An Artist and a Magician

by Hugh Fleetwood

  Normally….

  This time, this bleak January, he did not enjoy himself. Because, and in spite of the determined—too determined—efforts of Betty, he still felt lonely, and it was still too new and unsettling a feeling for him to relax with it for a second. He, lonely; but he couldn’t be, he told himself as he gazed disconsolately from his bedroom window in the morning. He couldn’t be, he told himself as he walked up the narrow lanes above Betty’s property, catching a glimpse every now and then of the grey sea and the boat-bobbing port. How they must rattle and ache in the wind, he thought, those boats that hadn’t been hauled in for the winter. How they must click, and creak, and be conscious of all their cold spars, empty masts, and tarpaulin covered decks. How unused they must feel. How lonely….

  He had never been able to conceive of the idea of loneliness before; had always considered it something that the constitutionally bleak and the champions of self-pity chose for themselves. He had never believed it could be forced on one. Yet obviously it could, he told himself as he went, alone, to bed at night. Oh, how it could.

  Betty of course was aware that there was something wrong with him; but she, he was sure, put it down to remorse, or the after-effects of his efforts with Jim. She probably believed that murder, like any too heady a brew, gave one a hangover….

  On the other hand, she treated the symptoms of his malaise as if she had known he were lonely. She insisted that they do something every day; either go for a walk, or go to visit those few friends of hers who lived in this part of the world all the year round, or go to lunch or dinner in some empty restaurant, which she would attempt to fill with laughs and jokes and stories. Once she even made him drive with her to Orbetello, and there go to some dismal comic movie that made her shriek. But all Wilbur could do was picture the road they had driven along to get there; a straight wet road running across the middle of the lagoon that separated the Argentario from the mainland; a straight wet road watched over by grey flightless sea-gulls, and telegraph poles sticking out of the water at crazy angles—as if at any second they might keel over, and interrupt for ever the fragile messages they carried.

  Worst of all, Betty would not allow him to work on his book. She was quite shocked when he told her that he had started, after all these years, on a novel; in spite of the fact that she had, ostensibly, always lent him money just so he could.

  ‘No Wilbur, I insist,’ she said gently, with a dazzling smile, when he pleaded to be allowed to go up to his room. ‘You’re not yourself, and sitting up there all alone with only your thoughts is absolutely the least indicated thing to do. No. I won’t hear of it. You can work when you go back to Rome if you must, but while you’re here—no. You must relax, and be happy. And I don’t want to hear another word on the subject. Now get us both a drink, dear, and come here and sit by the fire.’

  The thing was, Wilbur knew, that only if he had been allowed to work could he have escaped from his loneliness; sitting at his table, making the imaginary real; or perhaps the real, imaginary….

  How he longed to; to escape into that world of living, breathing people; where people talked, and touched, did and died; into that world where people sat around fires in houses in the country, and longed to be somewhere else.

  But he was too weak, too worn out to argue. Besides, he was no longer free, no longer the fool who could fly where he would at will. Now he was the slave, the guilty slave, who, up in the Big House, depended on the Master’s—or in this case, Mistress’s—whim.

  And the Mistress wished him to be with her, and talk; talk frankly, seriously, as they had never talked before; with earnestness, and eyes meeting meaningfully.

  ‘Oh do tell me Wilbur, have you ever been in love,’ Betty asked him one evening as she kept him cornered in a big beige sofa.

  ‘I’ve always been in love,’ Wilbur tried. ‘All my life.’

  But there was no evading the all powerful Betty, who raised a golden, bat-sleeved arm and tapped him playfully on the knee.

  ‘Yes I know you have. But I mean—with people.’

  ‘Yes my dear. With people, cats, flowers, monkeys, books, pictures, food, clouds—’

  ‘Wilbur, you’re teasing me. With any particular people.’

  Various images came to Wilbur for a second; images of faces from the past. Pale faces, with red voracious mouths like those of young birds. Dark faces, with black hair and pink tongues. Long faces, round faces. Funny faces, frowning faces, beautiful faces….

  ‘No, my dear, never,’ he said. ‘Oh, I’ve had my infatuations and my periods of depravity, but love of any one particular person has always seemed such a limitation. It excludes too much, it seems to me.’

  Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut?…

  ‘Oh but you’re wrong. It can include everything if it’s with the right person.’

  ‘Then I’ve obviously never met the right person.’

  ‘Oh my dear, and you’ve never felt lonely?’

  ‘No, never for an instant,’ Wilbur said. ‘Good God, there’s so much in the world, how could I? How can anyone?’

  ‘But so few of us, if any, have your talent for filling the world.’

  ‘Well maybe that’s it, my dear. And while we’re talking of filling, my glass is empty. But I must say,’ he added, as he attempted to edge his way out of the sofa—though Betty would have none of it, and waved him down as she stretched behind her for the whisky—‘I’ve never ever understood the meaning of the word loneliness.’

  Until now, was the obvious if unnecessary retort to this statement, Wilbur thought. But while it was unnecessary, he couldn’t help saying it to himself. And saying it, furthermore, with such bitterness that he once more had an image of all those faces from the past—those pale faces, dark faces, frowning faces and beautiful faces—as they pleaded with him, shouted at him, begged him, insulted him; all trying to stop him making light of their feelings; all trying to stop him being a fool; all trying to make him answer in the affirmative their questions: ‘Don’t you understand what I’m talking about?’ ‘Don’t you know the meaning of the word love?’ And finally, as a last resort, ‘But haven’t you ever been lonely, Wilbur?’

  No, no, and no, he remembered himself saying….

  Another evening Betty said, ‘Do tell me about your childhood, dear.’

  ‘Oh Betty, I’ve told you a hundred times.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I hate seeing you unhappy like this, and sometimes, if we talk about our childhood—I don’t know. It makes things better. Besides,’ she laughed, the steel creeping into her voice, ‘every time you’ve told me you’ve told me something different.’

  ‘That’s because I had so many different childhoods.’

  ‘Well, tell me the truth tonight. The real one.’

  ‘My dear, they’re all real.’

  ‘They can’t be.’

  ‘Well they are.’

  He heard he sounded sulky, and wondered whether such insolence would be allowed to pass.

  It wasn’t.

  ‘No,’ Betty cried, ‘I won’t stand for that. Come along now. You were born in South Carolina, and orphaned at the age of one—’

  That was one of the constants in his stories. How he had been orphaned tended to vary slightly, according to his listener. His parents, young, bright and thoughtless, the original flappers and party-goers, had killed themselves by driving their car off the road while drunk on champagne. Or: his mother had been a bar-girl, his father an alcoholic; they had been knocked down and killed by a car while standing in the middle of the road, brawling. Or: his parents, youthful and intense, had been two of the earliest civil-rights workers. While driving down a dark country road at night they had been ambushed and shot by the Ku-Klux-Klan. Their death had been put down as ‘due to drunken driving’. The final version of his parents’ death—that he only occasionally gave—was that his mother, a white Russian who had arrived in the States just before or just after the Revolution, had decided that life was at least as bad
as, if not worse, in this free America than it had been or was in the Russia she had fled from, and unable to bear the idea of watching her baby being slowly corrupted, had decided to kill herself by driving into a brick wall. She had taken her husband, who was American and already beyond hope, with her; but she had spared the child on the theory that maybe, just maybe, he would be strong enough, or intelligent enough, or something enough, to save himself.

  Another constant of his stories was that he had no, absolutely no relations to whom to be entrusted after his parents’ death—which also explained in part the conflicting accounts of those parents and their deaths. After all—how could mere strangers be relied upon to tell him, when he was twelve years old, what had really happened? Or even old newspaper reports, if they could have been found?

  He wasn’t sent to an orphanage however, or an institution. Various people who had known his parents took pity on the one-year-old child, and felt it their duty to give him a home. These people were—again, according to the listener—a thirty-year-old British bachelor, the de rigueur Englishman to be found in every town in the world, who was the youngest son or the blackest sheep of some fairly noble family from Suffolk called Winter—(‘Oh Pamela, I know he has to be a relation. Somewhere. Somehow.’)—who adopted the baby for reasons, apart from those of pity and duty, it was better not to go into; an extremely old lady, Miss Viola Bartlett, who lived in a white Southern mansion and who just adored marionettes and dolls, and wasn’t too fussy whether they were living or merely made of papier-mâché; a young married couple, painters, who were from New England but had come south for the colour (her name, before her marriage, had been Dale); and two spinsters, Miss Annie and Miss Rachel, who, whilst quite against marriage to men, would have liked, had it been possible, to have offspring of their own. (Miss Annie was always Miss Annie to everyone; but really she was Miss Amy. Miss Amy Simpson….)

  The third and last constant of Wilbur’s stories of his childhood was that none of these various surrogate parents gave him much in the way of a formal education, but all of them gave him what was far more precious; a sense of scope, and space; a sense of interior worlds, and magic. They also instilled in him the sense that hospitality—their hospitality in particular, but all hospitality in general—was the most sacred of all virtues, and gave him a taste for flight.

  He fled, accordingly, at the age of sixteen; to New York. Or at the age of seventeen. Or to Paris, at the age of eighteen….

  This evening he gave Betty a mixture of all these stories—a mixture he hoped she hadn’t heard before. Feeling mean, however he obstinately referred to the old lady in the white Southern mansion simply as Miss Viola; thus depriving Betty, whose maiden name had been Bartlett, of the chance to exclaim as she had so often in the past, ‘Oh that is extraordinary, isn’t it Wilbur? And though I’ve never heard of a Bartlett in South Carolina, there are so many of us all over the South that I just know she must be a great-aunt or something. I love to think so, anyway. It makes me feel we’ve been in touch all our lives, and that we were bound to meet sooner or later. Oh I do so believe in the hidden links.’

  What he did say was ‘There now, my dear. And that’s the truth. Every word of it.’

  ‘Oh Wilbur, you’re impossible,’ Betty cried. Then—to get her own back on him for his having omitted Miss Viola’s last name, or because she felt it of a melancholy suitable to Wilbur’s mood—she added softly, ‘Though I must say, in spite of the way you make it all sound so magical, it must have been a very lonely childhood.’

  ‘Lonely?’ Wilbur said. ‘Oh no, my dear. Never.’

  *

  But at the end of six days—and Wilbur still wasn’t sure how long he was going to be kept up here; ‘Oh, at least another day or two,’ Betty murmured airily when he asked how long she could put off her return to the big city—his hostess had given up the attempt to distract him or amuse him, and seemed, even, to become preoccupied and anxious herself. So much so, indeed, that the night of that sixth day, as they sat nursing what would probably be their final brandies before going to bed, and after an evening in which she had done nothing but repeat, almost word for word, what Wilbur himself had said (‘That is a charming painting, Betty, really.’ ‘Oh yes, Wilbur, it is a charming painting.’ ‘My dear, this wine is extraordinary.’ ‘Yes, it is an extraordinary wine, isn’t it?’), Betty started talking again about what had happened to her son, and about Jim’s—and Pain’s—responsibility for the tragedy.

  ‘What’s over is over, Betty dear,’ Wilbur tried to soothe her with. ‘What’s done is done.’

  ‘But it isn’t all over,’ Betty frowned, and attempted a brave smile. ‘Things like that never are, are they, dear?’

  ‘Oh I don’t know. I mean we can come to terms with even the most terrible facts of life.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Betty sighed, running her finger round the top of her glass, and obviously trying to strike just the right note. ‘But—there was one other thing I didn’t tell you last week. One last little piece in the puzzle. One last little—turn of the screw.’

  How the firelight flickered. How the rough, white, rustic walls showed all their cracks and pores. How the brandy in the glasses glowed, and how quiet the night outside was. No wind, no rain. No dogs barking, no bats squeaking. Just the deep, silent cold. The black, freezing January night….

  ‘Bernard.’

  It was one word, tossed out into the soft, warm room. And Betty didn’t raise her head from her glass as she said it. She hardly moved her lips.

  ‘Bernard Dale.’

  Then she was silent for a while, letting the name spread out, fall, cover the room like a white cloth being spread over furniture by someone who is leaving a house for ever.

  And she need, in fact, have said nothing more. Wilbur could have finished her speech for her. But there were certain rules to be obeyed; a certain formality to be observed. One had to lock the front door, even if one was never returning.

  ‘In a way it’s he, even more than Pam or Jim, whom I blame for what happened.’ Once more Betty paused; before launching into her story proper. ‘I had known Bernard in New York, before I came here. He and Hubert had done business together on various occasions. I never liked him, even then. He was always a cruel, prejudiced man. And the way he treated his wife—he crushed her out of existence. Literally. She just got smaller and smaller, more and more withered. And she’d been a pretty little thing. But—well, that’s nothing to do with me. Anyway, Tommy became friendly with Bernard’s youngest, Arthur. They were at school together briefly, and, as I say, Hubert and Bernard met occasionally. He was a nice boy, but he took after his mother, and Bernard despised him for it, and was always trying to make him go out huntin’ and shootin’ and fishin’. You know that absurd, immature Hemingway complex that so many American men had at the time. Perhaps they still do. I wouldn’t know.’ Betty sighed. ‘Well, Bernard didn’t approve of Tommy’s friendship with Arthur, but one summer—they were both just turned seventeen—Tommy asked me if he and Arthur could go and stay at a place we had in Maine. I was going to Europe, I don’t know what Hubert was doing, so I said yes, of course. So off they went, and I flew off to Nice, where I was staying with a friend of mine. I’d been there about two weeks when suddenly, who should turn up at the door, but Tommy. He looked very pale and sick, and said that he and Arthur had had some sort of fight, and that—well, just that he preferred to spend the summer with me in the South of France. However, a week later it all came out. It appeared that he and Arthur had been getting on fine together. But then one evening, after they’d been there a few days, Bernard suddenly arrived, roaring drunk. He started screaming that he didn’t want the two of them to be together, and that Tommy was corrupting Arthur or some such rubbish, and that they should both come with him. He took them to some cheap motel, told them it was time they both “had a woman”, and more or less marched them into this room where he had paid some prostitute to wait. But she wasn’t just an ordinary prostitute, Tomm
y told me. If she was a real prostitute at all. Because she was about fifty years old, fat and hideously ugly, and to cap it all, mentally retarded. And there he forced Arthur—at gun-point—to make love to this poor creature. Apparently it was the most hideous scene you can imagine. There was Bernard, drunk and screaming with laughter, and this wretched woman who was terrified and whimpering, and these two seventeen-year-old boys. Can you imagine, Wilbur? Seventeen. But anyway, Tommy told me, Arthur went with her. And then Bernard ordered Tommy to, too. But do you know what Tommy did? He said he suddenly felt terrifically calm, looked Bernard straight in the eye, and said, “no, and you can shoot me if you like.” And then he went over to the bed and very gently soothed the poor woman who was lying there crying, told her to get dressed, and asked if she needed a ride home. He felt so calm, he said, that Bernard, like all bullies when someone stands up to them, was speechless, and didn’t do a thing. And then Tommy picked up Bernard’s car keys that were lying on a table, and took the woman out. But as he was leaving, do you know what he did? He stopped in front of Bernard, smiled at him, whispered, “I pity you,” and then—you won’t believe this Wilbur, but Tommy swore it was true; he said he did suddenly feel overcome with pity for Bernard—he leaned forward, and kissed Bernard right on the lips.