Chapter Eighteen

 

It was only a little after seven when Sebastian came down next morning for another solitary stroll in the garden - another wandering through Lycidas in the direction of his own as yet unnamed and unwritten poem.  It would begin, he had decided, with the Venus of the balustrade - shaped by a mind out of the shapelessness of stone.  Order born out of chaos that itself was composed of innumerable lesser orders.  And the statue would be the emblem of an individual life in its possible and ideal excellence, just as the garden as a whole would stand for the ideally excellent life of a society.  From the ideally excellent he would pass to the actualities of ugliness, cruelty, ineptitude, death.  After which, in a third part, ecstasy and intelligence would build the bridges leading from the actual to the ideal - from the blue tart and his father's severities to Mrs Thwale and Mary Esdaile, from the corpse in the lavatory to Theocritus and Marvell.

      Precisely how all this would be put across without becoming a bore he wouldn't know until he had actually got to work among the words in which it was to be expressed.  Hitherto the only words that had come to him were connected with poor old Uncle Eustace and last night's séance, and would take their place somewhere in the second part.

      'This Thing was once a man,' he repeated to himself, as he walked up and down the terrace in the early sunshine.

 

                                             This Thing was once a man -

                                             Take it for all in all,

                                             Like the old piano ...

 

No, no, that was wrong: make it 'old Bechstein'.

 

                                             Like the old Bechstein, auctioned off for nothing;

                                             And men in aprons come for it with a van,

                                             Shuffling across the hall.

 

Of the lines that followed, he still felt a bit uncertain.

 

                                             But somebody in the empty drawing-room,

                                             Strumming the non-existent keys ...

 

He shook his head.  'Non-existent' was journalistic.  The word to aim at was 'absence'.  'Strumming the absence off its keys.'  Or, better perhaps, 'strumming an absence of departed keys.'

 

                                             But somebody in the empty drawing-room,

                                             Strumming an absence of departed keys,

                                             Still plays the old Chaconne and Für Elise

                                             And Yes, sir, she's my baby, yes, sir, she's

                                             My baby, yes, sir, till the crack of doom.

 

Which was certainly what it had seemed like at the séance, with that idiotic squeak quoting Uncle Eustace's smallest jokes, and even misquoting, as Sebastian had finally realized, his own little effort about Degas.  But meanwhile, there was that 'crack of doom' to be considered.  Did circumstances justify the cliché?  Or mightn't it be better to protract the sentence a little to lead it on, winding and serpentine, through 'tomb', perhaps, or alternatively through an interrogatory 'whom?' into further recesses of the subject?

      Sebastian was still debating the question, when something happened to interrupt the flow of his thoughts.  The small girl he had seen that dreadful morning in the hall suddenly appeared at the top of the steps carrying, not a baby this time or a chicken, but a large basket.  Startled by his unexpected presence, she halted and looked at him for a few seconds with an expression of uncertainty, almost of fear.  Sebastian gave her a smile.  Reassured by this display of benevolence on the part of one of the terrifying signori, the little girl smiled back and, walking in an excess of deference on the very tips of her clumsy boots, crossed the terrace and began to weed the flower-bed which ran in a narrow strip of colour and perfume at the foot of the villa's long façade.

      Sebastian continued his promenading.  But the presence of the child was an insurmountable obstacle to further composition.  It was not that she made any noise, or indulged in any violence of movement.  No, the trouble lay deeper.  What distracted him was the fact that she was working messily in the earth, while he strolled up and down with his hands in his pockets.  The proximity of the poor always made him feel uncomfortable, and to discomfort was added, when they worked and he apparently did nothing, a sense of shame.  These were feelings which ought, he supposed, to have made him want to follow in his father's footsteps.  But politics always seemed so futile and unimportant.  His ordinary reaction from the shame and discomfort was a flight from the situation which had occasioned them.  And today the situation was even worse than usual.  For the worker was a child, who ought to have been playing; and the poverty, contrasted with this surrounding magnificence, seemed peculiarly outrageous.  Sebastian glanced at his watch and, in case she might be looking at him (which she wasn't), overacted the part of one who suddenly realizes that he is late for an important business appointment and hurried away.  Half-way to the front door he suddenly remembered that he actually had a reason to hurry.  He was going down into the town after lunch.  Nominally to do some sightseeing.  But really, he had already decided to get himself measured for his evening clothes - that was to say, if he could first sell the Degas.

      He ran up to his room and came down again with his dispatch-case.  The drawing-room was empty, and the old persistent whiff of Uncle Eustace's cigars had so far faded that it smelt only of potpourri.  A long pencil of sunlight crossed the room and, as though with some mysterious purpose, lit up the three pelicans in the background of Piero's picture.

      The drawings were lying on the marble-topped table that stood in the embrasure of the central window.  Sebastian walked over, unfolded the brown paper, and from between the two protecting sheets of cardboard withdrew his legacy.  Two buttocks and a pendulous bub.  He placed the drawing in his dispatch-case and closed the lid.  Then, very carefully, he folded the paper as it had been before.  Degas and dinner jacket - now that poor old Uncle Eustace was dead, they were nobody's business but his own.

      A thin little noise of treble singing made him start.  He looked out through the open window.  There, almost immediately below him, squatted the child from whom he had just fled.  Her small grubby hands moved delicately among the hyacinths, pulling up here a groundsel, there a couple of blades of grass, so that all might be perfect and in order for the signori.

      'Gobbo rotondo,' she sang to herself, 'che fai in questo mondo?'

      Then, becoming somehow aware of the alien presence above her, she looked up and saw Sebastian.  An expression of guilt and terror came into her eyes; the almost colourless cheeks flushed crimson.

      'Scusi, signore,' she muttered in a trembling voice.  'Scusi.'

      Sebastian, who was almost as much embarrassed as the little girl, withdrew his head abruptly and, moving away from the window, bent down to pick up his dispatch-case.

      'What are you doing?' a low clear voice enquired behind him.

      He started and turned.  But without waiting for his answer, Mrs Thwale had gone over to the window and was looking out.

      'Cosa fai?' she asked.

      From the terrace outside, the frightened voice made some incomprehensible answer.

      Mrs Thwale shrugged her shoulders and came back into the room.

      'What were you talking to the child about?'

      'I wasn't,' Sebastian stammered.  'I was just ... well, she was singing.'

      'So you listened, and now you're going to sit down and do a slight Wordsworth about it?'

      He laughed uncomfortably.

      'And those are your manuscripts, I suppose?'

      She indicated the dispatch-case.

      Only too grateful for the suggestion, Sebastian nodded.

      'Well, put them down and come out into the garden.'

      Obediently he followed her across the hall and through the front door.

      'And how did you enjoy the séance?' she asked, as he came up with her on the terrace.

      'Oh, it was interesting,' he answered non-committally.

      'Interesting?' she repeated.  'Only that?'

      Sebastian blushed and averted his eyes.  She was giving him an opportunity to say something about what had happened last night - to ask her what it had meant, to tell her about Mary Esdaile.  But the words wouldn't come.  They simply wouldn't come.

      Mrs Thwale glanced at the red, agonized face beside her, and almost laughed aloud.  What exquisitely comic situations could arise with a person too timid to speak!  The most outrageous actions, and not a word uttered, no reference ever made to them.  Officially nothing would have happened; for there wouldn't be any communiqué.  But actually, actually ...

      'What a Punch and Judy show!' she said at last, breaking the long silence.

      'You mean the séance?'

      Mrs Thwale nodded.

      'All the same, it seemed genuine, didn't it?  I mean, sometimes,' Sebastian added, hedging a little for fear of finding himself compelled to defend a too explicit opinion.

      But the precaution was unnecessary.

      'Perfectly genuine,' she agreed.  'Death cocking snooks at reverence and piety in exactly the same way as life does.'

      They had reached the head of the steps, and she halted to look down, between the cypresses, at the roofs of Florence.  Shamelessness at the core; but on the surface Brunelleschi and Michelangelo, good manners and Lanvin clothes, art and science and religion.  And the charm of life consisted precisely in the inconsistency between essence and appearance, and the art of living in a delicate acrobacy of sauts périlleux from one world to the other, in a prestidigitation that could always discover the obscenity of rabbits at the bottom of even the glossiest high hat and, conversely, the elegant decency of a hat to conceal even the most pregnant and lascivious of rodents.

      'Well, we can't stand here for ever,' Mrs Thwale said at last.  They moved on.  As though casually and unreflectingly, she laid a hand on Sebastian's shoulder.