Earthly Powers (20 page)

       Despite postwar shortages, the ornate but airy restaurant of the Hotel de Paris was able to offer us the following: Saumon Fume de Hollande Velouté de Homard au Paprika Tourte de Ris-de-Veau Brillat-Savarin Selle d'Agneau de Lait Polignac Pommes Dauphin Petits Pois Fine-Fleur Sorbet au Clicquot Poularde Soufflée Impériale Salade A Ida Crèpes Flambées au Grand Mariner Coffret de Friandises Corbeille de Fruits Café Liqueurs. I had expected little more than a choice of ornate renderings of the flesh of the pigeons that, wounded by palsied triggerfingers in the famous Monte Carlo pigeon-shoot, wandering trustingly pecking round the outdoor tables of the Café de Paris opposite, were picked up as easily as kittens. But this was God's plenty and I said so. Don Carlo, after two seconds of consideration, accepted the term. It cost a lot, but Don Carlo had the money. For drink we began with champagne cocktails, went on to a good Chablis and a fine Chambertin, took a refreshing Blanquette de Limoux with the dessert, and ended with an acceptable Armagnac in flutes not balloons. Don Carlo ate with sweating concentration but, when we arrived at the sorbet, spared time to take in the charming belle époque decor. I said to him: "This decor of the belle époque. You find it charming?"

       He said, as I'd expected, "There is a vagueness about these expressions. Who says that epoch was beautiful? Beauty is one of the attributes of the divinity. And charming, I do not know what is meant by charming."

       "Alluring. Pretty. Pleasing. Ocularly seductive. Unprofound but sensuously satisfying. Tasteful and delicate. Like that lady behind you."

       He grunted, turning, munching the bread that was still on his breadplate and which he had forbidden the waiter to clear, to look at an animated woman in a chain-stitch-embroidered dress of very fine black pure silk chiffon. Ocularly unseduced, he turned round again. "A frivolous people," he said.

       "The French?" I said, joyously. "All the French? The French in myself? My mother? And what do you mean by frivolous?"

       He wagged his bit of bread at me. "Remember," he said, "that language is one of our trials and sorrows. We are forced, by the very nature of language, to generalise. If we did not generalise we would have nothing to say except such as," wagging it still, "this bread is a piece of bread."

       "Tautologia," Domenico said.

       "Is language then," I said, "of diabolic provenance?"

       "No," he said, and this time he munched. "Read Genesis, and you will see that God made Adam call things by name, and that was the birth of language. When Adam and Eve fell, then language became corrupted. Out of that corruption I say that the French are a frivolous people." And he swallowed his bread. There was nothing more to eat on the table. Don Carlo called for the bill. It was a big one. The table swarmed with paper money.

       "This decor of the belle époque," I said. "You find it charming?"

       His response was unexpected. He bellowed at me, so that heads turned: "Adiuro ergo te, draco nequissime, in nomine Agni immaculati—"

       "Basta, Carlo."

       Don Carlo grinned at me without mirth but with a sketch of menace appropriate to the words of exorcism he had uttered. "That is excessive," he said. "That goes too far. I address a little demon only, and I will call it a demon of frivolity. We will burn him out of you yet. We will have you back before you are finished. We will have you home." For the first time ever on hearing that word my eyes pricked, and the charming decor dissolved momentarily in coloured water. "Now," he said, "ask me again about the decor of the beautiful epoch." I said nothing, though my lips and tongue formed We? There was no bread in my mouth but I swallowed as if there were. Don Carlo was, I was learning, formidable. He drew from a side jacket pocket a big cheap watch that ticked at me across the table. "Seven o'clock mass at Sainte Devote," he said. "You know Father Rougier?" he asked of his brother.

       "Lo conosco."

       "I will say mass in my best Parisian Latin," he said to me. I had forgotten it was Sunday tomorrow, but the days of the week had long ceased for me to have individual flavours; they all tasted of the same loneliness and frivolity, which I termed work. So then, it was after ten and we must walk downhill from Carlo's mount to Carlo's lodging, that he might go to bed and be well rested for his early mass. In the vestibule of the Hotel de Paris Don Carlo smiled at the bronze equestrian statue of Louis XIV and then, with neither malice nor menace, at me. The effigy had been there only about twelve years, but the raised knee of the horse had been so often touched for luck that it shone golden. Don Carlo rubbed it affectionately. Then he turned to the greeting of a British voice.

       "The Don and the Monte. I knew sometime you two would meet. How are you, caro Carlo, Carlo querido?"

       "Muy bien." And Don Carlo shook hands with a pale-haired English smiler with a cricketer's body, got up in the uniform of an Anglican bishop, complete with gaiters. Domenico was introduced. I too.

       "The writer? The playwright? Well, quite an honour. Saw one of your things when I was back. A real scream." This man was the Bishop of Gibraltar. The pale hair was parted on the right, which in those days was called the girl's side, and a lock fell engagingly over the left very blue eye. Looking back on him now I see a fusion of Messrs. Auden and Isherwood, homosexual writers like myself. Most of the bishop's strong brown teeth were on show as he shook hands manlily. The Bishop of Gibraltar's diocese extended to the Côte d'Azur, and one of the earlier episcopal duties had been to warn the sunning British of the dangers to their souls of gambling. As I was almost at once to see, those days were over. What puzzled and a little shocked me was the amicality subsisting between an Anglican and a Catholic prelate. "I saw your brother in the Windy City," the bishop said to Don Carlo. "We had dinner. We played."

       "Craps?" asked, to my further shock, Don Carlo.

       "The Idaho variety."

       "What a good idea. You have, ha, i dadi?" He rerubbed the raised bronze pastern.

       "Los dados? Cierto."

       "Basta." Domenico was visibly tired from eating. I was weary too, but did not dare, for fear of exorcism, to protest. So we all went up to the episcopal suite on the third floor, and in the drawing room, full of belle époque charm, his lordship served whisky and brought out the dice in a cup of Florentine leather. Don Carlo lugged forth his big cheap watch and placed it on the table, where it beat aggressively.

       The bishop said, "Fasting from midnight, of course. The blessed mutter of the, as the poet has it. Browning, is it not?" he asked me.

       "Chicago," I said, nodding. "Why, if I may ask with a writer's professional cheek, Chicago?"

       "Anglican matters," the bishop said, shaking the dice. "An episcopal conference. I say no more. Come on, seven, eleven." He threw a total of 12 and then of 9 and then of 7 and lost. Don Carlo burlily cast, muttering a prayer, and got 11, fifteen to one. It was all between the two clerics: Domenico and I were hopeless. But, ever the enquiring novelist, I stayed to drink and listen. The bishop, presiding over an Anglican enclave at the foot of a fiercely Catholic peninsula, had a special social if not theological relationship with, ha ha, the sons of the Scarlet Woman. Big Eight: even money. Hardways: seven to one. Baby wants a new pair of shoes. Roll dem bones. This was madness. They talked about colleagues: men with reversed collars were all in the same business despite the electrified fence of the Reformation. The third Campanati brother, Raffaele, was an importer into the United States of Milanese foodstuffs. He had trouble, there was a kind of Neapolitan brigandage in Chicago, different from other American cities where the Sicilians were the dealers in monopoly and violence, which they termed protection. Craps: seven to one.

       The bishop said, "The big word came up, as you may suppose."

       "Ecumenico?" Big Six: even money.

       "Early days," the bishop said. I didn't understand. The word was new to me, who had done little Greek. But I began to understand, from fragmentary allusions, how it was that Don Carlo and the Bishop of Gibraltar knew each other, indeed were a sort of friends. Nothing to do with religion, though to do with Rome. His lordship liked autumn holidays in Rome. Don Carlo, in Rome for a task of translation of a very knotty document for the Holy Father's own benefit (English to Italian that was, about capital and labour or something), got to playing bridge with his lordship, not at the time more than a dean. Auction, of course, contract not yet having come in. The bishop proposed a session of contract, though, for the next day, after he had preached to the British and Don Carlo had eaten a long breakfast after his blessed mutter at Sainte Devote. Contract was the coming version; it would supplant auction totally; had I read the article in The Times by the Reverend Causley, D. D.? Did I, for that matter, play? A little auction. You will soon pick up contract. No, I said, alas, I had some writing to do.

       At one minute to midnight Don Carlo was served a stiff whisky. He finished it as, all eyes on synchronised watches, the hour came up. Like going into battle, the bishop said. Over the top into Sunday, and the best of luck. "It's a battle, yes," Don Carlo said. "It's all a battle." And he looked at me as though I were a white-feathered malingerer. I nearly made some excuse about my heart.

CHAPTER 22

Not my father but my mother. I read and reread the telegram as the Sunday day train crawled toward Paris. Don Carlo was not with me: he was going to take the late sleeper. Gravely ill come immediately. I could not make the curt summons mean anything other than that she would be dead by the time I got to Battle. It's a battle, all a battle, rattled the wheels. I dined late at the restaurant of the Gare de Lyon, surrounded by charming decor of the belle époque. I tried to push guilt back down my throat with boluses of lukewarm gigot unsharpened by mint sauce. My hand trembled and I spilt coffee on my tie. The killer influenza was a neutral life force going about its proper business, or else an agent of Don Carlo's devil, or more probably a punishment from the other shop for our not having punished ourselves enough with a punitive war. It was not, then, my fault that my mother was dying or already dead. Death is never the point; the point is the peacefulness of the death. My mother would grieve about my apostasy, a pervertedness she would regard as within the realm of choice, the shamefulness of an exile which she would interpret as Wildean or, if she knew of the ghastly man, Douglasian. I had let her down. There would be a deathbed message for me, possibly a letter, a dying mother's plea for a promise that could not be fulfilled. I hoped, of course, that she was already gone. I did not want dying eyes aghast on me, pleading, modulating into a horror that I must, as it were, pin above my perverted bed.

       I took a taxi to the Gare du Nord and then the boat train to Calais. The sole other occupant of the compartment was an old man indecently drunk who mumbled incoherently about the sins of the intellectuels. Did I consider myself to be an intellectuel? Non, monsieur, je suis dentiste. The dentists too, he said, were a sort of intellectuals. Hope lay only in the common people who could not cure their own toothache; France would fall before twenty years were done, and it would be because of the defection of the intellectuels. Home, country, loyalty: such terms were not to be analysed or questioned. Unreasoning faith, that was what was wanted. Cons puez les intellectuels.

       The bar of the cross-channel steamer was open. I drank cognac to defy the cruelty of the February Manche whooshing and battering. There was a man drinking light ale who, he said, was going to write a little book about the pet animals of famous people. He did not tell me his name and I did not tell him mine, for fear he might not know it. Dogs, he said, chiefly. Prince Rupert's Boy, for instance, dead at Marston Moor, his death rejoiced in by the Cromwellians, who believed he was an evil spirit. Charles Lamb's Dash, who first belonged to Thomas Hood. King Richard II's Math, who forsook his master at Flint Castle and attached himself to the usurper Bolingbroke. Flush. Mrs Browning's spaniel, scared of the big spiders under the bed of her filthy room. Flush.

       There was no means of getting direct from Dover to Hastings, so I took the train to Victoria. Somebody had left a Sunday newspaper in the compartment, and there was a silly quip in a silly Sunday chat column about Peace opening the window and in flew Enza. Flu deaths reaching alarming figures. Black jazz bands. The pivotal pig. Short skirts oo la la for nightclub wear. An article about a certain Ernest Allworthy, Labour Boss of New Zealand—E. A. controlled N. Z., it said. The influence of wartime matiness on the postwar relationship between maid and mistress. The influence of wartime shortages on postwar culinary ingenuity. The influence of Hugh Walpole on the younger postwar novelists. Say It, Cecil was still running.

       The black sky wept bitterly over London. I had forgotten English weather. I had nearly forgotten to bring my waterproof. I got to Charing Cross and caught a foredawn train to Hastings, stopping at Battle. I slept and nearly overslept my station, but a railman's voice yelled "Battle" through the rain. I squelched in the Monday dark, soaked and alone, to my father's surgery and house, my former home. On the High Street I had a very strange physical sensation. It was as though my shoes were full of nothing but air but where my heart should be there was nothing at all. I was giving out breath but taking none in to replace it. A rapid pen wrote in fire all down my left arm from shoulder to wrist. I staggered to rest against the window of a shut shop, a family butcher's. So this was the cardiac trouble that had kept me out of the war. It was, I could sense even in my panic, going to be a useful solvent of various kinds of guilt. My heart then resumed the vigorous thumping it had, like a drum in an orchestral score, followed some direction to intermit. The scrawled signature of pain in my left arm vanished, as though written in disappearing ink. My shoes refilled with flesh and bone and spelt out toes again. Air rushed, as into a pierced vacuum tin, back in lungs that groaned relief. I trembled for a cigarette, a ship's bar Gold Hake, and lighted it with a Swan vesta. I drew in the lovely smoke, feeling madly how good life had become. I was twenty-eight, a young man, an established writer, and life lay all before me. I splashed jauntily to my father's house.