The Merry Muse

by Eric Linklater

  Her question drew so lively a picture on Max’s imagination — a picture so incongruous and unexpected — that his brief anger was quite erased, and with the sudden change of temper that was characteristic of him, he was tempted to be facetious. But looking more closely at his wife’s expression, he thought better of that, and instead asked mildly, ‘Where’s Jane?’

  ‘Gone to bed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She may have been tired, or merely tired of waiting. I didn’t enquire.’

  ‘You could have reminded her that we have a guest. A distinguished guest.’

  ‘Who, I had hoped, was to be our guest as well as yours.’

  ‘I am very sorry,’ said Hector, ‘I’m afraid it was my fault.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Max.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Simon, ‘she isn’t feeling well. It isn’t like her, to go to bed so early. I think I ought … ’

  Self-conscious and apologetic about his concern for a girl so obviously healthy, he left, with uneasy speed, the drawing-room and an unfinished sentence. Hector, to atone for his share in the masculine rudeness that had kept them too long at table, talked to Mrs Arbuthnot about her favourite music. He had no great knowledge of jazz, but he could speak of its early days in New Orleans, of the rag-time background of boogie-woogie — he could refer, with a simulated familiarity, to Bessie Smith and Charlie Parker — and that was enough to give Mrs Arbuthnot room to expound and defend her preferences.

  Max listened for a little while, and then, retiring to the corner where the gramophone stood, put on a record of Gaelic music. The gramophone was an old and massive instrument, with a horn as big as a cornucopia that reached half-way to the ceiling. The record he chose gave to the air a woman’s voice: sweet, though a little nasal. She was singing either a lullaby or a lament, but no one who had not been brought up in the Outer Isles could say with assurance whether sorrow or solace was the theme. Under the architectonic, huge, and hand-made horn, Max sat quietly with a look of calm and spiritual discipline on his fine pugnacious face.

  Then Simon returned, and said that Jane was feeling tired and had taken some aspirin. She had been reading a novel about the American Civil War.

  ‘They’re so difficult to hold,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  ‘It’s the heavy industry, the iron and coal, of American literature,’ said Hector.

  ‘What about sex?’ asked Max.

  ‘They treat sex as the continuing theme. The war goes on though the uniforms are different.’

  ‘And now,’ said Simon, ‘it’s the women who demand unconditional surrender.’

  ‘One must remember,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot firmly, ‘that the Civil War was fought to put an end to slavery.’

  ‘And started a wider slavery,’ said Hector. ‘The triumph of the Northern States brought the conveyor-belt into industry, and to keep the conveyor-belts moving, and spilling profit, the whole world became servile.’

  ‘Harmony,’ said Max, a little vaguely. ‘That’s what we need. The music of the spheres depends on order, and order is what we have lost in the world to-day. It’s disappeared from life, it’s dropped out of music — and where,’ he demanded of Hector, ‘do you find it in literature?’

  ‘I have always felt,’ said Hector sadly, ‘that English literature lost much of its dignity when Matthew Arnold died. He was chasing a tramcar in Liverpool, and dropped dead in the street. Symbolical, isn’t it? And how the scene lacks poise!’

  For some minutes there was silence — a contemplative silence — which happily was broken by the entrance of a maid who brought whisky and soda-water. But in spite of this encouragement, conversation was not easily renewed, nor again became comfortable; and presently Hector got up and said he should go.

  ‘If you must,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  ‘Let me drive you back,’ said Simon.

  ‘Take the Morris,’ said Mrs Arbuthnot.

  ‘Take the Daimler, it’s more comfortable,’ said Max, a little pompously.

  ‘I’ll feel more at home in the Morris,’ said Hector, and shook hands with his hostess.

  But a moment later, from his doorstep, Max shouted, ‘Come back, come back,’ and his stentorian voice halted the little car before it had gone twenty yards. Hector opened the door, and Max, hurrying across the gravel, exclaimed, ‘You forgot the book! You were going without the book!’

  ‘I meant,’ said Hector mendaciously, ‘to come back for it in the morning.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Max. ‘Take it now — and take care of it! Don’t let it out of your sight, not for a moment. That book’s worth ten thousand pounds!’

  ‘He’s exaggerating, of course,’ said Hector, a minute or two later, as he laid the book in its manila envelope on a shelf in the dashboard. ‘If it’s genuine — and probably it is — it may be worth two thousand — perhaps as much as three thousand — but not more.’

  ‘Even so,’ said Simon, ‘it would be a pity to lose it.’

  ‘I wish it had never been found,’ said Hector.

  Simon drove swiftly through the dark and empty streets, and when they reached the mews behind St George’s Church Hector said, ‘Come in and have a nightcap.’

  ‘I mustn’t stay long,’ said Simon, and followed him up the narrow stairs.

  Hector said, ‘I hope you like Glen Grant?’ and gave him a whisky and soda.

  Simon said, ‘It’s odd to think we almost met at Sidi Rezegh.’

  ‘Sixteen — no, seventeen years ago.’

  ‘Do you remember Bill Pimm?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Ginger hair, one blue eye and one brown. Good fellow.’

  ‘He was killed at Alamein.’

  ‘I know … ’

  Then the Western Desert was re-peopled with their memories, and for an hour they shouldered the sun-burnt heroes of their private mythology, or re-trod familiar stony tracks and the suspect edge of minefields. Lightly they gossiped of death, and laboriously argued about who stood where on the Trigh Capuzzo or blotted his copybook at Gezira. The enormities of war were subdued to make a background for tittle-tattle — and Simon’s glass was twice refilled before he stood up and firmly declared it was time for him to go.

  With unnecessary circumlocution, and some redundancy of sentiment, he and Hector said good-bye and arranged to meet again. Hector went upstairs, and reluctantly decided it was time to go to bed. But some twenty minutes later, when he had undressed and put on his pyjamas, he was startled by a loud knocking on his door, and going down to open it, discovered Simon against the darkness of the mews. He held in one hand a manila envelope.

  ‘This wretched book of yours!’ he said. ‘It’s your responsibility, not mine, and you left it in the car. I’d almost got home before I noticed it.’

  ‘Ten thousand pounds,’ said Hector, ‘and I forgot all about it!’

  ‘Well, don’t forget it again.’

  ‘No, of course I shan’t. Come in and have a drink.’

  ‘It’s much too late.’

  ‘One for the road.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘A tiger frightener. Tea-planters in India always had one before they left the club. And it’s a sensible precaution wherever you are.’

  ‘Well, if you put it like that… ‘

  An hour later, though driving very slowly and carefully, Simon hit the left-hand gate-post that guarded the entrance to Max Arbuthnot’s house on Corstorphine Hill, and sadly crumpled the near-side mudguard of Mrs Arbuthnot’s Morris Minor. Deeply ashamed of what he had done, and somewhat unbalanced by shame, he was so ill-advised as to wake Jane, in her bed, and confess his fault.

  Flushed by the comfort of sleep, Jane sat up — or half sat up, one smoothly rounded shoulder bare — and rubbed her eyes, and said, ‘But where have you been till now?’

  Simon tried to explain, and immediately was handicapped by remembering that nothing could be said of The Merry Muses. The reason for his return to Hector’s flat was buried under the obligation of secrecy. But h
e had, he admitted, driven Hector home …

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘It’s after two.’

  ‘Have you been there till now? With Yacky Doo?’

  ‘We found a lot to talk about.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh, things we had in common. Common experiences. What both of us had seen … ’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘Places where we’d been.’

  ‘Were you talking about me?’

  ‘About you? Of course not.’

  ‘I thought, perhaps, you were talking about his play.’

  ‘That wasn’t mentioned, nor were you.’

  ‘Well, what did he tell you?’

  ‘Much the same sort of thing as I was telling him. We were both in the Western Desert … ’

  ‘You’ve been talking about the war? Till three o’clock in the morning?’

  ‘It was a long war. It left a lot to talk about.’

  Simon went towards her, with a placating smile, and held out his hands; but Jane, whose expression had been oddly strained — whose cheeks had gone white — turned suddenly away from him, and burying her face in the pillow cried in a muffled voice, ‘You’ve been drinking! You smell of drink.’

  ‘Well, naturally

  She sat up again, indignant now, and exclaimed, ‘And that’s why you ran into the gate-post, and smashed my mother’s car! You’re drunk! Well, wait till tomorrow morning, when you tell father what happened. I’ll be sorry for you then, and you’ll be sorry for yourself. Drinking all night with Yacky Doo! With him!’

  She returned to her pillow, and pulling the clothes to her ears, left her remorseful husband in the solitude of his private shame. As quickly and quietly as possible, he undressed, turned out the light, and retreated to the dark shelter of his bed. But for a long time he lay awake, wondering unhappily why Jane should be so angry with him. Then it occurred to him that she was jealous. Jealous of the great experience he had shared with Hector. Women, he knew, were always jealous of war, because its attractions so manifestly exceeded theirs.

  V

  ‘Abad memory and a good digestion, there’s your only recipe for a contented life.’ — Was it Max who had told him that? It sounded like Max, like the sort of thing he would say, and perhaps it was a sound assessment of the human condition. But it was no good to Hector, who could not banish his memories.

  His wife, or an image of his wife, still haunted him twenty years after he had married her and some ten years after she had left him. They had married in the summer of 1939: Hector Macrae, son of a briefly distinguished soldier and Joyce, younger daughter of Captain Annandale, R.N., granddaughter of a Commander Annandale, killed at Jutland, and great-grand-daughter of a Victorian admiral notorious for his piety and evil temper.

  She was a month or two older than Hector, and at the time of their marriage she stood on the near edge of great beauty. She was fair-haired and slim, delicately coloured, and her face, her hands and arms, retained something of the uncertainties of girlhood. They lacked assurance — and, like its surface, her character was still malleable. But Hector, who might have moulded it differently, went into the Army, and Joyce, obedient to ancestry, joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service.

  Her advancement was rapid, her career distinguished. By the end of 1942 she was a cipher-officer in the great underground headquarters at Gibraltar — one of three score young women in a crowded garrison of men — and from there was presently posted to Combined Operations, and ultimately to a position of confidence at Supreme Headquarters. Her career was marked throughout by a cool and easy efficiency, by a devotion to duty that no private interest could distract. Though parted from her husband after a few months of marriage — and for a long time not knowing whether he was alive or dead — she was faithful to him and lived in untarnished chastity.

  Hector had a rougher, often less fortunate, and more eventful life in the heat of the Desert and among the wintry mountains of Italy. He was wounded twice, he was taken prisoner, and escaped into the rough freedom of the partisans. During these years he wrote his poetry, and made his reputation as a poet. For his reputation — or for the early recognition of his genius — he was much indebted to a talented journalist called Wainwright.

  At a time when it was difficult to write with fervour of the achievement of British forces in the field — because their achievements were few — Wainwright, in Cairo, heard the story of a young officer who, though schooled impeccably at Winchester, had in the heat of battle rallied a company of dispirited Cockneys with the wild exuberance of a Gaelic battle-cry, and led them, thus inspired, in triumphant counter-attack. He investigated, and found the story true. He was told other stories of Hector’s unconventional behaviour, and from Hector himself — on leave in Cairo, and talkative — he heard of the poems he had written, and had already sent to a London publisher: a friend who was young enough to be venturesome.

  Wainwright, though no judge of poetry, was a good journalist, and when he learnt that Hector had written his poems in Gaelic — not until later, in the coolness of remembered emotion, had he translated them into English — he knew he had got what he wanted. He had a solid foundation for the tale of the battle-cry. Here, manifestly, was a genuine case of atavism: in the heightened mood that war induces, Hector had broken out of his conventional English upbringing and given voice to his deepest feeling in the tongue of Highland forebears. That was atavism, a throw-back to ancestral influence, and atavism of this sort, and in these circumstances, made a good story for the newspapers. Especially at a time when good stories were hard to find.

  There was, in fact, not much substance in Wainwright’s deduction. Though Hector had been schooled at Winchester, he had spent his childhood, and all his holidays, in the West Highlands. From infancy he had been bi-lingual, and to a Gaelic-speaking nurse he owed more affection than to an errant mother. At Winchester, moreover, a liberal schoolmaster, himself of Highland birth, had encouraged him to study the small but potent masters of the eighteenth-century Celtic renaissance. He was as much at home in Gaelic as in English, and when an intolerable pressure of emotion compelled him to find release in poetry, he turned naturally to a language shaped for sentiment and tuned to sorrow. — But though Wainwright’s story was of doubtful truth, it laid a red carpet, as it were, for the publication of Hector’s poems and opened their route to success.

  There were two themes in the volume: love and war. Of war he wrote, not in the fashion of his time — in this first book — but with a sensuous hardihood; and of love with the passion of an innocent mind that had yielded itself utterly in love, and been rewarded with the acquiescence of an innocence as whole-hearted as its own. But then, from the perfect confluence of their passion, Joyce and he had left each other to obey what they regarded as an inescapable imperative; and though the seeming brutality of their decision had been mitigated by a traditional sense of duty, the wound of his thwarted love still cried, with gaping lips, for expression of its intensity and wholeness. His imagery was violent, extravagantly allusive, yet curiously earth-bound — there were critics who compared him with the Spanish poet Lorca — but his versification was classical: a very young professor, in one of the younger universities, called it Horatian.

  His second book came out of imprisonment, and good fortune again gave him an advertising agent. For when he, and the friend with whom he had plotted escape, jumped from a slowly moving train — a train moving from Italy into Germany — Hector, as he fell, broke his ankle, but his friend was more fortunate, and to him Hector gave the manuscript of his new poems. They reached London, and their publisher, some three months later; and the tale of their hazards made another good story.

  Italian partisans took care of Hector, and when his ankle mended he was taken to a leader of the resistance in the mountains above Carrara. The Eighth Army was informed, in due course, of his presence there, and Hector was offered means of escape. But this he declined. In the leader of the partigiani he had found a mind
congenial to his own, and he offered to stay and help in the co-ordination of Italy’s clandestine offensive. For many months he lived a secret and nomadic life — sometimes dangerous, sometimes idle — and in the last weeks of the war, when the Germans were breaking, ran desperate chances and at last was rescued in a state of mental collapse, and half starved, by a patrol of armoured cavalry near Padua.

  For some weeks he lay in hospital — in Rome, and then in Sorrento — and when he returned to England he learnt that Joyce was in Washington. She came home, as quickly as she could, and on compassionate grounds was granted an immediate discharge. Her compassion was unquestionable; but Hector found it did not comfort him.

  Behind the lines in northern Italy he had written the third, and the last, of his books of poetry. As in the others, the dominant theme was love. His love of Joyce. But also there were wild, and now irregular lyrics, in praise of the recessive anarchy of freebooters and francs-tireurs — of hidden mountainsides, remote from the ordered world against which the partigiani intermittently fought — and when the book was published a percipient critic wrote, ‘There is evidence, alas, that a brave voice at last is breaking.’

  Indeed it had broken: so had his spirit. He had screwed it too taut, and kept it too long in tension. It might have mended, if Joyce could have cushioned it; but Joyce had no knowledge of cushioning. Joyce, by now, had grown to the full pitch of her beauty, and the undirected vitality of her youth had found an orderly channel of brisk efficiency. She had grown out of youth.

  He made no effort to recognize her growth, and Joyce, lacking imagination, could not understand what had defeated him. She tried to be kind, and was deeply hurt when her attempted kindness was rebuffed. She had grown accustomed to the sort of talk that clarified, that argued a case so as to make it quickly comprehensible — to an allied committee perhaps — and to her this seemed the natural way of presenting a point of view. She had not learnt that points of view might be shaded by emotion, or the point become invisible in its haze. For nearly six years she had been divorced from private emotion.