Julius (32 page)

This was no scholarly French, though, that they were speaking; it sounded like the commonest slang.

‘Not French all the time,’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t get a word in. Let’s hear some more about Italy, Gabriel. I want to hear what you thought of the Uffizi in Florence. Did you see those lovely Fra Angelicos?’

‘I don’t care for primitives,’ said Gabriel; ‘they’re too formless and too cold. None of the Florentines appealed to me at all. I like colour above all, and flesh that is flesh, and something that looks alive. Titian and Correggio, for instance; and there’s someone who gets hold of the richest glorious reds; what’s his name - Giorgione.’

‘I see. I really must rub up my
History of Art
when we’re in Town; we’ll go to the National Gallery together. Did you think the Forum very wonderful?’

‘I liked Rome,’ said Gabriel. ‘That’s where I got this dress, by the way. Oh! the Forum. I don’t know, I can’t get interested in dead things. It seems to me so useless, that sort of knowledge. Of course we went into every church and every gallery - Signorina wouldn’t let me miss a thing - but when you say the word “Rome” it doesn’t make me think of St Peter’s, or Raphael, or the Coliseum; it brings up a picture of a very mad evening - the carnival night before Careme, you know, and I’d made friends with an Italian girl called Maria; we gave Signorina the slip and mixed with the crowd. We wore masks, of course, and we clung to each other in case we were separated. I’ve never been drunk in my life, but I had the feeling of being drunk that night. Imagine a thousand people jostling together singing and shouting - such a warm, rich smell of flowers and wine and excited bodies, and the night very dark, a black sky like velvet, with torches tossing a yellow glare from the crowd. I remember a girl leaning out of a window with dark eyes like sloes, and she threw a scarlet flower to a man below, and he laughed and climbed up to her, and they shut the window. I know so well what they were feeling.’

There was a silence for a few moments, and then Rachel said ‘Fancy!’ rather brightly, and wondered if her daughter knew what she was talking about. It all sounded a little odd, but Julius was looking at Gabriel across the rim of his glass as though he understood.

‘The best thing in Italy was Venice,’ said Gabriel, ‘only we were there too early. Take me there some time, Papa. You’d be very good in Venice.’

She treated him, thought Rachel, as though she were his equal.

‘Yes, we must do that,’ agreed Julius. ‘Venice, and the Greek Islands, and the Dalmatian coast, and Central Europe, and the Mediterranean - we might plan out a tour this autumn and winter down south, perhaps. Would you like it?’

‘Julius, my dear, don’t fill her head with such nonsense,’ put in Rachel. ‘It will be lovely for Gabriel to do all those things when she comes out, but you must remember she hasn’t finished yet. I thought Paris in September for a year.’

Julius laughed. ‘I’ll show her Paris; she’d have a very good time, I assure you.’

‘I think,’ said Gabriel, raising her eyebrows, ‘that it would be most amusing to be finished by Papa.’

They both of them laughed, aggravatingly intimate, and Rachel said sharply, distressed at her own irritation: ‘Don’t play the fool, Julius; Gabriel has at least two years of lessons and classes before she begins to be grown-up.’

And this time Julius did not laugh; he looked at his wife with his eyes narrow and his thin lips pressed together, and he began to tap on the table with his fingers.

‘This is my affair,’ he said rapidly. ‘I’ve decided that Gabriel has had all the education she needs.You’ve looked after her up till this moment - from now on she’s mine. Don’t argue - I know about these things.’

Rachel dug her nails into her hands to control her anger. She knew by the way Julius spoke that this was final. Of course he would spoil Gabriel, ruin her completely; they would be a laughing-stock to all their friends, a girl of her age brought forward in this way! And suddenly her anger left her. She felt weak and depressed - she knew that the headache that had been threatening all day would be splitting before long - and she was tired, and she was aware that neither Julius nor Gabriel would mind if she went up to bed early. They did not care, they did not want her; she was rather a bore, in fact, tiresome, in the way and spoiling their fun.

She rose from her chair, her voice breaking in spite of herself. ‘I’ve got a wretched head, I’m going upstairs,’ she said, but they were not aware of her; they had forgotten her already, and Julius was leaning across the table reaching for Gabriel’s fingers. ‘Give them to me,’ he was saying. ‘What an amazing thing heredity can be; you’ve got hands like my father’s. But the rest of you is Blançard, pure Blançard.’

 

During the next three years Julius Lévy gave himself up to an orgy of expenditure. In spite of his wealth he had never before experienced the lust of pleasure that comes from wanton, reckless extravagance. He and Rachel had lived grandly, even pompously. He was a millionaire and believed in keeping up such a state because of the malicious delight it afforded him to watch other people’s envy.

With the discovery of Gabriel, any remnant of his youthful miserly instinct was thrown to the four winds; she could make a bonfire out of a thousand-pound bank-note for all he cared and if it amused her.

She expressed a wish to hunt that first autumn, so the Grand Tour was naturally postponed. A house was bought in Leicestershire and Gabriel had her choice of a dozen hunters in the stable. Sometimes Julius went with her, sometimes he followed by car. Melton became the Lévy headquarters that winter, and Julius’s business visits to London were on rare and only urgent occasions.

With the spring came the start of the flat-racing season, and Gabriel must now declare herself in strong favour of owning race-horses, and as she expressed herself firmly to her father: ‘Now, Papa, we’ve got to do it on the grand scale. The best trainer, the best jockeys, the best horses. Otherwise I’m afraid it isn’t going to amuse me. Do something about it, will you?’

And Julius, in a fever lest she should be bored, bought up the entire stable of the Duke of Storborough, whose heir was an idiot and in care of a keeper; and as Julius told the Duke brutally, ‘Your boy doesn’t know the hind legs of any animal from its head, so you may as well sell me the lot, and then shut up your estate and spend the money I give you at Monte Carlo,’ which the Duke was glad to do.

Thus was founded the famous Lévy stable, and - soon widely familiar to every race-goer in England - the Lévy colours; and being Julius Lévy, of course, no working up into a position but starting with a splash and a bang right away; an owner on the grand scale, as he had promised his daughter.

So now there was a house down at Newmarket, for Gabriel to be on the spot whenever she wished, up at six in the morning to watch the gallops. She was horse-crazy during that first year and a half, talking horses, dreaming horses, living horses, and giving to Julius some of her own enthusiasm, instilling into him a desperate interest that was not his by choice, but of which he forced himself to partake so that he could watch her face under its hard felt hat, her eyes intent on a gallop a mile and a half away, breathing shortly, her lips compressed, and he watched the long line of her leg pressed close against the flank of her animal, and her hands slender and firm upon the reins.

‘You do feel it, Papa, don’t you?’ she said, leaning down to him, her hand on his shoulder. ‘You’re not pretending; it does get you, doesn’t it, like me? Because we’ve got to have the same things, you must see with me over everything.There’s never been a thrill like this - listen - do listen, that thud, thud, over the hill beyond that mound. They’ll be round the bend in exactly half a minute - here they come. You couldn’t have anything more alive than that, could you? As I thought, Red Deer is leading; he’s a perfect devil when he gets away - faster than I expected, though. Follow Me shouldn’t be two and a quarter lengths behind - I thought this was a trial, not a morning gallop. What’s that idiot boy doing? - why did Follow Me swerve to the side of the track? Red Deer’s slacking, he’s a sprinter, of course. Follow Me has double his stamina, but Red Deer’d send ’em all to bed over five furlongs. That little chestnut in the second string just coming along now has a lovely head, don’t you think, Papa? But he’s nervy - damn sight too nervy ever to be a certainty. I think we ought to breed from him - those looks alone are worth a fortune.’

She rattled on, never expecting an answer, while Julius patted her horse’s neck and leant against her knee, aware only that the morning was sharp and fine, a haze of early summer across the heath, a bee buzzing close to his ear, and the fact that Follow Me had more stamina than Red Deer mattered little to him; he liked the warm breath of a horse upon his hand, the smell of horse flesh that was a mixture of sweat and leather, the sun and the air and the feeling of Gabriel at his side - her health, her laughter, more alive than fifty race-horses. These were the things that mattered to him.

Rachel did not join in the crazes of her husband and daughter. She knew little more about horses than did the idiot son of the Duke of Storborough. Occasionally she dragged herself to a race meeting, and from pure pride put in an appearance for formality’s sake at Melton during the hunting season, but both were an effort to her. She disliked the hunting crowd and the racing crowd, they were Philistines and alien to her; they knew nothing about music, her sort of music, they never read, they didn’t care for pictures. All these things formed a great part of Rachel’s life. She was bitterly disappointed that Gabriel shrugged her shoulders at any form of art, and at the same time had an instinctive flair for the value of any object, invariably picking out the best from the mediocre with the inevitable phrase on her lips:‘What’s it worth?’ No love in her heart, though, no true appreciation. She had one talent uncannily inherited from Paul Lévy, and this was self-taught without guidance from any master - she played Paul Lévy’s flute as though the knowledge of it was part of her blood. Rachel could not bear to listen to her. The flute was like a symbol of some evil thing; she would go to the other end of the house and shut the doors between them. In her mind, and she was intensely musical like all the Dreyfuses, the flute should be an instrument of intense purity, a high single note rising into the air with piercing sweetness and restraint together mingled, suggesting in some strange fashion the unbroken voice of a young boy.

In Gabriel’s hands and against Gabriel’s lips the cry became a summons of a different kind, a call out of the earth, a beckoning, mocking whisper like a night-bird from the woods; and there was one jerky persistent note that started from a mere breath of suggestion and grew into a leaping, discordant rhythm, harping its way into the brain with maddening power - a wild, fantastic tune hopelessly unsuited to a flute, a savage ugly note, a jungle note.

The continuation of this seemed to Rachel like the ceaseless and senseless banging of a stick on a hollow drum, and with her nerves torn to shreds she would call down to Gabriel:

‘Not that appalling thing, for pity’s sake. Can’t you play music, real music?’

But Gabriel only laughed, for Julius would be lying in a long chair with his feet propped up on the mantelpiece and his hands under his head, the crazy, jerky rhythm beating upon his senses like the lost hidden music of Alger, mysterious and alive, and he said to his daughter: ‘You play the flute like my father would have played it if he’d sold his soul to Satan.’

So Gabriel smiled and tapped her foot on the floor, and, ‘What do you call this, then?’ she asked, drawing a breath, and breaking into a note that was a query, an unbalanced quiver of suspense, that ran unevenly along a broken trail as though it had lost its way, and then mounted slowly, higher and higher, swooping in circles to some unattainable summit, like the relentless climbing flight of a bird of prey - soon lost, soon vanished in the glaring rays of the sun.

To Julius with his eyes shut it was like the song that Père had sung to him as a child and the whisper that led to the secret city, but this was another whisper and another city; this was not the enchanted land beyond the white clouds, so melancholy, so beautiful, for ever unattainable, a land of promise unfulfilled - for there was a sudden swoop and a turn and a plunge into the bowels of the secret earth, heart beating, wings battered and scorched, and this new-discovered city was one that opened and gave itself up to him; there were eyes that welcomed and hands that beckoned, all mingled in extravagant confusion of colour and scent and ecstasy.

‘Do you like that, Papa?’ said Gabriel, and he was in the room again, back in the world, startled as though with the first shock of waking, the sight of her standing there so cool and undisturbed jarring upon him who felt dissatisfied and unrefreshed, an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean.

‘You’re an odd creature,’ he said, staring at her. ‘I don’t believe you ever feel anything, do you? Are you fond of your mother? Do you like me? Do you care about anyone?’

She lay her flute down upon the table. ‘I don’t know,’ she said carelessly. ‘I like doing things.’

‘You won’t always be like that,’ he insisted. ‘Some day you’ll feel something, surely? I believe you’re still a child in lots of ways. All this - the flute, and hunting and racing and driving, it’s just a game to you, isn’t it?’

She shrugged her shoulders.

‘We think alike over everything and enjoy the same things,’ he said. ‘We’re together almost always. But you don’t let me get at the core of you, do you? Why don’t you? Is it that you’re such a child?’

She frowned, drawing patterns with her finger on the table.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

He rose and began walking up and down the room.

‘You’d tell me if you weren’t happy, wouldn’t you?’ he said.

‘Yes - I suppose so.’