‘So you see we mustn’t blame Sebastian if at times he seems a little insipid — but then you don’t blame him, do you, Charles? With that very murky background, what could he do except set up as being simple and charming, particularly as he isn’t very well endowed in the Top Storey. We couldn’t claim that for him, could we, much as we love him?
‘Tell me candidly, have you ever heard Sebastian say anything you have remembered for five minutes? You know, when I hear him talk, I am reminded of that in some ways nauseating picture of “Bubbles”. Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights ‘and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.’
And then Anthony spoke of the proper experiences of an artist, of the appreciation and criticism and stimulus he should expect from his friends, of the hazards he should take in the pursuit of emotion, of one thing and another while I fell drowsy and let my mind wander a little. So we drove home, but his words, as we swung over Magdalen Bridge, recalled the central theme of our dinner. ‘Well, my dear, I’ve no doubt that first thing tomorrow you’ll trot round to Sebastian and tell him everything I’ve said about him. And, I will tell you two things; one, that it will not make the slightest difference to Sebastian’s feeling for me and secondly, my dear — and I beg you to remember this though I have plainly bored you into condition of coma, — that he will immediately start talking about that amusing bear of his. Good night. Sleep innocently.’
But I slept ill. Within an hour of tumbling drowsily to bed I was awake again, thirsty, restless, hot and cold by turns, and unnaturally excited. I had drunk a lot, but neither the mixture nor the Chartreuse, nor the Mavrodaphne Trifle nor even the fact that I had sat immobile and almost silent throughout the evening instead of clearing the fumes, as we normally did, in puppyish romps and tumbles, explains the distress of that hag-ridden night. No dream distorted the images of the evening into horrific shapes. I lay awake and clear-headed. I repeated to myself Anthony’s words, catching his accent, soundlessly, and the stress and cadence of his speech, while under my closed lids I saw his pale, candle-lit face as it had fronted me across the dinner table. Once during the hours of darkness I brought to light the drawings in my sitting-room and sat at the open window, turning them over. Everything was black and dead-still in the quadrangle; only at the quarter-hours the bells awoke and sang over the gables. I drank soda-Water and smoked and fretted, until light began to break and the rustle of a rising breeze turned me back to my bed.
When I awoke Lunt was at the open door. ‘I let you lie,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you’d be going to the Corporate Communion.’
‘You were quite right’
‘Most of the freshmen went and quite a few second and third year men. It’s all on account of the new chaplain. There was never Corporate Communion before just Holy Communion for those that wanted it and Chapel and Evening Chapel.’
It was the last Sunday of term; the last of the year. As I went to my bath, the quad filled with gowned and surpliced undergraduates drifting from chapel to hall. As I came back they standing in groups, smoking; Jasper had bicycled in from his digs to be among them.
I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast as I often did on Sundays at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library, a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start.
None but churchgoers seemed abroad that morning; undergraduates and graduates and wives and tradespeople, walking with that unmistakable English church-going pace which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering; holding, bound in black lambskin and white celluloid, the liturgics of half a dozen conflicting sects; on their way to St Barnabas, St Columba, St Aloysius, St Mary’s, Pusey House, Blackfriars, and heaven knows where besides; to restored Norman and revived Gothic, to travesties of Venice and Athens; all in the summer sunshine going to the temples of their race. Four proud infidels alone proclaimed their dissent, four Indians from the gates of Balliol, in freshly-laundered white flannels and neatly pressed blazers with snow-white turbans on their, heads, and in their plump, brown hands bright cushions, a picnic basket and the Unpleasant Plays of Bernard Shaw, making for the river.
In the Cornmarket a party of tourists stood on the steps of the Clarendon Hotel discussing a road map with their chauffeur, while opposite, through the venerable arch of the Golden Cross, I greeted a group of undergraduates from my college who had breakfasted there and now lingered with their pipes in the creeper-hung courtyard. A troop of boy scouts, church-bound, too, bright with Coloured ribbons and badges, loped past in unmilitary array, and at Carfax I met the Mayor and corporation, in scarlet gowns and gold chains, preceded by wand-bearers and followed by no curious glances, in procession to the preaching at the City Church. In St Aldates I passed a crocodile of choir boys, in starched collars and peculiar caps, on their way to Tom Gate and the Cathedral. So through a world of piety I made my way to Sebastian.
He was out. I read the letters, none of them very revealing, that littered his writing table and scrutinized the invitation cards on his chimney-piece — there were no new additions. Then I read Lady into Fox until he returned.
‘I’ve been to at the Old Palace,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been all this term, and Monsignor Bell asked me to dinner twice last week, and I know what that means. Mummy’s been writing to him. So I sat bang in front where he couldn’t help seeing me and absolutely shouted the Hail Marys at the end so that’s over. How was dinner with Antoine? What did you talk about?’
‘Well, he did most of the talking. Tell me, did you know him at Eton?’
‘He was sacked my first half. I remember seeing him about. He always has been a noticeable figure.’
‘Did he go to church with you?’
‘I don’t think so, why?’
‘Has he met any of your family?’
‘Charles, how very peculiar you’re being today. No. I don’t suppose so.
‘Not your mother at Venice?’
‘I believe she did say something about it. I forget what. I think she was staying with some Italian cousins of ours, the Foglieres, and Anthony turned up with his family at the hotel, and there was some party the Foglieres gave that they weren’t asked to. I know Mummy said something about it when I told her he was a friend of mine. I can’t think why he should want to go to a party at the Foglieres — the princess is so proud of her English blood that she talks of nothing else. Anyway, no one objected to Antoine — much, I gather. It was his mother they thought difficult.’
‘And who is the Duchesse of Vincennes?’
‘Poppy?’
‘Stefanie.’
‘You must ask Antoine that. He claims to have had an affair with her.’
‘Did he?’
‘I dare say. I think it’s more or less compulsory at Cannes. Why all this interest?’
‘I just wanted to find out how much truth there was in what Anthony said last night.’
‘I shouldn’t, think a word. That’s his great charm.’
‘You may think it charming. I think it’s devilish. Do you know he spent the whole of yesterday evening trying to turn me against you, and almost succeeded?’
r /> ‘Did he? How silly. Aloysius wouldn’t approve of that at all, would you, you pompous old bear?’
And then Boy Mulcaster came into the room.
CHAPTER III
My father at home — Lady Julia Flyte
I RETURNED home for the Long Vacation without plans and without money. To cover end-of-term expenses I had sold my Omega screen to Collins for ten pounds, of which I now kept four; my last cheque overdrew my account my a few shillings, and I had been told that, without my father’s authority, I must draw no more. My next allowance was not due until October. I was thus faced with a bleak prospect and, turning the matter over in my mind, I felt something not far off remorse for the prodigality, of the preceding weeks.
I had started the term with my battels paid and over a hundred pounds in hand. All that had gone, and not a penny paid out where I could get credit. There had been no reason for it, no great pleasure unattainable else; it had gone in ducks and drakes. Sebastian used to tease me — ‘You spend money, like a bookie’ — but all of it went on and with him. His own finances were perpetually, vaguely distressed. ‘It’s all done by lawyers,’ he said helplessly, ‘and I suppose they embezzle a lot. Anyway, I never seem to get much. Of course, mummy would give me anything I asked for.’
‘Then why don’t you ask her for a proper allowance?’
‘Oh, mummy likes everything to be a present. She’s so sweet,’ he said, adding one more line to the picture I was forming of her.
Now Sebastian had disappeared into that other life of his where I was not asked to follow, and I was left, instead, forlorn and regretful.
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.
Thus I spent the first afternoon at home, wandering from room to room, looking from the plate-glass windows in turn on the garden and the street, in a mood of vehement self-reproach.
My father, I knew, was in the house, but his library was inviolable, and it was not until just before dinner that he appeared to greet me. He was then in his late fifties, but it was his idiosyncrasy to seem much older than his years; to see him one might have put him at seventy, to hear him speak at nearly eighty. He came to me now, with the shuffling, mandarin-tread which he affected, and a shy smile of welcome. When he dined at home — and he seldom dined elsewhere — he wore a frogged velvet smoking suit of the kind which had been fashionable many years before and was to be so again, but, at that time, was a deliberate archaism.
‘My dear boy, I they never told me you were here.’ Did you have a very exhausting journey? They gave you tea? You are well? I have just made a somewhat audacious I purchase from Sonerscheins — a terra-cotta bull of the fifth century. I was examining it and forgot your arrival. Was the carriage very full? You had a corner seat? (He travelled so rarely himself that to hear of others doing so always excited his solicitude.) ‘Hayter brought you the evening paper? There is no news, of course — such a lot of nonsense.’
Dinner was announced. My father from long habit took a book with him to the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his chair. ‘What do you like to drink? Hayter, what have we for Mr Charles to drink?’
‘There’s some whisky.’
‘There’s whisky. Perhaps you like something, else? What else have we?’
‘There isn’t anything else in the house, sir.’
‘There’s nothing else. You must tell Hayter what you would like and he will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one comes to see me. But while you are here, you must have what you like. You are here for long.?’
‘I’m not quite sure, father.’
‘It’s a very long vacation,’ he said wistfully. ‘In my day we used to go on what were called reading parties, always in mountainous areas. Why?. Why,’ he repeated petulantly, ‘should alpine scenery be thought conducive to study?’
‘I thought of putting in some time at an art school — in the life class.’
‘My dear boy, you’ll find them all shut. The students go to Barbizon or such places and paint in the open air. There was an institution in my day called a “sketching club”‘ — mixed sexes’ (snuffle), ‘bicycles’ (snuffle), ‘pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, holland umbrellas, and, it was popularly thought, free love’ (snuffle), such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still go on. You might try that.’
‘One of the problems of the vacation is money, father.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.’
‘You see, I’ve run rather short.’
‘Yes?’ said my father without any sound of interest.
‘In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.’
‘Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been “short” as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?’ (snuffle). ‘On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, “Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.” Such a lot of nonsense. You try. Go to those gentlemen in Jermyn Street who offer advances on note of hand only. My dear boy, they won’t give you a sovereign.’
‘Then what do you suggest my doing?’
‘Your cousin Melchior was imprudent with his investments and got into a very queer street. He went to Australia.’
I had not seen my father so gleeful since he found two pages of second-century papyrus between the leaves of a Lombardic breviary.
‘Hayter, I’ve dropped my book.’
It was recovered for him from under his feet and propped against the epergne. For the rest of dinner he was silent save for an occasional snuffle of merriment which could not, I thought be provoked by the work he read.
Presently we left the table and sat in I the garden-room; and there, plainly, he put me out of his mind; his thoughts, I knew, were far away, in those distant ages where he moved at ease, where time passed in centuries and all the figures were defaced and the names of his companions were corrupt readings of words of quite other meaning. He sat in an attitude which to anyone else would have been one of extreme discomfort, askew in his upright armchair, with his book held high and obliquely to the light. Now and then he took a gold pencil-case from his watchchain and made an entry in the margin. The windows were open to the summer night; the ticking of the clocks, the distant murmur of traffic on the Bayswater Road, and my-father’s regular turning of the pages were the only sounds. I had thought it impolitic to smoke a cigar while pleading poverty; now in desperation I went to my room and fetched one. My father did not look up. I pierced it, lit it, and with renewed confidence said, ‘Father, you surely don’t want me to spend the whole vacation here with you?’