But at midnight they had found themselves, almost suddenly, on earth again, shiveringly cold under the moon. Cold, cold to the quick, Fanning had picked himself up. They stumbled homewards through the woods, in silence. It was in a kind of trance of chilled and sickened exhaustion that he had at last dropped down on his bed in the convent cell. Next morning he was ill. The liver was always his weak point. That had been nearly three weeks ago.
The second of the two monsignori moved away; Fanning stepped into his place. The barmaid handed him his hot dilute sulphate of soda. He deposited fifty centesimi as a largesse and walked off, meditatively sipping. But returning to the place from which he had come, he found their chairs occupied by a pair of obese Milanese businessmen. Pamela had gone. He explored the Alma Tadema background; but there was no sign of her. She had evidently gone back to the hotel. Fanning, who still had five more glasses of water to get through, took his place among the monsters round the band-stand.
In her room at the hotel Pamela was writing up her diary. ‘September 20th. Montecatini seems a beastly sort of hole, particularly if you come to a wretched little hotel like this, which M. insisted on doing, because he knows the proprietor, who is an old drunkard and also cooks the meals, and M. has long talks with him and says he’s like a character in Shakespeare, which is all very well, but I’d prefer better food and a room with a bath, not to mention the awfulness of the other people in the hotel, one of whom is the chief undertaker in Florence, who’s always boasting to the other people at meal times about his business and what a fine motor hearse with gilded angels he’s got and the number of counts and dukes he’s buried.
M. had a long conversation with him and the old drunkard after dinner yesterday evening about how you preserve corpses on ice and the way to make money by buying up the best sites at the cemetery and holding them till you could ask five times as much as you paid, and it was the first time I’d seen him looking cheerful and amused since his illness and even for some time before, but I was so horrified that I went off to bed. This morning at eight to the pump-room, where M. has to drink eight glasses of different kinds of water before breakfast and there are hundreds of hideous people all carrying mugs, and huge fountains of purgatives, and a band playing the “Geisha”, so I came away after half an hour, leaving M. to his waters, because I really can’t be expected to watch him drinking, and it appears there are six hundred W.C.s.’
She laid down her pen and, turning round in her chair, sat for some time pensively staring at her own reflection in the wardrobe mirror. ‘If you look long enough,’ (she heard Clare’s voice, she saw Clare, inwardly, sitting at her dressing-table), ‘you begin to wonder if it isn’t somebody else. And perhaps, after all, one is somebody else, all the time.’ Somebody else, Pamela repeated to herself, somebody else. But was that a spot on her cheek, or a mosquito bite? A mosquito, thank goodness. ‘Oh God,’ she said aloud, and in the looking-glass somebody else moved her lips, ‘if only I knew what to do! If only I were dead!’ She touched wood hastily.
Stupid to say such things. But if only one knew, one were certain! All at once she gave a little stiff sharp shudder of disgust, she grimaced as though she had bitten on something sour. Oh, oh! she groaned; for she had suddenly seen herself in the act of dressing, there, in that moon-flecked darkness, among the bushes, that hateful night just before Miles fell ill. Furious because he’d humiliated her, hating him; she hadn’t wanted to and he’d made her. Somebody else had enjoyed beyond the limits of enjoyment, had suffered a pleasure transmuted into its opposite. Or rather she had done the suffering. And then that further humiliation of having to ask him to help her look for her suspender belt! And there were leaves in her hair. And when she got back to the hotel, she found a spider squashed against her skin under the chemise. Yes, she had found the spider, not somebody else.
Between the brackish sips Fanning was reading in his pocket edition of the Paradiso. ‘L’acqua che prendo giammai non si corse,’ he murmured;
‘Minerva spira e conducemi Apollo,
e nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse,’
He closed his eyes. ‘E nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse.’ What a marvel! ‘And the nine Muses point me to the Bears.’ Even translated the spell did not entirely lose its potency. ‘How glad I shall be,’ he thought, ‘to be able to do a little work again.’
‘Il caffé?’ said a voice at his elbow. ‘Non lo bevo mai, mai. Per il fegato, sa, è pessimo. Si dice anche che per gl’intestini . . .’ The voice receded out of hearing.
Fanning took another gulp of salt water and resumed his reading.
Voi altri pochi che drizzante il collo
per tempo al pan degli angeli, del quale
vivesi qui ma non sen vien satollo . . .
The voice had returned. ‘Pesce bollito, carne ai ferri o arrostita, patate lesse . . .’
He shut his ears and continued. But when he came to
La concreata e perpetua sete
del deiforme regno,
he had to stop again. This craning for angels’ bread, this thirsting for the godlike kingdom . . . The words reverberated questioningly in his mind. After all, why not? Particularly when man’s bread made you sick (he thought with horror of that dreadful vomiting of bile), when it was a case of pesce bollito and you weren’t allowed to thirst for anything more palatable than this stuff. (He swigged again.) These were the circumstances when Christianity became appropriate. Christians, according to Pascal, ought to live like sick men; conversely, sick men can hardly escape being Christians. How pleased Colin Judd would be! But the thought of Colin was depressing, if only all Christians were like Dante! But in that case, what a frightful world it would be! Frightful.
La concreata e perpetua sete
del deiforme regno cen portava
Veloci, quasi come il ciel vedete.
Beatrice in suso ed io in lei guardava. . . .
He thought of Pamela at the fireworks. On that pedestal. Ben son, ben son Beatrice on that pedestal. He remembered what he had said beneath the blossoming of the rockets; and also what he had meant to say about those legs which the pedestal made it so easy for the worshipper to pinch. Those legs, how remote now, how utterly irrelevant! He finished off his third glass of Torretta and, rising, made his way to the bar for his first of Regina. Yes, how utterly irrelevant! he thought. A complete solution of continuity. You were on the leg level, then you vomited bile, and as soon as you were able to think of anything but vomiting, you found yourself on the Dante level. He handed his mug to the barmaid. She rolled black eyes at him as she filled it. Some liverish gentlemen, it seemed, could still feel amorous. Or perhaps it was only the obese ones. Fanning deposited his offering and retired. Irrelevant, irrelevant. It seemed, now, the unlikeliest story. And yet there it was, a fact. And Pamela was solid, too, too solid.
Phrases floated up, neat and ready-made, to the surface of his mind.
‘What does he see in her? What on earth can she see in him?’
‘But it’s not a question of sight, it’s a question of touch.’
And he remembered—sentiments-centimètres—that French pun about love, so appallingly cynical, so humiliatingly true. ‘But only humiliating,’ he assured himself, ‘because we choose to think it so, arbitrarily, only cynical because Beatrice in suso e io in lei guardava; only appalling because we’re creatures who sometimes vomit bile and because, even without vomiting, we sometimes feel ourselves naturally Christians.’ But in any case, nove Muse mi dimostran l’Orse. Meanwhile, however . . . He tilted another gill of water down his throat. And when he was well enough to work, wouldn’t he also be well enough to thirst again for that other god-like kingdom, with its different ecstasies, its other peace beyond all understanding? But tant mieux, tant mieux, so long as the Bears remained unmoved and the Muses went on pointing.
Pamela was looking through her diary. ‘June 24th,’ she read. ‘Spent the evening with M. and afterwards he said how lucky it was for me that I’d been seduced by him, which hurt my feelings (that word, I mean) and also rather annoyed me, so I said he certainly hadn’t seduced me, and he said, all right, if I liked to say that I’d seduced him, he didn’t mind, but anyhow it was lucky because almost anybody else wouldn’t have been such a good psychologist as he, not to mention physiologist, and I should have hated it. But I said, how could he say such things? because it wasn’t that at all and I was happy because I love him, but M. laughed
