In the King's Arms (17 page)

“Oh God, yes. It’s very nice. The fright. The thing I couldn’t bear was not knowing. How could she tell you and not me?” Tears suddenly flooded his eyes and he blinked them away impatiently.

“I’m not really crying—I’m just, you know, Peter,” he blinked again, tears flowing, “j-j-just overwhelmed.

“Something big like this just happens, like a mighty squall at sea and we ought to be able to—God, where
is
she? What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s too clever by half,” Peter answered. “She thinks she knows everything, and she doesn’t. I’m surprised by you, to tell you the truth. I feel a burst of brotherly respect. She’s sold you short, if you want my opinion. Thinks she knows all the answers. Wants to run off now, and show her people what a pretty job she’s done with the English in England. Got a baby to show for it, a baby all her own. I think she’s got some idea of never seeing you again. Raise it in her image—raise you in her image, that sort of thing. It’s a feeling I get about her. And I’m usually right in my hunches, you know.

“She’s always been that way, full of notions and plans and plots. Always something cooking with her. Know what I mean?”

“Yes, sort of. Yes, I do. It’s funny, it’s sort of like your play, isn’t it? No wonder she looked so stricken when I saw her in the interval. It was her look that made me run off to The King’s Arms, Peter. She looked possessed by her own morbid thoughts. I felt I could never get near her, never penetrate that calcified misery.”

“But you have, you see.”

“Yes. Yes, I have.” He sat motionless for a moment, letting this wisdom flood him. “Why does she never stop analyzing? I’m not letting her ‘think’ this one through, I’m not. It’s pompous of her; it’s
cruel! And she’s the one who’ll suffer most from this this Oxbridge-clever thing!”

“Envy, envy,” Peter chided, raising a long finger.

“No. I don’t envy you constipated lot, if you must know. When I’m through with her,” he said, filling his mind with fierce, pleasurable imaginings, “she won’t have a thought left in her head.”

“What a sweet thing to say, Julian!”

“Don’t bother being sarcastic. It’s far from sweet. I’m tired of her torments.”

“Well, it really is quite true, what you say about our difficult Lily,” said Peter, putting water on to boil again. “And it’s too bad, because she exhausts herself making everything fit into its place. Does it come of studying literature, do you suppose, and having to write sensible, clear-headed essays about bits of beautiful gossamer? What a nice phrase. I shall use it in my next essay. Beautiful gossamer. Very nice.

“Well, that’s her problem in a nutshell. Nothing does stay put, does it? You can’t pin it down with your brain. I’ve always found it best to muddle through and see what turns up.”

“Well, perhaps she doesn’t feel safe enough to muddle through,” said Julian.

“Oh, look,” said Peter. “Danger’s a cult for her. That’s what I think. An old family habit.”

“That’s rotten. Stop it. I’ve shaken her up. I haven’t made her feel safe. I want to, now. She deserves to feel safe.”

“You deserve it too, Julian.”

“Oh, I’m not worried.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be going to Bog-land or something?”

Shelagh Eveline Fanning, in her enthusiasm for Julian, had arranged for him to visit at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where his
own father had trained and performed. If he liked them, and they him, perhaps he could begin training the following autumn.

“I’ll go another time.” But one of Julian’s hands made snakes from his black hair, and his sky-eyes flickered dark.

“Don’t get all impulsive and silly now. What does Archibald always say? Follow through, lad.”

“And what about Lily?”

“Listen here, youngster, love has patience.”

“Not when love is pregnant.”

“Of course I know that, imbecile. I’ve kept gerbils, as you well know. Do talk to her. Tell her what’s happened. That you might actually be able to have a calling, a
métier
, like everyone else in the world, and not merely drift from staircase to staircase here, looking up skirts, etc., etc.”

“Tell her, and go to Dublin?” This cleared the air, and Julian, relaxing for the first time, lit up a Gauloise.

“Yes, rat. Get the girl, get the job, get everything I’ve ever wanted. Go on, you lucky bugger. And I’ll tell you what. Tell her you’ve got some dough as well. Dad gave me a stash for my twenty-first which I haven’t spent; I’ll lend it to you. See if she doesn’t react with a wee little smile.”

Julian reacted with a broad, brilliant smile.

“You’re not so bad, you old bender.”

“Get dressed! Go! Run!”

Julian got dressed and ran over to Lily’s college. Her enormous steamer trunk sat prominently in the lodge. It had a large white sticker stuck on the top. A New York address was written on this sticker with bold magic marker. Julian sat on the trunk and ground his fists into his eyes, pushing back the stinging tears.

“What’s wrong, lad?” asked the porter.

“I’m looking for Lily Taub. Has she gone?”

“Let me think for a moment. The American girl?”

“Has she gone?”

“Yes, lad. Saw her go out about an hour ago.”

Julian borrowed a pen and a scrap of paper from the lodge, and jotted quickly.

W
HEN JULIAN GOT BACK to Gloucestershire that evening, he raced upstairs. He did not greet, but could visualize, Timmy in his special chair, eating “toad-in-the-hole,” Helena picking listlessly at her small potatoes, and Archibald wiping gravy from satisfied lips. Julian wasn’t hungry. His stomach was hard and flat, as though braced for challenge or the sharp relief of laughter. Having Lily’s address had restored in him a feeling of power. He could reach her; he could move her. He had moved her: she was carrying his child.

He stood in front of the mirror, as he’d done all his life, and saw his power to capture and sway. His impending trip to Dublin enhanced this view: he would mesmerize them, both there, and, come springtime (as Caliban) in Oxford. The girl could run wherever she liked, he thought, but she was his. “I will people this world with Calibans!” he roared. The mirror reflected his cavernous mouth and strong teeth. He seemed to see, emerging, an appetite to reckon with: it came from his own gut.

“Hungry, darling?” His mother’s voice, his enemy’s voice, tickled up from downstairs. Hers was a young voice, eerily young, young enough to have a tremor of hope when it rose: “Darling?”

He wanted to answer: “I am never your darling,” but realized
the words would emerge with a passion that could only call her nearer. She did not call for him again.

But there she was, knocking very lightly on his door.

The witch, he thought.

“Come in,” he said.

“Busy?” He stood up and started to pack some shirts into a bundle. As he moved, his mother’s eyes followed him around worriedly, and he composed a letter to Lily: “Don’t worry about Helena Kendall,” it would say. “She died a very long time ago.”

“Something wrong, darling?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you going somewhere?”

He continued his imaginary letter: “She died a very long time ago, when she gave up my Dad.”

“Why are you packing?”

“Going to see Dad,” he said flippantly. “Popping over to see your ex.”

“To France? Why, Julian, you were just there before Christmas! You keep flitting here, and there, and everywhere! How on earth are you ever going to amount to something?”

“Well, this time, actually, I’m flitting ’cross the water to Dublin-town. To freedom.”

“You mean your father is now back in Ireland?”

“I’m going to the Abbey.”

They both knew what he meant.

“How in heaven’s name! Did he get you mixed up in that?”

It would be just like him, to grab at her heart from afar.

“He didn’t.”

“Who did?” She thought for a moment. “Is this that obese Fanning again?”

Helena did not appreciate Peter’s interest in the Oxford acting clique; now it had infected his young brother.

“Well, as a matter of fact, you’re right. She saw me wandering around Oxford and she got sort of intense about me. Said I looked like good old Dad. Thought I could let it out. Acting-wise. Without holding it back.

“Turned out I could! Poor Peter; he was so hurt. The one thing he wishes he could do, the one thing, and Fanning said—don’t tell him this, Mum, promise—she said that she couldn’t even believe we were brothers!”

To his surprise, Helena’s eyes shone with delight.

“Well, you were special from the minute I saw you, I must confess,” said his mother. “Different from Peter, as the bright yellow sun from the moon.”

After a moment, she added, “You were the moon, darling; you were the cool, dark night with silver glowing through it.”

She looked at him intently, and he met her eyes.

“The face of an angel, Julian, and always, always understanding, without anyone having to explain. I never worried about Peter; he was a bookworm, keen and sharp. But you, you,” she found herself starting to cry, “by day you suffered; it was cruel; there was no place for you.

“But every night we used to talk; remember, darling? You had the soul of a confessor. Always absorbing, never judging, fading into darkness when you slept, so still and quiet. So still and quiet. Storing up your soul, I used to think.” She sniffed, collecting herself. “I suppose it is something that she saw the specialness in you.”

“And it’s about time, too, Mum,” said Julian, warmly. “Because I was never good at anything.”

“Going along with your eyes. You were good at that. Listening, in that way that you had.”

And even now, his face was following hers, responsive to every nuance.

“And you were loyal to the core.”

“But Mum, that has nothing to do with real life. Men have to be good at things. They have to be agile, and clever, and fierce, oh, you know; it’s so boring.

“And all I could ever do was make girls lie down.”

Helena turned her face away, as though she herself had been one of those poor girls, now doomed to wander unclaimed.

“So I thank my lucky stars,” he said, ignoring her, “that this has turned up. The Abbey Theatre is an amazing place. I want to act. I can do it, I think, and maybe do it very well.”

“No, darling,” she said, turning back with an efficient, matronly expression, “there are many things you can try when you’re older, when you might have more stamina. Now look here. Of course you can go and have a look at those theatre people. I’d be the last one to stop you having fun.”

Fun, he thought, and here I’m prepared to work hard for the first time in my life.

“Just a week,” he said, “it’s just preliminary. If I’m lucky, I’ll be back there.”

“Fine. But then you really ought to sit down and have a long talk with Archibald.”

“All talks with Baldy are long,” said Julian. This wouldn’t be the first one, either. Archibald wanted him to go into a firm and work his way up. That was the road of the bald and bored and portly.

“You’re lucky to have a step-father who, through sturdy, consistent effort, has lucrative connections to share. Things would be quite different if he were one of those artistes,” she said primly. “We’d be living on mealy potatoes, for one thing.”

Archibald looked like a potato, now that he thought about it.

“Can you imagine it?” said Julian. “Our Baldy as Prince Hal?”

Helena’s lips parted in the beginnings of a smile, a little girl going along with a mischievous brother, hoping (despite herself) for the picaresque and prankish. Then she collected herself.

“No, my dear, I can’t. But I can you, and it scares me. Actors play at being well-born, you see, wearing their fine clothes, and speaking in their fine accents, but they’re not like us. They’re just vagabonds, really. How on earth do they make a living? Just tell me that. Busking and begging, I should think, like raggle-taggle gypsies!”

“They work in a company, usually, like, like . . . ” he was about to recall his rogue father again, who (as she very well knew) had travelled in a troupe across the Western world, but concluded, surprising himself, “a company like Archibald’s. And they work hard, as well.”

Fanning had told him that performers were like athletes of the soul, their work exhausting. And that first of all, there would be class after class of exercise: fencing, elocution, dialects, dance. The rhythms of body and breath, refined to a disciplined practice.

(Julian didn’t know, but it did cross and linger through Helena’s mind, that he had been conceived, in scorching love, during his father’s provincial tour of
The Taming of the Shrew
.)

“Oh, really, they work hard like my husband Archibald.”

“Yes, really. They give you a role, and you play it. Then they give you another, and another. You get up and go where they tell you to go.”

Even now, at home with his dubious mother, he was starting to travel away.

“You eat, you drink, and sleep. You dream rich, dreamy dreams.
Everything you need is in your grasp: your mind and your body and heart and the page.”

“And then you pack it all up in a trunk, I’d imagine, all wrinkled and mildewy. And I can’t imagine they bathe too much, either, theatre people.”

She looked at him, coolly breathing twin jets of smoke through his fine nostrils.

“Don’t smoke those horrid French cigarettes, dear; I’m beginning to think it can’t be healthy.”

He took the last drag through to the butt; she watched his breath make orange fire and lazy, blue smoke.

“I suppose that huge, odd woman thought you quite dashing, then.”

“Fanning? Well, I guess. But she did make me audition, Mum. I had to read pages and pages of Shakespeare, Wilde and Shaw. I had to read Stoppard, Mum! It’s not as if it all went to her head or anything. She didn’t rave non-stop. She said my work showed ‘brilliance, mixed with nonsense and mistake.’”