After the Fireworks (4 page)

Fanning laughed aloud. “Ah, if only we all had the courage to say so, like you, my child!” And with a familiar affectionate gesture, as though she were indeed a child and he had known her from the cradle, he dropped a hand on her shoulder. “To say so and to act up to our beliefs. As you do, I'm sure.” And he gave the slim hard little shoulder a pat. “A world without goodness—it'd be Paradise.”

They walked some steps in silence. His hand lay heavy and strong on her shoulder, and a strange warmth that was somehow intenser than the warmth of mere flesh and blood seemed to radiate through her whole body. Her heart quickened its beating; an anxiety oppressed her lungs; her very mind was as though breathless.

“Putting his hand on my shoulder like that!” she was thinking. “It would have been cheek if some one else . . .
Perhaps I ought to have been angry, perhaps . . .” No, that would have been silly. “It's silly to take things like that too seriously, as though one were Aunt Edith.” But meanwhile his hand lay heavy on her shoulder, broodingly hot, its weight, its warmth insistently present in her consciousness.

She remembered characters in his books. Her namesake Pamela in
Pastures New.
Pamela the cold, but for that very reason an experimenter with passion; cold and therefore dangerous, full of power, fatal. Was she like Pamela? She had often thought so. But more recently she had often thought she was like Joan in
The Return of Eurydice
—Joan, who had emerged from the wintry dark underworld of an unawakened life with her husband (that awful, good, disinterested husband—so like Aunt Edith) into the warmth and brilliance of that transfiguring passion for Walter, for the adorable Walter whom she had always imagined must be so like Miles Fanning himself. She was sure of it now. But what of her own identity? Was she Joan, or was she Pamela? And which of the two would it be nicer to be? Warm Joan, with her happiness—but at the price of surrender? Or the cold, the unhappy, but conquering, dangerous Pamela? Or wouldn't it perhaps be best to be a little of both at once? Or first one and then the other? And in any case there was to be no goodness in the Aunt Edith style; he had been sure she wasn't good.

In her memory the voice of Aunt Edith sounded, as it had actually sounded, only a few weeks before, in disapproving comment on her reference to the passionless, experimental Pamela of
Pastures New.
“It's a book I don't like. A most unnecessary book.” And then, laying her hand on Pamela's, “Dear child,” she had added, with that earnest, that dutifully
willed affectionateness, which Pamela so bitterly resented, “I'd rather you didn't read any of Miles Fanning's books.”

“Mother never objected to my reading them. So I don't see . . .” The triumphant consciousness of having at this very moment the hand that had written those unnecessary books upon her shoulder was promising to enrich her share of the remembered dialogue with a lofty impertinence which the original had hardly possessed. “I don't see that you have the smallest right. . . .”

Fanning's voice fell startlingly across the eloquent silence. “A penny for your thoughts, Miss Pamela,” it said.

He had been for some obscure reason suddenly depressed by his own last words. “A world without goodness—it'd be Paradise.” But it wouldn't, no more than now. The only paradises were fool's paradises, ostrich's paradises. It was as though he had suddenly lifted his head out of the sand and seen time bleeding away—like the stabbed bull at the end of a bull-fight, swaying on his legs and soundlessly spouting the red blood from his nostrils—bleeding, bleeding away stanchlessly into the darkness. And it was all, even the loveliness and the laughter and the sunlight, finally pointless. This young girl at his side, this beautiful pointless creature pointlessly walking down the Via del Babuino. . . . The feelings crystallized themselves, as usual, into whole phrases in his mind, and suddenly the phrases were metrical.

Pointless and arm in arm with pointlessness,

I pace and pace the Street of the Baboon.

Imbecile! Annoyed with himself, he tried to shake off his mood of maudlin depression, he tried to force his spirit back
into the ridiculous and charming universe it had inhabited, on the whole so happily, all the morning.

“A penny for your thoughts,” he said, with a certain rather forced jocularity, giving her shoulder a little clap. “Or forty centesimi, if you prefer them.” And, dropping his hand to his side, “In Germany,” he went on, “just after the War one could afford to be more munificent. There was a time when I regularily offered a hundred and ninety million marks for a thought—yes, and gained on the exchange. But now . . .”

“Well, if you really want to know,” said Pamela, deciding to be bold, “I was thinking how much my Aunt Edith disapproved of your books.”

“Did she? I suppose it was only to be expected. Seeing that I don't write for aunts—at any rate, not for aunts in their specifically auntly capacity. Though of course, when they're off duty . . .”

“Aunt Edith's never off duty.”

“And I'm never on. So you see.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I'm sure,” he added, “you never paid much attention to her disapproval.”

“None,” she answered, playing the un-good part for all it was worth. “I read Freud this spring,” she boasted, “and Gide's autobiography, and Krafft-Ebbing. . . .”

“Which is more than I've ever done,” he laughed.

The laugh encouraged her. “Not to mention all
your
books, years ago. You see,” she added, suddenly fearful lest she might have said something to offend him, “my mother never minded my reading your books. I mean, she really encouraged me, even when I was only seventeen or eighteen. My mother died last year,” she explained. There was a
silence. “I've lived with Aunt Edith ever since,” she went on. “Aunt Edith's my father's sister. Older than he was. Father died in 1923.”

“So you're all alone now?” he questioned. “Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.”

“Whom I've now left.” She was almost boasting again. “Because when I was twenty-one . . .”

“You stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!”

“I won't have you being sorry for her,” Pamela answered hotly. “She's really awful, you know. Like poor Joan's husband in
The Return of Eurydice.
” How easy it was to talk to him!

“So you even know,” said Fanning, laughing, “what it's like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous Aunt.”

“No joke, I can tell you.
I'm
the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn't mind my going away, whatever she might say.”

“She did say something then?”

“Oh, yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like head-mistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite—
and
so fat. Enormous. Don't you
hate
enormous people? No, she's really delighted to get rid of me,” Pamela concluded, “simply delighted.” Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.

“What a tremendous hurry she's in,” he was thinking, “to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, what
an intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .” His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.

“She always disliked me,” Pamela had gone on. “Mother too. She couldn't abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.”

“And your mother—how did she respond?”

“Well, not hippoishly, of course. She couldn't be that. She treated Aunt Edith—well, how
did
she treat Aunt Edith?” Pamela hesitated, frowning. “Well, I suppose you'd say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .” She bit her lip. “Well, if she ever
was
really natural.
I
don't know. Is anybody natural?” She looked up questioningly at Fanning. “Am I natural, for example?”

Smiling a little at her choice of an example, “I should think almost certainly not,” Fanning answered, more or less at random.

“You're right, of course,” she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. “But isn't it awful? I mean, isn't it simply hopeless?”

Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, “At your age,” he said consolingly, “you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is something you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,” he added, “there are some people who are unnatural by nature.”

“Unnatural by nature.” Pamela nodded, as she repeated the words, as though she were inwardly marshalling evidence to confirm their truth. “Yes, I believe that's us,” she concluded. “Mother and me. Not hippos, I mean, not
po
seuses
*
,
but just unnatural by nature. You're quite right. As usual,” she added, with something that was almost resentment in her voice.

“I'm sorry,” he apologized.

“How is it you manage to know so much?” Pamela asked in the same resentful tone. By what right was he so easily omniscient, when she could only grope and guess in the dark?

Taking to himself a credit that belonged, in this case, to chance, “Child's play, my dear Watson,” he answered banteringly. “But I suppose you're too young to have heard of Sherlock Holmes. And anyhow,” he added, with an ironical seriousness, “don't let's waste any more time talking about me.”

Pamela wasted no more time. “I get so depressed with myself,” she said with a sigh. “And after what you've told me I shall get still more depressed. Unnatural by nature. And by upbringing too. Because I see now that my mother was like that. I mean, she was unnatural by nature too.”

“Even with you?” he asked, thinking that this was becoming interesting. She nodded without speaking. He looked at her closely. “Were you very fond of her?” was the question that now suggested itself.

After a moment of silence, “I loved my father more,” she answered slowly. “He was more . . . more reliable. I mean, you never quite knew where you were with my mother. Sometimes she almost forgot about me; or else she didn't forget me enough and spoiled me. And then sometimes she used to get into the most terrible rages with me. She really frightened me then. And said such terribly hurting things.
But you mustn't think I didn't love her. I did.” The words seemed to release a spring; she was suddenly moved. There was a little silence. Making an effort, “But that's what she was like,” she concluded at last.

“But I don't see,” said Fanning gently, “that there was anything specially unnatural in spoiling you and then getting cross with you.” They were crossing the Piazza del Popolo; the traffic of four thronged streets intricately merged and parted in the open space. “You must have been a charming child. And also . . . Look out!” He laid a hand on her arm. An electric bus passed noiselessly, a whispering monster. “Also maddeningly exasperating. So where the unnaturalness came in . . .”

“But if you'd known her,” Pamela interrupted, “you'd have seen exactly where the unnaturalness . . .”

“Forward!” he called and, still holding her arm, he steered her on across the Piazza.

She suffered herself to be conducted blindly. “It came out in the way she spoiled me,” she explained, raising her voice against the clatter of a passing lorry. “It's so difficult to explain, though; because it's something I felt. I mean, I've never really tried to put it into words till now. But it was as if . . . as if she weren't just herself spoiling me, but the picture of a young mother—do you see what I mean?—spoiling the picture of a little girl. Even as a child I kind of felt it wasn't quite as it should be. Later on I began to
know
it too, here.” She tapped her forehead. “Particularly after father's death, when I was beginning to grow up. There were times when it was almost like listening to recitations—dreadful. One feels so blushy and prickly; you know the feeling.”

He nodded. “Yes, I know. Awful!”

“Awful,” she repeated. “So you can understand what a beast I felt, when it took me that way. So disloyal, I mean. So ungrateful. Because she was being so wonderfully sweet to me. You've no idea. But it was just when she was being her sweetest that I got the feeling worst. I shall never forget when she made me call her Clare—that was her christian name. ‘Because we're going to be companions,' she said and all that sort of thing. Which was simply too sweet and too nice of her. But if you'd heard the way she said it! So dreadfully unnatural. I mean, it was almost as bad as Aunt Edith reading
Prospice.
And yet I know she meant it, I know she wanted me to be her companion. But somehow something kind of went wrong on the way between the wanting and the saying. And then the doing seemed to go just as wrong as the saying. She always wanted to do things excitingly, romantically, like in a play. But you can't
make
things be exciting and romantic, can you?” Fanning shook his head. “She wanted to kind of force things to be thrilling by thinking and wishing, like Christian Science. But it doesn't work. We had wonderful times together; but she always tried to make out that they were more wonderful than they really were. Which only made them less wonderful. Going to the Paris Opera on a gala night is wonderful; but it's never as wonderful as when Rastignac goes, is it?”

“I should think it wasn't!” he agreed. “What an insult to Balzac to imagine that it could be!”

“And the real thing's less wonderful,” she went on, “when you're being asked all the time to see it as Balzac, and to
be
Balzac yourself. When you aren't anything of the kind. Because, after all, what am I? Just good, ordinary, middle-class English.”