Fanning’s voice fell startlingly across the eloquent silence. ‘A penny for your thoughts, Miss Pamela,’ it said.
He had been for some obscure reason suddenly depressed by his own last words. ‘A world without goodness—it’d be Paradise.’ But it wouldn’t, no more than now. The only paradises were fools’ paradises, ostriches’ paradises. It was as though he had suddenly lifted his head out of the sand and seen time bleeding away—like the stabbed bull at the end of a bull-fight, swaying on his legs and soundlessly spouting the red blood from his nostrils—bleeding, bleeding away stanchlessly into the darkness. And it was all, even the loveliness and the laughter and the sunlight, finally pointless. This young girl at his side, this beautiful pointless creature pointlessly walking down the Via del Babuino . . . The feelings crystallized themselves, as usual, into whole phrases in his mind, and suddenly the phrases were metrical.
Pointless and arm in arm with pointlessness,
I pace and pace the Street of the Baboon.
Imbecile! Annoyed with himself, he tried to shake off his mood of maudlin depression, he tried to force his spirit back into the ridiculous and charming universe it had inhabited, on the whole so happily, all the morning.
‘A penny for your thoughts,’ he said, with a certain rather forced jocularity, giving her shoulder a little clap. ‘Or forty centesimi, if you prefer them.’ And, dropping his hand to his side, ‘In Germany,’ he went on, ‘just after the War one could afford to be more munificent. There was a time when I regularly offered a hundred and ninety million marks for a thought—yes, and gained on the exchange. But now. . . .’
‘Well, if you really want to know,’ said Pamela, deciding to be bold, ‘I was thinking how much my Aunt Edith disapproved of your books.’
‘Did she? I suppose it was only to be expected. Seeing that I don’t write for aunts—at any rate, not for aunts in their specifically auntly capacity. Though, of course, when they’re off duty. . . .’
‘Aunt Edith’s never off duty.’
‘And I’m never on. So you see.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘But I’m sure,’ he added, ‘you never paid much attention to her disapproval.’
‘None,’ she answered, playing the un-good part for all it was worth. ‘I read Freud this spring,’ she boasted, ‘and Gide’s autobiography, and Krafft-Ebbing. . . .’
‘Which is more than I’ve ever done,’ he laughed.
The laugh encouraged her. ‘Not to mention all your books, years ago. You see,’ she added, suddenly fearful lest she might have said something to offend him, ‘my mother never minded my reading your books. I mean, she really encouraged me, even when I was only seventeen or eighteen. My mother died last year,’ she explained. There was a silence. ‘I’ve lived with Aunt Edith ever since,’ she went on. ‘Aunt Edith’s my father’s sister. Older than he was. Father died in 1923.’
‘So you’re all alone now?’ he questioned. ‘Except, of course, for Aunt Edith.’
‘Whom I’ve now left.’ She was almost boasting again. ‘Because when I was twenty-one . . .’
‘You stuck out your tongue at her and ran away. Poor Aunt Edith!’
‘I won’t have you being sorry for her,’ Pamela answered hotly. ‘She’s really awful, you know. Like poor Joan’s husband in The Return of Eurydice.’ How easy it was to talk to him!
‘So you even know,’ said Fanning, laughing, ‘what it’s like to be unhappily married. Already. Indissolubly wedded to a virtuous aunt.’
‘No joke, I can tell you. I’m the one to be sorry for. Besides, she didn’t mind my going away, whatever she might say.’
‘She did say something, then?’
‘Oh yes. She always says things. More in sorrow than in anger, you know. Like headmistresses. So gentle and good, I mean. When all the time she really thought me too awful. I used to call her Hippo, because she was such a hypocrite—and so fat. Enormous. Don’t you hate enormous people? No, she’s really delighted to get rid of me,’ Pamela concluded, ‘simply delighted.’ Her face was flushed and as though luminously alive; she spoke with a quick eagerness.
‘What a tremendous hurry she’s in,’ he was thinking, ‘to tell me all about herself. If she were older or uglier, what an intolerable egotism it would be! As intolerable as mine would be if I happened to be less intelligent. But as it is . . .’ His face, as he listened to her, expressed a sympathetic attention.
‘She always disliked me,’ Pamela had gone on. ‘Mother too. She couldn’t abide my mother, though she was always sweetly hippo-ish with her.’
‘And your mother—how did she respond?’
‘Well, not hippo-ishly, of course. She couldn’t be that. She treated Aunt Edith—well, how did she treat Aunt Edith?’ Pamela hesitated, frowning. ‘Well, I suppose you’d say she was just natural with the Hippo. I mean . . .’ She bit her lip. ‘Well, if she ever was really natural. I don’t know. Is anybody natural?’ She looked up questioningly at Fanning. ‘Am I natural, for example?’
Smiling a little at her choice of an example, ‘I should think almost certainly not,’ Fanning answered, more or less at random.
‘You’re right, of course,’ she said despairingly, and her face was suddenly tragic, almost there were tears in her eyes. ‘But isn’t it awful? I mean, isn’t it simply hopeless?’
Pleased that his chance shot should have gone home, ‘At your age,’ he said consolingly, ‘you can hardly expect to be natural. Naturalness is something you learn, painfully, by trial and error. Besides,’ he added, ‘there are some people who are unnatural by nature.’
‘Unnatural by nature,’ Pamela nodded, as she repeated the words, as though she were inwardly marshalling evidence to confirm their truth. ‘Yes, I believe that’s us,’ she concluded. ‘Mother and me. Not hippos, I mean, not poseuses, but just unnatural by nature. You’re quite right. As usual,’ she added, with something that was almost resentment in her voice.
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologized.
‘How is it you manage to know so much?’ Pamela asked in the same resentful tone. By what right was he so easily omniscient, when she could only grope and guess in the dark?
Taking to himself a credit that belonged, in this case, to chance, ‘Child’s play, my dear Watson,’ he answered banteringly. ‘But I suppose you’re too young to have heard of Sherlock Holmes. And anyhow,’ he added, with an ironical seriousness, ‘don’t let’s waste any more time talking about me.’
Pamela wasted no more time. ‘I get so depressed with myself,’ she said with a sigh. ‘And after what you’ve told me I shall get still more depressed. Unnatural by nature. And by upbringing too. Because I see now that my mother was like that. I mean, she was unnatural by nature too.’
‘Even with you?’ he asked, thinking that this was becoming interesting. She nodded without speaking. He looked at her closely. ‘Were you very fond of her?’ was the question that now suggested itself.
After a moment of silence, ‘I loved my father more,’ she answered slowly. ‘He was more . . . more reliable. I mean, you never quite knew where you were with my mother. Sometimes she almost forgot about me; or else she didn’t forget me enough and spoiled me. And then sometimes she used to get into the most terrible rages with me. She really frightened me then. And said such terribly hurting things. But you mustn’t think I didn’t love her. I did.’ The words seemed to release a spring; she was suddenly moved. There was a little silence. Making an effort, ‘But that’s what she was like,’ she concluded at last.
‘But I don’t see,’ said Fanning gently, ‘that there was anything specially unnatural in spoiling you and then getting cross with you.’ They were crossing the Piazza del Popolo; the traffic of four thronged streets intricately merged and parted in the open space. ‘You must have been a charming child. And also . . . Look out!’ He laid a hand on her arm. An electric bus passed noiselessly, a whispering monster. ‘Also maddeningly exasperating. So where the unnaturalness came in . . .’
‘But if you’d known her,’ Pamela interrupted, ‘you’d have seen exactly where the unnaturalness . . .’
‘Forward!’ he called and, still holding her arm, he steered her on across the Piazza.
She suffered herself to be conducted blindly. ‘It came out in the way she spoiled me,’ she explained, raising her voice against the clatter of a passing lorry. ‘It’s so difficult to explain, though; because it’s something I felt. I mean, I’ve never really tried to put it into words till now. But it was as if . . . as if she weren’t just herself spoiling me, but the picture of a young mother—do you see what I mean?—spoiling the picture of a little girl. Even as a child I kind of felt it wasn’t quite as it should be. Later on I began to know it too, here.’ She tapped her forehead. ‘Particularly after father’s death, when I was beginning to grow up. There were times when it was almost like listening to recitations—dreadful. One feels so blushly and prickly; you know the feeling.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, I know. Awful!’
‘Awful,’ she repeated. ‘So you can understand what a beast I felt, when it took me that way. So disloyal, I mean.
