“Flat to let,” Maurice read.
“I think this looks rather promising,” said Michael.
It was an extraordinary pile, built in some Palladian nightmare. A portico of dull crimson columns ran round three sides of the house, under a frieze of bearded masks. The windows were all very large, and so irregularly placed as completely to destroy the classic illusion. The stucco had been painted a color that was neither pink nor cream nor buff, but a mixture of all three; and every bit of space left by the windows was filled with banderoles of illegible inscriptions and with plaster garlands, horns, lyres, urns, and Grecian helmets. There must have been half an acre of garden round it, a wilderness of shrubs and rank grass with here and there a dislustered conservatory. The house would have seemed uninhabitable save for the announcement of the flat to be let, which was painted on a board roped to one of the columns.
They descended the steps and pressed a bell marked Housekeeper. Yes, there was a flat to let on the ground floor; in fact, the whole of the ground floor with the exception of this part of the hall and the rooms on either side. The housekeeper threw her apron over her shoulder like a plaid and unlocked a door in a wooden partition that divided the flat called Number One from the rest of Ararat House.
They passed through and examined the two gaunt bedrooms: one of them had an alcove, which pleased Michael very much. He decided that without much difficulty it could be made to resemble a Carpaccio interior. The dining-room was decorated with Spanish leather and must have been very brilliantly lit by the late tenants, for everywhere from the ceiling and walls electric wires protruded like asps. There was also a murky kitchen; and finally the housekeeper led the way through double doors into the drawing-room.
As soon as he had stepped inside, Michael was sure that he and Lily must live here.
It was a room that recalled at the first glance one of those gigantic saloons in ancient Venetian palaces; but as he looked about him he decided that any assignment in known topography was absurd. It was a room at once for Werther, for Taglioni, for the nocturnes of Chopin and the cameos of Théophile Gautier. Beckford might have filled it with orient gewgaws; Barbey d’Aurevilly could have strutted here; and in a corner Villiers de l’Isle Adam might have sat fiercely. The room was a tatterdemalion rococo barbarized more completely by gothic embellishments that nevertheless gave it the atmosphere of the fantasts with whom Michael had identified it.
“But this is like a scene in a pantomime,” Maurice exclaimed.
It was indeed like a scene in a pantomime, and a proscenium was wanted to frame suitably the effect of those fluted pillars that supported the ceiling with their groined arches. The traceries of the latter were gilded, and the spaces between were painted with florid groups of nymphs and cornucopias. At either end of the room were large fireplaces fructuated with marble pears and melons, and the floor was a parquet of black and yellow lozenges.
“It’s hideous,” Maurice exclaimed.