The Finishing Touch

In a history of fictions inspired by the lives of famous spies, no novel would lie more deeply in the footnotes than Brigid Brophy’s
The Finishing Touch
. This ‘buried treasure’ is no sort of spy thriller. The author liked to call it ‘a lesbian fantasy’. Its setting is a French finishing school for the daughters of the very rich, a hothouse of such exquisite heiresses as Regina Outre-Mer, whose mauve blotting paper reveals her most passionate devotions; Fraise du Bois, whose addictions leave her
droguée
in the asparagus bed from dawn to dusk; and a hereditary abbess, her Poggibonsian bottom ‘buttoned down the back; so suggestive of the girl’.

The novel’s plot, containing nothing of cold wars, or any wars, concerns only the arrival at the school (and hasty departure) of an English princess, her royal breast stung by a nasty local wasp, her headmistress’s oral remedy caught by a contraband camera.

Brigid Brophy’s work attracted much thoughtful criticism in its day, but in 1963, no one saw the slightest connection between
The Finishing Touch
and the Blunt affair, Britain’s greatest post-war spy scandal. Eventually came the revelation that Miss Antonia Mount, the fictional
educationaliste
with the lifelong difficulty in deciding between yellow and green Chartreuse, had been inspired by Sir Anthony Blunt, curator of paintings for the Queen and the ‘Fourth Man’ of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.

On the surface of the novel lay a few clues: a feminised Christian name and a fondness for sex with British sailors shared by both the real and imagined figures. Beneath Brophy’s sparkling and perfumed prose lay deeper rococo corruption. But even so newsworthy a critical identification could not bring this masterpiece of comic style a permanent popular appeal. Brigid Brophy, when remembered at all today, is remembered for other works than this, which is her finest.

To read
The Finishing Touch
today is to enter an almost forgotten sensibility. Every sentence is there to be weighed, stroked and smelled. The mixture of languages, the mocking allusions, the merciless way with snobbism: all produce a sense of extended pause and perilous calm. Instead of hastening from paragraph to paragraph in the modern manner, the reader is drawn back after every few lines to sniff the night airs again, to hear the
grenouilles
(‘as though at a mad dinner party every guest had simultaneously seized on his pepper mill’) and to seek the ‘dusky dusting powder’ in the
ménage
of the African president’s daughter (‘but was it, Antonia prickled with the question, black or blue?’).

Every schoolgirl’s parent hopes, of course, for a future friendship with the royal newcomer, a rounders-playing
ingénue
with an ‘innocence of French literature’ that Buckingham Place is keen should not be spoiled by French schooling. Letters from homes around the world urge the same message ‘like multifarious petals awaiting pounding into a potpourri’. Sadly for their writers’ social ambitions, and for the future dreams of ‘Dame Antonia’, a wasp, a bosom, a medically attentive mouth and the paparazzi skills of the Plash girls ensure that the captain of a British destroyer has to come and provide the finishing touch to the plot.

Digging up this lost treasure is no act of social nostalgia. Brophy was an inventive original throughout her life, self-consciously at the forefront of extending rights as well as imaginations, for fellow authors and fellow animals most of all: ‘Whenever people say, “We mustn’t be sentimental,” you can take it they are about to do something cruel. And if they add, “We must be realistic,” they mean they are going to make money out of it.’

All British writers who cash a Public Lending Rights cheque, an annual sum calculated on the number of their books borrowed from libraries, owe a toast to her memory. Her reputation probably suffered from the very breadth of her activities, and from a long final illness that ended her literary productivity without providing the promotional possibilities of death.

When Brophy first met Sir Anthony, at dinner among the sailors and art students (‘probably both,’ she suggested) of his Courtauld Institute apartment, not even the British security service knew that the aesthete was their betrayer. A few years later, he secretly exchanged immunity for a full confession and remained a respected art connoisseur, at the heart of London society, until he was finally exposed in 1979 and deprived of the title that Antonia never gained. Anthony Blunt suffered a few other signs, too, of belated public disgrace. John Banville and Alan Bennett turned him more directly into fiction. But a life eked out in a finishing school for girls? That, Brophy wrote in 1987, was perhaps ‘the hell he had imagined for himself’.

Sir Peter Stothard

I have only once put a deliberate portrait of a real person into a work of fiction, and that is not this work of fiction.

For reasons which I could trace for a psychoanalyst but which anyone else would find tedious, my temperament is anti-autobiographical. In addition, since I write both fiction and non-fiction I find it simpler to keep my fiction imagination, where you are required to invent, quite separate from my non-fiction imagination, where you are always checking dates and quotations in order to avoid accidental invention.

I do not dislike or despise
autobiographical
novelists: who could dislike or despise Marcel Proust? I cannot, however, be one of them, any more than I can be one of the symphonists. And to a very small extent I do despise the common academic assumption that
all
novelists are
autobiographical
.

What a novelist invents is seldom an entire country or an entire substitute
reality
, though I have made shots at doing both. Something, however, in your real reality sets your imagination going. After the fiction is written, you can, on lucky days, remember or deduce what the spark consisted of, especially if it is fixed in your mind by some external event.

In that sense I owe
The
Finishing
Touch
to a conjunction of chicken pox and the fact that I married an art historian.

I think that it was in 1963, when she was six, that Michael Levey’s and my daughter Kate caught chicken pox. She did not feel ill for more than half a day. Michael and I escaped worry but not the tiresomeness of keeping a perfectly well child at home for what seemed weeks until she passed the infectious stage. I discovered that Michael had not had the disease during his own infancy. I counted on his good health to shield him. I had not had chicken pox, either; but I already had a rational inkling, which a doctor has since confirmed, that I possess natural immunity to it.

Kate had passed the infectious boundary and gone thankfully back to school when Michael developed chicken pox. He was beyond the advisable age and for three or
four days the disease made him feel deeply ill. He simply lay in bed suffering, itching and sweating.

He recovered to the point of getting up. He could not, however, go back to his work at the National Gallery or even into the local shops because he was still a source of infection. He refused social life, even with friends who had safely had chicken pox, because most of the spots were on his face and he supposed them to make him look a good deal worse than they really did.

What did impair his looks was that he thought it wiser not to shave lest he decapitate a spot by accident and cause a pock mark. He grew a scrubby and scratchy beard, which disobligingly refused to hide the spots but circumnavigated them,
leaving
them sticking up like peaks; and that made him even further disinclined for company.

My immunity held through proximity to the two invalids. I felt an itch, but it was spiritual. My imagination had been seized with a novel I yearned for time, extracted from shopping and from escorting Kate to and from school, to write it. And, since Michael was deeply bored by staying at home in the company only of a preoccupied wife, I yearned to put the finished
manuscript
into his hands in the hope of amusing him.

I met that private deadline by a couple of days. As a matter of fact, I that year sent a parcel containing two novels to my
publisher
, who decided to publish the briefer quickly, in the same year, and the longer in the next year.

As a result of Michael’s assistant
keepership
, as it then was, at the National Gallery, I met most of the personnel of art-historical London. My part at such meetings was chiefly that of spouse/appendage, a part that leaves plenty of time for observation. What sparked my
imagination
to a new novel were the meetings Michael and I had with the head of an institute that taught art history. Michael occasionally lectured there and more often attended lectures by colleagues. On such occasions the head often invited us for a drink afterwards in his flat on the top floor of the remarkably elegant building that housed the institute.

Like the building, its head was
remarkably
elegant: in word and gesture alike. His tastes were – and that, too, was in keeping with the architecture – austere, both in relation to works of art and in food and drink. When he dined with Michael and me
he became the only person I have met to refuse champagne. When we had a drink with him, which happened more often, his hospitality was multifarious but his own consumption nil.

He talked to us freely and happily about his bi-lingual (English and French)
upbringing
as the son of a British clergyman resident in France. There was much, it later became clear, that he did not say to us. Yet we became good, though never intimate friends with him. He belonged to an older generation than ours and generously
forgave
us our ignorances. He spoke in a charming upper-class drawl that was neither an affectation nor quite an Edwardian relic, and he seemed for ever on the verge of utter exhaustion. He was tall, slim and very nearly beautiful.

Whatever was concealed, there was no concealment, from us or anyone at the institute, of his homosexual affiliations. His flat on the top floor was separated from but not impregnable to the rest of the building. Whenever we went there, the evening was tattered by brief incursions of young men introduced by first name only, who might have been sailors or might have been students of Poussin and were very likely both. They would put to him practical and
domestic problems (“The mustard you said would be in the cupboard on the left isn’t”) and he would wave a hand, dismissing not the person but the problem. Practical
matters
he seemed to find gross. To bend his attention on them he seemed to find impossible; the mere suggestion that he try seemed to drive him nearer than ever to the point of exhaustion.

When Michael and I came home after one of these visits we would decide in the course of discussing it that the presence of the young men in that not very
self-contained
flat was deliberately induced as a protective barrier, on the lines of the flitting sylphs in
The
Rape
of
the
Lock,
against more dire incursion by one of the women in the institute, who included both undergraduates and teachers, who
obviously
and sometimes explicitly considered him sexually desirable.

The institute, which has its handsome home in Portman Square, is the Courtauld Institute of Art. Its head was Sir Anthony (and then suddenly just Anthony again) Blunt. Everyone in the Institute had always addressed and spoken of him just as Anthony anyway.

What my imagination did, when it
picked
him up by the scruff of his neck, was
change his sex and make him the
headmistress
of a finishing school for girls. Perhaps it was the hell he had imagined for himself. I notice that through all metamorphoses he retains his excellent, virtually native French and something of his adumbrated liking for sailors. He also retains his name.
The
Finishing
Touch
is the title supplied by my publisher, which I agree to be a better title than the one I originally wanted, namely simply
Antonia.
My publisher sent
someone
to search reference books for finishing schools in the south of France. Infected by the all-fiction-is-autobiographical fallacy, he was convinced I was slandering some institution where I had myself been
educated
and was not to be persuaded of the truth, which is that I have never set foot in a finishing school and would not know where to seek one.

Brigid Brophy
1986