Herbert was sitting on a tree stump in the middle of the wood doing those yoga breathing exercises, accompanied by autosuggestion, which he found so good for his constipation. Closing his right nostril with a long forefinger, he breathed in deeply through his left—in, in, deeply, while he counted four heart-beats.
Then through sixteen beats he held his breath and between each beat he said to himself very quickly, ‘I’m not constipated, I’m not constipated.’ When he had made the affirmation sixteen times, he closed his left nostril and breathed out, while he counted eight, through his right. After which he began again. The left nostril was the more favoured; for it breathed in with the air a faint cool sweetness of primroses and leaves and damp earth. Near him, on a camp stool, Paul was making a drawing of an oak tree. Art at all costs; beautiful, uplifting, disinterested Art. Paul was bored. Rotten old tree—what was the point of drawing it? All round him the sharp green spikes of the wild hyacinths came thrusting out of the dark mould. One had pierced through a dead leaf and lifted it, transfixed, into the air.
A few more days of sunshine and every spike would break out into a blue flower. Next time his mother sent him into Godalming on his bicycle, Paul was thinking, he’d see if he couldn’t overcharge her two shillings on the shopping instead of one, as he had done last time. Then he’d be able to buy some chocolate as well as go to the cinema; and perhaps even some cigarettes, though that might be dangerous. . . .
‘Well, Paul,’ said his father, who had taken a sufficient dose of his mystical equivalent of Cascara, ‘how are you getting on?’ He got up from his tree stump and walked across the glade to where the boy was sitting. The passage of time had altered Herbert very little; his explosive beard was still as blond as it had always been, he was as thin as ever, his head showed no signs of going bald. Only his teeth had visibly aged; his smile was discoloured and broken.
‘But he really ought to go to a dentist,’ Judith had insistently urged on her sister, the last time they met.
‘He doesn’t want to,’ Martha had replied. ‘He doesn’t really believe in them.’ But perhaps her own reluctance to part with the necessary number of guineas had something to do with Herbert’s lack of faith in dentists. ‘Besides,’ she went on, ‘Herbert hardly notices such merely material, physical things. He lives so much in the noumenal world that he’s hardly aware of the phenomenal. Really not aware.’
‘Well, he jolly well ought to be aware,’ Judith answered, ‘that’s all I can say.’ She was indignant.
‘How are you getting on?’ Herbert repeated, and laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘The bark’s most horribly difficult to get right,’ Paul answered in a complainingly angry voice.
‘That makes it all the more worth while to get right,’ said Herbert. ‘Patience and work—they’re the only things. Do you know how a great man once defined genius?’ Paul knew very well how a great man had once defined genius; but the definition seemed to him so stupid and such a personal insult to himself, that he did not answer, only grunted. His father bored him, maddeningly. ‘Genius,’ Herbert went on, answering his own question, ‘genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains.’ At that moment Paul detested his father.
‘One two-and three-and One-and two-and three-and . . .’ Under Sylvia’s fingers the mechanical butterflies continued to flap their metal wings. Her face was set, determined, angry; Herbert’s great man would have found genius in her. Behind her stiff determined back her mother came and went with a feather brush in her hand, dusting. Time had thickened and coarsened her; she walked heavily. Her hair had begun to go grey. When she had finished dusting, or rather when she was tired of it, she sat down. Sylvia was laboriously cornet-soloing through the dance rhythm. Martha closed her eyes. ‘Beautiful, beautiful!’ she said, and smiled her most beautiful smile. ‘You play it beautifully, my darling.’ She was proud of her daughter. Not merely as a musician; as a human being too.
When she thought what trouble she had had with Sylvia in the old days . . . ‘Beautifully.’ She rose at last and went upstairs to her bedroom. Unlocking a cupboard, she took out a box of candied fruits and ate several cherries, a plum, and three apricots. Herbert had gone back to his studio and his unfinished picture of ‘Europe and America at the feet of Mother India.’ Paul pulled a catapult out of his pocket, fitted a buckshot into the leather pouch and let fly at a nuthatch that was running like a mouse up the oak tree on the other side of the glade. ‘Hell!’ he said as the bird flew away unharmed. But the next shot was more fortunate. There was a spurt of flying feathers, there were two or three little squeaks. Running up Paul found a hen chaffinch lying in the grass. There was blood on the feathers. Thrilling with a kind of disgusted excitement Paul picked up the little body. How warm.
It was the first time he had ever killed anything. What a good shot! But there was nobody he could talk to about it. Sylvia was no good: she was almost worse than mother about some things. With a fallen branch he scratched a hole and buried the little corpse, for fear somebody might find it and wonder how it had been killed. They’d be furious if they knew! He went into lunch feeling tremendously pleased with himself. But his face fell as he looked round the table. ‘Only this beastly cold stuff?’
‘Paul, Paul,’ said his father reproachfully.
‘Where’s mother?’
‘She’s not eating today,’ Herbert answered.
‘All the same,’ Paul grumbled under his breath, ‘she really might have taken the trouble to make something hot for us.’
Sylvia meanwhile sat without raising her eyes from her plate of potato salad, eating in silence.
After the Fireworks
1
‘Late as usual. Late.’ Judd’s voice was censorious. The words fell sharp, like beak-blows. ‘As though I were a nut,’ Miles Fanning thought resentfully, ‘and he were a woodpecker. And yet he’s devotion itself, he’d do anything for me. Which is why, I suppose, he feels entitled to crack my shell each time he sees me.’ And he came to the conclusion, as he had so often come before, that he really didn’t like Colin Judd at all. ‘My oldest friend, whom I quite definitely don’t like. Still . . .’ Still, Judd was an asset, Judd was worth it.
‘Here are your letters,’ the sharp voice continued.
Fanning groaned as he took them. ‘Can’t one ever escape from letters? Even here, in Rome? They seem to get through everything. Like filter-passing bacteria. Those blessed days before post offices!’ Sipping, he examined, over the rim of his coffee cup, the addresses on the envelopes.
‘You’d be the first to complain if people didn’t write,’ Judd rapped out. ‘Here’s your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.’
Taking his egg, ‘On the contrary,’ Fanning answered, ‘I’d be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask for is to be able to pretend that the world doesn’t exist. The wicked flee when no man pursueth. How well I understand them! But letters don’t allow you to be an ostrich. The Freudians say . . .’ He broke off suddenly. After all he was talking to Colin—to Colin. The confessional, self-accusatory manner was wholly misplaced. Pointless to give Colin the excuse to say something disagreeable. But what he had been going to say about the Freudians was amusing. ‘The Freudians,’ he began again.
But taking advantage of forty years of intimacy, Judd had already started to be disagreeable. ‘But you’d be miserable,’ he was saying, ‘if the post didn’t bring you your regular dose of praise and admiration and sympathy and . . .’
‘And humiliation,’ added Fanning, who had opened one of the envelopes and was looking at the letter within. ‘Listen to this. From my American publishers. Sales and Publicity Department. “My dear Mr Fanning.” My dear, mark you. Wilbur F. Schmalz’s dear. “My dear Mr Fanning,—Won’t you take us into your confidence with regard to your plans for the Summer Vacation? What aspect of the Great Outdoors are you favouring this year? Ocean or Mountain, Woodland or purling Lake? I would esteem it a great privilege if you would inform me, as I am preparing a series of notes for the Literary Editors of our leading journals, who are, as I have often found in the past, exceedingly receptive to such personal material, particularly when accompanied by well-chosen snapshots. So won’t you cooperate with us in providing this service? Very cordially yours, Wilbur F. Schmalz.” Well, what do you think of that?’
‘I
