Hearing secret harmonies (30 page)

Not bad, is it?’

‘It all sounds very contemporary. What does it mean?’

‘Roughly, that a quart of good wine in London is better than anything to be stolen in the country, and, as long as wine’s to be drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stocks, while some heel is stuffing your tart – that’s a palliard docking your dell. Owing to Gwinnett, I came across a good couplet in Tourneur too:

Lust is a spirit, which whosoe’er doth raise,
The next man that encounters boldly, lays.

There seems a foot too many in the first line. They may have elided those relatives in a different way at that period.’

‘How does the thieves’ slang poem come into the Middleton play?’

‘The Roaring Girl sings it herself, with a character called Tearcat. The Roaring Girl dresses like a man, smokes, carries a sword, fights duels. A narcissistic type, rather than specifically lesbian, one would say. At least there are no scenes where she dallies with her own sex.’

Delavacquerie’s good memory, eye for things that were unusual, had certainly been useful to him as a PR-man; for which he also possessed the requisite toughness. What he said next was a side he much less often revealed. It suggested reflections on Fiona.

‘It’s odd how one gets acclimatized to other people’s sexual experiences. At a younger age, they strike one so differently. For instance, during the war I knew a married woman – a captain’s wife – who told me of her first seduction. She was seventeen or eighteen, and on the way to her art-school one morning. Running to catch a bus, she just missed it. Two men, cruising by in a car, laughed at her standing breathless on the pavement. They stopped and offered her a lift. When they dropped her at the art-school door, the one who wasn’t driving asked if she’d dine with him later in the week. She agreed. They went to a road-house outside London. In the course of dinner – establishing his bonafides as
homme sérieux
– her host remarked that he had lived with one girl for two years. Telling the story to me, she commented that – in those days – she thought love was for ever. Anyway, the chap gave her dinner, they had a good deal to drink – which she wasn’t used to – and, afterwards, went into the garden of the roadhouse where he had her in the shrubbery. When she got home, finding her knickers all over blood, she thought to herself: I’ve been a silly girl. That’s what she told me.’

‘What’s the moral of all that?’

‘There isn’t one, except that the story used to haunt me. I don’t quite know why. It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.’

‘She never saw the bloke again?’

‘No. I don’t think it really made a ha’p’orth of difference to her. All I say is that for a while the story haunted me.’

‘You were in love with the heroine?’

‘Naturally. In a way that wasn’t the point, which is that, in due course, you find girls are really perfectly well able to look after themselves, most of them. Even allowing for the fact that
les chiens sont fidèles, mais pas aux chiennes
. To retain the metaphor – bring it up to date – in sexual matters, as in others, the dogs bark, the Caravelle takes off.’

I never knew what Delavacquerie really felt about the Fiona business. Afterwards I wondered whether the heroine of the story he had told was really his dead wife. As Canon Fenneau had observed, we go through life lacking understanding of many things, though I think the Canon inwardly made something of an exception of his own case, where knowledge was concerned. That, at least, was modestly implied in an article I came across later that year, in which he contrasted Chaldean Magic with the worship of Isis and Osiris.

7

BAD WEATHER, OTHER ODD JOBS, mere lack of energy, had all contributed to allowing the unlit bonfire, projected as a few hours’ clearing and burning, to become an untidy pile of miscellaneous debris; laurel (cut down months before), briars, nettles, leaves, unsold rubbish from a jumble sale, on top of it all several quite large branches of oak and copper beech snapped off by the gales. In spite of fog, something calm, peaceful, communicative, about the afternoon suggested the time had come to end this too long survival. A livid sky could mean snow. That dense muffled feeling pervaded the air. The day was not cold for the season, but an autumnal spell of mild weather – short, though notably warm that year – was now over. It had given place to a continuous wind blowing from the west, dropped the night before, after bringing down a lot of leaves and the sizeable boughs. There was a great stillness everywhere, except for a monotonous thud-thud from the quarry; a persistent low rumble, like a faraway train making laborious headway along a rough stretch of track. White vapour, less thick over by Gauntlett’s farm, where a few ghostly trees penetrated its mists, wholly obscured the quarry’s limestone platforms and Assyrian rampart.

For kindling, I shoved twists of newspaper in at the base of the heap. At the moment of ignition, the match flared against capital letters of a headline displayed on the outward surface of one of these scraps of newsprint.

EDWARDIAN SYMBOLIST
SEASCAPE VOTARIES

The enigmatic antithesis topped an article read a week or two before. Even allowing for contemporary changes in art fashions, the critic’s enthusiasm had then seemed surprising. After seeing the pictures, remembering the piece, I vaguely thought of glancing through the notice again, to see if I now felt more agreement with the opinions expressed. By then the newspaper had been thrown away, or disappeared among a heap of others; kept for such uses as lighting fires. A search, likely to be unfruitful, seemed scarcely worth the trouble. Now, inclination to read about what had been said of the exhibition – the two exhibitions – was reanimated. In any case the visit to the gallery had been rather an historic occasion; setting something of a seal on all sorts of past matters.

Lighting another screw of newspaper under the stack, I extracted a handful of crumpled up pages, and straightened them out. On the back of one of these was a paragraph reporting Quentin Shuckerly’s end in New York (battered to death in Greenwich Village), while on a cultural mission of some kind. I tore out Edwardian Symbolist/Seascape Votaries, committing Shuckerly’s obituary lines to their funeral pyre. The paper flared up, dry twigs began to crackle, damp weeds smouldered, smoke rose high into the white mists, merging into grey-blueness. The atmosphere was filled all at once with the heart-searing bonfire smell.

‘… albeit his roots lie in Continental Symbolism, Deacon’s art remains unique in itself. In certain moods he can recall Fernand Khnopff or Max Klinger, the Belgian’s near-photographic technique observable in Deacon’s semi-naturalistic treatment of more than one of his favourite renderings of Greek or Roman legend. In his genre pictures, the academic compliances of the Secession School of Vienna are given strong homosexual bias – even Deacon’s sphinxes and chimaeras possessing solely male attributes – a fearless sexual candour that must have shocked the susceptibilities of his own generation, sadomasochist broodings in paint that grope towards the psychedelic…’

The writer of the critique, a young journalist, with already something of a name in art circles, had been less enthralled by the late Victorian seascapes, also on view at the gallery; though he drew attention to the fact that here too, as with the Deacons, an exciting revival had taken place of a type of painting long out of fashion with yesterday’s art critics. He expressed his welcome of these aesthetic reinstatements; noting the fact that at least a few connoisseurs, undeterred by the narrow tastes of the day, had followed their own preference for straightforward marine subjects, painted in an unaffectedly naturalistic manner. Most of those on view at the gallery had come from a single collection. He praised the ‘virtuosity’ and ‘tightness of finish’ of
Gannets Nesting, The Needles: Schooner Aground, Angry Seas off Land’s End
, all by different hands.

Although a card had arrived for a Private View at this gallery, a new one, these two exhibitions had run for at least a fortnight before I found opportunity to pay a visit. Returning to the newspaper article – having been to the gallery – I felt less surprise at the critic’s warm responses, not only to the Deacons, but also to the Victorian seascapes. That was probably due, as much as anything else, to a desire to keep in the swim. There was also a sense of satisfaction in reading praise of Mr Deacon (to me he always remained ‘Mr Deacon’), given by a responsible art critic; a young one at that. The last quality would have delighted Mr Deacon himself. He had once remarked that youth was the only valid criterion in any field. He himself never quite achieved a fusion of the physical and intellectual in propagating that view. Certainly the notice marked how far tastes had altered since the period – just after the second war – when I had watched four Deacons knocked down for a few pounds in a shabby saleroom between Euston Road and Camden Town. At the time, I had supposed those to be the last Deacons I should ever set eyes on. In a sense they were; the last of the old dispensation. The pictures on view at the Barnabas Henderson Gallery (the show specifically advertised as the Bosworth Deacon Centenary Exhibition) were not so much a Resurrection as a Second Coming.

If the rehabilitation of Mr Deacon’s art had not in itself provided an overriding inducement to visit the exhibition, the name of the gallery – proving all curiosity was not at an end – would have gone a long way as an alternative inducement to do so. A single-page pamphlet, accompanying the Private View card, outlined the aims of this new picture firm, which had just come into being. They seemed admirable ones. The premises were in the neighbourhood of Berkeley Square. It was rather late in the afternoon when I finally reached the place, a newly painted exterior, the street in process of being rebuilt, the road up, several Georgian houses opposite looking as if they had been recently bombed. In the window of the Barnabas Henderson Gallery itself a poster proclaimed Mr Deacon’s name in typography of a size, and fount, he would have approved, an aureole of favourable press notices pinned round about.

Within, I found myself surrounded by Deacon canvases assembled on an unprecedented scale; more Deacons than might be supposed even to have been painted, far less survived. The Victorian seascapes were segregated in a room beyond, but an arrow pointed to an extension of the Deacon Centenary Exhibition on the upper floor, which I decided to explore first. The red tag of a sale marked a high proportion of the pictures. Two of those so summarily dismissed at the down-at-heel auction-rooms were immediately recognizable from their black-and-gold Art Nouveau frames, Deacon-designed to form part of the picture itself; a technique Mr Deacon rather precariously supported by quoting two lines from
Pericles
:

In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed:
To make some good, but others to exceed.

In the shabby saleroom this purpose of the frames had been obscured by dirt and tarnished paint, which cleaning and restoration now made clear. Light in pigment, some of the canvases were huge in size, remembered subjects included Hellenic athletes painfully straining in some contest; another (too grimy at the time to be properly appreciated), a boy slave reproved by his toga-enveloped master, whose dignified figure was not without all resemblance to Mr Deacon himself in his palmy days. The show was stylish in presentation. In fact Barnabas Henderson had done a stupendous rescue job from the Valley of Lost Things; Mr Deacon’s Astolpho, or perhaps one of the well disposed swans, fishing up his medallion for the Temple of Fame. Henderson clearly knew his business. To have supposed him the dim figure he had seemed, only a few months earlier in the same year, under the Murtlock regime, was an error of judgment. Since his self-manumission at Stourwater the Private View card was the first I had heard of him; nor was there any further news of Murtlock and Widmerpool.

Even Mr Deacon’s closest friends were accustomed to smile tolerantly, behind his back, about his painting. The few patrons had all faded away by the later stages of his life, when he had exchanged an artist’s career for an antique-dealer’s. All the same, in days when Barnby’s studio was above the antique shop, Barnby had remarked that, little as he approved himself, Sickert had once put in a good word for Mr Deacon’s work. Looking round, more impressed than I should have been prepared to admit, I took heart from Sickert’s judgment; at the same time trying to restore self-confidence as to an earlier scepticism by noting something undoubtedly less than satisfactory in the foreshortening of the slave boy’s loins.

There was still no one about in the first ground floor room of the gallery when I returned there, the attendant’s desk in the corner unoccupied. Through a door at the far end several persons, one of them in a wheel-chair, were to be seen perambulating among the Victorian seascapes. I had not at first noticed that one of the smaller pictures in this first room was
Boyhood of Cyrus
. Moving across to ascertain how closely, if at all, the palace in its background resembled the configurations of the local quarry, I was intercepted by Barnabas Henderson himself, who came hurrying up a flight of stairs leading from the basement. It was instantaneously apparent that he was a new man; no less renovated than the Deacon pictures on the walls. That was clear in a flash, a transformation not in the least due to adjustments in dress and personal appearance, also to be observed. He had slightly shortened his haircut, reverted to a suit, elegant in cut without being humdrum in style, wore a tie of similar mood. These, however different from a blue robe, were trivial modifications in relation to the general air of rebirth. There was a newly acquired briskness, even firmness of manner, sense of self-confidence amply restored.