“They don’t,” said Ross, “it’s the butterflies.”
“These did. And the first curate said check with the white bishop, and I stopped enjoying it, and hunched up and went in to get my tea, and there was a party, and I stopped thinking.”
“When do you do your thinking?”
“Never.”
Scylla said: “I wish you had, before you let this morning’s business be sprung on us. What did you do it for?”
They all waited for his answer. It came.
“Mind your own business.” Like a rude boy. And then:
“It was my mother who was driven to death.”
“That’s nothing to do with it,” said Ross.—“Pawn your father’s collection. Throw it into the sea, but don’t—”
“Don’t what?” said Picus.
Felix came out.
“Here’s what’s left of your bloody book. Nanna took it off the fire.” Ross opened it with kind hands not afraid of char-black and turned the middle pages the fire had not curled up. He stared.
“Look at this.” The book was open at a full-page photograph of the cup. Underneath was written—Plate 17. Early English altar-vessel. From the collection of Christopher Tracy, Esq.
While the cup was fetched from its drawer and passed from hand to hand, Carston appreciated Picus’s blissful look, untouched by relieved anxiety, not too elated or even too absorbed.
“Picus,” said Ross, “in common decency tell us what you know.
“Now that I’ve been asked, listen. I took the cup. Mother and I used to pretend with it. Not this time, but when I came back to Tollerdown last spring. The well was brimming and I took it out to get a drink, and it slipped through my fingers like a fish. It couldn’t be got out then, and I didn’t want Clarence to fuss. He didn’t know. Once it was gone, I wondered what it was, and I this time told my father that I hadn’t seen it lately, and something he said put me on to that book. So I left it to see what would happen. And Felix fished it out with Clarence’s spear. It may have come from India. The whore who killed my mother may have used it. It suited the old man to palm it off as a church vessel and to tell you it was a poison-cup. He’s lived in India long enough, and his best friend is an arch-deacon. That’s all I know. Oh yes, I curled up behind an ant-hill on Hangar’s ridge Carston shied at. And I stuck the cup in his room to teach him that ants don’t bite, and give him something else to think about. Oh yes, I made love to Scylla because she is a darling, and usually I’m afraid of women. And—”
“Hold up—” said Ross.
It was a great blessing that the old man had done the lying. Put untruth away in a far corner. Far corners are more difficult to get at. But what they needed then was Picus’s brightness restored.
Carston said: “It seems to me that your father’s story was a lie because he wanted the book back.”
“Trust Nanna,” said Scylla, blissfully, “she wouldn’t have the kitchen fire put out.”
“The kitchen fire, mark you,” said Felix, suddenly interested again.
Hestia is an old goddess—I think she had a name written under her altar not even the Romans might know. And in her case, their lives, the sap of their bodies was nourished at Nanna’s fire. There the sea bubbled in butter, the meat dripped its red juice, birds split into white shreds. Round it the lettuces sparkled, the roots under the wood boiled, old herbs scented the place, wine dripped in like dew, and Nanna was perhaps the only person unequivocally loved.
The wailing that went up round her: “Nanna, I’m hungry.” “Nanna, I’ve got a cold.” “Nanna, I’ve blistered my heel.” “Nanna, where are the buttons on my white waistcoat?” Nanna who liked cigarettes and silk stockings and no device for saving labour, her hair tied up like an old gipsy, and her tongue free. She had got them round this corner. All the same, a lie is harder to run to earth three counties away.
“We are left where we began,” said Felix, “with the Thoroughly Rum.”
Also, as Carston noticed, with the thoroughly boring. The adventure of the cup had happened. It had been complicated, violent, inconclusive. Now it would be too much trouble to take trouble for more trouble. For a new series of untruths or “stubborn, irreductible” facts. Not much chance of them, and difficult to get. Three counties away. As though they had been in a room together, and something had passed through that had left too raw traces for all its invisibility, had left them alone with private griefs and memories quickened. Which, if it came again, would enter by a different door. Picus, stirred by the story of his mother, victim of Victorian social stupidities in an age less agreeable and more remote than that which produced mass-cups, and complicated biographies of public characters like Huon of Bordeaux, son of Julius Caesar, and Morgan le Fay.
They were tired of it, as he saw, till another door opened. This, when his own interest for the first time was really aroused. The business was more or less out in the open. News. A story. He wanted to find out exactly what Mr. Tracy had been up to. If they were prepared to leave it alone until something else happened, he was not; anticipating a dateless, glorious moment when he would appear before them with the story complete. Hand them the finished psychology of old Mr. Tracy. A new philosophy: a fortune: the cup of the Sanc-Grail. No intention of leaving now.
Then a sound that was almost “service” rose in his thought. Not public or personal or progressive, or in relation to the “hard-eyed men of the Y.M.C.A.” Not even for results; there might be no results. As the conception grew, fortifying like a cup of wine à point, he saw an approach to Scylla, without reference to possession or to her reaction. What she did not have with these unemployed condottieri her peers. What he must do for her, and she was no spoilt american bitch.
Immediately, he stepped into another world, their world and his own. At its largest, airiest and freest. He had never been there before. He had always been there. He would always be there, never the same apprehensive, gifted, rootless man. Reckoning without his hosts, he urged another slice of cake on her, and suggested that it might be his turn to fetch the evening fish.
“We’ll go together,” she said. “A walk will do me good.”
Chapter XIX
It was perceptibly cooler, stale-cool, uneasy air-threads stirring in the straight wood drive. No sun since three o’clock, but a glaring grey gauze overhead. Outside the wood, below the little cliff, a small scoop of bay protected the fisherman’s boats. From the edge they could have stepped on to the roof of his hut, whose tarred shingles were frosted with salt. Set on a ledge out of storms’ reach, brambles padded it from the cliffs side, and it was reached down wooden balks, steep-set and built into the clay. It surprised Carston to see the egg-blue and peacock water changed to the colour of a gun-barrel. Little wind, but the sea was twitching, slapping against the rocks; the colours inland, neither light-veiled or shining, but off a new palette.
Scylla was staring out to sea, and her head lifted in profile made her look at the sky, where it seemed as if some mathematical monster had risen out of the west. For where the sun was turning down-Channel, a ball glared, surrounded by ranks of rose bars, and out from these clouds radiated that reached over to the eastern heavens, across whose spokes strayed loose flakes dipped in every variety of flame, the triangles of empty sky stained all the greens between primrose and jade.
“Herring sky,” she said.
“What does that mean?”