After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (10 page)

And fortunately it wasn't done, wasn't even begun; the book was still unread, the hours of entertainment and instruction still lay before him. Remembering that pang of jealousy he had felt up there, in the swimming pool, he smiled indulgently. Let Mr. Stoyte have all the girls he wanted; a well-written piece of eighteenth-century pornography was better than any Maunciple. He closed the volume he was holding. The tooled morocco was austerely elegant; on the back, the words “The Book of Common Prayer” were stamped in a gold which the years had hardly tarnished. He put it down with the other
curiosa
on a corner of the table. When he had finished for the afternoon, he would take the whole collection up to his bedroom.

“Oh, what fun to have a plum bun,” he chanted to himself, as he opened another bundle of papers, and then, “On a summer's afternoon, where the honeysuckles bloom and all Nature seems at rest.” That Wordsworthian touch about Nature always gave him a special pleasure. The new batch of papers turned out to be a correspondence between the Fifth Earl and a number of prominent Whigs regarding the enclosure, for his benefit, of three thousand acres of common land in Nottinghamshire. Jeremy slipped them into a file, wrote a brief preliminary description of the contents on a card, put the file in a cupboard and the card in its cabinet, and, dipping again into the bran pie, reached down for another bundle. He cut the string. “You are my honey, honey, honeysuckle, I am the bee.” What would Dr. Freud have thought of that, he wondered? Anonymous pamphlets against deism were a bore; he threw them aside. But here was a copy of Law's “Serious Call” with manuscript notes by Edward Gibbon; and here were some accounts rendered to the Fifth Earl by Mr. Rogers of Liverpool; accounts of the expenses and profits of three slave trading expeditions which the earl had helped to finance. The second voyage, it appeared, had been particularly auspicious; less than a fifth of the cargo had perished on the way, and the prices realized at Savannah were gratifyingly high. Mr. Rogers begged to enclose his draft for seventeen thousand two hundred and twenty-four pounds, eleven shillings and fourpence. Written from Venice, in Italian, another letter announced to the same Fifth Earl the appearance upon the market of a half length Mary Magdalen by Titian, at a price which his correspondent described as derisory. Other offers had already been made; but out of respect for the not less learned than illustrious English
cognoscente,
the vendor would wait until a reply had been received from his lordship. In spite of which, his lordship would be well advised not to delay too long; for otherwise . . .

It was five o'clock; the sun was low in the sky. Dressed in white shoes and socks, white shorts, a yachting cap and a pink silk sweater, Virginia had come to see the feeding of the baboons.

Its engine turned off, her rose-coloured motor scooter stood parked at the side of the road thirty or forty feet above the cage. In company with Dr. Obispo and Pete, she had gone down to have a closer look at the animals.

Just opposite the point at which they were standing, on a shelf of artificial rock, sat a baboon mother, holding in her arms the withered and disintegrating corpse of the baby she would not abandon even though it had been dead for a fortnight. Every now and then, with an intense, automatic affection, she would lick the little cadaver. Tufts of greenish fur and even pieces of skin detached themselves under the vigorous action of her tongue. Delicately, with black fingers, she would pick the hairs out of her mouth, then begin again. Above her, at the mouth of a little cave, two young males suddenly got into a fight. The air was filled with screams and barks and the gnashing of teeth. Then one of the two combatants ran away and, in a moment, the other had forgotten all about the fight and was searching for pieces of dandruff on his chest. To the right, on another shelf of rock a formidable old male, leather-snouted, with the grey bobbed hair of a seventeenth-century Anglican divine, stood guard over his submissive female. It was a vigilant watch; for if she ventured to move without his leave, he turned and bit her; and meanwhile the small black eyes, the staring nostrils at the end of the truncated snout, kept glancing this way and that with an unsleeping suspicion. From the basket he was carrying, Pete threw a potato in his direction, then a carrot and another potato. With a vivid flash of magenta buttocks the old baboon darted down from his perch on the artificial mountain, seized the carrot and, while he was eating it, stuffed one potato into his left cheek, the other into the right; then, still biting at the carrot, advanced towards the wire and looked up for more. The coast was clear. The young male, who had been looking for dandruff suddenly saw his opportunity. Chattering with excitement, he bounded down to the shelf on which, too frightened to follow her master, the little female was still squatting. Within ten seconds they had begun to copulate.

Virginia clapped her hands with pleasure. “Aren't they cute!” she cried. “Aren't they
human!

Another burst of screaming and barking almost drowned her words.

Pete interrupted his distribution of food to say that it was a long while since he had seen Mr. Propter. Why shouldn't they all go down the hill and pay a call on him.

“From the monkey cage to the Propter paddock,” said Dr. Obispo, “and from the Propter paddock back to the Stoyte house and the Maunciple kennel. What do you say, angel?”

Virginia was throwing potatoes to the old male—throwing them in such a way as to induce him to turn, to retrace his steps towards the shelf on which he had left his female. Her hope was that, if she got him to go back far enough, he'd see how the girl friend passed the time when he was away. “Yes, let's go and see old Proppy,” she said, without turning round. She tossed another potato into the enclosure. With a flutter of grey bobbed hair the baboon pounced on it; but instead of looking up and catching Mrs. B. having her romance with the ice-man, the exasperating animal immediately turned round towards the wire, asking for more. “Stupid old fool!” Virginia shouted and this time threw the potato straight at him; it caught him on the nose. She laughed and turned towards the others. “I like old Proppy,” she said. “He scares me a bit; but I like him.”

“All right then,” said Dr. Obispo, “let's go and rout out Mr. Pordage, while we're about it.”

“Yes, let's go and fetch old Ivory,” Virginia agreed, patting her own auburn curls in reference to Jeremy's baldness. “He's kind of cute, don't you think?”

Leaving Pete to go on with the feeding of the baboons, they climbed back to the road and up a flight of steps on the further side, leading directly to the rock-cut windows of Jeremy's room. Virginia pushed open the glass door.

“Ivory,” she called, “we've come to disturb you.”

Jeremy began to murmur something humorously gallant; then broke off in the middle of a sentence. He had suddenly remembered that pile of curious literature on the corner of the table. To get up and put the books into a cupboard would be to invite attention to them; he had no newspaper with which to cover them, no other books to mix them up with. There was nothing to be done. Nothing, except to hope for the best. Fervently he hoped for it; and almost immediately the worst happened. Idly, out of the need to perform some muscular action, however pointless, Virginia picked up a volume of Nerciat, opened it on one of its conscientiously detailed engravings, looked, then with wider eyes looked again and let out a whoop of startled excitement. Dr. Obispo glanced and yelled in turn; then both broke out into enormous laughter.

Jeremy sat in a misery of embarrassment, sicklily smiling, while they asked him if
that
was how he spent his time, if
this
was the sort of thing he was studying. If only people weren't so wearisome, he was thinking, so deplorably unsubtle!

Virginia turned over the pages until she found another illustration. Once more, there was an outcry of delight, astonishment and, this time, incredulity. Was it possible? Could it really be done? She spelled out the caption under the engraving: “La volupté frappait à toutes les portes”; then petulantly shook her head. It was no good; she couldn't understand it. Those French lessons at high school—just lousy; that was all you could say about them. They hadn't taught her anything except a lot of nonsense about
le crayon de mon oncle
and
savez-vous planter le chou.
She'd always said that studying was mostly a waste of time; this proved it. And why did they have to print this stuff in French anyhow? At the thought that the deficiencies in the educational system of the State of Oregon might for ever prevent her from reading Andréa de Nerciat, the tears came into Virginia's eyes. It was really
too
bad!

A brilliant idea occurred to Jeremy. Why shouldn't he offer to translate the book for her—
viva voce
and sentence by sentence, like an interpreter at a Council Meeting of the League of Nations? Yes, why not? The more he thought of it, the better the idea seemed to him to be. His decision was made and he had begun to consider how most felicitously to phrase his offer, when Dr. Obispo quietly took the volume Virginia was hold ing, picked up the three companion volumes from the table, along with “Le Portier des Carmes” and the “Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and slipped the entire collection into the side pocket of his jacket.

“Don't worry,” he said to Virginia. “I'll translate them for you. And now let's go back to the baboons. Pete'll be wondering what's happened to us. Come on, Mr. Pordage.”

In silence, but boiling inwardly with self-reproach for his own inefficiency and indignation at the doctor's impudence, Jeremy followed them out of the French window and down the steps.

Pete had emptied his basket and was leaning against the wire, intently following with his eyes the movements of the animals within. At their approach he turned towards them. His pleasant young face was bright with excitement.

“Do you know, doc,” he said, “I believe it's working.”

“What's working?” asked Virginia.

Pete's answering smile was beautiful with happiness. For, oh, how happy he was! Doubly and trebly happy. By the sweetness of her subsequent behaviour, Virginia had more than made up for the pain she had inflicted by turning away to listen to that smutty story. And after all it probably wasn't a smutty story; he had been maligning her, thinking gratuitous evil of her. No, it certainly hadn't been a smutty story—not smutty because, when she turned back to him, her face had looked like the face of that child in the illustrated Bible at home, that child who was gazing so innocently and cutely while Jesus said, “Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” And that was not the only reason for his happiness. He was happy, too, because it looked as though those cultures of the carp's intestinal flora were really having an effect on the baboons they had tried them on.

“I believe they're livelier,” he explained. “And their fur—it's kind of glossier.”

The fact gave him almost as great a satisfaction as did Virginia's presence here in the transfiguring richness of the evening sunlight, as did the memory of her sweetness, the uplifting conviction of her essential innocence. Indeed, in some obscure way, the rejuvenation of the baboons and Virginia's adorableness seemed to him to have a profound connexion—a connexion not only with one another, but also and at the same time with Loyalist Spain and Anti-Fascism. Three separate things, and yet one thing. There was a bit of poetry he had been made to learn at school—how did it go?

I could not love thee, dear, so much,

Loved I not something or other (he could not at the moment remember what) more.

He did not love anything
more
than Virginia. But the fact that he cared so enormously much for science and justice, for this research and the boys back in Spain, did something to make his love for her more profound and, though it seemed a paradox, more whole-hearted.

“Well, what about moving on?” he suggested at last.

Dr. Obispo looked at his wrist watch. “I'd forgotten,” he said, “I've got some letters I ought to write before dinner. Guess I'll have to see Mr. Propter some other time.”

“That's too bad!” Pete did his best to impart to his tone and expression the cordiality of regret he did not feel. In fact, he was delighted. He admired Dr. Obispo, thought him a remarkable research worker—but not the sort of person a young innocent girl like Virginia ought to associate with. He dreaded for her the influence of so much cynicism and hard-boiledness. Besides, so far as his own relations to Virginia were concerned, Dr. Obispo was always in the way. “That's too bad,” he repeated, and the intensity of his pleasure was such that he fairly ran up the steps leading from the baboon-enclosure to the drive—ran so fast that his heart began palpitating and missing beats. Damn that rheumatic fever!

Dr. Obispo stepped back to allow Virginia to pass and, as he did so, gave a little tap to the pocket containing “Les Cent-Vingt Jours de Sodome” and tipped her a wink. Virginia winked back and followed Pete up the steps.

A few moments later Dr. Obispo was walking up the drive, the others down. Or to be more exact, Pete-and Jeremy were walking, while Virginia, to whom the idea of using one's legs to get from anywhere to anywhere else was practically unthinkable, sat on her strawberry-and-cream-coloured scooter and, with one hand affectionately laid on Pete's shoulder, allowed herself to be carried down by the force of gravity.

The noise of the baboons faded behind them, and at the next turn of the road there was Giambologna's nymph, still indefatigably spouting from her polished breasts. Virginia suddenly interrupted a conversation about Clark Gable to say, in the righteously indignant tone of a vice crusader: “I just can't figure why Uncle Jo allows that thing to stand there. It's disgusting!”