Walter was not mollified by the flattery. ‘I don’t like you to exult over me,’ he said, still frowning.
‘Exult?’
‘As though you’d killed me.’
‘What an incorrigible romantic!’ She laughed. But it was true, all the same. He had looked dead; and death, in these circumstances, had something slightly ridiculous and humiliating about it. Herself alive, wakefully and consciously alive, she had studied his beautiful deadness. Admiringly, but with amused detachment, she had looked at this pale exquisite creature which she had used for her delight and which was now dead. ‘What a fool!’ she had thought. And ‘why do people make themselves miserable, instead of taking the fun that comes to them? ‘ She had expressed her thoughts in the mocking question which recalled Walter from his eternity. Bothering about love—what a fool!
‘All the same,’ insisted Walter, ‘you were exulting.’
‘Romantic, romantic!’ she jeered. ‘You think in such an absurdly unmodern way about everything. Killing and exulting over corpses and love and all the rest of it. It’s absurd. You might as well walk about in a stock and a swallow-tail coat. Try to be a little more up to date.’
‘I prefer to be human.’
‘Living modernly’s living quickly,’ she went on. ‘You can’t cart a waggon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by aeroplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it’s too ponderous nowadays. There’s no room for it in the aeroplane.’
‘Not even for a heart?’ asked Walter. ‘I don’t so much care about the soul.’ He had cared a great deal about the soul once. But now that his life no more consisted in reading the philosophers, he was somehow less interested in it. ‘But the heart,’ he added, the heart…’
Lucy shook her head. ‘Perhaps it’s a pity,’ she admitted. ‘But you can’t get something for nothing. If you like speed, if you want to cover the ground, you can’t have luggage. The thing is to know what you want and to be ready to pay for it. I know exactly what I want; so I sacrifice the luggage. If you choose to travel in a furniture van, you may. But don’t expect me to come along with you, my sweet Walter. And don’t expect me to take your grand piano in my two-seater monoplane.’
There was a long silence. Walter shut his eyes. He wished he were dead. The touch of Lucy’s hand on his face made him start. He felt her taking his lower lip between her thumb and forefinger. She pinched it gently. ‘You have the most delicious mouth,’ she said.
CHAPTER XVI
The Rampions lived in Chelsea. Their house consisted of one large studio with three or four little rooms tacked on to it. A very nice little place, in its rather ramshackle way, Burlap reflected, as he rang the bell that Saturday afternoon. And Rampion had bought it for nothing, literally for nothing, just before the War. No post-War rents for him. A sheer gift of a hundred and fifty a year. Lucky devil, thought Burlap, forgetting for the moment that he himself was living rent-free at Beatrice’s, and only remembering that he had just spent twentyfour and ninepence on a luncheon for himself and Molly d’Exergillod.
Mary Rampion opened the door. ‘Mark’s expecting you in the studio,’ she said when salutations had been exchanged. Though why on earth, she was inwardly wondering, why on earth he goes on being friendly with this creature passes all comprehension. She herself detested Burlap. ‘He’s a sort of vulture,’ she had said to her husband after the journalist’s previous visit. ‘No, not a vulture, because vultures only eat carrion. He’s a parasite that feeds on living hosts, and always the choicest he can find He has a nose for the choicest; I’ll grant him that. A spiritual leech, that’s what he is. Why do you let him suck your blood?’
‘Why shouldn’t he suck?’ retorted Mark. ‘He doesn’t do me any harm, and he amuses me.’
‘I believe he tickles your vanity,’ said Mary. ‘It’s flattering to have parasites. It’s a compliment to the quality of your blood.’
‘And besides,’ Rampion went on, he has something in him.’
‘Of course he has something in him,’ Mary answered. ‘He has your blood in him, among other things. And the blood of all the other people he feeds on.’
‘Now, don’t exaggerate, don’t be romantic.’ Rampion objected to all hyperboles that weren’t his own.
‘Well, all I can say is that I don’t like parasites.’ Mary spoke with finality. ‘And next time he comes I shall try sprinkling a little Keating’s powder on him, just to see what happens. So there.’
However, the next time had arrived, and here she was opening the door for him and telling him to find his own way to the studio, as if he were a welcome guest. Even in atavistic Mary the force of polite habit was stronger than her desire to sprinkle Keating’s.
Burlap’s thoughts, as he found his own way to the studio, were still of financial matters. The memory of what he had paid for lunch continued to rankle.
‘Not only does Rampion pay no rent,’ he was thinking; ‘he has hardly any expenses. Living as they do with only one servant, doing most of the housework themselves, having no car, they really must spend ridiculously little. True, they have two children to educate.’ But Burlap managed by a kind of mental conjuring trick, at which he was extremely adept, to make the two children disappear out of his field of consciousness. ‘And yet Rampion must make quite a lot. He sells his pictures and drawings very decently. And he has a regular market for anything he chooses to write. What does he do with all his money? ‘ Burlap wondered rather resentfully, as he knocked at the studio door. ‘Does he hoard it up? Or what?’
‘Come in,’ called Rampion’s voice from the other side of the door.
Burlap adjusted his face to a smile and opened.
‘Ah, it’s you,’ said Rampion. ‘Can’t shake hands at the moment, I’m afraid.’ He was cleaning his brushes. ‘How are you?’
Burlap shook his head and said that he needed a holiday but couldn’t afford to take it. He walked round the studio looking reverentially at the paintings. St. Francis would hardly have approved of most of them. But what life, what energy, what imagination! Life, after all, was the’important thing. ‘I believe in life.’ That was the first article of one’s creed.
‘What’s the title of this?’ he asked, coming to a halt in front of the canvas on the easel.
Wiping his hands as he came, Rampion crossed the room and stood beside him. ‘That?’ he said. ‘Well, “Love,” I suppose, is what you‘d call it.’ He laughed; he had worked well that afternoon and was in the best of humours. ‘But less refined and soulful people might prefer something less printable.’ Grinning, he suggested a few of the less printable alternatives. Burlap’s smile was rather sickly. ‘I don’t know if you can think of any others,’ Rampion concluded maliciously. When Burlap was in the neighbourhood it amused him, and at the same time he felt it positively a duty, to be shocking.
It was a smallish painting, in oils. Low down in the left-hand corner of the canvas, set in a kind of recess between a foreground of dark rocks and tree trunks and a background of precipitous crags, and arched over by a mass of foliage, two figures, a man and a woman, lay embraced. Two naked bodies, the woman’s white, the man’s a red brown. These two bodies were the source of the whole illumination of the picture. The rocks and tree trunks in the foreground were silhouetted against the light that issued from them. The precipice behind them was golden with the same light. It touched the lower surface of the leaves above, throwing shadows up into a thickening darkness of greenery. It streamed out of the recess in which they lay, diagonally into and across the picture, illuminating and, one felt, creating by its radiance an astounding flora of gigantic roses and zinnias and tulips, with horses and leopards and little antelopes coming and going between the huge flowers, and beyond, a green landscape deepening, plane after plane, into blue, with a glimpse of the sea between the hills and over it the shapes of huge, heroic clouds in the blue sky.
‘It’s fine,’ said Burlap slowly, wagging his head over the picture.
‘But I can see you hate it.’ Mark Rampion grinned with a kind of triumph.
‘But why do you say that?’ the other protested with a martyred and gentle sadness.
‘Because it happens to be true. The thing’s not gentle-Jesusish enough for you. Love, physical love, as the source of light and life and beauty—Oh, no, no, no! That’s much too coarse and carnal; it’s quite deplorably straightforward.’
‘But do you take me for Mrs. Grundy?’
‘Not Mrs. Grundy, no.’ Rampion’s high spirits bubbled over in mockery. ‘Say St. Francis. By the way, how’s your Life of him progressing? I hope you’ve got a good juicy description of his licking the lepers.’ Burlap made a gesture of protest. Rampion grinned. ‘As a matter of fact even St. Francis is a little too grown up for you. Children don’t lick lepers. Only sexually perverted adolescents do that. St. Hugh of Lincoln, that’s who you are, Burlap. He was a child, you know, a pure sweet chee-yild. Such a dear snuggly-wuggly, lovey-dovey little chap. So wide-eyed and reverent towards the women, as though they were all madonnas. Coming to be petted and
