After the Fireworks Read online

  “Well, if you really want to know,” said Pamela, deciding to be bold, “I was thinking how much my Aunt Edith disapproved of your books.”

  “Did she? I suppose it was only to be expected. Seeing that I don’t write for aunts—at any rate, not for aunts in their specifically auntly capacity. Though of course, when they’re off duty . . .”

  “Aunt Edith’s never off duty.”

  “And I’m never on. So you see.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But I’m sure,” he added, “you never paid much attention to her disapproval.”

  “None,” she answered, playing the un-good part for all it was worth. “I read Freud this spring,” she boasted, “and Gide’s autobiography, and Krafft-Ebbing. . . .”

  “Which is more than I’ve ever done,” he laughed.

  The laugh encouraged her. “Not to mention all your books, years ago. You see,” she added, suddenly fearful lest she might have said something to offend him, “my mother never minded my reading your books. I mean, she really encouraged me, even when I was only seventeen or eighteen. My mother died last year,” she explained. There was a silence. “I’ve lived with Aunt Edith ever since,” she went on. “Aunt Edith’s my father’s sister. Older than he was. Father died in 1923.”

  “So you’re all alone now?” he questioned. “Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.”

  “Whom I’ve now left.” She was almost boasting again. “Because when I was twenty-one . . .”

  “You stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!”

  “I won’t have you being sorry for her,” Pamela answered hotly. “She’s really awful, you know. Like poor Joan’s husband in The Return of Eurydice.” How easy it was to talk to him!

  “So you even know,” said Fanning, laughing, “what it’s like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous Aunt.”

  “No joke, I can tell you. I’m the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn’t mind my going away, whatever she might say.”

  “She did say something then?”

  “Oh, yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like head-mistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite—and so fat. Enormous. Don’t you hate enormous people? No, she’s really delighted to get rid of me,” Pamela concluded, “simply delighted.” Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.

  “What a tremendous hurry she’s in,” he was thinking, “to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, what an intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .” His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.

  “She always disliked me,” Pamela had gone on. “Mother too. She couldn’t abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.”

  “And your mother—how did she respond?”

  “Well, not hippoishly, of course. She couldn’t be that. She treated Aunt Edith—well, how did she treat Aunt Edith?” Pamela hesitated, frowning. “Well, I suppose you’d say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .” She bit her lip. “Well, if she ever was really natural. I don’t know. Is anybody natural?” She looked up questioningly at Fanning. “Am I natural, for example?”

  Smiling a little at her choice of an example, “I should think almost certainly not,” Fanning answered, more or less at random.

  “You’re right, of course,” she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. “But isn’t it awful? I mean, isn’t it simply hopeless?”

  Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, “At your age,” he said consolingly, “you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is something you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,” he added, “there are some people who are unnatural by nature.”

  “Unnatural by nature.” Pamela nodded, as she repeated the words, as though she were inwardly marshalling evidence to confirm their truth. “Yes, I believe that’s us,” she concluded. “Mother and me. Not hippos, I mean, not poseuses*, but just unnatural by nature. You’re quite right. As usual,” she added, with something that was almost resentment in her voice.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized.

  “How is it you manage to know so much?” Pamela asked in the same resentful tone. By what right was he so easily omniscient, when she could only grope and guess in the dark?

  Taking to himself a credit that belonged, in this case, to chance, “Child’s play, my dear Watson,” he answered banteringly. “But I suppose you’re too young to have heard of Sherlock Holmes. And anyhow,” he added, with an ironical seriousness, “don’t let’s waste any more time talking about me.”

  Pamela wasted no more time. “I get so depressed with myself,” she said with a sigh. “And after what you’ve told me I shall get still more depressed. Unnatural by nature. And by upbringing too. Because I see now that my mother was like that. I mean, she was unnatural by nature too.”

  “Even with you?” he asked, thinking that this was becoming interesting. She nodded without speaking. He looked at her closely. “Were you very fond of her?” was the question that now suggested itself.

  After a moment of silence, “I loved my father more,” she answered slowly. “He was more . . . more reliable. I mean, you never quite knew where you were with my mother. Sometimes she almost forgot about me; or else she didn’t forget me enough and spoiled me. And then sometimes she used to get into the most terrible rages with me. She really frightened me then. And said such terribly hurting things. But you mustn’t think I didn’t love her. I did.” The words seemed to release a spring; she was suddenly moved. There was a little silence. Making an effort, “But that’s what she was like,” she concluded at last.

  “But I don’t see,” said Fanning gently, “that there was anything specially unnatural in spoiling you and then getting cross with you.” They were crossing the Piazza del Popolo; the traffic of four thronged streets intricately merged and parted in the open space. “You must have been a charming child. And also . . . Look out!” He laid a hand on her arm. An electric bus passed noiselessly, a whispering monster. “Also maddeningly exasperating. So where the unnaturalness came in . . .”

  “But if you’d known her,” Pamela interrupted, “you’d have seen exactly where the unnaturalness . . .”

  “Forward!” he called and, still holding her arm, he steered her on across the Piazza.

  She suffered herself to be conducted blindly. “It came out in the way she spoiled me,” she explained, raising her voice against the clatter of a passing lorry. “It’s so difficult to explain, though; because it’s something I felt. I mean, I’ve never really tried to put it into words till now. But it was as if . . . as if she weren’t just herself spoiling me, but the picture of a young mother—do you see what I mean?—spoiling the picture of a little girl. Even as a child I kind of felt it wasn’t quite as it should be. Later on I began to know it too, here.” She tapped her forehead. “Particularly after father’s death, when I was beginning to grow up. There were times when it was almost like listening to recitations—dreadful. One feels so blushy and prickly; you know the feeling.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I know. Awful!”

  “Awful,” she repeated. “So you can understand what a beast I felt, when it took me that way. So disloyal, I mean. So ungrateful. Because she was being so wonderfully sweet to me. You’ve no idea. But it was just when she was being her sweetest that I got the feeling worst. I shall never forget when she made me call her Clare—that was her christian name. ‘Because we’re going to be companions,’ she said and all that sort of thing. Which was simply too sweet and too nice of her. But if you’d heard the way she said it! So dreadfully unnatural. I mean, it was almost as bad as Aunt Edith reading Prospice. And yet I know she meant it, I know she wanted me to be her companion. But somehow som
ething kind of went wrong on the way between the wanting and the saying. And then the doing seemed to go just as wrong as the saying. She always wanted to do things excitingly, romantically, like in a play. But you can’t make things be exciting and romantic, can you?” Fanning shook his head. “She wanted to kind of force things to be thrilling by thinking and wishing, like Christian Science. But it doesn’t work. We had wonderful times together; but she always tried to make out that they were more wonderful than they really were. Which only made them less wonderful. Going to the Paris Opera on a gala night is wonderful; but it’s never as wonderful as when Rastignac goes, is it?”

  “I should think it wasn’t!” he agreed. “What an insult to Balzac to imagine that it could be!”

  “And the real thing’s less wonderful,” she went on, “when you’re being asked all the time to see it as Balzac, and to be Balzac yourself. When you aren’t anything of the kind. Because, after all, what am I? Just good, ordinary, middle-class English.”

  She pronounced the words with a kind of defiance. Fanning imagined that the defiance was for him and, laughing, prepared to pick up the ridiculous little glove. But the glove was not for him; Pamela had thrown it down to a memory, to a ghost, to one of her own sceptical and mocking selves. It had been on the last day of their last stay together in Paris—that exciting, exotic Paris of poor Clare’s imagination, to which their tickets from London never seemed quite to take them. They had gone to lunch at La Pérouse. “Such a marvellous, fantastic restaurant! It makes you feel as though you were back in the Second Empire.” (Or was it the First Empire? Pamela could not exactly remember.) The rooms were so crowded with Americans, that it was with some difficulty that they secured a table. “We’ll have a marvellous lunch,” Claire had said, as she unfolded her napkin. “And some day, when you’re in Paris with your lover, you’ll come here and order just the same things as we’re having to-day. And perhaps you’ll think of me. Will you, darling?” And she had smiled at her daughter with that intense, expectant expression that was so often on her face, and the very memory of which made Pamela feel subtly uncomfortable. “How should I ever forget?” she had answered, laying her hand on her mother’s and smiling. But after a second her eyes had wavered away from that fixed look, in which the intensity had remained as desperately on the stretch, the expectancy as wholly unsatisfied, as hungrily insatiable as ever. The waiter, thank goodness, had created a timely diversion; smiling at him confidentially, almost amorously, Clare had ordered like a princess in a novel of high life. The bill, when it came, was enormous. Clare had had to scratch the bottom of her purse for the last stray piece of nickel. “It looks as though we should have to carry our own bags at Calais and Dover. I didn’t realize I’d run things so fine.” Pamela had looked at the bill. “But, Clare,” she had protested, looking up again at her mother with an expression of genuine horror, “it’s wicked! Two hundred and sixty francs for a lunch! It wasn’t worth it.” The blood had risen darkly into Clare’s face. “How can you be so disgustingly bourgeoisie, Pamela? So crass, so crawling?” Incensed by the heaping up of this abuse, “I think it’s stupid to do things one can’t afford,” the girl had answered; “stupid and vulgar.” Trembling with rage, Clare had risen to her feet. “I’ll never take you out again. Never.” (How often since then Pamela had recalled that terribly prophetic word!) “You’ll never understand life, you’ll never be anything but a sordid little middle-class Englishwoman. Never, never.” And she had swept out of the room, like an insulted queen. Overheard by Pamela, as she undignifiedly followed, “Gee!” an American voice had remarked, “it’s a regular cat fight.”

  The sound of another, real voice overlaid the remembered Middle Western accents.

  “But after all,” Fanning was saying, “it’s better to be a good ordinary bourgeois than a bad ordinary bohemian, or a sham aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual. . . .”

  “I’m not even third-rate,” said Pamela mournfully. There had been a time when, under the influence of the now abhorred Miss Huss, she had thought she would like to go up to Oxford and read Greats. But Greek grammar was so awful . . . “Not even fourth-rate.”

  “Thank goodness,” said Fanning. “Do you know what third- and fourth-rate intellectuals are? They’re professors of philology and organic chemistry at the minor universities, they’re founders and honorary life presidents of the Nuneaton Poetry Society and the Baron’s Court Debating Society; they’re the people who organize and sedulously attend all those Conferences for promoting international goodwill and the spread of culture that are perpetually being held at Buda-Pesth and Prague and Stockholm. Admirable and indispensable creatures, of course! But impossibly dreary; one simply cannot have any relations with them. And how virtuously they disapprove of those of us who have something better to do than disseminate culture or foster goodwill—those of us who are concerned, for example, with creating beauty—like me; or, like you, my child, in deliciously being beauty.”

  Pamela blushed with pleasure and for that reason felt it necessary immediately to protest. “All the same,” she said, “it’s rather humiliating not to be able to do anything but be. I mean, even a cow can be.”

  “Damned well, too,” said Fanning. “If I were as intensely as a cow is, I’d be uncommonly pleased with myself. But this is getting almost too metaphysical. And do you realize what the time is?” He held out his watch; it was ten past one. “And where we are? At the Tiber. We’ve walked miles.” He waved his hand; a passing taxi swerved in to the pavement beside them. “Let’s go and eat some lunch. You’re free?”

  “Well . . .” She hesitated. It was marvellous, of course; so marvellous that she felt she ought to refuse. “If I’m not a bore. I mean, I don’t want to impose . . . I mean . . .”

  “You mean you’ll come and have lunch. Good. Do you like marble halls and bands? Or local colour?”

  Pamela hesitated. She remembered her mother once saying that Valadier and the Ulpia were the only two restaurants in Rome.

  “Personally,” Fanning went on, “I’m slightly avaricious about marble halls. I rather resent spending four times as much and eating about two-thirds as well. But I’ll overcome my avarice if you prefer them.”

  Pamela duly voted for local colour; he gave an address to the driver and they climbed into the cab.

  “It’s a genuinely Roman place,” Fanning explained. “I hope you’ll like it.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I shall.” All the same, she did rather wish they were going to Valadier’s.

  III

  FANNING’S OLD FRIEND, DODO DEL GRILLO, WAS IN Rome for that one night and had urgently summoned him to dine. His arrival was loud and exclamatory.

  “Best of all possible Dodos!” he cried, as he advanced with outstretched hands across the enormous baroque saloon. “What an age! But what a pleasure!”

  “At last, Miles,” she said reproachfully; he was twenty minutes late.

  “But I know you’ll forgive me.” And laying his two hands on her shoulders he bent down and kissed her. He made a habit of kissing all his women friends.

  “And even if I didn’t forgive, you wouldn’t care two pins.”

  “Not one.” He smiled his most charming smile. “But if it gives you the smallest pleasure, I’m ready to say I’d be inconsolable.” His hands still resting on her shoulders, he looked at her searchingly, at arm’s length. “Younger than ever,” he concluded.

  “I couldn’t look as young as you do,” she answered. “You know, Miles, you’re positively indecent. Like Dorian Gray. What’s your horrible secret?”

  “Simply Mr. Hornibrooke,” he explained. “The culture of the abdomen. So much more important than the culture of the mind.” Dodo only faintly smiled; she had heard the joke before. Fanning was sensitive to smiles; he changed the subject. “And where’s the marquis?” he asked.

  The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. Her husband was one of those dear old friends whom somehow one doesn’t manage to see anything of nowadays. “Fili
ppo’s in Tanganyika,” she explained. “Hunting lions.”

  “While you hunt them at home. And with what success! You’ve bagged what’s probably the finest specimen in Europe this evening. Congratulations!”

  “Merci, cher maître!”* she laughed. “Shall we go in to dinner?”

  The words invited, irresistibly. “If only I had the right to answer: Oui, chère maîtresse!”† Though as a matter of fact, he reflected, he had never really found her at all interesting in that way. A woman without temperament. But very pretty once—that time (how many years ago?) when there had been that picnic on the river at Bray, and he had drunk a little too much champagne. “If only!” he repeated; and then was suddenly struck by a grotesque thought. Suppose she were to say yes, now—now! “If only I had the right!”

  “But luckily,” said Dodo, turning back towards him, as she passed through the monumental door into the dining-room, “luckily you haven’t the right. You ought to congratulate me on my immense good sense. Will you sit there?”

  “Oh, I’ll congratulate. I’m always ready to congratulate people who have sense.” He unfolded his napkin. “And to condole.” Now that he knew himself safe, he could condole as much as he liked. “What you must have suffered, my poor sensible Dodo, what you must have missed!”

  “Suffered less,” she answered, “and missed more unpleasantnesses than the woman who didn’t have the sense to say no.”

  “What a mouthful of negatives! But that’s how sensible people always talk about love—in terms of negatives. Never of positives; they ignore those and go about sensibly avoiding the discomforts. Avoiding the pleasures and exultations too, poor sensible idiots! Avoiding all that’s valuable and significant. But it’s always like that. The human soul is a fried whiting. (What excellent red mullet this is, by the way! Really excellent.) Its tail is in its mouth. All progress finally leads back to the beginning again. The most sensible people—dearest Dodo, believe me—are the most foolish. The most intellectual are the stupidest. I’ve never met a really good metaphysician, for example, who wasn’t in one way or another bottomlessly stupid. And as for the really spiritual people, look what they revert to. Not merely to silliness and stupidity, but finally to crass nonexistence. The highest spiritual state is ecstasy, which is just not being there at all. No, no; we’re all fried whitings. Heads are invariably tails.”