‘You’re a very poor cox,’ he says.
The picture changes: another bend of that river. A path leads to the water edge, stops, hesitates, and turns to loop around a rude bench. It is not quite evening yet, but the air is golden and midges are performing a primitive native dance in a sunbeam between the aspen leaves which are quite, quite still at last, forgetful of Judas.
Sebastian is sitting upon the bench and reading aloud some English verse from a black copybook. Then he stops suddenly: a little to the left a naiad’s head with auburn hair is seen just above the water, receding slowly, the long tresses floating behind. Then the nude bather emerges on the opposite bank, blowing his nose with the aid of his thumb; it is the long-haired village priest. Sebastian goes on reading to the girl beside him. The painter has not yet filled in the white space except for a thin sunburnt arm streaked from wrist to elbow along its outer side with glistening down.
As in Byron’s dream, again the picture changes. It is night. The sky is alive with stars. Years later Sebastian wrote that gazing at the stars gave him a sick and squeamish feeling, as for instance when you look at the bowels of a ripped-up beast. But at the time, this thought of Sebastian’s had not yet been expressed. It is very dark. Nothing can be discerned of what is possibly an alley in the park. Sombre mass on sombre mass and somewhere an owl hooting. An abyss of blackness where all of a sudden a small greenish circle moves up: the luminous dial of a watch (Sebastian disapproved of watches in his riper years).
‘Must you go?’ asks his voice.
A last change: a V-shaped flight of migrating cranes; their tender moan melting in a turquoise-blue sky high above a tawny birch-grove. Sebastian, still not alone, is seated on the white-and-cinder-grey trunk of a felled tree. His bicycle rests, its spokes a-glitter among the bracken. A Camberwell Beauty skims past and settles on the kerf, fanning its velvety wings. Back to town tomorrow, school beginning on Monday.
‘Is this the end? Why do you say that we shall not see each other this winter?’ he asks for the second or third time. No answer. ‘Is it true that you think you’ve fallen in love with that student chap? – vetovo studenta?’ The seated girl’s shape remains blank except for the arm and a thin brown hand toying with a bicycle pump. With the end of the holder it slowly writes on the soft earth the word ‘yes’, in I English, to make it gentler.
The curtain is rung down. Yes, that is all. It is very little but it is heartbreaking. Never more may he ask of the boy who sits daily at the next school desk, ‘And how is your sister?’ Nor must he ever question old Miss Forbes, who still drops in now and then, about the little girl to whom she had also given lessons. And how shall he tread again the same paths next summer, and watch the sunset and cycle down to the river? (But next summer was mainly devoted to the futurist poet Pan.)
By a chance conjuncture of circumstances it was Natasha Rosanov’s brother that drove me to the Charlottenburg station to catch the Paris express. I said how curious it had been to have talked to his sister, now the plump mother of two boys, about a distant summer in the dreamland of Russia. He answered that he was perfectly content with his job in Berlin. I tried, as I had vainly tried before, to make him talk of Sebastian’s school life. ‘My memory is appallingly bad,’ he replied, ‘and anyway I am too busy to be sentimental about such ordinary things.’
‘Oh, but surely, surely,’ I said, ‘you can recall some little outstanding fact, anything would be welcome….’ Her laughed. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘haven’t you just spent hours talking to my sister? She adores the past, doesn’t she? She says, you are going to put her in a book as she was in those days, she is quite looking forward to it, in fact.’
‘Please, try and remember something,’ I insisted, stubbornly.
‘I am telling you that I do not remember, you queer person. It’s useless, quite useless. There is nothing to relate except ordinary rot about cribbing and cramming and nicknaming teachers. We had quite a good time, I suppose…. But you know, your brother… how shall I put it?… your brother was not very popular at school….’
15
As the reader may have noticed, I have tried to put into this book as little of my own self as possible. I have tried not to allude (though a hint now and then might have made the background of my research somewhat clearer) to the circumstances of my life. So at this point of my story I shall not dwell upon certain business difficulties I experienced on my arrival in Paris, where I had a more or less permanent home; they were in no way related to my quest, and if I mention them in passing, it is only to stress the fact that I was so engrossed in the attempt to discover Sebastian’s last love that I cheerfully dismissed any personal troubles which my taking such a long holiday might entail.
I was not sorry that I had started off with the Berlin clue. It had at least led me to obtain an unexpected glimpse of another chapter of Sebastian’s past. And now one name was erased, and I had three more chances before me. The Paris telephone directory yielded the information that ‘Graun (von), Helene’ and ‘Rechnoy, Paul’ (the ‘de’, I noticed, was absent) corresponded to the addresses I possessed. The prospect of meeting a husband was unpleasant but unavoidable. The third lady, Lydia Bohemsky, was ignored by both directories, that is the telephone book and that other Bottin masterpiece, where addresses are arranged according to streets. Anyway, the address I had might help me to get at her. I knew my Paris well, so that I saw at once the most time-saving sequence in which to dispose my calls if I wanted to have done with them in one day. Let it be added, in case the reader be surprised at the rough-and-ready style of my activity, that I dislike telephoning as much as I do writing letters.
The door at which I rang was opened by a lean, tall, shock-headed man in his shirtsleeves and with a brass stud at his collarless throat. He held a chessman – a black knight – in his hand. I greeted him in Russian.
‘Come in, come in,’ he said cheerfully, as if he had been expecting me.
‘My name is so-and-so,’ I said.
‘And mine,’ he cried, ‘is Pahl Pahlich Rechnoy’ – and he guffawed heartily as if it were a good joke. ‘If you please,’ he said, pointing with the chessman to an open door.
I was ushered into a modest room with a sewing machine standing in one corner and a faint smell of ribbon-and-linen in the air. A heavily built man was sitting sideways at a table on which an oilcloth chessboard was spread, with pieces too large for the squares. He looked at them askance while the empty cigarette holder in the corner of his mouth looked the other way. A pretty little boy of four or five was kneeling on the floor, surrounded by tiny motor cars. Pahl Pahlich chucked the black knight on to the table and its head came off. Black carefully screwed it on again.
‘Sit down,’ said Pahl Pahlich. ‘This is my cousin,’ he added. Black bowed. I sat down on the third (and last) chair. The child came up to me and silently showed me a new red-and-blue pencil.
‘I could take your rook now if I wished,’ said Black darkly, ‘but I have a much better move.’
He lifted his queen and delicately crammed it into a cluster of yellowish pawns – one of which was represented by a thimble.
Pahl Pahlich made a lightning swoop and took the queen with his bishop. Then he roared with laughter.
‘And now,’ said Black calmly, when White had stopped roaring, ‘now you are in the soup. Check, my dove.’
While they were arguing over the position, with White trying to take his move back, I looked round the room. I noted the portrait of what had been in the past an Imperial Family. And the moustache of a famous general, moscowed
