“What I mean is this. We were both born into the same sort of world—”
“Only you were born into its purple.”
“Nonsense. My father’s great period had burnt itself out before I arrived, and after that the Pastorelli was all anticlimax and seediness. We were born, I say, into the same world; and we were both turfed out. Well, it’s my opinion that we were lucky. I don’t say that so meagre a ration of parents as was contrived for us was lucky. I mean that it was all a dead-end by The Times we came along, that émigré Florence life. It was all a looking back into the past and persuading oneself and others that it had been august and golden. Old Charles Shaxby in his broadcast caught exactly the note I mean. Kidding oneself with bogus retrospection, a past full of giants, and ourselves a race of mere pygmies – or the other word like it.”
“Epigones?”
“Yes. Stunted descendants, editing and annotating the lines of the mighty dead, and dusting their knick-knacks in sterilised unlived-in rooms. It’s something that for some reason I don’t at all like, and I’m glad that I for one am shut of it. You’ve found a different attitude.”
“I certainly intend to edit and annotate poor old Landor, though I don’t know that he was all that of a giant. Still, the more I get the measure of him such as it is, the more I do seem to spy quite a number of epigones about the place. And with your father it’s the same but more so. For he was a bit of a giant, if you ask me. Do you read his books – the big ones?”
“Yes.”
“Well now, Anthea, do you ever read one without staring round afterwards and being flabbergasted by the emptiness of what they call the contemporary literary scene?”
“That’s something quite different.” Anthea gave considerable dogmatic force to this arbitrary assertion. “I’m all for due reverence in front of a great book – The Ambassadors, say, or The Cosmopolitans or Nostromo. But I don’t like centenaries and pious fuss.”
“You’re in a muddle.” Dauncey too was dogmatic. “It’s not perhaps very important, but you should clear it up. What about the old lady? What do you think of her? She’s edited and annotated all her days.”
“Miss Bave? I’d say it’s been good for her – the discipline of that sort of work. It’s made her selfless and perhaps rather wise – as well as mildly terrifying, which is what I chiefly find her. But it hasn’t done a peck of good to the stuff. That would be better left alone, to operate upon us with what potency it has – and in secret, more or less.”
“Queer – decidedly queer.” And Dauncey glanced at Anthea in what appeared to be high delight – and for so long that the car swerved alarmingly towards the ditch. “You’re mixing up belletristic twaddle with solid hard-working conservative scholarship. Don’t you know that a book, almost as much as one of your blessed turbo-jets, has to be kept in constant repair if it’s not to perish? Did you ever read a contemporary novel without being aware of small spots where it’s already begun to crumble after being no more than once through the hands of the printer? Gaol has become goal, say – and in a place where goal is miraculously specious. You see, somewhere in the universe there’s a malignant spirit bent on crumbling everything of that sort away – bent on rubbing it out. With buildings and statues and pictures he’s bound to succeed in the end; there’s no final stopping him. But that isn’t so with the word. Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes shall outlive this powerful rime. It’s true – but it’s true only on conditions. Somebody must be doing his best first to look over the poet’s shoulder as he works and then to keep an eye on the whole elaborate, clumsy, blundering process by which the original immaterial thing is kept trundling down the centuries on its material vehicle. It’s not work, I grant you, that makes exactly as much noise as a jet popping through the sonic barrier; but at least it’s useful. And there are complications too, as you may guess – higher reaches to the job – where one needs quite all one’s wits not to make a mess of it. How do I shape as a lecturer, Anthea?”
“Better than as a driver, at the moment. That’s the Shaxbys’ gateway, just ahead on the right, and you look like hurtling straight on.” Anthea felt in a bag and produced a pair of gloves. “And don’t as you drive up to the house give an imitation of one of your Hollywood compatriots winning a chariot race in ancient Rome.”
“Gloves?” Dauncey swung off the road with reassuring signs of respectful caution. “It’s all very correct, and one’s best behaviour is required?”
“Hermione Shaxby rather notices anything that isn’t quite 1907.” Anthea glanced quickly into the driving-mirror and smoothed her dress. “She’ll probably notice you.”
“And her brother?”
“He’ll certainly notice. Shall I explain that you propose to take me fossicking in Florence?”
“Sure. Sir Charles Shaxby is going to be one of our most important backers. Wasn’t he your father’s literary executor and so forth? He must know quite a lot.”
“And will you then make clear to him – or to me – just what this nebulous proposal is? No doubt texts should be preserved and restored and so on by the conscientious labour of quiet scholarly souls like Miss Bave and yourself. Sir Charles will beam encouragement on such proposals. But it’s not quite obvious how all that – goals and gaols, say – ties up with excavations on the Lambert legend.”
“I don’t say it quite does.” Taking the last sweep of the drive, Garth Dauncey was large and vague. “It’s just that I have a notion about your father.”
“And you have it as what you call a conservative scholar?”
“Absolutely. People – artists – are fascinating, as I’ve said. And, of course, what happens to them is reflected in what happens in their works – and to their works. So I’m interested in what happened to Mark Lambert. But I wouldn’t, about your father, much go in for what they could call impertinent curiosity.”
“The Shaxby aura is affecting you, and you’re turning extremely correct. But thank you – and now explain.”
“Very well,” Dauncey reduced his speed to a crawl. “What would you say was the last great Lambert?”
Anthea was surprised. “Why, Lucia’s Changeling, without a doubt. It came out in 1915. After that there were only the travel sketches, and the curious historical thing, and the two unsuccessful plays.”
“My notion is that there was another real Lambert – in the great tradition.”
The car was coming to a stop. Anthea, who had leant forward to grasp the door-handle, sat back again. “It is something you have from your father?”
“Only partly that. He’s not informative – or not consciously so.” Dauncey slipped out of gear. “If you don’t like the idea of Florence in July we could make it early September.”
“No good. I want to be at Farnborough—”
Anthea broke off, with a sufficient sense of having made one of the unwarier of her life’s utterances. But Dauncey took it up with his largest ease. “Is that polo? I’m not too well up in your English occasions.”
“Polo? Don’t be idiotic. It’s the aircraft industry’s big do, with people coming from all over the place.”
“Then”—Dauncey was placidly matter of fact—”it will have to be July after all. Now get out and let’s have our tea.”
“I wish you’d get it into your head that I’m not in fact prompted—”
“Quit it, sister. Let it rest.” Largely pleased with himself and the world, the young man luxuriated once more in outrageous address. “Didn’t you bring that old lady to listen in? Ain’t you taking me out to tea with these folks in their beautiful ancestral home?” Surveying the modest façade of mellow Cotswold stone before them, Dauncey might positively have been fingering the coins that would take them through some waiting turnstile to the ranged antiquities beyond. “And—say!—isn’t it just out of this world?”
“Be quite, you ass. Here’s Sir Charles coming out to meet us.”
Dauncey took a look at the tall figure coming down the steps and appeared t
o acknowledge the need for sobriety. “Just give a tug at that knob,” he said. “I may have a pair of gloves too.”
SIX
Hermione Shaxby poured tea. Seated beside her, Garth Dauncey seemed prompted to give as much of his attention as was civil to his hostess’s mere ambience in Umbrian primitives and Etruscan bronze; he could have been speculating on what common impress of race lay alike on the staring smiling pagan things, whether hierarchically stiff or priapically prancing, and the small Gallilean evocations, intricate and awful, that glowed in clear colour and minutely patterned gold. Sir Charles too, eyeing his guest with an openness no doubt allowable in a professional student of the more highly evolved of life’s tangible and visible surfaces, appeared to hit upon a problem in genetics. “Do you know,” he said pleasantly, “that I cannot recall whether your mother was Italian? You will allow the question in one who counts himself your father’s old friend. It is really delightful of Anthea to have brought us Wendell Dauncey’s son.”
“My mother’s father was Italian, but married to an American. So I can claim only the bare quarter of Latin blood. But it seems to make me love Italy, and everything connected with the place – including Mark Lambert’s novels.”
“I am delighted to hear it. And it was this interest that drew you into Anthea’s society?”
“Well, sir – everything about Lambert certainly attracts me very much. And when I met Miss Lambert and learnt that she is Mark Lambert’s daughter—”
A pause, inserted with what Anthea felt to be abominable rhetorical skill in these ingenuous responses, gave Miss Shaxby an opportunity to intervene. “You at once began to find her interesting?”
“I began to hope that she would find me not too dumb.”
Miss Shaxby’s response to this was a very slight nod, such – Anthea felt – as a benevolently disposed examiner might employ in covert assurance of a candidate’s shaping well. Sir Charles reached hospitably among plates of scones and sandwiches. “And how,” he asked, “is your father? I am ashamed to acknowledge how much I have lost touch with everybody out there.”
“I’m sorry to say that I’m in no sort of contact with him. He shifts his quarters from time to time, and more often than not only the police and his bankers know about it. I had an address about six months back, but by now I guess he’ll be someplace else. Elusiveness is my father’s strong suit, as you no doubt know.”
“Indeed a most shy and retiring man. It has interfered sadly with the play of his talent – which is something in which I have always firmly believed.” Sir Charles, as if from a sense of ground upon which it was injudicious to linger, reached prematurely for a cake. “Shall you be visiting Florence soon?”
At this Anthea, who found herself in a divided mind over the campaign which this disturbing young man was plainly opening up, felt prompted to interrupt. “Mr Dauncey will tell you that we are to go out together – he and I.” She gave to the announcement a malicious relish about which she had the grace to feel an instant misgiving. “We are to take Miss Bave and the latest excavating machinery, and my father is to have a final tidy up.”
“You astonish me.” Sir Charles, disconcerted, glanced for guidance towards his sister, and found it in the decided chilliness with which she was enquiring into the state of Dauncey’s cup. “I had not understood that it was positively in the interest of professional research that Mr Dauncey had made your acquaintance. I am afraid he will hardly find it useful to cultivate mine.”
“It’s why I am cultivating his.” Rallying to the young man with a decisiveness which perhaps surprised her, Anthea made this declaration roundly. “I want to know much more than I do.”
“My dear Anthea, this is a change of mind indeed – and I am very sure that you deserve a holiday from your scientific pursuits.” Sir Charles was delighted. “It may be that the centenary has kindled your interest. If so, I shall consider it not to have passed in vain. But your Florentine project is, I own, obscure to me. What do you propose to find out?”
“Oh, all sorts of thing.” Anthea now spoke lightly. “For instance, about the girl on the Piazzale.”
“The girl on the Pizzale?” Sir Charles was at a loss.
“Perhaps you invented her?” Anthea’s malice took another turn. “Talk about artists seems always to hanker after being artistic itself, and mere truth has to play second fiddle all the time. And weren’t you, in your wireless talk, when you wiped the floor with all those wishy-washy young men, going all out to achieve a planned artistic effect? Didn’t it stick out at every cadence – at every however and indeed and moreover and nevertheless?”
Sir Charles rose to take Anthea’s empty cup. “To be sure, my dear. And what I said may therefore be remembered by some few people for some little while. Whereas the remarks of the young men you mention, although so much cleverer than anything I could offer, were certainly within no one’s recollection by the next morning’s breakfast time. That is what is meant by being artistic – simply being a little less unmemorable than usual. I hope Mr Dauncey will support me in this.”
“It’s not a bad working definition.” Dauncey, as he marked the growing good-humour of his host, let his glance travel conspiratorially to Anthea’s. “And as for the girl on the Piazzale Michelangelo, I’ve more than a notion that she was real enough.”
“Indeed she was. And my sister, as it happens, shares Anthea’s whimsical wish to know more about her. But as a research project—is that not the phrase?—I am afraid it is sadly without feasibility.”
“It is true that I should like to know what became of her.” Miss Shaxby applied herself to a spirit lamp on her tea equipage. “For is she not, as it were, one of your father’s lost heroines?”
Anthea shook her head. “I don’t know that, after all, her fate is very interesting in itself. But suppose my father had really written, and left us, some substantial piece of fiction the germ of which lay in his glimpses of the girl. And suppose that, in sober fact, she did have some sort of story – some involvement, veritably and in her own right, in what a novelist would condescend to call a situation. Would there be any real relationship between the two – between the facts and the fancies?”
“Any relationship?” Sir Charles was puzzled.
“We all enjoyed your beautifully literary evocation of the thing. Mark Lambert’s eye fell on the girl, and at once he was fascinated; he was inspired. I don’t doubt that things of that sort happen to writers. But what, if anything, do they mean? Is there any real divination, any sort of telepathy involved? There is the girl – and suddenly a whole story glimmers in my father’s mind. Is anything queer at work?”
Sir Charles appeared to be disagreeably affected by this line of speculation. “The creative imagination must always be mysterious. I don’t know that we can go further than that.”
Dauncey nodded. “I see there’s an interesting question. But I agree with Sir Charles that there’s no way of finding out.”
“Isn’t there?” Anthea was suddenly challenging. “Suppose for the moment that my father did actually record imaginings about the girl, it should still be possible to retrieve the facts about her, and then make one’s comparison. There’s usually a way of getting at facts, if only one organises properly. That’s what’s satisfactory about them. Yes, I think I really shall take Mr Dauncey to Florence, and Miss Bave and all her cleverest pupils too, and we shall hunt the girl down and have it out with her.”
Miss Shaxby was amused. “Dear child, you speak as if she were on the Piazzale still. But it would be your father’s version of her – granting him to have created one – who would have that sort of immortality; who would be there in almost the same way that Michelangelo’s David is there.”
“Well, the real girl is somewhere. Has the nasty Italian married her? Or has he had to be content with the mother?”
Sir Charles Shaxby shook his head in mild severity. “These, Anthea, would not, in real life, be pleasant things to start finding out about. They are scarce
ly the sort of facts that I should care to see Mr Dauncey and you organising – as you call it – a hunt for. I am glad to think that it is, in any case, impracticable. You have been speaking as if that girl were virtually your contemporary. Whereas, if still alive, she is old enough to be the mother of either of you. We must find, my dear child, some other field for this newly awakened literary curiosity.”
“Mr Dauncey believes that he has found one already. And I think you will be surprised to hear about it.”
“At least I shall be very interested.”
Whether or not Garth Dauncey judged this civil rejoinder encouraging, he appeared momentarily indisposed to accept the opening which Anthea had with some deliberation provided for him. Perceptibly, indeed, he hedged. “I expect Sir Charles hears too many folk airing talk on Mark Lambert these days. He won’t want another line of it from me.”
“By no means. Every sign of Mark’s restored reputation is, I assure you, delightful to me. And I may say that your thinking to come out with Anthea and discuss him with me is not the first of today’s pleasures in that regard. You perhaps know my old friend Stephen Brash and his admirable journal? Well, he has been so kind as to drop me a line about my little piece on the air the other evening; and he adds that to-morrow’s main article is on Lambert. It offers a radical revaluation. And the writer – for Brash let me into the secret – is Edmund Culpit.”
“Well – if that isn’t fine!” Dauncey received as with wholesome awe the name of his eminent countryman. “And everybody will know. It’s an unmistakable style.”
“Quite so. And there is another thing – not nearly so important in itself, but a sign of the way the wind is blowing. Somebody called Poyle, who is apparently quite well known among the younger writers, publishes a volume of essays next week. Brash, who has passed out the book for review, tells me that the opening essay is on Lambert. You know this Poyle, Mr Dauncey? He is a responsible critic? You see I freely confess my ignorance of what goes on nowadays.”
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