Earthly Powers

by Anthony Burgess

  The blinds were drawn and the curtains closed, but light escaped from the chinks. Light in the hallway, in all the front rooms, including the surgery. I knocked many times. The knock, I knew, was heard but was being for the moment ignored. There was something very urgent going on there. She was dying, it was the actual point of death, and there I was waiting outside in the rain. I was interrupting death, knocking. I nearly ran away, I would come back later at a time more convenient. Then I could hear my sister coming, sobbing my name. The door fumbled open and she was in my wet raincoated arms, crying: "Ken, oh Ken, it was just now, she heard the knock and she knew it was you, and she tried to live a minute longer but she couldn't, oh it was terrible."

  "It was just now?"

  "Poor poor Mother, she suffered, Ken, it was terrible."

  So it was all over. No, I didn't want to see her, she wasn't there any more, it was just a dead body. Oh Ken, Ken. My father came leaden downstairs, dryeyed, with no greeting for me except a bitter look as at a bad son. And there was my brother Tom, demobbed, still short-haired, in a suit too big for him. His grief was being expressed in a coughing fit. I embraced him and at the same time thumped him on the back. They were all in crumpled day clothes. Up all night. She suffered. Extreme unction at seven in the evening and she had seemed (and even to restore health if God sees it to be expedient) to recover a little. But then the final slide downhill. Brown, the doctor, had done all he could. People were dying of flu like flies all over England. There was a Mrs. Levenson round the corner who did laying-out jobs. A busy woman these days. It was too early to call on her. It was too early for anything except the making of a pot of tea. We all sat round the kitchen table, drinking it, Hortense and Tom and I smoking my ship's Gold Flake. Tom coughed. With the coming of the wet dawn we were already adjusting ourselves to a motherless or wifeless future. Or so I thought. There was a question I had to ask.

  "No, no letter," my father said harshly. "It came too suddenly for her to think of writing letters. But she made it very clear what I have to say to you."

  "Look, I couldn't, not even for her. A man's soul. It's his own--I couldn't go through a lie, not even for her."

  "A man's soul. It's not just the soul, is it?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "No, not now. Not with the children here. And her lying there upstairs."

  "She's not lying upstairs," said Tom. "She's in purgatory or somewhere. One lot of suffering and you're straight into another lot. Christ, is there anything but suffering?"

  "You too?" I asked.

  "Him too," said my father, "as far as that's concerned. I say it's the war, I say it will pass. We expected peace and look what we get. But we'll all get over it."

  Hortense went to the cupboard for biscuits. "There's a lot of God-hating going on just now," she said, slim, pretty, her ankle-length pale green smart if crumpled, the boat-shaped neckline elegant, a woman now. "I can't think that God's so stupid as to be surprised. But Mother didn't hate, oh no." She sobbed fiercely and then crammed half a Garibaldi biscuit into her mouth.

  "Not disbelief," Tom said. "There has to be a God, that stands to reason. Just hate. But we'll get over it. As he says." The he sounded hostile, certainly un filial. And then: "Children, he says. One child turned into a sort of expert on poison gas. The other seduced by her art teacher."

  "No, no, no," Hortense said. "He tried, that's all. What they call irony," she said to me. "Mother didn't like my German nuns so she had me go to the French school at Bexhill. But that's all over now."

  "So," Tom said, "the children know all about you, Ken. We're not shocked. We belong to the new unshockable generation."

  "You condone it," said my father. "An unnatural generation."

  "Your bloody natural generation started the war," Tom said.

  "You will not speak to me like that, Tom."

  "Oh, for God's sake," I said. "This is no way to behave."

  "I think we all ought to get some rest," said my father. "I think I'll go and lie down for an hour."

  "Oh, come, Dad," Hortense said, "why don't you tell Ken all about Mrs. Scott?"

  "Lydia Scott," said my father, "has been a good friend."

  "Mrs Scott," Hortense said, "is to be the second Mrs. Toomey."

  "I never said that," my father said weakly.

  "A patient?" I asked. I didn't wait for an answer. "Is this true? Mother hardly cold in her--No, no cliches. I see. It's been going on for some time, has it?"

  "There are some things a man needs," Tom said, and I could tell he was quoting my father. My father glared at him.

  "The privacy of a dental surgery," Hortense said. "A little trouble with that impacted wisdom tooth."

  "How dare you," my father trembled. "You are not to, it is--"

  "A widow?" I asked.

  "A war widow," Hortense said, both hands about her teacup. "The gallant Major Scott caught it early. On the Marne or the Somme or somewhere."

  "I will not have--"

  "Why not, why not?" I said. "Some men need marriage."

  "There are certain decencies," Tom said primly.

  "Oh, for God's sake, come off it, Tom," I said. "Life has to continue, resume, whatever the word is."

  "Whatever life is."

  "I'm going to lie down in the spare room," my father said. And he got up wearily. "Your room," he amended to me. "It was your room."

  "I see," I said. "So this is the end of the family."

  "I didn't say that," irritably. "Hortense, you'd better go and get Mrs. Levenson. Tom, ring up Brown. There has to be a certificate of... of...

  "Death death death death," Tom said, with an intonation suggesting the Westminster chimes.

  "You're a coldhearted lot," my father said.

  "Oh yes, cold," cried Hortense and burst into loud sobbing. My father made a sketch of holding out comforting arms, then shook his head and shuffled off. "Sorry," said Hortense, wiping her eyes on a tea towel.

  "Well," I said. "Will he be all right?"

  "Some things a man needs," Tom repeated bitterly. "That's what he said when I caught them at it."

  "Caught them?"

  "Kissing, that's all. I'm sure Mother knew all about it. She wasn't well, you know. It wasn't just this bloody epidemic."

  "Sex," I said, "can be a damned nuisance. As I know. As I shall continue to know. And now what?"

  "I'm not staying," Hortense said. "I don't want a stepmother. I'll get a job somewhere."

  "You're under age," I said. "And what kind of job can you do?"

  "I can take one of these six-week courses in Pitman's and typing. Ah," she then said. "Do you need a secretary?"

  "I think," I said, "you'd both better come back with me. Get away from this climate. Think things over."

  "I've thought things over," Tom said. "I'm all right. Thrown into it in a way. Well, it was your name that did it. Any relation to the playwright wallah? Yes, I said. Let's see what you can do, they said. I just stood there and said any damned thing that came into my head. About Henry the Eighth and his wives. They thought it was funny."

  "What is all this?"

  "The show's called Rob All My Comrades. Or Run Albert, Matron's Coming. One can be the kind of sequel to the other. Or the two can run at the same time, two different troupes."

  "It's what they call the RAMC," Hortense said. "The Royal Army Medical--"

  "Look, I may have been a scrimshanking civilian--"

  "Like the Roosters," Tom said. "And that Australian troupe called Les Girls. They reckon there'll be a lot of scrimshanking civilians who'll flock to see an army concert party. Old soldiers too. Professionally done, of course. Highest possible standards. The man we have, Jack Blades, QMS as was, he was in that sort of thing before the war. March twenty-first we start the tour. Summer we have a choice of seaside engagements."

  "And you just stand there and talk?"

  "Well, there are sketches. Choruses. I'm what's known as a Light Comedian." Yes, that was about it. I looked at him
, thin, fair, frail, voice light and pitched well forward. My brother Tom the Light Comedian. "Tom Toomey, Tommy Toomey, which do you think?" he asked.

  "Oh, the second one, without a doubt."

  "That's what they all think."

  "Well," I said, handing round the Gold Flake again, "who would have thought it? Two of us in the theatre. Mother wanted something a bit more dignified in the French manner. I always got the impression she felt that tooth drawing was not quite a real vocation. Medicine for you, law for me. And now look at us."

  "Marriage," Hortense said. "That's the French idea. You know, there's even a dowry tucked away in the District Bank on the High Street. Mother could never get that out of her head, that there had to be a dowry. Mademoiselle Chaton said that the days of free love were upon us."

  "At this school in Bexhill?"

  "Poor Mother. She thought it must be all right if it was French. And there they were, saying there was no God and we all had to be free. Have you read any D. H. Lawrence?"

  "Free love," I said with weight, "is precluded by the facts of biology. I refer, of course, to heterosexual love."

  "And now," Tom said, "tell us all about homosexual love."

  "It was a shock?"

  "Of course it was a shock. And it was a shock to know that our innocent sister here knew already and wasn't shocked."

  There was a groan from upstairs. "Oh my God." The Gold Flake almost fell from my fingers. "She's--" And then I remembered that our father was up there, starting to fade out of our lives.

  Hortense said, "I'd better go and get Mrs. Levenson."

  I said earlier that Tom smoked three cigarettes in his entire career. The first was in the school urinal when he was fourteen. The other two were from my ship's bar Gold Flake packet on this occasion of our mother's death and the breakup of the family.

  CHAPTER 23

  Hortense went back with me to Monaco. It was only when the train was nearing Nice and she was gold-flushed with excitement at her first view of the Cote d'Azur that I began to wonder at the propriety of having her stay in an apartment where a susceptible Italian artist sometimes made our morning coffee naked and occasionally micturated without shutting the toilet door. I had thought of Tom and Hortense visiting together and two brothers protecting her from possible southern lust, not necessarily Domenico's. Besides, Domenico was always on the verge of going to Milan to see Merlini about I Poveri Ricchi. The vocal score was finished and had been copied by a professional copyist in Cannes named Pecriaux, with the text in English and Tuscan set in beautiful print script under the vocal lines, the alternative ties and additional notes made necessary by the bilinguality done with exquisite spider penwork. There was no need for him to stay in my apartment, to whose upkeep he contributed little, in order to get the orchestration completed. In a day or two, he kept saying, he would be off to Milan. But he delayed, perhaps because, like most artists, he feared the consigning of his art to the coldness of the mere entrepreneur, feared too the possible confirmation of his own doubts about its value, even its competence, when it became orphaned, undressed and prodded by institutional strangers. We were cosy, the two of us, mothers at different stages of gestation, our art babies not yet ready to confront the exterior light and air. He diverted himself once a week, sometimes twice, in a casino at Ventimiglia, but, as the train drew into Monte Carlo station, I could foresee very lucidly his response to the presence of a lovely Anglo-French girl here, on the spot, on holiday, wanting diversion of her own.

  I had foreseen accurately. The great melting eyes of admiration, quick to grow moist when he heard our bad news--mother dead, your mother dead, O Dio mio, for an Italian, hearing of another's mother dead has a terribly vivid image of the death of his own, may God not permit the day of that eventuality to dawn--and then the hands caressing the sheets drawn from the corridor linen cupboard to deck her bed, dinner tonight at the Vesuvio, on me, my mother's check has arrived (madre, madre, O Dio mio), then lasagne and pepper steaks, cassata, Bardolino and grappa. "Your brother," he said, eyes glistening in candleshine, "is my brother also."

  "That's nice," Hortense smiled, glowing with wine from her charming low brow to her crossover V neckline. "What Sister Gertrude called Kunstbruder. Brothers in art, you know. You two boys working away together at your art." She was only a girl but she had this pert and affectionate disdain which women, who produce real children, often show for men who give themselves airs about their child surrogates, broken-backed books and limping sonatas.

  "My real brothers," he said, "laugh at my music."

  "Italians laughing at music? Goodness, I thought Italians were the first people in the world for loving music."

  "The Italians," Domenico said, "are mostly stone deaf."

  "Tone deaf."

  "What I said."

  "Stone deaf, you said."

  "Very well, both, tone and stone. They cannot hear music unless it is very loud. They cannot like it unless it is very sexual." Daring that word, very, in 1919, from a man to a girl he had met only three hours before. "I mean love duets. La Boheme. Butterfly." And he gave out, wretchedly, with a bit of Pinkerton at the end of Act One.

  "Composers can't sing," she said. "Tone and stone, you'd think. Sister Agnes used to do an imitation of Beethoven singing Kusse gab sie uns und Reben, einen Freund gepruft im Tod." But she sang it herself very sweetly before doing a harsh monotoned growl, frowning, underlip thrust out.

  "You should hear Carlo sing mass," Domenico said. "Like a dog." And he looked with a dog's adoration at Hortense, a known gambit which she was too young to know, unless that art master--I must ask her about that art master.

  "Can you dance?" Hortense asked.

  "Oh, I can do all the latest dances," Domenico said i'i feigned boasting. "The Bunny Hug and the Turkey Trot and the Castle Walk."

  "Everybody's doing it," sang Hortense with the same sweetness as for the "Ode to Joy."

  "Doing it, doing it," sang Domenico. "Addition, s'il vous plait," pulling out a wad of francs with the kind of bored automatism of one who always pays the bills, which was not true.

  There was dancing going on at the Louisiane, not far from the Casino. "Ah, the famous Casino," Hortense said, as we got out of the cab.

  "That word," Domenico said, with the hint of a leer, "is not a word used politely in Italy. A casino, you see, is a little house."

  "A little house in Ventimiglia," I said brutally, "for example," prematurely perhaps warningly, a warning itself being a kind of encouragement. Domenico flashed a warning of his own back, though with leering warmth in it, being encouraged.

  "You mean a bordel," Hortense said in her clear innocent girl's voice. "I see," looking at the rococo prettiness of the facade. "So that's what it is really. I read in The Illustrated London News I think it was about Mata Hari there and the other one, La Belle whoever it was, covered in jewels and nothing else. So the gambling is just a thing, you know, a whatsit."

  "Pretext," I said. "No, not true. A difference between French and Italian Usage."

  "My holy brother has been very lucky in there," Domenico said. "A French kind of casino is permitted to a holy man."

  I did not like this sort of talk. I must get Domenico on that damned train to Milan very soon. And Hortense wouldn't like that, released from cold England to the smile of southern teeth, wooed southernly by an Italian musician of good looks and family whose brother was a priest, meaning he wouldn't go too far, her spoilsport own brother as gloomy protector of her honor and him a homosexual anyway, what right had he and so on. We went downstairs into the Louisiane.

  "Goodness," Hortense said, "a genuine fig to make it authentic." But the black man in the little band was, from his features, only authentically Senegalese; he played his cornet like a colonial army bugler. The saxophonist, pianist, banjoist and drummer were whites. They played from sheet music, commercial or diluted ragtime not real jazz. The banjoist was singing, in Frenchified American, an old song by W. C. Handy called "The St. Louis Blue
s":

  "I love dat gal like a schoolboy loves his pie,

  Like a Kentucky colonel loves his mint an' rye,

  I'll love ma baby till de day I die."

  "Let's dance," Hortense said to Domenico, and it was left to me to order three beers. The decor of the place was black and white, as if the artist had studied the illustrations in Wyndham Lewis's 1915 Blast, and the motif seemed to be of stylized Manhattan skyscrapers ready to topple. The Modern Age, Jazz Age, we were into it now. There was a loud American with two local girls, a beefy man who proclaimed himself as hailing from Cincinnati, Ohio, round at the ends and high in the middle, probably left over from his country's Expeditionary Force, in some racket or other to do perhaps with sides of army beef, spending freely. He shouted at the band to play "The Darktown Strutters' Ball" and they did. He sang:

  "Remember when we get there honey,

  The twosteps I'm goin' to have 'em all."

  He decided he would cut in on Domenjco and Hortense but Domenico was not having that. Hortense said, "You sit down like a good little boy."

  "Eo," the man from Cincinnati said, "gud leedle bawee."

  "All right," I said, "cut it out."