Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “I’d just as soon have nothing, thank you.”

  But he had gone – to return with a tray which shook alarmingly in his hands. “Will you help yourself? Giovanni used to be good at mixing these things. He did it at parties – in the days when anybody came. But Giovanni has left me, no doubt for one of those abominable great hotels. And the others never seem to be about – or only Maria.” Raymond’s voice had gone peevish, and he turned to recover his glass. “My own servants boycott me. As for society, it simply never comes. I sit up here under an ostracism, occasionally suffering wandering scribblers and schoolmistresses. Our own people never come. The Fernalls, for example, and the L’Estranges: they haven’t been up here for years. Nor sent me a card nor made me a sign.”

  Anthea looked at her brother in wonder. “But they never came back after the war! All that society, as you call it, has gone – and probably forever.”

  “I live in the past, you suggest? Certainly I enjoy singularly few opportunities of luxuriating in the present. What if I returned to England? Should I be received? Or ought I to aim at taking lodgings in Oxford, and making my way through such contacts as you are good enough to afford me with the dons? I have two friends among them already, after all.”

  “You mean those I brought to visit you – Miss Chipchase and our Sub-Dean? I’m sorry if they bored you.”

  “Not at all, not at all. They entertained me. And I entertained them. In the afternoon, when I took them about the place, I enjoyed telling them about Poyle.”

  “About Poyle?” Anthea was puzzled – and the more so because she caught in her brother’s glance something suddenly apprehensive and watchful.

  “Never mind, never mind.” Raymond made an evasive gesture which she had come to recognise as habitual with him. “And your young American friend too – I am charmed with him. He is not perhaps quite so witty as Tim L’Estrange, and certainly he has nothing of Basil Fernall’s knowledge of wine or—”

  “Raymond, you really can’t help him to contact his father? It seems so curious that Wendell Dauncey should just disappear, and his whereabouts be unknown even to you. I think that his son, although he has seen very little of him, is attached to him and is uneasy. He feels that his father may be ill—”

  “Or dead?” Raymond’s interruption was accompanied by the same oddly apprehensive glance. Indeed, for the flicker of a second he seemed almost shamefaced. “Another drink?”

  “I’ve hardly begun this one, thank you. You didn’t much keep up with Wendell Dauncey? It appears – although I hadn’t known it – that he was our father’s very close friend.”

  “No doubt. And I have had little to do in life but cultivate such old associations – is that it?”

  “You have had your life to use as you would, I suppose – just as I have.”

  “Thank you.” Unexpectedly, Raymond had flushed darkly – and now he reached with the evident sense of a gesture for the brandy bottle. “I revered my father’s genius too much – revered it or feared it. And I never got away, from it or from this. Don’t be alarmed about the bottle. I remain fit for the society of ladies – even learned ones.”

  Anthea bit her lip. “Why, Raymond, when you allow yourself a little of the truth, do you shy away from it on a bad joke?”

  “Truth is invariably humiliating, and frequently dangerous. If I had a son, I would advise him to form the habit of giving it as wide a berth as possible.” He paused. “You are not amused. Tim, now, would have been delighted. And Basil – well, he would at least have drunk brandy, and not vermouth.”

  “On the other hand”—Anthea flashed this at him—”Tim and Basil appear to have abandoned you. I’m here. And I wish I could help.”

  “Am I in so evident a plight, my dear sister?”

  “People must find you very difficult, I should say. I’m not surprised that you have few regular visitors.”

  “Untouchable – is that it? I grant you my emblem is to be seen on every electrical installation in Italy. Haven’t you noticed? A death’s head. And beneath it, Chi Tocca Muore. Keep off, Anthea! Don’t touch. I might even kill you.” He laughed at her – a queer nervous laugh. “This is the point at which you rise and leave me, declaring that I am hopelessly in liquor. Shall I obligingly fall under the table?” He looked at the small marble-topped affair beside him. “Tavolinaccio!” he exclaimed suddenly, and gave it a kick which brought it with a crash to the marble pavement.

  Anthea sat still and said nothing until her brother, muttering, had set the little table upright again and got himself another glass. “You really are in a bad way, Raymond. You must be—mustn’t you?—to put on a silly turn like that.”

  “I apologise. Sometimes I have an irresistible impulse to upset things: a tavolina, an apple-cart, anything that is about. But here is Maria. Somehow, there is always a meal of sorts. Nothing upsets that. And a Frascati.” He had risen, and now stood beside her as if their entire exchange had been of an unflawed urbanity. “I think I can offer you a rather notable Frascati tonight.”

  They passed from the loggia, now in dusk, through the near-darkness of the cortile. It was that part of the Pastorelli of which Anthea’s memory was clearest. She could still, she believed, find her way about it blindfold; indeed she had often played just such a solitary game there as a child, running with tightly closed eyes from statue to statue in a sort of frozen tig, or feeling her way, with cautiously outstretched fingers, amid the giants and ogres and monsters – sarcophagi and cistae and canopic urns – of her father’s Etruscan collection. They were all there still; and so – it was the only presence certainly benign – was that bronze boy astride the spouting dolphin, laughing and with wind-blown curls, which had been the first object of her devoted love. But Raymond, she suspected, was capable of cutting off the fountain and melting down the boy for grappa. What else he was capable of, she scarcely knew. But she felt, as they sat down together in a sort of ruined stateliness in the great dusky dusty peeling and flaking sala, that he was a figure grown suddenly sinister in her imagination, and that this dinner at the Pastorelli must be her last.

  Whether notable or not, the Frascati appeared to her, from what little she drank of it, to be a potent wine. Nevertheless, together with the meal, it sobered her brother. He made more effort than he had hitherto done to be agreeable. Their coffee had come and gone, and she was thinking that soon she might reasonably go to her room, when it struck her that this effort of Raymond’s had an object. Some curiosity that he had restrained during the earlier days of her visit was alive in him. He was seeking – with his curious uneasiness he was obliquely seeking – for information.

  She had not, after all, been very explicit about the objects of her visit to Florence; and it even occurred to her that what she thought of as his characteristic evasiveness might be in part the reflection of some lack of forthrightness on her own part. And yet she now found herself disposed to remain reticent. She was anxious only that this should all be over. Why it should be so, why a change of disposition should have come upon her, was something that eluded her even to a point of perplexity and an effect of uncivil preoccupation. “The centenary?” she heard herself saying. “It has worked in with a revival of our father’s reputation that was already under way. But you will have heard of all that.”

  “I’ve heard of all that. A cigarette?”

  He smoked only cigars, and was about to light one now. He had thought, then, to buy cigarettes for her, having observed her smoking her own during the preceding days. She was almost touched by the small accommodation, and it came to her that to possess an elder brother in some substantial sense had always stood in her mind as a desirable state of affairs. “Yes, please.”

  He rose to give her a light. “Mr Dauncey,” he said, “I mean young Mr Dauncey – is a professional student of literature?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he hit upon this that you lately mentioned – there being an unpublished novel of my father’s – some time ago?”

/>   Anthea nodded. “Perhaps three years ago, title and all.”

  “That’s very queer.” Raymond took a nervous pull at his cigar. “You must explain it to me.”

  “But you knew too.” The instinct of wariness was growing strong in Anthea. “You knew about The End of It All. And yet you have never revealed it. Isn’t that queer? And how did you come to know?”

  “It was something I picked up.” Raymond was in his turn noncommittal. “It didn’t come to the young man from anything he quite recently read?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “And it hasn’t been confirmed – for either of you – by anything of that sort? You’ve neither of you yet—” Raymond broke off. “I can’t expect you to drink grappa. But if I might find you . . . ” He had risen even while speaking, and before Anthea could intervene he had hurried from the room. When he returned, with a dusty bottle of some liqueur, he was talking again as he entered the door. “I gather that you and the young man would like to find the novel; and so, of course, should I. Unfortunately there is no reason to suppose that it still exists. I remember very well, you know – what isn’t surprising, since I was grown-up at the time – the whole business following my father’s death. Charles Shaxby, together with some fellow that my father employed as an agent, turned the place upside-down in the determination to possess themselves of every scrap of what they called literary property, and very disagreeable it was. There was a notion, I remember, that manuscripts, and even annotated typescripts, might bring money. The twenties were a great time for nonsense of that sort. Shaxby – it was most offensive, I’m bound to say; and I resent it hotly down to this very moment – Shaxby as good as insinuated that I had made away with a number of such things myself with the idea of selling them on the quiet. And he conducted a regular inquisition, as he was legally entitled to do. It was uncommonly disagreeable, as I’ve remarked; but it did leave me fairly confident that nothing had been overlooked. No, The End of It All must have been destroyed by my father long before. The way he spoke of it “

  “He did speak of it?”

  “Not more than two or three times, and almost inadvertently at that, if in a way that set me on the scent of the story.”

  “The story?”

  “He spoke of it, in any case, as of something that would have to be destroyed. And destroyed it was, I haven’t the slightest doubt.” Raymond paused – but it was only to relight his cigar and continue in uncomfortable haste. “So I’m afraid your professional association with young Dauncey – if that is it – will bear no fruit.”

  “I don’t know that I really mind, Raymond. Another great Mark Lambert would be a wonderful thing, I suppose. But it has occurred to me that, if it were only a little less good than the greatest we possess, its appearance in the world now would be something of an anticlimax. Of course, I know Garth doesn’t feel that way.”

  “Garth?” With what could only be affectation, Raymond presented himself as one at a loss.

  “Mr Dauncey – young Mr Dauncey.”

  “Of course . . . I suppose it is that?”

  “Is that? I don’t understand you.”

  Something had gone badly wrong with Raymond Lambert’s cigar. He had taken it from his mouth and turned it round for study. It trembled queerly before his face, so that Anthea had a sudden vision of a desperate man turning some lethal weapon against himself. “I mean,” he said after a moment, “that yours and this young man’s is a professional association? He has got hold of you as Mark Lambert’s daughter, and you have been amiably seeing whether it is possible to do him a good turn?” Raymond hesitated. “I got rather a different notion from something one of those two women said as they went away. But that would be how it is?”

  Anthea looked at her brother for a moment in silence. Whether it was the grappa again or not, he was in an odd state; his mouth, deprived of its cigar, was twitching; there were what appeared to be beads of sweat on his forehead. Unaccountably, Anthea felt within herself what she identified as a sudden stab of fear. It made her answer absolutely. “We are to be married.”

  “I see. The young man is to be congratulated. I hope you will be very happy.” The phrases came – correct, colourless and with a strange effect of automatism – while Raymond got up and fumbled somewhere in the room’s farther darkness for another cigar. He came back to her. “Soon?”

  “Soon.”

  He smiled at her brilliantly – and with the effect, for a moment, of being a creature of imagination and power. And again Sargent’s portrait rose before her. More distinctly than before, she could fancy to herself that she glimpsed her father in Raymond. But she disliked the vision. Raymond with that brilliant smile was assuming, spuriously and repulsively, some bizarre connoisseurship in human futility, human agony, to which he was not entitled. She preferred him uneasy and indecisive. “You will call upon me?” he was saying. “You will call upon the head of the family for the usual offices? I shall have to come to England after all?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “Of course – nothing like that. You are quite right. Nothing like that at all.”

  Just as before she had experienced sudden fear, she experienced now sudden anger, for she felt him treating her as not a person but a thing – as a card, a counter, an element in some private and shoddy joke. While uneasy and evasive, he was a moral being – although a weak one. Like this, he represented substantial evil, so that obscurely she felt she ought to challenge him. But her sense of this was mastered for the time by a powerful impulse simply to get away. She got up. “I shall go to bed now, Raymond. I had a tremendous walk, and I’m more tired than I thought. Good night.” She gave him a level glance that meant more than this neutral speech. And then she left him.

  She had the impression of a chill on the worn stone staircase – a chill that deepened in the high dark corridors, studded with doors closed like forgotten occasions or broadening into cavernous disregarded saloni, shadowy with lumber and musty with old hangings. In her own room she found that Maria had kindled a small fire, and for this she was grateful, although she suspected that it was nothing in the temperature of the air that was affecting her. For a long time she sat before the warmth, mute to herself, and seeing no pictures in its flame and flicker. The room had been her own long ago, and still held some former possessions: those of her first books which had been judged unworthy or unsuitable to accompany her to England, a collection of pebbles to which she could attach no memory at all, a portfolio of pressed flowers and grasses, a violin upon which all expertise had notably eluded her. Outside, by some pond or cistern, frogs were croaking and plonking; the sound prompted her to glance once wanly at the abandoned fiddle, and some old association made her faintly smile. When at length she got up it was to shake off her clothes quickly and impatiently, as if with them there might fall away a preoccupation or presentiment. Ready for bed, she hesitated, and then began to move swiftly about the room, packing her suitcases. The operation was nearly completed when she noticed, tossed into a window-embrasure, the grey-and-green cover of Rupert Poyle’s volume of essays. She recalled her promise to Garth – and recalled too, with a quick frown, something that her brother had said, or begun to say, about the author.

  She crossed the room, picked up the book, and brought it back to the fireplace. She stirred the embers, and began to read.

  EIGHT

  She found her brother in the garden next morning, idle and brooding among the oleanders. He was not commonly visible so early; and she counted it as a good mark to him, although one but faintly etched upon the great dark plate of the day, that he had come out in the knowledge that he must face her. She dropped Poyle’s book on a bench beside him. “Raymond, you gave that man what he has written here?”

  He nodded, and her sense of any conceivable good mark for him faded. He was ugly and cornered – and struggling to find some attitude that might serve him against self-knowledge too humiliating to admit. “Rupert Poyle?” he asked. “Yes. I told him a
few things I know.”

  “Know?” Everything she had suffered in the night went into the lash of the word. “Do you claim to know that Wendell Dauncey died in 1934? His son saw him three years ago.”

  Raymond gave a tremulous laugh. His attitude was coming to him. “I’m not responsible for the unburied dead.”

  “How much of the rest of it is lies too?” Anthea pointed at the book. “All of it – or all of it except the statement that any hope our parents had of you, Raymond, is an instance of the vanity of human wishes?”

  He flushed darkly – making thereby a high contrast with her own absolute pallor. “The dirty little hound – to get his blasted copy from me and then go off and write that!”

  She stared at him incredulously. “Perhaps that should be our only cause of displeasure with the essay?”

  He laughed again – this time more harshly. “Take it all as a sour draught, child, if you will. But be thankful it has physicked you in time.”

  “You stand by this story – and by everything it makes possible?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Mustn’t there be an area of doubt? Shall we ever know? Is anybody left except the old dotard Dauncey – if he is left?” Raymond paused, curiously breathless.

  “And mayn’t there have been circumstances which he would be the last man to be informed of?”

  “The word for that, to my mind”—and again she pointed—”is a smear. And it was you who invented it – not that wretched little man. You invented it about your own father – and mine.”

  “And who else’s – isn’t that the question?” He gave her a look from which she fell back as from a blow. “You know nothing about our father. I do. I learnt about the world – I learnt about the stark facts of procreation, girl – from spying on his women. There was material enough.”

  “You are abominable.” Anthea found that she was trembling.