Earthly Powers (35 page)

       The year began and continued well for me too, though (and my stomach shudders at the prospect of having to set it all down) it ended in agony. It was the year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. This was presided over by the Prince of Wales (whose sculpted effigy in New Zealand butter was one of the attractions of the show) and opened by his father on Shakespeare's birthday. There were Palaces of Art and Industry and Engineering, and this last was six times the size of Trafalgar Square. There was a model coal mine and cigarette factory and printing works, and there were pavilions dedicated to the industrial achievements of the dominions and colonies. There was also the Queen's Doll's House, which had tiny books in its library, distinguished auctorial holographs, myself unincluded as not yet sufficiently distinguished. Kings and queens came to visit the exhibition, and I seem to remember that it was in June that the nominal ruler of Italy and his consort were there, thus being absent from Rome on the occasion of the brutal murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the great progressive and bitter foe of Italy's true new ruler, by fascist thugs. That stupidly overt criminal act might have been the end of Mussolini, but Britain, along with other nations fearful of bolshevism, showed stupid cordiality to him, and Austen Chamberlain was in the Holy City later in the year to praise the ghastly régime.

       On May 25 (the day of the deposition of George II, King of the Hellenes, and the declaration of a Greek Republic), my new play, The Tumult and the Shouting, opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London. This was a tonguein-cheek piece whose popular success Jim Joyce would have given his left eye (not much use to him, admittedly) to emulate. It was appropriate to the spirit of imperial enthusiasm that abounded and was seen by many visitors to London, but you will not find it in the three volumes called Toomey's Theatre. The plot dealt with a young anarchic firebrand, only son of a retired colonial official who suffered terribly from sandfly fever, and he began the first act by screaming against British imperial oppression and shouting the necessity of declaring the Universal Republic of Man. His father, dithering in a febrile bout theatrically highly effective, told him to get out of their Swiss Cottage home if that was the way he felt. I will, I will. He slammed the door, and the quavering father regretted his dismissive heat. The young firebrand did some screaming about human liberty at a public meeting and was beaten up by fascists (I had modelled these on the Italian blackshirts whom I had seen in the European illustrated papers; they anticipated Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley's cornerboys by some seven years). Picked up broken and bloody by a kindly Hindu doctor and nursed back to health by him, he was gently instructed in the virtues of British imperialism and told that from it was already emerging the international commonweal he desiderated. He also fell in love with a dusky beauty, a quadroon from Trinidad, whom the Indian doctor had adopted, and declared his wish to marry her. She ended the play with a speech in which she expressed regret that the time for the mingling of the bloods was, despite the precedent of her own parentage, not yet, though some day it would come. Some day, she said, the brotherhood of all who lived under the British flag would be more than a pious (sanctimonious really) aspiration. For now it was necessary to defer to the prejudices of the unenlightened, thinking particularly of the cross of others' stupidity and ignorance that the offspring of a mixed union, such as herself, still had to bear. The reformed firebrand nodded and nodded, taking on the appearance of a wiser, older, more patriarchal man with a sandfly fever dither, and kissed the sensible quadroon gently on the brow as the curtain went slowly down and the applause started: It is strange now to reflect that both coloured parts were taken by uncoloured players coloured for the occasion, these being Phil Kemble (who still, incidentally, wanted to play Pitt) and Rosemary Fanshawe. We have come a long way since then.

       Rudyard Kipling, with his bossy American wife, came to the first night. After all, the title was taken from his own "Recessional" and he had a right to a couple of free tickets and a free drink in the first interval in the manager's office. His wife watched closely as Ferguson, manager, poured Kipling whisky. "Plenty of wawder," she said. When Ferguson offered a refill she said, "No, Ruddy." Kipling began to sing, unexpectedly, from Gay's and Handel's Acts and Galatea: "Oh ruddier than the cherry oh sweeter than the berry."

       "See what I mean?" Mrs Kipling said sternly to a piece of the wall between myself and her husband.

       Kipling said to me, "You young men, you never see what it's all about. The insincerity comes through." His intonation had a lilt which suggested a Welsh background; one did not dare think of it as babu, chichi, a long-learnt gesture of solidarity with the Indian anglophones. The moustache was grey but the heavy eyebrows still black. He had been sunning in Hastings perhaps and was browner than an Englishman should be. His spectacles were as thick as bottle-bottoms, and the eyes swam fierce and enlarged. "A bad play," he pronounced, "so far. But that won't worry you. I wouldn't have come if we hadn't been in town already. That damned tattoo," he cried.

       "Now, Ruddy."

       "You weren't there, Toomey?" No. "The most crude pantomime of my little poem about Gunga Din, with a burnt-corked bishti doling out drops of pawnee to the wounded under fire and then being shot by whooping tribesmen. He knifejacked up before dying and then saluted. The cheers of the kuchnays. Oh my God. And the music. What was that music, Carrie?"

       "'Nimrod,'" said Ferguson, who had read the reviews. "Elgar. Sir Edward.

       From the Enigma Variations."

       "Oh yes, poor Elgar."

       "Poor?" Mrs Kipling exclaimed. "You should have no sympathy for the man. He ruined your big steamers." I did not understand and showed it. "'Oh where are you going to all you big steamers?'" clarified Mrs Kipling. "His setting. Elgar's setting. The music he put to the words."

       "We were in the royal box," Kipling told me, "with George and Mary and young David puffing away at his gaspers. Elgar at one end, the wife and I at the other, separated by a large wedge of whatwhatwhat nobility."

       "Stop that, Ruddy."

       "Kuchnays with coronets. We exchanged glances of shame. We're both long past that tawdry expansionism. Elgar and those damnable words. Land of grope and whoredom."

       "Ruddy, that is not amusing."

       "I'll have another drop of that."

       "The bell has gone, Ruddy. We must return to our seats."

       "Must we? Got to, have we? You want us to, Toomey? Ah, well. Elgar," he suddenly chortled. "Hippism and microscopy, given up music as a mug's game. And me?"

       "Guilt, symbolism and technology," I said, or perhaps did not. I say it now anyway.

       "Not bad," Kipling said. "Is there a toilet anywhere near here? Bladder not as good as it was."

       "Show Mr Kipling," Mrs Kipling ordered me, "to the nearest facility."

       The second bell was trilling as Kipling pounded away. "Saw the other Tooniey," he gasped. Micturition seemed to take a lot out of him. "Any relation?"

       "My brother."

       The public had not yet tired of Rob All My Comrades at the Cambridge, but the khaki element was giving way to mufti, and in the second act the entire cast was in evening dress. There were also real girls instead of hairylegged transvestites The title was taking on a bolshevik flavour, and it changed to Friends, Just Friends for its next edition. Tommy Toomey's turn was military enough. He was a hawhawing subaltern giving his platoon a lecture on the Empire. Occasionally he would cough and say, "No good, I shall have to give 'em up, what." This catchphrase caught on widely among the million or so British scratchers of carborundum pyrites when Tom did this and other turns on 2L0 the following year. The Prince of Wales was to use it while trying an Argentine gasper at the British Exhibition in Buenos Aires. The catchphrase Ceased to be funny when Tom's cough was revealed as clearly unvolitional and could no longer be interpreted, to use the new jargon, as a suprasegmental prosodic trope. The damned irony of it, as I have already, I think, said. But Tom was well enough and coming into his success in 1924. He was very amusing with his mixed-up story of Clive of India and the Black Hole of Calcutta (No, Jones 69, I do not mean B Company's latrines). He was too good for the show.

       We had a late supper one night at Scott's, top of the Haymarket. His lady friend came too, a girl with a blue-black bob and kohled eyes, Estella some thing, a small actress, an artist's model, anything that offered. She knew exactly what she wanted as we took our seats in the crowded smoky restaurant: potted shrimps, lobster Mornay, a carafe of house Chablis. How we all smoked in those daysGold Flake, Black Cat, Three Castles, Crumbs of Comfort. All except Tom, who merely coughed. He had goujons frits, I coulibiac of salmon. Estella read books. She had read one or two of mine. She thought little of them. Sentimental, she said. Contrived. Old-fashioned.

       "All right, Stell, enough," Tom smiled. "This is just biting the hand that feeds you."

       "Oh, his treat, is it? Well, I mean, compared with Huxley. Antic Hay, that's marvellous, isn't it, Tommy, marvellous."

       "I only read the papers. Gags, you know," he said to me in apology. "Topicalities. I try to keep the act up to date. You know, so they built a statue of Clive in ghee but it didn't last long."

       "'There was a young man of East Anglia whose loins were a tangle of ganglia.' That's in Antic Hay, that's marvellous."

       "What are ganglia?" Tom asked.

       "It won't do," I said. "There's no other rhyme. Anybody can start a limerick—"

       "Now you're jealous." She drank Chablis and left a coating of chewed white bolus on the rim. "Aldous is marvellous."

       "You know him?"

       "We all know him. He's our voice. Postwar disillusionment, you know, marvellous."

       "An overtall gangler with glass eyes, mooning after Nancy Cunard. Marvellous, yes."

       "Good God," she said, not listening, "there's a coincidence." A young man, very upright, with a trimmed golden beard and, just behind him, a mor, sluttish version of Estella, overrouged and dirty looking and wobbling on heels like stilts, had just come in, laughing loudly. "That's Heseltine," Estella said. "Or Peter Warlock, his other self. He's in two books, isn't that marvellous, Women in Love and this Aldous one." There seemed to be others in Heseltine's company. Heseltine clapped his hands for a table. The place, as I said, was crowded. He lalled mockingly the coda of the finale of Brahms's First Symphony. There had been a Henry Wood Promenade Concert at the Queen's Hall.

       Every eye was on him, he glowed. The others in his company seemed to include Val Wrigley, my former lover. I nearly choked on a fishbone as I looked at him. What seven years can do. He had become what used to be known as a queen, his hair henna and his gestures elegantly petulant. To my horrible shock Estella waved at him with vigour, rattling the tortoiseshell bangles on her arm. "Val, Val, Val, there's room here."

       "Oh no," both Tom and I murmured. She said to me very eagerly: "The most marvellous poet. If you don't know him you ought to. They did his thing tonight. Do congratulate him."

       "What thing?" I frowned. And there Val was, a little tipsy, his eyes not quite in focus, recognising me all right, bowing derisively to the cher maitre. She said, all in one breath: "Couldn't be there Val how did it go I'm sure it was marvellous."

       "The words," Val said, "were inaudible. They were the mere vehicle for his gush and flood and bangs. Well, old thing," to me, "sorry I can't stay. You flourish like the rose from the look of you." He sibilated fiercely, spittle rode the smoky air. "My place is with," and he made the name preposterous, "Bernard."

       "What is this, what's been happening?"

       "Bernard van Dieren, you see him? That dim thing with the grey face in napless velvet. Amoretto Two, it was called. Words mine, and the scrapes and blowings and chucked fire-irons and hurled dustbin lids all his, my dear. His hour of triumph, just look at that beautifully assumed modesty. Come and see me, will you, old thing?"

       "Where?"

       Estella pouted at the evidence of Val's and my knowing each other and raised a finger at the ancient waiter who trundled the dessert trolley about. With that finger she pointed at what she wanted, with the corresponding one of the other hand she twined a black curl. The waiter mumbled as with distaste at all the chromatic sweetness in his charge and piled her plate with caramel cream, trifle and chocolate mousse with Chantilly, setting finally on top of the mess like a cloacal overflow the sugary buttocks of a meringue. "Oh, I'll be at the Neptune tomorrow night. Most nights actually. Sort of club call it. Dean Street. Latejsh."

       Sort of club call it. I could guess what kind. "Lateish, yes. I have royalty coming tomorrow night. The Clarences, you know." Val was colouring me. I was overstressing and alveolizing, making all preposterous.

       "Up in the world, aren't we? Remember Baron's Court and the ragout de bully? So grey, just like dear summoning Bernard, and quite as inesculent. I see they actually have a seat for me. I must go and be scolded." Heseltine, or Warlock, was roaring something obscene about towsing. Val went, undulant, hands gracefully moulding figurines symbolising regret, grimacing. Then he turned deliberately back to look on Estella, nose wrinkled. "Don't know you, do I? No, thought not." And he went, undulant and so on. The poor silly girl blushed strawberry above her mess.

       "Marvellous poet, eh?" I said cruelly. "I discovered him. Some damned thing about a thrush in the heart of Ealing." I would not go. Yes, I would. I was curious. I wanted to see the world into which, had I not exiled myself, I might have fallen. And I wished to bitch at Val, over whose desertion I had once wept. To Tom I said, "You still write to him, Father I mean? I gave it up, so did Hortense. Well, I did drop a note about his being a double granddad, Hortense wouldn't even do that. No reply."