Earthly Powers (23 page)

       "You're not used to it, Hortense," I said kindly. "Let's go—" I could not say home.

       "You. The Good hips Samarit hips. Dancing's the thing for. Let's hips go back to that place."

       "Bed for you, dear. And for me. It's been a long day for both of us."

       "Dance of the sheets, I see, hips. What do men do together?"

       "That's quite enough, Hortense. Drink your drink and we'll go." And then, as she hipsed and hipsed, "Nine sips and hold your breath."

       Domenico counted gravely nine crotchets in Italian. "Brava," when she emerged gasping.

       She filled her lungs in much the same rhythm as Sir Richard Curry Bart had. "Good. Gone. Hips. Damn." But she got up to go, and Domenico obeyed me too in mock meekness, making himself sib and coeval to Hortense, submissive to frowning elder brother, something incestuous in it. "Hips. Bloody thing."

       "Hortense, language."

       So we walked back down the hill, sea lights flashing on our left. Hips. She recovered with the three-story climb. My bedroom was between Domenico's and hers, and I lay awake for a time, listening for padding feet and whispers. But I heard nothing except Domenico's light snores and Hortense's crying "Mainan" once in her sleep and then sobbing.

CHAPTER 24

My old-fashioned inlocoparental fears for Hortense's honour were, you will say out of the future which is your enlightened present, absurd as well as hypocritical. They were also, if Domenico were to be considered the sole candidate or ingrate for battering at that honour, proved, temporarily at least I thought, needless by his receipt of a letter from Merlini in Milan. A letter I brought with his coffee the following morning, being up early to resume my moral watch. Idiot, considering that I proposed going off duty in the mufti of my own lust at the most sensitive time of the day. However. Merlini urgently wanted at least the vocal score of I Poveri Ricchi. It was proposed to open the autumn season at the Teatro alla Scala with the first two little operas of Puccini's Trittico. There had been serious consideration of making up the weight with Bayer's Die Puppenfee, last performed on February 9, 1893, after the prima rappresentazione of Verdi's Falstaff, but an examination of the score had confirmed the legend of its mediocrity. So, though there was no firm promise, here might be Domenico's big chance. The letter made Domenico fandango barechested about the apartment, kissing Hortense in joy and also, though with less conviction, myself. He remembered at one point that I was part-librettist and went into a mist-eyed routine about what dressing-gowned uncrapulous Hortense called Kunstbruderschaft. But soon it was all his dawn again.

       Hortense and I went with him to the station just before noon. He would be back, he had left most of his clothes, his luggage being mostly the full vocal and half-completed orchestral scores, he would send news. He kissed us both again, in the same degrees as before, before climbing aboard the stopping train to Ventimiglia. Extravagant Tuscan waves from him, prim Anglo-French ones from us. Hortense and I looked at each other when he had gone.

       She said, "It's all right, you know. I'm not a Henry James heroine, all eager to be seduced by the glamorous south."

       "I see. 'Which particular heroine were you thinking of?"

       "Oh, that one in the little book he gave you, Maisie or Tilly or somebody, he's a terrible old bore. The one with the long loving scrawl from your alas temporarily infirm but still fundamentally gay friend and master. Is it too early for lunch?"

       "Well, now," I said. "Today I have a luncheon appointment. Do you mind terribly? A young actor who happens to be on holiday here. Why don't you make yourself a snack and we'll have a big dinner tonight, the two of us, and talk about the future. Èze, perhaps. The place where Nietzsche was. He wrote part of Also Sprach Zarathustra there."

       "And that makes the food good, does it? Sister Gertrude was always going on about the übermensch. The Menschlein you met last night, is it? The willowy blond one you succoured?"

       "What's that word?"

       "Helped, assisted in his vomity torment, held the suffering head of."

       "I recognised him, you see. He was going to be in one of my things, but then he wasn't. I knew his father too," I added. "Sir James Curry. Dead now. He's a double orphan now, poor boy."

       "You needn't give me all that," she said. "I could see you positively dithering to take his willowy form in your arms. All right, get on with it. But please do stop being the big moral disapproving elder brother with me, that's all. Ugh." And then, "What do men do together?"

       "Pretty men I mean pretty well what men and women do together. Except there's an obvious difference. A matter of equipment, you might say."

       "And it's wrong, isn't it? It's what Sister Magda would call a sin against biology. It has to be wrong, it's not natural." We were walking down rue Grimaldi in March sunlight.

       "To some of us," I said, "the natural thing seems unnatural."

       "And that's obviously wrong, isn't it? Diseased, isn't it?"

       "So Michelangelo's diseased, is he?" I had said that before to her. No, of course, it had been our mother. But, of course, there was something diseased about the extravagant musculature of the David and the Sistine Last Judgment. "It's the way some of us are," I said as I'd undoubtedly said before, "the way we're made."

       "I don't believe it, nobody's made that way. God wouldn't allow it."

       "Ah, bringing in God again. Got over the God-hating, have we?"

       "You ought to see a psychowhatsit," she said.

       "I thought the Church didn't hold with amateur soul surgery."

       "You're not in the Church. Only the biologically pure can be in the Church. All right, forget it." We had arrived at the front door of the apartment house opposite the Société Marsellaise de Credit. On this door there was a smirking cowled monk's head knocker, perhaps a pun on the name of the principality. I gave her the keys.

       "I'll be back about three or four," I said. "You'll find cold ham and salad and things in that sort of cooler thing."

       She looked evilly at me and then sadly smiled, saying, right hand on my left cheek, "Poor old Kenny Penny."

       What happened that afternoon after lunch in the single bedroom of the Immoral or Amoral, as Sir Dick Bart indifferently called it, need not be described here. It was satisfying to deprived glands and, indeed, emotions. But the term love, despite the warning implicit in that filthy limerick of filthy Norman Douglas (whom Dick had once met and been drunkenly fingered by briefly and whom he called Abnorman Fuckless), threatened to mean more than merely lust and gratitude. I love you, my lovely and lovable boy, signifying desire to possess dog-in-the-mangerishly (Who is this man you're having dinner with? Who was that one you smiled at on the Boulevard des Moulins? Who are these people who invited you aboard their yacht? Yes yes, I know I'm taking my sister to Eze or Antibes or Cannes, but that is duty, not pleasure. I have to know where you are, and so on). Yet Dick was amusing as well as capriciously accommodating, though he made too many jokes about his name. Coming to the hotel on the third day of our liaison I found an enraging note awaiting me: "Off with the Pettimans. Pizzle in sauce piquante not on the menu today." On the fourth afternoon he pouted and said, "I expected a little gift, you know, something nice and useless, you know, from Cartier's." But, though I now had it to give, he would never demand money, like that little whore Val, for the private printing of his poems. He had plenty of money of his own and he did not write poems. He did not do anything. Some time in the early autumn, he said, he would cease his wandering over Europe and go back to the tomby house in Berkshire, there to consider putting the greenhouses in order and, my dear, start learning something, seriously, you know, really seriously, about orchids, lovely ballock-shaped things.

       Hortense, as I had half anticipated, developed her own routines. There were no real facilities for seabathing at Monaco, though the organisation that ran us was called the Société des Bains de Mer, so she took to travelling by train further up the coast, to Beaulieu or Menton, where there was sand as well as rocks, and lunching off a pan bagnat and a ballon blanc, playing tennis back in the principality in the late afternoon with some nice harmless English people (right out of the court, what, thought I was playing cricket haha) who had a bookish seventeen-year-old pimpled son, and dining with me in the evening, least I could do, sometimes a film show at the Prince after, Lon Chaney, Charlot.

       "Off to Barcelona," Dick said, showing me half-packed bags. "Call in at Avignon on the way." This was the tenth day, or eleventh.

       "You said not yet. You said not till April."

       "Change my shirt, can't I, gentleman's privilege. Nothing to stop you coming, is there? Rather have you as a travelling companion than that nasty toothy Boogie character."

       "Who is this? What is all this? What has been going on?"

       "Free as the pure and limpid, you always say. Unencumbered like a whatsit. My pens and paper and aha sacred talent and a monastic cell with a chained richardtionary. Live anywhere. So we go to Barcelona and Avignon on the way. Sons les ponts de. Chase each other round the papal palace."

       "But there's my sister, damn it."

       "Yes, always hearing about her, aren't we, believe when I see."

       "She exists all right, damn it. I can't leave her all alone."

       "Well, isn't there this wopera character you told me about? He'll look after her, won't he? Sing to her, very oily."

       "He's not here, thank God he's not. But you can't leave a girl of eighteen on her own."

       "Put it in, would he, as soon as look. Man, woman, dog, throw them all on a bed. All right, no hurry for Avignon. Today I have a fancy for a bit of rough. Nice, you know, the old port. Funny, just saw that sort of written on the wall, like meeny meeny tickle your arse. My father, you know, after dinner. The old port, very nice. Still, Nice could be nice, very."

       "What is all this? What are you after? Sailors? Fights? You want to be thrashed and flayed?"

       "Highly yellowdramatic. No, just see, look. Hurtling bottles knocking one's body off the table, got that the wrong way round, oh I don't know though. Torn clothes and filthy language. Make a change."

       "I think it's a rotten idea."

       "Oh, listen to the transmuter of experience into deathless words. Read that somewhere, they didn't mean you, dear. Miss Mouse, writing about what he won't do, living by poxy, proxy that is."

       "Has somebody been talking to you about me?"

       "Oh, all self self self, as ever. None of my friends has even heard of you, dear. Come, a cab to the gare and a puffpuff to Nice."

       "I have to be back by seven. Hortense expects me."

       "Hortense? So that's her name. Oh yes, of course, half frog, the two of you. Chance for you to show off with the lingo wherever we end up at. Rare argot. Speaks it like a native. Monsieur is veritably formidable. Come on then."

       So, despite my unease, we went. In the old port we drank cognac mildly in two cafés decorated with nets and anchors. It was the wrong time for whatever action Dick expected, it was the time for sleep after a heavy luncheon. Then, in Le Crampon, I was proved, to Dick's delight, wrong. There were roistering matelots, and they were not French but British. Tars, my dear. Their caps, thrust back to haloes, said HMS BELLEROPHON. The Bully Ruffian, out there in the harbour. Spring cruise. There was a horned gramophone on the counter, protected by a sour bulldoggy woman with frizzed ginger hair and bare mottled arms thick as thighs. Some of the tars danced. It was a wartime tune, from The Bing Boys: Notherlildrink notherlildrink notherlildrink wondousanyharm. It began to run down, to sailors' cries and groans. Naw lal droooonk. The patronne rewound muscularly. A Liverpool tar, brown as a nut, black hair knotty, then began to paw her, saying, "Summat nice, love. A bacon butty. No bub without grub." She hit out at him without anger. There was a strong hogo of sick and urine, and the flow from under the WC door showed the apparatus was blocked.

       "Ce monsieur-ci," Dick said, with governess clarity, "voudrait quelque chose à manger. Un petit sandwich, par exemple." The patronne gave out with a hoarse gobful of Niçois. "Just trying," Dick smiled to the sailor, "to get you that little something." A worn bald man in a filthy apron appeared yawning, showing gold and a caked tongue, just emerging from his siesta. "Deux absinthes," ordered Dick.

       "Water with mine," I said.

       "Nonsense. Sacrilege. Makes the heart grow fonder," he smirked at the sailor. He tossed it off. "There," he said. "Toss it off, that's the way."

       "We've all done it," the tar said, "but there's some as won't admit it. You two lads live here then?"

       A lone petty officer sat glazed at a soaked table. "Bloody did for the bastard," he said, several times.

       "Dancin with im," another matelot said, impelled by his partner's boisterous whirl toward us. His partner crashed to the wall, under a picture of Pierrot and Pierrette all sprinkled with artificial gold dust. Im was Dick.

       "Charmed," Dick said, and swallowed his third.

       "Toss off, that's right, when you can't get owt else."

       "Watch it, please," I said, still on my first.

       "Old fusspot." And, in the arms of the dancing matelot, a young man with a simian brow but honest eyes, he one-stepped willowily. The record had been turned over. If yoooo war the ownly garl in the waaaarld.

       "You two lads live here then?"

       "Did him proper, the bastard."

       I hate to remember, and why should I remember, when I cannot remember a miracle? Your distrust of me should have begun a long time ago. Dick, I cannot forget, insisted on mixing a modified Hangman's Blood in, pulled from its nail on the wall, a metal chamber pot with the head of a sale Boche painted inside, sale bouche screaming mutely to be muted in. Cognac, whisky from Indochina with slant-eyed bonny Scot on the etiquette, white rum, genuine nearblack Nelson's blood, gin, port, some of that sticky muck there like plumjuice, need a bottle of Guinness really, never mind, some of that pissy belch water will have to do.