by Francis King
But Dennis called his father ‘Sir’, and saluted him when he saw him. And the most Father ever did to show that he was pleased was to flick one of his ears or slap him on the bottom.
But he loved Father, oh yes, he loved him. And in the innocently erotic dreams of childhood he and Father no longer wrestled, but lay silent and motionless together, all conflict gone; and Dennis’s face rested on his chest; and his arms encircled him in a snare of love.
It was inevitable that Hugh’s ambition should consume the boy. He was too frail a vessel for that heady spirit. He was too young. One way or another he would be destroyed. Either he would become an automaton or he would die. These were the only solutions.
This is myself, Hugh thought, as he wrestled with the boy or taught him to dive or hurled a cricket ball at him. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh... And all that he could do this boy would also be taught to do. To be a light unto the Gentiles...
So when, after a day out among the mountains in Wales, with only some raisins to eat, Dennis ran into the dining-room and said, "Gosh, I’m hungry," and began to gnaw at some bread, his father reproved him. One must not be a slave to the body. One must always be master. A lack of self-restraint... But the boy was only seven.
One winter they went to Switzerland to ski. Then Dennis was to be seen every morning on the mountain-side in nothing but a pair of shorts, wiry, dark-skinned, his muscular legs scarred where he had fallen doing impossible things for love of Father.
They had two rooms, one in the hotel itself and the other in the annexe. And these two buildings were separated from each other by a glass conservatory four or five feet in width.
One afternoon Judith and Dennis played dominoes in the bay of the window of their room while Hugh wrote letters on the balcony of his. He had thrashed Dennis a short time before because he had shirked his cold bath by going into the bathroom, letting the water run, and then coming out—dry. This was Deception, and not Playing the Game. So Dennis was beaten, as he had been beaten so often before, and as Hugh imagined he would be beaten so often again. "Take down your trousers..." And Dennis never so much as whimpered.
But now Hugh felt it was time to forgive. So he shouted across: "What are you both up to?"
"Playing dominoes, sir."
"Dominoes!" Hugh put aside the pad on which he had just been writing. "That’s a pretty poor sort of a game, eh?" And Dennis blushed as though at a reproof. "What about another game of chess?"
"Oh, yes, sir. Please, sir. Now, sir?" So he was forgiven. So Father still loved him. So he was not entirely worthless.
"All right. You come across here. Get the board and come across here." Judith had already disappeared, shrugging her shoulders irritably. She was always left out of it. "Hurry, though. Double quick!"
"Yes, sir."
Dennis ran towards the door; but before he could open it Hugh called: "Here! Come here! Come back!"
"Yes, sir?" He stood once more in the embrasure, with closely cropped hair that curled in spite of his efforts to straighten it. A snake-belt encircled his waist. His tie was held neatly with a tie-pin, his shoes gleamed. "Yes, sir?"
"Why don’t you jump?"
"Jump, sir?"
"Yes. Jump, sir," High mimicked back. "Get on to that ledge—and jump. It’s only four or five feet. You’ve jumped that often before."
But it was such a drop. Supposing he fell? Supposing he missed his footing? He stared downwards, white-faced, ashamed, his fingers fiddling with the snake of the belt.
"Well? Come on! Aren’t you going to do it?"
He shook his head, miserably, his eyes filling with tears against his will.
"Funked it, eh? ... Oh, in that case, I’m not sure that I want a game of chess." Hugh took up the pad again. But out of the corner of his eye he was watching Dennis.
Slowly, biting his lip, the boy climbed on to the window-ledge, clutching the frame to steady himself. His hand trembled, the knuckles went white. Far, far away, in a field, he could see the three Dutch children they had played with that morning. They moved in red fur over a white expanse.
"Changed your mind, eh? That’s right. It’s nothing very much. You can do it. You can do it easily."
He tensed the muscles in his legs. "You can do it easily..." And he would be forgiven; and this would be the proof—the proof that he had dreamed of. That’s right ... It’s easy now. You’ve only got to jump. Father’s eyes and father’s voice, and the ache of the muscles in his legs. And the game of chess. And the dream he had had of saving Father from some extraordinary doom—cannibals, was it? It’s nothing very much... Oh, it’s nothing very much. And far away, in one corner of his vision, were the Dutch children rolling in snow. And behind him Judith sang to herself in the dressing-room where she slept. And this was the proof: and afterwards there would be no conflict, but his face on Father’s chest, and his arms holding him, and...
A dry sob broke from his mouth as he hurled himself forwards. Hugh held out arms, held them outstretched long, long after there was any chance of catching anything. Far away, below, there was a crash of glass, a tinkle, a silence. And still he held out his arms, as though petrified.
Someone ran out and screamed; the Dutch children stopped playing and raced across the field; two consumptives who were doing a ‘horizontal’ on another balcony threw aside rugs, hot-water bottles, magazines, and hung over the side.
He could not go down. And then suddenly he glanced across to the embrasure; and there was Judith. And she was looking at him, without reproach, in acceptance, in love.
In the English church they sang, "Time, like a never-ending stream", and Hugh, who stood mute and held a prayer-book in cold fingers, thought then of the flux of time, time flowing constantly; bitterly like Judith’s tears, time bearing its sons away, time bearing his son away, in a black box, as it would bear away those flowers, sweet and fresh from a mountain-side; and to-morrow they, too, would disappear on the cruel wave, they, too, would be slack and faded. And as he thought all this Judith clutched the pew and her eyes closed and tears splashed on to the prayer-book; and Miss Poulton, the consumptive from the hotel, pulled out the ‘vox humana’ and made the organ wheeze as if it, too, had only one lung; and the choirboys showed sleek hair, and quavered, quavered shrilly at the descant; and the padre looked round at the congregation, and his nostrils trembled as he stifled a yawn.
So Judith became Father’s girl, a familiar sight on golf-courses, in tweeds and brogue shoes that flapped: and she called him ‘Fibsy’ and he called her ‘Pynx’; and she learnt to whistle, and did exercises with him before breakfast, and cut the fingernails of his right hand.
And she was spoiled.
"For some reason it was rather moving," the General tended to say when recounting one particular incident in his South American campaign. Quite simply what had happened was this: a half-caste boy had let himself be killed instead of Hugh.
They were walking through a ravine when a volley of shots rang out: and when Hugh looked down there was the boy with a wound in his groin. He did not survive. And Hugh, in exasperation, had cried to him: "You fool! You little fool!" as he used to do when the boy upset something or forgot something or committed some blunder. And the boy grinned at him sheepishly, this too reminiscent of other, less honourable occasions; and then he turned over and died.
Afterwards, anyone else would have romanticised the incident. But not Hugh. He never forgot that he hadn’t liked the boy; for one thing, he had been inefficient, he wouldn’t learn; and on his thighs were small ulcers, the mild form of syphilis that is common in those parts; and the others had laughed at him because he was unclean, and soiled his bed, and grunted in his sleep.
So all Hugh would say in retrospect was this: "It was strangely moving." Strangely: because it puzzled him that he should be moved by an act of idiocy; and he still could not see why the boy had done it.
He did not yet know his powers.<
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PART III
LABYRINTH
FOR as long as she could remember there had hung above that bed a photograph of Father and an oleograph of the Sacred Heart.
When she was a small child she had thought that if only she were patient enough, if she waited enough and lay awake enough, her father would one night speak to her. But the miracle never happened. The lips never trembled into speech. For hours she listened, tense against her pillow, while an owl shrieked in the forest, and Mother and Cousin Maurice laughed and tinkled glasses downstairs, and the moon moved from the wardrobe to the wash-basin and then across her eiderdown. Sometimes she thought: "Yes. That’s him. He hasn’t forgotten." But it was only a voice in the road or the wind shaking the door.
Her father was dead. He had been killed when she was four years old and she could remember him hardly at all. There had been walks with him in the Forest of Fontainebleau; yes, she could picture that. Whenever they came upon litter left by some party of tourists he would stoop down, make it into a little bonfire, and then set it alight: so that it seemed as if their whole walk had been somehow rare and exciting because of these beacons. Yes, she could smell the smoke now, as it curled in ringlets from soiled copies of Paris Soir, the Continental Daily Mail, the Frankfürter Zeitung: and she could feel his hand, moist, strangely salt when she kissed it. But his face—that she could never recall. The photograph told her that he had a moustache under which hid a weak mouth and chin; and that his eyes were prominent, like her own. But nothing more. The face in the photograph never really seemed to exist; it was a conglomeration of features of a kind which she never could fix in her mind. Had his face been like that in life? And was that why it had faded, when other, more trivial, things remained—his smell, so English, the product of soap and tobacco; the way that he spoke, swallowing the end of the sentence, so that one said: "What’s that? I didn’t quite catch"; the touch of his hands, and a salt taste on the lips?
On those walks he would often stop to sketch: and the results still cluttered the attic. A stranger would have had difficulty in telling his work from hers—fastidious, careful, and, oh, so dull. He painted trees in water-colours, and did some etching, and sometimes tried to draw the rocks that fill those parts. Not for the first time a young man of talent had considered himself a genius. But in this case failure had unmistakably claimed him for her own: so that even when he was a student at the Slade one could say with complete confidence: That man will never succeed at anything.
But what was so clear to others never seemed to have occurred to him. Not even Mother’s doubts could cloud the glittering vistas through which he moved. To the end he believed that somehow, some day, a critic would go to the Royal Academy and proclaim him for what he was. (For like many people of his kind he was ‘hung’—rather ingloriously perhaps, ‘skied’ even; but he felt it to be an honour.)
Mother was never taken in. She had known immediately, instinctively, although she had never looked at a picture in her life. It was she who persuaded him to take pupils, usually American girls; and this was the beginning of the hotel.
Not only his features but his personality eluded Shirley. What had he been like? What sort of man had he been? She could not tell. She only knew that he had spoken softly—and had pretended to blow smoke-rings through his ears, and that she had loved him. But she guessed other things—his kindness, his shyness, his self-consciousness—from the few incidents that she had hoarded up in her memory.
When she had to go behind a tree or a bush on their walks it was he, not she (reversing the usual roles), who called out: "Are you sure no one can see you? Oh, do be careful! Do hurry! I heard voices."
Once, he took her to Fontainebleau in a pony carriage and began to trail her round the Palace: but at the second stateroom she sat down on the floor and howled with boredom and fatigue. He had not been angry at this, though he had planned the excursion weeks ago. Instead, he took her to a café where they could sit in the open, and ordered for himself a glass of beer, for her a café glacé. But when she had dipped her spoon into the concoction and sucked it she again began howling, because it was ‘cold’ and made her teeth ache.
"Very well," he said, smiling. "I prefer café glacé. Would you like to change?"
"Oh, please."
So they changed over. And half-way through she had to be taken into the street to be sick. But she never regretted this incident. It was something memorable, like the first time she could blow her own nose.
And now he was just a photograph. Often, although she had ceased to expect that miracle of speech, she paused to look at him as she moved about the room; and each time she was inflicted with an intolerable ache, an emptiness; and sometimes she stretched out on the bed, and sometimes she prayed, but most often she opened the large scrapbook and read and stared and thought of the General.
Her father had come to Barbizon almost by accident. He had begun by migrating to Paris from a two-storied house in Edgware because he had heard someone say at the Slade: "It’s the only place to paint in." This was typical of him. He believed that if one learnt the requisite rules and did the requisite things then somehow the elements coalesced and the result was a masterpiece. Paris was quite ‘the thing’ at the time: so one went to Paris.
His father who travelled up to the City each morning from the house in Edgware, and his mother, who sang prettily and had once been spoken to by King Edward, were a little anxious at his departure. But his mother gave him a medicine-chest and his father gave him advice; and he took a room in Neuilly; and there he began to paint, conscientiously, in great boredom and without meeting anyone.
Paris was dull he decided. He could paint as well in Edgware. And this ‘special quality of light’ that the students talked about—well, had he found it? Regretfully he shook his head as he took a solitary stroll, and a solitary bock, and a solitary meal.
If only he had some friends! But the men he met at classes filled him with disgust. He began to think nostalgically of musical evenings at home, with Mamma and Aunt Hester singing duets. Mamma had a charming voice, but Aunt Hester, who had ‘trained’, played the oddest tricks with her vowels. When Mamma started off on the old ballad:
The ploughboy kisses,
Those golden tresses.
Aunt Hester joined in with:
The play-boy cusses,
Those go-olden trusses.
Oh, but he could forgive even that! He was so lonely.
Then one day he had been to the Louvre to admire the "Mona Lisa" and the rest (but he walked hurriedly past things like Reuben’s "Fertility led Captive"); and as he strolled he was drawn into a little knot of people who were listening to a professor lecture on Millet; and Millet had painted "The Angelus" at Barbizon.
And Ralph Forsdike thought: "Well, if Millet can do it, I can!" And, of course, when he discovered that Barbizon was less than forty miles from Paris that settled it. If it had been ten miles farther he might not have gone.
So he came to Barbizon and found it delightful (as indeed it is); and each morning he painted, and each evening he went for a stroll. He was still bored, certainly. But there is something rather less shameful in being friendless in the country. Besides, this was a period of waiting; he could afford to wait; he was only twenty-one. At any moment he would be ‘discovered’ and then there would be commissions, and society, and perhaps a knighthood. Oh, yes, he could afford to wait. (But fortunately death spared him that. He never had to wait for an appointment which would not be kept, year in, year out, until he grew old. He died believing, Qualis artifex pereo. And that was something, even though Mother immediately carried all his paintings into the attic.)
Mother had been ill up at the farm: she was a young girl then, Denise Polnay, daughter of a farmer. One day she had attempted to ‘bring off’ a baby: and, as in most things, succeeded. But the injury crippled her for several months.
Ralph had heard this story from his landlady at breakfast: and t
hough shocked profoundly (he simply couldn’t look at his kidney and bacon) he found himself pitying the girl. Then later, by a coincidence, he went to sketch in one of their fields. They were finishing the harvest, on an expanse now bare and dry except for the sheaves; it was very hot, with a haze tingling and distorting the atmosphere. When Ralph began sketching the scene he suddenly noticed a girl, in a low-waisted frock of blue linen, who limped slackly, a sheaf under either arm. Her face was white, she had large thighs and arms and a single violet-dark plait of hair circled her head three times. After that, he ceased to sketch the corn-field and watched her instead. For a while she moved slowly, even resentfully, at her task, until, with a shrug of her shoulders, she dropped the two sheaves that she was carrying, without even placing them in a stook, and wandered off to pick blackberries from the hedge.
Still he watched her, absorbed, distracted; until, looking down, he discovered that his hand was sketching her in on the cartridge paper, in a few bold strokes which obliterated the feathery outlines of trees and reapers and sheaves. This was strange, for he had never attempted figure-drawing before. And stranger still, he was drawing her nude.
At this discovery he blushed, hurriedly threw his things into a rucksack, and made for home. His cheeks burned, so that when he came in his landlady exclaimed: "You do look hot, monsieur." In sudden shame he went to the wash-basin, wreathed in china roses, and sluiced water on to the back of his neck with a sponge. Someone had once told him of this remedy at the Slade.
But he was to see her again. One evening he went down to the river, as he often did, to swim. Cows pulled at willow-herb along the banks or plashed in mud; bats circled; the sun was sinking, a mass of scarlet viscera, in the west. Suddenly he had glimpsed her, appearing from trees with a poodle at her heels—a comical dog, clipped like a lion; in panic, he had thought of racing to the bank and slipping on his clothes; but already she was inexorably upon him. With a wide swing of bare arms she flung a rubber ball into the water for the dog. It plopped quite near Ralph, he started, and she laughed.