Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “Yes, Hermione – indeed you were. And it was Anthea Lambert.”

  “Anthea!”

  “I was surprised, I confess. She has always appeared so little interested. She wished, she said, to be the first to express pleasure in the broadcast. It must be her excuse, she added, for a telephone-call at this hour.”

  “Dear Anthea.” Miss Shaxby is scarcely less pleased than her brother. “I am so glad she listened.”

  “She did so with two friends. One of them was Miss Bave. You recall meeting her? The lady who wrote the excellent and sympathetic study of poor Gissing.”

  “Yes, indeed. And the other?”

  “An American scholar – one, it seems, who is something of an authority on Landor. He sounds unexceptionable.”

  “Unexceptionable, Charles?”

  “I mention the point because Anthea proposes to bring him to tea one afternoon later in the week. His name is Dauncey.”

  “That will be very nice.” Miss Shaxby is now tidying up her darning and preparing for bed. She pauses however and frowns as if in some effort of recollection. “Did you say Dauncey?”

  “Yes, Dauncey.” Sir Charles drains his nightcap – and then he too seems to catch at a memory. “But of course . . . and it never occurred to me! A relation, quite conceivably. I must make a note to find out whether the old fellow is still alive. Ignorance might appear unmannerly.”

  “So it might.” Miss Shaxby, as she moves across the room, accepts this considerate thought with gravity. Then – unexpectedly – she a little wistfully sighs. “Dear Charles – when have I known you unmannerly yet?”

  FIVE

  In Oxford the year dies in June – and with it the youth of a quarter or more of those who constitute the place what it is. Through hypertrophied, harassing and it may be haunting competitive examinations the fair congregation is dismissed, while yet in its budding-time of health and hope and beauty, to entombment in the Malayan Police, in manufactories of cocoas or detergents; in Parliament, in provincial seats of learning, or wherever else some narrow plot may be found. And these grimly ineluctable annual obsequies are celebrated by balls of Edwardian expensiveness and elaboration, by gatherings for the degustation of incomprehensibly facetious Latin speeches, and by solemnities at which the especially distinguished and decrepit are entitled to extra strawberries and cream. This order of things the young and middle-aged alike take very much for granted, but there are those betwixt and between – those, that is to say, in their really serious years – to whom the season is irrational and disturbing. To be swept off the footpath at ten o’clock in the morning by children in dance-frocks or tail-coats – ourselves of but five years ago – or to find the Bodleian Library closed because our colleagues are imitating the appearance and behaviour of macaws in the adjacent Sheldonian Theatre: this, if not irritating, is unsettling. It induces for a time the uneasy feeling of an Oxford gone restless, bumpy and impermanent; and it has as one issue a frequent uttering of the rather mechanical question, “When are you going down?”

  Garth Dauncey’s car had scarcely negotiated the Woodstock Road roundabout when Anthea Lambert found that she had made this enquiry. For a moment the young man hung fire – partly perhaps because he had to elucidate the idiom and partly because he was executing a rapid sweep round a bus. He then with an admirable union of ease and gravity replied, “I’ve been thinking we might go down together.”

  “You surprise me, Mr Dauncey. Where are we to go?”

  “To Florence. In the interest of the same thing that we’re after this afternoon – literary research. And we’ll take the old lady.”

  “The old lady?”

  “Miss Bave. She knows the period backwards.”

  “And will act as a chaperone, Mr Dauncey, and make it all quite proper?”

  But this of Anthea’s, if offered as sarcasm, was ineffectual. Garth Dauncey briskly nodded. “Fine. I hadn’t thought of it – but so she will. You don’t mind high summer in the north of Italy?”

  Anthea marked in herself with disapproval some approximation to mental – even to emotional – confusion. “Aren’t you,” she asked coldly, “a little forcing the pace?”

  “Sorry.” Dauncey eased his foot on the accelerator. “I just don’t allow for your crazy English roads. And you did say we were to be at the Shaxbys’ at four-thirty.”

  “I don’t in the least want to go to Florence.” Anthea began a careful speech. “I have only one relation there, whom I haven’t seen for years, and to whom I should have very little to say. So clearly—”

  “Your brother? Then aren’t we in precisely the same boat?” Dauncey offered this with the greatest candour as a notable bond. “My father and I haven’t been a dozen hours in each other’s company since I was born. He takes not the slightest interest in me. But I have a hunch, all the same, that it’s about time to look him up.”

  “Perhaps he too was given tea by Landor?”

  This was again an ineffectual shaft. “He couldn’t have been; Landor died in 1864, and my father wasn’t born until 1875.”

  “Then it will be some time before a centenary in the family threatens you.”

  Dauncey shook his head. “There won’t be any supper for Wendell Dauncey, I guess. And that, for your father, appears to have been my father’s charm. Your father had a wonderful eye, it’s clear, for failures and ineffectives, and fed them cunningly into his books. There’s commonly—isn’t there?—that skilfully disposed area in grisaille. It’s in the background always – or certainly is never brought forward for more than a single scene – but it’s a very important element in the whole system of tones employed. There’s a considerable resemblance between a great Lambert and a great Velasquez.”

  For a moment Anthea was silent. It struck her both that this remark was true and that nobody had yet offered it to the world in a textbook. “You mean,” she presently asked, “that my father became intimate with your father in order to have on hand a convenient patch of grey drapery? I don’t know that literary research into relationships of that kind appeals to me.”

  “Don’t be a prig.” As he uttered his outrageous injunction the young man took his eye from the road to glance swiftly at his companion. She had flushed with indignation – and on this rise in emotional temperature he deftly pounced. “May I call you Anthea? There’s this old family connection, after all.”

  “Yes; but I’d rather not be insulted at the same time.”

  “But weren’t you preparing to be thoroughly priggish – or to give an exhibition of ghastly English good taste? We must be obliged to writers and artists for their works, but avoid scrutinising their lives, in case they turn out to have been not quite nice. Of course it’s true enough.” Dauncey raised his voice, for his car was an open one and now again moving at high speed. “The lives of artists are often a mess, and sometimes it kind of spreads. Do you know about Landor, for instance? When we go to the Villa Landor I’ll tell you about the end of his days. But a lot that isn’t edifying can be instructive – and fascinating. Sometimes, no doubt, the truth about a man, or a relationship, is thoroughly dull – duller than some fancy picture in high colours that legend has concocted of him. Sometimes, though, it’s the other way about. One never knows – not unless one goes to see. My father is a painter, and his paintings have never excited anybody. Nor, one would now suppose, has he. But his pictures may be dim not because he has always been so, but directly and absolutely because he once blazed like a meteor. Or consider your father. With him the meteor-theory holds the field. His life is thought to have been so full of passions, loyalties, involvements, and these he is supposed for ten years to have poured so resistlessly into fiction, that a cautious old literary person like this that you’re very kindly taking me to see is all for smoothing over and wrapping up. Didn’t you think that was the tenor of his talk?”

  “Well, yes – I did.”

  “He told his little story – which interested me quite a bit – in order to present Mark Lambert
as an aloof observer, deliberately sticking to the artist’s contemplative habit. But at other times he was plainly on hot bricks in case a little centenary rooting round in a biographical way should result in dynamiting the decencies. Is that a fair summary?”

  “It’s at least not quite a travesty.” Anthea paused. “And do you really suggest that I should go to Florence and start dynamiting the decencies round my own father’s grave?”

  “Of course not – if you put it that way.” Garth Dauncey was silent for some time. Glancing at him, Anthea saw with surprise that it was he who was now flushed. “Forget it, Anthea. I guess American bad taste is quite as ghastly as English good. Of course you don’t want to take a spade to the Mark Lambert legend. I can see it just wouldn’t be delicate.”

  “What utter rot!” Whether accidentally or by design, Dauncey’s choice of words had decidedly touched off a spark. “Nothing would be more tiresome to me, I promise you, than having a smoothed over, wrapped up, and considerately edited father. But, as a matter of fact, it has never been quite that. I have a feeling that nothing much has ever knowingly been concealed from me; and that none of the surviving people who knew my father well is acquainted with any very notable skeleton in his cupboard. But along with my father’s memory there goes a sort of uneasiness, a nervousness that must in some way be a legacy from the man as he lived. It’s as if his friends were never quite sure they might not be button-holed and invited to look at something horrid in the back-garden. I’m not against having a bit of a dig.”

  “But a more or less private dig?”

  “Well, yes.” Anthea frowned, as if the discovery of this discreet disposition in herself surprised her and required justification. “Suppose, for the sake of argument, that my father was subject to some grave moral frailty that was significantly related to his work. I’d rather know it than not. I’d rather, even, discover it myself than have it discovered for me. And eventually, of course, it would be proper that it should become general knowledge. But I admit that it wouldn’t, as you say, be delicate to make large expository public gestures with the spade myself. I’m prepared to agree there with Miss Bave, who has preached me a little sermon on leaving such jobs to professionals. Well, I’ll leave it to you, who are so interested. Isn’t it rather a sudden interest, by the way?”

  Not perhaps wholly to his vexation, Garth Dauncey was at this moment interrupted by Lord Nuffield, who sent bearing down upon him one of those towering truck-loads of embryonic motor-bodies which maintain a mysterious two-way traffic between Birmingham and Oxford. Only when he had negotiated this hazard with exaggerated care did the young man speak. “My interest in Mark Lambert is far greater now that I know you.”

  “It adds the personal angle?”

  “Sure, sister – it does just that.” Ironically drawling, he gave her one of his swift glances across the wheel. “And that certainly is a beautiful expression – a vurry beautiful expression. You’ve certainly gotten the literary instinct, Anthea Lambert; you have it in your blood.”

  “I don’t think your efforts as a stage American are a bit funny. And hasn’t your father provided you with rather more of a personal angle all along? He was an intimate friend of my father’s, it seems, although so much younger a man. Have you never been prompted to take up Mark Lambert with him?”

  “Only once. He’s not an easy person to take things up with. And in fact, and as I’ve said, I’ve seen little more of him than you have of your brother.” Dauncey accelerated. “Would you care to hear about me?”

  “Yes – in fact, decidedly. The Shaxbys will expect me to have some decent minimum of knowledge. They are rather old-fashioned people.”

  “Fine. My father was raised in Texas – and, when he was a lad, from Texas to Rome and Florence was still quite a long way. It’s true that money was fairly easy. You know Texas?”

  Anthea considered. “I imagine it has a lot of cattle.”

  “It has everything. You name it, we have it.” Dauncey delivered himself of this slogan as of a simple faith. “But my father’s folk, although in with the prosperity of the state and able to maintain an artist in the family if they were minded to it, haven’t in fact gone on record as showing much impulse that way. So I conclude my father must have needed, and possessed, quite a lot of his own steam. Enough combustion, put it, to take him right off the surface of Texas and into the outer space of Italy. But that colossal journey used him up, or so I read the matter. He was en disponibiliti, as the novelists used to say, as a satellite, and finding one or another massive and impressive body to revolve round was as much as his later energies stretched to. That, for a time at least, was how your father came in.”

  “Did my father collect satellites?”

  “The satellites had to have something – and I should give a wrong impression if I implied that, as a young man, my father didn’t have that. Indeed, he’s still like our own moon in this: that he suggests a hidden face that might be not without its surprises. And it’s of a sort of lunar charm, incidentally, that the presented face might remind you, although veiled behind an extraordinary reticence. Somebody once said that he appeared like a man under a cloud, but that in fact he was merely behind one. To what extent he positively emerged over the business of getting married, I don’t know. But marry he did – suddenly, violently and, one gathers, vastly against all expectation – and I’m the consequence. I may be called the sole consequence, at least of any permanence. My mother died when I was a few months old, and my father rubbed his eyes – one would hazard it was that rather than dried them – and returned to his former orbital occasions. Do we turn at the first corner?”

  Anthea nodded. “Do you know that some of your Americanisms are quite authentic? We take the first turning.” She waited until this manoeuvre was executed. “And you? After, I mean, your mother’s death?”

  “I must have been an object of some perplexity. Conceivably I might have become the centre of a new system myself, with my father making a whole-time job of circling me. But I lacked, I suppose, the requisite mass. Some strong force of repulsion came into play. Before I was twelve months old I had vanished from the Florentine sky and landed with something of a bump – which indeed I was too young to feel – in Texas. Everything went very well; I was no burden to prosperous relations; and my father never complicated matters by sending any suggestions – or enquiries, as far as I know. He has always continued to live in Italy – as you might say mooning around. I’ve paid him two or three very short visits, or rather calls, in recent years. And that’s the whole of our common history.”

  “You give rather a sardonic slant to it all.” Anthea turned in her seat to look candidly at her companion. “Is that just literary habit, or does it represent your really not very much liking it?”

  “Not much liking it, I suppose. But I’ve no strong feelings, I’d say.

  “I’m not so sure. Here was this world of expatriate artists and writers and so forth, and you were turfed out of it in infancy. Sent back to Texas and singing to the cattle, or whatever children do there. As you grew up, you decided to start resenting it – resenting the exclusion from that wonderfully cultivated world. Hence Landor and so forth – your setting up, you know, as a young professor of that sort of thing. Hence your impulse, too, to pick up Mark Lambert’s daughter and exploit her in investigating Mark Lambert, the central figure in the world from which you were shut out.” Anthea settled back in her seat as she comfortably pursued this analysis. “We’re to return to Florence and break in – or rather you are, using me as a sort of jemmy. It’s a picture to which considerable psychological interest must be said to attach. Only—” Anthea broke off abruptly and with difficulty kept her head from bumping the windscreen. “Why ever did you brake like that?”

  “To turn round, of course.”

  “Don’t be an ass.” Anthea spoke the more witheringly for having felt an obscurely motivated stab of panic.

  Dauncey impassively continued the operation upon which he had e
mbarked. “I wouldn’t say, Anthea, that you’re too clever. Brains go with your style of beauty well enough. But when you set them smugly to work to pervert truth—”

  “I did no such thing. And you are the most intolerable man I know.”

  “I said to pervert truth.” Dauncey spoke carefully – and the better to do so abandoned entirely the controls of his car, so that it stood still, spanning the road. “Or is it to nip it in the bud? Yes, that’s better. A small bud of truth appearing between us – just venturing above the surface of the ground. And you go for it. Are you so scared that it will grow into a tree?”

  “I can’t think what you are—” Anthea paused, preserved from completing this prevarication by a sudden angry hooting in her left ear. Although the road was not a busy one, it so happened that the hold-up was already extensive. “For goodness’ sake stop clowning and straighten the car.”

  “Which direction?” Dauncey spoke at leisure through a crescendo of hooting and honking.

  “We’re going out to tea. We don’t break engagements because of scenes.”

  Dauncey gave his unexpected shout of laughter – so loudly that it penetrated the din and considerably increased the indignation of the waiting drivers. Anthea had a disturbed impression that one of them was descending in a threatening manner from the cab of a lorry. “Didn’t I tell you?” the young man disregardingly cried. “Didn’t I say that you are a terrible prig?”

  Anthea closed her eyes resignedly. “Very well. Drive on, entirely on your own argumentative terms. This is not a scene and these people are not shouting at you. But do drive on.” She waited until the car was smoothly in motion again. They were still, she saw, outward bound. “Does it occur to you,” she asked, “that our histories have a good deal in common? But that we’ve reacted in different ways?”

  “There certainly isn’t much connection between aerodynamics and Walter Savage Landor.” Dauncey spun his car with luxurious ease round a hay-cart. “And no doubt your course marks much the larger independence of mind.”