What does castrati mean? he had asked Umberto in Italy.
Castrati? Castrati!
Umberto was surprised but delighted by the question. It was the antithetical question to all that he wanted to tell the boy.
Un castrato cannot be a father.
Umberto began to explain at length and fulsomely. He poured out wine and insisted that his son drink. As he talked Umberto’s fingers chopped themselves off, made hooks of themselves, wagged.
The boy had seen Tom castrating lambs: a flick of the knife and then the two testicles sucked out into the mouth and spat upon the ground. But he had not connected the Italian word with the English.
Umberto cited himself as a father, and hit the lower part of his stomach with his flat hand. He leant across the table so that his huge face was close to the boy’s. But il castrato today, he said, is an insult. It does not mean it properly. It means a weak man, a man who is not capable, a feeble one. Him. Quest’uomo è castrato. He could be called that. Un Castrato. Umberto was so close to his son’s face that he could not resist touching it. Ecco my boy my boy, he said.
The gun room was small and square with a high ceiling. High on one wall hung a pair of mounted antlers, dusty and grey. An oil lamp was reflected in the black curtainless window. Jocelyn stood at a bench-like table on which his gun lay in three parts. The boy sprawled in a sagging arm-chair in front of the fireplace in which there was no fire.
Why, asked the boy looking towards the black window rather than towards Jocelyn, do you disapprove of Aunt Beatrice’s marriage?
It is not a subject we should discuss.
The boy took in the crowded room: boots, mackintoshes, fishing rods, baskets, piles of old copies of The Sportsman, two foxes’ masks, a pipe-rack, a ladder—and on everything pointing upwards an old hat or cap hung. He remembered the room as he had been aware of it as a child. He had never been allowed in. But he had noticed through a half-open door men in their shirt-sleeves, a fire burning and an unusual smell. After a pause, he re-started the same conversation.
Everything has changed since she went, he said.
Jocelyn was screwing together the brass joins of two lengths of a cleaning rod. The table smelt of gun oil. The smell reminded Jocelyn of his father. It was associated in his mind with the smell of cordite and metal—the smell of sport. It suggested to him the smell of food being prepared for company. This last was associated with returning home with friends after a shoot, but is perhaps inherent in the smell itself. The smell of gun oil, for all its graphite, has something about it of the smell of butter in shortbread or pastry when they are still very hot in an iron oven. It is the antithesis of the smell of lilac. In the chill fireless room, Jocelyn shivered and heard himself saying: There was no stopping her.
Did he sweep her off her feet, then? asked the boy.
He fawned at her feet like a dog.
Is she happy with him?
She couldn’t be happy with him, Jocelyn said and then, with the gesture of a romantic ’cello-player, drove the cleaning-rod through the barrel. The action always pleased him. He ran his hand along the bluish polished metal of the underside of the barrels. Again he was speaking before he had decided to do so. She has the highest standards, he was saying, that is how she is made.
He was handsome, said the boy in a tense intended to provoke.
He is a cad, said Jocelyn, his hand beginning to tremble.
Did you have it out with him?
I could not.
A cad you think?
Jocelyn put the barrels down and steadied himself with both hands on the table.
This is not a subject we should pursue, he said.
He was not thinking of the boy’s age. He wished to talk to nobody about this subject.
The boy, however, was determined to force Jocelyn to say more: not out of personal animosity but in order to claim his own right—and his ability—to know, to touch on no matter what subject. It seemed to him that nothing familiar now remained in his life: hence his right to pursue every question.
I doubt, said the boy, whether there are any marriages which the families of both parties are really happy about. There used to be.
One side always makes a sacrifice. Usually the side with the least money.
Surprised by the odd sense and wording of those remarks, Jocelyn turned to look at the boy who was leaning deep back in the arm-chair, his face in shadow. He could discover no insolence in his expression. When their eyes met, the boy said:
You didn’t approve of my mother and father did you?
That was a very different case.
You mean because they were never married?
Who told you that?
A boy at school called Charles Hay.
Jocelyn turned to the window. The whole of the boy’s upbringing, he considered, had been compromised by half-measures and his mother’s sudden whims.
The boy was still speaking: You can tell by looking at them that they’ve never been married. They don’t treat each other like husband and wife. They don’t possess anything in common—except me.
That is no way to speak of your mother and father.
Is lying better?
I find it regrettable that you should come across such stories at school.
They call me Garibaldi because they say my mother might have been his mistress too.
It is terrible.
I laugh.
Laugh?
Do you expect me to defend my mother’s honour?
Jocelyn wanted to tell the boy that he had argued many times with Laura that it was necessary to tell him the truth. Yet he felt that anything he said would now be incomprehensible because it belonged to a past which existed only in his own memory.
He turned back to the table and began wiping the stock of his gun.
Why is Captain Bierce a cad? asked the boy in a gentle, almost tender voice.
He’s a bullying Irish braggart—a mutton-fisted loud-mouthed pack-horse captain!
That’s no way to talk about your brother-in-law!
Having said this, the boy laughed. And Jocelyn laughed too. They laughed at the collapse of the formalities which had surrounded them. In face of this collapse they were for a moment equal. The boy got up from the chair and went over to the table. The man sat down and leant back in the arm-chair. He was trembling.
The boy, picking up the stock, noticed that the firing-pins had not been released. Pressing the front of the stock against the table top, he squeezed each trigger. The two sharp taps of the pins against the wood broke the silence. The surface of the table there was already scarred with thousands of tiny pock marks caused during the years by this method of releasing firing-pins so that their springs should not be weakened.
Jocelyn began to speak from the depths of the chair, staring at the fire grate, and softly as though almost to himself:
He tore her out of her own place. I know what she is like. She is as fine as china. She’s like that figure there with flowers around her waist. She needs to be protected and free.