Point Counter Point (46 page)

‘What a horror!’ Marjorie shuddered.

Elinor observed the shudder and was annoyed by it into contradiction.

‘Do you think so? It seems to me sometimes rather an enviable talent.’ She laughed and Marjorie was duly shocked by her cynicism. ‘For a boy with Walter’s shyness and timidity,’ she went on, ‘there’s something very exciting about that kind of bold temperament. It’s the opposite of his. Reckless, without scruple, wilful, unconscientious. I can so well understand its going to his head.’ She thought of Everard Webley. ‘Force is always attractive,’ she added. ‘Particularly if one lacks it oneself, as Walter does. Lucy’s obviously a force. You may not like that kind of force.’ She herself didn’t much like Webley’s energetic ambition. ‘But you can’t help admiring the force in itself. It’s like Niagara. Fine, even though you mayn’t want to be standing underneath. May I take another piece of bread and butter?’ She helped herself. Out of politeness Marjorie also took another slice. ‘Delicious brown bread,’ Elinor commented and wondered how Walter could have lived with anyone who crooked the little finger of the hand that held the tea-cup and who took such horribly small bites from a slice of bread and then chewed only with the front teeth, like a guinea-pig—as though the process of eating were an indelicate and rather disgusting affair.

‘But what do you think I ought to do?’ Marjorie brought herself finally to ask.

Elinor shrugged her shoulders. ‘What can you do, but hope he’ll get what he wants and soon be sick of it.’

It was obvious; but Marjorie thought her rather unfeeling, hard and cruel to have said it.

In London the Quarleses sketchily inhabited what had once been the last of a row of stables in a Belgravian mews. You passed under an archway. A cliff of cream-coloured stucco rose sheer on your left—windowless, for the Belgravians had declined to be aware of the squalid domesticity of their dependants. On the right stretched the low line of stables with the single storey of living rooms above, tenanted now by enormous Daimlers and the families of their chauffeurs. The mews ended in a wall, over the top of which you could see the waving planetrees of Belgravian gardens. The Quarleses doorstep lay in the shadow of this wall. Set between the gardens and the sparsely inhabited mews, the little house was very quiet. The coming and going of limousines and the occasional yelling of a child were the only disturbances.

‘But fortunately,’ Philip had remarked, ‘the rich can afford to buy silent cars. And there’s something about internal combustion engines that makes for birth control. Who ever heard of a chauffeur with eight children?’ Coach-house and horse-boxes had been knocked together in the reconstruction of the stable, into a single spacious living-room. Two screens hinted at a division. Behind the screen on the right, as you entered, was the drawing-room end of the apartment—chairs and a sofa grouped around the fireplace. The screen on the left concealed the dining-table and the entrance to a tiny kitchen. A little staircase slanted up across one of the walls, leading to the bedrooms. Yellow cretonnes mimicked the sunshine that never shone through the northward-looking windows. There were many books. Old Bidlake’s portrait of Elinor as a young girl hung over the mantelpiece.

Philip was lying on the sofa, book in hand. ‘Very remarkable,’ he read, ‘is Mr. Tate Regan’s account of pigmy parasitic males in three species of Cerativid Anglerfishes. In the Arctic
Ceratias holbolli
a female about eight inches in length carried on her ventral surface two males of about two-and-a-half inches. The snout and chin region of the dwarf malewas permanently attached to a papilla of the female’s skin, and the bloodvessels of the two were confluent. The male is without teeth; the mouth is useless; the alimentary canal is degenerate. In
photocarynus spiniceps
the female, about two-and-a-half inches in length bore a male under half an inch long on the top of her head in front of her right eye. In
Edriolychnus schmidti
the dimensions were about the same as in the last case, and the female carried the pigmy male upside down on the inner surface of her gill-cover.’

Philip put down the book and feeling in his breast pocket pulled out his pocket diary and his fountain-pen. ‘Female Anglerfishes,’ he wrote, ‘carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies. Draw the obvious comparison, when my Walter rushes after his Lucy. What about a scene at an aquarium? They go in with a scientific friend who shows them the female Anglers and their husbands. The twilight, the fishes—perfect background.’ He was just putting his diary away, when another thought occurred to him. He reopened it. ‘Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in terms of deep-sea monstrosity.’ He lit a cigarette and went on with his book.

There was a rap at the door. He got up and opened; it was Elinor.

‘What an afternoon!’ She dropped into a chair.

‘Well, what news of Marjorie?’ he asked.

‘No
news
,’ she sighed, as she took off her hat. ‘The poor creature’s as dreary as ever. But I’m very sorry for her.’

‘What did you advise her to do?’

‘Nothing. What else could she do? And Walter?’ she asked in her turn. ‘Did you get a chance to be the heavy father?’

‘The middle-weight father, shall we say. I persuaded him to come down to Chamford with Marjorie.’

‘Did you? That was a real triumph.’

‘Not quite such a triumph as you think. I had no enemy to fight with. Lucy’s going to Paris next Saturday.’

‘Let’s hope she’ll stay there. Poor Walter!’

‘Yes, poor Walter. But I must tell you about Anglerfishes.’ He told her. ‘One of these days,’ he concluded,’ I shall really have to write a modem Bestiary. Such moral lessons! But tell me, how was Everard? I quite forgot you’d seen him.’

‘You would have forgotten,’ she answered scornfully.

‘Would I? I don’t know why.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘I’m crushed,’ said Philip with a mock humility. There was a silence.

‘Everard’s in love with me,’ said Elinor at last without looking at her husband and in the flattest, most matter-of-fact of voices.

‘Is that news?’ asked Philip. ‘I thought he was an old admirer.’

‘But it’s serious,’ Elinor went on.’very serious.’ She waited anxiously for his comment. It came, after a little pause.

‘That must be less amusing.’

Less amusing! Couldn’t he understand? After all, he wasn’t a fool. Or perhaps he did understand and was only pretending not to; perhaps he was secretly glad about Everard. Or was it just indifference that made him blind? Nobody understands what he does not feel. Philip couldn’t understand her because he didn’t feel as she felt. He was confident in the belief that other people were as reasonably lukewarm as he was himself. ‘But I like him,’ she said aloud in a last desperate attempt to provoke him into at least a semblance of caring. If only he’d show himself jealous, or sad, or angry, how happy she’d be, how grateful! ‘Very much,’ she went on. ‘There’s something very attractive about him. That passionateness of his, that violence….’

Philip laughed. ‘Quite the irresistible cave-man, in fact.’

Elinor rose with a little sigh, picked up her hat and bag, and bending over her husband’s chair, kissed him on the forehead, as though she were saying goodbye; then turned away and still without a word went upstairs to her bedroom.

Philip picked up his abandoned book. ‘_Bonellia viridis_,’ he read, ‘is a green worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean. The female has a body about the size of a prune, bearing a string-like, terminally bifid, very contractile proboscis, which may be two feet long. But the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct (modified nephridium) of the female. It has no mouth and depends on what it absorbs parasitically through its ciliated surfaces….’

Philip once more put down the book. He was wondering whether he oughtn’t to go upstairs and say something to Elinor. He was sure she’d never really care for Everard. But perhaps he oughtn’t to take it so much for granted. She had seemed rather upset. Perhaps she had expected him to say something—how much he cared for her, how wretched he’d be, how angry, if she were to stop caring for him. But these precisely were the almost unsayable things. In the end he decided not to go upstairs. He’d wait and see, he’d put it off to another time. He went on reading about
Bonellia viridis
.

From Philip Quarles’s Notebook

To-day, at Lucy Tantamount’s, I was the victim of a very odd association of ideas. Lucy, as usual, was the French tricolor; blue round the eyes, a scarlet mouth and the rest dead white against a background of shiny metal-black hair. I made some sort of a joke. She laughed, opening her mouth—and her tongue and gums were so much paler than the paint on her lips that they seemed (it gave me a queer creepy shock of astonished horror) quite bloodless and white by contrast. And then, without transition, I was standing in front of those sacred crocodiles in the palace gardens at Jaipur, and the Indian guide was throwing them bits of meat, and the inside of the animals’ mouths was almost white, as though the mouths were lined with a slightly glace cream-coloured kid. And that’s how one’s mind naturally works. And one has intellectual pretensions! Well, well. But what a windfall for my novel! I shall begin the book with it. My Walterish hero makes his Lucyish siren laugh and immediately (to his horror; but he goes on longing for her, with an added touch of perversity, all the same and perhaps all the more) sees those disgusting crocodiles he had been looking at in India a month before. In this way I strike the note of strangeness and fantasticality at once. Everything’s incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing’s in the least like what it seems—or rather it’s like several million other things at the same time. All India rushes like a cinema film through his head while she’s laughing and showing—she the beloved, longedfor, lusted-after, beautiful one—those gruesomely bloodless crocodile’s gums and palate.

The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. (_Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia_). But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet.) More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways—dissimilars solving the same problem. Or,
vice versa
, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects—emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical,
etc.
He will modulate from one to the other—as from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. But perhaps this is a too tyrannical imposition of the author’s will. Some people would think so. But need the author be so retiring? I think we’re a bit too squeamish about these personal appearances nowadays.

Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting—at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc.,
etc.
Alt about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood-pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands and reaction times.

Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express—which excludes all but about .01 per cent. of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.

The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run.

The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours. Such amazing meannesses as one’s always coming across, particularly among the rich! Such fantastic extravagances too. Both qualities, often, in the same person. And then the hoarders, the grubbers, the people who are entirely and almost unceasingly preoccupied with money. Nobody’s unceasingly preoccupied with sex in the same way—I suppose because there’s a physiological satisfaction possible in sexual matters, while there’s none where money’s concerned. When the body’s satiated, the mind stops thinking about food or women. But the hunger for money and possessions is an almost purely mental thing. There’s no physical satisfaction possible. That would account for the excesses and perversities of acquisitiveness. Our bodies almost compel the sexual instinct to behave in a normal fashion. Perversions must be violent before they overrule the normal physiological tendencies. But where acquisitiveness is concerned, there’s no regulating body, no lump of too too solid flesh to be pushed out of the grooves of physiological habit. The slightest tendency to perversion is at once made manifest. But perhaps the word ‘perversion’ is meaningless in this context. For perversion implies the existence of a norm from which it departs. What is the norm of acquisitiveness? One guesses vaguely at some golden mean; but is it in fact the true statistical norm? I should imagine myself rather ‘under-acquisitivized’; less interested in money and possessions in general than the average. Illidge would say it’s entirely due to having been brought up in an atmosphere of easy money. It may be partly true. But not entirely, I think. Consider the many people born rich who are preoccupied with nothing but money making. No, my under-acquisitiveness is hereditary as well as acquired. In any case I find myself uninterested in possessions and rather unsympathetic with, and without understanding of, those who are. No predominantly acquisitive character has appeared in any of my stories. It is a defect; for acquisitives are obviously very common in real life. But I doubt if I could make such a character interesting—not being interested myself in the acquisitive passion. Balzac could; circumstances and heredity had made him passionately interested in money. But when one finds a thing boring, one’s apt to be boring about it.