“I can guess.” Anthea spoke soberly. “Although I don’t remember a person – only the painting of the anchorites, which I grew to like more and more.”
“My father’s words were simply, ‘It was poor Mark’s little girl.’ Oddly enough, I hadn’t, for some moments, any notion whom he meant.”
“But this is surely delightful.” Hermione Shaxby took the situation firmly in hand. “Neither before or after Mark’s death was your father, Garth, really substantially cut off from the life of the Pastorelli. And, Anthea, he must have taken you on expeditions to the galleries from time to time.”
Anthea nodded. “I wish I could remember him; it’s the least I ought to be able to do, since he has managed to remember me. But I just don’t. He can’t have kept it up until I came away. For by then, you know, I was ten.” She turned to Garth. “And then what happened?”
“My father jumped to his feet, and for a moment I thought he was so upset that he intended to turn me out. But it was nothing like that. He reached down a large brown-paper bag from a high dusty shelf—”
“He produced a document?” Sir Charles asked this question in what appeared to be some alarm.
“Nothing like that.” Garth was amused. “He produced a spotless panama hat, planted it with a nicely calculated negligence on his distinguished head, and led me by the arm from the room. He had odd drifts, I should tell you, of what might be called spontaneous and perfectly normal paternal feeling. This was far the most notable of them. We strolled down the hill through those crumbling houses, across the wooden contrivance that passed – and probably still passes – for the shattered Ponte Santa Trinita, and were presently in the Uffizi. The thing might be called our golden morning, our glimpse of each other as father and son. And Anthea – or rather the memory of Anthea taking her first steps in artistic appreciation – had done the trick.”
There was again a silence. Sir Charles – a thing unusual with him – bore some appearance of being at a loss. “It was an occasion,” he presently ventured, “in which, my dear Garth, you must have taken considerable satisfaction.”
“It had the satisfaction attending any substantial discovery. Mark Lambert, I discerned, had been the true emotional centre of my father’s life. It was only Lambert and what was Lambert’s – a small daughter, say, round-eyed before those fierce and busy little men – that touched him at all poignantly.”
“Isn’t that rather an extreme inference?” Sir Charles was swiftly urbane. “Although the two, as I well know, were very close friends indeed.”
“It was less an inference than an intuition, sir. And the point is that it led me to another. We looked at the anchorites together and were highly delighted – my father affecting to be mortified because he had forgotten one of the old men lurking in a tree. And after that we spent an hour or thereabouts in two or three of the adjacent rooms. I had never done that with a painter, so perhaps I formed an exaggerated impression of something that, in my father, appeared to approximate to a special power. It was less critical power proper – the ability to analyse and assess the specific works before us – than an almost uncanny feeling for what I’d call their genetics: what the painters had been after, and the stages by which they had arrived at their goal.”
“I am with you entirely.” Sir Charles spoke with professional gravity. “That sort of swift and intuitive sympathy is – in the sphere of art, at least – a rare thing. And your father has it, without a doubt. It may not, however, be altogether a blessing to an artist.”
“It’s something I’d like to have inherited from him, whether in one sphere or another. But my point is that our morning in the Uffizi loosened us up for a time, my father and me. We had lunch together – in a quite shocking place—”
“A shocking place?” Miss Shaxby was puzzled.
“He has a perverse streak in him—isn’t it mentioned in those last pages of the Memorandum Book?—and particularly when, so to speak, he does at all emerge from within himself. He affected to believe that I was longing for what he called real home cooking, and took me to a place where we had Southern fried chicken and waffles and heaven knows what. There was a notice on the door asserting that one could get the best meal in Florence upon simply mentioning some Boston paper.”
“Which I hope you did.” Sir Charles was unexpectedly amused. “And this, too, is something which, in your father, I quite clearly remember: a freakish strain which his extreme shyness commonly inhibited him from exercising. But the vein didn’t last?”
“Only during the meal, and through part of the walk that we took afterwards. While it held, I tried to get him to talk of Mark Lambert. I hadn’t ventured on it before. But I was tremendously curious.”
“We can readily believe it.” Sir Charles permitted himself to deliver this somewhat drily. “And did you have any success in your attempt?”
“Very little. It turned into my doing most of the talking myself. Looking back on that walk now, I see it as in a sort of comical contrast to your walk – the one, I mean, that in your radio talk you described yourself as taking with Lambert. Yours was a reasonably planned expedition amid the tranquillities of San Miniato; and at least you heard what Lambert said. This was an aimless prowl through the hubbub and jostle of the city; much of what one of us designed for the other never reached its destination; and I was a good deal distracted by wondering how my father could have survived for years his particular way of taking the traffic of the place. He treated it as if it wasn’t there – as no more it was, I suppose, when Florence was new to him. Still, despite all this, something did get through.”
“But largely, you say, from you to him?”
“He said a little about Lambert, but in a reticent way and with every indication that pressing the subject would drive him into his shell again. On the other hand he did seem prompted to draw me out, and as we pursued our restless course up the Tornabuoni I must have talked with a good deal of enthusiasm about the novels. At first he seemed content with as much of this as reached him; and that, as I’ve said, was not a great deal. But presently our wanderings took on a hint of purpose, and eventually we came to rest in the Piazza di San Marco. In that jaded month it was a dusty place, but we accepted such refuge from the trolley-buses and Vespas as its scanty trees afford. And there my father heard me out – on The Cosmopolitans and Lucia’s Changeling particularly, for it was these that were freshest in my head. I didn’t figure it, by the way, that his old friend’s novels were particularly fresh in his head; indeed, he seemed vague about them, and I guessed that any pleasure he got from my talk consisted in its calling up things he had once enjoyed and since denied himself. I didn’t, perhaps, do too badly. When I had finished, he paid me a compliment.”
“A compliment?” Sir Charles did not dissimulate his surprise. “Then, whatever it was, it was the more prizeable, I am prompted to say, for being something out of the way. Your father is too modest a man to pay compliments unless strongly moved. He would regard ninety-nine out of a hundred such things as impertinent. But my dear fellow, I need not instruct you on his almost painful degree of sensibility.”
“Which we can’t be sure that Garth doesn’t inherit.” Anthea offered this to her host with gravity. “I’ve found that it takes a world to draw him out. And is he going to repeat the compliment? I doubt whether he can bear to.”
Sir Charles, whom a vein of this sort had evident power to discompose, found a resource in passing the cigarettes again. “I hope,” he said, “to hear about this encounter just as much as Garth will tell.”
“I can certainly tell you what my father said. It was simply that I mightn’t write, but that I could read . . . And then he said something about the little girl.”
NINE
“The little girl?” Anthea Lambert was puzzled. “He didn’t mean—”
“Yes – you. He said that your brother Raymond showed small sign of regarding the novels as a patrimony, but he thought the girl had been one who would receive such a dowry with
understanding. I felt him to be speaking on the strength of your response to that painting in the Uffizi long ago.”
“And I suppose it was then that you made your note to look me up?” Anthea has turned a little pale. “How, Garth, did you picture me? As an elderly spinster in a private hotel in Bath, fond of lending her dear papa’s books to the other old ladies? Or did your intuition tell you at once that I was a renegade person mucking about in a lab?”
“I didn’t need to make a note, and I wasn’t for long at all at sea about your age. I certainly made up my mind to find you. I felt at once that you would be—well, a very great curiosity. Was that too bad? I’m sure that Sir Charles, in my position, would have done the same.”
Sir Charles, thus impassively appealed to, took refuge in the manipulation of a silver match-box. His sister, who discernibly shared his uneasiness before the obscure duel in which their young visitors intermittently engaged, found nevertheless a readier response. “Anthea might have been equally curious had rather similar circumstances first brought her an account of Garth.”
“Anthea can’t escape her heredity, after all.” Garth Dauncey appeared determined to talk this particular problem out. “In that aspect she will still be a very great curiosity to me – even when I have come to know her very well, and for a very, very long time.”
Perhaps because this was a remark upon which a pause of silence seemed only too likely to succeed, Anthea made haste to follow it up. “Isn’t it for a very, very long time that you’ve been promising to arrive at some point you haven’t, in fact, yet brought us in sight of?”
Making one of his sporadic raids upon the unexpected, Sir Charles Shaxby burst out laughing. “How true it is that heredity will break through! Anthea, you may work in a lab, but you can turn a phrase that would be wholly right for Lucia herself – or even for my own most adored of all your father’s creations, Edith Saltire. And, as with them, what you say is to the point. Garth has evidently yet some way to go. Isn’t it from San Marco to the Piazzale Michelangelo – or at least to the prospect of it?”
“Yes, sir. My father and I sat on for some time, mostly in silence – or mostly in silence after one more thing had been said. ‘I’m afraid,’ he murmured, ‘that I have nothing of the sort which I can leave you.’ He had brought a walking-stick out with him, as well as that panama hat; and for some time had been tracing a dim but elaborate design on the patch of mere dust – for it was that – in front of us. As he spoke, he obliterated it with a rapid zigzag movement. It wasn’t a symbolism requiring much elucidation, I guess – but he did say one further thing. ‘You must just reflect, Garth, that there are limits to the advantageousness of being able to point back to a parent of genius.’ And on that we sat mum for a time. There was probably something I ought to have said, but I just didn’t find it. I’d put in a lot of time as a kid, you see, rather feeling that to have a dad would be pretty good on almost any terms – even, say, if he was the sort they kept pretty permanently in gaol. But I’m sure it never came into my head to pine for a genius. So there seemed nothing neat or satisfactory to say, and after a couple of minutes I quit trying to find anything. We got up, finally, and walked on to the Porta alia Croce, and from there to the Arno.
“It looked as if the curtain had rung down on the abortive little play of our resumed relationship. For one thing, mere topography was against its continuance, for we were following the river on a pavement which you’ll remember as scarcely fit to accommodate a cat; and even when moving in single file and with all a cat’s circumspection, one uncomfortably feels the wind of the passing street-cars stirring, as one might say, in one’s whiskers. Again, there was enough of devastation in that view to depress any old inhabitant that loved the place: the bridges all blown except the Ponte Vecchio – and round about that, sufficient confusion to suggest that two monstrous aquatic creatures, flailing their way ruinously from up and down the river, had met there as if in some outrageous encounter at a barrier. The image is a muddle – but so, in a way sufficiently profound to be alarming, was the scene. Destruction slapped out blindly and instantaneously by the same species of being that had put a millennial labour into building the place: it had an ugly effect on the mind, like a first premonitory symptom, say, of one’s own approaching madness. Of course life was with a large obviousness triumphantly going on as usual and people were doing the old familiar things: shovelling sludge endlessly through sieves, fishing for lord knows what, contentedly washing clothes in a rich solution of mud. And there was reconstruction going on too, for they had begun rebuilding the Ponte alia Carraia. It was a remark of mine about this that prompted my father to that day’s final and – as I think you’ll agree – tantalisingly problematical sequence of utterances.
“I said – or rather I shouted forward into his ear between the whisk of one street-car and another – that this rebuilding was getting on well. I offered this, I suppose, by way of an endeavour to elevate our common nervous tone by calling attention to one of the more cheerful features of the scene. As such, it didn’t get very far, for my father replied – turning momentarily in a sort of dim gloom to do so – that he judged the design thin. 1 rejoined that it looked as if the final effect was going to depend upon the colour of the stone.”
“Quite right.” Sir Charles Shaxby, who for several minutes had been listening with eyes somewhat disconcertingly closed, opened them to the accompaniment of an emphatic nod. “You had undoubtedly discerned the intended emphasis.”
“I don’t kid myself it was an artistic perception at all out of the way. That whole scene gains half its beauty, obviously enough, from a kind of restricted palette which achieves immense variety while keeping everything within so many tones or shades of plain Arno mud; and in that aspect the stone of the new bridge locks the whole composition together in a very satisfactory manner. Well, this remark of mine, for what it was worth, had the effect of bringing my father to a halt, and for some moments we leant over the embankment and idly scanned the farther bank. When my father spoke, it was to ask a question clearly prompted by my late excursion into aesthetics. ‘And you don’t paint either, Garth?’
“I said I did not – and ventured to remind him that it was an activity less often in the forefront of life in Texas than in Tuscany, as he must once have known. He paid no attention to this, and I noticed that his glance had shifted upward a little from the verge of the Oltrarno – to the eroded stump, I concluded, of the Porta a San Niccolo, upon the top of which the afternoon sun was at play. But, although there was a long silence, his theme remained with him. For presently he spoke again. ‘Raymond Lambert has come to nothing. But what, I wonder, about the girl? Do you know about her? Would she do anything?’
“Naturally I had, at that time, no answer. If I had been able to announce that Anthea Lambert occupied herself with studying the behaviour of air streams upon cambered surfaces, or whatever it is, I’m afraid my father would not have accepted it as ‘doing’ in his rather special sense – although he might well have regarded it as less hopeless than the activities he associated with an embryonic professor of literature. By this time I guess I was a trifle irritated, and I said I knew nothing of Lambert’s daughter, but that there was some statistical probability that she was married to a doctor or a lawyer or a civil servant, had two children, very little money, an impossible house in an English provincial town, and enough guts to make a damned good job of it,”
“Thank you very much.” Anthea was amused. “It was a generous conjecture, Garth, and I’m sorry I don’t measure up.”
“There’s plenty of time for something roughly of the same sort.” Delivering himself of this, Garth disconcerted Miss Shaxby by offering her the ghost of a wink. “But my father certainly saw no charm in statistical probability. In fact it reduced him to what might unkindly be called his dimmest dismalest, and he murmured that it was all only too likely. At that I let him have it.”
“You let him have it?” It was Sir Charles’s turn to be startled.
Garth nodded. “Of course he was oldish – round about seventy – and you might think it hopeless. But I was becoming fond of him, I think; and I had to acknowledge that he was doing his best to take some interest in me. I didn’t see why he shouldn’t be shaken out of all this golden age gone by and talents given in vain stuff, and do a little downright living and enjoying in his declining years.”
“There!” In rash triumph Anthea turned to Sir Charles. “You see there is a lot of sense in Garth, in spite of his melancholy calling.”
“No doubt, my dear. But I wonder whether that was his father’s conclusion. You spoke, Garth, at some length?”
“I said that gentle restrospective melancholy in an ivory tower ought to be regarded by artists as no better than measles, and had better be left to cultivated old—”
Very understandably, Garth stopped and blushed. Sir Charles was highly amused. “To cultivated old fogies, my dear boy, and retired gallery directors? There is almost everything to be said for that point of view. But to your father – and thus fired off at him at the end of your little jaunt – it may have come as rather a large proposal? He did not quite instantly concede your case?”
“He certainly did not.” Garth had a cheerful grin for this refined banter. “My father’s Weltanschauung was pretty well unaffected, I have to admit. But my proposition did stir him up to say one or two things more.”
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