Point Counter Point (45 page)

‘Give us the credit of coming down heads,’ said Philip laughing. ‘We’re the intelligentsia, remember.’ Spandrell frowned; he felt the frivolity, as an irrelevance. The subject for him was a serious one. ‘When I think of myself,’ he said, ‘I feel sure that everything that has happened to me was somehow engineered in advance. As a young boy I had a foretaste of what I might have grown up to be, but for events. Something entirely different from this actual Me.’

‘A little angel, what?’ said Illidge.

Spandrell ignored the interruption. ‘But from the time that I was fifteen onwards, things began happening to me which were prophetically like what I am now.’ He was silent.

‘And so you grew a tail and hoofs instead of a halo and a pair of wings. A sad story. Has it ever struck you,’ Illidge went on, turning towards Walter, ‘you who are an expert on art, or at least ought to be—has it ever struck you that the paintings of angels are entirely incorrect and unscientific?’ Walter shook his head. ‘A seventy-kilogram man, if he developed wings, would have to develop colossal muscles to work them. And big flying muscles would mean a correspondingly large sternum, like a bird’s. A ten-stone angel, if he wanted to fly as well as a duck, would have to have a breastbone projecting at least four or five feet. Tell your father that, next time he wants to paint a picture of the Annunciation. All the existing Gabriels are really shockingly improbable.’

Spandrell, meanwhile, was thinking of those raptures among the mountains, those delicacies of feeling, those scruples and sensitivenesses and remorses of his boyhood; and how they were all—the repentance for a bad action no less than the piercing delight at the spectacle of a flower or a landscape—in some way bound up with his sentiment for his mother, somehow rooted and implied in it. He remembered that
Girls’ School in Paris
, those erotic readings by flashlight under the sheets. The book had been written in the age when long black stockings and long black gloves had been the height of pornographic fashion, when ‘kissing a man without a moustache was like eating an egg without salt.’ The seductive and priapic major’s moustaches had been long, curly and waxed. What shame he had felt and what remorse! Struggled how hard, and prayed how earnestly for strength! And the god to whom he had prayed wore the likeness of his mother. To resist temptation was to be worthy of her. Succumbing, he betrayed her, he denied God. He had begun to triumph. And then, one morning, out of the blue, came the news that she was going to marry Major Knoyle. Major Knoyle’s moustaches were also curly.

‘Augustine and the Calvinists were right,’ he said aloud, breaking in on the discussion of Seraphim’s breastbones.

‘Still harping?’ said Illidge.

‘God means to save some people and damn others.’

‘Or rather he might do so if (a) he existed, (b) there were such a thing as salvation, and (c)…’

‘When I think of the War,’ Spandrell went on, interrupting him, ‘what it might have been for me and what in fact it was…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Yes, Augustine was right.’

‘Well, I must say,’ said Philip, ‘I’ve always been very grateful to Augustine, or whoever else it may have been, for giving me a game leg. It prevented me from being a hero; but it also preserved me from becoming a corpse.’

Spandrell looked at him; the corers of his wide mouth ironically twitched. ‘Your accident guaranteed you a quiet detached life. In other words, the event was like you. Just as the War, so far as I was concerned, was exactly like me. I’d been up at Oxford a year, when it began,’ he went on.

‘The dear old College, what?’ said Illidge, who could never hear the name of one of the more ancient and expensive seats of learning mentioned without making some derisive comment.

‘Three lively terms and two still more lively vacs—discovering alcohol and poker and the difference between women in the flesh and women in the pubescent imagination. Such an apocalypse, the first real woman!’ he added parenthetically. ‘And at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the superheated fancy and the pornographic book.’

‘Which is a tribute to art,’ said Philip. ‘As I’ve so often pointed out.’ He smiled at Walter, who blushed, remembering what his brother-in-law had said about the dangers of trying to make love after high poetic models. ‘We’re brought up topsy-turvy,’ Philip went on. ‘Art before life;
Romeo and Juliet
and filthy stories before marriage or its equivalents. Hence all young modern literature is disillusioned. Inevitably. In the good old days poets began by losing their virginity; and then, with a complete knowledge of the real thing and just where and how it was unpoetical, deliberately set to work to idealize and beautify it. We start with the poetical and proceed to the unpoetical. If boys and girls lost their virginities as early as they did in Shakespeare’s day, there’d be a revival of the Elizabethan love lyric.’

‘You may be right,’ said Spandrell. ‘All I know is that, when I discovered the reality, I found it disappointing—but attractive, all the same. Perhaps so attractive just because it was so disappointing. The heart’s a curious sort of manure—heap; dung calls to dung, and the great charm of vice consists in its stupidity and sordidness. It attracts because it’s so repellent. But repellent it always remains. And I remember when the War came, how exultantly glad I was to have a chance of getting out of the muck and doing something decent, for a change.’

‘For King and Country!’ mocked Illidge.

‘Poor Rupert Brooke! One smiles now at that thing of his about honour having come back into the world again. Events have made it seem a bit comical.’

‘It was a bad joke even when it was written,’ said Illidge.

‘No, no. At the time it was exactly what I felt myself.’

‘Of course you did. Because you were what Brooke was—a spoilt and blase member of the leisured class. You needed a new thrill, that was all. The War and that famous “honour” of yours provided it.’

Spandrell shrugged his shoulders. ‘Explain it like that if you want. All I say is that in August 1914 I wanted to do something noble. I’d even have been quite pleased to get killed.’

‘“Rather death than dishonour,” what?’

‘Yes, quite literally,’ said Spandrell. ‘For I can assure you that all the melodramas are perfectly realistic. There are certain occasions when people do say that sort of thing. The only defect of melodrama is that it leads you to believe that they say it all the time. They don’t, unfortunately. But “rather death than dishonour” was exactly what I was thinking in August 1914. If the alternative to death was the stupid kind of life I’d been leading. I wanted to get killed.’

‘There speaks the gentleman of leisure again,’ said Illidge.

‘And then, just because I’d been brought up a good deal abroad and knew three foreign languages, because I had a mother who was too fond of me and a stepfather with military influence, I was transferred willynilly into the Intelligence. God was really bent on damning me.’

‘He was very kindly trying to save your life,’ said Philip.

‘But I didn’t want it saved. Not unless I could do something decent with it, something heroic for preference, or at least difficult and risky. Instead of which they put me on to liaison work and then to hunting spies. Of all the sordid and ignoble businesses…’

‘But after all the trenches weren’t so very romantic.’

‘No, but they were dangerous. Sitting in a trench, you needed courage and endurance. A spy catcher was perfectly safe and didn’t have to display any of the nobler virtues; while as to his opportunities for vice… Those towns behind the lines, and Paris, and the ports-whores and alcohol were their chief products.’

‘But after all,’ said Philip, ‘those are avoidable evils.’ Naturally cold, he found it easy to be reasonable.

‘Not avoidable by me,’ Spandrell answered. ‘Particularly in those circumstances. I’d wanted to do something decent, and I’d been prevented. So it became a kind of point of honour to do the opposite of what I’d desired. A point of honour—can you understand that?’

Philip shook his head. ‘A little too subtle for me.’

‘But just imagine yourself in the presence of a man you respect and like and admire more than you’ve ever admired and liked anyone before.’

Philip nodded. But in point of fact, he reflected, he had never deeply and whole-heartedly admired anyone. Theoretically, yes; but never in practice, never to the point of wanting to make himself a disciple, a follower. He had adopted other people’s opinions, even their modes of life—but always with the underlying conviction that they weren’t really his, that he could and certainly would abandon them as easily as he had taken them up. And whenever there had seemed any risk of his being carried away, he had deliberately resisted, had fought or fled for his liberty.

‘You’re overcome with your feeling for him,’ Spandrell continued. ‘And you go towards him with outstretched hands, offering your friendship and devotion. His only response is to put his hands in his pockets and turn away. What would you do then? ‘ Philip laughed. ‘I should have to consult Vogue’s
Book of Etiquette
.’

‘You’d knock him down. At least that’s what I would do. It would be a point of honour. And the more you’d admired, the more violent the knock and the longer the subsequent dance on his carcase. That’s why the whores and the alcohol weren’t avoidable. On the contrary, it became a point of honour never to avoid them. That life in France was like the life I’d been leading before the War—only much nastier and stupider, and utterly unrelieved by any redeeming feature. And after a year of it, I was desperately wangling to cling to my dishonour and avoid death. Augustine was right, I tell you,; we’re damned or saved in advance. The things that happen are a providential conspiracy.’

‘Providential balderdash!’ said Illidge; but in the silence that followed he thought again how extraordinary it was, how almost infinitely improbable that he should be sitting there, drinking claret, with the Perpetual Secretary of the British Academy two tables away and the second oldest Judge of the High Court just behind him. Twenty years before the odds against, his being there under the gilded ceiling had been at the rate of several hundreds or thousands of millions to one. But there, all the same, he was. He took another draught of claret.

And Philip, meanwhile, was remembering that immense black horse, kicking, plunging, teeth bared and cars laid back; and how it suddenly started forward, dragging the carter along with it; and the rumble of the wheels; and, ‘Aie!’ his own scream; and how he shrank back against the steep bank, how he tried to climb, slipped, fell; and the appalling rush and trampling of the giant; and ‘Aie, aie!’ the huge shape between him and the sun, the great hoofs and suddenly an annihilating pain.

And through the same silence Walter was thinking of that afternoon when, for the first time, he entered Lucy Tantamount’s drawing-room. ‘Everything that happens is intrinsically like the man it happens to.’

‘But what’s her secret?’ Marjorie asked. ‘Why should he have gone mad about her? Because he has gone mad. Literally.’

‘Isn’t it rather an obvious secret?’ said Elinor. What she found queer was not that Walter should have lost his head about Lucy, but that he should ever have seen anything attractive in poor Marjorie. ‘After all,’ she continued, ‘Lucy’s very amusing and alive. And besides,’ she added, remembering Philip’s exasperating comments on the dog they had run over at Bombay, ‘she has a bad reputation.’

‘But is that attractive? A bad reputation?’ The tea-pot hung suspended over the cup as she asked.

‘Of course. It means that the woman who enjoys it is accessible. No sugar, thanks.’

‘But surely,’ said Marjorie, handing her the cup, men don’t want to share their mistress with other lovers.’

‘Perhaps not. But the fact that a woman has had other lovers gives a man hope. “Where others have succeeded, I can succeed.” That’s the man’s argument. And at the same time a bad reputation makes him immediately think of the woman in terms of love-making. It gives a twist to his imaginations about her. When you met Lola Montes, her reputation made you automatically think of bedrooms. You didn’t think of bedrooms when you met Florence Nightingale. Only sickrooms. Which are rather different,’ Elinor concluded.

There was a silence. It was horrid of her, Elinor was thinking, not to feel more sympathetic. But there it was; she didn’t. She reminded herself of the abominable life the poor woman had had—first with her husband, and now with Walter. Really abominable. But those dreadful, dangling, sham jade earrings! And the voice, the earnest manner…

Marjorie looked up. ‘But is it possible that men can be so easily taken in? By such a cheap bait? Men like Walter. Like Walter,’ she insisted. ‘Can men like that be such…such…’

‘Pigs?’ suggested Elinor. ‘Apparently they can. It seems odd, certainly.’ Perhaps it would be better, she reflected, if Philip were rather more of a pig and less of a hermit crab. Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps; but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.

Marjorie shook her head and sighed. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ she said with a conviction that struck Elinor as rather ludicrous. ‘What sort of an opinion can she have of herself?’ she wondered. But Marjorie’s good opinion was not for herself so much as for virtue. She had been brought up to believe in the ugliness of vice and the animal part of human nature, the beauty of virtue and the spirit. And cold by nature, she had the cold woman’s utter incomprehension of sensuality. That Walter should suddenly cease to be the Walter she had known and behave ‘like a pig,’ as Elinor rather crudely put it, was to her really extraordinary, quite apart from any personal considerations of her own attractiveness.

‘And then you must remember,’ Elinor said aloud, ‘Lucy has another advantage where men like Walter are concerned. She’s one of those women who have the temperament of a man. Men can get pleasure out of casual encounters. Most women can’t; they’ve got to be in love, more or less. They’ve got to be emotionally involved. All but a few of them. Lucy’s one of the few. She has the masculine detachment. She can separate her appetite from the rest of her soul.’