Earthly Powers (37 page)

       Mother tongue. It sounded curiously and bitchily physical in Val's mouth. Mother putting out her tongue for a purpose for some reason obscene. "My father tongue," I corrected. "My mother was French." And then, the mention of my mother taking rue back to myself wiping tears for Val and catching a train for Battle. "I take it you're not suggesting—"

       "I am suggesting nothing. I am certainly not suggesting a ménage, if that's what you had in your mind. I've become quite the little Don Giovanni, you know, tikin moi fan where ah fahnds it as dear old terrible Ruddy Kipling says. Oh, look, he's actually done it. I never thought he would."

       I could not at first believe my eyes. There wheeled into this club a ridiculously young archbishop in full archiepiscopal robes, ring agleam smirkingly held out for kissing, genuine crosier in hand. The pianist began to play "Whiter Than the Whitewash on the Wall." The club members were admiring and abusive but not astonished. They campily genuflected and osculated. Lovely material. Must have cost a fortune. Oh, do hear my confession. What do we call you?

       "Autocephalous," Val explained. "No, cephalous not syphilis. You've heard of autocephalous churches, surely you have. Anybody can start one, apparently. Consequence of our break with Rome, or something." The Rome grasseyé, petulant, very nasal. I said, marvelling at the young mock prelate, crosier in one hand, bottle of Bass's barley wine in the other, no glass, that I just could not, that I had never seen, that the world was full of surprises. "Oh, it is, dear. And don't think that he doesn't believe, because he does. The trouble is that anybody who believes can't wait till he's got the finery, not theatrical, oh no, the real thing, and then he's the head of his own church, the tail too, and no body in the middle. There's talk of an autocephalous ecclesiastical conference in Whitby I think it is."

       "I must send you something," I said grimly. "A rewrite of part of the Book of Genesis I did. His Grace there might like it."

       "If it's mockery," Val said with severity, "he won't. He's very devout. He'd like to convert all these naughty boys here to what he calls the way, the truth, the life. God is not mocked. As a man rose, so shall he seep."

       The archbishop raised his bottle of Bass's barley wine like a little trumpetfor some reason it seemed right, drinking straight from that bottle with its red triangle on the label; a glass would have been vulgarly secular—and the pianist, fresh cigarette apuff, began to play "Abide with Me." We cannot dance to that, Cyril. Play "Felix" again.

       Felix Kept on walking kept on walking still With his hands behind him You will always find him A man in full Scots day dress came in, the tartan Stuart. He brought three sailors with him, already drunk. Oh my God, sailors. They were all from Liverpool and they responded complicatedly to the sight of a high prelate in full robes drinking from a bottle at the bar. One of them, full of guilt at something, tried to get out again; another said fucking mockery I'll do the bastard. The archbishop, prepared for the buff etings of the world, raised his crosier in threat. His bottle finished, he lifted two fingers in general benediction, then went out. Fucking mockery. He's fucking real, Curly, there's no fucking law that says he can't have a jar. The three sailors, trying to focus, gazed around and saw me with a white bow tie on. Fucking posh, all got up in his fucking soup and fish.

       I said, "It's been nice seeing you again, Val. Now I really must go. I have a little rewriting to do." My intention had been to enjoy making Val snivel somewhat over his eight-year-old, or nearly, treachery. It was clear he would not snivel. "Kipling, no less, found fault with some of my Indian allusions."

       "Again?" And he looked at me coldly over his light ale.

       "What do you mean, again?"

       "That was your excuse for getting away last night, according to that little bitch Estella."

       "Whom you alleged you did not know."

       "Oh, she deserves it, old thing, real little campfollower, all artiness and no brains, no art, no heart either for that matter. I read her some Felicia Dorothea Hemans and said it was Tom Eliot, oh how maaaaaahvelous, stupid cow. Which reminds me that your brother can be very witty. He took that line of Landor's, you know, Nature I loved and next to Nature Art, and Art, you know, said Tommy, was the butcher's boy. It's the way he does it, timing. He is, as you ought to know, a real little saint."

       "Tom?"

       "There was this Estella, a real drab, being given syph and gon and gleet by Augustus John, and Tommy has her living with him in that place of his in Earl's Court and going to a doctor, nothing wrong with her actually but there might well have been, and he never touches her, you know. Naturally chaste. Very generous, your Tommy or Tom. Don't like Tom much. We all know what a torn is, don't we? All right, off you go then, you've not changed much, I was going to give you a copy of my poems, signed here arid now in a fine flowing hand, but I won't. Ah, trouble."

       The sailors were causing it. The man in the Stuart tartan kilt was trying to control them. He did not seem to be a Scot. He had a Levantine accent: You stob dad boyce you my guists rimimber. Well you stop that bastard saying what he just said about me having a fucking red nose will you I won't have no fucker touching my fucking nose without he's given permission. Paul or Pauli balls came from behind the bar to protect his cottage piano, which two of the tars proposed turning on its side. Glass was being crunched into the coconut matting. Most of the club members looked on with shining eyes, trouble their element. "We'll have the police here soon," Val said happily. "They're always watching. They had poor old Paulkins on running a disorderly house once, not here, somewhere off the Edgware Road, innocent as the day, just like this. Always on the move."

       "Talking about moving," I said, getting up, light ale unfinished. Val grasped my coatbelt and pulled me down again. Indeed, there was no clear exit at the moment. Pauliballs had the two piano-moving tars well held by their bunchedup sailor collars (intended originally, of course, to protect the jacket under from the tarry pigtail) and was jolting them to the door, telling the kilted Levantine that he could consider his membership void. Fuck fuck you fucking. The other sailor had released a mealy coil of vomit onto the piano keyboard. The pianist and his cigarette-feeder got him for that. Dirty thing.

       "Yes, out of course when there's trouble," Val said. "No Ballad of Reading Gaol for you, old thing. Respected author in full evening dress has embarrassing brush with the sex police. Toomey taken with filthy tars. Can't have that, can we, dear?"

       "Got it in for me, haven't you?" I said. "You walk out and seek the big meat, no time for a struggling writer, and the little treacherous bitch bitches. Not that I care, of course."

       "Of course. Best of both worlds, isn't it, dear? You didn't join in the petition, 2 oh no. Five hundred names, but not yours. You scuttled ratlike, but you wouldn't waft the precious clean Toomey name across the Channel, oh no."

       "What's this? I don't know anything about—"

       "Oh, come oft it. Copper in disguise as a rent and poor innocent Kevin takes him home and does nothing except give him a drink and the other bastard bursts in. Oh, you know it, who doesn't? The gloating of the beefy bulldog clean-living popular press. The Times too, hypocrites. You got a letter, don't deny it."

       "I," I said, "get a lot of letters. I don't read them all."

       "How's it all going to be changed? You scuttled, shitting your trousers, we know all about it. Anyway, she's in Australia now."

       "That was a long time ago. That was during the war. Besides, we all have to look after ourselves. You were quick enough to do that, leaving me heartbroken—2'

       Val did a comic doghowl. Then, in a schoolmistressly way, he said, "We have to look after each other. Unless, of course, we're prosperous novelists in exile in places where the laws aren't quite so draconian. There have to be some real martyrs, not put-up ones like poor little Kevin Rattigan with the stammer and the cough. A martyr is a witness."

       "I'm working over there." I didn't like the quaver of apology but I couldn't control it. "I've written this thing. The first time ever in English fiction—"

       "Published in Paris, of course. In Arsehole International or some other coterie rag. Under a pseudonym, of course."

       "That's not fair."

       "Oh, you smell. Go on, off then. Tell the coppers watching across the street about the filth of everybody here. Boys dancing together, constable. I'd made a mistake, officer, I thought it was somewhere different. Just come from bowing to royalty, sergeant. Distinguished playwright. Look into it, duty to the clean-living public. Still stands thine ancient sacrifice. Oh, go on, get out."

CHAPTER 33

I was not the only one moving east. There was Carlo too, Monsignor Cam panati, roving commissioner for the faith on heathen soil. But his east would be more comprehensive than mine. I was limiting myself to the Malay Archipelago 2 and bits, perhaps, of Polynesia. India was too much, and Kipling had, for the moment, said all that was necessary, but no, there was Morgan Forster or would be. I was to make money out of my trip, while Carlo was, among other things, to explain to the far-flung priests and nuns why no money was available in the Vatican coffers for the further propagation of the faith. Schools, hospitals and so on. Penny catechisms. While dandling his nephew, and mine, on his fat knee, he told me with exasperation of the state of the Vatican finances, while I dandled my and his niece on my bony one. This was in the apartment of Domenico and Hortense. Hortense was reading André Gide or some similar nonsense, and Domenico, scoring paper on piano music stand and pencil like cutlass in teeth, played over and over the same three bars of his slow movement. It was like strong blue peppermint.

       "Benedict was bad enough," Carlo said in French (why French? Probably because we were in Paris), "but Pius is the world's great idiot in matters of money. I will tell you." He told off point after point on the child's downy head, ear to ear, occiput to brow, while the child gazed like a drunk at the wonder of its own fingers. "The day after he took office he gave—I will put it in American dollars—$26,000 to the German cardinals because they suffered from the devaluation of the mark. Then he handed over $62,500 to that French sanatorium. Then $156,250 to the Russians. Then $9,375 to the poor of Rome, who probably got drunk on it. Then $50,000 to the victims of that fire in Smyrna—"

       "How do you remember these figures? So exactly, I mean."

       He stared at me as if I was mad. "Because those are the sums he gave away. Every centesjmo counts. Then another $81,250 for the Germans, $21,875 to the Viennese, $20,000 for the Japanese earthquake. Something will have to be done. That madman must be forced to see sense."

       "Pius?"

       "No no no no no." He was irritable today, much to do, off to Rome before off east, the family news not good. He jolted little John or Gianni and the child frowned briefly as at the memory of something similar in the womb. "The brat of the atheistical blacksmith. Benito after Benito Ju‡rez, Amilcare after Amilcare Cipriani, Andrea after Andrea Costa. A revolutionary, an anarchist and a socialist. The three devils within." Out of hindsight I am able to see the whole Lateran business shaping behind Carlo's inkblack eyes. "The Godless animal must be put to work like the ox he is. Good out of evil." He turned to Domenico, whose fine teeth gripped his pencil to snapping while he tested, ear down like a mechanic's to a car engine, the oxymoronic sonority his haired fingers held. "Stop that one moment," Carlo cried, still in French. Domenico cut the chord off, but its harmonics lingered like the memory of a toothache. "Did you too receive a letter from Mother?"

       "No, no letter. You know it is only to you she writes."

       "Well, there is not much more time, she says."

       "Povero babbo."

       "You say poor, but he has been virtually dead for ten years and more. When he is truly dead his soul will go to purgatory and then be with God. Now his soul is howling silently for release along the uninhabited corridors of his brain." That was well put, perhaps something Carlo was getting ready for a tactless panegyric. "You had better get over there so as to be present at the end and to make all the funerary arrangements."

       "I am the youngest. It should be Raffaele. I am not a priest. It should be you."

       "By the time Raffaele arrived it would be all over. He cannot leave his work to bite his nails and wait. For me I must be on the train to Rome tonight and in Tunis in one week." He looked sternly at me and said, "Kuala Lumpur?"

       "No, that's not anywhere near Tunis. It's in the Federated Malay States."

       "I know I know. Will you be in Kuala Lumpur?"

       "I presume so. Quite when I have no idea at present. I have drawn up no timetable. I am to wander, observe, meditate, write as the spirit moves."

       "The spirit." Carlo shrugged away certain theological implications and gave little Johnny another jolt. "I," he said, "will be celebrating Christmas midnight mass in the Church of Saint Francis Xavier in Kuala Lumpur. A promise made to Father Chang."

       "That's a fair way ahead." Today was August 4, tenth anniversary of the start of the Great War. Work had delayed my setting off, but it would not be long now. London, then Southampton, the P and O 20,000-ton passenger ship SS Cathay first class, Gibraltar, Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore. "Who," and also Hong Kong for whoever wanted it, "is Father Chang?"

       "His first name is Anselm. He was formerly Chang Li Po. I met him in Rome. He is a fine bridge player. He conducts the bridge column in, I think it is called, The Straits Times. Under the pseudonym Philip le Bel. The Grand Inquisitor of France." He looked at me as if I, an indifferent player, ought to be holily tortured. "So," he said, "we shall meet. A tropical Christmas," in English.