‘Is that a… sect?’
‘By God it is. They were strict, my God were they strict! I can’t remember any moment since I was born when I didn’t know very well that sex was the original sin — and anything to do with sex. I went through hell. That’s why, one reason why, I was so keen on Gregory — his cool indifference to it all.’ He laughed down his nose. ‘I daresay that’s why I married young — to save myself from eternal damnation.’
Your husband, he thought abruptly, had no such anxieties. He could wait, and make his good marriage.
‘Oh, I’ve no doubt that Harriet Ellis was his mistress — at some time. Before my time. Nothing to do with me.’
‘She’s still devoted to him, eh?’ said Lambert.
‘It’s not only that,’ Beatrice said. She was reflecting aloud. The fact that he was listening was unimportant. ‘She clings to us because knowing us reassures her — socially.’
‘She needs some reassurance,’ Lambert said with genial brutality. ‘As a writer she’s nobody. Never sells.’
Both he and Gregory, she thought, admire success, and dislike knowing or meeting failures. But there is a great difference between them. Lambert drops people the minute they go out of fashion, the very minute he smells failure on them. Gregory goes on being casually pleasant to them, even kind. Casually? Am I being unjust to him? Yes, and no. If he sees, with his own eyes sees a human being on the rack, he behaves well and kindly. Until that happens, he is as indifferent to their un-happiness as a stone….
‘My dear Lambert, you’re wrong about poor Harriet. I’ve read three or four of her novels. They’re not at all bad.’
‘Oh, nonsense,’ he said, with the same coarse energy. ‘I tell you, she’s never made it. She never will, she’s finished.’
He really is servile, Beatrice thought: servile and at the same time brutal and self-confident. What a monster! No, very ordinary.
‘What time is it?’
He looked at his watch, and jumped up. ‘Six, by God. I must go, my dear. I’ve stayed too long. You must be tired.’
‘Help me up.’
He came forward, deft and spry, bending his long ugly body, and got her easily to her feet. Through an uncurtained window she saw the floodlit penthouses of Grosvenor House: half vaporised by the mist rising round them from the Park, they had so little substance that it seemed possible they were held up only by the darkness. A younger self woke in her and stared, shivering. They reminded her, at a great distance in time, of nights when she was a child looking with a child’s rigid passion of expectation at the lighted windows of houses in the distant valley. Lost, she thought foolishly, lost.
She felt cold. ‘Draw all the curtains before you go,’ she said, ’and touch the bell, please…. Now you can go. Do remember me to your wife.’
Chapter Eleven
The last day of the year was clear and mild, a charming piece of hypocrisy on the part of a climate which never knows its own mind.
Coming into Gregory’s room in Rutley House at five o’clock, Lambert asked, ‘What are you doing this evening? Come and have a bite with me. Penny has taken the boy to her mother’s for the night.’
‘This evening? I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m dining with Arthur Blount.’
‘You’ve always got on well with that fellow, haven’t you?’
‘Fortunately. Since I married his sister.’
This was not quite true. At their first meeting he had thought Blount a cold languid creature — and felt an instant respect for him. And envy. He possessed, easily, everything that Gregory Mott, if he had been invited to choose, would have chosen: he was worldly, a brilliant talker, charming in company, and singularly free of any wish to impress — but why should he wish it, since in addition to a fine brain he had been given birth and enough money not to need to market his talents? Gregory had no talent for intimacy, he was not a fraterniser (one reason why he found it easier to talk to women: they take pains, usually, to be agreeable and they don’t herd), and the advances he made to Blount after their first meeting were so discreet that a less perceptive man might have overlooked them. Blount did not — he even took the trouble to be charming. Yet it had been a long time before Gregory felt, as he did now, fully at ease with him, a long time before he ceased to feel the nervousness of an outmatched fencer.
‘Can’t say I like him, y’know. He’s a cold fish.’
‘No. He’s not. He gives that impression to people who meet him casually. In fact he’s one of the kindest and most generous men in the world.’
‘Well, you know him better than I do.’
‘I’m very fond of him. He’s one of the two men I know I can rely on — in any way, in any situation…. You’re the other.’
‘Good,’ Lambert said in a jaunty voice. ‘I’m glad you feel that. It’s a fact, too. But tell me one thing about Blount — I know you dine with him once or twice every week — has he any vices? Any single human failing that makes him fit to talk to?’
Gregory laughed. ‘I don’t know what you mean by vice. He likes a good dinner and good wines. As for talk — the finest conversation you can have is that of a philosopher who is also a man of the world, and can tell you how it works.’
A derisive gleam sprang in Lambert’s eyes. ‘That’s what you get out of it, is it? I wondered.’
‘Why should I get anything?’
Lambert said easily, ‘Oh, we all do, y’know. Look what I get out of having known you since you were in short breeches. And what you get out of me — a useful dog. Damned useful, if I say it myself.’
‘My dear boy——’
‘No, no, don’t worry. I’m not asking to be patted. The fact that I personally can’t see anything splendid in Mr. Honourable Arthur bloody Blount doesn’t mean he isn’t all you say. He has brains and he’s very decorative. But what the hell use is he? He doesn’t condescend to work, does he? Not he. In fact, he does damn all for the world.’
Arthur should have asked him to dinner, thought Gregory. He felt exasperated and sorry. His affection for Lambert — the only person with whom he had never had to make an effort, and inextricably one of the roots of his life — sharpened his annoyance. He said deliberately,
‘We have plenty of clever chaps doing things. Too many. There’s something to be said for good breeding, when you get it allied with a brain and kindness.’
‘Have it your own way, my dear boy,’ Lambert said, grinning. ‘Y’know, if I didn’t know you like the back of my hand I’d say you were a snob.’
‘Why not? If a liking for what’s most civilised, most engaging, and least narrowly stupid and grasping in our world now is snobbish, very well, I’m a snob, and propose to remain one.’
‘And you’re quite right,’ said Lambert warmly. ‘I mean that, y’know. I talk a lot of rot but, damn it, you know me.’
‘I know I couldn’t run this Rutley circus without you.’
‘We get a dickens of a kick out of it, though, don’t we?’
‘On the whole, yes,’ Gregory said, smiling.
‘Plain yes…. Well — have a good dinner. I’ll be off now. Happy New Year.’
‘To you, too, my dear Lambert.’
In the outer office, Gregory’s secretary was talking to Bonnifet. The young man had been sitting on the edge of her desk. When Lambert came in he stood up, with what struck Lambert as insolent slowness. Ignoring him, Lambert said genially,
‘Well, Diana, my dear, what are you doing to celebrate New Year’s Eve?’
She gave him one of the glances which broke from her like a sexual gesture, nearly involuntary. ‘Mr. Bonnifet is taking me out to dinner.’
‘Oh, is he, indeed?’
‘Any objections, sir?’ said Bonnifet.
‘No.’ He grinned. ‘Behave yourselves.’
‘Old goat.’
‘I quite like him,’ Diana said lightly.
‘Oh, he’s all right. He’s just so pleased with himself and his earth-shaking platitudes. That’s all. I
don’t mind his lechery.’
‘I hadn’t noticed it.’
‘My dear girl——’
‘What your dear girl hopes for is a fillet steak and a lager.’
‘Right,’ Bonnifet said in a young quick voice. ‘I think I can pay for that.’
Since Blount liked to dine late, it was ten when they left the table and returned, for their coffee, cigars, armagnac, to the library. Tonight this meant that Gregory would have to leave in half an hour to attend, as he did every year, Watch Night service in the Abbey. He regretted this. He had found the other guest, an elderly French diplomat, attractive. No one in the world, he thought, is as civilised, intelligent, charming, as a cultivated Frenchman. Saint-Arnoult, a man between sixty and seventy, frail, with a smile of extreme gentleness, seeming very tired, seemed also completely disillusioned but not, not in any way, dry or cynical: his serenity was as remarkable as his lack of illusions. During dinner they had talked about the newest philosophers in France. ‘Not philosophers at all,’ Saint-Arnoult said, with his polite little smile. ‘Politicians. Anxious to keep the places they’ve made for themselves. One should take them seriously only as a symptom of disease. Disease is not a pleasant subject. Forgive me.’
‘I would have said,’ Gregory smiled, ’that of all countries, yours was the least likely to die of any ailment. France and a sane balanced life are words meaning the same thing.’
His brother-in-law laughed gently. ‘Let me warn you, Saint-Arnoult, that Mott is one of those Englishmen whose liking for your country — and its writers and scholars and garage-hands — is so unshakeable that you won’t know whether to be amused or exasperated by it. Or embarrassed.’
‘Why should it embarrass us to be liked? That we don’t deserve it is another matter.’
After dinner, seizing a last chance to impresss himself on a distinguished Frenchman, Gregory said,
‘The only hope for Europe, the only hope for the world, is for your country and mine to unite. Then our deathly efficiency will be tempered by your genius for living and your sense of what is humanly possible, your difficulty in organising yourselves by our feeling for order, your instinct for equality by ours for freedom and tolerance.’
Saint-Arnoult made a light gesture with his old nearly transparent hands. ‘It won’t happen. Your politicians have decided against us. As they have every right to do, they prefer the terribly industrious American and the even more terribly industrious German. In any case, my dear sir, it’s too late. For both of us. You, and we, have learned everything, we know everything; we can no longer act. It’s time to let other nations try to make something of the planet.’
‘I think you’re wrong.’
‘No, no, I am right,’ Saint-Arnoult said gently, smiling. ‘You will see.’
‘My great grief,’ said Gregory, ‘is that I can’t go on trying to convince you. I must go.’
‘Already?’ said Blount.
‘Yes. It’s a quarter to eleven. If I can pick up a cab I shall be all right. If not…. ’
‘Forgive me a moment,’ Blount said to Saint-Arnoult.
He walked to the street door with Gregory. Halting when they reached it, he said in his light voice, ‘I had something to say to you, dear boy. Couldn’t say it in front of Saint-Arnoult, pleasant fellow as he is, don’t you think?’
‘Very pleasant.’
‘You know — I’m sure you knew that I should have been sorry if you’d allowed them to make a knight of you.’
‘Completely irrelevant to a serious writer.’
‘Yes, yes, of course. I’d say: inadequate…. Any writer who wants what you call irrelevant honours is welcome to them. Of course. You certainly ought not to have been placed on that level.’
Not clear where the other man was taking him, Gregory smiled slightly. ‘I’m glad you think I did the right thing.’
‘I must tell you that I wasn’t consulted. Not, that is, until it was too late. And then I warned them that you would refuse.’ He went on with great gentleness and warmth. ‘Any great writer is classless — in the sense that no class can say: He’s ours, he belongs to us——’
Gregory interrupted him. ‘My father was a merchant sailor.’
‘If you’re to be written into any one class, my dear boy, it should be one which is the equivalent of your rank as a writer. Anything else is absurd. Unsuitable.’ A smile softened his long face, which seemed concave because forehead and chin sloped outwards. ‘I’ve had a talk with them about you. I hope that — next time — you won’t want to refuse.’
The sudden movement made by his heart distracted Gregory for a second. He found breath to say calmly, ‘I’ll ask your advice.’
‘Good,’ said Blount. ‘Do…. I wish you’d ask me for something a little harder to give. It would make me happy.’
Gregory felt a surge of gratitude. ‘Thank you.’
‘Good night, dear boy. A happy New Year to you — may it be very happy.’
‘Yours, too,’ Gregory said warmly.
Walking rapidly along Upper Brook Street towards Park Lane he made a great effort to forget the implications of what he had just been told. They were too overwhelming. You may not have understood him, he warned himself: if you think about it too much, you may exaggerate. Better not think about it at all. Leave it…. The real affection he felt for his brother-in-law ran head on into something he did not recognise as a prayer addressed to his luck — luck or skill? — in having, as almost an elder brother, a man whose word carried weight in what it was not absurd to call centres of power.
He smiled. The man, he thought, whom Lambert curses as useless and idle.
A Watch Night service stirred him as no other did. Standing, kneeling, he felt himself filled with a life more intense than his own, spirit and senses, mind and body, as it were open, receiving, alert. To past and future; to the soundless voices of dead parents trying to reach him, their last hold on the light they could no longer enjoy; and to a Voice only to be heard in moments of passionate attention. The shabby weather-worn sea-captain, broad shoulders bent forward, came to him for a second, and shambled away again, driven off by his son’s exultant sense of being part of a living continuity. From this place where he was kneeling the line stretched back as far as the first handful of obscure worshippers. He felt an immense serenity. The joy, for a moment, of communing with another Mind. For a moment, only for a moment, he believed that he grasped the Paradox — time broken into by eternity — then, now, always.
When he left the Abbey he was still too filled with energy to want to take a cab. He walked home — along Birdcage Walk and Constitution Hill to Park Lane. Never had London seemed more… what was the word? More majestic? No, a quieter word than that, a word with more heart. More filled with existence, with the lives of men, women, children, breaking on all sides from the stones, as though the stones flowered. n Park Lane he stopped outside the railings of a house to listen to a gramophone record being played in a curtained room — Brahms? Bach? (It mortified him that, moved as he was by great music, he could never recognise a single piece by its name, however many times he had heard it.) A triumphant outcry of violins brought tears to his eyes: he closed his hands on the frozen iron of the railings.
He thought suddenly: What I ought to have said to that Frenchman… the disease of disbelief from which both our countries, all countries, suffer. To which the only answer is God the Father…. And if Saint-Arnoult had smiled his tired polite smile, or made that gesture, infinitely disillusioned and gentle, with his hands, he would have added: My own belief… my reason, my intellect… the intellectual love of God….
He walked on, excited by a sense of power, of triumph, of walking towards a future, certain, whatever the meaning of his brother-in-law’s hints, to be not less than remarkable.
In his room, he thought: I shan’t sleep.
He looked at his watch: two o’clock. A restless impulse sent him to throw open the curtains at all four windows and let the world into his room.
Through his own shadowy reflection in the panes he looked down at the wide road, turned a bronzed black by the arc-lights, and beyond it at a nearly invisible web of leafless black branches stretched across the mistier blackness of the Park. He went back quickly to the writing-table, and with the briefest pause began writing, the energy in his body a controlled impatience, a fever, driving his hand across the pages. After a time something extraordinary began to happen: the spectral outline of another book, entirely unlike the one he was concentrating on, emerged from the obscurity at the back of his mind. With a mounting excitement he thought (without ceasing for a moment to write): All the fashionable and accepted ideas of social justice, of equality, are a hoax, a shameless lie, a cancer eating into us. Politicians dupe people with the lie — to get and keep power over the simple men who swallow it. In the past it was permissible to say openly that men are not equal. Now the truth has to be denied in public while all the time it is being secretly acted on — even in the churches. Is a village priest the Pope’s equal? The horrible thing is that it is the best, the most generous men who have let themselves be destroyed by their fear of seeming unjust…. The figure of a priest invaded his mind. He belonged, obviously, to the as yet unborn novel. Where the devil, he wondered, do they come from, these characters who rush into my head, unsought, totally unexpected? Especially the ones who force themselves on me violently — like this priest? Who may, now that I look at him, be a Cardinal…. With a shock of delight and amusement, he thought: But of course! I was born — we all are — a bundle of dozens of possibilities. I chose one of them. These obsessive intruding chaps are the others, the ones I refused to be — seizing their chance to live on my nerves and blood, like the ghosts Ulysses fed when he poured the blood of a black sheep on the little hill under the tall poplars…. If I had been born a Roman Catholic I might very well have become a Cardinal, an aristocrat of the Church….
His hand was so stiff that he dropped the pen. A plan born of fever and weariness sprang in his mind…. After the Conference I’ll send Lambert away for a month; he’ll need a rest. Then, at the beginning of October, I’ll take two or even three months off, rent an apartment in Rome, finish the book I’m on now — and let the other grow as it likes in that rich Roman soil….
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