But somehow something kind of went wrong on the way between the wanting and the saying. And then the doing seemed to go just as wrong as the saying. She always wanted to do things excitingly, romantically, like in a play. But you can’t make things be exciting and romantic, can you?’ Fanning shook his head. ‘She wanted to kind of force things to be thrilling by thinking and wishing, like Christian Science. But it doesn’t work. We had wonderful times together; but she always tried to make out that they were more wonderful than they really were. Which only made them less wonderful. Going to the Paris Opera on a gala night is wonderful; but it’s never as wonderful as when Rastignac goes, is it?’
‘I should think it wasn’t!’ he agreed. ‘What an insult to Balzac to imagine that it could be!’
‘And the real thing’s less wonderful,’ she went on, ‘when you’re being asked all the time to see it as Balzac, and to be Balzac yourself. When you aren’t anything of the kind. Because, after all, what am I? Just good, ordinary, middle-class English.’
She pronounced the words with a kind of defiance. Fanning imagined that the defiance was for him and, laughing, prepared to pick up the ridiculous little glove. But the glove was not for him; Pamela had thrown it down to a memory, to a ghost, to one of her own sceptical and mocking selves. It had been on the last day of their last stay together in Paris—that exciting, exotic Paris of poor Clare’s imagination, to which their tickets from London never seemed quite to take them.
They had gone to lunch at La Pérouse. ‘Such a marvellous, fantastic restaurant! It makes you feel as though you were back in the Second Empire.’ (Or was it the First Empire? Pamela could not exactly remember.) The rooms were so crowded with Americans, that it was with some difficulty that they secured a table. ‘We’ll have a marvellous lunch,’ Clare had said, as she unfolded her napkin. ‘And some day, when you’re in Paris with your lover, you’ll come here and order just the same things as we’re having today. And perhaps you’ll think of me.
Will you, darling?’ And she had smiled at her daughter with that intense, expectant expression that was so often on her face, and the very memory of which made Pamela feel subtly uncomfortable. ‘How should I ever forget?’ she had answered, laying her hand on her mother’s and smiling. But after a second her eyes had wavered away from that fixed look, in which the intensity had remained as desperately on the stretch, the expectancy as wholly unsatisfied, as hungrily insatiable as ever. The waiter, thank goodness, had created a timely diversion; smiling at him confidentially, almost amorously, Clare had ordered like a princess in a novel of high life.
The bill, when it came, was enormous. Clare had had to scratch the bottom of her purse for the last stray piece of nickel. ‘It looks as though we should have to carry our own bags at Calais and Dover. I didn’t realize I’d run things so fine.’ Pamela had looked at the bill. ‘But, Clare,’ she had protested, looking up again at her mother with an expression of genuine horror, ‘it’s wicked! Two hundred and sixty francs for a lunch! It wasn’t worth it.’ The blood had risen darkly into Clare’s face.
‘How can you be so disgustingly bourgeoise, Pamela? So crass, so crawling?’ Incensed by the heaping up of this abuse, ‘I think it’s stupid to do things one can’t afford,’ the girl had answered; ‘stupid and vulgar.’ Trembling with rage, Clare had risen to her feet. ‘I’ll never take you out again. Never.’ (How often since then Pamela had recalled that terribly prophetic word!) ‘You’ll never understand life, you’ll never be anything but a sordid little middle-class Englishwoman. Never, never.’ And she had swept out of the room, like an insulted queen. Overheard by Pamela, as she undignifiedly followed, ‘Gee!’ an American voice had remarked, ‘it’s a regular cat-fight.’
The sound of another, real voice overlaid the remembered Middle Western accents.
‘But after all,’ Fanning was saying, ‘it’s better to be a good ordinary bourgeois than a bad ordinary bohemian, or a sham aristocrat, or a second-rate intellectual. . . .’
‘I’m not even third-rate,’ said Pamela mournfully. There had been a time when, under the influence of the now abhorred Miss Huss, she had thought she would like to go up to Oxford and read Greats. But Greek grammar was so awful . . . ‘Not even fourth-rate.’
‘Thank goodness,’ said Fanning. ‘Do you know what third- and fourth-rate intellectuals are? They’re professors of philology and organic chemistry at the minor universities, they’re founders and honorary life presidents of the Nuneaton Poetry Society and the Baron’s Court Debating Society; they’re the people who organize and sedulously attend all those Conferences for promoting international goodwill and the spread of culture that are perpetually being held at Buda-Pesth and Prague and Stockholm.
Admirable and indispensable creatures, of course! But impossibly dreary; one simply cannot have any relations with them. And how virtuously they disapprove of those of us who have something better to do than disseminate culture or foster goodwill—those of us who are concerned, for example, with creating beauty—like me; or, like you, my child, in deliciously being beauty.’
Pamela blushed with pleasure, and for that reason felt it necessary immediately to protest. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘it’s rather humiliating not to be able to do anything but be. I mean, even a cow can be.’
‘Damned well, too,’ said Fanning. ‘If I were as intensely as a cow is, I’d be uncommonly pleased with myself. But this is getting almost too metaphysical. And do you realize what the time is?’ He held out his watch; it was ten past one. ‘And where we are? At the Tiber. We’ve walked miles.’ He waved his hand; a passing taxi swerved in to the pavement beside them. ‘Let’s go and eat some lunch. You’re free?’
‘Well . . .’ She hesitated. It was marvellous, of course; so marvellous that she felt she ought to refuse. ‘If I’m not a bore. I mean, I don’t want to impose . . . I mean . . . .’
‘You mean you’ll come and have lunch. Good. Do you like marble halls and bands? Or local colour?’
Pamela hesitated. She remembered her mother once saying that Valadier and the Ulpia were the only two restaurants in Rome.
‘Personally,’ Fanning went on, ‘I’m slightly avaricious about marble halls. I rather resent spending four times as much as eating about two-thirds as well. But I’ll overcome my avarice if you prefer them.’
Pamela duly voted for local colour; he gave an address to the driver and they climbed into the cab.
‘It’s a genuinely Roman place,’ Fanning explained. ‘I hope you’ll like it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure I shall.’ All the same, she did rather wish they were going to Valadier’s.
3
Fanning’s old friend, Dodo del Grillo, was in Rome for that one night and had urgently summoned him to dine. His arrival was loud and exclamatory.
‘Best of all possible Dodos!’ he cried, as he advanced with outstretched hands across the enormous baroque saloon. ‘What an age! But what a pleasure!’
‘At last, Miles,’ she said reproachfully; he was twenty minutes late.
‘But I know you’ll forgive me.’ And laying his two hands on her shoulders he bent down and kissed her. He made a habit of kissing all his women friends.
‘And even if I didn’t forgive, you wouldn’t care two pins.’
‘Not one.’ He smiled his most charming smile. ‘But if it gives you the smallest pleasure, I’m ready to say I’d be inconsolable.’ His hands still resting on her shoulders, he looked at her searchingly, at arm’s length. ‘Younger than ever,’ he concluded.
‘I couldn’t look as young as you do,’ she answered. ‘You know, Miles, you’re positively indecent. Like Dorian Gray. What’s your horrible secret?’
‘Simply Mr Hornibrooke,’ he explained. ‘The culture of the abdomen. So much more important than the culture of the mind.’ Dodo only faintly smiled; she had heard the joke before. Fanning was sensitive to smiles; he changed the subject. ‘And where’s the marquis?’ he asked.
The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. Her husband was one of those dear old friends whom somehow one doesn’t manage to see anything of nowadays. ‘Filippo’s in Tanganyika,’ she explained. ‘Hunting lions.’
‘While you hunt them at home. And with what success! You’ve bagged what’s probably the finest specimen in Europe this evening. Congratulations!’ ‘Merci, cher maître!’ she laughed. ‘Shall we go in to dinner?’
The words invited, irresistibly. ‘If only I had the right to answer: Oui, chère maîtresse!’ Though as a matter of fact, he reflected, he had never really found her at all interesting in that way. A woman without temperament. But very pretty once—that time (how many years ago?) when there had been that picnic on the river at Bray, and he had drunk a little too much
