Darcourt was eating and wool-gathering at the same time, a frequent trick of his. I wonder what we should look like, he thought, if a mischievous genie were to pass over this table and strike us all naked? The result would be better than at most tables. Maria would be a stunning beauty, clothed or naked. Hollier was absurdly handsome for a professor (but why? Must a professor always be a broomstick or a tub?) and without his clothes would reveal, in middle age, a Michelangelesque symmetry, agreeable to his splendid head. Arthur would be sturdy; passable but not astonishing. Powell would be less than he seemed in his clothes; like many an actor he was slight, almost thin, and his head was the best part of him. As for Penny Raven—well, there were the remains of a fine woman about Penny, but to Darcourt’s probing eye the breasts were a little languid, and there was a hint of a rubber tire around the waist. The sedentary life of the scholar was running Penny down, and her jolly face was sagging a little at the chops.
As for the Doctor—well, he was reminded of a remark he had heard a student make about another student, a girclass="underline" “I’d as soon go to bed with a bicycle.” The Doctor, under the fine, Chopinesque get-up, might have the wiriness, the chill, the impracticable resistance of a bicycle to a sexual approach, but she was probably interesting. Any breasts? One cannot get beneath the coat. Any hips? The skirts of the coat concealed them, whatever they might be. But an elegantly formed waist. Long, elegant feet and hands. The Doctor might be very interesting. Not that he was the man who would find out.
As for himself, Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt, he had to admit that he did not peel well. He had been a fatty from his mother’s womb and now the stretch-marks on his belly were the wound stripes of countless lost battles against overweight.
The table is almost silent, he thought; an angel must be passing. But not the stark-striking genie. The servant removed his plate and he got up to attend to the next service of wine. It was to be champagne. Who would be the first to protest that whatever wine Arthur of Britain may have served at the Round Table, it was certainly not champagne? Nobody. They accepted it with murmurs of pleasure.
Maria allowed the next course to be served without comment. It was a pretty confection of eggs and cream stiffened with something elusive.
“What is this?” asked the Doctor.
“Nobody can say that it isn’t a genuinely Arthurian dish,” said Maria. “Its name is washbrew.”
The company was reduced to silence. Nobody liked to ask what washbrew might be, but when they heard the name their minds misgave them. Maria said nothing for a minute or two, then she relieved their apprehension.
“It can’t hurt you,” she said. “It is just very fine oatmeal, with a few things to give it a nice taste. Geraint’s Welsh ancestors called it flummery.”
“Buttermilk and flummery say the bells of Montgomery,” sang Powell, to the tune of “Oranges and Lemons”.
“The flavour,” said Penny. “Elusive. Delicious! Reminds me somehow of childhood.”
“That is the hartshorn,” said Maria. “Very Arthurian. You were probably given hartshorn candy for sore throats.”
“But not just hartshorn,” said Hollier. “There is another flavour, and I think it’s brandy.”
“I am certain Arthur had brandy,” said Maria, “and if anybody contradicts me I shall send it back to the kitchen and get you some raw turnips to chew, and that will be authentically Early Britain, and I hope it will satisfy all you purists. The champagne should help you to worry down a few turnips.”
“Please don’t be annoyed, dear,” said Arthur. “I’m sure nobody means to be disagreeable.”
“I am not so sure, and I’m sick and tired of having my dinner tested for archaeological accuracy. If my intuition tells me something is Arthurian, it’s thereby Arthurian, including champagne, and that’s that!”
“Of course,” said the Doctor, and her tone was as smooth as the cream they were eating. “We are all being intolerable, and I demand that everyone stop it at once. We have insulted our hlafdiga, and we should be ashamed. I am ashamed. Are you ashamed, Professor Raven?”
“Eh?” said Penny, startled. “Yes, I suppose I am. Anything served at Arthur’s Round Table is thereby Arthurian, isn’t it?
“That is what I like about you Canadians,” said the Doctor; “you are so ready to admit fault. It is a fine, if dangerous, national characteristic. You are all ashamed. And I am ashamed, too.”
“But I don’t want anybody to feel ashamed,” said Maria. “Just happy. I do wish you could be happy and not nag and quarrel all the time.”
“Of course, my dear,” said Hollier. “We are ungrateful beasts, and this is a delightful dinner.” He leaned across Penny Raven to pat Maria’s hand, but he misjudged his distance and got his sleeve in Penny’s flummery. “Oh, hell,” he said.
“About this opera,” said Arthur. “I suppose we ought to give it some thought?”
“I’ve given it many hours of thought,” said Powell. “The first thing we must have is a story. And I have a story.”
“Have you so?” said the Doctor. “You have not seen the music, and you have not talked to me, but you have a story. I suppose we are to be permitted to hear the story, so that we little people may set to work on it?”
Powell drew himself up in his chair, and swept the table with the smile with which he could melt fifteen hundred people in a theatre.
“But of course,” said he. “And you must not suppose that I wish to impose my story on anyone, and least of all on the musicians. That is not the way we librettists work. We know our place in the hierarchy of operatic artists. When I say I have a story, I mean only that I have a basis on which we may begin discussions of what this opera is to be about.”
How well he manages us, thought Darcourt. He uses at least three levels of language. There is his Rough Demotic, in which he tells the Doctor to bet her pretty little ass on something, and another form of that is the speech in which he calls me “Sim bach”, and “boy”, and reverses his sentence structure in what I suppose is a translation from his cradle Welsh; and there is his Standard English, in which he addresses the world of strangers, about whom he cares little; and there is his Enriched Literary Speech, finely pronounced and begemmed with quotations from Shakespeare and the more familiar poets, and soaring at need into a form of rhapsodic, bardic chant. It’s a pleasure to be bamboozled by such a man. What lustre he gives to the language that most of us treat as a common drudge. What is he going to give us now? The Enriched, I suppose.
“The story of Arthur,” said Powell, “is impossible to gather into a single coherent tale. It comes to us in an elegant French form, and a sturdy, darkly coloured German form, and in Sir Thomas Malory’s form, which is the richest and most enchanting of all. But behind all of these forms lies the great Celtic legend, whence all the elegance and strength and enchantment take their life, and in the brief story I offer you for this opera you may be sure I have not forgotten it. But if we are to have an opera that will hold an audience, we must above all have a strong narrative that can carry the weight of music. Music can give life and feeling to an opera, but it cannot tell a tale.”
“By God, you are right,” said the Doctor. Then she turned to Darcourt. “Champagne,” she hissed.
“Yes! Gwin o eur!” said Hollier.
“Now—listen. You will agree, I hope, that there can be no tale of Arthur that leaves out Caliburn, the great magic sword; I do not like the later form Excalibur. But—economy! We cannot go back to the beginning of his life to tell about how he came by Caliburn. So I propose a device that was put in my head by Hoffmann himself. You remember how in the overture to Undine he strikes the right note at once by using the voices of the lover and the water-god, calling the name of the heroine? I propose that almost as soon as the overture to Arthur of Britain begins, we raise the curtain on a vision scene—you do it behind a scrim which makes everything misty—and we see the Magic Mere, and Arthur and Merlin on its shore. At a gesture from Merlin the great sword arises from the water, gripped in the hand of an unseen spirit, and Arthur seizes it. But as he is overcome with the grandeur of the moment, there arises from the Mere a vision of Guenevere—the name means White Ghost, as you surely know—presenting the scabbard of Caliburn; Merlin bids Arthur accept the scabbard and makes Arthur understand—don’t worry, I’ll show ‘em how to do it—that the scabbard is even more important than the sword, because when the sword is in its scabbard there is peace, and peace must be his gift to his people. But as Arthur turns away, the visionary Guenevere shows by a gesture that the scabbard is herself, and that unless he knows her value and her might, the sword will avail him nothing. You follow me?”