Chapter Sixteen

 

'Well,' said Mrs Thwale, as Foxy's barking and the thin croak of the Queen Mother's endearments died away into the distance, 'now you're my pupil.  Perhaps I ought to have provided myself with a birch.  Do you get birched at school?'

      Sebastian shook his head.

      'No?  What a pity!  I've always thought that birching had considerable charm.'

      She looked at him with a faint smile; then turned away to sip her coffee.  There was a long silence.

      Sebastian raised his eyes and surreptitiously studied her averted face - the face of Mary Esdaile come to life, the face of the woman with whom, in imagination, he had explored what he believed to be the uttermost reaches of sensuality.  And here she sat, decorously in black among all the coloured richness of the room, utterly unaware of the part she had played in his private universe, the things she had done and submitted to.  Messalina inside his skull, Lucretia inside hers.  But of course she wasn't Lucretia, not with those eyes of hers, not with that way of silently impregnating the space around her with her physically feminine presence.

      Mrs Thwale looked up.

      'Obviously,' she said, 'the first thing is to discover why you mumble, when it's just as easy to speak clearly and coherently.  Why do you?'

      'Well, if one feels shy ...'

      'If one feels shy,' said Mrs Thwale, 'the best thing to do, I've always found, is to imagine how the person you're shy of would look if he or she were squatting in a hip bath.'

      Sebastian giggled.

      'It's almost infallible,' she continued.  'The old and ugly ones look so grotesque that you can hardly keep a straight face.  Whereas the young, good-looking ones look so attractive that you lose all alarm and even all respect.  Now, shut your eyes and try it.'

      Sebastian glanced at her, and the blood rushed up into his face.

      'You mean ...?'

      He found himself unable to finish the question.

      'I have no objection,' said Mrs Thwale composedly.

      He shut his eyes; and there was Mary Esdaile in black lace, Mary Esdaile on a pink divan in the attitude of Boucher's Petite Morphil.

      'Well, do you feel less shy now?' she asked when he had reopened his eyes.

      Sebastian looked at her for a moment; then, overwhelmed by embarrassment at the thought that she now knew something of what was happening in the world of his phantasy, emphatically shook his head.

      'You don't?' said Mrs Thwale, and the low voice modulated upwards on a rising coo.  'That's bad.  It almost looks as if yours were a case of surgery.  S-surgery,' she repeated, and took another sip of coffee, looking at him all the time with bright ironic eyes over the top of her cup.

      'However,' she added, as she wiped her mouth, 'it may still be possible to achieve a cure by psychological methods.  There's the technique of outrage, for example.'

      Sebastian repeated the words on a tone of enquiry.

      'Well, you know what an outrage is,' she said.  'A non sequitur in action.  For example, rewarding a child for being good by giving it a sound whipping and sending it to bed.  Or better still, whipping it and sending it to bed for no reason at all.  That's the perfect outrage - completely disinterested, absolutely platonic.'

      She smiled to herself.  Those last words were the ones her father liked to use when he talked about Christian charity.  That damned charity, with which he had poisoned all her childhood and adolescence.  Surrounding himself, in its name, with a rabble of the unfortunate and the worthy.  Turning what should have been their home into a mere waiting-room and public corridor.  Bringing her up among the squalors and uglinesses of poverty.  Blackmailing her into a service she didn't want to give.  Forcing her to spend her leisure with dull and ignorant strangers, when all she desired was to be alone.  And as though to add insult to injury, he made her recite I Corinthians xiii every Sunday evening.

      'Absolutely platonic,' Mrs Thwale repeated, looking up again at Sebastian.  'Like Dante and Beatrice.'  And after a second or two she added pensively: 'One day that pretty face of yours is going to get you into trouble.'

      Sebastian laughed uncomfortably, and tried to change the subject.

      'But where does shyness come in?' he asked.

      'It doesn't,' she answered.  'It goes out.  The outrage drives it out.'

      'What outrage?'

      'Why, the outrage you commit when you simply don't know what else to do or say.'

      'But how can you?  I mean, if you're shy?'

      'You've got to do violence to yourself.  As if you were committing suicide.  Put the revolver to your temple.  Five more seconds, and the world will come to an end.  Meanwhile, nothing matters.'

      'But it does matter,' Sebastian objected.  'And the world doesn't really come to an end.'

      'No; but it's really transformed.  The outrage creates an entirely novel situation.'

      'An unpleasant situation.'

      'So unpleasant,' Mrs Thwale agreed, ' that you can't think of being shy any more.'

      Sebastian looked doubtful.

      'You don't believe me?' she said.  'Well, we'll stage a rehearsal.  I'm Mrs Gamble asking you to tell me how you write a poem.'

      'God, wasn't that ghastly!' cried Sebastian.

      'And why was it ghastly?  Because you didn't have the sense to see that it was the sort of question that couldn't be answered except by an outrage.  It made me laugh to hear you humming and hawing over psychological subtleties which the old lady couldn't possibly have understood even if she had wanted to.  Which, of course, she didn't.'

      'But what else could I have done?  Seeing that she wanted to know how I wrote.'

      'I'll tell you,' said Mrs Thwale.  'You should have spoken for at least five seconds; then very slowly and distinctly you should have said: "Madame, I do it with an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper."  Now, say it.'

      'No, I can't ... really ...'

      He gave her one of his appealing irresistible smiles.  But, instead of melting, Mrs Thwale contemptuously shook her head.

      'No, no,' she said, 'I'm not a bit fond of children.  And as for you, you ought to be ashamed of playing those tricks.  At seventeen a man ought to be begetting babies, not trying to imitate them.'

      Sebastian blushed and uttered a nervous laugh.  Her frankness had been horribly painful; and yet with a part of his being he was glad that she should have spoken as she did, glad that she didn't want, like all the rest, to treat him as a child.

      'And now,' Mrs Thwale went on, 'this time you'll say it - do you understand?'

      The tone was so coolly imperious that Sebastian obeyed without further protest or demur.

      'Madame, I do it with an indelible pencil,' he began.

      'That's not an outrage,' said Mrs Thwale.  'That's a bleat.'

      'I do it with an indelible pencil,' he repeated more loudly.

      'Fortissimo!'

      '... With an indelible pencil on a roll of toilet paper....'

      Mrs Thwale clapped her hands.

      'Excellent!'

      She uttered a delicate grunt of laughter.  More boisterously, Sebastian joined in.

      'And now,' she went on, 'I ought to box your ears.  Hard, so that it hurts.  And you'll be so startled and angry that you'll shout, "You bloody old bitch," or words to that effect.  And then the fun will begin.  I'll start screeching like a macaw, and you'll start ...'

      The door of the drawing-room was thrown open.

      'Il Signor De Vries,' announced the footman.

      Mrs Thwale broke off in the middle of her sentence and instantaneously readjusted her expression.  It was a grave madonna who faced the new arrival as he hurried across the room towards her.

      'I was out all morning,' said Paul De Vries, as he took her extended hand.  'Didn't get your phone message till I came back to the hotel after lunch.  What a shocking piece of news!'

      'Shocking,' Mrs Thwale repeated, nodding her head.  'By the way,' she added, 'this is poor Mrs Barnack's nephew, Sebastian.'

      'This must be a dreadful blow to you,' said De Vries as they shook hands.

      Sebastian nodded and, feeling rather hypocritical, mumbled that it was.

      'Dreadful, dreadful,' the other repeated.  'But of course one must never forget that even death has its values.'

      He turned back to Mrs Thwale.

      'I came up here to see if there was anything I could do to help you.'

      'That was very kind of you, Paul.'

      She lifted her eyelids and gave him an intent, significant look; the unparted lips trembled into a faint smile.  Then she looked down again at the white hands lying folded in her lap.

      Paul De Vries' face lit up with pleasure and suddenly, in a flash of insight, Sebastian perceived that the fellow was in love with her, and that she knew it and permitted it.

      He was overcome with a fury of jealousy, jealousy all the more painful for knowing itself futile, all the more violent because he was too young to be able to avow it without making a fool of himself.  If he told her what he felt, she would simply laugh at him.  It would be another of his humiliations.

      'I think I ought to go,' he muttered, and began to move towards the door.

      'You're not running away, are you?' said Mrs Thwale.

      Sebastian halted and looked round.  Her eyes were fixed upon him.  He flinched away from their dark enigmatic regard.

      'I've got to ... to write some letters,' he invented; and, turning, he hurried out of the room.

      'Do you see that?' said Mrs Thwale as the door closed.  'The poor boy's jealous of you.'

      'Jealous?' the young man repeated in a tone of incredulous astonishment.

      He hadn't noticed anything.  But then, of course, he seldom did notice things.  It was a fact about himself which he knew and was even rather proud of.  When one's mind is busy with really important, exciting ideas, one can't be bothered with the trivial little events of daily life.

      'Well, I suppose you're right,' he said with a smile.  '"The desire of the moth for the star."  It's probably very good for the boy,' he added in the tone of a wise, benevolent humanist.  'Hopeless passions are part of a liberal education.  That's the way adolescents learn how to sublimate sex.'

      'Do they?' said Mrs Thwale with a seriousness so absolute that a more perspicacious man would have divined the underlying irony.

      But Paul De Vries only nodded emphatically.

      'By discovering the values of romantic love,' he said.  'That's how they achieve sublimation.  Havelock Ellis has some beautiful things to say about it in one of his ...'

      Becoming suddenly aware that this wasn't at all what he really wanted to talk to her about, he broke off.

      'Damn Havelock Ellis!' he said; and there was a long silence.

      Mrs Thwale sat quite still, waiting for what she knew was going to happen next.  And, sure enough, he suddenly sat down on the sofa beside her, took her hand and squeezed it between both of his.

      She raised her eyes, and Paul De Vries gazed back at her with a tremulous little smile of the most intense yearning.  But Mrs Thwale's face remained unalterably grave, as though love were too serious a thing to be smiled over.  With those nostrils of his, she was thinking, he looked like one of those abjectly sentimental dogs.  Ludicrous, but at the same time a bit distasteful.  But then it was always a question of choosing between two evils.  She looked down again.

      The young man raised her unresponsive fingers to his lips and kissed them with a kind of religious reverence.  But her perfume had a kind of sultry and oppressive sweetness; her neck was flawlessly round and smooth and white; under the stretched black silk he could imagine the firmness of the small breasts.  Yearning came sharply into focus as desire.  He whispered her name and, abruptly, rather clumsily, put one arm round her shoulders and with the other hand raised her face towards his own.  But before he could kiss her Mrs Thwale had drawn away from him.

      'No, Paul.  Please.'

      'But, my darling ...'

      He caught hold of her hand and tried once again to draw her towards him.  She stiffened and shook her head.

      'I said no, Paul.'

      Her tone was peremptory: he desisted.

      'Don't you care for me at all, Veronica?' he said plaintively.

      Mrs Thwale looked at him in silence, and for a moment she was tempted to answer the fool as he deserved.  But that would be silly.  Gravely, she nodded.

      'I'm very fond of you, Paul.  But you seem to forget,' she added with a sudden smile and change of tone, 'that I'm what's known as a respectable woman.  Sometimes I wish I weren't.  But there it is!'

      Yes, there it was - an insurmountable obstacle in the way of modified celibacy.  And meanwhile he loved her as he had never loved anyone before.  Loved uncontrollably, beyond reason, to the verge of insanity.  Loved to the point of being haunted by the thought of her, of being possessed by the lovely demon of her desirableness.

      The small inert hand which he had been holding came suddenly to life and was withdrawn.

      'Besides,' she went on gravely, 'we're forgetting poor Mr Barnack.'

      'Damn Mr Barnack!' he couldn't help snapping.

      'Paul!' she protested, and her face took on an expression of distress.  'Really ...'

      'I'm sorry,' he said, between his teeth.

      Elbows on knees, head between hands, he stared unseeingly at the patch of Chinese carpet between his feet.  He was thinking, resentfully, how the demon would break in upon him while he was reading.  There was no preservative or exorcism; even the most excitingly new and important books were powerless against the obsession.  Instead of quantum mechanics, instead of the individuation field, it would suddenly be the pale oval of her face that filled his mind, it would be her voice, and the way she looked at you, and her perfume, and the white roundness of her neck and arms.  And yet he had always sworn to himself that he would never get married, that he'd give all his time and thought and energies to this great work of his, to the bridge-building which was so obviously and providentially his vocation.

      All at once he felt the touch of her hand on his hair and, looking up, found her smiling at him, almost tenderly.

      'You mustn't be sad, Paul.'

      He shook his head.

      'Sad, and mad, and probably bad as well.'

      'No, don't say that,' she said, and with a quick movement she laid her fingers lightly over his mouth.  'Not bad, Paul; never bad.'

      He caught her hand and covered it with kisses.  Unprotestingly, she abandoned it for a few seconds to his passion, then gently took it back.

      'And now,' she said, 'I want to hear all about your visit to that man you were telling me about yesterday.'

      His face brightened.

      'You mean Loria?'

      She nodded.

      'Oh, that was really exciting,' said Paul De Vries.  'He's the man who's been carrying on Peano's work in mathematical logic.'

      'Is he as good as Russell?' asked Mrs Thwale, who recalled an earlier conversation on the same subject.

      'That's just the question I've been asking myself,' the young man cried delightedly.

      'Great minds think alike,' said Mrs Thwale.

      Smiling an enchantingly playful smile, she rapped with her knuckles first on her own forehead, then on his.

      'And now I want to hear about your exciting Professor Loria.'