Sir Vivian, although much distressed by the news of the fatality, also felt a certain measure of relief. His conscience had been pricking him over the freakish experiment (as it had been) with Varieties of Literary Experience, and it had been striking him that the only thing to do was to return to the proposal of producing along with Herbert a collaborated work. His own name, carried on the title page of such a better-conceived venture, would surely bring Herbert the enhanced reputation which was required. But he had also been conscious that there would be difficulties (Herbert was difficult) of a formidable order to be overcome if such a project were to be achieved. So perhaps what had happened was just as well.
It was nearly two years after this that there appeared in the bookshops, in two volumes, The Chomsky File and Other Literary Remains of Herbert Humbert, edited by Bernard Hinkstone. Than this monstrous collection of disjecta membra, of the outpourings of waste-paper baskets, of sweepings-up from a littered floor there had been, in the highest literary and academic circles, no such sensation since the turn of the century. To the roll of the great English critics – Dryden, Johnson, Arnold, Eliot, Leavis – a new name had been added overnight. Humbert’s former employers in a corner of the University of London were appalled at the little regard they had paid to the genius in their midst; a spectacle that could only have been paralleled had, say, Richard Bentley been constrained to vapour away his days in a private school. So they touted around and found a millionaire – the owner of some chain-stores – who approved of education, and from him they got enough money to endow their college with a Herbert Humbert Professorship. The first incumbent of the Chair was, very rightly, that sound scholar, Bernard Hinkstone. When, a good many years later again, the distinguished belletrist and litterateur Sir Vivian Cardwell was given an honorary degree, Professor Hinkstone made an urbane little speech about him.
THE REAL THING
I
Oliver Russell and David Read had been at school together. They were in the same house, and they became full prefects on the same day, sharing the joys and cares of suddenly being in a position to exercise despotic authority over forty or fifty other boys. It was a civilised school as schools went in the early 1930s, but you could be pretty Draconian if that amused you. Russell tackled the job more robustly, more in his stride, than Read. Read was inclined to be now hard and now soft, to be ashamed and even guilt-ridden over mild routine sadisms, and to bore the housemaster by over-conscientious endeavours. But it all really went quite well. The year ended with the house taking a creditable position in the school at one thing and another. Russell and Read were both popular. Both won scholarships to Oxford.
The achievement took them to different colleges, since when you are after an award you have to go, within limits, where the dons take it into their heads to send you. People seldom complained about the system, an open scholarship being a prestige affair; the equivalent, in the brainy world into which you were moving, of rugger caps and cricket colours. Being quartered on different sides of Oxford’s High Street didn’t much affect the friendship of Russell and Read, who had long before (and even in those formal days) become Olly and David to one another. But it brought Timothy Merton into their joint life and companionship. Tim was at Olly’s college, and it thus came about that, although all three were pretty thick together, Olly and Tim were thicker on the whole. This continued to be so to some extent thereafter, and perhaps the more so because, paradoxically, it was between Tim and David that there existed a closer underlying temperamental affinity. Tim and David continued a little shy of one another, as if not wanting to pry. But for several years Tim, David and Olly were to continue a triumvirate, like chums in a school story.
Rather to the surprise of his friends, it was Olly who took a First in Schools, the other two just missing this tricky distinction. They then all found plausible reasons for continuing their education in Vienna: the Vienna of Chancellor Dollfuss (who was a midget) and the Kreditanstalt bankruptcy. They had thought of Berlin, which precocious writers a few years older than themselves had begun to celebrate in various curious ways. But Tim’s father, who was in the Foreign Office, knew things about Berlin that he didn’t at all like. So the young men closed with Vienna in the interest of a discreet solidarity. Besides, Vienna was a good deal cheaper than Berlin; you could live almost affluently for a year there on the allowance you had barely made do on at Oxford during three eight-week terms. And that wasn’t quite all. They were clever youths, all three; they came of good families, traditional in feeling and cultivated after a fashion; the instinct for rebellion proper to their age didn’t extend to sympathy with, or even tolerance of, anything like a riff-raff, raggle-taggle society. None of them would have been – or at the start would have been – much at home among people whom it would have been impossible to introduce to a sister. Vienna was understood to conduct its affairs with a certain eighteenth-century refinement unknown to Berlin, which was unashamedly vulgar. Olly had been to Berlin with his family, and he said it was quite unbelievable. It was true that on the banks of the Havel at Potsdam there had been naked youths chucking javelins and discuses in an amusing neo-Greek fashion (and even, he swore, picking up chunks of rock and hurling them at each other like the warriors before windy Troy). But the Palace itself was sick-making to anybody who knew Versailles: it would be just the place for this howling maniac Adolf Hitler. Neither Tim nor David had been to Versailles, let alone Potsdam, both happening to have Italomaniac parents, who had dragged them through the Uffizi and the Brera from their tender years. So they had to receive these judgements with respect.
David, who had in fact become first resigned to and then a lover of those artists referred to by his mother as the Old Masters, looked forward to spending a good deal of time in the Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum. And since he had played the recorder at school he believed himself all agog to hear Vienna’s principal orchestras other than on his old portable gramophone.
Olly, who affected philistinism although he was the best-read of the three, said that you could ride very decent horses for next to nothing in the Prater, skate all winter at the Eislaufverein, and play tennis there for the rest of the year when on a fixed date the ice miraculously vanished and the place turned into dozens of tennis courts instead. You could still dine at Sachers, if you wanted to, in one of the private rooms in which the Grand-dukes had industriously seduced ballet-girls after tanking them up with the imperial Tokay.
Tim was the only one of the three booked for any academically respectable activity in Vienna. His Second in Schools had perplexed and for a time outraged his tutors. But having discovered through a family grapevine that it had been the consequence of some private disaster too delicate to be discussed, they had rallied round in a big way, securing for him various introductions to influential and even exalted persons such as would enable him, he believed, to advance as a diplomatic historian and set Metternich in a clear light once and for all.
This serious purpose apart, what were they chiefly thinking about, all three, as they thus exchanged a familiar Oxford (then an enlarged public school) for an unknown continent? It is a question hard to answer, and which they would have found hard to answer with any seriousness themselves. Olly professed to view their situation in terms of the Grand Tour. Here they were, sent abroad to improve themselves as ornaments of society, but fortunately without that superintendence by a bear-leading tutor which had been prescriptive even when Grand Tourists had been little younger – if younger at all – than themselves. Olly even averred that his parents, worldly-wise as became their station in life, had packed him off to sow his wild oats in regions conveniently remote, and had chosen David and Tim for his companions as discerning in them youths ripe for similar profligacy at the drop of a hat. So time and occasion must be found for low pleasures were the old folks at home not to be let down.
Tim and David played up to this sort of nonsense effectively enough, although each was inclined to wonder why the other could be detected as not terribl
y liking it. None of the three would very readily have admitted much thinking about sex except when talking about it in a routine bawdy way that grew boring if it went on for long. Had they been questioned on the subject by somebody who must be given an answer, they would have produced a common front on reticent and defensive lines. Sex lay within a category of activities that must definitely be got round to soon. The behaviour of their bodies (including their heads when their heads swam at a mere glimpse of one thing or another) told them that. But the thing required to be slotted in with other activities, physical, intellectual and even aesthetic, which it was taking a good deal of energy to get the hang of. Beyond this – even if so far – they wouldn’t have been communicative. Young American men, of whom there were plenty around Vienna at the time, seemed perpetually absorbed in, and prepared lavishly to discuss, plans for laying this woman or that in a fashion that struck Olly, David and Tim as highly ludicrous and mildly contemptible. The Americans on their part, confronting an attitude so perplexingly compounded of the half-baked and the immature, were inclined to declare that so protracted a latency in the three Britishers simply betrayed the fact that they couldn’t be too well hung. But this, as well as being coarse, was untrue. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any story.
II
Olly and Tim had made the railway journey to Vienna together, and David followed by himself a few days later. He’d had to be at home for a sister’s wedding. The event had been vaguely upsetting – which was silly in the light of the fact that his new brother-in-law seemed a thoroughly nice man. But during the marriage service (in which certain tremendous things were said, so that he had felt the tears in his eyes) it had suddenly occurred to him that he might lie awake that night, imagining the very private consummation that must follow upon this very public solemnity. He would visualise the couple’s caresses, their kisses, the disposition of their limbs – the lot. And it seemed to David that this almost involuntary or compulsive voyeurism would mark him out as an extremely depraved and degenerate person. He had, of course, read the appropriate books, and knew that the most disgraceful phantasies generated themselves occasionally in other heads besides his own. But there was a kind of incestuous slant to this impending indulgence that would surely make it totally unforgivable.
Needless to say, when he got into bed the horror didn’t happen. He even saw that he wouldn’t be a monster if it did. And from this he went on (for there was a certain boldness in his nature) to try to make it happen. But this immediately seemed quite foolish, and he fell asleep. Next morning, his memory was very little perturbed by the whole thing. Yet a little uneasiness remained. Here he was, with his twenty-firster behind him. And he wasn’t being at all good at coping with the whole area of experience that ends up, presumably, with your getting married yourself.
At Calais he got into his second-class sleeper, which was the way one travelled in those days even when still living on one’s father. One side of the little compartment made up into two beds or bunks for the night. But it turned out that there wasn’t going to be another passenger. So he had it all to himself, including a privy and wash place through a sliding door. It was as good as travelling first – although it would be rather solitary in effect, except when he went along to dinner and breakfast in the Speisewagen.
The train was called the Orient Express, and if you moved up to the front you would be in carriages that went on to Constantinople, and that advertised the fact by saying so in Turkish characters on boards slung below the windows. David, although not so widely travelled as his own children in their nonage were to be, had been here and there about the continent – usually with his parents in Italy, but sometimes with friends, or even on his own, in other places. So he wasn’t particularly keyed up by his present situation. Still, it was something of a milestone, or at least it ought to be. He was off and into something in a way he’d never been before. It was a pity, the more sagacious side of his head opined, that it wasn’t something a bit more definite.
David settled down in his encapsulated and gently wobbling condition to read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This and The Orators and Words for Music Perhaps constituted the reading-matter with which he had provided himself for the journey. At the bookstall at Victoria his father had spent a well-meaning but futile seven-and-six on buying him an Agatha Christie detective-story. It had to be admitted that he and his father (although in general agreement about Giotto and Masaccio) weren’t all that close to one another. He hadn’t even owned to his father that he wanted to be a writer – an unnecessary reticence, since his father would have regarded it as a quite ordinary thing to want to be.
But Gertrude Stein – although described facetiously by Olly Russell as a writer’s writer’s writer – didn’t on this occasion hold David’s interest, any more than did the Belgian industrial landscape (which was like souped-up Wadsworth) deploying itself along the railway line. He put down the book and explored his little wash place and loo. It turned out to be shared with the neighbouring compartment, but when he locked the door on his side a door on the other side locked automatically too. He wondered whether his neighbour was also travelling alone, and might prove to be a beautiful and accessible (but not promiscuously accessible; accessible, really, only to a masterful David Read) girl. When he had peed and washed his hands and returned to his seat he remembered that he hadn’t entered the word ‘loo’ in the pocket notebook he kept for brand new words, and he made good this deficiency before withdrawing into an introspection controlled at the outset by his shamelessly sanguine and sadly unrealistic fancy. He had to admit – owning, as he did, considerable intellectual clarity – that if such a neighbouring girl there were, and if she now came to him all warm and breathing and so on, the result would simply be to scare the pants off him, although not in a literal and apposite way.
So far, he hadn’t been much good with girls. Once in a taxi coming away from a dance (he hated dances), he had put his hand on a girl’s leg just above the knee – prompted, possibly, by the memory of Leon’s successful performance with Emma Bovary in a cab. But he hadn’t himself been successful. The stocking had felt unexpectedly harsh and grainy, so that he had taken his hand away with a mumbled apology, pretending that the contact had been accidental. On another and similar occasion he had suddenly grabbed a girl and kissed her. She had been surprised and upset, and on the following day had told her best friend about it, so that in no time the story was all over the place. This could only mean that she had interpreted his action as merely oafish – unegrossiereté voulue would be the French for it – and in this she had no doubt been far from astray. He hadn’t really wanted to a bit! It was a humiliating recollection, and he still sometimes woke up in the middle of the night with it. In fact it was the climax of a recurrent wet dream. Which was very mysterious indeed.
He knew he wasn’t homosexual: hadn’t ever been so even in a schoolboy way. Olly, that extravagant liar, was fond of expatiating on the enormous secret lust that had possessed him whenever he had walloped a small boy for burning his toast or failing to get the mud off his rugger boots. This was incomprehensible to David, who was convinced that Olly had simply picked it up from a school story of the modern spuriously emancipated, now-it-can-all-be-told sort. David had worked it out that his own embarrassingly retarded condition had something to do with his mother. Again with the aid of the appropriate books, he had seen that, although not father-eclipsed, he did go in for mother-refuge in a big way. In fact he was rather like Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers – this much more than like Leon or Rodolphe in Madame Bovary. No Miriam would be any good to him until his mother was dead, probably after a long and agonising illness. What an appalling condition! David was still brooding over it when the Orient Express expressed itself into Germany, and horrible Polizei were clicking their heels at him and arrogantly demanding to see his passport. Soon, however, he began to look forward to his dinner. He would call for Lowenbräu in a knowledgeable way. And what had been going through his head he wo
uld put behind him. It was stuff he would never dream of confessing to Olly and Tim, now waiting for him in Vienna.
But before he got there a strange, and strangely upsetting, thing happened. It was in the middle of the night. He had wakened up, he supposed because the train seemed to have slowed down a little. Leaning out of his bunk, he pulled up a blind and looked out. He had no idea where they were, and now there wasn’t much to enlighten him. A crescent moon was in the sky; there were clouds over most of the stars; a vague impression of forest and mountain was something he was perhaps merely making up. Then the train’s speed dropped further, and there was a rattle and slight swerve as if it was passing over points. A few faint lights appeared, then a low building, and he saw that they were running through a station. On the platform he glimpsed a uniformed man standing stiffly at attention in the solitude of the night. They did things like that, he remembered, in Germany. The chap probably took pride in thus turning out and going on parade for the benefit of perhaps nobody at all. David himself couldn’t even wave to him.
They were through the station and in complete darkness again. But not quite. There was a house, close to the line, in which there was a single lighted window. In a moment David was abreast of this. And in the window, apparently looking out at the train, stood a young woman. She was quite naked.
The train hadn’t yet gathered speed; nevertheless, what David ought to have seen was no more than a blurred impression of something barely to be identified. But this hadn’t been the fact. The vision had been as clear, as detailed in every way, as if he had been standing before a frontally posed nude by Ingres. Only Ingres’ nudes aren’t real; aren’t meant to be. This had been real.
The Bridge at Arta Page 20