Their faces beamed with happiness.
‘Well, why are you so cheerful about it then?’ their father asked.
‘Oh, just because it is so horrible,’ said Susan, and their faces glowed afresh. ‘You’ll never guess, and so we’ll tell you.’ She caught Victor’s eye to give him his cue, and at the tops of their voices they chanted in unison:
‘The pylon’s coming back!’
Dead silence followed; even the impression of noise, which had been as strong as or stronger than the noise itself, was banished.
‘You don’t say anything,’ said Susan, disappointed. ‘We hoped you’d be . . . you’d be . . . just as upset as we are, and there you sit in your pyjamas . . . like . . . like . . .’
Her voice died away into the silence which had returned with double force, and seemed to occupy the room even more completely than the uproar had.
Roger’s voice broke it.
‘But you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘They’re not making a new pylon, they’re only breaking up the platform of the old one.’
‘No, no,’ said Susie, dancing to and fro. ‘It’s you who are wrong, Daddy. You aren’t always right, you know. You see we’ve been across and talked to the men themselves, and they say they are building a new pylon taller than the last——’
‘A hundred and thirty-seven feet high,’ put in Victor.
‘Oh, yes, a huge great thing. We were so horrified we couldn’t wait to tell you. It’s true, Mummy, isn’t it?’
She appealed to Anne who, hitherto unnoticed, was standing by the door.
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is,’ Anne said.
‘There, we told you! And now the view will be spoilt again for ever!’
Stung in his masculine pride, shorn of his mantle of infallibility, Roger lost his temper. These wretched children! Ill-mannered brats, why had he spoilt them so? ’ Now you clear out!’ he thundered, adding, ‘I don’t mean you, Anne.’ But his wife had already gone.
Laurie remained, but where? He had slipped down between the bedclothes, out of sight and almost out of mind. Now he came to the surface and let his stricken face be seen.
‘Oh, Daddy!’ he exclaimed. ‘Oh, Daddy!’ But what he meant by it he could not have told, so violent and discordant were the emotions that surged up in him. Indeed, they seemed to sound inside his head, drowning another noise that punctuated but did not break the silence: the hammerstrokes from which would rise a bigger and better pylon.
‘I’m here, Laurie, I’m here!’ his father said, but remembering the effect his presence had in Laurie’s dreams he doubted whether it would be much consolation now; for was not Laurie always in a dream?
MRS. CARTERET RECEIVES
Mrs. Carteret Receives was first published in Great Britain in 1971
MRS. CARTERET RECEIVES
From the social angle, as Proust might have seen it, the great cities of Italy have no counterpart in England. In England there were hierarchies still at the turn of the century and later, as long as each town, large or small, was an entity in itself only to be approached from outside by a long, laborious and possibly hazardous journey in a horse-and-trap or wagonette.
In such towns there were ranks, conditions and degrees; and a newcomer, be he doctor, solicitor, farmer, or someone not actively engaged in ‘trade’, was carefully vetted before he was admitted into the social club, the tennis club, the cricket club, the Masons’, the Foresters’, or any of the many clubs where men congregate to keep each other in, and outsiders out.
All this sounds very snobbish, but it was really not so; for certainly in the smaller towns everyone knew everyone else and was hail-fellow-well-met with him; there were no Trades Unions; the carpenter was satisfied with being a carpenter, and had no feeling of inferiority or envy when he talked to a white-clad member of the tennis club (perhaps lately elected) swinging his racquet. There was a kind of democracy based on neighbourliness and familiarity. Enter the motor-car, with its money-borne social distinctions and its capacity to move its owner and his family from a dull town to a gayer one, and this democracy of place and local habitations began to wane.
Not so in the great cities and even the smaller towns of Italy. There the bourgeoisie had, and no doubt still have, their social rivalries, their jockeying for place, their intrigues, their equivalents for keeping up with the Joneses (though it must be said that most Latin countries, if not so democratically governed, are socially more democratically-minded, than we are, and this is true of all ranks of society). They have not a common parlance, a lingua franca, indeed they have not, least of all in Venice where only a few of the aristocracy can speak the dialect of the popolo, which is almost a separate language. At the same time a duchess could talk more freely to a window-cleaner (if such exists in Venice), and with less sense of the barriers of class than she could here. The Venetian popolo has very little sense of social or intellectual inferiority; cat can look at a king, and address him too. But they have a very strong sense of pecuniary inequality. ‘Questa Duchessa ha molti milioni’ (This Duchess has many millions) and of this discrepancy they take what advantage they can, as their employers, should they be private or public, well know.
But what I wanted to say was that the social system of Italy in its upper reaches such as would have appealed to Proust, differed from ours in being predominantly urban, not rural. The great families, the Colonna, the Orsini, the Caetanis, the Medicis, the Sforzas, the Estes, the Gonzagas, the Contarinis and Mocenigos, had and no doubt still have, great estates in the country, but the centre of their lives, their point d’appui, was urban, in the city to which they belonged and over which they ruled.
In England, noble families arc seldom denizens of the towns or counties from which they take their titles. The Duke of Norfolk doesn’t live in Norfolk; the Duke of Devonshire doesn’t live in Devonshire; the Duke of Bedford doesn’t live in Bedford; the Duke of Northumberland does live in Northumberland, but Northumberland is a large county, and many people would not know that his home town was Alnwick, where his castle is.
At the time of which I write, bridging perhaps half a century between 1890 and 1940, English people, emigrants or semi-emigrants, had established a hold, based on affinity, in many cities of Italy, chiefly Rome, Florence and Venice. Others went further afield; but the lure of Italy, for many English people, especially those with aesthetic tastes, was irresistible.
‘Open my heart, and you will see graved inside of it, Italy,’ wrote Robert Browning; and how many of his compatriots have re-echoed those sentiments. The Italians, great and small, seemed to re-echo them too. There was a genuine feeling of affection, based on more than mutual advantage, between the two nations. I remember my gondolier saying to me when the troublous relationships between our two countries began over Sanctions, ‘There was a time when an Englishman was a king in Venice.’
But that was much later.
Going back to earlier years and adopting (as far as one can!) a Proustian outlook of the upper ranks of ‘Society’, and how they comported themselves, one heard of the Anglo-American colony in Venice, residents with beautiful houses. They were completely different from and slightly aghast at the rash of moneyed visitors who invaded Venice after the First World War, a cosmopolitan crowd who thronged the Lido, behaved anyhow in the Piazza, and at a given date—dictated by fashion—departed one and all to an hotel on Lake Como. These rather noisy immigrants were called by the Italians ‘The Settembrini’, and various odd and irregular modes of behaviour were attributed to them.
As it happened this post-war violation of Venice coincided with, though it did not cause, the exit from the city of the older and stabler foreign colony. Some died; some just went away, and these included several distinguished ladies, titled and untitled, who had made Venice their second home, and had there entertained many eminent literary figures, some from foreign countries including Henry James, and also including (last and least) Baron Corvo, who bit the hand that fed and lent him money.