Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (38 page)

It was an intensely hot May in Verona. Even the seemingly tireless throng of local bourgeois who in the evenings passed and re-passed between the cafés and the amphitheatre seemed robbed of their usual Italian high spirits. Gerald welcomed this, for he found the Italian character, so beloved of his English colleagues, childish, noisy, and inane. He fought steadily a desire to remain in his hotel bedroom and read; he denied himself the easy excuse which the intense heat would have given to fulfil this desire. The Congress would soon be over and he would be on his way to Merano and the first step of the quest for which he was now so impatient. He had written to Mrs Portway, recalling her hospitality of long ago and asking if he might visit her when he was in that neighbourhood. He had received an answer in a shaky, but imperious hand, telling him that no old friend who came to Merano and did not visit her would ever be forgiven. He had not mentioned Elvira, but he had presented the compliments of Marie Hélène to Madame Houdet. In addition to Mrs Portway's reply there came a very formal letter in purplish ink returning the compliments of Madame Veuve Houdet and her son, M. Yves Houdet, and begging that the father-in-law of their dear niece and cousin would present himself to them on his visit to Merano.

Meanwhile Gerald went on all the expeditions provided by the Congress, so securing a reputation for friendliness and a deal of cool air on the motor-coach journeys. It was thus that he found himself at Mantua, screwing his neck upwards to gaze at the curious behaviour of horses and goddesses portrayed by Giulio Romano on the ceilings of the Palazzo del Tè. With him was Father Lavenham, who soon ceased to contort his neck and peered instead through the windows at the little formal garden outside.

'I hope,' said Father Lavenham, 'that I don't seem ostentatiously puritan, or rather, for once, I don't mind if I do, but I confess that all this Renaissance paganism is very antipathetic to me. I have neither an aesthetic inclination towards it nor a Warburgian interest in the development of myth. The vulgarity of Imperial Rome is unsavoury enough, this sort of imitation is insufferable. It makes me glad that I am a medievalist. If I am forced to choose a pagan spirit, give me that of the Gracchi rather than of the Gonzagas. But then I'm very English.' It was a perfectly true and obvious statement, yet he never failed to find a necessity to repeat it to combat his colleague's distrust of a Roman priest.

Gerald said politely, 'I'm largely in agreement with you.' Professor Clun was so intent on the intricacies of mythological monstrosity that he heard nothing around him.

'Do you know,' said Lavenham, 'I think I shall escape to the small amount of shade offered by that oleander."

'A very good idea,' Gerald agreed.

'Are you coming, Clun?'  Father Lavenham asked loudly and with a certain distaste.

Professor Clun came to, and, fearing that his obsessive interest might have been remarked upon, he said, 'The trouble with these congresses is that there's a great deal too much fiddle-faddle attached to them.'

With difficulty they evaded the guide and sat on the grass in the half-shade of the oleander - three elderly English scholars with no real communion of feeling except their nationality, which in the circumstances was a very powerful one. Lavenham's goat face seemed in happy keeping with the pagan world he so disliked. Gerald could not forbear to say, 'You have a curiously Pan-like look yourself, you know.'

The priest looked seriously disturbed. 'I hope not,' he said. 'I always incline to think that the Nonconformity into which I was born is the most depressing thing in life, but it only requires a small dose of paganism to make me count my Methodist upbringing as a blessing. The Chapel at Stoke-on-Trent was a gloomy place, but it seems as nothing whenever I am confronted with the desert waste of the pagan world. To play at paganism as these people did,' and he waved his hand towards the imitation Roman bath-house, 'seems to speak such weariness of soul that I feel stifled by its presence.'

Gerald turned an ironical eye towards him. 'Of course,' he said jauntily, 'you can't lump the whole of Olympus together with the idols of Melpham and Heligoland like that.' In the determination of his new quest, he felt free at last to speak of Melpham.

Father Lavenham smiled. 'I make little of varieties of terror and despair,' he said. Gerald thought, what a theatrical way of talking these R.C.
S
have.

It was evident that Arthur Clun reacted similarly, for he said sharply, 'Well, that may be, Lavenham, but Pforzheim's report's left you with a little explaining to do about your missionaries.'

Father Lavenham laughed heartily. 'You're the fourth of my colleagues who's told me that,' he said. 'I believe even the most civilized of Englishmen still think that Catholic historians falsify or deny whatever doesn't suit their book. Apostasy's not exactly a new problem, you know. Readmission of apostates was one of the burning questions for the Early Fathers. And as for sorcery! Why, my dear Clun, even in the small experience of a priest like myself these things are not new. In the life of the Church ...' he waved his hand to suggest a limitless range - 'I doubt if the Church will boggle at Eorpwald or Aldwine, or a few others if they turn up, for that matter, in her infinite variety of experience. No, it's my chauvinistic pride as an Englishman that's been dealt a salutary blow there.'

'It's just as well it's all an open historical question now,' Clun remarked. 'The whole thing's safely in the hands of reputable scholars. It's no longer the playground of cranks.'

Lavenham smiled, 'if you mean Dr Lorimer,' he said, 'it looks to me as though her crankiness is on the wane. I'm glad, for she's a good soul and, as a matter of fact, I'm peculiarly glad because there was a moment when her crankiness seemed to be involving me in a most unpleasant fashion.'

Gerald turned to him. 'In what fashion?'  he asked.

Lavenham now appeared anxious to retrieve what he said, for he remarked with studied casualness, 'Oh, I think she's got it in for all of us Romans, you know, as part of the great conspiracy the poor soul imagined was formed against her. She wrote me one or two rather foolish letters.' The other members of the party came streaming from the palace headed by a voluble guide. 'This looks like relief at last,' he said abruptly and joined the crowd.

The intense heat did not diminish as Gerald's train climbed up from the Italian plains into the foothills. He had refused to take Larwood on his European trip and would not even make use of hired cars. He had not made a train and bus journey of any length for many years, but one side of him had turned his new quest into a youthful adventure, though the other was filled with foreboding and anxiety. He read an Everyman copy of Gilchrist's life of Blake. He had a pious devotion to Blake's life which was in some degree an atonement for his poor opinion of his drawings. As he read, memories of the adventures of the heroes of John Buchan's novels came irrelevantly into his mind. Such self-mockery was his talisman against the hubris he so dreaded in life. At Trento the storm broke overhead; and by the time his taxi was carrying him to his hotel, the little arcaded streets of Merano were filled with jostling umbrellas of bedraggled Italian holiday-makers.

The rain continued so heavily that he telephoned to Mrs Portway to ask if he could postpone his visit until the next day. Madame Houdet answered the call and her heavy French accent was difficult to interpret. After consultation, however, she asked him to luncheon. She inquired after Marie Hélène, but on the whole she seemed preoccupied with a story of a local family of peasants whose house had been struck by lightning. The bedridden grandmother, it appeared, had been hit by a chimney brick and had died before a priest could reach the house. 'And terrible burns,' she cried, rolling her r's with relish, 'terrible burns.'

After dinner he took Blake's life to the American bar. The only other occupants were two stout, hiking schoolmistresses, whose voices suggested that they had been strangely washed up there from Manchester. As Gerald ordered his drink, a tall, broad-shouldered young man came or, more truthfully, strutted into the room. With his coat draped over his shoulders, his flashy wrist-watch, his faint whiff of perfume, and his sensual black eyes, he was all that Gerald detested in the Latin male. He pictured such men forever swaggering in front of women in cafés or bars and wondered if his great distaste for them was due to jealousy. Before Gerald could bury himself in his book, the young man turned from the bar, glanced at the cover of Gerald's book, and said with an American accent, 'What's your guess about all these storms we're having? Do you think it's the A-bomb?'

Gerald said abruptly, 'No, I should think that was most improbable.'

'I don't know,' the young man's American accent seemed almost a stage one; 'there's a lot of experiments going on we don't know anything about.' He addressed the room when he spoke. 'And if we do know, we can't say.' He left no doubt as to which of these categories was his. 'You heard about the guy who talked?'  he asked, looking round the room. 'No? Well, you never will now, 'cos he's not talking any more.' He laughed loudly at this joke, which suggested an imperfect understanding of the language he spoke so fluently.

Gerald read his book, but the schoolmistresses laughed politely. The young man devoted his svelte, overdressed person to them.

'So you're from England,' he said. 'I've got relations over there. Pretty big people, too. Robin Middleton. Ever heard of him?'  - Gerald looked up in horrified amazement - 'Yeah, he's on the Market,' the young man continued. 'You know the sort of stuff. Money talks and so on. I'm going over to their place to stop this summer. My cousin's quite a bit of a hostess. All the big people - Churchill, Eden, all that crowd, T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells.'

One of the ladies mentioned that Wells was dead, but the young man was quite unperturbed. 'Yeah. He may be too,' he said. 'He
certainly
burned the candle at both ends. Of course, it doesn't mean anything to me,' he said, ordering another whisky sour, 'I've been around too much. I'm the cosmopolitan type, you know. Born in France, lived a good deal in the States, as you can hear from my accent, or so they tell me. But Italy's good enough for me now. That's where you get the
real
aristocracy - feudal estates, starving peasants, all the works. You heard about that big ball they had in Venice?' One of the ladies thought she had. 'Yeah. That was the real thing. Champagne poured in the canals. Of course, the Commies screamed their lungs out. I was there. I had a pretty good time, too. But still you can't play all the time.'

Gerald closed his book and left the bar. If he was fated to meet M. Yves Houdet, tomorrow seemed quite soon enough. Sensual and elegant though Gerald was, he detested the flashy smartness of such Latin womanizers.

The heat next day was once more stifling, though the sun was hidden by low clouds that hung around the mountain-tops and threatened further storms. Mrs Portway was sitting in the garden when Gerald arrived at the villa. Although he would not have recognized his former hostess in the handsome old woman who came across the brown, dried lawn to greet him, there was something in the pale mauve parasol, the wide-brimmed lavender linen hat, and the violet tulle at the throat which recalled his arrival at Melpham to him, so that unconsciously he took peculiar pains to avoid falling on the gravel path.

It was Lilian, however, who had need of such care; since her stroke, her walk was tottery and her head shook more often. She still carried herself as erect as a young woman. Gerald wondered if she would greet him with classical allusion as she had in 1912, and sure enough, 'Welcome! Professor Middleton,' she cried. 'We meet as shades on the other side of the Styx.' Such allusions were, perhaps, her stock in trade for academical visitors. 'Though why
you,
who do not have to do so, should wish to plunge yourself into Stygian gloom, I cannot imagine.'

'I was at the Historical Congress at Verona and ...' said Gerald, working towards his fabricated excuse for being in Merano, but he had no need of it.

'Ah!' Lilian Portway cried, 'Verona!
That
is Italy. Not Tuscany, but still Italy. While this ...' She turned her lovely swan neck in disgust.

'I didn't see much of it last night because of the rain,' Gerald said, smiling, 'but it seems very attractive this morning Don't you like it?'

'
Like
it!' Mrs Portway beat in the air with her hand. 'I hate it! I detest it!
That,'
she said, pointing southwards with her parasol, 'is where I should live. But the doctors forbade it. Ah, how well G.B.S. understood those doctors. They hate the arts. They killed Dubedat and they'll kill me.'

It seemed a little illogical to Gerald, but he did not contradict her; already, indeed, Madame Houdet - her only concession to the heat the crêpe-de-chine material of her black dress - was at their side. 'You must not excite yourself, Lilian,' she said. 'Poor Mrs Portway has been ill. She is always so brave when she is
souffrante.'

Lilian Portway waved her aside. 'They would have me live as an invalid,' she said scornfully. 'But if I live, I
live,
not crawl upon the surface of the earth.'

Conversation with the two ladies did not prove easy. Madame Houdet talked of Marie Hélène. So
distinguée
and so clear-headed - Gerald must be so sad to be apart from his dear ones, it was always sad to be apart from one's dear ones - and of the old peasant woman killed by the lightning - 'Imagine! pinned beneath a beam for nearly an hour and one arm completely charred, but completely!' She made no clear distinction between the two topics, so that when she said,
'Et toujours
si devote.
Believe me, sir, Notre Dame de la Miséricorde knows those who honour her,' Gerald was not sure whether she referred to the old peasant woman or to Marie Hélène.

Mrs Portway, on the other hand, determined to exclude Stéphanie from the conversation by restricting it to reminiscences of English life. She took it for granted that Gerald shared her memories of the great. 'Oh, they were brave men, Mr Asquith and his colleagues!' she said scornfully. 'They thought they could break the women's spirit by forcible feeding. They could ruin the beauty that God had given to women like Constance Balfour, but they couldn't break their spirits, as you and I know, my dear friend.' She called him to share intimate laughter over Tree's vulgarity and intimate honour for Granville Barker's high projects for the theatre; yet in and out of her ramblings came clear threads of memory. 'What a day,' she cried, 'to sprain your ankle. They made the greatest archaeological discovery of the age, my dear Stéphanie, and what did this fellow do? - he sprained his ankle!' She turned to Gerald. 'And now they've all gone, my dear friend. Reggie and Stokesay and his brilliant son killed in that senseless war. And only you and I are left. Oh! and Dollie, dear English Dollie' - and she looked scornfully at Madame Houdet. 'But you and she had an
affaire
de cœur!'
she cried to Gerald.