Dr. Obispo was standing over her. “Sig!” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “What are you doing?”
Dr. Obispo smiled his smile of ironic admiration, of intense and at the same time amused and mocking concupiscence. “I thought we might go on with our French lesson,” he said.
“You’re crazy!” She looked apprehensively towards the door. “He’s just across the hall. He might come in . . .”
Dr. Obispo’s smile broadened to a grin. “Don’t worry about Uncle Jo,” he said.
“He’d kill you, if he found you here.”
“He won’t find me here,” Dr. Obispo answered. “I gave him a capsule of Nembutal before he went to bed. He’ll sleep through the Last Trump.”
“I think you’re awful!” said Virginia emphatically; but she couldn’t help laughing, partly out of relief and partly because it really was rather funny to think of Uncle Jo snoring away next door, while Sig read her that stuff.
Dr. Obispo pulled the Book of Common Prayer out of his pocket. “Don’t let me interrupt your labours,” he said with the parody of chivalrous politeness. “‘A woman’s work is never done.’ Just go right on as though I weren’t there. I’ll find the place and start reading.” Smiling at her with imperturbable impudence, he sat down on the edge of the rococo bed and turned over the pages of the book.
Virginia opened her mouth to speak; then, catching hold of her left foot, closed it again under the compulsion of a need even more urgent than that of telling him exactly where he got off. The varnish was drying in lumps; her toes would look just awful if she didn’t go on with them at once. Hastily dipping her little brush in the bottle of acetone enamel, she started painting again with the focussed intensity of a Van Eyck at work on the microscopic details of the Adoration of the Lamb.
Dr. Obispo looked up from the book. “I admired the way you acted with Pete this evening/’ he said. “Flirting with him all through dinner, so that you got the old man hopping jealous of him. That was masterly. Or should one say mistressly?”
Virginia released her tongue to say emphatically: “Pete’s a nice boy.”
“But dumb,” Dr. Obispo qualified, as he sprawled with conscious elegance and a maddeningly insolent assumption of being at home, across the bed. “Otherwise he wouldn’t be in love with you the way he is.” He uttered a snort of laughter. “The poor chump thinks you’re an angel, a heavenly little angel, complete with wings, harp and genuine eighteen-carat, fully jewelled, Swiss-made virginity. Well, if that isn’t being dumb . . .”
“You just wait till I get time for you,” said Virginia menacingly, but without looking up; for she had reached a critical phase in the execution of her work of art.
Dr. Obispo ignored the remark. “I used to underestimate the value of an education in the humanities,” he said after a little silence. “Now, I make that mistake no longer.” In a tone of deep solemnity, a tone, one might imagine, like Whittier’s in a reading from his own works, “The lessons of great literature!” he went on. “The deep truths! The gems of wisdom!”
“Oh, shut up!” said Virginia.
“When I think what I owe Dante and Goethe,” said Dr. Obispo in the same prophetic style. “Take the case of Paolo reading aloud to Francesca. With the most fruitful results, if you remember. ‘Un giorno leggevamo per diletto di Lancilotto, come amor lo strinse. Soli eravamo e senz’alcun sospetto. Senz’alcun sospetto,’ ” Dr. Obispo repeated with emphasis, looking, as he did so, at one of the engravings in the “Cent-Vingt Jours.” “Not the smallest suspicion, mark you, of what was going to happen.”
“Helll” said Virginia, who had made another slip.
“No, not even a suspicion of hell,” Dr. Obispo insisted. “Though, of course, they ought to have been on the lookout for it. They ought to have had the elementary prudence to guard against being sent there by the accident of sudden death. A few simple precautions, and they could have made the best of both worlds. Could have had their fun while the brother was out of the way and, when the time for having fun was over, could have repented and died in the odour of sanctity. But then it must be admitted that they hadn’t the advantage of reading Goethe’s ‘Faust.’ They hadn’t learnt that inconvenient relatives could be given sleeping draughts. And even if they had learnt, they wouldn’t have been able to go to the drug-store and buy a bottle of Nembutal. Which shows that education in the humanities isn’t enough; there must also be education in science. Dante and Goethe to teach you what to do. And the professor of pharmacology to show you how to put the old buzzard into a coma with a pinch of barbiturate.”
The toes were finished. Still holding her left foot, so as to keep it from any damaging contact until the varnish should be entirely dry, Virginia turned on her visitor. “I won’t have you calling him an old buzzard,” she said hotly.
“Well, shall we say ‘bastard’?” Dr. Obispo suggested.
“He’s a better man than you’ll ever be!” Virginia cried; and her voice had the ring of sincerity. “I think he’s wonderful.”
“You think he’s wonderful,” Dr. Obispo repeated. “But all the same in about fifteen minutes you’ll be sleeping with me.” He laughed as he spoke and, leaning forwards from his place on the bed, caught her two arms from behind, a little below the shoulders. “Look out for your toes,” he said, as Virginia cried out and tried to wrench herself away from him.
The fear of ruining her masterpiece made her check the movement before it was more than barely initiated. Dr. Obispo took advantage of her hesitation to stoop down, through the aura of acetone towards the nape of that delicious neck, towards the perfume of ‘Shocking/ towards a firm warmth against the mouth, a touch of hair like silk upon the cheeks. Swearing, Virginia furiously jerked her head away. But a fine tingling of agreeable sensation was running parallel, so to speak, with her indignation, was incorporating itself in it.
This time, Dr. Obispo kissed her behind the ear. “Shall I tell you,” he whispered, “what I’m going to do to you?” She answered by calling him a lousy ape man. But he told her all the same, in considerable detail.
Less than the fifteen minutes had elapsed when Virginia opened her eyes and, across the now darkened room, caught sight of Our Lady smiling benignantly from among the flowers of her illuminated doll’s house. With a cry of dismay she jumped up and, without waiting to put on any clothes, ran to the shrine and drew the curtains. The lights went out automatically. Stretching out her hands in the thick darkness, she groped her way cautiously back to bed.
PART II
Chapter I
“AGAIN, no dearth of news,” Jeremy wrote to his mother three weeks later. “News of every kind and from all the centuries. Here’s a bit of news, to begin with, about the Second Earl. In the intervals of losing battles for Charles I, the Second Earl was a poet. A bad poet, of course (for the chances are always several thousands to one against any given poet being good), but with occasional involuntary deviations into charm. What about this, for example, which I found in manuscript only yesterday?
One taper burns, but ‘tis too much;
Our loves demand complete eclipse.
Let sight give place to amorous touch,
And candle-light to limbs and lips!
Rather pretty, don’t you think? But alas, almost the only nugget so far unearthed from the alluvium. If only the rest were silence! But that’s the trouble with poets, good no less than bad. They will not keep their traps shut, as we say in the Western hemisphere. What joy if the rest of Wordsworth had been silence, the rest of Coleridge, the rest of Shelley!
“Meanwhile the Fifth Earl sprang a surprise on me yesterday in the form of a note-book full of miscellaneous jottings. I have only just started on them (for I mustn’t spend all my time on any one item till I have the whole collection unpacked and roughly catalogued); but the fragments I’ve read are decidedly appetizing. I found this on the first page: ‘Lord Chesterfield writes to his Son that a Gentleman never speaks to his footman, nor even the beggar in the street, d
’un ton brusque, but “corrects the one coolly and refuses the other with humanity.” His lordship should have added that there is an Art by which such coolness may be rendered no less formidable than Anger and such humanity more wounding than Insult.
“ ‘Furthermore, footmen and beggars are not the only objects on whom this Art may be exercised. His lordship has been ungallant enough in this instance to forget the Sex, for there is also an Art of coolly outraging a devoted female, and of abusing her Person, with all the bienstance befitting the most accomplished Gentleman.’
“Not a bad beginning! I will keep you posted of any subsequent discoveries in this field.
“Meanwhile contemporary news is odd, confused and a bit disagreeable. To begin with, Uncle Jo is chronically glum and ill-tempered these days. I suspect the green-eyed monster; for the blue-eyed monster (in other words Miss Maunciple, the Baby) has been rolling them, for some time now, in the direction of young Pete. Whether she rolls more than the eyes, I don’t know; but suspect the fact; for she has that inward, dreamy look, that far-away sleep-walker’s expression, which one often remarks on the faces of young ladies who have been doing a lot of strenuous love-making. You know the expression I mean: exquisitely spiritual and pre-Raphaelitish. One has only to look at such a face to know that God Exists. The one incongruous feature in the present instance is the costume. A pre-Raphaelite expression demands pre-Raphaelite clothes: long sleeves, square yokes, yards and yards of Liberty velveteen. When you see it, as I did today, in combination with white shorts, a bandana and a cowboy hat, you’re disturbed, you’re all put out. Meanwhile, in defence of Baby’s Honour, I must insist that all this is mere hypothesis and guess-work. It may be, of course, that this new, spiritual expression of hers is not the result of amorous fatigue. For all I know to the contrary, Baby may have been converted by the teachings of the Propter-Object and is now walking about in a state of perpetual samadhi. On the other hand, I do see her giving the glad eye to Pete. What’s more, Uncle Jo exhibits all the symptoms of being suspicious of them and extremely cross with everybody else. With me among others, of course. Perhaps even more with me than with others, because I happen to have read more books than the rest and am therefore more of a symbol of Culture. And Culture, of course, is a thing for which he has positively a Tartar’s hatred. Only, unlike the Tartars, he doesn’t want to burn the monuments of Culture, he wants to buy them up. He expresses his superiority to talent and education by means of possession rather than destruction; by hiring and then insulting the talented and educated rather than by killing them. (Though perhaps he would kill them, if he had the Tartar’s opportunities and power.) All this means that, when I am not in bed or safely underground with the Hauberks, I spend most of my time grinning and bearing, thinking of Jellybelly and my nice salary, in order not to think too much of Uncle Jo’s bad manners. It’s all very unpleasant; but fortunately not unbearable—and the Hauberks are an immense consolation and compensation.
“So much for the erotic and cultural fronts. On the scientific front, the news is that we’re all perceptibly nearer to living as long as crocodiles. At the time of writing, I haven’t decided whether I really want to live as long as a crocodile. (With the penning of the second ‘crocodile,’ Jeremy was seized by a sudden qualm. His mother would be seventy-seven in August. Under that urbanity of hers, under the crackled glaze of the admirable conversation, there was a passionate greed for life. She would talk matter-of-factly enough about her own approaching extinction; she would make little jokes about her death and funeral. But behind the talk and the little jokes there lurked, as Jeremy knew, a fierce determination to hold on to what was left, to go on doing what she had always done, in the teeth of death, in defiance of old age. This talk of crocodiles might give pain; this expression of doubt as to the desirability of prolonging life might be interpreted as an unfavourable criticism. Jeremy took a new sheet of paper and started the paragraph afresh.)
“So much for the erotic and cultural fronts,” he wrote. “On the scientific front, rien de nouveau, except that the Obispo is being more bumptious than ever; which isn’t news, because he’s always more bumptious than ever. Not one of my favourite characters, I’m afraid. Though not unamusing when one feels inclined for a few moments of ribaldry. Longevity, it appears, is making headway. Old Parr and the Countess of Desmond are on the march.
“And what of the religious front? Well, our Propter-Object has given up his attempts at edification, at any rate so far as I’m concerned. Thank heaven 1 for when he dismounts from his hobby horse, what excellent company he isl A mind full of all kinds of oddments; and the oddments are pigeon-holed in apple-pie order. One rather envies him his intellectual coherence; but consoles oneself by thinking that, if one had them, they’d spoil one’s own particular little trick. When one has a gift for standing gracefully on one’s head, one is foolish and ungrateful to envy the Marathon-runner. A funny little literary article in the hand is worth at least three Critiques of Pure Reason in the bush.
“My final item is from the home front and refers to your last letter from Grasse. What a feast! Your account of Mme. de Villemomble was really Proustian. And as for the description of your drive to Cap d’Ail and your day with what remains of the Princess and ce pauvre Hunyadi—well, all I can say is that it was worthy of Murasaki: the essence of all tragedy refined to a couple of tablespoonfuls of amber-coloured tea in a porcelain cup no bigger than a magnolia flower. What an admirable lesson in the art of literary chastity! My own tendencies—only in the world of letters, I am thankful to say—are towards a certain exhibitionism. This vestal prose of yours puts me to shame.
“Well, there is nothing more to say, as I used to write when I was at school—very large, do you remember? in an effort to make the words fill up half a page of note-paper. There is nothing more to say, except, of course, the unsayable, which I leave unsaid because you know it already.”
Jeremy sealed up his letter, addressed it—to The Araucarias, for his mother would be back from Grasse by the time it had crossed the Atlantic—and slipped the envelope into his pocket. All around him, the Hauberk Papers clamoured for his attention; but for some time he remained idle. His elbow on the desk, in an attitude of prayer, he meditatively scratched his head; scratched it with both hands where two little spots had formed dry scabs at the roots of the hair that still remained to him, scabs which it was an exquisite pleasure to prize up with the finger-nails and carefully detach. He was thinking of his mother and how curious it was, after all, that one should have read all the Freudian literature about the Oedipus business, all the novels, from “Sons and Lovers” downwards, about the dangers of too much filial devotion, the menace of excessive maternal love—that one should have read them all and still, with one’s eyes open, go on being what one was: the victim of a greedy possessive mother. And perhaps even odder was the fact that this possessive mother had also read all the relevant literature and was also perfectly aware of what she was and what she had done to her son. And yet she too went on being and doing what she had always been and done, just as he did, and with eyes no less open than his own. (There! the scab under the right hand had come loose. He pulled it out through the thick tufted hair above his ears and, as he looked at the tiny desiccated shred of tissue, was suddenly reminded of the baboons. But, after all, why not? The most certain and abiding pleasures are the tiniest, the simplest, the rudimentarily animal—the pleasure of lying in a hot bath, for example, or under the bed-clothes, between waking and sleeping, in the morning; the pleasure of answering the calls of nature, the pleasure of being rubbed by a good masseur, the pleasure finally of scratching when one itched. Why be ashamed? He dropped the scab into the waste paper basket and continued to scratch with the left hand.)
Nothing like self-knowledge, he reflected. To know why you do a thing that is wrong or stupid is to have an excuse for going on doing it. Justification by psychoanalysis—the modern substitute for justification by faith. You know the distant causes which made yo
u a sadist or a money-grubber, a mother-worshipper or a son-cannibal; therefore you are completely justified in continuing to be a son-cannibal, mother-worshipper, money-grubber or sadist. No wonder if whole generations had risen up to bless the name of Freud! Well, that was how he and his mother managed things. “We bloodsucking matriarchs!” Mrs. Pordage used to say of herself—in the presence of the Rector, what was more. Or else it was into Lady Fredegond’s ear trumpet that she proclaimed her innocence. “Old Jocasta’s like me, with a middle-aged son in the house,” she would shout. And Jeremy would play up to her by coming across the room and bellowing into that tomb of intelligent conversation some feeble waggery about his being an old maid, for example, or about erudition as a substitute for embroidery; any rot would do. And the old harridan would utter that deep gangster’s laugh of hers and wag her head till the stuffed sea-gulls, or the artificial petunias, or whatever it was that she happened to be wearing in her always extraordinary hat, nodded like the plumes of a horse in a French pompe funèbre of the first class. Yes how curious it was, he said to himself again; but how sensible considering that they both, his mother and he, desired nothing better than to go on being just what they were. Her reasons for wanting to go on being a matriarch were obvious enough; it’s fun to be a queen, it’s delightful to receive homage and have a faithful subject. Less obvious, perhaps, at any rate to an outsider, were his own reasons for preferring the status quo. But looked into, they turned out to be cogent enough. There was affection, to begin with; for under a certain superficial irony and airiness, he was deeply attached to his mother. Then there was habit—habit so long-standing that his mother had come to be for him almost like an organ of his own body, hardly less dispensable than his pancreas or his liver. There was even a feeling of gratitude towards her for having done to him the things which, at the time she did them, had seemed the most cruelly unjustifiable. He had fallen in love, when he was thirty; he had wanted to marry. Without making a single scene, without being anything but sympathetically loving towards himself and charming in all her dealings with dear little Eileen, Mrs. Pordage had set to work to undermine the relationship between the two young people; and had succeeded so well that, in the end, the relationship just fell in on itself, like a house sapped from beneath. He had been very unhappy at the time, and with a part of himself he had hated his mother for what she had done. But as the years passed, he had felt less and less bitterly about the whole business, until now he was positively grateful to her for having delivered him from the horrors of responsibility, of a family, of regular and remunerative labour, of a wife who would probably have turned out to be a worse tyrant than his mother—indeed, who would certainly have turned out to be a worse tyrant; for the bulging, bustling matron into whom Eileen had by degrees transformed herself was one of the most disastrous females of his acquaintance; a creature passionately conventional, proud of her obtuseness, ant-like in her efficiency, tyrannically benevolent. In short, a monster. But for his mother’s strategy he would now be the unfortunate Mr. Welkin who was Eileen’s husband and the father of no less than four little Welkins as dreadful even in childhood and adolescence as Eileen had become in her middle age. His mother was doubtless speaking the truth when she jokingly called herself an old Jocasta, a blood-sucking matriarch; and doubtless, too, his brother Tom was right when he called him, Jeremy, a Peter Pan, and talked contemptuously of apron strings. But the fact remained that he had had the opportunity to read what he liked and write his little articles; and that his mother saw to all the practical aspects of life, demanded in return an amount of devotion which it really wasn’t very difficult to give and left him free, on alternate Friday afternoons, to savour the refined pleasures of an infinite squalor, in Maida Vale. Meanwhile, look what had happened to poor Tom! Second Secretary at Tokyo; First Secretary at Oslo; Counsellor at La Paz; and now back, more or less for good, in the Foreign Office, climbing slowly up the hierarchy, towards posts of greater responsibility and tasks of increasing turpitude. And as the salary rose and the morality of what he was called upon to do correspondingly sank, the poor fellow’s uneasiness had increased, until at last, with the row over Abyssinia, he just hadn’t been able to stand it any longer. On the brink of resignation or a nervous breakdown, he had managed, in the nick of time, to get himself converted to Catholicism. Thenceforward, he had been able to pack up the moral responsibility for his share in the general iniquity, take it to Farm Street and leave it there, in camphor, so to speak, with the Jesuit Fathers. Admirable arrangement! It had made a new man of him. After fourteen years of childlessness, his wife had suddenly had a baby—conceived, Jeremy had calculated, on the very night that the Spanish Civil War began. Then, two days after the sack of Nanking, Tom had published a volume of comic verses. (Curious how many English Catholics take to comic versifying.) Meanwhile, he was steadily gaining weight; between the Anschluss and Munich he had put on eleven pounds. Another year or two of Farm Street and power politics, and Tom would turn the scale at fourteen stone and have written the libretto of a musical comedy. No! Jeremy said to himself with decision. No! it simply wasn’t admissible. Better Peter Pan and apron strings and infinite squalor in a little room. Better a thousand times. Better to begin with, aesthetically; for this getting fat on realpolitik, this scribbling of comic verses on the margins of an engraving of the Crucifixion—really, it was too inelegant. And that wasn’t all; it was better even ethically; for of course the old Propter-Object was right: if you can’t be sure of doing positive good, at least keep out of mischief. And there was poor old Tom, as busy as a beaver and, now that he was a Papist, as happy as a lark, working away at the precise spot where he could do the maximum amount of harm to the greatest possible number of people.