Sir Pompey And Madame Juno

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Sir Pompey And Madame Juno Page 9

by Martin Armstrong


  As if embarrassed by the nakedness of his confession, Leeson changed his attitude, clasping his hands round his knees.

  ‘Nowadays? Oh, no; never. I gave up composing years ago. After all, what was the good of it? I am speaking, of course, from my own point of view. There’s no one, you know, so self-centred as your hermit. From the point of view of society it is, I suppose, a good thing that music should be written, provided it’s good music. But, for myself, I began to see after a time that all this writing of poetry, music, philosophy, whatever you like, is only the hermit’s substitute – a poor, pale, unsatisfying substitute – for living your life. Life – the healthy external life – has always eluded me: or rather – I admit it – it is I that have eluded life. When I came to realize that, when I saw that my life was mere ink and paper and decorative sounds strung together by intellectual subtilties, all my pleasure in composition evaporated. The substitute was too thin, too bloodless to be worth having. If I couldn’t have life, I would have nothing. That sounds, perhaps, like a spoilt child who throws away his apple because he can’t have a peach. Perhaps it was. But, as a matter of fact, once I had made that discovery, once composition had lost its worth in my eyes, I ceased to be able to compose. So now, you see, I have neither the peach nor the apple. And I suppose I shall never get the peach. I am no nearer to life now than I was as a youth, because I still retain my damning disabilities.

  ‘Oh, yes: you find me changed, no doubt. I have changed, I know. In the first place, I have at least become conscious of my disabilities. That means that I have to some extent detached myself from them. And I have progressed even farther than that, as you are discovering – poor Oliver! – to your cost. I have even got to the point of discussing them. When last we met I would have died rather than admit them to anyone but myself. Yes, it is a good symptom, undoubtedly, that I can talk about them like this. Still, I’m rather afraid that my garrulousness about them springs more from the shamelessness of despair than from the courage of detachment. Oh, no, I don’t want to make out that my life is nothing but unmitigated misery. That would be sheer misrepresentation. Music, after all, is my great hobby, and I get plenty of it here. Besides that, this lovely old place still delights me. Oh, undoubtedly I get some satisfaction out of the minor details, but in the supreme concern of life I really am pretty close to despair, or if not despair, at least to resignation, which is worse, because resignation means acquiescence in failure.

  ‘At first I was really happy here. The first few weeks, in fact, were the happiest time of my life. The place enchanted me. Why is it so satisfying to live in a beautiful old town? The whole tone of my life was changed. An internal peace came upon me, a physical and mental well-being. In London the old and beautiful are rare: one comes upon them seldom as the result of a happy accident or deliberate search. For weeks together, when I lived there, I saw nothing but the commonplace, the dull, the mean, till at last, depressed beyond endurance, I used to hurry for an antidote to St. Stephen’s Walbrook, St. Magnus Martyr’s, or to those dark Gothic nooks behind the altar in Westminster Abbey. But when I came here I found myself surrounded by beauty. It delighted me, in the first weeks, to wake in the morning and try, with closed eyes, to remember where I was. I knew somehow that I was not in London. There was a strangeness about me. Was it, I tried to guess, a pleasant or unpleasant strangeness? Then memory rushed back and I opened my eyes and felt with a thrill the new room and the new circumstances assembling about me. Opposite me, framed in the mullioned window opposite my bed, I saw the high Norman gable of the north transept and the great four-turreted central tower. The four gilded vanes on the tower filled me with glee. On sunny mornings they were four little dazzling flames. I used to lie and watch the jackdaws settle on the roofs and pinnacles or launch themselves into the air, swirling upwards, downwards, or right round the tower, as though they were swimming. Their hoarse cries, sometimes separate, sometimes breaking out all together in a sudden gust of laughter, came in through the open window. It was delicious. I lay absorbed in watching them, identifying myself with their movements. It was as good as a bathe in the sea, and much less trouble: I always hated bathing. Oh, yes: it was delightful here at first. And it was not only the wonderful old place itself. My work was interesting, too. The organ was far finer than the one I had had in London, the choir was good, and I was allowed a very free hand with the music. My troubles began, as I told you just now, over the social side of my new life. People began to call: quite a number came: and at that my absurd shyness at once began to torture me again. I was assailed by a perfect agony of nervousness whenever, during calling-hours, the front-door bell rang. Sometimes I fled in panic upstairs, telling Mrs. Parker to say I was not at home. Even when I did succeed in forcing myself to face them, it was almost as bad in the end, because I made such a mess of it; and when all was over and the callers gone I used to sit, living over again every circumstance, every phrase of conversation, consumed with shame at the recollection. Then, when invitations came, all my shames and fears sprang into frenzied activity. I kept telling myself that now was my only chance, that if I let these new opportunities slip, I should land myself in the vacuum in which I have always landed myself before. But I couldn’t face the ordeal. It must sound to you, Oliver, ridiculous to the last degree; but I used to sit at my desk with an invitation before me, trying to screw myself up to accepting it and actually sweating from the mental conflict. Sometimes I compelled myself to write an acceptance, but when the moment came, my courage failed and I daren’t go. And with each failure, each new submission to my weakness, I felt that I was more and more losing control of myself, making it more and more hopelessly impossible for me to save the situation. I can’t tell you what I suffered during that time. And yet, to a man with any guts, the thing would have been at the worst a matter of tiresome routine and, more probably, actually enjoyable. Well, as I have told you already, the inevitable occurred. Before long I was back in my old vacuum, face to face with my own contemptible self.

  ‘What a horrible thing loneliness is, not only in itself but in its consequences! For weeks on end, except for a few words with Mrs. Parker and in the course of my duties, I led a completely silent, lonely life. The daytime was not so bad: I was fairly occupied then. Services, choir-practices, my own organ-practising and a certain amount of clerical work kept me fairly busy till teatime: but after that, work was over and I was faced by the awful vacuity of my life. I used to sit, too acutely miserable to read, listening to the unbearable silence and longing for something, anything, to happen. As the time got towards half-past five I used to listen for the postman as if my life depended on his coming, and when I heard the thud of the gate and footsteps coming up the walk my heart used to leap with anticipation. Even if he brought me only a circular or a bill I felt somehow consoled: and whenever half-past five went by and he did not come, I was bitterly disappointed. I got to hate Sundays, because on Sundays there was no post and so I had nothing to look forward to but just the horrible certainty that nothing could happen. Gradually I formed the habit of rummaging about in my mind, analysing my feelings and moods, and the more I probed and analysed the more complex and unaccountable the moods became. I began to notice that my body reacted to my mental states or took on morbid moods of its own. Sometimes my heart would accelerate for no apparent reason – I used rather to enjoy the thick, slightly oppressive feeling it produced just below the throat: sometimes, after a bout of depression, I would suddenly be assailed by that feverish, hypersensitive feeling and the dazed swimming of the head which are generally the symptoms of ’flu or a chill. Soon I began to take a perverse pleasure in this morbid self-scrutiny. But the pleasure never lasted long: it always ended in a horrible fit of the blues. Yes, the evenings were a nightmare: I began to look forward to them with terror. One day it entered my head to take refuge in alcohol. As you know, I always hated wine and spirits. You used to laugh at me at Cambridge, I remember, for being a teetotaller. Well, I hated it still, but I was determ
ined to try it. I don’t mean to say I got drunk. Thank God, I didn’t descend to that. I just got pleasantly blurred. One whisky-and-soda for dinner and one, or sometimes two, glasses of port afterwards were quite enough, I found, to produce the effect. It didn’t make me happy, but it deadened the pain. I was happy in the sense that I had almost ceased to be unhappy. I seemed somehow to float, in the ocean of my unhappiness, on a small, fragile raft of mental and physical ease. It was as if the alcohol had thawed something in me, broken down the ice barriers that penned me in. Then I got to like the stuff, especially the port, and one morning when I was feeling particularly low – feeling that need, which obsesses lonely people, for some touch of colour, some small excitation of the senses – I went to the dining-room cupboard and got out the decanter. There was no glass, so I used a cup which happened to be there. I hadn’t the face to ask Mrs. Parker for a wine-glass. After that, I used from time to time to feel an absolute craving for a glass of port in the middle of the morning, and one morning, as I was pouring it out, Mrs. Parker came into the dining-room and, to my shame, caught me at it. I hadn’t heard a sound, and I nearly jumped put of my senses.

  ‘You’re laughing, Oliver! Well, I admit a glass of port in the morning is not a very deadly sin, nor, indeed, were my mild indulgences in the evening. No, I’m not disgusted with myself merely because I took to drinking port and whisky. On the contrary, if I led a happy, sociable life I should probably drink more than I do. It’s my motive that disgusts me. If I drank them simply because I liked them, I shouldn’t mind: but surely it is rather disgusting that I should have to drug myself for a part of each day simply to enable myself to face the life I live. For that, after all, is what it amounts to. An anodyne, a drug, an anaesthetic-that’s what I take alcohol for, because I feel so wretched in the evenings.

  ‘One evening, during one of my long reveries, I found myself imagining that I was married. I was picturing as my wife the little maid who used to wait on me in my lodgings in London. She was a charming little thing with a round, rosy face, dark, alert eyes, and a most refreshing smile. I fell in love with her and used to venture – imagine it, Oliver! – to talk to her sometimes when she was clearing the table. I needn’t tell you what we talked about-the weather, the landlady’s rheumatics, and other austere themes: and all the time, my timid, inarticulate senses and her bright eyes and smile were doing their best to talk of things entirely different. Her name was Rose. Rose what? I never knew the other name. Sometimes, when I heard her tidying my bedroom, I used to go in, as if by accident, and get a handkerchief, just to have the pleasure of seeing her; and, before going in, I would prepare something jovial and natural to say, which, when the moment came, I never succeeded in saying. But there is one incident – if you can call it an incident – which I especially remember. I was sitting in the arm-chair in my sitting-room with my legs stretched out and my feet in the fender and she came in with a scuttle of coal. She knelt down on the hearthrug, almost touching my legs, and began to put coal on the fire and sweep up the hearth. In that position she was in front of me and with her back to me. Her neat, compact little body, her hair, her white neck and the rosy curve of one cheek were there for me to inspect unobserved. But, even though there was no one to see me, I was half ashamed to look. Then suddenly I had a violent impulse to throw my arms round her, and rest my chin on her shoulder with my cheek against hers. Oh, of course, I didn’t do it. I needn’t tell you that. I just sat still, and soon she got up and went out. An exciting story, isn’t it? A few months later she left and I saw no more of her. Well, it was Rose that I pictured as my wife in that day-dream of mine. I pictured her just as I had known her, in her servant’s print-dress; and the house – this austere, bachelor establishment – was noisy with children. They shouted upstairs, banged doors, or burst into the room bringing some absurd childish question to be solved. How delightful it would be, I thought to myself, to live in a cheerful, noisy house like that! And then it occurred to me that I might make friends with the choir-boys, ask them to tea on Sundays, tame them, so to speak, till they lost their awe of me and would run about the house and bang my doors and treat me … well, at least as an uncle. So I began the very next day, and week by week I had them to tea and tried to get to know them.

  ‘But I soon found it was no good. I didn’t know how to behave to children: I couldn’t think what to say to them. Good Lord! I felt just as shy with them as I did with grown-up people. My official, schoolmaster manner which I always turned on at choir-practices was, I found, the only one I had. I had no idea how to set about getting some sort of merriment going. I had imagined that it would start of its own accord, by spontaneous combustion, I suppose. But not so, and soon I found myself talking heavy shop about choir-practices and anthems and oratorios, and the boys, of course, faced by a cold, grim schoolmaster, were as shy and reserved as I was. Sometimes I would listen detachedly and critically to my lamentable attempts at conversation, and my voice, the very words and phrases I used, sounded stilted, devitalized, frozen. How I hated and despised myself! Then, when it was time for them to go, I used to watch them walking, prim and silent, down the garden path, and always, when they had shut the gate behind them, I heard them suddenly break out into chatter and laughter, just as if by shutting me away they had regained their own natural selves. No, it was no good. They froze me and I froze them. I shall never forget the day when I finally gave up trying. Two of them were here. We had finished tea. Mrs. Parker had cleared the table and had just gone out carrying a tray, and one of the boys was shutting the door after her. The other stood somewhere near that table, and I had gone over to the mantelpiece there to get some photograph to show them. The photograph was propped against the mirror and as I put out my hand towards it, something moving in the mirror caught my eye and I glanced into it. The first thing I saw was the boy by the door. He had just shut it: his hand was still on the door-knob, and his face and body were half turned away from it. He was staring at the other boy and his face was screwed into a grin. Without moving my head I glanced at the other – at his reflection, that is – and was just in time to catch him dancing with his fingers to his nose at me behind my back. It was all over in a flash. I left the photograph where it was and turned round. There they both stood as solemn as judges. You’ll think me a fool, no doubt, to take the thing so seriously, but after all, Oliver, it does imply so much, such a complete duplicity, such callousness towards the friendship I was trying – lamely enough, I admit-to show them. Never have I felt so deeply wounded. For a moment I was on the point of bursting out and accusing them to their faces; but only for a moment. As usual, my courage failed me; and perhaps it was just as well it did, for I should have created an unbearable situation for the three of us. And yet, might it not have been better to have had the thing out there and then, to have treated it as a monstrous joke and so, once for all, broken through the ice? But no! At the moment it would have been impossible. My feelings were too acute for that, but at least I controlled myself sufficiently to pretend that I had seen nothing, and quickly enough too to make the boys believe it. After that I gave up hope of surrounding myself with a happy family and retired again into my vacuum.

 

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