The Funny Mountain was completed, then Albinos in Black and then his third and last short story, The Back of the Moon. You remember that delightful character in it – the meek little man waiting for a train who helped three miserable travellers in three different ways? This Mr Siller is perhaps the most alive of Sebastian’s creatures and is incidentally the final representative of the ‘research theme’, which I have discussed in conjunction with The Prismatic Bezel and Success. It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow, with every detail of habit and manner, palpable and unique – the bushy eyebrows and the modest moustache, the soft collar and the Adam’s apple ‘moving like the bulging shape of an arrased eavesdropper’, the brown eyes, the wine-red veins on the big strong nose, ‘whose form made one wonder whether he had not lost his hump somewhere’; the little black tie and the old umbrella (‘a duck in deep mourning); the dark thickets in the nostrils; the beautiful surprise of shiny perfection when he removes his hat. But the better Sebastian’s work was the worse he felt – especially in the intervals. Sheldon thinks that the world of the last book he was to write several years later (The Doubtful Asphodel) was already casting its shadow on all things surrounding him and that his novels and stories were but bright masks, sly tempters under the pretence of artistic adventure leading him unerringly towards a certain imminent goal. He was presumably as fond of Clare as he had always been, but the acute sense of mortality which had begun to obsess him, made his relations with her appear more brittle than they perhaps were. As for Clare, she had quite inadvertently in her well-meaning innocence dallied at some pleasant sunlit corner of Sebastian’s life, where Sebastian himself had not paused; and now she was left behind and did not quite know whether to try and catch up with him or attempt to call him back. She was kept cheerfully busy, what with looking after Sebastian’s literary affairs and keeping his life tidy in general, and although she surely felt that something was awry, that it was dangerous to lose touch with his imaginative existence, she probably comforted herself by presuming it to be a passing restlessness, and that ‘it would all settle down by-and-by’. Naturally, I cannot touch upon the intimate side of their relationship, firstly, because it would be ridiculous to discuss what no one can definitely assert, and secondly because the very sound of the word ‘sex’ with its hissing vulgarity and the ‘ks, ks’ catcall at the end, seems so inane to me that I cannot help doubting whether there is any real idea behind the word, Indeed, I believe that granting ‘sex’ a special situation when tackling a human problem, or worse still, letting the ‘sexual idea’, if such a thing exists, pervade and ‘explain’ all the test is a grave error of reasoning. ‘The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea, from its moon to its serpent; but a pool in the cup of a rock and the diamond-rippled road to Cathay are both water,’ (The Back of the Moon.)
‘Physical love is but another way of saying the same thing and not a special sexophone note, which once heard is echoed in every other region of the soul,’ (Lost Property, page 82,) ‘All things belong to the same order of things, for such is the oneness of human perception, the oneness of individuality, the oneness of matter, whatever matter may be, The only real number is one, the rest are mere repetition,’ (ibid, page 83.) Had I even known from some reliable source that Clare was not quite up to the standards of Sebastian’s love-making I would still never dream of selecting this dissatisfaction as the reason for his general feverishness and nervousness. But being dissatisfied with things in general, he might have been dissatisfied with the colour of his romance too. And mind you, I use the word dissatisfaction very loosely, for Sebastian’s mood at that period of his life was something far more complicated than mere Weltschmerz or the blues. It can only be grasped through the medium of his last book The Doubtful Asphodel. That book was as yet but a distant haze. Presently it would become the outline of a shore. In 1929, a famous heart-specialist, Dr Oates, advised Sebastian to spend a month at Blauberg, in Alsace, where a certain treatment had proved beneficial in several similar cases. It seems to have been tacitly agreed that he would go alone. Before he left, Miss Pratt, Sheldon, Clare, and Sebastian had tea together at his Hat and he was cheerful and talkative, and teased Clare for having dropped her own crumpled handkerchief among the things she had been packing for him in his fussy presence. Then he made a dart at Sheldon’s cuff (he never wore a wristwatch himself), peeped at the time and suddenly began to rush, although there was almost an hour to spare. Clare did not suggest seeing him to the train – she knew he disliked that. He kissed her on the temple and Sheldon helped him carry out his bag (have I already mentioned that, apart from a vague charwoman and the waiter who brought him his meals from a neighbouring restaurant, Sebastian did not employ servants?). When he had gone, the three of them sat in silence for a while.
All at once Clare put down the teapot and said: ‘I think that handkerchief had wanted to go with him, I’ve a great mind to take that hint. ‘
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Mr Sheldon.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
If you mean that you want to catch the same train,’ began Miss Pratt…
‘Why not,’ Clare repeated. ‘I have forty minutes in which to do it. I’ll dash to my place, pack a thing or two, bolt into a taxi…
And she did it. What happened at Victoria is not known, but an hour or so later she rang up Sheldon who had gone home, and told him with a rather pathetic little laugh that Sebastian had not even wanted her to stay on the plaform until his train left. I have a very definite vision somehow of her arriving there, with her bag, her lips ready to part in a humorous smile, her dim eyes peering through the windows of the train, looking for him, then finding him, or perhaps he saw her first…. ‘Hullo, here I am,’ she must have said brightly, a little too brightly perhaps…
He wrote to her, a few days later, to tell her that the place was very pleasant and that he felt remarkably well. Then there was a silence, and only when Clare had sent an anxious telegram did a card arrive with the information that he was curtailing his stay at Blauberg and would spend a week in Paris before coming home.
Towards the end of that week he rang me up and we dined together at a Russian restaurant. I had not seen him since ‘1924 and this was 1929. He looked worn and ill, and owing to his pallor seemed unshaven although he had just been to the barber. There was a boil at the back of his neck patched up with pink plaster.
After he had asked me a few questions about myself, we both found it a strain to carry on the conversation. I asked him what had become of the nice girl with whom I had seen him last time. ‘What girl?’ he asked. ‘Oh, Clare. Yes, she’s all right. We’re sort of married.’
‘You look a bit seedy,’ I said.
‘And I don’t give a damn if I do. Will you have “pelmenies” now?’
‘Fancy your still remembering what they taste like,’ I said.
‘Why shouldn’t I?’ he said drily.
We ate in silence for some minutes. Then we had coffee.
‘What did you say the place was called? Blauberg?’
‘Yes, Blauberg.’
‘Was it nice there?’
‘It depends on what you call nice,’ he said and his jaw-muscles moved as he scrunched a yawn. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I hope I get some sleep in the train.’
He suddenly fumbled at my wrist.
‘Half past eight,’ I replied.
‘I’ve got to telephone,’ he muttered and strode across the restaurant with his napkin in his hand. Five minutes later he was back with the napkin half-stuffed into his coat-pocket. I pulled it out.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, I must be going. I forgot I had an appointment.’
‘It has always distressed me’, writes Sebastian Knight in Lost Property, ‘that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries, who bring them their food and check their overcoats and push doors open for them. I once reminded a businessman with whom I had lunched a few weeks before, that the woman who had handed us our hats had had cotton wool in her ears. He looked puzzled and said he hadn’t been aware of there having been any woman at all…. A person who fails to notice a taxi-driver’s hare-lip because he
