‘Which is all very well,’ objected Dodo. ‘But what about the old satyr? Wouldn’t it also be a bit of a triumph for him? You know, Miles,’ she added gravely, ‘it would really be scandalous if you were to take advantage. . . .’
‘But I haven’t the slightest intention of taking any advantages. If only for my own sake. Besides, the child is too ingenuously absurd. The most hair-raising theoretical knowledge of life, out of books. You should hear her prattling away about inverts and perverts and birth control—but prattling from unplumbed depths of innocence and practical ignorance. Very queer. And touching too. Much more touching than the old-fashioned innocences of the young creatures who thought babies were brought by storks. Knowing all about love and lust, but in the same way as one knows all about quadratic equations. And her knowledge of the other aspects of life is really of the same kind. What she’s seen of the world she’s seen in her mother’s company. The worst guide imaginable, to judge from the child’s account. (Dead now, incidentally.)
The sort of woman who could never live on top gear, so to speak—only at one or two imaginative removes from the facts. So that, in her company, what was nominally real life became actually just literature—yet more literature. Bad, inadequate Balzac in flesh and blood instead of genuine, good Balzac out of a set of nice green volumes. The child realizes it herself. Obscurely, of course; but distressfully. It’s one of the reasons why she’s applied to me: she hopes I can explain what’s wrong. And correct it in practice. Which I won’t do in any drastic manner, I promise you. Only mildly, by precept—that is, if I’m not too bored to do it at all.’
‘What’s the child’s name?’ Dodo asked.
‘Pamela Tarn.’
‘Tarn? But was her mother by any chance Clare Tarn?’
He nodded. ‘That was it. She even made her daughter call her by her Christian name. The companion stunt.’
‘But I used to know Clare Tarn quite well,’ said Dodo in an astonished, feeling voice. ‘These last years I’d hardly seen her. But when I was more in London just after the War. . . .’
‘But this begins to be interesting,’ said Fanning. ‘New light on my little friend. . . .’
‘Whom I absolutely forbid you,’ said Dodo emphatically, ‘to. . . .’
‘Tamper with the honour of,’ he suggested. ‘Let’s phrase it as nobly as possible.’
‘No, seriously, Miles. I really won’t have it. Poor Clare Tarn’s daughter. If I didn’t have to rush off tomorrow I’d ask her to come and see me, so as to warn her.’
Fanning laughed. ‘She wouldn’t thank you. And besides, if any one is to be warned, I’m the one who’s in danger. But I shall be firm, Dodo—a rock. I won’t allow her to seduce me.’
‘You’re incorrigible, Miles. But mind, if you dare. . . .’
‘But I won’t. Definitely.’ His tone was reassuring. ‘Meanwhile I must hear something about the mother.’
The marchesa shrugged her shoulders. ‘A woman who couldn’t live on top gear. You’ve really said the last word.’
‘But I want first words,’ he answered. ‘It’s not the verdict that’s interesting. It’s the whole case, it’s all the evidence. You’re subpoenaed, my dear. Speak up.’
‘Poor Clare!’
‘Oh, nil nisi bonum, of course, if that’s what disturbs you.’
‘She’d have so loved it to be not bonum, poor dear!’ said the marchesa, tempering her look of vague condolence with a little smile. ‘That was her great ambition—to be thought rather wicked. She’d have liked to have the reputation of a vampire. Not a spiritual one, mind you. The other sort. Lola Montes—that was her ideal.’
‘It’s an ideal,’ said Fanning, ‘that takes some realizing, I can tell you.’
Dodo nodded. ‘And that’s what she must have found out, pretty soon. She wasn’t born to be a fatal woman; she lacked the gifts. No staggering beauty, no mysterious fascination or intoxicating vitality. She was just very charming, that was all; and at the same time rather impossible and absurd. So that there weren’t any aspiring victims to be fatal to. And a vampire without victims is—well, what?’
‘Certainly not a vampire,’ he concluded.
‘Except, of course, in her own imagination, if she chooses to think so. In her own imagination Clare certainly was a vampire.’
‘Reduced, in fact, to being her own favourite character in fiction.’
‘Precisely. You always find the phrase.’
‘Only too fatally!’ He made a little grimace. ‘I often wish I didn’t. The luxury of being inarticulate! To be able to wallow indefinitely long in every feeling and sensation, instead of having to clamber out at once on to a hard, dry, definite phrase. But what about your Clare?’
‘Well, she started, of course, by being a riddle to me. Unanswerable, or rather answerable, answered, but so very strangely that I was still left wondering. I shall never forget the first time Filippo and I went to dine there. Poor Roger Tarn was still alive then. While the men were drinking their port, Clare and I were alone in the drawing-room. There was a little chit-chat, I remember, and then, with a kind of determined desperation, as though she’d that second screwed herself up to jumping off the Eiffel Tower, suddenly, out of the blue, she asked me if I’d ever had one of those wonderful Sicilian peasants—I can’t possibly reproduce the tone, the expression—as a lover.
I was a bit taken aback, I must confess. “But we don’t live in Sicily,” was the only thing I could think of answering—too idiotically! “Our estates are all in Umbria and Tuscany.” “But the Tuscans are superb creatures too,” she insisted. Superb, I agreed. But, as it happens, I don’t have affairs with even the superbest peasants. Nor with anybody else, for that matter. Clare was dreadfully disappointed.
I think she’d expected the most romantic confidences—moonlight and mandolines and stretti, stretti, nell’ estasì d’amor. She was really very ingenuous. “Do you mean to say you’ve really never . . .?” she insisted. I ought to have got angry, I suppose; but it was all so ridiculous, that I never thought of it. I just said, “Never,” and felt as though I were refusing her a favour. But she made up for my churlishness by being lavish to herself.
But lavish! You can’t imagine what a tirade she let fly at me. How wonderful it was to get away from self-conscious, complicated, sentimental love! How profoundly satisfying to feel oneself at the mercy of the dumb, dark forces of physical passion! How intoxicating to humiliate one’s culture and one’s class feeling before some magnificent primitive, some earthily beautiful satyr, some divine animal! And so on, crescendo. And it ended with her telling me the story of her extraordinary affair with—was it a gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit-shooting in it, I know.’
‘It sounds like a chapter out of George Sand.’
‘It was.’
‘Or still more, I’m afraid,’ he said, making a wry face, ‘like a most deplorable parody of my Endymion and the Moon.’
‘Which I’ve never read, I’m ashamed to say.’
‘You should, if only to understand this Clare of yours.’
‘I will. Perhaps I’d have solved her more quickly, if I’d read it at the time. As it was I could only be amazed—and a little horrified. That rabbit-shooter!’ She shook her head. ‘He ought to have been so romantic. But I could only think of that awful yellow kitchen soap he’d be sure to wash himself with, or perhaps carbolic, so that he’d smell like washed dogs—dreadful! And the flannel shirts, not changed quite often enough. And the hands, so horny, with very short nails, perhaps broken. No, I simply couldn’t understand her.’
‘Which is to your discredit, Dodo, if I may say so.’
‘Perhaps. But you must admit, I never pretended to be anything but what I am—a perfectly frivolous and respectable member of the upper classes. With a taste, I must confess, for the scandalous. Which was one of the reasons, I suppose, why I became so intimate with poor Clare. I was really fascinated by her confidences.’
‘Going on the tiles vicariously, eh?’
‘Well, if you choose to put it grossly and vulgarly . . .’
‘Which I do choose,’ he interposed. ‘To be tactfully gross and appositely vulgar—that, my dear, is one of the ultimate artistic refinements. One day I shall write a monograph on the aesthetics of vulgarity. But meanwhile shall we say that you were inspired by an intense scientific curiosity to . . .’
Dodo laughed. ‘One of the tiresome things about you, Miles, is that one can never go on being angry with you.’
‘Yet another subject for a monograph!’ he answered, and his smile was at once confidential and ironical, affectionate and full of mockery. ‘But let’s hear what the scientific curiosity elicited?’
‘Well, to begin with, a lot of really rather embarrassingly intimate confidences and questions, which I needn’t repeat.’
‘No, don’t. I know what those feminine conversations are. I have a native modesty. . . .’
‘Oh, so have I. And, strangely enough, so had Clare. But somehow she wanted to outrage herself. You felt it all the time. She always had that desperate jumping-off-the-Eiffel-Tower manner, when she began to talk like that. It was a kind of martyrdom. But enjoyable. Perversely.’ Dodo shook her head. ‘Very puzzling. I used to have to make quite an effort to change the conversation from gynaecology to romance. Oh, those lovers of hers! Such stories! The most fantastic adventures in East End opium dens, in aeroplanes, and even, I remember (it was that very hot summer of ’twenty-two), even in a
