“Do I look like a duchess?”
“I hardly suppose so.”
“Or a tennis champion or a beauty queen?”
“No.”
“Do I look like a dissipated charwoman?”
“Yes.” Anthea felt something decidedly unsatisfactory about the state of her knees. Nevertheless she judged that, as between two persons dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, this was the only possible reply.
“Precisely.” Miss Bave spoke with evident satisfaction. “On meeting me, the parents of nicely nurtured girls like yourself have frequently expressed dismay at the prospect of placing their cherished child in the hands of a gin-sodden wretch.”
“I’ve never seen you drink gin.”
“I don’t – and never have. What has brought physical indignity upon me is unremitting intellectual labour. It produces—well, painful diseases in crude old age. Milton knew what he was talking about.”
“Isn’t plain living and high thinking supposed—”
“Stuff and nonsense. Libraries are unwholesome places. Doesn’t even the toughest leather rot in them? Spend a little time in the Divinity Schools quadrangle one day, Anthea, and watch the miserable old creatures like myself doddering in and out of the Bodleian . . . Not that the British Museum isn’t much worse. And that laboratories are any healthier I haven’t at all heard.”
“Are you warning me off?”
“Certainly not.” And Miss Bave turned alarmingly upon Anthea the clear blue eyes that oddly lit her seamed and puffy face. “I have simply pointed out one aspect of a situation. And now tell me about this young man.”
“About Mr Dauncey?” Anthea realised with surprise that she had no disposition to regard Miss Bave as impertinent. “I know hardly anything about him. He’s an American whom I’ve met two or three times at parties. This afternoon we met and walked for a few minutes together in the Parks. As it happened, I did something perfectly idiotic. But it had very little to do with the young man.”
“You did something idiotic?” Miss Bave was interested.
“I pitched a small dog into the pond in order to lure the swan off its nest. I wanted to count the eggs. Only there weren’t any. Rats have had them. It was queerly shocking.”
“Quite so.” Miss Bave appeared less shocked than gratified. “We must always be prepared for the unexpected – even for the positively disagreeable – as the consequence of any piece of disinterested research. Did this Mr Dauncey encourage you?”
“Not a bit. He had an ineffective shot at the thing himself, and then when I took more radical measures he was quite alarmed.”
“In fact the research was simply the cover for a little duel of sex – with the woman very properly drawing first blood.” As she delivered this verdict Miss Bave sat down under the college mulberry tree. It was her favourite summer station, and she motioned Anthea to a seat beside her with every apparent intention of extended colloquy. “But the chief curiosity about this young man remains. Is he a relation of Wendell Dauncey’s – a nephew, perhaps, or even a son?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid I’ve never heard of Wendell Dauncey.”
“Dear me.” For a moment a flicker of unaccustomed uncertainty seemed to pass over Miss Bave’s face. “Your aunt has never mentioned him?”
“Never. He was a friend of my father’s?”
“I believe that for a time he was quite an intimate friend – although what is called nowadays rather a dim person. Several memoirs of the period have something to say about him. He was an expatriate American – an unsuccessful painter – who spent most of his life in Florence. Indeed, he may be alive and settled there still, for he was certainly a much younger man than your father. You never go there yourself?”
Anthea shook her head. “The villa belongs to my brother, and my aunt disapproves of him. She has been terrified that the centenary would prompt him to come to England and make a nuisance of himself. But he appears to be sitting tight. I never see him, and I don’t suppose we would have much to say to each other. Raymond is nineteen years older than I am.” Anthea smiled cautiously. ‘The centenary no doubt seems less odd to him than it does to me.”
“That may be so. Had this young Mr Dauncey been to the lecture?”
“Yes. He asked me what I had thought of it. And I believe he must have some connection with Wendell Dauncey. He said something about having a reason for being interested in Mark Lambert’s books. And it wasn’t because of his own research. That’s about Landor.”
“When your father was a small boy Landor asked him to tea.”
“I know. He told me.”
“Your father told you—?” Miss Bave was momentarily at sea.
“Of course not. My father died when I was quite small. This young Mr Dauncey – Garth Dauncey – told me. But he meant that he had some quite different reason for his interest. And later he asked me something that perhaps connects up with it. He asked me whether I had ever decided how many novels my father wrote. It was an odd question.”
Miss Bave appeared to feel that this required a moment’s consideration. “Do you mean odd – or merely idle?”
“Odd. It sprang from our talking of the number of swan’s eggs. But there was something interesting behind it – something that he thought might interest me. Only he sheered away from it.”
“There are no doubt diverse ways of engaging the interest of a young woman in a public park.” Miss Bave followed this excursus in the sardonic with another reflective pause. “As a matter of fact the question has its interest for me too. Is your father, for example, likely to have left anything unpublished? I should like to feel that I was quite sure of the answer.”
“Then come and see Garth Dauncey, and find out what he was talking about.”
It might have been observed that this proposition had a greater effect of surprise upon Anthea, who made it, than upon Miss Bave, to whom it was addressed. The latter indeed, after yet another pause, contented herself with the placid enquiry: “Then you are on calling terms with this young man?”
“I don’t even know where he lives – but I suppose we can find out from the Resident Members list. What happened was this: he gave me an invitation – it was to go and hear the broadcast this evening, perhaps bringing a friend – and I’m afraid I rather snubbed him.”
“And now you feel some compunction in the matter?” This time the sardonic was almost obtrusively absent from Miss Bave’s voice.
“He was being friendly – and I snubbed him simply because I was feeling rather an ass about the swan. And American manners are so hard to gauge.”
Miss Bave took a moment to survey the promise of the mulberry crop above her head. “That is a relevant consideration, no doubt.”
“And if, as you say, his uncle – or his father – was rather a dim friend of my father’s—”
“Wendell Dauncey was certainly that.” Miss Bave spoke drily. “A sort of Third Lord, with never more than a line or two to speak, but regularly posed near the back-drop in an attitude of respectful devotion to your royal papa.”
“Well, if it was like that, it’s surely all the more incumbent upon me—”
Disconcertingly Miss Bave gave her sharpest bark. “If I am no duchess, neither are you a princess, Anthea Lambert. You escaped it, perhaps, by being your father’s youngest, and not his eldest, child. No need to make a belated bid for the role.”
Anthea found it necessary to revise her estimate of the reliability of Miss Bave. It was true indeed that this eminent scholar forbore premature familiarities. But it looked as if, once launched, she let you have it. “Miss Bave, it must be quite clear that I’m not disposed to do anything of the sort. You would be amused, I think, to know at how absurdly early an age I became clear about one thing I was not going to be.”
“You mean”—Miss Bave spoke soberly—”Mark Lambert’s daughter?”
“Yes – in a sense call it that. Or call it an animated footnote to English literary history. The sentiment has mo
ulded my life.” Anthea hesitated, perhaps feeling that this was rather a pompous expression. “I mean, it is what made me do science when I went to school, and has landed me my present job.”
“Did you have to fight?”
“Of course I had to fight. Mark Lambert went out of fashion after his death, but there was always, you know, a clique. Until my mother died – and I was ten by then, for she survived my father by seven years – until my mother died the legend was still something of a going concern. Lambert fans—”
“My dear Anthea!” Miss Bave’s could not have been other than a genuine shudder.
“Admirers of Lambert’s books still came in a regular trickle to the Villa Pastorelli to stare. And I was in the picture, you see, as the last fruit of the old man’s genius. A wonder child, whose only proper future – whose only artistically permissible future, you might say – would be as a Lambert heroine. Think of being one of them.”
For the first time in Anthea’s experience, Miss Bave showed surprise. “But they are magnificent, surely?”
“It’s certainly in the grand manner that they take what comes to them.” Anthea was fair. “But to be viewed as a little victim, required by both family piety and aesthetic decorum to grow into that sort of fate.”
“It would be unnerving, no doubt.” Miss Bave’s sympathy was perfunctory. “When did you move to England?”
“At ten. My mother died, and an English aunt decided that my brother Raymond was not a suitable guardian for me. So she descended on Florence and carried me off. But my singularity travelled with me. My new protectors were extremely kind and conveniently prosperous. But they were the sort of people who think the writing of books deuced odd.”
“And so it is.” Delivering herself on this with decision, Miss Bave subjected Anthea to brief dispassionate scrutiny. “Your appearance would be some protection. There is nothing out of the way about it.”
“Thank you. But there was feeling nevertheless that I was going to prove a handful – to be outrée, temperamental, and probably precocious in deplorable directions. My aunt’s husband – a benevolent stockbroker with a great knowledge of the world – always kept a sharp eye on the gardener’s boys.”
“And you cheated all this expectation?”
“Lamentably. 1 was surrounded by conscientious relations, who felt that I must be handled very carefully, and also that I ought to be given every opportunity for what they called artistic expression. Their conviction that everything of that sort is deuced odd didn’t make them the least intolerant. They were the kind that looks at modern painting in silence, without uneasy jokes. They had their acknowledged connection with all that sort of thing through Mark Lambert, you see, and it was up to them not to rock the boat.”
“And up to you to put in an oar yourself?”
“If I had taken to writing novels they would certainly have given them around as Christmas presents or urged their friends to borrow them from The Times Book Club. It would have been deuced odd in a girl, of course. But, with this particular girl, they would have said that it was in the blood. And they had a great belief that blood will tell.”
“But science?”
“Science was harder to take. The factors that make for success in writing – and they had a strong feeling for success – are unaccountable and even mysterious; and there are female novelists who are known to enjoy large circulations. But science is rational and so they were convinced they knew about it. They counselled confining my ambition to a college that dispensed the domestic variety.”
“There was something to be said for it.” Miss Bave had her own tolerance. “You have falsified such advice, of course. But how many of our undergraduates, after all, might go further with French pastry than English philology.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m not an unreasonable cook as it is.” Anthea paused on this inconsequent boast. “But does my history really interest you?”
“Very much. And not the less because it is so absolutely as history that you render it. You speak of this circle of admirable relations uncompromisingly in a past tense.”
“So I do.” Anthea appeared struck by this observation. “Well, most of them are in fact dead. And, in any case, I feel it as all belonging to a past that no longer concerns me. I don’t want it to be otherwise. I think you know Sir Charles Shaxby – who is going to be in the broadcast tonight? He sometimes reproaches me for preserving what he calls an imagination untouched by my ancestry. Perhaps it is so, but I can’t help it. This centenary, for instance – I’m just managing to keep on civil terms with it.”
“So it has been possible to remark.”
Anthea flushed. “You think that graceless?”
“I think it thoroughly sensible.” Miss Bave produced this unexpected judgment with emphasis. “You are surprised?”
“Well, I have found that most literary people agree with Sir Charles. Why don’t you?”
“Why?” Thus challenged, Miss Bave might have been thought to hesitate, but it appeared that this was merely an effect of her being minded to move her chair into the last warmth of the evening sun. “It’s my professional point of view. A great artist’s descendents should no doubt honour his works. But descendents are commonly a nuisance, I assure you, when they continue to interest themselves in their ancestor simply as an ancestor. They suppress information either because they are ashamed of a black sheep – which is an aspect, you know, which a good many artists can be found to have possessed – or from some muzzy notion that there must be money in it or that one or another literary nephew or niece may one day want to make a book of the stuff.”
“That’s all?”
Miss Bave received this further question by rising, somewhat painfully, to her feet. “It grows chilly; we’ll go in.” She moved across the grass. “All? Well, not quite. What sort of mechanisms, would you say, go to producing a work of imaginative literature?”
Anthea considered. “To some extent, the same sort that go to producing dreams.”
“A fashionable answer – but a very tolerably useful one. Suppose yourself, Anthea, in the company of your parents and, say, a younger sister and a maternal aunt at the breakfast-table. Would you think it healthy to make your father tell you all his dreams in order that you might fall to a rigorous analysis of them?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?” Miss Bave halted. “I doubt whether we have enough common ground for discussion. I belong with Noah and his ark.”
“Nonsense, Miss Bave. I don’t say that I would spend breakfast time in that way, but only that doing so would be quite healthy. There’s surely everything to be said, in a general way, for finding the truth and surveying it. No doubt there would, in practice, be some embarrassment in digging out a lot of adulterous and incestuous fantasies over the toast and marmalade. But, if the people were any good, it would be salutary rather than otherwise.”
“Because truth is always salutary?”
“Just that.”
“But, you see, truth might be precisely what you quite notably failed to find. Achieve this breakfast-table éclaircissement, Anthea, and get it all wrong – and where are you then? In a shocking muddle, if you ask me. The whole enterprise would be a treacherous one, best left to professionals. And it is rather the same with a work of art. The chemistry by which it has been distilled out of the raw stuff of experience may be extremely tricky.”
“And had better not be enquired into by anybody who might have contributed to the brew?” Anthea was interested. “I have no doubt you are perfectly right. And it does, I suppose, constitute a sort of theoretical justification for my habit of ignoring the Lambert legend. So thank you. But it’s surely an argument of rather tenuous application, all the same. For me, after all, the point of possible embarrassment is decidedly not in the hazard of finding myself unexpectedly contributing to my father’s imaginative chemistry. His career as a writer was over and done with a good many years before I was born. No, it’s the very remoteness in time of the whole
business – the fact that it so patently touches neither myself nor any world I know – that has a certain baffling and disturbing quality. You speak of the ark. But is it not I who, at the moment, have good reason to feel that I belong there?”
“Which brings us back to that young man.”
“To Garth Dauncey?” Anthea was puzzled. “Has it anything to do with him?”
“As I understand the matter, you suspected him – whether justly or unjustly – of cherishing what might be termed learned designs upon you. He appeared disposed to look you up, so to speak, in your character of the sort of footnote you have mentioned.” Miss Bave had paused in her slow progression, apparently in the interest of precise statement. “Whereupon, Anthea, you asked yourself if you were for ever to be of interest only as Mark Lambert’s daughter, and proceeded to vindicate your independent existence by pitching a dog into a duck-pond. What a good thing it will be when this little centenary flurry is over.” And Miss Bave, who had offered her decidedly astringent analysis without any marked concession to the humorous, resumed her perambulation. “By the way – at what time?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My dear Anthea, you have very kindly given me an invitation. At what time do we call on Mr Dauncey and listen to the broadcast?”
THREE
If it is chilly of a June evening in the garden of St Cecilia’s it is not likely to be warmer in the Cotswolds some hours later. We need not therefore be surprised to find a fire – although but a mildly flickering affair of apple-wood – constituting a focus for the next stage of our narrative. On opposite sides of it sit a man and woman, elderly and distinguished-looking. The room thus warmed and tenanted lies much in darkness and is evidently large. Here and there electric light, shining uncertainly through old-fashioned pleated silk, dies away against a background of vellum and tooled leather. The hint is of books so numerous and handsome that we shall suppose ourselves to be in a gentleman’s library until, getting used to the obscurity, we spy too a profusion of small dim ancient paintings, and of small rubbed glinting bronzes, suggestive of what a past age might have called the cabinet of a virtuoso. The man by the fire – the proprietor as he may well be of these covetable objects – is occupying himself with embroidery. His companion, who is discernibly a sister, more prosaically but with an equal grace darns socks. Both are silent – but the room is nevertheless full of voices. An unobtrusive wireless-set – in these surroundings clearly a cautious concession to the march of time – is decidedly on.
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