Love—
“Did you know Uncle Frank had a child?” said Maria.
“I knew there was somebody called Charlotte Cornish to whom he left a quarterly allowance for life, because Arthur told me so,” said Darcourt. “But I didn’t know she was a daughter. Could have been any sort of old relation. The parish register recorded the marriage of Francis and his cousin Ismay Glasson, but there was no word of a child. Fool that I was, when I was snooping around in Cornwall I discovered that Francis had been married to Ismay Glasson, but when I made inquiries about her everybody shut up and knew nothing. And nobody said a word about Little Charlie or the Pony Club. Just shows that I am not much of a detective. Of course, all the Glassons had vanished, and when I got in touch with Sir Roderick in London he couldn’t have been less forthcoming, and was too busy to see me. Well, well! Little Charlie is certainly no great letter-writer, is she?”
“But she’s a reality. She must have heard something about Uncle Frank, even if she can’t remember him. So you may have struck gold for the book, Simon.”
“I’m too cautious to expect any such thing. This letter puffs and blows and giggles a bit, doesn’t it? But it’s a ray of light in the very dark centre of Francis Cornish’s life.”
“So we’ve both got something—not much, but something—out of the divano, Simon.”
2
When Darcourt had gone, Maria went to bed, leaving a note for Arthur, saying that he was to wake her when he came in from the airport. This was something she always did, and a request that Arthur always ignored—part of his extraordinary consideration, and his refusal to understand that she wanted to be wakened, wanted to see him, wanted to talk with him.
She did not read herself to sleep. Maria was not a reader-in-bed. Instead she set her mind to work on something that would bring sleep at last. Something substantial, some old friendly theme, but not so demanding as to keep her awake.
What should it be tonight? Darcourt had told her not to subdue her Rabelaisian nature; not to starve the full Rabelaisian humour that had been hers when she first met Arthur; not to dwindle into a wife, lest she cease to be a real wife. A good, sleepy theme might be the Seven Laughters of God. Of the angers, the vengeances, the punishments, the manifold Bellyaches of God the modern world seemed to know enough, even when it was most eager to banish God from all serious consideration. Let’s have the Laughters.
The idea of the Seven Laughters was such an odd one, in the light of modern religion. Gnostic, and of course heretical. Christianity could not countenance a merry God. That God should have rejoiced, and taken delight in what He was making, and that the whole Universe sprang from delight—how foreign to a world obsessed by solemnity, which so quickly became despair. What were the Seven Laughters?
The first was the Laughter from which came light, as Genesis says. Then the Laughter of the Firmament, which our world has just begun to explore—to put a technological toe into space, and to invent bugaboos about spaceships, and Little People with antennae growing out of their heads, who might be spying on us unseen, and a sense of our inferiority in the face of immensity. Not much laughter there for us, whatever it may be for God.
What was the Third Laughter? Mind, wasn’t it? Now there was a God one could really love, a God who laughed Mind into being just as soon as He had a place for it. Mind, the old thinkers said, was Hermes, and Hermes was a very good conception of Mind, because he was so various, so multitudinous, so many-shaped, certainly so ambiguous, but if you took him the right way, such a cheerful creation—so inventive and vigorous. Then what?
The Fourth Laughter was called Generation, which wasn’t just sex, but growth and multiplicity. Nevertheless, sex was certainly a part of it if not the whole, and how God must have laughed when He confronted astonished Hermes with that pretty kettle of fish! And how Hermes, after his first astonishment, must have seized upon it as the splendid joke it was—though God and Hermes would certainly have known that many people would never see the joke. Would, indeed, spoil the joke. So, to cope with the people who could not understand jokes, God laughed again and Fate, or Destiny, came into being. The wax, in fact, upon which Darcourt insisted we all set our seal, without always knowing what the seal was.
God, rolling about on His Throne, knew Destiny would never work unless it had a frame, so—probably choking on the Joe Miller of the thing—laughed Time into being, so that Destiny would function serially, permitting people who never saw jokes to haggle about the nature of Time forever.
Last Laughter of all, when God, probably prompted by Hermes, had seen that He was perhaps being a little hard on the creatures who would inhabit the Creation, was Psyche—the Soul, the Laughter that would give creation, and mankind above all, a chance to come to terms with all God’s merriment. Not to master it, and certainly not to understand it fully, but to find a way to partake of some part of it. Poor old Psyche! Poor old Soul! How our world was determined to thwart her at every turn, and speak of her—when it did speak of her—as a gloomy, gaseous maiden who did not, most of the time, know her spiritual arse from her metaphysical elbow! Never for a moment seeing her as the Consort, the true mate, of Hermes.
Well, there they were, and the effort of dredging them up from memory, where Maria had filed them some time ago, had made her sleepy. Not so sleepy, however, that she did not understand afresh what Darcourt meant when he urged her not to starve the Rabelaisian nature in herself. There were her Hermes and her Psyche, and with them she must live in truest amity, or she would cease to be Maria and her marriage would go to ruin.
She must not forget that Rabelais had known and delighted in the Arthurian stories, and had drawn upon their spirit even as he parodied them. Surely she would love her own Arthur better if she did not take him quite so seriously. Magnanimous? Of course. But a virtue in excess may slither into a weakness.
She slept. When Arthur returned, about one o’clock, he smiled affectionately at her note, and went to another bedroom, so as not to waken her.
3
“Do you want me to cut your grass?”
A simple question, surely? Yet as Hulda Schnakenburg uttered it to Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot it was total surrender; it was Henry IV standing barefoot in the snow at Canossa; it was an act of vassalage.
Schnak had been working with the Doctor for two weeks, and this was the end of their sixth session together. The work had not begun promisingly. What the Doctor saw in Schnak was “a woman of the people”, not a peasant but an urban roughneck, and she had spoken to her very much from on high. In the Doctor, Schnak thought she had met yet another tedious instructor, perhaps greatly skilled but not greatly talented, and as snotty as they come. If she had been surly and mocking with Dean Wintersen, she was rude and ugly with the Doctor, who had countered with icy courtesy. But in a short time they had begun to respect one another.
Schnak always made it her business to find out what her instructors had achieved, and what that amounted to in most cases was a respectable body of unexceptionable music, fashionably but cautiously experimental, that had been performed a few times and had won fashionable, cautious approval; rarely had it travelled far beyond the borders of Canada. It was music, surely enough, but in Schnak’s expression it did not grab her. She wanted something more interesting than that. In the published work of Dr. Gunilla Dahl-Soot she found something that grabbed her, something she did not feel she could rival, an unmistakable, individual voice. Not that the Doctor was one of the world’s great composers, by any means. Critics tended to describe her work as “notable”. However, these were the best critics. She had been one of the better pupils of Nadia Boulanger, and had first attracted attention with a String Quartet, in which the idiom of an original voice had been discerned—a voice not that of her great teacher; Schnak had read the score with a reserve that began as derision, but that had to be abandoned, for this was unquestionably music marked by a fine clarity of thought, expressed through conventional techniques used in a wholly independent manner. It was not a long work; indeed, as music goes, it was terse, rigorous, strictly argued. But in the later Violin Sonata there was a quality even Schnak could not deride, and which she knew she would not rival; to speak of wit in music is uncritically vague, but there was no other word for it. Every succeeding work showed the same distinction of mind: a Suite for clarinet and strings, a Second String Quartet, a Symphony on a small scale (as compared with the block-busters, demanding more than a hundred players, following on the nineteenth-century masters), a body of songs that were real songs and not merely measured utterance undertaken in rivalry with an argumentative piano, and last of all a Requiem for Benjamin Britten which knocked the breath out of Schnak, and made her aware beyond a doubt that she had met her master. The Requiem was not witty, but deeply felt and poignant; these were qualities Schnak knew she lacked in herself, but which, she discovered to her amazement, she desired intensely. This was the real goods, she admitted.