The furnishing of his little room suggests a highly eclectic spirit; the few objects which adorn the anchorite’s life have a severely personal flavour, as if together they composed the personality of their owner. That is why Clea’s portrait gives such a feeling of completeness, for she has worked into the background the whole sum of the old man’s possessions. The shabby little crucifix on the wall behind the bed, for example; it is some years since Scobie accepted the consolations of the Holy Roman Church against old age and those defects of character which had by this time become second nature. Nearby hangs a small print of the Mona Lisa whose enigmatic smile has always reminded Scobie of his mother.
(For my part the famous smile has always seemed to me to be the smile of a woman who has just dined off her husband.)
However this too has somehow incorporated itself into the existence of Scobie, established a special and private relationship.
It is as if his Mona Lisa were like no other; it is a deserter from Leonardo.
Then, of course, there is the ancient cake—stand which serves as his commode, bookcase and escritoire in one. Clea has accorded it the ungrudging treatment it deserves, painting it with a microscopic fidelity. It has four tiers, each fringed with a narrow but elegant level. It cost him ninepence farthing in the Euston Road in
1911, and it has travelled twice round the world with him. He will help you admire it without a trace of humour or self-consciousness.
‘Fetching little thing, what?’ he will say jauntily, as he takes a cloth and dusts it. The top tier, he will explain carefully, was designed for buttered toast: the middle for shortbreads: the bottom tier is for ‘two kinds of cake’. At the moment, however, it is fulfilling another purpose. On the top shelf he his telescope, compass and Bible; on the middle tier lies his correspondence which consists only of his pension envelope; on the bottom tier, with tremendous gravity, lies a chamberpot which is always referred to as ‘the heirloom’, and to which is attached a mysterious story which he will one day confide to me.
The room is lit by one weak electric-light bulb and a cluster of rush lights standing in a niche which also houses an earthenware jar full of cool drinking water. The one uncurtained window looks blindly out upon a sad peeling wall of mud. Lying in bed with the smoky feeble glare of the night-lights glinting in the glass of his compass — lying in bed after midnight with the brandy throbbing in his skull he reminds me of some ancient wedding-cake, waiting only for someone to lean forward and blow out the candles!
His last remark at night, when one has seen him safely to bed and tucked him in — apart from the vulgar ‘Kiss Me Hardy’ which is always accompanied by a leer and a popped cheek — is more serious. ‘Tell me honestly’ he says. ‘Do I look my age?’ Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer—stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words ‘Joshua Samuel Scobie
1870. Honour thy father and thy mother’. To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deepsea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans — an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, porpentines and isobars. When he sings, which he so often does, it is in the very accents of the Old Man of the Sea. Like a patron saint he has left little pieces of his flesh all over the world, in Zanzibar, Colombo, Togoland, Wu Fu: the little deciduous morsels which he has been shedding for so long now, old antlers, cuff-links, teeth, hair…. Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.
*******
Clea, the gentle, lovable, unknowable Clea is Scobie’s greatest friend, and spends much of her time with the old pirate; she deserts her cobweb studio to make him tea and to enjoy those interminable monologues about a life which has long since receded, lost its vital momentum, only to live on vicariously in the labyrinths of memory.
As for Clea herself: is it only my imagination which makes it seem so difficult to sketch her portrait? I think of her so much — and yet I see how in all this writing I have been shrinking from dealing directly with her. Perhaps the difficulty lies here: that there does not seem to be an easy correspondence between her habits and her true disposition. If I should describe the outward structures of her life — so disarmingly simple, graceful, selfcontained — there is a real danger that she might seem either a nun for whom the whole range of human passions had given place to an absorbing search for her subliminal self or a disappointed and ingrown virgin who had deprived herself of the world because of some psychic instability, or some insurmountable early wound.
Everything about her person is honey-gold and warm in tone; the fair, crisply-trimmed hair which she wears rather long at the back, knotting it simply at the downy nape of her neck. This focuses the candid face of a minor muse with its smiling grey-green eyes. The calmly disposed hands have a deftness and shapeliness which one only notices when one sees them at work, holding a paint-brush perhaps or setting the broken leg of a sparrow in splints made from match-ends.
I should say something like this: that she had been poured, while still warm, into the body of a young grace: that is to say, into a body born without instincts or desires.
To have great beauty; to have enough money to construct an independent life; to have a skill — these are the factors which persuade the envious, the dispirited to regard her as undeservedly lucky. But why, ask her critics and observers, has she denied herself marriage?
She lives in modest though not miserly style, inhabiting a comfortable attic—studio furnished with little beyond an iron bed and a few ragged beach chairs which in the summer are transferred bodily to her little bathing cabin at Sidi Bishr. Her only luxury is a glittering tiled bathroom in the corner of which she has installed a minute stove to cope with whatever cooking she feels inclined to do for herself; and a bookcase whose crowded shelves indicate that she denies it nothing.
She lives without lovers or family ties, without malices or pets, concentrating with single-mindedness upon her painting which she takes seriously, but not too seriously. In her work, too, she is lucky; for these bold yet elegant canvases radiate clemency and humour. They are full of a sense of play — like children muchbeloved.
But I see that I have foolishly spoken of her as ‘denying herself marriage’. How this would anger her: for I remember her once saying: ‘If we are to be friends you must not think or speak about me as someone who is denying herself something in life. My solitude does not deprive me of anything, nor am I fitted to be other than I am. I want you to see how successful I am and not imagine me full of inner failings. As for love itself — cher ami — I told you already that love interested me only very briefly — and men more briefly still; the few, indeed the one, experience which marked me was an experience with a woman. I am still living in the happiness of that perfectly achieved relationship: any physical substitute would seem today horribly vulgar and hollow. But do not imagine me as suffering from any fashionable form of broken heart. No. In a funny sort of way I feel that our love has really gained by the passing of the love-object; it is as if the physical body somehow stood in the way of love’s true growth, its self-realization. Does that sound calamitous?’ She laughed.