“You were not under an anaesthetic,” she retorted.
“True. But the fact is I probably need an anaesthetic. Then people sometimes say worse things without them.”
He took one step forward, all that was needed for complete contact, and placed both his arms around her. She turned, of course, the big silly mouth away. But very soon the mutual warmth and marital pressures converted her from an indignant icicle into a mass of melting flesh. A similar transformation occurred in the masterful analyst. This was not at all, at the conference in the neighbouring flat, as it had been planned to proceed. Eros was a factor he always left out of his calculations and when he first remarked that the above pressures were resulting in the same warmth on his side as he had intended them to induce on hers, he was traversed by what almost amounted to a shudder. The absurd was happening. He was unable to escape from the absurd; that absurd which was for him an analogous enormity to
l’infâme
. It was with mortification that he arrived a quarter of an hour late at the restaurant where he was meeting for lunch an ex-colleague, a man whose friendship he greatly prized.
T
he house and garage of Percy Lamport was hemmed in by high walls and laurel bushes. In the most “desirable” part of Hampstead, above which were once the wastes of the Heath, an unusual degree of privacy had been contrived by the original “homemaker.” What was at present to be found at the core of this seclusion, within the massive Edwardian walls of the many roomed palatial site? An individual, but not exactly the kind of human being around whom high walls must be raised.
Percy Lamport was a heavy doe-like creature. He had dwelt for a long time in Welwyn, the original “garden city”: one of a group of families who had collectively evolved a strongly marked mannerism, suggestive of the coy shyness of a retiring herbivore. If one can imagine a phenomenally smart, forever quietly amused yak, standing quite still, slyly self-conscious, its big, knowing eye shining with quiet, self-satisfied humour, standing almost as if it expected to be stroked or hugged, for being so entirely
understanding
an animal, if you can summon to stand there in your fancy such a curious beast, always
sideways,
always one-eyed, not looking at you, but at some mesmerically absurd thought which bemused and transfixed it,
then
you would, by the same token, be in the presence of Percy Lamport, Esq.
In a street in Welwyn, to this day, a herd of these animals may be encountered: a whole tribe of people, neighbours and friends, who stand quietly like obedient ponies, or like yaks on a secluded hillside, or in the cages of a zoo, presenting you with a profile in which is a big, amused, contemplative eye.One of theseWelwynites was known to René, a colleague, a lecturer in physics. This strange professor would stand there, before his academic audience, as if thunderstruck with quiet fun, in front of a chart of the astral universe, making the entire galaxies and starry clusters seem delightfully ridiculous. René had watched him with uneasiness, almost with alarm, and with his brother-in-law Percy Lamport, most true to type and capable of remaining in profile with the “Welwyn eye” as René called it for minutes at a time, he was never quite at his ease.
This great retiring mansion situated near the crest of Hampstead Hill, far from the built-over bog-lands of the Thames-side, had been selected in the twenties by Percy Lamport and his wife Mary, to meet the needs of a growing family, and in view of his mounting prosperity. As an executive in a big insurance business, now in his early fifties, Percy was a minor magnate. Ultra-liberal Welwyn-origins accounted for his reading-matter: the
News Chronicle
and
The New Statesman and Nation
and other left-wing periodicals. And as a matter of fact, the richer he became, the more to the left these newspapers and weeklies moved.An enlightened interest in the fine arts was also, with him, of radical origins. He had become the possessor of an original Matisse, two or three Vlaminks, a half-dozen Marie Laurençins, the painter most exactly corresponding to his taste. Shaw, G.D.H. Cole, Priestley, Katherine Mansfield, Wystan Auden,
The Road to
Wigan Pier
,
Father Brown
, was the sort of literature to be found in his study. So his cultural habits of thought were orthodoxly liberal and unusually developed for a City Man.
Such was René Harding’s brother-in-law: it was Tuesday, May the 23rd, and René and his wife accordingly were to go to dinner in Hampstead; with “Big Business” as René called him. At 7:30 in the evening, as René stood beside the taxi, waiting for his change, his eye rested upon the superbly spacious house, so beautifully unlike the House that Jack Built. Nothing absurd about
this house
. How excellently abstract wealth was after all: it got rid of the idiosyncratic, the absurd! Lobb, the chauffeur, stood beside the Cadillac: so exactly uniformed, his face so excellently devoid of expression,
he
was not absurd. (His
name
was, but not the chauffeur.) And as to the Cadillac, no Cadillac can possibly be absurd. A few moments later René and Hester passed the waiting car and began to ascend the six steps to the pair of ponderous front doors. One of these opened, and “Rod” (Rodriques), most hysterical of spaniels, rushed out, seething with the wildest joy. He was immediately followed by Pauline — his owner, speaking legally, his goddess in canine theology. Pauline was twenty, and though lacking the fanatical abandon of her dog, possessed the impulsive vitality of her years. On seeing René, with an ardour worthy of Rod, she sprang at him, seized his beard, and flung her arms convulsively around his neck.
“My bear uncle! My old bear uncle, where have you been? What have you been doing with yourself? Oh, make your bear noise, René darling!”And René, lifting his bearded face in the air, gave his ho-ho-ho laugh: and she echoed delightedly, in a higher register, his famous ho-ho-ho.
Pauline turned to Hester, and another girl was now descending the steps.They were going to the ballet at Covent Garden, Hester was told: and then Pauline stood just below René, with her face in profile, presenting him, for a few moments, a heredity “Welwyn eye.” Then she looked up, and enquired, “When am I coming to hear you lecture? They say you are a wonderful lecturer. May I come next week?”
René shook his head.
“Afraid not,” he told her. “I shan’t be there.”
“You always put me off. You despise my IQ, I suppose, that’s it.”
As she got into the car she was wagging her finger at him. From the doorway René blew her a bearded kiss. With a deafening ovation in reverse from Rod, the Cadillac moved away.
The quietness and gloom of the dark hall, after the noisy scene without, almost startled René and he stopped. At the far end a door was open, and through it Percy Lamport appeared. Before the latter had passed into the hall, René had put himself into rapid motion, at the same time crying “Ah, Percy!” His advance across the hall was at so smart a pace that it caused small waves to dart and jump around the foot of his torso — where the jacket had no support the cloth was prone to frisk. His bearded head was carried heroically aloft, as the superb figurehead cut through the gloom towards his smiling host.
Le roi
René was not a man to be unconscious of style, in himself or others. He delighted to swim through space with the air of a Louis the Eleventh, bearing himself as a King of France hurrying to meet the Emperor Maximilian. He realized that his gait and gesture were too superb for his status or for the occasion. But this amused him. Sometimes he would deliberately act the king, or the statesman, about whom he was just then reading. De Richelieu he was very fond of impersonating.
These tricks and fancies, however, were incidental, and they never caused him to forget a mission or an opportunity. The present, he recognized, belonged to the latter class. He understood quite well with what object Mary had arranged this visit.
As ever, like an ill-conceived figure on the reverse side of a splendidly designed coin, was the unfortunate Hester. It would be a pity to exaggerate this, for it was nothing more than an irritable consciousness at times presenting itself, as of something amiss, but never strong enough to spoil the sensation experienced in his more flamboyant moments. But there was after all Hester to be counted in, as part of any picture in which
le roi
René was starring.
Just in a flash, as he swept across the shadowy hall, he saw the figure at his heels: the hips were placed too low and gave her gait a sexish drag, her neck was too long, which acted as a sort of pole to carry Big Eyes aloft.
Mary’s face, Mary’s gait did not advertise … oh, the horror of our lot. But
he
was goatish, he knew that: and all Hester was — was the Sandwich woman of his Achilles’ heel: with some women a man must feel like a dog with a chicken tied around his neck. But he switched off the telltale image, as one switches off the radio when it gets too bad, and thrust his head a fraction higher and quickened his quick dancing step.
But now, driving the smiling Percy back, he entered the drawing room like a conqueror. When he looked in Mary’s face the forecast was favourable, there were no danger signals in her eyes, they just looked at him serenely. As to Percy, he was standing sideways, an eye in the side of his face, a darkly mischievous, mesmerized amusement carrying the gaze outwards to the horizon. Suddenly awakening out of his trance he proposed a drink, and all of them soon stood holding their sherry glasses, containing a wine as near to a tasteless abstraction as the best Rhine wine. Among other things, Percy was a member of the Food and Wine Society. Sherry is the last thing the Englishman learns how to buy.
René disapproved of his host’s orthodoxy in the matter of painting, of his tame acceptance of fashionable pressure, and the values imposed. He regarded these values as an offence, when sponsored by a stupid man. Percy was a prize idiot, he had no right to these views — he should be collecting academic monstrosities. So, refusing to take Percy’s
avantgardisme
seriously, he nevertheless always enquired with great politeness about any new purchase, which was usually to be found on the walls.
“A new one I think.”
He had observed something which it seemed to him he had not seen before: the figure of a hanging man in some enclosed place, with a number of big-headed, round-faced marionettes, all expressing bloodlust and derision. One pulled at the rope, one lighted an immodestly carved pipe of great size. A dog scratched itself, with a flea nearly as large as the dog squatting on its rump.
He examined it an inch from the glass,
très amateur
.
“
École de Paris?
” he enquired.
“No,” Percy told him. “This is a Belgian etcher of the nineteenth century. His name is Ensor. I am not quite sure how much I like him.”
“No, I suppose it is not easy to make up one’s mind straight away.”
“You have to live with a picture before you can say whether you really like it.”
“I can see how that might be.” René nodded his head sagely.
René stood gazing at the tongue protruding from the mouth of the victim. Meanwhile, the happy possessor of the picture stood in profile, the one eye amusedly and with infinite knowingness simmering away all to itself. As René turned to speak to him he had the mental comment, as his eye fixed itself upon the profile, “
Un Ensor, sapristi!
”
“I must say I rather take to this,” he declared aloud.
“You like it? I am glad of that. I find I like it more and more.”
“It does grow on one,” the other agreed. René moved down the room to where he thought he saw a new Marie Laurençin. Laurençin heads all resemble one another to such a degree that anyone not an expert may well find it difficult to say which is which.
“I have not seen this one, have I, Percy?”
“‘Clothilde’? ... Yes, you have often seen the ‘Clothilde.’” It used to hang in the dining room not far from the door. I mean on the same side as the door. I think it is wonderful.”
“Of course I remember it. How stupid of me.”
“It is not stupid,” Percy protested. “With her pictures even I sometimes forget which is which.”
“How extraordinary!” exclaimed René. “I should have thought …”
“I am not often at a loss,” Percy smiled.
René had noticed that they were now alone in the room. Mary, he had assumed, had abstracted Hester purposively. Percy looked up and said almost with violence, “I want to tell you how greatly I admire your action in resigning your position at the University. It is one of the finest things I have ever heard of. I congratulate you.”
This took René’s breath away. For a moment he said nothing and stared a little stupidly at his brother-in-law. Suddenly he recovered, and almost shouted, “My dear chap, you don’t know how those words have cheered me. I knew you would understand. But the wholehearted nature of your support, your uncompromising endorsement of what I have done, well, it’s like a breath of fresh air. Thank you, Percy.”
“It is I who have to thank you for setting all of us an example of fearless courage, of facing up to obscurantism and hypocrisy, the conservative mind which crushes all the life out of our institutions. To give up everything rather than be privy ... to the intellectual fraud perpetrated in the name of education. My dear chap, it is inexpressibly fine, it is to have done a great public service. I wish I had half your guts!”
René listened in growing amazement. Did Percy mean that if he had the guts he would denounce the villainies of the great Insurance Companies?
Did he regard himself as a village Hampden
manqué
? Apparently his amazing brother-in-law derived pleasure from imagining a day when he would return as usual from his office, kiss his wife, and announce that they at once must pack: that he was saying goodbye to insurance, that he was selling his houses, cars, and so on, dismissing the servants and that in future they would dwell in a three-room flat in Pimlico or Shepherd’s Bush. René had often speculated as to what effect a lifelong diet of revolutionary journalism might have upon a highly successful executive. It now was obvious that Marxism was simply transmuted into romance, into British Dare-to-be-a-Danielism.