Chapter Three

 

Sebastian, meanwhile, had walked down Glanvil Place, frowning to himself and biting his lips.  This was probably his last chance of getting those evening clothes in time for Tom Boveney's party.  His father, he knew, was not expected to dinner that evening, and the next day he was going to Huddersfield, or somewhere, for a conference; wouldn't be back till Wednesday evening, and on Thursday morning they were to set out together for Florence.  It must be now or never.

      'Evening clothes were a class symbol, and it was a crime to spend money on useless luxuries when people as good as oneself were starving!'  Sebastian knew in advance what his father's arguments would be.  But behind the arguments was the man - dominating and righteous, hard on others because even harder on himself.  If the man were approached in the right way, perhaps the arguments would not be pressed home to their logical conclusion.  The great thing, Sebastian had learnt from long and bitter experience, was never to seem too anxious or insistent.  He must ask for the dinner jacket - but in such a way that his father wouldn't think that he really longed for it.  That, he knew, would be to invite a refusal - nominally, of course, on the score of economy and socialist ethics, but really, he had come to suspect, because his father took a certain pleasure in thwarting the too explicit manifestations of desire.  If he managed to avoid the pitfall of over-eagerness, perhaps he would be able to talk his father out of the other, avowable reasons for refusal.  But it would take good acting to bring it off, and a lot of finesse, and above all that presence of mind in which, at moments of crisis, he was always so woefully lacking.  But perhaps if he worked out a plan of campaign in advance, a piece of brilliant and inspired strategy....

      Sebastian had kept his eyes fixed upon the pavement at his feet; but now he raised his head, as though the perfect, the irresistible plan were up there in the murky sky, waiting only to be seen and seized.  He raised his head, and suddenly there it was on the other side of the street - not the plan, of course, but the Primitive Methodist Chapel, his Chapel, the thing that it was worth walking down Glanvil Terrace of an evening on purpose to see.  But today, lost as he was in the labyrinth of his own miseries, he had forgotten all about it.  And now here it confronted him, faithfully itself, the lower part of the façade suffused with the greenish gaslight of the street lamp in front of it, and the upper part growing dimmer and dimmer as it mounted from the light, until the last spiky pinnacles of Victorian brickwork hung there, opaquely black against the foggy darkness of the London sky.  Bright little details and distinctions fading upwards into undifferentiated mystery; a topless darkness of the London sky.  Bright little details and distinctions at its foot.  Sebastian stood there, looking; and in spite of the memory of his humiliations and his dread of what might be in store for him at his father's, he felt something of that strange, inexplicable elation which the spectacle always evoked in him.

 

                                             Little squalor! transfigured into Ely.

                                             Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness;

                                             Burgeoning out of the gaslight into Elephanta;

                                             Out of the school-treats, out of the Reverend Wilkins.

                                             Flowering into Poetry ...

 

He repeated to himself the opening lines of his poem, then looked again at its subject.  Built at the worst period, of the shoddiest materials.  Hideous, in the daytime, beyond belief.  But an hour later, when the lamps were lit, as lovely and significant as anything he had ever seen.  Which was the real chapel - the little monstrosity that received the Reverend Wilkins and his flock on Sunday mornings?  Or this unfathomably pregnant mystery before him?  Sebastian shook his head, and walked on.  The questions admitted of no answer, the only thing you could do was to reformulate them in terms of poetry.

 

                                             Little squalor! transfigured into Ely,

                                             Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness ...

 

Number twenty-three was a tall stucco-fronted house, identical with all the others in the row.  Sebastian turned in under the pillared porch, crossed the hall, and with a renewal of his momentarily banished apprehension began to climb the stairs.

      One flight, two flights, three flights, yet another, and he was standing at the door of his father's flat.  Sebastian raised a hand to the bell button, then let it fall again.  He felt sick, and his heart was beating violently.  It was the blue tart over again, the headmaster, the nausea of the threshold.  He looked at his watch.  Six forty-seven and a half.  At six forty-eight he would ring and go in and just blurt it out, anyhow.

      'Father, you really must let me have a dinner jacket....'  He lifted his hand again and pressed the ball of his thumb firmly against the button.  Inside, the bell buzzed like an angry wasp.  He waited half a minute, then rang again.  There was no answer.  His last chance had vanished.  Disappointment was mingled in Sebastian's mind with a profound sense of relief that he had been allowed to postpone the hour of his ordeal.  Tom Boveney's party was four week away; whereas, if his father had been at home, the dreaded interview would be going on now, at this very moment.

      Sebastian had gone down only a single flight when the sound of a familiar voice made him halt.

      'Seventy-two stairs,' his father was saying down there in the hall.

      'Dio!' said another, a foreign voice.  'You live half-way up to paradise.'

      'This house is a symbol,' the ringing, upper-class English voice continued.  'A symbol of the decay of capitalism.'

      Sebastian recognized the conversational gambit.  It was the one John Barnack usually played upon his visitors the first time he accompanied them up those interminable stairs.

      'Once the home of a single prosperous Victorian family.'  That was it.  'Now a nest of bachelors and struggling business women, with a childless couple or two thrown in for good measure.'

      The voice grew louder and more distinct as its own approached.

      '... and it's a product, too, of rising unemployment and a falling birth-rate.  In a word, of blighted hopes and Marie Stopes.'  And on that there was the startling explosion of John Barnack's loud, metallic laughter.

      'Christ!' Sebastian whispered to himself.  It was the third time he had heard that joke and the subsequent outburst.

      'Stope?' queried the foreign voice through the tail-end of the other's merriment.  'Do I know what it signifies, to stope?  Stopare?  Stopper?  Stopfen?'  But neither Italian, nor French, nor German seemed to throw any light.

      Very elaborately, the Cambridge accent started to explain.

      Not wishing it to appear that he had been eavesdropping, Sebastian started once more to run down the stairs, and when the two men came round the corner into sight, he uttered a well-simulated exclamation of astonishment.

      Mr Barnack looked up and saw in that small slender figure poised there, six steps above him, not Sebastian, but Sebastian's mother - Rosie on the evening of the Hilliards' fancy-dress dance, in the character of Lady Caroline Lamb disguised, in a monkey-jacket and tight red velvet breeches, as Byron's page.  Three months later had come the war, and two years after that she had left him for that vicious imbecile, Tom Hilliard.

      'Oh, it's you,' Mr Barnack said aloud, without allowing the faintest symptom of surprise, or pleasure, or any other emotion to appear on his brown leathery face.

      To Sebastian that was one of the most disquieting things about his father: you never knew from his expression what he was feeling or thinking.  He would look at you straight and unwaveringly, his grey eyes brightly blank, as though you were a perfect stranger.  The first intimation of his state of mind always came verbally, in that loud, authoritative, barrister's voice of his, in those measured phrases, so carefully chosen, so beautifully articulated.  There would be silence, or perhaps talk of matters indifferent; and then suddenly, out of the blue of his impassivity, a pronouncement, as though from Sinai.

      Smiling uncertainly, Sebastian came down to meet them.

      'This is my youngster,' said Mr Barnack.

      And the stranger turned out to be Professor Cacciaguida - the famous Professor Cacciaguida, Mr Barnack added.  Sebastian smiled deferentially and shook hands; this must be that anti-fascist man he had heard his father talking about. Well, it was a fine head, he thought, as he turned away.  Roman of the best period, but with an incongruous mane of grey hair brushed romantically back from the forehead - he shot another surreptitious glance - as though the Emperor Augustus had tried to get himself up as Liszt.

      But how strangely, Sebastian went on to reflect as they climbed the final flight, how pathologically even, the stranger's body fell away from that commanding head!  The emperor-genius declined into the narrow chest and shoulders of a boy, then, incongruously, into the belly and wide hips almost of a middle-aged woman, and finally into a pair of thin little legs and the tiniest of patent-leather button-boots.  Like some sort of larva that had started to develop and then got stuck, with only the front end of the organism fully adult and the rest hardly more than a tadpole.

      John Barnack opened the door of his flat and turned on the light.

      'I'd better go and see about supper,' he said.  'Seeing you've got to get away so early, Professor.'

      It was an opportunity to talk about the dinner jacket.  But when Sebastian offered to come and give a hand, his father peremptorily ordered him to stay where he was and talk to their distinguished guest.

      'Then when I'm ready,' he added, 'you must scuttle.  We've got some important things to discuss.'

      And having thus tersely put Sebastian in his childish place, Mr Barnack turned and, with quick decided steps like an athlete going into combat, strode out of the room.

      Sebastian stood hesitating for a few seconds, then made up his mind to disobey, follow his father into the kitchen and have it out with him, there and then.  But at this moment the Professor, who had been looking inquisitively around the room, turned to him with a smile.

      'But how it is aseptic!' he exclaimed in that melodious voice of his, and, with that charming trace of a foreign accent, those odd and over-literary turns of phrase, which merely served to emphasize the completeness of his command of the language.

      In that bare, bleak sitting-room everything except the books was enamelled the colour of skim milk, and the floor was a polished sheet of grey linoleum.  Professor Cacciaguida sat down in one of the metal chairs and, with tremulous nicotine-stained fingers, lighted a cigarette.

      'One awaits the arrival of the surgeon,' he added, 'at any moment.'

      But instead it was John Barnack who came back into the room, carrying plates and a handful of cutlery.  The Professor turned in his direction, but did not speak at once; instead, he put his cigarette to his lips, inhaled, held his breath for a couple of seconds, then voluptuously spouted smoke through his imperial nostrils.  After which, his craving momentarily assuaged, he called across the room to his host.

      'It's positively prophetic!'  He indicated the room with a wave of his hand.  'A fragment of the rational and hygienic future.'

      'Thank you,' said John Barnack without looking up.  He was laying the table with the same focused attention, Sebastian noticed, the same exasperatingly meticulous care, as he gave to all his tasks, from the most important to the humblest - laying it as though he were manipulating an intricate piece of apparatus in the laboratory, or (yes, the Professor was quite right) performing the most ticklish of surgical operations.

      'All the same,' the other went on with a little laugh, 'where the arts are concerned, I confess to being sentimental.  Give me yesterday rather than tomorrow.  Isabella's apartment at Mantova, for example.  Much dust, no doubt, in the mouldings.  And all that sculptured wood!'  He traced a series of volutes with the smoke of his burning cigarette.  'Full of archaeological filth!  But what warmth, what wealth!'

      'Quite,' said Mr Barnack.  He straightened himself up and stood there, upright and assertive, looking down at his guest.  'But whose pockets did the wealth come out of?'  And without waiting for an answer, he marched back to the kitchen.

      But the Professor had only just begun.

      'What do you think?' he asked, turning to Sebastian.  The words were accompanied by a genial smile; but it became sufficiently obvious, as he went on, that he took not the smallest interest in what Sebastian thought.  All he wanted was an audience.

      'Perhaps dirt is the necessary condition of beauty,' he continued.  'Perhaps hygiene and art can never be bedfellows.  No Verdi, after all, without spitting into trumpets.  No Duse without a crowd of malodorous bourgeois giving one another their coryzas.  And think of the inexpungable retreats for microbes prepared by Michelangelo in the curls of Moses' beard!'

      He paused triumphantly, waiting for applause.  Sebastian gave it in the form of a delighted laugh.  The effortless virtuosity of the Professor's talk delighted him; and the Italian accent, the odd unexpected vocabulary, lent an adventitious charm to the performance.  But as the improvisation prolonged itself, Sebastian's feelings towards it underwent a change.  Five minutes later, he was wishing to God that the old bore would shut up.

      It was the smell and sizzling of fried lamb chops which finally produced that much-desired result.  The Professor threw back his noble head and sniffed appreciatively.

      'Ambrosia!' he cried.  'I see we have a second Baronius among the pots and pans.'

      Sebastian, who did not know who the first Baronius was, turned round and looked through the open door into the kitchen.  His father was standing with his back to him, his grizzled head and the broad strong shoulders bent forward as he pored over the range.

      'Not only a great mind, but a great cook as well,' the Professor was saying.

      Yes, that was the trouble, Sebastian reflected.  And not only a great cook (though he had the utmost contempt for those who cared about food for its own sake), but also a great desk-tidier, a great mountain-climber, a great account-maker, a great botanizer and bird-watcher, a great letter-answerer, a great socialist, a great four-mile-an-hour walker, teetotaller and non-smoker, a great report-reader and statistics-knower, a great everything, in short, that was tiresome, efficient, meritorious, healthful, social-minded.  If only he'd take a rest sometimes!  If only his armour had a few chinks in it!

      The Professor raised his voice a little, evidently hoping that what he was about to say would be heard even in the kitchen and through the noise of frying.

      'And the great mind is associated with an even greater heart and soul,' he pronounced in a tone of vibrant solemnity.  He leaned over and laid a small hand, very white except for the yellowed fingertips, upon Sebastian's knee.

      'I hope you're as proud of your father as you ought to be,' he went on.

      Sebastian smiled vaguely and made a faint inarticulate noise of assent.  But how anyone who knew his father could talk about his great heart, he really couldn't imagine.

      'A man who could have aspired to the highest political honours under the old party system - but he had his principles, he refused to play their game.  And who knows?' the Professor added parenthetically, with a confidential lowering of the voice.  'Perhaps he'll get his reward very soon.  Socialism is much nearer than anyone imagines - and when it comes, when it comes ...' he raised his hand expressively, as though prophesying Mr Barnack's apotheosis.  'And when one thinks,' he went on, 'of all those thousands he might have made at the Bar.  Thousands and thousands!  But he abandoned all.  Like San Francesco.  And what he has, he lavishes with a heroic generosity.  Causes, movements, suffering individuals - he gives to all.  To all,' he repeated, nodding his noble head emphatically.  'All!'

      All but one, Sebastian inwardly amended.  There was still money enough for political organizations and, he guessed, for exiled professors; but when it came to sending his own son to a decent school, to getting him a few decent suits and a dinner jacket - nothing doing.  Sonorously, the Professor renewed his infuriating eloquence.  Almost bursting with suppressed anger, Sebastian was thankful when at last the arrival of the chops cut short the panegyric and set him free.

      'Tell Aunt Alice I'll be with her after dinner,' Mr Barnack called after him as he ran down the stairs.  'And make sure that Uncle Eustace doesn't leave before I get there; I've got to make all sorts of arrangements with him.'

      Outside in the street his little squalor of a chapel still darkened up into poetry, into inexplicable significance and beauty; but this time Sebastian felt so bitterly aggrieved that he would not even look at it.