“Well, if you like,” she assented dubiously. “Only my feet are rather tired. I mean, there’s something about sightseeing. . . .”
“There is indeed,” said Fanning. “But I was prepared to be a martyr to culture. Still, I’m thankful you’re not.” He smiled at her, and Pamela was pleased to find herself once more at the focus of his attention. It had been very interesting to hear him talk about his philosophy and all that. But all the same . . .
“Twenty to four,” said Fanning, looking at his watch. “I’ve an idea; shouldn’t we drive out to Monte Cavo and spend the evening up there in the cool? There’s a view. And a really very eatable dinner.”
“I’d love to. But . . .” Pamela hesitated. “Well, you see I did tell Guy I’d go out with him this evening.”
He was annoyed. “Well, if you prefer . . .”
“But I don’t prefer,” she answered hastily. “I mean, I’d much rather go with you. Only I wondered how I’d let Guy know I wasn’t. . . .”
“Don’t let him know,” Fanning answered, abusing his victory. “After all, what are young men there for, except to wait when young women don’t keep their appointments? It’s their function in life.”
Pamela laughed. His words had given her a pleasing sense of importance and power. “Poor Guy!” she said through her laughter, and her eyes were insolently bright.
“You little hypocrite!”
“I’m not,” she protested. “I really am sorry for him.”
“A little hypocrite and a little devil,” was his verdict. He rose to his feet. “If you could see your own eyes now! But andiamo.”* He held out his hand to help her up. “I’m beginning to be rather afraid of you.”
“What nonsense!” She was delighted. They walked together towards the door.
Fanning made the driver go out by the Appian Way. “For the sake of your education,” he explained, pointing at the ruined tombs, “which we can continue, thank heaven, in comfort, and at twenty miles an hour.”
Leaning back luxuriously in her corner, Pamela laughed. “But I must say,” she had to admit, “it is really rather lovely.”
From Albano the road mounted through the chestnut woods towards Rocca di Papa. A few miles brought them to a turning on the right; the car came to a halt.
“It’s barred,” said Pamela, looking out of the window. Fanning had taken out his pocket-book and was hunting among the bank-notes and the old letters. “The road’s private,” he explained. “They ask for your card—heaven knows why. The only trouble being, of course, that I’ve never possessed such a thing as a visiting-card in my life. Still, I generally have one or two belonging to other people. Ah, here we are! Good!” he produced two pieces of pasteboard. A gatekeeper had appeared and was waiting by the door of the car. “Shall we say we’re Count Keyserling?” said Fanning, handing her the count’s card. “Or alternatively,” he read from the other, “that we’re Herbert Watson, Funeral Furnisher, Funerals conducted with Efficiency and Reverence, Motor Hearses for use in every part of the Country.” He shook his head. “The last relic of my poor old friend Tom Hatchard. Died last year. I had to bury him. Poor Tom! On the whole I think we’d better be Herbert Watson. Ecco!” He handed out the card; the man saluted and went to open the gate. “But give me back Count Keyserling.” Fanning stretched out his hand. “He’ll come in useful another time.”
The car started and went roaring up the zig-zag ascent. Lying back in her corner, Pamela laughed and laughed, inextinguishably.
“But what is the joke?” he asked.
She didn’t know herself. Mr. Watson and the Count had only been a pretext; this enormous laughter, which they had released, sprang from some other, deeper source. And perhaps it was a mere accident that it should be laughter at all. Another pretext, a different finger on the trigger, and it might have been tears, or anger, or singing “Constantinople” at the top of her voice—anything.
She was limp when they reached the top. Fanning made her sit down where she could see the view and himself went off to order cold drinks at the bar of the little inn that had once been the monastery of Monte Cavo.
Pamela sat where he had left her. The wooded slopes fell steeply away beneath her, down, down to the blue shining of the Alban Lake; and that toy palace perched on the hill beyond was the Pope’s, that tiny city in a picture-book, Marino. Beyond a dark ridge on the left the round eye of Nemi looked up from its crater. Far off, behind Albano an expanse of blue steel, burnished beneath the sun, was the Tyrrhenian, and flat like the sea, but golden with ripening corn and powdered goldenly with a haze of dust, the Campagna stretched away from the feet of the subsiding hills, away and up towards a fading horizon, on which the blue ghosts of mountains floated on a level with her eyes. In the midst of the expanse a half-seen golden chaos was Rome. Through the haze the dome of St. Peter’s shone faintly in the sun with a glitter as of muted glass. There was an enormous silence, sad, sad but somehow consoling. A sacred silence. And yet when, coming up from behind her, Fanning broke it, his voice, for Pamela, committed no iconoclasms for it seemed, in the world of her feelings, to belong to the silence, it was made, as it were, of the same intimate and friendly substance. He squatted down on his heels beside her, laying a hand on her shoulder to steady himself.
“What a panorama of space and time!” he said. “So many miles, such an expanse of centuries! You can still walk on the paved road that led to the temple here. The generals used to march up sometimes in triumph. With elephants.”
The silence enveloped them again, bringing them together; and they were alone and as though conspiratorially isolated in an atmosphere of solemn amorousness.
“I signori son serviti,”* said a slightly ironic voice behind them.
“That’s our drinks,” said Fanning. “Perhaps we’d better . . .” He got up and, as he unbent them, his knees cracked stiffly. He stooped to rub them, for they ached; his joints were old. “Fool!” he said to himself, and decided that to-morrow he’d go to Venice. She was too young, too dangerously and perversely fresh.
They drank their lemonade in silence. Pamela’s face wore an expression of grave serenity which it touched and flattered and moved him to see. Still, he was a fool to be touched and flattered and moved.
“Let’s go for a bit of a stroll,” he said, when they had slaked their thirst. She got up without a word, obediently, as though she had become his slave.
It was breathless under the trees and there was a smell of damp, hot greenness, a hum and flicker of insects in the probing slants of sunlight. But in the open spaces the air of the heights was quick and nimble, in spite of the sun; the broom-flower blazed among the rocks; and round the bushes where the honeysuckle had clambered, there hung invisible islands of perfume, cool and fresh in the midst of the hot sea of bracken smell. Pamela moved here and there with little exclamations of delight, pulling at the tough sprays of honeysuckle. “Oh, look!” she called to him in her rapturous voice. “Come and look!”
“I’m looking,” he shouted back across the intervening space. “With a telescope. With the eye of faith,” he corrected; for she had moved out of sight. He sat down on a smooth rock and lighted a cigarette. Venice, he reflected, would be rather boring at this particular season. In a few minutes Pamela came back to him, flushed, with a great bunch of honeysuckle between her hands.
“You know, you ought to have come,” she said reproachfully. “There were such lovely pieces I couldn’t reach.”
Fanning shook his head. “He also serves who only sits and smokes,” he said and made room for her on the stone beside him. “And what’s more,” he went on, “‘let Austin have his swink to him reserved.’ Yes, let him. How wholeheartedly I’ve always agreed with Chauncer’s Monk! Besides, you seem to forget, my child, that I’m an old, old gentleman.” He was playing the safe, the prudent part. Perhaps if he played it hard enough, it wouldn’t be necessary to go to Venice.
Pamela paid no attention to what he was saying. “Would you like this one f
or your buttonhole, Miles?” she asked, holding up a many-trumpeted flower. It was the first time she had called him by his christian name and the accomplishment of this much-meditated act of daring made her blush. “I’ll stick it in,” she added, leaning forward, so that he shouldn’t see her reddened cheeks, till her face was almost touching his coat.
Near and thus offered (for it was an offer, he had no doubt of that, a deliberate offer) why shouldn’t he take this lovely, this terribly and desperately tempting freshness? It was a matter of stretching out one’s hands. But no; it would be too insane. She was near, this warm young flesh, this scent of her hair, near and offered—with what an innocent perversity, what a touchingly ingenuous and uncomprehending shamelessness! But he sat woodenly still, feeling all of a sudden as he had felt when, a lanky boy, he had been too shy, too utterly terrified, in spite of his longings, to kiss that Jenny—what on earth was her name?—that Jenny Something-or-Other he had danced the polka with at Uncle Fred’s one Christmas, how many centuries ago!—and yet only yesterday, only this instant.
“There!” said Pamela and drew back. Her cheeks had had time to cool a little.
“Thank you.” There was a silence.
“Do you know,” she said at last, efficiently, “you’ve got a button loose on your coat.”
He fingered the hanging button. “What a damning proof of celibacy!”
“If only I had a needle and thread. . . .”
“Don’t make your offer too lightly. If you knew what a quantity of unmended stuff I’ve got at home. . . .”
“I’ll come and do it all to-morrow,” she promised, feeling delightfully protective and important.
“Beware,” he said. “I’ll take you at your word. It’s sweated labour.”
“I don’t mind. I’ll come.”
“Punctually at ten-thirty, then.” He had forgotten about Venice. “I shall be a ruthless taskmaster.”
Nemi was already in shadow when they walked back; but the higher slopes were transfigured with the setting sunlight. Pamela halted at a twist of the path and turned back towards the Western sky. Looking up, Fanning saw her standing there, goldenly flushed, the colours of her skin, her hair, her dress, the flowers in her hands, supernaturally heightened and intensified in the almost level light.
“I think this is the most lovely place I’ve ever seen.” Her voice was solemn with a natural piety. “But you’re not looking,” she added in a different tone, reproachfully.
“I’m looking at you,” he answered. After all, if he stopped in time, it didn’t matter his behaving like a fool—it didn’t finally matter and, meanwhile, was very agreeable.
An expression of impertinent mischief chased away the solemnity from her face. “Trying to see my ears again?” she asked; and, breaking off a honeysuckle blossom, she threw it down in his face, then turned and ran up the steep path.
“Don’t imagine I’m going to pursue,” he called after her. “The Pan and Syrinx business is a winter pastime. Like football.”
Her laughter came down to him from among the trees; he followed the retreating sound. Pamela waited for him at the top of the hill and they walked back together towards the inn.
“Aren’t there any ruins here?” she asked. “I mean for my education.”
He shook his head. “The Young Pretender’s brother pulled them all down and built a monastery with them. For the Passionist Fathers,” he added after a little pause. “I feel rather like a Passionist Father myself at the moment.” They walked on without speaking, enveloped by the huge, the amorously significant silence.
But a few minutes later, at the dinner table, they were exuberantly gay. The food was well cooked, the wine, an admirable Falernian. Fanning began to talk about his early loves. Vaguely at first, but later, under Pamela’s questioning, with an ever-increasing wealth of specific detail. They were indiscreet, impudent questions, which at ordinary times she couldn’t have uttered, or at least have only despairingly forced out, with a suicide’s determination. But she was a little tipsy now, tipsy with the wine and her own laughing exultation; she rapped them out easily, without a tremor. “As though you were the immortal Sigmund himself,” he assured her, laughing. Her impudence and that knowledgeable, scientific ingenuousness amused him, rather perversely; he told her everything she asked.
When she had finished with his early loves, she questioned him about the opium. Fanning described his private universes and that charming nurse who had looked after him while he was being disintoxicated. He went on to talk about the black poverty he’d been reduced to by the drug. “Because you can’t do journalism or write novels in the other world,” he explained. “At least I never could.” And he told her of the debts he still owed and of his present arrangements with his publishers.
Almost suddenly the night was cold and Fanning became aware that the bottle had been empty for a long time. He threw away the stump of his cigar. “Let’s go.” They took their seats and the car set off, carrying with it the narrow world of form and colour created by its head-lamps. They were alone in the darkness of their padded box. An hour before Fanning had decided that he would take this opportunity to kiss her. But he was haunted suddenly by the memory of an Australian who had once complained to him of the sufferings of a young colonial in England. “In Sydney,” he had said, “when I get into a taxi with a nice girl, I know exactly what to do. And I know exactly what to do when I’m in an American taxi. But when I apply my knowledge in London—God, isn’t there a row!” How vulgar and stupid it all was! Not merely a fool, but a vulgar, stupid fool. He sat unmoving in his corner. When the lights of Rome were round them, he took her hand and kissed it.
“Good-night.”
She thanked him. “I’ve had the loveliest day.” But her eyes were puzzled and unhappy. Meeting them, Fanning suddenly regretted his self-restraint, wished that he had been stupid and vulgar. And after all would it have been so stupid and vulgar? You could make any action seem anything you liked, from saintly to disgusting, by describing it in the appropriate words. But his regrets had come too late. Here was her hotel. He drove home to his solitude feeling exceedingly depressed.
VI
JUNE 14TH. SPENT THE MORNING WITH M., WHO lives in a house belonging to a friend of his who is a Catholic and lives in Rome, M. says, because he likes to get his popery straight from the horse’s mouth. A nice house, old, standing just back from the Forum, which I said I thought was like a rubbish heap and he agreed with me, in spite of my education, and said he always preferred live dogs to dead lions and thinks it’s awful the way the Fascists are pulling down nice ordinary houses and making holes to find more of these beastly pillars and things. I sewed on a lot of buttons, etc., as he’s living in only two rooms on the ground floor and the servants are on their holiday, so he eats out and an old woman comes to clean up in the afternoons, but doesn’t do any mending, which meant a lot for me, but I liked doing it, in spite of the darning, because he sat with me all the time, sometimes talking, sometimes just working. When he’s writing or sitting with his pen in his hand thinking, his face is quite still and terribly serious and far, far away, as though he were a picture, or more like some sort of not human person, a sort of angel, if one can imagine them without nightdresses and long hair, really rather frightening, so that one longed to shout or throw a reel of cotton at him so as to change him back again into a man. He has very beautiful hands, rather long and bony, but strong. Sometimes, after he’d sat thinking for a long time, he’d get up and walk about the room, frowning and looking kind of angry, which was still more terrifying—sitting there while he walked up and down quite close to me, as though he were absolutely alone. But one time he suddenly stopped his walking up and down and said how profusely he apologized for his toes, because I was darning, and it was really very wonderful to see him suddenly changed back from that picture-angel sort of creature into a human being. Then he sat down by me and said he’d been spending the morning wrestling with the problem of speaking the truth
in books; so I said, but haven’t you always spoken it? because that always seemed to me the chief point of M.’s books. But he said, not much, because most of it was quite unspeakable in our world, as we found it too shocking and humiliating. So I said, all the same I didn’t see why it shouldn’t be spoken, and he said, nor did he in theory, but in practice he didn’t want to be lynched. And he said, look for example at those advertisements in American magazines with the photos and life stories of people with unpleasant breath. So I said, yes, aren’t they simply too awful. Because they really do make one shudder. And he said, precisely, there you are, and they’re so successful because every one thinks them so perfectly awful. They’re outraged by them, he said, just as you’re outraged and they rush off and buy the stuff in sheer terror, because they’re so terrified of being an outrage physically to other people. And he said, that’s only one small sample of all the class of truths, pleasant and unpleasant, that you can’t speak, except in scientific books, but that doesn’t count, because you deliberately leave your feelings outside in the cloak-room when you’re being scientific. And just because they’re unspeakable, we pretend they’re unimportant, but they aren’t, on the contrary, they’re terribly important and he said, you’ve only got to examine your memory quite sincerely for five minutes to realize it, and of course he’s quite right. When I think of Miss Poole giving me piano lessons—but no, really, one can’t write these things, and yet one obviously ought to, because they are so important, the humiliating physical facts, both pleasant and unpleasant (though I must say, most of the ones I can think of seem to be unpleasant), so important in all human relationships, he says, even in love, which is really rather awful, but of course one must admit it. And M. said it would take a whole generation of being shocked and humiliated and lynching the shockers and humiliaters before people could settle down to listening to that sort of truth calmly, which they did do, he says, at certain times in the past, at any rate much more so than now. And he says that when they can listen to it completely calmly, the world will be quite different from what it is now, so I asked, in what way? but he said he couldn’t clearly imagine, only he knew it would be different. After that he went back to his table and wrote very quickly for about half an hour without stopping, and I longed to ask him if he’d been writing the truth and if so, what about, but I didn’t have the nerve, which was stupid.
After the Fireworks Page 9
