After the Fireworks (5 page)

She pronounced the words with a kind of defiance. Fanning imagined that the defiance was for him and, laughing, prepared to pick up the ridiculous little glove. But the glove was not for him; Pamela had thrown it down to a memory, to a ghost, to one of her own sceptical and mocking selves. It had been on the last day of their last stay together in Paris—that exciting, exotic Paris of poor Clare's imagination, to which their tickets from London never seemed quite to take them. They had gone to lunch at La Pérouse. “Such a marvellous,
fantastic
restaurant! It makes you feel as though you were back in the Second Empire.” (Or was it the First Empire? Pamela could not exactly remember.) The rooms were so crowded with Americans, that it was with some difficulty that they secured a table. “We'll have a marvellous lunch,” Claire had said, as she unfolded her napkin. “And some day, when you're in Paris with your lover, you'll come here and order just the same things as we're having to-day. And perhaps you'll think of me. Will you, darling?” And she had smiled at her daughter with that intense, expectant expression that was so often on her face, and the very memory of which made Pamela feel subtly uncomfortable. “How should I ever forget?” she had answered, laying her hand on her mother's and smiling. But after a second her eyes had wavered away from that fixed look, in which the intensity had remained as desperately on the stretch, the expectancy as wholly unsatisfied, as hungrily insatiable as ever. The waiter, thank goodness, had created a timely diversion; smiling at him confidentially, almost amorously, Clare had ordered like a princess in a novel of high life. The bill, when it came, was enormous. Clare had had to scratch the bottom of her purse for the last stray piece of nickel. “It looks as
though we should have to carry our own bags at Calais and Dover. I didn't realize I'd run things so fine.” Pamela had looked at the bill. “But, Clare,” she had protested, looking up again at her mother with an expression of genuine horror, “it's wicked! Two hundred and sixty francs for a lunch! It wasn't worth it.” The blood had risen darkly into Clare's face. “How can you be so disgustingly
bourgeoisie,
Pamela? So crass, so crawling?” Incensed by the heaping up of this abuse, “I think it's stupid to do things one can't afford,” the girl had answered; “stupid and vulgar.” Trembling with rage, Clare had risen to her feet. “I'll never take you out again. Never.” (How often since then Pamela had recalled that terribly prophetic word!) “You'll never understand life, you'll never be anything but a sordid little middle-class Englishwoman. Never, never.” And she had swept out of the room, like an insulted queen. Overheard by Pamela, as she undignifiedly followed, “Gee!” an American voice had remarked, “it's a regular cat fight.”

The sound of another, real voice overlaid the remembered Middle Western accents.

“But after all,” Fanning was saying, “it's better to be a good ordinary bourgeois than a bad ordinary bohemian, or a sham aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual. . . .”

“I'm not even third-rate,” said Pamela mournfully. There had been a time when, under the influence of the now abhorred Miss Huss, she had thought she would like to go up to Oxford and read Greats. But Greek grammar was so awful . . . “Not even fourth-rate.”

“Thank goodness,” said Fanning. “Do you know what third- and fourth-rate intellectuals are? They're professors of philology and organic chemistry at the minor universities,
they're founders and honorary life presidents of the Nuneaton Poetry Society and the Baron's Court Debating Society; they're the people who organize and sedulously attend all those Conferences for promoting international goodwill and the spread of culture that are perpetually being held at Buda-Pesth and Prague and Stockholm. Admirable and indispensable creatures, of course! But impossibly dreary; one simply cannot have any relations with them. And how virtuously they disapprove of those of us who have something better to do than disseminate culture or foster goodwill—those of us who are concerned, for example, with creating beauty—like me; or, like you, my child, in deliciously
being
beauty.”

Pamela blushed with pleasure and for that reason felt it necessary immediately to protest. “All the same,” she said, “it's rather humiliating not to be able to do anything but be. I mean, even a cow can be.”

“Damned well, too,” said Fanning. “If I
were
as intensely as a cow
is,
I'd be uncommonly pleased with myself. But this is getting almost too metaphysical. And do you realize what the time is?” He held out his watch; it was ten past one. “And where we are? At the Tiber. We've walked miles.” He waved his hand; a passing taxi swerved in to the pavement beside them. “Let's go and eat some lunch. You're free?”

“Well . . .” She hesitated. It was marvellous, of course; so marvellous that she felt she ought to refuse. “If I'm not a bore. I mean, I don't want to impose . . . I mean . . .”

“You mean you'll come and have lunch. Good. Do you like marble halls and bands? Or local colour?”

Pamela hesitated. She remembered her mother once saying that Valadier and the Ulpia were the
only
two restaurants in Rome.

“Personally,” Fanning went on, “I'm slightly avaricious about marble halls. I rather resent spending four times as much and eating about two-thirds as well. But I'll overcome my avarice if you prefer them.”

Pamela duly voted for local colour; he gave an address to the driver and they climbed into the cab.

“It's a genuinely Roman place,” Fanning explained. “I hope you'll like it.”

“Oh, I'm sure I shall.” All the same, she did rather wish they were going to Valadier's.

F
ANNING'S OLD FRIEND, DODO DEL GRILLO, WAS IN
Rome for that one night and had urgently summoned him to dine. His arrival was loud and exclamatory.

“Best of all possible Dodos!” he cried, as he advanced with outstretched hands across the enormous baroque saloon. “What an age! But what a pleasure!”

“At last, Miles,” she said reproachfully; he was twenty minutes late.

“But I know you'll forgive me.” And laying his two hands on her shoulders he bent down and kissed her. He made a habit of kissing all his women friends.

“And even if I didn't forgive, you wouldn't care two pins.”

“Not one.” He smiled his most charming smile. “But if it gives you the smallest pleasure, I'm ready to say I'd be inconsolable.” His hands still resting on her shoulders, he looked at her searchingly, at arm's length. “Younger than ever,” he concluded.

“I couldn't look as young as you do,” she answered. “You know, Miles, you're positively indecent. Like Dorian Gray. What's your horrible secret?”

“Simply Mr. Hornibrooke,” he explained. “The culture of the abdomen. So much more important than the culture of the mind.” Dodo only faintly smiled; she had heard the joke before. Fanning was sensitive to smiles; he changed the subject. “And where's the marquis?” he asked.

The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. Her husband was one of those dear old friends whom somehow one doesn't manage to see anything of nowadays. “Filippo's in Tanganyika,” she explained. “Hunting lions.”

“While you hunt them at home. And with what success! You've bagged what's probably the finest specimen in Europe this evening. Congratulations!”

“Merci, cher maître!”
*
she laughed. “Shall we go in to dinner?”

The words invited, irresistibly. “If only I had the right to answer:
Oui, chère maîtresse!
”
^†
Though as a matter of fact, he reflected, he had never really found her at all interesting in that way. A woman without temperament. But very pretty once—that time (how many years ago?) when there had been that picnic on the river at Bray, and he had drunk a little too much champagne. “If only!” he repeated; and then was suddenly struck by a grotesque thought. Suppose she were to say yes, now—now! “If only I had the right!”

“But luckily,” said Dodo, turning back towards him, as she passed through the monumental door into the dining-room, “luckily you haven't the right. You ought to congratulate me on my immense good sense. Will you sit there?”

“Oh, I'll congratulate. I'm always ready to congratulate
people who have sense.” He unfolded his napkin. “And to condole.” Now that he knew himself safe, he could condole as much as he liked. “What you must have suffered, my poor sensible Dodo, what you must have missed!”

“Suffered less,” she answered, “and missed more unpleasantnesses than the woman who didn't have the sense to say no.”

“What a mouthful of negatives! But that's how sensible people always talk about love—in terms of negatives. Never of positives; they ignore those and go about sensibly avoiding the discomforts. Avoiding the pleasures and exultations too, poor sensible idiots! Avoiding all that's valuable and significant. But it's always like that. The human soul is a fried whiting. (What excellent red mullet this is, by the way! Really excellent.) Its tail is in its mouth. All progress finally leads back to the beginning again. The most sensible people—dearest Dodo, believe me—are the most foolish. The most intellectual are the stupidest. I've never met a really good metaphysician, for example, who wasn't in one way or another bottomlessly stupid. And as for the really spiritual people, look what they revert to. Not merely to silliness and stupidity, but finally to crass nonexistence. The highest spiritual state is ecstasy, which is just not being there at all. No, no; we're all fried whitings. Heads are invariably tails.”

“In which case,” said Dodo, “tails must also be heads. So that if you want to make intellectual or spiritual progress, you must behave like a beast—is that it?”

Fanning held up his hand. “Not at all. If you rush too violently towards the tail, you run the risk of shooting down
the whiting's open mouth into its stomach, and even further. The wise man . . .”

“So the whitings are fried without being cleaned?”

“In parables,” Fanning answered reprovingly, “whitings are always fried that way. The wise man, as I was saying, oscillates lightly from head to tail and back again. His whole existence—or shall we be more frank and say ‘my' whole existence?—is one continual oscillation. I am never too consistently sensible, like you; or too consistently feather-headed like some of my other friends. In a word,” he wagged a finger, “I oscillate.”

Tired of generalizations, “And where exactly,” Dodo enquired, “have you oscillated to at the moment? You've left me without your news so long. . . .”

“Well, at the moment,” he reflected aloud, “I suppose you might say I was at a dead point between desire and renunciation, between sense and sensuality.”

“Again?” She shook her head. “And who is she this time?”

Fanning helped himself to asparagus before replying. “Who is she?” he echoed. “Well, to begin with, she's the writer of admiring letters.”

Dodo made a grimace of disgust. “What a horror!” For some reason she felt it necessary to be rather venomous about this new usurper of Fanning's heart. “Vamping by correspondence—it's really the lowest. . . .”

“Oh, I agree,” he said. “On principle and in theory I entirely agree.”

“Then why,” she began, annoyed by his agreement; but he interrupted her.

“Spiritual adventuresses,” he said. “That's what they
generally are, the women who write you letters. Spiritual adventuresses. I've suffered a lot from them in my time.”

“I'm sure you have.”

“They're a curious type,” he went on, ignoring her sarcasms. “Curious and rather horrible. I prefer the good old-fashioned vampire. At least one knew where one stood with her. There she was—out for money, for power, for a good time, occasionally, perhaps, for sensual satisfactions. It was all entirely above-board and obvious. But with the spiritual adventuress, on the contrary, everything's most horribly turbid and obscure and slimy. You see, she doesn't want money or the commonplace good time. She wants Higher Things—damn her neck! Not large pearls and a large motor-car, but a large soul—that's what she pines for: a large soul and a large intellect, and a huge philosophy, and enormous culture, and out sizes in great thoughts.”

Dodo laughed. “You're fiendishly cruel, Miles.”

“Cruelty can be a sacred duty,” he answered. “Besides, I'm getting a little of my own back. If you knew what these spiritual vamps had done to me! I've been one of their appointed victims. Yes, appointed; for, you see, they can't have their Higher Things without attaching themselves to a Higher Person.”

“And are you one of the Higher People, Miles?”

“Should I be dining here with you, my dear, if I weren't?” And without waiting for Dodo's answer, “They attach themselves like lice,” he went on. “The contact with the Higher Person makes them feel high themselves; it magnifies them, it gives them significance, it satisfies their parasitic will to power. In the past they could have gone to religion—fastened themselves on the nearest priest (that's what the
priest was there for), or sucked the spiritual blood of some saint. Nowadays they've got no professional victims; only a few charlatans and swamis and higher-thought-mongers. Or alternatively the artists. Yes, the artists. They find our souls particularly juicy. What I've suffered! Shall I ever forget that American woman who got so excited by my book on Blake that she came specially to Tunis to see me? She had an awful way of opening her mouth very wide when she talked, like a fish. You were perpetually seeing her tongue; and, what made it worse, her tongue was generally white. Most distressing. And how the tongue wagged! In spite of its whiteness. Wagged like mad, and mostly about the Divine Mind.”

“The Divine Mind?”

He nodded. “It was her specialty. In Rochester, N. Y., where she lived, she was never out of touch with it. You've no idea what a lot of Divine Mind there is floating about in Rochester, particularly in the neighbourhood of women with busy husbands and incomes of over fifteen thousand dollars. If only she could have stuck to the Divine Mind! But the Divine Mind has one grave defect: it won't make love to you. That was why she'd come all the way to Tunis in search of a merely human specimen.”

“And what did you do about it?”

“Stood it nine days and then took the boat to Sicily. Like a thief in the night. The wicked flee, you know. God, how they can flee!”

“And she?”

“Went back to Rochester, I suppose. But I never opened any more of her letters. Just dropped them into the fire whenever I saw the writing. Ostrichism—it's the only ratio
nal philosophy of conduct. According to the Freudians we're all unconsciously trying to get back to . . .”

“But poor woman!” Dodo burst out. “She must have suffered.”

“Nothing like what I suffered. Besides she had the Divine Mind to go back to; which was her version of the Freudians' pre-natal . . .”

“But I suppose you'd encouraged her to come to Tunis?”

Reluctantly, Fanning gave up his Freudians. “She could write good letters,” he admitted. “Inexplicably good, considering what she was at close range.”

“But then you treated her abominably.”

“But if you'd seen her, you'd realize how abominably she'd treated me.”

“You?”

“Yes, abominably—by merely existing. She taught me to be very shy of letters. That was why I was so pleasantly surprised this morning when my latest correspondent suddenly materialized at Cook's. Really ravishing. One could forgive her everything for the sake of her face and that charming body. Everything, even the vamping. For a vamp I suppose she is, even this one. That is, if a woman
can
be a spiritual adventuress when she's so young and pretty and well-made. Absolutely and
sub specie æternitatis
*
,
I suppose she can. But from the very sublunary point of view of the male victim, I doubt whether, at twenty-one . . .”

“Only twenty-one?” Dodo was disapproving. “But Miles!”

Fanning ignored her interruption. “And another thing you must remember,” he went on, “is that the spiritual vamp
who's come of age this year is not at all the same as the spiritual vamp who came of age fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years ago. She doesn't bother much about Mysticism, or the Lower Classes, or the Divine Mind, or any nonsense of that sort. No, she goes straight to the real point—the point which the older vamps approached in such a tiresomely circuitous fashion—she goes straight to herself. But straight!” He stabbed the air with his fruit-knife. “A bee-line. Oh, it has a certain charm that directness. But whether it won't be rather frightful when they're older is another question. But then almost everything is rather frightful when people are older.”

“Thank you,” said Dodo. “And what about you?”

“Oh, an old satyr,” he answered with that quick, brilliantly mysterious smile of his. “A superannuated faun. I know it; only too well. But at the same time, most intolerably, a Higher Person. Which is what draws the spiritual vamps. Even the youngest ones. Not to talk to me about the Divine Mind, of course, or their views about Social Reform. But about themselves. Their Individualities, their Souls, their Inhibitions, their Unconsciouses, their Pasts, their Futures. For them, the Higher Things are all frankly and nakedly personal. And the function of the Higher Person is to act as a sort of psychoanalytical father confessor. He exists to tell them all about their strange and wonderful psyches. And meanwhile, of course, his friendship inflates their egotism. And if there should be any question of love, what a personal triumph!”

“Which is all very well,” objected Dodo. “But what about the old satyr? Wouldn't it also be a bit of a triumph for him? You know, Miles,” she added gravely, “it would really be scandalous if you were to take advantage. . . .”

“But I haven't the slightest intention of taking any advantages. If only for my own sake. Besides, the child is too ingenuously absurd. The most hair-raising theoretical knowledge of life, out of books. You should hear her prattling away about inverts and perverts and birth control—but prattling from unplumbed depths of innocence and practical ignorance. Very queer. And touching too. Much more touching than the old-fashioned innocences of the young creatures who thought babies were brought by storks. Knowing all about love and lust, but in the same way as one knows all about quadratic equations. And her knowledge of the other aspects of life is really of the same kind. What she's seen of the world she's seen in her mother's company. The worst guide imaginable, to judge from the child's account. (Dead now, incidentally.) The sort of woman who could never live on top gear, so to speak—only at one or two imaginative removes from the facts. So that, in her company, what was nominally real life became actually just literature—yet more literature. Bad, inadequate Balzac in flesh and blood instead of genuine, good Balzac out of a set of nice green volumes. The child realizes it herself. Obscurely, of course; but distressfully. It's one of the reasons why she's applied to me: she hopes I can explain what's wrong. And correct it in practice. Which I won't do in any drastic manner, I promise you. Only mildly, by precept—that is, if I'm not too bored to do it at all.”

“What's the child's name?” Dodo asked.

“Pamela Tarn.”

“Tarn? But was her mother by any chance Clare Tarn?”