Point Counter Point

  ‘He told me,’ Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes,’ he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in conservatories. Conservatories!’ she repeated. ‘What a wonderful touch! So marvellously in period. The ‘eighties. The old Prince of Wales. Zola’s novels. Conservatories! Poor dear man! He said he hoped I wouldn’t let it happen again. My mother’d be so dreadfully distressed if she knew. Oh dear, oh dear!’ She drew a deep breath. The laughter finally died down.

  Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the terrible power of her attraction. And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time. Now for the first time—with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the dirty ash-tray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.

  ‘Conservatories,’ Spandrell was repeating. ‘Conservatories. Yes, that’s very good. That’s very good indeed.’

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Lucy. ‘The old are really marvellous. But hardly possible, you must admit. Except, of course, Walter’s father.’

  John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs. He was very tired. ‘These awful parties,’ he was thinking. He turned on the light in his bedroom. Over the mantelpiece one of Degas’s realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back. On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his own and one of Walter Sickert’s visions of Dieppe. Above the bed hung two caricatures of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre. There was a decanter of brandy on the table, with a siphon and glass. Two letters were propped conspicuously against the edge of the tray. He opened them. The first contained press cuttings about his latest show. The Daily Mail called him ‘the veteran of British Art ‘ and assured its readers that’ his hand has lost nothing of its cunning.’ He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into the fireplace. The next was from one of the superior weeklies. The tone was almost contemptuous. He was judged by his own earlier performance and condemned. ‘It is difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy—ineffectively flashy, at that—as those collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate Gallery ‘Haymakers’ and the still more magnificent ‘Bathers,’ now at Tantamount House. In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which…’ What a rigmarole! What tripe! He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first. But his contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism. ‘Veteran of British art’—it was the equivalent of ‘poor old Bidlake.’ And when they complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second childhood. The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment. He almost wished that he had never painted those Bathers.

  He opened the other envelope. It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor. It was dated from Lahore:

  ‘The bazaars are the genuine article—maggoty. What with the pullulations and the smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese. From the artist’s point of view, the distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it’s exactly like that painting of Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of last century. You know the stuff, smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be printed on tea canisters. When you’re here, you see that the style is necessary. The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the sweat puts a polish on the skin. One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as an Ingres.’

  He read on with pleasure. The girl always had something amusing to say in her letters. She saw things with the right sort of eye. But suddenly he frowned.

  ‘Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior. We had imagined him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name. He had never seen Phil, of course. We killed such fatted calves as this hotel can offer in honour of the prodigal brother.’

  John Bidlake leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The enormous military man with the grey moustache was his son. Young John was fifty. Fifty. There had been a time when fifty seemed a Methusalem age. ‘If Manet hadn’t died prematurely…’ He remembered the words of his old teacher at the art school in Paris. ‘But did Manet die so young?’ The old man had shaken his head. (Old? John Bidlake reflected. He had seemed very old then. But probably he wasn’t more than sixty.) ‘Manet was only fifty-one,’ the teacher had answered. He had found it difficult to restrain his laughter. And now his own son was the age of Manet when Manet died. An enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And his brother was dead and buried at the other side of the world, in California. Cancer of the intestine. Elinor had met his son at Santa Barbara—a young man with a rich young wife, evading the Prohibition laws to the tune of a bottle of gin a day between them.

  John Bidlake thought of his first wife, the mother of the military gentleman and the Californian who had died of cancer of the intestine. He was only twenty-two when he married for the first time. Rose was not yet twenty. They loved one another frantically, with a tigerish passion. They quarrelled too, quarrelled rather enjoyably at first, when the quarrels could be made up in effusions of sensuality as violent as the furies they assuaged. But the charm began to wear off when the children arrived, two of them within twentyfive months. There was not enough money to keep the brats at a distance, to hire professionals to do the tiresome and dirty work. John Bidlake’s paternity was no sinecure. His studio became a nursery. Very soon, the results of passion—the yelling and the wetted diapers, the broken sleep, the smells—disgusted him of passion. Moreover, the object of his passion was no longer the same. After the babies were born, Rose began to put on fat. Her face became heavy; her body swelled and sagged. The quarrels, now, were not so easily made up. At the same time, they were more frequent; paternity got on John Bidlake’s nerves. His art provided him with a pretext for going to Paris. He went for a fortnight and stayed away four months. The quarrels began again on his return. Rose now frankly disgusted him. His models offered him facile consolations; he had a more serious love affair with a married woman who had come to him to have her portrait painted. Life at home was a dreariness tempered by scenes. After a particularly violent scene Rose packed up and went to live with her parents. She took the children with her; John Bidlake was only too delighted to be rid of them. The elder of the squalling diaper-wetters was now an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache. And the other was dead of cancer of the intestine. He had not seen either of them since they were boys of five-and-twenty. The sons had stuck to their mother. She too was dead, had been in the grave these fifteen years.

  Once bitten, twice shy. After his divorce John Bidlake had promised himself that he would never marry again. But when one falls desperately in love with a virtuous young woman of good family, what can one do? He had married, and those two brief years with Isabel had been the most extraordinary, the most beautiful, the happiest of all his life. And then she had died in childbirth, pointlessly. He did his best never to think of her. The recollection was too painful. Between her remembered image and the moment of remembering, the abysses of time and separation were vaster than any other gulf between the present and the past. And by comparison with the past which he had shared with Isabel every present seemed dim; and her death was a horrible reminder of the future. He never spoke of her, and all that might remind him of her—her letters, her books, the furniture of her room—he destroyed or sold. He wished to ignore all but here and now, to be as though he had only just entered the world and were destined to b
e eternal. But his memory survived, even though he never deliberately made use of it; and though the things which had been Isabel’s were destroyed, he could not guard against chance reminders. Chance had found many gaps in his defences this evening. The widest breach was opened by this letter of Elinor’s. Sunk in his armchair, John Bidlake sat for a long time, unmoving.

  Polly Logan sat in front of the looking-glass. As she drew the comb through her hair there was a fine small crackling of electric sparks.

  ‘Little sparks, like a tiny battle, tiny, tiny ghosts shooting. Tiny battle, tiny ghost of a battle-rattle.’

  Polly pronounced the words in a sonorous monotone, as though she were reciting to an audience. She lingered lovingly over them, rolling the r’s, hissing on the s’s, humming like a bee on the m’s, drawing out the long vowels and making them round and pure. ‘Ghost rattle of ghost rifles, in-fin-itesimal ghost cannonade.’ Lovely words! It gave her a peculiar satisfaction to be able to roll them out, to listen with an appreciative, a positively gluttonous ear, to the rumble of the syllables as they were absorbed into the silence. Polly had always liked talking to herself. It was a childish habit which she would not give up. ‘But if it amuses me,’ she protested, when people laughed at her for it, ‘why shouldn’t I? It does nobody any harm.’

  She refused to let herself be laughed out of the habit.

  ‘Electric, electric,’ she went on, dropping her voice, and speaking in a dramatic whisper. ‘Electrical musketry, metrical biscuitry. Ow! ‘ The comb had caught in a tangle. She leaned forward to see more clearly in the glass what she was doing. The reflected face approached. ‘Ma chere,’ exclaimed Polly in another tone, ‘tu as l’air fatigue. Tu es vieille. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. At your age. Tz, tz!’ She clicked her tongue disapprovingly against her teeth and shook her head. ‘This won’t do, this won’t do. Still, you looked all right to-night. “My dear, how sweet you look in white!”’ She imitated Mrs. Betterton’s emphatic voice. ‘Same to you and many of them. Do you think I shall look like an elephant when I’m sixty? Still, I suppose one ought to be grateful even for an elephant’s compliments. “Count your blessings, count them one by one,”’ she chanted softly, ‘“And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.” Oh, heavens, heavens!’ She put down her comb, she violently shuddered and covered her face with her hands. ‘Heavens!’ She felt the blood rushing up into her cheeks. ‘The gaffe! The enormous and ghastly floater!’ She had thought suddenly of Lady Edward. Of course she had overheard. ‘How could I have risked saying that about her being a Canadian?’ Polly moaned, overwhelmed with retrospective shame and embarrassment. ‘That’s what comes of wanting to say something clever at any cost. And then think of wasting attempted cleverness on Norah! Norah! Oh Lord, oh Lord!’ She jumped up and pulling her dressing-gown round her as she went, hurried down the corridor to her mother’s room. Mrs. Logan was already in bed and had turned out the light. Polly opened the door and stepped into darkness.

  ‘Mother,’ she called, ‘mother!’ Her tone was urgent and agonized.

  ‘What is it?’ Mrs. Logan answered anxiously out of the dark. She sat up and fumbled for the, electric switch by the bed. ‘What is it?’ The light went on with a click. ‘What is it, my darling?’

  Polly threw herself down on the bed and hid her face against her mother’s knees. ‘Oh, mother, if you knew what a terrible floater I made with Lady Edward! If you knew! I forgot to tell you.’

  Mrs. Logan was almost angry that her anxiety had been for nothing. When one has put forth all one’s strength to raise what seems an enormous weight, it is annoying to find that the dumb-bell is made of cardboard and could have been lifted between two fingers. ‘Was it necessary to come and wake me up out of my first sleep to tell me?’ she asked crossly.

  Polly looked up at her mother ‘I’m sorry, mother,’ she said repentantly. ‘But if you knew what an awful floater it was!’

  Mrs. Logan could not help laughing.

  ‘I couldn’t have gone to sleep if I hadn’t told you,’ Polly went on.

  ‘And I mayn’t go to sleep until you have.’ Mrs. Logan tried to be severe and sarcastic. But her eyes, her smile betrayed her.

  Polly took her mother’s hand and kissed it. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind,’ she said.

  ‘I do mind. Very much.’

  ‘It’s no good trying to bluff me,’ said Polly. ‘But now I must tell you about the floater.’

  Mrs. Logan heaved the parody of a sigh of resignation and, pretending to be overwhelmed with sleepiness, closed her eyes. Polly talked. It was after halfpast two before she went back to her room. They had discussed, not only the floater and Lady Edward, but the whole party, and everyone who was there. Or rather Polly had discussed and Mrs. Logan had listened, had laughed and laughingly protested when her daughter’s comments became too exuberantly highspirited.

  ‘But Polly, Polly,’ she had said, ‘you really mustn’t say that people look like elephants.’

  ‘But Mrs. Betterton does look like an elephant,’ Polly had replied. ‘It’s the truth.’ And in her dramatic stage whisper she had added, rising from fancy to still more preposterous fancy: ‘Even her nose is like a trunk.’

  ‘But she’s got a short nose.’

  Polly’s whisper had become more gruesome. ‘An amputated trunk. They bit it off when she was a baby. Like puppies’ tails.’

  CHAPTER XII

  For valued clients, Sbisa never closed his restaurant. They could sit there, in spite of the law, and consume intoxicating poisons as far into the small hours as they liked. An extra waiter came on at midnight to attend to the valued clients who wished to break the law. Old Sbisa saw to it that their value, to him, was very high. Alcohol was cheaper at the Ritz than at Sbisa’s.

  It was about halfpast one—’only halfpast one,’ Lucy complained—when she and Walter and Spandrell left the restaurant.

  ‘Still young,’ was Spandrell’s comment on the night. ‘Young and rather insipid. Nights are like human beings—never interesting till they’re grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to halfpast. An hour later they’re growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middleaged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading themselves that they’re not old. After four they’re in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire’s exhausted itself into disgust. I have rather a weakness for the death-bed scenes, I must confess,’ Spandrell added.

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ said Lucy.

  ‘And it’s only in the light of ends that you can judge beginnings and middles. The night has just come of age. It remains to be seen how it will die. Till then, we can’t judge it.’

  Walter knew how it would die for him—in the midst of Marjorie’s tears and his own complicated misery and exasperation, in an explosion of self-hatred and hatred for the woman to whom he had been cruel. He knew, but would not admit his knowledge; nor that it was already halfpast one and that Marjorie would be awake and anxiously wondering why he hadn’t returned.

  At five to one Walter had looked at his watch and declared that he must go. What was the good of staying? Spandrell was immovable. There was no prospect of his having a moment alone with Lucy. He lacked even that justification for making Marjorie suffer. He was torturing her, not that he might be happy, but that he might feel bored, ill, exasperated, impatiently wretched.

  ‘I must really go,’ he had said, standing up.

  But Lucy had protested, cajoled, commanded. In the end he sat down again. That had been more than half an hour ago and now they were out in Soho Square, and the evening, according to Lucy and Spandrell, had hardly begun.

  ‘I think it’s time,’ Spandrell had said to Lucy, ‘that you saw what a revolutionary communist looked like.’

  Lucy demanded nothing better.

  ‘I belong t
o a sort of club,’ Spandrell explained. He offered to take them in with him.

  ‘There’ll still be a few enemies of society on view, I expect,’ he went on, as they stepped out into the refreshing darkness. ‘Good fellows mostly. But absurdly childish. Some of them seem genuinely to believe that a revolution would make people happier. It’s charming, it’s positively touching.’ He uttered his noiseless laugh. ‘But I’m an aesthete in these matters. Dynamite for dynamite’s sake.’

  ‘But what’s the point of dynamite, if you don’t believe in Utopia?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘The point? But haven’t you eyes?’

  Lucy looked round her. ‘I see nothing particularly frightful.’

  ‘They have eyes and see not.’ He halted, took her arm with one hand and with the other pointed round the square. ‘The deserted pickle factory, transformed into a dance hall; the lying-in hospital; Sbisa’s; the publishers of Who’s Who. And once,’ he added, ‘the Duke of Monmouth’s palace. You can imagine the ghosts:

  ‘Whether inspired by some diviner lust,

  His father got him with a keener gust…’

  And so forth. You know the portrait of him after the execution, lying on a bed, with the sheet up to his chin, so that you can’t see the place where the neck was cut through? By Kneller. Or was it Lely? Monmouth and pickles, lying-in and Who’s Who, and dancing and Sbisa’s champagne—think of them a little, think of them.’