Antic Hay (17 page)

‘Well, kind enough, I hope,' said the Complete Man. He was delighted with his new acquaintance.

Together they disembogued into the Bayswater Road. It was here, Gumbril reflected, that the Mild and Melancholy one would dumbly have slunk away to his glass of port and his loneliness among the alien topers at the bar. But the Complete Man took his new friend by the elbow, and steered her into the traffic. Together they crossed the road, together entered the park.

‘I still think you are v-very impertinent,' said the lady. ‘What induced you to follow me?'

With a single comprehensive gesture, Gumbril indicated the sun, the sky, the green trees airily glittering, the grass, the emerald lights and violet shadows of the rustic distance. ‘On a day like this,' he said, ‘how could I help it?'

‘Original sin?'

‘Oh,' the Complete Man modestly shook his head, ‘I lay no claim to originality in this.'

The stranger laughed. This was nearly as good as a young poet at the tea-table. She was very glad that she'd decided, after all, to put on her best suit this afternoon, even if it was a little stuffy for the warmth of the day. He, too, she noticed, was wearing a great-coat; which seemed rather odd.

‘Is it original,' he went on, ‘to go and tumble stupidly like an elephant into a pitfall, head over ears, at first sight . . .?'

She looked at him sideways, then closed down the magnolia petals, and smiled. This was going to be the real thing – one of those long, those interminable, or, at any rate, indefinitely renewable conversations about love; witty, subtle, penetrating and bold, like the conversations in books, like the conversations across the tea-table between brilliant young poets and ladies of quality, grown fastidious through an excessive experience, fastidious and a little weary, but still, in their subtle way, insatiably curious.

‘Suppose we sit down,' suggested Gumbril, and he pointed to a couple of green iron chairs, standing isolated in the middle of the grass close together and with their fronts slanting inwards a little towards one another in a position that suggested a confidential intimacy. At the prospect of the conversation that, inevitably, was about to unroll itself, he felt decidedly less elated than did his new friend. If there was anything he disliked it was conversation about love. It bored him, oh, it bored him most horribly, this minute analysis of the passion that young women always seemed to expect one, at some point or other in one's relation with them, to make. How love alters the character for both good and bad; how physical passion need not be incompatible with the spiritual; how a hateful and tyrannous possessiveness can be allied in love with the most unselfish solicitude for the other party – oh, he knew all this and much more, so well, so well. And whether one can be in love with more than one person at a time, whether love can exist without jealousy, whether pity, affection, desire can in any way replace the full and genuine passion – how often he had had to thrash out these dreary questions!

And all the philosophic speculations were equally familiar, all the physiological and anthropological and psychological facts. In the theory of the subject he had ceased to take any interest. Unhappily, a discussion of the theory always seemed to be an essential preliminary to the practice of it. He sighed a little wearily as he took his seat on the green iron chair. But then, recollecting that he was now the Complete Man, and that the Complete Man must do everything with a flourish and a high hand, he leaned forward and, smiling with a charming insolence through his beard, began:

‘Tiresias, you may remember, was granted the singular privilege of living both as a man and a woman.'

Ah, this was the genuine young poet. Supporting an elbow on the back of her chair and leaning her cheek against her hand, she disposed herself to listen and, where necessary, brilliantly to interpellate; it was through half-closed eyes that she looked at him, and she smiled faintly in a manner which she knew, from experience, to be enigmatic, and though a shade haughty, though a tiny bit mocking and ironical, exceedingly attractive.

An hour and a half later they were driving towards an address in Bloxam Gardens, Maida Vale. The name seemed vaguely familiar to Gumbril. Bloxam Gardens – perhaps one of his aunts had lived there once?

‘It's a dr-dreadful little maisonette,' she explained. ‘Full of awful things. We had to take it furnished. It's so impossible to find anything now.'

Gumbril leaned back in his corner, wondering, as he studied that averted profile, who or what this young woman could be. She seemed to be in the obvious movement, to like the sort of things one would expect people to like; she seemed to be as highly civilized, in Mr Mercaptan's rather technical sense of the term, as free of all prejudices as the great exponent of civilization himself.

She seemed, from her coolly dropped hints, to possess all the dangerous experience, all the assurance and easy ruthlessness of a great lady whose whole life is occupied in the interminable affairs of the heart, the senses and the head. But, by a strange contradiction, she seemed to find her life narrow and uninteresting. She had complained in so many words that her husband misunderstood and neglected her, had complained, by implication, that she knew very few interesting people.

The maisonette in Bloxam Gardens was certainly not very splendid – six rooms on the second and third floors of a peeling stucco house. And the furniture – decidedly Hire Purchase. And the curtains and cretonnes – brightly ‘modern', positively ‘futurist'.

‘What one has to put up with in furnished flats!' The lady made a grimace as she ushered him into the sitting-room. And while she spoke the words, she really managed to persuade herself that the furniture wasn't theirs, that they had found all this sordid stuff cluttering up the rooms, not chose it, oh and with pains! themselves, not doggedly paid for it, month by month.

‘Our own things,' she murmured vaguely, ‘are stored. In the Riviera.' It was there, under the palms, among the gaudy melon flowers and the croupiers that the fastidious lady had last held her salon of young poets. In the Riviera – that would explain, now she came to think of it, a lot of things, if explanation ever became necessary.

The Complete Man nodded sympathetically. ‘Other people's tastes,' he held up his hands, they both laughed. ‘But why do we think of other people?' he added. And coming forward with a conquering impulsiveness, he took both her long, fine hands in his and raised them to his bearded mouth.

She looked at him for a second, then dropped her eyelids, took back her hands. ‘I must go and make the tea,' she said. ‘The servants' – the plural was a pardonable exaggeration – ‘are out.'

Gallantly, the Complete Man offered to come and help her. These scenes of intimate life had a charm all their own. But she would not allow it. ‘No, no,' she was very firm, ‘I simply forbid you. You must stay here. I won't be a moment,' and she was gone, closing the door carefully behind her.

Left to himself, Gumbril sat down and filed his nails.

As for the young lady, she hurried along to her dingy little kitchen, lit the gas, put the kettle on, set out the teapot and the cups on a tray, and from the biscuit-box, where it was stored, took out the remains of a chocolate cake, which had already seen service at the day-before-yesterday's tea-party. When all was ready here, she tip-toed across to her bedroom and sitting down at her dressing-table, began with hands that trembled a little with excitement to powder her nose and heighten the colour of her cheeks. Even after the last touch had been given, she still sat there, looking at her image in the glass.

The lady and the poet, she was thinking, the
grande dame
and the brilliant young man of genius. She liked young men with beards. But he was not an artist, in spite of the beard, in spite of the hat. He was a writer of sorts. So she gathered; but he was reticent, he was delightfully mysterious. She too, for that matter. The great lady slips out, masked, into the street; touches the young man's sleeve: Come with me. She chooses, does not let herself passively be chosen. The young poet falls at her feet; she lifts him up. One is accustomed to this sort of thing.

She opened her jewel-box, took out all her rings – there were not many of them, alas! – and put them on. Two or three of them, on second thoughts, she took off again; they were a little, she suspected with a sudden qualm, in other people's taste.

He was very clever, very artistic – only that seemed to be the wrong word to use; he seemed to know all the new things, all the interesting people. Perhaps he would introduce her to some of them. And he was so much at ease behind his knowledge, so well assured. But for her part, she felt pretty certain, she had made no stupid mistakes. She too had been, had looked at any rate – which was the important thing – very much at ease.

She liked young men with beards. They looked so Russian. Catherine of Russia had been one of the great ladies with caprices. Masked in the streets. Young poet, come with me. Or even, Young butcher's boy. But that, no, that was going too far, too low. Still, life, life – it was there to be lived – life – to be enjoyed. And now, and now? She was still wondering what would happen next, when the kettle, which was one of those funny ones which whistle when they come to the boil, began, fitfully at first, then, under full steam, unflaggingly, to sound its mournful, otherworldly note. She sighed and bestirred herself to attend to it.

‘Let me help you.' Gumbril jumped up as she came into the room. ‘What can I do?' He hovered rather ineptly round her.

The lady put down her tray on the little table. ‘N-nothing,' she said.

‘N-nothing?' he imitated her with a playful mockery. ‘Am I good for n-nothing at all?' He took one of her hands and kissed it.

‘Nothing that's of the 1-least importance.' She sat down and began to pour out the tea.

The Complete Man also sat down. ‘So to adore at first sight,' he asked, ‘is not of the 1-least importance?'

She shook her head, smiled, raised and lowered her eyelids. One was so well accustomed to this sort of thing; it had no importance. ‘Sugar?' she asked. The young poet was safely there, sparkling across the tea-table. He offered love and she, with the easy heartlessness of one who is so well accustomed to this sort of thing, offered him sugar.

He nodded. ‘Please. But if it's of no importance to you,' he went on, ‘then I'll go away at once.'

The lady laughed her section of a descending chromatic scale. ‘Oh no, you won't,' she said. ‘You can't.' And she felt that the
grande dame
had made a very fine stroke.

‘Quite right,' the Complete Man replied; ‘I couldn't.' He stirred his tea. ‘But who are you,' he looked up at her suddenly, ‘you devilish female?' He was genuinely anxious to know; and besides, he was paying her a very pretty compliment. ‘What do you do with your dangerous existence?'

‘I enjoy life,' she said. ‘I think one ought to enjoy life. Don't you? I think it's one's first duty.' She became quite grave. ‘One ought to enjoy every moment of it,' she said. ‘Oh, passionately, adventurously, newly, excitingly, uniquely.'

The Complete Man laughed. ‘A conscientious hedonist. I see.'

She felt uncomfortably that the fastidious lady had not quite lived up to her character. She had spoken more like a young woman who finds life too dull and daily, and would like to get on to the cinema. ‘I am very conscientious,' she said, making significant play with the magnolia petals and smiling her riddling smile. She must retrieve the Great Catherine's reputation.

‘I could see that from the first,' mocked the Complete Man with a triumphant insolence. ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all.'

The fastidious lady only contemptuously smiled. ‘Have a little chocolate cake,' she suggested. Her heart was beating. She wondered, she wondered.

There was a long silence. Gumbril finished his chocolate cake, gloomily drank his tea and did not speak. He found, all at once, that he had nothing to say. His jovial confidence seemed, for the moment, to have deserted him. He was only the Mild and Melancholy one foolishly disguised as a Complete Man; a sheep in beaver's clothing. He entrenched himself behind his formidable silence and waited; waited, at first, sitting in his chair, then, when this total inactivity became unbearable, striding about the room.

She looked at him, for all her air of serene composure, with a certain disquiet. What on earth was he up to now? What could he be thinking about? Frowning like that, he looked like a young Jupiter, bearded and burly (though not, she noticed, quite so burly as he had appeared in his overcoat), making ready to throw a thunderbolt. Perhaps he was thinking of her – suspecting her, seeing through the fastidious lady and feeling angry at her attempted deception. Or perhaps he was bored with her, perhaps he was wanting to go away. Well, let him go; she didn't mind. Or perhaps he was just made like that – a moody young poet; that seemed, on the whole, the most likely explanation; it was also the most pleasing and romantic. She waited. They both waited.

Gumbril looked at her and was put to shame by the spectacle of her quiet serenity. He must do something, he told himself; he must recover the Complete Man's lost morale. Desperately he came to a halt in front of the one decent picture hanging on the walls. It was an eighteenth-century engraving of Raphael's ‘Transfiguration' – better, he always thought, in black and white than in its bleakly-coloured original.

‘That's a nice engraving,' he said. ‘Very nice.' The mere fact of having uttered at all was a great comfort to him, a real relief.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘That belongs to me. I found it in a secondhand shop, not far from here.'

‘Photography,' he pronounced, with that temporary earnestness which made him seem an enthusiast about everything, ‘is a mixed blessing. It has made it possible to reproduce pictures so easily and cheaply, that all the bad artists who were well occupied in the past, making engravings of good men's paintings, are now free to do bad original work of their own.' All this was terribly impersonal, he told himself, terribly off the point. He was losing ground. He must do something drastic to win it back. But what?