“Let’s have a day in the country to-morrow. We might go to Versailles.”
“All right, if we’re up.” The voice was soft and virile, touched with a brogue. No getting him to himself where everyone was out to be seen. In desperate need of a focus he gave up trying to understand French, and began to describe the people at his table to himself. He would never get to know them. Who ever gets to know the French? He might as well have something to remember. When he was a famous man, they’d wish they’d been nicer to him. There was the Frenchwoman in her man’s coat, without make-up, half-boy, half great lady, level-eyed and low-voiced, incapable of pretension or any false gesture. Then the musician’s chinese rotundity, the pouting lips, flat and amiable white hands, contradicted by a chin cleft like a Caesar’s, and terribly intelligent eyes. Felix respected those eyes. They had looked at him kindly, and he suspected pity, found himself caught with an emotion that was like pity when he looked at the third, the young Frenchman, because his beauty was “no stronger than a flower.” Scented like one, too, out of a bottle Felix wanted the name of.—“But he’s no brains,” he said, “and they say he takes drugs. It’s a pity.” He nursed the idea that he could be happy nowhere. Was there any one else in the room who was alone? He looked around. Even two boys having a row at the bar were in contact. A swing door burst open. It was the Russian back again, if anything, tighter. Felix saw a glass of champagne beginning to slide on the top of the downy black head. Skull of a tibetan idoclass="underline" mouth of a wicked baby. In the middle of the floor he lowered the glass, and began an on-the-spot Charleston. “Hey, hey,” he shouted. Then a rune:
He shot through to the dancing-room. He was ugly. He had exquisite hands and feet. ‘Probably a shop-assistant pretending to be a prince.’ Felix’s demon was on the spot. He came back again, carrying the glass now like a chalice, empty, and looking crossly into it. Felix burst out laughing.
“Excuse me,” he said, “have another drink,” and went with him to the bar.
“Enfin il s’amuse, le petit anglais,” said the musician. Felix’s friend frowned. Money spent on that demon would not last long. But Felix had sensed that here was another isolation, but not its quality, its brutal and innocent acceptance of things. But he was talkable-to, with his unmodulated French, his trick of sprawling sideways at the bar, his head pitched forward, laughing down at his feet.
ROSS
Ross finished the drawing of a plant that grew in whorls and spirals and tendrils and bracts. The naturalist had trained the painter. He copied it exactly. To-morrow he would do it differently, double it, halve it, add six to it, make a picture out of repetitions of a stalk.
It was very late. The hardly perceptible noise of his pencil was all he had for company. He went into the kitchen to look for bread and cheese. A candle was lit in a tin lantern, there was a fire-stain on the floor. Nanna, long in bed, had left her sewing.
He grinned at the old nurse’s horror-story, went back to the studio and watered one of the shallow pans stuck with the seeds he had gathered tramping Europe. A bee-orchid had come up: an odd-scented herb from a pass on the Pyrenees: a rare lily was over. Whenever he touched it life grew. Plants and dogs and children. Eggs hatched. And men? They were there to make him laugh. If they found rest in him, he was indifferent as Nature, and in general as kind.
He loosened the earth pricked by a hairy spike, tossed a pebble away, opened a window. A bird disturbed brushed him without alarm. An owl sailed by, curved over at the house-corner and skimmed down the wood. A dark grey night, brimming with business. His portfolio under his arm for a picture-book, he went up to bed.
PICUS
On the same night Picus went out, also alone and in a clearing among trees. English yews, black and untidy with their shoots that are never young, a yard of rusty twig, old as a house-high lime or beech.
The space was diversified with the stone boxes of a country churchyard. Dressed for Piccadilly, Picus was lying face-down on his mother’s grave, on turf not dew-sown, but rain-sodden, overlooked by a sugar-white marble angel carrying an urn. He was telling the stalks and the worms and a snail how he loved her, and resented her death, and was troubled by its mystery.
‘Pretty mother, why did you do it?’
‘Why did that tart matter?’
‘What did you want me to do?’
‘Why do I hate all women?’
Once Nanna had made him ill when he had heard her say: “What did Mrs. Tracy mean by drowning herself with Mr. Picus a boy, and his father taking his child to the inquest and saying it was suicide?”
And Scylla’s answer: “People went in for sensibilities then.” Blaming his mother. Now he’d see if she had any. He grasped the turf mound and tried to shake it. Get mother out and make her tell him what had really happened and that he must never make anyone suffer as she had suffered. That was like his father and he must never be like his father— The marble parody of a nymph went on offering him an urn. He tried to see if the lid would come off, but it was all in one meanly designed, badly chiselled piece. His father with his impeccable taste had stuck it up on purpose. Fattened on his son’s hatred. Had used the cup to make him wicked. To lose him the people who comforted him. Would go on living forever. The wires of the rust tin flower-box caught his cuff. Rain water in it, and no flowers. Can’t go daisy-hunting at midnight in the rain. That’s all mother had, an empty tin box with the rain in it and no flowers. He did not count his six feet of young man flung there.
“You’d no business to go off and leave me like that. Gives me nothing to do but want you back. Just for a minute to tell me something: put kick into me again. Mummy, don’t you see: you gave the old boy the game? You were so much prettier: might have stayed and seen me through. Now you’ve made me be a bitch.”
He sat there weeping and considering how he had been a bitch and couldn’t stop. Didn’t know how to find old Clarence and Scylla again and love them and see that they loved him. Clarence now. One of his suspicions was that the change in Clarence was his fault. Why wasn’t it entirely the man’s own fault if he chose to go gaga and mope about like a frustrated hen? Funny. They used to call Clarence a bit too handsome, like a super-chorus-boy. Now you might say like a butler with a past. Tell him that. Now Felix beginning to act like a toad. Good old Carston. And great Ross. Hats off to Ross, doing nothing at all but what he had to. He remembered their old conviction that Ross had some sort of stable tip in invisible affairs. ‘Won’t tell. Says we can look at his pictures.’