A Fish Dinner in Memison - Zimiamvian Trilogy 02 (28 page)

'In this hypothetical case I can promise you there isn't'

'Well then,—'

It was getting late. They had fetched a circle round by Glandford and the Downs and so through Wiveton and Cley with its great church and windmill and up onto the common again and were now riding down the hill above Salthouse. The broad was alive with water-fowl. Beyond the bank they saw the North Sea like roughened lead and all the sky dark and leaden with the dusk coming on and a great curtain of cloud to northward and a sleet-storm driving over from the sea. Mary said, 'I should think Charles's view might be valuable.'

Lady Bremmerdale's handsome face darkened.
‘
I haven't consulted Charles,' she said, after a pause.

They came riding into Salthouse now, level with the bank. Thev saw how a flieht of brent geese, a score or more, swept suddenly
down steeply from that louring
sky like a flight of arrows, to take the water: a rushing of wings, black heads and necks arrow-like pointing their path, and white sterns vivid as lightning against that murk and beginnings of winter night.

Anne said slowly, 'But I think
I’
m
inclined to agree with you and Jim.'

'And we, madonna, are we not exiles still?

When first we met

Some shadowy door swung wide.

Some faint voice cried,

—Not heeded then

For clack
of
drawing-room chit-chat, fiddles,

glittering lights, Waltzes, dim stairs, scents, smiles
of
other women—

yet,

'Twas so: that night
of
nights. Behind the hill Some light that
does not set Had stirr’
d, bringing again New earth, new morning-tide.

'I didn't mean that seriously, years ago when I wrote it,' Lessingham said: 'that night you were such a naughty girl at Wolkenstein.' He was working on a life-size portrait of Mary in an emerald-green dress of singular but beautiful design, by artificial light, between tea and dinner that same afternoon, in the old original Refuge at Anmering Blunds. 'I mean, I felt it but I hadn't the intellectual courage of my feelings. Strange how the words can come before the thought,' he talked as if half to her, half to himself, while he worked: 'certainly before the conscious thought. As if one stuck down words on paper, or paint on canvas, and afterwards these symbols in some obscure way have a power of coming to life and telling you (who made them) what was in fact at the back of your mind when you did it; though you never suspected it was there, and would have repudiated it if you had.'

Mary said, ‘I
t opens up fascinating possibilities. On that principle you might have an unconscious Almighty, saying, as He creates the universe,
Moi, je ne crois pas en Dieu.'

'I know. I can't see why not An atheistical Creator is a contradiction. But is not reality, the nearer you get to the heart of it, framed of contradictions? I'm quite sure our deepest desires are.'

Tm sure they are.' A comic light began to play almost imperceptibly about the corners of Mary's lips. 'Really, I think I should find an atheistical Almighty much more amusing to meet than an Almighty who solemnly believed in Himself. Can you imagine anything more pompous and boring?'

Lessingham was silent a minute, painting with concentrated care and intention. Then he stopped, met her eye, and laughed. 'Like an inflated Wordsworth, or Shelley, or Napoleon: prize bores all of them, for all their genius. You can't imagine Homer, or the man who was responsible for
Njal's Saga,
or Shakespeare, or Webster, or Marlowe, thinking like that of themselves.'

Mary smiled. 'Marlowe,' she said: Svhen he was like to die, "being persuaded to make himself ready to God for his soul, he answered that he would carry his soul up to the top of a hill, and run God, run devil, fetch it that will have it." I could hug him for that'

'So could I. They were far too deep in love with their job to bother about themselves as doers of it. They knew the stature of their own works, of course: Beethoven's saying of the
cavatina
(wasn't it?) in Op. 130, "It will please them someday"; but that is worlds apart from the solemn self-satisfaction of these one-sided freaks, not men but sports of nature. How would you like Shelley for your
inamorato?'

‘I
think I should bite his nose,' Mary said.

Something danced
in Lessingham's eye. He painted
swiftly for a minute in silence. 'Just as I know,' he said, taking up the
thread of his thought again, (
better than I know any of your what people call accepted scientific facts) whether a
picture of mine is right when I’
ve finished it, or whether it's worthless. It's one or the other: there's no third condition. When I've finished it. Till then, one knows nothing. This one, for instance: heaven knows whether it will come off or not My God, I want it to.'

'Yes. You used to slash them into pieces or smudge them over when they were half finished. Till you learnt better.'

'Till you taught me better. You, by being Mary.' He stood quickly back, to see sitter and portrait together. 'You are the most intolerable and hopeless person to paint I should think since man was man. Why do I go on trying?'

'You succeeded once. Perhaps that is why. The appetite grows with feeding.'

'The Vision
of
Zimiamvia
portrait? Yes. It caught a moment, out of your unnumerable moments: a perfect moment: I think it did. But what is one among the hundreds of millions? Besides, I want a perfect one of you that the world can see. That one is only for you and me and the Gods. O, the Devil's in it,' he said, changing his brash: 'it's a lunacy, a madness, this painting. And writing is as bad. And action is as bad, or worse.' He stepped forward to put a careful touch on the mouth: stepped back, considered, and corrected it
‘
Est-ce que vous pouvez me dire, madame, quelle est la difference
entre une brosse a dents et un e
cureuil?'

Mary's response was the
curiouries
t of little inarticulate sounds, lazy, mocking, deprecatory, that seemed, as a sleepy child might if you stroked it, or a sleepy puppy, to stretch itself luxuriously and turn over again, hiding its nose in the downy deep contentment of many beloved absurdities: how stupid you are, and yet how dear you are to be so stupid, and how cosy us two together, and how absurd indeed the world is, and how amusing to be you and me.

'Do you know the answer? His eyes were busy.

‘
No,' she said, in a voice that seemed to snuggle deeper yet into that downiness of honey-scented pillows.

'Quand on les mit tous les deux en dessous d'un arbre, c'est
celui qui le grimpe qui est l'e
cureuil.
’

'O silly riddle!'

'Do you know what you did then?' said Lessingham, painting with sudden ex
treme precision and certitude. ‘
You did a kind of pussy-cat movement with your chin, as though you were smoothing it against a ruff. I know now what this picture wants. Have you got a ruffle? Can't we make one? I can see it: I could do it out of my head. But Td like to have it in the flesh, all the same.'

'Angier can make one by to-morrow. I can show her.'

Tired?'

‘
No.'

He put down palette and brushes. 'Anyhow, let's knock off and have a rest Come and look at it. There. Aren't I
right?’

Mary, standing beside him, looked at it awhile in silence. 'Not one of those enormous ones,' she said, 'like a peacock's tail.'

'Good heavens, no.'

‘
Nor the kind that swaddles one up to the chin in a sort of white concertina, as if one hadn't any neck.'

‘
No, no. I want it quite narrow: not more than two inches deep, like Isabella d'Este's in our Titian in the music-room at home. But much longer, of course, following the opening of your dress.'

'When you designed this dress,' said Mary, 'did you mean it to be a Zimiamvian dress?'

'Pure Zimiamvian. It clothes, but does not unduly conceal: adorns, but is not silly enough to try to emulate: displays, but does not distort.'

'On the principle of Herrick's
Lily in Crystal.'

‘
Exactly. It's a Zimiamvian principle, isn't it? Up to a point'

'Or rather down.'

'I should have said, down. There again: another of these antinomies at the heart of things. Every experience of pure beauty is climacteric; which means it gathers into its own being everything that has led on to it, and, conversely, all that leads on to it has value only because of that leading on. You can't live on climaxes alone.'

‘
Words!'

He was busy selecting new brushes and setting his palette for the green.
‘
I stand rebuked. A concrete parallel, then. Think of the climax, like all the morning stars singing together, worked up in those terrific tremolo passages towards the end of the
Arietta
in Op.III
. Played by itself, what is it but just a brilliant and extraordinarily difficult display of technique? But play it in its context, coming after the sel
f-destroying Armageddon and Rag
narok of the
Allegro con brio ed appassionato,
and after those early unfoldings of the
Arietta
itself,—'

'Ah, that little simple beginning,' said Mary, Tike little farms all undesecrated, and over there the sea without a blemish; and all the fields full of tiny speckets, lambs in spring.'

'And so gradually, gradually, to the empyrean. Which is itself simply the ultimate essence crammed with the implications of all these things. White hot with them.'

'Or a great mountain,' she said.
‘
Ushba, as we first saw him from those slopes of the Gul glen above Betsho, facing the dawn. Take away the sky: take away the roots of the mountain: the Suanetian forest about the roots— crab-apples, thorns, rowan, sweet brier and rhododendron, hornbeam and aspen and beech and oak, those monkshoods higher than your head as you rode by on horseback, and great yellow scabious eight feet tall, and further up, that riot of poppies and anemones, gentian, speedwell and ranunculus, forget-me-not geraniums, and huge Caucasian snowdrops: take these trimmings away, you lose the size and the wonderfulness and the living glory of it, and have nothing left but a lump of ice and stone.'

The unrelated climax. Dead. Nothing.'

Mary was studying the picture on the easel. 'You've started the hair, I see.'

'Just roughed it in.'

'It ought to be black. Jet-black.'

'Ought it?'

'Oughtn't it? And scarlet dress?'

‘
Because I've captured the Queen of Spades mood about the mouth?'

'Well, of course. Why should she be tied down to red-gold and green? She doesn't like it Has to put up with it in this stodgy world; but, when you can paint like that, it's most unkind not to give her her own outsides sometimes. After all, she is me, just as much as I am myself. You painted her in your Valkyrie picture, but I've always felt that as fancy dress. I can't wear poppy-red, or yellow or even honey-colour. But I itch to wear them: will, too, someday. For (you and I know) there will be days there, won't there?'

'Days. And nights. How could you and I get along without them?'

‘
Why should we be
expected to?—Well,' she said, 'I.
m ready. An hour yet before it will be time to change for dinner.'

‘
Head's free now,' said Lessingham as he settled her pose again: 'I'm only on the dress. I can't alter this now,' he said, returning to his easel. 'And the truth
is, I couldn't bear to. But I’ll
do the spit image of it, if you like—same pose, same everything, but in Dark Lady form,—as soon as this is finished.'

'And a self-portrait too, perhaps,' said Mary, 'on the same principle?'

'Very well.'

'She'd like it. Personally, of course, I prefer my King suited in black rather than red. But when she gets the upper hand—and remember, she is me—'

Lessingham laughed. 'It's
a mercy that these Jekyl
l-Hyde predilections of ours don't lead to promiscuity on both sides. How is it they don't?'

'Because when longing aches you for
La Rose Noire,
it is still me you ache for. The empty body, or with someone not me behind it: what would you give for that?'

'O madonna mia,
who sent you into this world, I wonder?'

‘
Who sent us?'

Lessingham painted for a while without speaking. The clock ticked, while slowly on the canvas inert pigments ground in oil gradually, through innumerable subtle relationships of form and colour, took life: gradually and painfully, like the upthrusting of daffodil blades through the hard earth in spring, became to be the material witness to the vision, seen through Lessingham's eyes, of Mary's warm and breathing body clothed in that dress which from throat to hips, like a fifteenth-century coat-hardy, fitted like a skin. Still painting, he began to say, 'What happens when we get old: twenty, thirty, forty years hence? to lovers, I mean. Get old, and powers fail: blind, deaf, impotent, paralysed? Is memory enough? Even that fails. Bad to think of: a going down into fog and obscurity. All the things of the spirit belong so entirely to the body. And the body is (in our experience) mat
ter. Time dissolves it away. Wh
at remains?'