Op. 14
SECRET EXCHANGES
Long Prose
Copyright © 2013 John O'Loughlin
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CONTENTS
Chapters 1-10
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CHAPTER ONE
He was so
very pleased to be sitting in such close proximity to the paintings he had
specifically brought Gwendolyn Evans along to the Tate Gallery to view; to have
them all round him in a dazzling profusion of light and colour.
Yes, it was fundamentally here, with these
largely abstract-looking canvases, that modern art
began. Here, with Peace,
Burial at Sea,
Around the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries in particular, when Western man was in full-flower, there could not
have been the slightest possibility of an art arising which betrayed a distinct
predilection for the spirit - for light and colour over form and substance. Had, by any quirk of evolutionary fate,
something approximating to a late Turner been produced then, it would have
struck people as a mess, not art but rather something akin to an artist's
palette - one that had taken a number of diverse paints and suffered them to be
experimentally blended. With the
nineteenth century, however, a great change came over the Western mind, a
change initiated by the Industrial Revolution, itself a product in part of the
Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent growth of towns and cities to a size quite
unprecedented in the entire history of mankind.
No longer was civilized man finely balanced between the sensual and the
spiritual, the subconscious and the superconscious
minds, but in the process of becoming increasingly biased on the side of the
transcendent - in short, to whatever reflected his growing isolation from
nature in the artificial urban and industrial environments he had created for
himself in response to evolutionary necessity.
From the nineteenth century, it was becoming increasingly evident that
Western man had passed his prime as an egocentric being, a recipient of
dualistic tension, and accordingly entered a post-egocentric epoch of
transcendental lopsidedness, in which the influence of the superconscious
came to play an ever-more decisive role in shaping his destiny. Hence Turner's late canvases, which reflected
the imbalance that was characterizing modern man. And hence, too, their great importance and
significance to such eyes as could be expected, at this more evolved juncture
in post-egocentric time, to appreciate them - a greater number of minds, it
should be evident, than would have done so shortly after they were first
painted.
Yet, despite the eulogistic comments which
Matthew Pearce was making on behalf of the half-dozen or so brightly painted
canvases in front of him, Gwen's eyes weren't all that appreciative, her mind
remaining rather unmoved by them, even though, thanks in large measure to the
esoteric information being imparted to her by Matthew with regard to the
general direction of human evolution, she was now in a better position than
ever before to understand them. Had she
been honest with her boyfriend, instead of trying to please him by feigning
enthusiasm for the works, she would have confessed, there and then, to the sad
fact that a majority of the paintings on display in this particular section of
the Turner bequest left her stone cold, absolutely failed, for one reason or
another, to interest her. But from
feminine tact, which embraced a certain fear of what Matthew would think of her
if she disappointed him in this way, she did her best to appear sympathetic, to
share his unquestionable admiration for those exhibits upon which he
specifically chose to comment.
However, it was far from easy! For even with the best will in the world, she
couldn't bring herself to view paintings like Mountain in
Landscape and
Not that Matthew Pearce was unduly
garrulous or imposing, and therefore necessitated one's constant attention on
his conversation. Yet he was certainly
not a man to allow himself to be led from painting to
painting at a rate corresponding to the disinterestedness of his partner! On the contrary, standing or sitting in front
of a Turner from 3-5 minutes, as he devotedly did in a number of instances, it
was obligatory for her to fix her attention on the relevant painting for a
corresponding period of time, even when it wasn't of any particular interest to
her. A sign of impatience would almost
certainly have offended him, a cursory inspection of the other occupants of the
room no less than a tendency to flit from one painting to another independently
of his guidance and running commentary.
Feminine tact was enough to tell her this - now no less than previously!
Yet it wasn't enough to tell her that,
after a couple of minutes' silent inspection of Stormy sea
with dolphins, Matthew would suddenly change mental track and, for the first
time since setting eyes on the Turners, launch out on a swift stream of
criticism concerning the manifest turbulence of the scene portrayed, which he
considered the worst aspect of Romanticism and the one he could least
abide. For, to his way of thinking, the
turbulent was by nature Satanic, opposed to evolutionary progress towards blissful
passivity, and, for that reason, something to be condemned. "God knows," he continued, speaking
in a fairly quiet though firm tone-of-voice, "Delacroix and Gericault were worse offenders against 'the peace that
passes all understanding' than ever Turner was!
Yet that doesn't mean to say that he wasn't guilty, from time to time,
of following suit and producing works which, in their Romantic turbulence,
correspond to the demonic. That and the
one next to it, the Snow Storm, are typically Romantic in this
respect. They seethe with negativity,
with horribly tortuous activity. Not my
favourite Turner, by any means!"
He broke away from the canvas in question,
as though from an evil spell, and briskly led Gwen towards the next room, which
contained works by other English painters.
He looked quite stylish in his tight black denims and puffy
zipper-jacket, stylish enough, at any rate, to attract the passing attention of
two young women, who caused Gwen to look at him from a broadly personal
viewpoint herself and reflect upon his tidy, if informal, appearance. His dark-brown hair, gathered into a short
pigtail that gently curved down from the back of his head to his neck, had been
washed only the night before and looked perfectly docile. With his aquiline profile and large blue
eyes, he was certainly more handsome than the previous men in her life, which
was of some consolation. He was also
more intelligent, though not perhaps more highly-sexed. As yet, it was still too soon for her to get
him into proper sexual perspective, since she hadn't known him long
enough. But time would doubtless tell,
and thus enable her to extend her assessment of him to such matters as were of
specific importance to her as a woman, not simply as an intellectual.
Before entering the next room, however,
Matthew halted near the exist in front of one last Turner, a relatively small
work entitled The Angel Standing in the Sun, for which he confessed a special
fondness, deeming it one of the master's most spiritually noble productions - a
shedder of dazzling light.
"Admittedly, not one of his most abstract-tending works," he
softly remarked. "Yet the whole
concept of angelic transcendence and light is really too beautiful. Not altogether surprisingly, it was one of
his last works, dated 1846. I can't help
but admire its mystical symbolism. It is
virtually an epitome of the coming post-human millennium, of man become
superman, or angelic being, surrounded by spiritual light in blissful
self-realization. For, of course, the
essential light of the post-human millennium won't be the sun, though that will
doubtless continue to exist in heathen selflessness for some time thereafter,
but the light of spirit in the superconscious - the
clear, as opposed to unclear or chemical, light. Yet before his death, Turner left us this
magnificently paradoxical symbol of mankind's future destiny, one which will
continue to shine in the hearts of men throughout the coming decades."
He looked sideways at Gwen to gauge her
response, which, as before, appeared to be fairly sympathetic. She smiled back at him but remained
silent. She didn't have much to say,
since it was all rather bewildering to her, and he sensed as much from her
reticence. He sensed, too, that she was
probably too shy or reserved to talk in art galleries and was slightly
embarrassed by his speech. Nevertheless
he felt that he had to say something, if only to justify being in her
company. It would have seemed stranger
to him had they gone through the rooms without exchanging a word, as some
couples evidently did. Hitherto he had
always gone along to the Tate Gallery alone and had remained wrapped-up in
himself, enshrouded in silence and thoughtful contemplation of the paintings. Now that he was accompanied by a woman,
however, he considered it his duty to speak, to offer comments on several of
the exhibits which particularly impressed or even depressed him. And, besides, he had a burning desire to
instruct, to enlighten, to expatiate. He
hoped he wouldn't be wasting his breath on Gwen who, after all, was an
intelligent young woman - intelligent enough to have gone to college, at any
rate, and got herself a teaching diploma in French, which she was currently
justifying in her capacity as French teacher in a south London comprehensive. So, if that was anything to judge by, she
ought to be appreciative of the merits of a great painter when she saw one, and
accessible, moreover, to such evolutionary theories as he was only too keen to
impress upon her for her own good.
Leaving the last room of the Turner
bequest, they stepped across the threshold of the next room, which was divided
into two sections, one small and the other large, and were immediately
confronted by the turbulence of a huge canvas by Francis Danby entitled The Deluge,
at which Matthew quickly took umbrage for its Romantic ferocity - the sight of
so many twisted, struggling nude or semi-nude bodies endeavouring to climb to
safety from the rushing flood-waters onto the rocks and trees that lay to-hand,
offering the victims of the deluge a temporary shelter from the waters of
death. Not a particularly agreeable
spectacle, by any means; though a work of undoubted ingenuity, reminiscent of
the turbulent waterscapes favoured by Gericault,
Delacroix, and, on occasion, the great Turner himself. Compared with John Martin's The Plains of
Heaven, which was exhibited, curiously, in the same section of the room, it
was indeed a hellish context, its violence in complete contrast to the blissful
serenity of one of Martin's greatest works, the only work on view of which the
latter-day artist would allow himself to think highly. In fact, the three canvases by this artist on
display here could be assessed, according to him, on the basis of a descending
order of merit, The Plains of Heaven, being wholly transcendent,
signifying the apex of tranquil spirituality, The Last Judgement, with
the Saved blissfully to one side of the canvas and the Damned agonizingly to
the other, presided over by Christ and His angels, signifying a compromise
between Heaven and Hell, and, finally, The Great Day of His Wrath,
focusing on a cataclysmic upheaval in which numerous naked bodies were hurled
with the falling, lightening-cleft rocks into a dark abyss of raging hell,
signifying virtually the furthest possible remove from blissful
tranquillity. One shuddered at the sight
of it, of so many panic-stricken people plunging helplessly to their doom in
the ugly black abyss between the sundered rocks! Romantic pessimism could go no further. The great evil at the root of life was
indubitably manifest.
"So far as I'm concerned," said
Matthew, suddenly breaking the horrified silence into which he had fallen in
the presence of this gruesome work, "the scene before us is positively
primeval in its cataclysmic turbulence, a record, one might argue, of pagan
man, or man tyrannized over by the moral darkness of his subconscious and
living in fear of a wrathful and largely materialistic deity. It seethes with negativity, it knows no
compromise. Unlike the scene depicted in
The Last Judgement, which could be said to signify the
mentality of Christian man, or man torn between the hell of materialistic
damnation and the heaven of idealistic salvation, half-way up the ladder of
human evolution in some egocentric compromise.
And there, at the apex of evolution, one finds not a trace of Hell. For the compromise has been superseded, and
instead of seething negativity one has blissful positivity,
instead of death - life!"
He was of course referring Gwen's attention
to The Plains of Heaven, which he considered significant of the
culmination of transcendental man's spiritual aspirations. As yet, we were still too close to the
dualistic compromise for comfort; we still had a long way to go before attaining
to a life of transcendent bliss. Yet we
were certainly heading in the right direction, our spiritual bias on the side
of the superconscious was becoming more evident all
the time and would doubtless continue to develop over the coming decades ...
until such time as not a trace of egocentric dualism remained, and we entered
the post-human millennium - the heaven that John Martin had ingeniously
symbolized through a tranquil, otherworldly landscape peopled by the Blessed.
Oh yes, there could be little doubt that we
were now closer to that heavenly culmination than Western society had ever been
in the past! We were no longer as
dualistic, thank goodness, as our egocentric forebears in the heyday of
Christianity. We didn't give much
credence to Hell. We didn't like the
concept of compromise. Still less what
had preceded it. The Great
Day of His Wrath could hardly be expected to attract all that many
enthusiastic admirers these days, least of all for its cataclysmic
subject-matter! No, it was to The
Plains of Heaven that the enlightened modern man instinctively turned, eager
to see there the goal of human evolution.
This painting had relevance to him.
The others didn't. This was John
Martin's highest conceptual achievement, a fact which Matthew was keen to impress
upon his girlfriend as they stood in front of the large canvas for about three
minutes, admiring and studying. And he
was no less keen to impress upon her the fact that, taken together, the three
canvases in the vicinity of where they were standing signified a summary of
human evolution, beginning with the pre-Christian, progressing to the
Christian, and culminating in the post-Christian - the wholly
transcendent. A
journey, as it were, from agony to bliss via a dualistic compromise.
"Yes, I see your point," Gwen
admitted, smiling coyly.
"Psychologically, one could argue that The Deluge
is on a similar plane to The Great Day of His Wrath," she added,
turning back towards the Danby, plunging from the heights of Heaven to the
depths of Hell in a split second.
"Indeed!" concurred Matthew,
following her across the room.
"Although Danby does at least provide one with an angel weeping
over the death, it would appear, of a flood victim. Yet that's psychologically inept, in my
opinion, since angels shouldn't weep. As
symbolic representatives of transcendent spirituality, they should be incapable
of indulging in negative emotions. They
should pertain to the blissful tranquillity of Heaven, not weep like poor
wretches from a more mundane realm. They
should be spiritually consistent - bringers of love and joy. A weeping or angry angel would seem to be a
contradiction in terms."
"Well, Francis Danby evidently
considered it symbolically apt to have a representative from the divine realm
saddened by all the evil afoot," Gwen declared pithily.
"So it would seem," Matthew
conceded, smiling wryly. "Yet is
still strikes me as rather surreal, if you see what I mean. An angel in Hell? Very unlikely! Unless, of course, it was a
fallen angel. But, then, fallen
angels aren't really angels in the true sense, are they?"
Gwen couldn't very well argue with
that! She simply moved on a few paces to
a canvas by Samuel Colman entitled The Destruction of the Temple (c.
1830) which, with its lightening-stricken crumbling stone and panic-stricken
inhabitants, appeared unequivocally hellish, unequivocally on a psychological
level with the pre-Christian.
Undoubtedly a very imaginative work, but hardly one guaranteed to
inspire one with any great confidence in the coming post-human millennium! Nevertheless, as they were about to take
their leave of it for the larger section of Room 16, Matthew elected to say a
few words in praise of the transparency of a majority of the figures therein
portrayed which, so he maintained, was agreeably transcendent.
No such comment, however, could he allot to
the Pre-Raphaelite and associated paintings which now confronted his weary gaze
as, reluctantly, he shuffled after Gwen and stepped into a world of late
Victorianism. Ugh, how he had come to
loathe the Pre-Raphaelites! How
reactionary they seemed to him these days, in light of what the Impressionists
had been doing in
Not that the Middle Ages were as black or
bleak as was sometimes thought by contemporary liberals. Yet they were by no means as agreeable as a
spell in the fanciful illusions of Pre-Raphaelitism might have led one to
suppose! Nor would
they have offered one much consolation for the upheavals of modern life. There was nothing particularly heavenly about
an age of mounting dualism. Nothing charitable about the great castles which had been erected
to protect the nobility from fellow noblemen, popular unrest, and foreign
invasion. Compared with the
present, it was undoubtedly closer to Hell, even given all the horrors and
limitations which beset the modern world.
Yet the Pre-Raphaelites didn't want to see that. They preferred to turn their back on
industrial progress and large-scale urbanization for the sake of a comforting
illusion which medievalism seemed to offer them. They preferred to think in terms of an
illusory Golden Age of the English past in which chivalrous knights came to the
timely rescue of beautiful damsels in distress, and people lived in harmony
with nature. They had no desire to learn
from Constable or Turner and follow in their progressive footsteps by adopting
a transcendental approach to painting.
That was left, on the contrary, to the Impressionists, those glorifiers
of spirituality in light and colour, those disintegrators of matter. The Pre-Raphaelites, by contrast, appear to
have had scant taste for spiritual leadership - assuming they would have known
how to recognize it in the first place.
Instead, they preferred to thematically regress not merely to the
previous century but some five or six centuries, and to paradoxically pretend
that such a regression was effectively a kind of progress. To them, an aristocratic society would have
made more sense than a proletarian one.
It would have corresponded to a Golden Age, whereas what was going on
around them in the industrial world signified a tarnishing of the mean, a
societal 'fall' from natural grace, which no right-thinking person could
possibly condone. Therefore back to the
days of old when knights were bold and
It was with some psychological displeasure
that Matthew Pearce observed the titles and subject-matter of the paintings on
display here, in the larger section of Room 16.
He was not at all resigned to what seemed like an enthusiasm for them on
the part of Gwen, who peered eagerly into the canvases, let fall a whispered
"too beautiful!" or a respectful "so choice!" every now and
then, as though to assure him that she had a fairly developed aesthetic sense
and was confident he would agree with her as a matter of course - a thing
which, to some extent, he was superficially prepared to do, since the paintings
here, as elsewhere, of the leading Pre-Raphaelites were of course generally
quite beautiful and obviously the work of highly skilled artists. Yes, naturally! No-one with an ounce of culture could
possibly deny that such exhibits had beauty and were accordingly deserving of
some respect. Yet all that was somehow
beside-the-point, painfully irrelevant to the evolution of modern art, and he
was disappointed with Gwen, after all he had said to her, that she couldn't see
it. To her, they were skilfully painted
representational works with noble subject-matter. To him, by contrast, they were traitors to
the age, down-dragging influences in an age of mounting transcendentalism.
Yes, of course King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, The Lady of Shalott, and The Knight Errant, painted by
Bourne-Jones, Waterhouse, and Millais respectively,
were accomplished works, done with loving care and an eye for detail. One couldn't doubt that! Yet how frightfully anachronistic they
seemed, how devoid of contemporary significance when compared with Turner's
most revolutionary works - works, for example, like Scene in Venice, Venice
from the Salute, or even Interior at Petworth,
the abstract impression of which was to set the tone for the next century and
influence all or most of the leading painters of the age! Could one say the same of the
Pre-Raphaelites? Not if one knew
anything about modern art! Theirs was a
lost cause, as lost as that of the French Symbolists, with their fin-de-siècle
decadence. From Turner, the torch of
modernism had passed to the Impressionists, especially to Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro, and from
them it was handed down more diversified to the twentieth century via the
Post-Impressionists, Nabis, and Divisionists
who, in their various ways, were to keep the belief in progress alive and
weather the storms of decadence and reaction which swept all about them. But The Lady of Shalott,
in front of which Gwen was now standing, rapt, it appeared, in wholehearted
admiration, had very little faith in progress and nothing to say to
modernity. The stream which bore its
heroine away from Camelot was only a variant on the current of reactionary
sentimentality which enabled Waterhouse, its Tennysonian
creator, to be borne away from the nineteenth century towards an imaginary
realm of medieval romance. There was
little about the work to suggest that a new era of human evolution had recently
got under way, superior to anything in the past. Strictly speaking, it wasn't an integral part
of late-nineteenth-century art. It had
no real relevance to the age. It had
simply been imposed upon it out of a longing for mythical escape. To Matthew Pearce, however, it was something
to be escaped from! He had no desire to
tally there any longer in the world of the reactionaries. He couldn't share Gwen's respect for Pre-Raphaelitis.
"But don't you like it?" she
protested, as he tugged her away from the Waterhouse, as though from a bedbug,
and made for the room's nearest exit.
"No, I bloody well don't!" he
firmly and almost categorically asseverated, not bothering to look at her. "I've no respect for
down-draggers!"
She didn't quite understand him, but said
no more. She was disappointed that he
didn't share her tastes in art, yet in no way anxious
to quarrel with him. She knew that he
had his reasons and wouldn't be diverted from them by anything she said on
behalf of her own. She had to accept
him. Yet she was conscious, as they
walked back through the earlier rooms again and on towards the main exit, that
an apocalyptic-like rift had opened-up between them - one doubtless born of
their dissimilar wavelengths - into which they were now tumbling, as into a
hell of their own contrivance. No matter
how hard she tried to learn from him and accept his views as her own, she
couldn't surmount her previous conditioning overnight, so to speak, and thereby
climb straight onto his level of awareness.
The words she heard him speak made no real impression on her soul. She wasn't ready for them. Her pretence of complicity in awareness had
been exposed in Room 16, and she knew he resented it. Now she was secretly angry with herself for
having allowed her natural response to the genius of the Pre-Raphaelites to be
aired in such obviously eulogistic terms, completely overlooking the fact that
Matthew might not think so highly of it.
Instead of continuing to play second-fiddle to him, she had suddenly taken
the lead, and it was not one that he had any intentions of following. It had been a foolish miscalculation on her
part!
CHAPTER TWO
"Any
sign of them yet?" Thomas Evans casually inquired of his wife, as she
peered out through the sitting-room's large front windows onto the driveway
leading up from the wooden gateposts, some thirty yards away, to their front
door.
"Yes, I didn't think my ears were
deceiving me," Deirdre Evans replied, automatically turning away from the
windows. "They're half-way up the
drive." She hesitated a moment,
looked back over her shoulder, and smiled to herself. "I must say, Gwendolyn appears to have
found herself quite a good-looking boyfriend at last! Neatly dressed and handsome with it! That's not a combination one sees that often
these days."
"You saw it often enough in my
day," Mr Evans declared, putting down his newspaper and casting an
exploratory glance through the front windows - a glance, alas, which was too
late to catch the approaching figures outside.
For they had already reached the front door and
disappeared from view. The
driveway was once again empty and silent, its copious gravel no longer
responding to the regular clump of purposeful feet. The afternoon August sun shone down brightly
into the house, illuminating a patch of carpet and part of the tea table to one
side of the seated man. At the sound of
the doorbell, his wife had swiftly passed in front of him, leaving, in her
excited wake, a trail of patchouli perfume which tickled his nostrils and, in
conjunction with the swishing sound of her nylon stockings, aroused him to a
momentary lasciviousness. There was an
expectant pause while the door opened and then, characteristically, a gush of
exuberant greetings, as mother and daughter spontaneously embraced in the
watchful presence of their guest, whom Gwen duly introduced.
"So glad to meet you, Matthew,"
announced Mrs Evans, extending to the artist a small graceful hand. "My daughter has already told me all
about you in one of her recent letters to me, so I wasn't altogether unprepared
for you." She let go of his hand
and gently smiled into his face.
"How did the journey go?" she asked, in due course.
"Oh, quite well, thanks," he
replied. "The train ran on time
anyway."
"Yes, and thanks to the fine weather,
it was a pleasure to gaze at the passing countryside," said Gwen.
"Or such of it as is left between
"Quite."
Glancing from the one to the other, Matthew
discovered that Gwen's face had very little in common with her mother's, other
than a slightly retroussé nose. For the eyes and hair of both women were of
different colours and the chins of different shape - Mrs Evans' curved, Gwen's
quite straight. One would hardly have
taken them for mother and daughter at first glance; though a more lingering
comparison might have led to one's discovering similarities here and there, the
most pronounced of which undoubtedly being the type of nose. Yet Deirdre Evans seemed further to elude the
status of Gwen's mother by dint of an appearance at once youthful and
seductively attractive, which suggested not so much motherhood as elder
sisterhood. In fact, Matthew was
somewhat surprised to find her so youthful-looking, though he assumed from
Gwen, who had just turned twenty-two, that she must be at least forty. In point of fact, she was thirty-nine, having
conceived her daughter at the tender age of seventeen, a mere six months into her
marriage. But such information wasn't to
be imparted to the artist there and then, as he stood next to his girlfriend
and endeavoured to compare the two women while they talked. He would have to content himself with
guesswork, which, in any case, had been pretty close.
Turning away from her daughter, Mrs Evans
suddenly said: "Now then, Matthew, come and meet my husband, whom I'm sure
will be delighted to see you."
"Yes, I'd almost forgotten about
dad," Gwen murmured, catching hold of her boyfriend's sleeve and well-nigh
dragging him in her mother's turbulent wake.
"He's evidently in the sitting room."
Which of course he was,
and still seated in his favourite armchair with pipe in mouth and the daily
paper on his lap. He rose
unsteadily to shake hands with the visitor, cast his daughter a welcoming nod,
and, no sooner than these social obligations had been perfunctorily dispatched,
gratefully relapsed into his chair again, pipe still in mouth. One might have supposed from his behaviour
that the reception of a stranger into his house was nothing
out-of-the-ordinary, even if that stranger did happen to be his daughter's
latest boyfriend. At any moment,
disdaining ceremony or curiosity, he might have picked up his paper again and
carried on reading as though nothing had happened. But that was only a surface impression. For, in reality, he welcomed the prospect of
finding out what kind of a young man Gwen had got herself involved with this
time.
It wasn't therefore long before, having
taken the chair offered him shortly after entering the room, Matthew
found himself drawn into conversation with Mr Evans on the subject of Gwen,
which of course was common to them both, if from rather different angles. "She told me you wrote to her a few
weeks ago," Mr Evans stated, by way of an opening gambit, "and
invited her to meet you somewhere in north London, if that was possible."
"That's right," Matthew admitted,
blushing slightly in the presence of the two women. He wondered whether he hadn't let himself in
for some kind of interrogation on the subject.
"Hampstead Heath, to be precise," he added, for Mr Evans'
benefit.
"And you apparently hadn't written to
her for well over two years prior to that?"
"No, quite true. The previous letter I'd sent to her didn't
receive an answer, so I assumed she had no desire to contact me. I'd also written one even earlier than that
... about three-and-a-half years ago, but she didn't respond to that
either. I didn't realize, at the time,
that she might have changed address beforehand and not had the letters forwarded-on
to her. Since they weren't returned to
me, I had no way of knowing. Indeed, it
didn't even occur to me to use the second address she had given me that day we
first met, namely yours - not, at any rate, until quite recently, when I began
to consider the possibility of writing to her again. I must have been too pessimistic about the
fate of the earlier letters."
"Which, presumably, had simply gone to
an address she was no longer resident at?"
"Yes, precisely! But I didn't discover that until we got into
correspondence quite recently, I having decided, after all, to send a letter to
her care of you, a letter which I must thank you for having forwarded-on to her
Mr Evans vaguely waved a hand in the
direction of the women, who were seated together on a nearby couch, before
saying: "Don't thank me, dear boy, thank my wife. It was she who re-addressed it."
Matthew deferred to Mrs Evans with a polite
smile. He was still feeling embarrassed
by the turn of conversation, but did his best not to show it.
"I hear you first met my daughter
outside Kenwood House in Highgate, north
"Yes, a Sunday afternoon about four
years ago," he obliged. It was so
hateful to be reminded of the fact.
Obviously Gwen had spoken to her mother on the subject!
"And that was the last you saw of her
until a couple of weeks ago, when she met you in
"Unfortunately so," Matthew
confessed, feeling more than a shade disgruntled by this further example of
parental curiosity concerning his relations with their daughter. "Had she not changed address, a few
months after we met, I might have received a reply sooner. But she decided against notifying me, so I
continued to send futile letters to her old one instead. Since I didn't get around to writing to her
until some five months after our brief acquaintance, she imagined, in the
meantime, that I'd lost interest in her and that it therefore wasn't desirable
or necessary for her to notify me of any change of address. However, by the time I finally got round to
writing - and writing letters, alas, has never been my forte
- she had already moved house over a month previously, which is why
I didn't receive a reply."
"You ought to have written to her care
of us after that," Mr Evans commented, pipe in hand.
"Yes, so I realize," the artist
admitted, feeling still more disgruntled with himself. But he hadn't and that was that! He had ignored their address and preferred to
concentrate on the
"Well, at least he wrote to me care of
you eventually," said Gwen, offering her admirer some moral support.
"Better late than never, I
suppose," Mr Evans conceded.
"Though you could well have been deeply attached to someone else at
the time and therefore not in a position to answer it in quite the way Mr
Pearce would have hoped."
This was hardly the kind of suggestion to
win the latter's approval. Yet he
retained a discreet silence, in spite of its essentially baleful effect on
him. He was beginning to regret that he
had ever written the damn letter at all and wasn't still in London, miles away
from this rather cantankerous individual who sat opposite him with an
evil-smelling pipe in his mouth and an even more evil-looking newspaper on his
lap. Better, perhaps, to have forgotten
about Gwen than to have dragged her into his life again after so long. Yet, deep down, he knew that his recent
letter to her was virtually inevitable, insofar as he had no other woman to write
to and was still desperately searching for love. Gwen had not been his first and truest
love. As yet, she was scarcely even his
second. But she possessed the dubious
distinction of being the only woman he had met, during the past four years, who
bore a strong physical resemblance to his first love, and it was primarily for
this reason that he had written to her in the hope of establishing some degree
of intimate contact. His judgement had
told him that if he couldn't find his first love again - and he had no way of
contacting her since she disappeared from his life one sad August afternoon
several years before - he would be well-advised to find someone like her,
someone with whom it would be possible to form a deep and lasting relationship. Hence Gwen, being the nearest thing to her,
had gradually acquired a special significance in this respect, despite the
relative brevity of his prior meeting with her and the subsequent time-lag in
their correspondence. Had someone else
come along in the meantime, to fill the void in his love-life, he would never
have dreamt of contacting her.
Unfortunately for him, however, no-one else had, so the void had
remained unfilled.
Even now that he had established close
contact with Gwen and made her his girlfriend, he was far from convinced it was
being filled. For, as already noted, he
hadn't yet succeeded in falling in love with her and was privately disappointed
by the fact that, in a number of respects, she existed on a completely
different wavelength from himself, not, by any means, as spiritually close to
him as he had imagined, on the dubious basis of their first meeting, that she
would be.
That day, outside Kenwood House, they had
talked for ages about art and travel and religion and other substantial subjects
of mutual interest, and Matthew had come away with the impression that he had
at last met a kindred spirit - a person with whom intimate conversation was
possible. Yet now, all these years
later, it seemed to him that he may have been mistaken in his initial
impression or, alternatively, inclined to modify it in his imagination in the
meantime, since his recent relations with Gwen had exposed numerous disparities
between them and accordingly caused him to cast suspicion upon his previous
assumptions.
For instance, that afternoon at the Tate, a
few days ago, he had become gravely disillusioned by her manifest admiration
for and enjoyment of the Pre-Raphaelites, which seriously conflicted with his own
attitude, based on radically post-Raphaelite taste. She had only come to cultural life, it seemed to him, when they entered the Pre-Raphaelite
section of Room 16. Her responses to
Turner, on the other hand, had been decidedly cool, especially where the more
abstract-looking works were concerned.
It was as though she didn't comprehend the creative significance of what
Turner had done and was consequently all-too-inclined to undervalue his work,
to see in the gradual reduction of concrete representation a mess and
incompetence rather than a radical breakthrough to a higher level of spiritual
awareness. Only with the more
conventional early works did she appear to have any spontaneous interest, to
stand in front of them with any degree of pleasure and occasionally make some
eulogistic comment. With the later and
less conventional ones, on the other hand, it didn't take Matthew long to
realize that she wasn't really there, didn't really appreciate what they
signified in the development of modern art.
She appeared to withdraw into herself and clam-up, to respond but weakly
to his enthusiasm. Even The Angel
Standing in the Sun didn't appear to make any great impression on her, no
matter what he said on its behalf.
Yes, it was evident that Gwen wasn't quite
as kindred a spirit as Matthew had initially imagined,
or that if, by any chance, she had once been closer to him, she had evolved in
a different way during the course of the past four years. Of the two possibilities, he wasn't quite
sure which one to attribute more importance to, though he had a growing
suspicion that the first was probably nearer the truth. For time could only be subordinate to
essence, since people who were essentially alike in their spiritual
predilections remained so, no matter how long separated by time. Still, it was perhaps too early, as yet, for
Matthew to dismiss Gwen as a mistake on his part, and he was grateful, in spite
of the cultural differences which existed between them, for the friendship she
had granted him. At least that was
something to be pleased about!
Meanwhile, the conversation had switched,
much to Matthew's relief, to the subject of art, and specifically to his art,
which Mr Evans seemed anxious to investigate after a rather cynical
fashion. "I mean, you're not one of
these abstract artists, are you?" he fairly snorted, momentarily removing
pipe from mouth. "One
who throws or flicks paint over the canvas and calls the deplorable result a
work of art?"
"Not quite; though I do indulge in a
form of Post-Painterly Abstraction on occasion," the artist confessed in a
slightly defensive tone-of-voice.
"What-on-earth's that?" Mr Evans
asked condescendingly.
"Well, it's a kind of simple,
geometrical abstraction employing only a few colours to create a predominantly
classical as opposed to, say, romantic type of modern art," Matthew
informed him. "One might argue that
it generally looks neater than Abstract Expressionism, since primarily a matter
of form rather than feeling. Essentially
an American phenomenon of the 'forties, it's now somewhat out-of-date, which is
why I don't indulge in it very often.... Art styles change very rapidly these
days, you know."
"Perhaps that's just as well," Mr
Evans averred sarcastically. "So
what do you generally indulge in, if that's not too sweeping a
question?"
"Well, I work in a variety of styles
actually, sometimes veering in the direction of Op Art, with the use of closely
knit wavy or angular strips of paint to create an illusion of movement, like
one finds in Bridget Riley. Sometimes
veering in the direction of still life influenced by Pop Art, with the use of
simple outlines painted in bright or matt tones of pure paint, like one finds
in Patrick Caulfield. Sometimes even
veering in the direction of Computer Art, with the use of more complex
geometrical shapes which reflect the influence of technology, like one finds in
Eduardo Paolozzi.
And sometimes making use of minimalist techniques, in which only a few
lines or dots or other simple forms are painted onto the canvas, and the result
is extremely simplistic, suggestive of a greater degree of abstraction than had
been achieved by most of the earlier abstract artists ... with the notable
exceptions of the Italian, Fontana, and the Frenchman, Klein, who preferred to
leave the canvas blank or to paint it white."
"And you call all that art?" Mr
Evans exclaimed, almost choking on his pipe.
"A blank or monochromatic canvas - art?"
"Certainly modern art," Matthew
admitted as calmly as possible. He had
anticipated some such outburst on his interlocutor's part. "The general tendency being towards
increased abstraction in one form or another, the most radical modern art
completely breaking away from the traditional three-dimensional,
representational concept of art."
"But why-on-earth does it have to do
that?" Mr Evans objected obdurately.
"Because it does," the artist
matter-of-factly stated, instinctively shying away from the immense abyss of
dissimilar awareness which had suddenly opened up, hell-like, between
them. He didn't have the nerve, at
present, to attempt bridging it, nor much confidence that such an attempt would
meet with any success. It was obvious
that the reactionary philistine in front of him had no real desire to find out
why modern art had to be modern. If he
had, he would have found out long ago!
No, it was perfectly clear that he was more interested in discrediting
it than in seeking to justify its radicalism in the light of industrial and
environmental change.
"But surely an artist should put
something recognizably artistic onto a canvas," Gwen's father protested,
before Matthew could add anything to his initial reply. "I mean, what's the point of a
monochromatic canvas or, alternatively, of a canvas covered in geometrical
patterns, zigzag lines, or whatever? How
can that have any relationship to genuine art?" He stared sternly, almost offensively so, at
his guest, as though wholly confident of the fact that he represented the voice
of sanity and the artist, if not insanity, then certainly folly.
"I don't know whether it has any
relationship to conventional art as such," Matthew replied, endeavouring
not to show his impatience. "But it
definitely has one to modern art. So far
as Western art is concerned, there are essentially three kinds, viz. the
pre-Christian, the Christian, and the post-Christian, each of which follows its
own rules within carefully prescribed boundaries."
"That may well be," the
pipe-smoker countered with an air of exasperation. "But the way I see it, a lot of modern
art simply isn't art."
"It isn't Christian art, so it can't
be judged by exactly the same standards as an art which was largely
representational," Matthew averred.
"You have to judge it from a post-Christian viewpoint - from the
viewpoint, namely, of twentieth-century transcendentalism. Then it will make some sense to you. But if you think that there's only one kind
of art, viz. Christian, and that all art should correspond to it and be judged
by it, then I'm afraid you're very much mistaken."
Mr Evans appeared to be taken-aback, much
as though he hadn't expected Matthew to rebut his criticism so
confidently. And he appeared baffled
moreover, evidently uncertain of what the artist meant by 'Christian art'. On the face of it the term seemed to imply
crucifixions, visitations, resurrections, and the like, with strictly Christian
associations. Was this so? He put the question to his guest.
"No, by 'Christian' I don't just mean
religious art," Matthew declared, "but any art, no matter how secular
its subject-matter, which was painted from approximately the 12-18th centuries,
during the period, one might say, of strong Christian influence. In other words, an art which is dualistic,
reflecting Western man's compromise position between the subconscious and the superconscious, rather than an art reflecting one or other
of the psychic extremes, like one finds in the pre- and post-Christian
periods. Therefore Christian art is
balanced between illusion and truth, the sensual and the spiritual, Hell and
Heaven, etc., through whichever dualities you care to name. It's largely a consequence of the
environmental position of Western man during the time he lived in a
more-or-less balanced condition between nature and civilization in his
towns. As soon as the balance began to
tip in favour of civilization and the superconscious,
however, Christian art started to decline and continued to decline the more
tipped the balance, so that only a post-Christian, non-representational art was
possible or, at any rate, truly representative of the age."
"I'm afraid I don't quite follow
you," Mr Evans confessed, not bothering to disguise his bewilderment. "I mean, what-on-earth is the superconscious? I
haven't heard of such a term before."
No, he hadn't. And it was almost as though one should
congratulate him for it, congratulate him for his
ignorance and average middle-class mediocrity!
Matthew was fairly annoyed for having allowed himself to get drawn into
an explication of art in relation to environmental transformations, for having
given way to his penchant for high-flown didacticism in this patently
philistine sitting-room. Yet, protest as
he might, it had been forced upon him by the necessity of justifying modern art
and, through that, his own work in the face of unenlightened opinion. He had no option but to continue, to respond
to Mr Evans' ignorance.
"Well, to put it as simply as
possible, the superconscious is the highest part of
the psyche, the intellectually- and spiritually-biased part of the mind as
opposed to its emotionally- and sensuously-biased part," he obliged. "It's that part signifying moral light
as opposed to moral darkness, good as opposed to evil, positivity
as opposed to negativity - in short, love as opposed to hate. It is spirit at its lowest and highest, the
spirit of intellectuality and the spirit, more importantly, of pure awareness,
of timeless bliss. The former on the
lower level, the latter higher up ... at the apex, one might say, of mystical
beatitude. Indeed, it has been contended
- and not without justification - that its topmost level is capable of
identification with the Infinite; that, through it, man can come to a direct if
partial knowledge of the Godhead; that the inner light is indeed commensurate
with the essence of spirit per se, and thus equivalent to the truth
beyond all appearances. For one can
experience an intimation of ultimate reality through the superconscious
mind if one so desires or, to put it more accurately, if one is in a position
to, that's to say, if one has the time, patience, inclination, and
determination to dedicate oneself to the cultivation of pure awareness. It won't come to one who hasn't properly
prepared himself in advance, who hasn't dedicated his life to regular and sustained
bouts of mystical concentration. It has
to be earned."
"Presumably as the fruit of
Transcendental Meditation," Mr Evans observed in an impatient
tone-of-voice. "Frankly, I'm afraid
I can't accept what you say about the superconscious
being capable of identification, partial or otherwise, with God. It has never convinced me, this mystical
theory of God as a state-of-mind, 'a being withdrawn', or whatever the
quotation is, with which one can get into direct contact. It all sounds too arbitrary. The fact of a superconscious
mind may be true, but I don't see that one should be led to infer the existence
of God from it. After all, there have
been other concepts of God as well, so what is there about this one that should
single it out for special commendation?"
"Simply the fact that it's true and
corresponds to ultimate reality," Matthew insisted.
"Oh, come now!" Mr Evans
protested. "Just because some
people - mystics or whatever they're called - believe it to be true, that
doesn't mean to say it really is so!
Some people believe Jesus Christ to be God, but so what? Does that mean that, ultimately, Christ
really is God? I've never thought so,
anyway, and I'm nominally a Christian, not a Jew, a Moslem, a Hindu, or
whatever. To me, Christ is simply a man
who happened to get himself taken for God in some parts of the world while the
legitimacy of an anthropomorphic viewpoint prevailed."
"In a sense, He's that for me
too," Matthew confessed, blushing deeply in spite of himself. For he was aware of the relativity of the
term under discussion and felt that, while Christ wasn't exactly ultimate
divinity, He was still divine to the degree of signifying a compromise between
one level of divinity and another, the Father and the Holy Ghost, and thus had
as much right, within relative terms, to be regarded as God as the other and
more extreme parts of the Trinity.
"Yet I don't see why one should therefore disbelieve in a
spiritually achieved intimation of God as the mystics conceive of Him," he
went on. "I don't see why a lower
concept of God, founded as much on illusion as on truth, should prevent one
from taking a higher concept of divinity seriously. After all, there are plenty of people, these
days, who are too enlightened to believe in God when conceived, say, as either
Jesus Christ or some white-bearded Creator lording it over the Universe. In other words, when conceived in traditional
anthropomorphic terms, and who therefore consider themselves atheist."
"I, for one!"
Mr Evans declared.
"Yes, well, such people often imagine
they're above belief in God simply because what has hitherto been taken for
divinity fails to convince them," Matthew continued. "They come to a halt two-thirds of the
way up the ladder of religious evolution under the delusion that they've
actually reached the top or, rather, gone beyond it, transcended religion
altogether, and then flatter themselves that they're too intelligent to believe
in God. For it's a taken-for-granted
tenet of their philosophy that God, of whatever conception, is an illusion, a
figment of the imagination which a less-enlightened ancestry were inclined to
take too seriously. To them, religion is
a system of illusions or superstitions, beneath the dignity of an atheistic
mind."
"Well, isn't that what it essentially
is?" Mr Evans countered, his face turning red with consternation.
"No, no more than art is or must
inevitably be," Matthew confidently retorted. "Like art, religion can be divided into
roughly three stages, corresponding to the nature of the environment and the
degree of evolution manifested in it at any given time. There's a religious sense largely founded on
the subconscious, which is dark and fearsome, involving propitiatory sacrifice
to a cruelly vengeful deity. It's the
equivalent of Creator-worship and is totally illusory, having no basis in
reality whatsoever. It isn't necessary
to slay animals or people to win the favours of this Creator-God for the simple
reason that such a deity, conceived in anthropomorphic terms, is largely if not
purely a figment of the imagination. Yet
those who exist in this pre-Christian context can't be expected to realize
that, since they're victims of the subconscious, unable to transcend its
dominion to any appreciable extent - least of all to an extent which would
enable them to see through their illusions.
They're too primitive, too much under nature's sway, and consequently
too sensual to have any qualms about worshipping or, rather, fearing and
propitiating a deity who corresponds to their subconscious enslavement. Being predominantly sensual, they project
their sensuality on to their deity, and accordingly endeavour to appease him in
an appropriately sensual manner, usually through blood sacrifices though also,
as in the case of the ancient Greeks - a slightly less fearful and generally
more egocentric people on the whole - through sexual orgies ..."
A titter of laughter erupted from the
direction of the couch to Matthew's right, though Mrs Evans, less amused than
her daughter, merely smiled her tacit acknowledgement of ancient Greek
religiosity or, at any rate, to such of it as their guest had alluded.
"Well, if these pre-Christian or pagan
peoples are more under the sway of the subconscious than of the superconscious," Matthew continued, ignoring as best
he could Gwen's non-verbal interruption, "then Christians represent an
evolutionary development which signifies a balance between the two parts of the
psyche, between the sensuous illusion-forming part and the spiritual
truth-forming part, and are consequently more dualistic. They aren't a people under the dominion of
nature, but a people, on the contrary, who have evolved, thanks in large
measure to the gradual expansion of their villages into towns, towards a
position midway between nature and civilization. To them, Heaven is as much a fact of life or
religion as Hell. For they're no longer
under the dominion of evil, but balanced between evil and good in what I like
to regard as the ego in its prime, that's to say, the twilight fusion-point of
the two main parts of the psyche.
Christianity, you see, is really a twilight religion between the
darkness of Creator-worship and the light of Holy Ghost experience, between the
sensual and the spiritual. Thus it's a
religion half-illusion and half-truth - Jesus Christ, the actual deity of the
Christians, having actually lived and been a man, religious requirement having
endowed Him with supernatural significance, attributed all manner of miracles
to Him which, though valid from a theological viewpoint, appear less than plausible
from a rational one, and accordingly fail to impress us or, at any rate, those
of us who are rational."
"Here, here!" exclaimed Mr Evans,
banging the hand holding his pipe down on the arm of his armchair so violently
... that some of its still-smouldering contents spilled out onto the
carpet. "I've never been able to
accept the divinity of Christ. To me,
the idea of God as man or of man as God seems intrinsically
suspect."
"Yes, well that doesn't mean to say
that the idea of God as spirit should also be so," Matthew calmly
responded. "For it's from
Christianity, with its illusion/truth dichotomy, that we progress to the
post-Christian context, largely brought about by the expansion of towns into
cities and our growing independence from the sensuous influence of nature, in
which the balance between the two parts of the psyche no longer holds sway and
we find ourselves becoming progressively biased on the side of the superconscious, on the side of truth, goodness, peace,
spirituality - all those attributes of life, in short, which stand at the
opposite pole to those worshipped by the pre-Christians, or pagans. No longer can God be conceived in terms of a
dualistic compromise between illusion and truth, still less in terms of
illusion alone, but only as truth, as God per se, which
corresponds, in traditional terminology, to the Holy Ghost, the third and
highest part of the so-called Blessed Trinity.
"Here, at last, is the spiritual as
opposed to anthropomorphic awareness of God," Matthew went on, warming to
his thesis, "the religious sense commensurate with ultimate divinity. No longer is it necessary to fear as well as
love God, but simply to experience and understand God as love, light, bliss,
peace, etc. Nor need one conceive of
this God in terms of 'He', as an anthropomorphic projection of the ego, for the
simple reason that one has transcended the balance between the subconscious and
superconscious parts of the psyche, and thus evolved
beyond egocentric projections. No longer
'He' but 'it', no longer Jesus Christ but the Holy Spirit of Universal
Consciousness or whatever else you prefer to term this manifestation of true
divinity, which is one with the superconscious mind.
"Thus religion, becoming at last a
question of truth, evolves to its third and final stage," Matthew
continued, by now considerably fired-up, "beyond which it cannot
change. For once one has arrived at a
true conception of God, one cannot return to an earlier illusory or part-illusory
concept. It's no good, once one has seen
through the nature of prayer - that mental activity
founded on egocentric projection - pretending that one can return to a
religious framework endorsing it in due course.
One can't! A society growing
increasingly under the sway of the superconscious can
only respond to that influence in an appropriately transpersonal way - by
transcending egocentric selfhood. For
God, conceived in any ultimate sense, isn't there to be petitioned or thanked,
praised or cursed, but simply experienced, as the heavenly side of Last
Judgement paintings has generally shown.
Bliss, peace, love - this is compatible with ultimate divinity, not
action! Only an illusory or partly
illusory concept of God leads one to believe that He is a being capable of
exerting Himself on one's behalf, or even against one. And to assume it isn't possible to believe in
God because there's so much evil in the world ... is simply to betray the fact
that one would have a rather simplistic and outmoded concept of God in mind to
equate Him with such evil. For this
higher divinity is certainly not responsible for all the evil in the
world. How can it be when it has nothing
to do with evil, since a state-of-mind, a peace which 'surpasses all
understanding'? No, it's highly unlikely
that bliss can be held responsible for agony.
Only a dualist might think so, a man, in other words, who signifies but
a phase of human evolution, when evil and good seem to be balanced in the world
and it's possible to assume that the one must necessarily be dependent on the
other. Yet just as human evolution is a
journey from the subconscious to the superconscious,
from sensuality to spirituality, illusion to truth, so it's a journey from evil
to good - from Hell to Heaven. It's only
a combination of Hell and Heaven, so to speak, during the Christian twilight
era of human evolution, when the darkness seems to be balanced by the
light."
Thomas Evans wasn't particularly impressed
by this line of argument, since he had suffered a great deal in life from poor
health (he currently had a smoke-fuelled weak heart), financial and business
worries, personal anxieties of one kind or another, etc., and was therefore
unconvinced that life, however one conceived of it, was becoming progressively
more heavenly. To him, it was pretty evident
that dualistic considerations still had to be borne in mind, and he wasted no
time in saying so.
"Oh, I quite agree," said Matthew
by way of a deferential response.
"There is still a large amount of evil in life. For we haven't yet transcended the egocentric
balance to any appreciable extent, and accordingly still have a fair way to go
before we get completely beyond dualism, since the subconscious hasn't been
completely triumphed over at present. It
may take decades or even centuries before we evolve to a context where Heaven
becomes more of a reality than at present.
But there's no way that you or anyone else can disprove the fact that
we're evolving in the right direction for spiritual transformation, and it
seems quite probable that if we persist long enough we'll eventually attain to
our goal - attain, in other words, to what I am wont to call a post-human
millennium, which, as the terms suggests, is more than merely post-humanist,
being properly divine."
"No, I can't believe that for one moment,
any more than I can believe most of what you say!" Mr Evans obdurately
retorted. "I expect you'll be
telling us, before long, that we're destined to turn into angels or supermen or
something equally preposterous at this post-human millennium of your fanciful
imagination."
"Thomas!" interposed Mrs Evans,
somewhat annoyed by her husband's impertinence.
"It isn't necessarily as preposterous as you, in your bourgeois
short-sightedness, would seem to think."
Mr Evans glared ferociously at his wife, as
though she had just committed a sacrilege in his house. What right had she to
interfere, least of all in a way which drew attention to the limitations of his
ideological views? But he didn't say
anything to her. Instead, he turned his
attention back to Matthew Pearce and glared at him awhile. The atmosphere in the room was by no means
pleasant. "And I don't quite
see," he confessed, picking up the thread of his retort again,
"exactly what all this has to do with modern art, which I recall we were
discussing prior to religion. Am I to
take it that such art generally signifies a superconscious
bias, too?"
"Yes, that would be helpful,"
said Matthew. "For I was saying
that Christian art was essentially a matter of dualism, not just religious
subjects, and that post-Christian art couldn't be judged by the same standards,
but had to be viewed in its own context of lopsided spirituality, had to be
seen from the viewpoint of superconsciousness instead of mere egocentricity. For, compared with traditional art, modern
art is largely a transpersonal phenomenon, transpersonal in its abstraction and
transpersonal in what often appears as scrappiness or simplicity - a refusal to
appear figuratively great, profound, overly objective, technically brilliant,
or whatever else may be associated with an art form centred on the ego, which
is to say, the dualistic fusion-point between subconscious and superconscious minds.
Thus when it really is modern, and
accordingly reflects the most advanced creative tendencies of the day, art is
essentially an abstract rather than a representational phenomenon, a product of
the city environment.
"Most of
"However that may be, it's still fair
to say that modern art is better characterized by transcendental abstraction
than by surrealistic representation," Matthew continued, "that a
painting intimating of the Holy Ghost is more relevant to and indicative of the
age than one with Christian associations, even if those associations happen to
be radicalized by a nuclear or mystical technique."
"I'm afraid I know very little about
If anything was guaranteed to make Matthew
lose patience with the man, it was this kind of attitude. For it was evident that Mr Evans couldn't
think of art in other than traditionally objective terms, and therefore automatically
referred the present back to the past, regarding modern works as art only if
they could be compared, to some extent, with those of the old masters, and
considering all the rest, that is to say the bulk of twentieth-century art, as
anti-art or even as no art at all. A
typically philistine viewpoint, but scarcely one to be wondered at, in the
circumstances! After all, Thomas Evans
was the manager of an insurance company in
It was therefore important for Matthew to
keep this in mind and thus make a determined effort not to be impressed by the
reactionary opposition Mr Evans chose to offer, on the contentious subject of
modern art. No, instead of losing
patience with him on account of his virtually inevitable unenlightened viewpoint,
Matthew resolved to keep Mr Evans in perspective as a perfectly ordinary
middle-class citizen whom it was unwise to expect to behave or talk like an
artist, least of all a radical one. If
his viewpoint was somewhat limited, then so be it! There could be no real reason, given his
critical temperament and occupational habits, why it should be otherwise.
Yet to some extent it was nonetheless
necessary for the artist to continue his defence and explication of modern art,
if only because his own reputation and self-respect were personally at stake,
and this he proceeded to do, albeit without any conviction that what he had to
say would be appreciated.
The fact that art had once primarily served
the emotions was perfectly true. Just as
it had also served, albeit at a later and more evolved epoch, both the will and
intellect combined, and was now primarily serving the spirit. It had passed, like religion, from the realm
of illusion to the realm of truth, and would continue to evolve in accordance
with the contemporary imbalance on the side of truth. To claim, therefore, that art should only
serve illusion would be as ridiculous, in Matthew's view, as to claim that
religion was only a matter of illusion and would cease to exist as religion if
it wasn't. No, art hadn't ceased to
exist simply because the old criterion of dualistic balance had been
superseded. On the contrary, what now
existed was simply a different kind of art - more truthful and rational than
hitherto. If, from a traditional
viewpoint, it appeared to be a lesser art than that relative to an egocentric
age, it nonetheless existed on a higher level of evolution and had to be
respected on its own terms. This much,
at any rate, the artist endeavoured to assure his sceptical host.
"Yes, but I still don't see the
artistic significance of either a monochromatic or nearly blank canvas,"
Mr Evans objected, unwilling to accept Matthew's attempted vindication at
face-value. "You call it
minimalism, or some such term, and regard the result as an advanced or extreme
form of abstraction. But, really, it
doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, is
that the ultimate truth in modern art?"
Matthew had to smile, in spite of his
seriousness. "I don't know whether
it's the ultimate truth," he replied, "but it can certainly be
equated with spirit, light, and thus the truth of the superconscious
mind. Indeed, I incline to view
abstraction as a mode of religious art, the religious art of transcendental
man. It signifies the victory of the
spiritual over the material, the transpersonal over the impersonal,
subjectivity over objectivity. A thing
which also applies, I believe, to most light art, especially where neon tubing
is involved. And, of course, to a large
quantity of modern sculpture, or sculpture emphasizing light and space as
opposed to the secular, to whatever reflects materialism, technology,
urbanization, scientific progress, and so on, in the world at large. It's the difference, if you like, between
that which emphasizes the influence of the Holy Ghost and that, by contrast,
which emphasizes the influence of contemporary science and industry. Both kinds of art, now as previously, are
equally justified, but they aren't on the same level. The religious, now as before, signifies a
superior tendency, one dealing with the more-than-human, dealing, in short,
with the principal concern of human evolution - namely, the attainment to
salvation in the millennial Beyond, the transformation of man into the
superhuman being which lies transpersonally beyond him."
"Bah! I cannot accept that
interpretation of human evolution," Mr Evans confessed, glowering
defiantly.
"No?
Well, maybe that's because you're essentially a materialist and
therefore have no use for spiritual salvation," Matthew retorted. "Yet, to me, a person who is indisposed
to reconcile himself to the notion that science and technology are ends in
themselves, it seems indisputably evident that evolution must be conceived
primarily in terms of man's changing relationships to divinity and only secondarily
in terms of how he sustains himself during the course of those changes. To see technological and industrial progress
as ends in themselves would seem to me a kind of insanity. Yet neither would it be entirely sane if one
were to dismiss the secular and materialistic side of evolution altogether, as
though it were of small account. For
it's only through our ever-changing environments that we come to attain to a
better and more truthful relationship with divinity. Only with the aid of our
materialistic progress in respect of new technologies."
"So that is presumably why you
sometimes work in a genre or format in which complex geometrical shapes,
suggestive of the influence of contemporary technology, play an important role,
is it?" Mr Evans deduced, recalling to mind an
earlier facet of their conversation.
Matthew nodded affirmatively. "Yes, though not very often, least of
all these days," he admitted. "For I like to think of myself as a predominantly religious
painter, in the service of the Holy Ghost. In point of fact, I abandoned the
impersonality of geometrical concerns some time ago for a kind of
transcendental, symbolic art which sometimes makes use of a dove and at other
times of an intensely luminous globe of light-suggesting paint."
"How d'you
mean?" asked Mr Evans, looking slightly puzzled, as well he might.
"Well, as you doubtless know, the dove
is symbolic of the Holy Ghost, so I use it to signify our age's growing
allegiance, via the superconscious mind, to
transcendentalism, and thus to the spirit.
Painted in white on a silver background, or occasionally on a pale-blue
one, the dove becomes for me a symbol of contemporary religion, equivalent to Teilhard de Chardin's Omega
Point. Now as the Omega Point is also a
symbol, a concept for Ultimate Godhead in pure spirit, I make use of that as
well, and so paint canvases in which an intensely pure light, turned-in upon
itself in blissful self-contemplation, exists at the centre of a silver
ground. But more recently, within the
past couple of months, I've begun to paint, in very minimalist outlines
reminiscent of Matisse's graphics and Caulfield's still-lives, figures
meditating, seated cross-legged in upright postures on a flat plane with a kind
of seraphic glow about them."
"Oh, really?"
Mr Evans responded in a mockingly indifferent tone-of-voice. He had never meditated in his life, nor did
he know anyone who had. "And are
they supposed to represent the Buddha, or what?" he almost sarcastically
inquired.
"No, nothing of the kind," Matthew
maintained, ignoring, as best he could, the air of flippancy attending his
host's sarcastic curiosity. "The
figures used in the compositions in question are perfectly Western, designed to
reflect the mounting relevance of meditation to a post-Christian society. They're not so much emissaries of Eastern
religion or traitors to their cultural heritage ... as intelligent Westerners
for whom the 'Third Person' of the Trinity has come to have more significance
than the 'Second'. They pertain to
spirituality in a modern industrialized and urbanized society, to a
spirituality which reflects our severance from nature and consequent
post-dualistic bias. To them, sin and
fear of God are alike irrelevant. For they are too ascetic to be unduly exposed to sin, and can only
conceive of God in terms of grace.
They're not Buddhists but transcendentalists. And when they meditate, it's effectively with
a view to fulfilling Christian prophecy and bringing the Christian aspiration
towards salvation closer to fruition. In
other words, to entering the '
Thomas Evans inflicted a short, sharp snort
on the artist in supercilious response.
"I wish I could say the same," he caustically declared. "But, as it happens, I have to live in
this world, which, to the best of my knowledge, is decidedly dualistic. Your meditating figures seem far too
complacent for me, too much a figment of your self-serving imagination. They suggest a greater degree of optimism
concerning this life than ever I would wish to entertain. They seem to me to have turned their backs on
reality and to be living in a kind of dream world."
"I'm afraid I can't agree with
you," said Matthew.
"No, I don't suppose you can," Mr
Evans retorted sarcastically, after which, to Matthew's relief, he relapsed
into a silence disturbed only by the lighting and puffing of his pipe.
CHAPTER THREE
Following
dinner early that evening, Gwen and Matthew went out into the large back garden
to get some air and soak up a little of the sun which was now bathing it in a
pool of soft light. They took a couple
of deck chairs and found a pleasant spot over by an imposing cluster of
rhododendrons, which stood to the right of the garden at a distance of some
thirty yards from the house. It was
really Gwen's decision to sit there, for she hated to sit in the centre of the
garden, where there was a total absence of plant life and one felt exposed to
prying eyes all around one. Only by its
edges, where the flowers and bushes were reposing in loosely arranged beds, did
she feel any degree of complacency, born of the privacy they appeared to
provide. Besides, she liked the scent of
the plants, which was particularly pleasant where they were now sitting. The centre of the garden, about which only
pale grass grew, seemed to her relatively barren and devoid of life.
"I trust you didn't find dad too
trying during dinner?" she gently inquired of Matthew, after a few minutes'
respectful silence had fallen between them in the refreshing presence of
temperate nature.
"No, not really," he replied,
more out of a mechanical response to her probing statement than an honest
answer. He looked at her
half-humorously, as though in ironic deference to the fact that Mr Evans had
been more upsetting before dinner than during it. Indeed, it might have been truer to imply
that Mr Evans was pretty upsetting whether or not he was talking. But he had no real desire to compromise her over
the thorny issue of her father, limiting himself, instead, to a good-natured
dismissal of the matter, as though it were of small account. For anything more serious would probably have
led him to get up and make his way back to the station there and then, in order
to be free not only of Gwen's father but of Gwen herself, who wasn't exactly
the most kindred of spirits, either. Yet
he didn't want to make a scene of it, to treat this experience too seriously. Better, on second thoughts, to treat it with a
kind of scientific detachment, as though one had been entrusted with the
responsibility of studying, at relatively close-quarters, a species of life
which, though personally abhorrent to one, it was nevertheless necessary to
treat with a modicum of respect, if only to complete one's studies. It might, after all, lead to some as-yet
unimagined revelation. At least it had
already led to a better understanding of Gwen, which was something.
"I really ought to have warned you, in
advance, of what my father was like," she
remarked sympathetically. "But I
wasn't altogether sure of how he would react to you. Besides, I was afraid that you might not have
agreed to come here, had I given you prior warning about him."
Matthew smiled dismissively. "Oh, don't worry yourself about
it," he advised her. "I didn't
exactly expect him to be an exact replica of myself. He's entitled to his views, after all, even
if I can't share them."
There ensued a further short period of
silence, before Gwen asked: "What d'you think of
my mother?"
It was a question Matthew had
half-expected, but he still blushed slightly as he replied: "She seems
quite pleasant really, quite polite and friendly; though I haven't yet had a
chance to form a clear impression of her.
Like you, she tends to keep quiet when Mr Evans is speaking."
"Yes, that's true enough," Gwen
admitted. "She's not a particularly
talkative person anyway, even given the fact that dad
doesn't exactly encourage conversation.
He mostly keeps to himself in the house."
"Don't your parents get on very well
together?" Matthew asked, partly in response to this remark and partly
from a vague premonition to the contrary.
"No, not for the past five or six
years," Gwen revealed, blushing slightly.
"Largely in consequence of dad's poor health - his fits of
depression and bad heart, his liver and bronchial trouble - which seems to have
come between them and isolated them from each other to a certain extent. Not that mum's health is entirely good. But she does at least fare better than him,
as a rule."
"She certainly looks well,"
Matthew candidly opined. "And young, too.
Indeed, I was more than a little surprised to learn that the woman who
answered the door to us was in fact your mother. She seemed more like an elder sister."
Gwen smiled faintly and then said:
"Yes, she's only seventeen years older than me actually. But that, too, is one of the reasons why my
parents don't get on as well as they formerly did. For dad is ten years her senior and tends to
behave as if he were a member of an older generation ... which, when you
consider the nature of his health, effectively appears to be the case. It's as though he has already crossed the
threshold into old age, while she has hardly entered middle age."
Matthew couldn't argue with that
observation! "And you're their only
child?" he conjectured.
"Yes, though mum lost two children
prematurely, and I had a brother who died of pneumonia at six," Gwen
answered on a note of sadness. "He
was two years younger than me."
"I'm sorry to hear it," said
Matthew, respectfully deferring to convention.
"It must have been rather upsetting for you."
"Yes, for a while," Gwen
admitted. "But more so for mum, who
was very fond of him. She had always
wanted a boy." There was a tinge of
self-pity in her voice, as though indicative of the fact that, as a girl, she
had rated lower in her mother's estimation and grown to resent it. But she didn't say anything else about the
subject, and Matthew tactfully refrained from further inquiry.
Indeed, he was secretly gratified when,
instead of continuing the conversation along other lines, his girlfriend
relapsed into one of her characteristic silences, abandoning her face to the
sunlight, which caused it to take on an almost angelic aura of transcendent
spirituality, like Rossetti's Beatrice. To be sure, there was certainly something
Pre-Raphaelite about her at this moment, something ethereal and
not-quite-there. Yet such an illusion
was quickly dispelled from Matthew's mind as she turned her face to one side
and caught some shadow from the nearby rhododendrons. Now she was simply Gwendolyn Evans again,
devoid of spiritual nobility, the daughter of a provincial bourgeois. Her attractiveness, suddenly released from
transcendent pretensions, assumed more earthly proportions. But for her delicacy of build, one might have
taken her for an average sensualist.
Instead of which, one had no option but to acknowledge her for the
dualistic compromise she was - both sensual and spiritual in approximately
equal degrees.
Turning his gaze away from her impassive
face, Matthew focused his attention on the detached house in front of them, the
rear windows of which glinted in the soft sunlight. Its perfectly conventional middle-class respectability
suddenly became a source of annoyance to him as he recalled, not without a pang
of regret, that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a context for which he
had no real sympathy and absolutely no desire to emulate in his own life -
namely, the context of bourgeois compromise.
For the fairly large house that his vision now embraced stood as a
symbol to him of most of the things he was in rebellion against and preferred
not to see. It stood, above all, as a
symbol of the class which had come to power after the aristocracy and now
prospered on the sweat of the proletariat.
Yet it also stood as a symbol, in large measure, of the class which took
the middle road between the aristocracy and the proletariat, and signified a kind
of midway stage of human evolution. Not
as materialistic as the former nor as spiritualistic as the latter, the
bourgeoisie were resigned to a compromise formula which, while leaving them
cognizant of the fact that excessive wealth was a grave obstacle to spiritual
enlightenment, precluded them from relinquishing the benefits of materialism to
any appreciable extent, least of all to an extent which made them candidates
for spiritual enlightenment personally!
Quite the contrary, the bourgeois was very
firmly, now as before, a creature of the middle road, the dualistic
material/spiritual compromise which found its religious home in Christianity
and its political home in parliamentary democracy. If his house wasn't as grand as an
aristocrat's, well and good! He had no
great difficulty living with that fact.
But to suggest to him that he should go one stage further up the ladder
of human evolution and relinquish private property altogether, resigning
himself to life in a comparatively small council house or flat, would be
tantamount to depriving him of his very existence, and such a suggestion would
meet with very little approval! Indeed,
it would probably meet with none! For
the bourgeois was not an animal which could turn itself into a proletarian, any
more than an aristocrat was an animal which could turn itself into a
bourgeois. If a bourgeois was
spiritually superior to an aristocrat, he was yet spiritually inferior to a
proletarian, and could never alter himself one way or the other. By his very compromise nature, he was
condemned to the twilight stage of human evolution in between the darkness and
the light - a perfectly legitimate position while the twilight was inevitable,
but an increasingly questionable, not to say untenable, one the more the
twilight changed to light and society accordingly progressed away from its
former dualistic compromise towards a stage of life that transcended dualism, a
stage in which only proletarian criteria were relevant. As a creature who
signified a kind of dovetailed combination of aristocratic and proletarian
elements within himself, the bourgeois could never emerge from the moral
twilight. If it came to an end under the
sway of an increasingly strong barrage of light, the bourgeois would perish
too. He wasn't capable of living solely
in the light, for it would be a refutation of his other half, an abnegation of
his dualism. No, he could only flourish
and perpetuate himself while the twilight
prevailed. Once it had gone - whoosh, no
more bourgeois!
Whatever pertained to the light was
proletarian; was man become wary of materialism and living in smaller houses,
smaller apartments, or flats because he was too evolved to require large-scale
property, because, in other words, his superconscious
predominated over his subconscious rather than existed in a balanced compromise
with it; was man born and bred in the city, away from the sensuous influence of
nature; was transcendental man. Yes, but
not the bourgeois, not Christian man.
There could be no question of his
transformation. This house, sparkling in
the sunlight, was destined to be superseded world-wide - and in a sense already
had been - by a less materialistic scale-of-values.
In the overall progression of evolution
through approximately three stages ... from a dominating materialistic class to
a liberated spiritualistic class via a worldly compromise class, this house
undoubtedly signified something morally better, higher, and more humane than
the typical aristocratic dwellings which had preceded it. It was certainly less glaringly materialistic
than the huge castles, palaces, and country houses favoured by the
nobility. It was not the repository of
so many possessions, and such possessions as it housed were generally of a
less-ornate and expensive variety than those favoured by the overtly
materialistic class. They were unlikely
to distract the eye from spiritual preoccupations to anything like the same
extent as those possessions which had been specifically designed to glorify
matter. The library, for instance, would
not be nearly so large or contain as many weighty and expensively-tooled,
leather-backed books. On the contrary,
it would be of moderate proportions, containing, at most, a few thousand books,
and most if not all of those less-expensive hardbacks would have been read, not
simply owned for the mere sake of collecting or signifying the extent of one's
wealth and/or materialistic power.
Indeed, there may even be, among the ranks
of such bourgeois tomes, a few paperbacks, as befitting an age in which the
spiritual predominates over the material and a book is accordingly judged more
by what it contains by way of intellectual or cultural nourishment than with
what care or materials it was made. Yet
it was highly unlikely that such a library would house any great number of
paperbacks. For the bourgeois would not
want to deprive himself of hardbacks to an extent
which made his collection lack a certain amount of materialistic elegance. Oh, no!
If he instinctively looks down on the extensive materialism of an aristocrat's
library, he yet shies away from the prospect of relinquishing his taste for
hardbacks to the extent required by a proletarian library, in which, one may
surmise, only paperbacks would exist.
Furthermore, he would not wish to reduce the number of books in his collection,
either. For the few thousand he owns
seems to him more becoming than the mere 500-odd books to be found in the
average proletarian collection. After
all, his house is somewhat larger than the average proletarian dwelling, and
therefore it's likely that his library will have to be correspondingly larger,
if it isn't to look ridiculously out-of-scale with its surroundings. As the man of the middle road, he knows
exactly where he stands. His library,
like just about everything else about him, is somewhere in-between the
alternative extremes. It corresponds to
stage two of human evolution.
Yes, and although Thomas Evans wasn't the
most scholarly or bookish of middle-class people, it could certainly be said of
his library - which Matthew had taken a glance at prior to dinner -
that it represented the requisite compromise of scale and favoured books
in-between the extensive materialism of the previous historical class and the
intensive spirituality of the ultimate one.
Nothing extreme would be found there!
A gentle sigh beside him caused the artist
to abandon his philosophical reflections and turn his attention back towards
Gwen who, with eyes closed, seemed perfectly resigned to the absence of
conversation and only too happy for a chance to vegetate in the warm evening
air, feeling the caress of the sun upon her upturned face, which had assumed a
mellow glow. Watching her thus,
seemingly oblivious of his presence beside her, Matthew experienced a moment of
tenderness towards her and gently but firmly placed a hand on her nearest leg,
just above the knee and below the rim of her pale-cream skirt, which she had
drawn-up slightly in response to the sun.
This presence of his hand on her flesh caused her to smile in a subtly
sensual way, yet she kept her eyes closed.
She looked perfectly complacent, like a softly purring cat - submerged
in soft sensuality. At any other time
Matthew would probably have raised the rim of her skirt until her thighs were
completely naked and her panties exposed to view, content to focus his
attention upon that part of them behind which her crotch would be gently
stewing in its own sexual gravy, leading a kind of vegetable existence of its
own - soft and languid. But in the back
garden of her parents' house, what with the prospect of someone spying on them
through one or another of the rear windows, he had to resign himself to gently
patting her nearest leg instead, not exposing the outer reaches of her more
private parts to his tender gaze.
And this he continued to do even after his
thoughts had once more turned away from Gwen's body and become entangled in
intellectual matters again, this time concerning the architectural innovations
of Gottfried Semper, the nineteenth-century German
architect who occasionally designed buildings with a view to reflecting
different stages of architectural evolution - the façade beginning on the
ground floor with a coarse appearance and ascending, through successive floors,
to a smoother one, with a corresponding change of materials in the overall
construction. At present, Matthew
couldn't remember very much about the man from what he had read, some years
before, in the local public library; though he knew that, if he were an
architect bent on illustrating evolutionary transformations from one floor to
another, he would adopt a somewhat different approach from Semper
- one emphasizing the growing predilection for the light which characterized
our evolutionary struggle.
Thus, taking the façade as its most
representative component, his projected building would have a row of small
windows on the ground floor spaced at regular, if quite distant, intervals, so
that the overall impression was one of darkness or, rather, of the ego - that
fusion-point of the subconscious and superconscious
minds - under subconscious dominion. The
subconscious would be represented by the concrete, the superconscious
by the windows, and the ratio of the one to the other would be approximately in
the region of 3:1. Thus the ego of
pre-dualistic man would be represented as a predominantly dark phenomenon. Aristocratic materialism would have the
advantage.
With the first floor, however, indicative
of stage two of human evolution, the ratio of concrete to windows would be
transformed into a dualistic balance, so that the increase in window space came
to signify a greater degree of superconscious
influence, commensurate with bourgeois consciousness, and the overall
impression was accordingly of an ego balanced, in twilight compromise, between
the dark and the light. In this section
of the façade, the percentage which the material aspect had lost would have
been gained by the spiritual one. Heaven
and Hell would be kept in dualistic equilibrium.
Not so, however, with the second and final
floor, representative of the third stage of human evolution, in which the ratio
of concrete to windows or, rather, of windows to concrete had become the
converse of that exhibited on the ground floor, and the light of the superconscious accordingly prevailed over the darkness of
the subconscious in the ratio of 3:1, reducing the material part of this upper
section of the façade to but a quarter of the total space. Here, then, it would be the turn of
proletarian man to advertise his predilection for the light, his ego being
decidedly under the sway of the superconscious and
thus partial to a spiritual bias. Here,
on the second floor, human evolution attained to its climax. And after that - well, it only remained for
proletarian man to transcend his humanity altogether, namely by dispensing with
the remaining influence of the subconscious, for him to enter the post-human
millennium and thus become divine. In
the meantime, however, a lot of work to be done, not least of all in using more
window space than hitherto, which is to say, than the bourgeoisie could
countenance!
Such, at any rate, was the plan Matthew
thought he would put into architectural operation, were he an architect bent on
expanding and refining upon the techniques first propounded by Gottfried Semper. Indeed, he
might even do a variation on that, in which the façade of his evolutionary
building, while retaining the respective ratios of concrete to windows on each
floor, was less part of one house than indicative of three different buildings
built one atop the other - the one on the ground floor, so to speak, three
times as large as its top-floor counterpart, while the one in the middle,
suggestive of bourgeois compromise, signified a sort of cross between the other
two.... Or, alternatively, to conceive of such a wedding-cake building as one
house in which three separate apartments, viz. an aristocratic, a bourgeois,
and a proletarian, were arranged in vertical juxtaposition, the overall
pyramidal shape of the building indicative of the diminishing scale of
materialism as one approached the top floor.
Thus one could speak of an aristocratic floor, a bourgeois floor, and a
proletarian floor, each of which reflected the aforementioned evolutionary
transformations in the psyche. It would
be an evolutionary building more comprehensive and profoundly significant than
anything of which Semper had ever dreamed!
The sight of Mrs Evans emerging from the
house suddenly put a stop to further musings on Matthew's part, bringing him
sharply back to the provincial surroundings in which he somewhat ironically
found himself. She was crossing the lawn
in their direction, heading, it appeared, for Gwen.
"It looks as though your mother has
something to tell you," Matthew softly remarked, for the benefit of the
tranquil figure beside him.
"Oh?" She opened her eyes and cast the approaching
figure an inquisitive glance. She didn't
appear too disconcerted by this interruption.
"Your friend Linda's on the
phone," Mrs Evans informed her, as soon as she came within speaking
distance.
"Oh, really?"
Gwen responded in a genuinely surprised tone-of-voice. "I hadn't expected her to phone
today." She got up from her
deck-chair and turned towards Matthew, who was on the point of getting up
himself. "You needn't disturb
yourself, Matt," she reassured him.
"I won't be long."
"No, and if Mr Pearce doesn't object,
I'll keep him company in your absence, Gwendolyn," said Mrs Evans,
simultaneously sitting herself down in the space just vacated by her
daughter. "We mustn't allow him to
feel neglected, must we?" She
smiled at Gwen, who impulsively reciprocated, before setting off at a fairly
brisk pace for the waiting call.
Strange things can happen, for all of a
sudden Matthew found himself transformed from a rather bored and meditative
dreamer into an alert and sensitive companion of Mrs Evans. It was as though, with the change of woman
beside him, a new lease-of-life had suddenly been instilled into his veins,
making him conscious of himself as a man for virtually the first time that
evening.
"Just the perfect weather for being
out here, isn't it?" Mrs Evans observed, as she turned her dark-green eyes
on the artist.
"Most assuredly," he agreed,
nodding profusely. He might almost have
blushed with shame for the (what seemed to him) too conspicuous response to her
sensual presence beside him, the too-lingering consciousness of her beauty,
tempered, as it was, by a whiff of patchouli perfume which mingled almost
surrealistically with the natural scents of some nearby shrubs. A little extra daring on his part and he
would have cast a glance over her pale-blue skirt to the dark nylon-stockinged knees, as though to obtain a better idea of her
beauty and achieve a more comprehensive assessment. But such daring, he felt, would expose his
consciousness of her as a sensual being to an extent which could only have
compromised him further, and he lacked the courage or audacity to indulge
it. Besides, she might have taken
offence, considered him ill-mannered, and embarrassed him as never before. No, it was not for him to play the gallant
where Gwen's mother was concerned, even if she did possess an uncommon degree
of feminine beauty.
"I must say, I was quite intrigued by
some of the things you were saying to my husband before dinner," Mrs Evans
revealed. "Especially by the types
of transcendental motifs you're currently painting. It sounds rather fun."
Matthew felt agreeably flattered. "Yes, it's certainly a new direction in
my art, as in my sculpture too," he averred.
"You're also a sculptor?"
"Well yes, at least to some
extent. I mean, I'm first and foremost a
painter and only secondarily a sculptor, so to speak. But I enjoy the one as much as the
other." Which
wasn't quite true, though he could hardly elaborate on his reasons for
preferring painting to sculpture at the moment.
"What sort of things do you
sculpt?" Mrs Evans wanted to know.
"Well, quite a
number of things actually. Doves, for instance.
Symbols, one might say, of the post-Christian religious impulse."
"Not copulating
doves, by any chance?"
"Er,
no. Not like the ones favoured by
Jacob Epstein, and not particularly like Barbara Hepworth's,
either. Exclusively
single doves with outstretched wings, like they were gliding through the air. Spiritual doves rather than
simply sensual ones."
"And how big are they?" Mrs Evans
asked.
"Oh, about life-size, which is to say,
quite small," Matthew informed her matter-of-factly. "But I occasionally vary the scale,
sometimes making them as large as a football, sometimes reducing them to
approximately the size of a cricket ball.
The smallest ones are the hardest to do, but they provide me with a
fresh challenge, which is basically why I do them."
Mrs Evans smiled admiringly. "And what else do you do?" she
pressed him.
"Oh, figures meditating, seated
cross-legged on a small pedestal or cushion, as in my paintings," he
revealed, blushing slightly. "There
are only a few of those at present, but they signify a development which I
intend to expand on over the course of time, provided they meet with public
approval. Otherwise I shall be stuck
with an unmarketable product. However,
all this is a comparatively recent development, not at all typical of my
sculpture in general, which, in any case, tends to be less representational, as
befitting the age."
"You mean, it's
abstract?" Mrs Evans conjectured.
"Essentially biomorphic, like the
sculptures of Henry Moore and Jean Arp, two of my
principal influences," Matthew declared, smiling. "Like Arp, I
generally tend to work to a small scale, using marble or lignum vitae. Yet, unlike him, I don't quite possess the
talent for naming works with such poetic skill or imagination! His titles are really quite surreal, you know,
usually having no apparent bearing on the nature of the work itself, which, in
any case, is pretty nondescript.
Besides, he's such a great sculptor - as, of course, is Henry Moore, who
is really the sculptor of our time."
"Really?" responded Mrs Evans
excitedly. "I'm afraid I know very
little about either of them, though I've seen photographic reproductions of one
or two of
"Simply because it's relevant to the
age," Matthew replied at once.
"We've gone beyond the merely representational, the truth-to-nature
school, as one might term the more traditional sculptors. Admittedly, there are exceptions - sculptors,
for instance, like Jacob Epstein and David Wynne, who are generally more
traditional in their approach to sculpture, more given to representations of
one sort or another. But sculptors like
Moore and Arp are, on the whole, more representative
of the times. Indeed, even they are
being surpassed now, since they pertain to a generation whose approach to
sculpture was less transcendent than the leading sculptors of my generation,
like Phillip King and Bruce Beasley, who, naturally enough, have taken
sculpture one stage further in its evolution."
"In what way?"
Mrs Evans queried.
"Well, it's not easy to say in a few
words," Matthew confessed, frowning gently, for the reverse of a critic
like Mr Evans was not particularly easy to accommodate either, "but,
fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that they've dispensed with such
natural materials as marble, stone, and wood, and constructed lightweight
sculpture out of synthetic materials, like plastic, fibreglass, plexiglas, and acrylic, which tend to make their works
transcendentally superior to those of their predecessors. Superior on account of the fact that they're
made from synthetic materials and also because they're less heavy, less solid -
altogether more lightweight in appearance.
They often have an effect of expanding space and dissolving or
disintegrating matter, making careful use of light and transparency, perspective
and positioning. For instance, Dan Flavin has constructed sculpture from fluorescent tubes,
which aptly illustrates what I mean by the more transcendental nature of
contemporary sculpture. At times it
tends to merge with Kinetic Art, and it can be difficult to tell them apart -
Kinetics sometimes making use of light, as in the work of Takis."
"I'm afraid you're going way above my
head," Mrs Evans protested, offering him a revealingly bewildered facial
expression. "I've never even heard
of such sculpture, never mind seen it!
Yet what especially puzzles me is why the transcendental? Why the use of synthetic
materials?"
Matthew had to smile slightly. It was always the same with average
people. Why this, why that, why not
something else? And, just as often, why
not something better? In Mrs Evans' case
it was evident that her ignorance was partly a consequence of her husband's
hostility to such things, since an investigation of modern art and sculpture
wouldn't have been encouraged or tolerated by the philistine in question. And, of course, some of his prejudices had
rubbed off onto her in any case, making her almost as suspicious as him of
contemporary trends. She was, after all,
a bourgeois, even if a very attractive and relatively pleasant one. Yet the question she had raised was begging
for an answer.
"Well, it just so happens that, being
a comparatively recent development, synthetic materials haven't been used in
this context before," Matthew obligingly informed her. "Now as the genuine artist is always
ready to avail himself of new procedures, indeed is
virtually compelled to, it follows that the use of synthetics appeals to
him. However, one could also claim that
the tendency towards enhanced artificiality is a consequence of modern man's environmental
severance from nature, and is accordingly justified on that account. We live at such a remove from the country -
and consequently from its influence - in our great cities, that it becomes
increasingly difficult for us to relate to natural patterns and correspondingly
unattractive. Hence
the rise of non-representational art this century, with the use of synthetic
rather than natural materials. We
wish to achieve a victory over nature, and the more our cities evolve and the
more civilized we become, the greater, by a corresponding degree, is the
magnitude of that victory. You see, the
city itself is essentially a victory over nature, a something apart from and in
opposition to it, and everyone who lives in the city partakes of and, sooner or
later, relates to that victory. At one
time, in the far-off days of our earliest civilizations, we were dominated by
nature, under the sway of sensuous phenomena to an extent which made us very
little different from the beasts. But,
fortunately, we continued to pit ourselves against it, to assert the uniquely
human world over the impersonal and often hostile natural one, and gradually we
got the better of it, evolved to where we are today - participators in an
advanced civilization, anti-natural and/or transcendental men. Needless to say, most of this has come about
within the past 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution and the consequent
expansion of our towns and cities to their current gigantic scales."
"I think it's all evil," Mrs
Evans opined, a gentle though earnest frown of disapproval on her brow. "All this severance from nature which
urban life seems to signify, it isn't good."
"That's where I believe you're
wrong," Matthew retorted, if in a relatively gentle way. "It isn't as bad as might at first
appear." Yet he was conscious,
once more, that he was speaking to a female bourgeois, a bourgeoise,
not to a proletarian, and that his words were consequently wasted on her. For the bourgeoisie, he had little need to
remind himself, were ever a compromise between nature and civilization, the
sensual and the spiritual, and accordingly they had little taste for the big
city, which, in both its extensive and intensive artificiality, constituted a
threat to their integrity - indeed, a refutation of their very existence. The bourgeoisie could only tolerate life in
the big city provided they had a country or suburban house to return
home to in the evenings, after their office work was over and done with for
another day. They were constitutionally
able to manage this kind of compromise, and the bigger the city professional
commitments obliged them to frequent, the more they
preferred a correspondingly extreme rural retreat. Oscillating between essentially proletarian
and aristocratic environments, they retained their class integrity and were
relatively content.
Yet they would have been still more content
if, as in Thomas Evans' case, business could have been conducted in a
medium-sized town and it wasn't therefore necessary to oscillate between radical
extremes - his house being situated in a pleasantly residential section of town
and affording him a welcome relief from its busy main streets. For the bourgeois was traditionally a man of
the town rather than the city, and although he could cope with the latter in
small doses, i.e. for the duration of his working day, he felt much more
at-home between the closer-to-nature walls of the town than in the large-scale
artificial environments of the city.
Having both nature and civilization within easy reach was, after all,
more reassuring for a dualistic mentality than being isolated or threatened
with isolation in one or the other. To a
bourgeois, extremes were equally fatal.
Not to be countenanced! And, as
Matthew Pearce had been reminded, Mrs Evans couldn't possibly countenance
them. She saw advanced civilization as
evil - like D.H. Lawrence, who, in this respect, was fundamentally a bourgeois,
despite his partly proletarian origins.
And there was nothing that Matthew could do or say to convince her otherwise. No use telling her that the artificial
environment was a passport to the post-human millennium, to the ultimate
victory of the spirit. The post-human
millennium wasn't something to which a bourgeois could relate. In the journey of man from the beastly to the
godly, the bourgeois could go no further than two-thirds of the way up the
ladder of human evolution, having a life-span, so to speak, that lasted
throughout the time when the ego was in its twilight prime. Beyond that, he would cease to be a bourgeois
- indeed, cease to live. No wonder the
prospect of a post-human millennium met with no
sympathy or encouragement on his part!
It was a refutation of him!
"And do you also sculpt in or with the
aid of synthetic materials?" Mrs Evans tentatively inquired of Matthew, as
though the possibility that he did so was a kind of evil to be held against
him.
"Naturally," the 'sculptor'
replied, somewhat paradoxically.
"After all, I'm a member of the younger generation of artists, and
so I should be contemporary. There isn't
much point in trying to emulate Moore or Arp now, if
you see what I mean. As an artist, one
should be a sort of spiritual antenna of the race, no matter in what medium one
happens to work. For
if you write or paint or sculpt or compose in a style that's outmoded, you're
either a reactionary or a dilettante, and therefore not strictly necessary. In fact, you're more than likely to be a
curse, assuming, of course, that you're given an opportunity to advertise
yourself. So you've got to be up-to-date
if you hope to achieve anything worthwhile, and one of the best ways - if not
the only way - of assuring that you are up-to-date
is to live in the big city and thus relate to the foremost spiritual thrust of
the age. You can't reflect late
twentieth-century civilization if you spend most of your time in a
village."
"No, I suppose not," Mrs Evans
conceded begrudgingly. "One would
simply relate to the surrounding environment."
"Precisely!"
Matthew confirmed. "So if you're to
become a bona fide artist, you've got to relate to an advanced
environment, it's as simple as that! And
if, having once related to it, you subsequently abandon it for something lower,
like, say, a small town, the chances are that you'll gradually come to relate more
to the spirit of the town and consequently cease being an advanced artist. You might well end-up an unenlightened
dilettante, consciously or unconsciously praising the shit out of nature and
bourgeois values generally."
It wasn't too difficult for Matthew to see
that Mrs Evans had been slightly wounded by this, though she did her best to
conceal the fact by distancing herself from the latter part of his previous
remark. But, as usual, he couldn't
resist the temptation to be true to himself and speak his mind. If the bourgeoise
in her had been offended, it was just too damn bad! He had no intention of betraying his
allegiance to something higher on account of her! After all, people who did that remained
victims of the status quo and not potential or actual victors over it.
"And do you have these, er, advanced works in your
"Yes, at least to see such of them as
I haven't already sold," Matthew answered, somewhat surprised by the
nature of her second question. "Why
do you ask?"
"Simply because I'll be in
Matthew was indeed surprised. "Well, please take the
opportunity," he responded, a shade nervously under pressure of the regret
that was now pervading his soul, like a dark cloud, for having mentioned the
stuff in the first place. "I'll be
at hand most of next week, so you can come whenever you like."
"Thanks," Mrs Evans responded
with alacrity. "I look forward to
seeing them," she added, principally alluding to his sculptures, though
also unconsciously including his paintings.
There was a pause, before she continued: "It will probably be on
the Wednesday. It's in the Highgate area
of north
"Yes," confirmed Matthew, who
then verbally supplied her with the address of his studio.
"Right," said Mrs Evans, making a
mental note of it. "I shouldn't
have any trouble finding my way there.
I'll get a taxi up from the
Mrs Evans' blunt frankness had the effect
of making Matthew blush slightly.
"I don't normally see Gwen during the day in any case, because I
have my work to do," he assured her.
"She stays in her
"Yes, I'm sure she has," Mrs
Evans agreed, with what seemed to Matthew like a small sigh of relief. Then, turning her attention in the direction
of the house, she exclaimed: "Ah, here comes Gwendolyn now! My word, that was quite a long phone
conversation, wasn't it?"
"Just under twenty-five minutes,"
the artist estimated, consulting his digital watch.
Gwen arrived back fairly flushed. "Sorry to have deserted you for so long,
Matt," she said in a lightly apologetic tone-of-voice, "but I haven't
heard anything from Linda for a few weeks because she's been unwell, so I felt
it incumbent on me, as her colleague, to chat her up a bit."
"No problem," he assured her,
smiling thinly. "Your mother has
kept me company." Which was, to be sure, obvious enough.
"Well, I'd better leave the pair of
you to your private devices again, assuming, of course, you want to stay out
here," Mrs Evans remarked, getting up from the deck-chair on her
daughter's return. She looked at both of
them with searching eyes.
"For a little longer, I suppose,"
said Gwen. "Provided
you're not bored with it, Matt."
"No, not particularly," the
latter responded. "While the sun's
still up, we may as well continue to take heathen advantage of its
vitamin-shedding warmth a while longer."
"Yes, I guess so," Gwen
agreed. And with that, she sat down and
closed her eyes upon her mother's retreating form.
CHAPTER FOUR
Linda
Daniels gently replaced the telephone receiver and returned to the company of
her husband, who was sitting in the adjoining room. He was bent over the pages of a political
novel and briefly looked up at the approach of the medium-built, dark-skinned
young woman who happened to be his second wife.
She tentatively smiled through closed lips and sat down opposite him in
her customary armchair. He was anxious
to learn what she had been discussing all this time with Gwen.
"Principally her latest
boyfriend," she declared, with an ironic chuckle which momentarily exposed
her brilliant white teeth.
"Oh?" Peter Daniels was instantly intrigued. "I didn't realize she had a new
one."
"Well, she still sees Mark Taber on
occasion, but apparently not with any real enthusiasm. And she doesn't seem to be all that keen on
her latest boyfriend either, if what she told me about him is anything to judge
by."
"How did she meet him?" Peter
asked.
"Apparently quite by accident outside
Kenwood House in north
"Four years?" Peter looked as astounded as he sounded.
"Yes, but since she was deeply engaged
in an affair at the time, she didn't give him much satisfaction," Linda
declared. "In fact, she was waiting
for her then-current boyfriend to meet her there, later that same afternoon. But then this guy, Matthew Pearce, suddenly
appeared out-of-the-blue and started chatting her
up."
"How curious!"
Peter opined, putting his book to one side and then leaning back in his
capacious armchair. "And didn't she
like him?"
"Well, she liked him enough to give
him her address, and not only that, but her parents' one too," said
Linda. 'As she'd been obliged to spend
the best part of the afternoon by herself, just casually watching people passing
to-and-fro from a bench outside Kenwood House, she wasn't averse to a little
conversation with this fairly handsome stranger, who seemed to have taken a
distinct fancy to her. She even
accompanied him back to his nearby bedsitter, where
she gave him the aforementioned addresses and I don't know what else
besides. But she got away from him in
good time anyway, evidently by telling him that she had a rendezvous with some
friends, which was partly the case. And
so nothing more was heard of this Matthew guy until he wrote to her parents'
address last month and invited her to meet him, which, curiously enough, she
decided to do, if only because her relationship with Mark had become such a
bore and she was accordingly anxious to expand her romantic horizons a
bit. She felt that Matthew, being an artist,
would be more interesting or, at any rate, less boring. The fact that he also lived in
"But what-on-earth induced him to
write to her after four bloody years!" Peter exclaimed. "I mean, surely he ought to have
forgotten about her by then, considering they hadn't had very much to do with
each other in any case?"
"Yes, so one would imagine,"
Linda agreed. "But you know what
artists can be like. Evidently he's a
little cracked. Either that, or he must
have been extremely hard-up and desperate enough to try anything, even
contacting someone he hadn't seen in years who was basically a stranger to him
at the time. Perhaps, on the other hand,
their brief meeting outside Kenwood House, that day, and subsequent affair made
a stronger impression on him than either we or Gwen could understand."
"Well, it certainly seems strange to
me," Peter confessed, smiling wryly.
"Be that as it may, this Matthew
Pearce isn't quite as interesting as she had hoped," Linda rejoined,
"and principally because he's too serious-minded and so involved with his
art as not to be particularly interested in her as a person. Or so it appears on the surface. For she's now under the
impression that he's somehow disappointed in her and unable, in consequence, to
take her seriously."
Patently puzzled, Peter Daniels asked:
"Disappointed in what way?"
"She doesn't quite know, though she
has a feeling it's because she isn't sufficiently on his progressive wavelength
and may not be as sexually attractive to him as he'd remembered."
Peter Daniels chuckled sarcastically. "One wonders what he could have
remembered after four frigging years!" he remarked. "If the poor fellow's disappointed in her,
it serves him bloody-well right for taking such a gamble. You wouldn't catch me inviting a woman I
hadn't seen in years to meet me for a date or whatever. No way!"
"Yes, well, we're all different,"
Linda smilingly assured him. "And
different we'll doubtless remain."
"Humph! What it really boils down to is that some
people are less sane than others," Peter bluntly declared.
Linda had to laugh. "One of your notorious
over-simplifications," she averred.
"But, seriously, Gwen seems rather upset by the fact of Matthew's
apparent disappointment in her, despite her secret disapproval of his
serious-mindedness. After all, if he
severs connections with her she'll be back to square-one again, back to
occasional visits from Mark and the desire to find someone else. Not that he has shown any immediate desire to
break with her. But she isn't altogether
confident that he won't do so before long.
And she's afraid that her parents haven't made the best of impressions
on him either, especially her father, who apparently started questioning and
arguing with the poor guy almost from the moment he first clapped eyes on
him! Jealousy at first sight would
appear to be the explanation of it."
"Why did she have to invite him to
meet them anyway?" Peter remarked.
"I mean, it wasn't strictly necessary to drag him all the way up to
"No, but I suppose she thought he
might think better of her if she showed him where her parents lived and how
respectable they were," Linda conjectured.
"Make him feel he was associating with the well-to-do, or something
of the kind. You know how snobbish she
can be like that, eager to prove she comes from a solidly middle-class
background and all that. Funny really,
but I suspect it's a result of some kind of inferiority complex she suffers
from, especially where the artistically and/or intellectually perspicacious are
concerned. Yet it appears that her
method of ingratiation in this regard hasn't quite paid off. For Matthew seems not to like the place,
never mind her father. He hasn't said as
much, but she feels that he has somehow clammed-up on her, withdrawn into himself and left her stranded on the beach of his receding
interest. Rather than impressing him,
his visit to their place seems rather to have depressed him."
There then ensued a short reflective
silence on Peter's part before he commented: "So that was the gist of her
conversation, was it?"
"Yes, more or less," Linda
confirmed, nodding. "Not a
particularly inspiring one, to say the least!
But since I phoned her, I suppose I've only got myself to blame. Anyway, I was interested to find out how she
was getting on and what she was doing, not having spoken to her for so
long."
"You'd have found out soon enough
anyway, had you waited for the new school term to start before talking to
her," Peter averred. "I'm sure
she'll tell you all about her problems in more depth when you return to the
teaching grind again."
"I dare say so," Linda agreed,
slightly offended by her husband's lack of sympathy for Gwen. "But that's another week away, and, in
the meantime, we've been invited over to her flat to meet Matthew."
"Oh?
On which day?" Peter wanted to know,
turning defensive.
"Either the Thursday or Friday of next
week, depending on his availability," Linda explained. "She said she'd phone me on Tuesday to
finalize it. For she
didn't have Matthew to-hand when I spoke to her and could only give me a
provisional date in consequence.
Had I not been ill, these past three weeks, she said she'd have invited
us over to meet him before going up to
"I entirely agree!" said Peter
gruffly. "Though
it might have more significance for Gwen."
"Yes, I incline to think so too,"
Linda chuckled, "especially in view of her current romantic insecurity and
incertitude. For she
seems to imagine that we'll get along well with him - me in particular."
"Not too far along, I hope,"
Peter snorted, throwing back his head in a posture of feigned reproach. "Though if he's an
artist, and a so-called progressive one at that, you ought to have something in
common, since modern art is one of your specialities."
"Was one of my specialities."
"Still is, so far as I'm
concerned. At least you still paint from
time to time, don't you?"
"Only when I can do
so without running the risk of offending you with the nature of my canvases or
the smell of my paints."
"Oh, come now! I'm not as prohibitive as all that! You needn't wait until my back's turned
before dabbling in paint. I'm not a
bloody schoolmaster, you know. Nor a gaoler."
"No.
But you aren't exactly a champion of modern art, either. You don't like to see me indulging in
activities you personally take umbrage at."
Peter Daniels emitted a heartfelt
sigh. "Well, of course, I'd much
rather you did something I could relate to, like, for instance,
photography," he asserted. "Yes, why not?
Since we live together we should do our level best to get on together,
to refrain from doing things that will cause a rift to come between us. Now since you're my wife ..."
"I should presumably do my utmost to
kow-tow to your desires!" Linda interpolated with sarcastic relish,
finishing off what she assumed to be the gist of his statement.
"Well, that's putting it rather
crudely," Peter objected, blushing in the process. "But you might at least do what you can
to prevent unnecessary friction. I mean,
it's too vulgar, too demeaning. My first
marriage was ruined by it, and I have no desire to encourage a repeat
performance in my second one. All I ask
of you is to back me up in my professional endeavours, to offer me support in
my struggle against the decadent and feeble, the world-weary and anarchic - in
short, the enemies of Western civilization! And to do that you've got
to refrain from behaving like an enemy of it yourself."
"But do you seriously believe that my
paintings turn me into an enemy of Western civilization?" Linda ejaculated
on a wave of intensely sceptical incredulity.
"Some of them do," Peter
averred. "I mean, they're such a
mess, dear. They're a species of
anti-art, not art. One gets the
impression that you simply throw paint onto the canvas without caring
where-the-hell it lands. Now I know
you're not a professional artist. But,
damn it all, why waste time behaving as though you didn't care a jot about the
rules of composition and were only interested in making a pitiful mess!"
"But what are the rules
of composition?" Linda angrily protested, losing patience with her
husband's conservatism. "After all,
there's no one eternal set of sacrosanct rules, you know!"
Becoming angry, as though by contagion,
with his wife's intractability, Peter Daniels sternly countered: "Of
course there is! As far as Western
civilization is concerned, there's a set of rules that apply to painting
techniques whatever the generation one happens to belong to."
"You're talking absolute rubbish and
you know it!" Linda retorted no less sternly.
"Damn you, woman, how can you be so
bloody thick? I mean, if you don't keep
to the rules, you can only frigging-well break
them."
"On the contrary, you can only change
them," Linda asseverated defiantly.
"They're not something static, you know. There's continuous evolution. The rules you allude to - and I'm far from
sure which ones you have in mind - were evolved from something earlier and have
duly been superseded by rules more pertinent to the present."
"Rules?" snorted Peter
incredulously. "I can hardly
believe the efforts of most contemporary painters are governed by them!"
"Well, they are!" Linda
declared. "And
usually by pretty stringent ones, too!
But let's not waste our time arguing like this, Pete. It doesn't exactly contribute towards the
harmonious relationship you're always talking about."
"'Unnecessary friction' was the phrase
I used," he reminded her, calming down a bit, "and this is something
I regard as a certain amount of necessary friction,
if only to impress upon you the importance of avoiding the unnecessary."
"You're becoming quite
irrational," Linda objected, automatically succumbing to a degree of
forced amusement at his expense.
"Your distinction between the one and the other becomes
increasingly arbitrary." She stared
at him in light-hearted bewilderment a moment, then
continued: "Anyway, getting back to the subject of Gwen, I assured her
that we'd be available to meet Matthew on whichever evening she specified. So it's up to her to confirm a date."
"Humph! I wish you hadn't done
anything of the kind, since I probably won't get on with him," Peter
sullenly rejoined. "If he's
avant-garde, he'll probably be too anarchic for my tastes - assuming the word
'avant-garde' implies what I imagine it to."
"Well, she did say he was into
minimalist and transcendentalist art, but she wouldn't enlarge on it, even when
I pressed her," Linda revealed.
"Apparently, she isn't particularly keen on the subject."
"Then I can't see that I shall be
either, considering our tastes are pretty close," said Peter,
frowning. "Like me, she shies away
from most of the modern stuff."
"Yes, but it's rather unlikely that
we'll be confronted by his work at Gwen's place, isn't it?" Linda
remarked. "After all, it's not his
studio we'll be going to, so there's a fairly good chance you won't have to
take offence at his work. Provided you
don't inquire too deeply into it and refrain from attacking modern art, we
might get along quite pleasantly with him."
"Bah, I shouldn't wish to get along
with an ideological enemy!" exclaimed Peter Daniels in a tone of obdurate
defiance that always suggested to Linda a degree of arrested development in her
husband. "If I don't find out what
kind of art he does, I shan't know how to treat him. I mean, I'll have to probe him to some
extent, if only to get him into perspective.
And if he transpires to being as radical as I assume, from Gwen's
attitude, that he is, then I'll have no option but to tell the bugger what I
think of him and his kind and, if necessary, bloody-well send him to
"Really, Pete, you take yourself far
too seriously!" Linda chided him.
"It's essentially my cause that I take
seriously, my dear, not myself!" her husband reminded her. "The cause of Western civilization and
all it represents. How can one not be
serious where the life or death of that is
concerned? How can one allow it to
crumble to bits right before one's very eyes?
No, there are some of us who are too lucid to sit back and allow the
destroyers of civilization to have their barbarous way. We have to fight them, impede their
degenerate activities as much as possible.
Else all will be lost. The
libertarian trash will overrun us and we shall all perish. Don't you believe me?"
"I try to, darling, but sometimes I
think you indulge in hyperbole, exaggerating your Spenglerian
pessimism to a point where you're virtually fascist," Linda caustically
opined.
"Fascist?" echoed Peter Daniels
in a tone of outraged innocence. "No, not that! Simply conservative."
"Maybe." And not for the first time an overwhelming
sadness descended upon Linda Daniels at the realization of the fundamental and
seemingly ineradicable incompatibility which existed
between them. She wished, at this
moment, that she had never married the man in the first place, never been
gulled by his good looks and considerable wealth into taking him for a
lover. At the time, some ten months ago,
she hadn't known him long enough to be able to form a clear impression of what
he was like, nor had she been confronted by his conservative views to any
appreciable extent and, consequently, had no way of really comparing herself
with him. Now, however, she was in
possession of all the information she needed to disillusion herself with their
relationship, and she felt terribly humiliated by it. Her efforts to align herself with his beliefs
were proving too much for her, and transpired to being a source of
self-betrayal with which she was becoming increasingly dissatisfied. Sooner or later a split would have to come, if
not in her own life, then certainly with him.
It was impossible to carry-on deceiving both him and herself
indefinitely. Impossible and, what's
more, morally indefensible!
CHAPTER FIVE
Wednesday
afternoon came all too quickly and Matthew Pearce was resigned to awaiting the
arrival of Mrs Evans at his Highgate studio to see ('view' would hardly be the
appropriate word in her case) the works, finished or unfinished, which he kept
there. In all, there were at least
thirty canvases and twenty pieces of sculpture to-hand, as well as an
indefinite number of drawings and a few engravings.
Indeed, now that he had cleaned and tidied
the studio up a bit, brought some of his old canvases out of hiding and hidden
some of his new ones away, it seemed to Matthew that it was not so much a
studio as an art gallery in which he was standing, even though there was still
sufficient evidence of his painting utensils and a pervasive smell of stale
paint about the fairly large ground-floor premises which left one in no doubt
as to its actual purpose!
However, the rearrangements which he had
seen fit to make, earlier that day, were not without some justification, in
view of the customary anarchic state of his studio - a thing which Mrs Evans,
with her provincial tidiness, would hardly have welcomed! Recalling the poor impression it had made on
Gwen, a week or so previously, he thought he might as well do what he could to
save her mother from such a fate. After
all, if she was prepared to travel down from Northampton via the West End, she
might as well be provided with something decent to look at, be given an
opportunity to learn something about contemporary art in relatively congenial
surroundings, assuming, of course, that she was really interested in doing so -
an assumption which, Matthew had to admit to himself, was by no means
guaranteed!
For it had occurred to him more than once
during the past couple of days, and even before he arrived back from
Northampton on the Monday, that Mrs Evans might well have an ulterior motive
for visiting him which was less concerned with his art than with himself as a
potential or actual lover. After all,
she had certainly done her best, over the weekend, to make a favourable
impression on him, and, despite his distaste for her provincialism and
comparative ignorance of modern art, she hadn't entirely been without some
success in that respect. She was
unquestionably a very attractive woman, superior to her daughter in some ways,
and not simply because she was older or more sexually mature. One also had to take account of the fact that
she was better-proportioned, which is to say altogether more fleshy and buxom
without being flabby or fat.
Such, at any rate, was how she seemed to
Matthew, who had taken a certain low-key interest in her physical person,
despite the ten-year age gap between them.
And he was mindful, moreover, of what Gwen had told him about her
parents' growing estrangement from each other, the fact of her father's
ill-health having an adverse effect on their marriage. Was it stretching the imagination too far,
therefore, to deduce from this the existence in Deirdre Evans of a degree of
sexual frustration which resulted from her husband's inability to satisfy her
any longer and consequently sought release elsewhere? No, he didn't think so; though he wasn't
prepared to jump to any over-confident conclusions either.
Besides, he wasn't sure he liked Gwen's
mother enough as a person to risk succumbing to carnal intimacies with her,
even if what he supposed was true and she was only too willing, in consequence,
to throw herself into the arms of the first able-bodied man who presented
himself as a suitable replacement for her ailing and, in may ways, distinctly
irascible husband, whether or not the two were connected. Wasn't she a bourgeois, a member of a class
which, with his artist's independence and self-determination, Matthew
instinctively despised? Yes, all too
palpably! Yet, there again, so was her
husband who, if his lifestyle and opinions were anything to judge by, was even
more bourgeois than herself, and consequently all the more despicable from an
artist's standpoint.
Would it not be a kind of revenge,
therefore, to 'have' Mr Evans' wife behind his back, more satisfying even than
'having' his daughter? There was indeed
a vague possibility that it would be, though deep down Matthew wasn't
particularly impressed by the idea, which seemed of him somehow too mean and
underhand. Better to 'have' her simply
because she appealed to him and genuinely desired to be 'had', rather than from
a desire for cold-blooded revenge. But
that would depend on what happened when Mrs Evans arrived, how they got on
together, what she said to him, and so on.
He had no intention of raping the woman just because she might happen,
in due course, to be available and at his mercy. If she kept him at a distance and only
desired to see his art, well and good!
He had no intentions of forcing anything upon her, least of all himself.
It was almost
"My, so this is it!" she
exclaimed, as they stepped across the threshold.
Matthew felt under no obligation to answer,
so he simply closed the door behind her and, disdaining ceremony, walked slowly
across to the nearest canvas - a large white one with the outlines of a seated
figure painted in black. It was one of
his meditation illustrations.
Mrs Evans automatically followed him across
the intervening space and stood beside him to contemplate it. She smelt strongly of patchouli, as before,
and wore eye shadow and face powder.
There was more than a hint of bright red lipstick about her mouth. Her fine dark-brown hair, framed by two large
turquoise earrings, was tied-up in a thick plait at the back of her head. Her nape, pale and slender, bore evidence of
a thin gold chain that obviously formed part of a personal necklace. Her arms were bare but for a gold
bracelet. "So this is one of your
Western meditators, I take it?" she commented,
after a short inspection of the canvas.
"In a kind of minimalist
technique," he confirmed. "Just the bare outlines."
"Hmm, I quite like it actually,"
Mrs Evans admitted.
He felt strangely nervous with the woman
standing so close to him, and also slightly unsure of how best to conduct
proceedings. He reckoned he ought to
have offered her a seat before drawing attention to this painting, asked how
her cousin was and what the baby was like, whether it was a boy or a girl, etc. But partly through nervousness, and partly
because of the nature of some of his previous reflections, he had felt
strangely inhibited before her and curiously shy, as though afraid to appear
guilty of more than met the eye. The
painting in question served as a kind of support for his verbal impotence at
this moment, but only for a short while.
For already the woman was showing signs of impatience with it and
turning her head in the direction of some of the others. He would have to act. "Well, would you like a cup of tea or
something else to drink prior to your cultural sightseeing, as it were, or
would you prefer me to show you around the, er,
studio now?" He was aware that he
sounded false to himself and still more than a little nervous.
"I think you'd better show me round
first and give me a cup of tea afterwards," she replied without
hesitation. "I really ought to earn
it."
"Yes, I suppose you ought," he
half-humorously agreed, cackling understandingly, and immediately led her past
a couple of similar cross-legged meditating figures to a small canvas on which
a brightly painted white dove appeared to be flying in a silvery-blue sky, as though in a halo of mystical
transcendence.
"Ah, so this is your propaganda of the
Holy Ghost!" Mrs Evans deduced, recalling what he had told her husband on
the subject over the weekend. "My,
it's really quite beautiful!"
Beauty hadn't been Matthew's intention, but
he graciously thanked her for the compliment all the same, which was only to be
expected from somebody who had only a conventional notion of the meaning and
purpose of art. "This is one of my
more successful versions ... unlike the one to its right, which is a shade too
animated," he went on. "The
objective of transcendent tranquillity in optimum truth hasn't quite been
achieved there, owing to the fact that the dove appears to be flapping its
wings rather than just gliding or hovering."
"I can't honestly see any great
difference," she confessed, going up to the second version and scrutinizing
it close-up. "Unless
you're alluding to the higher angle of the wings and to the forward position of
its head in relation to the neck."
"Partly that, but partly also to the
size of the wings, which are a shade too short, too contracted, it might seem,
with the muscular effort of flying," Matthew informed her, unable to
suppress another cackle which was partly a result of the good lady's powers of
observation.
Already Mrs Evans had grown tired of doves
and slight variations in their physical deportment and was heading, to her
host's horrified surprise, in the direction of the next related theme - one
that took the form of an intensely pure globe of silver paint at the centre of
a predominantly gold surround, which could be said to serve as a transcendent
halo for the self-contained globe.
Matthew thought she would remember what this type of painting was
supposed to signify, but she hadn't. Or,
at least, she appeared not to have done.
"This is a more abstract painterly
interpretation of the millennial Beyond," he crisply informed her, as they
came to a sudden halt in front of the work, Matthew fairly proud of his
achievement, Mrs Evans somewhat puzzled and even dazzled by it. "Another symbol of ultimate reality,
universal consciousness, or whatever you prefer to call that which pertains to
pure superconsciousness - the spiritual focus of
transcendental man." He could tell
she was quite impressed by the concept, if still somewhat puzzled. She stared intently at the painting's mystical
cynosure for some time, as though looking for a clue as to the nature of
ultimate reality, but made no constructive comment, evidently because it wasn't
something to which she could properly relate.
There were one or two other equally
puzzling versions of the theme in question to pass before they arrived at the
next variation on a transcendental theme - a medium-sized canvas painted
silver. To Mrs Evans it came as
something of a let-down after the globular one, a thing to be slightly
irritated about. "And what,
exactly, does this signify?" she asked in a faintly condescending
tone-of-voice.
"It's one of my rare experiments in
spatial reality," he calmly replied.
"After the manner of the late Yvres
Klein, who painted monochromes with a view to creating real space, in which the
viewer becomes mystically and optically immersed rather than simply passively curious. It isn't a
form of abstraction so much as a delineation of space. Hence in this kind of work one is a spatial
realist."
"Really?"
Mrs Evans responded half-sceptically, the hint of a smirk upon her luscious
lips. For it wasn't a work she was
prepared to take seriously. To her,
space was exclusively of the air and sky, not something one could immerse
oneself in on a canvas! She didn't much
care for the idea of looking too intently at a bright silver monochrome, nor,
for that matter, at the gold and pale-blue ones beside it. There wasn't much there to look at, after
all.
Sensing her impatience, Matthew drew the
woman in the direction of his sculpture, some of which he knew she would
appreciate, if only because, in taking the forms of doves and meditating
figures, it was largely representational.
He didn't think it expedient to impose the plexiglas
and acrylic biomorphic sculptures inspired by the more transcendental
sculptors, like Gabo and Beasley, upon her at this
point, so led the way, instead, to his overtly religious works, which stood
together on a small table to the right of his paintings. Mrs Evans seemed decidedly pleased at the
sight of them all.
"So these are you sculptured
doves!" she exclaimed, automatically picking up the nearest one to-hand
and gently stroking its smooth back.
"I'd quite forgotten about them, actually." She suddenly became self-conscious of her
action and blushed slightly. "I do
hope you don't mind my picking it up," she apologized, fearing that he
would be offended.
"Not at all," he assured
her. "They ought to bear being
stroked, considering that sculpture is fundamentally a tactile art."
She smiled her appreciation of this
esoteric fact and turned the small dove over and over in her hands, looking at
it from a variety of angles.
"That one, as you doubtless realize,
happens to be in marble," he remarked.
"But I've also done one in lignum vitae ..." he
pointed it out "... and another in bronze ..." which he also pointed
out. "More recently, however, I've
constructed one out of nylon strings and a steel frame ..." again he
pointed to the relevant sculpture "... which, from a transcendental
viewpoint, I regard as my best work to-date." He was conscious, as he spoke, that he had
lost his initial nervousness and become almost overbearing in his eagerness to
inform her of his cultural achievements, to impress his creative significance
upon her. She was no longer someone to
be feared as a potential critic, but simply someone to instruct, enlighten, and
convert. Yet this consciousness,
momentarily intruding itself between the sight of his religious sculptures and
his comments on them, caused him to lose a little of his didactic absorption,
his self-confidence, and grow conscious of the figure standing beside him as a
woman again, and a very attractive and sweet-smelling one, to boot! However, he was not to be thrown off course
but continued: "Hopefully I shall be able to proceed to more transcendent
versions of the dove and, for that matter, the beatific meditators
in due course, making use of transparent plastic materials and possibly acrylic
to obtain the desired effect. At present
I'm not altogether satisfied with the use of marble, bronze, and wood, which
seem to me somewhat outdated. I need to
bring the symbol of the Holy Ghost more up-to-date, to spiritualize it as much
as possible. Else I'll be working at
cross-purposes, if you see what I mean."
"Yes, I think I do," Mrs Evans
assured him, returning the marble dove in her hand to its space beside the
others on the table. "At least I
recall what you told me in the garden of my house about it - in other words, of
the need to use synthetic materials in accordance with the artificial nature of
the contemporary urban environment."
"Precisely," Matthew agreed, not
a little surprised by the fact that she had in fact remembered all that,
despite the manifest paradox of the phrase 'artificial nature'. "It's a matter of responding to the
environment in which one lives in an appropriately relevant way. And the modern city inspires a degree of
transcendentalism quite unprecedented in the history of man. Whether one is talking of acrylic, biomorphics, punk rockers with green or blue hair, computer
dating, light shows, lasers, contraceptives, skyscrapers with more window-space
than concrete or metal infills, supersonic aircraft,
digital watches, or cassette recorders, it all comes down to the same thing -
namely, our growing severance from the sensual and greater predilection for the
spiritual, for the superconscious as opposed to the
subconscious. That's why our art, no
less than everything else these days, is generally what it is, and why an
ever-increasing number of us are more inclined to meditate than to pray."
"Presumably including you," Mrs
Evans commented, turning her attention away from the small sculptures of
meditating figures to the man beside her.
"Yes, from time to time," he
admitted, breaking into a mild blush at what appeared to be a gently mocking
look in her bright eyes. "Not that
I'm a fanatic. But I do find it pleasant
to indulge in when the mood takes me.
It's a form of relaxation, you know."
"Really?" Mrs Evans seemed interested. "And do you come face-to-face with the
Holy Spirit or whatever when you do it?" she asked.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking I
suppose one does," he replied.
"At least one gets into a state of mind in which peace,
tranquillity, stillness, even bliss predominate, and that seems to me very
heavenly. It brings one into contact
with the reality beyond appearances, beyond verbal concepts in the ego-bound
self, which mystics tend to equate with the Godhead. One gets out of one's shadow and into the
light. That's the important thing about
it, and that's essentially why one does it - to get away from the illusory and
strive to experience undiluted truth.
One tunes-in to one's superconscious mind and
is lifted above the petty worries and miseries of diurnal life. Lifted above the sway of
the subconscious to the realm of pure spirit. It's a pleasant experience, believe me, this wavelength of tranquillity and blessed
peace!"
"Well, seeing as you've intrigued me
about it, perhaps you'd be kind enough to give me a lesson," Mrs Evans proposed,
gently smiling. "If it's not a mode
of religious solemnity but a form of spiritual relaxation, I don't see why I
shouldn't give it a try. Unless, however, you've got better or more pressing things to
do?" She stared at him
half-curiously, half-mockingly.
Matthew Pearce was indeed surprised! This was the last thing he had expected her
to say! He didn't quite know how to
reply, never having been confronted with the prospect of teaching a woman to
meditate before - least of all in his studio!
It was rather unnerving. But
there were, after all, a couple of cushions on the floor not far from where he
stood, large puffy velvet-covered cushions which he habitually used when
meditating or just resting prior or subsequent to work. So there was no reason to suppose it wasn't
possible to utilize the studio for purposes of spiritual instruction. He had no real alternative, therefore, but to
consent to her proposal and teach or, at any rate,
make a stab at teaching her to meditate.
"And you say it's easy," Mrs
Evans murmured, as he led her across the intervening space to where the
cushions lay.
"Very," he affirmed, bending down
to arrange them in an acceptable manner, one in front of the other at a
distance of about three feet; though, in point of fact, he wasn't so confident
where she was concerned. Perhaps she
would be too egocentric?
She put her white handbag onto a table not
far from where they were now standing and then proceeded to survey the area in which
Matthew proposed to instruct her in meditation.
It was perfectly clean and brightly lit by a large window which gave on
to a neatly trimmed and secluded back-garden - all in all, quite a pleasant
prospect! The weather, fortunately, was
still unusually fine.
"Now, ideally, you should sit down
upon one of these cushions, like this, and cross your legs," he averred,
leading the way with an unselfconscious demonstration. "Though if, on account of your close-fitting
dress, you would prefer to kneel ..."
But Mrs Evans had already taken to her
cushion in a manner similar to Matthew and made an effort to cross her legs,
exposing, to his startled gaze, the greater part of her copious thighs, which
were not without a certain seductive potency.
Indeed, her dress had ridden so far up her legs, as she sat down, that
he could see more than a little of her nylon panties, which were pale pink,
about the area of her crotch. He was
unable to prevent himself from blushing a similar
colour at the sight of them!
"Perhaps I ought to remove my
dress," Mrs Evans suggested, realizing that its displacement had become
both a source of distraction for Matthew and not altogether comfortable for
herself. "It might be better if I
had a bit more physical freedom."
"Well, it isn't absolutely necessary
for you to sit cross-legged," he reminded her, blushing a shade
deeper. But before he could say anything
else she had got to her feet, turned her back on him, and started to unzip her
dress which, because of its tightness, she was obliged to ease to the floor,
revealing, to his astonished gaze, one of the most attractive figures the mind
of man could ever hope to rest upon - a figure in which rump and thighs
conspired to seduce the eye to a mouth-watering appreciation of the flesh. Then as she bent down to pick up her dress,
threw it in the direction of the nearby table, and bent down again to remove
her high heels, Matthew became so conscious of the curvaceous seductiveness of
the flesh in question ... that he could scarcely take his eyes off it,
especially since she was wearing but the skimpiest of briefs through which the
mound of her pubic bush was darkly visible.
He was almost drooling with incipient lust as she turned around to face
him again and, aided by a no-less skimpy brassiere, confronted him with frontal
charms the likes of which he hadn't seen in years.
"Sorry to have kept you waiting,"
she nonchalantly remarked, as she sat down in front of him in the rudiments of
a cross-legged position. "Now, what
do I do next?"
Matthew wasn't altogether sure. Or, rather, he was beginning to wonder
whether she could still be serious. But
he made an effort to pretend that he had been unaffected by her impromptu
striptease, and duly proceeded with a word of advice concerning the necessity
of emptying the mind of distracting thoughts.
"Just relax as much as possible and listen-in to such thoughts as
still occur to you without passing judgement on them, as though they weren't
really yours." He felt peculiarly
self-conscious with her sharp eyes directly focused upon him, drilling, it
seemed, into the depths of his mind. He
wondered if she was secretly mocking him now, what with that cool regard. Did he look more distracted than he
felt? Somewhat
embarrassed perhaps? He tried not
to dwell on the possibility. "Now
that you are aware of your thinking mind as a kind of separate entity," he
continued, ignoring his subjective insecurity as best he could, "you can
listen-in to your breathing as though that, too, came from outside you and
wasn't strictly dependent on your conscious control. Just let your breathing take care of
itself. Let it happen to
you." He felt even more
self-conscious under the resolute fixity of her stare, which seemed to indicate
a certain disappointment in him, an impatience with
the pedantic course of events. He wanted
to escape from it, to hide from her.
"And as you become aware of your breathing, er,
happening to you, you'll find that you can increase its flow, making it
gradually deeper with the inhalation, smoother and more precipitant with the
exhalation, allowing your breath to tumble out of you, so to speak, of its own
accord." His words were sounding
increasingly false and strained to him, especially as her posture was
insufficiently straight. In fact, it
appeared to have sagged slightly forwards, causing the upper halves of her
breasts to become more conspicuous than before.
A little further and she might have toppled over onto him, her eyes
still fixedly staring into his face, as though for a clue to the millennial Beyond.
Abandoning the relative physical comfort of
his cushion, he crawled over to a position immediately behind her, as much to
escape her Zen-like stare as to correct her posture, and advised her to
straighten up a little, placing a hand on her back to encourage such an
adjustment. He was made acutely aware,
in the process, of her perfume, which teased his nostrils and gave him a degree
of nasal pleasure he had rarely experienced from standard perfumes before. It seemed stronger and sweeter than anything
Gwen was in the habit of using.
"Now continue to breathe more consciously with the inhalation and
less consciously with the exhalation," he advised her, as soon as she had
responded to his previous advice, "using gradually deeper and deeper
breaths, in and out, in and out, in ... and ... out." He adjusted his position slightly and, as
though partly in response to his breathing instructions and partly in response
to the inviting proximity of her body, slid his hands under her arms and around
to the bulging contours of her breasts, cupping them in each hand and applying
a little extra pressure in accordance with the demands of the in-breaths,
relaxing his pressure with the out-breaths, so that the steady "in ... and
... out, in ... and ... out" of her breathing routine acquired physical
support. He realized, all too soon, that
her breathing was becoming progressively quicker as well as deeper, doubtless
due to his presence immediately behind her and the effect of his physical
assistance. It was also acquiring, in
response to the variable pressure of his hands upon her breasts, a certain
vocal accompaniment not ordinarily associated with meditation - a sighing and
moaning which suggested the onslaught of sensual abandon. He wondered whether he hadn't better draw
away from her before he got too physically involved. But, as though in anticipation of some such
retreat, Mrs Evans suddenly reached her hands back behind herself and unclipped
her bra, with the inevitable consequence that, following further promptings on
her part, it slid away from her breasts, leaving his hands stranded, as it
were, on the heaving mounds of naked flesh.
"In ... and ... out, in ... and ... out" he continued, growing
all the time more excited and sensuously committed to her physical beauty
himself.
Yet now that he felt the soft, smooth
surface of her naked breasts against his fingers, it was only a matter of time,
more precisely a few seconds, before they closed over her nipples and he
proceeded to caress them gently and slowly, backwards and forwards, to the
mounting accompaniment, now somewhat more uninhibited, of her sighings and moanings. Already she had turned her head back towards
him, resting it on his nearest shoulder, and he found himself kissing her neck
and shoulder blade, becoming ever more turned-on by the sweet perfume behind
her ears. From the neck to the cheek,
the cheek to the mouth, and the mouth to the tongue ... required only a slight
adjustment of their respective limbs, an adjustment which made it perfectly
beyond doubt that he had been successfully seduced by Mrs Evans and was now
unequivocally committed to exploring the potential for sensual gratification
which her maturely attractive body held out to him.
"Ah, Matthew, you shouldn't ...” she
gently reproved him, as he became progressively bolder, stretching out a hand
to caress her between the thighs while simultaneously applying his tongue to
the protruding nipple of one of her breasts.
"You mustn't do this," she added. "I thought you were teaching me to
meditate, to gain spiritual insight.
You're not going to fuck me surely, not after what you said you'd
do? Really, Matthew, I don't know how
..."
But he had already removed from her heaving
body the final flimsy obstacle to his sexual objective, and was now struggling
to remove his own rather more substantial obstacles to it, whilst endeavouring
to maintain the impetus of his carnal assault and thus keep her sexually
aroused. He knew enough about the devil
in woman not to be impressed by Mrs Evans' low-key reproaches, which seemed, in
any case, specifically designed to channel and further inflame his
passion. He knew exactly what she wanted
and, as much from the promptings of the demon in himself as from the devil in
her, he intended to let her have it, to make her squirm in an ecstasy of
sensual abandon, forgetting who or where she was and even who she was
with. If her husband, with his failing
health, had been unable to satisfy her, then Matthew Pearce would make doubly
sure he did, applying to her body the physical commitment which recent
circumstances had prevented him from applying to Gwen. He wouldn't let her go until he had fully
expended himself on her, avenging himself not only on her beauty but on her
husband as well - indeed, on the entire bourgeois establishment of which this
woman was but an epitome, a microcosm of the whole. If it was sensuality she was really after, he
would do his level best to make sure she got it, even if he had to go through
hell in the process!
"Ah, Matthew ..." she was moaning
as, freed from his constricting jeans and underpants, he applied himself to her
distended sex with a vigour he never suspected himself capable of, so long was
it since he had really screwed a woman - a real sensuous woman and not a frigid
simulacrum of one, like Gwen.
"You'll kill me, Matthew.
You'll break me. Ah, no, not so violently, not so deeply!" Mrs Evans
feebly protested. "My God, I never
thought you'd be so virile! You'll
rupture me. Ah, free me, take me, do it harder, Matthew!
Still more, aaaaahhhgh ..." Her delirium mounted in intensity, reached a
peak of unintelligibility, and slowly trailed off after she had succumbed to
her orgasm and been freed from the mounting tension which his thrusts, ever quicker
and deeper, imperiously inspired. She
took his climax with scarcely a murmur, submerged, as she already was, in a sea
of warm sensual gratification. Her body
had become sex from head to feet, not just in the pubic region where it was
focused. Rather, it had been subtly
diffused throughout her, like a ray of bright sunshine, causing sensations she
hadn't experienced in years to float to the surface and bask in its gentle
warmth. She was left agreeably speechless
as his passion reached its consummation and began to ebb away, gradually
withdrawing from her as from a foreign beach.
It was withdrawing, yes, but it had left its mark on her, left the
imprint of its flow! She hadn't known
this degree of cathartic release in years.
She could hardly recognize herself.
"Don't leave me, darling," she murmured, reaching out a
restraining hand to her lover's neck as he began to disengage himself from her
tender flesh. She was afraid that his
total withdrawal would cause her to plunge back into the memory of her old
self, the self from which she had temporarily escaped.
Gently he bent down over her again and
kissed her lengthily on the mouth, allowing his tongue to meet hers in a
whirlpool of sensual caressing. He felt
that he could choke her with the force of his pressure on her tongue; that, by
a renewed burst of passion, he could drive his tongue down her throat whilst
simultaneously driving his penis deeper into her cleft vagina under the
perverse notion that the one would eventually meet-up with the other somewhere
in the pit of her stomach, and so bring him into the utmost physical and even
metaphysical intimacy with her. It was
as though, with the python-like tightening of her grip about him and his sexual
responses to it, they were desperately trying to merge their separate bodies
into one writhing being, to become fused together in an ecstasy of
undifferentiated carnality. But, of
course, he knew there were strict limits to the degree of his carnal commitment
to her which could not be transgressed without the desire for increased sexual
gratification turning into a form of sadism, so he wisely refrained from
choking her with his tongue and began, instead, to playfully caress it in
response to her wishes. He, too, was
afraid to abandon her and face-up, albeit from a different angle, to the
immediate consequences of his actions.
It was easier, for the time being, to sample a little more of her body,
to play along with the pretence of innocence which now prevailed between them.
Yet it wasn't long before he felt obliged
to desist from his attentions and repulse her renewed attempt to kindle the
dying embers of his passion. The
weariness of having expended oneself and done what there was to do with a woman
of her sort had come upon him, rendering the pursuit
of further pleasure all but impossible.
The limit of sensual gratification had been reached. Beyond it, barring the possibility of sadism,
there was only the madness and futility of superfluous kissings
and fondlings, of a mere physical engagement without
enthusiasm or passion, a fall from metaphysical grace. Sated as he now was, her body had suddenly
become a repugnant thing to him, unable to perpetuate further pleasure.
He pushed her unreasonably imploring hands
away from himself and stumbled towards his clothes, which lay heaped together
on the floor not far from hers. He got
dressed quickly and quietly, almost self-consciously ashamed of his nudity and
the concomitant fact that he was, after all, a separate person, different and
remote. He didn't want his body to be
exposed as the repugnant thing Mrs Evans' body had suddenly become to him. He was conscious of a sort of fall from
spiritual grace. Conscious, too, that he
had allowed himself to be seduced by her at the very time when he was most intent
upon teaching her to meditate. It came
as a kind of condemnatory blow to him, this secondary consciousness, and made
him feel both ashamed and humiliated. It
was as though the illusion of his spiritual probity had been shattered by the
ease with which Mrs Evans had achieved her carnal objectives. Hitherto, no such temptation had presented
itself, least of all from an attractive married woman, and he was accordingly
able to sustain a comforting belief in the earnestness of his spiritual
endeavour and the commendable extent of his fidelity to it. Yet now that he had succumbed to the flesh at
the very time when he ought to have shown loyalty to the spirit, he was less
confident that he was in fact as spiritually earnest as he had previously
imagined himself to be! Perhaps, on the
other hand, his spiritual pretensions were largely a consequence of the
regrettable fact that social, professional, ideological, and financial
circumstances had not hitherto particularly favoured his romantic or sex life,
making it necessary for him to seek compensation for and oblivion from his
solitary plight in spiritual strivings?
No, that couldn't be! He refused to acknowledge the
possibility! It was far too humiliating,
altogether too self-effacing! He had
always known himself to be a predominantly spiritual being, an extreme ectomorph, or thin man, with intellectual motivations. There could be no question of his being
confounded with L'homme moyen sensuel, the average
sensual man. But why,
then, had he succumbed to Mrs Evans' seductive influence with so little
hesitation or resistance? Was it
simply because of her exceptional good-looks?
Or was it because of the ten-year age gap between them which, besides
exciting his curiosity, endowed her with a sort of moral authority over
him? Or was it, perhaps, because of her
bourgeois status and a correlative desire, on his part, to avenge himself on
her in some way, either on account of her husband or Gwen or indeed, by
association, the bourgeois establishment in general? In all probability, all three considerations
had played a part and possibly one or two others besides, though he couldn't
determine to what extent. All he knew
for certain was that he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and deeply humiliated
by what he had done. If his religious
pretensions could be shattered so easily, what hope was there that he could
prevent the same thing from happening again in future, either with Mrs Evans or
someone like her?
Indeed, how would those pretensions now
appear to the woman herself, she who had so easily succeeded in overcoming
them? How convinced would she be, on the
evidence of his carnal appetite, that he was in fact
as spiritual as, largely through his paintings and sculptures, he made himself
out to be? She would probably be
laughing at him behind his back, mocking him for his inconsistencies. Yes, why not?
Hadn't she won a victory over him and exploited his moral weakness at
the very time when it would be most vulnerable to attack, when his spiritual
pretensions were most clearly exposed and a victory over them prove
correspondingly more gratifying? Yes,
indeed she had! Her sensuality had
overcome his spirituality at the very moment when it was most exposed to its
own pretensions and had gobbled it up - lock, stock, and fucking barrel. No wonder she had implored him to stay with
her longer!
Turning round to face her, he saw, with
resentful eyes, that she had got to her feet and was in the process of getting
dressed, pulling her slender briefs into place over the mound of dark pubic
hair that crowned her sex. She appeared
perfectly content with herself, which wasn't altogether surprising really,
considering that she had got what she wanted.
To a certain extent she had no further need of him, just as he had no
further need of her. No further sexual
need, at any rate; though he couldn't help admiring the ample bulk of her
thighs and the generous curve of her hips, as she lowered her dress over her
head preparatory to covering them. There
could be no denying her physical attractiveness!
She smiled warmly at him as she eased her
dress back into place and invited him, with an appropriate twist on her heels,
to zip her up, which he obligingly did, though not before taking one last
lingering look at her smooth back, the smooth nature of which both charmed and
fascinated him. "You aren't angry
with me, are you?" she asked, turning around to face him and placing an
affectionate, almost maternal hand on his arm.
"Of course not!" he automatically
replied, a faint blush suffusing his cheeks in telltale self-abnegation, as he
fought against the sordid temptation to reveal what he really felt. It was no use being frank with her.
"And not angry with yourself, I
trust?" she inquired.
"No."
"Good!
That's as it should be. I was a
little worried about you actually."
"Oh, in what
way?"
Mrs Evans resumed her warm, teasing smile
and lightly squeezed his arm, as though to kindle a spark of his former passion
from it. "About the extent of your
spiritual commitment principally," she revealed. "The degree of your
spiritual earnestness."
Matthew blushed more deeply, almost like a
shy adolescent. "I don't quite
understand," he said.
"Well, I thought perhaps you were a
little too spiritual for your own good, a little too ascetically earnest,"
Mrs Evans informed him, vaguely waving a hand in the direction of the paintings
and sculptures to their right. "I
was afraid, from the nature of your work, that you were rather too preoccupied
with transcendentalism, virtually obsessed by it. But I'm glad to say that you aren't
altogether immune to fleshy enticements, and that I was accordingly able to
broaden your horizon a little. And I'm
no-less glad to say that you gave me more sexual satisfaction than my husband
has done, over the past five or six years.
You're not at all a bad lover, actually."
Matthew didn't know whether to be grateful
for this unexpectedly frank piece of information or further ashamed of himself,
so overwhelmed was he by conflicting emotions.
To some extent it delivered him from a number of pessimistic
suppositions concerning himself or, rather, his sexual performance. But, all the same, it didn't exactly flatter
his spiritual integrity! It was like a
kiss and a slap on the face at the same time.
He had been set up as a lover, only to be knocked down as a sage. Her frankness disarmed him.
"Yet all these doves and meditating
figures had me worried for a time, I must confess," Mrs Evans resumed,
ignoring his ambivalent facial expression, "and got me to thinking that
perhaps you weren't really a man at all but a kind of deity or angel or
something. At least I now know that,
even with all your transcendental loyalties and noble strivings, you're
essentially a man, and a jolly good one too! For what is man, after all, but a creature
balanced between the sensual and the spiritual in harmony with the laws of what
mankind should be?"
Matthew winced perceptibly with this
paradoxical comment. For it was almost
painful for him to have to listen to it.
"Man isn't a creature that's fixed in its ways or being, like an
animal," he sternly countered, "but an evolutionary experiment, a
continuous transformation. If he began
as a beast, he must end as a god. Or, to
put it more concretely, he must slough off more and more of his beastliness as
he evolves towards a higher state of being, one in which only the spiritual
counts for anything."
"Now you're talking nonsense!"
Mrs Evans opined half-jokingly.
"You're trying to contradict your own manhood no sooner than five minutes
after I've had first-hand experience of it."
"Not at all!"
Matthew protested. "I'm merely
saying that this balance you refer to is an illusion, a temporary situation,
and that man needn't necessarily be forced into any particular mould." Yet, once again, he realized that he was
speaking to a bourgeois, a species of 'man' whose mean it was to be balanced in
the aforesaid manner, and that she could no more be expected to share his view
than he ... hers. What she understood by
'man' was essentially egocentric man, man in his prime as man - the
middle stage in the spectrum of human evolution. It was the mean of D.H. Lawrence, as of Rampion, the Lawrence-like character in Huxley's Point
Counter Point, a mean that signified a sensual/spiritual integrity, an
all-roundedness of being which fought shy of saints and sinners alike, being
prepared to brand all those who didn't or couldn't subscribe to its dualistic
integrity as failures or perverts. To go
beyond the dualistic mean was, to its devotees, just as bad as, if not worse
than, failing to come up to it. Either
way, one would not be a man, which, in a sense, was true. That is to say, one would not be man in his
prime as man - a bourgeois. No,
one would be either an early or a late man, a subman or a superman.
If early, then one would be lopsided on the side of the subconscious and
thus ... predominantly sensual, fundamentally pagan. If late, on the other hand, one would be
lopsided on the side of the superconscious and thus
... predominantly spiritual, essentially transcendental. The subman, being
closer to the beasts, would be inferior to the balanced, egocentric man. The superman, being closer to the godlike,
would be his superior. Now, naturally,
if one is in-between these two extremes one isn't going to endorse the
superiority of the spiritually lopsided man, even if, at least tacitly, one
inclines to look down upon the pagan.
No, as a bourgeois, one remains loyal to oneself, since anything else
would be self-defeating.
Accordingly one dismisses the lopsided as
failures or perverts, content with the assumption that the mean is ever
dualistic and cannot be bettered. Yet
the fact is that, contrary to the bourgeois' complacent entrenchment in
relativity, it can and is being bettered, and by no less than the spiritually
lopsided! If they are not yet godly,
testifying to the complete sovereignty of the superconscious
over the subconscious, they are at least on the road to eventually becoming
such, being a good deal closer to the culmination of human evolution in the
millennial Beyond than ever their egocentric detractors or bourgeois
predecessors were, and consequently of a more fortunate disposition.
But Matthew had to admit to himself that
such knowledge was hardly likely to make a profound impression on Mrs Evans,
who seemed to be too resigned to the dualistic mean to have any use for
whatever stood above it. And so he
refrained from launching out in defence of lopsided spirituality, contenting
himself, instead, with an ironic smile and shrug of the shoulders, as though to
impress upon her the futility of their arguing about it. Besides, hadn't his passion for her body
demonstrated that he was not all that far removed from such a balanced dualism
himself, but only incipiently transcendental or, at any rate, of a
consciousness which was probably compounded of no more than two-thirds superconscious mind and one-third subconscious mind,
leaving room for a fair amount of sensuality?
As it happened, he wasn't exactly in the strongest of positions to
defend transcendentalism from the claims of dualism. Neither, for that matter, were the vast
majority of latter-day transcendentalists, who were probably little further
advanced than himself along the long and narrow road that led to the post-human
millennium, and thus to the possibility of ultimate salvation. Yet at least one had the consolation of
knowing that one belonged to a class of persons which would eventually reach
paradise, even if it took a number of decades or even centuries.
Meanwhile Mrs Evans had put on her black
high-heels, straightened her nylon stockings, and tidied her hair, using the
small portable mirror she habitually carried in her handbag to check and modify
her facial appearance into the bargain.
She seemed to have grown tired of discussing the nature of man too,
since more interested in herself and the application of a smear or two of
lipstick to her sensuously pouting lips.
Then she turned back to Matthew and, with gentle application of a paper
tissue, wiped some lipstick from his face, commenting all the while on his
funny appearance. "You could be
taken for some kind of half-arsed punk," she joked in quasi-American
fashion, as the last traces of its smear were gently removed from his cheeks.
For an instant he wanted to kiss her anew,
so attractive did she seem all of a sudden.
But he realized that he would only succeed in getting her to reciprocate
and thereby mess-up his face all over again.
"Now we wouldn't want Gwen to discover
you've been making love to a woman who wears bright-red lipstick, would
we?" she added, with a teasingly conspiratorial look in her eyes.
"No, I guess not," he
conceded. "Especially
when that woman was her mother."
"Quite!" Mrs Evans agreed. "It wouldn't help to improve your
relationship any." She turned away
from him and, with nervous hesitation, duly returned the crumpled,
lipstick-smeared tissue to her handbag.
Her face in profile appeared exquisitely refined, more so than her
daughter's ever did. A sudden beam of light
shooting through the window caused the bright red of her dress to be
momentarily intensified, making it appear as though she were on fire. A hairgrip on her piled-up mass of hair
sparkled like a diamond. She turned back
towards him, losing some of the otherworldly significance which the sun had
gratuitously and even paradoxically granted her. "Now then," she murmured,
"what about that cup of tea you promised me earlier?"
CHAPTER SIX
The
following Thursday evening Matthew Pearce set off by taxi for Gwen's Chelsea
flat, in accordance with the invitation he had received, a few days previously,
to meet a couple of her friends there - namely Peter and Linda Daniels. Since he hadn't seen Gwen since Monday,
following their joint return from
Arriving at Gwen's address at about
seven-thirty, he rang the bell and was duly admitted by the young lady in
person, who seemed pleased to see him and relieved that he had in fact been
able to make it after all, contrary to his initial misgivings about the evening
in question.
"Have your friends arrived yet?"
he asked, following her up the thickly carpeted wooden stairs to her
second-floor apartment.
"Just a few minutes ago," she
replied, glancing over her shoulder at the denim-clad ascending figure
behind. "Which
was pretty good timing on their part, too."
He was led into the lounge and introduced first
to Peter and then to Linda Daniels, the former extending a rather stiff white
hand, the latter a more flexible black one.
"Glad to meet you," he averred,
as he shook hands with each of the Daniels and briefly scanned their faces -
the man's firm and set, rather hard and aristocratic; the woman's, by contrast,
quite fluid and gentle, pleasantly serene.
He took an immediate liking to her, though the husband repelled him a
little and immediately put him on his guard.
"So you're the artist Gwen has been
telling us about," Peter Daniels remarked, no sooner than the
introductions had run their customary course.
"Yes, I guess so," said Matthew,
smiling.
"Well, I'm a writer myself, of mostly
journalistic tendency, though occasionally a poet and novelist as well,"
Peter Daniels declared. "And my
wife is a fellow-teacher at Gwendolyn’s school."
"A physical education teacher if I
remember correctly, isn't it?" Matthew responded, recalling to mind what he had already learnt from Gwen.
"Yes, unfortunately so," Linda
admitted, with a gentle self-deprecatory sigh.
"I think she would rather be an art
teacher actually," Gwen opined, for the artist's benefit.
"Is that so?"
"Well, not specifically," Linda
admitted. "Though
I do have an interest in art, both ancient and modern."
Peter Daniels frowned enigmatically, or at
least that's how it appeared to Matthew.
"I suppose your interest is chiefly in the modern, is it?" he
said to the latter, who, at Gwen's request, had just sat down in a nearby
armchair.
"Well, as a practising artist I guess
it has to be," he replied.
"I'm not one to either copy or strive to emulate the old masters,
you know."
"Ah, so you're
anti-representational?" Peter Daniels conjectured enigmatically.
The inference struck Matthew as a bit odd,
but he smiled and simply said: "Not so much anti-representational as
pro-transcendental."
Peter Daniels raised his brows in acute
surprise. "And what exactly is
that?" he asked.
Matthew attempted to explain, using as few
words as possible, the basis of his allegiance to the Holy Ghost and
correlative penchant for the superconscious. However, the journalist transpired not to
being particularly impressed by his explanation, having no prior knowledge of
the superconscious and its role in shaping the
arts. To him, it sounded like a figment
of the imagination. And not only that but, worse still, a threat to his egocentric integrity,
with its empirical objectivity. He had
no desire to revise his philosophical viewpoint of Spenglerian
pessimism and opposition to decadence, including, not least of all, its
mystical manifestations. He was a
champion of Western civilization, with its scientific rationality, and he lost
no time in letting the transcendentalist know it! Needless to say, Matthew was somewhat
taken-aback, suddenly confronted, as he now was, by a sense of deja vu in the presence of what seemed to him like a carbon copy of
Gwen's father. "I don't quite
understand you," he confessed.
"Well, whether you realize it or
not," Peter Daniels rejoined, with an air of didactic earnestness,
"Western civilization is seriously threatened by certain destructive
elements in contemporary society whose only desire is to bring about its
complete and utter downfall, and so enable the opponents of civilization to
triumph. The decline of the West, as
outlined by Spengler in his seminal work of that
name, is an indisputable fact which cannot be denied, no matter how repugnant
it may appear to us or, at any rate, to those of us with an interest in
preventing and perhaps even reversing its decline. It's an extremely regrettable fact, but there
it is! The enemies of Western
civilization, who patently include mystical transcendentalists of a
non-empirical disposition, are slowly but steadily gaining the
ascendancy."
Matthew was virtually thunderstruck. He could scarcely believe his ears! Was this what he
had come along to Gwen's flat to hear - the prejudices of a reactionary
bourgeois? He was almost on the point of
exploding with laughter. "But the
civilization to which you allude," he responded, as soon as he could get
over the initial shock of what he had just heard, "is being superseded by
that which stands above it and signifies the next and probably final rung on
the ladder of human evolution. If
anything is in decline it's only the bourgeois world, which cannot last for
ever but is destined to be superseded in due course. Indeed, it has already been superseded to a
large extent, as a cursory glance at the contemporary world, with its
photography and films and pop music, would adequately confirm."
Peter Daniels seemed not to have heard
aright. "Are you seriously trying
to tell me that what's currently happening to our civilization is for the
better?" he objected incredulously.
"Yes, naturally," Matthew
maintained. "It may not be for the
better as far as the bourgeoisie are concerned, but it's certainly so for the
proletariat, who have largely superseded them.
If bourgeois civilization didn't decline - and it's no longer in
effective operation anyway - there would be a frightful stasis, a horrible
permanence of egocentric dualism, which it would be impossible to endure. I mean, what could be more absurd and
fundamentally tragic than that? The idea
simply doesn't bear thinking about!
Fortunately, however, life is a perpetual evolution, not a permanent
stasis, so we needn't fear that the changes which are occurring to and in our
society are inevitably for the worse.
We're climbing up higher, not falling down lower."
"Bullshit!" cried Peter Daniels,
who had become flushed from suppressed rage.
"How can so many of the changes which have come over the Western
and, in particular, West European world this century possibly signify
progress? Are you seriously trying to tell
me that modern art, for instance, is superior to traditional art - to the
representational art, shall we say, of the 16-19th centuries?"
"Superior in one respect it most
certainly is," Matthew affirmed, trying to avoid thinking of Mr
Evans. "It's not so much balanced
between illusion and truth as distinctly biased on the side of truth,
distinctly a product of the superconscious, with its
non-representational subjectivity. Which
is why I said that, as a product of egocentric tension, Western civilization is
effectively no longer in operation, having been superseded by what stands above
it - the transcendental bias of post-egocentric man."
"Don't you really mean what stands
beneath it?" Peter Daniels protested defiantly.
"On the contrary, what stands beneath
it is the pre-egocentric, in which the balanced dualism to which you evidently
subscribe hadn't yet come properly into existence," Matthew retorted,
"the reason being that, at that stage in his evolution, Western man was
distinctly biased on the side of the subconscious and thus given to an art form
which reflected his sensual predominance and correlative predilection for the
illusory. But modern art generally
reflects the opposite tendency and, consequently, is of a far superior
nature. At its best, its
most abstract, it tends to reflect a superior development to both the religious
and secular art of the representational past, which is either sensuously
lopsided or balanced between the sensual and spiritual realms in what amounts
to an egocentric compromise. A
spiritualized abstract canvas is closer to truth, whereas a beautiful
representational one, particularly such as was produced during the cultural
heyday of Western civilization, contains a great deal of illusion - namely the
thing or person or whatever being represented, and the way in which the
subject-matter is handled. Now if these
days we, or at least the more spiritually evolved of us, prefer the sight of an
abstract or monochromatic canvas to a fully representational one, it's largely because
we've lost our taste and capacity for illusion, having evolved to a point which
is so biased in favour of the superconscious ... that
only what intimates of or reflects truth has any real relevance to us. The other, though still intelligible, becomes
something of an anachronism for us."
Peter Daniels grunted his animal
disapproval of this radical statement.
"Not for me it doesn't," he grimly declared. "I take no pleasure in abstract or
monochromatic canvases. And neither, I
should imagine, does anyone with the least degree of sense, taste, or
intelligence!"
"I'm bound to say that's a highly
presumptuous claim," Matthew averred, giving way to a degree of emotional
contempt for the journalist. "The
fact is that the most enlightened people tend to relate more to modern
non-representational art than to any traditional art, great or otherwise."
A smile of undisguised satisfaction passed
across Linda Daniels' attractively oval face at this remark, whereas Gwen's
remained rather stern. The former felt
secretly gratified by it, whereas the latter, conscious of her inability to
understand most of Matthew's art, took it as a personal affront.
"Even where monochromatic canvases are
concerned?" said Peter Daniels sarcastically.
"Yes, though it's not necessary to
dwell on extremes or to equate the bulk of modern art with such radical
experiments," Matthew objected.
"There's a lot more to it than that, as I think you would realize
if you visited any large gallery of modern art or glanced through the pages of
any comprehensively illustrated encyclopaedia on the subject. Even my work, at present focusing on certain
religious ideals, with particular reference to the inner light of meditation,
is not without a degree of variety."
"Humph, of a rather simplistic order I
should imagine!" the journalist sneered, to the evident disapproval of his
wife, who immediately reproved him with a curt, emphatic utterance of his
Christian name.
But Matthew remained unperturbed. "As a matter of fact, my work is
generally rather simplistic," he confessed. "For it wouldn't serve my illustrative
purposes to make it otherwise. My basic
adherence to what are termed minimalist techniques is a reflection, in large
measure, of fidelity to the superconscious as opposed
to the ego. Or, to be more precise, of
fidelity to an ego which is more under the sway of the superconscious
than of the subconscious, and accordingly less given to egocentric
embellishments and self-aggrandizing complexities than would otherwise be the
case."
"Bah! that's
only to say you'd be incapable of producing great art, which of necessity demands a high
level of complexity," Peter Daniels exclaimed.
"Yes, I dare say I am incapable
of producing the kind of art that appertains to the egocentric past,"
Matthew admitted, anticipating some such objection on the journalist's part,
"but that's exactly as it should be.
For I live in an intensely artificial environment and am the recipient
of post-egocentric standards and predilections.
I'm very much a product of the big city and therefore don't feel
qualified to paint or sculpt in a manner which, strictly speaking, pertains
chiefly to a medium-sized town or a small city, where nature and, needless to
say, nature's sensuous influence are never very far away, and man is
accordingly more under the dominion of his subconscious, with its penchant for
the illusory. No, if I were able and
qualified to paint in a style approximating to the representational tradition,
I'd be an anachronism, not a bona fide contemporary artist."
Peter Daniels snorted contemptuously at
what seemed to him like a narrowly one-sided viewpoint. "And you regard what you do paint as
art rather than anti-art?" he asked sceptically.
"Yes, most
certainly!" Matthew replied.
"Only, it's an art centred on truth rather than balanced between
truth and illusion, essence and appearance, the subjective and the
objective. In short, a
sort of superart.... However, the fact that
there has been an outpouring of anti-art this century is something I won't,
of course, deny. Yet even that was
partly founded on the delusion that art is essentially a matter of illusion,
like religion, rather than a phenomenon which evolves into truth, as in fact it
can do and subsequently has done. No, I don't concentrate on anti-art, any more
than on the negativity of Spenglerian pessimism
concerning the West, because I prefer to take a positive line and thus accept
the applicability of truth to art, whether in the realm of the spiritual or the
secular, the transcendent or the mundane.
To me, art isn't simply something that comes to an end with the passing
of an egocentric age, in which myth and sensuality play a significant part, but
something that continues on up the ladder of human evolution to the reflection
of a transcendental age, in which truth and spirituality are the leading
factors. Why therefore should I waste
time producing anti-art - which, in any case, has already been produced in
sufficient abundance this century, and seems primarily intended to belittle and
undermine the old representational mode of art - when there's a new art-sense
to consider and much work to be done in consolidating and perfecting it? Gone are the days when it was respectable or,
at any rate, credible to be an anti-artist.
If I knew anyone who was one these days, I shouldn't wish to associate
with him. He'd only bore and confuse
me."
"Which is precisely what you do to
me!" snapped Peter Daniels, to the verbal disapproval, once again, of his
wife. "Whether or not it's because
I was born and bred in the country, I don't know. But, whatever the reason, I can't relate to
what you're saying. As a conservative, I
find a great deal of modern art, of whatever tendency, totally unacceptable and
completely without justification. It
palls to insignificance by comparison with the greatest art produced by
European civilization right up to the mid-nineteenth century, which seems to be
the turning-point, the beginning of the rot, the gradual decline in our
significance as a cultural power. One
need only read a work like The Hour of Decision by Oswald Spengler, to obtain a fair idea of what is happening to us
and why we're in decline, not only as regards the arts but ..."
"Fortunately I have no use for neo-royalist
solutions to the apparent dilemma which confronts us," Matthew interposed,
on the crest of another wave of contempt which had built-up inside him at the
mention of Spengler again. "And no sympathy for the book to which
you refer, which, in my honest opinion, is one of the most depressing, if not
reactionary, works ever written."
Peter Daniels flinched
sharply, as though from a sudden blow to the face. "I can hardly agree with that
statement!" he ejaculated, patently shocked and offended.
"Oh, so you're a neo-royalist, are
you?" Matthew deduced.
"No, damn it, a conservative, as I
told you a moment ago!"
"Ah yes, a democratic royalist,"
the artist concluded inferentially.
There was a period of strained silence
before, with an obvious air of constraint, Peter Daniels confessed: "I'm
afraid I don't quite follow you."
"It simply means that you're not as
extreme as your authoritarian counterparts," Matthew calmly remarked. "As a royalist, you can only be one of
three principal types, viz. a genuine royalist, a democratic royalist, or a
neo-royalist."
"I fail to appreciate the distinction
between a genuine royalist and a neo-royalist," said Peter Daniels with a
thinly ironic smile on his lips.
"So do a lot of people," Matthew
retorted, "but that's only because they're ignorant."
"How dare you!" The journalist had got to his feet and was
staring down at Matthew in a highly threatening manner, his fists tightly
clenched at his sides.
"Peter!" Linda Daniels had also got to her feet and
put a restraining hand on her husband's nearest arm. "Are you going to behave reasonably, or
must we leave the room?"
"It would be better if we left this
place altogether," rasped Peter Daniels, still staring down at the seated
artist.
"Please, I'd rather you didn't,"
pleaded Gwen, stepping up to his other side.
"I have some dinner on at the moment, after all."
The mention of dinner appeared to calm
Peter Daniels down a little and induced him to return to his seat, accompanied
by the faithful and ever-persevering presence of his wife. Gwen sighed her
relief and excused herself on the pretext of having to return to the
kitchen. There was an uneasy silence in
the room, disturbed only by the heavy ticking of an old-fashioned wall clock. It was Matthew, however, who first broke it
or, rather, broke out of it.
"I didn't intend to offend you
personally," he averred, speaking directly to the journalist, "but
was simply trying to point out a fact.
And if you're still interested in hearing my notion, erroneous or not,
of the distinction between royalism and a neo-royalism, I'll give it to you."
Peter Daniels emitted a fulsome sigh of
regret. "Very well, what is
it?" he rasped.
"Essentially the difference between a
Henry VIII or a Louis XIV and a Franco or a Mussolini," replied Matthew,
blushing slightly in response to what he basically knew to be an unorthodox
viewpoint, but one which circumstances had launched him into without proper
preparation or indeed complete conviction.
"The difference, in other words, between a genuine aristocratic
dictatorship and a dictatorship which is anything but aristocratic. Genuine royalism
pertains to an epoch in which the aristocracy govern, an epoch preceding the
bourgeois one of royalist/socialist compromise.
Neo-royalism, or fascism, is only possible in
an age like our own, which is in transition to a proletarian one and
consequently subject to confusions and extreme reactionary tendencies. It's a species of authoritarianism which may
triumph for a time but never for very long, since the current of evolution is
against it and, in the end, it must succumb to the prevailing Zeitgeist,
which, especially these days, is decidedly socialistic. Not being a genuine article but a bogus,
anachronistic, plebeianized form of royalism, it is doomed to extinction and failure, even if,
for a while, it has the appearance of strength.
No, the legitimate epoch for royalism is one
in which man hasn't yet attained to a balance between the subconscious and superconscious minds but is under the dominion of the
former, and thus given to the perpetuation of a society which upholds the
sovereignty of the sensual and materialistic over the spiritual and
idealistic. Royalism
is an elitist phenomenon, and therefore it emphasizes differences between men,
as between the nobility and the commonality.
It is fundamentally dark, cruel, evil, illusory - in a word, pagan. And its upholders are generally men of
action, which, in any case, is what every genuine aristocracy should be. Only after they've been dethroned by the
bourgeoisie do the aristocracy - or such of them as are left - begin to
cultivate a more studious and contemplative mode of life. Yet the more they feel obliged to do this,
the less genuinely aristocratic they become, with a result that, after
centuries of progressive atrophying of the truly aristocratic instincts, one
arrives at the equivalent of the poor wretch whom Huysmans
delineates in his classic novel Against Nature through the character of
Des Esseintes - a sickly dilettante and dandy, the
degenerate consequence of bourgeois rule.
Of that race of proud and ruthless predators from which he was
descended, scarcely a trace remains. The
fact is you can't be a genuine aristocrat, and hence royalist, after the
termination of your governing epoch. You
become progressively spurious to the point where, if you have any fight left in
you, you may well be prepared to clutch at any fascist straw which the wind of
reactionary conservatism may blow your way."
"Well, fortunately for me, I happen to
be middle class," Daniels responded, "so I can't pretend it bothers
me all that much if the aristocracy are not what they used to be. And my politics are neither
royalist nor neo-royalist and/or fascist, as you define it, but
conservative."
"Yes, democratic royalist,"
Matthew repeated, "because the bourgeois is ever a compromise animal,
indisposed to the authoritarian.
Appertaining to the middle, or second, stage of human evolution in
between the aristocracy and the proletariat, you divide into two main camps -
one camp with closer ties to the dethroned aristocracy, the other with closer
ties to the ascending proletariat. Thus
arises the prolonged parliamentary struggle between the right-wing conservative
bourgeoisie and their left-wing liberal counterparts, with the former growing
steadily weaker as the latter grow stronger, the political pendulum gradually
swinging from the Right to the Left, even given all the relatively minor
election oscillations coming in-between, as can be verified, I believe, by the
increasing radicalism which the parliamentary progression from Whig and Liberal
to Labour governments implies."
"Humph, you make it all sound too
philosophically neat and simple!" Peter Daniels objected.
"Maybe
that's because I happen to look down on it all from a higher
vantage-point," Matthew declared.
"What, democratic socialist?" the
journalist scoffed, turning briefly towards Linda Daniels for support.
"Totalitarian, if you please," came the instant rejoinder.
"What, you a communist?" Peter Daniels was almost on the verge of
getting to his feet again, so taken-aback was he by the artist's complacent
admission.
"Yes, in a manner of speaking,"
Matthew admitted, blushing slightly in spite of himself, for he was aware now
that part of what he said was not so much him speaking as an argumentative
persona which the debate had conjured up from the nether depths of his psyche
like some kind of demented demon of wilful intent. "Which is to say, to the extent," he rejoined, "that I perceive totalitarian socialism as
a means to social democracy and thus to the achievement of real political power
by the proletariat."
"But you're an educated and
well-spoken man, you're not a proletarian!" Peter Daniels hotly protested, exhaling what might have been dragon's breath towards his
obdurate interlocutor.
"As a matter of fact, whether I'm
educated and well-spoken or the converse has absolutely nothing to do with
it," Matthew rejoined, unmoved.
"The fact remains that I can understand the development of evolution
away from a royalist/socialist dualism towards what transcends it and
accordingly stands at the opposite pole to royalism,
being the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than of the aristocracy. Now whether or not I'm a genuine socialist is
another matter, seeing that, just as one cannot be a genuine royalist when the
aristocracy are no longer in power but have been superseded by the bourgeoisie,
so, it seems to me, one cannot be a genuine socialist when the proletariat have
not yet attained to power, through the agency of totalitarian socialism, but
are still subject to the control, no matter how tenuously, of the bourgeois
status quo, with its capitalist base.
Democratic socialists, on the other hand, are no closer to being genuine
socialists ... than democratic royalists, or conservatives, to being genuine
royalists or, rather, neo-royalists and, hence, fascists. They are tainted by the bourgeois brush of
dualistic compromise, they're part of the parliamentary tension between royalism and socialism and, as such, they pertain to a
parliamentary epoch, even if and when that epoch is drawing towards a
close. A genuine socialist, however,
could only look down on them from the idealistic vantage-point of one who has
evolved beyond the middle, or twilight, stage of the political spectrum, with
its capitalist exploitation. Standing in
the light of proletarian triumph, he would not care for the relative darkness
appertaining to the epoch of bourgeois democracy. But I don't stand in such a light, not even
in the inceptive context of communist authoritarianism, when the proletariat,
having wrenched power from the bourgeoisie through a revolutionary elite, have
yet to come into their own political maturity and are accordingly subject to
the paternalistic control of the Communist Party, like a child dependent on the
guidance of a stern parent. No, I simply
realize that such a light is one day destined to materialize, and that it's
therefore impossible to regard democratic socialism as an end-in-itself, with nothing
higher above or beyond it. Thanks to my
knowledge and insight, I'm obliged to live as an outsider, unable to commit
myself to the compromise integrity of democratic socialism, which is Welfare
State socialism coupled to state capitalism, but simultaneously unable to enter
into the true spirit of genuine socialism, and for the simple reason that such
a spirit doesn't yet exist, the proletariat not having officially come to
power, since still living under the economic heel of bourgeois capitalism."
Peter Daniels could hardly believe his
ears! It was as though the fact that he
found himself in close proximity to a man who belittled and contradicted all
his own views and standards was too much to take, too difficult to
comprehend. He had never been politically
face-to-face with 'the enemy' before, with a person so unequivocally and
radically left wing, and now it appeared that he was in fact face-to-face with
such a person he found it strangely unreal, as though he were simply the
hapless victim of a bad dream. It was
really quite different from what he had imagined it would be, and largely
because he was no longer as confident as before about the virtues of
parliamentary democracy. He almost felt
humiliated! And not only on account of
Matthew Pearce but, no less evidently, also on account his wife, who, although
sitting next to him, seemed spiritually far removed from him, drawn to the
substance of the artist's remarks, wrapped-up in an attentive silence which
somehow only served to emphasize the temperamental and ideological
incompatibility which he knew to exist between them but did his best to
minimize or ignore. There seemed to be a
conspiracy against him in the air.
But he would not be humiliated, least of
all by a frigging advocate of totalitarian socialism! His middle-class dignity rebelled against the
prospect. He would speak out, defend the
cause and reality of parliamentary freedom if it was the last thing he
did! And Matthew Pearce, socialist or no
socialist, would have to listen, irrespective of how abhorrent he found
it. Maybe there was a chance that he
could be reformed, made to see sense while the opportunity prevailed,
encouraged to grow up and put his wishful and largely over-simplistic thinking
behind him.
Thus Peter Daniels responded to the
challenge in the only way he knew how - with a wholehearted defence of
parliamentary democracy, a defence designed to remind Matthew Pearce that,
although such democracy was not without its faults, it was still a damn sight
better than the chaos and tyranny which inevitably accompanied socialist
revolutions.
The artist listened patiently but, even
with a consciousness of his own ideological shortcomings, remained
unimpressed. He had heard such arguments
before, accompanied by the usual welter of platitudes concerning the virtues of
capitalist freedom and the superiority of liberal over totalitarian
systems. It was what one had to expect
from a bourgeois, that man of the compromise stage of evolution. To him, dictatorships of whatever description
were equally objectionable. And why? Because they
deprived him of his power, took away his freedom to
exploit as he thought fit. Royalist
autocracies kept economic power in the hands of the aristocracy. Communist autocracies would share power
amongst the proletariat once they came of age and could be more democratically
entrusted with its management themselves.
No wonder he feared and hated them!
Either way - with the possible exception of a fascist regime partial to
the monied interests of the conservative bourgeoisie
- a regression to feudalism or a progression to socialism signalled the end of
his capitalist power. Consequently he
had no option but to uphold the parliamentary system, that compromise of the
bourgeois world. Four years of a
democratic-socialist government, with its state capitalism, would be easier or
less hard to bear, depending on one's viewpoint, than an indefinite period of
totalitarian socialism which, if it didn't do away with one as an individual,
would almost certainly put an end to one's economic exploitation. For after those four years had elapsed, there
was at least a chance, indeed a very good chance, a more than even chance, that
the party closer to his own heart and economic interests would be returned to
power, and matters accordingly take a turn for the better. It was a compromise worth putting-up with!
But not for any socialist, any genuine
socialist, that is. Oh, no! Such a person had no patience with the
government, intermittent or otherwise, of a party in the pay of, and thus
sympathetic to, the capitalistic interests of the bourgeoisie, particularly the
grand-bourgeoisie. He wanted their party
done away with, so that the road would be clear for socialism. And with the end of the democratic royalists
would come the demise of the democratic socialists
who, although left wing, were insufficiently extreme to function in the guise
of genuine socialism. With the demise of
parliamentary democracy, an undiluted socialist party would prevail, to signal
the beginnings of a new era of political development in which, eventually, the
proletariat would take over from Big Daddy the economic, political, and
judicial management of their affairs.
That was what every progressive proletarian wanted to see and, unless a
catastrophe of unimaginable horror or disaster overtook the world in the near
future, it would surely happen, evolutionary progress continuing along the path
opened-up by the growth of urban civilization.
Yet it was impossible for Matthew to say
all this to Peter Daniels, who probably wouldn't have understood or appreciated
it. Instead, he contented himself with
words to the effect that he had no use or respect for the type of freedom, so
dear to the bourgeois heart, which enabled capitalist exploiters to amass
private fortunes at the proletariat's expense, growing ever more corrupt the
richer they became.
"Yes, but really," the journalist
rejoined, his voice strained with self-righteous emotion, "surely you must
realize that dictatorial regimes are essentially evil and cruel. I mean, just look at the examples the world
has seen this century, Stalin's most especially, not to mention those currently
still in existence."
"Of course, I strongly object to
fascist regimes," Matthew countered, "since they're against the grain
of evolution and a scourge to the most progressive people. When I think of the number of socialists
killed or tortured by Hitler's accomplices, my blood positively boils with
anger at the magnitude of the reactionary tyranny unleashed at the time. But there's one hell of a difference between
a neo-feudal regime and a socialist regime, and that's a fact which you
parliamentary people don't always appreciate.
You cite Stalin as an example of communist tyranny, and no-one would
doubt that Stalin was effectively a cold-blooded autocrat who ruled the
"Oh, come now!" Peter Daniels
protested, becoming red in the face with suppressed rage. "I would hesitate to describe someone
responsible for the butchering of some twenty million people in quite such
euphemistic terms!"
"Yes, but one must remember that
Stalin was under a considerable amount of internal pressure from rival factions
and consequently felt obliged to take extremely stringent measures to safeguard
his regime," Matthew averred.
"As to the full facts of the matter, I'm not of course sufficiently
well-informed, since that is something for the historian or politician. But I do know that I'd rather hear about the
erection of concentration camps by a Stalin than by a Hitler, or any other
fascist dictator for that matter."
"Even with the murder of several
million people?" queried Peter Daniels incredulously.
"Even then."
"You mean you're not against the mass
murder of millions of innocent people?" gasped Peter Daniels, patently
astounded.
Matthew was about to reply in the negative,
but then wisely hesitated on the verge of speaking. No, he wasn't going to be duped by bourgeois
humanism. "As to the mass murder of
millions of innocent people, I would most certainly object, and in the
strongest possible terms!" he averred.
"But not to the liquidation - an altogether more pertinent term -
of millions of guilty people, or people, in other words, whom it's
necessary for one to remove in order to further and safeguard the new
society. I strongly object to the
indiscriminate murder of millions of innocent people, such as was sanctioned by
Hitler's regime on chiefly racial grounds.
For such cold-blooded genocide is patently criminal. It leads to the elimination of millions of
the best as well as the worst, socialists as well as capitalists, the oppressed
as well as their class oppressors. It
doesn't hit the nail on the head, so to speak, and these days more than ever
it's precisely the head which needs hitting - namely the bourgeois one!"
"You mean you wouldn't object to a
purge of the bourgeoisie by any prospective socialist regime which came to
power in the near future?" exclaimed Peter Daniels, his strained
tone-of-voice indicating a mixture of horror and accusation.
"No, of course
not!" Matthew admitted.
"For it's pretty obvious that the bourgeoisie would be somewhat
incompatible with the socialistic requirements of such a regime. They would be far from enthusiastic about
sacrificing their competitiveness for the sake of a uniformly co-operative
framework within the context of public ownership, and for the simple reason
that such a sacrifice would run contrary to their material interests as
capitalist exploiters and free-market predators. One couldn't expect them to suddenly become
proletarians, as though by the wave of a magic wand. You can't simply slip out of one soul and
into another, out of a private domain which has done a Faustian pact with the
Devil and into a public one which repudiates any such pact. No, they'd have to be interned, and not
simply because they were adjudged incompatible with the socialistic
requirements of a truly co-operative society, but also as retribution for their
capitalist crimes and exploitative past.
The proletariat would have to be avenged on their historical
oppressors!"
"And who exactly would those
oppressors be?" Peter Daniels wanted to know, a mildly ironic humour
replacing his previous sombre response to the artist's apocalyptic
revelations. For it
was as though the tragedy of what he had just heard had suddenly been
transmuted into farce, albeit of a slightly sinister order. He wasn't prepared to accept the guilt of the
bourgeoisie, since bourgeois blood ran in his veins. He knew that, historically, the bourgeoisie
were justified, even if he wasn't prepared to admit to the fact that their
justification was transitory.
"Obviously a great number of them
would be businessmen," Matthew obliged, after a few seconds thoughtful
deliberation during which time he cleared his throat with guttural relish, as
though in preparation for an arduous task.
"And, most especially, those businessmen, in
particular, who had oppressed the workers the most and reaped the biggest
dividends from the capitalist system.
The largest sharks above all! But
also a number of smaller ones, staunch believers in free enterprise, i.e. the
right of private entrepreneurs to pursue their capitalist interests
irrespective of the moral and spiritual cost to society in general, and with a
view to becoming rich and powerful, like their more successful exemplars. Then, of course, a number of professionals,
including private doctors, private dentists, and public-school teachers - in
short, those professionals who weren't salaried employees of the State but
distinctly independent. And, needless to
say, fascists and conservative politicians, artists and writers of a
reactionary or conservative turn-of-mind, royals and peers, reactionary
priests, especially those who had belonged to the Established Church and thus
recognized the monarch as head of the Church - a thing which no genuine
Christian would ever do, since alpha and omega, power and peace, are quite
incommensurate, and the Church is supposed to be on the side of ecclesiastic
truth and not, as would appear to be the case with the Church of England, on
the side of monarchic strength! Such a
paradoxical Church, which has the embodiment of autocratic power as its head
and a long tradition of invasive imperialism behind it, could only be
incompatible with socialist requirements."
"I see," sighed Peter Daniels,
following a short but anguished pause during which he mopped his brow with a
linen handkerchief. "And presumably
this hypothetical socialist regime would liquidate, if that's the correct word,
journalists like myself, who profess to distinctly conservative viewpoints."
"Naturally," Matthew
rejoined. "It would intern anyone
who was in any way opposed to its policies of socialist progress and either
incapable of or unwilling to contemplate reform."
"Well, thank goodness it doesn't exist
at present, and that a certain amount of sanity and decency still prevail in
the world, especially the Western half of it!" cried Peter Daniels
triumphantly. "I very much doubt
that such a godforsaken regime will ever exist, and not only because we, the
right-thinking individuals of society, wouldn't allow it to, but, no less
probably, because the catastrophe that would most likely precipitate such a
horrible state-of-affairs - namely a third world war - would more than likely
result in the wholesale destruction of life on this planet and consequently in
the elimination of all political parties, whether
Right, Left, or Centre, moderate or extreme, and not in what I suspect you
would hope to be a socialist victory!"
"Oh, let's not drag Armageddon into
it!" protested Linda Daniels, breaking the long silence she had patiently
kept while the two men waged their own verbal war in front of her - an
ideological one which she had tactfully preferred to keep out of. "A third world war would be too unspeakably
vile, too unspeakably horrendous! Let's
hope it will never come about, and that some sense and decency will accordingly
continue to prevail. We want life, not
death!"
As though that were a signal for a fresh
beginning, Gwen suddenly returned to the room and announced, rather to
everyone's relief, that dinner was ready.
Accordingly, Matthew followed the others out through the open door and
into the dining-room across the hallway.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Consisting
of roast lamb and assorted vegetables, diner provided a slight reprieve from the
ideological tension and mutual antipathy which had sprung-up between the two
men in the lounge. But only, alas, a
slight one! Although their conversation
was somewhat muted by preoccupation with food, the close proximity into which
they had been thrown by the relatively small circular table at which they were
sitting caused them to feel psychologically uncomfortable, especially Peter
Daniels, who felt the physical closeness to his ideological rival as a kind of
humiliation and personal betrayal. But for
the women, he would have got up from the table and sat himself down, plate in
hand, on one of the spare chairs the far side of the dining-room (which in any
case wasn't a particularly large room), in order to be delivered, in some
degree, from the oppression of social intimacy with his political enemy. Indeed, he would have refused to eat dinner
altogether! But, of course, such a
refusal would hardly have pleased his hostess, who had put so much effort into
getting it ready, and so he was obliged to resign himself, like Matthew, to the
rather trying situation which circumstances had forced upon him. Taking refuge, as far as possible, in the
meal itself was the only solution, it seemed, to
present itself to either man's imagination.
Yet the women, though scarcely on the best
of terms with each other, were not prepared to allow the occasion to sink into
a boorish silence, interrupted only by the mundane sound of chewing and
swallowing, but made an effort to lift it above the merely bestial level by indulging
in a little sporadic conversation, Gwen especially doing her best to raise the
atmosphere slightly, her sociability doubtless owing something to the fact that
she had not been present throughout the greater part of the male-dominated
conversation in the adjoining room.
Nor altogether surprisingly, the principal
subject of their conversation was the new school term and the likelihood of
their having to work harder then than during the previous one, which, despite
the summer exams, seemed to them more like an anti-climax to the year. Linda Daniels, in particular, was especially
anxious to improve the quality of her teaching next term, since she felt that
it had somehow suffered from her generally poor health in recent months, while
Gwen, though not over-complacent about her own past teaching record, was
confident that her talents would stand the test of time and be adequately
rewarded when the next batch of examination results were due, come Christmas.
The men listened in solemn silence, rather
bored by the topic under discussion yet secretly grateful, all the same, for
something external to cling-on to and relieve them, slightly, from the
psychological pressure of their mutual antipathy. Matthew might have questioned Linda Daniels
about her teaching of physical education had he not been constrained to silence
by the brooding presence of her husband, who seemed equally disinclined to ask
questions of Gwen. All in all, dinner
transpired to be more of an ordeal than a pleasure and, when it was over, both
men were relieved to drift as far apart as possible, even if this meant they
were obliged to enter into conversation with the women instead.
However, it wasn't about school life that
Matthew talked, as he found himself being escorted back towards the lounge by
Mr Daniels' attractive and curiously-interested wife, but about art and, in
particular, his art, upon which he proceeded to enlarge to the extent that
circumstances would permit. It was
evident that the women were determined to prevent a repeat performance of the
bourgeois/proletarian antagonism by keeping the men apart (not that they had
any desire to remain together!), Gwen likewise having battened-on to Peter
Daniels' arm and escorted him in the opposite direction from Matthew, so that
they would be out of harm's reach.
To be sure, this arrangement soon proved to
the mutual satisfaction of both parties.
For it wasn't long before, warming to Linda's curiosity and spurred-on
by the wine he had dispatched at table, Matthew forgot about his antipathy
towards her husband and immersed himself in the subject to-hand - one that was
always most dear to him, since the focal-point of his life's endeavour. He explained how he was striving to make his
art more transcendental by using minimalist techniques and exploiting the
application of synthetics, like acrylic, nylon, and plastic, in order to
divorce it still further from natural origins or influences.
Linda listened attentively. She recalled what he had said earlier, about
the synthetic nature of his art, and inquired a little more deeply into some of
the subjects he had touched upon - namely, the fact of the superconscious
and its relation to the inner light. She
was also curious to learn who his chief influences were, who he particularly
admired.
Matthew deliberated with himself a moment,
as though the answer to this question required a meticulous mental sifting
through dozens of possible names, before replying: "Of the painters, I
think probably Ben Nicholson and Piet Mondrian have had the greatest influence on my development,
especially the latter, whose Neo-Plasticism
I particularly admire. He was very
spiritual, you know. Very
committed to reflecting the effects of urban environments on the psyche, to
making his work as internal and abstract as possible. And, of course, he was a mystic to boot - a
theosophist. From the modern viewpoint,
a tremendously significant and important artist! Not one of your anti-science and
anti-technology types, by any means. Nor
a traitor to evolution and bourgeois apologist, like certain other so-called
modern artists. Very
much a believer in the big city and its spiritualizing effects upon our lives. Very much an artistic
leader."
"Yes, I do know a thing or two about
him actually," Linda revealed, smiling appreciatively. "He painted a work entitled Broadway
Boogie-Woogie, didn't he?"
"Correct. One of his most complex and famous works,
paying due tribute to
"And what about Ben Nicholson?" she
asked, anxious to keep the conversation on the same rails. "How did he influence you?"
"Well, in pretty much the same
way," the artist replied, "that's to say, by being so
transcendentally abstract and pertinent to the times. I particularly admire his relief work,
especially the more formalized and geometrically congruous examples of it
constructed largely in the 'thirties; though it has had less overall influence
on me than his minimalist still-lives, which were to set the tone, to some
extent, of my meditating figures, in which only the bare outlines, executed in
acrylic on a monochromatic ground, are allowed to emerge. That gives them a kind of transparency which
emphasizes the spiritual over the material, you see. Makes them pertinent to the
superconscious and therefore to transcendentalism. If I were more egocentric, on the other hand,
I would undoubtedly have filled them in with various corporeal elaborations and
embellishments, so they'd look more like traditional portraits of seated
figures. But such a procedure wouldn't
really have established me as a modern artist, or enabled me to consider myself
one of the spiritual antennae of the race.
It would simply have shown that I was backward, lagging behind the
times, and therefore not entitled to consider myself a genuine artist. For such an artist is less a person who can
paint well or elaborately, displaying all manner of complex techniques, than a
person who is relevant to the age and best capable of illustrating the nature
of that age.... Which is why, in my opinion, an artist like Ben Nicholson is
greater than, say, Stanley Spencer, who, though possessing a technical facility
that suggests true greatness, lacks real relevance and is effectively
anachronistic. At times, you would
hardly think he lived in the twentieth century, especially where his Christ at Cookham works are concerned. Yet there could be no doubt in your mind that
Ben Nicholson did. For most of his work
is appropriately abstract and therefore indicative of a society biased towards
the superconscious.
Thus, bearing in mind the criterion of relevance, one can only conclude
Nicholson to be the greater artist.
Indeed, I'm inclined to regard him as the finest British artist this
century, bearing in mind his sustained commitment to transcendentalism."
"Even finer than
Graham Sutherland?" Linda queried.
"Certainly more consistently abstract
than Sutherland," Matthew opined, "which isn't to say that the
latter's work is relatively inconsequential.
On the contrary, I'd place it above
"I'm afraid you've gone a little out
of my depth," Linda confessed, feeling slightly puzzled. "I know there's a kind of jaggedness to
some of Sutherland's works, if that's what you mean."
"Yes, at times a rather fearsome
jaggedness," Matthew confirmed, smiling weakly. "Which fact doubtless owed something to
his experiences as a war artist, a recorder of the frightful destruction which assailed
"How d'you
mean?" Linda asked, with a puzzled look on her pretty face.
"Well, I mean whatever rebels against
the rise of technology and science, the expansion of the city, and other
related phenomena, considering such developments pernicious to the welfare of
mankind, is essentially bad art," Matthew responded almost
matter-of-factly. "For it misleads
people by giving them the impression that things are either worse than or not
as good as they really are; that instead of progressing, we're indulging in a
kind of suicidal regression which it's in the interests of art to point out
and, if possible, correct and/or stem - assuming it were still possible for
people to respond to it in terms of a desire to correct and/or stem. I mean, there's inevitably a point at which
such pessimistic art becomes merely fatalistic, with no other motive than to
record the degree of that fatality, in relation to society, as the artist
perceives it. Perhaps it's mostly like
that? I don't know. But one thing I am sure of is
that such art is bad, because it has turned against the age rather than
accepted it, and accordingly refused to see the changes which have come about
as manifestations of evolutionary progress.
One gets the impression that the artists concerned are either too stupid
to recognize progress when they see it or, alternatively, are bourgeois
apologists, hirelings of a reactionary establishment who regret the decay of
traditional, egocentric values. Whatever
the case - and they may even be both - their art isn't what I would regard as a
reflection of the age but, rather, a distortion and denigration of it, and
that's bad! It can cause a lot of
confusion in people's minds, and not only directly, by attacking the modern
world, but indirectly, by turning away from it.
A truly great artist, however, can only be loyal and relevant to the
age, not reactionary or anachronistic.
He doesn't seek oblivion in some imaginary Golden Age of the past, or
endeavour to resurrect certain aristocratic values long after they've ceased to
have any applicability to the times, but forges ahead, content in the
knowledge, like Mondrian, that life is gradually
changing for the better, remaining faithful, again like Mondrian,
to the exigencies of evolution, and not either stagnating in a stasis of
perpetual dualism or reverting to a context of pre-dualistic sensual and
material one-sidedness. The true artist
is ever the advocate of his age, not a rebel against it! And if the age demands that art becomes a reflection
of truth rather than a propagator of truthful illusions or illusory truths,
well then, truthful his art must be, no matter how anti-traditional it may
appear to the philistines!
"The representative art of the past
hundred years, including that of the novel," he went on, growing in
confidence, "testifies to the mounting influence of the superconscious at the expense of the subconscious. It aims at truth and light, not their
negation. In literature it takes the
form of Flaubert and Zola rather than Huysmans or
Wilde. It adopts a scientific
detachment, an impersonality and impartiality towards the facts under
surveillance. That humility and
painstaking patience before the phenomena of existence which is the hallmark of
the true scientific temper - what is that if not a reflection of our mounting
allegiance to the superconscious at the expense of
mere egotistical self-indulgence? Was it
something that Descartes or Leibniz really understood? No, they lived in an egocentric age which was
as much governed by illusion as by truth.
They wouldn't have understood the patience and self-effacing
intellectual humility of a Pasteur or a Darwin.
Still less would they have approved of the literature of Flaubert or
Zola or any of the other great moderns.
Admittedly, they might have approved of Tolkien
in some measure, but that's only because he was one of the most unequivocally
illusory writers who ever lived, an exponent of bad art, or art that defies the
transcendental preoccupation with truth which characterizes our age and
propagates a species of illusion which stands out like a literary sore thumb in
the march of evolutionary progress! Just
as politics has its Hitlers, so literature has its Tolkiens. It also
has its D.H. Lawrences and John Cowper Powyses. But that, I
think, is really quite another story!"
"In what way?"
Linda eagerly wanted to know, becoming puzzled.
"Oh, in a variety of ways
actually," Matthew rejoined, pulling a wry face as though to indicate his
distaste for the subject. "I mean, from
the viewpoint of relevance to the age, D.H. Lawrence was a very bad artist, a
deplorable novelist. His rebellion
against science and technology, post-Christian transcendentalism, the city, and
so on, was thoroughly misguided and unenlightened, eventually leading him to a
kind of neo-pagan acceptance of nature and belief in sex as a mode, nay, the principal
mode of salvation, like Wilhelm Reich, his rather more sophisticated German
counterpart. Whether in regard to The Plumed
Serpent or Lady Chatterley's Lover or, indeed, half-a-dozen other
novels, one is led to the conclusion that he was one of the most reactionary
and worldly writers of his time. The
very fact that he ended-up virtually worshipping the 'dark gods of the loins',
or whatever it was, speaks for itself.
Instead of being among the ideological antennae of the race, as a
genuine artist should be, D.H. Lawrence became a kind of tail to it, a
down-dragging influence who related to pre-dualistic criteria, as germane to a
pagan age, in which the senses predominate, under the auspices of subconsciousness, in response to the sensuous presence of
untrammelled nature. One could hardly be
more anti-modern than him, not even if one were intent upon propagating a
philosophy of nature-worship, or Elementalism, like
John Cowper Powys, who, to judge from his elementary books, wasn't the most
genuine of artists either!"
"Wasn't he the one who wrote In Defence
of Sensuality?" Linda
tentatively commented, recalling to mind the only J.C.
Powys title she knew.
"So I recall," Matthew admitted,
a faintly ironic smile appearing on his thin lips in response to Linda's
prompting. "Hardly
the kind of book to have appealed to someone like Mondrian,
who was truly modern. But Powys
was essentially a bourgeois anachronism with a strong admiration for people
like Rousseau and Wordsworth, and consequently much of what he wrote is
irrelevant or contrary to the trend of evolution, including his paradoxical
belief in a two-faced First Cause, which he would have us all ambiguously
responding to in an appropriately grateful or defiant manner, depending on our
circumstances at any given time! Not
quite the religious viewpoint that Aldous Huxley grew
to endorse, is it? But, then, artists of
Huxley's calibre are few-and-far-between anyway, so one can't be particularly
surprised!
"For every genuine and truly modern
artist," Matthew continued, unconsciously slipping into a terminology more
congenial to himself, "there seems to be at least
a dozen sham ones - men who lack both the nerve and the ability to come
properly to terms with their age. Powys
and Lawrence are simply two of the more conspicuous examples of bad artists,
and not simply because of what they wrote
but also in terms of how they wrote. I mean, the most significant
twentieth-century novels aren't those which tell a story, and thus promulgate
fictions in one context or another, but those which are overtly
autobiographical and/or philosophical, and thereby attest to the swing of the
literary pendulum from illusion towards truth.
To produce fictions, in this day and age, is contrary to the dictates of
transcendentalism and liable to result in one's being
branded an anachronism. A novelist who
gives us something approximating to traditional literature, with plot,
characterization, long descriptive passages, narrative, and so forth, is
equivalent to a painter who produces representational canvases, or a composer
whose music is tonal and harmonic, or a sculptor whose sculptures are
figurative. He isn't truly contemporary,
for his head is full of traditional criteria and it's precisely those criteria
which, in their classical objectivity, are no longer relevant. By not relating to the foremost developments
of the age he reduces himself to the level of an anachronistic dilettante, and
consequently whatever he does is of little evolutionary import. His storytelling, accomplished or otherwise,
will simply make for bad art or, rather, for no art at all, insofar as former
criteria of literature no longer apply - except, that is, in the popular
context, where they both intimate of cinema and to some extent serve the
insatiable hunger of the film industry for narrative productions. As a victim of atavistic inheritance or
historic class-fixation, his work will simply be out-of-place. It may be as good as if not better than
novels used to be when the canons of illusion applied. But that won't alter its irrelevance to the
present by one jot! At best, one can
congratulate him for his ability to emulate past masters, his antiquarian
capacities, but hardly anything else - least of all his refusal or inability to
satisfy the demands of contemporary art!
For, these days, the artist is very much, to repeat, a man of inner
truth and light, not their objective negation!"
"Which is presumably what you
are?" Linda concluded sympathetically.
"I hope so," said Matthew,
blushing. "At least I try to be
such as much as possible, though only, of course, within the spheres of
painting and sculpture, which are my principal concerns. As to literature, I don't apply myself, since
unable to practise three professions simultaneously. But I had a friend who was a novelist and a
very progressive one, too! He used to
write more philosophically than autobiographically, but he also experimented
with a variety of radical techniques, including a species of verbal abstraction
which aimed at depriving his work of intelligibility."
"How d'you
mean?" Linda queried, not altogether unreasonably in the circumstances.
Matthew hesitated a moment before
replying. For he was
obliged to stifle a degree of amusement at his late-friend's expense. "Well, he wanted some of his writings to
directly parallel, so far as possible, the development of abstraction in
painting and music, since he believed that, due to commercial pressures,
literature had fallen behind the other arts in this respect," the artist
at length responded. "For instance,
he would write sentences like 'This munching got or placing use cat to their
run taken over shoes,' or something of the sort. I can't remember his exact verbal
constructions but, anyway, words were arranged in such fashion as to avoid all
sense or, at any rate, as much sense as possible."
Linda had to giggle at the mention of this,
which sounded somehow crazy to her.
"You mean to say he used a kind of automatic writing
technique!" she doubtfully exclaimed.
"No, since he often deliberated over
his choice of words for hours on-end," Matthew revealed. "After all, when you write automatically
you still find yourself making some kind of sense here and there. Familiar words and phrases hang
together. But he wanted to reduce
meaning as much as possible in order to be thoroughly abstract, and this he
systematically endeavoured to do, though mostly in short poems, which were
really Mallarmé ten or twenty times over, so to
speak. Not the sort of thing that would
have appealed to Tolstoy, who failed even to make any sense of Mallarmé, but arguably compatible with a kind of
avant-garde abstraction which the French poet seems to have anticipated. Anyway, before his death - he was killed in a
road crash early last year - my late-friend was working on what he called an
avant-garde supernovel, using this abstract technique
of his, which he regarded as more radical than anything James Joyce or William
Burroughs had ever done. Had he lived to
finish the work, I'm confident it would have been the most revolutionary
example of literary abstraction ever penned or, rather, typed. Yet such wasn't to be the case, and, so far
as I know, the world still awaits a novel which purports to make as little
sense as possible."
"Maybe that's just as well!"
Linda commented, offering Matthew a wry smile.
"Well, however nonsensical the idea
may seem," he rejoined, "it has a certain contemporary relevance,
insofar as similar if less radical experiments have already
been made. Yet, in a way, the idea of
breaking-up meaningful language is no less significant than breaking-up or
transcending representational form in art or diatonic melody in music, and
corresponds to the same post-egocentric urge.
I, for one, wouldn't be at all surprised if we abandoned language
altogether, in the future, and resorted to pure awareness and non-verbal contemplation
as a means to enlightenment. After all,
if early man, grovelling in the dirt of prehistoric survival, was beneath
language, not having evolved to a civilized framework, why shouldn't late man
be above it, having evolved beyond such a framework and, thanks to his mastery
of the machine, entered a non-verbal epoch primarily dedicated to the
attainment of spiritual salvation. It
seems a perfectly credible contention to me, at any rate. And I'm convinced it would have seemed no
less credible to Aldous Huxley, who was an advocate
of pure contemplation, or 'cleansing the doors of perception' through the
removal of verbal distractions. For the
trend of evolution is certainly in the direction of spiritual salvation, as our
growing allegiance to the inner light adequately attests, and, as such, it's to
our advantage to transcend the constraints of language in due course, since it
has no relevance to 'the peace that surpasses all understanding', i.e.
intellectuality."
"No, I guess not," Linda conceded
doubtfully. "Though
it seems unlikely that we'll outgrow our verbal preoccupations for some time
yet, even if certain avant-garde writers are anxious to break up language at
present."
"Oh, I quite agree," Matthew
admitted, smiling. "Yet that isn't
to say the attempts which are currently being made to transcend such
preoccupations are without justification or meaning. They're essentially symptomatic of a long,
slow process of de-verbalization upon which the modern world would seem to be
embarked, not arbitrary indulgences imposed upon society out of mere whim or in
consequence of a fad. They're bound to
have a significant influence upon our future development. For the more godlike we become, the less need
we'll have of language. If the beast is
beneath speech, then the god is very much above it. And modern man is closer to becoming godly
than to remaining beastly."
"Yes, though some modern men are
evidently less far removed from the beastly than others," Linda Daniels
averred, jerking her head back in the general direction of her husband, across
the far side of the room.
Matthew automatically smiled and nodded his
head in tacit confirmation of Linda's suggestion, which left him agreeably
surprised and even flattered. He hadn't
expected her to be quite so sympathetic to himself and contemptuous of her
husband, and was somewhat relieved to discover that his preconceptions about
her, in regard to Peter Daniels, had been proven inaccurate.
Indeed, judging by the interest she had
shown in his art, it was difficult not to conclude that Linda was a very
different type of person from her husband, much more culturally and
temperamentally akin to himself. He was
certainly intrigued by her and glad to have someone intelligent and sympathetic
with whom to talk for a change, someone who, unlike Gwen and even Mrs Evans,
suggested a wavelength similar to his own.
And he was well aware, as he sat opposite her, no more than three feet
away, that she was a more attractive woman than Gwen, not to mention Gwen's
mother, who, though far from unattractive, was probably a little past her
prime.
Yes, he liked the look of her richly
plaited hair, dark-brown eyes, aquiline nose, and nobly shaped lips, which
suggested refined sensuality. He also
liked her dark-green satin minidress, which was eye-catchingly décolleté, and the ample
contours of her breasts, which were not without a certain seductive charm for
him. And then, too, her voice had a
pleasing resonance, a feminine depth and huskiness to it which was far from
devoid of sensual overtones. All things
considered (or, at any rate, as much of her as he could see), she struck him as
of superior physical quality to Gwen and much too good for the reactionary fool
to whom she was married.
He wondered how she had got herself hitched
to him in the first place, though he had no intention of asking her about it
while Peter Daniels was still in the flat, even if at a fairly safe distance
from them both, and with the suggestion of being too engaged in conversation
with Gwen to be in a position to overhear anything. Still, there was always the possibility that
he could find out in due course, say, through inviting her over to his flat or
studio one evening. After all, if she
was as interested in his art as she appeared to be, why not invite her over to
scrutinize it close-up, and thus have the opportunity to discuss art in more
congenial surroundings? Particularly
since, according to what he had already learnt about her, she was something of
an artist herself, with distinct leanings towards abstraction and the avant-garde
in general?
Yes, it would be refreshingly tonic to have
a kindred spirit to address, if not undress.
He was always on the lookout for understanding, and Linda Daniels, with
her attentive nature, seemed more than adequately qualified to provide it, even
if she was less of an artist than a schoolmistress. At least she had a progressive disposition,
which was more than could be said for a fair number of professional artists -
sculptors no less than painters. Yes, he
would definitely invite her over!
CHAPTER EIGHT
"Had a
busy day at the office?" Mrs Evans asked her husband, as he entered the
kitchen minus his bowler hat and leather briefcase.
"Not really," he replied, going
up to and giving her a perfunctory peck on the cheek, as per custom. "Pretty quiet, in the
main." He briefly glanced
round the kitchen, before asking her what was for dinner?
"Boiled bacon, potatoes, and
carrots," she replied. "Can't
you smell it?"
"I've got a blocked nose
actually," he informed her. "Must have caught another damn cold."
Mrs Evans made an effort to appear
sympathetic, but, privately, she was disgusted with him and fearful of catching
his germs. She'd had enough colds for
one year and didn't relish the prospect of catching yet another! Indeed, now that she had it in mind to send a
letter to Matthew Pearce, arranging to visit him again the following week, a
new cold was the last thing she wanted!
How would he feel if she went to him snivelling or all blocked-up with
her husband's stinking germs? Not
particularly amorous, she thought. So,
feigning concern for the food, she swiftly turned away from Thomas Evans and
proceeded to apply a fork to the potatoes, gently prodding them through the
turbulent water in which they were fiercely simmering.
Mr Evans took a seat at the kitchen table
and then vigorously blew his nose.
"At least I haven't lost my appetite," he remarked at length.
"Dinner will be ready in about five
minutes," Mrs Evans announced, with her back still turned on him.
There was a strained silence before Mr
Evans next ventured to open his mouth, saying: "You might be interested to
learn that I discovered a crumpled, lipstick-smeared paper tissue in our
bedroom this morning."
"Oh?" Mrs Evans carried on prodding individual
potatoes as though the fact of this discovery was nothing out-of-the-ordinary,
though she felt anything but comfortable at the mention of it.
"Found it in the bottom of our blue
wardrobe while looking for my best shoes there," he went on. "It must have fallen out of a pocket or
something."
Mrs Evans recalled that she had transferred
the paper tissue in question from her handbag to the side pocket of one of her
dresses, the green one, shortly after arriving back from
"Since you were asleep at the time, I
didn't care to make a fuss," Mr Evans continued calmly. "But I picked the tissue up, all the
same, and put it in my trouser pocket. I
have it here now."
Mrs Evans turned around in manifest
disbelief, as her husband dangled the said item between the forefinger and
thumb of his right hand. She was on the
point of reaching out and snatching it from him, when a sudden realization of the
fact it was the very same tissue upon which he had just blown his snotty nose
made her hesitate and then recoil in disgust.
She stared at it speechlessly.
"What puzzles me about this rather
soiled item," Mr Evans remarked, "is that you don't usually use red
lipstick these days, and that when you do very occasionally use any you don't
wipe it off on a paper tissue, like this, but wash it off. And you certainly don't make a point of
hiding such crumpled items in wardrobes."
"I wasn't hiding it!" Mrs Evans
protested. "I had simply forgotten
to throw it away."
"What, after you had used it to wipe
lipstick off someone else's face?" Mr Evans conjectured sarcastically.
Mrs Evans had begun to blush as brightly as
the lipstick in question. "No, of
c-course not," she stammered.
"I must have used it on myself, some m-months ago, and then put it
into the p-pocket of the dress I was w-wearing at the time."
"Which strikes me as being singularly
uncharacteristic of your habits," Mr Evans declared in a brusque
manner. "Besides, a tissue directly
used on your lips would surely have more lipstick on it than this one
does. And the lipstick wouldn't be so
faint or widely diffused." He
paused for effect a moment, then continued: "Now
if you had used it some time ago, you would surely have discovered it, in the
meantime, and thrown it away, since you don't keep all that many dresses in
that particular wardrobe, and those you do keep there are in fairly regular
use."
Mrs Evans was beginning to feel
insulted. "Are you suggesting I'm a
liar?" she shouted.
"I'm not suggesting anything of the
kind, my dear," her husband calmly responded. "I'm merely intrigued by the discovery
of this item. Intrigued by that and by one
or two other things, including what appears to be a noticeable change in your
behaviour recently, as though you had other and better things to think
about."
"Such as?"
"Oh, that's not for me to say, is
it?" Mr Evans retorted. "I'd
rather you told me."
Mrs Evans' blush had attained to such a
blistering peak by now that she was obliged to turn back to the oven in order
to hide her emotions from him as best she could. "I've nothing to tell you," she
confessed.
"I must say, I am surprised to hear
that," Mr Evans resumed, his tone quietly confident, "especially
after the impressions I formed of your attitude towards that artist-fellow whom
Gwendolyn brought here recently."
"I don't know what you're talking
about," Mrs Evans declared.
"Ah well, perhaps I was
mistaken," Mr Evans conceded sceptically.
"Only it seemed to me that you took rather a fancy to him, even to
the point of sitting next to him in the garden while Gwendolyn was on the phone
that evening. I was observing you
through the sitting-room's rear windows a good deal of the time, wondering what
the hell you could be talking about."
"Mostly about modern art, if you must
know," Mrs Evans confessed.
Mr Evans fidgeted nervously on his
chair. "Is that so?" he
remarked almost offhandedly. "Well,
the artist was evidently gratified by your company and not as tongue-tied as
with Gwendolyn. Prior to your appearance
they hardly said a word to each other, you know. One got the impression they were bored with
themselves. But when you arrived on the
scene, my word, what a difference came over the fellow! How delighted he seemed to be, having you
instead of Gwendolyn beside him!"
"I think you're imagining
things," Mrs Evans opined, bending over the carrots with fork unsteadily
in hand.
"I rather doubt it," Mr Evans
countered. "After all, my eyes
don't usually deceive me, no more, for that matter, than do my ears, which were
well aware of the fact that you were very polite and hospitable towards him at
dinner. Far more so
than you usually are towards strangers.
And you found him handsome too, if I remember your first impressions
correctly. Better-looking
than Gwendolyn’s previous boyfriends."
Mrs Evans sighed in exasperation. "I can't see how that can have anything
to do with it, since one would have to be blind to doubt his good-looks,"
she objected.
"Yet not so blind to
doubt his sanity, if his theories on art and religious evolution were anything
to judge by!" Mr Evans responded with a sarcastic relish that
belied his ill-health. "Why, the
man's cracked, positively cracked! All
that nonsense about transcendental meditation and abstract art, the Holy Ghost
and ultimate truth - it didn't even begin to make sense to me! If that's the kind of enlightenment Gwendolyn
is getting herself involved with, then I have to say I feel sorry for her! She ought to know better than to bring a
pathetic little wimp like that into the house.
Indeed, she oughtn't to have replied to his letter in the first place,
since he was virtually a complete stranger to her.... Writing to someone he
hadn't seen in over four years, and then only very briefly and for the first
time - what's that if not a clear indication of how cracked he is? D'you think any man in his right mind would have done such a
thing? No, really, I'm both surprised
and disappointed at Gwendolyn for having taken an interest in him! She ought to have ignored his letter and left
him to his abstract doodles, the little fairy!
Had she not fallen out with her previous boyfriend, a couple of weeks
before, I expect she would have ignored it. Unfortunately for her, she was at a loose-end
at the time.... Yet that colleague from her school, Mark bloody Taber or something, was much more sensible and of her type, the way I
saw it. Not one of these eccentric
avant-garde types anyway - bloody stuck-up Nazi subjectivists who resent the
fact that photography has left them in the petty-bourgeois lurch and that they
aren't really as contemporary or progressive as they like to imagine.... A pity
he couldn't have made it up again, and thus prevented her from making a damn
fool of herself with this artist character. After all, she's likely to gain more from a
kindred spirit like Mark than ever she will from this trumped-up
transcendentalist, or whatever he calls himself. At least Taber's down-to-earth and of a
decently solid middle-class background.
You know where you stand with him.
But the artist?" Again he blew his nose, to Mrs Evans' renewed
distress and further disgust, on the lipstick-smeared tissue and, getting up
from the table, deposited it in the plastic rubbish-bin with a sigh of relief. Then he returned to his place and poured
himself a glass of mineral water.
"No, I didn't like him one little bit. His transcendentalism, or whatever he called
it, strikes me as nothing more than a figment of his perverted
imagination. And his art, assuming he
wasn't bluffing us about it, strikes me as constituting a mode of degeneracy
and charlatanism. Not really art at all
but anti-art - bogus, decadent, puerile, and feeble, like most of it tends to
be these days! However, since you spent
so much time in compassionate discussion with him, I expect you have different
opinions."
Mrs Evans frowned severely and, turning
sharply around, glared ferociously at her husband a moment. "What if I do,
is that any damn business of yours?" she cried.
"Not particularly," conceded Mr
Evans, who was slightly taken-aback by her anger. "Though it might have
some bearing on your strange behaviour these past four or five days. It might even have some bearing on the paper
tissue I had the ill-fortune to chance upon this morning. After all, if you're not altogether opposed
to his art, I can't see that you need be opposed to certain other things about
him, least of all his capacities as a lover.
I mean, he's likely to be more virile than me, despite his art."
"You don't know what you're
saying!" Mrs Evans weakly protested.
"Well, maybe that's because I haven't
got all the facts and can only go on conjecture," Mr Evans declared. "Of course, I'm well aware that you went
to
"What are you trying
to insinuate?" Mrs Evans exclaimed, turning completely away from the oven
in order to look her husband squarely in the face.
"Well, through having phoned Stephanie
from the office today, I'm aware that you only spent the morning with her,
since you apparently had to dash off, shortly before lunch, to attend to what
she described to me as some 'pressing business'," Mr Evans revealed.
Mrs Evans felt a lump in her throat and a
sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the mention of this. "You phoned Stephanie this
morning?" she gasped.
"This afternoon actually, after I had
earlier deliberated over the possibility of your paying a visit to someone
whose face needed wiping," Mr Evans calmly corrected. "And she obligingly informed me that you
spent only a couple of hours with her.
Now since you didn't arrive back here till gone eight o'clock, you must
have done something with yourself in the meantime - either paid a visit to
someone else or walked around the West End all afternoon or ... attended to
some 'pressing business'."
Mrs Evans flushed deeply. She wondered why she had said such a thing to
Stephanie at the time. Was it because
she felt guilty about what she had actually arranged to do and was secretly
afraid that her cousin would be offended by her premature departure, if she
didn't endow it with some more cogent excuse than merely wanting to look around
town? Not surprisingly, Stephanie had
been delighted to see her again, after over five months, and keen to make her
visit as pleasant as possible, which, of course, it had been, especially since
the baby - a boy of six weeks - was such a treasure to behold. But ironically, what with the exciting
prospect of seeing Matthew Pearce in the afternoon, her visit had not been as
pleasurable as it might otherwise have been, and it wasn't altogether
impossible that Stephanie had noticed a slight impatience on her part which
made it seem necessary for her to invent a cogent excuse in the form of
pressing business. However, whether or
not Stephanie had been offended by her premature departure shortly before lunch,
the fact remained that she hadn't inquired into its motive, which, in view of
Thomas Evans' current suspicions, was probably just as well! Yet it didn't exactly make life any easier
for her at present. An explanation was
still required and, against the surge of embarrassment which had overcome her,
Mrs Evans struggled to find one.
"As a matter of fact I went along to
Gwendolyn’s school to watch her preparing things for the new term," she
blurted out, forced, on the spur-of-the-moment, to grasp at the first seemingly
credible straw of an excuse that floated to the turbulent surface of her
hard-pressed mind. It sounded false and
ridiculous, but she couldn't think of anything better, in the circumstances.
Mr Evans raised an eyebrow in a show of
ironic surprise. "And you call that
'pressing business'?" he sneered.
"No, not exactly," Mrs Evans
conceded. "But it just so happens
that I'd been invited by Gwendolyn to visit her while in London anyway, so it
was like a kind of obligation to me, especially as I hadn't seen her school
before. I ought perhaps to have told you
of her invitation while she was here.
But as I didn't think you'd be interested, I kept it to myself. In point of fact I was quite impressed by the
place, as also by her new flat, which is situated conveniently close by. You'd be surprised how spacious it is."
"Really?"
Mr Evans responded thoughtfully, with a vague nod. "And presumably that's where you saw the
artist again and had recourse to the use of a paper tissue on his face?"
"Yes, I mean no, of course not!"
Mrs Evans replied. "Gwendolyn and I
were alone together throughout the entire time." Once again she regretted her words, of having
been obliged to improvise such a flimsy excuse.
If Thomas Evans were to contact Gwendolyn and ask her what had been
going on on the afternoon in question, it would be
exposed for the blatant lie it was.
Fortunately, the chances of him telephoning her were pretty slight,
since he was partly deaf in his right ear and generally averse to making phone
calls to people out of the blue, especially to soft speakers like his daughter,
so, short of visiting her in person, his most likely approach would be to write
to her. Yet that didn't make matters a
great deal better either, especially if he got it into his suspicious head to
write to her straightaway, before Mrs Evans could do anything to influence her
daughter against him.
Really, it was very foolish to drag
Gwendolyn into it, particularly as she would almost certainly become suspicious
if her father started asking awkward questions and intimated that an affair was
secretly going on between Matthew and her mother. It was hardly likely that she would prove the
most reliable of allies, under the circumstances! But, alas, no other idea vaguely
corresponding to the pitiful excuse of 'pressing business' had presented itself
to Deirdre Evans' beleaguered imagination, so it was now a question of sticking
to one's guns and hoping for the best, hoping, in other words, that Thomas
Evans wouldn't contact Gwendolyn in due course.
And, needless to say, it was no less necessary to hope that Gwendolyn
wouldn't get it into her capricious head to phone home, over the next few days,
for the sake of a chat or in order to find out how her father, with his
persistently poor health, was faring. It
was, of course, to be hoped that he wouldn't be at home or available for
comment if, by any chance, she did so.
However, the reality of his presence in
their house at present was no easy matter for Mrs Evans to live with,
especially as she felt that her excuses weren't really passing muster with
him. On the contrary, her embarrassment,
coupled to the nervous and, at times, angry tone of her voice, had the effect
of making her feel exposed and unconvincing.
She felt that he could see through her to the lie beneath. But she couldn't go back on it, not after all
she had said. Besides, she couldn't have
told him the truth at the beginning even if she had wanted to; for it would
have led to her being disgraced to an extent beyond anything she had ever
known. And not only with regard to him
but in the eyes of Gwendolyn as well, who would almost certainly get to hear
about it in due course. No, better to
risk anything than that, even if one had to lie oneself red in the face!
Oh, what a mistake it had been not to throw
the used tissue away, but to have
held-on to it as a kind of memento of her conquest! Had she not been so infatuated with Matthew
Pearce, she would never have allowed herself to attach such sentimental value
to it in the first place. Yet because it
had touched his face and bore the marks of her love, she had chosen to hang-on
to it, like a young adolescent in the first flush of romantic passion. Now, of all her regrets, this was the worst,
the one she could least countenance. The
tissue ought never to have found its way into her handbag, let alone the blue
wardrobe! It ought to have been
deposited in Matthew's wastepaper basket.
But where the self-recriminations ended, the sentimentality began. And with that came the suffering, not least
of all in relation to the fact that he, Thomas Evans, had blown his snotty nose
on it! Blown his dirty nose on her love,
he who had been unable to inspire so much as a genuine kiss from her in over
ten years! Really, she could have killed
the bastard! No doubt, his impudence had
achieved something by way of exposing her feelings for Matthew. He must have relished the fact!
But at that moment Mr Evans had other
things to relish, including the impending prospect of his evening meal, which
Mrs Evans was making a gallant effort, in spite of her nerves, to transfer from
the various saucepans to his plate.
"I'll have a double helping of bacon while you're at it," he
requested, momentarily discarding his air of outraged innocence. "And one or two extra
potatoes."
Obediently his wife added an extra sliver
of boiled bacon to the plate and another potato, before placing his dinner in
front of him. Then she returned to the
oven and, having turned it off, put lids on the saucepans.
"Aren't you going to eat anything
yourself?" asked Mr Evans, visibly surprised. For, normally, his wife sat down to dinner
with him.
"Not now."
Mr Evans looked genuinely concerned, almost
worried. "Have I taken away your
appetite, then?" he said.
"For the time being, yes, you
damn-well have!" cried Mrs Evans, who briefly flashed him a defiant look
and then continued to busy herself about the oven, applying a damp cloth to the
stains there. She was well-nigh
convulsed with hatred towards him, hatred for all the humiliations he had
forced upon her, both today and in the past.
A tear welled-up in her left eye and slowly slid down her cheek. Then another, followed by
one in her right eye. She turned
away from the oven and mumbled some quick barely audible excuse. She couldn't stand his hostile, mocking
proximity any longer. Blindly, she
dashed out of the kitchen and ran upstairs, heading for their bedroom.
Once there, she locked the door behind her,
threw herself down on the bed, and sobbed like a
child, wept out the bitterness that had welled-up inside her during her ordeal
downstairs. Her tears were like poison
to taste, bitter with pain. Not for
years had she cried like this, out of a deep-seated loathing for her legal
oppressor and the fate he had so callously inflicted upon her. What if she had been
unfaithful to him, was that a crime under the circumstances of his inability to
satisfy her, to bring her true knowledge of her womanhood? Did his ill-health mean she would have to
continuously suffer as well, to rot away in sexual deprivation? Hadn't she suffered enough from it already? God, what a nerve he had, to interrogate her
like she was some kind of wayward adolescent who needed correcting! What if he had noticed a
change in her since her return from London - wasn't that a change for the
better, a consequence of the fact that she had experienced a new lease-of-life
through Matthew Pearce, been brought back from the dead and given fresh
strength, hope, and courage for the future?
To think he begrudged her what little satisfaction she could find
elsewhere, as though she should always be a member of the sick-house in which
he bad-temperedly languished, a hired nurse with no right to a life of her own
- really, his selfishness could go no further!
One was indeed unfortunate to be married to such a pig!
Raising herself from the pillows onto which
she had plunged her tear-drenched face, Mrs Evans
unlocked the bottom drawer of her bedside locker and extracted from it the
novel she was currently reading. Since
her eyes were too dimmed by tears for her to see clearly, it was necessary for
her to make an attempt to dry them before opening the book and taking from
between its pages the letter she had written, during the morning, to
Matthew. Unfolding it, she slowly and
not without physical difficulty began to read:-
Dearest Matthew
Just a short letter to thank
you for the warm hospitality you showed me last Wednesday. I was indeed grateful for the opportunity to
view your paintings and sculptures at first-hand, and, although not properly
qualified to judge in such matters, I am of the opinion that they are a credit
to your powers of imagination and invention.
Of the sculptures, I particularly admired the small white dove I had the
pleasure to examine closely, whilst your painting of 'ultimate reality', with
its centripetal essence, made a profounder impression on me than anything else
I saw on canvas that day. I can still
see it before me as I write, which doubtless speaks highly of its clarity, or
perhaps I should say memorability?
Anyway, it wasn't so much
your work which gave me most pleasure in the long-run as - need I say? - you yourself, what with that pleasantly mundane body of
yours, a pleasure which is still to some extent with me whenever I think of
you. Had you actually taught me to
meditate, as for a while I feared you might, I would never have known the sweet
thrill of your love, nor the peace that comes from satisfied desire. I am sincerely glad I persuaded you to
abandon your transcendentalism for a while.
It seemed to me that you needed a reprieve from its ascetic demands on
you.
But don't be angry with me
now, I beg you! I'm not quite the enemy
of the spirit that you might take me for, even if I may now appear a shade more
mundane in your estimation than you would like.
I am not entirely devoid of spiritual aspirations, despite my
matrimonial alliance to a rather unprepossessing materialist in the ungainly
form of Mr Thomas Evans! No, if you'll
allow me to say so, I'm still interested in learning to meditate, in continuing
the lesson we were nobly embarked upon prior to the intrusion of the senses in
such a delightfully subtle fashion.
Consequently I would
appreciate an opportunity to visit you again in the near future - possibly next
week or the week after, if you aren't otherwise engaged. My best days are always Wednesdays and
Thursdays, though, should either of these prove inconvenient for you, I can
always arrange to visit your studio some alternative weekday, the middle of the
morning as well as early afternoon. I
hope such a request won't strike you as in any degree importunate or
unreasonable, bearing in mind the fact that you're obviously a busy man. But as we got on so well on Wednesday, I
can't see why we shouldn't get on still better, if you follow me, in future -
provided I can learn to meditate properly and we both keep a cool head about
it.
So if you're prepared to see
me again, would you please pen me a brief reply, addressing the letter to me
personally.... On second thoughts, why bother to reply
at all? Why not simply allow me to
assume that a Wednesday or, failing that, Thursday afternoon visit will be
acceptable to you anyway, and that, if not, you'll let me know by return
post. That way no-one but me will be any
the wiser, least of all my husband. After all, I would rather avoid arousing his
suspicions, as I'm sure you can appreciate.
So, until next week or the
following one, I look forward to not hearing from you, but to seeing you in
your true light.
Yours sincerely
Deirdre Evans.
Having read the letter, she refolded and
returned it to its hiding place.
Already, no more than five hours after putting pen to paper in such
thoughtful fashion, it was out-of-date, certainly as far as the reference to
her husband's assumed ignorance of their affair was concerned! Indeed, it had been out-of-date in that
respect even while she wrote it, since he had discovered the paper tissue
earlier that morning and therefore had his suspicions aroused a good three
hours before. Now one
need hardly fear that a reply from Matthew Pearce would necessarily arouse his
suspicions any further, since they had already been aroused to an extent which
made them the precursors of certain knowledge. If anything, it would only confirm him in his
opinion of what was going on between them, provide him with fresh evidence of
her betrayal - assuming, of course, she didn't get to the post before him or it
didn't arrive after he had gone to the office, as was sometimes the case.
In the event of her getting to the post
first or in his absence, she wouldn't have anything to fear. But due to his habit of early rising and
leaving for work just after
No, it was certainly wiser not to encourage
Matthew to write to her personally, even though there was no guarantee, under
the terms she had suggested, that he wouldn't do so. But was there really any point in sending him
the letter now, seeing her husband wasn't altogether unaware that something was
going on between them and could hardly be depended upon to encourage further
developments in that direction? Surely
it was safer, in the circumstances, to drop the affair altogether and resign
oneself to living in sexual frustration again, lest Thomas Evans became still
more beastly towards her and dedicated himself to making her life even more of
a misery than at present. After all, he
wouldn't take kindly to any future visits to
Besides, there was no guarantee that
Matthew would welcome her again, that he would want to get involved with her on
a regular basis. His relationship with
Gwendolyn could only suffer in the process, and there was no real evidence, as
yet, that he welcomed the prospect of deceiving her. Either way, it seemed unwise to send the
letter - firstly because of her husband's strong suspicions, and secondly
because of Matthew's relationship with her daughter and the correlative possibility
that Gwendolyn might get wind of it, one way or another, in due course.
But even with those prohibitive factors,
even taking into account the additional shame which could befall her if
Gwendolyn got to learn of the affair, she still felt the lure of her desire for
Matthew, felt the emotional commitment which had imperiously thrust itself upon
her, following their clandestine meeting, and made her conscious of a richness
of emotional depth she hadn't experienced in years and had virtually ceased to
regard as possible. Yes, even given all
the prohibitive factors founded upon what other people would think of her, the
voice of her own soul still clamoured for attention, spoke to her of the duty
she owed to herself and the indisputable reality of her feelings for the
artist. No matter how foolish or
dangerous it appeared, on the surface, to send the letter to Matthew in the
face of the other, external voices which spoke to her, this personal and unique
voice of her self-interest would not be quietened but, rather, grew
increasingly insistent the more she endeavoured to suppress it!
Now it reminded her that
she was thirty-nine and would soon be forty, soon have crossed the threshold
into an age-group which was resigned to growing progressively less attractive,
less sensuously seductive, as, one by one, the years slipped away. To some extent fortune had been kind to her, it had at least enabled her to preserve a fairly
youthful appearance well into her thirties - an appearance which even now was
not devoid of a certain juvenile charm.
Perhaps this was in part due to the quiet life she generally led in
As yet, she still had a few months to go,
possibly even years, if fate continued to favour her with a youthful
longevity. Why therefore should she
waste what precious time remained before the curtain of old age, with its
introspective painfulness, closed down upon her, shutting her off, for the
remainder of her life, from such pleasures as were still within her grasp? Hadn't she wasted enough valuable time
already, thanks in large measure to the wretched health of her husband in
recent years? Wasn't it therefore
fitting to atone, in some degree, for the neglect she had suffered at his hands
throughout the time in question? And how
better to atone for this enforced celibacy than by visiting Matthew Pearce in
person - he who had brought her back from the dead and enabled her to feel
powerful emotions again? Not as
powerful, admittedly, as those she had experienced in her late teens and early
twenties, but still more powerful than anything she had known either before or
since. Surely he wouldn't turn her down, he whom fate would seem not to have treated
particularly kindly as far as regular sexual satisfaction was concerned,
either. Had it done so, he would never
have written to Gwendolyn after so many years and requested her company. After all, there were plenty of women in
But if Gwendolyn was one straw, then
Deirdre Evans felt herself to be quite another and, in her own estimation, a
much bigger and tougher one - almost a log.
He couldn't, surely, turn her away if she visited him again, especially
if she took every precaution to make herself as attractive as possible? No, she owed it to herself to exploit this
channel of satisfaction to the hilt, no matter how much opposition Thomas Evans
might choose to place in her way. She
would send the letter regardless, just as Matthew had sent his own letter to
Gwendolyn without any guarantee of a positive response, and hope for the
best. For Matthew's approval would far
outweigh any disapproval from her husband - of that she was in no doubt
whatsoever!
CHAPTER NINE
It was in mid-September,
a week or two after the beginning of the new school term, that Linda Daniels
literally responded to Matthew's invitation to visit him, whenever she liked,
by calling at his Highgate flat, one fine evening, following a brief
pre-arrangement over the phone. To
Matthew's satisfaction it happened to be an evening when Gwen had decided to
stay at home to mark school work, while to Linda's satisfaction it happened to
be an evening when her husband had apparently gone to a journalist's
conference, leaving her relatively free to please herself.
Thus it was to their mutual satisfaction
that Matthew answered the door to his small ground-floor flat. He had so looked forward to seeing her again,
and she, for her part, had not been without a similar desire in regard to him -
one fostered as much on her interest in modern art as on a need to get away
from the oppressive conservatism of Peter Daniels and expand her somewhat
limited social horizons, which, until then, had been mostly confined to the conflicting
currents of fellow-teachers and journalistic colleagues of her husband. So the advent of Matthew into her life,
coming completely out-of-the-blue, wasn't without its secret allurements,
especially as she'd had so little contact with anyone even remotely resembling
him in the past.
"Did you tell Gwen you'd be coming up
here this evening?" he asked, as soon as she was comfortably seated in one
of the two small armchairs in his living room.
"In point of fact, I hardly saw her at
all today," Linda confessed, blushing slightly. "But when she did briefly cross my path,
I made no mention of any intention of visiting you. Why, are you afraid she might
disapprove?"
He smiled dismissively in response to her
ironic humour, and said: "No, but I'd rather she wasn't given grounds for
becoming jealous, that's all. You never
know how she might decide to take it out on me in future."
Linda giggled a bit. "Perhaps she's already taking it out on
you by staying in tonight," she remarked.
"What d'you
mean?" he ejaculated, wondering if she could have found out about Mrs
Evans through Gwen or something.
"Oh, nothing in particular,"
Linda chuckled. "Just
a little private joke. Though,
now I come to think of it, she did seem somewhat distant and ... abstracted
today. Yes, it was as if something was
troubling her and she didn't want to discuss it or commit herself to the usual
social camaraderie which is all the time going on between her and various other
members of the teaching staff, myself included.
I recall someone else remarking that she wasn't quite her usual
self."
Matthew became puzzled and vaguely worried
on Gwen's behalf. "Maybe she still
hasn't got used to being back to school," he suggested half-facetiously.
"Yes, that could be it," said
Linda, nodding ironically. "It's
certainly the case with me, at any rate!
However, let's not discuss school now.
I usually try to forget about my work in the evenings."
"I'm sure you do," he
sympathetically responded, smiling.
"What would you like to drink - a beer or a cola?"
"I think I'll have a beer," she
answered, without much hesitation.
Matthew disappeared into the kitchen and,
in view of the fact that Linda was wearing a skirt, came back with two full
glasses of lager in his hands. There
then ensued a brief silence while they tasted their respective drinks, though
it wasn't that often he had recourse to anything alcoholic these days, since he
preferred cola in view of his transcendental predilections.
"Do you mind if I ask you a personal
question?" Linda inquired of him in due course, the light ale evidently to
her taste.
"Not at all," he replied, licking
some froth from his upper lip.
The P.E. teacher cleared her throat and
swallowed hard, so to speak. "Are
you in love with Gwen?" she asked.
The artist almost choked with
astonishment. "Good God, no!"
he exclaimed impulsively.
"I see." Linda seemed slightly relieved.
"Why, were you afraid I might
be?"
"No, not
specifically. Though, to be
honest, I didn't think you were."
Matthew gently smiled his approval. "And what about you?" he
asked. "Are you in love with your
husband?"
"No, although there was a time,
shortly before and after our marriage, when I thought I was. But, these days, I rather doubt
it." She felt consumed, all of a
sudden, by a piercing stab of self-pity and remorse, took a large gulp of beer,
as though to drown her feelings, and stared ruefully at the afghan carpet just
in front of her feet.
"Somehow I didn't think that you and
he were really cut-out for each other," Matthew opined, desiring to break
the slightly oppressive silence which had fallen between them, like a
ton-weight of psychological debris.
"You strike me as being an altogether more radical person. Or perhaps I should say less
conservative?" he added, as an afterthought.
Linda had to smile at this remark, which
struck her as slightly impertinent.
"Frankly, I don't consider myself at all conservative - at any
rate, not politically," she revealed.
"On the contrary, my political bias tends towards the Left, but
such a bias isn't encouraged by my husband, as you well know. Unfortunately, I only discovered that after I'd
married him. Had I realized what his
true inclinations were before our
marriage, I would never even have got engaged to the sod!"
"How come you got involved with him in
the first place?" Matthew wanted to know, becoming intrigued by the
apparent implausibility of their marriage.
"Well, I had the ill-fortune, I can
now say, to be invited along to a party, shortly after I'd graduated from
college, at which we met," Linda confessed, blushing faintly in spite of
her apparent calm, "and as he rather took a fancy to me and was quite
good-looking, I allowed things to develop from there. Coming from a relatively poor background,
both my parents being Jamaican immigrants, I allowed myself to become foolishly
impressed by his wealth and social status.
For I thought it would open up new doors to me and at last bring
happiness within my grasp. His father
was a prosperous banker actually, and when he died, a few years ago, he left
most of his wealth to Peter, including a large detached house in Dulwich. Personally, I dislike the place because it's
too big and requires so much upkeep. But
since I'd never lived in anything even remotely resembling such a place before,
I suppose it appealed to my curiosity and sense of adventure, not to mention my
pressing desire to escape from the rather cramped flat I'd been sharing with a
couple of fellow-undergraduates. So I
plunged into the deep end, as it were, only to belatedly discover that I
couldn't swim there. Unfortunately there's a lot of me that I have to suppress when in Peter's
company, including my penchant for modern art.
Yet even if I am of a relatively socialistic
disposition, I can't pretend that I'm as left-wing as you seemed to be when in
conversation with him the other week. I
don't think I could go as far as sanctioning purges or dictatorships!"
Matthew smiled understandingly and quaffed
back some more beer. He was by no means
surprised to hear this, since it stood to reason that the conservative
environment in which she lived wouldn't permit her bias for socialism to
develop particularly far. The worldly
influence of the monied bourgeoisie would always be
around her, thwarting her political development. Given a change of environment for the better,
that is to say, within a less materialistic and naturalistic context, one
needn't be surprised if her political orientation underwent a corresponding
transformation, and thus became more radical.
As things stood, however, she was fundamentally a victim of her suburban
milieu, and consequently what she said would have to be evaluated in terms of
that. It wasn't something which any
radical socialist need be impressed by, anyway.
"Well, most of what I said to your husband was inspired by an
uncharitable impulse to shock and bewilder him," the artist at length
confessed, placing the by-now near-empty beer glass by the side of his chair,
"in that I took an immediate dislike to the bugger and thought it fitting
to display my contempt for his politics.
I didn't imagine that he'd feel very comfortable, under the
circumstances of my professed allegiance to socialism, so I tried my best to
make him feel damned uncomfortable.
Which, as you'll doubtless recall, he most certainly did feel after a
while!"
"Yes, you needn't remind me,"
sighed Linda, a mock frown in attendance.
"Had it not been for my restraining influence, he'd probably have
come to blows with you or stamped out of the room or something. For I'd never seen him lose
his cool so quickly before."
"How flattering for me!"
exclaimed Matthew, feeling perversely proud of himself. "Still, I had to impress upon him my
extreme distaste for his politics somehow, and an unabashed advocacy of
something closer to what I believe in seemed to me the best way of doing
so. It's good to speak out, to give
one's thoughts free rein when the need or opportunity presents itself.... Not
that I believe in free speech as such.
Oh, no! The society I want to see
come about certainly wouldn't encourage people of a reactionary turn-of-mind to
air their capitalist views - assuming there were any such people left. But the society in which we're living at
present hasn't evolved to a stage where the capitalist/socialist dichotomy
which characterizes it has been transcended in favour of socialism,
or ownership of the means of production by a politically sovereign
proletariat. And so a situation prevails
in which the mouthpieces of the bourgeois right continue to promulgate their
capitalist policies at the proletariat's expense. Yet, one way or another, the future belongs
to the proletariat, and consequently you can rest assured that the said
mouthpieces won't be able to continue in their well-worn tracks for ever. At present, however, free speech still
prevails, and so one is obliged to tolerate the views of people whose politics
run contrary to one's own and who, by their grasp on power, effectively prevent
the advent of a better and fairer society - one in which there are no privately
owned firms but only publicly owned ones, in line with the impersonality of the
Holy Ghost. Although the balance of free
speech is tipped against people like us, that's no reason why we should
abdicate our principles and better knowledge to suit the vested interests of a
fundamentally immoral status quo, in which some individuals can become
extremely wealthy, while the great majority of people languish in abject
poverty and neglect. The struggle for a
better world can only be an uphill one, since contrary to the materialistic
grain of life ... with its predatory roots, and therefore it behoves us to
carry-on with it, no matter how tough the going in this respect. Good things take time, after all, and we cannot
expect a social revolution to come about without an immense struggle, one of
probably global dimensions."
He realized, by now, that he must have
sounded somewhat pompous, if not conceited, to her. Yet, despite his intense dislike of entering
into political discussions with women, he knew that her husband's extreme
conservatism had, even in recollection, carried him away in a torrent of
righteous indignation ... such as he usually succumbed to within the concealed
confines of his mind. When such a torrent
assailed him, as unfortunately it all-too-often did these days, he would end-up
cursing his lucidity and status as an ideological outsider, an Irish-born
though English-raised outsider who, owing to circumstances which had catapulted
him through both a Catholic and a Protestant upbringing in painful succession,
could take neither the Father nor Christ seriously but only the Holy Ghost, the
third and, as yet, unrealized part of the Trinity, each of whose components he
believed to be subdivisible into autocratic,
democratic, and theocratic parts, with Communism signifying the autocracy of
the Holy Ghost no less than Social Democracy its democracy and, for all he
knew, some kind of socialistic transcendentalism its future theocracy. He would see himself as a kind of martyr and
dissident, obliged, through ideological lucidity, to turn his gaze towards a
brighter future and take the existing state-of-affairs, with its liberal
democracy of Christ and protestant theocracy of Christ (the Cromwellian
autocracy of Christ having been consigned to the rubbish heap of history some
three centuries ago), with a considerable pinch of sceptical salt. He couldn't enter into the spirit of this
existing state-of-affairs - it just wasn't for him, the Christic
British never having done much for his native land, neither autocratically,
democratically, nor theocratically. All he could do was look down on it from what
he regarded, not without moral justification, as a higher vantage-point, namely
that of the Holy Ghost, and hope that, one day, it would be swept away, so that
the more progressive and enlightened people could be delivered from their
current political spleen, and enter into a positive relationship to society
which would both redeem and save them.
However, Matthew was anxious not to spoil
the rest of the evening for both Linda and himself with any more such weighty
talk, being mindful, by the rather pained expression on the young P.E.
teacher's ordinarily passive face, that most of what he had said must have
sounded somewhat strange to someone who lived in a detached house and, despite
an inclination towards socialism, was the recipient of much conservative
influence. No doubt, she would have come
to appreciate it better had she been living with him for any length of
time! For there was certainly something
about her that suggested a kindred spirit.
But she was a kindred spirit, alas, who had come to experience such a
dissimilar pattern of environmental and social influence, in recent days, that
one might have taken her for a bourgeois philistine, might have taken her for
someone whose spiritual orientation was fundamentally contrary to and, hence,
incompatible with one's own - not perhaps diametrically opposed to it (for she
wasn't an aristocrat and therefore aligned with either the royalist autocracy, the
peerist democracy, or the anglo-catholic
theocracy of the Father), but certainly of an order which could never be
transmuted into something higher!
However, bearing in mind her dissatisfaction with her husband's
conservative lifestyle, it seemed indisputable that Linda Daniels was
essentially a proletarian intellectual who'd had the grave misfortune, through
her exceptionally fine looks, to get herself tied-up with a damned bourgeois, a
man who related, in his parliamentary disposition, to the democracy of
Christ. At least she was progressive
rather than reactionary.
"Can I get you another beer?"
Matthew offered, by way of seeking to conciliate her in some measure. For he didn't like to see
her consumed with self-pity.
"Yes, I'd like that very much,"
she said, holding out her glass to him.
Within less than a minute he was back from
the kitchen with two further full glasses of ice-cold lager, the fridge being
well-stocked with cans of beer and soft drinks at present. Returning to his armchair, he asked:
"Does your husband drink regularly?"
"No, not in my company," she
replied. "But he does drink both
light ale and wine quite heavily at times.
Like his intellectual hero, Oswald Spengler."
"Who also smoked cigars, I
believe?"
"Well, fortunately, Peter smokes
nothing worse than small cigars, so I don't have to put-up with too much nasal
inconvenience or tobacco pollution - not at table, at any rate! His drinking and smoking mostly take place in
private, or in the company of some of his journalistic
colleagues from 'The Cultural Heritage', who occasionally pay us a visit."
Matthew self-consciously gulped down a
rather large mouthful of beer, since the habit of drinking from a glass was
foreign to him these days, and he felt uncomfortably bourgeois in a liberal
sort of way, which reduced him, in his own estimation, to the level of Peter
Daniels or, at least, to how he supposed Daniels would drink. Nevertheless, he managed to shrug off his
subjective qualm sufficiently to be able to ask: "And are the people who
contribute towards this 'Cultural Heritage', or whatever its
called, all like himself, meaning principally strait-laced conservatives?"
"Mostly," Linda admitted, smiling
in her customary ironic fashion.
"Though they aren't all neo-Nazi, Bible-punching, tight-lipped
paragons of bourgeois respectability, by any means! One or two of them are even dandy in
appearance and behaviour. I mean, Peter
was himself a kind of dandy at one time, always wearing bright velvet suits and
sporting flash silk ties. However, the
influence of Spengler and various other right-wing
intellectuals evidently diminished his taste for such garish apparel. But he was decidedly beau
himself before his conversion to a sort of political activism. He admired the Decadents and Symbolists
immensely, and was all for turning himself into a late twentieth-century
version of Oscar Wilde, albeit a Wilde minus the socialism. His sophisticated aestheticism even extended
to an admiration of Huysmans' Against Nature,
which, for a time, he regarded as a kind of Bible. Fortunately, he never went quite as far as
its reactionary protagonist, Des Esseintes, in his
disdain for and rebellion against modern trends. But it's not altogether surprising that he
subsequently gravitated from Huysmans to Spengler and took refuge in The Decline of the West. After all, the lamentation over the collapse
of Western and, in particular, Catholic culture, in the last chapter of Against
Nature, isn't exactly irrelevant to the latter work, is it?"
"No, I guess not," Matthew
conceded, endeavouring to recall the said chapter to mind; for he was in fact
familiar, through past reading, with Huysmans. "But I'm surprised to learn that your
husband was a kind of dandy," he continued, his mind turning somersaults of
intellectual daring, as it began to conjecture the likelihood of a bourgeois
dandy appertaining to the bureaucracy of Christ in worldly femininity. "I would never have suspected such from
his appearance and conversation last week.
He looked very plain and sounded even plainer. I couldn't detect anything effeminate about
him. It seems that Spengler
must have made a man of him."
"Yes, up to a point," Linda
confirmed, smiling. "Though he
still wears a bright velvet suit from time to time and indulges in a limited
amount of aestheticism, including a taste for various fin-de-siècle
artists and writers. Then there are
twentieth-century aesthetes like Drieu
Matthew winced slightly. He didn't care much for the Symbolists
personally, nor for the Aesthetes and Decadents, whose pseudo-aristocratic
refinements and cultural snobbery struck him as constituting but another instance
of the reactionary. Even Baudelaire,
that arch-dandy and forerunner of fin-de-siècle decadence, had
been tarred by the aristocratic brush.
Excellent as an advocate of the modern, a champion of the new in art, he
was yet tied to the past in a way which Zola, with his strong advocacy of
socialist progress, never had been. He
would have preferred Schopenhauer or Nietzsche to Hegel or Marx, the
monarchical system to the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, if he was politically reactionary,
he was spiritually progressive, a believer in the new, the city, the
anti-natural, the contemplative - in a word, the
transcendent. And so Matthew found
himself forced into an ambivalence of mind over him - as, for that matter, over
most of his decadent successors, whom he admired so far as the anti-natural,
and hence pro-artificial, was concerned,
but despised for their allegiance to the aristocratic.
The cult of the artificial - witness Wilde
and Huysmans - was thoroughly modern and indicative
of spiritual progress, of a sophisticated response to large-scale urban
civilization. But the snobbish belief in
and insistence on caste, the emphasis on aristocratic detachment and privilege,
was somewhat antiquated, and thus indicative of social regress and rebellion
against the city. To have been
artificial and socialist, like Oscar Wilde, seemed to him a more consistent
approach to the problem of modernity than that adopted by, say, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Pater, or, indeed, Baudelaire himself. On the other hand, there were those who were
socialist or, at any rate, in favour of socialism, but not artificial, like
Zola and Nordau, and even some who, strictly
speaking, were neither socialist nor artificial, like the great Leo Tolstoy,
who of course became a Christian, if a rather anarchic one!
"I used to be a bit of an aesthete
myself, at one time, though that was before my conversion to transcendentalism
and its modernist implications," Matthew confessed, blushing faintly from recollective shame of the fact that he had once worn purple
pants and written short lyric poems in deference to female beauty, which
subsequently served as a springboard to art.
"Nowadays, however, I try not to have anything to do with works of
art, whether literary, musical, or plastic, that pertain
to the pre-modern. I find they are
largely irrelevant to me, since somewhat anachronistic. Either they're too sensuous or too Christian
or too dualistic or too romantic or too naturalist or something of the
kind. They don't speak to me personally
- unlike, for example, the abstract works of Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson.
They would only confuse me and weaken my modernism in some way, were I
to become seriously involved with them.
So, as a rule, I confine myself to twentieth-century art, occasionally
going back as far as the late-nineteenth century, but rarely or never
beyond. I imbibe whatever speaks to the
man of the big city - the post-cultural man of a superconscious
bias. 'The truly modern artist', wrote Mondrian in 1918, 'sees the metropolis as the supreme form
of abstract life; it stands closer to him than Nature.' And, in consequence, whatever he does should
pertain to the anti-natural and pro-spiritual, whether it is to exclude
representational elements from his canvas or to advocate, in suitably modern
terms, the importance of light. He must
avoid the reactionary at all costs, and one of the best ways of ensuring that
he does so ... is to turn his gaze away from the art of the past and
concentrate solely on the contemporary.
Not an easy thing to do, by any means, since I often feel tempted to
study paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto,
etc., but certainly not impossible! In
the future, it will doubtless come more easily.
But, at present, what with so much transitional activity going on around
us all the time, it's often an uphill struggle.
After all, none of us is, as yet, that transcendental, even granted all
the spiritual progress which has been made
during the course of the past century.
We all have reactionary tendencies of one sort and degree or another,
even if only in terms of preferring hardbacks to paperbacks or materialistic
architecture to idealistic architecture.
And how many of us are fully committed to the idea of laser beams as the
relevant weapons for transcendental man?"
"Not I, for one!" Linda replied,
with a facial show of distaste for the subject.
"No, but the fact is that the use of
light for military purposes corresponds to our growing allegiance to the
spiritual, and must inevitably come to replace the old, materialistic modes of
weaponry," Matthew averred confidently.
"Intensified beams of light would certainly constitute a more
transcendental mode of defence than the use of, say, bullets or missiles. However, all that is simply by way of saying
that, as yet, we're by no means as transcendentalist as we might be and will
doubtless eventually become. We still
have a long way to go to the post-human millennium, the coming time of a
transcendental lead!"
"In certain respects, that's probably
just as well," Linda averred.
"Though I'm still not quite sure what this post-human millennium of
yours exactly signifies?"
"Simply the ultimate point of
spiritual triumph, the ultimate triumph, on earth, of the spiritual
principle," Matthew informed her, "and thus the reign of light,
peace, bliss - in a word, Heaven. Yes,
that's what it signifies to me, at any rate!
A kind of transcendent state in which man, having thrown off the last
vestiges of his traditional dualism and thereby transcended nature, becomes godly,
becomes something above and beyond man - as far above dualistic man as that man
was above the beasts. But such a
metamorphosis is by no means in sight at present, even given the recent spurt
in spiritual progress. All we can be
certain of is that man is a phenomenon in the process of evolving towards
something greater, not a fixed form. The
changes he creates in his environment guarantee that he continues to evolve,
not remain static like a beast. The
difference between us and the caveman is really quite considerable. Unlike him, we aren't living under a
subconscious dominion but have evolved to a point, the other side of the ego,
where the superconscious increasingly prevails."
"And so the chances are that we'll
evolve even further and eventually enter a post-human millennium?" Linda
deduced with, in spite of herself, a hint of scepticism in her voice.
"I can't see why not," Matthew
affirmed, smiling optimistically.
"Unless, of course, we're all killed in a nuclear apocalypse and
no-one survives to continue our progress.
Personally, however, I'd find that very difficult to believe. After all, we haven't evolved this far just
to blow ourselves to smithereens, have we?
Nuclear weapons may be terrible things but, given our transcendental
progress generally, they would seem to be relative to the times, to an age
which is splitting the atom and thus effectively engaged in the process of
severing the proletariat from bourgeois and/or aristocratic control. It's highly unlikely that any future world war
would be waged solely with conventional weapons anyway, since, quite apart from
the fact that one couldn't risk allowing one's own nuclear installations to be
overrun, they would be largely irrelevant to the global nature of the conflict
and inadequate, moreover, for purposes of permitting one side to achieve an
ascendancy over the other."
"Yes, I suppose so," Linda
wearily conceded, resigning herself, it seemed, to the logic of post-atomic
modernity. However, it wasn't a subject she
particularly cared to dwell on, not really believing in the possibility of
future world wars anyway, least of all of a nuclear order, so she made an
effort to find something more congenial and, catching sight of an abstract
painting behind Matthew's head, inquired of him whether it was one of his
works.
"Actually it's a variation on one of Mondrian's paintings, based on a square and colour
composition," the artist replied on what sounded like a more cheerful
note, "like the one over there in fact." He pointed to a small painting hung above a
table across to Linda's right, which was of similar abstract design. "I did them both earlier in the year,
principally because I couldn't get hold of an original Mondrian
and wanted at least a copy or a variation on one of his themes to-hand. I flatter myself to think that they could be
mistaken for the genuine article, and a number of people have in fact
subsequently mistaken them for it."
"Really?"
Linda exclaimed, looking intently from the one to the other. She was indeed intrigued by them. Their simplicity and purity of colour endowed
them with a certain classicism which she found agreeably reassuring. They blended-in well with the overall
neatness and cleanliness of the room, which was itself mostly in white, like an
Ivres Klein void.
"You evidently think very highly of Mondrian's
art," she at length remarked, refocusing her increasingly beer-clouded
attention upon him.
"Yes, that has to be admitted. In fact, I regard him as the finest painter
of the early-twentieth century, the most consistently and systematically modern
painter."
"Even finer than Ben
Nicholson?"
"Yes, though not perhaps a great deal
so! Despite his considerable
achievement, however, Nicholson wasn't as systematically abstract or transcendentalist,
as his drawings, usually done in a kind of minimalist representational style
often focusing on landscapes, adequately demonstrate. Then, of course, his reliefs,
which are undoubtedly his main claim to fame, could be described as a sort of
cross between painting and sculpture rather than pure painting. Maybe even as a kind of decadent,
quasi-sculptural painting in which aesthetic considerations are compromised by
materialism. But Mondrian
never deviated from painting, and, once he attained to his mature abstract
style, what he painted was spiritually streets ahead of most other painters,
even if, on the surface, its simplicity and impersonality superficially lead
one to regard it as of a lesser importance than, say, the relatively complex,
personal work of artists like Dali, Spencer, Ernst, Delvaux,
Bonnard, et al.
Yet that, paradoxically, is precisely why it's so
significant; because it has abandoned the old cultural criteria of greatness
and wholly adapted itself to the abstract, post-egocentric and, hence,
less-complex standards of transcendental man.
The greatness of someone like, say,
"I recall your having said something
similar at Gwen's place the other week," Linda declared, alluding to his
statement concerning the relative merits of Spencer and Nicholson on the basis
of contemporary relevance. "Yet
what you're saying also presupposes that the more abstract or transcendental an
artist's work becomes, the more significant he is in relation to the present,
so that anyone who produces work of a consistently more abstract order than Mondrian's should rank higher than him as an artist."
Matthew nodded with alacrity. "To be sure, someone currently at work
in Mondrian's footsteps might well be producing - if
he hasn't already done so - a corpus of work which excels his in transcendental
standing, bringing the late-twentieth century to a painterly climax," he
averred. "But as far as his generation
is concerned, I can't think of anyone who stands above him. To the best of my knowledge, none of his
contemporaries, not even Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Bomberg,
and Balla, related to the urban milieu in quite such
positive and philosophically systematic terms.
In fact, it would be truer to say that most of them were in rebellion
against the city. However, I don't wish
to sound unduly pedantic or presumptuous.
Suffice it to say that, like life itself, art is ever a source of
ambivalence and complexity, even when it endeavours to clarify or simplify
itself! It could well be that Mondrian's art, with its geometrical patterns and black
grids, signifies not so much a religious as a secular greatness, which might
well find itself taking second place to a predominantly religious art-form in
the eyes of future generations - an art form giving greater attention to the
Light and the correlative significance of the Holy Ghost to the modern
mind."
"Such as your
art?" Linda suggested light-heartedly.
"One shouldn't entirely rule out that
possibility!" Matthew chuckled.
"Though I'm perfectly resigned to standing in Mondrian's
shadow at present." He realized
that the beer had gone to his head, making him slightly waver in his judgement
and shed some of his intellectual inhibitions.
The extent to which Mondrian's art could be
regarded as secular was indeed open to debate; though it seemed unlikely that
such paintings as Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Foxtrot
A could be classified as religious.
Abstract they might well be, but that didn't necessarily have any
bearing on the Holy Ghost, the mystic's focal-point for ultimate divinity, even
granted their creator's avowed commitment to theosophy. The lines and colour areas of his Compositions,
for instance, seemed rather to suggest an in-between realm of
moral illegibility which could be interpreted neither solely in terms of the
secular nor of the religious. The two
were somehow fused together - products of both a positive response to the urban
environment and a spiritual aspiration towards the Infinite. There was little in the individual paintings
to suggest that the artist was endeavouring to portray, in somewhat skeletal
terms, an outline of the city or, alternatively, to lead one towards a
contemplation of the Infinite. Their
abstraction was complete.
Yet this indeterminate status, born of
their inscrutability, was precisely what Matthew had decided to turn against
off late, preferring to be a specifically religious painter, and so draw the
viewer's attention, by means of such transcendental symbols as doves, globes of
infused light and meditating figures, towards the Holy Ghost. If Christianity had its painters, then he saw
no reason why transcendentalism shouldn't also be served by art, though, of
necessity, in a much-less representational way.
To be sure, the concessions to
representation which the symbolic illustration of superconscious
fidelity had forced upon him were not without their shortcomings in relation to
contemporary abstraction, yet seemed impossible to surmount without necessarily
appearing vague and indeterminate again.
Unfortunately, the production of bright monochromatic canvases wouldn't
automatically have connoted with transcendental meditation and the claims of
the spiritual life, but might just as easily have been confounded with Kleinesque experiments in spatial reality - pertinent and
valid as such experiments undoubtedly were.
No, he somehow wanted to put people in mind of the fact that they were
living in the age of the Holy Ghost, and to do this he felt he had to have
recourse to a limited amount of symbolic representation. Time would doubtless tell whether or not he
had made a mistake. For the present,
however, he was convinced of the validity of this specifically religious
orientation.
But what of Linda? Was that a hint she had given him that she
wanted to see his art, since he had promised to show it to her at Gwen's
place? He felt a sudden qualm at the
prospect of having to go to the trouble of taking her over to his studio and
then go through the rigmarole of pointing out and explaining what was what,
especially as he was beginning to succumb to beer-induced lethargy and
muddle-headedness. Surely she wasn't
expecting him to take her over there now?
No, it would be too inconvenient under the
circumstances. Besides, the alcohol
would doubtless be having its effect on her too, making her unsteady on her
legs and slightly incoherent. Now was
hardly the time to explore the studio!
Better, perhaps, to play some music in his flat and just take things
easy. That way no-one would be any the
worse off - least of all himself!
He returned his empty glass to the table
and ambled across to his midi system, which stood next to his bookcase
immediately in front of the brighter of the room's two side walls. "Would you like to listen to some
music?" he asked.
"Hmm, what have you got?" Linda
wanted to know, automatically depositing her own empty beer glass on the same
table.
"Come and see for yourself!" he
advised her, stooping down in front of the racks which housed the bulk of his
music collection.
Obediently, she vacated her chair and knelt
down beside him. "Hmm, mostly
modern jazz," she observed, as her eyes scanned the titles of a number of
albums by musicians such as Narada Michael Walden,
Jean-Luc Ponty, Chick Corea,
Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, and Herbie
Hancock.
"I imagine your husband doesn't
approve of or relate to this kind of music."
"No, unfortunately
not! He avoids modern jazz of any
description - religious, secular, or in-between."
"And presumably that means you have to
avoid it too, does it?"
Linda sighed her
indignant confirmation of this inference and said: "Yes, generally
speaking; though I occasionally tune-in to some good soul or rap music on my
radio, when he's out. But he certainly
wouldn't approve of my buying this kind of music and playing it on a regular
basis - not while he's in, at any rate!
It has to be Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, or nothing. He's even against
modern classical, as a rule, with the exception of stuffy composers like Elgar and Walton, who aren't really that modern
anyway."
Matthew smiled ironically, almost in
imitation of Linda. "Do you have to listen to them with him, then?"
he asked her.
"Not if I can avoid it, I don't! For I usually contrive to be elsewhere, in
some other part of the house. But he
occasionally takes umbrage at that and obliges me to keep him company while he
listens to Mozart or Beethoven for the umpteenth frigging time! Fortunately for me, he doesn't indulge in his
musical tastes more than once or twice a week, so I don't have to put-up with
it too often. Yet he seems not to
accredit me with any taste at all! The
mention of soul and he throws a fit!
There's no compromise in him.
Either one sacrifices oneself to him completely or he takes umbrage and
flies into a reactionary rage."
"Sounds positively
Victorian!" Matthew objected, wincing slightly in involuntary
revulsion. "Bourgeois snobbery
could hardly go any further!"
"So it would seem," sighed Linda,
who by this time had her hands on a cassette by Narada
Michael Walden. "Do you think we
could play this?" she requested, holding it out to him.
"Sure," he agreed, taking it from
her. Although it wasn't one of his
modern jazz tapes as such, its musical excellence was beyond dispute and highly
appropriate, he thought, in view of Linda's close proximity to him at this
moment, her close-fitting leather miniskirt having ridden up her black-stockinged thighs to a degree which made it impossible for
him to ignore their seductive appeal.
The cassette in question, with its soulful fervour, seemed to him an
excellent choice on her part and, no sooner had he set it in motion and knelt
down beside her again, than he felt a consciousness of her sexuality growing
inside him, pervading his mind and senses with a suggestibility it would have
been not only impossible but imbecile to ignore. She was indeed a beautiful woman, and the
longer he was close to her, the more beautiful she seemed to become. So much so, that he soon found himself
irresistibly drawn, like a magnet, to the alluring oasis of her dark flesh;
found himself endeavouring to quench a thirst from which he had too long
suffered, even given his brief affairs with Deirdre and Gwen Evans. It wasn't sex as such ... so much as sex with
the right person, sex with someone one could genuinely respect and feel proud
to possess - in a word, love. And now,
with Linda, it seemed possible this thirst would be quenched and an old nagging
want finally laid to rest.
Instinctively, he drew himself still closer
to her and, putting an arm round her slender waist, slowly brought his lips to bear
on her face, applying himself to her nearest cheek and then, as she impulsively
turned towards him, gently switching to her lips and mouth. She made no protest, not even verbally, but
submitted to his attentions with a willingness which suggested that she had
been waiting for this all along and was only too relieved that he had finally
got round to expressing his desire for her in more concrete terms.
She gave him responsive access to herself
and he pursued his desire to the very best of his ability, caressing and
kissing her in a mounting crescendo of passionate embraces which had the effect
of diminishing whatever reserve may still have existed between them and
precipitating each into the sexual clutches of the other. It wasn't long before his hands had reached
under her vest and up her skirt to more pressing objectives, freeing her from
her underclothes and exposing the totality of her flesh to his sturdy
advance. They made love in the centre of
the room, on the afghan carpet between the armchairs. It was superior to anything he had known with
women before, much better than with Gwen or her mother; better even than it
probably would have been with the two of them together. Linda was an altogether different kind of
woman - more responsive and sensitive, less bashfully self-conscious, tougher
and slicker, altogether more to his liking.
She was neither frigid nor lascivious.
And to judge by her capacity for carnal pleasure, she was in earnest
need of what he had to give her, in need of a reprieve from her bourgeois
husband.
He thrust himself upon her in a frenzy of
quickening lust and humped her like he had never humped anyone before, catching
hold of her buttocks and driving himself deep inside her convulsed flesh with
what seemed like a determination to get to the very centre of her womb, the
kernel of her sex, which was the final goal of all passion, the resolution of
all earthly desire, the heavenly resting place of the world. The contrast between his white skin and her
black skin only intensified his passion.
For it seemed like they were opposites who had come together to cancel
each other out in the culmination of their coupling, thereby achieving a golden
mean which would signify the overcoming of thesis and antithesis in a
dialectical synthesis of perfect racial harmony. He held nothing back, but gave it all to
her. For he had no shame in his
commitment to her and would gladly have accepted a child in the event of her
becoming pregnant, far as the thought of pregnancy was from his mind that
evening! He ejaculated every last
globule of sperm into her with a thoroughness which completely drained him.
The Narada tape
had progressed to side two by the time he relaxed his ardour for her body and,
satisfied by his carnal achievement, duly abandoned the pursuit of further
pleasure. They lay quiet and still for some time in each other's arms,
listening to the remaining tracks and just savouring the sensual warmth in
which they basked, like softly-purring cats.
However, it was Matthew who eventually broke the silence by asking if
she had expected him to make it with her that evening?
"Yes, I suppose so," she
smilingly confessed, blushing in spite of everything.
He smiled back at her. "So you hadn't come all the way up here
just to look at paintings and talk about modern art, then?" he teased.
"No, I was under the impression that
you wouldn't have invited me all the way up here just to discuss art," she
bluntly declared.
"Even after what I'd
said about my transcendentalism, or the spirituality to which I aspire?"
"Even then. I could tell you had a crush on me."
Matthew had to chuckle. "And what about Gwen, could you tell
that I was bored and frustrated by her?" he asked.
"Of course! You wouldn't have been so keen on my
conversation had that not been the case.
Besides, I learnt from Gwen that she was under the impression that you
were somehow disappointed in her and consequently less than happy in your
relationship."
"Oh?" Matthew was instantly intrigued. "When did she tell you that?" he
pressed her.
"On the phone one
day."
"I see." He meditated in silence a moment, but didn't
desire to inquire any further into the matter.
Frankly, the subject of Gwen rather bored him, especially as there was
another one on his mind which he realized would have to be dealt with in due
course, since it would almost certainly lead to unfortunate complications if
neglected. But, in the meantime, there
was Linda, who was something else or, at least, he hoped so. "Tell me, this little affair of ours - is
it a once-only thing, or are you prepared to visit me again in the near
future?" he asked.
"Well, if you really want to see me
again, I'm more than prepared to come here," she replied, smiling
faintly. "Or to
go anywhere, for that matter, where we can be alone together."
He heaved a sigh of gratified relief and
hugged her tenderly. "Good!"
he cried. "Then we'll see a lot
more of each other in future."
She smiled tenderly, happy in the knowledge
that he was genuinely interested in her.
It seemed that love had returned to her life. "But the next time we meet, I'd like to
see your studio and examine some of your works, if that's okay," she
reminded him.
"Sure.
I had intended to take you over there tonight, but, what with the beer
and everything, it seemed somehow inappropriate." He was still feeling a bit tipsy, despite the
fact that he had drunk only two full glasses of beer. It was doubtless due to his relatively high
metabolism and habitual abstinence. Due,
too, in some measure, to the presence of Linda and the delightful experiences
he had shared with her. Yet he was not
so tipsy, all the same, that he couldn't see through the optimism their evening
together had engendered and wonder whether they would, in fact, be able to see
very much of each other in future? After
all, Linda's husband still had to be taken into consideration. He would doubtless become suspicious if she
were away from home too often. And what
about tonight - would he still be at the journalist's conference he was
apparently attending? Matthew glanced at
his watch and, noting it was now
"Fortunately, he won't get home till
around
"And the future?”
Matthew asked. "I mean, do you
think he'll prove a major obstacle?"
She had risen from the carpet and started
to dress, putting on her pink bra and matching panties. It wasn't a question she particularly cared
to answer. Speculation seemed futile to
her, since it partly depended on Matthew in any case, on whether he would be
prepared to marry her if she got a divorce; on whether he would be prepared to
put himself out a little in the meantime - to visit her after school hours or
go down to Dulwich with her. It depended
on a lot of things, not least of all her husband's social and professional
commitments. But she couldn't see why,
if he was really determined, they couldn't arrange to see each other quite
regularly. After all, Peter Daniels
might be her legal spouse but he wasn't her gaoler. He couldn't prevent her from going out. She could always plead school commitments or
invitations from Gwen. Besides, she had
a few relatives in town, including a rather ailing mother, who could serve as
useful alibis if necessary. Thus Matthew
needn't worry himself about it, and, having imparted as much to him, Linda
ventured to relieve her own mind of a nagging doubt by saying: "I take it
you won't be seeing Gwen so much in future?"
"No, not if I can help it," he
smilingly assured her, pulling up his black jeans, which were the tightest pair
of denims he had ever worn. "I
don't want to arouse your jealousy, do I?"
She giggled her approval of this rhetorical
question and quipped: "As long as I know who you really want, you're
unlikely to do that!"
He advanced towards her half-dressed, his
T-shirt still hanging loose, and kissed her tenderly on the lips, proceeding to
caress her backside in a correspondingly tender fashion with both hands, one of
which gradually worked its way back around and under her short skirt to rest,
palm upwards, against her pantied crotch in a gesture
of sly intimacy such that would convey his tender respect for her. To his further pleasure, she accepted without
demur. It seemed that she was his woman,
after all, and that nothing could alter the fact of their mutual trust and
admiration. They had a pact with each
other, and it was not between incommensurables but, on the contrary, partners
in love.
It had just gone
Yes, so now he was her lover, more or less,
and what he had done with her had given him one of the most gratifyingly
memorable evenings of his entire life.
He was her lover, and what he would do with her in future would be no
less gratifying! He would have plenty of
time to gaze in voyeuristic rapture at her suspender-sporting thighs, if that
was what turned him on. Or remove her
bra and fondle one or both of her mouth-watering breasts. Or take instamatic photos of her in a variety
of erotic poses. Or make a video with
her which, together with the photos, might serve him usefully in old age when,
lacking the will or ability to maintain coital relations with anyone, he was
obliged to enter into the comparative salvation of a theocratic sexuality, and
thus allow himself to be served by a combination of erotic material and plastic
vibrator, his penis encapsulated, in centripetal smugness, by it vagina-like
contours. As yet, however, there was no
real need or desire, in his life, for such a sexual salvation but, rather, a
pressing desire to continue seeing Linda and thus maintain a democratic
sexuality on suitably socialistic terms.
Certainly, there could be no question of a masturbatory autocratic one,
least of all since the collapse of Stalinism in
Yet Linda's entry into his life did mean
that he would not now be in a position to carry-on seeing Gwen, as though
nothing had happened. He would have to
get rid of her and, no less importantly, her mother as well. Indeed, especially Deirdre Evans, who, on the
strength of the importunate letter he had recently received from her, was
becoming rather too demanding. He could
not have three women 'on the go' at once, nor even two, considering his
dedication to the spirit and the exacting claims of transcendentalism. Even one woman was, according to the highest
spiritual authorities, more of a hindrance than a help to the spiritual life, a
worldly omega which, especially if she was so sensuously attractive as to
demand too much of one's time, could become an end-in-itself, to the exclusion
of the heavenly omega or, at any rate, the possibility of leading an idealistic
lifestyle in pursuit of heavenly goals.
Of the three women in his life at present,
Linda was certainly the one most suited to himself, the one with whom he would
be most likely to succeed in seeing eye-to-eye on a variety of issues, not to mention
in getting to meditate with him as well as to discuss art, politics, religion,
etc., and have satisfying sex to a background, if mutually desirable, of
soulful or funky music. She was the
promise of companionship and understanding.
The others, being fundamentally middle class, would have to go. He would not be swallowed-up or suffocated by
the flesh, even if he wasn't spiritually earnest or strong enough to be able to
completely turn his back on it. His art
would only suffer, and that wouldn't serve his transcendental purposes one
little bit. Had he not been so celibate
in the past his art would never have evolved to the extent and in the way it
had, following, in Mondrian's sacred words, 'The path
of ascension; away from matter'. But
prolonged celibacy had not left him free from depression and self-deception,
nor was it something he particularly wanted to live with for ever. Provided he could keep his sexual commitments
in moderation, he was perfectly resigned to fairly regular contact with at
least one woman, and Linda, with her beauty and intelligence, struck him as
being the most suitable of the three.
Therefore the letter from Mrs Evans would have to be answered, and
preferably as soon as possible. If he
wrote to her straightaway, that evening, and sent his reply off to her early
the following day, she would almost certainly receive it by Monday or, at the
very latest, Tuesday, and thus have no excuse for turning-up at his studio, as
she had threatened to do, on the Wednesday afternoon.
Quickly, impatiently, he rummaged through
the top drawer of his writing desk and extracted her letter which, out of undue
prudence, he had hidden beneath a pile of envelopes. Reading it through once more he was assailed
by a momentary qualm and pity for the woman, reminded
of the sweet scent of her perfume and the generous curve of her hips. He was almost persuaded not to write to her
and so grant her the pleasure of another visit, especially as she still seemed
interested in learning to meditate. Yet
he was afraid that if he gave way to her request now he would do the same in
future too, thus jeopardizing and perhaps even destroying his budding
relationship with Linda. Frankly, he
couldn't risk further involvement with her, despite her obvious attractions and
urgent desire to please him. The next
time she would be a little more ardent, a little more persuasive in her
caresses, and, in all likelihood, a little more possessive as well. If she wasn't already emotionally involved
with him, the chances were pretty high that she would almost certainly become
so on or following her next visit. And
then where would he be? Shackled to a
provincial bourgeois in a monoracial
heterosexuality the equivalent of liberal democracy?
No, he would have to write to her, giving
as excuse that he would be out of the country for a number of weeks on overseas
business and therefore unable to comply with her request. Anything would do, just as long as she didn't
continue to pester him. And if she was
foolish enough to ignore his response, she would find herself making the trip
down to
Yet he was subject, all the same, to a
certain amount of regret, as he reached for his writing materials and began to
wield his felt-tipped pen, that he had to disappoint her, particularly as she
was by no means bereft of feminine charms.
Had she been closer to him in spirit, he would almost certainly have
succumbed to her influence. But, bearing
in mind her provincial background and philistine mentality, not to mention the
prolonged and virtually ineradicable influence of her
irascible husband, he was under no uncertainty concerning the right course of
action. The pleasure she had given him
would be more than adequately replaced by the pleasure he would obtain from
Linda. And if her husband got his hands
on the letter, it would be no loss to him.
On the contrary, it could only serve his purposes the more!
CHAPTER TEN
Miss Evans
scanned the class for a suitable victim, someone she hadn't already picked-on
during the lesson, and eventually her attention settled on the fair-haired boy
in the second row. "Parfitt, let's have the present indicative of 'to
ring'," she demanded.
Parfitt nervously
began to intone: "Je sonne,
tu sonne, il sonne,
er, nous sonnons, vous ... sonnez, ils sonnent."
"Correct." She cast about her for another victim. "Now you, Brady. The present indicative of
'to smoke'."
Brady obligingly intoned: "Je fume, tu fume, il fume, nous fumons,
vous fumez, ils fumment."
"Bon! And you Cartwright,
go through the verb 'to go out'."
"Je sors, tu sors,
il sort, nous sortons, vous sortez,
ils sortent," was
Cartwright's correct response.
She was satisfied with their performance
and quickly switched to another exercise, this time one which involved the
possessive adjective. "Give the
first-person possessive adjective relative to Livre est vert, Hardy."
"Mon," Hardy replied
immediately.
"And you, Smith, provide the
third-person singular for livre anglais est
bleu."
Smith scratched his head a moment, and then
stuttered "S-S-Son."
Another correct answer. He was duly passed over without comment. "And, finally, the second-person
familiar plural to yeux sont gris. This time let's hear from you, Marsh."
"Tes,"
the shy boy in question answered after a moment's thoughtful deliberation,
during which time his face turned from pale cream to bright red.
"Très
bon!" cried Miss Evans, casting Marsh and the class in general an
approving glance. They were in form
today, which was more than could be said for the previous class of the
morning! She turned over the pages of
her textbook and decided to spring them a few adjectives. "The adjective for 'brief',
"And what about 'jealous', Hargreaves?" continued Miss Evans.
"Jaloux!" Hargreaves
replied in no uncertain manner.
"And 'clever',
The redhead to her left scratched his curly-haired
head, but seemingly in vain. "Er, er ..."
"Tell him, Simpson!" she
intervened, losing patience.
"Habile, Miss,"
"Bon!" She was more relieved to have found a chink
in their collective armour at last than to have got the correct answer second
time round. "And finally Davidson,
you tell us the translation of 'reasonable'."
Davidson was ordinarily the laziest member
of the class, and today was to prove no
exception. For his version of Raisonnable was duly pronounced raison-able.
"Not 'able' but 'arble'!"
Miss Evans objected, over-emphasizing the 'ar'
sound. "You still tend to pronounce
your French 'a's as though they were English 'a's. Make them more
like 'r' in future." She knew, from
bitter experience, that an approximation was the best that could be expected
where he was concerned. "D'accord?"
"Oui,
mademoiselle," Davidson meekly promised, the silent
'd' of the pronoun duly being replaced by an audible 'r'.
She smiled in half-hearted approval and,
putting aside her textbook, turned to the volume of French poetry which had
been reserved for last, instructing her pupils to follow suit. "Aujourd'hui, nous lirons un poème par Paul Verlaine," she informed them, selecting La Lune Blanche. "Page Quarante-neuf." She began to read:-
"La lune blanche
Luit dans les bois,
De chaque branche
Part une voix
Sous la Ramée ...
O
bien-aimée.
L'étang reflete,
Profound miroir,
La silhouette
De saule noir
Ou le vent pleure ..
Revons, c'est l'heure.
Un vaste et tendre
Apaisement
Semble descendre
Du firmament
que
l'astre irise ...
C'est l'heure exquise."
The pupils nervously followed the lines in
their books.
"Now then, where does the white moon
shine, Sinclair?" she asked the tall, thin, dark-haired boy in the back
row.
"In the wood, Miss," came his correct answer.
"And where does a voice come from, Crabb?" she asked, turning to Sinclair's plump
neighbour.
Crabb looked
blank.
"From each branch," a boy to his
right whispered.
"I didn't ask you, Ryan,"
countered Miss Evans, casting the offender a disapproving glance.
There was a tiny snigger from someone a few
desks back from the front row.
"Perhaps you could tell us what the
pond reflects then, Crabb?" she suggested,
changing tack.
"Er, the
pond reflects ...” An uneasy silence supervened while he endeavoured to find
the right line.
"Second verse," Miss Evans
charitably informed him.
"Ah! the
silhouette of ... the black ... willow."
"In which,
"In which the wind ...” It was obvious
he was stuck.
"Tell him, Ryan!" she commanded,
losing patience as before.
"Cries, Miss," the whisperer
obliged.
"Bon! You must try to wake up,
"Good." She smiled her approval and then asked
Davidson to tell them what the firmament itself was made iridescent by.
Surprisingly, the member of the class who
was ordinarily the laziest confidently replied: "The star."
"Which is pronounced?"
He was on the point of giving the 'a' of l'astre an English pronunciation when he suddenly
checked himself and said: "L'arstre,
Miss," to general amusement around the class.
"C'est
meilleur," Miss Evans commented
half-jokingly, though, in truth, she would have preferred something in-between
and was slightly afraid that he might become a bad influence on some of the
others. But she had no time to tone down
his 'r' a little, for, at that moment, the mid-morning
bell rang, obliging her to terminate the lesson. Altogether, she was satisfied with their
performance and dismissed them without further ado.
Yet at the back of her mind she became
conscious, once more, of the dissatisfaction she was feeling with herself or,
more specifically, with herself in relation to Matthew Pearce. As she headed along the noisy corridor
towards the staff room for a cup of tea, she couldn't help thinking about this
dissatisfaction again and wondering whether the affair with the artist had
indeed come to an end, as events during the past few days had induced her to
suppose. Not that he had categorically
stated that he didn't want to see her anymore.
Yet there was definitely something reserved and even unfriendly about
his attitude towards her off late, which suggested as much. Then, too, the letter she had received from
her father, the previous week, inquiring into her whereabouts and activities on
the afternoon of Wednesday 26th August, made her feel distinctly uneasy, not to
say bewildered, especially as he had never written such a letter before and
usually preferred to keep himself out of her business. No explanation, other than a brief word about
wanting to check-up on something her mother had said concerning her doings at
the time. It was all very strange,
notwithstanding the fact that she couldn't quite remember exactly what she had been doing
then. Still, she was pretty certain she
had been alone and not in company, as the letter from her father seemed to
imply. Yet even though she wrote back to
him with, to the best of her recollection, a resumé of that
day's activities and asked what it was all about, why he had to contact her
like this and request a written response, she still hadn't received a reply,
and was now even more baffled by it than previously. The fact that it probably had something to do
with Matthew seemed the most credible explanation for her father's strange
behaviour, though she couldn't quite see how that could be linked to his own
changed attitude towards her recently.
But perhaps she would find out in due course?
Resignedly, she pushed her way through the
swing doors of the large, crowded staff room and proceeded towards the tea urn
at the far end. A number of colleagues
were queuing to have their cups filled by a small black charwoman in a green
overall and, as she slipped in behind them, one of them turned round and
greeted her in a warmly polite manner.
It was Mark Taber, her former admirer, and, as she reciprocated, she
felt herself blushing slightly, though she had known him long enough by now not
to be embarrassed by his friendly attitude towards her. However, the blush must have intrigued him a
little. For, having received his tea, he
stood aside to await her as she duly approached the urn. That was something he hadn't done in ages!
With cup filled, she turned towards
him. They stood a moment undecided what
to do, and then Taber, realizing they were in the way of those at the rear of
the queue, gently drew her away in the direction of a less crowded and quieter
part of the smoke-filled room. The air
stank rather of pipe and cigarette tobacco, which was always an inconvenience
to those who, like them, were resolutely non-smokers. So they went across to the proximity of one
of the open windows and stood within the radius of its fresh-air ambience. Taber especially loathed the acrid stench of
stale smoke!
"I haven't seen you that much
recently," he averred, looking down at his fellow teacher from a
seven-inch advantage over her.
"No, I guess not," she conceded,
casting him a brief but intentionally apologetic smile. "I've been rather busy." She knew that such a lame excuse for having
generally avoided the staff room since their return from summer recess wasn't
likely to convince him. But, all the
same, she considered it the most expedient thing to say.
"And busy outside school as
well?" he asked, responding to her smile with one of his own - in the
circumstances rather more quizzical.
"For the most part," she replied.
The hubbub around them gave him the
confidence to be more explicit. "So
you're still seeing this Matthew chap, then?" he deduced.
She lowered her gaze and took a couple of
deep sips from the steaming tea in her hand.
"To some extent," she at length admitted, not looking up.
"You don't sound very confident,"
he observed.
"Maybe that's because I'm not,"
she confessed.
"You haven't yet come to a parting of
the ways, then?"
"No, though I dare say we shall before
long. At least, we seem to have become
somewhat estranged from each other all of a sudden, as though the affair had
petered out or lost whatever meaning it may once have possessed. He seems to be disappointed with me and,
quite frankly, I feel less than enthusiastic about him."
"Oh, on what
grounds?" Taber was keen to ask.
At first Gwen appeared reluctant to
specify, but then she relented and said: "Oh, largely as regards his
artistic and philosophical predilections, which I can't subscribe to. But also in regard to our sexual
relations."
"Really?"
Taber exclaimed, patently intrigued.
"Isn't he particularly virile, then?"
Gwen blushed anew, this time more deeply,
and took momentary refuge in her still-steaming tea. "Not particularly," she
admitted. "At least he doesn't
appear to be as far as I'm concerned, whether because he doesn't find me
particularly stimulating or because he just lacks the drive, I'm not absolutely
sure. Possibly a
combination of both."
"Poor you," Taber sympathized,
instinctively lowering his voice.
"You seem not to have found the greatest satisfaction, after
all." This was said with a little
chuckle, as though something to relish.
"No, although when I consider the
nature of his spiritual ambitions and their repercussions on his art, I can't
be at all surprised," she rejoined.
"I ought to have known better in the first place, but I didn't realize,
at the time, what kind of an artist he was.
I mean, I had no idea that he'd be so spiritually earnest, so set
against the sensual. Even if I had seen
his works in advance, his sculptured doves and paintings of ultimate reality,
as he calls them, I wouldn't necessarily have equated them with a kind of
sexual inadequacy on his part. I
wouldn't have thought that because his work was transcendentalist, he would be
a poor or, at any rate, perfunctory lover.
I'd simply have taken the art as one thing and the man as quite
another! But now I know better, having
come to realize that his art and his life are inseparable, and that the one
tends to influence and reflect the other.
So if he was unable to satisfy me in bed, it's probably because he's
less sensuous than myself and not therefore committed to the senses to anything
like the same extent. A woman who was
less sensuous or more spiritual than me probably wouldn't find him so
inadequate - assuming he could find himself such a woman, that is!"
Across the crowded room Linda Daniels could
be seen talking with a couple of elderly colleagues, and it was at her that
Gwen cast a faintly derisory glance, as she sipped some more tea and savoured
the aura of intense curiosity which Taber's towering presence had already come
to signify. Mindful of Linda, she wondered
whether Matthew might not be better served by someone like her, despite the
fact that she was hardly the most spiritual of women, and wondered, too,
whether the apparent change which had come over him recently might not be
ascribed to Linda's influence in some way.
After all, she wasn't unaware of the fact that Matthew had taken a
distinct liking to her colleague on the first occasion that they had met, a
couple of weeks before, at her flat in
But would that mean that
she would then be reduced to the occasional visit from Pete Daniels, or was
there some alternative, a possibility of more frequent satisfaction from
someone already known to her? She glanced inquiringly at Mark Taber, who
appeared to be stunned by her revelation of the minute before. He was still interested in her, she could see
that, and no less handsome now than he had been prior to Matthew's unexpected
intrusion into her life. True, he wasn't
the most interesting conversationalist, and his teaching of history made him
somewhat conservative in his politics.
But at least he was a good lover and more on her social wavelength.
Indeed, she hadn't quite realized just how
good until the affair with Matthew brought it home to her, until contact
with a more spiritual being brought home to her the extent of her dependence on
men like Taber who, for all their intellectual limitations and shortcomings,
were more sensuously attuned to herself. In that respect, the experience with the
artist may well have been a blessing in disguise, if only on the grounds that
it made her appreciative of what she used to have with Mark, and consequently
gave her new insight into her own spiritual limitations. After all, she was essentially conservative
in her political outlook too, the product of a strict middle-class upbringing,
and not attuned to such views or attitudes as professed to by Matthew
Pearce. She was essentially
traditionalist too, and if the artist had done anything for her, it had been to
bring this fact home to her in no uncertain terms! The affair with him had been less of a
mistake than an eye-opener. And now that
she could see herself more clearly, it did indeed seem that the only sensible
thing to do was to sever connections with him and, hopefully, return to her own
level again - assuming circumstances would permit. She had, at any rate, received a push in the
right direction from Pete Daniels, a push she could hardly fail to appreciate,
especially with his wife standing no more than five yards away, still busily
engaged in lightweight conversation with the two elderly colleagues.
Yet if Linda was five yards away, Taber was
right beside her and duly reminding her of this fact as, all too soon, the bell
sounded again and she heard him asking, in a slightly nervous tone-of-voice,
whether she wouldn't care to have dinner with him that evening, since he had no
specific commitments. "I mean, it
would be better to discuss such matters in private, wouldn't it?" he
added, glancing around the still-crowded and smoke-filled staff room. "Unless, however, you
have prior arrangements to honour?"
Gwen thought of Peter a
moment, but the arrangements he had made with her were for another night, and
therefore nothing that need interfere with today. "None I can think of," she assured
him, smiling deferentially.
"Well?" he pressed.
"Yeah, that sounds a very good
idea," she agreed, extending a grateful hand to his nearest arm. "I'd love to!"
"Good!" sighed
Taber with considerable relief. "In
that case we needn't talk any more about your, er,
sexual problems until then, need we?"
She gulped back the rest of her, by now,
lukewarm tea and returned the empty cup to a nearby tray. It was just like old times, except that this
time, thanks to the artist, there was an additional man in her life, and he was
the husband of the woman in tight black slacks, who didn't in the least suspect
that Peter was having an affair of his own with her best friend while she was
so busily having one with that very friend's former lover, Matthew Pearce. Well, what else were friends for but to use
and deceive in the interests of lovers?
