Earthly Powers (25 page)

       "Pack your traps," I said. "Out. I don't want to see you ever again. Or," I added not really relevantly, "that greedy gambling hypocrite of a brother of yours. Defiling me and my house and my sister. Go on. I'd throw you out if I had the strength but you see how I am. The whole world's rotten."

       "And what if it is love, what if she said love and I said it too? And another thing, it is the English that are the hypocrites."

       "Don't give me that about love." I spilled whisky with my shaking. "I will not hear that word again, do you hear? Not from any man's lips and much less from yours. Go on, I won't look at you. You don't exist except as filth for the poubelle of the world. Out of the place for which I and I only pay the rent." Then Hortense came in with her honey-coloured hair in a blue ribbon and wearing a wool and silk dress with pleated sides and bishop sleeves and artificial cherries on the left lapel.

       She said, "I'll have a drink too." But I barred the drinks table from her like an innocent she would defile, saying: "Oh yes, of course, sex and cigarettes and whisky. Be the big authentic fallen woman, you a mere kid of eighteen. God, the shame of it." But it was all, I was more and more aware, my fault.

       "I do not," she said in a very sharp governess tone, "wish to hear from you anything at all in the moral line. You are not qualified to judge others. Normal others." The cheap novelist in me wanted, in a way, to forgo judgment and ask questions about what it was like to be deflowered by an urgent Tuscan: I might as well get some professional advantage out of what was all my fault, and of course heterosexual Nature's, and of course theirs.

       "It is a kind of jealousy," said Domenico, "and it is very sad."

       "Deflowerer," I tried to snarl. "Defloratore." That sounded too mild. Domenico seemed to think so too.

       He suggested "Stupratore." And then, artbrothers, we looked at each other with the promise of unwilling warmth, working again, happy innocent days, on the opera Milan did not want.

       "You bloody men," came the clear sweet voice of fallen Hortense, "with your bloody deflowering." She saw that the expletive was a genuine unpurposed, though redundant, adjective of description and she blushed. "Treating a hymen as though it were a whatsit a commodity. In any case, it was the French school that did it." I was bewildered—of poetry? Painting? Phenomenology? "Mother wouldn't have me taught by German nuns and that was the result. Domenico, go and get some clothes on. More clothes, I mean."

       "And then I go?"

       "Oh yes, you bloody go all right," I said. "I'm in charge here."

       "And," he said, wary dog-eyes on Hortense, "you come with me?" I could tell from the belated teeth clamping his tongue that he had put himself into a situation of near avowal totally unwonted, but Hortense was quick with: "No, Domenico, me not with you. You want me to live in sin, as they call it? And you with a brother a priest? Are you proposing marriage? No, of course not, you oleaginous little Don Giovanni—"

       "Just what I called him," I muttered inaccurately into my whisky.

       "I am not," also muttered Domenico. "The ime is not. It is my art."

       "Go on, sing it," I jeered, "like flaming Tosca."

       "I will strike you," Domenico cried, bunching his fists. "I have had enough of your English hypocrisy."

       "Oh," said Hortense in a kind of resignation, "they're all hypocrites. The French too. Burbling about the beauties of Monet."

       "So the art master got there, did he?" I said, the whisky partly at fault, crudely.

       "You nasty thing," Hortense hissed. "It was a horse. It was the riding we were made to do: There's nobody more English than some of the French. Un cheval," she added, "not ein Pferd." It would, she led me to believe, have been all right with Sister Gertrude demonstrating, black habit tucked up, hallooing like a Valkyrie. "As for the other, yes and no. The door opened, you see." And then, irrelevantly I thought, "You crude and unpleasant homosexual."

       "Poor Mother," I said.

       "Mother?" Domenico cried, not having well understood, perhaps even holding an image of a horse covering poor Hortense. "You mean you are already, that it, he—"

       "Our mother, fool," Hortense cried back. "The French could do no wrong. She had no opinion about the Italians." That was well said. Then: "Go on, get out, Domenico. Go for a walk or a swim or seduce somebody or something. My brother and I have to talk."

       "If you mean he's to come back," I said, "you're mad and also wicked. Have I not made myself clear? Out and out now and forever. And yes, talk, by God, I'm going to do the talking."

       "I am sick at heart," Domenico said, hands limp at his sides. His intonation suggested an aria, perhaps from the Principe di Danimarca of Enrico Garitta, which I had not seen. "I will go to a hotel. I will come for my things tomorrow. I am too sick to pack now."

       "Everything out this minute," I said. And then, not wanting Domenico to make an operatic scena out of filling his suitcases: "Tomorrow. At nine o'clock. Hortense will not be here."

       "Ah, sending me away too, are you? Back home to Dad and the second Mrs Toomey? That's what we have to talk about."

       "I meant you would not be available to be seen and cajoled and perhaps also even... Ugh."

       "Terrible, isn't it, a man and a woman together? At least I'm not all beaten about, rough sailors I suppose it was, friends of that bloody blond tulip, and look at the state of your clothes. Change them now. We've got to talk seriously later."

       Dad sent a "To you?"

       "To you."

       "How dare you interfere with my mail. Have you been opening other things too? I won't have this, Hortense, you've gone too far, you need a really stern hand, the sooner you—" The sooner you what? Go back to the German nuns? Learn the disciplines of a seducible London stenographer? Marry?

       "Oh, don't talk silly. It came three days ago. I knew it must be urgent."

       "Where is it? I demand to see it."

       "Get it, then. On your desk. On your way to changing your disgusting clothes. Ugh, blood and other things."

       "I'm not leaving you alone with that bastard over there."

       "I will not be called a bastard, you English hypocrite." And Domenico padded out, groaning his fancied wrongs.

       "Can I have that drink now?" she said quietly, sitting in the armchair, as heavily as her frailty would allow. But no, women are not frail.

       "Whisky?" I said almost humbly. "What does he say?" getting it for her, a single finger. "If it's an upsetting letter I don't particularly want to read it."

       "Did you a favour then really, didn't I? Thanks." She sipped then coughed. Not all that grown-up. "The second Mrs Toomey isn't going to be the one I thought. It's another patient, Doris something, and she's only in her twenties. Dad's selling the practice. He's going to Canada. So you see my situation. He sees it too, in his long-winded way. Oh, read it."

       "Later. I see." I poured more for myself. "He has to have you, though. You're still under age."

       "I don't want to go to Canada. I don't want a stepmother a few years older than myself. I don't want to stay with you."

       "I can see," I said, "why you wouldn't want to stay with me. Unnatural goings on. And me going on about morality. On the other hand I don't have any duty to you, you know. Except what—family affection dictates." I would not say love.

       "You bloody bore. You real horrible hypocrite."

       Domenico, going off down the corridor parallel to, but at no point visible from, the long salon, must have heard that with approval. He sang a strangled "Ciao, Orténsia" as he turned left into the hallway, visible from the part of the salon where she and I sat through the arch with its twisty columns, opened the flat door and went out quietly. He could be heard going down the marbled stairway on sad punching feet.

       "Operatic," Hortense said, "in everything. It's in the language, way of life. Sex, too. Religion, of course. England could never take to it. Still," she said, "I'm going to marry him."

       "I'll go and change," I said. I switched off thought and feeling, though I could not switch off physical pain, as I stripped off my defiled clothes and put on a silk shirt and tennis trousers. Thus dressed as for games I came back to ask her to repeat what she had said. She repeated it. "You mean," I said quietly and tiredly, "that you love him? That you let him do what he did because you love him? I never heard such wretched and wicked and adolescent nonsense. You don't know what love is. You don't know anything of the world. He's practically the first man you've ever been in contact with. Social, I mean, apart from the other wretched and evil thing."

       She ignored all that, swinging one crossed white-silk-stockinged leg. "It's not worthwhile, you know, trying to explain things to you. You're dense as well as homosexual. Marriage and love are not the same thing. Mother used to make that clear to me when we had our little talks. How can you ever know about the one big whatdoyoucall destined love when there are so many millions and millions of the other sex in the world, that's what she used to say, and it was very sensible. You don't go looking or waiting. Too much world and too little time. You take what you can get if you're at all keen on marriage. I mean somebody physically all right and talented enough and with enough money. Domenico seems all right. I mean, I've seen him naked, for instance."

       "This is terrible."

       "Oh yes, terrible. There's money in that family. With the right sort of encouragement Domenico can make a name. That opera thing you did together, he played some of it for me on that rotten old piano there, weeping while he played. Then I took him to bed."

       I sat on the hard chair facing her, my hands clasped between my knees, bent forward, looking at the lemon-coloured rug between tufts of which a minute intact cylinder of cigarette ash rested. I said without expression, "He arrived sad. They had rejected his opera, mine too incidentally. This this they have rejected, he cried, and sat down at the piano and sang you one of his brilliant arias. So you felt sorry for him and kissed him and took him to bed. He was willing, I don't doubt, but, I should imagine, also surprised."

       "Well, yes," she said, smiling with reluctant admiration at the exactness of the reconstruction. "Just like that. Of course, you're a novelist, of course. I forget that sometimes. Most of the time you're so stupid."

       "We were converging on you. He and I. But his train got in first. Such a pity."

       "No no no no. He arrived the day before yesterday. I took him to bed then, but since then he's been taking me to bed. As broad as it's long, really."

       "What is as broad as it's long?"

       I could not understand for a moment why she railed at me. "You obscene horrible vulgar and tasteless horror." I looked bewildered. "Sorry," she said. "Perhaps I don't always do you justice. Perhaps I think too much about men being naturally coarse. Domenico isn't coarse, though. He'll be all right. He needs bossing and so on. I'll get that talent of his working. That was always Mother's regret, you know, that she hadn't married a man of talent."

       "He was a talented dentist." And then I shook myself and said, "I have never in my life heard such madness."

       She ignored that, of course. "I've no talent," she said. "Except perhaps for choosing the right father for my children. That's woman's responsibility now. Replenish the stock. All boys. Too many women in the world."

       "This is very old-fashioned. And stupidly biological. As if you only knew about marriage from its its its—"

       "In terms of its primary function," she said crisply, impatiently. "To breed good children. Haven't you read Bernard Shaw?"

       "Back to the Ubermensch," I mocked bitterly.

       "Sister Gertrude made us read him in German. She said he was better in German. English wasn't his real language, she said."

       "And when," I still mocked bitterly, "is this Ehe or Ehestand or Eheschlies sung to take place?"

       "The Eheschliessung," she said, "will be in Italy, I suppose. At that cheese place. With his brother officiating. And my elder brother gives me away. In," with her own bitterness, "the absence of a father."

       "And when Domenico comes tomorrow morning to collect his clothes," I said, "he will be informed that he is to marry you and breed supermen for the new age, and he'll be overjoyed and leap in the air and cry che miracolo or meraviglioso or something."

       "No," she said, ignoring my sarcasm, "not quite like that. But it'll be a relief for him, really. It's always a relief for a man not to have to go chasing women any more. For a time, anyway. Anyway, he's not to know yet what he's got to do. I've got to be cool and just friendly as though nothing happened, and then he'll wonder why and be worried and eager, men are such fools, and then he'll be down on his knees, you'll see, or rather you won't see."

       "You know so little of the world," I said, "so very little."

       "I know," she flashed, "a million times more about what goes on between a man and a woman than you'll ever know." She made a vulgar gesture with her fingers, the vulgar child, one of the new breed, coarsened by war. "So put that in your pipe or up it."

       "All right," I said with patience. "I know certain biological facts, even if not out of direct experience. I know that when a male and female copulate, if you know the word—"

       "You and your prissy stupidities. That's what's so diabolic about you and your lot. Pleasure without danger of conception or joy of it for that matter. I know what your bloody copulation if that's what it really is is all about. Pollution, that's what Sister Berthe called all sexual acts where you spill your seed, disgusting, the sin of Onan. With a man and woman it's a matter of taking a chance."

       "Oh, no, it's not, it's not that at all, it's not by any means that. Do you mean you took a chance with that filthy smirking Domenico creature?"