and her notice the very center of the world.
And now the grizzled maid brought out a tray and they had highballs
at the white table under the shade of the big parasol and the great elms.
May Outram cried, “Good God! take off your coat!” and Garda Thorne
said, “And your necktie—and your necktie too.” And when he had taken
off both jacket and tie, Harold Outram smiled to him and said with ap-
proval, “Now you look as if you had come to stay.”
They were all ever so kind to him and he sat there in [a] sort of bril-
liant haze, though he did not show in his face what he felt. The scene
itself was beautiful—the afternoon light was soft, the pool shimmered
under the blue sky, the tree under which they sat rustled in a gentle
breeze, there were beds of bright flowers, and beyond a hedge he saw
the unfinished novel
the young corn stalks of a large truck garden. Every cliché of felicity was
here, down to the tinkle of ice in the glasses. All his companions were
handsome. He ceased to feel either the protection or the disadvantages
of his own age. The four seemed of equal age together and it seemed to
Vincent to be a sign of the provincial, of the vulgar and poor in spirit,
to mark the differences in years. The setting sun was on his left and
the thought came to him that to his right, where there stretched a long
bright haze, was the east and the ocean he had never yet seen.
5
chapter 13
In a little while May Outram left them. Shortly after, her husband an-
nounced that he was going for a swim. It was not an invitation to the other
two. Vincent and Garda Thorne were left alone at the little white table.
Garda Thorne said, “Shall we have another drink, Mr. Hammell?”
And then, holding the whiskey bottle poised just at the rim of his glass,
she said, “Do you mind if I immediately call you Vincent?”
It occurred to him that Harold Outram had left them alone together
for a purpose.
“I’d be honored,” was the reply that came from him.
She lifted the bottle brusquely and let the whiskey fall into the glass.
“Honored is not precisely the word I should have wanted you to
choose.” She said it with manifest dryness.
He could feel the blush suffusing him. But she went on, “And you
must please call me Garda immediately.” She poured whiskey into her
own glass.
“I’m making these stipulations, Vincent, for a quite specific reason,”
she said.
the unfinished novel
She put ice into each of the glasses, then soda. She stirred his drink
and handed it to him. She was pacing this little colloquy as precisely as
if she were composing it in a story. There was nothing for him to say or
do. He could only await the next development with a sense of its ultimate
importance. But at least he had now a clue to the will that shaped Garda
Thorne’s career.
She said, “The reason is that we must be friends from the start.”
She raised her glass to her mouth and looked at him over the rim.
Then, having taken a sip, she said, “Must be, Vincent.”
This, clearly, was intrigue.
“You are,” said Garda Thorne, “the biographer of Jorris Buxton.”
It was as if he had been sitting at a table at the Café de la Paix and a
stranger had come up to him and said, “You are the bearer of important
dispatches to the Archduke of Merovingia.” He replied, “Well?” with as
much cool reserve, as much question in his voice as he would have used
in responding to the Merovingian statement.
“Well, aren’t you?” Garda Thorne said tartly.
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said in some confusion.
She accepted his admission. “That is why we must be friends from
the start. For there’s nobody who can be of more use to you than I can.”
She paused, and the Merovingian tone recurred as she went on to
say with considerable emphasis, “And you can be of great help to me.”
He managed to sound the secret-agent’s note by saying, “In what
way?”
For a moment she considered. “Let me put the fact simply,” she said,
“and then you will be able to understand how I can help you, how we can
help each other.”
She opened her handbag, took out a cigarette case, opened the ciga-
rette case, took out a cigarette and lighted it. So elaborate a preparation
seemed justified by the statement she now made. “I was once Jorris Bux-
ton’s mistress,” she said.
It was a statement of obvious weight, but it did not impede the light
rapidity with which she now spoke. “What an old-fashioned word. Is it
ever used any more? Do I have to explain that I don’t mean a casual af-
fair, a matter of weeks or months? I mean we were lovers in every full
sense of that word. And over a period of years. There were long separa-
tions. I don’t mean that anything went wrong between us. There were
reasons why we had to be apart. I speak of these intervals because they
were the occasion for his letters.”
the unfinished novel
She had been gazing beyond Vincent’s shoulder as she talked but
now she looked him squarely in the face. “There are a great many letters.
I am very fond of letters, they are my favorite reading, I read volumes of
them, and there aren’t any to equal the ones of Jorris Buxton. They are
wonderful in themselves, and to a biographer they should be invaluable.
I should say, indeed, essential.”
By now Vincent should have thought of something to say, but he was
too absorbed watching Garda Thorne move skillfully toward her goal of
stipulation which he now knew must be coming. Besides, he was mak-
ing arithmetical calculations in his head.
“Buxton is nearly eighty,” Garda Thorne said, as if she could perceive
the digits moving inconclusively about in his head, “and you want to
know when this happened. If I told you twenty-five years ago, would that
satisfy you? Ah, it’s sweet of you to look bewildered. I was eighteen—no,
nineteen: —oh damn, I was twenty.”
She smiled, charmingly shy and guilty at the little evasion she con-
fessed. Then she added, and it startled Vincent, “And a very tasty little
thing I must have been.”
She said it with a kind of bitter relish and it shocked Vincent Ham-
mell. Of the two girls in her story who had taken off their shoes and
stockings and lifted their skirts to step into the tub of wine, Garda
Thorne herself was surely one. He had always been charmed and a
little aroused by that scene of gay young girlhood, but somehow he had
never supposed that the femininity it suggested, sexually delightful as
it was, would ever develop into actual sexuality. Garda Thorne’s recol-
lection of herself as a fresh young girl who had pleased the sensual
appetite of a great man even hinted that the girls had not been, as he
had always assumed, necessarily virginal when they had stepped into
the wine-tub.
Vincent had still not said a word through all his companion’s great
rush of talk and now he decided that his best maneuvre
was to continue
his silence.
“Buxton’s life could be written without these letters,” Garda Thorne
went on, “and it would still be, as they say, a monumental life. But it
would not be at all the life that could be written by the man who had the
letters to work with. I am going to let you use these letters, Vincent.”
He said, the Merovingian tone coming in again, “But on a condition?”
“Yes, on a condition. But I think not a hard or a disagreeable condi-
tion. The condition is only this—that you use them as my friend.”
This had every appearance of dishonesty and she knew he thought so.
the unfinished novel
“It doesn’t sound well the way I put it. But it isn’t the way it sounds.
When I give you the letters I’ll give them to you outright, with no strings
except the ones that tie them up. And I’ll give you every one of them. Not
to keep, of course. Of course not to keep, but you can read every one of
them and you can copy them—that’s the way they do, isn’t it, copy them?”
“Yes, or photograph them. The best way is to photograph them.”
“Well, you can photograph every one. And you can use them as much
or as little as you please.”
“But then what do you mean,” he said, and there was an edge of
impatience to his voice—astonishing that he should be speaking so to
Garda Thorne!—“What do you mean by my using them as your friend?”
With some elaborateness she looked at the tip of her cigarette. “I
mean specific things by that,” she said, “and some of them are simple
and some are not. You see, Vincent—oh, I don’t have to tell you—no
woman could ever be ashamed of having been Jorris Buxton’s mistress,
or anything but proud of it. You see, it’s the first thing about myself that
I’ve told you. Not that I make a practice of telling people, but under the
circumstances—. And it’s known, of course, it’s not a secret. And I want
it known—eventually, ultimately—as one of the things about myself. It’s
something of myself, and so I cherish it and I’m proud of it. Oh, I’m a
vulgar woman, a beastly vulgar woman—I have a sort of fame of my
own, but it’s a little, little fame, and I am vulgar, don’t for a moment sup-
pose, Vincent Hammell, that I don’t want to go down in history as the
love of Jorris Buxton’s life.”
She said it delightfully. She wanted a toy and she so legitimately
wanted it, and she so clearly had not a touch of vulgarity about her.
“But there are considerations,” she went on. “We none of us know
how long Buxton can live. Oh, he’s robust enough, but it must be touch
and go now. There are chances that he might not live through the writing
of your book, which will surely be a matter of a couple of years. That is
why you’re here now and you should have been here earlier. Harold de-
layed too long making arrangements. The book won’t come out until he’s
dead, and it’s brutal to say but that can’t be very long. But that’s not the
point. I’m getting confused, you see. I don’t know precisely what I want,
I want two contradictory things. What I want for history I don’t want for
now. I don’t want to see myself fixed and crystallized as Buxton’s mistress.
It’s all right for when I’m dead or old. It’s not a reputation I want mixed
up now with my writing reputation. To be part of history at my age—no.
And then I just might, of course, just marry again. Do you know the story
of the Duc d’Orsay who married the Countess Guiccioli? He used to in-
the unfinished novel
troduce her as ‘My wife, formerly the mistress of Lord Byron.’ Only in
French it’s worse, ‘Ancienne maîtresse de Lord Byron.’ That’s not the sort
of thing—”
She ended decisively. “So you see!” she said.
He did not see, and yet he did. But he had no chance to report on his
degree of enlightenment, for she immediately went on. “And then from
Buxton’s own point of view there are considerations. When I stumbled
about my age a few minutes ago, you surely thought I was lying like
any woman, protecting her age. I said ‘eighteen,’ then ‘nineteen,’ then
‘twenty,’ not for my sake but for Buxton’s sake. Because if you judge it
in cold numbers, I suppose it doesn’t make an entirely pretty picture by
the usual notions—a man of fifty-five and a girl of seventeen, for that
is what I really was. He could have been her father—almost, possibly,
her grandfather: that’s what they would say. Ah, but we have such silly
pictures of young girls. I was quite a match for any man, even a clever
man, or a remarkable one like Buxton. More of a match then, it seems
to me now, than I was later. I gave myself generously but I gave myself
very wisely. Oh yes, there is a kind of wisdom in that first hot rush of ad-
venturous feeling. I didn’t know then of his greatness—none of us knew,
but I sensed it, sensed something. Every good thing in my life came from
that, as I know now. Oh indeed it was anything but a vulgar seduction.
And somehow the truth of that must be kept, even if it means concealing
meaningless facts.”
Suddenly the torrent ceased and she sat perfectly still. Vincent re-
mained silent. A great deal of life had just swept by and it awed him. Al-
most for the first time he had a sense of his undertaking as a biographer,
a life-writer.
“I think I have a notion of what you mean,” he said. “But of course
you haven’t yet been very specific about your conditions.”
“Well, conditions—” she murmured. “But it’s exactly that I don’t
want to set conditions.”
She was being evasive and feminine and difficult. He saw that he
must respond in a masculine way—he demanded definiteness. It was
only later that he understood that it was he, not she, who had insisted
on conditions. “We have to be clear about it,” he said. “I must know pre-
cisely what you have in mind.”
“Well then,” she said reluctantly, “the first thing is that my name
mustn’t appear. But no mystery must be made of the person to whom
the letters are addressed. You mustn’t melodramatize the reason why
the person is anonymous. That of course is just a matter for your liter-
0
the unfinished novel
ary skill to handle. It’s a matter of tone, and surely you can manage to
do it delicately.”
She paused and waited for his assent.
“I think there ought to be no difficulty about that,” he said.
She hurried on. “Then there is the matter of my letters to Buxton.
He has them, and it’s possible that he will show them if you ask. Now in
regard to those letters—”
He had not been looking at her, he was looking down at his drink on
the table. When she suddenly broke off her speech it was part of what
he believed was his diplomatic reserve not to lift his eyes. So he did not
see her face, and he only heard the cry she uttered, the great “Oh” which
began as a wail and finished as a sob.
The cry struck him cold to the heart. Her quick hand covered her
mouth and she closed her eyes. He saw her for a moment as she sat
there with her clenched eyes and her stopped mouth. When she uncov-
ered her face again it was almost composed. It was even stern, forbid-
ding pity. But the cry in all its horrid coarseness hung in the air, heard
still by both of them.
It was a graceless cry from an unaccepting spirit, and it was animal,
awkward, gross. As Garda Thorne sat here now, there was every mark of
mind upon her. Mind shone from her wonderful blue eyes, it informed
the curve of her cheek, it was in the very tendons of her fine brown hands.
But the cry came from behind mind, from the incommunicable privacy
of flesh, at the sight of youth irrecoverably gone and death wholly real.
For that, as Vincent knew, was what Garda had seen, and the tone and
timbre of her cry shocked him. In literature he knew and loved the idea
of death as the element that carries and volatilizes the savor of life, like
the alcohol in wine. But it was not in reality the way it was in literature.
Some day Garda Thorne’s mind would take hold of this sudden horrify-
ing vision of hers, this coarse, feral cry, and write a story around it. The
story she would write, the story of a woman perceiving death as a real-
ity, would be bound to issue in a mood of high, chastened acceptance.
Death, in that story, would be quite overcome and refined by art. There
is no art that can encompass the panic fear of flesh, and the mind rec-
ognizes what the flesh feels only to betray it. But Vincent had heard the
pain of the flesh itself and it was the negation of all the conciliations that
literature had ever made. It was too terrible to be kept in memory.
Garda Thorne said, “We will talk about this again, Vincent—when
I’m less likely to act like a fool.”
He had nothing to answer.
1
the unfinished novel
It was Harold Outram who interrupted the silence they shared. Who-
ever would have come up at that moment would have been intrusive and at
a disadvantage, but what Outram said was, “Have you two been chatting?”
Garda Thorne’s eyes were as furious as her voice. She said, “Yes,
Harold, chatting—and isn’t it sweet of us?”
Outram flushed up and stood there looking hurt and haughty. When
The Journey Abandoned_The Unfinished Novel Page 20
