Earthly Powers (14 page)

       I said, "That belongs to the leading actor in the French-style farce I shall take you to see tonight. He is a fine actor, also a war hero mutilated in a bloody battle."

       "Does he live here with you?"

       "No, he lives with his wife and children, but his house is in Swiss Cottage and he finds it convenient sometimes to come here, this flat being so central, to freshen up before or after a performance. Does that answer your question, madam?"

       "Very stuffy. Sometimes I don't know whether you're joking or not. Poor man. Easier for a man, though. Sister Agathe says that skirts will be very short after the war because of the shortage of material. It seems to be made very well, that leg, a very nicely made artificial leg. I've never seen one before." And she looked at me acutely as though she more than half divined what was going on. I very nearly said: There's nothing going on, you know.

       She divined further that evening at the Comedy Theatre. She had had a reasonably good dinner at Frith's, where they often had a very fair game pie, into whose contents it was imprudent to enquire too particularly. She'd had also a tinselly dessert which was really no more than a cleverly disguised bread pudding, and had shared with me a bottle of something eely and alumy and North African with a Pommard label. And then she had loved the first act of Parleyvoo, even the heavy jokes about the Balfour Declaration and the fall of Jerusalem. In the first interval she came with me into the vestibule, flushed and bright-eyed and proud of her brother. I was proud of her too, in her dressy waistless gown with sequins, something she wore for the once-a-term all-girl dances at her school, probably with Sister Agathe or Gertrude being grimly efficient on the piano with the Turkey Trot. She also had an eye-matching bandeau round her honey-coloured hair and a very little rouge on her lips. I was given an awed nod by some I did not know who had been told by some who did know that this was he, the author. And there, one of those who did know me and very well too, was Val Wrigley, my former boy-lover. I felt no bitterness. He seemed to be alone. He seemed also not very well, thinner, his sunken chest sunk further, the points of his cheekbones crimson.

       "Well, Kenneth dear." Hortense was all attention. "Not what you and I used to mean when we talked of the glory of literature, is it?"

       I did the introductions. "Where," I asked, "is your friend?"

       "Oh, he's gone off. Left as soon as you fired that little joke about an asylum for the Jews. Not funny, he thought. Nor me."

       "Ah," I said, "but you stayed."

       "Saw you coming in, old thing. With this delightful girl on your arm. Hortense, eh? Always proud of the French blood, weren't you, dear?" Hortense giggled. "Thought it might be nice," Val leered, "to renew an old friendship."

       "Did you get your little book printed?"

       "Some small difficulties, old thing. But I doubt not that they'll be overcome in God's good time." The stress he laid on the holy name indicated an all too mortal tyranny. "But soft," he then said, "whom have we here?" I felt dirty. I felt my linen was already grimy from the sweat of guilty embarrassment that had at first trickled but now gushed. Linda Selkirk was there, very beautiful, her eyes of a preternatural blue, her fine abundant black hair in a chignon. Her companion was Phil Kemble, whose father had been plain Watson but who had dug out the Kemble from his mother's side, invoking the name of a great theatrical family to prime the engine of his own theatrical career. I had heard, though, that his mother's Kembles had nothing to do with Fanny and Charles but were really Campbells, small distillers with a Kelvinside accent. Phil was a good actor, though difficult to suit with his aptitude for tragedy and his long comic body. Seeing him and Linda together, I felt the thought flash: They are lovers. Was this artist's intuition or the wishful thinking of my own guilt?

       Val had recognised Kemble but did not know him. I introduced everybody to everybody. Phil pulled me into a space between the box office and the house full notice. "You never replied," he reproached.

       "I'm still thinking about it, Phil. I'm not sure whether it's the sort of thing I can do. I can see that that kind of part would be right, of course—" It would, too; Phil could make a very moving, complex and unusual William Pitt. He had something of the look of Pitt in the Gillray cartoon, where he and Boney are carving the pudding of the world. "There's the question too of not offending the French," I said.

       "The war will be over next spring," Phil said. "We'll be able to offend the French all we want to, mean-souled bastards that they are. A spring opening, think, the first big play of the peace: patriotic, comic, tragic. 'England has saved herself by her exertions.'" He made a kind of Pitt arise out of that line; people began looking at him. I was aware, and was uneasy about it, that Val was doing a lot of talking and Hortense was doing a lot of talking, while Linda listened, smiling. She turned, caught my eye, then did not smile. I didn't like this. Phil went on about good plain straight John Drinkwater dialogue without prithee and egad and who could play Fox and who George III till the bell went.

       I said, "This your first visit to this?"

       "Yes. Awful tripe, as you'll be the first to admit, old lad, but who can blame you? We all have to eat, if you can call it eating these days. Linda's first too, did you know? Had to drag her here practically. Things not going so well in that household, but you know better than I, I should imagine. Well, we'll give it another couple of weary gags or so and then I'll take her to supper." He nodded pleasantly and went to collect Linda. Val left, waving sadly at me. I took Hortense in.

       After the performance, back at the apartment, I gave Hortense a large cup of hot strong milky cocoa. She was overexcited, she would not sleep without some such nursery nightcap. I had picked up the last mail delivery of the evening from the table downstairs. "Here's news," I said, while she sipped shoeless on the striped couch, feet tucked under her. "My agent says that Bourreau wants to do it in Paris. As a typical piece of English farce."

       "That means a lot more money," she said.

       "Dearest Hortense," I said, putting the letter down, "I realise I've been very selfish and neglectful. All I gave you for your birthday last year was a book. For Christmas too. And the books didn't even cost me anything. Tomorrow we must go out and buy really magnificent presents for you. And for Father and Mother as well. And Tom. But what would you like?"

       "Not the way you give presents, that," she said. "Presents are meant to be surprises. Nice surprises." And then: "Why did Mrs Whatsit seem nastily surprised tonight?"

       "Selkirk? Linda Selkirk? How? What about?"

       "Well, you know one babbles things out when one's nervous, I mean Mrs Whatsit is a bit overwhelming, blue eyes and raven hair, very unusual that, and I was being complimentary about her husband's acting and the stiff walk was funny but tragic really. She said it was an artificial leg and I said I knew and I'd seen his spare one and... There was nothing wrong in saying that, I thought, but she went all white. Why? And that poet boy, I'm sure he's consumptive, trying to be like Keats I suppose, laughed in a very strange way. He said better to wake up to that than to onions. What did he mean? Was he trying to be modern like Sister Anastasia's favourite poet? You know, the one who has smells of steaks in passageways—"

       I too had, I knew, gone white. I tried to breathe easily. Hortense's eyes, too bright for this time of night, grew wider.

       She said, "Oh golly, oh saints in heaven, it's not possible, is it?"

       "What, Hortense? What is not possible?"

       "The Café Royal, Oscar and Bosie, oh my dear Lord, are you one of those?"

       "One of what, Hortense?"

       "You know, you know. So this boy deserted you because you had no money, and now you're making money, and he said it was all his fault you turning from great literature and writing muck for the stage. Oh my dear dear Lord in heaven, it all fits in."

       "You," I said carefully, "are having a modern education. Mother and Father—it would never be possible for them to—too late, I mean. If you told them that in prisoner of war camps man and man were driven by sheer necessity but apart from that, there are, and I suppose they're comparatively rare, cases, I mean... what I mean is, your mother knows and is inexpressibly shocked. Father doesn't and, says your mother, mustn't. As for corrupting poor innocent Hortense, she said—"

       "Well." She tucked her feet under more comfortably. "It is a bit of a surprise, my own brother, that is. Oh, I'll shut up about it at home, pretend not to know. It happens in schools, I know. Jill Lipton's brother. And with girls. Two of our girls were caught, fourth-formers, immature, inexperienced, it's silly to get caught."

       "I've got caught, haven't I?"

       She looked at me with adult seriousness. "Not like Oscar. Bosie got away with it, didn't he, being a lord. Oh my dear Lord, you must be careful." And then, with a pose of scientific curiosity which her shining eyes and flushed cheeks belied, "What exactly is it that men do together?"

CHAPTER 17

I lived a celibate life from Christmas till Shrovetide. This was not a matter of caution: what went on behind locked doors was nobody's business but the consenting participants'. But Rodney had already given warning that he would leave the play in the new year, handing over his part to Fred Martins. He had been invited to appear in a sort of trial production of Shaw's Heartbreak House in Manchester, taking what most considered to be the totally unsuitable role of Captain Shotover—a role that nevertheless fascinated him and which he was determined to attempt. Val tried to make a pathetic return into my life, finding his present friend tyrannical and parsimonious, but I was stern in my rejection of his advances. I was far from lonely; I had my work, I had my friends in the theatre.

       The new comedy broke, for me, unexpected ground. When I showed the draught first act to J. J. Mannering, he breathed on me his chronic odour of cigars and said, "Lad, it's a musical comedy."

       "Never."

       "Oh yes. Look—parallel love stories, those people there could be blown up into a chorus, this boozer character is pure rich low comedy. God, even some of these speeches suggest lyrics. Have you ever written lyrics?"

       "Well, I wrote poetry at school."

       "That's all musical comedy lyrics are, lad—poetry you write at school. Drury Lane, get that into your noddle, big stage, open out, let the thing breathe, dancing, singing, get down to it. Duets, patter songs, choruses. You start with a chorus and end with a chorus. Two acts. Second act in Monte Carlo, Biarritz, somewhere naughty and foreign. Do the lyrics, you know, you know the word, along with the book, let them spring out of the book, you know the word—"

       "Pan passu?"

       "Knew you'd know the word. Joe Porson's itching for a job. Wasn't his fault Tilly Tulip closed after a month. At least three good numbers in it, he has the gift, Joe, Jerome Kern touch, Irving Berlin, jazzy, we're past that Chu Chin Chow muck. Get down to it, lad."

       I was being driven further and further away from literature all the time. You could hardly call this sort of thing literature: Waking and sleeping, It's always the same, Sleeping and waking I call on your name. Sleeping I cry, Waking I sigh, Knowing there's no reply.

       What would Henry James have said? I remembered, or perhaps it is now I remember, walking with him in the autumn garden of Lamb House after the publication of my Socrates novel, him saying, "Keep away from the stony bosom of the theatre, my dear young friend, is the considered advice of one who has suffered the agonies of the damned from the—There is a nakedness, there is a laying on of whips, there is a—" Emotion would not let him get the words out. He shuddered, his mouth opened and shut. He picked up his dachshund Max and clasped him to his unstony bosom as if to protect him too from the theatre. He was, I could tell, remembering the hoots and howls that greeted Guy Domville, himself responding in innocence to the cruel call of "Author," standing there to be ridiculed, his mouth opening and shutting. Oh for the concealing warmth of the novel, the tortuous caverns of style wherein to hide. Nakedness was right.

       The musical comedy was called Say It, Cecil and was based on a very silly idea. A young man named Cecil loves a young girl called Cecilia but cannot bring himself to utter the ultimate endearment. In August 1914 he said I love you to a girl and immediately war broke out. In France he said Je t'aime to a girl and the surrounding village was blasted to smithereens. Somebody taught him to try Ya vas lublu and his brought about the Russian Revolution. Cecilia thinks she loves him but refuses to be sure until she hears him utter the unequivocal formula. He says Ich liebe dich, despite the snarls of the patriotic, and this brings about the collapse of Germany. Great jubilation, but he still dare not say I love you. He has a song with chorus—"What I want to say"—and the chorus sings it for him, but this still will not do. The problem is solved (I blush, I still blush) through a trick involving the names of islands. Isle of Man, Isle of Wight, Isle of Capri, Isle of You. No further disasters. Final reprise of chorus "Oh, say it, Cecil" as "You've said it, Cecil." Is it possible for the reader to imagine anything stupider? I was haunted throughout the writing by an image of the great stone head of Henry James, unmoved, unmoving, eye and brow all eternal reproach.

       I finished the final chorus on Sunday, February 24: We're versing and voicing Our heartfelt rejoicing, Your troubles belong to the past. So nuzzle and nestle, For you've said it, Cecil, At last.

       Curtain. The shame, the salivation at the prospect of more money.

       There was a knock at the door.

       "Rodney, dearest. Such a lovely lovely surprise."