I shall most likely like him better still.'

Miss Penrose writes to Harold Carrington: ‘Your daughter is overly temperamental.'

Leonora's passions are aroused by every new painter she discovers. ‘That's how I'd like to paint, that's who I want to be.'

It proves impossible to get her out of the museum. One afternoon she can't be found, until Miss Penrose encounters her seated in front of Simone Martini's
Annunciation.

‘The Virgin is in a bad mood. She doesn't want to have to be the Mother of God.'

‘Your daughter is uncontrollable,' reads the next message to Maurie. ‘No-one ever has the least idea what she'll do next, nor how she's going to react.'

If getting to know Padua, Venice and Rome lifts her out of herself, Florence makes her fall in love. In the Uffizi Gallery, Leonora discovers Uccello and, most of all, Arcimboldo. His portraits apparently composed of vegetables draw her back to the fine line between reality and imagination, about which she talked so much with the Jesuit, Father O'Connor. Arcimboldo's strange heads composed of roots, fruit and legumes – are they hallucinations? Are his mental faculties different to those of other men? She is attracted by lips composed of mushrooms, strawberries or cherries. At times the cherries are used for eyes, and turn red. ‘This painter has to be sick,' comments Miss Penrose, who serves as their guide. Leonora feels a surge of rage rise in her throat.