Famous Last Words (9 page)

every word set deeply in its place, all the writing clearly cut and decipherable. Yet, surely, some of it must have been written in haste. And under whatever threat, since death for Mauberley had been murder, and he must have known it

would come that way—very sudden—quick—and the end

of all words forever. Yet even in spite of terror—absolute clarity. So after years of silence. Mauberley was a writer at the last. And here was his book—his testament entirely made

THREE

1936

0 bright Apollo…

What god, man or hero

Shall I place a tin wreath upon!

Ezra Pound

Quinn had thought to begin his reading of the walls where Mauberley himself had obviously intended—over to the right of the epigraph from the Book of Daniel. But his eye was caught by a second epigraph, inscribed on the ceiling; a sentence scrawled outside the disciplined alignment of the others and set there like a bear trap to catch the reader unaware.

“All I have written here,” Quinn read, “is true; except the lies.”

FR1;Quinn smiled.

He loosened his scarf, removed his cap and lit a cigarette.

(If Mauberley had smoked two pounds of cigarettes, then so would he: a new kind of hero-worship.) And he began to read by the light of candles, kneeling on his cot beneath the words “except the lies”.

At once, he was in another time, another idiom. And the voice he heard was hoarse with the distance it had journeyed in order to be heard.

Dubrovnik: August 17th, 1936

The heat was merciless. The whole of Dubrovnik was turned like the palm of a hand against the sun, squinting through its fingers at the sky. The Adriatic light was white, the air translucent and the sea a remorseless sheet of green-tinted glass. If Icarus had fallen here he would have bounced.

H.S. MAUBERLEY, ESQUIRE, read the cable in my pocket,

HOTEL GRAND BRETAGNE, VENEZIA: NAHLIN ARRIVING

DUBROVNIK NOON SEVENTEENTH. MASQUERADE

IMPERATIVE. WE ARE COMING INCOGNITO. LOOKING

FORWARD YOUR COMPANY. LOVE. W.

One was left, of course, no leeway to refuse this invitation.

Still, it would be madness to complain of being commanded to join the King of England’s progress through the Isles of Greece—one of a dozen hand-picked guests. The wire had said “we are coming incognito”—he as the Duke of Lancaster and she as Bessie Jones from Baltimore—so my intention had been to wait as unobtrusively as possible. Consequently, my rented Daimler and its chauffeur had gone straight back to Venice and I had hired a boy from the marketplace to trundle my bags on a cart.

By three o’clock in the afternoon there was still no sign—

61

no signal. Nothing on the horizon. 1 was sitting halfway down the town, having chosen a cafe terrace from which I could see the harbour and the bay beyond. In spite of the overnight rain, the atmosphere was stifling and breathless.

The terrace on which I sat and the buildings around it were bleached a blinding grey that hurt the eyes. And there was a sound—a humming, arid sound I could not trace—of insects or of birds. It was like a kettle boiling dry. Yet there was nothing here completely wilted or dead, as one might expect. Every window box was filled with scarlet geraniums and nearly every upright surface crawled with magenta wallflowers.

Some of the stones, in fact, were split apart with

yellow shafts of broom and pungent aloe swords the colour of a peach. And the scent of all these blossoms mingled with the cobble dust to produce a kind of powdered, aromatic drug that settled over everything. The whole population—

dogs and cats and people—was drowsy. Everyone moved

through the streets as if afraid to wake. Even now my boy was asleep on the stones of a nearby wall and my steamer trunk was hunkered down in its cart beside the curb, dreaming of its contents—all my new white suits and coloured

shirts and handmade underwear from France.

Dubrovnik is a very foreign place where everyone wears

black—so I’m certain I looked, in my Venetian whites and Panama hat, precisely as I felt; a misplaced, bad-tempered tourist.

I was over-tired from my hectic journey—over-anxious

lest I be detected and recognized and greatly overexcited thinking of my impending rendezvous. As a consequence

of all these tensions the first thing I did, sitting down, was to tip the dregs of the previous customer’s wine across the cloth; after which, with my usual excess of nervous nonchalance, I set myself on fire while lighting a cigarette.

A man in a fez was staring at me from another table. Not a pleasant experience. An ugly man and I was fairly certain he belonged to the police—though whose police I could not saw . He might even be an Englishman, I thought. Englishmen loved the fez and all that wearing it implied of erotic sophistication.

They wore them. I suspected, to bed. Alone.

This man wore it wrong, however. Surely it should not cover the ears.

I wondered if he knew who 1 was. Or was I just another

turista seeing the sights. Of course, the intensity of my gaze made him nervous, since I stared so meaningfully at the harbour that I must have appeared to be memorizing the

details of the town’s defences (nil) and the comings and goings of all the ships (twenty-two since dawn). Perhaps, if he was English, he thought I had come to kill the King.

A Bolshevist assassin. Princip updated—who had killed that other foreign prince and his morganatic wife a handful of miles from here. And of course, the king of this country, Alexander Karageorgevitch, had been murdered only two

years ago at Marseilles. Ports of call were dangerous for kings.

And yet I liked this coast—its legendary cast. This place was once IlJyria, Lady. Mythic. Well chosen for the king in hand, since this was -where they had deified Pan. Well chosen, too, for my sake, I thought—since somewhere south of

Dubrovnik was the cave where Cadmus had been transformed into a serpent (dragon?) who was made the guardian

of myth and literature… .Folklore had it that Cadmus was the Phoenix, or a sort of lizard-Lazarus, rising from the flames of some forgotten human rebellion; an assurance that, in spite of fire, the word would be preserved. And it was then I decided what my disguise might be for that incognito rendezvous. I should play the serpent’s part.

Closing in on suppertime 1 became aware of a genial but throbbing commotion in the streets surrounding my cafe.

People began to lean out of windows pointing towards the bay while others rose from nearby tables, including the man in the fez, to get a better view.

“What’s going on?” 1 asked the fez—damned it I’d risk my neck trying to stand up on my chair.

“Ships,” he said, with a tilt of his chin at the harbour.

63

And ships there were! With the sun beginning to sink

beyond them into the Adriatic—two magnificent British

destroyers in full regalia, gliding into view. And sandwiched in between them, very slightly to the rear, was a long white graceful ship much larger than any yacht I had ever seen.

The NahJin.

Every bell in town began to ring and every signal known to sailors round the world broke out across the waters. Great whooping sounds like operatic birds and horns like prairie trains: the most glorious fracas I have ever heard.

Incognito, indeed!

Only the Nahlin came into harbour, the other ships remaining out beyond the bar, and the whole town rose and

gave it a standing ovation.

Boys and girls and men and women, little children, dogs and cats began to run. Babies were hoisted onto their mother’s shoulders: not even they would be allowed to miss this

sight—because the golden king had come from heaven bringing his lover with him—icons walking on the earth—choosing the people of Dubrovnik to bask in. This was the new

mythology, I thought. Homer might have written it.

And as night began to fall, they filled the streets with lights and shouts, all the young men carrying torches, all the young women shouting: SMIRT MRAKU! DEATH TO

DARKNESS! DZIVELA LJUBAV! LONG LIVE LOVE!

The press of people was so great I was afraid I should not be able to reach the quayside in time to get on board the motor launch. I had expected the whole event would be a whisper. Now this pandemonium. And my hired boy—long

since awakened—was standing on his wall and dancing with excitement.

“Avantif” I called to him, using all my languages at once: “Trasmiti! Vorwarts! Go?” I screamed; having to scream it to be heard above the bells and all the shouting. At last I had to pull him from the wall and force him into place

behind the cart. And all the while he kept on saying over and over and over again “Eduardo! Eduardo!” as if it was a spell.

Thus it was I found myself with my attache case in one

64

hand and my black umbrella in the other, inexplicably raised against the moon, rushing and pushing, being pushed and rushed among ten thousand others down the winding streets of this Dalmatian Camelot with my steamer trunk thundering behind—the boy and it full tilt on wheels at my heels. All this to greet and be greeted by the legendary Prince of Wales, the idol of a whole generation—the Boy King of England, Edward VIII and his lover, Wallis Warfield Simpson, with whom I had been in love myself in the way dogs have of

loving the feet at which they lie. And when Wallis greeted me she said; “It was so good of you to come.” And I said; “No. It was good of you to come.” After which we all stood leaning on the rail, watching the whole dark mountainside light up with bonfires.

And the man in the fez? He too was on board, asleep

already in a cabin beneath us. He would be departing tomorrow, for he had come to perform, in the strictest secrecy,

a relatively easy task. English he was, after all—and a very special agent of the King—whose job it was to measure

Wallis Simpson for the Crown.

Quinn sat down.

He was shaking.

The candle guttered, threatening to go out, and it was only revived when he set it on the floor beside his cot.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t known—as everyone had known—

there was a flashbulb-gossip-column friendship between the writer and the Duchess.

It was the shock of seeing it pulled from the impersonal distance of newsprint into the focus of “The” and “Wallis”.

And the awareness—like a draught—that a door had just been opened way off down a darkened corridor. And the

fear of where it led.

No. Not the fear; the certainty.

Mauberley was lying with that thing in his eye, on the

65

floor across the hall, and the beginning and the ending had already been joined.

Quinn got up and went across the room to the candelabra, reaching out to touch the stalactite of wax that was hanging down towards the base. He couldn’t help thinking that

Mauberley’s fingers must have performed the same gesture.

It was one of those irresistible things people did—automatic as smelling a paper flower or standing back from a painting.

All the time he stood there, Quinn thought; Mauberley was here; he stood right here, like me; he felt this wax; he could see the same view; he could raise the same dust as he crossed the floor. It was a painful thought that all these things, mere things, had had the privilege of being there with Mauberley during the final days of his life and could never tell of it.

But Mauberley himself could tell—so long as Quinn went on with his reading. And began at the beginning.

Looking up from where he stood, he read; “1924”. The

figures were beautiful and formal. The nine had a great rococo loop spreading out beneath the one and the four had

a great, high cap riding back towards the two. “1924”: written over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the

wall… .

This then was where it began. Quinn felt the same as he had when he made his first parachute jump—suddenly confronted with the enormity of space and the death that might

await him at the bottom. He closed his eyes and held his breath. And then he opened them—and read.

66

China: August, 1924

Tell her that sheds

Such treasure in the air,

Recking naught else but that her graces give

Li/e to the moment,

J would bid them )ive

As roses might, in magic amber laid,

Red overwrought with orange and all made

One substance and one colour

Braving time.

Wallis is sitting in my mind as I saw her first in the lobby of the old Imperial Hotel in Shanghai.

This was in the middle-age of her youth.

She had already married once and had come to China to

pursue her husband. He had deserted her; not for another woman, but the bottle. He was someone of importance in

the United States Navy: someone having something to do

with aeroplanes; a man called Spencer. My theory is he was a homosexual. Not that it matters. So am I—from time to time. The thing is—he left her.

She was lost.

The lobby of the old Imperial Hotel was crowded far beyond its capacity. A great wave of people washed back and forth between the pillars and the palms, one half attempting to depart, the other half attempting to arrive, neither half succeeding.

There were plain too many bodies in the city. Shanghai

was then the crossroads of the world: known as the Charnel House of the East because the bones of so many cultures had been hung out to dry, to be sold in her streets. She was also known as the Golden Whore of the Orient.

Boats and trains brought daily hordes of foreigners: South Americans, Russians. Europeans, Mexicans—Americans from Boston and Baltimore; all of us in flight. Many were in flight from wars and revolutions; some were in simple flight from the past; some were in flight from one another.

67

I. too, was “lost” as Gertrude Stein said, with the rest of my generation: “lost” meaning not, as so many seem to think, astray, but destroyed. Perdu. And if we wandered, what we wandered in was the aftershock of a great catastrophe. An earthquake had tumbled everything known to all the generations leading up to ours. My father, even in 1910, had