With or Without Angels

With or Without Angels

Douglas Bruton

Fairlight Books

First published by Fairlight Books 2023

Fairlight Books

Summertown Pavilion, 18–24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG

Copyright © Douglas Bruton 2023

The right of Douglas Bruton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Douglas Bruton in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

ISBN 978-1-914148-37-8

www.fairlightbooks.com

Printed and bound in Great Britain

Designed by Becca Blackmore-Dawes

Contents

The Writer’s Prologue

The First Picture

The Second Picture

The Third Picture

The Fourth Picture

The Fifth Picture

The Sixth Picture

The Seventh Picture

The Eighth Picture

The Ninth Picture

The Tenth Picture

The Eleventh Picture: Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

List of Illustrations

Il Mondo Nuovo [The New World], Giandomenico Tiepolo, 1791

The Writer’s Prologue

(from the Greek ‘prologos’ meaning ‘speaking before’)

I am not sure I like crowds. At school once the playground emptied and I followed all the boys round to the back of the school building. I may have skipped and laughed and thrown my arms above my head. There was some rough exuberance and shouting that sounded like the bellowing of animals – cows in a field once, past milking time, set up such a noise, something pained and plaintive. The very air bristled and thrilled with a boisterous excitement.

Somewhere at the front there was a fight and in a circle about them the press and shove of boys with no pity – so many boys.

At some point I could see blood and I swear I heard the dull thump of a fist against the bleeding boy’s cheek followed by cheering or jeering. It felt like the fight might spill over and all of us be pulled into the punch and kick of it. There was, I think, something animal in that crowd, something sweaty and heaving and feral. I wanted to somehow separate myself from them all and not be any part of it.

It frightened me, stopped my breath or shortened it, and it made my stomach turn.

I remember another time seeing a crowd in the street, all gathered together, their backs turned to me and all their silent focus on something before them that I could not see. Those at the rear and nearest to me stood on tiptoe, craning their necks to better observe what I could not. The people seemed arranged to prevent me seeing, like a wall, and so my curiosity was piqued.

After pushing my way into the crowd, myself on pointe like a dancer and all my body stretched to its fullest reach, I saw that a horse lay dead or dying on the road in front of the people. It was a great sweating lump of toppled flesh, lying on its side with its knobbled legs thrown out straight. Blood leaked from one pink nostril that gaped like an open wound. I held my breath looking in vain for some sign that the horse still breathed.

A girl at the front retched and threw up beside the dead horse. Someone in the crowd reached forward to pull the girl’s hair back from her face, one arm thrown across her hunched shoulder holding her up.

I don’t think I had ever been so close to death before. Not such a big death. I remember I was shaking a little and I felt somehow vulnerable, as though Death was part of that crowd, leaning in and silent like the rest of us and somewhere at my shoulder. The sour air smelled of metal and fear and salt. It was the end of something; that much was clear, and as such it was overwhelmingly sad and awful. There were no words and so no one spoke.

Later, I told my mother about the dead horse and the silent crowd. She held one hand over her mouth and her eyes were wide and she pulled me close, held me pressed against her, not letting go.

‘I was part of the crowd,’ I said to my mother, but I don’t think she heard.

*

It is a strange painting. A fresco, really. Cut from the wall of the Tiepolo family villa it had once been in and put in a frame, and now one of the main attractions of the Ca’ Rezzonico museum in Venice. It is the work of Giandomenico Tiepolo, son of the greater painter Giambattista Tiepolo. They are both there in the painting, father and son, both dressed in sombre brown frock coats and shown in profile, the son looking over the shoulder of the father, appearing to look through an ocular device like a monocle or a quizzing glass.

The fresco shows a crowd scene but unusually the crowd is painted from behind so it is the backs of the people we see painted on the wall and not anything of what they are looking at. They are gathered on the sand where the land meets the sea and beyond them we can see the blue water and where it bleeds into the sky.

Flags like brightly coloured ribbons catch the air.

There are people from all levels of society gathered together: well-dressed ladies with baskets and in one basket a white nesting bird, maybe a dove; and women dressed more roughly; and men in military attire or wearing soft cloth fishermen’s caps or the floppy wide-brimmed straw hats of the peasantry or periwigs; and children are there too, and a dog, skinny like a whippet or a greyhound, sheltering at the feet of a tall man in a striking full-length cloak. The clothes of the people are painted in carnival colours, oranges and blues and reds, and despite the beetle-backs and slumped shoulders of some of the onlookers, there is a sense of occasion in the picture, almost a celebration and something of the attendant anxiety that goes with such a celebration.

One man on the left of the picture stands on a high wooden stool. We had such stools in the art room at school, solid and steady. The man is dressed in a brown coat and breeches with cream-coloured stockings and on his head a cocked tricorne hat from beneath which trails his hair in two pigtails; maybe there