A Man Over Forty (36 page)

He shouted an order through an open window, and said, ‘We'll have some wine, don't you think? – My word, Guy, how you've grown! – Some of these monasteries make excellent wine. Better wine than you get in the rest of Greece. Oh, much better! And we need it, especially in winter. After prayers at midnight, prayers at four o'clock in the morning – we do a lot of praying, you know. There's great need for it. Oh, great need, with the world getting worse and worse all the time – and after praying really hard on a cold winter morning, well, a glass of good wine is very welcome, I assure you.'

‘I've come here as a visitor,' said Balintore, ‘but it's my hope to remain. To remain—'

‘As one of us, you mean? How splendid, how perfectly splendid! We need recruits, you know, we're getting rather thin on the ground, and I hope you're going to set a trend. I hope your example will encourage more Englishmen to come here. Only the other day I was saying to our librarian – I'm on very good terms with the librarian – I was saying “What we really need is a dozen or two good, hearty, healthy young Englishmen” – and bless my soul, Guy's letter about you came two days later. I said to the librarian, “God's got long ears, hasn't he?” – and the old boy laughed like anything. He's got very long ears himself.'

He swigged off his wine, clapped the brown table-top, and laughed full-mouthed, above his jutting beard. His light-blue,
blazing eyes flashed from one to another, and then, jumping up, he shouted incomprehensibly to two elderly monks – clad like himself, but, with black beards, all of one colour – who, under their umbrellas, were walking slowly on the white dusty road.

‘I've been staying with them for the last couple of days,' he said, ‘at their monastery, which is called Xeropotamou. It isn't far from here. That's where our new recruit and I will sleep tonight. And tomorrow we'll set off for Great Lavra, right down at the tip of the peninsula; or not far from it. And how jolly it will be to have someone to talk to who can talk English! – Though you'll have to learn Greek as quick as you can, of course.'

An hour later, Palladis and Ricci went back to the boat. Balintore had said goodbye to them with a courteous acknowledgement of their help and kindness to him, but without visible emotion; and when they looked back they saw him, already forgetful of them, deep in animated conversation with Brother Henry.

‘Have you got a feeling,' said Ricci, ‘that all we've done is just what we had to do?'

‘I'm not superstitious,' said Palladis, ‘but sometimes, I admit, it does seem that a pattern of events finds its own conclusion.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Now that you ask me, I'm not very sure.'

‘I'll be thankful when we get to sea again,' said Ricci. ‘No disrespect to your uncle, but those monks send shivers down my back.'

They went aboard, and as the caique drew away from the pier, fishermen on the shore, mending their nets, looked up with brief curiosity about an unknown boat. From his seat under the white tavern wall Brother Henry stood up and waved goodbye, but Balintore, his elbows on the table, did not move.

Under The bright canopy of spring London looked gay and charming when, towards the end of May in the following year, Palladis left his mother's house in Mount Street and walked towards Piccadilly. He looked at his watch, and saw that he was going to be much too early for his appointment with Charles Mulligan in Albany. He was annoyed with himself for this betrayal of his feelings. A lot depended on what Mulligan had to say, but it was undignified – it was humiliating – to be anxious about his reception: to be eager for Mulligan's approval. He tried to banish from his mind all thought of the approaching interview, and walking briskly through the Green Park crossed over into St James's Park. For several minutes he stood on the bridge and looked gravely, but without much interest, at the ducks.

He turned north again, and as he passed St James's Palace it seemed to him that the sentries were smaller and less formidable than they used to be. The windows of the clubs in St James's Street shone cheerfully in the sun, but no longer looked interesting nor woke – as they had when he was younger – a curiosity about what men talked of, in those guarded rooms, and how the patterns of conversation differed between this side of the street and that. Today there was no difference at all, and all looked dull.

But this is absurd, this state of mind, he thought. I know what is wrong with me – I am depressed by anxiety – and I can do nothing about it. Nothing is of any interest to me except my interview with Mulligan, and what he's going to say. What a harrowing existence one is condemned to, for writing a book!

He looked at his watch again, and saw that he was still too early. He turned west and went into the Ritz, where he drank a large brandy and ginger ale. It had no flavour that he could discern, and as he crossed to the north side of Piccadilly he was aware of a gathering sense of gloom. The fatal gift of drink, he thought, is that it prepares one for the worst.

He passed Burlington House with a shudder. Another of
those exhibitions! Art should be a private thing, the exposure of heart and mind to the sympathy of heart and mind: an act of devotion and passionate response to a passionate need. This flaunting display was a symbol of the modern world and its vulgarity: everything that was made was made to be sold, and man's aspiring mind aspired only to salesmanship.

And books – why, books were worse than pictures: even pictures in Burlington House. For books demanded ten thousand readers, while a picture looked only for a single lover. Oh, how depraved and damnable a thing it was to write a book, and expect a publisher's approval, and hope for general favour! The lowness, the squalor of such a hope…

He turned into the courtyard of Albany with the decision in his mind to say to Mulligan, ‘Give me back my manuscript. I've changed my mind, and I don't want you – neither you nor anyone – to publish it.'

The top-hatted porter greeted him and said, ‘It's a long time since we've seen you, Mr Palladis. And how's Mr Balintore getting on?'

‘He's well,' said Palladis. ‘He's very well indeed. But he won't be coming here again.'

‘No,' said the porter, ‘I gathered as much when I heard hewas selling his lease. And we were very sorry to hear he'd sold it.'

‘Yes,' said Palla dis, ‘it's a break – you could call it a painful fracture – in an old association.'

‘I wouldn't say a word against Albany or the gendemen who live here,' said the porter, ‘but we do miss a gendeman like Mr Balintore, who brought a spice of variety to the place – well, sir, you know what I mean, and you know where Mr Mulligan lives, don't you?'

While working for Balintore he had often met Mulligan: met him on the Rope Walk, stopped to speak to him, and occasionally, in Mulligan's chambers or Balintore's, had drunk a glass of sherry with him. But they had never been on terms of friendship, for Mulligan, though an admirable publisher – a publisher respected by authors and enriched by success – was a dry, unapproachable man who seemed to exhibit and emphasize an impersonal quality by dressing always in the formality
of short black coat, black Homburg hat, and striped trousers. No one had ever seen him clad otherwise, and it was rumoured that his pyjamas were tailored with equal severity. He came from the north of England, where his father had made a fortune during the war; and with money behind him, and intellect and ambition to use it, he had become within a dozen years a person of considerable importance in the literary world.

Palladis turned left off the Rope Walk, past a tub of clipped laurel, and climbed the shallow steps to Mulligan's chambers.

Mulligan opened the door, and with a dry smile parting his thin lips, extended a dry, bony hand in greeting. Formality continued with the offer of a glass of dry sherry, and Mulligan said, ‘Well, let us not waste time. I asked you to come here, rather than to my office, because private walls are more appropriate for what we have to discuss.

‘I have read your manuscript, and I have no hesitation in saying that you have written a remarkable story with grace and skill, with enviable humour and steadily increasing sense increasing sense and a gathering momentum – of its inherent drama. But I see no possibility of publishing it.'

Palladis' reluctance to face the vulgarity of authorship – his decision to withdraw his manuscript – vanished, or was rescinded, immediately. Now he was prepared to fight for his work, and warmly he said, ‘If it's as good as you say it is – and I'm entirely of your opinion – then it must be published. There may be some difficulties, more apparent than real—'

‘To me,' said Mulligan, ‘they are both apparent and real. You have written what purports to be a biography of Edward Balintore—'

‘A biography that is uncommonly true to fact.'

‘Which makes it the more dangerous. Balintore was known to millions of people – he was one of the best-known men in the country – and to accuse such a man of murder—'

‘He admitted it.'

‘From a legal point of view, that's of no importance. He could take me to court, sue me for publishing a libel, and be awarded enormous damages.'

‘But he won't.'

‘What makes you so sure?'

‘He has become a monk in a monastery on Mount Athos. He has taken vows—'

‘Vows can be broken, monks can run away from their monastery.'

‘He won't,' said Palladis again.

‘What guarantee can you offer?'

‘He could be charged with murder.'

‘On no evidence but his own alleged confession, which he could deny?'

‘You haven't read the book carefully enough. When Balintore admitted that he had murdered the woman who was his adoptive mother, he was releasing a fact which he had buried in the hinterland of his mind; where – because it was buried alive – it was slowly driving him mad. He couldn't deny the murder without reburying the truth, and losing his sanity.'

‘I'm not sure that I agree with you. Your argument—'

‘You haven't heard it all. What you don't understand is that on Mount Athos Balintore found what he was looking for. He was looking for sanctuary, and having found it, he's happy. And that's what will keep him in his monastery. He won't leave it.'

‘He doesn't seem to have been a religious man. Certainly not in any conventional way.'

‘He was brought up in a church-going Scotch household, and in his ordinary conversation you could hear, again and again, the vestiges of that training. He stopped going to church after he left home – he never went while I knew him – but he couldn't get God out of his mind.'

‘And now—'

‘They have a great deal of freedom in an idiorrhythmic monastery, but they spend a lot of time in prayer, so he's able to let an old, shadowy, but persistent faith come out into the open.'

‘Forgive me if I'm being impertinent,' said Mulligan, ‘but you yourself – do you accept, or respect, a religious faith?'

‘I have a quality,' said Palladis, ‘about which I've been very complacent since I discovered, on Keat's authority, that I share it with him and Shakespeare. He called it Negative
Capability, and explained it as a capacity to be ”in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. I have always gladly acknowledged the mystery of life, and never teased myself by looking for explanations which can't be found.'

‘Very interesting,' said Mulligan; but without any show of interest. ‘And now, to come back to the matter of this manuscript—'

‘You have changed your mind?'

‘Not at all. When I first read it – and I have read it twice I knew it was a book I should like to publish. A book I should be proud to publish. It tells an astonishing story about a man who was widely known, it's uncommonly well written – if you'll allow me to say so – and it would, if it were published, be immensely popular. It would make a great deal of money, and every publisher needs books which will give him a profit. You call it
A Man of our Time—'

‘He is, isn't he? Not only because of the peculiar profession he chose, but because – and this comes out clearly in the story – because in our times the impostor or fraud isn't a man who claims to have done extraordinary things when in reality he's done little or nothing; but a man who has done extraordinary things, and pretends to have done less. We have lived in a time when experience has become too lavish for belief; and therefore too lavish to be talked about.'

‘That may be so,' said Mulligan, ‘I, however, am still thinking of the risk involved in publishing your book – the legal risk – and it has occurred to me that if you are so sure that Balintore will take no exception to what you have written about him – to many things which to me seem actionable, quite apart from the charge of murder – if, as I say, you are so confident, then you can have no objection to signing a clause, additional to that in our normal contract, in which you specifically accept full responsibility should Balintore raise an action against us.'

‘Oh, I'll do that,' said Palladis. ‘Willingly.'

‘You're quite sure that you know what I mean?'

‘You mean that if Balintore calls for a dirty tune, I'll have to pay the piper.'

‘That, I suppose, is what I have in mind.'

‘I agree to that without hesitation. And you, for your part, will do your utmost to see that the book has the success – the commercial success – which, as we're both agreed, it deserves?'

‘I do that for all the books I publish.'

‘But not all your books are likely to sell – shall we say, 50,000 copies?'

‘I wish they would.'

‘But mine will, won't it?'