‘That’s what I’ve always felt about it,’ his mother concluded.
And had been right, he insisted; and that he didn’t dream of criticizing what she had done, of even thinking it criticizable. But that was because her circumstances had been so different from his. A man, he had opportunities to make his own living such as she had never had. Besides, she had been left with responsibilities; whereas he . . .
‘But what about Joan?’ she interrupted, laying her hand affectionately, as she spoke, on Joan’s arm. ‘Isn’t she a responsibility?’
He dropped his eyes and, feeling that it was not for him to answer the question, said nothing.
There were long seconds of an uncomfortably expectant silence, while he wondered whether Joan would speak and what, if she didn’t, he should say and do.
Then, to his relief, ‘After all,’ Joan brought out at last in a curiously flat and muffled voice, ‘Brian was a child then. But I’m grown up, I’m responsible for myself. And I’m able to understand his reasons.’
He raised his head and looked at her with a smile of gratitude. But her face was cold and as though remote; she met his eyes for only a moment, then looked away.
‘You understand his reasons?’ his mother questioned.
Joan nodded.
‘And you approve them?’
She hesitated for a moment, then nodded again. ‘If Brian thinks it’s right,’ she began, and broke off.
His mother looked from one to the other. ‘I think you’re a pair of rather heroic young people,’ she said, and the tone of her voice, so beautiful, so richly vibrant with emotion, imparted to the words a heightened significance. He felt that he had been confirmed in his judgment.
But later, he remembered with a pained perplexity, later, when Joan and he were alone together and he tried to thank her for what she had done, she turned on him with a bitterly resentful anger.
‘You love your own ideas more than you love me. Much more.’
Brian sighed and, shaking himself out of his long distraction, looked at the trees by the side of the road, at the mountains so sumptuously shadowed and illumined by the late afternoon sunlight, at the marbly islands of cloud in the sky – looked at them, saw that they were beautiful, and found their beauty hopelessly irrelevant.
‘I wish to G-god,’ he said, ‘I knew what to d-do.’
So did Anthony, though he did not say so.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Autumn 1933
IT TOOK LONGER than Mark expected to dispose of his business, and at moments, during the long weeks that preceded their departure, the temptation to throw up the whole ridiculous enterprise and scuttle back into the delicious other-world of Mediterranean sunshine and abstract ideas became, for Anthony, almost irresistible.
‘What are you really going for?’ he asked resentfully.
‘Fun,’ was all the answer that Mark condescended to give.
‘And your Don Jorge,’ Anthony insisted. ‘What does he hope to achieve by this little revolution of his?’
‘His own greater glory.’
‘But the peasants, the Indians?’
‘They’ll be exactly where they were before, where they always will be: underneath.’
‘And yet you think it’s worth while to go and help this Jorge of yours?’
‘Worth while for me.’ Mark smiled anatomically. ‘And worth while for you. Very much worth while for you,’ he insisted.
‘But not for the peons, I gather.’
‘It never is. What did the French peons get out of their revolution? Or our friends, the Russians, for that matter? A few years of pleasant intoxication. Then the same old treadmill. Gilded, perhaps; repainted. But in essentials the old machine.’
‘And you expect me to come along with you for fun?’ The thought of the Mediterranean and his books heightened Anthony’s indignation. ‘It’s crazy, it’s abominable.’
‘In other words,’ said Mark, ‘you’re afraid. Well, why not? But if you are, for God’s sake say so. Have the courage of your cowardice.’
How he had hated Mark for telling him the home truths he knew so well! If it hadn’t been for Mr Beavis, and that interview with Helen, and finally Beppo Bowles, perhaps he would have had the courage of his cowardice. But they made it impossible for him to withdraw. There was his father, first of all, still deep in the connubial burrow, among the petticoats and the etymologies and the smell of red-haired women – but agitated, as Anthony had never seen him agitated before, hurt, indignant, bitterly resentful. The presidency of the Philological Society, which ought, without any question, to have come to him, had gone instead to Jenkins. Jenkins, if you please! A mere ignorant popularizer, the very antithesis of a real scholar. A charlatan, a philological confidence trickster, positively (to use an American colloquialism) a ‘crook.’
Jenkins’s election had taken Mr Beavis long strides towards death. From being a man much younger than his years, he had suddenly come to look his age. An old man; and tired into the bargain, eroded from within.
‘I’m worried,’ Pauline had confided to Anthony. ‘He’s making himself ill. And for something so childish, really. I can’t make him see that it doesn’t matter. Or rather I can’t make him feel it. Because he sees it all right, but goes on worrying all the same.’
Even in the deepest sensual burrow, Anthony reflected as he walked back to his rooms, even in the snuggest of intellectual other-worlds, fate could find one out. And suddenly he perceived that, having spent all his life trying to react away from the standards of his father’s universe, he had succeeded only in becoming precisely what his father was – a man in a burrow. With this small difference, that in his case the burrow happened to be intermittently adulterous instead of connubial all the time; and that the ideas were about societies and not words. For the moment, he was out of his burrow – had been chased out, as though by ferrets. But it would be easy and was already a temptation to return. To return and be snug, be safe. No, not safe; that was the point. At any moment a Jenkins might be elected to some presidency or other, and then, defenceless in one’s burrow of thought and sensuality, one would be at the mercy of any childish passion that might arise. Outside, perhaps, one might learn to defend oneself against such contingencies. He decided to go with Mark.
But in the succeeding days the temptation kept coming back. In spite of the spectacle of Mr Beavis’s self-destroying childishness, the quiet life seemed immensely attractive. ‘Mark’s mad,’ he kept assuring himself. ‘We’re doing something stupid and wrong. And after all, my sociology is important. It’ll help people to think clearly.’ Wasn’t it (ridiculous word!) a ‘duty’ to go on with it? But then, more than six weeks after his return to London, he saw Helen and Beppo Bowles – saw them both in the course of a single afternoon. The meeting with Helen was a chance one. It was in the French Room at the National Gallery. Anthony was stooping to look closely into Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, when he became aware that two other visitors had halted just behind them. He shifted a little to one side, so as to let them see the picture, and continued his meticulous examination of the brushwork.
A few seconds passed; then, very slowly and with a foreign accent, a man’s voice said: ‘See now here how the nineteenth-century petit bourgeois tried to escape from industrialism. Why must he paint such landscapes, so romantic? Because he will forget the new methods of production. Because he will not think of the proletariat. That is why.’
‘Yes, I suppose that is the reason,’ said another voice.
With a start, Anthony recognized it as Helen’s. ‘What shall I do?’ he was wondering, when the voice spoke again.
‘Why, it’s Anthony!’ A hand touched his arm.
He straightened himself up and turned towards her, making the gestures and noises appropriate to delighted astonishment. That face, which he had last seen alternately stony and bright with mockery, then in the rapt agony of pleasure, then dabbled with blood and pitiably disintegrated by a grief extreme beyond expression, finally hard as it had been at first, harder, more rigidly a stone – that face was now beautifully alive, and tender, illuminated from within by a kind of secure joy. She looked at him without the least trace of embarrassment. It was as though the past had been completely abolished, as though, for her, only the present existed and were real.
‘This is Ekki Giesebrecht,’ she said.
The fair-haired young man beside her bent stiffly forwards as they shook hands.
‘He had to escape from Germany,’ she was explaining. ‘They would have killed him for his politics.’
It was not jealousy that he felt as he looked from one glad face to the other – not jealousy, but an unhappiness so acute that it was like a physical pain. A pain that endured and that was not in the least diminished by the solemn absurdity of the little lecture which Helen now delivered on art as a manifestation of class interests. Listening, he could laugh to himself, he could reflect with amusement on love’s fantastic by-products in matters of taste, political opinions, religious beliefs. But behind the laughter, beneath the ironical reflections, that pain of unhappiness persisted.
He refused her invitation to have tea with them.
‘I’ve promised to go
