Point Counter Point (22 page)

‘Ah, Edward,’ cried the disembodied voice of the head of the family from forty miles away at Gattenden. ‘Such a really remarkable discovery. I wanted your opinion on it. About God. You know the formula,
m
over nought equals infinity,
m
being any positive number? Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought? In which case you have
m
equals infinity times nought. That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity. Doesn’t that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing? Doesn’t it?’ The diaphragm of the telephone receiver was infected by Lord Gattenden’s excitement, forty miles away. It talked with breathless speed; its questions were earnest and insistent. ‘Doesn’t it, Edward?’ All his life the fifth marquess had been looking for the absolute. It was the only sort of hunting possible to a cripple. For fifty years he had trundled in his wheeled chair at the heels of the elusive quarry. Could it be that he had now caught it, so easily, and in such an unlikely place as an elementary school-book on the theory of limits? It was something that justified excitement. ‘What’s your opinion, Edward?’

‘Well,’ began Lord Edward, and at the other end of the electrified wire, forty miles away, his brother knew, from the tone in which that single word was spoken, that it was no good. The Absolute’s tail was still unsalted.

‘Talking about elders,’ said Lucy,’did I ever tell either of you that really marvellous story about my father?’

‘Which story? ‘

‘The one about the conservatories.’ The mere thought of the story made her smile.

‘No, I never remember hearing about the conservatories,’ said Spandrell, and Walter also shook his head.

‘It was during the War,’ Lucy began. ‘I was getting on for eighteen, I suppose. Just launched. And by the way, somebody did almost literally break a bottle of champagne over me. Parties were rather feverish in those days, if you remember.’

Spandrell nodded and, though as a matter of fact he had been at school during the War, Walter also nodded, knowingly.

‘One day,’ Lucy continued, ‘I got a message: Would I go upstairs and see his Lordship? It was unprecedented. I was rather alarmed. You know how the old imagine one lives. And how upset they are when they discover they’ve been wrong. The usual Arab tea party.’ She laughed and, for Walter, her laughter laid waste to all the years before he had known her. To elaborate the history of their young and innocent loves had been one of his standing consolations. She had laughed; and now not even fancy could take pleasure in that comforting romance.

Spandrell nodded. ‘So you went upstairs, feeling as though you were climbing a scaffold…’

‘And found my father in his library, pretending to read. My arrival really terrified him. Poor man! I never saw anyone so horribly embarrassed and distressed You can imagine how his terrors increased mine. Such strong feelings must surely have an adequate cause What could it be? Meanwhile, he suffered agonies. If his sense of duty hadn’t been so strong, I believe he would have told me to go away again at once. You should have seen his face!’ The comic memories were too much for her. She laughed.

His elbow on the table, his head in his hand, Walter stared into his wine-glass. The bright little bubbles came rushing to the surface one by one, purposively, as though determined at all costs to be free and happy. He did not dare to raise his eyes. The sight of Lucy’s laughter-distorted face, he was afraid, might make him do something stupid—cry aloud, or burst into tears.

‘Poor man!’ repeated Lucy, and the words came out on a puff of explosive mirth. ‘He could hardly speak for terror.’ Suddenly changing her tone, she mimicked Lord Edward’s deep blurred voice bidding her sit down, telling her (stammeringly and with painful hesitations) that he had something to talk to her about. The mimicry was admirable. Lord Edward’s embarrassed phantom was sitting at their table.

‘Admirable!’ Spandrell applauded. And even Walter had to laugh; but the depths of his unhappiness remained undisturbed.

‘It must have taken him a good five minutes,’ Lucy went on, ‘to screw himself up to the talking point. I was in an agony, as you can imagine. But guess what it was he wanted to say.

‘What?’

‘Guess.’ And all at once Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably. She covered her face with her hands, her whole body shook, as though she were passionately weeping. ‘It’s too good,’ she gasped, dropping her hands and leaning back in her chair. Her face still worked with laughter; there were tears on her cheeks. ‘Too good.’ She opened the little beaded bag that lay on the table in front of her and taking out a handkerchief, began to wipe her eyes. A gust of perfume came out with the handkerchief, reinforcing those faint memories of gardenias that surrounded her, that moved with her wherever she went like a second ghostly personality. Walter looked up; the strong gardenia perfume was in his nostrils; he was breathing what was for him the very essence of her being, the symbol of her power, of his own insane desires. He looked at her with a kind of terror.

‘He told me,’ Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes,’ he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in conservatories. Conservatories!’ she repeated. ‘What a wonderful touch! So marvellously in period. The ‘eighties. The old Prince of Wales. Zola’s novels. Conservatories! Poor dear man! He said he hoped I wouldn’t let it happen again. My mother’d be so dreadfully distressed if she knew. Oh dear, oh dear!’ She drew a deep breath. The laughter finally died down.

Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the terrible power of her attraction. And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time. Now for the first time—with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the dirty ash-tray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.

‘Conservatories,’ Spandrell was repeating. ‘Conservatories. Yes, that’s very good. That’s very good indeed.’

‘Marvellous,’ said Lucy. ‘The old are really marvellous. But hardly possible, you must admit. Except, of course, Walter’s father.’

John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs. He was very tired. ‘These awful parties,’ he was thinking. He turned on the light in his bedroom. Over the mantelpiece one of Degas’s realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back. On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his own and one of Walter Sickert’s visions of Dieppe. Above the bed hung two caricatures of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre. There was a decanter of brandy on the table, with a siphon and glass. Two letters were propped conspicuously against the edge of the tray. He opened them. The first contained press cuttings about his latest show. The
Daily Mail
called him ‘the veteran of British Art ‘ and assured its readers that’ his hand has lost nothing of its cunning.’ He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into the fireplace. The next was from one of the superior weeklies. The tone was almost contemptuous. He was judged by his own earlier performance and condemned. ‘It is difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy—ineffectively flashy, at that—as those collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate Gallery ‘Haymakers’ and the still more magnificent ‘Bathers,’ now at Tantamount House. In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which…’ What a rigmarole! What tripe! He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first. But his contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism. ‘Veteran of British art’—it was the equivalent of ‘poor old Bidlake.’ And when they complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second childhood. The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment. He almost wished that he had never painted those Bathers.

He opened the other envelope. It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor. It was dated from Lahore:

‘The bazaars are the genuine article—maggoty. What with the pullulations and the smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese. From the artist’s point of view, the distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it’s exactly like that painting of Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of last century. You know the stuff, smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be printed on tea canisters. When you’re here, you see that the style is necessary. The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the sweat puts a polish on the skin. One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as an Ingres.’

He read on with pleasure. The girl always had something amusing to say in her letters. She saw things with the right sort of eye. But suddenly he frowned.

‘Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior. We had imagined him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name. He had never seen Phil, of course. We killed such fatted calves as this hotel can offer in honour of the prodigal brother.’

John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The enormous military man with the grey moustache was his son. Young John was fifty. Fifty. There had been a time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age. ‘If Manet hadn’t died prematurely…’ He remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris. ‘But did Manet die so young?’ The old man had shaken his head. (Old? John Bidlake reflected. He had seemed very old then. But probably he wasn’t more than sixty.) ‘Manet was only fifty-one,’ the teacher had answered. He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter. And now his own son was the age of Manet when Manet died. An enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in California. Cancer of the intestine. Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara—a young man with a rich young wife, evading the Prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day between them.

John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine. He was only twenty-two when he married for the first time. Rose was not yet twenty. They loved one another frantically, with a tigerish passion. They quarrelled too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they assuaged. But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within twentyfive months. There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work. John Bidlake’s paternity was no sinecure. His studio became a nursery. Very soon, the results of passion—the yelling and the wetted diapers, the broken sleep, the smells—disgusted him of passion. Moreover, the object of his passion was no longer the same. After the babies were born, Rose began to put on fat. Her face became heavy; her body swelled and sagged. The quarrels, now, were not so easily made up. At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John Bidlake’s nerves. His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris. He went for a fortnight and stayed away four months. The quarrels began again on his return. Rose now frankly disgusted him. His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted. Life at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes. After a particularly violent scene Rose packed up and went to live with her parents. She took the children with her; John Bidlake was only too delighted to be rid of them. The elder of the squalling diaper-wetters was now an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And the other was dead of cancer of the intestine. He had not seen either of them since they were boys of five-and-twenty. The sons had stuck to their mother. She too was dead, had been in the grave these fifteen years.

Once bitten, twice shy. After his divorce John Bidlake had promised himself that he would never marry again. But when one falls desperately in love with a virtuous young woman of good family, what can one do? He had married, and those two brief years with Isabel had been the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the happiest of all his life. And then she had died in childbirth, pointlessly. He did his best never to think of her. The recollection was too painful. Between her remembered image and the moment of remembering, the abysses of time and separation were vaster than any other gulf between the present and the past. And by comparison with the past which he had shared with Isabel every present seemed dim; and her death was a horrible reminder of the future. He never spoke of her, and all that might remind him of her—her letters, her books, the furniture of her room—he destroyed or sold. He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to be eternal. But his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabel’s were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defences this evening. The widest breach was opened by this letter of Elinor’s. Sunk in his armchair, John Bidlake sat for a long time, unmoving.

Polly Logan sat in front of the looking-glass. As she drew the comb through her hair there was a fine small crackling of electric sparks.

‘Little sparks, like a tiny battle, tiny, tiny ghosts shooting. Tiny battle, tiny ghost of a battle-rattle.’

Polly pronounced the words in a sonorous monotone, as though she were reciting to an audience. She lingered lovingly over them, rolling the r’s, hissing on the s’s, humming like a bee on the m’s, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure. ‘Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-fin-itesimal ghost cannonade.’ Lovely words! It gave her a peculiar satisfaction to be able to roll them out, to listen with an appreciative, a positively gluttonous ear, to the rumble of the syllables as they were absorbed into the silence. Polly had always liked talking to herself. It was a childish habit which she would not give up. ‘But if it amuses me,’ she protested, when people laughed at her for it, ‘why shouldn’t I? It does nobody any harm.’