Dream of Fair to Middling Women (22 page)

“Free?”

“Of the seraglio.” She folded up her legs and looked at him with her mouth. “Didn't you know?”

Belacqua began to feel ill at ease. He fidgeted on his seat.

“Don't tell me” exclaimed the Alba “the child has piles!”

Then, he remaining remote and blank, she thought she could safely let it come, she felt it would be all right, the fiery question that had been threatening this long time back, itching in her ears.

“What is love?”

Belacqua withdrew his little finger sadly from his nostril and shanghaied his catch on the chair-arm.

“A great Devil” he said.

“No. A little devil, an imp.”

“A great Devil, a fiend.”

“He is young” she sighed “but that will pass.”

“I am” he admitted sadly “a juvenile man, scarcely pubic. But I will not agree that love is an imp when I am of
the opinion that love is a fiend. That would be fake blasé. And fake blasé” here his voice rang, it was suddenly proud, “is a vulgarity that I cannot tolerate and to which I decline to bend.”

He sat bolt upright, declining to bend, red in the face.

“Sans blahague !” she mocked grockly, she would be sorry for this, “ce qu'il est sentimentique !”

The Homer dusk, mutatis mutandis, lapsed, as through the deeps of ocean a drowned body lapses. They kept their seats, they delved into the subject, they treated it coldly and carefully. She got his measure, he was not altogether unworthy. The aged gardener, brooding over the fragility of all life, moved vaguely in the little garden, assailing, he did not want to, he would have much preferred not, but he was forced to, his rose had been taken and hidden, with hard jets of water the vanquished flowers. The trams moaned up and down across the maw of the avenue, and passed. In the house not a mouse was stirring. It was the magic hour, the magic tragic prepuscule, alluded to and torn to tatters passim above, when the poets come abroad on the lamplighters' spoors, when Nemo is in position, when Night has its nasty difficult birth all over the sheets of dusk, and the dark eyes of the beautiful darken also. This was the case now with the Alba, furled in her coils upon the settee, the small broad pale face spotted in a little light escaped from the throttled west. Her great eyes went as black as sloes, they went as big and black as El Greco painted, with a couple of good wet slaps from his laden brush, in the Burial of the Count of Orgaz the debauched eyes of his son or was it his mistress? It was a remarkable thing to see. Pupil and white swamped in the dark iris gone black as night. Then lo! she is at the window, she is taking stock of her cage. Now under the threat of
night the evening is albescent, its hues have blanched, it is dim white and palpable, it pillows and mutes her head. So that as from transparent polished glass or, if you prefer, from tranquil shining waters, the details of his face return so feeble that a pearl on a white brow comes not less promptly to his pupils, so now he sees her vigilant face and in him is reversed the error that lit love between the man (if you can call such a spineless creature a man) and the pool. For she had closed the eyes.

“Spirit of the moon” he said.

She begged his pardon.

He said it again.

“There is one poem by the Ronsard” she said, moving back gaily towards him into captivity, “entitled:
Magic, or, Deliverance from Love.
If you are familiar with it we could give earth to this conversation there.”

“A great poem” he gushed “a great poem. But why do you say
the
Ronsard?”

She had just felt like it, she had felt she would like to.

“He was a comic old lecher” she said. Her jaw dropped in a way that made him a little anxious. “So we are of one mind” she said “think of that!”

After that he had no excuse for prolonging his visit. He had paid his respects. Perhaps even he had got copy for his wombtomb.

In the vestibule, the safe side of the Radio, he hoped that he had not fatigued her. No, that was not possible. At the garden gate he told her a storiette.

“You know what the rose said to the rose?”

No, she did not seem to have heard that one.

“‘No gardener has died within the memory of roses.'”

“Very neat” she said “very graceful. Adios.”

She stood watching him waddle through the gloaming.

There is a class of lady that stands at the gate (though more usually in her porch) witnessing the recession of her visitor. His posteriors, she thought, are on the big side for his boots… Otherwise… She turned to go in, she strutted in a slow swagger prisonwards down the garden path, she flaunted the glittering peignoir for the envy of Mrs ---, her neighbour, her enemy.

They do much time side by side, azure skies come and go, the waters go. And they go from intimacy to intimacy, that is to say, about them rises the marsh of granny's-bends that is their relation.

Bear in mind, we are particularly anxious that you should, how his want to go—no matter where, anywhere, anywhere bar Moscow and England, increases with the climbing frequency of the place-ague. She too has said she wants to go. She must be off, she says. That is true, but frivolous also. She does not seriously want to move, she is past that. Still, she clasps and unclasps her hands, she does and undoes them, her hands that are just right, on the large side for her body as his posteriors for his boots, and says that carajo! but she must go, must get away, that she will go out of her mind. But she works herself up to it, she drinks and starves and smokes and dopes herself into a regular how-dee-do, she plunges into town to buy a ticket and drags home in the tram with a fish or a bag of buttered eggs. She is not serious, she does not seriously want to stir, not in her most buried forum. Her inner spectator, the good and faithful witness, yawns the usual, turns over on her other haunch, and the Alba lets it go at that. Still, great mangling and laundrying of hands goes on between the pair of them, even suicide is dragged in by the cork of the
bottle, its pros and cons piously sifted. He comes out in hard and full pulses all over his public parts and in spasms of subsultus bungles a petit mal ult. horis. But she, does not really care about moving (must we drum that drum for ever?), she puts not her trust in changes of scenery, she is too inward by a long chalk, she inclines towards an absolute moral geography, her soul is her only poste restante. Whereas he does care, he prays fervently to be set free in a general way, he is such a very juvenile man. But he will get over all that. Hence, she shall not go. She can talk and talk and take trams into Cook's, but she shall not go. She can talk and talk and suddenly crucify her hands, saying: Shall I be mewed up, shall I, like a falcon, all the days of my life, shall I, in this stenching city?, she shall not go. He shall go. Wait till you see. He would be gone long ago but for the morass of nerve-squitch and beauty and that most tenuous of all the tenuous etc., where bogged beside the royal Alba he wallows caught in the reeds of their relation.

He has not lain with her. Nor she with him. None of that kind of thing here, if you don't mind.

What we are doing now, of course, is setting up the world for a proper swell slap-up explosion. The bang is better than the whimper. It is easier to do. It is timed for about ten or fifteen thousand words hence. We shall blow him out of the muck that way.

And the family? And Chas? And the P.B., the poor old P.B? To say nothing of the boys and girls he left behind him,
and whom soon he runs the risk of rejoining.
Are they then to be let slide? Are they, squeezed dry, to be cast aside into the gutter, the tragic gutter of not being referred to any more in this book? You fondly ask. Because we (concensus of me) we have not the slightest idea where they come in or if they come in at all. Beyond a few nebulous
directions we have no plans, but none at all, for the late Fall and Winter. We hope to keep our hands off all families, because they tend to make us magdalen. And Chas? We find that the body of our feeling corresponds with that enunciated by the Polar Bear, to wit, that Chas is inclined to be rather a bore and a crab-louse. We can always fire him into the aching boosom of his Shetland Shawly if at any moment we find ourself short of copy or at all uncertain as to how to proceed. In what concerns the Polar Bear, we confess ourself totally at a loss. He may loom large yet, he may have to be called on to do the best he can as an out-at-elbow down-at-heel gone-in-the-legs Colossus. But it is not possible to make any statement. How much more pleasant it would be for all parties all round, he is such a nice fellow, were it but feasible to arrange for him to be left in peace. He merits peace.
Perviam pacts ad patriam perpetuæ claritatis
—that is the fond hope and the vow, may it gleam through the horrid latin and light him, that we make, both now and ever, for the poor old P.B. We cannot do fairer than that. We would not ask better for ourself. By paths of peace to the land of everlasting clearness..! Can you beat it?

Clearness standing here of course for us for the
obscure clarté
that already more than once has been flogged to within one candle-power of its life, way back in the wilds of this old maid.

Now once more and for the last time we are obliged to hark back to the liu business, a dreadful business, feeling heartily sorry that we ever fell into the temptation of putting up that owld Tale of a Tub concerning Christopher Lîng-Liûn and his bamboo Yankee doodle. Our excuse must be that we were once upon a time inclined to fancy ourself as the Cézanne, shall we say, of the printed page,
very strong on architectonics. We live and learn, we draw breath from our heels now, like a pure man, and we honour our Father, our Mother, and Goethe.

The observation we feel we simply must place now, this very moment, preparatory to saying no more at all about it, is: that just as we feared the Alba and Co. have turned out to be as miserable a lot of croakers as Belacqua at his best and hoarsest and the entire continental circus. Such a collection of Kakiamouni wops, scorching away from their centres, no syndicate of authors, it is our stiff conviction, ever had the misfortune to have to do with. What would Leibnitz say?

Still and all we love ‘em one and all, we can't be cross with 'em long, they are such charming and engaging creatures after all when all is said and done,
when
it is. Their very artlessness puts wrath to flight quite. How could anyone be angry with ‘em for any length of time? They have such winning little ways. It is utterly out of the question. Even the Syra-Cusa, though we think she might have sent him at least
one
of her eyes in a dish. Even Chas, that bit of a nit. Pets one and all.

Now a most terrible and unexpected thing happens. Into the quiet pages of our cadenza bursts a nightmare harpy, Miss Dublin, a hell-cat. In she lands singing Have-lock Ellis in a deep voice, itching manifestly to work that which is not seemly. If only she could be bound and beaten and burnt, but not quick. Or, failing that, brayed gently in a mortar. Open upon her concave breast as on a lectern lies Portigliotti's
Penumbre Claustrali
bound in tawed caul. In her talons earnestly she clutches Sade's
Hundred Days
and the
Anterotica
of Aliosha G. Brignole-Sale, unopened,
bound in shagreened caul. A septic pudding hoodwinks her, a stodgy turban of pain it laps her horse-face. The eye-hole is clogged with the bulbus and the round pale globe goggles exposed. Solitary meditation has furnished her with nostrils of generous bore. The mouth champs an invisible bit, foam gathers at the bitter commissures. The crateriform brisket, lipped with sills of paunch, cowers ironically behind a maternity tunic. Keyholes have wrung the unfriendly withers, the osseous rump screams beneath the hobble-skirt. Wastes of woad worsted are gartered to the pasterns. Aïe!

What shall we call it? Give it a name quick. Lilly, Jane or Caleken Frica? Or just plain Mary? Suppose we make it Caleken to please the theologasters and Frica to please ourself, and of course whatever comes in handy for short.

The Frica had a mother, and thereby was partially explained: a bald caterwauling bedlam of a ma with more toes than teeth. As a young mare she had curvetted smartly, lifting the knees chin-high, and had enjoyed a certain measure of success in certain quarters. And if the dam trot, as the saying runs and we all know to our cost, shall the foal then amble? She shall not. Nor did. For did she not caper caparisoned in those nightmare housings and in her absinthe whinny notify Belacqua that her darling ma bade him to a party with back-stairs, claret-cup and the intelligentsia. Belacqua uncovered cautiously his face.

“I couldn't” he said “I could not.”

Now she was springing the garters. What did she want? That was what he could not understand.

“I do wish” said Belacqua “that you would take a tip from Madame your noble mother and wear a respectable perforated
rubber suspender-belt in place of those houghbands. Please do not flick them at me like that.”

“But I must” she snuffled, setting the eyes in motion, “don't you see, Bel, that I simply must?”

“No!” cried Belacqua “shall I be gehennate in my own chamber by a Blue-stocking?”

“Oh Bel” she whinnied “do you really and truly mean to say you think I am?”

Under the anger of the moon, Rubens embolus, Belacqua let fall his poor head.

“If now” he found it in his fading breath to implore “you would please to go and say to Madame your mother that Belacqua regrets he is unable…”

Belacqua regrets he is unable… That makes, he reflected, casting it up in great anguish of spirit, toads and vipers, three more of each, in their torture chamber. Without warning she loosed a high sexual neigh:

“Chas is coming! Chas and the Polar Bear are coming!”

Belacqua roared with laughter. Wot a sop!

“Chas!” he coughed “Chas! Chas! But that is what Chasses are there for!”

“The Alba” she bugled.

But he waxed stiff, he heard no more that day. Suddenly there was no clot of moon there, no moon of any kind or description. It was the miracle, our old friend that whale of a miracle, taking him down from his pangs, sheathing him in the cerements of clarity. It was the descent and the enwombing, assumption upside down, tête-bêche, into the greyness, the dim press of disaffected angels. It was at last the hush and indolence of Limbo in his mind proddied and chivvied into taking thought, lounging against the will-pricks. It was the mercy of salve on the prurigo of living,
dousing the cock-robin of living. In a word in fact he was suddenly up to the eyes in his dear slush.