And it was about his mother. Rupert Poyle’s account of the story of The End of It All, however come by, proved itself substantially accurate as Garth continued to read. Here was the young heroine, exquisite in sensibility, ignorant of life, dangerously charged with high romantic feeling. Here was the desperate American lady, relic of the sadly misinformed Italian nobleman; and here was the degenerating train of suitors Garth read on and on, while the sun climbed until he was left with only a strip of shade in the chapel. Outside, the lizards panted like small noiseless bellows, the vines clutched avidly at the downpouring light, the dark pools of shadow crept beneath and islanded the olives.
It was a dispassionate book. The heroine was finely realised and her plight rendered as deeply moving; nevertheless she stood in a full clear light of objective appraisal, like the creation of a deeply penetrating feminine intelligence. The author had learnt from Jane Austen and George Eliot – Garth had his professional glimpse, as he read, of the utility of The End of It All to one who would expound certain of the grand continuities of fiction – but there was far more than a matter of literary derivations involved. Sir Charles Shaxby’s vision of his illustrious friend as one painfully and finally disciplined to contemplative life had here its full vindication. The emotion was sharp and precise, but distanced, as if mediated through a wholly disengaged intelligence.
Realising this fully, Garth took a deep breath and read on. The story approached a crisis in the girl’s realisation that her current suitor, an upright and distinguished but elderly man, was her mother’s former lover. The simplicity of the situation only underlined the art with which it was presented, and for a time Garth was carried straight forward on the strong steady stream of the narrative. So absorbing was this that the change was upon him – was all about him, like suddenly risen waters – while he was yet unprepared.
His first awareness was simply of a shift in the character of the typescript. What he now had in his hands was plainly a first draft, composed directly upon the machine, and without manuscript corrections other than impatient pencil scorings through rejected words and sentences. But something else, hard to define yet of unmistakable significance, was happening: a troubling of the stream. Still deep, it was no longer clear; nor was its temperature now constant. Intermittently at first, and then to an effect of complete transformation, extraneous emotion flowed in. Page by page, uncertainty, perplexity, confusion spread over a surface hitherto pellucid and unflawed. There came a point at which a critic, unprovided with any background to the book, might have turned from it baffled. Garth, possessed of large but uncertain information, read on grimly. And presently the novel took on a new urgency and power – yet these were of a kind that chilled him as he read: The writing had become raw, painful, tormented and imaginatively null. Whenever the girl entered all artifice and consideration went out, dropped away indeed to a point of sheer embarrassment, as before the spectacle of garment after garment inopportunely shed. And in place of the former clear cool light there played about all the picture a hot naked flame in which every atom of illusion was presently consumed. What was left might have been a boy’s inept and agonised attempt to fictionalise love or lust. And yet this was not quite all. There were certain pages – almost the very last pages of the unfinished book – which had another character. They were again artistically inept. Indeed, they had almost precisely the thwarted chaotic quality of Lambert’s earliest work. But although themselves uncertain, baffled, even despairing, they obscurely suggested experience to which none of these qualities attached. What the writer ought to have been attempting – here was the truth that Garth finally glimpsed – was an epithalamium. And of the experience, whatever it was, which had disrupted the novel and led to this, the girl was at the heart.
He had set down the book, and was staring sombrely at the defaced virgin at the far end of the chapel, when he remembered the loose manuscript papers, tucked into a flap of the limp cover in which the typescript had been cased. He lifted these out and unfolded them. There were less than a dozen sheets, and they were covered in Mark Lambert’s bold hand with what appeared to be his first working notes for the novel. The effect was of a synopsis or scenario, sparsely sketched. In the middle, as if inadvertently folded up with them, was a small envelope. Scrawled across it, again in Lambert’s hand, were five words: The letter from Wendell’s wife.
Garth was aware of himself as looking at this for a long time. He was aware too of feeling cold, and he glanced overhead, almost expecting a suddenly clouded sky. But above the ruined walls there was only the soft Tuscan blue. About the chapel – he thought – there is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. And again he looked at the envelope. Whatever lay within it his mother had written.
He had no doubt that it contained some sort of certainty. Everything so far had been speculation, inference – perhaps no more than aberration, passing madness. Everything so far had been fiction or the fringes of fiction. The envelope contained fact. He opened it, and saw that it was brief. The writing was certainly his mother’s; he recognised it from the little diary he possessed. This letter was only the second memorial to her that he had ever held in his hands.
Dear Mark Lambert,
The child is a boy. He is strong and well. So I am very happy, even although I have discovered something they won’t tell me. I am going to die. Our secret will be safe, then, so far as I am concerned! But it would be that, I think, even if I lived to be an old woman. I always dreamed, oh how I dreamed, of greatness and beauty and what is immortal in art. And the child has his birthright, even if nobody knows of it. For me it is enough to know in my heart that the father of my child was the writer of The Cosmopolitans and Gareth’s Folly and Lucia’s Changeling. When he grows up, surely himself to be an artist, how proud the day will be, how happy it will be on which he learns – if he ever does learn – the truth. But do please believe me amply content that the secret should be for always.
Isabella Dauncey.
You and Wendell are to come together again. Please. It is my wish.
As if the insolent stroke, like a deft flick at a bug or beetle, had tossed him through space to an unknown terrain, Garth found himself in some farther fold of the hills where everything was unfamiliar to him. He walked through vineyards and past the small sleeping poderi until he found himself halted before another ruin. It had been a direct hit. Italians, Germans, British or Americans had achieved it; had in a flash turned one more quiet farm to ash and rubble; had fired their shell, dropped their bomb; gone on their way, killing and destroying, until eventually instructed to desist and turn from warlike to peaceful occasions. And the vision of the total anarchy, the vast disruption, the people in their cities and nationalities uprooted, driven out, blown in myriads like mere dead leaves hither and thither across the face of Europe, had suddenly for him its insidious and terrifying argument. The thing has happened, he told himself. It has happened a hundred, a thousand times. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters. There were old romances in which such confusions stemmed from shipwrecks, piracies, the machinations of wicked stepmothers. But all the western world had been a shipwreck, thousands upon thousands of relationships obliterated or confounded. Not that convulsions were necessary. In settled communities it happened too. At the English Restoration Court, throughout English aristocratic society during the Regency, who had been certain of what? Or who had cared, so long as the in-heritance of property was unendangered? And was not that rational enough? Must one accept taboos which had their origin in primitive tribal necessities?
Garth asked himself these questions perforce. They were the questions any educated man would ask. He was asking them still at his next halt – a halt that puzzled him, like a jumble of meaningless sensations, until he cleared his head sufficiently to render it intelligible. The fresh heat, the small flicker and flare in his face, the acrid scent in his nostrils: they came from one of the small fires of vine-trimmings that were burning all over these valleys. This one was untended.
He had turned off some small distinguishable path and veered towards it, like a moth to a flame. He stood before it now and gazed into the fire, a small unspectacular fire but intensely hot at the core. Under his arm still was his discovery. Typescript and letter, they were his discovery alone.
Garth gazed long at the fire, and wondered that the drops of sweat trickling down his cheeks and forehead were as cold as ice. At last he turned and walked away with his burden, back into a landscape which had been taken from him, but which he could never cease to possess. It had all seemed to take a very long time. But as he breasted a final rise and saw the Villa Pastorelli beneath him he heard from the city the dull reverberation of the midday gun and then the pealing of many bells.
TEN
“And Garth?” Miss Bave asked.
“He missed me, you see. He missed me a second time. So he left”—Anthea braced herself—”he left The End of It All and the letter in my room with a note. I was to read them, the note said, and then come to you.”
“I see. Well, it’s happened before.”
Anthea was startled. “You mean—?”
“No, I don’t. I mean young women turning up on me under that sort of injunction from a young man.” Miss Bave paused on this, frowning. The effect was of her being concerned to reconsider what she had just said in point of English grammar. “And where is Garth now?”
“He has gone away. He says in his note that he thinks it the best thing to do.”
“You mean without an address?”
“Yes.”
“I see no sense in it.” Miss Bave was testy. “No doubt, with a coup de théatre like this on our hands, we don’t all want to be rubbing elbows and jostling shoulders without a break. But I see nothing, but disadvantage in the man’s going off into the blue. I must set about finding him, I suppose.” She reached for her stick. “The aeroplanes – are they running now?”
“I believe there’s some sort of service during the summer months.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Miss Bave painfully rose. “And you had better be doing something too.”
“About finding Garth?”
“About finding his father, of course.” Miss Bave was impatient. “Wendell Dauncey ought to have been found long ago.”
“Will it do any good?”
“Probably not.” Miss Bave snapped out the words with every appearance of being at her most unfeeling. “But you started this investigation – at least, your young man did – and I see no reason for not concluding it. Give me that letter again.”
“Here it is.” Mechanically Anthea handed over Isabella Dauncey’s letter. “I’ve been wondering whom it belongs to.”
“It belongs to your father’s trustees. The copyright probably belongs to Garth’s father. Are you thinking of publication?”
The gruff question was a queer challenge to her strength, and Anthea managed to take it with a smile. “There’s been enough published, I’d say.”
“And prematurely.” Miss Bave was grim. “Without all the facts. This is a fact, no doubt.” She handed back the letter. “Wendell Dauncey is a fact, too. You must find him. You must cover all your sources and authorities, you know, and not stop off in the middle of them simply because something distracting has turned up.”
“Distracting?” Anthea repeated the word dully. “You’re right, no doubt. But isn’t it rather academic?”
“And are we not academic?” Miss Bave was suddenly formidable. “But take it we’re simply human. We do badly to settle down to suffering while we can at all still act.”
“I know that.” Anthea had turned away to stand in the tall hotel window and stare out over the Arno. Now she faced round in sudden naked desperation. “But act how?”
“Finish your research.” Miss Bave was stony. “Confirm or qualify your preliminary findings.”
Anthea took a long look at her friend, and as she did so her pallor, which had appeared already absolute, grew. “You can’t,” she whispered, “think there’s any hope that—”
“No, Anthea – no!” Unaccountably, briefly, Miss Bave had the girl in her arms. “Put hope out of your head, whatever you have in your heart. And find Garth’s father.”
There was only Raymond with whom to begin. He must at least know possible channels of enquiry. And he would do what she wanted him to do. His weakness was something she had taken the measure of. He had a strange futile lust for that sort of power over living people which his father had exercised imaginatively over phantoms. Hence the streak of what appeared maleficence in him; it was a kind of aping of that in Mark Lambert which had contrived so many sombre predicaments for his thronging creation. But before any sort of resistance Raymond crumpled. He was abject now. He would find Wendell Dauncey if he could.
The afternoon was hot and the streets were jaded. In the Signoria tourists in staggering numbers stared up at the Palazzo Vecchio, read to each other out of guide-books, rummaged through the bronze and marble lumber of the Loggia dei Lanzi. She passed among them like a spirit charged with a mission beyond the world of men – her features immobile and her glance never turning to left or right. She had received instructions from Miss Bave and was obeying them, but she realised that she was in no shape to investigate anything. The Duomo and the Baptistery as she walked between them were vague ornate objects which she would have had to collect herself to identify; and the Cavour which she presently traversed seemed to split and flow past her in hurrying insubstantial forms, like a street viewed through the eye of a travelling movie camera. And it was a silent movie. She heard nothing except her own inner voice, as if very far away, repeating at long intervals Garth’s name.
The trolley-bus was just vanishing as she entered the Piazza di San Marco, and she turned to seek a cab. But none was to be found – she supposed because more tourists, still reading to each other from guide-books, were driving round and round in them. She hesitated before a cafe, but the thought of the dark espresso revolted her, and she crossed to the centre of the square and sat down in sparse shade. There would be another bus in fifteen minutes. And she could consider how Raymond was to be tackled.
In front of her in large false grandeur was the statue of some nineteenth-century military personage, covered with a film of dust. Dust was all around her. Dogs basked and children played in it. And like the statue she had her own film of dust. She could feel it on her scalp and between her toes. A line of verse came into her head. And dust forbids the bird to sing. It repeated itself monotonously, taking the place of the name she had been reiterating before. And dust forbids the bird to sing. A small boy tried to sell her chewing-gum and an old woman parched flowers. On a seat opposite her own, two nuns conversed earnestly and with difficulty from within deep starched hoods. Florentine idleness and Florentine energy mingled all around her. Some buses came and went in a great hurry. Others remained mysteriously immobile, and into these people would climb, sit contentedly for a time, and then contentedly come out again. An old man with a stick hobbled up to Anthea’s bench, sat for a few minutes in similar contentment and then drifted away. Beside the statue two soldiers were exploiting every resource of voice and mime in an interminable argument. Anthea looked through it all, and knew only that she could see nothing on its farther side. She told herself that a time would come when the world would again be vivid to her – or at least vivid to another self, with hopes and fears and determinations of a sort, which in some fullness of time would be born from this present death.
But even now it was no use missing the bus. She rose as she saw it turn into the piazza, and as she did so she looked down at her dusty frock, her dusty shoes. She looked at the dusty ground. And dust forbids the bird to sing. She looked again – and her heart seemed to stop. The dusty surface in front of her bench, which had been smooth when she sat down, was etched into a dim precise design.
For a moment she thought that the piazza had begun to sway around her; then she knew that she had simply turned, with instinctive certainty, in the direction
taken by the old hobbling man. In front of her was San Marco – the church to her left, the monastery to her right. There was little reason to suppose that he had entered either – but if he was in neither he was irrecoverably gone. He was an old man, and that, in Italy, suggested the church. But he was also – unless her sudden piercing conviction was false – a painter. She ran. There was an angry shout, a scream of brakes, but she was safely in the vestibule of the Museo, impatient before the turnstile, a couple of hundred lire notes in her hand. In a moment she was in the cloister – the Dominicans’ cloister, Fra Angelico’s cloister. He would be with the Fra Angelicos.
She glimpsed St Thomas, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis; she glimpsed Christ as a pilgrim, with the two Dominicans receiving him. And then she was in the Hospice. It was deserted except for a single copyist, sitting at his little table before the tabernacle of the Linaioli. He was an old man, but she looked at him in sudden doubt. Her glance went to the floor. Beside him lay an old but immaculate panama hat.
Her heart was beating now, was pounding. This was Wendell Dauncey. He was copying in miniature one of the small angelic musicians that are the surrounding glory of the piece. On a little cushion beside him were two or three further miniatures, exposed for sale. He was doing what, in Florence, the humblest painters do. For a second she stood quite still. He had turned and was looking at her, but she was unable to see his face. He was in shadow. She realised that she, correspondingly, stood in a full light. Suddenly he spoke – spoke with conviction, but without emphasis or surprise. “You are Mark’s daughter,” he said. “Mark Lambert’s daughter.” He rose and turned, so that the light fell on his worn face. She had managed to nod; but now, seeing him, she stood transfixed. He put down his brush. “I wonder,” he asked, “if you know Garth?”
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