After the Fireworks (6 page)

He nodded. “That was it. She even made her daughter call her by her christian name. The companion stunt.”

“But I used to know Clare Tarn quite well,” said Dodo in an astonished, feeling voice. “These last years I'd hardly seen her. But when I was more in London just after the War . . .”

“But this begins to be interesting,” said Fanning. “New light on my little friend. . . .”

“Whom I absolutely forbid you,” said Dodo emphatically, “to . . .”

“Tamper with the honour of,” he suggested. “Let's phrase it as nobly as possible.”

“No, seriously, Miles. I really won't have it. Poor Clare Tarn's daughter. If I didn't have to rush off to-morrow I'd ask her to come and see me, so as to warn her.”

Fanning laughed. “She wouldn't thank you. And besides if any one is to be warned, I'm the one who's in danger. But I shall be firm, Dodo—a rock. I won't allow her to seduce me.”

“You're incorrigible, Miles. But mind, if you dare. . . .”

“But I won't. Definitely.” His tone was reassuring. “Meanwhile I must hear something about the mother.”

The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. “A woman who couldn't live on top gear. You've really said the last word.”

“But I want first words,” he answered. “It's not the verdict that's interesting. It's the whole case, it's all the evidence. You're
sub-poenaed,
my dear. Speak up.”

“Poor Clare!”

“Oh,
nil nisi bonum
*
,
of course, if that's what disturbs you.”

“She'd have so loved it to be not
bonum,
poor dear!” said
the marchesa, tempering her look of vague condolence with a little smile. “That was her great ambition—to be thought rather wicked. She'd have liked to have the reputation of a vampire. Not a spiritual one, mind you. The other sort. Lola Montes—that was her ideal.”

“It's an ideal,” said Fanning, “that takes some realizing, I can tell you.”

Dodo nodded. “And that's what she must have found out, pretty soon. She wasn't born to be a fatal woman; she lacked the gifts. No staggering beauty, no mysterious fascination or intoxicating vitality. She was just very charming, that was all; and at the same time rather impossible and absurd. So that there weren't any aspiring victims to be fatal to. And a vampire without victims is—well,
what?
”

“Certainly not a vampire,” he concluded.

“Except, of course, in her own imagination, if she chooses to think so. In her own imagination Clare certainly was a vampire.”

“Reduced, in fact, to being her own favourite character in fiction.”

“Precisely. You always find the phrase.”

“Only too fatally!” He made a little grimace. “I often wish I didn't. The luxury of being inarticulate! To be able to wallow indefinitely long in every feeling and sensation, instead of having to clamber out at once on to a hard, dry, definite phrase. But what about your Clare?”

“Well, she started, of course, by being a riddle to me. Unanswerable, or rather answerable, answered, but so very strangely that I was still left wondering. I shall never forget the first time Filippo and I went to dine there. Poor Roger
Tarn was still alive then. While the men were drinking their port, Clare and I were alone in the drawing-room. There was a little chit-chat, I remember, and then, with a kind of determined desperation, as though she'd that second screwed herself up to jumping off the Eiffel Tower, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me if I'd ever had one of those
wonderful
Sicilian peasants—I can't possibly reproduce the tone, the expression—as a lover. I was a bit taken aback, I must confess. ‘But we don't live in Sicily,' was the only thing I could think of answering—too idiotically! ‘Our estates are all in Umbria and Tuscany.' ‘But the Tuscans are
superb
creatures too,' she insisted. Superb, I agreed. But, as it happens, I don't have affairs with even the superbest peasants. Nor with anybody else, for that matter. Clare was dreadfully disappointed. I think she'd expected the most romantic confidences—moonlight and mandolins and
stretti, stretti, nell' estasì d'amor.
*
She was really very ingenuous. ‘Do you mean to say you've really never . . . ?' she insisted. I ought to have got angry, I suppose; but it was all so ridiculous, that I never thought of it. I just said, ‘Never,' and felt as though I were refusing her a favour. But she made up for my churlishness by being lavish to herself. But lavish! You can't imagine what a tirade she let fly at me. How
wonderful
it was to get away from self-conscious, complicated, sentimental love! How profoundly
satisfying
to feel oneself at the mercy of the dumb, dark forces of physical passion! How
intoxicating
to humiliate one's culture and one's class feeling before some
magnificent
primitive, some
earthly
beautiful satyr, some
divine
animal! And so on,
crescendo.
And it ended with her telling me the story of her
extraordinary
affair with—was it
a gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit-shooting in it, I know.”

“It sounds like a chapter out of George Sand.”

“It was.”

“Or still more, I'm afraid,” he said, making a wry face “like a most deplorable parody of my
Endymion and the Moon.
”

“Which I've never read, I'm ashamed to say.”

“You should, if only to understand this Clare of yours.”

“I will. Perhaps I'd have solved her more quickly, if I'd read it at the time. As it was I could only be amazed—and a little horrified. That rabbit-shooter!” She shook her head. “He ought to have been so romantic. But I could only think of that awful yellow kitchen soap he'd be sure to wash himself with, or perhaps carbolic, so that he'd smell like washed dogs—dreadful! And the flannel shirts, not changed quite often enough. And the hands, so horny, with very short nails, perhaps broken. No, I simply couldn't understand her.”

“Which is to your discredit, Dodo, if I may say so.”

“Perhaps. But you must admit, I never pretended to be anything but what I am—a perfectly frivolous and respectable member of the upper classes. With a taste, I must confess, for the scandalous. Which was one of the reasons, I suppose, why I became so intimate with poor Clara. I was really fascinated by her confidences.”

“Going on the tiles vicariously, eh?”

“Well, if you choose to put it grossly and vulgarly. . . . .”

“Which I
do
choose,” he interposed. “To be tactfully gross and appositely vulgar—that, my dear, is one of the ultimate artistic refinements. One day I shall write a monograph on the aesthetics of vulgarity. But meanwhile shall we
say that you were inspired by an intense scientific curiosity to . . .”

Dodo laughed. “One of the tiresome things about you, Miles, is that one can never go on being angry with you.”

“Yet another subject for a monograph!” he answered, and his smile was at once confidential and ironical, affectionate and full of mockery. “But let's hear what the scientific curiosity elicited?”

“Well, to begin with, a lot of really rather embarrassingly intimate confidences and questions, which I needn't repeat.”

“No, don't. I know what those feminine conversations are. I have a native modesty. . . .”

“Oh, so have I. And, strangely enough, so had Clare. But somehow she wanted to outrage herself. You felt it all the time. She always had that desperate jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower manner, when she began to talk like that. It was a kind of martyrdom. But enjoyable. Perversely.” Dodo shook her head. “Very puzzling. I used to have to make quite an effort to change the conversation from gynaecology to romance. Oh, those lovers of hers! Such stories! The most fantastic adventures in East End opium dens, in aeroplanes, and even, I remember (it was that very hot summer of 'twenty-two), even in a refrigerator!”

“My dear!” protested Fanning.

“Honestly! I'm only repeating what she told me.”

“But do you mean to say you believed her?”

“Well, by that time, I must admit, I was beginning to be rather sceptical. You see, I could never elicit the names of these creatures. Nor any detail. It was as though they didn't exist outside the refrigerator and the aeroplane.”

“How many of them were there?”

“Only two at that particular moment. One was a Grand Passion, and the other a Caprice. A Caprice,” she repeated, rolling the r. “It was one of poor Clare's favourite words. I used to try and pump her. But she was mum. ‘I want them to be
mysterious,'
she told me the last time I pressed her for details. ‘Anonymous, without an
état civil
*
.
Why should I show you their passport and identity cards?' ‘Perhaps they haven't got any,' I suggested. Which was malicious. I could see she was annoyed. But a week later she showed me their photographs. There they were; the camera cannot lie; I had to be convinced. The Grand Passion, I must say, was a very striking-looking creature. Thin-faced, worn, a bit Roman and sinister. The Caprice was more ordinarily the nice young Englishman. Rather childish and simple, Clare explained; and she gave me to understand that she was initiating him. It was the other, the Grand P., who thought of such refinements as the refrigerator. Also, she now confided to me for the first time, he was mildly a sadist. Having seen his face, I could believe it. ‘Am I ever likely to meet him?' I asked. She shook her head. He moved in a very different world from mine.”

“A rabbit-shooter?” Fanning asked.

“No: an intellectual. That's what I gathered.”

“Golly!”

“So there was not the slightest probability, as you can see, that
I
should ever meet him.” Dodo laughed. “And yet almost the first face I saw on leaving Clare that afternoon was the Grand P.'s.”

“Coming to pay his sadistic respects?”

“Alas for poor Clare, no. He was behind glass in the showcase of a photographer in the Brompton Road, not a hundred yards from the Tarns' house in Ovington Square. The identical portrait. I marched straight in. ‘Can you tell me who that is?' But it appears that photography is done under the seal of confession. They wouldn't say. Could I order a copy? Well, yes, as a favour, they'd let me have one. Curiously enough, they told me, as they were taking down my name and address, another lady had come in only two or three days before and also ordered a copy. ‘Not by any chance a rather tall lady with light auburn hair and a rather amusing mole on the left cheek?' That did sound rather like the lady. ‘And with a very confidential manner,' I suggested, ‘as though you were her oldest friends?' Exactly, exactly; they were unanimous. That clinched it. Poor Clare, I thought, as I walked on towards the Park, poor, poor Clare!”

There was a silence.

“Which only shows,” said Fanning at last, “how right the Church has always been to persecute literature. The harm we imaginative writers do! Enormous! We ought all to be on the Index, every one. Consider your Clare, for example. If it hadn't been for books, she'd never have known that such things as passion and sensuality and perversity even existed. Never.”

“Come, come,” she protested.

But, “Never,” Fanning repeated. “She was congenitally as cold as a fish; it's obvious. Never had a spontaneous, untutored desire in her life. But she'd read a lot of books. Out of which she'd fabricated a theory of passion and perversity. Which she then consciously put into practice.”

“Or rather didn't put into practice. Only day-dreamed that she did.”

He nodded. “For the most part. But sometimes, I don't mind betting, she realized the day-dreams in actual life. Desperately, as you so well described it, with her teeth clenched and her eyes shut, as though she were jumping off the Eiffel Tower. That rabbit-shooter, for instance. . . .”

“But do you think the rabbit-shooter really existed?”

“Perhaps not that particular one. But
a
rabbit-shooter, perhaps several rabbit-shooters—at one time or another, I'm sure, they genuinely existed. Though never
genuinely,
of course, for her. For her, it's obvious, they were just phantoms, like the other inhabitants of her dreamery. Phantoms of flesh and blood, but still phantoms. I see her as a kind of Midas, turning everything she touched into imagination. Even in the embraces of a genuine, solid rabbit-shooter, she was still only indulging in her solitary sultry dream—a dream inspired by Shakespeare, or Mrs. Barclay, or the Chevalier de Nerciat, or D'Annunzio, or whoever her favourite author may have been.”

“Miles Fanning, perhaps,” Dodo mockingly suggested.

“Yes, I feared as much.”

“What a responsibility!”

“Which I absolutely refuse to accept. What have I ever written but solemn warnings against the vice of imagination? Sermons against mental licentiousness of every kind—intellectual licentiousness, mystical licentiousness, fantasticamorous licentiousness. No, no. I'll accept no responsibility. Or at least no special responsibility—only the generic responsibility of being an imaginative author, the original sin of writing in such a way as
to influence people. And when I say ‘influence,' of course I don't really mean
influence.
Because a writer can't influence people, in the sense of making them think and feel and act as he does. He can only influence them to be more, or less, like one of their own selves. In other words, he's never understood. (Thank goodness! because it would be very humiliating to be really understood by one's readers.) What readers get out of him is never, finally,
his
ideas, but theirs. And when they try to imitate him or his creations, all that they can ever do is to act one of their own potential rôles. Take this particular case. Clare read and, I take it, was impressed. She took my warnings against mental licentiousness to heart and proceeded to do—what? Not to become a creature of spontaneous, unvitiated impulses—for the good reason that that wasn't in her power—but only to imagine that she was such a creature. She imagined herself a woman like the one I put into
Endymion and the Moon
and acted accordingly—or else didn't act, only dreamed; it makes very little difference. In a word, she did exactly what all my books told her not to do. Inevitably; it was her nature. I'd influenced her, yes. But she didn't become more like one of my heroines. She only became more intensely like herself. And then, you must remember, mine weren't the only books on her shelves. I think we can take it that she'd read
Les Liaisons Dangereuses
and Casanova and some biography, shall we say, of the Maréchal de Richelieu. So that those spontaneous unvitiated impulses—how ludicrous they are, anyhow, when you
talk
about them!—became identified in her mind with the most elegant forms of ‘caprice'—wasn't that the word? She was a child of nature—but with qualifications. The kind of child of nature that lived at Versailles or on the Grand Canal about 1760. Hence those rabbit-shooters and hence also those
sadistic intellectuals, whether real or imaginary—and imaginary even when real. I may have been a favourite author. But I'm not responsible for the rabbit-shooters or the Grand P.'s. Not more responsible than any one else. She'd heard of the existence of love before she'd read me. We're all equally to blame, from Homer downwards. Plato wouldn't have any of us in his Republic. He was quite right, I believe. Quite right.”