Making a strong effort to check my exasperation I said, «I was glad to get rid of my wife and he went too. Can't you understand that? It seems simple enough to me.»
«I rather liked him. I asked him to come and see us.»
«Oh Christ!»
«I don't think curiosity is a kind of charity. I think it's a kind of malice.»
«That's what makes a writer, knowing the details.»
«It may make your kind of writer. It doesn't make mine.»
«Here we go again,» said Arnold.
«Why pile up a jumble of 'details'? When you start really imagining something you have to forget the details anyhow, they just get in the way. Art isn't the reproduction of oddments out of life.»
«I never said it was!» said Arnold. «I don't draw direct from life.»
«Your wife thinks you do.»
«Oh that. Oh God.»
«Inquisitive chatter and cataloguing of things one's spotted isn't art.»
«Of course it isn't-«Vague romantic myth isn't art either. Art is imagination. Imagination changes, fuses. Without imagination you have stupid details on one side and empty dreams on the other.»
«Bradley, I know you-«Art isn't chat plus fantasy. Art comes out of endless restraint and silence.»
«If the silence is endless there isn't any art! It's people without creative gifts who say that more means worse!»
«One should only complete something when one feels one's bloody privileged to have it at all. Those who only do what's easy will never be rewarded by-«Nonsense. I write whether I feel like it or not. I complete things whether I think they're perfect or not. Anything else is hypocrisy. I have no muse. That's what being a professional writer is.»
«Then thank God I'm not one.»
«You're such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You're a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.»
«It is continuously significant.»
«Oh come, be humbler, let cheerfulness break in! I can't think why you worry so. Thinking of yourself as a 'writer' is part of your trouble. Why not just think of yourself as someone who very occasionally writes something, who may in the future write something? Why make a life drama out of it?»
«I don't think of myself as a writer, not like that. I know you do. You're all 'writer.' I don't see myself in that way. I think of myself as an artist, that is, as a dedicated person. And of course it's a life drama. Are you suggesting that I'm some sort of amateur?»
«No, no-«Because if you are-«Bradley, please let's not have this silly old quarrel again, I don't feel strong enough.»
«All right. Sorry. Sorry.»
«You get so worked up and flowery! You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!»
I felt a sizzling warmth in my coat pocket wherein I had thrust the folded manuscript of my review of Arnold's novel. Arnold Baffin's work was a congeries of amusing anecdotes loosely garbled into «racy stories» with the help of half-baked unmeditated symbolism. The dark powers of imagination were conspicuous by their absence. Arnold Baffin wrote too much, too fast. Arnold Baffin was really just a talented journalist.
«Let's start up our Sundays again,» said Arnold. «I so much enjoyed our talks. We must just keep out of those old rat runs. We're both like mechanical toys when certain subjects are mentioned, we go whirring off. Come to lunch next Sunday, why not?»
«I doubt if Rachel will want to see me next Sunday.»
«Why ever not?»
«Anyway I'm going abroad.»
«Of course, I'd forgotten. Where are you going to?»
«Italy. I haven't made detailed plans yet.»
«Well, you aren't going at once, are you? Come next Sunday. And let us know where you'll be in Italy. We're going there too, we might meet.»
«I'll ring up. Better go now, Arnold.»
«All right. Thanks. And don't worry about us. You know.»
He seemed ready to let me go now. In fact we were both of us exhausted.
He waved me off and closed the door quickly. By the time I reached the front gate I could hear his gramophone. He must have hared straight back into the drawing-room and put on a record, like a man racing for his fix. It sounded like Stravinsky or something. The action and the sound set my teeth on edge. I am, I fear, one of those who, according to Shakespeare, are «fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.»
It was now, I was surprised to see from my watch, nearly eight o'clock in the evening. The sun was shining again, though a part of the sky was covered with dark metallic cloud which had been drawn across it like a curtain. There was a rather lurid light, such as these early summer evenings can produce, when a clear but strengthless sun shines at the approach of night. I noticed green leaves in the suburban gardens outlined with an awful clarity. The feathered songsters were still pouring forth their nonsense.
I felt very tired and a little muzzy and weak at the knees with fear and shock. A mixture of emotions raged. Partly, I still felt something of the sheer unholy excitement which I had experienced initially at the thought of a friend (especially this one) in trouble. I felt too that, as far as the trouble was concerned, I had acquitted myself quite well. However it was also possible that I might have to pay the penalty for this. Both Arnold and Rachel might resent my role and wish to punish me for it. This was a particularly irritating anxiety to develop just as I was proposing to go away and forget all about Arnold for a time. It was alarming to find myself suddenly so bound up by exasperation, irritation, affection. I resented and feared these ligatures. I wondered if I should not now delay my departure until after Sunday. On Sunday I could test the atmosphere, estimate the damage, make some sort of peace. Then I could depart in a suitable state of indifference. That they would both resent me as a witness seemed inevitable. However in so far as they were both decent rational people I could expect from them a conscious effort to inhibit resentment. This seemed a reason to see them again soon so as to allow them to make their effort before the thing became historically fixed. On the other hand I had, in that lurid evening light, a superstitious feeling that if I did not make my escape before Sunday something would grab me. I even wondered if I should take a taxi (one passed me at that moment), go back to my flat, pick up my luggage, and go straight on to the station, catching whatever train I could, even if it meant waiting there until the following morning. But this was obviously an absurd idea.
I then began to wonder what on earth was happening now back at the Baffins' house? Was Rachel still lying like a disfigured corpse staring at the ceiling, while Arnold sat in the drawing-room drinking whisky and listening to The Fire Bird? Perhaps Rachel had drawn the sheet over her face again in that appalling way. Or was it all quite different? Arnold was kneeling outside the door begging her to let him in, weeping and accusing himself. Or else, Rachel, who had been listening for my departure, had come quietly down the stairs and into her husband's arms. Perhaps now they were in the kitchen together, cooking the supper and opening a special bottle of wine to celebrate. What a mystery a marriage was. What a strange and violent world, the world of matrimony. I was glad to be outside it. The idea of it filled me with a sort of queasy pity. I felt at that moment so «curious,» in just Arnold's sense of the word, that I almost turned back to snoop around the house and find out what had happened. But of course such an action was not in my character.
I had crossed the main road and entered the little shopping street that led to the station. The evening had darkened though the pale lurid sun was still shining. Some of the shops had switched their lights on. There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed. The rather dream-like atmosphere was intensified, I suppose, by my own tiredness, by having drunk alcohol, by having eaten nothing. In this mood of rather doom-ridden spiritual lassitude I noticed with only a little surprise and interest the figure upon the other side of the road of a young man who was behaving rather oddly. He was standing upon the kerb and strewing flowers upon the roadway, as if casting them into a river. My first thought was that he was the adherent of some Hindu sect, not then uncommon in London, and that he was performing some religious rite. A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to «weirdies» of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.
The young fellow appeared to be chanting some sort of repetitive litany. I now saw that what he was strewing was not so much flowers as white petals. Where had I seen just such petals lately? The fragments of white paint which the violence of Arnold's chisel had dislodged from the bedroom door. And the white petals were being cast, not at random, but in relation to the regular and constant passage of motor-cars. As a car approached the young chap would take a handful of petals out of a bag and cast them into the path of the car, uttering the while his rhythmic chant. Then the frail whitenesses would race about, caught in the car's motion, dash madly under the wheels, follow the whirlwind of the car's wake, and dissipate themselves farther along the road: so that the casting away of the petals seemed like a sacrifice or act of destruction, since that which was offered was being so instantly consumed and made to vanish.
I describe Julian here as teen-age because that was how I still thought of her, though at this period she was, I suppose, in her earliest twenties. Arnold had been a young father. I had felt a modest avuncular interest in the fairy-like little girl. (I had never wanted children of my own. Many artists do not.) With the approach of puberty however she lost her looks and developed an awkward sulky aggressive attitude to the world in general which considerably diminished her charm. She was always fretting and complaining, and her little face, as it hardened into adult lines, grew discontented and secretive. That was as I recalled her. I had not in fact seen her for some while. Her parents adored her, yet were at the same time disappointed in her. They had wanted a boy. They had both assumed, as parents do, that Julian would be clever, but this appeared not to be the case. Julian took a long time growing up, she took little part in the self-conscious tribalism of the «teen-age» world, and still preferred dressing her dolls to dressing herself at an age when most girls are beginning, even pardonably, to interest themselves in war paint.
Not notably successful in exams and certainly not in the least bookish, Julian had left school at sixteen. She had spent a year in France, more at Arnold's insistence than out of her own sense of adventure, or so it had seemed to me at the time. She returned from France unimpressed by that country and speaking very bad French which she promptly forgot, and went on to a typists' training course. Fledged as a typist she took a job in the «typing pool» at a Government office. When she was about nineteen she decided that she was a painter, and Arnold eagerly wangled her into an art school, which she left after a year. After that she had entered a teachers' training college somewhere in the Midlands where she had been, I think, for a year or perhaps two when I saw her on that evening strewing the white petals in the path of the oncoming motorcars.
«Hello, Bradley.»
Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold's «greasy» look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother's, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel's large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blond colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are skittish.
«Hello, Julian. Whatever are you doing?»
«Have you been to see Daddy?»
«Yes.» I reflected that it was just as well Julian was out this evening.
«Good. I thought you'd quarrelled.»
«Certainly not!»
«You don't come any more.»
«I do. Only you're away.»
«Not now. I'm doing teaching practice in London. What was happening when you left?»
«Where? At home? Oh-nothing special-«They were quarrelling so I left the house. Have they calmed town?»
«Yes, of course-«Don't you think they quarrel more than they used to?»
«No, I-How smart you are, Julian. Quite a dandy.»
«It's an exorcism. These are love letters.»
«Love letters?»
«From my ex-boy friend.»
I remembered that Arnold had mentioned rather unenthusiastically a «hairy swain,» an art student or something.
«Have you parted company?»
«Yes. I've torn them into the smallest possible pieces. When I've got rid of them all I'll be free. Here goes the last, I think.»
Taking from her neck the receptacle rather like a nose-bag which had contained the dismembered missives she turned it inside out. A few more white petals flew with the passing wind and were gone.
«But what were you saying, you were chanting something, a spell or such.»
» 'Oscar Belling.' «ш «What?»
«That was his name. Look, I'm using the past tense! It's all over!
«Did you abandon him or did he-?»
«I'd rather not talk about it. Bradley, I wanted to ask you something.»
It was quite dark now, a bluish night gauzed over by the yellow street lamps, and reminding me irrelevantly of Rachel's reddish golden hair adhering to the front of Francis's shabby blue suit. We walked slowly along the street.
«Look, Bradley, it's this. I've decided to be a writer.»
My heart sank. «That's fine.»
«And I want you to help me.»
«It's not easy to help someone to be a writer, it may not even be possible.»
«The thing is, I don't want to be a writer like Daddy, I want to be a writer like you.»
My heart warmed to the girl. But my answer had to be ironical. «My dear Julian, don't emulate me! I constantly try and hardly ever succeed!»
«That's just it. Daddy writes too much, don't you think? He hardly ever revises. He writes something, then he 'gets rid of it' by publishing it, I've heard him actually say that, and then he writes something else. He's always in such a hurry, it's neurotic. I see no point in being an artist unless you try all the time to be perfect.»
I wondered if these were the views of the late Oscar Belling. «It's a long hard road, Julian, if that's what you believe.»
«Well, it's what you believe, and I admire you for it, I've always admired you, Bradley. But the point is this, will you teach me?»
My heart sank again. «What do you mean, Julian?»
«Two things really. I've been thinking about it. I know I'm not educated and I know I'm immature. And this teachers' training place is hopeless. I want you to give me a reading list. All the great books I ought to read, but only the great ones and the hard ones. I don't want to waste my time with small stuff. I haven't got much time left now. And I'll read the books and we could discuss them. You could give me sort of tutorials on them. And then, the second thing, I'd like to write things for you, short stories perhaps, or anything you felt I should write, and you'd criticize what I'd written. You see, I want to be really taken in hand. I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don't you? Like learning to draw before you paint. Do please say you'll take me on. It needn't take much of your time, not more than a couple of hours or so in a week, and it would absolutely change my life.»
I knew of course that it was just a matter of choosing a way of getting out of this gracefully. Julian was already grieving over the wasted years and regretting that she had not much time left. My grief and my regret were a rather different matter. I could not spare her a couple of hours a week. How dare she ask for my precious hours? In any case, the child's suggestion appalled and embarrassed me. It was not just the display of youthful insensibility. It was the sadly misplaced nature of her ambition. There was little doubt that Julian's fate was to be typist, teacher, housewife, without starring in any role.
I said, «I think it's a very good idea and of course I'd like to help, and I do so agree with you about technique-Only just now I'm going to be abroad for a while.»
«Oh, where? I could visit you. I'm quite free now because my school has measles.»
«I shall be travelling.»
«Oh Iliad, Divine Comedy, please. That's marvellous! That's just it! The big stuff!»
«And you don't mind poetry, prose-?»
«Oh no, not poetry. I can't read poetry very well. I'm keeping poetry for later on.»
«The Iliad and the Divine Comedy are poems.»
«Well, yes, of course they are, but I'd be reading them in a prose translation.»
«So that disposes of that difficulty.»
«You will write to me then, Bradley? I'm so terribly grateful. I'll say good-bye to you here because I must just look in this shop.»
We had stopped rather abruptly a little short of the station outside the illuminated window of a shoe shop. High summer boots of various colours made out of a sort of lace occupied the front of the window. Slightly put out by the brusqueness of my dismissal I could not think of anything suitable to say. I saluted vaguely and said, «Ta-ta,» an expression which I do not think I have ever used before or since.
«Ta-ta,» said Julian, as if this were a sort of code. Then she turned to face the lighted window and began examining the boots.
I crossed the road and reached the station entrance and looked back. She was leaning forward now with her hands on her knees, her thick hair and her brow and nose goldened by the bright light. I thought how aptly some painter, not Mr. Belling, could have used her as a model for an allegory of Vanity. I watched, as one might watch a fox, for some minutes, but she did not go away or even move.
Yes, it was time to move. I had felt, during recent months, sometimes boredom, sometimes despair, as I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. The trouble was that the dark blaze, whose absence I had deplored in Arnold's work, was absent here as well. I could not fire and fuse these thoughts, these people, into a whole thing. I wanted to produce a sort of statement which might be called my philosophy. But I also wanted to embody this in a story, perhaps in an allegory, something with a form as pliant and as hard as my cast-iron garland of roses. But I could not do it. My people were shadows, my thoughts were epigrams. However I felt, as we artists can feel, the proximity of enlightenment. And I was sure that if I went away now into loneliness, right away from the associations of tedium and failure, I would soon be rewarded. So it was in this mood that I decided to set forth, leaving my darling burrow for a countryside which I had never visited, and a cottage which I had never seen.
I also write to ask you, as briefly as possible, a favour. You were of course interested to meet Francis Marloe, who by the weirdest accident was with me when you telephoned. You spoke of meeting him again. Please do not do so. If you reflect you will see how hurtful to me any such association would be. I do not propose to have anything to do with my former wife and I do not want any connection to exist between her world, whatever that may turn out to be, and the things of my own which are dear to me. It would of course be characteristic of you to feel «interested» in probing in this region, but please be kind enough to an old friend not to do so.
Let me take this chance to say that in spite of all differences our friendship is very precious to me. As you will remember, I have made you my literary executor. Could there be a greater sign of trust? However, let us hope that talk of wills is premature. I am just now leaving London and will be away for some time. I hope I shall be able to write. I feel that a most crucial period in my life lies ahead. Give my fondest love to Rachel. I thank you both for your consistent cordiality to a solitary man; and I rely upon you absolutely in the matter of F. M.
Refilling my pen, I began to write another letter, which ran as follows: My dear Julian, it was kind of you to ask my advice about books and writing. I am afraid I cannot offer to teach you to write. I have not the time, and such teaching is, I surmise, impossible anyway. Let me just say a word about books. I think you should read the Iliad and the Odyssey in any unvarnished translation. (If pressed for time, omit the Odyssey.) These are the greatest literary works in the world, where huge conceptions are refined into simplicity. I think perhaps you should leave Dante until later. The Commedia presents many points of difficulty and needs, as Homer does not, a commentary. In fact, if not read in Italian, this great work seems not only incomprehensible, but repulsive. You should, I feel, relax your embargo upon poetry sufficiently to accommodate the better known plays of Shakespeare! How fortunate we are to have English as our native tongue! Familiarity and excitement should carry you easily through these works. Forget that they are «poetry» and just enjoy them. The rest of my reading list consists simply of the greatest English and Russian novels of the nineteenth century. (If you are not sure which these are, ask your father: I think he can be trusted to tell you!)
My very good wishes to you, and thank you for wanting to know what I thought!
Yours,
Bradley
After I had finished this letter and after some reflection and fumbling and excursions to the chimney piece and the display cabinet, I began a further letter which went thus: Dear Marloe, as I hope I made clear to you, your visit was not only unwelcome but entirely without point, since I do not propose under any circumstances to communicate with my former wife. Any further attempt at an approach, whether by letter or in person, will be met by absolute rejection. However, now that you appreciate my attitude I imagine that you will be kind and wise enough to leave me alone. I was grateful for your help chez Mr. and Mrs. Baffin. I should tell you, in case you had any thought of pursuing an acquaintance with them, that I have asked them not to receive you, and they will not receive you.
Yours sincerely,
Bradley Pearson
Francis had, on his departure on the previous evening, contrived to thrust into my pocket his address and telephone number written upon a slip of paper. I copied the address onto the envelope and threw the paper into the wastepaper basket.
I then sat and twiddled for a bit longer, watching the creeping line of sun turning the crusty surface of the wall opposite from brown to blond. Then I fell to writing again.
Yours sincerely,
Bradley Pearson
PS. I should add that I am today leaving London and tomorrow leaving England. I shall be staying away for some time and may even settle abroad.
When I had finished writing this letter I was not only sweating, I was trembling and panting and my heart was beating viciously. What emotion had so invaded me? Fear? It is sometimes curiously difficult to name the emotion from which one suffers. The naming of it is sometimes unimportant, sometimes crucial. Hatred?
I looked at my watch and found that in the composition of the letter a long time had passed. It was now too late to catch the morning train. No doubt the afternoon train would be better in any case. Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
I decided that I would send off the letter to Francis and postpone deciding what sort of communication, if any, to send to Christian. I also decided that it was now a matter of urgency to get out of the house and down to the station, where I could have lunch and await the afternoon train at leisure. It was just as well the earlier train had been safely missed. I have sometimes had the unpleasant experience, arriving very early for a train, of finding myself catching its predecessor with a minute to spare. Thrusting the letter to Christian into my pocket I found my fingers touching the review of Arnold's novel. Here was another unsolved problem. Although I was well able to consider refraining from doing so, I knew that I also felt very anxious to publish. Why? Yes, I must get away and think all these matters out.
My suitcases were in the hall where I had left them yesterday. I put on my macintosh. I went into the bathroom. This bathroom was of the kind which no amount of caring for could make other than sordid. Vari-coloured slivers of soap, such as I cannot normally bear to throw away, were lying about in the basin and in the bath. With a sudden act of will I collected them all and flushed them down the lavatory. As I stood there, dazed with this success, the front doorbell suddenly began to ring and ring. part one 45 1 At this point it is necessary for me to give some account of my sister, Priscilla, who is about to appear upon the scene.
Priscilla is six years younger than me. She left school early. So indeed did I. I am an educated and cultivated person through my own zeal, efforts and talents. Priscilla had no zeal and talents and made no efforts. She was spoilt by my mother whom she resembled. I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent. My mother, though not too unhappily married, had a continued grudge against the world. This may have originated in, or been aggravated by, a sense of having married «beneath» her, though not exactly in a social sense. My mother had been a «beauty» and had had many suitors. I suspect she felt later in life, as she grew old behind the counter, that if she had played her cards otherwise she could have made a much better bargain in life. Priscilla, though she made in commercial and even in social terms a more advantageous buy, followed somewhat the same pattern. Priscilla, though not as pretty as my mother, had been a good-looking girl, and was admired in the circle of pert half-baked undereducated youths who constituted her «social life.» But Priscilla, egged on by her mother, had ambitions, and was in no hurry to settle with one of these unprepossessing candidates.
To cut a long story short, Priscilla really got quite «above herself,» dressing and behaving «grandly,» and did eventually satisfy her ambition of penetrating into some slightly «better» social circles than those which she had frequented at first. I suspect that she and my mother actually planned a «campaign» to better Priscilla's lot. Priscilla went to tennis parties, indulged in amateur dramatics, went to charity dances. She and my mother invented for her quite a little «season.» Only Priscilla's season went on and on. She could not make up her mind to marry. Or perhaps her present beaux, in spite of the bold face which Priscilla and my mother jointly presented to the world, felt that after all poor Priscilla was not a very good match. Perhaps there was after all a smell of shop. Then, doubtless as a result of working so hard on her season, she lost her job, and made no attempt to obtain another. She stayed at home, fell vaguely ill, and had what would now, I suppose, be called a nervous breakdown.
By the time she recovered she was getting on into her twenties and had lost some of her first good looks. She talked at that time of becoming a «model» (a «mannequin»), but so far as I know made no serious attempt to do so. What she did become, virtually, and not to put too fine a point upon it, was a tart. I do not mean that she stood around in the road, but she moved in a world of business men, golf-club bar proppers and night-club hounds, who certainly regarded her in this light. I did not want to know anything about this; possibly I ought to have been more concerned. I was upset and annoyed when my father once approached the subject, and although I could see that he had been made utterly miserable, I resolutely refused to discuss it. I never said anything to my mother, who always defended Priscilla and pretended, or deceived herself into believing, that all was well. I was by this time already involved with Christian, and I had other matters on my mind.
I will not attempt a lengthy description of Roger. He too will appear in the story in due course. I did not like Roger. Roger did not like me. He always referred to himself as a «public-school boy,» which I suppose he had been. He had a little education, and a great deal of «air,» a «plummy» voice and a misleadingly distinguished appearance. As his copious crown of hair became peppery and then grey he began to resemble a soldier. (He had once done some army service, I think in the Pay Corps.) He held himself like a military man and alleged that his friends nicknamed him «the brigadier.» He cultivated the crude joking manners of a junior officers' mess. He worked in fact in a bank, about which he made as much mystery as possible. He drank and laughed too much.
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