The thought of Beppo living for beauty – living for it with his bulging waistcoat and the tight seat of his check trousers and his bald crown and Florentine page’s curls – almost made Helen choke over her wine.
From the depths of his armchair, ‘“Glory be to God for dappled things,”’ murmured Mr Croyland. ‘I’ve been re-reading Father Hopkins lately. So poignant! Like a dagger. “What lovely behaviour of silk-sack clouds!”’ He sighed, he pensively shook his head. ‘They’re among the things that wound one with their loveliness. Wound and yet sustain, make life liveable.’
There was cathedral silence.
Then, making an effort to keep the laughter out of her voice, ‘Be an angel, Beppo,’ said Helen, ‘and give me some more of that hock.’
Mr Croyland sat remote, behind half-closed eyelids, the inhabitant of a higher universe.
When the clinking of the glasses had subsided, ‘“Ripeness is all,”’ he quoted. ‘“That sober certainty of waking bliss.” Waking,’ he insisted. ‘Piercingly conscious. And then, of course, there are pictures – the Watteaus at Dresden, and Bellini’s Transfiguration, and those Raphael portraits at the Pitti. Buttresses to shore up the soul. And certain philosophies, too. Zarathustra, the Symposium.’ He waved his little hand. ‘One would be lost without them – lost!’
‘And, with them, I take it, you’re saved?’ said Mark from his seat at the piano; and, without waiting for an answer, ‘I wish I were,’ he went on. ‘But there seems to be so little substance in it all. Even in the little that’s intrinsically substantial. For of course most thinking has never been anything but silly. And as for art, as for literature – well, look at the museums and the libraries. Look at them! Ninety-nine per cent, of nonsense and mere rubbish.’
‘But the Greeks,’ Mr Croyland protested, ‘the Florentines, the Chinese . . .’ He sketched in the air an exquisitely graceful gesture, as though he were running his fingers over the flanks of a Sung jar, round the cup-shaped navel of a High Renaissance water-nymph. Subtly, with what was meant to be the expression of a Luini Madonna, he smiled; but always, through the opening fur, his large yellow teeth showed ferociously, rapaciously – even when he talked about the Schifanoia frescoes, even when he whispered, as though it were an Orphic secret, the name of Vermeer of Delft.
But nonsense, Staithes insisted, almost invariably nonsense and rubbish. And most of what wasn’t nonsense or rubbish was only just ordinarily good. ‘Like what you or I could do with a little practice,’ he explained. ‘And if one knows oneself – the miserable inept little self that can yet accomplish such feats – well, really, one can’t be bothered to take the feats very seriously.’
Mr Croyland, it was evident from his frown, didn’t think of his own self in quite this spirit.
‘Not but what one can enjoy the stuff for all kinds of irrelevant reasons,’ Staithes admitted. ‘For its ingenuity, for example, if one’s in any way a technician or an interpreter. Steady progressions in the bass, for example, while the right hand is modulating apparently at random. Invariably delightful! But then, so’s carpentry. No; ultimately it isn’t interesting, that ordinarily good stuff. However great the accomplishment or the talent. Ultimately it’s without value; it differs from the bad only in degree. Composing like Brahms, for example – what is it, after all, but a vastly more elaborate and intellectual way of composing like Meyerbeer? Whereas the best Beethoven is as far beyond the best Brahms as it’s beyond the worst Meyerbeer. There’s a difference in kind. One’s in another world.’
‘Another world,’ echoed Mr Croyland in a religious whisper. ‘But that’s just what I’ve been trying to get you to admit. With the highest art one enters another world.’
Beppo fizzled with emphatic agreement.
‘A world,’ Mr Croyland insisted, ‘of gods and angels.’
‘Don’t forget the invisible lovers,’ said Helen, who was finding, as she drank her white wine, that everything was becoming more and more uproariously amusing.
Mr Croyland ignored the interruption. ‘A next world,’ he went on. ‘The great artists carry you up to heaven.’
‘But they never allow you to stay there,’ Mark Staithes objected. ‘They give you just a taste of the next world, then let you fall back, flop, into the mud. Marvellous while it lasts. But the time’s so short. And even while they’ve actually got me in heaven, I catch myself asking: Is that all? Isn’t there anything more, anything further? The other world isn’t other enough. Even Macbeth, even the Mass in D, even the El Greco Assumption.’ He shook his head. ‘They used to satisfy me. They used to be an escape and a support. But now . . . now I find myself wanting something more, something heavenlier, something less human. Yes, less human,’ he repeated. Then the flayed face twisted itself up into an agonized smile. ‘I feel rather like Nurse Cavell about it,’ he added. ‘Painting, music, literature, thought – they’re not enough.’
‘What is enough, then?’ asked Beppo. ‘Politics? Science? Money-making?’ Staithes shook his head after every suggestion.
‘But what else is there?’ asked Beppo.
Still anatomically smiling, Mark looked at him for a moment in silence, then said, ‘Nothing – absolutely nothing.’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Mr Croyland. ‘They’re enough for me.’ He dropped his eyelids once more and retired into spiritual fastnesses.
Looking at him, Staithes was moved by a sudden angry desire to puncture the old gentleman’s balloon-like complacency – to rip a hole in that great bag of cultural gas, by means of which Mr Croyland contrived to hoist his squalid traffickings sky-high into the rarefied air of pure aesthetics. ‘And what about death? You find them adequate against death?’ he insisted in a tone that had suddenly become brutally inquisitorial. He paused, and for a moment the old man was enveloped in a horribly significant silence – the silence of those who in the presence of a victim or an incurable tactfully ignore the impending doom. ‘Adequate against life, for that matter,’ Mark Staithes went on, relenting; ‘against life in any of its more unpleasant or dangerous aspects.’
‘Such as dogs falling on one out of aeroplanes!’ Helen burst out laughing.
‘But what are you talking about?’ cried Beppo.
‘Father Hopkins won’t keep dogs off,’ she went on breathlessly. ‘I agree with you, Mark. A good umbrella, any day . . .’
Mr Croyland rose to his feet. ‘I must go to bed,’ he said. ‘And so should you, my dear.’ The little white hand upon her shoulder was benevolent, almost apostolic. ‘You’re tired after your journey.’
‘You mean, you think I’m drunk,’ Helen answered, wiping her eyes. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Gosh,’ she added, ‘how nice it is to laugh for a change!’
When Mr Croyland was gone, and Beppo with him, Staithes turned towards her. ‘You’re in a queer state, Helen.’
‘I’m amused,’ she explained.
‘What by?’
‘By everything. But it began with Dante; Dante and Hans Andersen. If you’d been married to Hugh, you’d know why that was so extraordinarily funny. Imagine Europa if the bull had turned out after all to be Narcissus!’
‘I don’t think you’d better talk so loud,’ said Staithes, looking across the room to where, with an expression on his face of hopeless misery, Hugh was pretending to listen to an animated discussion between Caldwell and the young German.
Helen also looked round for a moment; then turned back with a careless shrug of the shoulders. ‘If he says he’s invisible, why shouldn’t I say I’m inaudible?’ Her eyes brightened again with laughter. ‘I shall write a book called The Inaudible Mistress. A woman who says exactly what she thinks about her lovers while they’re making love to her. But they can’t hear her. Not a word.’ She emptied her glass and refilled it.
‘And what does she say about them?’
‘The truth, of course. Nothing but the truth. That the romantic Don Juan is just a crook. Only I’m afraid that in reality she wouldn’t find that out till afterwards. Still, one might be allowed a bit of poetic licence – make the esprit d’escalier happen at the same time as the romantic affair. The moonlight, and “My darling,” and “I adore you,” and those extraordinary sensations – and at the same moment “You’re nothing but a sneak-thief, nothing but a low blackguardly swindler.” And then there’d be the spiritual lover – Hans Dante, in fact.’ She shook her head. ‘Talk of Kraft Ebbing!’
‘But what does she say to him?’
‘What indeed!’ Helen took a gulp of wine. ‘Luckily she’s inaudible. We’d better skip that chapter and come straight to the epicurean sage. With the sage, she doesn’t have to be quite so obscure. “You think you’re a man, because you happen not to be impotent.” That’s what she says to him. “But in fact you’re not a man. You’re sub-human. In spite of your sageness – because of it even. Worse than the crook in some ways.” And then, bang, like a sign from heaven, down comes the dog!’
‘But what dog?’
‘Why, the dog Father Hopkins can’t protect you from. The sort of dog that bursts like a bomb when you drop it out of an aeroplane. Bang!’ The laughing excitement seethed and bubbled within her, seeking expression, seeking an
