Chapter Six

 

Eustace woke up, that Sunday morning, at a few minutes before nine, after a night of dreamless sleep, induced by nothing stronger in the way of narcotics than a pint of stout taken at midnight, with two or three small anchovy sandwiches.

      Waking was painful, of course; but the taste in his mouth was less brassy, and that tired ache in all his limbs decidedly less acute than it ordinarily was at this black hour of the morning.  True, he coughed a bit and brought up some phlegm; but the exhausting paroxysm was over more quickly than usual.  After his early cup of tea and a hot bath he felt positively young again.

      Beyond the circular shaving-mirror and the image of his lathered face lay the city of Florence, framed between the cypresses of his descending terraces.  Over Monte Morello hung flat clouds, like the backsides of Correggio's cherubs at Parma; but the rest of the sky was flawlessly blue, and in the flowerbeds below the bathroom window the hyacinths were like carved jewels in the sunlight, white jade and lapis-lazuli and pale-pink coral.

      'The pearl-grey,' he called out to his valet without looking round and then paused to wonder which tie would go best with the suit and the gay weather.  A black-and-white check?  But that would be too much the jaunty stockbroker.  No; what the place and time required was something in the style of those tartans on a white ground from the Burlington Arcade.  Or better still, that delicious salmon-pink fellow from Sulka's.  'And the pink tie,' he added, 'the new one.'

      There were white and yellow roses on the breakfast table.  Really quite prettily arranged!  Guido was beginning to learn.  He pulled out a virginal white bud and stuck it in his buttonhole, then addressed himself to his hothouse grapes.  A bowl of porridge followed, then two poached eggs on toast, a kipper and some scones and marmalade.

      As he ate, he read his letters.

      A note, first of all, from Bruno Rontini.  Was he back in Florence?  And, if so, why not drop in at the shop one day for a chat and a glance at the books?  A catalogue of the new arrivals was enclosed.

      Then there were two charity appeals from England - those beastly Orphans again, and a brand-new lot of Incurables, whom he'd have to send a couple of guineas to, because Molly Carraway was on the committee.  But to make up for the Incurables was a most cheering note from the manager of his Italian bank.  Using the two thousand pounds of liquid capital he'd given them to play with, they'd succeeded in netting him, during the previous month, fourteen thousand lire.  Just by buying and selling on the dollar-franc exchange.  Fourteen thousand.... It was quite a windfall.  He'd give the Incurables a fiver and buy himself a little birthday present.  A few nice books perhaps; and he unfolded Bruno's catalogue.  But Combat?  Or the Opera Omnia of St Bonaventura edited by the Franciscans of Quaracchi?  Eustace threw the catalogue aside and settled down to the task of deciphering the long illegible scribble from Mopsa Schottelius, which he had reserved to the last.  In pencil and the most disconcerting mixture of German, French and English, Mopsa described for him what she was doing at Monte Carlo.  And what that girl wasn't doing could have been set down on the back of a postage-stamp.  How appallingly thorough these Germans always managed to be, how emphatic!  In sex not less than in war - in scholarship, in science.  Diving deeper than anyone else and coming up muddier.  He decided to send Mopsa a picture postcard, advising her to read John Morley on 'Compromise'.

      It was in accord with these same Morleian principles that he decided, when the meal was over, to smoke one of those small Larranage claros which had pleased him so much when he tried one at his London tobacconist's that he bought a thousand of them on the spot.  The doctors were always nagging at him about his cigars, and he had promised to smoke only two a day, after lunch and dinner.  But these little fellows were so mild that it would take a dozen of them to produce the same effect as one of his big Romeo and Juliets.  So, if he were to smoke one of them now, and another after lunch, and perhaps a third after tea, with only a single big one after dinner, he would still be well on the right side of excess.  He lit his cigar and leaned back, savouring the delicate lusciousness of its aroma.  Then he got up and giving orders to the butler to ring up Casa Acciaiuoli and find out if the Contessa could receive him this afternoon, made his way to the library.  The four or five books which he was simultaneously reading lay piled on the table that stood beside the chair into which he now cautiously lowered himself: Scawen Blunt's Journals, the second volume of Sodome et Gomorrhe, an illustrated History of Embroidery, the latest novel by Ronald Firbank.... After a moment's hesitation he decided on the Proust.  Ten pages were what he usually managed to read of any book before desiring a change, but this time he lost interest after only six and a half, and turned instead to the section on the Opus Anglicanum in the History of Embroidery.  Then the clock in the drawing-room struck eleven, and it was time for him to go up to the west wing and say good-morning to his mother-in-law.

      Brightly painted, and dressed in the most elegant of canary-coloured tailor-mades, old Mrs Gamble was sitting in state, having her right hand manicured by her French maid, stroking her toy Pomeranian, Foxy VIII, with her left, and listening to Sir Oliver Lodge's Raymond read aloud to her by her companion.  At Eustace's entrance, Foxy VIII jumped down from her knee, rushed towards him and, retiring backwards as he advanced, furiously barked.

      'Foxy!' cried Mrs Gamble in a tone almost as harshly shrill as the Pomeranian's.  'Foxy!'

      'Little hell-hound,' said Eustace genially; and, turning to the reader, who had broken off in the middle of her sentence, he added: 'Please don't let me interrupt you, Mrs Thwale.'

      Veronica Thwale raised her impeccably oval face and looked at him with a calm intentness.

      'But it's a pleasure,' she said, 'to get back from all these ghosts to a bit of solid flesh.'

      She lingered a little over the final consonant.  As 'flesh-sh', the word took on a meatier significance.

      Like an Ingres madonna, Eustace reflected, as he twinkled back at her.  Smooth and serene almost to the point of impersonality and yet with all the sex left in - and perhaps almost a little added.

      'Too, too solid, I'm afraid.'

      Chuckling, he patted the smooth convexity of his pearl-grey waistcoat.

      'And how's the Queen Mother this morning?' he added, crossing over to Mrs Gamble's chair.  'Having her claws sharpened, I see.'

      The old lady uttered a thin crackling laugh.  She was proud of her reputation for reckless plain speaking and malicious wit.

      'You're a rascal, Eustace,' she said and the thin old voice was still vibrant with those rasping intonations of authority which make so many rich and aristocratic old ladies sound like sublimated sergeant-majors.  'And who's talking of flesh?' she added, turning her unseeing eyes inquisitorially from where she imagined Eustace was to where Mrs Thwale had seemed to be sitting.  'Are you putting on flesh, Eustace?'

      'Well, I'm not quite as sylph-like as you are,' he answered, looking down with a smile at the blind little shrunken mummy in the chair beside him.

      'Where are you?' Mrs Gamble asked; and leaving one gnarled hand to the manicurist, she pawed with the other at the air, then found the lapel of his coat and, from that, ran her fingers over the pearl-grey bulge below.  'Heavens!' she exclaimed.  'I had no idea!  You're gross, Eustace, gross!'  The thin voice grated again, like a petty officer's.  'Ned was gross too,' she went on, comparing mentally the stomach under her hand with the remembered paunch that had been her husband's.  'That was why he passed on so young.  Only sixty-four.  No fat man ever lived even to seventy.'

      The conversation had taken a turn which Eustace could not help finding a bit distasteful.  He decided to laugh his way out into a more congenial subject.

      'That was up to the best of your old form,' he said gaily.  'But tell me,' he added, 'what happens to fat people when they die?'

      'They don't die,' she Mrs Gamble.  'They pass on.'

      'When they pass on,' Eustace amended, with an intonation that put the words between inverted commas.  'Are they still obese on the other side?  I'd like to ask next time you have a séance.'

      'You're being frivolous,' said the Queen Mother severely.

      Eustace turned to Mrs Thwale.

      'Did you finally succeed in locating a good witch?'

      'Unfortunately, most of them speak only Italian,' she answered.  'But now Lady Worplesden's given us the name of an English one, who she says is very satisfactory.'

      'I'd have preferred a trumpet medium,' said Mrs Gamble.  'But when one's travelling, one has to put up with what one can find.'

      Noiselessly, the French maid rose, moved her chair over and, taking Mrs Gamble's other hand from where it lay, clawlike, on Foxy's orange fur, began to file the pointed nails.

      'That young nephew of yours is arriving today, isn't he?'

      'This evening,' Eustace answered.  'We may be a little late for dinner.'

      'I like boys,' the Queen Mother pronounced.  'That is, when they have decent manners, which very few of them have nowadays.  And that reminds me, Veronica, of Mr De Vries.'

      'He's coming to tea this afternoon,' said Mrs Thwale in her calm, level voice.

      'De Vries?' Eustace questioned.

      'You met him in Paris,' said the Queen Mother.  'At my New Year cocktail party.'

      'Did I?'  Eustace's tone was vague.  He had also met about five thousand other people on the same occasion.

      'American,' the Queen Mother went on.  'And he took the greatest fancy to me.  Didn't he, Veronica.'

      'He certainly did,' said Mrs Thwale.

      'Came to see me constantly all this winter - constantly.  And now he's in Florence.'

      'Money?'

      Mrs Gamble nodded.

      'Breakfast Food,' she said.  'But what he's really interest in is science and all that kind of stuff.  However, as I keep telling him, facts are facts, whatever your Mr Einstein may say.'

      'And not only Mr Einstein,' said Eustace with a smile, 'Mr Plato, Mr Buddha, Mr Francis of Assisi.'

      A curious little grunting sound made him turn his head.  Almost voicelessly, Mrs Thwale was laughing.

      'Did I say anything so amusing?' he asked.

      The pale oval face resumed its customary serenity.

      'I was thinking of a little joke my husband and I used to have together.'

      'About Mr Francis of Assisi?'

      For a second or two she looked at him without speaking.

      'About Brother Ass-ss,' she said at last.

      Eustace would have liked to enquire further, but thought it more tactful, seeing that Thwale was so lately dead, to refrain.

      'If you're going down into the town this morning,' Mrs Gamble broke in, 'I wish you'd take Veronica.'

      'I'd be enchanted.'

      'She's got some shopping to do for me,' the old woman continued.

      Eustace turned to Mrs Thwale.

      'Then let's have lunch together at Betti's.'

      But it was the Queen Mother who declined the invitation.

      'No, Eustace, I want her to come straight back.  In a taxi.'

      He glanced anxiously at Mrs Thwale to see how she was taking it.  The face of the Ingres madonna was expressionlessly calm.

      'In a taxi,' she repeated in her clear, level voice.  'Very well, Mrs Gamble.'

      Half an hour later, in the sober elegance of her black tailor-made, Veronica Thwale walked out into the sunshine.  At the foot of the front steps stood the Isotta, large, dark blue, and prodigiously expensive-looking.  But Paul De Vries, she reflected as she got in, was probably at least as well off as Mr Barnack.

      'I hope you don't object,' said Eustace, holding up the second of the day's cigars.

      She raised her eyelids at him, smiled without parting her lips, and shook her head; then looked back again at the gloved hands lying limply folded in her lap.

      Slowly the car rolled down between the cypresses and out into the steep winding road beyond the gates.

      'Of all the specimens in my collection,' said Eustace, breaking the long silence, 'I think the Queen Mother is perhaps the most remarkable.  A fossil scorpion out of the Carboniferous, almost perfectly preserved.'

      Mrs Thwale smiled at her folded hands.

      'I'm not a geologist,' she said.  'And, incidentally, the fossil is my employer.'

      'Which is the thing I find most surprising of all.'

      She looked at him enquiringly.

      'You mean, that I should be acting as Mrs Gamble's companion?'

      The final word, Eustace noted appreciatively, was faintly emphasized, so that it took on its fullest, Brontëan significance.

      'That's it,' he said.

      Mrs Thwale examined him appraisingly, taking in the titled hat, the beautifully fitting pearl-grey suit, the Sulka tie, the rosebud in his buttonhole.

      'Your father wasn't a poor clergyman in Islington,' she brought out.

      'No, he was a militant anti-clerical in Bolton.'

      'Oh, it's not the faith I'm thinking about,' she answered, smiling with delicate irony.  'It's what your mother-in-law calls the Facts.'

      'Such as?'

      She shrugged her shoulders.

      'Chilblains, for example.  Living in a cold house.  Feeling ashamed because one's clothes are so old and shabby.  But poverty wasn't the whole story.  Your father didn't practise the Christian virtues.'

      'On the contrary,' said Eustace, 'he was a professional philanthropist.  You know - drinking-fountains, hospitals, boys' clubs.'

      'Ah, but he only gave the money and had his name written up over the door.  He didn't have to work in his beastly clubs.'

      'Whereas you did?'

      Mrs Thwale nodded.

      'From the time I was thirteen.  And after I was sixteen, it was four nights a week.'

      'Did they force you?'

      Mrs Thwale shrugged her shoulders and did not immediately answer.  She was thinking of her father - those bright eyes in the face of a consumptive Phoebus, that long thin body, stooping and hollow-chested.  And beside him stood her mother, tiny and fragile, but the protector of his helpless unworldliness, the little bird-like Atlas who sustained the whole weight of his material universe.

      'There's such a thing as moral blackmail,' she said at last.  'If the people around you insist on behaving like Early Christians, you've got no choice, have you?'

      'Not much, I admit.'

      Eustace took the cigar out of the corner of his mouth and exhaled a cloud of smoke.

      'That's one of the reasons,' he added with a chuckle, 'why it's so important to eschew the company of the Good.'

      'One of the Good was your stepdaughter,' said Mrs Thwale after a little pause.

      'Who, Daisy Ockham?'

      She nodded.

      'Oh, then your father must be that Canon What's-his-name she's always talking about.'

      'Canon Cresswell.'

      'That's it - Cresswell.'  Eustace beamed at her.  'Well, all I can say is that you ought to hear her on the subject.'

      'I have,' said Mrs Thwale.  'Very often.'

      Daisy Ockham, Dotty Freebody, Yvonne Graves - the Holy Women.  One fat, two scraggy.  She had once drawn a picture of them squatting at the foot of the cross on which her father was being crucified by a troop of Boy Scouts.

      Eustace broke the silence with a little laugh at his stepdaughter's expense - at Canon Cresswell's too, incidentally.  But there didn't seem to be any filial piety to consider in this case.

      'All those deplorably good works of her!' he said.  'But then, of course,' he added commiseratingly, 'there wasn't much alternative for the poor thing, after she'd lost her husband and the boy.'

      'She used to do them even before,' said Mrs Thwale.

      'So there's really no excuse!' he said.

      Mrs Thwale smiled and shook her head.  Then, after a pause, she volunteered that it was Daisy Ockham who had originally introduced her to Mrs Gamble.

      'Rare privilege!' said Eustace.

      'But it was at her house that I met Henry.'

      'Henry?' he questioned.

      'That was my husband.'

      'Oh, of course.'

      There was a silence, while Eustace sucked at his cigar and tried to remember what the Queen Mother had said about Henry Thwale.  A partner in the firm of solicitors who managed her affairs.  Very pleasant and well-bred, but had passed on of a ruptured appendix at only - what was the age she had mentioned, with her usual ghoulish accuracy about such things?  Thirty-eight, he seemed to recall.  So that he would have been at least twelve or fourteen years older than his wife.

      'How old were you when you married?' he asked.

      'Eighteen,'

      'Just the right age, according to Aristotle.'

      'But not according to my father.  He'd have liked me to wait a couple of years.'

      'Fathers are never supposed to relish the thought of their young daughters getting married.'

      Mrs Thwale looked down at her folded hands and thought of their honeymoon and summer holiday beside the Mediterranean.  The swimming, the deliciously stupefying sunbaths, the long siesta hours of the aquarium twilight of their green-shuttered bedroom.

      'I'm not altogether surprised,' she said, without raising her eyes.

      At the memory of those extremes of pleasure and shamelessness and self-abandonment she smiled a little to herself.  'Nature's lay idiot, I taught thee to love.'  And to the quotation Henry had added, as his personal testimonial, that she was a model pupil.  But then he had been a good master.  Which didn't prevent him, unfortunately, from having the most abominable temper and being mean about money.

      'Well, I'm glad you managed to make your escape,' said Eustace.

      Mrs Thwale was silent for a little.  'After Henry died,' she said at last, 'it almost looked as if I might have to go back to where I'd come from.'

      'To the Poor and the Good?'

      'To the Poor and the Good,' she echoed.  'But fortunately Mrs Gamble needed somebody to read to her.'

      'So now you live with the Rich and the Bad, eh?'

      'As a parasite,' said Mrs Thwale calmly.  'As a kind of glorified lady's maid.... But it's a question of making one's choice between two evils.'

      She opened her handbag, took out a handkerchief and, raising it to her nose, inhaled its perfume of civit and flowers.  In her father's house there was chronically the smell of cabbage and steamed puddings, and at the Girls' Club - well, the smell of girls.

      'Personally,' she said, as she put away the handkerchief again, 'I'd rather be a hanger-on in a house like yours than on my own with - what would it have been?  About fifty shillings a week, I suppose.'

      There was a brief silence.

      'In your position,' said Eustace at last, 'perhaps I'd have made the same choice.'

      'It wouldn't astonish me,' was Mrs Thwale's comment.

      'But I think I'd have drawn a line ...'

      'People don't draw lines unless they can afford it.'

      'Not even at fossil scorpions?'

      Mrs Thwale smiled.

      'Your mother-in-law would have preferred a trumpet medium.  But even she has to be content with what she can find.'

      'Even she!' Eustace repeated with a wheezy laugh.  'But I must say, she was pretty lucky to find you, wasn't she?'

      'Not so lucky as I was to find her.'

      'And if you hadn't found one another, what then?'

      Mrs Thwale shrugged her shoulders.

      'Perhaps I could have made a little money illustrating books.'

      'Oh, you draw?'

      She nodded.

      'Secretly,' she answered.

      'Why secretly?'

      'Why?' she repeated.  'Partly from mere force of habit.  You see, one's drawings weren't much appreciated at home.'

      'On what grounds?  Aesthetic or ethical?'

      She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.  'Who knows?'

      But Mrs Cresswell had been so dreadfully upset by the discovery of her sketchbook that she had gone to bed for three days with a migraine headache.  After that, Veronica had never done any drawing except in the w.c. and on bits of paper that could be thrown away without risk of stopping up the drains.

      'Besides,' she went on, 'secrecy's such fun for its own sake.'

      'Is it?'

      'Don't tell me you feel like my husband about it!  Henry would have been a nudist if he'd been born ten years later.'

      'But you wouldn't, even though you were born ten years later?'

      She shook her head emphatically.

      'I wouldn't even write out a laundry list with somebody else in the room.  But Henry ... Why, the door of his study was never shut.  Never!  It used to make me feel quite ill even to look at him.'

      She was silent for a moment.

      'There's an awful prayer at the beginning of the Communion Service,' she went on.  'You know the one: "Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hid."  Really awful!  I used to make drawings about it.  Those were the ones that seemed to upset my mother most of all.'

      'I can well believe it,' said Eustace with a chuckle.  'One day,' he added, 'will you show me some of your drawings?'

      Mrs Thwale glanced at him searchingly, then averted her eyes.  For a few seconds she did not speak.  Then, slowly and in the tone of one who has thought out a problem and come at last to a decision, she gave her answer.

      'You're one of the few people I wouldn't mind showing them to.'

      'I feel flattered,' said Eustace.

      Mrs Thwale opened her handbag and, from among its perfumed contents, extracted half a sheet of notepaper.

      'Here's something I was working on before breakfast this morning.'

      He took it and put up his monocle.  The drawing was in ink and, in spite of its smallness, extraordinarily detailed and meticulous.  Competent, was Eustace's verdict, but unpleasantly niggling.  He peered at it closely.  The drawing represented a woman, dressed in the severest and most correctly fashionable of tailor-made suits, walking, prayerbook in hand, up the aisle of a church.  Behind her, at the end of a string, she trailed a horseshoe magnet - but a horseshoe magnet so curved and rounded as to suggest a pair of thighs tapering down to the knees.  On the ground, a little way behind the woman, lay an enormous eyeball, as big as a pumpkin, its pupil staring wildly at the retreating magnet.  From the sides of the eye sprouted two wormlike arms, ending in a pair of huge hooked hands that clawed at the floor.  So strong had been the attraction and so desperate the futile efforts to resist, that the dragging fingers had scored long grooves in the flagstones.

      Eustace raised his left eyebrow and allowed the monocle to drop.

      'There's only one thing abut the parable I don't understand,' he said.  'Why the church?'

      'Oh, for any number of reasons,' Mrs Thwale answered, shrugging her shoulders.  'Respectability always heightens a woman's attractiveness.  And blasphemy gives an extra spice to pleasure.  And, after all, churches are places people get married in.  Besides, who tells you that that isn't the Decameron she's carrying, bound in black leather like a prayerbook?'

      She took the sheet of paper and put it away again in her bag.

      'It's a pity fans have gone out of fashion,' she added in another tone.  'And those big white masks they used to wear in Casanova.  Or talking from behind screens, like the ladies in "The Tale of Genji".  Wouldn't that be heavenly?'

      'Would it?'

      She nodded, her face bright with unwonted animation.

      'One could do the oddest things while one was chatting with the Vicar about ... well, let's say the League of Nations.  Oh, the oddest!'

      'Such as?'

      A little grunt of voiceless laughter was all the answer she vouchsafed.  There was a pause.

      'And then,' she added, 'think of the enormities one could bring out without blushing!'

      'And you feel you'd like to bring out enormities?'

      Mrs Thwale nodded.

      'I'd have been a good scientist,' she said.

      'What's that got to do with it?'

      'But can't you see?' she said impatiently.  'Can't you see?  Cutting bits off frogs and mice, grafting cancer into rabbits, boiling things together in test-tubes - just to see what'll happen, just for the fun of the thing.  Wantonly committing enormities - that's all science is.'

      'And you'd enjoy it outside the laboratory?'

      'Not in public, of course.'

      'But if you were ambushed behind a screen, where the Good couldn't see you ...'

      'Ambushed behind a screen,' Mrs Thwale repeated slowly.  'And now,' she went on in another tone, 'I shall have to get out.  There's a shop somewhere here on the Lungarno where you can buy rubber rats for dogs.  Rats with a chocolate flavour.  Foxy's very keen on the chocolate, it seems.  Ah, here we are!'

      She leaned forward and rapped the glass.

      Eustace watched her go.  Then, replacing his hat, he ordered the chauffeur to drive to Weyl's in the Via Tornabuoni.