Chapter Eleven

 

The train was unexpectedly punctual and, when they reached the station, the passengers were already elbowing their way through the gates.

      'If you see a small cherub in grey flannel trousers,' said Eustace, as he stood on tiptoes to peer over the heads of the crowd, 'that's our man.'

      Bruno pointed a bony finger.

      'Does that answer your description?'

      'Which one?'

      'That little non Anglus sed angelus behind the pillar there.'

      Eustace caught sight of a familiar head of pale and curly hair and, waving his hand, pushed his way closer to the gate.

      'And this is your long-lost second-cousin once removed,' he said, as he returned a minute later with the boy.  'Bruno Rontini - who sells second-hand books and would like everybody to believe in the Gaseous Vertebrate.'  And as they shook hands, 'Let me warn you,' he continued in a mock-solemn tone, 'he'll probably try to convert you.'

      Sebastian looked again at Bruno and, under the influence of his uncle's introduction, saw only foolishness in the bright eyes, only bigotry in that thin bony face, with its hollows under the cheekbones, its beaky protrusion of a nose.  Then he turned to Eustace and smiled.

      'So this is Sebastian,' said Bruno slowly.  Ominously significant, it was the name of fate's predestined target.

      'Somehow, I can't help thinking of all those arrows,' he went on.  'The arrows of the lusts which this beauty would evoke and would permit its owner to satisfy; the arrows of vanity and self-satisfaction and ...'

      'But arrows go both ways,' said Eustace.  'This martyr will give as good as he gets - won't he, Sebastian?'  He smiled knowingly, as from man to man.

      Flattered by this display of confidence in his prowess, Sebastian laughed and nodded.

      With an affectionate, almost a possessive gesture, Eustace laid a hand on the boy's shoulder.

      'Andiamo!' he cried.

      There was a note of something like triumph in his tone.  Not only had he got even with Bruno for what had happened in the car; he had also cut him off from any chance of exerting an influence on Sebastian.

      'Andiamo!' Bruno repeated.  'I'll take you to the car and get my bag.'  Picking up Sebastian's suitcase, he started towards the exit.  The others followed.

      Hooting in a melodious baritone, the Isotta slowly nosed its way along the crowded street.  Sebastian pulled the fur rug a little higher over his knees and thought how wonderful it was to be rich.  And to think that, if it weren't for his father's idiotic ideas ...

      'Funny old Bruno!' his uncle remarked in a tone of amused condescension.  'For some reason he always reminds me of those preposterous Anglo-Saxon saints.  St Willibald and St Wunnibald, St Winna and St Frideswide ...'

      He made the names sound so ludicrous that Sebastian burst out laughing.

      'But a thoroughly kind, gentle creature,' Eustace went on.  'And considering he's one of the Good, not too much of a bore.'

      Interrupting himself, he touched Sebastian's arm and pointed through the left-hand window.

      'The Medici tombs are up there,' he said.  'Talk about the Sublime!  I can't look at them now.  Donatello's my limit these days.  But of course it's quite true: the damned things are the greatest sculptures in the world.  And that's Rossi's, the tailor,' he went on without transition, pointing again.  'Order decent English cloth, and the man will make you as good a suit as you can get in Savile Row, and at half the price.  We'll take time off from our sight-seeing to get you measured for those evening clothes.'

      Scarcely daring to believe his ears, Sebastian looked at him questioningly.

      'You mean ...?  Oh, thank you, Uncle Eustace,' he cried, as the other smiled and nodded.

      Eustace looked at the boy and saw, by the transient light of a street lamp, that his face had reddened and his eyes were bright.  Touched, he patted him on the knee.

      'No need for gratitude,' he said.  'If I were in Who's Who, which I'm not, you'd see that my chief recreation was "Annoying my brother".'

      The laughed together, conspirators in mischief.

      'And now,' cried Eustace, 'bend down and take a squint up through this window at the second-largest egg ever laid.'

      Sebastian did as he was told, and saw great cliffs of marble and, above the cliffs, an enormous dome floating up into the sky and darkening, as it rose, from the faint lamplight that still lingered about its base into a mystery more impenetrable than the night itself.  It was the transfiguration, not of a little squalor this time, but of a vast harmonious magnificence.

      'Light first,' said Eustace, pointing a bloated finger that travelled upwards as he spoke, 'then darkness.'

      Sebastian looked at him in astonishment.  He too...?

      'It's like a looking-glass equation,' the other went on.  'You start with the values of x and y, and you end with an unknown quantity.  The most romantic kind of lighting.'

      'I didn't know anyone else had noticed it,' said Sebastian.

      'Optimist!'  Eustace smiled indulgently.  What fun to be young, to be convinced, each time one lost a virginity, that this sort of thing had never happened before!  'The Victorian etchers and engravers hardly noticed anything else.  All their romantic Matterhorns and ruined castles are darker on top than at the bottom.  Which doesn't make the looking-glass equation less amusing.'

      There was a little silence.  The car turned out of the cathedral square into a street even narrower and more crowded than the one by which they had come from the station.

      'I wrote a poem about it,' Sebastian confided at last.

      'Not one of those you sent me for Christmas?'

      The boy shook his head.

      'I didn't think you'd like it.  It's a bit ... well, I don't know ... a bit religious; that is, if it was about religion, which it isn't.  But seeing you've noticed it too ... I mean, the way things are lighted from the bottom ...'

      'Can you recite it?'

      Torn between shyness and a desire to show off, Sebastian hummed and hawed, then finally said yes.

 

                                             Little squalor! transfigured into Ely,

                                             Into Bourges, into the beauty of holiness ...

 

      Leaning back in his corner, Eustace listened to the still almost childish voice and, as the lights came and went, scanned the averted face as it gazed with angelic gravity, wide-eyed, into the darkness.  Yes, there was talent there all right.  But what touched him so profoundly, what moved him almost to tears, was the wholeheartedness, the guileless good faith, the essential purity.  Purity, he insisted - even though one couldn't really say what the word meant, or even justify its use.  For obviously the boy was obsessed with sex - certainly masturbated - probably had affairs, homosexual or otherwise.  And yet there was a purity there, a real purity.

      The recitation came to an end, there was a long silence - so long, indeed, that Sebastian began to wonder uneasily if his little squalor were really as good as he believed.  Uncle Eustace had taste; and if he thought it was no good, then ... But the other spoke at last.

      'That was very beautiful,' he said quietly.  The words referred less to the poem than to what he himself had felt while listening to it - this unexpected uprush of high emotion and protective tenderness.  'Very beautiful.'  He laid his hand affectionately on Sebastian's knee.  Then, after a pause, he added, smiling, 'I used to write verses when I was a few years older than you are now.'

      'You did?'

      'Dowson and water,' said Eustace, shaking his head.  'With occasional flashes of Wilde and cat-piss.'  He laughed.  Enough of sentimentality.  'I don't rise above limericks nowadays,' he went on.  'But as Wordsworth so justly remarked,

 

                                             Scorn not the Limerick, Critic, you have frowned,

                                             Mindless of its just honour; with this key

                                             Shakespeare unlocked his pants; th'obscenity

                                             Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ...

 

And so on - until, of course, in Milton's hand

 

                                             The Thing became a strumpet; whence he blew

                                             Soul-animating strains - alas, too few!

 

After which I really must tell you about the "Young Girl of Spokane".'

      He did.  The car, meanwhile, had emerged into a larger darkness.  Lights gleamed on water; a bridge was crossed, and with gathering speed they rolled for a minute or two along a wide embankment.  Then their road swung to the right, grew tortuous, began to climb.  Through his window, Sebastian looked on fascinated, as the headlamps created out of nothingness a confluent series of narrow universes.  A gaunt grey goat standing up on its hind legs to munch the wistaria buds that hung across an expanse of peeling stucco; a priest in black skirts pushing a lady's bicycle up the steep hill; a great ilex tree, writhing like a wooden octopus; and at the foot of a flight of steps two startled lovers, breaking apart from their embrace and turning with a flash of eyes and laughing teeth towards the light which had evoked and now, passing, abolished them.

      A moment later the car drew up before tall iron gates.  Musically, but imperiously, it hooted for admittance, and a little old man came running out of the shadows to undo the bolts.

      The drive wound its way under tall cypresses; a bed of blue hyacinths appeared and vanished, then a little fountain in a shell-shaped niche.  As the Isotta made its final turn, the headlights called into existence half a dozen weathered nymphs, naked on pedestals, then came to rest, as though this were the final, the all-explaining revelation, on an orange tree growing in a very large earthenware pot.

      'Here we are,' said Eustace; and at the same moment a butler in a white jacket opened the door and deferentially inclined his head.

      They entered a high square vestibule, pillared and barrel-vaulted like a church.  The butler took their things, and Eustace led the way up the stone staircase.

      'Here's your room,' he said, throwing open a door.  'Don't be alarmed by that,' he added, pointing at the enormous canopied bed.  'It's only the carving that's antique.  The mattress is contemporary.  And your bathroom is in there.'  He waved his hand towards another door.  'Do you think you can get yourself washed and brushed in five minutes?'

      Sebastian was sure he could; and five minutes later he was downstairs again in the hall.  A half-opened door invited; he entered and found himself in a drawing-room.  A faint spicy perfume of potpourri haunted the air, and the lamps that hung from the coffered ceiling were reflected, in innumerable curving high-lights, from surfaces of porcelain and silver, turned wood and sculptured bronze and ivory.  Mountains of glazed chintz, enormous armchairs and sofas alternated with the elaborately carved and gaily painted discomfort of eighteenth-century Venetian furniture.  Underfoot, a yellow Chinese carpet lay like an expanse of soft and ancient sunshine.  On the walls, the picture-frames were doorways leading into other worlds.  The first he looked into was a strange, bright universe, intensely alive and yet static, definitive and serene - a world in which everything was made of innumerable dots of pure colour, and the men wore stovepipe hats and the women's bustles were monumental like Egyptian granite.  And next to it was the opening into another, a Venetian world, where a party of ladies in a gondola trailed their pink satins against the complementary jade of the Grand Canal.  And here, over the mantelpiece, in a maniac's universe of candlelight and brown bituminous shadows, a company of elongated monks sat feasting under the vaults of a cathedral ...

      His uncle's voice brought him back to reality.

      'Ah, you've discovered my little Magnasco.'

      Eustace came and took his arm.

      'Amusing isn't it?'

      But before the boy could answer, he began to speak again.

      'And now you must come and look at what I did yesterday,' he went on, drawing him away.  'There!'

      He pointed.  In an arched recess stood a black papier-mâché table, painted with scrolls of gilding and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.  Upon it stood a bouquet of wax flowers under a glass bell and a tall cylindrical case of stuffed humming-birds.  On the wall, between and a little above these two objects, hung a small fourteenth-century painting of young men with bobbed hair and codpieces, shooting arrows at a St Sebastian attached to a flowering apple tree.

      'Your namesake,' Eustace said.  'But the real point is that at last one's discovered a way of using minor primitives.  Obviously, it's ridiculous to treat this sort of rubbish as though it were serious art.  But on the other hand, it's charming rubbish; one doesn't want to waste it.  Well, here's the way out of the dilemma.  Mix with Mid-Victorian!  It makes the most delicious salad.  And now, my dear, let's go and eat.  The dining-room's over here, through the library.'

      They moved away.  From behind the door at the other end of the long tunnel of books came the sound of a harsh cracked voice and the clinking of silver and porcelain.

      'Well, here we are at last!' Eustace cried gaily as he opened.

      Dressed in a steel-blue evening gown, with seven rows of pearls about the mummied neck, the Queen Mother turned sightlessly in their direction.

      'You know my habits, Eustace,' she said in her ghost of a sergeant-major's voice.  'Never wait dinner for anyone after seven forty-five.  Not for anyone,' she repeated emphatically.  'We've almost finished.'

      'Some more fruit?' said Mrs Thwale softly, putting into the old woman's hand a fork, on which was impaled a quarter of a pear.  Mrs Gamble took a bite.

      'Where's the boy?' she asked with her mouth full.

      'Here.'

      Sebastian was pushed forward, and gingerly shook the jewelled claw which was held out for him to take.

      'I knew your mother,' Mrs Gamble rasped.  'Pretty, very pretty.  But badly brought up.  I hope you've been brought up better.'  She finished off the rest of her pear and put down the fork.

      Sebastian blushed crimson, and made a deprecating, inarticulate noise to the effect that he hoped so.

      'Speak up,' said Mrs Gamble sharply.  'If there's one thing I can't tolerate, it's mumbling.  All young people mumble nowadays.  Veronica?'

      'Yes, Mrs Gamble?'

      'Oh, by the way, boy, this is Mrs Thwale.'

      Sebastian advanced into an aura of perfume and, raising abashed eyes from the folds of a dove-grey dress, almost cried in amazement at what he saw.  That oval face in its setting of smooth dark hair - it was Mary Esdaile's.

      'How do you do, Sebastian?'

      Oddly enough, he had never, with his inward ear, clearly heard the sound of Mary's voice.  But it was obvious, now, that these were its very tones - rather low, but clear and exquisitely distinct.

      'How do you do?'

      They shook hands.

      It was only in the eyes that he found a difference between his fancy and its incarnation.  The Mary Esdaile of his daydreams had always dropped her eyes when he looked at her.  And how unwaveringly he was able to look in his dreams, how firmly and commandingly!  Like his father.  But this was no dream, but reality.  And in reality he was still as shy as ever, and those dark eyes were now fixed upon him with a steady and slightly ironic scrutiny, which he found intensely embarrassing.  His glance faltered, and at last flinched away.

      ''You know how to speak the king's English,' Veronica,' Mrs Gamble creaked on.  'Give him a few lessons while he's here.'

      'Nothing would give me greater pleasure,' said Veronica Thwale, as though she were reading from a book of Victorian etiquette.  She raised her eyes once again to Sebastian's face, the corners of her beautifully sculptured mouth quivered into a tiny smile.  Then, turning away, she busied herself with peeling the rest of Mrs Gamble's pear.

      'Let the poor boy come and eat,' called Eustace, who had sat down and was already half-way through his soup.  Thankfully, Sebastian moved away to the place assigned to him.

      'I ought to have warned you about our Queen Mother,' Eustace went on jocularly.  'Her bite is worse even than her bark.'

      'Eustace! I never heard such impertinence!'

      'That's because you've never listened to yourself,' he answered.

      The old lady cackled appreciatively, and sank her false teeth into another piece of pear.  The juice ran down her chin and dropped into the bunch of cattleyas pinned to her corsage.

      'As for Mrs Veronica Thwale,' Eustace went on, 'I know the young lady too little to be able to offer you advice about her.  You'll have to find out for yourself when she gives you your mumbling lessons.  Do you like giving lessons, Mrs Thwale?'

      'It depends on the intelligence of the pupil,' she answered gravely.

      'And do you think that this one looks intelligent?'

      Once more Sebastian found himself compelled to flinch away from the steady scrutiny of those dark eyes.  But she was beautiful in that grey dress, and the neck was smooth like a white pillar; and the breasts were rather small.

      'Very,' said Mrs Thwale at last.  'But of course,' she added, 'where mumbling is concerned, you can never be quite certain.  Mumbling is rather special, don't you think?'

      And before Eustace could answer, she uttered her odd little snorting stertorous laugh.  For a second only; then the face resumed its grave marble serenity.  Delicately, she began to peel a tangerine.

      Mrs Gamble turned in the direction of her son-in-law.

      'Mr De Vries came to see me this afternoon.  So I know where you had lunch.'

      '"And from whom no secrets are hid,"' said Eustace.

      Mrs Thwale raised her eyelids to give him a quick glance of complicity, then looked down again at her plate.

      'A most instructive young man,' he continued.

      'I like him,' the Queen Mother pronounced emphatically.

      'And he simply adores you,' said Eustace with hardly veiled irony.  'And meanwhile, how are you getting on with your Einstein, Mrs Thwale?'

      'I do my best,' she answered without lifting her eyes.

      'I bet you do,' said Eustace in a tone of genial mischief.

      Mrs Thwale looked up; but this time there was no complicity in her glance, no hint of answering amusement - only stony coldness.  Tactfully, Eustace changed the subject.

      'I had a long talk with Laurina Acciaiuoli this afternoon,' he said, turning back to Mrs Gamble.

      'What, hasn't she passed on yet?'  The Queen Mother seemed disappointed, almost aggrieved.  'I thought the woman was so desperately ill,' she added.

      'Evidently not quite ill enough,' said Eustace.

      'Sometimes they drag on for years,' rasped Mrs Gamble.  'Your mother passed on some time ago, didn't she, Sebastian?'

      'In 1921.'

      'What?' she cried.  'What?  You're mumbling again.'

      'In 1921,' he repeated more loudly.

      'Don't yell like that,' barked back the ghostly sergeant-major.  'I'm not deaf.  Have you had any communications with her since then?'

      'Communications?' he repeated in bewilderment.

      'Through a medium,' Eustace explained.

      'Oh, I see.  No; no, I haven't.'

      'Not because of religious objections, I hope?'

      Eustace laughed aloud.

      'What a preposterous question!'

      'Not preposterous at all,' the Queen Mother snapped back.  'Seeing that my own granddaughter has religious objections.  Mainly due to your father, Veronica,' she added.

      Mrs Thwale apologized for the Canon.

      'No fault of yours,' said the Queen Mother generously.  'But Daisy's an idiot to listen to him.  There she sits with a husband and a child on the other side, and does nothing whatever about it.  It makes me sick.'

      She pushed back her chair and stood up.

      'We're going upstairs now,' she said.  'Goodnight,' Eustace.

      Since she couldn't see him, Eustace didn't bother to stand up.

      'Goodnight, Queen Mother,' he called back to her.

      'And now, boy, you're to have a mumbling lesson tomorrow, do you understand?  Now, Veronica.'