Jocelyn whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.
You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.
Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.
A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.
All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.
3
In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as I Quattro Mori. There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:
‘…made in 1617 after the death of Ferdinand. Later (between 1623 and 1626) Pietro Tucca added his admirable slaves, the models for which he chose from the local prison.’
THREE CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS ABOUT HIS FATHER
Why don’t I have a Papa?
Your Papa died.
Dead? Yes.
In the cemetery he’s dead?
If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.
Was Papa good?
I’m sure he was.
Always?
We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.
But Maman—
Your mother met him in Italy I think.
What was he doing in Italy?
He had something to do with ships.
Was he English?
I think he was Italian.
What did Maman call him?
Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.
Was he run over by a train?
Who?
Papa when he was dead.
I don’t know.
Couldn’t Maman stop him?
Finish your soup.
I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!
Finish—
Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.
I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.
You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?
He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.
Was he Italian?
Yes, an Italian merchant.
Were they married long before he died?
A very short time.
And did he really die in an accident with a train?
Who told you that?
That’s what Cook used to tell me.
I didn’t know.
Was he very old when he died?
He was much older than your mother.
Am I like him?
I’ve told you I never saw him.
But guess.
Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.
Would you like to go to Italy?
When?
Next week—to Milan.
Is Milan near Livorno?
It’s quite a long way.
I should like to visit Father’s grave in Livorno.
Who told you he had a grave?
Nobody told me. All dead people have graves.
I meant why did you think it was in Livorno?
Because that’s where he lived.
What would you say if your father was alive?
He can’t be.
And supposing I told you he was?
You told me he was dead.
It was a terrible mistake. We thought he was dead.
But why didn’t you hope he was alive?
It was all a terrible mistake.
You mean he’s alive.
Yes.
The train didn’t kill him.
Would you like to visit him? The two of us together.
Us? If he’s alive, I’d say the question is whether you want to see him.
There’s no need for impertinence.
The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that the boy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.
She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art—they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan—about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.
Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.
She has certain characteristics by which he recognizes her instantly in his dreams and thoughts. The smallness of her plump hands, and their surprising lightness of touch; the way she opens her hazel eyes very wide (like the china eyes of a doll); her large bosom and square body (like a silk sack stuffed); the firmness with which she says certain words—RIGHTS, IDEAL, DISGRACE; a scent, hyacinth-like which covers, as lightly as tulle, another (for him) unnamed but older smell. But these characteristics do not create a person in his mind: they remind him of the fact that his mother happens to have these characteristics.
When, through the train window or the carriage window in Paris, a woman for some reason or another attracts his attention—it happens rarely—and he has time to observe her, he plays a game of imagining her as his mother. The game is impossible if the woman is in the carriage and likely to talk to him or to Laura: she must be and must remain a stranger. The woman there with a tiny waist, wearing blue satin, who is shaking with laughter and whose screams first attracted his attention and separated her from the crowd, what would it be like, he wonders, to have her as a mother? Or the fat woman who is carrying too much away from the market and who looks as though she is too fat to climb up into the train: or the woman in the landau with ostrich feathers, wearing narrow trousers beneath her slit skirt? He does not compare these women with the woman beside him. If the game were just one of judging between them, of deciding which mother he would prefer, it would soon palclass="underline" furthermore, if his judgement were to go against Laura, he would be assuring his own unhappiness. The imaginary mothers he sees through the window are candidates for filling the absence which Laura represents. The game is always to try to imagine more about having a mother. It is the first time he has played the game. It is Laura’s presence which supplies the necessary sense of absence from which to begin.