Chapter Two
it was my wife's idea to hold the private view on Friday.
"We are out to catch the critics this time," she said. "It's high time
they began to take you seriously, and they know it. This is their chance. If
you open on Monday they'll most of them have just come up from the country,
and they'll dash off a few paragraphs before dinner -- I'm only worrying
about the weeklies of course. If we give them the week-end to think about
it, we shall have them in an urbane Sunday-in-the-country mood. They'll
settle down after a good luncheon, tuck up their cuffs, and turn out a nice,
leisurely, full-length essay, which they'll reprint later in a nice little
book. Nothing less will do this time."
She was up and down from the Old Rectory several times during the month
of preparation, revising the list of invitations and helping with the
hanging.
On the morning of the private view I telephoned to Julia and said: "I'm
sick of the pictures already and never want to see them again, but I suppose
I shall have to put in an appearance."
"D'you want me to come?"
"I'd much rather you didn't."
"Celia sent a card with 'Bring everyone' written across it in green
ink. When do we meet?"
"In the train. You might pick up my luggage."
"If you'll have it packed soon I'll pick you up, too, and drop you at
the gallery. I've got a fitting next door at twelve."
When I reached the gallery my wife was standing looking through the
window to the street. Behind her half a dozen unknown picture-lovers were
moving from canvas to canvas, catalogue in hand; they were people who had
once bought a woodcut and were consequently on the gallery's list of
patrons.
"No one has come yet," said my wife. "I've been here since ten and it's
been very dull. Whose car was that you came in?"
"Julia's."
"Julia's? Why didn't you bring her in? Oddly enough, I've just been
talking about Brideshead to a funny little man who seemed to know us very
well. He said he was called Mr. Samgrass. Apparently he's one of Lord
Copper's middle-aged young men on the Daily Beast. I tried to feed him some
paragraphs, but he seemed to know more about you than I do. He said he'd met
me years ago at Brideshead. I wish Julia had come in; then we could have
asked her about him."
"I remember him well. He's a crook."
"Yes, that stuck out a mile. He's been talking all about what he calls
'the Brideshead set.' Apparently Rex Mottram has made the place a nest of
party mutiny. Did you know? What would Teresa Marchmain have thought?"
"I'm going there to-night."
"Not to-night, Charles; you can't go there to-night. You're expected at
home. You promised, as soon as the exhibition was J ready, you'd come home.
Johnjohn and Nanny have made a banner with 'Welcome' on it. And you haven't
seen Caroline yet."
"I'm sorry, it's all settled."
"Besides, Daddy will think it so odd. And Boy is home for Sunday. And
you haven't seen the new studio. You can't go tonight. Did they ask me?"
"Of course; but I knew you wouldn't be able to come."
"I can't now. I could have if you'd let me know earlier. I should adore
to see the 'Brideshead set' at home. I do think you're perfectly beastly,
but this is no time for a family rumpus. The Clarences promised to come in
before luncheon; they may be here any minute."
We were interrupted, however, not by royalty, but by a woman reporter
from one of the dailies, whom the manager of the gallery now led up to us.
She had not come to see the pictures but to get a "human story" of the
dangers of my journey. I left her to my wife, and next day read in her
paper: --
charles "stately homes" ryder steps off the map
That the snakes and vampires of the jungle have nothing on Mayfair is
the opinion of socialite artist Ryder, who has abandoned the houses of the
great for the ruins of equatorial Africa. ...
The rooms began to fill and I was soon busy being civil. My wife was
everywhere, greeting people, introducing people, deftly transforming the
crowd into a party. I saw her lead friends forward one after another to the
subscription list that had been opened for the book of Ryder's Latin
America; I heard her say: "No, darling, I'm not at all surprised, but you
wouldn't expect me to be, would you? You see Charles lives for one thing --
Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had
to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer. After all,
he has said the last word about country houses, hasn't he? Not, I mean, that
he's given that up altogether. I'm sure he'll always do one or two more for
friends".
A photographer brought us together, flashed a lamp in our faces, and
let us part.
Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the
entry of a royal party. I saw my wife curtsey and heard her say: "Oh, sir,
you are sweet"; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of Clarence
said: "Pretty hot out there I should think."
"It was, sir."
"Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me
feel quite uncomfortable in my great-coat."
"Ha, ha."
When they had gone my wife said: "Goodness, we're late for lunch.
Margot's giving a party in your honour," and in the taxi she said: "I've
just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess's
permission to dedicate Latin America to her?"
"Why should I?"
"She'd love it so."
"I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone."
"There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity
to give pleasure?"
There were a dozen at luncheon, and though it pleased my hostess and my
wife to say that they were there in my honour, it was plain to me that half
of them did not know of my exhibition and had come because they had been
invited and had no other engagement. Throughout luncheon they talked without
stopping of Mrs. Simpson, but they all, or nearly all, came back with us to
the gallery.
The hour after luncheon was the busiest time. There were
representatives of the Tate Gallery, the Chantrey Bequest, the National Art
Collections Fund, who all promised to return shortly with colleagues and, in
the meantime, reserved certain pictures for further consideration. The most
influential critic, who in the past had dismissed me with a few wounding
commendations, peered out at me from between his slouch hat and woollen
muffler, gripped my arm, and said: "I knew you had it. I saw it there. I've
been waiting for it."
From fashionable and unfashionable lips alike I heard fragments of
praise. "If you'd asked me to guess," I overheard, "Ryder's is the last name
would have occurred to me. They're so virile, so passionate."
They all thought they had found something new. It had not been thus at
my last exhibition in these same rooms, shortly before my going abroad. Then
there had been an unmistakable note of weariness. Then the talk had been
less of me than of the houses, anecdotes of their owners. That same woman,
it came back to me, who how applauded my virility and passion, had stood
quite near me, before a painfully laboured canvas, and said, "So facile."
I remembered the exhibition, too, for another reason; it was the week I
detected my wife in adultery. Then, as now, she was a tireless hostess, and
I heard her say: "Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays -- a building or a
piece of scenery -- I think to -myself, 'That's by Charles.' I see
everything through his eyes. He is England to me."
I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of
saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels
shrivel within me at the things she said. But that ,j day, in this gallery,
I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me
any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief,
sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.
At the end of the day my wife said: "Darling, I must go. It's been a
terrific success, hasn't it? I'll think of something to tell them at home,
but I wish it hadn't got to happen quite this way."
So she knows, I thought. She's a sharp one. She's had her nose down
since luncheon and picked up the scent.
I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow--the rooms
were nearly empty -- when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard
for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of
remonstration.
"No. I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know
whether I received one. I have not come to a social function; I do not seek
to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the
Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures.
Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a
personal interest in the artist--if that word has any meaning for
you."
"Antoine," I said, "come in."
"My dear, there is a g-g-gorgon here who thinks I am g-g-gate-crashing.
I only arrived in London yesterday, and heard quite by chance at luncheon
that you were having an exhibition, so of course I dashed impetuously to the
shrine to pay homage. Have I changed? Would you recognize me? Where are the
pictures? Let me explain them to you."
Anthony Blanche had not changed from when I last saw him; not, indeed,
from when I first saw him. He swept lightly across the room to the most
prominent canvas -- a jungle landscape -- paused a moment, his head cocked
like a knowing terrier, and asked: "Where, my dear Charles, did you find
this sumptuous greenery? The corner of a hothouse at T-t-trent or T-t-tring?
What gorgeous usurer nurtured these fronds for your pleasure?"
Then he made a tour of the two rooms; once or twice he sighed deeply,
otherwise he kept silence. When he came to the end he sighed once more, more
deeply than ever, and said: "But they tell me, my dear, you are happy in
love. That is everything, is it not, or nearly everything?"
"Are they as bad as that?"
Anthony dropped his voice to a piercing whisper: "My dear, let us not
expose your little imposture before these good, plain people" -- he gave a
conspiratorial glance to the last remnants o the crowd -- "let us not spoil
their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible
t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche
little bar, quite near here. Let us go there and talk of your other
c-c-conquests."
It needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate
chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of
advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between
the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the
end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems
inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then
angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one's fatigue.
Anthony led me from the gallery and down a side street to a door
between a disreputable news agent and a disreputable chemist, painted with
the words blue grotto club. Members Only.
"Not quite your milieu, my dear, but mine, I assure you. After all, you
have been in your milieu all day."
He led me downstairs, from a smell of cats to a smell of gin and
cigarette-ends and the sound of a wireless.
"I was given the address by a dirty old man in the Bceuf sur le Toit. I
am most grateful to him. I have been out of England so long, and really
sympathetic little joints like this change so fast. J I presented myself
here for the first time yesterday evening, and already I feel quite at home.
Good evening, Cyril."
"'Lo, Toni, back again?" said the youth behind the bar.
"We will take our drinks and sit in a corner. You must remember, my
dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my
dear, as I should be in B-b-bratt's."
The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt linoleum on the floor.
Fishes of Silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and
walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines;
an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was
some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up
to us and said, "Would your friend care to rumba?"
"No, Tom, he would not, and I'm not going to give a drink; not yet,
anyway. . . . That's a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my
dear."
"Well," I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den,
"what have you been up to all these years?"
"My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk
about. I've been watching you, my dear. I'm a faithful old body and I've
kept my eye on you." As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker
furniture, the gambling-machines, the wireless, the couple of youths dancing
on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots, the purple-veined,
stiffly dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole
drab and furtive joint, seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out
over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin Gothic. "I went to your
first exhibition," said Anthony; "I found it -- charming. There was an
interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite
delicious. 'Charles has done something,' I said; 'not all he will do, not
all he can do, but something.'
"Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there
was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I
arm not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English
snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said,
'Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?'
"The next thing I saw was your very handsome volume -- Village and
Provincial Architecture, was it called? Quite a tome, my dear, and what did
I find? Charm again. 'Not quite my cup of tea,' I thought; 'this is too
English.' I have the fancy I for rather spicy things, you know, not for the
shade of the cedar tree, the cucumber sandwich, the silver cream-jug, the
English girl dressed in whatever English girls do wear for tennis -- not
that, not Jane Austen, not M-m-miss M-m-mitford. Then, to be frank, dear
Charles, I despaired of you. 'I am a degenerate old d-d-dago,' I said, 'and
Charles -- I speak of your art, my dear -- is a dean's daughter in flowered
muslin.'
"Imagine then my excitement at luncheon to-day. Everyone was talking
about you. My hostess was a friend of my mother's, a Mrs. Stuyvesant
Oglander; a friend of yours, too, my dear. Such a frump! Not at all the
society I imagined you to keep. 1 However, they had all been to your
exhibition, but it was you f they talked of, how you had broken away, my
dear, gone to the tropics, become a Gauguin, a Rimbaud. You can imagine how
my old heart leaped.
"' Poor Celia,' they said, 'after all she's done for him.' 'He owes
everything to her. It's too bad.' 'And with Julia,' they said, 'after the
way she behaved in America.' 'Just as she was going back 1 to Rex.'
" 'But the pictures,' I said; 'tell me about them'
'"Oh, the pictures,' they said: 'they're most peculiar.' 'Not at 1 all
what he usually does.' 'Very forceful.' 'Quite barbaric.' 'if call them
downright unhealthy,' said Mrs. Stuyvesant Oglander.
"My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted tof dash out
of the house and leap in a taxi and say, 'Take me to Charles's unhealthy
pictures.' Well, I went, but the gallery after J luncheon was so full of
absurd women in the sort of hats they'i] should be made to eat, that I
rested a little --I rested here witfcl Cyril and Tom and these saucy boys.
Then I came back at the unfashionable time of five o'clock, all agog, my
dear; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very
successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so
much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear, simple,
creamy English charm, playing tigers."
"You're quite right," I said.
"My dear, of course I'm right. I was right years ago--more years, I am
happy to say, than either of us shows -- when I warned you. I took you out
to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail
of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist
outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills
love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you."
The youth called Tom approached us again. "Don't be a tease, Toni; buy
me a drink." I remembered my train and left Anthony with him.
As I stood on the platform by the restaurant-car I saw my luggage and
Julia's go past with Julia's sour-faced maid strutting beside the porter.
They had begun shutting the carriage-doors when Julia arrived, unhurried,
and took her place in front of me. I had a table for two. This was a very
convenient train; there was half an hour before dinner and half an hour
after it; then, instead of changing to the branch line, as had been the rule
in Lady Marchmain's day, we were met at the junction. It was night as we
drew out of Paddington, and the glow of the town gave place first to the
scattered lights of the suburbs, then to the darkness of the fields.
"It seems days since I saw you," I said.
"Six hours; and we were together all yesterday. You look worn out."
"It's been a day of nightmare -- crowds, critics, the Clarences, a
luncheon party at Margot's, ending up with half an hour's well-reasoned
abuse of my pictures in a pansy bar. ... I think Celia knows about us."
"Well, she had to know some time."
"Everyone seems to know. My pansy friend had not been in London
twenty-four hours before he'd heard."
"Damn everybody."
"What about Rex?"
"Rex isn't anybody at all," said Julia; "he just doesn't exist."
The knives and forks jingled on the tables as we sped through the
darkness; the little circle of gin and vermouth in the glasses i lengthened
to oval, contracted again, with the sway of the carriage, touched the lip,
lapped back again, never spilt; I was leaving the day behind me. Julia
pulled off her hat and tossed it into the rack above her, and shook her
night-dark hair with a little sigh of ease -- a sigh fit for the pillow, the
sinking firelight and a bedroom window open to the stars and the whisper of
bare trees.
"It's great to have you back, Charles; like the old days."
Like the old days? I thought.
Rex, in his early forties, had grown heavy and ruddy; he had lost his
Canadian accent and acquired instead the hoarse, loud tone that was common
to all his friends, as though their voices were perpetually strained to make
themselves heard above a crowd, as though, with youth forsaking them, there
was no timdi to wait the opportunity to speak, no time to listen, no time
ten reply; time for a laugh -- a throaty mirthless laugh, the base| currency
of goodwill.
There were half a dozen of these friends in the Tapestry Hall ill
politicians, "young conservatives" in the early forties, with spar hair and
high blood-pressure; a socialist from the coal mines wh had already caught
their clear accents, whose cigars came lid pieces in his lips, whose hand
shook when he poured hir out a drink; a lovesick columnist, who alone was
silent, glc ing sombrely on the only woman of the party; a financier oldafl
than the rest, and, one might guess from the way they treated him, richer; a
woman they called "Grizel," a knowing rake whom, in their hearts, they all
feared a little.
They all feared Julia, too, Grizel included. She greeted them and
apologized for not being there to welcome them, with a formality which
hushed them for a minute; then she came and sat with me near the fire, and
the storm of talk arose once more and whirled about bur ears.
"Of course, he can marry her and make her queen to-morrow."
"We had our chance in October. Why didn't we send the Italian fleet to
the bottom of Mare Nostrum? Why didn't we blow Spezia to blazes. Why didn't
we land on Pantelleria?"
"Franco's simply a German agent. They tried to put him in to prepare
air'bases to bomb France. That bluff has been called, anyway."
"It would make the monarchy stronger than it's been since Tudor times.
The people are with him."
"The press arc with him."
"I'm with him."
"Who cares about divorce now except a few old maids who aren't married,
anyway?"
"If he has a showdown with the old gang, they'll just disappear like,
like . . ."
"Why didn't we close the Canal? Why didn't we bomb Rome?"
"It wouldn't have been necessary. One firm note . . ."
"One firm speech."
"One showdown."
"Anyway, Franco will soon be skipping back to Morocco. Chap I saw
to-day just come from Barcelona . . ."
". . . Chap just come from Fort Belvedere . . ."
". . . Chap just come from the Palazzo Venezia . . ."
"All we want is a showdown."
"A showdown with Baldwin."
"A showdown with Hitler."
"A showdown with the Old Gang."
". . . That I should live to see my country, the land of Clive and
Nelson ..."
". . . My country of Hawkins and Drake."
". . . My country of Palmerston . . ."
"Would you very much mind not doing that?"'said Grizel the columnist,
who had been attempting in a maudlin manner to twist her wrist. "I don't
happen to enjoy it."
"I wonder which is the more horrible," I said, "Celia's Art and Fashion
or Rex's Politics and Money."
"Why worry about them?"
"Oh, my darling, why is it that love makes me hate the world? It's
supposed to have quite the opposite effect. I feel as though' all mankind,
and God, too, were in a conspiracy against us."
"They are, they are."
"But we've got our happiness in spite of them; here and noW| we've
taken possession of it. They can't hurt us, can they?"
"Not to-night; not now."
"Not for how many nights?"
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