Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “Garth?” The name just breathed from her lips.

  “Garth Dauncey. My son.”

  Perhaps he never knew. Raymond had said something like that – that there were things which he would be the last man to be told. She walked beside him round the cloister to its eastern side, where warm sunlight still fell. She was thankful when he made her sit down, for there was no strength in her limbs. He had dusted the smooth stone – unobtrusively, with grave courtesy – and now he stood before her. She saw that he had become very, very old. But she did not think his wits were gone. His eyes were clear in his finely lined face. He had the air of one who has kept an appointment, who is in command of a situation. She had in her pocket what might be a kind of death to him. But it must all come out. Quietly, suppressing all urgency, she began to speak.

  Presently he sat down beside her. He was so still that she wondered if he heard – or if, hearing, he understood. But when she said that she had promised to marry Garth he took her hand for a moment, and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She pressed on. And at length he had the letter in his hands.

  He read it carefully – but for this, she saw, he had no emotion. In the end he folded it and handed it back to her. “You must keep it.” he said. “It is now doubly yours.”

  After all, he had failed to understand. His memory, his mind were indeed gone. And although touched, moved, he was in truth very remote, withdrawn – as Garth had described him. She heard herself give a strange sound: half sob, half cry of despair. And then, mastering herself, she was speaking again – frankly, fiercely explaining, with the letter still in her hand.

  He was puzzled, troubled – and then suddenly uncontrollably agitated. He stood up and drew out an old watch, elegant and as thin as a leaf. It trembled like a leaf in his hand. “I must tidy up,” he said. “I must tidy up. Leaving things about – they don’t like it.” He made a gesture, courteous still, inviting her to rise. They walked back together to the Hospice. “Anthea, there is something you must know – a secret. Nobody has known. Nobody except my wife.” He was silent until they stood again before the great Fra Angelico. “It is the secret she speaks of to Mark in that letter.”

  She wanted to cry out that she did know; that it was plain; that their agony might now end. But it was only at a second effort that she managed to speak at all. “Please, please, let us stop. I understand. Indeed I do.”

  “I think not.” He paused, busied himself with what he called his tidying up, stuffing away in a worn case the little humble copies with which his livelihood must now be eked out. And then he looked full at her, and she remembered that he had possessed great beauty. “It’s a very simple and small secret, after all; though I had hoped to take it to the grave with me. I wrote The Cosmopolitans for poor Mark. And his later books too.”

  The Pilgrims’ Hospice swam round Anthea. “You—” Her voice died helplessly.

  “Yes. He was a very great genius – the very greatest and best man I have ever known. But, you see, he couldn’t write. And I discovered I could. I can’t paint, you know. My life has been as nothing because I can’t paint. But as for writing – well, I discovered I had the trick of that.”

  ELEVEN

  Miss Bave had insisted on bringing a Continental Bradshaw – thus adding considerably, Garth maintained, to the labour of the ancient horse that had hauled her, together with old Mr Dauncey, to the Piazzale Michelangelo. And since her meal was frugal and her mood uncommunicative, Miss Bave had ample leisure for research. She had announced the possession of a sister living in Austria and a schoolfriend who conducted a seminary for young ladies at Grenoble; and with these among other objectives she was now constructing for herself an elaborate timetable. Anthea, finishing her coffee, looked curiously at her friend. “But won’t you,” she asked, “ever fly again?”

  “I think not. My generation was brought up to find romance in travel – by which was meant not merely the several places visited but also the journeying between them. But the air is for the most part no more romantic than the twopenny tube. I found the word for it on my flight out.” Miss Bave paused in recollection. “It was encapsulated. Chipchase, with her wonderful flair for an image, might be reminded of those odd pneumatic pipes in the large shops. But you interrupted me when I was trying to find a rapido from Cremona to Turin.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “You and Garth had better go and look at something, and leave Mr Dauncey and myself to digest our luncheons in peace. Not that I shall disturb Mr Dauncey”—and Miss Bave might have been detected giving a swift and wary glance at the old man—”for I have a good many trains to look up still.”

  “Yes, Miss Bave.” Anthea got up obediently and Garth did the same; they were like well-disciplined children who have been told to vanish. “But what shall we look at?”

  “San Salvatore – straight up between the cypresses.” Miss Bave scarcely lifted her nose from her Bradshaw.

  Wendell Dauncey, who had been gazing out over the city in what seemed the remotest of dreams, turned his gaze momentarily upon his companions. “San Salvatore?” he said. “La sua bella villanella. It was a description Mark loved to quote.”

  “And then go on up to San Miniato.” Miss Bave was like a resourceful parent, resolved upon an hour’s quiet. “They are a remarkable contrast. You may read about it in the guide.” She returned again to her investigations, but looked up as the young people were about to move away. “I think you said you are to be married before Christmas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then don’t neglect to write to the Principal tonight, resigning your lectureship. Nothing much can be done in the vacation, it is true. Nevertheless it will be convenient that she should know.” She waited until Anthea and Garth were gone, and then turned to old Mr Dauncey. Aware of her scrutiny, he gave a small vague bow and an apprehensive glance. He looked, it occurred to her, as the man in the moon might look if confronted with a rapidly approaching meteor. “Where was I?” she asked.

  He made a great effort of concentration. “A rapido,” he said. “You were anxious to find a rapido from Cremona to Turin.”

  “Thank you.” Miss Bave gave a brisk nod, produced a pencil and made a note.

  She flicked the pages of Bradshaw; he returned to his dream; there was a long silence between them. At their back was Poggi’s Loggia, scored and notched by high explosive. In front, beyond the David and a steep fall of oleander, tamarisk and ilex, the red roofs of the city ran in endless horizontals cut by the line of the river and relieved by the great landmarks: the naked brick of Santa Croce, the ornate and enormous Duomo. Wendell Dauncey looked out over it for a time, but presently his gaze travelled elsewhere – travelled to an empty corner of the open air restaurant where they sat. “It was here that I did it.” He spoke almost to himself. “And Mark, actually, was looking on.” He was silent again for some moments. “It was here that I did it – did what I shall always regret.”

  Miss Bave glanced at him cautiously. “But hasn’t something come of it – the most important thing of all?”

  “Life has come of it, I suppose.” He looked at her questioningly. “Yes – there has been that.”

  “Garth and Anthea today: you don’t regret them?”

  “I am very happy about them – as must indeed be apparent to you.” His pale lunar smile softened the already mild rebuke. “It has always been rather a dream of mine that they might meet and marry. Simple human happiness is there for us to rejoice in. We may at least say, I suppose, that it is well enough. But a great art is another thing.”

  “An incompatible thing?”

  “In our particular instance, yes.” He smiled at her again. “Did I say a great art? I ought not to call it that – but at least it was in some such terms that I was coming to dare to think of it. And here I broke it forever.” He made a long pause, and his next words were hesitant. “When must it all—well, appear?”

  Miss Bave put down her Bradshaw. “The manuscripts you let me re
ad this morning – the series of Mark Lambert’s letters and notes during your association – will be one of the greatest literary discoveries, I suppose, of the twenty-first century.”

  His face lit up. “It needn’t be before then?”

  “Certainly not. Let them work it all out in a hundred years’ time – your strange and potent collaboration.”

  “Yes – our collaboration.” He had seized on the word. “But Mark’s, you know, was all the genius.”

  “Let them argue about that – the scholars like your son and myself. And then let another Lambert – or another Dauncey – go on to discern the fable in it.”

  “The fable?” The old man looked at her with a quick vivid interest, so that she had the sensation of being really noticed for the first time. “You see that? Mark would have seen it. In a fashion, I think I saw it myself at the time. It began with Mary.”

  Miss Bave said nothing. Nor did she move a muscle. She might have been a waxwork – a waxwork gone slightly puffy, slightly out of shape under the strong Tuscan sun.

  “It began with Mary Lambert, who was a woman full of love and charity, and who sustained me in the really bitter time – the time of my realising that I could never be more than a mediocre painter. But soon I was deeply attached to Mark too. The bond between us was established, I think, before we at all realised what it consisted in: a common acknowledgment of bafflement, of near-failure.”

  “Lambert knew?” Miss Bave was curious. “He held a just estimate of all his early work?”

  “Assuredly he did. He had written much and made himself some sort of name; but he understood very well that any mastered art had eluded him. Mark was a full-lived man hungering to be an artist, and the very fullness of his living was the mischief. But it was a long time before it came to me as that. At first I saw him simply as a being of the largest vision and most magnificent conceptions, between whom and his own just and merited achievement there lay some inexplicable chasm. We came to talk about it a great deal.”

  Wendell Dauncey’s voice faded, and he stooped to pick up his panama hat. It looked as if, at this crucial point, he was minded to rise and take his leave. He would bow, set the hat carefully on his head, walk away across the Piazzale and while doing so – Miss Bave thought – very conceivably dissolve into air. But her estimate of his intentions proved mistaken. The old man set the hat on his knee and talked on.

  “Into that inexplicable chasm we may be said to have peered together a great deal. But we never quite acknowledged it as that. Our discussions were always in terms of one or another specific technical problem before which Mark conceived himself to be maddeningly halted. I used myself, in solitude, to brood over these problems, for my hopes were all bound up with Mark’s success. I had failed as a painter, and I was the more deeply concerned that my friend should succeed as a novelist in the end. But one needs a pen in tackling such things and presently I found that I was using one. You understand?”

  Miss Bave allowed herself the faintest of nods.

  “I need not retail the stages of our progress; indeed, I do not think I could do so now, even if I were minded to. The important point is my own growing understanding of the underlying facts of the situation. In myself I was nothing – and never had been. People spoke of me, I know, as a kind of wraith. And they were right. And yet I was something. Put it that I was simply that part of Mark which Mark himself lacked. And what he lacked was sufficiently evident. It was the power, having filled his arms with life, to withdraw into the world of disinterested creation. My arms were empty. But that world was mine.”

  There was a long silence – so long, that Miss Bave felt obliged to speak. “I understand,” she said gently, “the help you brought him. But I wonder a little – as in time many people will wonder – why you were not both prompted by these circumstances to a more formal and open collaboration.”

  The old man flushed, and for a moment she feared to have raised an issue that would silence him. But presently he went on.

  “I don’t want to speak of my own temperament. People are always tiresome when they do that. But I was a painter, not a writer. Moreover I was shy. It is a silly little word, is it not? But it can cover extraordinary pain at any hint of prominence in a position felt as delicate or equivocal. No – my temperament forbade anything of the sort you suggest.”

  “And perhaps Lambert’s temperament forbade it too?”

  Miss Bave felt this as temerarious even as she uttered it. But Wendell Dauncey took it up squarely. “At first – yes – there was vanity. Mark, like many another genius, was a great egotist, I suppose. At first I had to be very tactful. I was the friend who is lucky enough to hit upon the right succeeding development, the happy phrase, the best final polish for this or that. But later—”

  He broke off, with the air of one who almost visibly consults the past. “Soon I was no more to Mark than—how may I put it?—an accustomed extension of his own faculties. It was not unfair, for it was something of the sort, after all, that I had made myself. And then there was a further stage. We can all of us, you know, draw at need upon the most amazing reservoirs of self-deception.” Again he paused, and this time it was with a glance in which she seemed to recognise for a small miraculous moment the man who had actually written Gareth’s Folly. “Eventually, I believe Mark didn’t really know.”

  “He knew at the end.” Miss Bave was uncompromising now. “When dying, he asked himself what name he should leave behind him. It was a literal question. He meant his or yours. And he wanted to speak. But he was ill and weak and he didn’t.” She stopped to consider. “Yet he must have fully known—how could he not?—when the crisis came, the grand turn in your fable.”

  He nodded. “It was a turn; indeed, a complete peripety. In a sense, Mark entered more and more deeply into a state of delusion about the making of the books. But at the same time he came to see more clearly where his own actual weakness lay. The man Poyle is nowhere farther out than where he tries to sketch my eventual anxieties.”

  There was a silence which, this time, was not quite wholly a silence; and Miss Bave realised with an effect of some surprise that what she heard was Wendell Dauncey’s laughter. “Poyle gets it the wrong way round?” she asked.

  “Just that. Of course Mark was still in the deepest sense the full-lived man. He was avid for the actual world. Nevertheless he learnt spectatorship – and learnt it in the end even to a point of moral perversity. But I – and it is here the irony lies – was prompted the other way. Finding that I had the power to create and resolve action on paper, I developed the desire to do so in the world as well. In the end the reversal was, I say, complete. Mark was the active man turning at last to contemplation; I, the contemplative man hankering after action. I express it crudely, you will see. But you cannot mistake the outline.”

  “I don’t think I do.” Miss Bave took a moment to reflect. “When Mark Lambert brought you, hot from Florence, the situation that was to be the core of The End of It All, it was he who was for mere aesthetic spectatorship and you who felt some human impulse to interfere?”

  “Indeed, yes. I worked for weeks, for months, at the novel we had hammered out; but all the time the actual predicament of the living girl haunted me. You will forgive me if I avoid endeavouring to recall the succeeding events in detail? Isabella’s was a noble nature, and she was very beautiful. My love for her was like a new dimension in me. I married her – carrying her off, indeed, in circumstances of some little drama, of which I know a glimpse has been given you.”

  “And Lambert?”

  “We did after a fashion come together again. It was my wife’s last wish. She knew – as you have learnt – the secret of the books; and she was willing that it should be preserved, if only thereby the process might continue. She was a good wife for an artist. And yet, how fatal . . . ” The old man paused, and for the first time his expression was wholly sombre. “Be that as it may, Mark found my marriage hard to forgive. In terms of our life’s work, he h
ad disciplined himself, after a fashion. And I had collapsed into licentiousness. It was a fair judgment. Mark’s judgments were always fair.”

  “That I think is for posterity.” There was a hint of familiar grimness in Miss Bave’s voice. “And the novel?”

  “I tried for Mark’s sake to finish it, but I never could. And there, you see, lay the fatality. I had left that withdrawn world and filled my own arms with life. I found that I could not return. No, not even when the bounty I had taken went so swiftly to the grave. I have been outside ever since. As an artist, I must consider that the price was too high to pay.”

  “You expressed yourself with some vehemence to that effect three years ago.”

  “Three years ago?”

  “I see you don’t remember.” Miss Bave’s tone was cautiously dry. “It was to your own son. Fortunately for the poor boy’s feelings at the time, he had no idea what you were talking about.”

  “I do remember – and even some of the words I used. I have, you know, often thought of my action, here on the Piazzale, as Mark Lambert’s Waterloo. It was the end, that is to say, of the real Mark Lambert. I mean the Mark Lambert who was neither Mark nor myself, but the creator of The Cosmopolitans and Lucia’s Changeling.”