Two-Way Mirror Fiona Sampson (best romance ebooks .txt) 📖

to anyone. The misstep must be forgotten and so ‘will die out between you & me alone, like a misprint between you and the printer.’ Realising that he risks losing access to Elizabeth altogether, Robert plays along, claiming in his response that he was just being hyperbolic.

With all this cleverly sorted – they’re both intelligent as well as passionate, after all – the couple arrange to meet again, ‘you & me alone’, and then again – a total of ninety-one times.

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Sixth Frame

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‘Perception has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’, the artist Bridget Riley tells Paul Moorhouse in the course of a 2017 conversation. I’m reading her collected writings, The Eye’s Mind, after seeing her work in a touring exhibition of prints. In the small, white-cube gallery where it had been hung her print sung and dazzled. Its colours were welcoming, related, generous: blue, red and green. Its plaited verticals – not stripes, unless stripes can wax and wane – teased and throbbed.

It’s as if Riley has found the secret of chromatology, a secret as important as the invention of perspective for creating images to work upon eye and brain. The way Riley’s colours react with each other, in the forms she gives them, go right into the mystery of perception – just as the rules of perspective do. She calls this tonal organisation, and says she learnt it from the post-impressionist Georges Seurat.

I still remember the sensation I had as a teenager – it was something like being hurled about – the first time I saw a Riley, one of her multiform, multicoloured acrylics from the 1970s. I also remember the force with which her name struck me: so this was a woman’s mind. But I didn’t yet realise the third dimension that is the magic of Riley’s work. Usually, this third dimension resembles space: the eye makes what looks like a 3-D object appear backward or forward from the picture plane. Sometimes, though, the third dimension is time, and the image itself appears to move. The print I saw recently was like that; it appeared to flow up and down itself. It seemed as though the picture was in process: as though the artist’s process was continuing with us, even through us. It would have been easy to imagine that we were watching Riley at work. And in a way, of course, we were. Riley is adamant that these effects aren’t illusions or tricks, just part of what visible form does. ‘That they will occur cannot be doubted, but precisely how can only be discovered in the context of picture making.’

It seems to me that the third dimension portraits want us to experience isn’t space or time but narrative. It’s the dimension of human encounter. Sometimes this dimension of encounter isn’t just represented but expressed. Francis Bacon’s portraits of George Dyer are statements of desire (and rage) as much as they are explorations of the irreducible corporeality of his muse. When Riley, an artist of the generation following his, says, ‘Perception has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’, she reminds us that understanding and meaning-making are part of looking at every image, from a child’s drawing stuck up on a fridge to a glossy perfume advert. They’re also part of how we humans encounter each other. Looking at a person also ‘has an intellectual tail and is closely linked to insight’.

Book Seven: How to desire

While we two sate together, leaned that night

So close my very garments crept and thrilled

With strange electric life.

Monumental limestone harbour walls bleach in the October sun. They look lichened, though probably those discolourations are barnacles and the marks of Renaissance chisels. Livorno’s Porto Mediceo has withstood the Ligurian Sea since the sixteenth century. Livorno, or Leghorn as Elizabeth and her compatriots call it, has long been Tuscany’s only significant port. On 14 October 1846 its odd, long moles shelter arrivals on the morning tide, among them the little group of English passengers disembarking by tender from the Genoa night steamer. Seasick and faint after a stormy passage during which the engine broke down, they’re looking ‘as miserable as possible’. But not for long. After a reviving hotel breakfast they head for the railway station, eager to keep moving, for just fifteen miles north across a colourless, flat littoral lies their final destination, Pisa, that ‘little city of great palaces, & the rolling, turbid Arno, striking its golden path betwixt them’.

Elizabeth has been dreaming about the Mediterranean since she was the child who pictured herself liberating the Balkans from Ottoman rule. She was just ten when her role model, Lord Byron, went into the European exile that culminated in his attempt to do exactly this. Before that the poetic results of his earlier Grand Tour of the classical Mediterranean, including the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, had already made him wildly famous, even in the sleepy Herefordshire valley where she was reading him. Her brothers, though, have made no such Grand Tours. In their short lives the pair she was closest too, Bro and Sam, were forced to substitute tours of family duty in Jamaica – and indeed Torquay. (Only Henry, always the family exception, started travelling when he was only eighteen, and recently managed to get Stormie to accompany him to Egypt.) But now here she is, the family invalid, walking in the footsteps of her Romantic heroes.

For it’s not just Byron who came to live in Italy. Percy Bysshe Shelley emigrated here just as she was turning twelve; John Keats when she was fourteen. Byron died at Missolonghi in 1824; Shelley drowned here, off Livorno, in 1822; tuberculosis claimed Keats in Rome in 1821. But that all three perished in the classical Mediterranean doesn’t diminish its attraction. You might even take the symbolic view that all three poets returned to their spiritual home to die. The south represents more than just a contemporary geography of therapeutic climate, or personal and political freedom. It’s also the