Op. 10
AN INTERVIEW REVIEWED
OR
MUSIC IN THE STUDY
Long Prose
Copyright © 2014 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
Chapters 1-10
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CHAPTER ONE
After what
seemed an eternity the taxi turned into
Picking up his attaché case, he stood for a
moment seemingly undecided what to do.
There was still time for him to turn back, resign from the magazine, and
have done with this sort of apprehension once and for all! What rotten luck that Neil Wilder had
suddenly gone down with influenza and been obliged to withdraw from his
professional commitments all week! How
disconcerting to be informed by the editor that, other correspondents being
ill, on holiday, or otherwise engaged, he would have to deputize for the sick
man and interview the composer instead!
As if he had nothing better to do than interview someone whose music he
had little knowledge or understanding of, never mind inclination towards. Really, things were becoming more than a
trifle farcical at the offices of 'Arts Monthly' these
days!
He pushed open the plain metal gate and
slowly walked up the gravel path towards his professional destiny. He didn't have the courage to back out of the
assignment, after all. It would only
further complicate matters to find oneself being pompously lectured at by a
cunning Nicholas Webb and induced to retract one's resignation because, in his
editorial estimation, the magazine couldn't afford to lose such a talented
young correspondent at such an inconvenient time, since people like Keating
weren't easy to find, etc. Besides, what
would he do if he didn't slave for Webb five days a week? What else could he do?
He stood in front of the front door and,
with stoical resignation to his fate, pressed its bell a couple of times. Almost immediately, a loud bark issued from
somewhere deep inside the interior of the house, followed by a dutiful
scampering of paws, as a large dog bounded towards the door and, drawing-up
just short of a head-on collision with it, began to bark on a still fiercer
note, until the sharp sound of a woman's voice served to create a temporary
lull in its aggression. "Be quiet,
Ludwig!" the woman shouted again, as the dog, a golden labrador
(and not a rottweiler or pit bull terrier, as Keating had at first feared),
renewed its barking at sight of the caller.
She gave the brute a sharp slap on the nose and held it by the collar to
restrain its aggression. Then, turning
to her visitor, whose attention was largely focused on the over-zealous animal,
she apologized for any inconvenience.
"Oh, that's nothing!" Keating
politely assured her, smiling apprehensively in self-defence. He gripped the handle of his attaché case
more firmly and then informed her who he was and for what purpose he had come,
as previously arranged.
"Ah, do come in!" cried the
grey-haired lady, ushering him, with her free hand, into a brightly-painted,
elongated hall. "My husband has
been expecting you. What name was it
again?"
"Er, Anthony Keating."
"Right! Just wait here a moment whilst I tell him
you've arrived." She smiled
reassuringly and, dragging a reluctant Ludwig along by the collar, shut him
into an adjoining room. Then she headed
down the hallway and disappeared round a corner at the far end. Ludwig barked gruffly a few times from his
new place of confinement, but his initial aggression had considerably subsided,
and soon he grudgingly resigned himself to the presence of a stranger in the
house by growling a little for form's sake, as it were, and then relapsing into
a brooding silence.
Meanwhile Keating had taken out a small
notebook, which contained a number of hastily scribbled questions which he
intended to put to the composer in due course - assuming his illustrious quarry
would be willing to answer them, of course.
Unfortunately, they hadn't been compiled by him but by Neil Wilder and,
since he wasn't particularly familiar with Wilder's methods of conducting
interviews, he considered it worth his while to check them over once more, even
though he had already checked them over in the taxi. But before he could get beyond the fourth
question, Mrs Tonks duly reappeared in the hall to inform him that her husband
would be ready in a minute. "He's
just completing some work on the garden," she explained, as she led
Keating down the hallway and into a large room to the right, which gave on to
the back garden. Sure enough, there, no
more than thirty yards away, stood Howard Tonks with a watering can in his
hands and a bed of bright red roses directly in front of him.
"Would you like a tea or coffee while
you wait?" asked Mrs Tonks, offering her guest an armchair.
"A tea would be fine, thanks," he
replied, waiting until her plump middle-aged figure had vacated the room
before, abandoning his seat, he ventured to tiptoe towards the french
windows. He didn't want to go too close
to them in case the composer, who had his back to the house, suddenly turned
round and caught him staring through them.
But from where he stood he could just about discern the body of a
bikini-clad young woman lying on an air bed a few yards to the right of the
rose bushes. Overcoming his timidity, he
tiptoed a couple of paces closer to the windows to get a better view of her and
discovered, to his additional satisfaction, that there were in fact two young
women lying side-by-side on adjacent air beds - one in a pale-blue bikini, the
other in a pink one. He almost whistled
to himself at the sight of them, for they appeared to be highly
attractive. That, at any rate, was the
case as far as their bodies were concerned; for he couldn't, as yet, see much
of their faces. Perhaps
if he tiptoed a yard or two closer...?
But at that very moment the composer turned towards the two bikini-clad
sunbathers to his right and stared down at the nearest of them - a development
which served to freeze Keating in his spying tracks!
Slightly disappointed, he turned away from
the garden and, catching sight of a medium-sized portrait of Bela Bartók above
the mantelpiece, gazed up at it with mild curiosity. But Bartók had never been one of his
favourite composers, so he quickly lost interest in the portrait and turned
away from it in disgust. He soon
discovered, however, that there were some other portraits in the room as well -
a large one of Stravinsky on the wall opposite and, on the wall facing the
garden, two smaller portraits of what appeared to be Ives and Varèse
respectively. It was evident that Mr
Tonks liked to be surrounded by his musical precursors or heroes when he
composed. Perhaps they prevented him
from losing faith in himself, or precluded any
untoward frivolity from marring the austere atmosphere of his study? Standing in the middle of the room with the oily
gazes of these particular composers upon him wasn't exactly the most uplifting
of experiences, however, for Anthony Keating and, as though in a determined
effort to break the spell which their stern miens had momentarily imposed upon
him, he smiled to himself in seeming defiance of everything they stood for.
Taking mental leave of the portraits, he
turned his attention upon an open music score resting against the stand of a
Steinway grand piano, which stood, at that moment, with its ivory keys bathed in
bright sunlight. He stared down at it
with a slightly puzzled expression on his face, since the many lines and dots
scrawled across its cream-coloured surface presented him with one of the
strangest-looking musical hieroglyphs he had ever beheld. Should he attempt to decipher it? He bent closer to the manuscript and managed
to make out the words "Sonata in indeterminate key for solo
performer" above the first treble staff on the left-hand page, followed
immediately underneath by "At one's own pace". With mounting amusement he scanned the treble
bars of the first line, which contained a profusion of quavers, semiquavers,
and demisemiquavers, and, calling upon the remnants of his youthful education
in music, attempted to distinguish between the various notes on display
there. Tentatively he groped his way
deeper into the score, smiling to himself and, in spite of his contemptuous
attitude, almost feeling proud that he could still differentiate between
quavers and semiquavers, crotchets and minims.
But there were many notes and signs there which neither the eccentricity
of his school music teacher nor the concentricity of his private piano tutor of
several years ago had intimated the existence of, and he wondered, while
persisting in his investigations, whether he was really looking at music at
all? However, just as he was about to
extend his gratuitous curiosity to line five of the treble staff, the door
burst open and in came Mrs Tonks bearing a heavy-looking tea tray in her
hands. Startled out of
his preoccupation with the score, Keating blanched at sight of her, then
blushed when she smiled at him and apologized for her husband's delay. "Unfortunately, he's had to go upstairs
to wash and change after his gardening," she explained, placing the copiously
stocked tea tray on a small coffee table to the right of the piano. However, with nothing more to say on that
subject, she pointed to a plate of assorted biscuits and informed him that he
needn't feel obliged to eat any of them if he didn't want to, it simply being a
custom of hers to serve biscuits with tea.
Politely thanking her for her generosity,
Keating reseated himself and, when she had withdrawn again after pouring him
some Chinese tea, selected a pink-topped biscuit from the plate and devoured it
in a couple of ravenous bites. He was
really quite pleased to savour the taste of a sweet biscuit, for he hadn't
eaten one in about six years and had virtually forgotten such things still
existed. Washing it down with a mouthful
of tea, he turned towards the garden, where the mid-afternoon sun, shining high
in the right-hand pane of glass, momentarily caught his attention. Its brightness quickly dazzled him, however,
making him see sparks in the air as he averted his gaze, but it served to
remind him of the sunbathers outside and, prompted by a lustful desire to spy
on them afresh, he abandoned his armchair for the second time and, with cup in
hand, tiptoed across to the french windows again.
To his surprise he discovered that the
sunbather in the pink bikini had risen from her horizontal position and was
applying suntan lotion to her shins, massaging them slowly and steadily - first
the left and then the right. As she bent
forwards Keating noted, with especial avidity, the curvaceous outlines of her
ample breasts, snugly nestled in the cotton material supporting them. They appeared to hang loosely and to swing
gently backwards and forwards, like a pendulum, with her undulating movements. He was almost hypnotized by them. But what if she were suddenly to look up and
catch him standing there in such an uncompromisingly voyeuristic position,
teacup in hand and mouth hanging open like a dog in heat? He felt a reluctant misgiving at the thought
and would have abandoned his curiosity there and then, had not the subtle
pleasure resulting from it induced him to stay.
Lifting the china teacup to his lips, he took a few absentminded sips of
tea and continued to stare at the young woman, whose long fair hair, having adjusted
itself to her movements, was now partly obscuring his view of her breasts. But as though in compensation for this
intrusion, the other young woman suddenly raised herself from her back and
said something to her companion. Almost
immediately, she unclipped her pale-blue bikini top and exposed a pair of the
most ravishing-looking breasts Keating had ever seen! In his excitement the young correspondent
almost spilt some tea down the front of his shirt. For he had been about to take another sip of
it when the unclipping took place and had quite forgotten to adjust the angle
of his cup, which he held an inch or two in front of his quivering lips. And now he was half-hoping that the informal
striptease act wouldn't stop there; that she would remove the lower part of her
bikini as well when, to his dismay, she turned over onto her stomach and lay
with head turned towards the rose bushes, while her companion applied suntan
lotion to her back. He took another sip
of tea and had time to note the seductive contours of her cotton-covered
buttocks before a deep male voice, sounding a few yards behind him, made him
start violently awake from his self-indulgent preoccupations. Turning sharply round, he recognized the
silver-haired figure of Howard Tonks advancing towards him with outstretched
hand. He almost dropped the teacup in
his embarrassment, as the composer's gesture of introduction obliged him to
transfer it to his left hand.
"So sorry to have kept you waiting Mr
... er ... er ..."
"Keating," he obliged, blushing
to the roots of his hair. Was that irony
he saw in the man's eyes? His right hand
went limp as it encountered the firm grasp of the composer's predatory
handshake. He hardly dared look into his
face.
"The weather has been so fine recently
that I simply had to water the flowers today," Mr Tonks informed him with
an ingratiating smile.
"Yes, I was admiring the roses when
you came in here," explained Keating, who wondered whether this ruse might
not serve to justify his presence at the French windows.
The composer, having terminated his
python-like handshake, directed his attention towards the garden and commented
approvingly on the way his plants had thrived this year. Not only the roses, he
ventured to stress, but the dahlias and fuchsias as well. And with an air of satisfaction he pointed to
the respective beds in which the majority of those plants were reposing - the
dahlias to the left of the garden and the fuchsias to the right. "You like fuchsias?" he asked,
briefly turning towards the figure in profile at his side.
"Most beautiful," replied
Keating, the consciousness of renewed embarrassment endowing his response with
a degree of irrelevance which only served to embarrass him the more, insofar as
the part of the garden the fuchsias were to be found in caused one to look in
the general direction of the two young women to the right of the roses, and the
sight of them somehow implicated one in an opinion not wholly confined to
plants! The tingling sensation beneath
his skin was virtually at fever-pitch.
"Yes, I'm very fond of fuchsias," he added, automatically
stressing the noun, as though to preclude any possibility of ambiguity being
inferred from his statement. And,
resolutely, he kept his gaze riveted on the shrubs in question.
"Such charming things," opined Mr
Tonks, as his eyes came to rest on the sunbathers. "Incidentally, in case you're wondering
who those immodestly clad young females are, the one on the left is my
daughter, Rebecca, and the one on the right is a friend of hers, a fellow-student
from
"Oh, really?" exclaimed Keating,
feigning surprise as best he could. One
would have thought that he hadn't noticed them until then. His attention wavered and focused, wavered
and focused again. And the tingling
sensation beneath his skin actually reached fever-pitch.
"One can hardly blame them for taking
advantage of the weather in such an unequivocal way," remarked the
composer, smiling delicately. "Though they looked sufficiently well-tanned when they arrived
back from the South of
Anthony Keating was wondering to what
extent his red face was making him a pariah
when the composer's next words, applying to the business at-hand, quickly
cooled him down and restored it to something like its normal colour. Instantaneously the spell of fuchsias and
breasts, buttocks and roses was broken, as he returned to the sober context of
a correspondent for 'Arts Monthly' who was there to interview the world-famous
composer and conductor, Howard Tonks, on the important subject of his life and
music.
"I was quite impressed by an article
your magazine did on Berio a couple of months ago," continued Mr Tonks,
turning away from the French windows and slowly walking towards his Steinway. "One felt that you had a genuine
interest in the man."
Keating feigned a smile of gratitude on
behalf of Neil Wilder, the author of the article in question, while feeling
less than grateful for this allusion to something he hadn't even bothered to
read, let alone write. There was
certainly a genuine interest in the man as far as Wilder was concerned. But as for himself ... he hastened to change
the subject and, since Mr Tonks was standing in front of the piano, ventured to
suggest he had noted a Berio-like quality about some of the music in the score
there which, out of idle curiosity, he had taken the liberty to scrutinize, shortly after
entering the room.
"How interesting!" exclaimed Mr
Tonks, eyeing his score in a detached manner. "In point of fact, this work is a little
more complex than Berio." He sat
down on the velvet-cushioned piano stool and, positioning his fingers on the
keyboard, informed Keating that he hadn't yet completed it, there being a
number of bars in the last movement still to be composed. "But listen to this," he went on,
and immediately commenced playing the opening bars of his new piano sonata with
obvious relish.
At first Keating's reaction was one of
dismay for having blundered with his reference to Berio, made on the
spur-of-the-moment and without any genuine conviction. But as Mr Tonks proceeded with his playing,
the young correspondent's attitude became tinged with amusement until, by the
time the composer had got to the middle of the first movement, he was obliged
to grit his teeth together in an effort to prevent himself from exploding with
laughter. Really, this was becoming more
than a trifle farcical; it was positively grotesque! Where, one might wonder, was the slightest
intimation of genuine music among all this confusion of notes, this outbreak of
diabolical cacophony? And why was it
that a man who, only a short time ago, had given one the impression of being
reasonably intelligent, should suddenly seem an imbecile - worse, a lunatic -
as his fingers performed the most unbelievably strange antics on the keys? And not only his fingers but, to judge by
this performance, his elbows and arms as well!
For he had got to a section of the sonata which apparently necessitated
the simultaneous application of elbows and fingers! Keating almost bit his tongue.
"Oh, damn it!" groaned an irate
composer as the technical demands of the 'complex' work suddenly got the better
of him. "I've gone and messed it up
again!" he complained, frowning down at his fingers with a look which
might have suggested, to an impartial observer, that they alone were to blame
for the mistake.
Despite efforts to retain a respectful
silence, Keating was unable to prevent himself from sniggering slightly. Frankly, he would have been incapable of
discerning a mistake at any stage of the performance simply
because, to his mind, the whole damn thing was a mistake! It had been a mistake from the very first
note!
"You see, I'm utilizing a technique
here which requires the utmost concentration and is extremely difficult to
perfect," revealed Mr Tonks, once he had recovered his aplomb to a degree
which made it possible for him to articulate an explanation. "The chord clusters in this bar are
dependent upon the elbows of both arms as well as the fingers of both
hands, so the successful co-ordination of each is of the utmost importance in
achieving the desired effect.
Unfortunately, my left elbow struck a note adjacent to the ones
specified in the score, while the middle finger of my right hand connected with
a note reserved for the index finger," he confessed, leaning on the keys
with elbows outstretched and fingers contorted in accordance with the exacting
demands of the inner part of this particular chord cluster. He raised himself a little from the keyboard
and slumped forwards, causing the Steinway to emit a violent discord. "There!" he cried, with an
expression of unequivocal triumph on his bony face. "That's how it should have been
played. After which one proceeds to
another chord cluster formed in a similar way ..." He raised himself anew
and slumped forwards to the dictates of the next cluster of chords, which
somehow sounded even more violently discordant than the previous one.
Keating put a hand over his mouth, but the
mirth he was attempting to stifle somehow succeeded in relieving itself through
his nostrils instead. This being the
case, he took a paper tissue from one of his front pockets and pretended to be
blowing his nose. And when Mr Tonks
produced yet another violent discord, he availed himself of the cover it
afforded him to give vent to his repressed amusement in the form of a series of
low-key sniggers, which were successfully drowned by the noise coming from the
piano.
"Fortissimo!" bellowed
the composer, as he repeated the third elbow-finger chord with triumphant glee
and lent on the keys for the duration of a minim. "Undoubtedly the most difficult bar of
the entire movement!"
Keating wiped his eyes with a corner of the
small paper tissue and mumbled something about hay fever before inquiring, in a
less than respectful tone-of-voice, why it was necessary to utilize both
fingers and elbows simultaneously, since he had always been under the
impression that, with piano music, fingers were quite sufficient.
At this, Howard Tonks stared across at him
with a decidedly reproachful air, an air which seemed to imply that it should
be perfectly obvious why it was necessary, and then replied, with ill-disguised
impatience, that it permitted one to explore further afield, to push back the
boundaries of musical experience and embrace chord structures which lay beyond
the range of the fingers alone.
"And besides," he added, on the heels of a brief reflective
pause, "it makes life more interesting to have
such unprecedented technical complexities to master. That, amongst other things, is what
contemporary serious music is all about."
Having said which, he turned back to the score and continued his performance
from approximately where it had so discordantly left off.
Once more a sequence of atonal motifs
plunged Anthony Keating into making a renewed attempt to stifle the amusement
that assailed him with the onslaught of Mr Tonks' piano music, as he plied the
tissue afresh and blew his nose even more emphatically than before. And this time it wasn't just the music which
was to blame; it wasn't just the profusion of notes without melody or chords
without harmony, of phrases abruptly terminated before they could develop into
anything intelligible, or of cadences modulating to keys with which they had no
connection whatsoever and from which they acquired scarcely any musical support
- no, it wasn't just these and so many other aspects of the music which excited
his disrespect. It was also the blatant
incongruity between the composer's serious and seemingly gratified approach to
his work and the patently ludicrous nature of the work itself! If one of the most garishly painted and
bizarrely dressed circus clowns had sat down at this very piano and performed
Beethoven's Pathétique sonata without a technical blemish, the incongruity
between performance and performer wouldn't have been any greater. In fact, it would probably have been somewhat
less marked, because the music would have spoken for itself and in some degree
redeemed the ludicrous appearance of its performer. As, however, for this sonata, more pathetic
by far than anything by Beethoven, the sedate and slightly pompous appearance
of its performer in no way redeemed the ludicrous nature of the music but, on
the contrary, served rather to intensify it, making it sound more ridiculous
than it probably would have done had a clown been seated at the same piano.
Yes, there was undeniably something grossly
incongruous about the stark contrast between appearance and reality as
manifested in the person and music of Mr Howard Tonks! Could it really be true, as informative
opinion had led Keating to believe, that this man was world famous; that his
works were known and performed in every country which knew or cared anything
about serious Western music? And, if so,
how did a man like him get to be world famous anyway? Surely not on the strength of compositions
like the one he was now playing? The
contrary thought seemed too absurd to entertain, though Keating had to admit to
himself that he wasn't familiar with more than a handful of the composer's
works altogether.
He tried to recall the first occasion his
ears had witnessed the disturbing vibrations of one such work - a couple of
years ago, it might have been, when he was listening to a radio concert
featuring avant-garde music, and had heard mention of a sextet for flute,
cello, acoustic guitar, organ, french horn, and vibraphone by the 'Eminent
British composer, Howard Tonks,' prior to being condemned to twenty-five
minutes of the most unequivocal cacophony for small ensembles ever inflicted
upon him. How he had managed to
persevere with it, throughout that time, he could neither remember nor
understand. But it seemed not
improbable, in retrospect, that he must have been pretty hard-up for anything
better to do on the evening in question!
There was a sudden loud discord for two
hands alone, followed by an even louder one for both elbows and hands together,
which startled Keating out of his morose reflections and brought him back to
the problematic present.
"There!" exclaimed Mr Tonks in apparent triumph, as the
sustained notes of the final dissonance simultaneously died away. "Did you like it?"
"Quite thought-provoking,"
replied Keating, wiping his tear-drenched eyes with the remaining dry corner of
his by-now sodden tissue. But something
about the composer's reaction to this comment suggested that his manner of
answering the question hadn't been exactly what was expected, so he quickly
added: "I'm sure it would grow on one with repeated listenings."
"Indeed!" confirmed Mr Tonks,
and, evidently mollified, he turned the page of his score to the second
movement. "Would
you like to hear some more?"
"Well, quite frankly, I don't think
I've got the time to listen to that and interview you as well," replied
Keating nervously. "You see, I
really ought to be asking you questions,
in accordance with the agreed terms of our interview." He hesitated, as though undecided what to say
next, and, fearing that his negative response might not suffice to deter the
composer from pressing ahead, he reached out his hand for the attaché case,
extracted a slender battery-operated cassette recorder from its felt-lined
interior and, pushing the tea tray to one side, placed the cassette recorder on
the coffee table prior to turning it on.
Then, by way of introducing Mr Tonks to the interview via a question
designed to flatter his ego, he asked the composer when and where he was likely
to be giving a public recital of his new work once it had been completed, only
to receive the curt reply: "I haven't a frigging clue." Unfortunately, Howard Tonks' ego wasn't to be
flattered by questions relating to such relatively trivial events as public
recitals! It was only in private that he
took any pleasure in performing. And, as though to confirm this fact, his hands began to respond to
the score of the sonata's second movement. "In point of fact, I haven't written all
that many works for piano," he added, after a thoughtful pause which gave
Keating time to take out his notebook and scan the first few questions again,
"so I rarely give recitals. I did
give one at the Festival Hall last year, but that could only have been my ninth
or tenth in all. A
piano concerto incidentally."
"Yes, I know the one," lied Keating impulsively.
"Quite a success apparently."
"The thing is, I'm not a concert
pianist," revealed Mr Tonks, momentarily turning towards his young
interviewer, "so I don't make a point of performing in public. There was a time, however, when I had more
interest in becoming a concert pianist than a composer - indeed,
I was actually trained to become one.
But I subsequently lost interest in the idea and dedicated myself almost
exclusively to composition instead. I
didn't want to end-up playing Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, and other such
hackneyed composers year after year in the same old germ-ridden halls to the
same old stuck-up audiences with the same old prejudices against anything
modern. That would have proved too
demoralizing by half! Particularly
as one would have been partly, if not largely, responsible for their prejudices
in the first place!" His
fingers depressed the keys specified in the score, and another painful discord,
painlessly registered by the cassette recorder, sent its belligerent waves
crashing against Keating's sensitive eardrums.
"It's more pleasurable to play historical composers at one's
leisure," he added, once the dissonance, having been dutifully dispatched,
had begun to fade away.
"Do you play such composers these
days?" the young correspondent tentatively ventured, in an effort to
maintain the dialogue.
"Indeed I do, Mr Keating, and with
considerable pleasure." Having
smiled which, Howard Tonks nodded, as though in confirmation of his feelings
towards such composers, before asking: "Would you like to hear an
example?"
This offer struck Anthony Keating as
well-worth accepting, since he had his doubts that the man who had just
demonstrated what seemed to him a lunatic composition would also be capable of
rendering a credible interpretation of one of the representative composers of,
say, the previous century. He smiled
inwardly and bade the composer go ahead.
Turning to a pile of scores stacked
together in a slender cupboard to the left of the Steinway, Mr Tonks began to sort
through it for something to play.
"Do you like Schumann?" he asked. "Or would you prefer Chopin or
Liszt?"
"Schumann would do fine,"
responded Keating, addressing himself to a stooped back and plump
backside. He realized, with some dismay, that the intended interview, his real reason for
being there, would now have to wait a while longer.
"How about Kriesleriana,
then?" suggested Mr Tonks, and, without giving Keating time to respond, he
opened the score at page one of the first variation and, carefully placing it
on the piano stand, reseated himself at the keyboard. "A wonderfully brisk tempo to begin
with!" he remarked in a cheerful tone, before his delicate-looking fingers
set the requisite keys in fast motion, in deference to Schumann's markings. And there suddenly, to Anthony Keating's
manifest surprise, came an explosion of melody and harmony - indeed, a
succession of melodies and harmonies that filled the air with their beauty and
quickly transformed the room's atmosphere from sterile intellectuality into
potent spirituality; from cacophonous hell into euphonious heaven.
At first, he could hardly believe his ears;
it seemed too incredible. Yet, as the
music progressed, he had no option but to acknowledge the fact that the
seemingly imbecile composer of the previous performance had become, as though
by magical transformation, the well-nigh brilliant performer of the composition
he was now playing with such evident relish.
And as the quick first variation gave way to the long, slow second one,
and that, in turn, was eclipsed by another quick one, the conviction that
Howard Tonks was, after all, highly intelligent grew increasingly more
difficult to suppress, and served, moreover, to throw the subject of
contemporary composition into a new light - one whereby the cacophonous
creations of such composers appeared not, invariably, as the work of
charlatans, imbeciles, lunatics, or demons, but, more usually, as the work of
dedicated, intelligent, refined men who were compelled, by the Zeitgeist,
to turn their back on the past and produce music as different from Schumann's
as his was from Bach's, and perhaps even more so, whether or not that meant
progress or regress.
Yes, there could be little doubt, on the
strength of this performance, that Mr Tonks was a child of his time, a composer
whose music, no matter how cacophonous or seemingly anarchic, was liable to
make him appear less absurd, to the ears of his contemporaries, than any number
of futile attempts one might make to reverse time and compose in the style of,
say, Schumann or Mendelssohn or Weber.
The past was dead and what had died could not, as a rule, be
resurrected. Howard Tonks was definitely
a composer - arguably one with a small 'c' compared with Prokofiev, an even
smaller 'c' compared with Liszt, a still smaller 'c' compared with Beethoven, a
tiny 'c' compared with Mozart, and a virtually minuscule 'c' compared with
Bach. Even so, he was still a composer
of sorts, and that, after all, was better than nothing!
A slender shadow falling across the carpet
between the coffee table and the piano suddenly distracted Keating's attention
from the music and, glancing towards the French windows, he beheld one of the
young women from the garden staring fixedly at the composer's back. The pale-blue bikini she was sporting
belonged, he remembered, to the sunbather nearest the rose bushes, the one he
had seen without her top on for an instant, and whom Mr Tonks had subsequently
referred to as his daughter. It was
evident that the piano had attracted her attention in passing and induced her
to spy on her father. Perhaps she was
unaccustomed to hearing him perform tonal music? He didn't know. But he was beginning to realize, as he sat
perfectly still in the relatively inconspicuous position afforded him by the
dark-blue armchair, that she was extremely attractive, and that her shapely
figure possessed all the feminine attributes one could ever hope to
encounter. To spy on someone so
attractive who was simultaneously, and for quite unrelated reasons, spying on
someone else - what felicity! Keating
hardly dared breathe.
All of a sudden young Rebecca Tonks cast a
glance in his direction and, noticing him for the first time, began to
blush. Instinctively, Keating smiled
across at her, since he didn't want to give her the wrong impression. But the young beauty, caught psychologically
off-guard, immediately turned away from the windows and disappeared from view,
leaving his ingratiating smile hanging embarrassingly in the lurch. He encountered, in her place, a weaker sun
and, swiftly averting his gaze from it, became newly conscious of Mr Tonks'
presence at the Steinway and of Schumann's music. The notes of variation five penetrated his
eardrums and entered his consciousness, and so, too, in due tonal course did
those of the last three variations as well.
They were all so very pleasant.
Having dispatched the final bar, the
'pianist' smiled triumphantly across at him as the silence reasserted
itself. He smiled his appreciation of
the performance back at the 'pianist', thus eclipsing the composer. But the latter had no intention of allowing
himself to be eclipsed for long, and duly informed Keating that there were
aspects of his playing which an Ashkenazy, a Richter, a Lill, or a Brendel
would have been severely critical of, albeit, from a composer's point of view,
he hadn't done too badly all the same.
Still, even if he had done far worse, even if he had been obliged to
stop from time to time to correct a wrong note or had played each variation at
the wrong tempo, Anthony Keating would have preferred that performance to the
previous one, and he hastened to assure Mr Tonks that, so far as he was
concerned, the playing had sounded virtually flawless. In fact, almost divine. But he was conscious, as he said this, that
his appreciation hadn't been entirely confined to the music, since his opinion
now embraced more experiences than the composer could possibly have
suspected! So he endeavoured to modify
it, and thus save face in his host's eyes, with words to the effect that, given
a little more practice, the Schumann would soon be up to recital standard.
"Quite possibly," Mr Tonks agreed
with some reluctance. "But I don't
think that I would want to run the risk of improving on it. As I remarked earlier, I've other and more
important commitments to consider."
And here he turned his attention upon the small portrait of Ives which
hung from the wall directly in front of him.
"But to think that Schumann should have composed this great work in
merely a few days, and at a time, moreover, when the refusal of old man Wieck
to part with his daughter was causing him such acute unhappiness! Quite remarkable, don't you think?"
Keating blushed faintly and nodded. Then, realizing the composer's attention was
still focused on the portrait of Ives, he said "Yes," and blushed
some more.
There was a momentary silence in the room
before a sharp click emerged from the vicinity of the coffee table. To his considerable dismay the young
correspondent realized that he had forgotten to press his cassette recorder off
at the commencement of the Kriesleriana. For the tape had run its course and come to
an abrupt end.
"So you've recorded my
performance!" exclaimed Mr Tonks enthusiastically, as his gaze in turn
fell upon the cassette recorder. "I
hadn't in the least realized."
'Neither had I' was what Keating felt like
replying, but, instead, he merely smiled and said: "I hope you don't
mind."
"Not at all!"
Mr Tonks assured him. "But it isn't
something you'll be able to publish in your magazine, is it?"
"Unfortunately not," conceded
Keating, remembering anew the real reason for his presence there, and
realizing, with mounting dismay, that the interview had still not got properly
under way. But perhaps they could now
get on with it? After all, there was
another side to the tape and a couple of fresh tapes in his attaché case. And he still had his notebook to hand.
"Dear me," murmured Mr Tonks,
glancing down at his watch. "I do
believe we've run out of time. You see,
I'm expected out to dinner this evening, and I have to wash, dress, pick up a
couple of friends in my car, and then drive the remaining seven or eight miles
to my host's house. Since it's now
half-past five, I really can't afford to lose any more valuable time."
Keating's expectations sank
drastically. He hadn't anticipated any
such prior engagement on Howard Tonks' part, and was wondering how he would
explain to Webb when he arrived back at the offices of 'Arts Monthly', the
following morning, without the interview, which had been scheduled to go into
print in four day's time. "But what
about our arrangement?" he objected, almost desperately. "It had been specifically arranged for
today."
"Well, I'm afraid it'll have to be
postponed for a few days, Mr Keating," the composer replied in a mildly
apologetic tone. "Tomorrow and the
following day I shall be in
"Thursday afternoon?" Keating
repeated on a distinctly dubious note.
But that would be too late! The
September edition of 'Arts Monthly' was due out the following week, on August
26th, and the final contributions were to be in by Tuesday. A Thursday appointment meant the interview
would have to go into the October edition instead.... Not that that was the end
of the world. Fortunately, there were
plenty of other interviews or articles Webb could put into the magazine in its
place, since he hoarded them up for months on-end sometimes. All the same, it would certainly be
inconvenient for him to have to change his plans at the last moment,
particularly in view of the fact that he had been so determined to secure an
interview with Howard Tonks in order to tie-up with the latter's sixtieth
birthday on September 6th. Not
surprisingly, his professional reputation wouldn't be greatly enhanced by the
public or other criticisms attendant upon its October publication instead!
But why-the-devil had
they left the interview so late anyway?
Surely it would have been more sensible ... but then, all of a
sudden, Keating recalled Webb telling
him that Howard Tonks had been away when they first wanted the interview to
take place, and had absolutely refused to have anything to do with the matter
until he returned home. Such,
apparently, was what the housekeeper, a Mrs Marchbanks, had told Webb's sub-editor,
Martin Osbourne, when he had optimistically rung the composer's number at the
end of July. And Mr Tonks wouldn't be
back, she had informed him in a rather nervous tone-of-voice, until August
14th, which was a Friday. So, all things
considered, they hadn't done too badly to get him to accept the interview, as
soon as he returned home, for the following Monday. But even then the composer had shown himself
oblivious to the urgency (one of Webb's favourite words) of the situation so
far as 'Arts Monthly' were concerned.
With the unfortunate consequence that Keating now found himself in the
unenviable position of having to accept the Thursday afternoon appointment
against his will and without the prior permission of Nicholas Webb, who would
probably have left the office by now.
Oh, if only Wilder hadn't gone down with the flu at such a critical
time! Being considerably more
experienced in interviewing people of eccentric disposition, he would probably
have gone out into the back garden as soon as he arrived and begun to conduct
proceedings in front of the rose bushes.
And he certainly wouldn't have allowed himself to get dragged into
listening to Howard Tonks' latest piano composition, or his performance of the
Schumann piece either! No, in all
probability, he would have been heading back to the office with over an hour's
steady and relevant conversation in his attaché case by
Packing his cassette recorder away in the
large black attaché case which he personally loathed the sight of, and loathed
even more at present, the young correspondent nervously shook hands with the
composer, thanked him - God knows why! - for his
co-operation, cast a farewell glance through the French windows at the
now-deserted garden, and, turning on his heels, briskly strode out of the
room. There was muffled growling from
behind a door to the left as he headed back along the hallway towards the front
door, but, mercifully, no sign of its canine instigator!
Standing outside on the pavement, he
stared-up at the front windows and thought he could detect the outlines of a
young woman's face watching him from behind a mesh-darkened window on the first
floor. But the face or apparition or
whatever it was quickly drew back from its clandestine
vantage-point, and he was left staring up at an empty window. He smiled to himself in ironic response to
this gentle comedy and, with attaché case firmly in hand, ambled off back along
CHAPTER TWO
Nicholas
Webb raised the pale-green china teacup to his parched lips and stoically sipped
the hot black tea which he was in the habit of drinking at about 10.30 every
morning. Leaning back in his
comfortably-padded swivel chair, with ankles crossed on top of his desk, he
appeared to be staring fixedly at his expensive new shoes when, in reality, he
was thinking about the new art exhibition which was due to open at the Merlin
Gallery on Friday afternoon.
Why-on-earth, he wondered, couldn't it have opened a week earlier, so
that he could have sent someone along to review it for the forthcoming edition
of 'Arts Monthly'.
As things stood, all he could hope for was a largely retrospective
review in the October edition, by which time the exhibition would be in its
last week! And, if rumour counted for
anything, it was quite an important exhibition this time too - one whose
controversial paintings were bound to attract considerable publicity. Really, it was a wonder to him that he didn't
revert to editing a weekly magazine sometimes, the number of times
circumstances had obliged him to ignore or forego important events in the world
of contemporary art.
He sipped a little too stoically at his hot
tea and burnt his tongue. "Damn
it!" he gasped, returning the offending cup to its saucer and placing them
on a relatively uncluttered part of his desk.
Frowning, he wiped his mouth with the back of his right hand and then
trained an aggrieved expression on the head of his senior sub-editor, who was
bent over the manuscript of a collection of poems which some young scribbler
had had the audacity to offer for publication.
From where he sat, all Webb could see of his colleague's face was part
of a hooked nose protruding from beneath a thatch of curly-brown hair. Alas, the nose remained - and in the nature
of such things could only remain - impervious to his negative expression. But the spectacle nonetheless gave him the
analogy of some kind of inverted bird's nest with a chick hanging out of it -
an analogy which partly served to dispel his irritation and return him to a
less-aggrieved frame of mind. A titter
of laughter from the 'inverted bird's nest' prompted him to snigger back. "I thought they'd amuse you," he
averred, with ironic detachment.
"Nothing like a fledgling surrealist for arousing one's sense of
humour, is there?"
The 'inverted bird's nest' momentarily
became the smiling face of Martin Osbourne.
"Possibly not," he admitted, before turning back into Webb's
analogical chimera again. And, reading
aloud from the poem in his hand, he quoted three of the lines which he found
particularly amusing.
"Yes, the 'persistent malaise of
strawberry clits' makes the mind boggle rather, doesn't it?" commented
Webb, chuckling gently. He crossed his
fingers behind his head and stared meditatively at the opposite wall. "What about the 'diaphanous horizon on
the legs of bloated peas'?" he asked, quoting from memory. "Can you make any sense of that?"
"Not the slightest!" came the inevitable reply from Martin Osbourne, after a
short pause. "But, then again, I
don't think one is supposed to make any sense of it." And, returning the manuscript to Nicholas
Webb's desk, the sub-editor inquired of his superior whether he was intending
to publish any of it in the forthcoming edition of their magazine.
"Certainly not!" replied Webb
sternly, casting his colleague an incredulous look. "I can't afford to lose any more
subscriptions. As soon as you publish
one imbecile, there are a million others who imagine they've just as much
entitlement to be published, too. And
from there it's simply a matter of time before you end-up in the
workhouse."
"The unemployment exchange these
days," corrected Osbourne humorously and with a dash of anachronistic
sentimentality. "Our century is
really quite the reverse of the previous one.
Before the rise of the proletariat, it was a punishment to be made to
work. Now, on the contrary, not having
any work ..."
"Yes, well, whatever the case,"
Webb rejoined with an air of impatience, "we can't afford to publish trash
like that ..." he frowned down at the manuscript on the right-hand corner
of his desk ... "and have intelligent, industrious, self-respecting
citizens poisoning their minds with the 'tears of age on rumps of sin', or
whatever the damn nonsense was! They'd
think we're running a kindergarten here."
"We sometimes are," said Osbourne
facetiously. "Only a kindergarten
in which the youngest members are the only real adults," he added, more
for his own benefit than Nicholas Webb's.
There was a short, sharp buzz from the
internal telephone. Still frowning, Webb
grabbed the receiver and heard the nervous voice of young Anthony Keating
requesting to see him.
"Unfortunately I'm in the middle of an important meeting at
present," he lyingly pretended.
"But you can do so in about half an hour. By the way, how did that interview with Mr
Tonks go yesterday?"
"Er, not too badly," replied the
strangled voice on the other end of the line.
"In fact, that's what I wanted to see you about actually."
"Indeed?" Nicholas Webb raised his furrowed brows in
feigned surprise. It was a long-standing
habit of his to indulge in amateur theatricals when speaking to junior members
of staff, and this habit persisted even when he was on the telephone and the
person to whom he was speaking had no chance of seeing him act. But he would be accessible in thirty minutes
and, with a curt "Alright?", he slammed the
receiver down and returned to the 'important meeting'.
"Not too serious, I trust?"
Osbourne ventured to speculate, as an expression of annoyance suddenly suffused
his senior colleague's stern face.
"Probably not," the latter
responded, picking up his by-now lukewarm cup of black tea and drinking what
remained of it down in one thirsty gulp.
"With young Keating, however, one can never take anything for
granted. As long as he didn't insult
Tonks and get himself thrown out of his bloody house, I needn't worry too
much.... You can't imagine what a devil-of-a-job I had finding anyone to accept
that assignment yesterday! What with Wilder catching a cold or something at the last moment,
probably on purpose."
"Perhaps it was just as well that I
happened to be out of town at the time," remarked Osbourne, who chuckled
drily. "Otherwise you might have
picked on me instead."
"As it happened, I was almost
contemplating a return to the old days and conducting the bloody interview
myself!" Webb exclaimed in a tone of voice not far short of
desperation. "Fortunately for me,
however, young Keating didn't have all that much on his plate, so I kind of threw
him in at the deep-end. Naturally, he
wasn't particularly keen on the idea. He
had his misgivings about interviewing someone whom he knew next-to-nothing
about and whose music, apparently, doesn't appeal to him. But I got round him in the end! After all, his is not to reason why, his is
but to do or die!"
"Not quite," objected the
sub-editor good-humouredly. "His is
but to do or lie. The necessity of death
shouldn't enter into it these days."
"Don't be too sure about that!"
countered the editor, guffawing loudly.
"But seriously, one has to remember that Keating is a relatively
inexperienced interviewer. It takes a
lot of practice to make a Neil Wilder, you know."
Returning the empty cup to its saucer,
Nicholas James Webb got up from his chair and strolled over to the single
window his office possessed. At
forty-two he was a tall, well-built man of resolute character and, apart from
the few streaks of grey which were slowly tarnishing his black hair, relatively
youthful appearance. Coming from what
would be considered a well-educated background, he had served under Sir Cecil
Thomas as sub-editor of the 'Literary Review'
before going on, following the retirement of his knowledgeable
predecessor, to become its editor. It
was during his five-year spell of editorship of this prestigious monthly that
another periodical, the 'Music World', ran into serious financial difficulties
and was managed by a succession of editors who only succeeded in making matters
worse. The last of these was Martin
Osbourne, an acquaintance of Webb's from undergraduate days, who implored the
latter, in conjunction with his directors, to offer capital to save the
periodical from liquidation. At first,
the leading lights of the 'Literary Review' would have nothing to do with the
idea. But, before long, the prospect of
taking over the 'Music World' altogether and amalgamating it with their own
periodical began to appeal to them, since it had a more impressive building
and, being in the vicinity of London's West End, was better situated. So the eventual outcome of the music
magazine's financial plight was the establishment of 'Arts Monthly', for which,
once art and sculpture had been added to its brief, there had been a steady
demand, much to the surprise and delight of everyone concerned.
This synthesizing process had taken place a
few years previously and, since then, Nicholas Webb had retained the
responsibilities of editor with even greater success than before. And in tandem with Andrew Hunt, a former
sub-editor with the 'Literary Review', Osbourne had proved his worth as a
competent assistant. Indeed, so much so
that Webb had evolved a private joke having its basis in a certain incredulity
for the fact that some fool had previously denied Osbourne his rightful place
in life by appointing him editor instead of keeping him sub-editor, where he
evidently belonged! At the moment,
however, the thirty-nine-year-old assistant in question was proving his
competence in nothing more than sitting still in his chair whilst he drank the
remains of a mild cup of sugared tea and, in-between whiles, puffed
complacently on a slender cigar.
Standing in front of the large window that
gave-on to a quite wide expanse of
And so it was with the consciousness of one
who realizes he is taking part in some esoteric and essentially
anti-existential rite that Nicholas Webb now stared across at a couple of old
oak trees standing close together, and reverently acknowledged the powers of
good. How strong they appeared! And how eternal when contrasted with the
stylistic transience of the surrounding architecture which, despite an
appearance of solidity, was destined to perish with the birth of new styles, to
grow progressively more antiquated with the passing of time, until there was no
longer any place for it in a rapidly changing world and it was accordingly
demolished without a trace of regret!
But the oak trees belonged not to time and society but to Nature and
Eternity. They had existed as a species
for thousands of years and, providing man didn't hack them all down in the name
of some hypothetical future progress, some as yet unrealized technological
millennium, they would doubtless continue to exist in the recognizable form of
their species for thousands of years to come.
And what applied to the oaks applied no less, in Webb's deferential
estimation, to the other representatives of almighty Nature which could also be
seen and plunged into from his office window, and which were just as important
a source of psycho-physical strength to their humble devotee.
Yet, if the truth were known, Webb wasn't
quite the humble devotee, these days, that he had once
imagined himself to be. For he was obliged
to admit that one could gather more strength from the larger and more powerful
forces of good than from the smaller and less powerful ones - albeit there was
always the possibility, he pedantically reflected, that a sufficient number of
smaller ones plunged into together might, between them, add-up to something
just as psychically stimulating and invigorating as one or two of the larger
ones plunged into separately, in noble isolation from the rest. Yes, that was always possible, he
thought. But, for the time being, it was
enough to plunge into the couple of large trees he had singled out from their
lesser fellows, and to do so, moreover, with all the determination of a
famished suckling bent on drawing sustenance from its mother's copious breasts. For there were so many yards between himself
and the garden that one just had to pick on the largest representatives of
almighty Nature if one hoped to draw anything substantially elemental from it,
to establish a subtle reciprocity of psychic emanations between their deeper
selves, bearing in mind that such a reciprocity also had the intervening window
to contend with - an obstacle which could only weaken it and thereby reduce its
therapeutic effect. Such, at any rate,
was how the moderate convert to Elementalism had first reasoned, when he began
to adopt the habit of exploiting the public garden in the interests of his
psycho-physical well-being, several months before. True, he had brought a few of his own theories
to bear on those of John Cowper Powys in the course of elemental time, and thus
created a slight variation or two on the original pantheistic theme. But, by and large, the great man's elemental
theology was still the cornerstone of his own theological edifice, and the
great man himself still the quasi-druidic high priest, as it were, of his
elemental devotions. Variations on the
original theme, he mused, were virtually inevitable!
A pretty nurse passing along the pavement
below suddenly distracted him from his psychic tête-à-tête
with the tallest of the old oaks and brought him back to the more sentient
world of human beings. A vague
excitement in the loins accompanied the explicit excitement in his mind as,
with freshly charged vision, he proudly followed the
graceful progress of her dark-stockinged legs for a number of exciting
yards. How they delighted one! And how, when he embraced a more
comprehensive perspective of her person, she reminded him of that young nurse
he had seduced the previous year! The
same dark hair, the same slender build, the same shapely calf muscles ... and
what an extraordinary creature! One
woman with her nurse's uniform on, a completely different one with it off. And a virgin, to boot! At least she had been when he accosted her in
the square, one summer's evening, and summarily invited her to have dinner with
him. A hapless virgin, if ever there was
one. Quite desperate
for male company. But completely
transformed once she'd got it, completely the slave of the master she elected
to make him! Yes, indeed! An attractive young nurse every once in a
while wasn't at all a bad idea, providing one didn't get carried away by
it. After all, he wasn't quite the
democratic Don Juan, these days, that he had aspired
to being in his undergraduate days, some two decades ago. The dark-stockinged legs disappeared from
view at the far side of the window. He
couldn't crane his neck around any farther.
"Was there anything for me this
morning?" Osbourne's suave voice was heard to inquire out of the blue.
"Only a couple of things," came the reply in a high-pitched female voice.
Startled out of his sexist preoccupations
at the window, Webb swiftly turned round, to encounter the slender fair-haired
figure of his secretary standing in front of his desk with a pile of letters in
her hands. He almost blushed with the
luxury of undergraduate shame.
"You don't appear to have any room for
these on your desk," she remarked, referring to the typed but unsigned
letters to which the editor was obliged to put his signature in due course.
He frowned responsively and, snatching them
from her, plumped them down on top of a London street-atlas. Then, catching sight of the poetry manuscript
again, he smiled faintly and picked it up.
There were, in all, some sixty large pages of quasi-surrealistic hogwash
held together by a couple of treasury tags - hogwash which he had been expected
to wade through. And not only in his
capacity as editor but, more importantly in the view of its perpetrator, as
'Champion of the arts'! Yes, it was
only, apparently, as something more than an editor, a mere bureaucratic
cogwheel, that he could be expected to do adequate justice to the poet by
publishing his contributions in the name of the almighty 'champion' he was
elected to be!
Well, even if by some special ordinance he was such a
man, he still had the right to differentiate between hogwash and poetry and to
reject the former in his hard-pressed endeavour to champion the latter! If he had his own way, if he could really be
the 'champion' such people seemingly required, he
would do better than simply to reject the prosy hogwash. He would tear it up into tiny pieces, throw
the pieces into the largest metal wastepaper bin he could lay hands on, and set
fire to them with the aid of some liquid paraffin. And he would do so, moreover, without the
slightest qualm or moral doubt as to the validity of his actions. He would proceed, in short, with all the
fanatical conviction and unflappable self-righteousness of one who habitually
burns witches at the stake! Unfortunately
for the arts, however, his powers were limited.
He could only champion them to the extent of rejecting the hogwash. Admittedly, that was better than nothing,
since it enabled him to avenge himself on the philistines and sham artists
and/or anti-artists to some extent, though not, alas, to the extent he would
have preferred! The complete destruction
of the hogwash would at least have compensated him for the inconvenience of
having had to wade through it all in the first place! Better, it would have encouraged him to do
so. For he had now got to the point
where, cognizant of the limitations imposed upon his championship, he would
only partly and, as it were, superficially wade through it. The rest he would leave unread.
Turning to the fifth poem of the
manuscript, his smile deepened somewhat.
He quoted a line which had conspicuously come to his attention earlier
and, still smiling, inquired of his secretary, who probably knew as much about
poetry as a horse about philosophy, whether she could enlighten them to any
extent.
"The 'persistent
malaise of strawberry clits'?" Judith Pegg repeated doubtfully, an
emotional upheaval instantaneously transforming her bureaucratically impassive
expression into one of baffled incredulity.
And, just as instantaneously, her emotions changed course and she began
to laugh. "It sounds rather
'risqué' to me," she confessed, as soon as her amusement would allow her
to speak again.
"Risqué?" queried the
editor, casting an ironically conspiratorial glance in Osbourne's deferential
direction. "Yes, I suppose one
could say that, depending what sort of a mind one
has!" He chuckled
both secretary and sub-editor into chuckling along with him for a moment.
"I trust I needn't enlighten you any
further," said Mrs Pegg from a strawberry-coloured face which momentarily
accentuated her bright-blue eyes. At
thirty-four, she was still quite an attractive woman, but one from whom neither man present had been able to profit in other
than purely professional terms in over two years. For, apart from a night spent in the editor's
bed shortly after she joined the firm, and a couple of nights spent in the
sub-editor's bed shortly after the editor had joined with her, she had
resolutely kept her body for her husband and given herself almost exclusively
to him - the only notable interruption of her conjugal fidelity having occurred
whilst a dashing correspondent by name of Glen Walters was working at the
office. But he had resigned and gone abroad
in search of greater temptations over six months ago, leaving her sadly to her
marital probity.
"No, I don't think we'll be requiring
any further enlightenment on that line," murmured a disdainfully smiling
Nicholas Webb. "Though you might be
able to throw some light on the 'tears of age on rumps of sin'?" He focused a mildly inquisitorial gaze on his
blond secretary, which she duly acknowledged with an appropriately ironic
chuckle.
"I don't think I could possibly permit
myself to comment on that!" she protested in a tone of mock reproach. "For it doesn't even begin to make
sense to me. But it has a faintly
Baudelairean ring to it, don't you think?"
"More a tinkle than a ring,"
Osbourne chimed-in smilingly. "But,
according to our contributor, it's supposed to be closer to André Breton."
"I'm afraid I haven't read him,"
confessed Mrs Pegg nonchalantly.
"So you'll just have to make do with Baudelaire." She smiled benignly at the sub-editor and,
taking the manuscript held out to her by an almost-imploring Nicholas Webb,
abruptly turned on her high-heeled feet and headed towards the door. The little cross-shaped pencil mark on the
top left-hand corner of its first page indicated quite unequivocally what was
expected of her. The rejection letters
were never, except in rather exceptional cases, dictated on the spot. They were pre-printed in an appropriately
terse, noncommittal, polite format, and distributed accordingly. No unnecessary time-wasting! The execution was quick, clean, simple, and,
above all, impersonal. 'Impersonality', Webb
had often asserted, 'is the best mode of concealing one's identity', and,
besides, it provided him with a further means of avenging himself on the
philistines!
Flicking the burnt-out remains of his cigar
into the swan-shaped ashtray which invariably stood, as though on-guard, to the
front of Webb's mahogany desk, Martin Osbourne mumbled something about having
printers' bills to attend to and, with a see-you nod of his head, followed Mrs
Pegg out through the open door.
"Alone at last!" sighed Webb, as
soon as the door had closed again.
"Free to carry on with my work!" Saying which, he sat down and, with something
approaching pleasure, proceeded to apply his signature to the pile of letters
his secretary had just brought him. How
many times circumstances had obliged him to put signature to paper over the
years! It was a wonder to him that he
hadn't availed himself of some kind of mechanical means of doing it by now;
though where such means could be obtained he had never quite discovered, nor,
so far as he knew, had anyone else.
Nevertheless he hadn't always found it inconvenient to sign
letters. There were times, indeed, when
it enabled one to relax one's brain or think of other, more interesting
matters. Even times when it enabled one
to satisfy a kind of egotistical gluttony for advertising one's name
far-and-wide, making it more important-looking with each successive batch of
letters. And on the relatively rare
occasions when one happened to be writing to someone who entertained an
inflated opinion of one's professional status, who took one for a famous poet
or essayist or something, it wasn't altogether far removed from signing an
autograph, being a sort of autograph-substitute or equivalent.
He had got to the 'W' of the eighth
signature when the external phone rang.
Completing the remaining letters of his surname with a flourish, he
picked up the receiver and, with moderately suave intonation, advertised his
name afresh. A female voice on the other
end of the line responded to it with reassuring familiarity. "Oh, hello
darling!" Webb ejaculated, dropping his pen. "I'd almost forgotten you were going to
ring me. How did the dental appointment
go, by the way?"
"Just a tiny filling on a lower-left
molar, so nothing to worry about," replied the sensuous voice of Deborah
Wilkes. "I got the impression that
the dentist was disappointed he couldn't do anything else."
"Why, is he hard-up or
something?" suggested Webb facetiously.
"Well, you know ..." She sent a
burst of meaningful laughter reverberating along the line. Then, swiftly returning to her usual self,
she casually inquired of him whether he was still intending to take her out to
dinner that evening.
"Naturally," Webb confirmed. "
"Of course,
Nicky." This reassuring
statement was followed by a short pause while Deborah pondered something in her
mind a moment. "Would you like me
to dress in any specific clothes this evening?" she at length asked,
mindful of her lover's sartorial preferences, which had lately developed into a
veritable fetishistic convention between them.
"Er, I think I'll leave that decision
entirely with you for once," replied Webb evasively. "As long as it's something ... you know,
kind of sexy. Anyway, you should know my
tastes pretty well by now."
"Oh I do, I do," his girlfriend
admitted. "Who knows them
better? All the same, you sometimes
change your mind at the last moment, don't you?"
Nicholas Webb fidgeted uneasily in his
chair at the critical change of tone in Deborah's voice. "Well, as long as you wear your new
black seamless stockings, pink suspenders, and
matching ..."
The office door suddenly burst open and in
walked young Anthony Keating with a determined look on his serious face. The half-hour postponement of his meeting
with the editor had run its trying course, and he was now itching to confess
what he had to say as quickly as possible.
He shut the door and headed with ominously purposeful stride towards
Webb's desk.
"Wouldn't you prefer me to wear the
pale-blue undies this evening?" protested the female voice on the other
end of the line. "After all, you
saw the pink ones on Sunday, didn't you?"
"Er, suit yourself!"
the editor curtly responded, as the intrusive presence of the junior
correspondent loomed menacingly above him.
"Just do what you think best."
Waves of blood seemed to be rushing to his face and unbalancing his
head.
"You see, the pink undies are in the
wash and they're the only ones I've got in that colour at present, Nicky,"
his girlfriend explained. "But the
pale-blues ones ..."
"Yes, alright,
alright!" Webb assured her.
"If that's the way it is!"
He was virtually shouting.
"And they go so well with my dark-blue
nylon stockings, don't they?" she purred.
"Perfectly!" he well-nigh
rasped. "Now if you'll excuse me, I
have some urgent business to attend to this morning. Thanks for calling." He slammed the receiver down and sighed in
manifest exasperation. His face was
almost as dark as a beetroot. This
wasn't the first time someone had intruded upon his privacy at an inopportune
moment. And, to judge by the way Miss
Wilkes kept pestering him, it probably wouldn't be the last! He frowned sullenly and motioned Keating to
take a seat. It was unlikely that the
young correspondent had overheard more than the outgoing part of the
conversation but, even so, a word or two about advertising costs probably
wouldn't be inappropriate ... just in case.
"Now then," he added, after the advertising industry had been
summarily dismissed as extortionate, "you had something appertaining to
yesterday's assignment on your mind, if I remember correctly."
"Yes, I'm afraid so," admitted
Keating who, with as much articulation as could be mustered, under the
difficult circumstances, now proceeded to produce a slightly revised version of
what had actually happened. The composer,
for all his cheerful spirits, had been suffering from a sore throat which,
alas, had prevented him from giving the interview. But to compensate the magazine for such
inconvenience as this was bound to cause, he had played some delightful piano
music - here Keating tactfully produced the Schumann tape - and had generously
agreed to grant the interview at a later date.
Unfortunately, circumstances compelled him to go to
"Yes, I get the picture," said a
still-frowning Webb, who emitted another sigh, this time more heartfelt. "Too late for the
September edition!" He shook
his head and mumbled something vaguely obscene under his breath about bloody
composers. "Is his throat likely to
be better by Thursday?" he asked without thinking.
"Assuming we can take his word, it
ought to be," replied Keating, who naturally felt somewhat uncomfortable.
"If we could postpone the printing for
a week, all would be well," Webb declared.
"Unfortunately, however, the printers have other clients besides us
and work to a pretty tight schedule.
Printing us later would mean printing someone else earlier, later, or
not at all, which would almost certainly be out of the question. So we shall just have to settle for what we
can get and publish the interview in the October edition instead. No doubt, we shall look pretty foolish if our
chief competitors come-up with something substantial to commemorate Howard
Tonks' sixtieth birthday in September.
He didn't mention anything about other interviews, by any chance?"
"Not a word," Keating responded
with alacrity, telling the truth for once. "Although if he was on holiday
earlier this month, it would be highly unlikely that anyone else could have got
to him before us, surely?"
"Don't be too sure!" retorted the
experienced voice of the editor.
"I've heard of people who were interviewed as long as six bloody
months before their birthday or the anniversary of a particularly important
professional occasion in their life.
Some editors won't take any chances, you know. They gather their nuts well in advance and
store them up for future use." At
which point he broke into a smile for the first time since Keating had entered
the office - the smile of a crafty squirrel.
"But we're not entirely lacking in that respect, Anthony," he
hastened to assure his young employee.
"There's a short essay on the composer written by your colleague,
Neil Wilder, some weeks ago which will serve as a fill-in, as well as a longish
interview with the painter, Miles Coverdale.
So, in a sense, your next visit to Howard Tonks' house isn't strictly
necessary. But since the public expects
an interview from us once a month, and since the composer agreed to grant us
one, you had better go back there and gather what information you can. I take it you're still prepared to do that,
in the absence of Wilder?"
Keating impulsively nodded his head. He was more than prepared; he was positively
itching to go back there and peer out at the garden again!
CHAPTER THREE
1. Who were the major
musical influences of your youth?
2. When did you first begin
to compose?
3. Which contemporary
composers do you most admire?
4. Which,
if any, contemporary composers do you dislike, and why?
5. Which
of your own compositions do you particularly like, and why?
6. Do you compose for
particular musicians and, if so, who?
7. Does composition come
easily to you, or is it generally a struggle?
8. Can you compose in your
head, or do you require the aid of a piano?
9. Do you have a specific
time-of-day when you prefer to compose and, if so, when?
10. How many compositions
have you thus far composed?
Anthony
Keating's head was fairly bulging with these and other such questions as he
pushed open Mr Tonks' front gate for the second time that week and, gently
closing it behind him, stood for a moment staring up at the large detached
property. Had he expected to catch
someone spying on him from one of its upstairs windows? The question subliminally presented itself to
his vain imagination and was hastily dismissed.
There were quite enough questions in his head already, and the more he
thought about them the more ridiculous and superfluous they seemed to
become. If he persisted in thinking much
longer he wouldn't be able to conduct an interview at all. He would answer all the damn questions
himself in order not to have to drag them up again. Or, better still, he would drop them through
the composer's letterbox in the form of a questionnaire, and leave him to
answer them in ink. There were times, to
be sure, when it was wiser to do that than to appear in person. But such a procedure wasn't, alas, the
general policy of 'Arts Monthly'!
He strode up the garden path, climbed the
five steps which culminated in the front entrance and, transferring his
customary attaché case to his left hand, gently pressed the doorbell. There was a gruff response from Ludwig as before,
but this time it came from deeper inside the house, from one of the downstairs
back rooms, and was correspondingly quieter.
As human steps approached the door, the housedog's barking grew no
louder but remained mercifully confined to the same distant level. A little of Keating's previous apprehension
returned as the lock was turned, but then, suddenly, it gave way to an
extremely pleasant surprise. For there,
standing right in front of him, was the composer's daughter, Rebecca!
"Mr Keating?" she smilingly
ventured, before he could introduce himself.
"Why, yes!" he admitted, feeling
slightly flattered to be expected and perhaps even recognized by this
attractive young female. "Sorry to
be a bit late, but my taxi was held-up in the traffic."
Rebecca smiled understandingly. "Actually, I should be apologizing to
you," she remarked, whilst inviting him into the hall. "I take it my father told you on Monday
about his trip to
"He did."
"Well, he rang home this morning to
say that he was being detained there an extra day and wouldn't be able to take
part in your interview as arranged," said Rebecca, frowning slightly. "However, he suggested that, if it's
convenient for you, you return here tomorrow at the same time. Unfortunately, a Friday afternoon appointment
is now the best he can do."
Keating could scarcely believe his ears,
though the sinking feeling in his guts was all too real. Really, this was the last thing he had
expected! "Oh dear," he sighed. "So I've come all the way up here for
nothing!"
There then ensued an uncomfortable silence,
which seemed to dovetail all his existential nightmares into one tight focus.
"Would you like a tea or
something?" asked Rebecca, feeling something like genuine sympathy for
him. "Seeing how grey, wet, and
windy it is today, you deserve some kind of refreshment for your trouble."
"Well, if it's no real inconvenience
to you, I could certainly use some tea right now," he averred, his throat
dry and sore.
"Splendid!" Rebecca closed the front door behind him and
then led the way along the hallway into the music room at the rear of the
house. "If you'd like to wait in
here a moment," she murmured, as he crossed the threshold and encountered
depressingly familiar surroundings, "I'll have it ready in a jiffy."
He stood his attaché case on the floor
beside the coffee table and, with a sigh of despair, slumped down in the
velvet-cushioned armchair which had served him on Monday afternoon. What a bloody nuisance this damn composer was
proving to be! If only Mr Tonks had
telephoned the offices of 'Arts Monthly' and thereby saved him the trouble of
coming all the way up to Hampstead for nothing!
What a stupid waste of time! And
what a bore it would be, having to repeat the journey tomorrow! He frowned bitterly and swore at the composer
beneath his breath. How could he return
on the Friday? He had been given another
assignment in the meantime. Really, this
sort of thing was more than a trifle annoying, it was downright maddening!
He glanced uneasily round the room. In front of him the large portrait of Bartók
appeared even more disagreeable than the first time he had set eyes on it, as
also, for similar reasons, did the smaller ones of Ives and Varèse to his
right. Behind him, Stravinsky was doubtless
staring down at the crown of his head with an equally disagreeable face!
Getting up from his chair, as though to
escape their gazes, he ambled over to the French windows and peered out through
their misty glass. It was indeed a
miserable day, not raining at the moment, but still very damp and, for this
time of year, extremely windy. The rain
clouds of the morning had given way to an unending sheet of dark cloud which
completely obliterated the sky, and in the garden the roses, dahlias, and
fuchsias looked distinctly out-of-place as the prevailing wind swept over and
around them, severely ruffling their habitual equanimity. One might have supposed it was the middle of
November, so different was the scene from the one which had charmed his eyes a
few days ago, when the sun had shone down from a flawless sky onto everything
below, including the supple bodies of the two young women in eye-catching
bikinis. Yet, mysteriously, one of those
very same sunbathers was now fetching him a cup of tea. And, as though the clouds of discontent
created by the composer's absence were somehow being dispersed by this thought,
the sunshine of his gratitude for her presence suddenly pervaded his soul with
restoring warmth, and he began to smile.
Yes, at least there was something for which to be grateful!
A couple of minutes later the door was
nudged open and Rebecca Tonks entered the room bearing the same tea-tray which
her mother had brought him on Monday. "Voilà!" she
exclaimed, placing it on the small coffee table in front of him, and, as she
bent forwards to pour the tea, he acquired a brief but engaging view of her
shapely breasts, compliments of the décolleté vest she was wearing. "I didn't want to drag you into the
kitchen because our dog is there and he would only bark unnecessarily and make
a general nuisance of himself, so I hope you don't
mind drinking it here."
"Not at all," Keating hastened to
assure her. "I find this a most
delightful room." It wasn't exactly
the truth, but he smiled gratefully as he accepted some milk from her and
helped himself to the tea she had just poured him. Was there something about her that was
different from when he first arrived? He
could almost swear she had applied a little additional eye-shadow and sprayed
or brushed her long hair. And the perfume? He
couldn't recall having smelt anything so sweet whilst he stood in front of her
in the entrance hall. But perhaps the
fact of the open door or the state of his nerves had prevented him from
noticing? He shrugged mental shoulders
and sipped his tea. "I hope you
weren't offended by my curiosity the other day," he at length remarked,
fearing that if he didn't say something to start a conversation she would think
he didn't like her and preferred to be left alone. "After all, it's not every day that one
is blessed by the sight of such an attractive bikini-clad young person
peering-in through the windows." He
could see plainly enough how this statement embarrassed her in its sudden
frankness.
"I wasn't aware that you were looking
at me to begin with," she confessed, with an involuntary giggle. "I was too intent on watching my father
at the piano. But you did give me rather
a surprise, I must say! I hadn't
suspected there was anyone else in the room." She turned her gaze in the general direction
of the French windows, as though to put herself in his position.
"Well, as long as I didn't give you a
particularly unpleasant surprise I needn't be too apologetic," said
Keating. "You gave me a pleasant
surprise anyway," he boldly added.
With compliments like that, it wasn't long
before he had seduced her into talking about herself, her friends, interests,
and, above all, her father. She knelt on
the carpet in front of him whilst he sipped his way through two cups of tea and
nibbled at the occasional sweet biscuit, the provision of which was a tendency
she had apparently inherited from her mother.
"Yes, he's quite a good pianist
really," she agreed, after Keating had given her an encouraging opinion of
her father's impromptu performance.
"But he isn't a particularly keen one, in view of the fact that
he's far too wrapped-up in his compositions to have much time or inclination to
spare on purely instrumental work.
That's why I could scarcely believe my ears when I heard him playing
Schumann the other day. He hadn't done
that for ages. If he does play the works
of other composers, they're mostly twentieth-century ones - people to whom he
can relate."
"Like Berio?" suggested Keating
thoughtfully.
"Not so much him as composers like
Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, and Honegger, together with such people as you see
advertised in this room," she remarked, briefly drawing his attention,
with an all-embracing sweep of her arm, to the portraits again. "Personally, I'd rather he played the
works of nineteenth-century composers more often," she added, sighing
faintly, "and thereby gave one something melodically pleasant to hum along
to. Unfortunately, so much
twentieth-century stuff only depresses me."
"I'm sincerely relieved to hear
it!" admitted Keating. "After
all, a good deal of what passes for contemporary music isn't really music at
all. It's calculated noise. It conforms, all too poignantly, to the
tendencies outlined by Spengler in his seminal tome The Decline
of the West. Anti-music would be a
more accurate description."
"I'm afraid I don't know all that much
about Spengler," confessed Rebecca apologetically. "But I can sympathize with your
conviction. Music has become far too intellectualized,
rationalized and serialized, these days, for its own good. It needs to be simplified, returned to the
life of the soul."
"Alas, that's unlikely to
happen!" opined Keating boldly.
"For the soul you refer to, the soul of great classical music, is dead. It's
the contemporary intellect which rules the roost, and such an intellect is
generally incapable of being other than itself.
All it can do is carry on churning out the atonal cacophony which
becomes it, to live in the lunar bedlam it seemingly requires. Civilizations rise and fall, you see, and
when they're due to fall, then fall they damn-well will - inexorably. Western civilization is falling ever more
precipitously into a chasm of soulless chaos.
Every new avant-garde composition is a further stab in the back of
genuine music, a further insult to the culture that preceded it. We can't put the clocks back, and neither can
we expect Western civilization to continue indefinitely. It's in its senility now, so the compositions
it produces are correspondingly senile."
He was aware that the devilish spirit of contentious didacticism had
taken possession of him again and, in an instant of self-consciousness, he
almost felt ashamed of himself for succumbing to its invidious influence. But the demon had to be placated somehow, and
giving vent to this spirit wasn't the worst of evils! On the contrary, it was virtually a good, a
veritable purgative. "So the
progress of anti-music is the chief concern of contemporary composers, the
process of furthering the mechanistic rot which began during the
late-eighteenth century," he went on, undaunted. "How long this process can continue is
anybody's guess, though, to judge by the extent to which the most radical
compositions have furthered the rot, one gets the impression it will have
reached its goal in a decade or two. I
mean, how can it go on getting indefinitely worse and worse? There has to be a limit somewhere. Otherwise you'll come full circle. You'll end-up back at the beginning again,
producing plainsong, progressing to the baroque, and culminating in the
classical. All that can happen now is
for the anti-musicians to carry-on the work initiated by the Romantics and
plunge contemporary serious composition deeper and deeper into the avant-garde
cacophony it seemingly requires.
However, we're not exactly called upon to criticize it or to preach a
crusade for the resurrection of genuine music and the correlative termination
of the cacophonous. On the contrary, if
we're not direct participants, we can only be witnesses, and hopefully persevering
ones, too!" His theory, he knew, was
usually on a more idealistic footing than his practice. Nonetheless, there were times when he was
capable of showing a degree of understanding and even sympathy towards what he
personally abhorred. "To my mind,
however, those who now perform the works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven are more admirable or, at any rate, less contemptible than people who
specialize in composing cacophony, in being contemporary atonal
composers," he defiantly concluded.
"Thanks for the compliment!"
laughed Rebecca, who was something of a classicist herself. "I usually do my best not to perform
anything too atonal." And here she
began to expatiate on the subject of her flute lessons and who she particularly
enjoyed playing, which, to Keating's delighted surprise, included some leading
jazz and rock musicians. "But seriously," she added,
returning to the gist of his previous comments, "you can't dismiss all
contemporary works as cacophonous, or anti-music. Depending how you define 'contemporary', this
century has produced some really fine music."
"Oh, I entirely agree!" rejoined
Keating, slightly embarrassed by the looseness of his generalization. "Even so, it's only fine by
twentieth-century standards, not by those of the previous three centuries. The very fact that it was composed in the
twentieth century virtually guarantees it a comparatively inferior musical
status.... Yes, you can demur if you like, but I assure you it's
perfectly true. It has the ring of
soulless modernity about it, and that is a far cry from soulful antiquity! What we hear is less the kernel of music than
its husk, a materialistic shell, brass and percussion heavy, which conveys no
more than the appearance of music while being totally bereft of its
essence. The fall from melodic grace is
atonal only because it lacks a soul. And
what applies to melody applies even more to harmony, where the fall from
harmonic grace has taken a discordant turn symptomatic of tonal decay. It isn't beauty and love which rule the
contemporary compositional roost, but ugliness and hate; not goodness and
pleasure, but evil and pain. The sooner
such anti-values are eclipsed by new positive ones, the better it'll be for
Europe in particular, but the world in general."
From the hall, the resonant sound of a
grandfather clock striking three interrupted his diatribe and made him aware of
how quickly the last hour had passed.
Far more quickly, he reflected, than would have been the case had
circumstances permitted him to conduct the interview with Rebecca's father
instead! But Mr Tonks was still in
Birmingham, and so too, apparently, was his wife Beverly, who had gone with
him. They had left the house to the
keeping of their twenty-year-old daughter, and she was still sitting at
Keating's feet, lapping-up his every word and positively brimming over with
juvenile admiration for his pessimistic diagnosis of the times. But perhaps it wasn't just his intellect she
admired. Perhaps, too, there was
something about his face, gestures, clothes, accent, build, etc., that
contributed to the pleasure she was evidently acquiring from being in his
company, virulent denunciations of contemporary serious music notwithstanding?
Yet how beautiful she looked! How her dark-blue eyes, smooth black hair,
moderately aquiline nose, and sensuous little mouth charmed him! And he had seen so much more of her
besides! Seen her
minus the white cotton vest, the black satin miniskirt, and the purple nylon
stockings. Even
seen her without a bikini top on for an instant, though she hadn't realized it. For if she had, she would
probably have blushed a little more intensely when he alluded to his curiosity
of the Monday afternoon. But that
was at a distance of several yards, and now he was seeing her close-up, so
close, in fact, that he could almost smell her fragrant skin through the
alluring perfume he still entertained a private suspicion about.
"Do you have a favourite
composer?" she asked, once it became evident to her that he had nothing to
add to his previous statement concerning contemporary music.
"Not in any permanent sense," he
confessed, smiling to himself at the thought that Rebecca was asking him the
sort of questions he had reserved for her father, "though I've admired
quite a number of different composers over the years, including Ravel and
Martinu. How about you, do you have
one?"
"Probably Schumann," she
admitted, smiling faintly.
"So that explains why you were at the
French windows on Monday, does it?" Keating deduced, as a fierce shaft of
sunlight suddenly pierced the gloom and illuminated the coffee table on which
the tea-tray was resting. The silver
teapot and part of the unused sugar bowl glistened dazzlingly.
"Don't tell me the sun's come out at
last!" exclaimed Rebecca, and, scrambling to her feet, she hurried across
to the windows in question. Sure enough,
the oppressive sheet of grey cloud was speedily disintegrating into small,
separate cumulus clouds which permitted intermittent sunshine. The garden, at that moment, stood bathed in
sunlight.
"You could almost do some more
sunbathing now," said Keating, who had also got to his feet and was
standing just behind her.
"If it wasn't for the fact that I'm
already over-tanned, I might consider it," she responded, half-turning
towards him. "But too much sun is
suicidal. That's what the latest medical
reports are telling us, anyway."
"So I hear," murmured Keating,
gazing over her shoulder at the bright red roses which stood in the middle of
the garden and glistened majestically in the fresh sunlight. How exquisite they were! And how exquisite, too, were all the other
flowers and shrubs which could be seen to either side of the rose bushes,
combining their individual appearances into a delicate fusion of colours and
shapes! The symmetrical brilliance of the
layout was beyond criticism - virtually flawless. The serried ranks of flowers somehow reminded
one of a military display, suggested, more specifically, a parade ground where
soldiers stood to attention and scarcely dared breathe. This was especially true of the dahlias,
though the fuchsias hardly qualified for the analogy which now presented itself
to Keating's imagination, as he admired the beauty of cultivated nature through
eyes that had been deprived of such a spectacle for too long, and simultaneously
reflected upon the apparent discrepancy between the sense of the Beautiful in
which Howard Tonks indulged with his flower arrangements and the overwhelming
ugliness of the man's music. How was it
possible that a man whose compositions abounded in inharmonious elements to the
point of cacophony could produce such a delicate harmony of colours and shapes
in the garden? Did the one necessarily
preclude the other, or was it that nature was beyond the decline of civilizations
and therefore enabled one to lavish aesthetic care on what remained impervious
to the transmutations of art? It didn't
appear to make sense, but there it was, a picture of perfect taste, a garden
where all the thistles and weeds, stones and pebbles, had been removed from the
soil in the interests of the flowers and other plants of a higher order; where
naturalism had been purged of realism and materialism, as it were, in the
interests of an idealism which had blossomed splendidly in the guise of the
various flowers straining heavenwards
towards the clearing sky. There was
little possibility of one's stumbling upon anything ignoble out there! A regular fidelity to beauty had ensured the
absence of ugliness.
"Yes, my father's very keen on
gardening," confessed Rebecca, responding to a comment Anthony Keating
duly made about the harmonious layout.
"It's his main hobby, actually."
She stood no more than an inch or two in
front of him, staring at the roses. The
scent of her perfume excited him immensely, causing his gaze to wander from the
garden to her hair, shoulders, and arms.
More beautiful by far than anything outside, it was ridiculous of him
not to acknowledge the fact and do something to show his appreciation, to prove
that one was a man and not a child or a dog or something. Besides, was she not expecting him to do
something? Was she not secretly willing
it? Had not the intellect run its dreary
course and made delight in sensuality a virtual certitude? Yes, she had listened attentively to his
Spenglerian discourse, his condemnation of bourgeois decadence, his cynical
appraisal of contemporary 'classicism', and allowed herself to be seduced by
the impassioned flow of his words. Now
she would be better qualified for that other, more tangible seduction, since
women did not live by intellect alone!
Thus, with a complimentary remark directed
at her beauty, he enveloped her waist and gently drew her against himself. She pretended surprise, protested weakly, and
then submitted to his embrace, to the kisses he proceeded to shower upon her
hair, neck, face, shoulders, lips. Oh, how much better to cultivate the garden
of such a beautiful young woman whilst it was still there to be
cultivated! And just the two of them,
with Ludwig safely locked away in the kitchen and her parents up in
"You work pretty fast, don't
you?" she managed to say, as he disengaged his lips from hers and applied
his nostrils to the perfumed lobe of her nearest ear.
"One has to these days," he replied. "One can never be sure that one will get
a second chance to make up for one's procrastination."
"That's true of any time," she
smilingly retorted.
"Yes, but more so of today," he
insisted, and before she could say anything else he had glued his mouth to hers
and made amorous contact with her tongue.
She felt herself being drawn away from the French windows, felt her
short skirt sliding to the floor, and, most poignantly, felt a hand on her left
breast, felt the nipple respond to its caresses and send gentle waves of
pleasure coursing through her. How could
she resist him? The lure of greater
pleasure was too strong. If he could get
this far, what sense was there in preventing him from going farther? "We really oughtn't to behave like this
in my father's study," she found herself feebly protesting. "It's not the place to ...” But he had
removed another item of her clothing and, through his persistent caresses, made
it harder to resist him.
"One can make love virtually anywhere
when the desire to do so is sufficiently intense and the justification for it
beyond dispute," he confidently assured her, smiling encouragement.
"Yes, but ... not in my father's
study." The words more or less
spoke themselves, without conviction.
For, by now, she was lying on the Afghan carpet with her eyes closed in
the throes of pleasure and her arms wrapped around his neck. There was only one item of clothing to be
lost, and that was no longer in its original position but over half-way down
her thighs. The evidence of the senses
spoke strongly in favour of love, and slowly, steadily, inevitably, the words
were superseded by sounds of a non-verbal nature, the sounds became more
spontaneous, frequent and intense, more the product of satisfied desire than
the desire for satisfaction, and culminated, some frantic minutes later, in a
sound which was nothing less than the expression of undiluted sensual ecstasy,
the ultimate comment upon everything that had gone before - the sound of
sounds! Was the music room really that
inappropriate a place to engender it?
But just as she was about to offer her most
sensitive parts to the probing tongue which had hitherto confined itself to her
mouth and breasts, there came another sound, one that issued not from her
mouth, still less from Keating's, but from the handle of the door to the
study. And this sound was quickly
followed by another one, as leather-soled footsteps could be heard entering the
room. "Miss Tonks!" a voice
hoarse and flabbergasted exclaimed in a pitch which bore no relation whatsoever
to anything amorous. "What-on-earth
are you doing down there like that?"
Violently startled out of her ecstatic
abandon, Rebecca turned her head in the direction of the disembodied voice and
encountered, with unbelieving amazement, the astonished face of Mrs Marchbanks
staring down at her with open mouth and protruding eyes. The old woman was now leaning against the
wall with one hand across her bulging chest and the other on her perspiring
brow. She appeared to be on the point of
fainting.
"I don't believe it!" she gasped,
as her eyes encompassed the mostly naked bodies of the two young people
spread-eagled on the floor in a posture of inverted oral sex.
"Who-the-devil's that?" exclaimed
Keating, endeavouring to raise himself to a position where he could see for
himself. But his voice sufficed to
ensure the old woman that she was not hallucinating and, with a gasp of
unbelieving dismay, she staggered out of the room and slammed the door shut
behind her with an involuntary shudder.
"Oh, shit!" cried Rebecca, her
face rose-red with embarrassment, and, disengaging herself from Keating's
frozen grasp, she rolled over onto her stomach and
began to sob. The body that, a moment
before, had been shaken by sexual ecstasy was now convulsed by emotional pain,
the pain of a shame the likes of which she had never experienced in her entire
life!
Overcome by pity Keating attempted to
console her, to mitigate the horrible shame which he, too, was now experiencing
in some degree. How was
it possible to plunge to such remorseful depths after one had scaled all
but the highest sensual heights? He was
virtually on the brink of tears himself.
If only he could have seen who had so completely interrupted their
pleasures.
The ugly sound of the front door slamming
shut made him start from his preoccupation with their mutual distress and
nervously inquire of Rebecca who had barged-in on them.
"The housekeeper," she replied
through trembling lips. "I had
forgotten the old bag was coming today.
No, not forgotten, simply overlooked the time." Her sobbing grew more intense. Yes, it was all her fault that this sordid
thing had happened, her fault for having invited Keating into the house in the
first place, instead of sending him away at the door, as her father had advised
her to do over the telephone. But she
had taken a fancy to him the afternoon he saw her in nothing but a pale-blue
bikini, had purposely gone out of her way to dress-up for him today, and, with
secret exultation, allowed herself to be ravished by him as soon as the
opportunity arose, as it was almost bound to do in sight of the rose
bushes. She had only herself to blame
for having invited him not only into the house, but into the very room from
which he had first laid eyes on her a few days previously.
"Do you think she'll tell your
father?" asked Keating.
"Quite possibly," came her
sob-choked reply.
Anthony Keating sighed despairingly and, as
he did so, the noise of Ludwig's fierce barking filled the air. The housedog had evidently taken up the
challenge, from the kitchen, of the slammed front-door. For a house that, ten minutes earlier, had
been the very soul of tranquillity was now a bedlam, a place from which one
longed to escape, as from a cacophonous recital. It was as though some terrible crime had just
been committed, the evidence of which was to be found in the nude and trembling
body of Rebecca Tonks, the items of clothing scattered across the floor, and
the noise of Ludwig's continuous barking.
A ghastly dread suddenly pervaded the young correspondent's fear-racked
mind: what if the housekeeper were under the false impression that Rebecca had
been raped and was now going to the police?
How could he explain his conduct or justify his presence in the house
when, to all intents and purposes, he was a complete stranger there? His heart beat frantically as he pondered
this possibility and imagined himself being questioned by stern-faced men in
dark suits who suspected the worst.
After all, had Rebecca really encouraged him to have sex with her? Hadn't she protested against his amorous
advances? Yes, two or three times! But that wasn't to say she didn't want sex at
all. On the contrary, her smile of gratitude ...
He felt a hand on his shoulder and,
startled out of his sombre reflections, discovered that Rebecca was no longer a
convulsed heap of guilt and shame but, in the meantime, had pulled herself
together and dried her eyes. She offered
him a wan smile, saying: "If she does tell my
father, I'll stand by you."
"You will?" he responded, unsure
what to think.
"Of course. We'll stand or fall together."
Overcome by relief, Keating bent towards
her and kissed her on the brow.
"Such a fine young lady," he murmured, holding her tightly
against his chest. "It would have
been positively outrageous of me not to have given you the kind of appreciation
your body deserves."
Partly flattered, in spite of her private
misgivings, she smiled in admiration, or perhaps it was forgiveness, of his
romantic bravado and returned him an equally noble kiss. "Yes, you're probably right," she
conceded.
CHAPTER FOUR
A sustained
buzz from the doorbell of Martin Osbourne's
Hunt obligingly scanned the room, in which four
other men were comfortably gathered, and shouted the name of Anthony Keating
after the door-bound figure. To his
surprise, however, in walked Neil Wilder, who ironically saluted everyone
before taking a seat in the chair just vacated by Osbourne.
"I trust you've fully recovered from
the flu?" Osbourne self-protectively inquired of him, while fetching his
latest guest a drink.
"As much as can be expected for the
time being," replied Wilder, smiling ingratiatingly. "Though, between ourselves,
I think it expedient for me to stay off work until Monday. There's no desperate need for me to rush
back, is there?" He directed this
question as much at Hunt as at Osbourne.
"Not that I'm aware of," the
junior sub-editor responded, with an ironic snigger. "As far as I can gather, things have
never been better."
"Then you haven't gathered much,"
Osbourne opined, simultaneously handing the new arrival a glass of medium-sweet
sherry. "The way I see it, things
have never been worse!"
"He says that every week," Wilder
playfully objected. "Perhaps that's
the main reason why his booze cabinet is always so well-stocked. Nothing like regular hardship for promoting
inebriety, is there?"
"It depends on the nature of the
hardship," rejoined Osbourne humorously, as he took a seat beside his
fellow sub-editor on the room's only settee and lit himself
a thin cigar. Now there was only one
person still to come, though, as far as the creation or maintenance of an
informal atmosphere was concerned, he had to be the least important. The 'stag party' was already an hour old and
proceeding quite pleasantly.
A few yards to Osbourne's left, a little
group comprised of a photographer, an artist, and a journalist was continuing
the rival conversation on pornography that had formed a kind of counterpoint to
the one in which he had been engaged with Hunt, prior to Wilder's unexpected
arrival. The photographer, a stocky
Scotsman by name of Stuart Harvey, was denouncing the existence of homosexual
pornography and emphasizing, in no uncertain terms, his preference for
attractive females, whether heterosexual or lesbian. Apparently, his profession had transformed
him into a specialist in nude and partly-clothed women, and had provided him,
moreover, with more than a few erotic perks. But there were drawbacks, not the least of
which being the fact that the women he was obliged to photograph in a variety
of postures weren't always to his taste.
Indeed, the sight of too many nude or partly-clothed bodies over a
relatively short period of time was not only boring, he hastened to assure his
immediate listeners, but downright depressing, to boot! It was a relief to be able to wash one's
hands of them, so to speak, and concentrate on something else every
once-in-a-while - for example, buildings or sunsets.
"Oh, I quite agree," Michael
Haslam, the artist, sympathized.
"One requires professional variety if one isn't to stagnate. For there's no surer way of disillusioning
oneself with the opposite sex than to be in their company either too long or
too often."
The journalist sniggered in implicit
agreement, but declined to comment.
"When I was an art student," the
tall, fair-haired artist continued, "I used to dream of painting nude
women all day. I saw myself as a
combination of Etty and Rubens, dedicated to the sensuous delineation of the
female form. What could be better, I
used to think, than a lifetime spent in the company of beautiful women? Well, after a couple of years of it, I found
myself asking: What could be worse? I
found myself seeking the company of men in the evenings."
"A time, ideally, when one should be
enjoying the company of women,"
"Quite! And not necessarily nude ones, either,"
Haslam insisted, as though to preclude implications of impropriety. "So, growing disillusioned with my
professional habits, I gravitated to painting fully clothed men during the day
and to entertaining nude women at night.
And, suddenly, life seemed a lot more supportable." He knocked back an ample mouthful of white
wine and smacked his lips in sensuous appreciation of its vinegary tang. "But these days I paint neither men nor
women, specifically, but things like that." He pointed towards a small canvas which hung
against the opposite wall, a canvas Martin Osbourne had bought from him some
six months previously for the comparatively modest sum of £500. Not that Osbourne was particularly keen on
it. On the contrary, he could hardly
bear the sight of it these days. But,
for sentimental and egotistical reasons, he had considered it worth his while
to be 'up with the times', as it were, and accordingly the possessor of a work
by a man whose friendship he had secured only a short time before - compliments
of 'Arts Monthly'. "My friend the
painter," he would boast to the various junior correspondents and other
artistic young men whom he lured along to his weekly stag parties on the
pretext of a friendly tête-à-tête.
And he would point out the various aesthetic subtleties of the work,
drawing especial attention to certain dubious technicalities which he
enigmatically described as 'modern', whilst endeavouring to explain and, in
some degree, justify the strange juxtapositions of subject-matter which
confronted the startled gazes of all who stood in front of it for the first time.
To be sure, it wasn't every day that one
encountered the paradoxical spectacle of a Greek temple standing in a desert
with a statue of the Buddha squatting complacently on its top step and, at the
foot of the steps, two figures - one dressed in armour and wielding a mace and
the other garbed in Oriental robes and wielding a scimitar - engaged in mortal
combat, whilst, to either side of the temple, an impassive sphinx and a fierce
Byzantine deity looked on, as though transfixed. There was certainly something unusual, not to
say radically incongruous, about all that!
And the bemused minds of those who had never met with such a work before
and could only, in the circumstances, have the most hazy idea as to its philosophical
implications, were nonchalantly informed by the host-owner in person that it
was one of Michael Haslam's 'Cultural Chimeras', and that he was a kind of
latter-day Alma-Tadema who specialized, with eclectic zeal, in depicting
aspects of all the great cultures of the past at once, through a sort of
multi-dimensional montage. In short,
someone who, whilst hardly eligible for inclusion within the West's own great
artistic tradition, would nevertheless be remembered as a highly talented
outsider and possibly even minor genius.
"You could say that I've gone from one
extreme to another," Haslam continued, staring up at his fifth 'Cultural
Chimera' with pride. "I began by
over-specializing and I've ended-up by taking the adage 'Variety is the spice
of life' to its utmost possible painterly realization. If you could only see my most recent
paintings! Never such
diffusion as now!"
'Never such confusion as now' would have
been a more apposite confession, Osbourne was thinking, as he savoured the
aroma of his mild cigar and stared at the canvas about which the artist, at
that moment, was being so immodestly and shamelessly enthusiastic. Things were certainly coming to a low ebb when so-called serious artists could take pride in
drawing inspiration from alien cultures, and cultures, moreover, which had been
in decline, if not extinct, for thousands of years. That was even worse than turning to science
and technology for inspiration!
"What's wrong, Martin?" Hunt was
asking, as though out of the blue.
"Have you become hypnotized by your painting or
something?" He waved a saving hand
backwards and forwards in front of his colleague's long nose.
"Not quite," the latter hastened
to assure him. "Why, have I missed
something?"
"You will if you don't listen to what
Neil's going to tell us about a cucumber," Hunt rejoined. "A rather special
cucumber, apparently."
"Why 'special'?" queried
Osbourne, his lips expanding into a sceptical smile.
"Because it was used as a dildo,"
Wilder calmly informed him. "You
know what that is, don't you?"
Osbourne irascibly pondered a moment this
slight to his intelligence, but simply said: "Sure, it's a kind of
vibrator minus the vibration, an ingredient in the Tao te Ching, a sort
of artificial phallus."
This answer, though purposely over-intellectualized,
evidently satisfied Wilder. "Yes,
good!" he averred. "Well, this
more naturalistic dildo was long and gently curved, see,
and belonged to a Mrs X."
"Who's she?" asked Osbourne.
"That doesn't matter," retorted
Wilder. "What does is that she and
her husband, a Mr X, had invited some important guests to dinner."
"Oh, really?" Osbourne's tone was vaguely contemptuous, but
he was mildly intrigued all the same.
"Well, Mr X saw his attractive young
wife rinsing a cucumber in preparation for the salad that was going to form the
main course of the meal and, struck by a bright if perverse idea, he snatched
it from his beloved's hands and commanded her to stretch out on the kitchen
table, which at that moment was conveniently empty."
Simultaneous sniggers broke loose from the
throats of the two sub-editors of 'Arts Monthly'.
"Being a ductile and exemplary wife,
Mrs X climbed onto the table and, at her husband's perverse bidding, hitched up
her skirt. Mr X thereupon greased the
cucumber and proceeded to manipulate it, albeit tactfully, in the manner of a
dildo. You follow?"
"Perfectly," Osbourne admitted
through the fumes of his latest cigar which, in circumstances like this, served
as an extension of his temper. "He
thrust it between his wife's thighs."
"Indeed he did!" came the amused response from an incipiently sherry-merry
correspondent. "And when he
withdrew it a couple of minutes later, funky
cucumber! It smelt unmistakably
feminine."
Unrestrained laughter erupted from the occupants
of the settee. Even the little group of
persons who weren't quite involved with them became, for the nonce, noticeably
intrigued. The division between
Osbourne's colleagues and friends became momentarily non-existent.
"What about Mrs X's panties?"
objected Hunt pedantically. "You
haven't mentioned any."
"Primarily because she wasn't wearing
any," declared Wilder, his face flushed with excitement, "her husband
being something of a compulsive lecher!
Anyway, getting back to the gist of things, he then instructed Mrs X to
slice the cucumber as usual, to evenly distribute it among the five guests, and
under no circumstances whatsoever to either wash it again or put anything on
it. He wanted it to retain the flavour
of her carnal person. So the duty of
preparing the salad was resumed by Mrs X more or less from where it had been so
rudely interrupted, she naturally obeying her husband's perverse
instructions. Now when, finally, the
guests arrived and they all sat down to dinner, Mr X's anticipatory excitement
was so intense that he could scarcely keep a straight face. Even his wife wasn't quite her usual innocent
self as each of the distinguished visitors helped themselves to their slices of
cucumber and commented approvingly on the meal, which also included roast
chicken. Unfortunately, one or two of
them, for reasons best known to themselves, quite spoilt Mr X's pleasure by
swamping their slices of the carnal cucumber in copious dollops of mayonnaise. But the remaining guests provided his imagination
with the sadistic titillation it evidently required, as he lavished especial
attention upon the progress of their forks whenever a slice of cucumber was in
evidence. Now there was one old lady
among them who just about crowned his felicity when she ..." he struggled
bravely against the temptation to explode with laughter "... sniffed
suspiciously at one such slice and involuntarily raised her brows in horrified
surprise. It was as much as Mr X could do
to refrain from asking her point-blank whether there wasn't something
wrong!"
Renewed bursts of laughter shook the rib
cages of the recipients of this slightly scurrilous and more than vaguely
implausible anecdote, connected, as some thought, with Nicholas Webb, and
promoted further good fellowship. Glasses
were refilled with whatever was available and verbal
inhibitions shed with an alacrity that would have flabbergasted anyone not
sufficiently well-acquainted with Martin Osbourne's little weekly
gatherings. There was even room for a
joke about a certain female at 'Arts Monthly' being 'well-organized', and a
certain male no less well-known to them being a 'good organizer', as well as a
slight variation on Havelock Ellis' first name, which replaced the 'l' with a
'c'.
"Consummate frivolity!" exclaimed
Haslam by way of congratulating Osbourne for one such joke, which transformed
even his ordinarily sober mien into a transmitter of radiant hilarity. "Strictly men
only!"
At that moment there came a short, sharp
buzz from the doorbell.
"Ah, that must be Tony!"
conjectured Osbourne, suddenly turning serious.
"It's so late that I'd begun to wonder whether he was coming, the
little twit!"
A slightly flushed and nervous Anthony
Keating entered the room and offered formal apologies for not being able to arrive
sooner. Unfortunately business had held
him up, he claimed.
"I suppose you mean that interview
with old Howard Tonks," the officiating host responded, offering him, at
his request, a glass of white wine.
Keating frowned sullenly and, feeling
slightly compromised, tentatively nodded his head. He couldn't bring himself to disclose what
had actually happened, so he mumbled something about the
composer keeping him to dinner and generally making a meal of things.
"Sounds as though he's a pretty
garrulous fellow," concluded Osbourne sympathetically. "Either that or just good at talking
about himself, the wanker," he added, as a malicious afterthought.
The junior correspondent nodded his head
and frowned again. "A bit of
both," he admitted, by way of keeping up appearances. Then, catching sight of Neil Wilder, whom in
his perplexity he had failed to notice on first entering the room, he waved
across at him and quickly changed the subject to his health.
"Yes, he's sort of back to normal
now," Osbourne confirmed, with an ironic snigger. "Well enough to drink sherry and be
merry here, at any rate. However, now
that you've carried off the Tonks interview, you needn't worry about being
asked to deputize for him again.
Tomorrow you've got a review at the Merlin Gallery, I believe."
"So I realize," responded
Keating, and he frowned more sullenly than before. How could he review the work of some crackpot
artist and simultaneously interview Mr Tonks as well? The dates couldn't be altered, and neither
could the assignments be cancelled - at least not now. For bossman Webb was dead set on getting the
review done as quickly as possible in order to have it sent on, by special
arrangement, to the printers and accordingly ensure its publication in the
forthcoming edition of their magazine.
It would be the last thing printed the following week and, as such,
would have to be dispatched on Friday evening at the latest. A shade inconvenient for
the printers perhaps, but, being a relatively short article, something for
which they could apparently reserve a space. "Not the kind of arrangement we can get
away with too often," Webb had reminded his senior sub-editor shortly
after receiving assurances from the printers in question that some degree of
compliance could be expected, "but likely to win us more respect and
approval from the public than would any retrospective review for which we might
otherwise have had to settle." And
with a reference to Keating's eligibility for the job, he had dismissed
Osbourne on an uncharacteristically optimistic note. Things were turning out quite differently, it appeared, from what he had initially
expected!
"Still, you've got more experience of
reviewing art exhibitions than of interviewing composers," the host
rejoined, in an encouraging tone-of-voice, "so it shouldn't prove too
difficult for you. You're more or less
back on your own professional territory again."
"Yes, I guess so," conceded
Keating, forcing a late smile to camouflage the spiritual discomfort he was
experiencing. For 'more or less' was no
small exaggeration, and one that, in the circumstances, provided scant
encouragement! In truth, he knew
full-well that the exhibition he would be reviewing, or was expected to review,
was essentially anything but his professional
territory. Indeed, it was even further
removed from it, in some ways, than Mr Tonks' music! But art criticism was his second string as a
junior correspondent and, that being the case, he had
little option but to indulge it, for better or worse. The reviewing of books, principally aesthetic
and literary ones, would have to wait, seemingly, until the following week -
assuming he would still be working for the magazine then. For the way things stood at present, he
couldn't be too confident. Unless, however, he could come to some kind of alternative
arrangement...?
Yes, that possibility suddenly struck him
like a revelation from On High! Perhaps
Neil Wilder would be able to help him out of the double-dealing fix he now
found himself in, compliments, in no small measure, of the man himself. After all, it was largely Wilder's fault that
he happened to be in such a predicament to begin with! A bud of incipient optimism sprouted from his
soul and gently spread its enlivening aura across his face. If there was going to be trouble at the
composer's house, the following day, over the housekeeper's shameful discovery
that afternoon, why should he walk straight into it? Wouldn't it be wiser to induce Wilder to take
his place and conduct the interview instead, bearing in mind that he was better
qualified to do so anyway, and probably wouldn't invite further trouble? Yes, that had to be the solution! For if Wilder wasn't due back to work until
next Monday, no-one would know what he was doing on Friday. And if no-one would know that, then neither
would anyone have cause to suspect that he had been enlisted by Keating to take
care of an assignment which should have been wrapped-up on Thursday! With Wilder seated in the music room at Tonkarias,
asking the simple questions he had hurriedly and somewhat facetiously prepared
in the first place, Keating would be free to dedicate himself to the fiasco at
the Merlin Gallery. As long as the
tape-recording was kept away from the ears of Webb, Osbourne, Hunt, et al., the
transcription onto paper wouldn't give anything away. With Keating's signature appended to it,
there would be little cause for suspicion.
And even the tape-recording could be redone, so that one heard Keating
asking the questions instead of Wilder.
Yes, there was indeed a way out of the fix
circumstances had landed him in, after all, a way that depended on the
co-operation of the cheerful character who was now
approaching him through the haze of cigar smoke. But he needed to get rid of Osbourne, since
it would be impossible for him to unfold his plan with the senior sub-editor
standing blithely in the way. Indeed, it
would probably be impossible for him to unfold it anyway, since there were only
seven of them in the room, which wasn't a particularly large one. Unless.... His eyes alighted on the stereo system to
the left of the wine cabinet. Why wasn't
it on?
"What's happened to the music
tonight?" he exclaimed, pointing a gentle finger in the direction of
Osbourne's sound system. "I'd hoped that you'd have a new disc or tape to
boast of."
"As a matter of fact I have,"
declared Osbourne, his patrician countenance instantaneously betraying a degree
of collector's pride. "Would you
like to hear it, then?"
"Of course I would!" responded
Keating enthusiastically. "I've got
great faith in your taste. As does Neil,
don't you mate?"
"If you say so," said Wilder
sheepishly, smiling vaguely.
"Actually, I was so preoccupied by my
friends' conversation, before you arrived, that it just didn't occur to me to
play anything," confessed Osbourne, striding across to the midi. "But now that you've raised the
issue." He bent down and began to
sort through his audio cassettes, many of which were piled together in heaps on
the floor.
Meanwhile, Anthony Keating was manoeuvring
himself in the direction he wanted things to go. "I hear you've recovered from your flu
bug," he revealed to Wilder.
"Just about," the latter
conceded. "I'm well enough to drink
sherry anyway."
Osbourne found the cassette he intended to
play and inserted it into the tape deck with a loud retort. There was an uneasy silence of anticipation
as it got under way, but then the first notes of a composition with a powerful
beat and an elastic electric guitar exploded upon them. "Any guesses?" he asked.
Keating didn't have to guess. He recognized the music immediately and
confessed as much.
"So you're familiar with Jeff Beck's
latest release too," Osbourne rejoined, as the heavy rock riff ground its
way through the track in question.
"Too familiar!" shouted Keating,
to the amusement of Wilder, who was also vaguely familiar with it. However, with Osbourne still standing in
close proximity to them, it was impossible for Anthony Keating to reveal his
plan, so, fearing that if he stayed put the senior sub-editor would engage him
in conversation about his latest tape or some other musical irrelevance, he
ambled across, glass in hand, to the other side of the room, where Michael
Haslam had just that moment launched himself into a defence of contemporary
art, 'Cultural Chimeras' and all, at the expense of the little Scots
photographer, Stuart Harvey. A copiously
stocked bookcase standing against the wall a couple of yards behind them
presented him with the pretext he felt he would require to justify his presence
there, and, bending down, he pretended to scan its predominantly literary
contents.
"But if one painted landscapes like
Constable, these days, one would be laughed at," Haslam was protesting in
a tone bordering on exasperation.
"All this return-to-nature-business is irrelevant, outdated, irresponsible. You've
got to paint in a way that's chiefly if not entirely your own. The influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on
painters is now virtually extinct.
You've got to change with the times, to lead the times, which is
something photography can't do. So
photography isn't an art."
"It is an art," retorted
"Bullshit!" exclaimed Haslam,
clearly the worse for drink. "It's
not a fine art."
"It's a damned sight finer than the
crude muck you painters dredge-up, like puke, from your frigging subconscious
and apply to the canvas, or whatever, with the aid of your boots!"
asseverated the photographer on the crest of Scots arrogance.
"Crude or not, it would still be more
of an art than photography," Haslam countered, not a little flushed,
"because photography is too impersonal and doesn't change all that
much. The photo you take today can be
taken in twenty or in thirty years' time and, providing the subject-matter
hasn't changed dramatically, it won't look all that different. Admittedly, the photographic material may
have changed a little and the technological quality of cameras been improved in
the meantime, but the photo would still be the same, or approximately so. With art, however, everything changes. Blake is different from
Turner, and Turner's different from Bourne-Jones, who is different from
Beardsley, etc. Individualism is
the key to genuine art. It has the
personal touch. But your celebrated photographers ... where's their personal
touch, eh? They have a machine and
they're dependent on the way that machine, the camera, functions for the
results they get. One of them
specializes in brothels, another in castles, a third in models, a fourth in
nature, and that's about as much individualism as you get from them. In short, not enough to
justify the term 'art'!"
"Nonsense,
man!" objected
"Yes, but all that has nothing to do
with genuine art," came the impatient rejoinder
from the self-respecting artist.
"In the final analysis photography is little more than the average
philistine's approach to art, the nearest he can get to it. For fine art demands skills which you
photographers wouldn't even be capable of imagining,
let alone realizing!"
Stuart Harvey suddenly gave vent to an
explosion of sardonic laughter. What was
all this nonsense about fine art and skills!
As if they still existed! It was
more than he could bear to hear someone endeavouring to equate the latest
'experimental' developments in painting with fine art! What was particularly 'fine' about
different-coloured paints that had been haphazardly splashed across a canvas, a
number of straight or curvy lines which made one dizzy to behold, simple
geometrical shapes that had been painted with a naiveté which made even the
'naives' appear sophisticated, or anything else which could be unequivocally
equated with late twentieth-century 'art'?
Wasn't there a chronological divide between fine art and crude art, a
time, so to speak, when fine art had generally ceased to be painted and been
supplanted by the sort of arcane, not to say inane, rubbish all-too-frequently
encountered in exhibitions of so-called contemporary art? And wasn't the term 'art' something of a
misnomer when applied to such rubbish - a cunning deception on the part of its
purveyors which served their purely exploitative purposes? Surely the terms 'sham art' or 'anti-art'
would have proved more apposite?
With hand on stomach the stocky Scotsman
laughed more spontaneously and pleasurably than he could remember having done
for some considerable period of time.
How pretentious of Michael Haslam to suggest that contemporary painting,
which included most late twentieth-century abstracts, was genuine art, and that
photography, by contrast, was merely the average philistine's approach to
it! As if he were
some kind of Raphael or Rubens or Rembrandt or even Dali with a special set of
painterly skills inaccessible to anyone else!
Why, when one considered the nature of his 'Cultural Chimeras', wasn't
it better to be a relatively unpretentious photographer? If Haslam had been capable of excelling in Modern
Realism, and could produce portraits or interiors virtually indistinguishable
from photographs, it would be quite another matter, irrespective of the
absurdity of slaving-on in an objective painterly manner in an age of
photography, which could do the job so much better and quicker and which, in
any case, was doubtless the real reason why most so-called avant-garde artists
were unable or unwilling to carry-on painting in an objective manner at the
risk of appearing even more anachronistic and redundant than they were already,
the quasi-mystical transmutations of anti-art notwithstanding! Rather than admit defeat and abandon art for
photography or some other, more relevant and truly contemporary mode of
perceptual objectivity, the reactionary bastards persisted in their paradoxical
creations quite as though they were really contemporary and not cultural
anachronisms who, in consequence of middle-class prejudice, attested to the
moral bankruptcy and aesthetic degeneration of painterly art to a level which
made photography seem comparatively beautiful, irrespective of its subject-matter.
"Photography is superior to
crude art," insisted
"Bullshit!" Haslam
protested. "Painting can only be a
fine art, not a crude one like photography.
What you're in fact implying is that photography isn't a crude art, but
something superior to that, superior, in other words, to cooking or gardening
or dress-making or ..."
Anthony Keating had heard more than enough
by now! The polemical obsessions of
these two semi-drunken friends of Martin Osbourne were becoming more than a
trifle exasperating, particularly since, like monarchs and presidents, they
tended to cancel one-another out in a mutually exclusive context of old- and
new-brain perceptual objectivity, so to speak, with or without incompatible
class implications. Thus with the
fragile hope that by moving to another part of the room they wouldn't
exasperate him so much, he straightened up and, abandoning the bookcase, strode
across to where Andrew Hunt and his journalistic protégé, David Turner, were
discussing spiritualism. But even there,
whilst he stood in front of Haslam's 'chimera' and pretended to scrutinize one
of its 'cultural' components, he was still too close for comfort to the men who
considered themselves the successors of Brassai and Dali, and accordingly felt
obliged to abandon his intention of listening to the advantages of spiritualism
over materialism by returning, tout de suite, to the proximity
of the midi system. There, thanks to the
tape that was still playing, one could only hear snatches of what was being
said or, rather, shouted in defence of the visual arts. But, more importantly, Osbourne had left the
room and Neil Wilder was squatting down beside a pile of audio cassettes
through which he was searching with the look of someone who, given on principle
to CDs, only touched tapes as a last resort.
"Where's Martin?" he asked,
drawing closer to the midi, where he pressed the volume increase a couple of
times before going across to Wilder.
"Gone to the loo," the latter
replied.
"Oh, good," sighed Keating with a
look of relief, and, seizing the opportunity of Osbourne's temporary absence,
he made mention of the interview with Howard Tonks, adding: "I have to
speak to you about it in private, as soon as possible!"
"What's wrong with now?" asked
Wilder, looking a shade perplexed.
"Shush! keep your voice down!"
pleaded Keating, as side one of the tape came to an end and momentarily exposed
their conversation to the ears of anyone who might have been interested in
overhearing it. Fortunately, Andrew
Hunt, the only other real threat to Keating's plan besides Osbourne, was still
preoccupied, like some old woman, with his conversation on the spirit world.
"Did something go wrong?" Wilder
asked him in a lower and more apprehensive tone-of-voice.
"Yes, dreadfully!" confessed
Keating. "So I need your
assistance."
"In what way?"
Wilder wanted to know.
It was difficult for the young correspondent
to broach the subject, so: "I'll explain later," was all he would say
at this point. "First, I want to
ensure that no-one overhears, okay?"
"Sure.
But couldn't we arrange to discuss this, er, problem somewhere
else?" suggested Wilder, frowning.
At that moment Martin Osbourne returned
from the lavatory and, gently closing the door behind him, began to advance
towards them. Keating pursed his lips in
dejected anticipation of the senior sub-editor's intrusion but, to his relief,
the man halted half-way across the room, turned with a look of annoyance
towards the two loudest conversationalists, who were still intellectually at
one-another's throats, and advanced towards them instead, evidently with a view
to restoring the party spirit. With an
involuntary sigh of relief, Keating took his colleague by the arm and led him
towards the furthermost corner from them, where, in a low voice, he proceeded
to divulge some details about his little problem.
CHAPTER FIVE
Across the
square the tall oaks creakingly swayed in the stiff breeze which had recently
sprung out of Nature's strange and unpredictable life. It was the sort of breeze which, though not
strong enough to wrench the leaves from their moorings on the sturdy branches
of the great trees, nevertheless caused a series of violent agitations among
them which was somewhat disquieting for Nicholas Webb to behold, and for two
reasons. On the one hand, it served to
remind him that autumn was just a few weeks away and that, after the autumn,
there wouldn't be any more leaves to look at until the late spring of the
following year, and, on the other hand, it insidiously contrived to undermine
his faith in the goodness of Nature, albeit not, as yet, to any appreciable
extent. For it was virtually axiomatic
with him that, by comparison with the city, Nature wasn't merely good but
almost divine. Nevertheless, there were
times when it seemed less good or quasi-divine than formerly. Times, indeed, when one was tempted to use
the word 'evil' to describe how one felt about it.... Not that there was any
need to think of man-devouring earthquakes or ship-sinking tornadoes or
house-flattening hurricanes or village-smothering volcanic eruptions or
anything of the like. God, no! It was far wiser to shut-out such diabolical
phenomena from one's mind altogether or, if one wasn't permitted that luxury,
at least as much as possible. After all,
the cult of Nature Worship, like most other cults, demanded a certain
imaginative myopia, or myopic imagination, on the part of its humble devotees
if they weren't to jeopardize the spiritual benefits accruing to the meticulous
cultivation of a faith which could so easily be assailed and, if the worst came
to the worst, completely shattered by logical posturings. A few cracks in it, now and again, would not
be the worst of outcomes, provided one didn't encourage them to unduly
expand. For a chink in the faith would
be harder to repair than a few cracks.
And after a chink ...?
No, Nicholas Webb hadn't developed more
than a few tiny cracks since falling under the influence of John Cowper Powys,
the prophet of sublimated Nature Worship, or Elementalism, and becoming a
humble devotee the year before. They had
appeared in the middle of winter at a time when the icy inclemency of January
had reduced his worship to the barest minimum, to a degree of dilettantism, one
might say, which he subsequently considered deplorable and hastened, with the
inception of spring, to atone for as best he could. He had even fallen partly under the confusing
influence, during those bitter January weeks, of a dualistic philosopher whose
ambivalent attitude towards Nature, more ambivalent by far than anything
characterizing John Cowper Powys, further managed to undermine his faith in its
goodness.
According to this philosopher, Nature was
neither good nor evil but a paradoxical combination of both, the good chiefly
manifesting itself in summer and the evil, by contrast, in winter, it being
duly inferred that the one couldn't exist without the other. Thus from Webb's ailing devotion to
Elementalism there emerged the heresy that, in contrast to those aspects of
Nature embodied in inclement weather conditions, the buildings of the square,
as indeed the city of which the square was but a tiny component, were alone
good at such a time - a heresy which almost served to transform the few cracks
into a veritable chink!
But all this had happened, he subsequently
reassured himself, at a juncture when his faith hadn't had sufficient time to
blossom into what it was in the process of becoming under favourable climatic
conditions; when it hadn't had adequate time to put down firm roots, so to
speak, and consequently withstand the temptation to err. Next time he would be better prepared for
whatever the winter held in store for him!
So much so that even the bare branches of the oak trees in the middle of
the square would be able to assist him, would encourage him to stand at the
window just as often as at more propitious times of year and 'plunge into' the
snow or ice or ...
He was on the point of returning to his
paper-strewn desk when the blue-stockinged calf muscles of a passing female
caught his wandering eye and induced him to plunge into them with even more
avidity than he had mustered for the fluttering leaves. A connotation with Deborah Wilke's
lust-provoking attire of the previous evening duly came hovering to mind and
invoked a complacent smile from his lips.
Why, she had looked even more ravishing, if that was possible to believe,
than on Tuesday, and so much so that it was as much as he could do to restrain
the impulse to indulge his passion before he took her out. And when they were out and
seated together at the theatre, his impatience to bring her back to his flat
became so acute, at one point, that he lost all interest in the frigging play
and felt obliged to mumble something derogatory about it every few
minutes. He even wanted to walk out of
the theatre before it had finished; though he knew from experience that Deborah
liked being seen in public and wouldn't relish missing the rest of a play which
she evidently found amusing, not to say socially gratifying. But he had weathered the compromise between
taking her out and bringing her back quite successfully in the long run. For she rewarded him most generously, in
private, for all the pains to which he had put himself in public. If she looked ravishing with her clothes on,
she appeared absolutely irresistible with them off, and he wasted no time in
making it perfectly clear to her just how irresistible she was! For the fact that he had kissed her anus was
proof enough of the respect she inspired in him. To how many other women had he done that in
the past? Only one -
the lady who subsequently became his wife and bore him two children. At the height of his passion for her he would
have preferred to kiss her arse than to kiss another woman's lips. She was beautiful to him all over, even on
the soles of her feet, and he wanted to prove it to her, he needed to prove
it to her, in order to testify to the strength and genuineness of his love.
But strong and genuine though his love was
at the time, it subsequently became less so, weakened to a point where the
prospect of kissing her in relatively unconventional places would have revolted
him, made him contemptuous of himself, and disgusted with her for allowing or
encouraging him to do so! And then it
weakened to a point where he couldn't even bring himself to kiss her in
conventional places, where the attempts he made at doing so increasingly began
to disgust him and resulted, several unrewarding endeavours later, in his not
kissing her at all - resulted, ultimately, in the divorce which brought about
their final separation just over two years ago.
Now, however, after a succession of fairly
lukewarm relationships with other women, he was beginning to experience
something akin to the passion he had felt for Pauline in the early days of
their love, some fifteen years previously.
A memory of those heightened times was returning to him and, with that
memory, one or two of his former habits were also being resuscitated. Could it be that Deborah Wilkes, his
twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend, had all the makings of a future wife? He couldn't be sure at this stage but, all
the same, it didn't seem implausible, particularly if his enthusiasm for the
entirety of her body was anything to judge by - an enthusiasm which she
evidently found agreeably flattering! And why not? It
wasn't every day or with every man that one could, as a woman, consider oneself
desirable all over!
He turned away from his voyeuristic
vantage-point by the window and returned to his desk. There were still a few letters to sign and a
number to read, as well as some recent journalistic contributions from the
outside world to consider. He was grateful
that fate had spared him the ignominy of an idle existence, even if the one he
normally led, in his editorial capacity, wasn't always to his taste. But even poor contributions and tedious
letters were better than nothing; even they sometimes provided him with a
couple of hours' agreeable preoccupation.
Take that young surrealist poet the other day, for instance. One's peace of mind often depended upon such
people. One never quite knew what to
expect next! Not to mention the stuff
which the regular contributors, the professional employees of 'Arts Monthly'
(arse-lickers every one of them), habitually churned out, ostensibly in the
service of the magazine. Young Anthony
Keating, for instance, with his petty-bourgeois obsession with the decline of the
West, an obsession which somehow found its way into just about everything he
wrote. Really, there were times when one
had to laugh at the earnestness with which the poor fellow set about the uphill
task of disillusioning people with the concept of continuous social and moral
progress! Spengler couldn't have wished
for a better heir to his pessimistic theories, a more ardent disciple than
young Keating, who was even more piously Spenglerian than Malcolm Muggeridge,
if that were possible to believe! And
yet he appeared to have purposely closed his eyes to the things that showed no
evidence of decline, including the beauty of the most attractive contemporary
women. But how could one think or worry
about the decline of Western civilization with a ravishing blonde like Deborah
Wilkes in one's arms? Perhaps that was
what Keating needed? Something to make
him conscious of the way certain things rose in contemporary life!
And then there was Andrew Hunt, with his
otherworldly spiritualism, his penchant for speculations about the
Afterlife. How many times had one been
obliged to read about the survival of consciousness following death in an essay
ostensibly treating of, say, contemporary poetry or drama? More times than one could bare or dare to
remember! And yet the public appeared to
like it, even to delight in the sharp juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated
topics as presented by the more scholarly, and possibly schizophrenic, of his
two sub-editors. But how could one be expected to believe that consciousness survived
death? It didn't make sense, at least
not to Nicholas Webb, who was aware that his scepticism would probably have
been condemned by Keating, if not by Hunt also, as a further symptom of Western
decline. One was expected to believe
that consciousness could continue to function in some kind of otherworldly way,
without the assistance of a brain and of the blood being pumped through it to
keep it alive. But that was tantamount
to believing the impossible: that mind, as we understood it, was something that
could continue to function without physiological support! And where exactly did this 'mind', this
bodiless consciousness of oneself and others, go, following death? Where, exactly, was it to be found? Could you pluck it out of the air around you,
this something which couldn't even be seen but which nonetheless continued to
dream its own dreams, or did it exist on a higher plane - for instance,
somewhere up above the clouds? If so,
how overcrowded it must be up there, what with the billions upon billions of
'minds' which had once belonged to prehistoric men, prehistoric reptiles,
historic men, fish, birds, animals, insects, etc., and, assuming there was life
on other planets throughout the Universe, innumerable aliens of one kind or
another as well! And now that there were
so many rockets and satellites and other technological marvels being sent out
into space by the Earth, not to mention what other hypothetically habitable
planets were probably dispatching, how these 'minds' must have been jostled
about and generally disturbed by the technological brainchilds of the lesser
minds still attached to bodies! Really,
it was as much as one could do to keep a straight face at the thought of what
life must be like in the other world - assuming it was as one imagined it to
be! Everything that had ever lived and
possessed a mind from the year dot to the current second on any planet capable
of sustaining autonomous life in any part of the Universe would be 'living', as
contemporaneous neighbours, on the higher plane! It didn't bear thinking about! And yet, if Andrew Hunt was any authority on
the subject, it had been thought about, in various ways, since the dawn of
thought, and would doubtless continue to be pondered until such time as
thinking minds ceased to exist. But
would Hunt think about this world in the other one - assuming he wasn't already
effectively in it? Nicholas Webb smiled
ironically and proceeded to apply his stylish signature to the letters in front
of him. At least he had no doubt as to
which world he inhabited. The
other one could wait until he died, so far as he was concerned.
A gentle rap on the door momentarily
aroused him from the development of his signature and induced him to glance in
its direction, where the oval face of Judith Pegg was now to be seen. He smiled his acknowledgement of her
secretarial function and motioned her to enter.
"Had a nice lunch?" he asked, glad of an opportunity to speak
to someone so unequivocally down-to-earth.
"Very nice, thanks!" she replied,
taking her customary seat in front of his paper-strewn desk. "A
He raised his brows in a show of admiring
surprise and continued to apply his signature to the letters still requiring
it. "Not very much dictation this
afternoon," he murmured while writing, "so
you needn't worry about having to work too hard. Just one or two things left over from
yesterday."
She smiled deferentially and glanced over
the contents of his desk. The pile of
letters that constituted the morning's post was still resting where she had
left it at 9.30, which of course meant that he hadn't got round to reading any
of them and therefore wouldn't have formulated any kind of appropriate response
to their proposals. He never read and
dictated simultaneously. The process of
assimilation had to take place in solitude, where there would be no-one to
distract his attention or impair his powers of concentration. Only after the contents of a letter requiring
a reply had been thoroughly digested could they be regurgitated,
a number of hours later, in an appropriately pertinent manner. It was as though he planned his dictation in
advance, like a military campaign, and secretly flattered himself over his
ability to remember, at a later time, what he had earlier decided upon, since
the letters subsequently required only the slightest attention. The greater part of his attention appeared to
be focused on his secretary, whom he enjoyed watching, and in whose person he
still had a vaguely amorous interest, despite the passage of time.
"Now then!" he gently exclaimed,
having dispensed with his signature-cum-autograph and pulled a small pile of
letters out of a drawer to the left of his desk. "Three of these can have the same reply,
since they relate to an identical subject." He briefly scanned the letters in question and
commenced dictation with: "We are most grateful for your inquiry regarding
the advisability of submitting an essay on the novelist Hillary Parker for the
October edition of our periodical, but regret to say that the edition in
question has already been planned and could not now be rearranged STOP We would
however be willing to consider such an essay for the November edition if
circumstances permit STOP Your interest in the magazine is much appreciated and
we look forward to receiving your contribution STOP". He read out the names and addresses of the
people concerned and cast their letters to one side. Not often, he mused, that potential
contributors bothered to sound one out beforehand. Most of them just sent things, and pretty
unsuitable things, too! But these three
must have had some raw experiences in consequence of former optimism, and
accordingly become more cautious. And rightly
so, since Hillary Parker's latest book hadn't received the most flattering of
critical introductions to the general public in certain other influential
periodicals.
Nicholas Webb frowned down at the remaining
letters in his hands, all of which could be covered by the same response - one
relating to the superfluous nature of the many articles received on Howard
Tonks from contributors, or potential contributors, who had previously been of
use to him. Thus: "Whilst we are
must grateful to you for offering us your article on Mr Tonks ... we regret to
say that we have already decided to publish an interview with him in the
September edition ... which has precluded us from considering any further
material STOP Nevertheless ..."
The ringing of the external telephone
suddenly interrupted his rather florid dictation, the product in part of a
slight inebriation. With an expression
of annoyance on his ruddy face, he snatched up the receiver and briskly
announced his name, as though to a subordinate.
"Good afternoon, Mr Webb! This is Howard Tonks speaking, and I regret
to inform you that I wish to lodge a serious complaint."
"Mr Tonks!?" Webb's expression immediately changed from
annoyance at being interrupted to apprehension at the words 'serious
complaint'. "What appears to be
the, er, trouble, sir?" he asked.
"The trouble, Mr Webb, is that my
daughter appears to have been raped, yesterday afternoon, by one of your
correspondents whilst I was detained in
At the mention of police, Webb flinched and
blanched perceptibly. The possibility of
'Arts Monthly' being involved in a scandal of such magnitude positively horrified
him. "Are you absolutely certain it
was one of our correspondents whom your housekeeper discovered, er, having
improper relations with your daughter?" he hastened to query. For he simply couldn't
believe that Anthony Keating would involve himself in such disgraceful
behaviour. It sounded altogether
too preposterous.
"Not absolutely certain," the
composer admitted, in a slightly trembling voice, "because Mrs Marchbanks
hadn't seen your correspondent before."
"You mean, Mr Keating?"
"Yes, he was the one who came on
Monday to interview me, wasn't he?" Mr Tonks recalled. "Mind you, he didn't actually succeed in
doing so, because he was more interested in hearing me play the piano and
talking about irrelevant issues."
"But I understood from him that you
had a sore throat, sir, and was unable, in consequence, to take part in the
interview as arranged."
"Not at all, Mr Webb!" the
composer hastened to correct. "I
was as fit as a fiddle. I could have
talked all afternoon and was perfectly prepared to do so. But Mr Keating was more interested in hearing
my music, and even went so far as to record me playing Schumann."
Webb frowned gravely. It was evident that young Keating had lied to
him on Tuesday morning!
"However, all that is really beside
the point," continued Mr Tonks, his voice regaining a hint of its former
anger. "The fact is that I agreed
to give the interview on Thursday afternoon, as soon as I got back from certain
last-minute professional engagements in
"I didn't hear about any such
call," Webb impulsively responded, in the teeth of a temptation to say the
contrary and thereby acquire a pretext for asserting that Keating had been
instructed to go elsewhere in the afternoon.
But that might have led to further complications.
"Well, it appears someone visited my
house yesterday afternoon," Mr Tonks rejoined, "since there is no reason
for me to assume my housekeeper was simply imagining things. And the way things stand,
Mr Keating seems to be the most likely suspect.
There is, however, one other possibility, so far as your employees are
concerned, and that's a young man by name of Wilder."
"Neil Wilder?" ejaculated Webb,
hardly able to believe his ears.
"But he has been off work all week with influenza."
"Really?" exclaimed Mr Tonks in
some perplexity. "Well, he was well
enough to turn-up at my door for a few minutes this afternoon, Mr Webb, with
the express intention of conducting the interview in Keating's stead. He knew, curiously, that I had been away the
day before, and he knew, too, that I'd agreed to give the interview this afternoon
- two factors which led me to assume that my daughter could have seen him on
Thursday and passed on the information I'd imparted to her by phone. As it happens, he denied having visited my
house the previous afternoon, but claimed that Mr Keating had informed him of
my change of circumstances the same evening.
In other words, he induced me to assume that Mr Keating had visited the
house on Thursday. But when I asked him
point-blank as to exactly when Mr Keating had last visited it, he immediately
replied: 'Monday'. There was no mention of
anyone coming here yesterday."
Nicholas Webb was flabbergasted. "But that's impossible!" he
asseverated, directing a look of horrified amazement at his baffled
secretary. "Someone must have gone
to your house yesterday to discover that you were postponing the interview an
extra day, since Mr Keating was under no doubt, when I spoke to him on Tuesday
morning, that you had only postponed it until Thursday."
"Yes, I fully appreciate that fact, Mr
Webb," responded the composer.
"It would seem that one of your two correspondents is lying, and,
until I know which of them to blame, I'm afraid I shall have to postpone the
interview indefinitely. And if I don't
hear from my daughter over the weekend, I'm afraid I shall have to notify the
police in the hope that they can trace her.
In the meantime, I suggest you question your correspondents as to what
they were up to, and then take appropriate measures to ensure that it doesn't
happen again! I look forward to hearing
from you at the earliest possible opportunity, Mr Webb. Good day!"
A sigh of despair escaped from between
Nicholas Webb's parted lips, as he gently returned the receiver to its
customary position on the body of the telephone.
"What was all that about?" asked
Mrs Pegg, with an air of bewilderment.
"Something pretty serious!" he
replied, furrowing his brows to a degree that left his secretary in no doubt of
the matter. "Something
that may well concern the future of our magazine." Then, realizing that there was little time to
be lost, he asked Mrs Pegg, in dismissing her, to send Osbourne in to see
him. The senior sub-editor, he knew,
held Thursday-evening gatherings at his flat to which several of the
correspondents and other members of staff were often invited. Perhaps it would be possible to elicit some
relevant information concerning the whereabouts, yesterday evening, of either
Keating or Wilder from him?
Unfortunately, there was no way he could see them in person that
afternoon, since the one was out reviewing the new art exhibition at the Merlin
Gallery, and would probably remain out for the rest of the day, while the other
was officially still off work with flu.
But he would certainly see them both first thing Monday morning. There could be no doubt about that!
Before long the door opened again and in
walked Martin Osbourne with an anxious expression on his thin face. "Is anything wrong?" he asked.
"You bet there is!" Webb affirmed
in a gruff voice, before motioning him to sit down. "I have just heard from ..."
Realizing it would probably be more tactful to keep quiet about the telephone
conversation with Howard Tonks for the time being, he cut himself short on that
score, and continued: "I take it you still hold your Thursday-evening, er,
gatherings?"
Osbourne felt inclined to smile at his
superior's tactful formality in spite of the solemnity of the occasion. "Why yes, I held one last night in
fact," he calmly admitted.
"And was Keating there?"
"Only just, for he arrived over an hour-and-a-half
late, excusing himself on the basis of his interview engagement with Howard
Tonks," revealed the senior sub-editor.
Webb could barely conceal his anger and
frustration. Nevertheless he just about
contrived to hold himself in check, as he asked: "And did he say anything
about it?"
"Only that the composer had kept him
to dinner and talked about himself a great deal."
Here Webb felt obliged to give minimum vent
to his pent-up feelings in the form of a protracted sigh, the negative breath of
which Osbourne must have felt across the other side of the desk, for he shifted
uneasily in his chair. There could be no
doubt that Keating had lied! It was his
word against Mr Tonks'. But what of Wilder?
How did he come to get involved, unless he happened to be at Osbourne's
little gathering, too? It seemed the
most likely explanation, and yet it was difficult to put the question
point-blank to Osbourne, difficult because he would feel decidedly
uncomfortable at the prospect of revealing that someone who was ostensibly ill,
and off work in consequence, was nevertheless well enough to attend his little
soiree. But there remained a more subtle
approach, and Webb was all for trying it.
"I take it Keating was the only member of staff present at your party
last night," he commented.
The senior sub-editor's face appreciably
darkened at the memory of what Wilder had said to him about keeping his
attendance confidential. It simply
wouldn't have been fair on him to disclose his presence there, and thereby enable
Webb to infer that he ought to have been well enough to return to work today,
assuming he had really been sick in the first place. So, after a moment's painful hesitation, he
simply said: "No, Andrew was also there."
"Only Andrew Hunt?" queried the
editor in what, to Osbourne, seemed like an impertinently sceptical tone.
"Yes." The temptation to mention Neil momentarily
presented itself to Osbourne again but was instantly quashed. "But what is all this about?" he
cried, unable to restrain his pique at being interrogated in such fashion.
"I'll tell you what it's all
about!" exploded Webb and, throwing caution to the wind,
he proceeded to divulge the information which Howard Tonks had imparted to his
worry-strained mind only a few minutes before.
"Oh, I see," murmured Osbourne,
as the implications of the affair began to register with him. "And Wilder turned-up on the composer's
doorstep this afternoon?"
"He did indeed! confirmed
Webb. "Which leads one to assume
that Keating must have phoned him or visited his flat
either before or after he visited yours," he added, "and thus got
Wilder to stand-in for him."
Martin Osbourne bit his lip in a panic of
guilt. All-of-a-sudden it was perfectly
obvious to him what had happened. They
must have come to some such arrangement while he was in the toilet and talked
about it behind his back, the deceitful bastards! Even Keating's desire to listen to music must
have had some ulterior motive, like ensuring they wouldn't be easily
overheard. For when he returned from the
toilet, Osbourne remembered, the music was louder than before, and, partly
because of this, he had gone across to the far corner of the room and left the
two correspondents to groove, ostensibly, to the other side of the Jeff Beck
instead of attempting to get into conversation with either or both of them, as
he had initially intended. But how could
he now admit that Wilder had been at his party?
How could he go back on what he had just said? He bit his lip again in the throes of this
quandary.
"Yes, it's quite a problem,"
admitted Webb, misinterpreting his colleague's pained expression. "We can't afford a scandal of this
magnitude and, what's more, we can't tolerate it! One if not both of them will have to go. We cannot continue to employ people who
betray our trust in them in such a blatantly underhand and frankly criminal
fashion!"
"But I can't believe that Anthony
Keating would actually rape anyone," objected Osbourne on an incredulous
note. "He's much too
civilized."
"Too devious would be nearer the
mark!" declared Webb aggressively.
"Yet if what Howard Tonks' housekeeper apparently wrote in her
letter of resignation is true, then we have no choice but to believe it. Besides, the fact of the old woman's
resignation is bad enough. It may cost
us the interview." He frowned
angrily and leant back in his chair. As
if there wasn't enough to worry about already!
"Well, now that you've told me, what
are we to do?" asked Osbourne nervously.
"Nothing until Monday morning,"
replied Webb, frowning. "Then we'll
get to the bottom of the matter. In the
meantime, I suggest you carry on as normal and pretend, for everybody else's
benefit, that nothing has happened."
The senior sub-editor nodded acquiescently
and, with some relief, took his leave of Webb's office. But he returned to his own office via Andrew
Hunt's one. For he had no desire that
the editor should subsequently find out, via Hunt, that his own account of what
had happened on Thursday evening was less than totally true!
CHAPTER SIX
Anthony
Keating carefully raised himself on one elbow and stared down at the
still-sleeping body of Rebecca Tonks beside him. How beautiful she looked! And how delightful the scent of her soft
femininity! He had been celibate for so
long, before meeting her, that he had quite forgotten
what women smelt like. Not only that; he had quite forgotten what they felt like, too. But Rebecca had made it possible for him to
put his celibacy behind him and embrace his sexuality with a sure
knowledge. She had made it possible on
Thursday and Friday and, with a little coaxing, she would doubtless make it
possible for him again today.
He bent down closer to her head and gently
inhaled the fragrance of her soft hair.
It seemed to him even more delightful at this virginal time of day than
during the night, when he had playfully run his fingers through it and
delicately buried his nostrils in its silken strands. There was certainly something aphrodisiac
about it, something that aroused one's desire.
But his desire had been so thoroughly satisfied, the previous evening,
that it could only be aroused to the comparatively feeble extent of putting the
tip of his tongue to a few strands of hair which he now held in his right hand. He didn't want to be deprived of the taste
and texture of her hair simply because of an essay he had read, some time ago,
about the existence of ticks, those insect-like bloodsuckers! To him, it was as much a gesture of
confidence in her hair as an indication of his growing love for her, the
implication being that even if, by some remote chance, her hair did contain
ticks, he would still find it no less attractive. For they would be her ticks,
after all, and therefore no ordinary ones!
On the contrary, they would almost be something special. But why was he thinking about ticks now,
about tiny parasites which she had probably never even heard of, let alone
contracted. It was really quite absurd.
Letting go of her hair, he gently eased
himself back to his former horizontal position by her side and shut his eyes to
the wan light filtering in through the pale-green curtains of his bedroom. What a strange dream he had dreamt just
before waking up! It was so strange that
he couldn't quite remember it, at least not accurately. But there had been a thing about
Having dealt with the front of the male
body in such an unconventional manner, the artist had then proceeded to apply
similar principles to the back of it in another drawing, so that, to take a single
example, the left buttock bore the noun 'nape' and the right one 'calf
muscle'. And in a third drawing, which
focused upon internal organs of the body, one found oneself staring at
designations such as 'heart' for kidneys, 'lungs' for bladder, and 'appendix'
for liver. As Keating had to admit, it
was more than a trifle perplexing, particularly in an age when surrealism was
no longer quite in vogue! But, on
subsequent reflection, it also contained
an amusing side which poked fun at conventional conditioning and gave one a
short holiday from the everyday world, including, no less importantly, of the
current art establishment. And so too,
for that matter, did the attendant drawings of the female body, with a slightly
different arrangement of names and, following them, the drawings of the various
animals, birds, fish, and insects which the artist had decided to submit to an
identical treatment. Indeed, there were
so many seemingly misplaced names or eccentrically designated parts on display,
in this particular section of the exhibition, that one had cause to wonder
whether their perpetrator would have been capable of applying the correct names
to the relevant parts, or of naming the relevant parts correctly, had
circumstances obliged him to do so.
Yet if that kind of mental or psychological
surrealism wasn't weird enough, what followed was even more so! For the surrealism of names, as one might
term it, was only one aspect of Connolly's art, and arguably not the most
revolutionary or unconventional aspect, either!
There was also a surrealism of colours applicable to paintings in which
roses were bright green, dark blue, or black; tulips grey, emerald, or dark
brown; leaves bright orange, pink, or blue; trees red or pale blue; hedges
black or dark grey; suns bright blue or mauve; clouds yellow, cabbages violet,
skies green, apples purple, bananas maroon, earth silver, and so on. Really, it was difficult to distinguish shit
from sugar when one found the natural world painted in these unrepresentative colours! One was made conscious of how much one's
ability to recognize familiar shapes depended on their colours, how much one
took these colours for granted, and how even the most carefully and accurately
defined shape became somewhat ambiguous and even problematic when deprived of
its rightful hue. But there may have
been something in it for the colour blind, Keating reflected, as he lay beside
his sleeping beauty and gazed up at the brightly-painted white ceiling which,
under the light-restricting influence of his cotton curtains, looked more like
a smooth grey cloud. For those who
couldn't see red, even a dark-blue rose would probably have been a more
interesting, not to say satisfying, proposition than a relatively colourless
one. And what applied to roses must
surely apply just as much, he imagined, to a number of other natural phenomena
- for example, trees and apples.
An arm stirred beside him, moved a little
farther across the pillow on which it was resting, and came to a gentle halt
against his left earlobe. It was evident
that Rebecca moved parts of her body about during sleep from time to time, and
did so, moreover, in a manner which suggested that she knew exactly to what
extent. But suggestions could be
misleading, and just because Keating had had the good fortune to have woken up,
the previous morning, at a time when Rebecca's left hand was in the process of
sliding down his stomach towards his flaccid penis, it didn't mean that she
could be depended upon to do the same thing again today, and with greater
moment! Even so, sharing a bed with
another person was certainly something of an adventure. One could never be absolutely sure what would
happen during one's sleep, whether, on waking, one would find the various limbs
resting in exactly the same positions as the night before or whether, on the
contrary, they would be in positions affording one a degree of sensuous
pleasure at the other person's expense.
That, at any rate, was how it seemed to Keating when he reflected on his
previous experiences with bed partners - few-and-far-between as they were. In all but one case he had been the partner
to wake up first, the person with the privilege, if he so desired, of
contemplating or smelling or even touching and gently caressing the sleeping body
beside him, of experiencing that peculiar sense of possession which such a
privilege entails.
He smiled faintly and relapsed into his
reflections on Connolly's art exhibition again.
It was certainly one of the strangest exhibitions he had ever seen, whether
privately or in his professional capacity as a correspondent for 'Arts
Monthly', and one that, in the main, merely confirmed him in his low opinion of
contemporary art. Of course, he had to
admit that there were exceptions to the general rule. There were dedicated artists who, even these
days, produced work of real artistic value - perhaps of lesser artistic value
than Rembrandt or El Greco or Tintoretto, yet nevertheless of some value when
judged by traditional painterly standards.
As a rule, however, artists like Alan Connolly prevailed, purveyors of
the sham art which circumstances had obliged him to review yesterday, and which
he hadn't yet got around to writing about.
How he would bring himself to do so, he didn't know. But as a salaried member of Webb's staff, he
was under strict orders to get it done as quickly as possible and sent off to
the printers before Monday. There
wouldn't even be time for the editor to look it over beforehand.... Not that Webb
knew anything much about contemporary art and would be likely, in consequence,
to find fault with it from a connoisseur's standpoint! On the contrary, his only real interest lay
in ensuring that words prejudicial to the financial or legal welfare of the
magazine didn't get printed, and, as far as that went, he knew exactly what to
look for, the crafty sod! So it was up
to Keating not to invalidate his trust.
Up to Anthony, in other words, not to succumb to the temptation which
was developing within him to slate contemporary art, through Alan Connolly, in
a manner guaranteed to excite public hostility and, no less importantly, to
slate Connolly, through contemporary art, in a manner guaranteed to excite
private hostility from the artist himself.
The principal thing was to restrain one's subjective feelings in the
interests of objective reality, to give an outline of the exhibition for what
it was rather than for what, in one's unreasonableness, one would prefer it to
have been. There could be no question,
therefore, of one's condemning the artist on the perfectly feasible grounds
that what he did wasn't really art. That
would have been sheer imbecility! The
only reasonable stance was one that recognized his work as somehow inevitable,
as something that had a right to be done at this point in time, given the
overly exploitative and, from a bourgeois or middle-class standpoint, decadent
nature of the age. Otherwise one would
fall into the ignominious trap of wishful thinking, of self-righteous moralizing
about the need to improve contemporary art when, to all appearances, it
couldn't be improved upon, least of all in a way that equated improvement with
a return to former standards, and to standards, moreover, quite beyond the
abilities or beneath the inclinations of most living artists.
Viewed objectively, the small number of
genuine conservatives, analogous in some respects to the purveyors of popular
culture, might be producing work of an artistically superior nature to those
who, after their decadent fashion, reflected the times and preferred to be
avant-garde. But that wasn't to say that
they were saints and the others, the more contemporaneous, abject sinners! Au contraire, their rejection of
avant-garde trends was, in itself, a kind of spiritual suicide, a denial of the
age and, as such, a concession to the spirit of aesthetic determinism, with its
representational objectivity. For just
as the most admirable of men were those who aided the development of a new
culture when an old one was crumbling around them, men who, like the first Christians,
faced torture and death in the name of a new religion, so, conversely, the
least admirable were those who endeavoured to sustain the old, crumbling
culture beyond its proper life-span and consequently held up the development of
the new - assuming, of course, that a new culture was really in the
making. It was a question, in short, of
knowing when to create and when to undermine or destroy; of knowing when
creation was more credible, because pertinent, than destruction and,
conversely, destruction more credible, because pertinent, than creation.
Now as far as contemporary art,
particularly in the West, was concerned, it was the destroyers and underminers
who reigned supreme, the men who, realizing there was little to be got from
traditional religion by way of nourishing the arts, had turned, via the
insidiously narcissistic route of l'art-pour-l'art, to science and
technology for their inspiration. And
the result, needless to say, was the wintry aridity that characterized the
representative or, more usually, non-representative art of our time, the
ridiculously simplistic or crack-brained works of people like Alan
Connolly! The result was not art, since
no genuine art can flourish after the decline of the religion which brought it
into being and provided it with the thematic guidance and sustenance it
requires, but sham art - the prevailing scientifically-minded worms that fed on
the putrescent corpse of the culture which had engendered them. The result, then, was not something to be
particularly pleased about! It was
simply a fact of contemporary life, one that had to be understood and endured
no less than any other. And, in this
respect, Keating was slowly but surely becoming more adept, more resigned to
the superficially fatuous though, at the same time, profoundly meaningful works
of the leading contemporary artists. In
a sense, most of them weren't really artists at all, since the criteria of
genuine art had long ceased to apply and could not now be resurrected. And neither were they truly contemporary,
since photography was the real art of the age.
As petty-bourgeois anti-artists, however, they still had a valid role to
play in chronicling Western cultural decline from a perspective rooted,
degeneratively, in the decadence of a civilization. Whether or not one liked the fact, the
legitimacy of that role was beyond dispute.
The only alternative to sham art was no art at all, and until that day
arrived, until the civilized West declined to a point where it couldn't decline
any further, having reached rock bottom, so to speak, of its materialistic
degeneration, the arid productions of its leading cultural representatives
would have to be tolerated, come what may!
After all, were they not the only kind of spiritual fodder to which the
civilized West could properly be expected to relate at present? It was a thought which Keating loathed to
entertain, though he had to admit that it contained a germ of truth so far as
the bourgeois intelligentsia were concerned.
He felt a bodily movement beside him,
followed by the sound of a voice asking whether he had slept well. Startled out of his sombre reflections, he
turned over to discover Rebecca staring across the pillow at him. He smiled his appreciation of this fact and
responded affirmatively. "But not
as well as you, if your expression was anything to judge by," he added,
putting an arm round her bare waist.
"You not only woke up after me, you bloody-well got to sleep before
me as well!"
"I'm usually a very sound and
compulsive sleeper," she admitted, with a hearty yawn in attendance for
good measure. "I can usually sleep
for eight hours at a stretch."
"Six is the most I can manage,"
he murmured, becoming a trifle embarrassed by the mutual bad breath being
exhaled with every word. It was more than
enough to make one feel both ashamed and disgusted with oneself! But it was virtually inevitable, a fact of
life with which a majority of couples who shared the same bed probably had to
persevere. Doubtless most of them came
to some arrangement for lessening or even avoiding it. One of the couple concerned would always get
up before the other or, assuming that wasn't possible, they would make a point
of either not speaking at all or of only speaking with their backs turned on
each other, so that the bad-breath factor wouldn't unduly impair or undermine
their relationship. For until one
brushed one's teeth, etc., and thereby freshened-up one's mouth, the reality of
bad breath would have to be borne as stoically as possible. Providing one wasn't coupled to a person who
suffered from halitosis throughout the day, one could at least consider oneself
relatively fortunate.
"So what are you intending to do
today?" asked Rebecca sleepily.
"Firstly, I shall have to get started
on that review I was supposed to have written yesterday evening," replied
Keating, primarily addressing his softly-spoken words at the ceiling, "and
then, if there's any time left before lunch, I'll take you for a stroll round
Croydon. After lunch, we can take a bus
out to Redhill and visit one of my friends, and later, well ..." He smiled
vaguely and lapsed into a ponderous silence.
It wasn't easy to address oneself to the ceiling, since it tended to
highlight one's motivation for doing so.
Better to turn one's head from time to time and expose the other person
to a whiff of bad breath. After all, he
wasn't the only one to blame. He turned
to face her and offered her a wan smile, a smile not open but sort of closed-in
upon itself.
"I'm sure we'll find something to
do," murmured Rebecca, reciprocating in kind.
"Yes, I'm sure we will," he
whispered, and he gave her a quick peck on the lips as though in confirmation
of some new-found confidence.
At that moment, however, the telephone rang
and, feeling slightly apprehensive, he climbed out of bed and hurried into the
adjoining room to answer it.
"Hello Tony, it's
Neil here," the voice on the other end of the line responded to his formal
announcement. "I phoned your place
three times last night and couldn't get a reply, so I assume you were
out."
"Until
"Not Rebecca Tonks, by any
chance?"
"Why, yes! How did you guess?"
Wilder sighed before saying: "It
wasn't a question of guessing, Tony. It
was simply a case of being confronted, yesterday afternoon, by an irate
composer who was of the express opinion that one of us had raped and abducted
his daughter."
"Raped and abducted?" echoed
Keating in amazement. "What d'you
mean?"
"Perhaps that's something you could
tell me," rejoined Wilder threateningly.
"It seems there were one or two things you didn't tell me about,
the other evening; things that led to my being accused of them and made to feel
a fool yesterday afternoon."
The nervous excitement that shot through
Keating's body, with the reception of this information, nearly caused him to
urinate on the carpet. He could barely
hold the telephone receiver still.
"You didn't have any trouble with the interview, did you?" he
gasped, after a few seconds' trembling silence.
Wilder repeated his sighing act of the
moment before, then said: "Unfortunately it
didn't take place, Tony. He absolutely
refused to let me into his house to conduct it."
"Refused?" Keating sank to his knees as his legs
suddenly lost their ability to support him.
"It's most unlikely that he'll allow
anyone to interview him now," asserted Wilder. "Unless, perhaps, he finds out exactly
what went on between you and his daughter on Thursday, and is satisfied that it
wasn't as bad as his housekeeper has evidently led him to believe. And then he'll want to find out what's going
on between you now, won't he?"
Keating chewed his lower lip in desperation
and then emitted a loud groan. It
appeared that he had landed himself in quite the most serious fix of his entire
journalistic career at 'Arts Monthly'! For a horrible thought suddenly assailed his
worry-stricken mind. What if Mr Tonks
had been in touch with Nicholas Webb about it?
Or the police, for that matter?
"He made no mention of having done so
to me," replied Wilder to a desperate question based on that
assumption. "But we have no reason
to assume that, if he hasn't already been in touch with them, he won't do
either or both next week, particularly if he doesn't find out what's happened
to his daughter in the meantime. And if
he does do either or both, then it's you who must take the consequences, Tony,
not me! I'm merely your dupe, remember? And not a very grateful one, either!"
"I'm dreadfully sorry, Neil, but I had
absolutely no idea this would happen," confessed Keating, trembling. "After all, I was obliged to go to the
Merlin Gallery yesterday afternoon."
"Yes, but you could
have told me what actually happened between you and Mr Tonks' daughter
on your last visit to her house, couldn't you?" Wilder
snapped. "But perhaps you'll tell
me now."
Anthony Keating sighed his heartfelt
reluctance at having to expatiate on that subject, what with Rebecca in the
adjoining room, presumably still in bed, but, realizing he had little
alternative, he began to explain things in a subdued tone-of-voice and as well
as his distinctly nervous condition would allow - the most important thing
being to make it perfectly clear to his fellow-correspondent that there had
been no question of rape or abduction.
On the contrary, a sexual relationship had developed by mutual consent -
naturally, joyfully, inevitably.
"A little rushed all the same, don't
you think?" opined Wilder in the strained wake of his colleague's
explanation. "You hadn't known her
for very long, after all."
"Yes, I realize that," Keating
conceded. "But, under the
favourable circumstances, the house being otherwise deserted and Rebecca being
conspicuously affable, not to say erotically attired, it seemed the most
reasonable step. I mean, what would you have done in my position?" he asked in
desperation.
In spite of his seriousness, Neil Wilder
felt compelled to stifle a snigger with this question. There could be no denying the fact that, for
all his faults, Tony was a likeable person!
"It would depend on whether she was my kind of woman or not before
I could hope to reach a decision about that," he at length rather
academically replied. "In such a
delicate matter as love, we're all on our own.
But even if I can't particularly blame you for having done what you did,
it ought to be fairly obvious that sex at such short notice, and in the context
it evidently happened, is more likely to be open to allegations of rape, from
external sources, than would be the case had it taken place following a period
of courtship. You have to be very
careful where some of the older generation are concerned, you know. I didn't see the housekeeper personally, but
I suspect she was getting on a bit."
"In her early seventies
apparently," obliged Keating, recalling what Rebecca had later told him.
"Well, that speaks for itself, doesn't
it?" declared Wilder. "And as
for your girlfriend's father, who is probably more of an idealist than a prude,
what do you expect him to think?"
Keating frowned gravely. Such a rhetorical question was just like Neil
and it pained him to have to swallow it.
The way matters stood at present, he could only expect Mr Tonks to think
the worst. But there was, it suddenly occurred to him, a means of getting the
composer to think less badly. Perhaps
even a means of inducing him to change his mind and grant the interview: namely
Rebecca herself. She could phone home,
tell him where she was, what she thought of her latest boyfriend, and so
on. Yes, that had to be the
solution. After all, who else could he
be expected to believe?
"Well?" pressed Wilder, after
several seconds' silence had prompted him to wonder whether his colleague was
still on the line.
"Listen Neil, I believe I have the
solution," revealed Keating with enthusiasm. "If I can get Rebecca to phone home this
morning, we should have this mess cleared up by Monday. Her father might even allow me to interview
him tomorrow or the day after."
"I hope he does," came the slightly sceptical response from a more experienced
correspondent. "Otherwise you won't
find life particularly congenial at 'Arts Monthly'
next week! I wish you luck."
The telephone clicked off, leaving Anthony
Keating to his worried thoughts. Of all
the unfortunate things to happen! And
just at a time when life was beginning to show signs of promise! He clambered to his feet with some
difficulty, staggered back to the bedroom, where Rebecca was brushing out her
long dark hair in front of the dressing-table mirror, and threw himself across the bed.
"So what was all that about?" she
asked, getting up from the small stool on which she had been kneeling and going
across to him. "You look quite
upset."
"I am actually," said Keating,
who then proceeded to reveal the substance of his conversation with Neil
Wilder.
"A bit of a problem" she agreed,
as his divulgence ran its sombre course and culminated in his request for her
assistance. "But I can do what you want, if you really think it'll help."
"Please go ahead," he urged her.
A naked goddess about to protect her
devotee, she strode calmly into the adjoining room and closed the door behind
her. For ten minutes the sound of her
muffled voice reached Keating's ears and kept him on tenterhooks. It seemed an eternity of suffering while the
conversation, presumably with her father, droned on, and always with the
possibility of his being called upon to offer an apology or, at the very least,
an explanation of his behaviour. But at
length, when he was on the verge of a nervous collapse, the conversation ended,
and a slightly pale-faced but still relatively calm-looking Rebecca Tonks
returned to the bedroom. "It's
alright," she said, offering him a reassuring smile. "He'll give you the interview Monday
afternoon."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The final
chord of César Franck's Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue gave rise,
following its timely demise, to a burst of spontaneous applause from both
Howard Tonks and Sean Carroll. The two
men clapped as though they were at a concert.
For something about the consummate manner in which Roy Hart had just
played the piano created the illusion they were.
"Quite remarkable," opined
Carroll, as the novelty of clapping his hands together, fingers to palm, in the
presence of only two other men began to wane.
"T(h)at was quite the best performance of
this composition I've ever heard. One
would have t(h)ought you were playing to
hundreds." And to make doubly sure
that his professional appreciation was felt or at least registered by the
pianist, he sent a broad Irish smile in hot pursuit of his words. With jet-black hair, bright-blue eyes, a
florid complexion, and a generous smile like that, there could be little doubt
as to his country of origin, even if one were deaf to his strong Dublin accent,
with its plethora of silent h's in connection with the letter
't', in ironic contrast, one might have supposed, to the silent t's of
Gaelic in connection with the letter 'h'.
But right now he was in
"Don't you t(h)ink
Franck was as great a composer for solo piano as Liszt?" remarked the
conductor in question, turning to his host.
"No, I can't say I actually do," the
latter thoughtfully and almost apologetically replied, not a little surprised
by the nature of Carroll's statement, which struck him as rather obscure and
pretentious. "Though there are
undoubtedly similarities between them," he conceded. "The work we have just been listening to
certainly has some marked affinities with Liszt. Not lacking in passion or brilliance, by no
means the sort of music to have appealed to a more reserved and graceful
composer like, say, Saint-Saëns. But not, for all that, the sort of music which is ideally suited to
the piano, unlike much of Liszt's.
One gets the impression that the organist in Franck usually got the
better of the pianist and affected his piano compositions accordingly. Even when composing for piano, he often
tended to think in terms of the organ."
"Yes, I would find it hard not to
agree with that observation," Roy Hart, the 55-year-old concert pianist
still seated at the Steinway, elected to comment. "Not that I know a
great deal about the, ah, organ.
But there are certainly occasions during the course of this particular
composition when relatively unpianistic writing imposes itself upon one, to the
detriment of technique. The fugue is, I
think, as good an example as any."
No stranger to Tonkarias, Roy Hart
had been a good friend of the composer for several years. With the sole exception of Maynard Ferguson,
a pianist five years his senior, he was the leading exponent in Britain of
Howard Tonks' piano music, a man who had given recitals of this music in just
about every major city in Europe and America, and been acclaimed, wherever he
went, as one of the most versatile of modern concert pianists - a reputation
stemming, in the main, from his ability to give piano recitals of virtually any
major composer for that instrument who had ever lived (though, these days, he
was increasingly coming under the influence of the avant-garde, and, more
specifically, of a group of five British composers, including Tonks, who
represented in some people's estimation the most radical departure from
traditional classical forms which the Western world had yet experienced).
"But there are compositions by Franck,
surely, t(h)at match if not surpass anyt(h)ing Liszt
ever did," objected Carroll good-humouredly, taking up the thread of his
earlier comment.
Howard Tonks scratched the crown of his
head with the middle finger of his right hand and turned a mildly quizzical
gaze on the middle-aged figure seated in the armchair to his right. "Yes, I suppose one could argue that Le Chasseur
Maudit is as good as any of Liszt's better symphonic poems, with the
possible exception of Prometheus," he concurred, after due
consideration. "As for Psyché,
I'm not so sure. Some people, I know,
regard it as the greatest symphonic poem ever written."
"Probably the greatest by a
Frenchman," said Hart, as he returned a half-consumed glass of
medium-sweet sherry to the small coffee table by his side. "Though I, personally, would hesitate to
rate it any higher," he added as an afterthought.
"That's not a particularly high rating
anyway," averred Howard Tonks.
"How many other Frenchmen - it not being forgotten that Franck,
though a naturalized Frenchman, was Belgian by birth - have actually written symphonic
poems?"
"Two or three at the most, beginning
with Berlioz and ending with, ah, Debussy," stated Hart confidently.
"Yes, La Mer
isn't a bad work either, is it?" opined Howard Tonks, and he proceeded to
hum a bar or two of Debussy's major work in the genre - a species of
scholarship to which Sean Carroll felt compelled to add another bar in order,
seemingly, to prove how well-versed he was in the repertoire of symphonic
poems. "But as regards the
symphonic poem in general," Tonks continued, ignoring the conductor's
humming, "I don't think you'll find a greater exponent than Liszt,
notwithstanding the important contribution made by Richard Strauss. At least six of his thirteen examples are of
a quality which should endure for some time to come, and the good work Bernard
Haitink and the London Philharmonic have done, in recent years, to record them
all and bring them to public attention in an excellent production is something,
I feel confident, that Liszt himself would justifiably be proud of, were he
alive today."
"Here, here!" interjected Hart, his
pale-grey eyes suddenly glinting with the enthusiasm being generated by his
spirit. "In point of fact, I would
rather listen to Les Préludes and Festklange performed by a poor
orchestra than many symphonies-proper, including the Franck, being performed by
a great one. I still think the result
would be more, ah, congenial to my ears."
"I'm sure it would," Howard Tonks
graciously concurred, though he had to admit to himself that the idea seemed
rather odd.
There was a short pause in the conversation
which prompted the composer to glance at his watch and wonder at what time his
daughter would be home. It was now half-seven, and he had been told to expect her early that
evening. Despite his concern, he had
almost forgotten about her - at any rate, to the extent of not remembering how
upset he had felt by her absence the day before. But thank god she was safe and presumably on
her way back! He would certainly want to
speak to her when she arrived, ask her a number of questions about that young
correspondent and her experiences of the past few days. What a pity he had been out when she
telephoned home that morning! The task
of meeting Sean Carroll at Euston Station and transporting him across
"A curious t(h)ing
about Liszt," observed Carroll, by way of starting-up the conversation
again, "is t(h)at his music so often seems to be in complete contrast to
his lifestyle. I mean, for a man who
reputably led such a busy social life, who was by inclination a 'man of the
world', it is really quite extraordinary t(h)at much of his music should be so
refined, so exquisitely otherworldly, if you'll permit me to say. You would t(h)ink he
lived in an ivory tower most of the time, an isolation of the spirit t(h)at
enabled him to perfect his unique style.
And then the spiritual tower would seem to have been supplemented by a
material tower, like the one Yeats had at T(h)oor Ballylee, which would grant
its fortunate possessor comparative freedom from all the social engagements and
professional obligations of life in a major city."
"Yes, I suppose one could think that
about Liszt," conceded Howard Tonks, nodding vaguely, "particularly
as regards works like Orpheus and Die Ideale - the most
otherworldly of his symphonic poems.
But, even so, the man-of-the-world is very much in evidence in certain
other works."
"Doubtless he needed the contrast
between his social and professional life to ensure that much of his music
attained to a high degree of, ah, spirituality," conjectured Hart from the
piano. "He was able to make the
best of both worlds, rather like Oscar Wilde, his nearest literary
equivalent. Remember that line in The Picture
of Dorian Gray about curing the soul by means of the senses
and the senses by means of the soul?
Well, it would appear Liszt was a master of doing just that, a man who
knew how to make the senses serve the spirit instead of hindering it. For, in the final analysis, it's a question
of knowing how to live well or, alternatively, of being in a social position
where one can live well, which is to say properly. If one is either too poor or too rich the
chances are that one won't be able to live properly, that, on the contrary,
circumstances will force a kind of, ah, spiritual or sensual lopsidedness upon
one and thereby hinder one's creative development. But in Liszt's case, circumstances evidently
favoured his creative development and enabled him to produce works which
testify to a healthy spirit. And, unlike
Schumann, he didn't suffer from manic depression and syphilis."
"Tertiary syphilis, wasn't it?"
Mr Tonks suggested, out of academic interest.
"So it is generally believed,"
the pianist confirmed. "Though
there are still some doubts as to the, ah, exact cause and nature of Schumann's
madness. But genius though he
undoubtedly was, we nevertheless have good reason to assume that his art was,
in some degree, tarnished by the nature of his health, both mental and
physical, and therefore fell short of true greatness. Or perhaps I should say proper living?"
"That may be partly true of the late
works," rejoined Mr Tonks, his impassive countenance suddenly betraying
signs of deep anxiety, "but I would hesitate to apply such a sweeping
assumption to the early ones.... Though to what extent his art was tarnished by
ill-health is something that few if any of us will ever be able to
ascertain."
"Oh, I quite agree," conceded
Hart, smiling defensively. "But the
assumption itself is by no means invalid.
Indeed, we could apply it to artists in every field, to painters and
poets as much as to composers and novelists.
The inability, for one reason or another, to live properly, healthily,
naturally, fully - call it what you like - inevitably makes for bad art. Or, if that sounds a little too rhetorical,
let us rather say for art which is less good than would otherwise be the case,
had its creator not been, ah, poisoned in some way. Even Beethoven's music, great though it
undoubtedly is, must have suffered to some extent in consequence of his
solitary lifestyle. And what applies to
Beethoven probably applies even more to Tchaikovsky, whose solitude was
complicated by, ah, repressed homosexuality."
There was a protracted sigh of disapproval
with this attitude from Sean Carroll, whose blue eyes now shone less brightly
than before. He couldn't abide the idea
that anyone who, by normal standards, was something of a freak ... should be
doomed to producing inferior art on that account. Was there not sufficient historical evidence
to show, on the contrary, that it was precisely those who most lived against the
natural grain, in one way or another, who produced the greatest art? Were not the greatest artists almost
invariably perverted solitaries - men like Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire,
Huysmans, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Tchaikovsky, even Nietzsche? Did not genius presuppose a certain level of
freakishness, born of solitude and inspiration?
And was it not in the nature of great works of art that they required
freaks of one sort or another to pursue them, that
they depended, in other words, on the unusual circumstances of their creators
for their originality and uniqueness as art?
"Naturally, there is some truth in
what you say," Hart conceded, after the conductor had concluded his
objections. "But that is hardly
reason for us to assume that only those who are sexually perverted or mad or
crippled or ailing or whatever are qualified to produce the greatest art. Such art is generally produced, in my
opinion, by men who live well, have a healthy sex-life, good companions, a pleasant environment in which to work, regular food, relatively
good health, and so on. Admittedly, it
may be true that an artist who lives badly, for one or more reasons, may have
more innate genius than a majority of those who live comparatively well, in
consequence of which he'll probably produce finer work. Even so, his work will almost certainly be
tarnished by the nature of his, ah, circumstances. Take Beethoven, for instance. One of the greatest composers, even given the
fact that we are made all too conscious, in a number of his works, of the depression
and frustration which underlay his repressed sexuality and habitual
solitude. There is decidedly something
of a sickroom atmosphere there, particularly in his later works, and this
atmosphere detracts, in my opinion, from his, ah, creative genius. It's the same with Tchaikovsky, Saint-Saëns,
Satie, and any number of other sexual perverts and solitaries. Their work may be great, but, in the final
analysis, it's more the record of men
who lived under, ah, pathological conditions and produced such work in
consequence of those conditions than a record of the highest art."
"I'm afraid I can't agree with t(h)at idea one little bit!" confessed Sean Carroll,
shaking his large handsome head from side to side in gestural testimony of his
disagreement. "They may have lived
under relatively unusual or frustrating conditions, but they were still capable
of producing great art!"
"Yes, but not the highest or greatest
art," countered Hart, briefly shaking his own head from side to side,
"for it stemmed from a maimed and perverted self. Compare Beethoven with Bach or Mozart and you
have to admit that, great though he was, his illustrious predecessors possessed
both a psychological and a physiological advantage over him, and accordingly
wrote healthier music. And it's the same
thing, if from a different standpoint, with Liszt, who must have possessed a
like-advantage over Schumann, even given the fact that Schumann had a wife and,
ah, six children. Unfortunately, his
family weren't able to prevent him from losing his mind as a result, one can
only assume, of the syphilitic infection he, ah, contracted in his student
days. And neither were they able to rid
him of the manic depression he probably acquired at the time he was struggling
to make a name for himself and get that megalomaniac Wieck to part with his,
ah, talented daughter. So, you see, it
makes a lot of difference what shape your health is in when you compose music
or write poetry or paint pictures. In
nine cases out of ten, the cripple is at a distinct disadvantage to the healthy
and sound!"
"I don't t(h)ink there would be much
great art left in the world if you disqualified everyone who had been either
diseased or solitary from your final assessment," opined Carroll, offering
the pianist an ironic smile. "After
all, it's in the nature of genius to be solitary."
"Not necessarily!" Hart
retorted. "A genius may not have
time to spare on too many friends or acquaintances, but he should at least be
able to spare some time on a wife or mistress.
Wasn't Bach a genius? Weren't
Mozart, Goethe, Blake, Brahms, Emerson, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Liszt,
Chopin, Turner, Dickens, Tolstoy, et al., all geniuses? The fact is that those who were solitary and
perverted tended - and still tend - to be the, ah, exception to the rule. It isn't the likes of Swift, Van Gogh,
Baudelaire, or Dadd who form the majority in this respect, but such married men
as Bach and Mozart who generally produced healthier work. So, in my opinion, a genius needn't
necessarily be a freak. The assumption
to the contrary seems to me somewhat misguided and, ah, over-simplistic. Even those who were freakish were more often
victims of unfortunate circumstances than simply freaks by natural inclination
- assuming one can be such a thing by natural inclination! Such, at any rate, was the case as regards
Baudelaire and Van Gogh, not to mention Nietzsche."
Howard Tonks raised his head from the bowed
position in which it had remained, during the course of this metaphysical
debate on genius, and gave Roy Hart, who struck him as having only a very
limited and intrinsically philistine concept of genius symptomatic of an
interpreter, a cursory glance. He was
almost expecting the pianist to allude to him as one such circumstantial
freak. But there was no sign of irony or
malicious intent upon the latter's plump face.
Staring straight at Sean Carroll, it bore, on the contrary, one of the
most smugly earnest and serious expressions the composer had ever beheld on it
- an expression, one might have supposed, of a ministering priest convinced of
his own unshakeable self-righteousness.
"I still t(h)ink
the greatest art comes from men who are what you arbitrarily call freaks,"
declared Carroll, unable to restrain the impulse to keep up his side of the argument. "After all, great art is an expression
of inspired individuality, and those who are most qualified to be inspired
individuals don't lead a relatively conventional existence, hedged around with
all manner of worldly and commonplace concerns or duties. For nature and art are ever antit(h)etical, and if one is too close to nature one can't
produce great art."
"Yes, but living with a wife or a
mistress doesn't necessarily imply that one is too close to nature!"
countered Hart, his acerbic tone-of-voice now betraying a degree of impatience
with the conductor that he had hitherto managed to conceal. "And neither does it necessarily mean
that one can't be highly individualistic in one's art. I have already mentioned Blake, Liszt, and
Turner in this respect. But I could just
as easily mention James Joyce, Stravinsky, Picasso, Aldous Huxley, Yeats,
Prokofiev, and Tolkien. What was there
about marriage or concubinage, for that matter, which prevented them from
expressing themselves in a highly individualistic manner, I wonder? All right, there are also the solitaries and
sexual perverts, the cripples and madmen - the likes of Genet, Céline, Satie,
Raymond Roussel, Utrillo, Kafka, et al.
But if your purpose is to convince me that they were the
ones who, in consequence of their respective psychological or physiological
anomalies, were producing the greatest art, then you're a bloody long way from
succeeding! Fortunately, the criterion
of great art doesn't depend upon the, ah, extent of its weirdness or the
comparative weirdness of its creators.
It depends, rather, on the nature of its subject-matter and the way in
which that subject-matter is, ah, handled.
The finest subject-matter, embracing the finest treatment or technique,
will make for the greatest art. Hence,
in the realm of painting, a work which focuses on a beautiful country house
will be aesthetically superior to one, displaying a similar standard of
technical proficiency, that uses for its
subject-matter a rat-infested city slum.
In the realm of literature, a work which focuses on the leisurely upper
classes will be aesthetically superior to one, with a similar standard of
technical proficiency, whose focus is the hard-pressed lower classes. And, by a like token, a work of music
utilizing the finest melodies and harmonies will be aesthetically superior to
one which doesn't. That should be fairly
obvious, surely?"
He looked inquiringly at both Sean Carroll
and Howard Tonks, as though to elicit an affirmative response from them. But such a response wasn't needed or indeed
desirable. For it would have humiliated
its perpetrator, particularly Tonks, whose music, judged by this rather narrow
estimate, would have appeared anything but great! Compared with the finest works of Bach,
Handel, Haydn, or Mozart, it would have dwindled to an
insignificance virtually beneath contempt. For if beauty was a constant, and the
greatest works of art were those which approximated most fully to the highest
beauty, whether human or otherwise, then it was only too evident that the works
of Howard Sebastian Tonks were among the aesthetically poorest which had ever
been composed; that they were, in fact, not music at all but anti-music -
creations, in other words, that took their inspiration from ugliness and hatred,
and, to judge by his most recent tendencies, the worst ugliness and hatred, to
boot!
But
if that was so, why did Roy Hart bother to perform such radically degenerate
compositions in public? Why did he
specialize, these days, in giving recitals of just such anti-music instead of
confining himself to what his theory and taste knew to be best? Was it simply because he had grown weary of
performing traditional classical music, or was there perhaps some deep-rooted
psychological malaise at the heart of it, a manifestation, for instance, of
middle-class masochism, or maybe even some desperate love-affair which had
caused him to ignore his better knowledge in the hope of gaining a satisfaction
that would otherwise be denied him?
Supposing the woman he had fallen desperately in love with happened to
be a keen avant-gardist, would not the intellect be sacrificed to the heart and
his taste be trampled underfoot in the interests of what his tyrannical passion
demanded? These were conjectures that
Howard Tonks had formulated on more than a few previous occasions, when the
pianist had taken a similar line as regards the relative merits of diatonic
composition and caused him to wonder why he bothered to perform contemporary
music at all, commercial factors notwithstanding. But despite their friendship, Roy Hart was
such a secretive devil, where his private motivations were concerned, that
Tonks' conjectures, whether plausible or not, were unable to penetrate the
barricade of secrecy which the pianist had stubbornly erected to protect
himself, presumably, from the outside world.
And because of this, the composer was no nearer today to unravelling the
enigma of his friend's divided allegiance, his theoretical allegiance to the
past but his practical allegiance to the present, than he had been during the
first months of their friendship.
Returning to the fray after the brief
lacuna in their conversation brought about by Hart's rhetorical question, Sean
Carroll said: "On the basis of the criterion you have just revealed to us,
it would seem t(h)at a work of literature like Proust's À la
recherche du temps perdu would strike you as being of greater artistic
significance than, say, James Joyce's Ulysses because, unlike the
latter, it deals with the upper classes rather than the lower, the rich rather
than the poor, and consequently has a finer subject-matter."
"Absolutely!" came
the implacable rejoinder from the man at the piano. "I do consider Proust superior to Joyce
on that account, since the subject-matter of lower-middle-class life is, ah,
less good, aesthetically considered, than the subject-matter generally favoured
by Proust. And the same holds true for
the comparative merits of, say, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence. I'm not against art that either predominantly
or exclusively focuses on the lower classes - far from it! All the same, I would never pretend that the
use of such, ah, humble or vulgar subject-matter could make for art of the
highest order. To my mind, there's all
the difference in the world between a play like The
Importance of Being Earnest and one like Waiting for Godot. The first is art, the second anti-art. The first deals with life at the top, the
second with life at the bottom. The
first is Victorian, the second absolutely modern. The first, being essentially aristocratic, is
relatively unpopular. The second, being
effectively democratic, is all too popular.
Need I say more?"
"I'd rather you didn't,"
responded Mr Tonks in a somewhat depressed tone-of-voice. "For if you carry on applying your
elitist criteria to contemporary art, you'll either drive me to suicide or,
assuming I can't muster the nerve for that, induce me to tear-up my scores and
prohibit anyone from publicly performing my works in future!"
"T(h)at would
be a terrible blow to the
"Do you really think so?" queried
Hart, a sceptical expression on his bearded face.
"I know so!" affirmed the
conductor, offering his opponent a mildly ingratiating smile. "For anyone with a genuine interest in
the arts, even poor art is preferable to no art at all.... Not t(h)at I wish to imply your music is poor, Howard," he
added, turning towards the figure seated a few feet from him, "since
t(h)at would be the height of presumption!
If it is grand enough to be known and played around the world, then it's
grand enough for me!"
Howard Tonks made a valiant effort to
simulate gratitude for this piece of flattery from an overly sycophantic
guest. But his heart remained heavy with
the burden of being contemporary or, more specifically, relatively contemporary
and therefore not even truly contemporary by the standards of, say, rock
musicians, with their electric instruments, but simply an outmoded species of
man who carried-on in one tradition whilst other and more representative
currents raged all around him, to the detriment of his creative stability. It wasn't the first time he had found cause
to doubt himself on account of his professional activity, or to feel sorry for
himself for having been born into a middle-class world at a time when classical
music was on the decline and would soon decline to a point which made even the
cacophonous sounds of the more overly barbarous rock bands seem comparatively
musical! Indeed, on more than one
previous occasion he had actually contemplated abandoning composition
altogether, in order to dedicate himself to his garden instead. But the world had prevented him from doing
so, had well-nigh insisted on his continuing to compose, and forced him to
live-up to his international reputation.
By now the habit of composing was too much a part of his nature to be
eradicated or supplanted by anything else.
It was a veritable obsession, and nothing short of death could be
expected to prevent him from pursuing it.
Whether he liked it or not, he would have to continue from where he'd
left off and present the cultured world or, at any rate, the mainly
middle-class part of it with still more atonality. For it had not escaped his notice that even
rock music and other such broadly proletarian forms, against which classical
avant-garde music continued to battle in vain, was becoming civilized at last,
thanks, in large measure, to drum machines
and to a variety of synthesizers and synthesized sounds which had the
effect of interiorizing the music, both rhythmically and pitchfully, and thus
rendering it comparatively sensible. As
yet, this tendency was only embryonic.
But an age was nonetheless approaching when it would be impossible to
take the barbarism of proletarian music for granted, and then where would he
and his ilk be, he wondered? What place
would there be for civilized acoustic music in a world that had evolved to its
electric counterpart and thus rendered what he did - assuming it was still
civilized and not so decadent and far gone in aesthetic degeneration as to be
effectively barbarous anyway - totally superfluous and redundant?
Fortunately he still had the political
establishment behind him, so there was no immediate worry on that score! Still, time could not be reversed, even if it
could be slowed down and even held-up a little, to suit the tastes of a
generation and class which could hardly be expected to groove to the latest
rock music, as though such music were an integral part of Western civilization
and not the product, in large part, of a
barbarously subcultural imposition inflicted upon it by relatively
uncivilized people who, in this day and age, had as much right to express
themselves in their own more openly aggressive manner as he had in his
comparatively more genteel one, and probably more right, if the financial
success of their simple music was anything to judge by - a success which put
even his 'grand' music in the shade, where it doubtless deserved to be and
where it would remain, irrespective of Hart's occasional attempts at publicly airing
it, along with the rest of what was once a proud civilization which now merely
tottered-on, in cultural senility, towards its inevitable demise.
Startled out of himself by the finality of
the word 'demise', which seemed more unpalatable than usual in view of his
imminent birthday, Mr Tonks reached across the coffee table for his sherry and
downed what was left of it in one hearty gulp, much as though it symbolized the
impending death of the civilization into which he had been born at a time when
it was already way past its prime and therefore mostly used-up in any
case. There were two other men in the
room besides himself, men whom he had almost, with
good reason, forgotten about, who were now respectively engaged in performing
and listening to his new piano sonata.
At the Steinway, Roy Hart was tentatively probing his way through its
second movement, sight-reading a work about which he had known nothing more,
the day before, than that it had just been completed, whilst, in the remaining
armchair to the right of the coffee table, Sean Carroll was displaying, with
insufferable complacency, all the signs of an attentive listener - part critic,
part devotee of the performance in question.
A hand on Mr Tonks' shoulder made him start
from his morose reflections, as, not without surprise, he recognized the
heavily made-up face of his wife descending towards him. "Sorry to disturb you, Howie," she
whispered in his nearest ear, "but Rebecca has just returned. So I think you'd better see her at
once."
"Yes, of course!" agreed Mr
Tonks, getting-up from his armchair with some difficulty, in view of the amount
of time he'd already spent in it, and tacitly excusing himself, with a gentle
wave of the hand, from the increasingly odious proximity of his two musically
engrossed guests.
He followed
"But I was always alright,"
confessed Rebecca in a slightly puzzled and offended tone-of-voice, which was
intended to impress upon her father the superfluous, not to say hysterical,
nature of his concerns.
Angered by her daughter's ungrateful and
apparently cavalier attitude, Mrs Tonks spat: "Yes, but you might have
left a note or phoned us on Thursday evening to prove it! You can't imagine the amount of worry your disappearance
has caused us, these past three days.
What with Mrs Marchbanks' letter of resignation ..."
"Oh, sod old Marchbanks!" Rebecca
spat back. "As it happens, I knew
nothing of her letter until this morning, when one of Tony's colleagues phoned
his flat to inform him about what had happened here Friday afternoon."
"I take it that would be a Mr
Wilder?" Howard Tonks ventured to speculate.
Rebecca briefly nodded confirmation. "And then Tony told me and, as soon as I
found out, I phoned home to inform mother what had actually happened," she
revealed. "As to the contents of
Mrs Marchbanks' letter, I can only repeat now what I said then: I was not raped, neither on Thursday afternoon nor at any
subsequent time."
"Thank goodness for that!" cried
Mr Tonks, whose voice was still strained with emotion.
"But if you were not raped, Rebecca,
then what-on-earth were you doing on the floor of your
father's study with no clothes on?" Mrs Tonks demanded to know.
"I was ... just having sex with Tony,
mother, that's all," explained Rebecca nervously.
"That's all?" echoed Mrs Tonks,
her lips trembling with anger. "You
ought to be ashamed of yourself, allowing such a thing to happen in your
father's study, of all places! What
about poor old Mrs Marchbanks? What
about your ...?"
"Mother, will you please stop scolding
me!" interposed Rebecca, becoming angry.
"I'm not a child any more, you know."
Mrs Tonks' mouth shot open in horrified
disapproval of her daughter's callous attitude.
How could she behave like this after all they had done for her? How could she let
herself be seduced by a man she hadn't even known for more than an hour at the
time? It was simply unthinkable! That sort of thing simply didn't happen to
young women who had been properly brought up.
"Are you absolutely certain you weren't raped?" she persisted
in doubting, as soon as her emotions would allow her to articulate another
question.
"Mother, I've no wish to repeat myself,"
Rebecca retorted. "I told you what
happened and that's as much as I can do.
If you must know, I'm in love with Tony."
"In love ... after three days?"
exclaimed Mrs Tonks in a tone of petulant incredulity bordering on the
hysterical.
"No, before then
actually," her daughter corrected.
"I fell in love with him last Monday to be precise, the day he
first came here. Perhaps love is too
strong a word but, well, suffice it to say that I felt
strongly attracted towards him. I had
gone to the French windows on my way-in from the garden to catch a glimpse of
dad playing Schumann, and that was when I first saw him and became aware he was
staring at me with one of the most admiring looks I had ever seen on any guy's
face. Naturally I was embarrassed at
first, given the surprise factor and the skimpy way I was dressed. But, well, my interest in him was aroused, and so much so
that, when I learnt from dad that he would be returning on Thursday afternoon,
I distinctly found myself looking forward to it."
"Even so, Rebecca, that's no excuse
for such immodest behaviour in your father's study, is it?" countered Mrs
Tonks on a fresh wave of petulance.
"It wouldn't have been quite so indecent had you taken Mr Keating
into your bedroom instead. At least Mrs Marchbanks
wouldn't have stumbled upon you there!"
"Quite so!" concurred Mr Tonks,
nodding in tacit approval of his wife's judgement. "And we wouldn't have lost the services
of a housekeeper who, as you well know, has been loyal to us for over six years."
Rebecca frowned sullenly. "Isn't there any chance of your inducing her to return?" she asked, turning a
guilty pair of eyes on each of her parents by turn.
"Virtually none," Mrs Tonks
averred. "A woman of her age won't
treat such an occurrence lightly, you know.
In fact, you were fortunate that it didn't cause her a heart
attack. Had it done so, matters might
now be a good deal worse than they already are."
Rebecca shook her head, shrugged her
shoulders in a gesture of helplessness, and, turning away from them, flung
herself down into a nearby armchair. How
depressing it was to have to hear all this, to be confronted by her parents in
such a humiliating situation, and all because of a stupid old bag who probably
hadn't had anything even remotely resembling sex in several years! Was it really necessary for mother to treat
her like a young adolescent, the way she had done a few years previously, at
the time of her first date? To Rebecca,
the only thing that mattered now was her relationship with Tony, her respect
for and love of Tony.
Thursday was in the past, and what was past had to be forgotten.... Not
that there weren't things about it she didn't care to remember!
"Well, at least we won't have to
contact the police now," Mr Tonks remarked, after a painful silence,
"and that is something which Mr Webb of 'Arts Monthly' will be relieved to
hear, I'm sure, particularly since his managerial incompetence was largely to
blame for this whole sorry affair in the first place. As to the interview, however," went on
Mr Tonks in a sterner tone-of-voice, "I shall have to inform the bugger on
Monday that, in consequence of his correspondent's grossly unprofessional
conduct, I have no choice but to withdraw my permission to grant it."
Rebecca's heart seemed to shoot-up into her
mouth with the stunning reception of this.
"But, dad, you mustn't!" she cried, going over to him in a
panic of disbelief. "I told Tony,
this morning, that you'd be prepared to see him on Monday."
"You what?" Howard Tonks was patently flabbergasted.
"She asked me whether it would be
possible to give Mr Keating a provisional date for the interview and, since you
weren't here when she rang, Howie, I suggested you might be prepared to see him
on Monday afternoon, assuming you weren't otherwise engaged."
Mr Tonks had raised outstretched hands in
indication of his exasperation.
"But,
Mrs Tonks had turned pale. "But the poor girl sounded so worried,
Howie, and I was so relieved to hear from her at the time that ..."
"It's unthinkable,
Rebecca's eyes filled agonizingly with
tears. She couldn't believe he meant
it. After all, Tony Keating wasn't
entirely to blame for what had happened.
She, too, had willed it. But,
despite her protestations and excuses, her father remained adamant, and to the
point of forcibly removing her beseeching arms from around his neck and
unceremoniously pushing her away from himself.
The man who, no more than five minutes ago, had clasped his daughter to
his chest in an expression of unmixed gratitude for her safety had suddenly
become, as though by schizophrenic transmutation, the stern father-figure who
refuses to allow his principles to be undermined by emotional appeals, no
matter how sincerely felt. He stood by
his word like a sentry at his post.
Whether she liked it or not, Rebecca would have to inform Mr Keating
that, under no circumstances, could he ever set foot in their house again. If she wanted to see him in future, she would
have to visit him personally, not bring him home. And if Tonkarias was no longer good
enough for her, then she had better go and live with him instead. That was all!
"I'm dreadfully sorry, Becky,"
declared Mrs Tonks at the close of her husband's impassioned diatribe,
"but if your father says no, then no it will have to be."
Rebecca pursed her lips in grim response to
an idea which had just occurred to her.
There was a chance that she could induce him to change his mind and
become more flexible. "Mummy, would
you be kind enough to leave the room and allow me to talk with dad alone?"
she requested.
"I can't see what good it will
do," said Mrs Tonks doubtfully.
"But if you insist."
She cast her husband a puzzled and vaguely disdainful look, turned on
her high heels, and left the room without further ado.
Rebecca listened to the receding footsteps
of her mother heading back down the hallway towards the kitchen before,
confident that the coast was sufficiently clear, she decided to proceed with
what she wanted to say. "There are
two things that I have to remind you of, father," she began in a respectfully
subdued tone-of-voice. "One of them
concerns me, and the other my best friend, Margaret." She paused to gauge the effect of her words,
but Mr Tonks' expression, tinged with impatience, remained relatively
impassive. "If you refuse to grant
Tony the interview, then I'll have no choice but to expose them to public
attention through the daily press."
"I don't know what the hell you're
talking about," declared Mr Tonks. "What
two things?"
Rebecca drew herself still closer to her
father, looked him straight in the eyes, and whispered: "Sexual
things."
"Sexual ...?" he echoed
incredulously.
"Margaret has occasionally served as a
convenient substitute for mother, hasn't she?" Rebecca went on. "And as for me, well, the way you've
behaved towards me, on a number of occasions in the not-too-distant past,
wasn't exactly what one would call paternal, was it?"
"How dare you!" Mr Tonks
exclaimed.
Rebecca smiled faintly and drew back a pace
from the by-now outraged countenance of her world-famous father. "It would certainly be inconvenient for
you if the interested public subsequently came to learn that your sexual
relations weren't exclusively confined to mummy
but also embraced your daughter and her best friend, wouldn't it?"
she remarked.
"How dare you!" Mr Tonks
exclaimed again, barely able to restrain the impulse to lash out at his
daughter and stop her mouth.
"You've no idea what you're saying!"
"Haven't I?" Rebecca smiled anew and turned towards the bay
windows in order to be free of the sight of him and better able, in
consequence, to proceed in as objective a manner as
was compatible with the requirements of the situation. "And will you also say that to Maggy,
once I inform her of my intentions and get her to testify against you as
well?"
Mr Tonks was beside himself with rage. "But I had been drinking when I
..."
"Took advantage of her youth?"
interposed Rebecca cogently. "Yes,
that has to be admitted - at least as far as the last time was concerned. But before that, when mum was at her sister's
and you had the pair of us alone here, luring Maggy into your bedroom on some
aesthetic pretext - were you also drunk then?" She paused to allow the full weight of what
they both knew to be a rhetorical question to have its desired effect, before
continuing: "And what about the time before that, when, mummy again being
absent, you induced us to take off our clothes and pose for your new camera for
the sheer hell of it? Admittedly, you
didn't commit yourself to any physical contact with either of us then, but, all
the same, you certainly got us to reveal ourselves in a manner which can only
be described as erotic, if not downright pornographic! And what became of the photos after you had
secretly developed them? Isn't that
something which only you and one or two of your closest friends, including Roy
Hart, know anything about?"
"Stop, for God's sake stop!"
protested Mr Tonks, and so loudly that it caused the housedog to bark excitedly
from his resting place nearby. "I
won't tolerate any more of this nonsense!
You've no right to blackmail me!" he added sternly.
"If I were you, dad, I'd lower your
voice a little," Rebecca calmly advised him, turning round to face him
again. "Otherwise mummy may get wind
of it even before I take my incestuous story to the papers."
"But you have no proof that what you
say actually took place. None whatsoever!"
He was almost sneering triumphantly at her now.
For her part Rebecca sniggered ironically, then retorted: "Who needs proof? When I take my story to the press, the very
fact that the daughter of a world-famous composer has such a tale to tell will
be sufficient to arouse considerable interest on that account. After all, even if it weren't true, your name
would still be associated with mine, the lies or madness I'd be accused of by
you would still prove of interest to anyone with a knowledge of your
professional reputation, and, before long, rumours would begin to proliferate
like lice, to the detriment of more things than your marriage. But, of course, with Margaret to back me up
and reveal her own part in the story as well, you'd have a much harder task
trying to prove that I was either lying or insane, particularly since Maggy was
the principal target of your lust."
"Enough, enough!" cried Mr Tonks,
his face burning-up with a potent mixture of anger and shame. "I can't believe you'd actually do this
to me. Why, you're my only
daughter!"
"Yes, daddy, and that's something you
haven't always remembered," said Rebecca, who lowered her eyes under
pressure from her own feelings of anger and shame, which caused a few
self-pitying tears to well-up from the depths of her humiliated soul and drip
onto her cheeks. "But if you're now
prepared to grant 'Arts Monthly' the interview, then I'm prepared to forget the
incestuous anomalies of our past relationship, to forget and, more importantly,
to forgive."
An uneasy silence ensued, during which time
Mr Tonks managed to cool down slightly and to assume an appearance of peeved
resignation to his fate. "You must
be rather fond of this Mr Keating," he at length remarked in a resentful
tone. Then, realizing his daughter had
nothing further to say by way of confirming this, he added: "Tell the man
to be here by
"Thank God for that!" sighed
Rebecca, as she flopped down into the nearest of the available armchairs and
closed her tear-drenched eyes with an almost prayerful reverence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It was with
a distinct feeling of apprehension that Anthony Keating arrived outside the
editor's office door at nine-thirty on Tuesday morning and gave it a gentle
knock.
"Come in!" responded Webb's voice
in its usual brisk manner.
With attaché case in hand, Keating pushed open
the door and strode towards the editor's desk.
"Ah yes, take a seat!" Webb
advised him, briefly looking-up from a letter which he held in crab-like
fashion between the chubby fingers of each hand. The young correspondent did so, and his
employer evinced no desire to look at him again until approximately a minute
had passed and the letter duly been cast aside without comment. "Now then," he remarked, leaning
back in his soft-leather chair and fixing a pair of dark eyes upon the worried face in front of his
desk. "I take it you have something
to tell me."
"As a matter of fact, I wish to
apologize for not being here yesterday but, unfortunately, I was rather sick on
Sunday evening and didn't feel particularly well enough to return to work the
following morning," confessed Keating nervously.
"That's alright, Anthony!"
affirmed Webb, smiling understandingly. "As long as you're feeling well enough to do some work
today." He glanced down at
the attaché case on the young correspondent's lap and then returned his gaze to
its former position. "How did the
review at the Merlin Gallery go, by the way?" he asked.
"Quite successfully on the
whole," replied Keating, recalling to mind the
few hasty notes he had compiled on Friday afternoon and endeavoured to expand
into a review on Sunday evening. "I
sent the finished product off to the printers late Friday evening." Under the circumstances of what had actually
transpired, lying seemed the best solution.
"Ah good! I
hoped you'd been able to do so," Webb remarked. "That means they should be working on it
today." He frowned briefly, as
though in spite of himself, and lowered his gaze a moment. "And what about the interview with
Howard Tonks the previous day?" he continued, looking up again. "How did that go?"
After some hesitation, a slightly nervous
correspondent replied: "Better than
I'd have expected. For Mr Tonks had
fully recovered from his sore throat and was only too keen to oblige. I have the recording here." At which point he tapped the top of his large
attaché case and offered Nicholas Webb a complaisant smile. "If you'd like to hear some of it now, I
need only ..."
"Frankly I don't think I can spare the
time now, Anthony," averred Webb solemnly.
"But I should be grateful for an opportunity of listening to it
during the next few days." There
was a pause before he added: "I take it the transcription has still to be
done."
Keating fidgeted nervously in his
chair. "Well, as a matter of fact,
I managed to transcribe some of it to paper on Friday morning, before setting
off for the Merlin Gallery, and I did a little more yesterday afternoon,"
he said. "So if there are no
pressing engagements lined up for me today, I should have it completely
transcribed and edited by tomorrow evening.
But if it's scheduled for the October edition, then there's no immediate
rush, is there?"
"Quite so!" agreed Webb, his face
suddenly becoming hard. "Especially as far as you are concerned."
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow
you," responded Keating, bracing himself for the worst.
Webb had abandoned his informal posture and
was now leaning across the desk with fingers intertwined in a business-like
manner. "I sincerely regret having
to tell you this, Anthony, but you had better resign yourself to finding
alternative employment as from the end of this month. For the fact is that I just cannot continue
to employ a person who lies to my face as much as you do, and since you entered
my office this morning you've done very little else!"
The young correspondent's head jerked
backwards, as though from the force of a blow to the chin, and his face
darkened appreciably. "I don't
quite understand," he confessed, with intent to covering up the truth.
"Don't you?" retorted Webb in a
patronizingly sceptical manner.
"Then permit me to enlighten you!" At which point he proceeded to expatiate on
the subject of Howard Tonks' telephone call on the Friday afternoon of the
previous week, followed by the conversation he had conducted with Martin
Osbourne shortly afterwards, during which time it was ascertained that Keating
had confessed to having conducted the interview on schedule, when he visited
the senior sub-editor's flat late Thursday evening. Unfortunately, Osbourne wasn't as forthcoming
as he ought to have been in the circumstances," the editor continued,
frowning regretfully, "since he withheld valuable information from me
regarding the whereabouts of Neil Wilder on the evening in question. But I suppose that was only to be expected,
in view of Wilder's official absence from work at the time. However, it was Wilder himself who, soon
after returning to work, yesterday morning, confessed the truth and admitted
that he had talked to you at Osbourne's flat and offered, albeit reluctantly,
to bail you out of trouble by conducting the interview with Howard Tonks on
your behalf. As things stood, he hadn't
realized the extent to which you'd deceived him until his phone call to you on
Saturday morning, and, even then, what you told him wasn't the whole truth,
since he was literally astonished by some of the things I was obliged to impart
to him regarding Mr Tonks' call last Friday.
Now partly because of this deceitfulness on your part, Anthony, and
partly because I threatened him with dismissal if he tried to contact you
before I'd had an opportunity to see you today, he wisely consented to keep his
mouth shut and allow you to speak for yourself, which of course you have
done. So if you're wondering why you
haven't heard from your colleague since Saturday, it's because of what I said
to him yesterday!"
Keating bowed his head under the ton weight
of shame that had descended upon it in the wake of the avalanche of sordid
revelations which issued from Webb's glib tongue. No doubt, that explained why he hadn't seen
Neil earlier this morning as well. For
his office had been empty. And even
Osbourne had made what seemed, at the time, an implausible excuse about having
to attend to an important task, when encountered on the main stairs not less
than ten minutes ago.
"Having got this far, I suppose I had
better inform you of the telephone call I made to Mr Tonks' residence first
thing yesterday morning, in order to ascertain whether your intention of
getting a late interview, revealed to me by your one-time collaborator, had in
fact borne fruit," the editor went on, ignoring Keating's shame. "As luck would have it, the composer
answered the phone personally and admitted, not without serious misgivings, that he had agreed to see you in the afternoon. I asked him to keep my call confidential,
since I had no wish for you to learn that I'd been checking up on you, and this
he graciously consented to do.
Thankfully he kept his word.
Though even if he hadn't, and you had modified your explanation accordingly,
the outcome for you would have been exactly the same, since your disgraceful
behaviour towards his juvenile daughter last Thursday afternoon is, of course,
more than sufficient grounds for your dismissal. Indeed, you can consider yourself jolly
fortunate that you've got away from all this so lightly, and that Mr Tonks
didn't call the police and have you arrested for indecently assaulting
her."
"I didn't indecently assault
her!" protested Keating on the verge of tears. "She freely consented to my
advances."
"So I was led to understand from Neil
Wilder yesterday morning," Webb conceded.
"Though what her father himself told me, last week, was somewhat
less than a romantic account of the affair!
But even so, even if she 'freely consented' to your advances, the fact
that you initiated them at a time when you ought to have been conducting an
interview or, failing that, reporting back here for something else to do in the
meantime is, beyond question, a gross impertinence and flagrant breach of our
trust in you. While you're being paid to
work for 'Arts Monthly', you damn-well ought to be working for it, not fooling
around with the only daughter of such an eminent man as Howard Tonks and
causing his elderly housekeeper the shock of her miserable life. Goodness knows, we
pay you well enough, don't we? And that
was after you'd failed to wrap-up the interview on Monday when it should have
been done and, had you used a little more intelligence and common sense,
jolly-well could have been done! Instead
of which you encouraged the composer to play the piano and then told me some
cock-and-bull story, the following day, about his suffering from a sore throat
which had prevented him from taking part in the interview! Really, I fail to understand how you had the
audacity to walk in here today and carry on lying to my face as though I were
an ingenuous idiot fresh out of college or something! If anyone was being made to look a fool it
was you, and not only with regard to Howard Tonks." Here Webb imperiously cleared his throat, as
though to change gear and steel himself for what was to come, before
continuing: "I received a call from our printers, earlier today, informing
me that the review of the Alan Connolly exhibition which you ostensibly
dispatched to them on Friday evening still hadn't arrived. Now if you sent it when you claimed you did,
they'd have received it by yesterday morning.
But they hadn't even received it this morning, which doubtless means you
lied to me about that as well!"
Keating was experiencing an apotheosis of
shame, as he stared down unseeingly at his attaché case and reluctantly nodded
his head in bashful confirmation of the editor's inference. He couldn't remember an occasion when he had
felt more ashamed of himself for being so obviously in the wrong. It was even worse than how he had felt when
Neil Wilder phoned him, Saturday morning, to break the news of his failure to
clinch the interview the previous day.
Rebecca notwithstanding, there had been no-one else present save himself
then. But now he was in Webb's presence,
and Webb had always given him the impression of being a useful and likeable
member of the staff, a veritable credit to his profession.
"Have you dispatched the review
yet?" asked the editor, whose voice was trembling with barely concealed
exasperation. "Indeed, have you
even written it yet?"
"Yes, I wrote and dispatched it on
Sunday," confessed Keating, momentarily raising his eyes to the level of
his interlocutor's chest.
"Unfortunately, circumstances prevented me from working on it
earlier."
"And what kind of circumstances would
they be?" Webb imperiously wanted to know.
Something about the arrogant tone in which
the editor delivered this question stung Keating into anger, and his response
was simply: "Is that any business of yours?"
"Only inasmuch as it concerns the
welfare of my periodical and the well-being of my staff!" retorted Webb
sharply. "But if you dispatched the
review to the printers on Sunday and they didn't receive it this morning, we
may infer, I suppose, that it has either gone astray in the post or will turn
up there tomorrow. And tomorrow, as you
should know by now, is too damned late!"
"Not if we postpone the distribution
of the magazine for another couple of days and get them to print it first thing
in the morning," suggested Keating, who was now flailing around out of his
depth.
"Goodness gracious, how many times
have I told you that we can't arbitrarily interfere with their schedule like
that?" shouted Webb, his face positively twitching with exasperation. "By rights we shouldn't have had to
request them to reserve a space for it in the first place.... Though I suppose I'm mostly to blame for having taken the chance
and put more trust in you than circumstances evidently warranted!"
Keating frowned gravely and pursed his lips
in desperation. Being so preoccupied
with the Tonks affair over the weekend, he had scarcely given a thought to the
possible repercussions which might result from his inability to get the review
posted as quickly as possible. Or,
rather, he had thought about the necessity of getting it written on Friday
evening, but had then been prevented from doing so by Rebecca's company and his
overriding desire to please her.
Giving-in to which, he had again thought about it on Saturday morning,
only to be prevented from executing his thoughts, that time, by Neil Wilder's
phone call and the subsequent state of his nerves. So Sunday was the first real opportunity he'd
had to do anything about it. But, even
then, he hadn't been able to give the review his full attention, primarily on
account of the amount of noise being generated by both the upstairs neighbour,
who was entertaining various friends in what sounded like a seventh-day orgy,
and a neighbour in the flat next-door, who spent at least five hours of the day
driving nails into wood with the aid of a heavy metal hammer. Now this latest of Webb's sordid revelations
was really quite disastrous, particularly in light of the immense effort put
into getting the review written.
"So what are you intending to
do?" he at length asked the editor.
"Fortunately, what had to be done was
taken care of before you entered my office," Webb revealed. "As soon as I heard the bad news, I
arranged to have the page reserved for your review taken over by one which our
principal art critic did of the painter Catherine Williams, a couple of weeks
ago, before he went on vacation. They
will consequently be printing a rather scathing review of an artist whose work
is largely derivative and whose exhibition is now, in any case, entering its
last week. Needless to say, I'm not at
all happy with this last-moment change of plan.
But, since you failed in your duty, it's the only alternative available
to me at present, and one which I had no option but to endorse. Doubtless, it will cause some brows to be
raised somewhat higher at our expense than would have been the case, had you
submitted your review on time and thereby given the public an opportunity to find
out what the exhibition was all about and what we thought of it. But I dare say a blank page would be even
worse from our standpoint!"
"Yes, I dare say it would,"
echoed Keating, his head still bowed under the imponderable weight of so much
shame. "I really don't know how to
apologize for all the inconvenience this has caused you."
"Don't bother trying!" the editor
rejoined, turning an uncompromisingly disdainful gaze upon Keating's bowed head
which, unlike Osbourne's, had nothing of the 'inverted bird's nest' analogy
about it and held no source of amusement for him in consequence. "It's too late as far as you're
concerned. For nothing you could say, by
way of an apology, would do anything to alter my low opinion of you. There's only one thing I now require from
you," he went on, rising in temper, "and that is to get out of my
sight once and for all! Your Connolly
review is no longer needed and neither, needless to say, is the interview with
Howard Tonks."
Keating's head suddenly jerked up in
horrified disbelief. "What d'you
mean?" he gasped.
"Exactly what I
said!" Webb declared.
"Since you are being dismissed from the firm, your latest
assignments are no longer valid. The
October edition will feature an interview with the author Michael Bagshott
instead. Naturally, I've little doubt
that Mr Tonks will be disappointed by my decision to omit his interview at this
late juncture. Once I impress upon him
my motives for doing so, however, I'm quite confident that he'll understand and
lend me his unequivocal support. Indeed,
he may even agree to grant the magazine another interview in the
not-too-distant future, one, needless to say, that would have to be conducted
by someone more trustworthy and competent in the matter than you. For as far as you are concerned, end of
story! I cannot allow your name to
appear in print, as the instigator of that interview, after you're no longer
here. Therefore much as I regret having
to do this, in view of the work involved, I would be grateful if you'd kindly hand
over the tapes, to ensure you don't get it into your devious head to take them
elsewhere. That, after all, would be
quite inadmissible!"
"You dirty rotten bastard!"
screamed Keating, jumping to his feet and angrily staring down at the editor,
while clutching to his chest the attaché case in which the tapes were still
locked. "If you think I'm simply
going to hand these over for you to destroy or store away somewhere, then
you've got another thing coming, you double-crossing pig!"
"Mr Keating! Would you mind restraining your language and
kindly hand over the tapes, please!" insisted Webb.
"Fuck you, bastard!" shouted the
young correspondent, who, beside himself with rage, was now on the point of
throwing the attaché case at his employer's flushed head.
"Mr Keating!" shouted back the
editor, who had also got to his feet as he held out his hand for the
tapes. "I need hardly remind you
that you are still under obligation to the magazine to do as requested and
behave in an orderly and responsible manner.
Otherwise I shall have no alternative but to call the police." His tone was firm but not threatening. Authority was on his side, after all.
For an instant Keating
felt like throwing the attaché case and all its precious contents, which
included the cassette recorder, at the editor. But realizing that such an act, no matter how
seemingly justified under the circumstances of his outrage, would almost
certainly result in his being accused of assault and landed in still deeper
trouble, he begrudgingly complied and, by way of emphasizing his wholehearted
distaste for the act, slammed the attaché case down on Webb's desk. There was a rattling noise, as of something
breaking, and then, apart from the sound of Keating's heavy breathing, complete
silence.
"Right!" said the editor,
returning his hand to his side.
"Now get out!"
It wasn't an order Keating had any
immediate desire to obey right then, given his loathing for the man and the
fact that both of them were locked in an eyeball confrontation which seemed
unbreakable in its near-hypnotic intensity.
But, as the seconds ticked by, the suspenseful undesirability of the
situation became increasingly unbearable and, as though snapping out of an evil
spell, the junior correspondent briskly turned on his heels and strode
purposefully towards the door which, on reaching, he wrenched open and, without
looking back, slammed shut behind him. A
picture calendar fell from the wall in which the door was located, and the tall
window of the office vibrated with an intensity hitherto unknown to its occupant.
"Phew!" sighed
Webb, once the office was his own again.
"Thank goodness for that!"
He slumped into his capacious swivel chair and brushed a nervous hand
across his worry-strained brow. He
hadn't expected Keating to react in such a forceful way to his decision to
invalidate the interview.... Not that he was absolutely sure he would
invalidate it - at least not before he had listened to it and considered the
possibility of amending its contents slightly.
But the temptation to hit back at Keating by asserting the contrary had
been too strong to resist, particularly in view of the fact that the young
correspondent had evidently gone to some considerable pains to get the
interview taped and was doubtless confident his work would be fully rewarded. Now, however, Keating would have a good
reason to curse himself for having lied his way into
trouble in the first place. And that
might be a sufficiently cogent motive to deter him from doing the same thing
again in future, wherever the future might take him.
The door opened and in walked old Mrs
Tyler, the charwoman, with her employer's mid-morning tea things. By rights, she ought to have brought them in
about fifteen minutes earlier, but the tone of conversation reaching the
passageway from Webb's side of the door had inhibited her from doing so, and
duly necessitated her throwing the original tea away and brewing him a fresh
pot when matters had quietened down again.
"I hope you don't mind it a little later today," she murmured,
gingerly approaching Webb's desk.
"Only, I didn't want to disturb you while you had that rowdy young
man in here," she added in a confidential and vaguely conspiratorial
whisper.
"That's alright, Lilly!" affirmed
Webb cheerfully, clearing a space for the tea-tray. "Quite frankly, I wouldn't have wanted
it any earlier today!"
The old charwoman obediently lowered the
tray onto the space provided by her employer and commenced pouring him some
black tea, to which she nervously added, in due course, a spoon-and-a-half of
brown sugar. When the bounds of her duty
were reached, however, she reluctantly shuffled back towards the half-open door
and gently closed it behind her departure.
Left alone with his thoughts again,
Nicholas Webb continued to reflect upon Keating's disgraceful behaviour and the
means by which he had endeavoured to punish him for it. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had
sworn at him so viciously, and was now feeling somewhat humiliated by the fact
that young Keating had dared to insult him in such unequivocally vulgar
terms. But to some extent he had brought
it upon himself, to some extent it was probably true to say that he had brought
everything upon himself, including both the interview with Howard Tonks and his
decision to press ahead with the Alan Connolly review at the last moment. And, no less humiliatingly, it was even true
to say that, to some extent, young Keating hadn't been entirely to blame for
what had happened over the past week, since circumstances had forced it all
upon him. Determining the exact extent
to which this was true, however, was no easy matter! Indeed, it was well-nigh impossible, if only
because there were so many factors involved.
What was clear, however, was that Keating had been dealt with in the
only credible way, that is to say, by being dismissed from his post. The circumstances in which the dismissal had
taken place were perhaps open to dispute, but the dismissal itself ... no,
there could be no room for doubt as to the legitimacy of that! Anthony Keating had got what he deserved,
including, of course, the rejection of his work.
Leaning back in his comfortably padded
chair, the editor sipped steadily of the hot black tea, which sent small
tickling spirals of steam up his nostrils and simultaneously had a calmative
effect on his nerves. He was grateful,
on further reflection, that Keating hadn't done anything worse than to swear at
him; that, despite his manifest rancour, the young man had managed to restrain
the impulse to resort to violence, and thereby impose upon him the onerous
necessity of recourse to some mode of formal vengeance. But what a shame that matters should have
come to such a sorry pass, considering how useful and generally reliable
Keating had shown himself to be, during the brief course of his promising
career at 'Arts Monthly'. It was just
too bad that fate should have decreed his dismissal at a time when he was
becoming increasingly respected and, hence, respectable as a talented
correspondent. And all because of a
young woman whom he had been unlucky enough to get himself
caught deflowering by an old woman of seemingly delicate sensibility!
For a moment, the association of young
woman and deflowering caused Webb to recollect that time during his youth when
his dear mother had caught him in a patently erotic position with his first
girlfriend - a girl whom, at the time, he had been madly keen to deflower. Fortunately, it hadn't resulted in anything
worse than a stern lecture from his father on the importance of behaving
'properly' towards young ladies one was not in a financial position to
marry. But the shock and shame which had
overcome him, when his mother suddenly walked into a room she believed to be
empty and discovered him lying on top of his girlfriend with his pants down and
his upturned member buried deep inside her ... was something he remembered
years afterwards with unavoidable distaste!
Yet that was also true of another, albeit
later, incident which had occurred whilst he was serving under Sir Cecil Thomas
at the 'Literary Review', and had been caught red-handed by that venerable old
man fondling his then-secretary, Mary Ashcroft, in the office assigned to him
as sub-editor. Since it was after
official office hours, Sir Cecil hadn't taken it too gravely, merely advising
him, in a patronizingly ironic manner, not to do anything he wouldn't do. For Nicholas Webb, who had a profound respect
for the old devil, the experience of being caught in
flagrante delicto, with one hand up his secretary's skirt and the other on
her heaving breasts, was enough to make him refrain from repeating such an act
on the premises for the remaining time he spent there.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough, however,
to prevent him from getting caught, less than a year later, glancing through
the pages of a pornographic magazine which a junior colleague had lent him to
while away the time when things became too tedious, as they sometimes did. Barging into his small office without
forewarning, one midsummer's afternoon, the editor-in-chief, as he was formally
known, had given him no time to thrust the magazine either back into the drawer
in which it had been secreted or, alternatively, under a pile of papers on top
of the desk, with the regrettable consequence that he was left holding it
between his fingers while the chief informed him of an important board-meeting
he was due to attend later that afternoon and, to make matters worse, stared
down at the garish item in Webb's hands with a somewhat forbidding expression
on his pallid face. Oh, how embarrassing
it had been, as Sir Cecil stood in front of him with his waxed moustache
twitching uncontrollably and his inflamed eyelids blinking so rapidly that they
suggested some kind of silent cinematographic apparatus bent on animating the
large inverted rump which, at that moment, photographically presented itself to
his horrified gaze! What had taken the
chief but fifteen seconds to narrate seemed to its recipient like an eternity,
so acute was the embarrassment which resulted from the old man's untimely
intrusion. Again, the experience had
made such a profound impression on Webb that he absolutely forbade himself the
luxury of such pornographic material thereafter, resolving to lead as chaste a
life on the premises of the magazine as, to all intents and purposes, did Sir Cecil
himself.
But what had all this to do with Anthony
Keating? Puzzled by his lapse into
personal reminiscence, the editor returned his by-now empty teacup to its
saucer and, carefully depositing them both on the desk, ambled across to the
window, where he hoped to recover a little of his managerial dignity by
'plunging into' whichever representatives of almighty Nature first met the
eye. Fortunately, the trees in the
middle of the square were still in full bloom and appeared more summery, if
anything, than the week before, when a strong breeze had heralded the approach
of hostile autumn. For all that,
however, there was little about them he could take any genuine pleasure in,
little in which his glum mood and difficult circumstances would permit him to
take any genuine pleasure. The world
was, indeed, too much with him, as he stared through the window and reflected
anew on the ironies of editorial fate.
Had Keating the sense to pay more attention to the eternal in Nature
than to the temporal in cultures, he might not have got himself into such a fix
in the first place. But his obsession
with the decline of the West had gradually brought about his own moral decline
as a human being, had sanctioned a defeatist attitude to life which made it
easier or more credible to behave in a disgraceful manner than to behave
reasonably well.
At least that was how it now seemed to
Webb, as he stared unseeingly across the square and recalled to mind what he
had read in Lewis Mumford, some years ago, about the decline of Western
civilization owing more to individual perversity than
to historical necessity. And yet, if
that was indeed the case, why were so many people choosing to drag the West
down instead of to build it up still further?
What was it about modern life that gave so much encouragement to the
barbarians? Perhaps this was a question
Keating would know how to answer.... Though, if Nicholas Webb knew anything
about modern life, he had enough answers of his own, and not only philosophical
ones either! But it was curious, all the
same, that he should have been privately criticizing Keating the previous week,
in light of his apparent need of female company, at a time when the young man
in question was helping himself to all the female company he could. There was indeed something curiously ironic
about that!
Turning away from the window, Webb returned
to his desk and unlocked the attaché case, which had been so violently
deposited there by the lover of Howard Tonks' daughter that it looked somehow
evil and threatening. The cassette
recorder was still more or less in one piece, but whether it would now be
working...? Removing it from the
interior of the case, he placed it on an uncluttered part of his desk and,
noting the presence of a tape inside, pressed the ON button. Yes, thank goodness for that! A rather too loud "Having been born with
perfect pitch, I'm able to compose in my head" assaulted his eardrums and
induced him to lower the volume.
Evidently Tonks was answering a question that had just been put to him,
and answering it, moreover, with some relish, since he went on to explain that
he had composed at least fifteen works, including four orchestral ones, without
the assistance of a piano, having mastered the art of "... imagining or
hearing the actual sound of just about any combination of notes in my head, so
that, with few miscalculations, I was able to transcribe to paper the various
complex chordal and melodic progressions I had invented more or less as they
occurred. I don't know whether you're familiar
with my third piano sonata, but you might be interested to learn that the whole
of the first movement, which is rather long, was composed in a railway carriage
whilst I was travelling between
"And you obviously succeeded! Tell me, do you have a time of day when you
prefer to compose, when you do most of your best compositional work?" The voice was Keating's, and it sounded
slightly hoarse with nerves.
"Yes, in point of fact, I usually do
most of my best work in the morning," came Tonks'
confident rejoinder. "Though
I sometimes compose in the afternoon as well. But never at night! To me, the night is too negative a time, too
complacent a time for me to do any serious or arduous work. At one time, incidentally, I did compose at
night - from about
Webb pressed the OFF button on the cassette
recorder and fast-forwarded the tape to another part of the interview. Then he pressed the ON button again and,
ignoring one or two clipped words, continued to listen:-
"... it isn't a question of
endeavouring to resurrect Bach or Handel or any of the other great composers of
the classical past, but of being oneself and giving the world into which one
was born something it can recognize as relatively contemporary. Naturally, you may not like or understand a
great deal of what you hear in this respect.
But that is no reason for you to assume it's wrong, corrupt, irrelevant,
and therefore shouldn't exist. The only
alternative to contemporary serious music is no music, irrespective of whether
or not you prefer to regard this music in an antipathetic light, as I
understand you, for one, do, given its acoustic limitations. What we contemporary composers are doing has
been thrust upon us by historical precedent and cannot possibly be avoided....
An acquaintance of mine once asked me whether I would rather have been born in
Bach's time than in our own, and I immediately answered: 'Yes! Good God,
yes!' From the cultural point of view it
seemed incontrovertible to me that one would have been better off as a minor
composer in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than as a so-called major
one today. Yet this acquaintance, a man
of considerable technological expertise, was perfectly justified, when I put
the same question to him, in asserting that Bach's time would have proved
virtually anathema to him - the reason apparently being that he had everything
going for himself in the twentieth century.
So, you see, it depends on who or what you are,
as to whether you're likely to take an appreciative or an unappreciative view
of the age in which you happen to live.... Broadly speaking, the men of
religion and the arts profit in one age, those of science and technology in
another - the two groups rarely or never profiting equally at the same time. Admittedly, there has always been this
fundamental dualism, since the one group can't be expected to exist completely
independently of the other. But, in
practice, it's more of an oscillatory than a balanced dualism, which favours
either the one group or the other according to the nature of historical
circumstances at any given time."
Webb pressed the OFF button again and
pushed the cassette recorder to one side.
He wasn't sure that he agreed, in principle, with everything the
composer had said, nor that he even understood it, but he felt fairly
convinced, from what little he had sampled,
that the interview would be well-worth publishing in the near future. It almost seemed as though young Keating had
won Howard Tonks' confidence to an extent and in a way he would probably failed
to have done, had he not become amorously involved with his daughter
beforehand. Which was
surprising really, considering all the fuss that had been made of the issue. But if, as appearances suggested, the
interview would be well worth publishing, then what about the interviewer
himself? How could Keating be disposed
of without causing a breach of contract or some other ticklish legal
problem? Obviously it was now too late
to inform him of any change of intention in that respect, since the nature of
his dismissal had been so peremptory as to preclude the possibility of any
reconciliatory prospects. The only
option open to himself, Webb felt, was to transcribe and edit the interview
personally, so that Keating would have no reason to suppose it was going to be
used - as he might do were the task duly entrusted to someone like, say, Neil
Wilder or even Martin Osbourne. And in
case Keating duly informed Mr Tonks that the interview had been invalidated, as
he might well do during the next few days, it would be necessary to telephone
or, better still, write to the composer in order to enlighten him concerning
one's change of intention, to bring him into one's confidence with regard to
one's motivation for misleading Keating, and to ask him, in accordance with the
trust that had already been established, to refrain from passing on news of
this change of intention to anyone else.
Since Tonks had already complied with one such request, it seemed not
improbable that he would also comply with another, thereby guaranteeing himself
a degree of revenge upon a young man who had, after all, caused him a
considerable amount of personal trouble over his daughter and housekeeper, the
latter of whom had of course resigned.
With a faint smile of conspiratorial
satisfaction on his patrician lips, Webb leant back in his upholstered chair
and crossed the fingers of both hands behind his head. It was almost lunch time, and he was
beginning to feel a wee bit peckish.
CHAPTER NINE
Martin
Osbourne glanced down at his wristwatch and noted it was
"Yes, I didn't think Anthony would
come somehow," admitted Wilder, briefly turning his head in deferential
acknowledgement of his senior colleague.
"He didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about the idea, when I
put it to him this morning. It's as
though he thinks we're all secretly against him."
"I suppose he feels too ashamed of
himself for getting the sack," conjectured Osbourne, smiling vaguely. "I don't think Webb has fired more than
a handful of people in his entire managerial career, at least not among the
'Arts Monthly' correspondents. Thus Tony
is the latest victim of a fairly tolerant regime."
"But the first to leave for other than
purely professional reasons," declared Wilder, before taking a further sip
of the sherry he was in the habit of drinking on Thursday evenings - usually,
though not invariably, compliments of his magnanimous host.
"I should think that must be something
of an embarrassment to him," Osbourne suggested. "All the same, he didn't give old Webb
much alternative, did he? I mean, what
would you have done in Webbo's position?"
Wilder gently shrugged his shoulders and
emitted a faint sigh of exasperation.
"I guess we ought to be thankful that we didn't get the push as
well," he said. "After all, we
lied to him too, didn't we?"
Osbourne had to smile. "Yeah, but not to the same extent as
Tony, since we merely told small lies," he averred, before finishing off
the wine in his glass and smacking his lips in moderate appreciation of its
vinegary tang, which was quite to his taste.
"And my lie was smaller than yours," he added, with a gentle
laugh.
"Not a lot smaller," retorted
Wilder, recalling to mind his unnerving experiences of
Monday morning, when he denied having gone to Hampstead when Webb had asked
him, point-blank, whether he'd been there the previous Friday. A stupid denial, of course, since Webb
wouldn't have asked him had he not already known something to the
contrary! Nevertheless,
a denial which shame and fear had forced upon him on the spur-of-the-moment. And when the editor went on to mention a
telephone call from Mr Tonks, giving information about an unexpected visitor by
name of Neil Wilder, how that shame and fear had increased! It was obvious to Neil, from then on, that
lying wouldn't do him any good, in consequence of which he felt obliged to
reveal everything he knew about the matter, including, to Osbourne's detriment,
the meeting he had conducted with Keating at the senior sub-editor's Kensington
flat on the Thursday evening. Not that
Osbourne was threatened with dismissal on his account. It was just rather embarrassing for him to
subsequently learn that Webb knew he had been lying about Wilder's whereabouts
at the time.
There was a short pause while Wilder sipped
some more sherry and then, by way of elaborating on his last utterance, said:
"Though I still regret not having lied to Webb about my presence at your
flat. It might have been more to your
advantage had I done so."
"Yes," conceded Osbourne,
offering his colleague a wry smile.
"It might at least have spared me the guilty feelings I had each
time circumstances obliged me to enter Webb's bloody office. But, seriously, the only thing that would
have got you the sack would've been a phone call to Tony after Webb had
expressly forbidden you to contact him."
Wilder nodded his journalistic head in sage
agreement. "Yeah, I know that only
too well!" he admitted.
"Though, entre nous, I was almost on the verge
of disobeying orders, once or twice on Monday evening, and committing
professional suicide, so to speak.
Frankly, I still regret not having warned Tony of Webb's intentions,
since we were quite close as colleagues go.
But, there again, I suppose that even if I had phoned him and advised
him not to lie about anything on Tuesday morning, he would still have got the
sack for all the trouble he caused Tonks, not to mention his behaviour with the
composer's delectable daughter."
"Without a doubt!" confirmed
Osbourne, lighting himself a slender cigar with the aid of a small match. "Not to mention his endeavour to enlist
you into his clandestine services. So
it's just as well you did what Webb wanted.
Otherwise there would have been two sackings instead of one. And a rather wasteful
sacking in your case!"
Wilder sagely nodded in professional
agreement, before declaring: "Well, I'll be relieved, in a way, to see the
back of Tony tomorrow, insofar as his presence at work makes me feel somewhat
guilty about what happened."
"Has he given you any indication of
what he intends doing after he leaves?" asked Osbourne, extinguishing his
match.
"Only that he hopes to take a short
trip abroad somewhere and continue with his latest novel," declared
Wilder, smiling ruefully. "But I
suspect he'll take up freelance journalism when he returns. That seems the most plausible supposition,
anyway."
"Yes, I suppose so," agreed
Osbourne. "By the way, David, you
wouldn't be interested in joining the illustrious staff of 'Arts Monthly' as a
junior correspondent, by any chance?"
The tall figure of David Turner had just
crossed the room and was now standing in front of the two seated men. Having grown weary of a conversation he had
been holding with Andrew Hunt on the subject of UFOs and their relationship
with the spirit world, about which, in any case, he was less well-informed, the
journalist had excused himself on the pretext of needing to take a leak and,
following his return from the toilet, had decided to pay the other two 'Arts
Monthly' representatives a brief visit.
Meanwhile Hunt had barged his way into a
conversation between Michael Haslam, the artist, and Stuart Harvey, the
photographer, on the nature of God, and was doing his best to impress upon them
the necessity of knowing how to differentiate true divinity from strong
divinity, the immanent deity from the so-called transcendent deity which was presumed to exist independently of man,
as 'Creator of the Universe' and other such variations on a Cosmic theme. He proceeded, from a higher mystical angle,
to explain how atheism was nothing less than loss of faith in the deity that
had traditionally served as God for the masses in what might be termed lower,
or primitive, religion. The fact,
however, that true divinity was immanent meant that, from the vantage-point of
higher, or advanced, religion, atheism was irrelevant, since immanent deity
never died but continued to exist within the upper, or superconscious, part of
the psyche for ever. As Schopenhauer had
contended, there was a religion for the Many and a religion for the Few, though
the latter wasn't so much academic philosophy as loyalty to true divinity. Academic philosophy was all very well, but it
could soon prove an obstacle on the path of personal salvation if pursued too
ardently. For the truth of God-within
had nothing to do with the many secular truths in which academic philosophy
ordinarily specialized, and could be obliterated by them if the desire to gain
power by use of such rational truths became too obsessive. "Take Nietzsche, for instance,"
Hunt went on, warming to the challenge of his convictions, "could anyone
have been further removed from the inner deity than him? And yet he was as ardent a truth-seeker as
ever lived. But a truth-seeker, alas,
who ignored the one essential truth in the fixity of his fight against Christianity. Had he turned, once in a while, to
God-within, he might not have taken the traditional deity quite so
seriously! Alas, he seems not to have
been aware that the deity he spent so much time proclaiming the death of was a
grave obstacle on the path of his discovering the truth which ultimately
mattered!"
"That may be," conceded Haslam
with ill-disguised impatience, "but your fixity on inner deity is just as
much an obstacle to your discovering the whole of God as Nietzsche's obsession
with popular religion was an obstacle to his discovering a part of Him. For God, if one must use such an outmoded and
ambiguous term, is manifested as much in the natural world as in the
supernatural one, and cannot be considered in His entirety in either
context. A spiritual divinity is no
closer to being the whole God than a material one. If you acknowledge the spiritual
manifestation of God you're merely acknowledging half of Him, and your concept
of divinity is accordingly apt to be lopsided.
And the same is true of the material manifestation of God in
nature. From what you've told me in the
past about Nicholas Webb's predilection for Elementalism, it would seem that
he's no closer to acknowledging God in His entirety than you, since he
recognizes only what John Cowper Powys has philosophically taught him to
recognize and is all-too-ready, in consequence, to equate God with nature by
indulging in a modern version of pantheism.
Now you, with your Eastern-inspired Aldous Huxley scholarship, are only
too ready to equate God with the Clear Light of the Void and overlook His body
altogether! But the truth would seem to
lie midway between Powys and Huxley, so that God can be regarded, in His
entirety, as possessing both body and spirit, like Christ. After all, the fundamental nature of life is
dualistic, and what applies to life must surely apply to God. It would be a fine thing if, instead of
acknowledging man for the mind-body relationship he is, we chose to view him as
a creature either all mind or, worse still, all body, and then proceeded to
treat him in accordance with our lopsided assessment, so that, in the one case,
he wasn't accredited with an ability to walk and, in the other case, he wasn't
accredited with an ability to think. You
can be pretty sure that, in a very short space of time, he would entirely cease
to exist! And yet, what applies to man surely applies no less to God, so that
if you persist in regarding Him simply as a mind or simply as a body, you not
only misrepresent Him but endanger His very existence, since too much attention
to the one aspect of His being tends to diminish the other and, eventually, may
even do away with it altogether. In
short, one must learn how to modulate between Powys and Huxley, not take either
of them for the whole truth! For, in the
final analysis, God-without is just as entitled to our acknowledgement as
God-within, and shouldn't be treated as something having merely a secular
existence. After you've died you might
well, as mystics generally believe, find yourself experiencing the Clear
Light. But, whilst you're alive on this
earth, you would be well advised to make the most of God-without, and not try
to live too exclusively in the other world - one which would seem to lie beyond
nature altogether."
"That sounds all very well on a
theoretical plane," rejoined Hunt swiftly, his oval countenance betraying
a degree of embarrassment at, not to say impatience with, the artist's
conventionally dualistic viewpoint, which seemed to him somewhat too Christian
and even bourgeois in its insistence on
a God-without, "but when you live in a big city, as I do, then the
temptation to turn to God-within on a more or less exclusive basis is
all-too-real, in view of the comparative lack of God-without. Can you be surprised that I should
acknowledge only the spirit of God when there is so little of His body, so
little nature, in evidence there; when, on the contrary, one is confronted
every day by so many thousands if not millions of cars, taxis, buses, lorries,
shops, houses, factories, offices, streets, etc. - in short, by things that
weren't fashioned by God but by man?"
"No, I can't be surprised,"
Haslam admitted, grimacing painfully.
"For the predominance of man over nature in any big city does
indeed make it difficult to give sufficient attention to God-without. But that's no reason for you to suppose that
God-within is the whole of God, any more than it would be a reason for you to
imagine that nature, in all its incredible diversity, was the whole of Him if
you lived in the country, where the inventions of man are comparatively
scarce. Now the fact that city life is a
predominantly man-made or artificial thing is no reason, either, for you to
suppose it's exclusively so. For there
are always manifestations of nature to be found in it, including the great
expanse of sky over our heads and the air, polluted though it be, which we
habitually breathe. Thus whilst I can
sympathize with the fact that city life may induce you to concentrate on your
mystical self-realization, I can't see that you should thereby be led to ignore
or belittle God-without. You may be at a
disadvantage compared with someone who lives in the country, but, even so, you
can always find a park or a woods or even a garden where it's still possible to
establish some contact with nature and thus, implicitly, with God-without, the
creator of nature."
Andrew Hunt laughed derisively. The small park near where he lived was almost
invariably overcrowded with dogs, kids, and expletive-prone adults when the
weather encouraged one to visit it, which frankly wasn't all that often, and
had an effect of depressing rather than impressing or cheering one. Had it been a bit bigger, things might have
been otherwise. Unfortunately, the city
hemmed it in on all sides, was visible from all sides and, no less
depressingly, was all too audible. Walking about on grass which had been walked
about on too often, looking at flowers which had absorbed a little too much
traffic pollution and were, in consequence, somewhat atrophied and virtually
devoid of scent, sitting on pigeon-stained benches which threatened to collapse
under one, leaning against tree trunks which bore the marks of malicious
penknives - all this and so much more had long ago disillusioned him with the
cult of nature-worship, and induced him to turn within instead.
"I have a theory, actually, for the
decline of faith in God conceived from a traditional angle," declared
Harvey, feeling it was about time he chimed-in at the expense of Andrew Hunt
who, though less bigoted than Haslam in
some respects, was no less irksome to him overall.
"Pray, tell us," quipped Haslam,
his lips glistening with the sherry he had just imbibed. "I'm always interested in your theories
- good, bad, or plain indifferent!"
"Well, I cannot believe, for instance,
that the growth of atheism, this century, is simply attributable to the ongoing
influence of men like Voltaire, Diderot, Nietzsche, Marx, or anyone else of a
similar unbelieving stamp," opined the photographer, drawing himself up to
his full height, which was still a good way short of both Haslam and Hunt, and
probably didn't have anything like the effect desired. "No, the chief cause of contemporary
atheism, to my mind, was the Industrial Revolution, back in the early decades
of the nineteenth century, and its subsequent transformation of society into
the predominantly urbanized affair we see around us. For any genuine religious attitude to life is
founded upon gratitude to God, if you like, for the beauty and splendour of the
natural world, a Thoreauesque or Whitmanesque gratitude for the privilege of
being born into such a magnificent world as manifested by almighty nature. Admittedly, one has to cultivate this world
to some extent, to keep it within certain bounds. Even so, most of its beauty is intrinsic, not
man-made. Now in a large modern city, on
the other hand, there are all too many things which are anything but beautiful
and which engender, in consequence of their plainness or ugliness or
dangerousness or whatever, not gratitude but defiance, despair, dejection,
rejection - call it what you like. In
the city one encounters so much traffic, traffic noise, pollution, congestion,
negative attitudes, together with so many road signs, advertisements,
monuments, walls, etc., that gratitude to God for His creations, which are
natural, is hardly the most logical response.
On the contrary, one is made predominantly conscious of man's creations,
in consequence of which a society develops around man instead of God or nature
or whatever else you'd like to call that which proceeds from a non-human source
- a society, in short, which is largely and effectively atheistic in its
humanistic materialism.
Michael Haslam's blue eyes shone with what
appeared to be unprecedented admiration for the photographer's theory, which
was by no means as ridiculous as he had half-expected, even though it tended to
belittle the works of man and only confirmed what Hunt
had been saying. "The danger
here," he ventured to retort, drawing himself up to his full height, as
though in sympathetic response to his intellectual antagonist, "is that
one becomes only too ready to equate the works of man with the Devil - with
ugliness instead of beauty. Yet man is
just as capable of producing beauty as God, as can be verified by a majority of
the paintings in the National Gallery, with their mostly Catholic
associations. Surely you realize
that?"
"Of course!" replied the stocky
Scot, more than a wee bit peeved at Haslam's arrogant assumption. "I didn't for one moment suggest that
everything in the city was ugly or evil.
But you can't deny that a lot of things there are such, or that the
world of man doesn't predominate over nature.
And this is precisely why we get humanism instead of Christianity, concern
with the here and now rather than with the Beyond. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that, even
these days, rural-dwellers are generally less humanistic and correspondingly
more religious, in their overall attitude to life, than a majority of urban-dwellers
who, of necessity, live under the dominion of man. It isn't for nothing that the Labour movement
has always failed to make real headway with agricultural labourers, who have
never thought too highly of socialism, the proletarian counterpart to the
bourgeoisie's liberal humanism. But
let's not criticize either side for an attitude which is, after all, virtually
inevitable, under the influence of their respective environments. It isn't for us to expect the impossible, to
expect a majority of human beings who grew-up under nature's influence to be
intrinsically atheistic or, conversely, a majority of those who grew-up in the
city to be intrinsically theistic. But,
these days, urban-dwellers constitute by far the larger percentage of the total
population, and thereby condition what has come to be regarded as the attitude
of the age, with its social/liberal Zeitgeist. So let's not deceive ourselves that the fall
of God isn't directly attributable to the rise of man. For all your Nietzsches and Bertrand Russells
are merely a consequence of the Industrial Revolution, a symptom of the modern
age, and not a disembodied voice 'crying in the wilderness'."
Andrew Hunt raised his brows in sceptical
incredulity. If what the photographer
said was true, why had he managed to find God in spite of the obstacles man had
chosen to put in his way? Wasn't the
Clear Light more important than any transcendent deity which
followed from a closeness to nature and tended to induce worship and, as
"From the individual's point of view,
the mystical experience may well be of more intrinsic value," conceded
Frankly, Andrew Hunt was quite staggered by
this opinion! He hadn't expected such a
lecture from Stuart Harvey, who always struck him as being both heathen and
secular in his attitude to life, and not at all disposed to taking
Christianity, or its prayerful waiting, particularly seriously. Before he could launch himself into a defence
of meditation at the expense of prayer, however, Haslam had returned to his
earlier theme about the Clear Light being only half of God, and then went on to
suggest that mystics who lived in more rural times must have possessed a
distinct spiritual advantage over those of us who now spent most of our lives cooped-up
in the city and refused or were unable, in consequence, to acknowledge God in
nature. "And the same doubtless
applies to those of your contemporaries," he continued, "who live in
the country and aren't entirely pantheistic.
Granted the requisite enlightenment, they should be able to alternate
between God-without and God-within without undue difficulty." He congratulated himself, with the aid of a
gruff laugh, for his verbal acrobatics, and then proceeded to expatiate on what
he took to be the imbecility of those who made it a policy to preach universal
meditation as a means by which contemporary society could rejuvenate and
redirect itself to more fruitful goals.
At this point Andrew Hunt, who always drank
less than everyone else and was accordingly in a less inebriated state-of-mind,
vehemently protested that such a policy was by no means imbecile, even granted
the fact that a majority of people weren't destined to realize the Godhead, at
present, but would have to settle for something less. "After all, even a few minutes'
meditation a day is better than none at all," he asseverated, addressing
himself exclusively to the artist, "and would almost certainly result, if
everyone could be induced to practice it, in the world becoming a saner, wiser,
healthier, and more peaceful place.
Admittedly, I'm not, through force of professional and social
circumstances, a full-blown bona fide mystic. But I do know, from personal experience, that
such meditation as I have managed every day has made me a better
person than I would otherwise be. And
the same, I suspect, would apply to anyone else."
Michael Haslam shook his head in unabashed
disapproval of an attitude he had heard so many times in life that it was now
virtually anathema to him. If only more
people could be got to do this, if only more people could be got to do that,
everything would be all right with the world.
All that was needed, apparently, was a crusade for universal meditation,
enlightenment, salvation, peace, etc., according to the presumed requirements
of the moment. If we could all be
induced to act the same way, human diversity would be stamped out and there
would be no cause for anyone to worry about what anyone else was doing. It was the perennial solution, the one
solution which never seemed to desert the world's stage. And yet, how fatuous and unspeakably
naive! How lacking in proper insight
into human beings! Could one really
pretend that this universal remedy, this perennial panacea, should be applied
to everyone without distinction, without regard, that is to say, to their
temperamental or physiological dispositions?
Really, how ignorant people could sometimes be!
"I suppose you aren't particularly
familiar with W.H. Sheldon's Varieties of Human Physique or
Varieties of Temperament" he murmured, after a short but anguished
pause.
"No, I'm not actually," confessed
Hunt in a tone of voice designed to emphasize the irrelevance of Haslam's
supposition.
"Neither am I for that matter,"
admitted
"Well, I don't intend to convey the
entire contents of these two seminal works of twentieth-century psychology to
you," Haslam somewhat pompously declared.
"But I do think it expedient to draw your attention to the fact
that what may suit one temperament and physique may be quite unsuitable, not to
say detrimental, to another, so that any regimen based on the fatuous
supposition that all men are the same and have identical or similar wants can
only be doomed to failure. Sheldon distinguishes,
you may be interested to learn, between three basic physiological types of
human being, viz. the fat, the muscular, and the thin, to use non-technical
language, and these three basic types are equated with corresponding
temperamental or psychological predilections.
One is what one is, in short, because one's build necessitates it,
because one is subject to a given pattern of physiological influence that, to
varying extents, determines one's psychology.
Now, I ask you, how can someone who, on account of his build, isn't
cut-out for a given philosophical or moral attitude to life, say quietism,
possibly be expected to indulge it to the same extent and with similar success
as someone whose build is compatible with such an attitude? How, for instance, can a medium-built
muscular person, with a correspondingly aggressive temperament, be expected to
regularly indulge in the lifestyle of someone with a predominantly cerebral
temperament derived from a thin physique?
Similarly, how can a fat, gut person, with a correspondingly genial or
ingratiating temperament, be expected to emulate either of the other two types,
and thus discard or overcome himself?"
"I really don't see what you're
driving at," protested Hunt peevishly, an expression of bewilderment animating
his pallid countenance in the face of what seemed to him like a dangerously
deterministic - and therefore materialistic - philosophy.
"Precisely the crass imbecility of
anyone who imagines that these physiological and temperamental differences between
people are irrelevant to an understanding of the world as it is and must, of
necessity, continue to be!" Haslam fairly bellowed from a throat
specifically designed to accommodate a muscular physique. "If you imagine you can turn a Napoleon
Bonaparte into a Thomas Traherne simply by getting him to meditate every day,
then you're grossly mistaken! And, by a
similar token, you'd be no less mistaken to imagine that a Thomas Traherne or a
William Law could be turned into a Napoleon Bonaparte or, for that matter, an
Oliver Cromwell with the requisite training in the martial arts! The fact that some people meditate and
discover God in themselves doesn't mean that everyone
else is wrong to do what they do instead."
"Not wrong?" thundered Hunt, his
eyebrows severely arched in radical disbelief.
"Do you mean to tell me that Napoleon Bonaparte and his ilk were
right to engage France and half of
"From the viewpoint of type, I most
certainly do," Haslam firmly replied, "insofar as Bonaparte acted in
a way one might expect such a man to act.
If anyone is wrong it's you for expecting people like that to behave in
a manner more suited to someone like yourself, for expecting them to transcend
their physiological and temperamental coercions."
"But that's preposterous!" the
junior sub-editor of 'Arts Monthly' vigorously objected. "How can you possibly condone war and
violence, greed and hate? Of course they
were wrong!"
"Only to the extent that they indulged
in evil in a world where it's part of the overall set-up of things and can't be
entirely eradicated," Haslam countered philosophically. "If you wish to dream of a time when,
through the efforts of the spiritual masters alone, the earth will be populated
with people who know only good and never indulge in war or violence or greed or
hate or anything else unequivocally evil, that's your affair.
But if you decide to equate such a dream with reality and sincerely
believe it can actually come about, then you aren't merely mistaken; you
immediately take your place alongside the greatest idiosyncratic idiots of the
age! For in a world where good thrives
upon evil and vice versa, it stands to reason that a one-sided concept of life
is fundamentally perverse. Even your
tendency to equate God with the Clear Light of the Void, instead of seeing that
as simply a part of Him, is indicative of a singularly partial
perspective. Now if it suits you,
fine! Probably your thin build has
something to do with it. But that's no
reason for you to assume it should suit everyone else as well! There's certainly no one path for everyone to
follow, and the philosophy of resignation from life propounded by Schopenhauer
is, objectively considered, no closer to being the right path for everyone than
Nietzsche's amor fati."
"No closer to being the right
path?" echoed Hunt in stunned amazement.
"Are you mad?"
Michael Haslam smiled dismissively. "Perhaps I should have said it's
probably the right path for those of a similar temperamental and physiological
disposition to Schopenhauer," he remarked, reminding them of his
Sheldonian classifications. "A
path, clearly, for which Nietzsche wasn't intended, and not solely on biological
grounds, but doubtless on societal and circumstantial grounds as well. Now what applies to them applies no less to
the dissimilarity of outlook between, say, Aldous Huxley and Oswald Spengler,
where the physiological differences are paralleled by appropriately antithetical
temperamental ones. To a fair extent
Huxley was a spiritual continuation of Schopenhauer, and Spengler a spiritual
continuation of Nietzsche. Now, so far
as you're concerned, it might be apposite to see God in the one camp and the
Devil in the other. But insofar as one
can be objectively impartial about such matters, one has to conclude that both
sides were correct within the limited boundary of their respective types. Where they'd be mistaken would have been in
assuming that what's right for them, their particular type, was right for the
other type as well. But a philosophy
suited to an intelligent ectomorph, or thin man, is no closer to being the
right philosophy for an intelligent mesamorph, or medium-built man, than it
necessarily would be for an intelligent endomorph, or fat man. You have to bear in mind the physiological
and corresponding temperamental differences between people, before jumping to
conclusions about what they should or shouldn't be doing.... Which
is something that you, apparently, haven't always done, Andy."
Andrew Hunt shook his head in stubborn
disagreement and stared ruefully at the dark-green carpet upon which they were
all standing. He couldn't bear to hear
that what he had taken to be The Way was simply relative to himself, his
type. True, he had long ago come to
realize that not everyone was qualified to experience the Godhead, that 'Many
were called but few chosen', etc. But he
had never before equated the Few with any one type, preferring, instead, to
believe it was a completely open matter - one decided by individual choice
rather than biological coercion. And
yet, if what Haslam had said was true, how could one avoid equating individual
choice with biological coercion? How
could one avoid attributing the former to the latter? Evidently, it wasn't as open a matter as he
had once thought! "But aren't you
over-generalizing when you attribute a specific lifestyle to a given type of
person?" he finally retorted.
"After all, not everyone who meditates is thin, any more than
everyone who starts and wages war is muscular.
Take Hitler, for instance. Wasn't
he fundamentally a thin man? And yet he
caused even more trouble in the world than Bonaparte. More trouble, I dare say, than both Mussolini
and Stalin put together."
"Yes, I suppose that can't be too far
off the mark," conceded Haslam offhandedly, as he allowed a faintly ironic
smile to play about his lips.
"Though I think you'd have to admit that Hitler was the exception
to the rule - as is borne out, in some measure, by a comparison with the others
you mentioned. The rule for dictators
and tyrants would appear to be mesamorphy, the Spenglerian muscular ideal. But occasionally one finds an ectomorph or an
endomorph in the dictatorial driving-seat and they, being exceptions, are apt
to be worse, if anything, than the rule!
Naturally, there are cases where the Sheldonian classifications have to
be taken cum grano salis, even with a considerable pinch of proverbial
salt. For there are
always exceptions to anything.
But if you mean to tell me that such classifications aren't generally
applicable to the nature of their subjects, then you're certainly deceiving
yourself - just as you're deceiving yourself when you contend that everyone
should follow the same path, and that Nietzsche's and Spengler's dynamic
attitudes to life are of an inferior nature, per se, to the passive
stance advocated by Schopenhauer and Huxley.
Inferior they may seem to you and your type. But as for those to whom they apply - that I
very much doubt!"
There then ensued a short but strained
silence before
"That's not quite true,"
protested Hunt, offering the stocky photographer a thin smile. "One is rarely given an opportunity to
ignore that fact!"
"Well, perhaps not," conceded
"Yes, you'd certainly like to convert
us to your way of thinking if you could," Haslam declared, "and make
us sacrifice our ...” here he flexed the muscles of his right arm and bellowed
"... mesamorphic potentialities!" - an
outburst which paved the way for an explosion of derisory laughter from both
Hunt and Harvey, who were rather more ectomorphic and endomorphic respectively.
Across the far side of the room, a rather
bewildered and intoxicated version of Martin Osbourne glanced-up from the
middle pages of the September edition of 'Arts Monthly' and mumbled something
to Wilder about the strange and pretentious nature of proceedings between the
other group.
"But they're always a little weird,
aren't they?" David Turner elected to reply, deputizing for the somnolent
correspondent who, due to the large quantity of sherry imbibed, was hardly in a
fit state-of-mind to form a rational or objective judgement. "How differently booze affects different
people," he meditatively added.
"Quite so!" agreed Osbourne,
scarcely able to focus his own vision on the trio in question. "One ought perhaps to ration it more in
future."
"Preferably after we've drunk our fill
of it," suggested Turner, leaning forwards over the back of the settee and
staring down at the magazine in Osbourne's hands.
"Quite!" confirmed Wilder, whose
personal and moral detestation of Michael Haslam prevented him from saying
anything positive about the other group, considering he was of the opinion that
the painter was an incorrigible idolater who would always oppose moves towards
the sort of decent society which Andrew Hunt and, to a lesser extent, Stuart
Harvey wanted to see come about from their respective standpoints - the one informally and on an individual
basis, the other formally and within the collective context of society in
general or, at any rate, with reference to those whose 'prayerful waiting'
placed them within the Christian mainstream of theocratic tradition in the
West.
CHAPTER TEN
Through the
open window of Rebecca Tonks' bedroom that evening, a mellow sun could be seen
slowly disappearing behind a cluster of beech trees in the horizontal distance,
its deep red glow mingling with their branches and bestowing upon them a sort
of solar halo of such splendour ... as to transform an otherwise mundane scene
into something startlingly supernatural and 'more deeply interfused', in
Wordsworthian parlance, than even the deep glow of its own mellow setting. To Anthony Keating, the view from Rebecca's
bed, where he lay with his back to the wall, was indeed enchanting, though
insufficiently so, alas, to entirely erase the memory of what had recently
happened to him, or to alter his depressed mood to one of passive,
quasi-blissful receptivity. On the
contrary, there occurred to him, in the sunset of this particular Friday
evening in August, a symbol of his own life - a 'day' which was over and
another 'day' which had yet to begin.
Doubtless the Australian continent would soon be flooded by light from
the very same sun which, at this moment in time, appeared to be on the verge of
extinction.
But what of his own life? What sun would initiate a new 'day' there and
thus grant him a fresh start, one that began where the offices of 'Arts
Monthly' left off? And would it be a
longer or a shorter 'day', one that lasted for weeks or months or even
years? He flinched at the thought of
years. Yet if one could do something one
enjoyed doing, of what use would weeks or months be? As if time was the all-important factor! Perhaps, after all, tomorrow would be better
than yesterday - brighter, fuller, warmer, more encouraging? No more embarrassing interviews with stuffy
atonal composers or last-minute reviews of crazy non-representational
artists! And what a crazy non-representational
artist Alan Connolly had been! Not
merely content to indulge in the more traditionally fashionable
non-representational developments, but a paradoxical surrealist, to boot! A nostalgic crank who evidently imagined
himself the natural heir of Ernst Fuchs and only succeeded in proving himself
no better than a second-rate René Magritte!
Really, it was a wonder he had been allowed to exhibit at all, even
given the fact that his work wasn't exclusively confined to Surrealism or, at
any rate, to his own rather interiorized and intellectualized brand of it, but
also embraced a little Abstract Expressionism and Op Art as well. But the latter were hardly better, under the
circumstances of their unorthodox treatment, than the more blatant anachronisms
on display, and only succeeded in disillusioning Keating with the entire exhibition
and inducing him, with Rebecca's prompting, to postpone his review until the
following day, by which time the telephone call from Wilder had necessitated
yet another postponement. Still, there
was something amusing - one might even say gratifying - about seeing the
belated review of Catherine Williams' paintings in the latest edition of 'Arts
Monthly', particularly in light of the fact that few people outside the
immediate college circles from which she hailed would have heard of her, and
scarcely anyone took any interest in her work, which was overly
representational and thus of a conservatism which made even Connolly's art
appear radical, if from a reactionary point of view.
This last-minute replacement by Webb was
really quite diverting! One couldn't
even be certain that Cathy Williams would approve of it. But, there again, one couldn't be certain
that she would care anything about the magazine anyway, since it wasn't exactly
a matter of life-and-death to most contemporary artists. The only people who seemed to take it
seriously stemmed, as a rule, from the commercial bourgeoisie; people who only
turned to the arts in their spare time, as a substitute, more often, for the
absence of spiritual creativity in their lives, a sort of surrogate culture, if
you will, and even they weren't beyond writing abusive and sometimes
threatening letters whenever opinions or philosophies contrary to their own
appeared in print, which, unfortunately for the magazine, happened
all-too-frequently! Yet, as far as Keating
was concerned, all that was a thing of the past. As also, thank God, was the humiliating
experience with Webb, even though it lingered-on in the memory and slightly
poisoned his feelings. What mattered now
was the new 'day' that had yet to begin, and whether or not Webb would approve
of it didn't matter a jot!
He smiled faintly as the thought of his new
freedom suddenly dawned upon him with the sun's final setting. The branches of those trees in the distance
which, a short while ago, had been wreathed in a red halo of almost
supernatural significance ... were slowly returning to their customary twilight
appearance - devoid of even the slightest transcendent connotations. Within a little while they would disappear
from view altogether, like the sun itself, swallowed-up by the impenetrable
camouflage of night. And so, too, would
the contents of Rebecca's room, if he didn't switch the light on.
Yes, what a pleasant room it was really,
even more pleasant with the light bulb shining and the curtains drawn on
unacceptable darkness! The armchair,
table, bed, dressing-table, and wardrobe all seemed to him so reassuring at
this moment! It was impossible to
imagine them apart from Rebecca, to conceive of them as belonging to anyone
else. Everything in the room appeared to
have been fashioned specifically for her, to bear the hallmarks of her
personality, to be in league with her against the outside world, which even
included the rest of the house. There
could be no question of one's confounding Rebecca's bedroom with anyone
else's. It was virtually a work of art -
the kind of art which, in its domesticity, mostly appeals to women.
The creaky sound of the door handle turning
startled him from these smug reflections and brought him the reassuring sight of
Rebecca re-entering a room she had vacated some fifteen minutes ago. He smiled his approval of her return and
moved a little to one side in order to make room for her on the bed.
"I'm sorry my friend kept me so long
on the phone," she murmured, as she scrambled up beside him and threw an
arm round his neck. "Unfortunately,
she's such a chatterbox that I always have to listen to her for at least ten
minutes, especially when I haven't seen or heard from her for a few
days." She was of course referring
to Margaret, the blonde whom Keating had seen in her sunbathing company that
first afternoon he arrived at the Tonks' residence. "Incidentally, my father would like to
see you before you leave for home this evening," she added.
"What-on-earth about?" exclaimed
Keating, suddenly becoming a shade apprehensive, since the prospect of seeing
Mr Tonks again gave him what might be described as the honky-tonks blues.
"He didn't specify, but I suspect it
has to do with the cancellation of that interview you told me to tell him about
yesterday."
Keating reluctantly nodded in regretful
agreement and simultaneously permitted a faint sigh to emerge from between his
lips. Yes, it would almost certainly be
about the interview, the cancellation of which could hardly be guaranteed to
flatter a man who had put so much time and effort into giving it! Here was yet another inconvenience for Mr
Tonks to live with, yet another insult to his professional reputation. As if what he had already experienced wasn't
bad enough! And, to cap it all, Keating
had been unable to break the news of Webb's decision to him face-to-face but
had relied upon Rebecca to do so, and to do so, moreover, as late as the day
before, since he had spent the greater part of the Tuesday and Wednesday evenings
deliberating over whether to break any news at all. Only when she had telephoned him at his
Croydon flat, late Thursday evening, and asked why she hadn't heard from him in
the meantime, did he permit himself to confess to what had happened and then request
her to inform her father. So it was with
some reluctance that he accepted an invitation to visit her the following day,
accepted it under the understanding that Mr and Mrs Tonks had given her
permission to invite him. For, much as
he wanted to see her again and secretly flattered though he was that her
parents were resigned to his returning, he felt distinctly apprehensive at the
prospect of what Mr Tonks would say to him about the cancelled interview when
he actually arrived.
As it transpired, however, Mr Tonks hadn't
said anything, being otherwise engaged when Keating was admitted into the house
just over an hour ago. Nevertheless, he
evidently had something in mind, and Rebecca's guest wasn't particularly happy
at the prospect of having to hear it.
Quite the contrary, he was convinced that this further blow to the
composer's self-esteem wouldn't serve to improve relations between them. It might even result in his being prohibited
from ever setting foot in Tonkarias again.
"Don't look so worried, Tony,"
murmured Rebecca, lightly stroking his nearest cheek. "He didn't seem that annoyed when I
mentioned it to him."
"He didn't?"
"No, he was simply sorry to learn that
you'd been dismissed from the magazine," she revealed. "Besides, it's my entire fault
anyway. My fault from
the beginning. Had I not lost my
heart to you, none of this would have happened."
"I don't regret anything,"
Keating hastened to assure her. "It
was worth being dismissed over you - worth every damn minute of it. In fact, I'm confident that, if one could
reverse time, I'd do exactly the same thing again - even with a foreknowledge
of the outcome." He smiled boldly
and, catching hold of her hand, kissed it tenderly. "Yes, I would," he repeated,
staring affectionately at her.
Rebecca reciprocated his smile. "You're an incorrigible romantic!"
she opined on a note of gentle reproof.
"But I still love you."
He squeezed her boldly against himself and
applied his lips to hers. It was some consolation
that they were together and that she loved him.
He had always wanted to be loved by someone he thought it would be
possible to love in return, someone he respected as an equal. Until then, he had never had that luck. Women there had of course been, but not the
sort of women, alas, with whom he could have fallen in love! Here, at last, was the promise of what
circumstances had hitherto denied him, and he was grateful for it - more
grateful than words could express. For
without love for another person, life was scarcely worth living. What did it profit one if one climbed to the
top of the professional ladder in a prestigious concern like 'Arts Monthly',
only to return home each night to an empty and loveless room? What was the point of achieving one's
professional ambitions if they weren't justified by concern for someone
else? Did one work for the mere sake of
working? No, of course not! Work-for-work's sake was fundamentally as
perverse and self-defeating as art-for-art's sake or power-for-power's sake,
and eventually led to the same barren dead-end.
It was indeed an ironic commentary on his life that, all the while he
had been diligently slaving for Webb, he was
without love, love for another person, and had lost his job primarily
over the very thing that would have given meaning to and justified it - namely,
Rebecca. And now that he was on the
verge of discovering love ... yes, how paradoxical life could be! One of these days he might understand its
convoluted logic. Meanwhile there was
the fascination of Rebecca's lips, the sweet scent of her perfume, the soft
resilience of her skin, the gentle warmth of her body.... He would rather have
a love and no job than a job and no love!
"Anthony!" protested Rebecca
playfully, as his desire for her lips began to expand into a desire for other,
more fleshy parts of her anatomy and resulted in her feeling ashamed of herself
for encouraging such a thing while her parents were indoors. "Not tonight," she added, by way of
reminding him of the situation.
"I'm sorry," he said, blushing
slightly. But he had to admit it was
only too easy to forget the situation when one had a beautiful young woman like
her in one's arms! Especially when the
lower half of her dress wasn't exactly in the most modest of positions, and one
found oneself confronted by the greater part of what it ordinarily concealed!
"So when are you going to see my
father?" Rebecca wanted to know, after Keating had considerately and
apologetically given-up the pursuit of further carnal pleasure and duly
returned the hem of her tight black dress to its former, more orthodox
position. Her tone-of-voice was light
and gentle, almost playful.
"Not yet," he informed her on a
more serious note, his honky-tonks blues returning to haunt him.
Rebecca smiled up at him from where she
lay. "I hope he gives you a good
caning," she teased.
But Keating wasn't in the mood to be
amused. His bad conscience over the
cancelled interview just wouldn't leave him alone. It was obviously something Rebecca wasn't in
a position to experience. And neither
could she know to what extent his growing fondness for her made him desirous of
establishing himself on the best possible terms with her father - a thing which
could hardly be guaranteed by this latest setback!
"Did you say goodbye to the editor
today?" she asked, growing bored with the silence which had fallen between
them, like a psychological wedge, and giving voice to the first seemingly
pertinent thought which entered her restless head.
Keating raised incredulous brows. "I could hardly do that!" he
replied. "Particularly
when you bear in mind the nature of my dealings with him on Tuesday. I was on the verge of throwing my attaché
case at his head, you know. Yes
..." And he mentally congratulated himself for having had enough sense to
restrain the impulse at the last moment.
"In point of fact, I only saw him once, after he'd officially fired
me, and that was on Wednesday afternoon, just as I was returning from lunch and
he was on his way out. We crossed
uncomfortably in the entrance hall."
"How embarrassing!" exclaimed
Rebecca, screwing-up her facial features by way of emphasizing her assessment
of the situation.
"More humiliating than
embarrassing," Keating averred with philosophic detachment. "I guess that was the only occasion when
our mutual endeavour to avoid each other broke down. But I said goodbye to most of the
others," including, he remembered, both Neil Wilder and Martin Osbourne.
Yes, it was a pity, in a way, that he
wouldn't be seeing either of them again, even though he had been invited to
continue attending Osbourne's Thursday-evening 'stag parties'. The invitation had come to him, he now felt
obliged to admit, as quite a surprise after what had happened. But he didn't much relish the prospect of
endeavouring to be sociable towards people he was subsequently destined to have
little or nothing to do with and who had, moreover, played a part in his
journalistic downfall. Besides, he
didn't want to be informed, every week, of what was happening at 'Arts
Monthly', as would almost certainly transpire if he continued to visit the
senior sub-editor's flat. Now that he
was no longer one of its correspondents, he wanted a clean break, not an incentive
for nostalgia, regret, or sentimentality, as might result from further contact
with such people as one usually encountered at Osbourne's.
Moreover, he was only too familiar with the
various arguments regularly bandied about, on a variety of subjects, to be
greatly thrilled by the prospect of hearing them all again, albeit with minor
variations, to the glory of the general aura of drunkenness which invariably
transformed a relatively innocuous gathering into an asylum of raging lunatics
hell-bent on one-another's intellectual destruction. Wasn't it better to be free of all that, free
of the oppressive pretentiousness which invariably descended on the
participants before the alcohol had taken effect? If, occasionally, a worthwhile discussion
emerged from the conflicting personalities, it was indeed something for which
to be sincerely grateful! Under the
prevailing circumstances of progressive inebriation, however, worthwhile
discussions were rather the exception to the rule, materializing, with luck, about
once a month, and only lasting until such time as the sherry or wine or
whatever decreed otherwise. No wonder
that people frequently got bored with it all and either relapsed into their
former vices or graduated to different ones instead! One could hardly blame them.
Still, there was something
agreeable about meeting other people once a week and indulging one's tongue for
better or worse. It had a kind of
therapeutic effect, after all, which it was unwise to underestimate when one
had been shut-up in the prison of oneself for too long. True, the conversation might not always have
appealed to one's higher judgement, the fruit of private reflection. But on a physiological level it could
certainly provide the basis for a useful catharsis against the dangers of
prolonged repression. Yes, indeed! And who knew that better than Michael Haslam
and Stuart Harvey? One had to admire the
tenacity with which they depended upon each other for mutual therapy in the
face of an indifferent and largely ailing world! No female could have served their cause more
thoroughly!
"So what are you going to do with
yourself next week?" asked Rebecca, as soon as she realized that Anthony
had nothing further to add to his previous comment.
"At the moment I'm not absolutely
sure," he replied meditatively, "though I've thought of doing some
freelance journalism for a while.
Fortunately, my financial position isn't too precarious at present, so I
needn't rush headlong into another full-time job - assuming I could get one
right now. I have also thought of going
to
"While he was a schoolmaster and
part-time novelist," confirmed Rebecca, recalling to mind what she had
read about the great writer's early life teaching at the Davidson High School
from 1908-12.
Keating nodded and smiled. "Yes, and it was the birthplace,
moreover, of both Malcolm Muggeridge and
"Who hasn't?"
"Yes, well, it's currently serving as
the birthplace of my novel - one which, as I think I may have told you last
week, follows the vicissitudes of a young man who is unfortunate enough to fall
madly in love with a beautiful lesbian without realizing the situation until
it's too late."
Rebecca laughed aloud. Frankly, she thought the idea hilarious! Of all the odd tricks fate could play on one, that would certainly be among the oddest! Why, if Tony could conceive of such an
implausible plot with a moderate degree of equanimity, what was there to
prevent him from delineating the converse possibility - that of a young
heterosexual woman unlucky enough to fall madly in love with a homosexual? Or was it that such a prospect would fail to
appeal to his wayward imagination on account of the probably one-sided,
stand-offish nature of its protagonists?
For, with the lesbian scenario, there was always the possibility that
the man, growing impatient with his predicament, would take her by storm and
thereby at least gratify his carnal desires to some extent, whereas, with the
converse situation, a young heterosexual woman could hardly be expected to
initiate sexual relations with the homosexual victim of her love - least of all
in England, where women were traditionally so reserved, if not prudish, on
account, in no small measure, of its puritanical legacy. On the contrary, a rather tedious unrequited
passion would seem to be the only possible outcome. Thus, in relation to Tony's choice of
subject-matter, there was evidently a method to his madness, albeit a method,
Rebecca felt, that it was perhaps wiser not to inquire into too deeply, since
feminine modesty forbade. Doubtless she
would find out what became of the incompatible couple in due course, when he
had brought the misadventure to its tragic denouement - whether through
anti-climax or otherwise. In the
meantime, however, she was content merely to laugh and shake her head in
feigned disbelief. Croydon's latest
literary foetus could hardly be expected to develop into a best-seller. With a parent like Anthony Keating, it was
bound to remain on the shelf!
"Aren't you being a little harsh on my
genius?" the budding novelist expostulated, by way of facetiously
commenting upon her response to his literary revelation. "After all, it isn't very often that the
reading public get an opportunity to sympathize with one or other of the
victims of such an anomalous relationship.
Most of the relationships they read about, in this sex-obsessed society,
are frightfully predictable - so predictable, in fact, that one wonders why
they even bother to read about them in the first place! But at least the novel I'm currently writing
has the charm of novelty, which is no small distinction these days. It may not be the type of literature to
appeal to someone like Malcolm Muggeridge, what with his rather strait-laced
heterosexuality, but I'm quite confident that Havelock Ellis would have derived
some profit from it, which would probably have supplemented his knowledge on
the varieties of sexual relationship, and perhaps even induced him to further expand his Psychological
Studies."
"Really, you're quite
incorrigible!" Rebecca hastened to remind him, playfully slapping his
backside. "You'll end-up writing
like the Marquis de Sade, if you're not careful."
"To the extent that he was one of the
best writers of his time, I shouldn't be at all ashamed or disappointed,"
Keating blandly asseverated. "He
liberated literature from more mental shackles than the rest of his generation
put together.... Which is only to be expected, I suppose,
from a man who spent most of his adult life in prison and duly felt obliged to
seek compensation in mental freedom.
Had he been less physically constrained, it's doubtful that we would
care anything much about his writings these days. Our interest in his books - assuming he'd
have written anything radical in freedom - would be either negligible or, more
probably, non-existent. Even D.H.
Lawrence seems rather tame by comparison.
One can read Lady Chatterley's Lover without a single blush. Try doing that where the Marquis' most
notorious works are concerned! You'll
soon spot the difference."
"It's not a difference I'd
particularly care to spot," admitted Rebecca, smiling coyly. "My literary tastes are really quite
prim. Nothing stronger
than Pride and Prejudice."
"That's strong enough," Keating
assured her, grimacing at the mere thought of its title. "Though you might as
well settle for
"Don't exaggerate so!" Rebecca
light-heartedly chided him. "Great
literature needn't always be tragic. It
sometimes ends happily. What about Camus' A Happy
Death?"
Keating knit his brows in pensive
consideration a moment, as he sought in his memory for what he could recall
about the novel in question. "I'm
not absolutely convinced of its greatness," he at length confessed,
mindful of the novel's radical brevity, a consequence, he had always believed,
of Camus' generally dilettantish commitment to literature in view of his
various practical commitments elsewhere, including politics and
journalism. "Besides, the fact of the
leading character's death doesn't make for a genuinely happy ending
anyway. In fact it's really quite
depressing that a young man should be whisked away from life just when he was
beginning to enjoy it. But if I was wrong
to say that all great literature ends tragically, I don't think you can deny
that a happy ending tends to be the exception to the rule. We expect the tragic, and in nine bloody
cases out of ten we damn-well get it!"
He paused a moment, as though for dramatic effect, before
continuing: "Occasionally, however,
a work of value ends happily, as in the case, for example, of Hermann Hesse's Narziss and
Goldmund. For the most part, however,
Madame Bovary is the rule. And
it's the rule I'm attempting to stick to where my own novel is concerned, even
if, under the prevailing decadence of contemporary society, it will never
attain to true literary greatness. If I
cannot achieve a tragic consummation with the sword, I may have to settle for
the dagger. Or maybe even the
metaphorical penknife," he added wistfully.
"I fear you'll lacerate my heart with
your tongue if you're not careful," protested Rebecca, while gently
stroking the back of his head with the hand that, a moment before, had served
her better use elsewhere. "You'll
shatter all my illusions about great literature."
"I'm sorry," rejoined Keating,
responding to her fingers with a deftly placed kiss on her brow. "You must think me a frightful
egotist."
"More delightful
than frightful, actually."
"I'm sincerely relieved to hear
it," he admitted and, taking her nape in his right hand, lovingly applied
his lips to hers in a renewed spate of kissing.
The minutes passed quickly as they lay
together on the bed, arm in arm and lip on lip.
It was almost blissful for Keating to lie there like that - basking
complacently in Rebecca's bodily warmth.
But not quite.
For at the back of his mind the consciousness of his impending meeting
with her father refused to disappear, refused to budge, and he was aware, too,
that he would have to see him fairly soon, before it grew too late. Rebecca's bright-red alarm clock was already
indicating
"Yes, I suppose you'd better go,"
she agreed, after he had disengaged himself from her body and reminded her of
his obligations to her father.
"Will I see you tomorrow?" he
asked nervously, putting on his zipper jacket.
"I can't see why not," she
replied. "After all, I'd like to
hear about what dad has to say to you."
Downstairs, in front of the door to Howard
Tonks' study, Keating hesitated, suddenly becoming apprehensive as to what lay
beyond. On the immediately discernible
level, it was apparent someone was playing the piano in a honky-tonks
manner. But it wasn't that level which
particularly worried him, even though he didn't much like the idea of
barging-in on the player and interrupting his performance, no matter how
disagreeable the music. He felt sure
that whatever happened between himself and Mr Tonks,
after he crossed the threshold, would be disagreeable.
"Go on!" Rebecca urged him from
the stairs to his rear. "He won't
bite you!"
This dramatic last-moment reassurance
sufficed to goad Keating's fingers into turning the doorknob as, with reluctant
resignation to his fate, he pushed open the study door and walked straight
in. His heart beat wildly as he closed
it behind him again. When he turned around,
however, the man at the piano wasn't Mr Tonks but someone he hadn't seen
before! And the room was otherwise
empty! His heart almost came to a
standstill. He couldn't believe his
eyes.
Catching sight of him standing where he
was, the stranger immediately ceased playing and stared intently at him a
moment. It was evident to Keating, by
the look in the grey eyes now confronting him, that
his entrance had come as rather a surprise.
Perhaps he had come to the wrong room?
But just as he was about to apologize and take his leave of it again,
the grey-eyed man politely asked him what he wanted. He explained.
"Ah, so you're Mr Keating!" the
man enthused, raising himself from the piano stool and holding out a friendly
hand. "Delighted to meet you! My name's Roy Hart, a friend of
Howard's."
Keating nervously advanced towards the
outstretched hand and allowed it to shake his own. He was still somewhat apprehensive about what
lay in store for him.
"Take a seat," Hart advised,
drawing attention, with a well-directed nod of his head, to the nearest
armchair. "Howard went to the
kitchen to make some, ah, coffee, so he'll be back any minute."
"Oh, right!" responded Keating,
hardly knowing whether to be thankful or resentful for this perfectly
straightforward information. The two men
sat down simultaneously on their respective supports.
"I hear you recently conducted an
interview here?" Hart commented, following a short pause.
"Yes," admitted Keating, feeling
slightly hot-under-the-collar all of a sudden.
He didn't want to dwell on that subject
now. "An aborted one, alas,"
he added.
"So I hear," Hart
sympathized. "Not
one of your lucky weeks, eh?"
"Indeed not!" It was evident to Keating that Mr Tonks
wasn't the only person who had something to say about the affair.
"Were you at 'Arts Monthly'
long?" asked Hart, clearly aware of more things than the young man had
suspected.
"Only a couple of years, I'm
afraid," confessed Keating, turning red.
"Ah, so you probably wouldn't know
anything about the interview they did with me a few years back,"
conjectured the pianist, changing tack.
"One of the worst interviews I've, ah, ever given."
Keating was fairly nonplussed. "Really?" he said.
"Quite
dreadful!" Hart insisted.
"I swore that would be the last one I ever gave. But I succumbed, a couple of months later, to
a German magazine, and since then it's been the same old story. I should imagine I've appeared in just about
every, ah, serious arts or music publication in the Western world - with the
possible exception of a few in
"I'm very sorry to hear that," declared
Keating, though, in reality, he was personally somewhat relieved that the older
man had switched to talking about himself rather than asking embarrassing
questions. Any number of
autobiographical confessions would have been preferable to them!
Such confessions, however, weren't to
continue. For at that moment the door
was thrown open and in walked Howard Tonks, carrying a tray with two mugs of
steaming coffee on it.
"We've a visitor," Hart informed
him, drawing attention to the occupied armchair.
"Ah, so we have!" exclaimed Mr
Tonks, before carefully depositing the tray on the small coffee table in front
of him. "I'm delighted to see you
again," he added, and he extended a hand for his rather startled visitor
to shake. "But I was sincerely sorry
to hear you've lost your job. It must
have come as quite a shock to you."
"Not as bad as I thought it would
be," admitted Keating, blushing anew.
Meanwhile, Roy Hart had helped himself to
his coffee and returned to the piano stool, from whence a gentle cultured
sipping could now be heard.
"By the way, would you like some
coffee, Anthony?" asked Mr Tonks.
"Had I known you were here, I'd have made another one."
"No, I'm fine thanks," Keating
assured him, reminding himself of the time.
It had already gone
"Well, since you're here, I suppose
I'd better bring you up-to-date about the interview," said the composer,
who picked up his coffee, walked a couple of yards in the direction of his
mini-portraits of Ives and Varèse, and sat down in the remaining empty
armchair. "From what my daughter
told me last night," he continued, putting his coffee to one side,
"it would appear that the interview was annulled because of your
dismissal."
A horrible feeling of dread now launched
itself into Keating's soul. It seemed as
though his worst fears were about to be realized. "Yes, I imagine so," he confirmed.
"Well, you might be interested to
learn that I received a letter from Mr Webb this morning, informing me that it
will now be published in the October edition of his magazine and that he,
personally, is going to edit it."
"You what?"
"Here's the letter," declared Mr
Tonks, extracting from his trouser pocket a crumpled piece of paper which he
uncrumpled and handed across to the stunned occupant of the other
armchair. "Read it for
yourself."
Nervously Keating did so. It categorically stated that the publication
of the interview was going ahead as planned.
There was no mention of him, nor any reference, not altogether
surprisingly, to his dismissal. "I
can't understand it," he gasped, re-reading the letter and becoming more
incredulous with every line. "The
editor made it perfectly clear to me on Tuesday that he had no intention of
publishing the thing. How could he have
changed his mind?"
"How indeed?"
Mr Tonks rejoined. "I can only
conclude that he lied to you in order to make your dismissal more painful. Lied to you in order to pay
you back for having previously deceived him."
"The dirty rotten bastard!"
erupted Keating, unable to restrain the impulse to resurrect his former
hard-feelings.
"You needn't feel too badly about
it," Mr Tonks assured him, smiling sympathetically. "For, believe it or not, I've taken your
side in the matter and refused Mr Webb permission to press ahead with his intentions. I phoned him this afternoon and personally
invalidated the interview, threatening him with legal
action should he proceed."
"You what?"
"He did what I suggested he ought to
do, under the circumstances of Rebecca's, ah, fondness for you," interposed
Roy Hart, momentarily desisting from his coffee. "From what I gather, she takes you quite
seriously. So it would seem that the
pair of you are destined to spend a lot more time in each-other's, ah,
company. Now, under those circumstances,
it would have been quite unfair of her family to treat you badly. And to submit to Webb's intentions would have
been to do just that! Besides, it was
this very same man who interviewed me, and the impression he created at the
time was, ah, anything but favourable!
As I intimated to you earlier, I was less than satisfied with the
result."
"Webb interviewed you?" exclaimed
Keating, his eyes opening like wild flowers under pressure of this latest and
most astonishing of the pianist's revelations.
"He did indeed!" Hart
confirmed. "And did so, moreover,
in a manner which I found highly insulting.
But when I eventually read the published material, I was even more
insulted. His editing took so many, ah,
liberties with what I'd actually said, that the
interview was barely recognizable to me.
It was virtually a caricature, a grotesquely sordid travesty of the
original, for which I ought to have sued him.
Unfortunately, due to my involvement in a series of, ah, foreign
concerts, I didn't get round to reading the interview until my return to
"A reminder which might have gone
unheeded, had it not also been for Rebecca's influence on me," Mr Tonks
confessed. "She, too, had a desire
to thwart Webb, albeit one motivated by rather different reasons from those
elicited by my good friend here."
Keating was even more nonplussed than
before. "You mean,
she knew about Webb's letter as well?" he gasped.
"She did indeed!" Mr Tonks
revealed. "For I
showed it to her first thing this morning, before I phoned his office."
"And she wasn't very keen on the way
he'd said one thing to you on Tuesday and written an entirely different thing
to Howard on Wednesday," declared Hart, drawing Keating's attention to the
date on the letter. "Had she not
phoned you when she did, yesterday evening, it's highly likely that Webb would
have got away with his, ah, cruel intentions and made a bigger fool out of you
than anyone else has probably ever done."
"Instead of which, he has been made to
look a pretty big fool by us," averred Mr Tonks smilingly. "But I must say, Anthony, you certainly
left that confession to my daughter rather late! Had she not immediately told me about it,
yesterday evening, I would almost certainly have given Webb the go-ahead
today. As it happens, I've prepared, in
addition to my telephone conversation of this afternoon, a signed letter
absolutely forbidding publication of the interview.... Or perhaps one should
say potential caricature?" he added, deferring to Hart.
Keating was bluntly amazed. He hadn't expected anything of the kind, and
it was as much as he could do to prevent himself from bursting into tears of
gratitude. No wonder Rebecca had teased
him about his pessimism with regard to the impending meeting with her
father! How amusing it must have seemed
to her, to see him making a mountain out of a molehill, a tragedy out of a
comedy! Wasn't that typical of him
anyway? Hadn't he always instinctively
feared the worst? Well, for once, his
pessimistic preconceptions were unjustified.
He had been his own worst dupe!
"I don't suppose you saw Mr Webb this
afternoon, by any chance?" Hart nonchalantly inquired of him, returning
his half-empty mug of coffee to its resting-place beside the piano.
"No, unfortunately not!" cried
Keating, whose face suddenly became illuminated by a radiant smile at the
thought of Webb's deceitfulness being invalidated by the telephone call from
Howard Tonks. To be sure, it was
remarkably therapeutic, incredibly cheering!
How gratifying it would have been to see the bastard's face when the
news had first invaded his mind and shattered his deceitful strategy to
pieces! How dumbfounded he must have
looked! And, having no means by which he
could hope to change the composer's mind, not being in a position whereby he
could see his correspondent again and offer to reinstate him, how frustrated he
must have felt! Now Keating knew this,
he was almost sorry he hadn't done the unspeakable and said goodbye to his
former boss, before leaving the firm earlier that day. The look on his face could only have been
pathetic!
"Incidentally, what do you intend
doing with yourself, now you're free?" asked Mr Tonks, breaking the
silence which had fortuitously fallen between them.
"That's something about which I'm not
absolutely certain at present," confessed Keating, his feelings rapidly
changing course and descending to a less-exultant level. "I've got a novel which I intend to
complete during the next few months. But
after that ...?" He shrugged his
shoulders in perplexity.
"Do you think you could write a
biography?" Mr Tonks suggested.
"A biography?" echoed
Keating. "Why do you ask?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, my good
friend here is of the opinion that it's about time someone made a serious
attempt at writing my biography," declared Mr Tonks, nodding in Hart's
smiling direction. "Now if,
Anthony, you think you might be able to manage the job and, no less
importantly, feel that you'd be able to tolerate a fair amount of my company in
the process," he continued, ignoring Hart's ironic burst of laughter at
this remark, "then I can see no earthly reason why you shouldn't undertake
it. Since you're a pretty intelligent
young man with some experience of professional writing, I can't see why you
shouldn't make an attempt at it, especially if you haven't got any specific
plans for the future. The fact that,
thanks to the interview, you already know quite a lot about me should
facilitate further inquiry. And if you
intend to continue visiting Rebecca, then it would be to your advantage to also
make what use you can of her to acquire additional information on me. Thus by being an intimate of the family,
you're in the best possible position to undertake the task. So what do you say?"
Keating was too bewildered by this
unexpected offer to know quite how to respond.
The possibility of writing a biography of Howard Tonks had no more
crossed his mind than had an autobiography of himself. It was almost unbelievable. And yet he was being asked, and by no less a
man than the composer in person, not only to believe it but to actually get on
and damn-well do it! Had Rebecca known
about this, too?
"Well?" pressed Mr Tonks
engagingly.
"Okay, I'll have a go at it,"
agreed Keating, breaking into a smile of acquiescent relief.
"Excellent!" the composer
enthused. "My family and I will
provide you with whatever help you may require.
Even if you're obliged to do some freelance journalism whilst working on
the project, there's every chance that, providing you do it well, you won't
have to work as a drudge-ridden correspondent or journalist ever again, least
of all for a clown like Nicholas Webb!
As yet, no biography of me has appeared, but when one finally does, you
can be pretty confident that it will sell hundreds-of-thousands of copies the
world over. So don't waste this unique
opportunity to make a name for yourself!
Given the necessary determination, you must surely succeed."
"And if you succeed with a biography
on Howard, you might well feel inclined to tackle one on, ah, me," Hart
remarked humorously. "Even
though I'm slightly less famous than my, ah, eminent friend here."
"But none the less
controversial!" opined Mr Tonks, and he picked up and commenced drinking
his neglected mug of coffee.
"Oh well, I think I'd better be taking
my leave of you now," concluded Keating as he consulted his watch, and,
getting up from his armchair - the very same armchair he had sat in during the
course of that first afternoon at Tonkarias - he thanked and shook hands
with each of these great men in turn. It
was indeed a long way to Croydon but, in the joyful mood he was in, he could
have walked there. Or
even spent the night on Hampstead Heath.
Provided he got home before Rebecca telephoned him the following
morning, what matter? The whole night
was ahead of him and tomorrow, after all, was a new day ... in every
sense. He had nothing to fear!
