After the Fireworks Page 6

  “But do you mean to say you believed her?”

  “Well, by that time, I must admit, I was beginning to be rather sceptical. You see, I could never elicit the names of these creatures. Nor any detail. It was as though they didn’t exist outside the refrigerator and the aeroplane.”

  “How many of them were there?”

  “Only two at that particular moment. One was a Grand Passion, and the other a Caprice. A Caprice,” she repeated, rolling the r. “It was one of poor Clare’s favourite words. I used to try and pump her. But she was mum. ‘I want them to be mysterious,’ she told me the last time I pressed her for details. ‘Anonymous, without an état civil*. Why should I show you their passport and identity cards?’ ‘Perhaps they haven’t got any,’ I suggested. Which was malicious. I could see she was annoyed. But a week later she showed me their photographs. There they were; the camera cannot lie; I had to be convinced. The Grand Passion, I must say, was a very striking-looking creature. Thin-faced, worn, a bit Roman and sinister. The Caprice was more ordinarily the nice young Englishman. Rather childish and simple, Clare explained; and she gave me to understand that she was initiating him. It was the other, the Grand P., who thought of such refinements as the refrigerator. Also, she now confided to me for the first time, he was mildly a sadist. Having seen his face, I could believe it. ‘Am I ever likely to meet him?’ I asked. She shook her head. He moved in a very different world from mine.”

  “A rabbit-shooter?” Fanning asked.

  “No: an intellectual. That’s what I gathered.”

  “Golly!”

  “So there was not the slightest probability, as you can see, that I should ever meet him.” Dodo laughed. “And yet almost the first face I saw on leaving Clare that afternoon was the Grand P.’s.”

  “Coming to pay his sadistic respects?”

  “Alas for poor Clare, no. He was behind glass in the showcase of a photographer in the Brompton Road, not a hundred yards from the Tarns’ house in Ovington Square. The identical portrait. I marched straight in. ‘Can you tell me who that is?’ But it appears that photography is done under the seal of confession. They wouldn’t say. Could I order a copy? Well, yes, as a favour, they’d let me have one. Curiously enough, they told me, as they were taking down my name and address, another lady had come in only two or three days before and also ordered a copy. ‘Not by any chance a rather tall lady with light auburn hair and a rather amusing mole on the left cheek?’ That did sound rather like the lady. ‘And with a very confidential manner,’ I suggested, ‘as though you were her oldest friends?’ Exactly, exactly; they were unanimous. That clinched it. Poor Clare, I thought, as I walked on towards the Park, poor, poor Clare!”

  There was a silence.

  “Which only shows,” said Fanning at last, “how right the Church has always been to persecute literature. The harm we imaginative writers do! Enormous! We ought all to be on the Index, every one. Consider your Clare, for example. If it hadn’t been for books, she’d never have known that such things as passion and sensuality and perversity even existed. Never.”

  “Come, come,” she protested.

  But, “Never,” Fanning repeated. “She was congenitally as cold as a fish; it’s obvious. Never had a spontaneous, untutored desire in her life. But she’d read a lot of books. Out of which she’d fabricated a theory of passion and perversity. Which she then consciously put into practice.”

  “Or rather didn’t put into practice. Only day-dreamed that she did.”

  He nodded. “For the most part. But sometimes, I don’t mind betting, she realized the day-dreams in actual life. Desperately, as you so well described it, with her teeth clenched and her eyes shut, as though she were jumping off the Eiffel Tower. That rabbit-shooter, for instance. . . .”

  “But do you think the rabbit-shooter really existed?”

  “Perhaps not that particular one. But a rabbit-shooter, perhaps several rabbit-shooters—at one time or another, I’m sure, they genuinely existed. Though never genuinely, of course, for her. For her, it’s obvious, they were just phantoms, like the other inhabitants of her dreamery. Phantoms of flesh and blood, but still phantoms. I see her as a kind of Midas, turning everything she touched into imagination. Even in the embraces of a genuine, solid rabbit-shooter, she was still only indulging in her solitary sultry dream—a dream inspired by Shakespeare, or Mrs. Barclay, or the Chevalier de Nerciat, or D’Annunzio, or whoever her favourite author may have been.”

  “Miles Fanning, perhaps,” Dodo mockingly suggested.

  “Yes, I feared as much.”

  “What a responsibility!”

  “Which I absolutely refuse to accept. What have I ever written but solemn warnings against the vice of imagination? Sermons against mental licentiousness of every kind—intellectual licentiousness, mystical licentiousness, fantasticamorous licentiousness. No, no. I’ll accept no responsibility. Or at least no special responsibility—only the generic responsibility of being an imaginative author, the original sin of writing in such a way as to influence people. And when I say ‘influence,’ of course I don’t really mean influence. Because a writer can’t influence people, in the sense of making them think and feel and act as he does. He can only influence them to be more, or less, like one of their own selves. In other words, he’s never understood. (Thank goodness! because it would be very humiliating to be really understood by one’s readers.) What readers get out of him is never, finally, his ideas, but theirs. And when they try to imitate him or his creations, all that they can ever do is to act one of their own potential rôles. Take this particular case. Clare read and, I take it, was impressed. She took my warnings against mental licentiousness to heart and proceeded to do—what? Not to become a creature of spontaneous, unvitiated impulses—for the good reason that that wasn’t in her power—but only to imagine that she was such a creature. She imagined herself a woman like the one I put into Endymion and the Moon and acted accordingly—or else didn’t act, only dreamed; it makes very little difference. In a word, she did exactly what all my books told her not to do. Inevitably; it was her nature. I’d influenced her, yes. But she didn’t become more like one of my heroines. She only became more intensely like herself. And then, you must remember, mine weren’t the only books on her shelves. I think we can take it that she’d read Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Casanova and some biography, shall we say, of the Maréchal de Richelieu. So that those spontaneous unvitiated impulses—how ludicrous they are, anyhow, when you talk about them!—became identified in her mind with the most elegant forms of ‘caprice’—wasn’t that the word? She was a child of nature—but with qualifications. The kind of child of nature that lived at Versailles or on the Grand Canal about 1760. Hence those rabbit-shooters and hence also those sadistic intellectuals, whether real or imaginary—and imaginary even when real. I may have been a favourite author. But I’m not responsible for the rabbit-shooters or the Grand P.’s. Not more responsible than any one else. She’d heard of the existence of love before she’d read me. We’re all equally to blame, from Homer downwards. Plato wouldn’t have any of us in his Republic. He was quite right, I believe. Quite right.”

  “And what about the daughter?” Dodo asked, after a silence.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “In reaction against the mother, so far as I could judge. In reaction, but also influenced by her, unconsciously. And the influence is effective because, after all, she’s her mother’s daughter and probably resembles her mother, congenitally. But consciously, on the surface, she knows she doesn’t want to live as though she were in a novel. And yet can’t help it, because that’s her nature, that’s how she was brought up. But she’s miserable, because she realizes that fiction-life is fiction. Miserable and very anxious to get out—out through the covers of the novel into the real world.”

  “And are you her idea of the real world?” Dodo enquired.

  He laughed, “Yes, I’m the real world. Strange as it may seem. And also, of course, pure fiction. The Writer, the G
reat Man—the Official Biographer’s fiction, in a word. Or, better still, the autobiographer’s fiction. Chateaubriand, shall we say. And her breaking out—that’s fiction too. A pure Miles Fanningism, if ever there was one. And, poor child, she knows it. Which makes her so cross with herself. Cross with me too, in a curious obscure way. But at the same time she’s thrilled. What a thrilling situation! And herself walking about in the middle of it. She looks on and wonders and wonders what the next instalment of the feuilleton’s going to contain.”

  “Well, there’s one thing we’re quite certain it’s not going to contain, aren’t we? Remember your promise, Miles.”

  “I think of nothing else,” he bantered.

  “Seriously, Miles, seriously.”

  “I think of nothing else,” he repeated in a voice that was the parody of a Shakespearean actor’s.

  Dodo shook her finger at him. “Mind,” she said, “mind!” Then, pushing back her chair, “Let’s move into the drawing-room,” she went on. “We shall be more comfortable there.”

  IV

  AND TO THINK,” PAMELA WAS WRITING IN HER diary, “how nervous I’d been beforehand, and the trouble I’d taken to work out the whole of our first meeting, question and answer, like the Shorter Catechism, instead of which I was like a fish in water, really at home, for the first time in my life, I believe. No, perhaps not more at home than with Ruth and Phyllis, but then they’re girls, so they hardly count. Besides, when you’ve once been at home in the sea, it doesn’t seem much fun being at home in a little glass bowl, which is rather unfair to Ruth and Phyllis, but after all it’s not their fault and they can’t help being little bowls, just as M. F. can’t help being a sea, and when you’ve swum about a bit in all that intelligence and knowledge and really devilish understanding, well, you find the bowls rather narrow, though of course they’re sweet little bowls and I shall always be very fond of them, especially Ruth. Which makes me wonder if what he said about Clare and me—unnatural by nature—is always true, because hasn’t every unnatural person got somebody she can be natural with, or even that she can’t help being natural with, like oxygen and that other stuff making water? Of course it’s not guaranteed that you find the other person who makes you natural, and I think perhaps Clare never did find her person, because I don’t believe it was Daddy. But in my case there’s Ruth and Phyllis and now to-day M. F.; and he really proves it, because I was natural with him more than with any one, even though he did say I was unnatural by nature. No, I feel that if I were with him always, I should always be my real self, just kind of easily spouting, like those lovely fountains we went to look at this afternoon, not all tied up in knots and squirting about vaguely in every kind of direction, and muddy at that, but beautifully clear in a big gushing spout, like what Joan in The Return of Eurydice finally became when she’d escaped from that awful, awful man and found Walter. But does that mean I’m in love with him?”

  Pamela bit the end of her pen and stared, frowning, at the page before her. Scrawled large in orange ink, the question stared back. Disquietingly and insistently stared. She remembered a phrase of her mother’s. “But if you knew,” Clare had cried (Pamela could see her, wearing the black afternoon dress from Patou, and there were yellow roses in the bowl on the table under the window), “if you knew what certain writers were to me! Shrines—there’s no other word. I could worship the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina.” But Harry Braddon, to whom the words were addressed, had laughed at her. And, though she hated Harry Braddon, so had Pamela, mockingly. For it was absurd; nobody was a shrine, nobody. And anyhow, what was a shrine? Nothing. Not nowadays, not when one had stopped being a child. She told herself these things with a rather unnecessary emphasis, almost truculently, in the style of the professional atheists in Hyde Park. One didn’t worship—for the good reason that she herself once had worshipped. Miss Figgis, the classical mistress, had been her pash for more than a year. Which was why she had gone to Early Service so frequently in those days and been so keen to go up to Oxford and take Greats. (Besides, she had even, at that time, rather liked and admired Miss Huss. Ghastly old Hussy! It seemed incredible now.) But oh, that grammar! And Caesar was such a bore, and Livy still worse, and as for Greek . . . She had tried very hard for a time. But when Miss Figgis so obviously preferred that priggish little beast Kathleen, Pamela had just let things slide. The bad marks had come in torrents and old Hussy had begun being more sorrowful than angry, and finally more angry than sorrowful. But she hadn’t cared. What made not caring easier was that she had her mother behind her. “I’m so delighted,” was what Clare had said when she heard that Pamela had given up wanting to go to Oxford. “I’d have felt so terribly inferior if you’d turned out a blue-stocking. Having my frivolity rebuked by my own daughter!” Clare had always boasted of her frivolity. Once, under the influence of old Hussy and for the love of Miss Figgis, an earnest disapprover, Pamela had become an apostle of her mother’s gospel. “After all,” she had pointed out to Miss Figgis, “Cleopatra didn’t learn Greek.” And though Miss Figgis was able to point out, snubbingly, that the last of the Ptolemies had probably spoken nothing but Greek, Pamela could still insist that in principle she was quite right: Cleopatra hadn’t learnt Greek, or what, if you were a Greek, corresponded to Greek. So why should she? She began to parade a violent and childish cynicism, a cynicism which was still (though she had learnt, since leaving school, to temper the ridiculous expression of it) her official creed. There were no shrines—though she sometimes, wistfully and rather shamefacedly, wished there were. One didn’t, determinedly didn’t worship. She herself might admire Fanning’s books, did admire them, enormously. But as for worshipping—no, she absolutely declined. Clare had overdone it all somehow—as usual. Pamela was resolved that there should be no nonsense about her feelings.

  “But does that mean I’m in love with him?” insisted the orange scrawl.

  As though in search of an answer, Pamela turned back the pages of her diary (she had already covered nearly eight of them with her account of this memorable twelfth of June). “His face,” she read, “is very brown, almost like an Arab’s, except that he has blue eyes, as he lives mostly in the South, because he says that if you don’t live in the sun, you go slightly mad, which is why people in the North, like us and the Germans and the Americans are so tiresome, though of course you go still madder where there’s too much sun, like in India, where they’re even more hopeless. He’s very good looking and you don’t think of him as being either old or young, but as just being there, like that, and the way he smiles is really very extraordinary, and so are his eyes, and I simply adored his white silk suit.” But the question was not yet answered. His silk suit wasn’t him, nor was his voice, even though he had “an awfully nice one, rather like that man who talks about books on the wireless, only nicer.” She turned over a page. “But M. F. is different from most clever people,” the orange scrawl proclaimed, “because he doesn’t make you feel a fool, even when he does laugh at you, and never, which is so ghastly with men like Professor Cobley, talks down to you in that awful patient, gentle way, which makes you feel a million times more of a worm than being snubbed or ignored, because, if you have any pride, that sort of intelligence without tears is just loathsome, as though you were being given milk pudding out of charity. No, M. F. talks to you on the level and the extraordinary thing is that, while he’s talking to you and you’re talking to him, you are on a level with him, or at any rate you feel as though you were, which comes to the same thing. He’s like influenza, you catch his intelligence.” Pamela let the leaves of the notebook flick past, one by one, under her thumb. The final words on the half-blank page once more stared at her, questioningly. “But does that mean I’m in love with him?” Taking her pen from between her teeth, “Certainly,” she wrote, “I do find him terribly attractive physically.” She paused for a moment to reflect, then added, frowning as though with the effort of raising an elusive fact from the depths of memory, of solving a difficult problem in algebra
: “Because really, when he put his hand on my shoulder, which would have been simply intolerable if any one else had done it, but somehow with him I didn’t mind, I felt all thrilled with the absolute frisson.” She ran her pen through the last word and substituted “thrill,” which she underlined to make it seem less lamely a repetition. “Frisson” had been one of Clare’s favourite words; hearing it pronounced in her mother’s remembered voice, Pamela had felt a sudden mistrust of it; it seemed to cast a kind of doubt on the feelings it stood for, a doubt of which she was ashamed—it seemed so disloyal and the voice had sounded so startlingly, so heart-rendingly clear and near—but which she still couldn’t help experiencing. She defended herself; “frisson” had simply had to go, because the thrill was genuine, absolutely genuine, she insisted. “For a moment,” she went on, writing very fast, as though she were trying to run away from the sad, disagreeable thoughts that had intruded upon her, “I thought I was going to faint when he touched me, like when one’s coming to after chloroform, which I’ve certainly never felt like with any one else.” As a protest against the doubts inspired by that unfortunate frisson she underlined “never,” heavily. Never; it was quite true. When Harry Braddon had tried to kiss her, she had been furious and disgusted—disgusting beast! Saddening and reproachful, Clare’s presence hovered round her once more; Clare had liked Harry Braddon. Still, he was a beast. Pamela had never told her mother about that kiss. She shut her eyes excludingly and thought instead of Cecil Rudge, poor, timid, unhappy little Cecil, whom she liked so much, was so genuinely sorry for. But when, that afternoon at Aunt Edith’s, when at last, after an hour’s visibly laborious screwing to the sticking point, he had had the courage to take her hand and say “Pamela” and kiss it, she had just laughed, oh! unforgivably, but she simply couldn’t help it; he was so ridiculous. Poor lamb, he had been terribly upset. “But I’m so sorry,” she had gasped between the bursts of her laughter, “so dreadfully sorry. Please don’t be hurt.” But his face, she could see, was agonized. “Please! Oh, I feel so miserable.” And she had gone off into another explosion of laughter which almost choked her. But when she could breathe again, she had run to him where he stood, averted and utterly unhappy, by the window, she had taken his hand and, when he still refused to look at at her, had put her arm round his neck and kissed him. But the emotion that had filled her eyes with tears was nothing like passion. As for Hugh Davies—why, it certainly had been rather thrilling when Hugh kissed her. It had been thrilling, but certainly not to a fainting point. But then had she really felt like fainting to-day, a small voice questioned. She drowned the small voice with the scratching of her pen. “Consult the oracles of passion,” she wrote and, laying down her pen, got up and crossed the room. A copy of The Return of Eurydice was lying on the bed; she picked it up and turned over the pages. Here it was! “Consult the oracles of passion,” she read aloud and her own voice sounded, she thought, strangely oracular in the solitude. “A god speaks in them, or else a devil, one can never tell which beforehand, nor even, in most cases, afterwards. And, when all is said, does it very much matter? God and devil are equally supernatural, that is the important thing; equally supernatural and therefore, in this all too flatly natural world of sense and science and society, equally desirable, equally significant.” She shut the book and walked back to the table. “Which is what he said this afternoon,” she went on writing, “but in that laughing way, when I said I could never see why one shouldn’t do what one liked, instead of all this Hussy and Hippo rigmarole about service and duty, and he said yes, that was what Rabelais had said” (there seemed to be an awful lot of “saids” in this sentence, but it couldn’t be helped; she scrawled on;) “which I pretended I’d read—why can’t one tell the truth? particularly as I’d just been saying at the same time that one ought to say what one thinks as well as do what one likes; but it seems to be hopeless—and he said he entirely agreed, it was perfect, so long as you had the luck to like the sort of things that kept you on the right side of the prison bars and think the sort of things that don’t get you murdered when you say them. And I said I’d rather say what I thought and do what I liked and be murdered and put in gaol than be a Hippo, and he said I was an idealist, which annoyed me and I said I certainly wasn’t, all I was was some one who didn’t want to go mad with inhibitions. And he laughed, and I wanted to quote him his own words about the oracles, but somehow it was so shy-making that I didn’t. All the same, it’s what I intensely feel, that one ought to consult the oracles of passion. And I shall consult them.” She leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. The orange question floated across the darkness: “But does that mean I’m in love with him?” The oracle seemed to be saying yes. But oracles, she resolutely refused to remember, can be rigged to suit the interests of the questioner. Didn’t the admirer of The Return of Eurydice secretly want the oracle to say yes? Didn’t she think she’d almost fainted, because she’d wished she’d almost fainted, because she’d come desiring to faint? Pamela sighed; then, with a gesture of decision, she slapped her notebook to and put away her pen. It was time to get ready for dinner; she bustled about efficiently and distractingly among her trunks. But the question returned to her as she lay soaking in the warm other-world of her bath. By the time she got out she had boiled herself to such a pitch of giddiness that she could hardly stand.