After Hannibal by Barry Unsworth

sorrowful-looking, with gold plates suspended over their heads, divided intotwo groups by a niche containing a statue of Madonna and Child in painted terra-cotta. He felt resentful with these paintings for their failure to arouse any feeling in him. He wanted to ask Cecilia why she was so interested in the postures of saints when she never even went to church, but he was inhibited because this was art and she knew about it.
    He wanted to know about it too. He was eager to see the respective merits of Raphael and Perugino—it was the kind of thing that went with the house. Otherwise they might as well have bought a place in Eastbourne. He was fond of making a kind of litany out of the historic cities of Umbria when talking to people back in Britain. We are in easy reach, he would say, of Assisi, Spoleto, Orvieto, Terni, Todi. Treasure-houses of art and history. He felt as he spoke that by achieving such proximity to these treasures he had come into possession of them. People traveled thousands of miles and spent thousands of pounds to see these things, and here they were on his doorstep. He worked doggedly to profit from the situation but so far had not had much success. However, as a step in the right direction he studied guidebooks and collected as much as he could in the way of facts.
    Cecilia understood these aspirations and they made her feel loving, in the way a missionary might feel loving on encountering an amenable pagan. She was given to questioning herself about most things but had not so far made much distinction between loving Harold and wanting to instruct and help him. “It is not just this Raphael,” she said, “it is the others one has seen, they sort of reinforce one another. The more of his work you see, Harold, the more you will get to like it. We’ll go to the Palazzo Pitti in Florence,they’ve got quite a few Raphaels there, they’ve got the
Madonna del Granduca
and some wonderful portraits.”
    She looked up at the frescoes again. The rush of happiness that had accompanied this project seemed to have sensitized her anew. The colors worked on her like a familiar incantation, olive, faded purple, gold, rose-pink … “We’ll go to the Vatican and see the Raphael frescoes there,” she said, turning eagerly toward him. “Of course the Perugino is weaker, he is a lesser artist. But you can see the tendency to rhetoric which was so—”
    “He was well over the hill when he painted that. It was painted in 1521, so he would have been either seventy-one or seventy-six.”
    “So utterly characteristic of the High—”
    “Depending on which set of dates you accept. On the other hand, Raphael died young. He was only thirty-seven.” Harold looked back at the fresco and something of wonder finally touched him. “Just my age,” he said. “He might have gone on to do great things if he had lived.”
    At five to six they were in Mancini’s outer office, gazing at the prints of Old Perugia that adorned the walls. The extremely attractive, rather sulky-looking young woman Harold remembered from former visits came to conduct them into the lawyer’s presence. Seated there in the spacious and expensively appointed office, they explained the difficult situation that had arisen with the Checchetti.
    The lawyer listened quite impassively, looking sometimes at their faces, more often fixing his eyes on the far wall or down on his immaculate desk. When Harold had finished, he nodded slowly but without speaking. He was holding a pencil and he tapped softly with this upon the desk, causing quick reflections in its polished surface.
    “It is only a small thing, I know,” Harold said, a little disconcerted by the silence. “But I thought it best to do whatever is to be done in legal form.”
    “That is very wise.” Mancini smiled suddenly. “Legal form resembles other virtues: when you have it, you don’t always need to apply it. Without it there is no form at all, none whatever.”
    The smile had been