The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (11 page)

‘Hello, Bradley.’

Owing to her absence at college and the demise of our Sundays I had not seen Julian for nearly a year, and before that indeed infrequently. I found her older, the face still sulky but with more of a brooding expression, suggestive of the occurrence of thought. She had a rather bad complexion, or perhaps it was just that Arnold’s ‘greasy’ look looked less healthy on a woman. She never used make-up. She had watery-blue eyes, not the flecked hazel-brown of her mother’s, nor did her secretive and dog-like face repeat Rachel’s large bland freckled features. Her thick undulating mane, which had no trace of red, was streakily fair with that dark blonde colour which is almost suggestive of green. Even at close quarters she still slightly resembled a boy, tallish, dour, who had just cut himself in a premature attempt to shave his first whisker. I did not mind the dourness. I dislike girls who are skittish.

‘Hello, Julian. Whatever are you doing?’

‘Have you been to see Daddy?’

‘Yes.’ I reflected that it was just as well Julian was out this evening.

‘Good. I thought you’d quarrelled.’

‘Certainly not!’

‘You don’t come any more.’

‘I do. Only you’re away.’

‘Not now. I’m doing teaching practice in London. What was happening when you left?’

‘Where? At home? Oh – nothing special – ’

‘They were quarrelling so I left the house. Have they calmed down?’

‘Yes, of course – ’

‘Don’t you think they quarrel more than they used to?’

‘No, I – How smart you are, Julian. Quite a dandy.’

‘I’m so glad you’ve come, I was just thinking about you. I wanted to ask you something, I was going to write – ’

‘Julian, what are you doing, with all that paper you’re scattering ?’

‘It’s an exorcism. These are love letters.’

‘Love letters?’

‘From my ex-boy-friend.’

I remembered that Arnold had mentioned rather unenthusiastically a ‘hairy swain’, an art student or something.

‘Have you parted company?’

‘Yes. I’ve torn them into the smallest possible pieces. When I’ve got rid of them all I’ll be free. Here goes the last, I think.’

Taking from her neck the receptacle rather like a nose-bag which had contained the dismembered missives she turned it inside out. A few more white petals flew with the passing wind and were gone.

‘But what were you saying, you were chanting something, a spell or such.’

‘ “Oscar Belling”.’

‘What?’

‘That was his name. Look, I’m using the past tense! It’s all over!’

‘Did you abandon him or did he – ?’

‘I’d rather not talk about it. Bradley, I wanted to ask you something.’

It was quite dark now, a bluish night gauzed over by the yellow street lamps, and reminding me irrelevantly of Rachel’s reddish golden hair adhering to the front of Francis’s shabby blue suit. We walked slowly along the street.

‘Look, Bradley, it’s this. I’ve decided to be a writer.’

My heart sank. ‘That’s fine.’

‘And I want you to help me.’

‘It’s not easy to help someone to be a writer, it may not even be possible.’

‘The thing is, I don’t want to be a writer like Daddy, I want to be a writer like you.’

My heart warmed to the girl. But my answer had to be ironical. ‘My dear Julian, don’t emulate me! I constantly try and hardly ever succeed!’

‘That’s just it. Daddy writes too much, don’t you think? He hardly ever revises. He writes something, then he “gets rid of it” by publishing it, I’ve heard him actually say that, and then he writes something else. He’s always in such a hurry, it’s neurotic. I see no point in being an artist unless you try all the time to be perfect.’

I wondered if these were the views of the late Oscar Belling. ‘It’s a long hard road, Julian, if that’s what you believe.’

‘Well, it’s what you believe, and I admire you for it, I’ve always admired
you
, Bradley. But the point is this, will you teach me?’

My heart sank again. ‘What do you mean, Julian?’

‘Two things really. I’ve been thinking about it. I know I’m not educated and I know I’m immature. And this teachers’ training place is hopeless. I want you to give me a reading list. All the
great
books I ought to read, but only the great ones and the
hard
ones. I don’t want to waste my time with small stuff. I haven’t
got
much time left now. And I’ll read the books and we could discuss them. You could give me sort of tutorials on them. And then, the second thing, I’d like to write things for you, short stories perhaps, or anything you felt I
should
write, and you’d criticize what I’d written. You see, I want to be really taken in hand. I think one should pay so much attention to technique, don’t you? Like learning to draw before you paint. Do please say you’ll take me on. It needn’t take much of your time, not more than a couple of hours or so in a week, and it would absolutely change my life.’

I knew of course that it was just a matter of choosing a way of getting out of this gracefully. Julian was already grieving over the wasted years and regretting that she had not much time left. My grief and my regret were a rather different matter. I could not spare her a couple of hours a week. How dare she ask for my precious hours? In any case, the child’s suggestion appalled and embarrassed me. It was not just the display of youthful insensibility. It was the sadly misplaced nature of her ambition. There was little doubt that Julian’s fate was to be typist, teacher, housewife, without starring in any role.

I said, ‘I think it’s a very good idea and of course I’d like to help, and I do so agree with you about technique – Only just now I’m going to be abroad for a while.’

‘Oh, where? I could visit you. I’m quite free now because my school has measles.’

‘I shall be travelling.’

‘But, Bradley, please, couldn’t you just start me off before you go? Then we could have something to discuss when you come back. Please at least send me a book list, and I’ll read the books and have a story written too by the time you come home again. Please. I want you to be my tutor. You’re the only sort of possible real teacher in my life.’

‘Well, all right, I might think about some books for you. But I’m no creative-writing guru, I can’t give time to – What sort of books do you mean, anyway? Like the
Iliad,
the
Divine Comedy
, or like
Sons
and
Lovers, Mrs
Dalloway
– ’

‘Oh
Iliad, Divine Comedy
, please. That’s marvellous! That’s just it ! The big stuff!’

‘And you don’t mind poetry, prose – ?’

‘Oh, no, not poetry. I can’t read poetry very well. I’m keeping poetry for later on.’

‘The
Iliad
and the Divine
Comedy
are poems.’

‘Well, yes, of course they are, but I’d be reading them in a prose translation.’

‘So that disposes of that difficulty.’

‘You will write to me then, Bradley? I’m so terribly grateful. I’ll say good-bye to you here because I must look in this shop.’

We had stopped rather abruptly a little short of the station outside the illuminated window of a shoe shop. High summer boots of various colours made out of a sort of lace occupied the front of the window. Slightly put out by the brusqueness of my dismissal I could not think of anything suitable to say. I saluted vaguely and said ‘Ta-ta’, an expression which I do not think I have ever used before or since.

‘Ta-ta,’ said Julian, as if this were a sort of code. Then she turned to face the lighted window and began examining the boots.

I crossed the road and reached the station entrance and looked back. She was leaning forward now with her hands on her knees, her thick hair and her brow and nose goldened by the bright light. I thought how aptly some painter, not Mr Belling, could have used her as a model for an allegory of Vanity. I watched, as one might watch a fox, for some minutes, but she did not go away or even move.

 

 

 

My dear Arnold
, I wrote.

It was the following morning, and I was sitting at the little marquetry table in my sitting-room. I have not described this important room adequately yet. It has a powdery faded brooding inward quality, strongly smelling, perhaps literally, of the past. (Not dry rot so much as something like face powder.) It was also rather stubby, being truncated by the wall of my bedroom, which curtailed its former spread, so that the green panelling aforementioned clothed only three sides of the room. This false proportion sometimes made it feel, especially at night, as if it were part of a ship, or perhaps a first class railway carriage of the sort one might have found upon the Trans-Siberian railway about 1910. The round marquetry table stood in the centre. (Often this had a potted plant upon it, but I had just given away the current incumbent to the laundry lady.) Against the walls variously: a tiny velvet armchair with what Hartbourne, who was too stout to sit in it, called ‘frilly drawers’; two frail-legged lyreback chairs (Victorian copies) with
petit-point
embroidery seats, various (one with a sailing swan, the other with tiger lilies); a tall but rather narrow mahogany bureau bookcase (most of my books live on simple shelves in the bedroom); a red, black and gold lacquered display cabinet in the Chinese style, Victorian; a mahogany night-table with tray top, badly stained, possibly eighteenth century; a satinwood Pembroke table, also stained; a walnut hanging corner cupboard with curved doors. Then: drawn up against the table with me sitting on it, a curvaceous ‘conversation chair’, with upholstered arms and a greasy balding seat of red velvet. On the floor, a carpet with large amber roses on a black ground. Before the fireplace, a black woolly rug simulating a bear. Upon it a blowsy chintz armchair (Hartbourne size, usually known as ‘his’ chair) needing a new cover. The wide-shelved chimney piece was made of a dark slatey blue-grey marble, and the cave of the grate beneath was framed by a design of black cast-iron rose garlands, complete with veined leaves and thorns. Pictures, all tiny, hung mainly upon the ‘false’ wall, since I could not bring myself to pierce the wood, and the existing hooks upon the panelling were too high for my taste. Small oils these were, in thick gilt frames, of little girls with cats, little boys with dogs, cats upon cushions, flowers, the innocent heart-warming trivia of our strong and sentimental forebears. There were two little elegant northern beach scenes, and, in an oval frame, an eighteenth-century drawing of a girl with loose hair, waiting. Upon the chimney piece and in the red, black and gold lacquered display cabinet stood the little items, china cups and figures, snuff boxes, ivories, small oriental bronzes, modest stuff, some of which I may describe later since two at least of these objects play a role in the story.

Earlier that morning Hartbourne had telephoned. Unaware that I was about to depart, he had suggested luncheon. We had been long accustomed to lunch together when I was at the office, and had continued this custom during my retirement. I was at that moment still undecided about whether or not to delay my departure in order to consolidate my peace with the Baffins on Sunday. I gave Hartbourne an evasive reply, saying I would ring back, but in fact his call prompted me to decide. I resolved to go. If I stayed until Sunday I would be caught back into the idle casual pattern of my London life, of whose ordinariness poor Hartbourne was a symbol. This was everything that I wanted to be done with, the relaxed banality of life without goals. And I was upset to find how really reluctant I was to leave my little flat. It was as if I was almost frightened. Spasms of prophetic home-sickness pierced me as I rearranged the china and dusted it with my handkerchief, obsessive visions of burglaries and desecrations. After a dream on the previous night I had hidden several of the more valuable things: hence the need to rearrange the others. The stupid thought that they would stand here silently on guard during my absence almost brought tears into my eyes. Exasperated with myself I decided to leave later that morning, catching an earlier train than the one I had aimed at yesterday.

Yes, it was time to move. I had felt, during recent months, sometimes boredom, sometimes despair, as I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a
nouvelle
, now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art. The trouble was that the dark blaze, whose absence I had deplored in Arnold’s work, was absent here as well. I could not fire and fuse these thoughts, these people, into a whole thing. I wanted to produce a sort of statement which might be called my philosophy. But I also wanted to embody this in a story, perhaps in an allegory, something with a form as pliant and as hard as my cast-iron garland of roses. But I could not do it. My people were shadows, my thoughts were epigrams. However I felt, as we artists can feel, the proximity of enlightenment. And I was sure that if I went away now into loneliness, right away from the associations of tedium and failure, I would soon be rewarded. So it was in this mood that I decided to set forth, leaving my darling burrow for a countryside which I had never visited, and a cottage which I had never seen.

However it was necessary first to settle certain things by letter. I am, I must confess, an obsessive and superstitious letter-writer. When I am troubled I will write any long letter rather than make a telephone call. This is perhaps because I invest letters with magical power. To desiderate something in a letter is, I often irrationally feel, tantamount to bringing it about. A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. (And, it must be admitted, of passing the buck.) It is a way of bidding time to stop. I decided that it was quite unnecessary to visit the Baffins on Sunday. I could achieve all that I wanted by a letter. So I wrote: