And Chatty told how her weak thin hand took his-he could feel all the bones in it—attached to an arm of steel. He was nearly dead, he said, by the time they all got up the long curving staircase, not from the climb so much as from sinking almost to the ankles in the hush of a deep-yellow stair-carpet. The four of them arrived in a large bedroom that had three high wide windows, the bay swelling over the lawn of the Crescent. But Chatty imagined from what was going on on the walls of the room that he was in the Burmese jungle. He wouldn’t have been surprised, he said, to see the violet bottoms of mandrills sitting in the branches. Furry animals, like animal royalty, were spread on the floor. There was a golden bed, a Cleopatra’s barge. Ronnie’s sister stood apart. She had obviously seen it all before and, as beauties often do, looked unwell. Ronnie’s face had stopped nodding. His mouth opened and he looked like a man congratulating himself on being about to be turned into a tiger, for Christine took a little run, almost a flight, to a wardrobe …
‘Don’t bother about the wardrobe,’ said Karvo.
‘… she pulled the doors open and out fell an enormous heap of hats, like a cloud of petals on the floor. About eighty of them. I spilled my champagne down my tie,’ said Chatty. ‘It was the least I could do. Let me go on. “She’ll wear them all,” Ronnie says. “Pussy, is your back tired? She has to rest her back.” “Doggie,” she says and pouts. Rhoda, the sister, is still standing apart. She is not drinking. She is a healthy woman who likes country walks but when the hats came tumbling out she expands and goes red in the face as if she is struggling against a pain in the chest. The stairs of course. Heart, I suppose-all those stairs.’
So, Chatty said, he tried to calm her by asking where she lived in the country and she said she lived this, side of Bath and he told her his aunt had a farm on the far side of the city and how he went down there for weekends.
‘ “It’s your part of the country too,” I said to Christine. How nice, how strange.’
‘Always be careful when you talk to girls, Karvo,’ said Chatty. ‘Profit by my experience. She said I was mixing her up with Ann. Ann came from Bath. She came from’ Yorkshire.’
‘What of it?’ said Karvo.
‘Didn’t your first girl friend ever slice you in half with a look?’ said Chatty.
Karvo had stopped listening so Chatty got down to business.
‘We went downstairs to the Albigenses.’
Ronnie edged him into a wall against a small Soutine as if about to give him extremely private information about a foreign government.
‘ “The return to the twelfth century,” Ronnie says, “It’s absolutely the modern subject. It’s the world today. Religious wars, mass murder, the crushing of small cultures. The Inquisition. It went on for a century. They appealed to the pope of course.” “Dear dreadful Pope Innocent,” Christine called across. “The Stalin of the time,” says Ronnie bearing down closer. “Tortures. The Provençal nobility appear in crowds on the scene.” ‘
Chatty gathered there was a sort of liberal called the Duc d’Aquitaine, trying to keep the peace, but the murder of Peter of Castelnau brought Pope Innocent’s storm troops down from the north.
‘ “Castelnaus, weren’t they cousins?” says Christine to her husband. And to Chatty, “The Johnsons came originally from Toulouse.” ‘
‘The sister interrupts. “Putney,” she says.’
‘ “You’ll find it in the Cistercian records,” says Christine. “Or you can look it up in Schmidt or in Vaissete.” ‘
‘It was a piquant moment,’ Chatty said. ‘There you had on the one hand a scholarly genealogist who could slip back to the twelfth century as easy as pie but who, to be frank, was a belle laide, especially when she showed her teeth, being challenged by a peaceful botanist who had a corner in monkish gardening.’
‘I enjoyed it,’ said Chatty to Karvo. ‘It took me back to the old days in Paris. I’m afraid the two ladies don’t get on.’
Karvo put on his martyred look.
‘It was all right,’ said Chatty. ‘Ronnie saved the situation. A born diplomat. He started telling me about the children of light and the children of darkness and finished up talking about the Perfecti.’
Karvo looked up.
‘It’s not a cigar,’ said Chatty.
The Johnsons asked Karvo to dinner.
‘That woman’s electric. You’re wrong about her book,’ said Karvo to Chatty when he came back. ‘I read the passages you marked. Wow! There’s a story. She’s going places.’
When the mid-Atlantic slick flooded into Karvo’s English, Chatty knew that one of what he called Karvo’s Seasons was about to begin.
‘I think,’ said Karvo. ‘You offended her. Did you say something?’
‘Something rude about the twelfth century, I expect,’ said Chatty.
‘No, something’s bugging her,’ said Karvo.
‘I left with Rhoda that evening. We walked down the side of the park under the trees,’ said Chatty. ‘Perhaps it was that. Now Rhoda, there’s a woman. She knows the names of flowers. Too plump for you, Karvo. And forty. She’s the complete English lady. So beautifully conventional and uncandid, quiet but deep—you know—when they talk about their neighbours you aren’t sure whether they are people or rhododendrons; whether the Winstanleys, say, are a breed of cattle or the county education committee or an asparagus bed. A good green-fingered woman – knows what is ranunculaceous and what is not. In human life, I mean. The only trouble is that they are always doing something for others. Lovely summer night and all she can do is to ask me the name of Christine’s professor in Paris. One of her neighbours wants to send her daughter there.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Karvo.
‘I’m talking about love,’ said Chatty. ‘Not as you know it. I could love a woman like that.’
‘I want a treatment for this story,’ said Karvo. And with that Karvo’s Albigensian period began. The word ‘massacre’ had caught him. So had ‘torture’. So had ‘incest’. So had Christine. His head filled up with crime, sex and churches, romanesque towers, medieval obscenities, antiques. After a month he bought a Van Gogh-and wouldn’t say what he gave for it-one of the painter’s swirling cornfields, done in the asylum. It matched his mood. He galloped over the Pyrenees with the incestuous rebel couple. Everywhere he went – to expensive restaurants, embassies and house parties-Christine and her husband were there. They gave enormous parties.
‘They never ask me,’ said Chatty.
‘You know, of course,’ Karvo said, ‘she’s a Castelnau. That’s why she wrote the book.’
‘No,’ said Chatty. ‘That’s her husband.’
‘I don’t take to him,’ said Karvo. ‘You’ve got it wrong.’
‘I think,’ said Chatty, ‘they’re both Castelnaus. There’s a Castelnau Road in Putney.’
‘That’s not surprising,’ said Karvo, briefly an historian. ‘The survivors and descendants of the Albigenses split up, half joined up with the Huguenots and went to Bordeaux and the other half to England. They made a fortune in cotton. That’s where she gets her money. She told me her brother’s still got the place in Toulouse.’
‘Incidentally, the Castelnaus were on the wrong side – in the pay of the pope. Did she mention it?’ said Chatty. ‘Of course I know one should never trust one’s ancestors. Does Dolly get on with her?’ Chatty asked, speaking of Karvo’s latest wife.
‘You know what women are about clothes. I’m taking Dolly to Paris,’ said Karvo.
‘My aunt is not well. I’m off to the country,’ Chatty said.
There were long seasons in Karvo’s life; there were short ones when he was between pictures. Seasons were apt to turn into cycles. The summer passed. The winds of early September were bashing the country gardens. ‘The hollyhocks are flat on their backs,’ Rhoda wrote in a note to Chatty. She added a postscript saying, ‘I discovered the Professor’s name-it was Ducros.’ Grit was blowing into Chatty’s office window as he read the treatment.
>
‘The story has no shape or end,’ he said to Karvo. ‘What does it mean, what is the message?’
Karvo spread his arms wide and held them in the air. Seeing nothing in them he began to reach for a button on his desk.
‘I’ll tell you what it means, what we have got to bring out,’ Chatty said. He stood up and recited: ‘The massacre of the Albigensians meant the final disappearance of the great medieval culture of Provence. It was lost for ever to European civilization.’
Karvo was suspicious, then appalled. He changed physically before Chatty’s eyes. The word ‘culture’ piled up like a wall that got larger every day. He stared at all that masonry and boredom settled on him.
‘Funny,’ he said, ‘those are the very words Christine used.’
‘They’re in the script,’ said Chatty.
‘It is true,’ he went on, looking at a pill on the palm of his hand and then swallowing it, ‘Nothing lasts.’
The learned Christine had cooked her goose, so Chatty said, with a phrase. In the following weeks she and the Albigensian heresy were done for.
‘Write her a note,’ said Karvo. ‘There’s a good fellow.’
‘No,’ said Chatty. ‘She’s your baby. She dropped me. I burn with resentment. I still can’t think what I did.’
‘It’s personally embarrassing,’ said Karvo, lifting his blotter and pretending to look for something.
‘Much more for me-old time’s sake, you know,’ said Chatty. ‘Get Phillips to do it.’ Phillips managed Karvo’s company. ‘Dear Mrs. Johnson, we have now had a full breakdown of the costs, etc. etc.… He is a master of the commercial lament.’
The letter was sent and Chatty returned the manuscript.
‘My office seems empty without it-modern almost,’ said Chatty. ‘Sad. You meet your childhood sweetheart again and then-nothing.’
He waited for the inevitable aftermath of Karvo’s dreams; he would hear Christine's syllables freezing the man who ignorantly rejected Proveraçal culture and the birthplace of the Castelnaus.
But there was no reply. After a few weeks the manuscript was returned by the post office.
‘Unknown’ was written across it in pencil by an enthusiastic hand.
Chatty telephoned to the house. No manservant answered. He heard the voice of the cook. She had come in, she said, to collect her things before the removal men got them. You could trust no one today. The Johnsons had gone to their house in Paris and Mrs. Johnson had gone to Toulouse-her brother had died-such difficulties about the estate! The cook did not know the address. The London house had been sold. She was damping the telephone wires with her tears.
‘Such troubles,’ she said.
An inexplicable hole had opened in London social life. It was as if whole streets, indeed the Crescent itself, had been removed, as if the map had been changed, without consultation, overnight, and nonentity had supervened.
‘Anyone could see there was trouble there,’ Karvo said. ‘Ronnie Johnson was an adventurer. He came in, stripped her of every cent she had. I heard him talking to a Greek banker at the Hollinsheds about the trouble she was having about getting money out of France.’
‘I’ll find out where she is from Rhoda,’ said Chatty.
‘Forget it,’ said Karvo.
‘I don’t want to talk about it on the telephone. May I come and see you?’ Chatty heard Rhoda’s clear harvesting voice gathering sheaves of moral beauty as it came across the hills, the fields and the woods, the gardens and the village churches from the borders of Somerset. Partridge shooting had begun.
When Chatty was clearing up after Karvo’s passages through peoples’ lives he usually took the grander casualties to The Hundred and Five, but it was closed for redecoration and Chatty was obliged to ask Rhoda to The Spangle. This little club was hardly the place for a lady from the country and one who could never be a casualty. The Spangle would be packed with people whose cheques bounced and whom ‘one had never met’. By nine in the evening couples were hunched and whispering nose to nose across the gingham cloth of their tables, listening not to each other, but for erotic news from the table behind them. It was a place for other peoples’ confessions. There was the hope of being refreshed by scenes breaking out now and then. Les, the proprietor, who wore a cowboyish shirt, was a big-bellied, soft man with heavy spongy arms, white as suet pudding. He was in his sixties and was damp and swollen with the public secrets of his customers. Most people came in asking for someone else.
‘Was John in last night?’
Les would perhaps reply, ‘Sarah was asking for him’, or ‘I had a card from Flo. She’s in Spain’, or ‘Phil can’t leave his dog’, or, flatly, ‘Ada’s barred.’
Rhoda was wearing a cardigan, a green blouse, a tweed skirt and good walking shoes, but Chatty saw her face had changed. The sad George Eliot gaze had gone. The thick smooth black hair had been cropped into a variety of lengths so that she looked as if she had been pulled-not unwillingly-through a hedge-that is to say, younger. Victory, even giddiness, was in her beautiful brown eyes. Les stared with suspicion and offence at any new woman guest brought into the club and scarcely nodded to her when Chatty introduced her, but Rhoda did not mind. She sat down, after an efficient look around her, and said:
‘What a killing place.’
The word ‘killing’ made Chatty happy; it was so lyrically out of date.
‘Tell me who everyone is,’ she said.
‘Les is in a bit of a mood tonight,’ Chatty began by apologizing for Les. ‘He’s on the watch for people who forgot to bring him a present for his birthday. He used to be an actor.’
So Chatty and Rhoda fell to whispering and looking around like everyone else. He thought he was in for a restful evening and started talking about his farm. He looked at her and saw starlings flocking, avenues of elms. Rhoda allowed this, then abruptly she said: ‘So you turned down Christine’s film?’
Chatty’s face twitched. Experienced in consoling discarded actresses and mistresses, he had little experience in consoling authors. He certainly did not know how to begin with authors’ relatives.
‘The sad fact is,’ he said, ‘that the best films are made out of bad books, not out of good ones.’
He saw the formidable Rhoda appear.
‘That is not true,’ she said with the quiet authority of a thoughtful life. He now saw himself in for an ethical evening. But he was wrong again. She was too firm or too gentle to argue. He ordered their meal and he saw her pursuing truth placidly on her own through a large plate of whitebait, a fish that would have given him gout within an hour.
‘It is always embarrassing turning down the work of a friend,’ he said. ‘One always does it at the wrong moment. Family crisis, brother dying-actually dead, I believe. I hear Christine’s in Toulouse. For the funeral, I suppose.’
Rhoda, a frugal woman, scrupulously ate the last small fish and then drank a glass of white wine straight off. He noted the care of the first operation, the abandon of the second.
‘That is what I want to talk to you about,’ she said.
Les was calling to a young woman: ‘Hello, darling. Where’s Stephen? Andrew was asking for him.’
‘Stephen,’ whispered Chatty, ‘has forgotten Leslie’s birthday.’
But Rhoda had lost interest in the killing aspect of the club.
‘They are not in Toulouse,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it was Paris, I forget,’ said Chatty. ‘Christine’s brother is not dead. She hasn’t got a brother.’
‘But surely!’ Chatty said. If there was one thing he remembered about the Christine of so many years ago, it was Christine telling him of her brother, retired from the Navy, living in the South of France, growing his own wine: ‘the head of the family’. With its old-fashioned overtones of solid money, family counsels, trusts, wills, marriages, crests on the silver and so on and the weary care of her voice as she threw away her brother’s distinctions, the phrase had stuck with him. He had read it in novels. To hear it spoken had been
one of those instances of a forgotten piece of social history flying out of the past into the present like a stone coming through a window.
‘Paul, the head of the family,’ said Chatty.
Seeing Rhoda’s eyes studying him he lost his confidence.
‘Perhaps it was Ann’s brother. One of them had a brother. It’s a long time ago,’ he said.
‘I’ve never met Ann,’ said Rhoda. ‘But I am quite certain Christine hasn’t got a brother.’
Chatty backed out, for he saw the truth-seeker in Rhoda’s eyes.
‘Or I may be mixing it up with the book,’ he said. ‘The girl who went off with her brother.’
‘I haven’t read the book,’ said Rhoda with a flick of the whip in her voice.
Chatty started telling the story but she interrupted.
‘There is no family,’ she said.
‘But she comes from the north,’ Chatty said. ‘Yorkshire or somewhere. She said so at dinner. Her mother died, the father was killed in an air raid. There was just this brother.’
‘Her mother died,’ said Rhoda, ‘but her father and her stepmother are still alive. Not in the north of England. They’ve never been near it. They live less than twenty miles from you, the other side of Bath. They run a small public house.’
Chatty saw that pile of pink, white and lacy hats come tumbling out of her wardrobe like butterflies and heard Christine’s voice saying:
‘No, I am a Yorkshire woman. You’re thinking of Ann.’
‘I have been to see them,’ said Rhoda. ‘They haven’t seen or heard of Christine for sixteen years. Her father used to be a seed salesman. They haven’t heard a thing about her since she was a student in Paris. They didn’t even know she was married. Their name is Till. She has a sister who runs the place, a nice girl, but it’s an awful pub. The father retired there to drink the profits. He said “Tell that girl if she comes near here I’ll get my belt out.” ‘
The waitress brought Boeuf Bourguignon for Rhoda and, for Chatty, a sole. What an appetite she had! Rhoda continued her pursuit of the truth in silence through the food. Chatty gaped at his fish.
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