Chapter One

 

Sebastian Barnack came out of the reading room of the public library and paused in the vestibule to put on his shabby overcoat.  Looking at him, Mrs Ockham felt a sword in her heart.  This small and exquisite creature with the seraphic face and the pale curly hair was the living image of her own, her only, her dead and vanished darling.

      The boy's lips were moving, she noticed, as he struggled into his coat.  Talking to himself - just as her Frankie used to do.  He turned and began to walk past the bench on which she was sitting, towards the door.

      'It's a raw evening,' she said aloud, acting on a sudden impulse to detain this living phantom, to turn the sharp memory in her wounded heart.

      Startled out of his preoccupying thoughts, Sebastian halted, turned and, for a second or two, stared at her uncomprehending.  Then he took in the significance of that yearningly maternal smile.  His eyes hardened.  This sort of thing had happened before.  She was treating him as though he were one of those delicious babies one pats the heads of in perambulators.  He'd teach the old bitch!  But as usual he lacked the necessary courage and presence of mind.  In the end he just feebly smiled and said, Yes, it was a raw evening.

      Mrs Ockham, meanwhile, had opened her bag and pulled out a white cardboard box.

      'Would you like one of these?'

      She held out the box.  It was French chocolate, Frankie's favourite - her own too, for that matter.  Mrs Ockham had a weakness for sweet things.

      Sebastian considered her uncertainly.  Her accent was all right, and in their rather shapeless tweedy way the clothes were substantial and of good quality.  But she was fat and old - at least forty, he guessed.  He hesitated, torn between a desire to put this tiresome creature in her place and a no-less urgent desire for those delicious langues de chat.  Like a pug, he said to himself, as he looked at that blunt, soft face of hers.  A pink, hairless pug with a bad complexion.  After which he felt that he could accept the chocolates without compromising his integrity.

      'Thanks,' he said, and gave her one of those enchanting smiles which middle-aged ladies always found completely irresistible.

      To be seventeen, to have a mind which one felt to be agelessly adult, and to look like a Della Robbia angel of thirteen - it was an absurd and humiliating fate.  But last Christmas he had read Nietzsche, and since then he had known that he must Love his Fate.  Amor Fati - but tempered with a healthy cynicism.  If people were ready to pay one for looking less than one's age, why not give them what they wanted?

      'How good!'

      He smiled at her again, and the corners of his mouth were brown with chocolate.  The sword in Mrs Ockham's heart gave another agonizing twist.

      'Take the whole box,' she said.  Her voice trembled, her eyes were bright with tears.

      'No, no, I couldn't ...'

      'Take it,' she insisted, 'take it.'  And she pressed it into his hand - into Frankie's hand.

      'Oh, thank you....'  It was just what Sebastian had hoped, even expected.  He had had experience of these sentimental old dodoes.

      'I had a boy once,' Mrs Ockham went on brokenly.  'So like you he was.  The same hair and eyes...'  The tears overflowed on to her cheeks.  She took off her glasses and wiped them, then, blowing her nose, she got up and hurried into the reading room.

      Sebastian stood looking after her until she was out of sight.  All at once he felt horribly guilty and mean.  He looked at the box in his hand.  A boy had died in order that he might have these langues de chat: and if his mother were alive, she would be nearly as old now as that poor creature in the spectacles.  And if he had died, she'd have been just as unhappy and sentimental.  Impulsively, he made a movement to throw the chocolates away; then checked himself.  No, that would be just silliness and superstition.  He slipped the box into his pocket and walked out into the foggy twilight.

      'Millions and millions,' he whispered to himself, and the enormity of the evil seemed to grow with every repetition of the word.  All over the world, millions of men and women lying in pain; millions dying, at this very moment; millions more grieving over them, their faces distorted, like that poor old hag's, the tears running down their cheeks.  And millions being cursed and kicked and beaten by other brutal millions.  And everywhere the stink of garbage and drink and unwashed bodies, everywhere the blight of stupidity and ugliness.  The horror was always there, even when one happened to be feeling well and happy - always there, just round the corner and behind almost every door.

      As he walked down Haverstock Hill, Sebastian felt himself overcome by a vast impersonal sadness.  Nothing else seemed to exist now, or to matter, except death and agony.

      And then that phrase of Keats' came back to him - 'The giant agony of the world!'  The giant agony.  He racked his memory to find the other lines.  'None may usurp this height ...’ How did it go?'

 

                                             None may usurp this height, returned that shade,

                                             But those to whom the miseries of the world

                                             Are misery, and will not let them rest....

 

How exactly right that was!  And perhaps Keats had thought of it one cold spring evening walking down the hill from Hampstead, just as he himself was doing now.  Walking down, and stopping sometimes to cough up a morsel of his lungs and think of his own death as well as of other people's.  Sebastian began again, whispering articulately to himself.

 

                                             None may usurp this height, returned that shade,

                                             But those ...

 

But, good heavens, how awful it sounded when you spoke it aloud!  None may usurp this height, returned that shade, but those ... How could he have let a thing like that get past him?  But, of course, old Keats was pretty careless sometimes.  And being a genius didn't preserve him from the most ghastly lapses into bad taste.  There were things in Endymion that made one shudder.  And when one reflected that it was supposed to be Greek ... Sebastian smiled to himself with compassionate irony.  One of these days he'd show them what could be done with Greek mythology.  Meanwhile, his mind went back to the phrases that had come to him just now in the library, while he was reading Tarn's book on Hellenistic civilization.  'Ignore the dried figs!' that was how it was to begin.  'Ignore the dried figs ...’ But, after all, dried figs can be good figs.  For slaves there would never be anything but the spoilage and refuse of the crop.  'Ignore the stale figs,' then.  Besides, in this particular context of sound, 'stale' carried the proper vowel.

 

                                             Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,

                                             The old men terrified of death ...

 

But that was horribly flat.  Steam-rolled and macadamized, like bad Wordsworth.  What about 'scared of dying?'

 

                                             The old men scared of dying, the women ...

 

He hesitated, wondering how to sum up that dismal life of the Gyneceum.  Then, from the mysterious source of light and energy at the back of his skull, out popped the perfect phrase: 'the women in cages.'

      Sebastian smiled at the image that bobbed up - a whole zoo of ferocious and undomesticable girls, a deafening aviary of dowagers.  But these would be for another poem - a poem in which he would take vengeance on the whole female sex.  At the moment his business was with Hellas - with the historical squalor that was Greece and the imaginary glory.  Imaginary, of course, so far as a whole people was concerned, but surely realizable by an individual, a poet above all.  Some day, somehow, somewhere, that glory would be within his grasp; of that Sebastian was convinced.  But meanwhile it was important not to make a fool of oneself.  The passion of his nostalgia would have to be tempered, in the expression, with a certain irony, the splendour of the longed-for ideal with a spice of the absurd.  Forgetting all about the dead boy and the giant agony of the world, he helped himself to a langue de chat from the stock in his pocket and, his mouth full, resumed the intoxicating labour of composition.

 

                                             Ignore the stale figs, the weevils and the whippings,

                                             The old men scared of dying, the women in cages.

 

So much for history.  Now for imagination.

 

                                             In a perpetual June ...

 

He shook his head.  'Perpetual' was like the headmaster talking about the climate of Ecuador in those asinine geography lessons of his.  'Chronic' suggested itself as an alternative.  The associations with varicose veins and the language of Cockney charwomen delighted him.

 

                                             In a chronic June, with Alcibiadeses

                                             Surround the beard of Plato!

 

Vile!  This was no place for proper names.  'What musculatures' perhaps?  Then, like manna, 'what heavyweights; fell from heaven.  Yes, yes; 'what highbrow heavyweights'.  He laughed aloud.  And substituting 'wisdom' for 'Plato' you got:

 

                                             In a chronic June, what highbrow heavyweights

                                             Surround the beard of wisdom!

 

Sebastian repeated the words with relish, two or three times.  And now for the other sex.

 

                                                                                        Hark, near by,

                                             The twangling and the flutes!

 

He walked on, frowning to himself.  Those prancing Bacchae, those Praxitelean breasts and buttocks, those dances on the vases - how hellishly difficult to make any kind of sense of them!  Compress and express.  Squeeze all the voluptuous images into a lump and, in the act, squeeze out of them a liqueur-glassful of verbal juice, at once astringent and heady, tart and aphrodisiac.  It was easier said that done.  His lips began to move at last.

      'Hark,' he whispered again.

 

                                                                                   Hark, near by,

                                             The twangling and the flutes.  Before, behind,

                                             Gyre after gyre, what orbed resiliences,

                                             The last veil loosened, uneclipse their moons!

 

He sighed and shook his head.  Not quite right yet; but still, it would have to do for the time being.  And meanwhile here was the corner.  Should he go straight home, or walk round by Bantry Place, pick up Susan and let her hear the new poem?  Sebastian hesitated a moment, then decided on the second course and turned to the right.  He felt in the mood for an audience and applause.

 

                                                                               ... what orbed resiliences,

                                             The last veil loosened, uneclipse their moons!

 

But perhaps the whole thing was too short.  It might be necessary to slip in three or four more lines between those resiliences and his final, purple explosion of Bengal lights.  Something about the Parthenon, for example.  Or maybe something about Aeschylus would be more amusing.

 

                                             Tragical on stilts, bawling sublimities

                                             Through a tortured mouth-hole ...

 

But goodness! here were those Bengal lights, rocketing up irrepressibly and uninvited into his throat.

 

                                             And all the time, dazzling upon a thousand

                                             Islands in the hyacinthine sea,

                                             What fierce desires ...

 

No, no, no.  Too vague, too fleshlessly abstract!

 

                                             What bulls, what boys, what frenzy of swans and nipples,

                                             What radiant lusts, like a red forge panting up

                                             From fire to brighter fire ...

 

But 'brighter' had no kind of resonance, no meaning beyond itself.  What he needed was a word that, while it described the growing intensity of the fire, should also convey the substance of his own passionately cherished faith - the equivalence of all the ecstasies, the poetic, the sexual, even the religious (if you went in for that sort of thing), and their superiority to all the merely humdrum and ordinary states of being.

      He went back to the beginning, hoping in this way to gather enough momentum to carry him over the obstacle.

 

                                             And all the while, dazzling upon a thousand

                                             Islands in the hyacinthine sea,

                                             What bulls, what boys, what frenzy of swans and nipples,

                                             What radiant lusts, like a red forge panting up

                                             From fire ... from fire ...

 

He hesitated; then the words came.

 

                                             From fire to purer fire, to Light Itself -

                                             The incandescent copulation of Gods.

 

But here was the turning into Bantry Place, and even through the closed and curtained windows of number five he could hear Susan at her piano lesson, playing that thing of Scarlatti's she had been working on all the winter.  The sort of music, it struck him, that would happen if the bubbles in a magnum of champagne were to rush up rhythmically and, as they reached the surface, burst into sounds as dry and tangy as the wine from whose depths they had arisen.  The simile pleased him so much that Sebastian failed to remember that he had never tasted champagne; and his last reflection, as he rang the bell, was that the music would be even dryer and tangier if it were the harpsichord that was being played and not old Pfeiffer's luscious Blüthner.

      Over the tope of the piano, Susan caught sight of him as he entered the music-room - those beautiful parted lips of his, and the soft hair she always longed to stroke and run her fingers through (but he would never let her), tousled by the wind into a delicious frenzy of pale curls.  How sweet of him to have come out of his way to call for her!  She gave him a quick glad smile, and as she did so, noticed all at once that there were tiny little water-drops in his hair, like the lovely dew on cabbage leaves - only here they were smaller, beaded along silk floss; and if one touched them, they would be as cold as ice.  To think of it was enough to get her all tangled up in the fingering of her left hand.

      Old Dr Pfeiffer, who was pacing up and down the room like a caged animal - a small, obese bear in unpressed trousers and with the moustache of a walrus - took the much-chewed cigar stump out of the corner of his mouth and shouted in German:

      Musik, musik!

      With an effort, Susan expelled from her mind the thought of dewdrops on silky curls, caught up the faltering sonata and played on.  To her chagrin, she felt herself blushing.

      Crimson cheeks, and the hair auburn almost to redness.  Beetroots and carrots, Sebastian reflected without indulgence; and the way she showed her gums when she smiled - it was positively anatomical.

      Susan struck the final chord and dropped her hands into her lap, waiting for the master's verdict.  It came with a roar and on a blast of cigar smoke.

      'Goot, goot, goot!' and Dr Pfeiffer clapped her on the shoulder, as though he were encouraging a cart-horse.  Then he turned to Sebastian.

      'Und here's der liddle Ariel!  Oder, perhaps, der liddle Puck - not?'  He twinkled between his narrowed eyelids with what he felt to be the most playfully subtle, the most exquisite and cultured irony.

      Little Ariel, little Puck ... Twice in an afternoon, and this time without any excuse - just because the old buffoon thought he was being funny.

      'Not being a German,' Sebastian retorted tartly, 'I haven't read any Shakespeare - so I really can't say.'

      'Der Puck, der Puck!' cried Dr Pfeiffer, and laughed so wholeheartedly that he stirred up his chronic bronchitis and started to cough.

      An expression of anxiety appeared on Susan's face.  Goodness only knew where this would end.  She jumped up from the piano-stool, and when the explosions and the horribly liquid wheezings of Dr Pfeiffer's cough had somewhat subsided, she announced that she must leave at once; her mother was particularly anxious for her to get back early today.

      Dr Pfeiffer wiped the tears out of his eyes, bit once again on the much-chewed end of his cigar, treated Susan to two or three more of his resounding, cart-horse endearments, and told her in God's name to remember what he had said about the trills in the right hand.  Then, picking up from a table the cedar-lined silver box, which a grateful pupil had given him for his last birthday, he turned to Sebastian, laid one huge square hand on the boy's shoulder, and with the other held the cigars under his nose.

      'Take one,' he said cajolingly.  'Take a nize big fat Havana.  Free of charge, und guarantiert it won't make a vomitus even to a sucking baby.'

      'Oh, shut up!' Sebastian shouted in a fury that was on the verge of tears; and suddenly ducking down, he slipped from under his persecutor's arm and ran out of the room.  Susan stood for a moment, hesitant, then without a word hurried after him.  Dr Pfeiffer took the cigar out of his mouth and shouted after her:

      'Quick!  Quick!  Our liddle genius is crying.'

      The door slammed.  In defiance of his bronchitis, Dr Pfeiffer started to laugh again, enormously.  Two months before, the liddle genius had accepted one of his cigars, and, while Susan did her best with the 'Moonlight Sonata', had puffed away at it for nearly five minutes.  Then there was a panic dash for the bathroom; but he had failed to get there quite in time.  Dr Pfeiffer's sense of humour was medievally robust; for him, that vomitus on the second-floor landing was almost the funniest thing that had happened since the jokes in Faust.