Mark Lambert's Supper

by J. I. M. Stewart

  “The world is that. And my father, I tell you, hunted women until he died. That was when I was twenty-two. I know what I’m talking about.” Raymond’s voice had cracked. “The old lecher took my own first—”

  “Stop!” She spoke with an intensity that silenced him – that drove him back momentarily upon his more authentic disintegrated and uneasy self. For seconds she held him with her eye, while mastering her own mind; compelling it to clarity. “Poyle’s story is plainly fantastic. As I read him, he isn’t making any serious claim to credence. He is trying to be amusing, and his idea of that is to take any likely facts he can get hold of and twist them into an absurdity.”

  “I agree.” Raymond was quieter now, but this only served to reveal that some hidden source of venom had opened within him. “And isn’t it as well? He makes up – or I make up for him – a comical interpretation of the facts. Wendell Dauncey is a restraining influence upon the amorous proclivities of his talented friend. What rot! But it is agreeable comedy, all the same. Rather than let his talented friend relapse, and so endanger a masterpiece, Wendell Dauncey himself carries off a dangerous young lady in the nick of time – carries her off triumphantly, mark you; and marries her, although he is himself to an ultimate degree not the marrying sort. Unutterable rubbish – but as a piece of literary slapstick funny enough in its way. But consider the sober probabilities, Anthea – consider them.”

  “I can’t.” She came out desperately with this. “Not without somewhere knowing what is truth and what are lies.”

  “The truth is simple enough, surely. My father had this girl – this waif of a ruined nobleman and a bogus American heiress. Then something troublesome happened.” Raymond paused on this, and looked at Anthea with a wolfish grin. “Something troublesome happened. And my father – our father – found himself quite upset. It was all over – by weeks, even by months, perhaps – but he discovered himself still to have some fondness for the lady. He was growing old, you must remember, and turning a bit soft. So he shouted in Dauncey. For the dim devoted creature no more would be needed than that. He shouted in Dauncey and told him whatever story came into his head. It must have been one of those occasions upon which being a professional novelist had its conveniences. He persuaded Dauncey that here was a nice virginal girl, hideously harried by a horrid old mama, whom it was Dauncey’s duty and indeed privilege – as an artist, a gentleman cowboy, and so forth – to marry there and then. That’s all.”

  “All?”

  “Isn’t it enough?” Raymond’s whole body was shaking – but whether with excitement, rage or shame it was impossible to tell. “I’d go and talk it over – eh?”

  “Talk it over?” Anthea just heard herself thus dully echoing her brother.

  “With—what shall I say? With our estimable young kinsman, my dear.”

  She turned and ran from the garden – ran down the long bleached road that scored the hill like a cicatrice, between the grey olives, the straggling lines of parched houses, through the small dust-coloured square with its dry fountain and hideous statue. Her throat was dusty and dry. The dust rose in clouds from her shoes as she ran and smarted in her eyes, settled on her hair. She ran, dry-eyed and through a kind of white glare with no meaning. In the lower piazza she sensed rather than saw that a trolley-bus was turning. She boarded it and within seconds, sufficiently composed to be feeling for her purse, was rolling down the hill to Florence. She watched the city fixedly, swinging clockwise and anti-clockwise round the pivot of the Duomo as the bus turned this way and that on the winding road.

  She was unaware of another bus that passed hers on a bend, climbing slowly. When this second bus reached Settignano the first passenger to alight was Garth Dauncey. Intent and pale, he strode rapidly up the hill.

  NINE

  His hope had set itself – irrationally, he knew – upon the lost novel, had so set itself in the very moment, less than an hour ago, that he first took the possible measure of the situation.

  On the previous evening Miss Bave had arrived fatigued. He had done no more than conduct her to her hotel, and there leave her with a promise to present himself again at breakfast time. The occasion had discovered her partaking sparingly of caffe latte and crumbling a roll; and the things he had first found to say she received silently and with an expression that could only be called severe. Misunderstanding, he had apologised. The particular occasion of their tryst in Florence had proved abortive; his own investigations were so far fruitless, and now Anthea no longer had a mind to the matter; they must all find – as they so readily could – other occasions of association.

  Miss Bave had continued attentively listening and he had grown easy with her, divining that she was wholly well-disposed. And where – he had eventually easily asked – where in Rome, whether in a Consulate or an Embassy church, did her superior knowledge of continental usage suggest that an American and a British subject might get themselves married? Miss Bave had opened her bag and brought out a grey-and-green covered book. Of the significance of what it contained, the train of speculation it might open up, Anthea and he – she had soberly said – must judge.

  He had read, and left her on a word. Her advice, her judgment might presently be invaluable, but for the moment the one necessity was to go to Anthea. The crisis was – peculiarly and to a point of strangeness and of possible horror – very much their joint affair.

  His father must be found and must speak. This, as he strode up the hill, was sufficiently clear to him. But first he must have the book. What was fantastic in this persuasion – what was fantastic in the spectacle of a man seeking in a suppressed work of fiction such factual certainty, one way or another, as he must now imperatively have – exhibited itself to him vividly enough as he climbed. But he had by instinct and training a high faith in the Word. It boiled down – through and despite all the novelist’s preoccupation with concocting a yarn it boiled down – to the faith of chronicles and the truth of feeling. If The End of It All existed, and was indeed a work prompted by the writer’s intimate personal experience, then translucent through all its contrivance certain crucial veracities would announce themselves to the trained sense. At least they would be a basis, provide a presumption upon which to proceed with the odd awkward business of tackling his father when he was found.

  He scanned the upper piazza, remembering Anthea’s fondness for wandering about the place and fearing that he might miss her. It was almost deserted. In the centre, under an oleander, an old woman offered peaches to a community discernibly without purchasing power, and near by a group of children exercised sun-browned dust-coated limbs in some tumbling skylarking game. From behind the facade of the Trinita chapel, which rose high and scalloped from adjacent green-shuttered domesticities like the white poop of a galleon, came a great clattering and banging, accompanied by song. He crossed the open space and went quickly in; some task of rebuilding was going forward and as a preliminary everything was being knocked to bits. The workmen, shirtless and bronzed and profanely singing as they wielded their mallets, might have been pagan divinities in trousers, rejoicing in the destruction. For further reassurances he crossed the littered floor and glanced into the church itself. There was no sign of Anthea. He came out and went on rapidly up the hill.

  The Pastorelli, when he reached it, seemed at first to be deserted. But a second peal upon the bell presently produced Maria, who approached along the side of the house carrying a basket, as if the summons had reached her ear when she was in the act of setting out on her marketing. The Signorina, she announced, had shortly before departed for the city – hastily, as if she had remembered some appuntamento for which she would be late. Maria had conjectured that this must be with Garth, and she expressed herself volubly on the shame it would be had some misunderstanding resulted in their missing each other. The Signore Raymond was absent too; only a few minutes ago he had whistled up his dog and departed in the direction of Terenzano. This meant that he would be absent for at least a couple of hours, perhaps
longer. Would Garth wait? She herself was on her way to the macelleria, having heard hopeful news of vitelletto of exceptional promise. But the giardiniere and his boy were both working close to the house, and would do their best to provide any service for which he might call.

  Garth thanked her and was about to say that he must return to Florence – for it seemed plain that, as with himself, Anthea had been prompted by some urgent need of communication. If however he went back now it was conceivable that they might again miss each other. And along with this thought there came to Garth another. It was not striking in itself, but for some reason his pulse quickened at it. He remembered that Anthea had spoken of this old woman as virtually her nurse from infancy. Garth paused, frowning, on this. As he did so, he remembered something else, something from Mark Lambert’s Settignano Memorandum Book. And that decided him. “Staro a vedere la signerina,” he said.

  “Resti servito.” The old woman was delighted, and for ten minutes she talked with a rapidity which often left him helpless. But much of what she said he followed, and his own stiff Italian was adequate to the questions which – it had come to him like a revelation – he must ask. They were about Anthea’s childhood. It was a subject upon which Maria was fortunately disposed to consider it as highly proper that he should be informed. When at length she left him to make her way to the butcher’s it was in the cortile – the cortile which indeed, she assured him, had been Anthea’s principal playroom since she began to walk.

  It was still cool in the high shadowed place, and even the square of clear blue sky overhead looked as cold as water. He was alone and yet among presences. The bronze boy on the dolphin, it was true, ignored him; the boy had caught some trick of being happy for ever and had no wish to get acquainted with mortals. Nor did the statues that stood here and there in niches or under arches much impress themselves. Either after the antique or undistinguished originals of the Seicento, they were only decorative objects, without the suggestion of either threat or promise. But on the north side, where the pillared and vaulted space deepened under a whole wing of the villa, it was otherwise. Here were the Etruscan things. Garth eyed them and they eyed him.

  He took a slow turn round the cortile. He was utterly an in-trader, yet he was entirely resolved to act in the light of what had come to him. In itself, his inspiration had been very simple. Suppose the manuscript of The End of It All had been something about which, in his last weeks and even in his last days, Mark Lambert had been unable to bring himself either to speak or to make up his mind – suppose this, and what would it be reasonable to conclude he had done with it? Might it not be something less rational than would readily occur to a man of sound body and clear mind?

  Suppose then that Lambert were simply prompted to conceal the thing. Well, here in this very cortile – there was his own word for it in the Memorandum Book – he had been accustomed to watch other things being hidden; hidden by his daughter Anthea at the prompting of that secretive impulse in her that he had remarked. And now an impulse to secretiveness had come upon Lambert himself. He had something to hide away, to hide away like a broken toy or doll.

  Garth stopped short in his perambulation. It had come to him overpoweringly, and in circumstances which made his excitement wholly painful, that he was standing at this moment within a few paces, even within arm’s reach, of what he sought. At his feet now was a bronze cista, about two feet high, with a lid the handle of which took the form of the nude backward-arched body of a boy. Garth stooped, and then shook his head. At the time he was supposing, Anthea was still a small child, habitually playing here. Nothing to which a curious child could penetrate, and nothing which an adult might well be prompted casually to open, would fulfil the conditions which he sought. On the other hand, Lambert had been in his seventy-fourth year, and a sick man who had judged it a notable feat to walk to the little chapel beyond Castello di Poggio. Nothing requiring marked physical strength could be in question. This narrowed the field. There was an alabaster sarcophagus with a reclining female figure for the prizing open of which there would probably be needed a crane. There was another in terracotta upon the top of which a well-dieted gentleman appeared to be lounging at dinner. Garth gave a heave at this and found that it entirely failed to budge. That left the urns. Some of them had grotesque heads as lids, and some had whole figures; they were all, he concluded upon a little experiment, beyond the powers of a small child to handle.

  One in particular arrested him. It was an almost spherical affair, meant like the others, he supposed, to contain human ashes. Across its surface two arms had been moulded in the gesture of one who placidly supports a belly distended to repletion. The head, thick-necked and massive, showed features fixed in a mocking archaic smile. It was impossible, Garth for the moment felt, that mockery so coldly cruel could be meant for anyone in the world except himself. He took a step forward and wrenched at the head. It fitted like a cap over the wide orifice of the vessel, and seemed immovable. He wrenched again and it gave slightly, emitting as it did so a dry grating sound like a faint scream – the scream of a mandrake, it might be, as it was torn from the earth. He found that the head was loose in his hands – heavy, but otherwise like some grotesquely formed balloon. He set it down and plunged an arm deep into the urn. He expected nothing, anything – bones, ashes, dust. But the nature of what his groping hand actually encountered he knew at once. It was papers, papers in a substantial sheaf. With difficulty – which was increased because his hand was trembling now – he edged his find through the neck of the great gross jar. Where he stood it was too dim to distinguish clearly. He moved, dazed and unsteady, to the centre of the cortile, where the bronze boy laughed at him still and the little fountain seemed to chuckle malignly. What he held was a thick gathering of typewritten foolscap sheets, stapled together and with a small pocket of what appeared to be manuscript material at the back. He flicked over the pages. They were dry, discoloured, rather brittle, but entirely legible; and he saw that they were in places annotated or altered in what he recognised as Mark Lambert’s hand. He looked at the beginning. Scrawled across a blank sheet in the same bold hand he read:

  THE END OF IT ALL

  Garth glanced back at the decapitated urn, and experienced a sudden overpowering sense of having committed an act of violation from which no good could come. It was a feeling, while it lasted, having all the quality of a sinister premonition, and he braced himself to throw it off as a man might struggle to rid himself of an intolerable physical burden. However the matter might have looked only a few hours ago, it was certainly not as an outsider that he had possessed himself of the enigmatical supper over which the arms of the great-bellied archaic creature had so complacently lain. From the marble floor the head still mocked him – severed yet vital, like a conjuror’s horrible illusion or some invulnerable creature slashed at in nightmare. The typescript felt unnaturally heavy in his hands, as if its substance was no longer paper but base metal. The moment ought to have been golden, holding no more than a promise of triumphantly captured intellectual delectation, but he found it weighing on him like lead. He looked again at the canopic head and saw it now as a tumbled Aunt Sally on some fair-ground of a nether world. But that was wrong. The cock-shy operated in the other direction. And no one – he had admitted to Anthea – could do as much dodging as he imagined.

  Finds reads. He would stick to that. Garth thrust the last Mark Lambert under his arm and hurried from the cortile, hurried through the garden and out upon the long dusty road. He climbed the hill. Above him the cypresses waited in their darkness, with here and there a villa islanded among them like a single pale face turned backward in a concourse of averted mourners. On the hill slopes, scraped and clawed into brown clods and ribbed with gesturing vines like a forgotten musical notation, the small fires were still burning. Their smoke, straight and insubstantial as the ghosts of poplars felled long ago, quivered in a heat other than their own. The whole landscape quivered in a fierce heat, as if it lay in some crucible wh
ich should dissolve it to its elements. Only the lizards, darting on the hot dry walls, seemed alive – salamanders feeding on fire. He turned once, before plunging among the trees, to look down on the city. The red roofs, quivering in heat within their enfolding hills, showed like blood in a cauldron, with the great dome of the cathedral like a rising bubble in the middle. He could see San Miniato, and beneath it a little horizontal grey line that he knew for the long balustrade of the Piazzale Michelangelo. He plunged into the trees and made for the ruined chapel – Anthea’s chapel, the chapel in which Mark Lambert had imagined an undisturbed repose. He had no notion of manufacturing an irony. Brute circumstance, seemingly, could be trusted for a sufficient lavishness at that. He wanted simply the most substantial shade available. When he had got himself within this he sat down and read.

  There could be no doubt of what he had possessed himself of. The opening sentence was alive; it held a faint but unmistakable pulse such as one might feel deep within a great slumbering bird.

  Sentence succeeded sentence and the bird stirred, preened its feathers, fluttered its wings, became a creature made for air and sifted through and through by light. The nobly shaped paragraphs extended themselves like pinions, the creature poised itself and then, with sweep upon sweep of powerful wings, took majestically to the skies. Before Garth had turned half a dozen pages he knew the spectacle to be definitive. Here was all the fused felicitousness and strength of the master. The recovered book was mature Mark Lambert.

  He thrilled to the thought as he read – thrilled to it in spite of the bizarre exigency of which he could never for a moment sink the sense. And there was soon no doubt about the fable. The novel, he guessed, was to have above all things high lucidity, a pattern declaring itself early, a reliance perhaps much on suspense but not at all on surprise. Those innermost recesses of the technical mystery upon which Mark Lambert had dazzlingly discoursed to his edified friend Charles Shaxby long ago were here to be explored – Garth knew it even as he turned to the second chapter – to their last crevices. It was true indeed that, if anything like the whole novel was in his hands, The End of It All could have nothing of the magnitude and richness of The Cosmopolitans. Nor did it seem to hold promise of that clear poetic vision which had prompted many of Lambert’s’ admirers to liken Lucia’s Changeling to The Tempest. But it was at least next to these two acknowledged masterpieces of the novelist that the new work gave promise of standing.