by Angus Wilson
‘Well, haven’t I made him vulgar, too? All this!’ he waved his hand over the entire ball, Hampstead Heath and farther.
‘You haven’t created all London yet. Besides you know very well that when it’s on this scale, words don’t apply.’
‘And I thought I was a snob, minding Lady Westerton snubbing me.’
‘Oh is that what you were sulking about? How tiresome you are to mind such things! Anyhow, if it’s a question of being grand, my great aunt Sybil, who was a dreadful old thing but the biggest of bowwows, only had the Westertons on her big crush list.’
‘Oh, I know you’ve got hundreds of throw away grand aunts and uncles, Mary, but that doesn’t help me. I could order her out.’
‘You’re lucky she came here. The German Embassy’s her usual stamping ground.’
‘The German Embassy!’
‘Yes. Surely you’ve noticed her stuffy Brahms look? So many of that generation have it.’
‘The old bitch! If only she’d brought some German attaché along uninvited, then I could have told them both to leave.’
‘Marcus, aren’t you being a bit stuffy? Gatecrashers. Why even dowagers back in the twenties …! Oh, I see. Because he was a German. Oh, Marcus, how awful. Don’t please. You don’t remember the war like I do. That was the most wicked part of it. Oh, no, my dear, you really mustn’t say things like that.’
‘It’s nothing to do with wars, Mary. Jack is Jewish. That at least makes me responsible for who comes into this house or not.’
‘Responsible! Marcus! What words! And why do you think about Jack being a Jew? I think that’s terrible. None of his old friends ever do. Oh, Marcus, look at all the fun you give us just when everybody thought that sort of think was coming to an end. Well, if you want me to, use grand words, all the beauty! Look at what you’ve done with this house, to make a Lutyens house look so elegant, and with Marlcote! Grand and beautiful, darling, if that’s what you want me to say.’
‘But I don’t understand you, Mary. You speak as if fun and beauty were somehow not responsible things. Anyway, while everything’s so un-beautiful and so un-funny in Germany for Jews like Jack, I’ve got a responsibility to them.’
‘Oh, dear, Marcus! You of all people! Of course it’s all dreadful and wicked and hateful and incredible. And none of us could ever, ever compromise with it. That goes without saying. But let the politicians deal with it. Not all worldly people are like Lady Westerton. Look at Baba’s husband; he’s killing himself getting this wicked Baldwin policy changed. And there are dozens of others. That’s their job. But we’ve got positive things of our own to give. Oh, you do make me feel old! Poor Jack, if you treat him to this sort of thing.’
She stopped speaking abruptly, then:
‘I like the polly cage you designed for me. I do think it’s clever. Does it become me?’
‘Enchantingly, Mary. You always ought to wear feathered crinolines. Come and talk to my sister Margaret.’
‘What, is she here? Well, naturally I thought she might be, but I didn’t dare ask because you were so cross years ago when we spoke about her.’
‘Oh, wasn’t I awful in those days! Let’s go and look for her. I’m not sure about her new husband, are you? He’s rather a dish but B.M. I’m afraid. Anyhow it wouldn’t do, would it? One’s sister’s husband. I think it’s forbidden in the Prayer Book. To talk to he’s the bore of all time. But she adores him, well anyway makes noises as if she did. You can never tell with Margaret. Did you know he was a tremendous archaeologist – King Tut and things? So he’s almost in place here just as himself.’
With difficulty they resisted snakes that wound round them, peacocks that raised whirring arcs to stop their passing, alligators that snapped; for a while they were caught up in a leaping dance of frogs. Across the entwined bodies of webfooted young men and women, Mary shouted to him:
‘Now what was naughty was your stopping Jack buying that Pevensey painting of Lionel’s. Monty’s furious. It’s one of Lionel’s best. And you know how well he’s been painting lately. You must have read what Monty’s been saying.’
‘He’s praised Lionel’s work every week for so long as I can remember. And it hasn’t got any better or any worse. He still paints without imagination let alone a spark of genius. And uses three shades of shit to do so.’
‘Oh, colour! You live in such a schoolgirl’s dream of Bakst. Lionel’s such a subtle and expressive painter. Expressive of plastic values, I mean, of course.’
‘Subtle! Really, Mary! Lionel’s one of the most pleasing friends we have. He’s a real person, intelligent, civilized and absolutely without nonsense. His paintings are exactly like him. But they aren’t any good. I mean any real good. And I won’t have them here with real paintings. That terrible Chanctonbury Ring with the Picassos and that bit of fake Cézanne of the Downs right beside Braque’s Homage to Bach. It’s too impossible.’
‘You speak as though you were the only person in England who did justice to Picasso or Braque. You know what Monty’s done to make people realize that Paris exists, and against what opposition and from the start.’
‘Yes, and then praises Lionel because he makes Pevensey Marshes look like the Camargue and Firle Beacon like a sea-sick memory of Cézanne’s Provence.’
‘You’re talking about an old friend, Marcus.’
But the chain of frog dancers now surrounded him in a ring from which she was excluded. ‘Betty Coed’s a smile for old North Western’ the band vocalists sang at them through their megaphones, ‘Her heart is Texas treasure, so ‘tis said.’
‘Whatever can it mean?’ Mary mouthed at him.
But although laughing, he was not to be deflected.
‘I’m talking about his painting‚’ he shouted, ‘That’s the trouble, you’ve mixed up friendship and art, the lot of you.’
He wasn’t sure whether she heard or not, for she cried:
‘Jack’s always been one of his most important patrons.’
Now they were thrown together again and he clung to her-jungle parasite.
‘If he’s short of money, you know that Jack will help at once.’ She threw off his exotic embrace. ‘Now that is vulgar,’ she cried, ‘ineffably vulgar.’
‘Well, I’m not giving way. Jack’s buying two wonderful Kandinsky compositions this year. And a marvellous, inventive, sad Paul Klee. And if there’s anything over he’s promised to buy those Cardinals in a Vault of Magnasco that Sachie found. To go with all the lovely fun pictures in my bedroom.’
‘Oh really Marcus. That awful religiosity and dead elegance. It’s just snobbery. And Klee too, for that matter – all that whimsy. And then you talk about a real master of plastic values like Kandinsky in the same breath.’
‘Plastic values! It’s his wonderful vitality, his rich colour.’
They stood still, facing each other beneath a sombre holm-oak. Against the dark foliage her delicate, high-cheek-boned face shone a furious shiny red beneath her wide crown of parrot feather and soft grey hair like any cook’s, like Regan’s. He wanted to kiss her but he realized the patronizing affection that prompted him, so, waving his arm in what he thought of as a haughty ancien regime manner, he asked:
‘Do you still want to talk to my sister?’
She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. She laughed:
‘Oh, you are absurd! No wonder Jack’s got it so badly for you. Why, why, why, just because at heart you’ve got the taste of the nineties, should I not want to talk to Margaret?’
And now here was Margaret advancing upon them.
‘I know you’ll think I’m making fun of Ethel Smythe, Mary,’ she said.
‘Oh, no, Ethel’s so robust. Anyway there’s nothing tropical about her. I thought you were a sort of Lesbian Robinson Crusoe with that parrot.’
Marcus and Margaret began to giggle.
‘Well, Mouse did love deserts, Mag. It’s a private joke really, Mary. Quite vulgar families have them, you know.’
‘I th
ink it’s in rather bad taste,’ Margaret’s husband said, ‘The aunt in question’s only been dead a few months. And she left Margaret all her money.’
‘That just shows how little outsiders understand, doesn’t it Marcus? Aunt Mouse would have been tremendously honoured, Douglas. Oh, I do think this is a wonderful ball, Marcus.’
‘Yes it is, isn’t it, Mag? Do you think I ought to have asked the Countess?’
‘Of course not. There’s no “ought” about such things anyway. And especially when she was such a beast to you always. She’ll be green with envy.’
‘Oh, I do hope so. Marcus has given a green ball again, Billy. I’m green with envy.’
He threw a liana root around his neck for a sable stole. Margaret bent over him and produced Billy Pop’s muzziest tones to which she added a slight brogue.
‘Ye need no ball at all me darlin, for tis as green as the shamrock ye still are.’
‘Oh, Mag, an Irish Billy Pop! How appalling!’
‘Yes, there were things that Divine Providence thought too unspeakable to visit even upon the wretched Matthews children.’
*
She said: ‘No, darling, if you’ll forgive me, I really won’t. I’m sun drunk and lazy and happy. And although I know it will be quite wonderful, I’d rather come again and see it all, not sticky, not with a glare like this. And there is a glare even though it’s nearly five. But then if there weren’t, this wouldn’t be the solar paradise that’s getting me ready for Gide and Malraux, and Mann and all the other ferocious peace and freedom lovers in Paris. As for dinner, have something there, dear, so that you can poke about until the last boat leaves. And then I needn’t go to the saloon. I shall just put on a dress and eat that delicious lobster out here on deck, with a slivovitz or two, to complete the sun’s bacchic rout of a decorous English gentlewoman.’
‘It isn’t only the temples, Maggie, and the Peristyle, there’s some very fine Romanesque in the Cathedral and a riot of baroque palaces dilapidated and crumbling enough even to satisfy you.’
‘Please don’t make me, Douglas. This is all working out so very well. And it isn’t as if we shan’t have time to do a hundred Splits together in the coming years.’
‘A middle aged couple doing the splits. It sounds worrying.’
‘Oh, you’ve no idea the energy I shall have when middle age comes. A second Mistinguett. Once we’ve brought that beast to his knees. That’s the only thing that worries me here. I almost feel that I can hear him bullfrogging away over there in the Palazzo Venezia.’ And she waved her hand vaguely to the west. He bent down and kissed her, and ran his hand along her thin sun-burned arm.
‘Ow!’ she cried.
‘Sorry. Now you’re not fussing about that speech?’
‘Oh, no, that’s all composed. Peace, freedom, art, all put in their places. And an encouraging word for the Lion of Judah thrown in.’
‘Nor those reviews? You knew what Desmond MacCarthy would say. You gave me his review word for word the afternoon you finished the novel. And look how understanding that chap Muir’s been. And that great long piece in the Literary Supplement.’
‘No, no. All the reviews are forgiven and forgotten, thank God. And for all praise I’m duly grateful. Now go along, or they’ll close the Museum and you’ll never be able to tell me what Diocletian’s wife looked like.’
Grey rock it had been all day as, lying in the sun, she had travelled up from Dubrovnik; grey rock except for the short call at the island. Limestone, the guide book said. But change a letter here and there and it could as well have been timestone or lifestone, for it seemed to Margaret all that day as she lay there, and still seemed as she sat back in the deck chair, to offer her some place of refuge between the cruelty of those words written, printed and not now by any means to be recalled, and the terror of those other words not yet spoken, not even finally formed, but hardly less, by any means that left a shred of decency, to be evaded. She sat on the deck and saw only cursorily the town walls, the cranes and the custom house all losing their outlines in the dying sun, for she was watching herself, a tiny figure, a modern primitive, a schoolchild’s pinhead woman, a Lilliputian – yes, a Lilliputian, for every finger, every hair, every nail was there in little, enough to delight Queen Mary – some sort of human ant scaling these endless cliffs, a mere speck seated on one of the huge boulders, absurdly standing on the sheer vertical cliffside, or clinging to an ugly, twisted, windswept pine tree precariously growing in a rare cranny – a Pearl White of the kinema series of her youth. Yet leap from the deck and swim in the green sea as she would, she could not become one with that minute Margaret Matthews, left to die in shipwreck, falling from heights in a nightmare, for there remained all the while, inert and heavy with despair, her own real body here on the deck.
Do your characters sometimes come to life, Miss Matthews? Yes, but not real life. You know I’m not a dissociated schizoid. Oh to be just that, to melt this lean flesh and take on cliffs or wrecked boulders, a dwarf nightmarish incorruption. Mind what Desmond MacCarthy wrote! She wondered at how little Douglas guessed what was tearing at her vitals. And yet at a moment’s notice, if she switched on to him – lay in his arms, went over his exquisite photographs of Luxor with him, read aloud with him turn by turn the poems and sermons of Donne, saw peristyles and Gothic voussoirs and baroque cupolas in his company, under his enlightening teasably pedantic guidance; or simply sat with him at café tables or on public benches staring at Spanish nuns, at Arab watersellers, or at Serbo Croat gentlemen reading newspapers on bamboo frames – in a second the despairs and their fuzz of surrounding depression would disappear, become one with outer darkness, where they would wait to spring at her in the night or as she came downstairs at Holland Park to receive friends for dinner or as she waited for a bus, or in the hotel lobby buying postcards, at any time when her guard was down. This very Douglas, her refuge, her hand that stroked the forehead, her voice that banished the lingering shreds of nightmare, her water wings, and her ‘Excellent, you only want confidence in order to achieve the highest …’ Douglas, who was all these, a very present help in time of trouble, thought that she had been upset by Desmond MacCarthy’s warm, burring, avuncular reproof, by Uncle Desmond regretfully chiding her attempts to spread her wings and asking her to repeat again the little pieces she used to say so well, the little pieces that had allowed him and her other literary aunts and uncles to see what a clever little girl she was. ‘I cannot help wishing that Miss Matthews had never heard of God and Tolstoy. She was surely so much nearer to saving us and the world, if that must be her generous concern, when she remained content to feed us periodically with those cool, astringent doses of life as lived by the fascinatingly disagreeable Carmichael family. After all, Jane Austen did not feel it necessary to show Wickham regenerated by death upon the field of Waterloo, nor Mr D’Arcy’s spiritual enlargement by contemplation of the Derbyshire peaks. And we are grateful to her that she did not.’ How to mind such a kind, irrelevant reproof?
How could Douglas fail to see the brutal thrust with which the Literary Supplement’s flatteringly long review had pierced her. ‘We do not believe as so many of Miss Matthews’ admirers would seem to hold, that she has extended her range too far, nor, in aiming too broadly, missed her mark …’ And on and on through hundreds of flattering words of clever, considered criticism to end – ‘The simple think that Miss Matthews “hates people”. The more sophisticated believe that she loves them, and quarrel only whether she has been wise to attempt to express that love positively. The truth is that she neither hates nor loves human beings; she is indifferent to them. And considerable fiction, even perhaps considerable art of any kind cannot be born of human indifference.’
And it was with this judgement, these words ringing in her ears that she must now sit down and compose stirring words to rouse a congress to defend the liberty of the artist, and, in so doing, affirm the vital importance, the final significance of each and every human being, and of man in ge
neral as the centrepiece.
If it hadn’t been for the limestone cliffs she would simply have given this anonymous creature (a well known face, no doubt, red and blustering or white and smirking, seen very often all smiles behind a cocktail glass) the direct lie. From girlhood she had been the amused and loving observer of human quirks and oddities. Every face in the street as she shopped or travelled to work by bus posed problems for her, haunted her, pursued her. Each boy, each girl in dancing class had demanded her attention as a potential sketch or story of adult tragedy or farce. Catching the exact word, pinning down the phrase, these had been as much her constant pursuit as imitating the exact nuance of voice had been Rupert’s. For year after year, for twenty years now, yes, since she was fourteen or less, she had been straining herself, tearing herself to pieces to put together human mosaics, to give movement and purpose and relationship to the creatures of her imagination, to set them working backwards and forwards in time, round and about in space; and now this anaemic, constipated, bad-breathed, underpaid failure lurking behind anonymity told her that all she had been doing was to play a glorified game of chess.
If it had not been for the limestone cliffs, and last year the vast rolling empty plains of La Mancha, or again and again over the years mountains, deserts, marshes seen in flashes from trains, seen and longed for, she would have dismissed the little flutter of fear that responded to the Grub Street jackal’s whine as a seemly but over sensitive humility. She who enjoyed life so much – travelling, talking, walking, eating, dancing, sleeping, making love, reading, writing and painting in oils, too, if that meant doing nothing in glorious contentment. But why then did she long to become that little Pearl White figure, Andromeda chained forever alone on that rock, Crusoe before he was troubled by Friday’s faithful service? Of course, she had known despair: before the divorce she had looked at the white tablets by her bed hopefully and then, picturing herself with vomit pouring from her mouth and nostrils, turned away; she had smelt eagerly the gas fumes in that room in Onslow Square but, seeing herself a mindless empty patient year after year in a hospital ward, had turned off the tap and had gone out to the cinema. Certainly in those months in Cassis after that boy from Durham, when she had first found the easy trick of bed without love, she had been very near once or twice to ‘contemplating suicide’, but that did not mean that she had not always been tempted back to life by hot fresh rolls and French butter, by the way the sea lapped around a rock, by a new evening dress, by the muscle of a man’s arm stretched on the sand, above all by fusing on paper Adela Takeley (that dreadful artists’ model) and Geneviève Rocquetin (that caricature of a jeune fille bien élevée). There had always been more than enough in life to spare.