“Well, you won’t like that, will you?” Nell was eating her baba very fast and crossly. “You’re always saying that he ought to write poetry for three years like mad and then die.”
“Oh, I don’t think I ever said that, did I, Nell? You must have misunderstood me.” His tone had just the right note of indulgent surprise (poor Nell; rather a scatterbrain).
But Nell could feel that Elizabeth was now listening with something more than conventional politeness; not, Nell was both relieved and irritated to think, because she found John an interesting type, but because she was interested in what he was saying.
“I’ve been worried about Benedict, as you know, for a long time,” he went on.
“Kind of you,” Nell bolted the last fragment of baba and put down her fork. Elizabeth glanced at her with a little surprise.
“He looks so ill. It’s a lot to do with that dreadful girl, of course.”
“I hope you like hearing about people you’ve never met, Liz,” said Nell, angrier every moment at what she thought was an elaborate display, meant to impress Elizabeth, of gifted friends in thrilling situations.
“It depends.” Elizabeth bent forward. “Why is she a dreadful girl?”
Nell knew that she was hoping Gardis was a contemporary version of the ladies in The Glass of Fashion; well, I suppose she is, in a way, Nell thought, only I never think of her as being.
“Oh, she just is. You see, she’s got him like that,” extending a big square thumb whose shape should have warned anyone what strength of will was lodged within its owner, and planting it on the table. “Like that,” wriggling it about. “And she’s simply horrible to him and she’s bad for his work, too.”
“Really? I thought you said that they ought to be together for twenty years of biting and clawing, because that sort of thing ‘keeps poetry alive’.” This was Nell.
This time he did not trouble to answer. The fish was hooked.
But as he earnestly began to say to Elizabeth, who was leaning towards him with a look of frank curiosity, “She’s an American, Gardis Randolph (yes, isn’t it odd? I think it must be Old French—but, as I expect you know, they have a passion in the Deep South, where she comes from, for exotic girls’ names), and at the moment she’s being secretary to my mamma,”—he was making himself a promise to punish Nell. She was being beastly this afternoon, and why should she? She couldn’t possibly have guessed about his plan; she was much too simple. It was just bloody-mindedness.
“If she really is such a character as you describe, it seems odd that he likes her,” was Elizabeth’s comment, at the end of an account of Gardis’s malice, grubbiness, rudeness, secretarial ineptness and general undesirability, and he smiled and said gently that it did, didn’t it, but then Benedict was a nice person, and loyal.
Having accomplished, in spite of the unexpected opposition from Nell, what he had set out that afternoon to do, he suddenly recollected that he had to meet someone who might be going to give him a job posing as a model for an advertising agency, and begged that they would excuse him; he would settle their bill on his way out; and after making charming farewells, off he went.
Nell waited with dour satisfaction to see him confronted by a bill including two cups of coffee and four cakes whose existence he did not suspect. Sure enough, there was a little confusion and explanation with the waitress, but he got through it successfully, presumably, as he was allowed to leave the place.
She saw him going away, with his deceptively slow walk that could easily cover miles of London’s streets in so short a time. He might have to go without food for the rest of the day, and walk back to Hampstead. Serve him right, thought Nell. After all, he was used to it. She was seeing him, a little, as Elizabeth had presumably seen him, who was accustomed to the society of young men, who worked hard and played hard and had—only of course they never spoke about them—the proper ideas.
He had behaved this afternoon even worse than usual; showing off, popping in upon them uninvited and telling lies about his opinion of Benedict’s affair with Gardis, and the way Benedict lived. Why? again. Nell had no idea; she usually had no idea about why he behaved as he did, but this afternoon she was very cross with him indeed.
She hoped that Elizabeth would not say anything about him.
“Come with me to Harrods?” said Elizabeth, when they were out in the street again. “I have to buy a brassière for Prideaux’s Pride … good. It’s so nice having this flat Mummy’s just taken for us in Knightsbridge; you must come and see it soon; and it has a lot of domestic gadgets; of course we could never afford to have them put in at Prideaux, and Daddy wouldn’t even if we could, but he loves playing with them, and he’s simply glued to the television set; we can’t prise him away … what a blossoming hat. Do you ever wear a hat? I do sometimes; Mummy likes me to.”
They stopped to admire the hat.
“Do you see much of your cousin?” Elizabeth asked, in a rather too-creamy voice, as they went on.
“More than enough,” Nell answered in a sharp and decided one.
She had made up her mind that, as Elizabeth would be much more likely to expect Sensible Old Sely to disapprove of that extraordinary little boy than expect her to be, well, tolerant about him, then disapprove of him Sensible Old Sely would. “He lives in the flat at the top of our house. So I have to.”
She did not, however, think that Elizabeth could really be interested in someone aged about seventeen and what Nell felt about him, and sure enough, when she had given her friend the curtest possible outline of John’s way of life and referred to the general hope that National Service might ‘knock some sense into him’, Elizabeth’s “How peculiar. Perhaps he went to the wrong kind of school,” was followed at once by:
“I do think that Benedict-man sounded fascinating … is he really like that? So clever?”
So this was the true point of interest. Nell’s relief that Elizabeth was apparently going to see John, and what Nell felt about John, exactly as Nell wanted her to, was now warmed by the pleasant idea that perhaps Elizabeth might ‘do’ for Benedict?
Of course, one did not introduce one’s friends to each other with such notions in mind, but if these two should happen to meet, naturally it would be nice if they took to one another. Nell knew little about Benedict’s work, except that she had not liked what she had read of it, or whether it would be good for him if he and Gardis were to separate, but she had never once seen them looking at peace when they were together; Gardis had always worn an air at once triumphant and cruel, and Benedict had looked dazed and wretched.
“Yes, he really is awfully clever,” she said decidedly, “and I think he will get on, you know.”
“I’ve got rather a taste for intellectuals just now,” Elizabeth said, thoughtfully, in a moment, “I’m sure I could run a salon. (“Oh, do look at that ravishing shortie nightgown.) It all started with one of the creatures at Les Rosiér’s brother; he was staying in the village (supposed to be painting, but really getting off with everybody under fifty, I think), and the girls and the staff used to get rather excited about his work and his goings-on generally. I used to talk to him rather a lot; he was good for my French.”
She broke into a flow of precise yet babbling sounds that Nell had difficulty in translating. “But he had a dirty beard, and that I could not take,” she went on, “Has Benedict a beard?”
“Not so far,” Nell said cautiously, “but they do tend to grow them suddenly, you know.”
“I do know one artist, but his father is a very famous painter, and that rather cramps poor Roddy’s style. He paints nothing but apples. Well, I shall hope to meet your Benedict, Nell. And I mean it.”
“He isn’t in the least mine, Liz. He’s very much Gardis’s.” Nell hesitated; three months of London life under the tuition of John had removed most of her inhibitions, in conversation at least, but she still hesitated occasionally. “I think they’re …”
Elizabeth nodded mysteriously. “But that may b
e an advantage to the attacking side.”
Then, as they were entering the portals of Harrods, no more about Benedict was said.
It was almost a fortnight later that John and Benedict were wandering through the lofty air-conditioned rooms of the mansion in Castlereagh Square where the Steyne Collection is displayed; pausing before gilt and inlaid furniture, and pointing out to one another—that is, John pointed out, while Benedict apathetically stared—china figures of fairy delicacy, and miniatures glowing with the ethereal, yet intense, blues and greys and rose-colour which seem to belong to this art alone; while the fact that they were almost the only visitors made each object appear to display its peculiar beauty with an added, concentrated, silent force. Chandeliers flashed stilly in the sunrays, the deep browns and purples gleamed along the lustrous wood of Empire desks and tables; and on the walls Guardi and Canaletto displayed the stately splendours of Venice above stretch after stretch of water, crisped into stiff grey wavelets or green and flowing, yet never presenting the disturbing quality of life. Always the scene was blessedly removed; into that realm where it can charm, delight and console the poor human eyes that behold it.
John would have been rather bored with these beautiful things, had he been required to give them his full attention, for he preferred living objects and more fluid scenes, but he was seeing and using them as part of the plan which he was this afternoon zestfully executing.
At the moment, he was neither speaking nor apparently moving in any particular direction, but dawdling through the rooms with a vague gaze, while Benedict, whose face was greenish following on a night of heavy drinking, was silently wavering after him. John had what he used to call, when he was a little boy, butterflies in his stomach as he loitered through a doorway which he had carefully noted during a visit made alone, some days previously.
Benedict was feeling sick. He was also wondering, in a dazed and confused fashion, whether his creative power and technical ability was of the kind that would benefit from being compelled to apply itself, industriously, copiously and almost unremittingly. Could his gift be forced, in short? If it were big enough it could respond without being damaged, but was it big enough?
He was almost satisfied with Prometheus In Nevada, and that had been a commissioned work, of which not a line had been set down on paper until he had been told by the Third Programme people that if he would write it they would use it. And now it was written, and it was true poetry; even those damned ‘bridge passages’ that were always such brutes to do, were plain and light, supporting the gorgeous or the horrific … It was tempting to believe his gift could stand being driven. But then there was Wordsworth, poor old man, outwriting himself so pitifully … and some contemporary examples he could think of … and Keats’s fatal remark—or so Benedict thought—about loading every rift with ore, so that the lines hampered the imagination like a voluminous, over-rich (or over-dry, for that matter) trailing fancy dress. …
“That’s rather nice.”
It cost John an effort not to speak sharply, for he had set his heart on having Benedict’s eye fall naturally upon the portrait while they were animatedly surveying the contents of the room, and now he had twice to draw attention to it, so absent and dopey was his friend this afternoon.
Benedict loitered to a stop in front of the oval frame whose richly tarnished gilt proclaimed that it was old, and stood there, vacantly looking. John stood quietly at his side, also looking, and compelling himself to wear an expression in which critical appreciation was nicely blent with admiration. Inwardly he was dancing with impatience. Was his miserable friend, who this morning looked more desolate and lost than ever he recollected seeing him, merely going to say “That’s lovely,” and stroll on?
But suddenly his machinations were crowned with triumph. Benedict actually made an affectionate mutter.
“What a poppet,” he said.
She had a pearly round face, with fair hair drawn up beneath a turban of gauze. Her plump shoulders, set off by one glowing rose, came up out of a bodice of softly gleaming satin, but for most beholders, all those beauties would be subordinate to the charm of the smiling young woman, leaning slightly forward as if to bow a gay retort to a compliment.
“Isn’t it a delightful colour-scheme, and masterly simple, just yellow and white and salmon-pink,” John said. “It’s so clever. And of course, so civilized.” Her best friend, if she had any friends, could not have called Gardis civilized. There could hardly have occurred a better opportunity for implanting the idea of contrast.
“I suppose we ought to have bought a catalogue.” His tone was innocence double-distilled.
Benedict shook his head. He was still looking at the portrait.
“They’re half-a-crown and you tend to look at them instead of at the pictures. It says here who she is, doesn’t it?” He bent closer; his sight was bad today. “She is—or was—the Honourable Georgiana Prideaux.” He paused. “She could be lovely to kiss,” he said.
John’s emphatic nod concealed the opinion that the pleasure thus obtained would be heavily paid for by submitting to the will shown in that round, firm, Regency chin. “If I were a horrible old aunt, or someone of that sort, I should say it’s so alive it might walk out of the frame.”
“If that’s what you really feel, why pretend you’re a horrible old aunt? God knows the last thing one wants contemporary portraits of girls to do is to walk out of the frame, and then have to kiss them.”
“No indeed. But such ideas about art are rather low, you know. Shall we be moving?” for John did not want to linger in front of the portrait until Benedict suspected that he was up to something; his friend had a disconcerting habit of suddenly emerging from the daze caused by hangover and amorous suffering and turning a very keen eye upon the surrounding landscape with figures.
Benedict slowly followed, blinking slightly with the pain of a headache which the brilliant shafts of sunlight striking upon the glittering and gleaming objects all about him seemed to intensify, and wincing as the thought returned on him, acute as toothache and harder to endure than his headache, that in less than a month Gardis would be flying home to America.
She was refusing to admit feeling any sorrow at leaving him, merely reminding him, when reproached, that she had only meant to stay in this dump for six months anyway, and what was there to stay for, now that she had learnt all that they had to teach her at the Art School, and a certain master there had left?
“Hadn’t you better have some lunch?” John said rather irritably, turning at a slight sound which had been wrung from Benedict by an unbearable jab of physical jealousy; he was going to see to it that no young woman ever wrung groans out of him, “you look quite alarmingly green.”
Benedict agreed with a rather unexpected docility, and they went to an open-air place in a park where he paid for five tomato sandwiches and two glasses of milk for John while himself eating nothing.
John ate and drank with a conscience as good as his appetite, for it seemed to him that this afternoon he had not only started to score off Gardis but had laid the foundations of Benedict’s future prosperity and happiness.
As for his poetry, that must take its chance.
He himself believed that Benedict had taken the first steps towards destroying his talent when he had accepted a commission, and if he were going to develop into the sort of poet who could, before he was forty, invite the Douglas Fairbankses to breakfast, he would do so whether John steered him towards Elizabeth Prideaux, and her way of living and her managing temperament, or not. John felt that he might go on with his plan, and take and enjoy his revenge without seriously troubling himself about his duty towards the Arts.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
NO-MAN’S-LAND
ON THE WALL of his father’s study in the old house at Eltham, Martin could remember, there had hung a large brown photograph of the youths and bearers of libations who wreathe eternally around the frieze adorning the Parthenon.
There had been a fash
ion for such earnest reproductions in the days of the old man’s prime, even as now, according to descriptions brought home by Nell, there was a fashion for putting blown-up photographs of foreign buildings in these new coffee-bars.
The days when Martin had looked up at the picture with a reverent admiration, absent-minded only because his own vigorous young life was full and so all-absorbing, now not only seemed far away; they were far away: in time; in place; in spirit. For they belonged within the region of Nevermore.
Yet lately, with a fancifulness not usual in him, he had been thinking about that frieze and its youths, because it had occurred to him that the continual coming and going of young people up and down the stairs of the house, which was so quiet when he and Anna were alone in it, was like the young procession winding along the sober walls of his father’s ‘den’. He did not resent their presence, nor the having to open the front door to them and answer them on the telephone half-a-dozen times a day, although he realized that five years ago he would have been as annoyed by the constant interruptions as he would have been disapproving of the disorderly and planless lives which apparently they all led. Even judging them by the slacker and weaker standards that he had begun to form since his misery had fallen upon him, there was plenty to justify disapproval.
The glimpses of their activities which he from time to time obtained had been what he described to Anna as an eye-opener.
He had of course known that most youngsters nowadays had jobs, although he had never thought it necessary for a girl to have one if she had a father to keep her until she married, and a home in which she could be a companion to her mother, but when he had succeeded in accepting the idea that nowadays everybody worked, he discovered a whole set that did not work at all, appearing to spend their days and their nights in talk (gossip, probably, dressed up as highbrow nonsense) and coffee-drinking and dashing off here and there meeting people who might be able to employ them for sums of money which seemed astronomical to Martin, until he observed that he was continually hearing in a roundabout fashion that, somehow, these jobs invariably failed to be given and paid for.
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