Point Counter Point (7 page)

He looked down at her. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said gruffly. ‘Sorry I hadn’t noticed.’ The annoyance, expressed in his frown and his ill-mannered words, was partly genuine, partly assumed. Many people, he had found, are frightened of anger; he cultivated his natural ferocity. It kept people at a distance, saved him from being bothered.

‘Goodness!’ exclaimed Lady Edward with an expression of terror that was frankly a caricature.

‘Did you want anything?’ he demanded in the tone in which he might have addressed an importunate beggar in the street.

‘You do look cross.’

‘If that was all you wanted to say to me, I think I might as well…’

‘Lady Edward, meanwhile, had been examining him critically out of her candidly impertinent eyes.

‘You know,’ she said, interrupting him in the middle of his sentence, as though unable to delay for a moment longer the announcement of her great and sudden discovery,’ you ought to play the part of Captain Hook in Peter Pan. Yes, really. You have the ideal face for a pirate king. Hasn’t he, Mr. Babbage?’ She caught at Illidge as he was passing, disconsolately alien, through the crowd of strangers.

‘Good evening,’ he said. The cordiality of Lady Edward’s smile did not entirely make up for the insult of his unremembered name.

‘Webley, this is Mr. Babbage, who helps my husband with his work.’ Webley nodded a distant acknowledgment of Illidge’s existence. ‘But don’t you think he’s like a pirate king, Mr. Babbage? ‘ Lady Edward went on. ‘Look at him now.’

Illidge uncomfortably laughed. ‘Not that I’ve seen many pirate kings,’ he said.

‘But of course,’ Lady Edward cried out, ‘I’d forgotten; he is a pirate king. In real life. Aren’t you, Webley?’

Everard Webley laughed.’Oh, certainly, certainly.’

‘Because, you see,’ Lady Edward explained, turning confidentially to Illidge, ‘this is Mr. Everard Webley. The head of the British Freemen. You know those men in the green uniform? Like the male chorus at a musical comedy.’

Illidge smiled maliciously and nodded. So this, he was thinking, was Everard Webley. The founder and the head of the Brotherhood of British Freemen—the B.B.F.’s, the ‘B—y, b—ing, f—s,’ as their enemies called them. Inevitably; for, as the extremely well-informed correspondent of the Figaro once remarked in an article devoted to the Freemen, ‘les initiales B.B.F. ont, pour le public anglais, une signification plutot pejorative.’ Webley had not thought of that, when he gave his Freemen their name. It pleased Illidge to reflect that he must be made to think of it very often now.

‘If you’ve finished being funny,’ said Everard, ‘I’ll take my leave.’

Tinpot Mussolini, Illidge was thinking. Looks his part, too. (He had a special personal hatred of anyone who was tall and handsome, or who looked in any way distinguished. He himself was small and had the appearance of a very intelligent street Arab, grown up.) Great lout!’

‘But you’re not offended by anything I said, are you?’ Lady Edward asked with a great show of anxiety and contrition.

Illidge remembered a cartoon in the Daily Herald. ‘The British Freemen,’ Webley had had the insolence to say, ‘exist to keep the world safe for intelligence.’ The cartoon showed Webley and half a dozen of his uniformed bandits kicking and bludgeoning a workman to death. Behind them a top-hatted company-director looked on approvingly. Across his monstrous belly sprawled the word: INTELLIGENCE.

‘Not offended, Webley?’ Lady Edward repeated.

‘Not in the least. I’m only rather busy. You see,’ he explained in his silkiest voice, ‘ I have things to do. I work, if you know what that means.’

Illidge wished that the hit had been scored by someone else. The dirty ruffian! He himself was a communist. Webley left them. Lady Edward watched him ploughing his way through the crowd. ‘Like a steam engine, she said. ‘What energy! But so touchy. These politicians—worse than actresses. Such vanity! And dear Webley hasn’t got much sense of humour. He wants to be treated as though he were his own colossal statue, erected by an admiring and grateful nation.’ (The r’s roared like lions.) ‘Posthumously, if you see what I mean. As a great historical character. I can never remember, when I see him, that he’s really Alexander the Great. I always make the mistake of thinking it’s just Webley.’

Illidge laughed. He found himself positively liking Lady Edward. She had the right feelings about things. She seemed even to be on the right side, politically.

‘Not but what his Freemen aren’t a very good thing,’ Lady Edward went on. Illidge’s sympathy began to wane as suddenly as it had shot up.’don’t you think so, Mr. Babbage?’

He made a little grimace. ‘Well…’ he began.

‘By the way,’ said Lady Edward, cutting short what would have been an admirably sarcastic comment of Webley’s Freemen, ‘you must really be careful coming down those stairs. They’re terribly slippery.’

Illidge blushed. ‘Not at all,’ he muttered and blushed still more deeply—a beetroot to the roots of his carrot-coloured hair—as he realized the imbecility of what he had said. His sympathy declined still further.

‘Well, rather slippery all the same,’ Lady Edward politely insisted, with an emphatic rolling in the throat. ‘What were you working at with Edward this evening? ‘ she went on. ‘It always interests me so much.’

Illidge smiled. ‘Well, if you really want to know,’ he said, ‘we were working at the regeneration of lost parts in newts.’ Among the newts he felt more at ease; a little of his liking for Lady Edward returned.

‘Newts? Those things that swim?’ Illidge nodded. ‘But how do they lose their parts? ‘

‘Well, in the laboratory,’ he explained, ‘they lose them because we cut them off.’

‘And they grow again?’

‘They grow again.’

‘Dear me,’ said Lady Edward. ‘I never knew that. How fascinating these things are. Do tell me some more.’

She wasn’t so bad after all. He began to explain. Warming to his subject, he warmed also to Lady Edward. He had just reached the crucial, the important and significant point in the proceedings—the conversion of the transplanted tail-bud into a leg—when Lady Edward, whose eyes had been wandering, laid her hand on his arm.

‘Come with me,’ she said, ‘and I’ll introduce you to General Knoyle. Such an amusing old man—if only unintentionally sometimes.’

Illidge’s exposition froze suddenly in his throat. He realized that she had not taken the slightest interest in what he had been saying, had not even troubled to pay the least attention. Detesting her, he followed in resentful silence.

General Knoyle was talking with another military-looking gentleman. His voice was martial and asthmatic. ‘“My dear fellow,” I said to him’ (they heard him as they approached), ‘“my dear fellow, don’t enter the horse now. It would be a crime,” I said. “It would be sheer madness. Scratch him,” I said, “scratch him.” And he scratched him.’

Lady Edward made her presence known. The two military gentlemen were overwhelmingly polite; they had enjoyed their evening immensely.

‘I chose the Bach specially for you, General Knoyle,’ said Lady Edward with something of the charming confusion of a young girl confessing an amorous foible.

‘Well—er—really, that was very kind of you.’ General Knoyle’s confusion was genuine; he did not know what to do with the musical present she had made him.

‘I hesitated,’ Lady Edward went on in the same significantly intimate tone, ‘between Handel’s Water Music and the B minor Suite with Pongileoni. Then I remembered you and decided on the Bach.’ Her eyes took in the signs of embarrassment on the General’s ruddy face.

‘That was very kind of you,’ he protested. ‘Not that I can pretend to understand much about music. But I know what I like, I know what I like.’ The phrase seemed to give him confidence. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘What I always say is…’

‘And now,’ Lady Edward concluded triumphantly, ‘I want to introduce Mr. Babbage, who helps Edward with his work and who is a real expert on newts. Mr. Babbage, this is General Knoyle and this is Colonel Pilchard.’ She gave a last smile and was gone.

‘Well, I’m damned!’ exclaimed the General, and the Colonel said she was a holy terror.

‘One of the holiest,’ Illidge feelingly agreed.

The two military gentlemen looked at him for a moment and decided that from one so obviously beyond the pale the comment was an impertinence. Good Catholics may have their little jokes about the saints and the habits of the clergy; but they are outraged by the same little jokes on the lips of infidels. The General made no verbal comment and the Colonel contented himself with looking his disapproval. But the way in which they turned to one another and continued their interrupted discussion of race-horses, as though they were alone, was so intentionally offensive, that Illidge wanted to kick them.

‘Lucy, my child!’

‘Uncle John!’ Lucy Tantamount turned round and smiled at her adopted uncle. She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair, oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead. Naturally pale, she wore no rouge. Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes. A black dress emphasized the whiteness of her arms and shoulders. It was more than two years now since Henry Tantamount had died—for Lucy had married her second cousin. But she still mourned in her dress, at any rate by artificial light. Black suited her so well. ‘How are you?’ she added, thinking as she spoke the words that he was beginning to look very old.

‘Perishing,’ said John Bidlake. He took her arm familiarly, grasping it just above the elbow with a big, blue-veined hand. ‘Give me an excuse for going to have supper. I’m ravenously hungry.’

‘But I’m not.’

‘No matter,’ said old Bidlake. ‘My need is greater than thine, as Sir Philip Sidney so justly remarked.’

‘But I don’t want to eat.’ She objected to being domineered, to following instead of leading. But Uncle John was too much for her.

‘I’ll do all the eating,’ he declared. ‘Enough for two.’ And jovially laughing, he continued to lead her along towards the dining-room.

Lucy abandoned the struggle. They edged their way through the crowd. Greenish-yellow and freckled, the orchid in John Bidlake’s button-hole resembled the face of a yawning serpent. His monocle glittered in his eye.

‘Who’s that old man with Lucy?’ Polly Logan enquired as they passed.

‘That’s old Bidlake.’

‘Bidlake? The man who…who painted the pictures?’ Polly spoke hesitatingly, in the tone of one who is conscious of a hole in her education and is afraid of making a ridiculous mistake.’do you mean that Bidlake?’ Her companion nodded. She felt enormously relieved. ‘Well I never,’ she went on, raising her eyebrows and opening her eyes very wide. ‘I always thought he was an Old Master. But he must be about a hundred by this time, isn’t he?’

‘I should think he must be.’ Norah was also under twenty.

‘I must say,’ Polly handsomely admitted, ‘he doesn’t look it. He’s still quite a beau, or a buck, or a Champagne Charlie, or whatever people were in his young days.’

‘He’s had about fifteen wives,’ said Norah.

It was at this moment that Hugo Brockle found the courage to present himself. ‘You don’t remember me. We were introduced in our perambulators.’ How idiotic it sounded! He felt himself blushing all over.

The third and finest ofJohn Bidlake’s ‘Bathers’ hung over the mantelpiece in the dining-room of Tantamount House. It was a gay and joyous picture, very light in tone, the colouring very pure and brilliant. Eight plump and pearly bathers grouped themselves in the water and on the banks of a stream so as to form with their moving bodies and limbs a kind of garland (completed above by the foliage of a tree) round the central point of the canvas. Through this wreath of nacreous flesh (and even their faces were just smiling flesh, not a trace of spirit to distract you from the contemplation of the lovely forms and their relations) the eye travelled on towards a pale bright landscape of softly swelling downland and clouds.

Plate in hand and munching caviar sandwiches, old Bidlake stood with his companion, contemplating his own work. An emotion of mingled elation and sadness possessed him.

‘It’s good,’ he said, ‘it’s enormously good. Look at the way it’s composed. Perfect balance, and yet there’s no suggestion of repetition or artificial arrangement.’ The other thoughts and feelings which the picture had evoked in his mind he left unexpressed. They were too many and too confused to be easily put into words. Too melancholy above all; he did not care to dwell on them. He stretched out a finger and touched the sideboard; it was mahogany, genuine wood. ‘Look at the figure on the right with the arms up.’ He went on with his technical exposition in order that he might keep down, might drive away the uninvited thoughts.’see how it compensates for the big stooping one there on the left. Like a long lever lifting a heavy weight.’ But the figure with the arms up was Jenny Smith, the loveliest model he had ever had. Incarnation of beauty, incarnation of stupidity and vulgarity. A goddess as long as she was naked, kept her mouth shut, or had it kept shut for her with kisses; but oh, when she opened it, when she put on her clothes, her frightful hats! He remembered the time he had taken her to Paris with him. He had to send her back after a week. ‘You ought to be muzzled, Jenny,’ he told her, and Jenny cried. ‘It was a mistake going to Paris,’ he went on. ‘Too much sun in Paris, too many artificial lights. Next time, we’ll go to Spitzbergen. In winter. The nights are six months long up there.’ That had made her cry still more loudly. The girl had treasures of sensuality as well as of beauty. Afterwards she took to drink and decayed, came round begging and drank up the charity. And finally what was left of her died. But the real Jenny remained here in the picture with her arms up and the pectoral muscles lifting her little breasts. What remained of John Bidlake, the John Bidlake of five and twenty years ago, was there in the picture too. Another John Bidlake still existed to contemplate his own ghost. Soon even he would have disappeared. And in any case, was he the real Bidlake, any more than the sodden and bloated woman who died had been the real Jenny? Real Jenny lived among the pearly bathers. And real Bidlake, their creator, existed by implication in his creatures.