Love in a Bottle

CYNTHIA

WHEN THEY THREW ME OUT of Cambridge for my poor taste in neckties and generally immoral conduct, I enrolled at University College London, whose chief claim to fame (though they kept this private) was that its Dean was obliged, as a matter of principle, to see off any clergyman who dared set foot on the premises.

So one fine day, by way of experiment, I dressed up in the traditional garb of an Anglican vicar, so familiar from popular films, and seated myself conspicuously by the main entrance to the college, where English girls and Persian boys in sporting attire bathed themselves in the pallid English sun. I lowered my eyes reverently and waited in delicious terror for the Dean, the sanctified elders and university proctors to process before me. I love processions. But none came; teatime was approaching, and I suddenly realised how naive I had been, yet again. So I began to preach. I spread my arms wide and held forth to my brothers and sisters present, as seemed appropriate, about certain revelations of the divine intentions supposedly vouchsafed me on the Liverpool to London train, and how the Great Beast of the Apocalypse was actually Scotland. Clearly unimpressed, the English girls heard me out with an air of devout boredom. Only then did I leave. Utterly humiliated, I went off for some tea. I felt that English good breeding had rejected my entire being, and that, even as a cautionary example, my whole existence was theologically unsound. I was oppressed by the immensity of the world and my own insignificance in it. That evening I wandered tearfully around Hyde Park, and, in a great, rueful gesture, I made a present of the reflections on the lake, which she so loved, to my girlfriend Cynthia. I would have offered the whole world to her, or to anyone else who might be kind enough to stroke my hand in a spirit of nocturnal sentimentality. I kept nothing back. I gave it all away — most generously of all, given my incurable snobbery, the London Halberdiers.

As a result, I was once again the first person to arrive the next morning at the Reading Room of the British Museum. Ever since my late uncle’s Jules Verne-like will had sentenced me to a life of scholarly pursuits, library visits had become practically second nature to me — though my real nature might well have been to drive a locomotive or charge on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. I really can’t say. I never did grow out of that adolescent phase in which — in an experimental kind of way — you are forever dressing up as different people. When I contemplate the extent of my wardrobe it astonishes even me.

I sat in my usual place. Before me lay the usual books, with their divine smell of dust and their shamefaced air of not having been read for centuries. One or two of them had, to my precise knowledge, last been handled by the poet laureate Southey in about 1830, the thought of which moved me deeply. Then the young man who sat beside me every day turned up. I was rather fond of this fellow. He seemed to me to be truly part of the atmosphere of the place, along with the great dome above our heads, the rings of shelves with their endless rows of books, and the silence, deeper and more intense than in a temple, in which the only sound was the constant rustling of paper. I settled myself down and began to read.

Later I found myself browsing through the catalogues and wondering whether I might make Cynthia a gift of them too, or perhaps bestow them on Eileen, keeping only the letter ‘T’, to which I was so devoted, when I became aware of the same young man standing beside me and wanting a word. I had long intended doing the same myself, and had he been a woman I would surely have already done so, but I had been unable to overcome my shyness with other men. But I now saw that the great moment had come when a new friendship, one determined in some cloudy pre-existence, was about to be born.

“Yes?” I said, and smiled obligingly.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, and stammered a bit, in his confusion deploying one or two phrasal verbs incorrectly, but very politely for all that. “You’ve been using that book by Henry Thomas on the novels of Amadis de Gaula for two weeks now, and I need it rather urgently. Would it be a very great nuisance if you could let me have it for a couple of days?”

“Not at all. But… you’re also working on Amadis?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied, with that warm, deeply confiding and slightly myopic smile that only philologists can produce when talking about their subject. A tingle of comfortable recognition shot through my heart. I knew that this was the heaven-sent person I so much needed. Not because of Amadis de Gaula. What was Amadis to me, and what was I to him? But I was gazing at the one man to whom in 1930 Amadis still had something to say: a man over whose head the centuries of cold reason had passed without trace; a man who still had a feeling for the charming, ever surprising and truly heroic folly that had once been Europe.

Meanwhile teatime had come round again, as it always does, and we went out, so rapt in our great discovery of each other that we cast not a glance at the old woman who fed the pigeons every morning in the gardens outside the Museum with a strange, erotic joy written all over her face. We made our way straight to the Bury Street tearoom and, as if by unspoken agreement, both ordered buttered crumpets with our tea, and gazed at one another in wonder and expectation.

Amadis, the unparalleled knight, must have been turning in his grave. Whole decades, perhaps I should say centuries, must have passed since anyone had spoken about him at such length as we did that day. For a full three hundred years ungarlanded oblivion had squatted on his once-great novels. Now we summoned to memory that Spanish nobleman who called on a friend one day to find the whole family in mourning. “Amadis is no more,” declared his grieving host, and pointed to an open book, that great and challenging folio whose disturbing sentences captured the dream of the centuries — the dream that has since been lost. We spoke of the wonderful names he gave his characters — Oriana, and Urganda la Discognue, and Galaor — and his countless fantastical islands set in the mystical Mediterranean Sea.

I deeply regretted that I hadn’t had a chance to ask the young man’s name and nationality. I could tell that he wasn’t English, but his accent reminded me of no country I was familiar with. I was even sorrier that it was Friday, and that that afternoon I was going off with Cynthia for the weekend.

In my transcendent mood I had nothing more for lunch than a couple of oysters, then took myself off to Bond Street to buy her something truly wonderful. I made several fine purchases: a state-of-the-art lip-reading tool in gold, an Old French dog collar and an evening dress that certainly would have looked very good on the little shop assistant herself — except that I realised just in time that I wasn’t really in the sort of relationship with Cynthia to buy her a dress; perhaps I should send the whole bundle of stuff to Eileen instead, and ask the assistant to dinner? Her name was Doris, and she was English. That week she was busy, but the following week we spent a very pleasant evening together, though I would prefer to keep things in their chronological order as far as possible. And anyway, this Doris isn’t really significant — I’ve since moved on from that whole ambience, and all I wanted to mention about her is that when I was taking her home in the car… but I’d rather not talk about that either.

Sufficient it to say, I had now come to the end of Bond Street, and still hadn’t found anything truly wonderful for Cynthia, when Providence brought before me, in all his glorious individuality, Stephen Ellesley, a fellow whose one shoulder emanated joie de vivre while the other was weighed down by the burden of his debts. I couldn’t offer him to Cynthia, I thought — I simply can’t find words to express the grotesqueness of his being — but in that precise moment I knew what I was going to surprise my lady with: a chimpanzee. From a little red cubicle I telephoned one of the directors of the zoo, a man I had recently befriended at an anti-vivisection league dinner. We settled on a baby chimp, and, to make him happy, I promised to become a life member of the Friends of the Zoo and vaguely resolved to become vegetarian once again. I left the business of parcelling the creature up and, insuring it to his expertise, went home, packed my bags, and set off for Codliver Manor.

There was a sweet after-rain atmosphere, the trees, the red roofs of the little houses and the telegraph wires all gently dripping. The road followed its own winding way from one end to the other with the peculiar individualism of this country that accords everything its due. It was lined all the way with the cosy houses of the affluent middle class, with English families drinking tea behind carefully drawn curtains, their lives, according to experts, so immeasurably dull but to me so inexpressibly full of attractive mystery (when observed from a passing car. Actually to step inside one would have been the end of any such notion).

By the time I had arrived at the old gate nestling between enormous beech trees, and was making my way towards the manor, I had fallen once again under the spell of Cynthia’s whole aristocratic ambience and the thought that her ancestors’ names featured in the work of several Elizabethan playwrights, not to mention Dryden’s dedication, which I had memorised verbatim when I first got to know her and mumbled in fragments while we were kissing.

But somehow these ancestors were merely an incidental undertone in the rich music of her aristocratic identity, and the closer I got to her the more light years were set between us. I might spend an entire evening in her company, but she never failed to ask in amazement, while I was squeezing her hand:

“So you’re still in England? How can you put up with this damp, boring little country if you’ve nothing special to do here?”

And when after half an hour I finally got the chance to kiss her, before her lips were again in position to be used for speech, she would already have asked me the French for ‘hunting bag’.

With her, you could do anything. She knew no moral inhibitions, nor do I believe any real passions. (“There are three sexes,” Paul Morand tells us somewhere: “men, women and the English.”) But she did go the whole way. My assigned role was to act as if what was going on wasn’t actually happening to us as well-brought-up and intellectual beings, but to two natives somewhere in Patagonia, two complete foreigners, while at the same time, half in a dream, we considered the latest critique of a St John Ervine play. For a while I really enjoyed it — the mouth that wasn’t actually her mouth but rather a means to help the thoughtful philologist conjure up the image of the Oriana of the Amadis novels for himself; the shoulder she so marvellously offered for my kiss that wasn’t her shoulder so much as a precious object revealed for the greater wonderment of a guest, and the whole stunning impersonality of her physical actions. On one occasion, for those same reasons, something gradually rose up inside me, and I sank my teeth into the shoulder as it approached. Cynthia slapped me powerfully but impersonally on the cheek, and started talking about protection racketeering.

I now see that, while we were together, for the whole of those two and a half months, we did genuinely love one another, while our love lasted. I loved her for her superior social class, starting with her Coldliver Manor poker ankles and her eighteenth-century wit. I loved it when she played golf and went riding, and visited the village poor, and fell asleep in church on Sunday morning: these things she invested with an aristocratic perfection I could never have attained in a million years. I loved most of all to think of her asleep, because every thought that ran through her head diminished her unreasoning, God-given perfection. When she slept, with her face set and rather solemn, and now so hopelessly distant from me who a few minutes before had held her in my arms, she was, beyond question, Oriana, the beloved of Amadis’ knight.

But Cynthia, naturally, had a less awestruck attitude to her rank. It is a characteristic of the true upper classes that they are quite unaware of themselves. The sad thing was that Cynthia prided herself on her cleverness. She read a vast amount and was ashamed of all the books she hadn’t read. And she was ashamed of her aristocratic background. Once, after a game of golf, we were lying about on the side of a hill, and Cynthia, set free by a kind of erotic pleasure, allowed herself to relax in the sun, as only the English know how — as if she were experiencing the world through her skin alone. Suddenly she sat up, her face full of agitation.

“You probably imagine that I’m not thinking about anything. But…” And she went on to some highly intelligent observation or other.

And she loved me the way a clever woman loves a clever man. Wise Americans have a saying that women are much more sensible and calculating than we are. Cynthia did not expect any material advantage from me, least of all that I should marry her (which her family would never have consented to, given my dubious forebears and their origins in so many different countries) and because, in erotic terms, I interested her about as much as a native of Patagonia, that is to say, not at all. Mostly she loved me because she was a woman with ‘interests’—an intellectual ‘vamp’. She kept little notebooks about her in which she recorded words she did not know, and came to consult me as the highest lexical authority. If we were alone together, there would be a few kisses, as a sort of preliminary, then out would come the notebooks and the questions. At first, of course, I simply told her nonsense. I advised her that Copernicus’ Christian name was John Nepomuk, that I had compiled a vast collection of works about Ivan the Terrible and translated the Metempsychosis for the Microscope. But when I saw that she believed my every word I became too lazy to lie and gave her the correct answers, didactically, like a good schoolteacher. And besides, she was so stupid. My God, she was stupid!

1932

A GARDEN PARTY IN ST CLOUD

YES, INDEED, ‘a garden party in St Cloud, in summer’… but, splendid as that may sound, the reality won’t prove quite so grand — as with this friend of mine who never uses his aristocratic Hungarian middle names because of the ‘intolerable poesie’ of his life. A ‘garden party in St Cloud’ has an air of ‘tea with Rasputin in the Hermitage in the days of the old carnival’ or ‘one of those fine days in Aranjuez’. This tale has nothing to do with such wonders of the past. The garden in question is not the famous one with the green-bearded marble steps, nor is there the slightest hint of snobbery in my thoughts. This particular party had been organised by a gentleman named Robinet (the name means ‘tap’ in English) who ran a boarding house, and quite how I came to be there is not at all clear. Marcelle had been invited, and I trailed along — or it may have been the other way around.

The lamp-lit veranda was crammed with guests speaking every sort of language. Among the Spanish and South Americans was the only person I recognised, a little girl called Concepción. She had once had a fiancé, a gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár in Transylvania, who had undertaken to do what no one had done before — ride his horse across the Amazon. He raised the money for his trip, bought a steed and a gun, had his picture in all the major South American papers… and promptly vanished. Concepción had since overcome her grief in Paris. Also present was an elderly Russian lady, a countess I need hardly add, as was only to be expected when every Hungarian in Paris had prefixed a ‘de’ to his or her barbaric-sounding name. There was also a well-known young man, a friend of the same wealthy Comtesse to whom Napoleon III had declared just four days before his coronation: “Madame, as long as there are still ladies like you in France, it will be worth being Emperor.”

But present in the greatest numbers were English-speaking girls, from that veritable League of Nations the United Kingdom and its associated Dominions. Monsieur Robinet had in fact spent some years as a boots in a little hotel in London, studying the peculiar tastes of the Anglo-Saxons and learning how to satisfy the more basic needs of his English guests. He could moreover profess a wife and a niece, presently attired as monkeys. In the boarding house for five guests the three of them carried out all the daily renewed Herculean tasks collectively known as ‘service’ and, indefatigable and resolute in their money-making Frenchness, they never wearied of it. True, there was also a waiter from Alsace, but he was still very young and able to make himself understood to the guests only through myself as interpreter. I was the poor fellow’s sole channel of communication with the non-German-speaking world, and the channel was mostly one-way. I was like the disciple of a reclusive scholar who, though loyal, nonetheless finds his situation impossible, for I in my turn couldn’t follow his dreadful regional dialect.

Rapidly, and by foreordained necessity, I set about flirting with a little Highland Scots girl, an Arts student. With my usual boyish enthusiasm, and looking for an easy topic we might have in common, I expounded St Thomas Aquinas’ theory of time to her. “Yes, yes,” she replied — pronouncing that ‘yes’ with the wonderfully impenetrable simple-mindedness that makes British girls so attractive. Eighty per cent of Marcelle’s acquaintances were young people, and when I finally caught up with her group the following scene was taking place:

“Actually, I was brought up in a forest. My father was a coal miner, you know. But what do you people know about such a life? I slept in a hollow tree; I found my way home by the stars. I know how to trap rabbits with a necktie — which is no great thing, really. You watch the place the rabbit always goes back to, and then you tie the tie into an open knot to make a noose. The rabbit runs along its usual path and doesn’t look where it’s going: he runs bang into the noose and you’ve got him.”

Everyone listened with a mixture of astonishment and respect, and I feel compelled to say a few words about who Marcelle was. Essentially, she was the girlfriend of my friend Gábor Pilaszanovits, and, as such, mine. The difference lies only in the ambiguity of the word ‘girlfriend’: to say that she was his girlfriend is somewhat to understate the reality; to say that she was mine would be going too far. Besides, Gábor wasn’t my friend in the sense that we had any shared intellectual interests. I loved the way everything about him was so impressive, so flamboyant, from his name to his way of speaking. His tall, somewhat stooping form had the silent dignity of a Transdanubian poplar; his physical movements suggested the graceful lines of a classic limousine, and in his permanent lack of cash I detected the devil-may-care attitude of the true gentry. I adored him for the fact that he despised books and could still like me, which seemed to show that there was something more in me than mere bookishness. I adored him because women doted on him. Wistfully I contemplated that do-or-die quality he possessed that I so clearly lacked. These ‘negative friendships’ do sometimes happen, like that between the crocodile and the ibis in the world of nature.

Marcelle worshipped Gábor, referring constantly to him as her ‘Lord and Master’: such were her feelings about the aristocracy. She was always telling people that she was Swedish, partly because Swedes live so far away, and partly because her hair was ginger-blonde. She spoke that exquisite French you so rarely hear in France. Her sentences came across like so many casual accounts of an aristocratic world she had never been part of. Making impeccable use of the imperfect subjunctive she would assert that she had been raised in the most exclusive girls’ boarding school in the most clericised département of all, and gave you to understand, in a manner not to be gainsaid, that her mother had withered away in mourning for the Bourbons.

This was why the story about the coal miner had produced such astonishment and dismay. What it told me was that she had already started drinking. These occasions had two, somewhat contradictory, endings: she would kiss all the waiters because they ‘reminded her of her uncle’, and then scold her knight errant furiously if he tipped the driver a sou more than was absolutely necessary.

The moment she spotted me she abandoned the young men, dispatched the little Highland Scot at my side with a well-placed remark and hauled me off to the tables.

“Milord,” she said, reverting to aristocratic mode, “you are neglecting your duty to Venus and Bacchus. But tonight I intend to play the role of Venus for you. But not the Venus de Milo, poor thing, who never steps out of her evening dress.”

The reality of her own arms was not in question, and as if to prove it, perhaps a little unnecessarily, she slid one into mine and gripped me by the neck, making me lean over at an angle that can be attained only in Paris. Through the stiffness of my wing collar I discovered the power that lies in a woman’s arms on a summer evening. There are people who, when searching for images of a life of storm and tempest, rhapsodise about cars, machines and surging crowds, but what is an entire industrial city compared to a woman’s arm? I was a prisoner, led by the neck — like a calf, or a man to the gallows, or a husband.

By the time we had knocked back a large bottle of cognac swimming with ice cubes, I had gathered the courage to kiss that arm.

“You were a great success, Marcelle,” I said, for something to say.

“Oh, yes, with all those… Martians and eunuchs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Martians, because they’ll never get any closer to me, and if they did, they might as well be eunuchs, so far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ve been your Martian for a long time now,” I said gently.

“Not any more. Today the good Lord hung the stars up upside down… Look, the English girls are already drunk and you’re still sober. Perhaps that’s rather wise of you.”

I drank and marvelled at her chameleon-like nature. To tell the truth, she had always deeply attracted me: I loved both her wonderful two-sidedness and its very transparency, in the same the way that I had always been secretly attracted to walking sticks that could turn into umbrellas, slide rules that could be used as laryngoscopes, and the symbols in Ibsen. I was also drawn to her for the reason that men are generally attracted to women: that is to say, I have no idea why. But this particular attraction I had dismissed as just another of the hopeless loves with which I serially embellished my young life.

I knew that Marcelle adored Pilaszanovits with the tragic fidelity of a midinette, which tempted me to believe that La Dame aux camélias might not be entirely nonsense. But Pilaszanovits treated her with the tender casualness of a con man fingering a dud chequebook. (Though, later, when Marcelle left him for a rayon manager in a morning coat at the Galeries Lafayette, Pilaszanovits killed himself. Every year I laid flowers on his grave in the Montparnasse cemetery, the ones which featured in his favourite song: lilies of the valley, purple carnations, common larkspur, sweet marjoram. But that’s a long way in the past now, and experience tells me no one would believe the story anyway.)

But how could I, or perhaps more precisely in this context, how could my humble self, have believed for a moment that Marcelle might think me worthy of a single glance, in the meaningful sense of that phrase, when Pilaszanovits could treat me as follows in her presence: “Tamás, old chap, you’re a terribly clever man. You’re so clever you’re quite unlike anyone else. You’re so clever no normal woman will ever understand you. So clever that women invariably treat you as a bit of a joke.”

And if I ever did ever mention one of my conquests, however tentatively, he would be secretly convinced that the woman in question must be a hunchback, only I had failed to notice this fact, being so caught up in my wonderful rationalising myths.

The only reason I’m telling you this is to emphasise how totally unforeseen it was, that summer evening, when Marcelle suddenly took me by the arm, after countless light years of the cosy, eunuch-like friendship in which she had so hopelessly confined me. But when I looked about myself, under the Chinese lanterns theatrically lighting the great Corot-like trees from below, with all the summer stars out in the sky above, it was a really miraculous summer night. One of those nights when dumb animals open their mouths and utter wise sayings.

Whether I had been drinking — or everyone else had — is hard to determine. A French gentleman in a hat was telling stories in which St Denis entertained his Gallic contemporaries before valiantly gathering up his decapitated head under his arm. The ugly Spanish girls around him were shrieking with laughter. I didn’t see the Spanish boys, because they had already vanished into the darkness of the shrubbery. M. Robinet was giving his magic show, with an egg, some bicarbonate of soda and the ship’s hooter with which his brother-in-law the captain had signalled the presence of his vessel as it made its way placidly along the Louvre-Suresnes, and which he had subsequently bestowed on M. Robinet during a family picnic. The famous young man gave a display of solo dancing, his legs apparently detached from the rest of his joints and twisting about in the wild rhythms with such daring that they were more like electrified trousers than actual legs. Music sounded, like a madness. Everyone was on his or her feet, and only the Alsatian waiter stayed sitting gloomily beside a large bottle of beer. But the English girls — my God, the English girls! — set aside their native cold-bloodedness and really let themselves go, the protective powder slipping from their faces and those faces becoming even more babyish than usual. There was electricity in the air, forgotten jealousies and secrets spilling out — it was another Koriandolis, where snake-like desires for other men’s women boiled over, as if everyone had staked all their emotions, heads or tails, on this one hour; and when M. Robinet in his endless benevolence extinguished the light, there seemed every possibility for sexual adventure.

On the veranda where we were sitting the darkness seemed to increase as the music fell away. It was made all the more intense by tumultuous voices coming at random from every side. How could I deny that my first action was to feel around with my hand in the blackness for Marcelle, with no particular purpose in mind but with a happy smile on my face? But Marcelle was most decidedly no longer there. I set off in frantic haste to look for her. The light might be switched on again at any time.

My hand came upon someone at random and I took her firmly by the arm. The girl I was holding said, “Ooh,” ending in the final ‘u’ of the English. I cut it short by kissing her, with uncharacteristic vigour, full on the mouth.

That kiss was an even finer instrument of self-expression than the sonnet, and at moments like this much more promising. The opening lines of the kiss said little: more important than the technical aspect was the simple joy felt in them, the joy of the mischievous adolescent and the woman’s delight in the unexpected. But the second strophe, with its daring seriousness, was already establishing a theme. In a spirit of reverence, and with a yearning that drew on my most distant memories, I paid homage to the stranger who embodied the beauty of the night, the Unknown Goddess in my arms, as the kiss proclaimed her to be through its ecstasies of pain. The third strophe concluded the theme: because I cannot see you, because I don’t know who you are — because you are Everywoman — you are the Supremely Beautiful, the She who smoulders at the base of all my passion, and my devotion to you is, like the night, eternal. But the final strophe… was no longer a strophe, and the sonnet was no more — it was nothing, simply a kiss, without duration, and I was so immersed in it, with every atom of my being, that my head spun, and I let go of that mysterious someone. When I came to again, she was no longer there, and I “thrice embraced the empty air”, as Virgil puts it so beautifully, in his Latin.

Besides, the light had suddenly come on again.

Monsieur Robinet was standing by the switch like a convivial old Satan, delighting in his guests’ damnation. The Russian Duchess grabbed the Frenchman by the shoulder and shook him:

“You’re quite mistaken,” she yelled, with a display of energy that was quite shocking. “Love can do anything. There are people out there who swim the Channel for love, and people who die in suicide pacts for love, and everyone forgives them.”

“It seems Madame is not a native of this country,” the Frenchman exclaimed, his face white with anger.

The English girls were noisily pestering a beautiful young man with a large behind, like the fantasy object of some elderly female civil servant. The Alsatian waiter had fallen asleep. But Marcelle, the perfidious Marcelle, was standing in rather intimate proximity to the famous young man. Then she sat down with him, and a few others of his kind, at a table. I turned away from them, in a whirlpool of grief.

I went over to the little Highland Scot. I was tormented by the fear that it might have been her in the darkness. It was not as if she were ugly, rather… But, even viewed from a distance, she could never have been the Unknown Goddess. Could any girl one had actually met be that? I took her by the left arm and right hand, and felt her even farther back. It hadn’t been her. Every woman’s body has a different feel in a man’s hand. Hers was not the one.

For a moment I was horrified by the thought that malicious Fate, with its love of confusion, had made me take Concepción in my arms, while she was perhaps all the while thinking of the gallant Jewish boy from Temesvár. True, I had seen her, just as the lights came on again, materialising at the far end of the veranda and sidling up, with a seductive look, to the Greek gentleman who had only half a skull — the other being made of silver (whereby, according to craniology, he must have been a martyr to previously unknown nervous disorders). But then the knowledge latent in my hands reassured me: anyone they had found beautiful could not have been Concepción.

Filled with mournful amiability I caught up with the Highland Scottish girl and declared, with stormy subjectivity, how much, ever since childhood, I had adored the Celts, the plaintive verses of Ossian and the one-eared dogs that in Ireland symbolised desire — and also that I happened to know that pen is the Gaelic word for ‘head’: something she in fact did not.

By this time I was so grief-stricken and ecstatic that I found myself not only using English with absolutely unshakeable confidence, I even felt — for some minutes — that I might do the same in Gaelic, and indeed in all manner of tongues, like the Apostles at Whitsun. I won’t go so far as to say that the girl carried boundless feminine intuition in her dear little bosom, but she looked at me like someone who realised that the tempestuous, world-annihilating possibilities I was blathering about might well have been had been imbibed along with the cognac, and the same for my tears, no doubt, and she was clearly wondering if there was any sort of Balm in Gilead for such Dadaist angst. There is indeed a balm for everything in Gilead, and not just for the torments of the School of Solemnity, and the blessed heart of the little Celtic girl found it.

Suddenly there was another girl standing beside her, practically holding out in her right hand a balm, straight from Gilead, for my fevered brow. Yes, from Gilead without question. For Gilead, I believe, is not a place, just a geographical joke in the Bible, and the new girl had also appeared from nowhere — I hadn’t seen her face all evening — she had, as it were, materialised from among the cognacs. I said nothing, but kissed her hand. It was all I could do; she was so wonderful.

She was one of those women the sight of whom fills a man with a choking, pleasurable melancholy. Not the perennially insistent sadness of ‘so many women, and all spoken for’, but the sort of sadness you know when you feel that neither the world — that mediocre, pretentious planet, the killing field of Nature and all Creation — nor humanity itself are worthy of such a face, of such a subtle body, or rather of the Platonic Ideal that emanates from that body. All this might seem a bit exalted, might make me sound rather juvenile, and suggest that my illusions originate and have their life and being on my writing desk, neatly parcelled up with string, among the part-payment receipts. But I threw my illusions away some time ago, in a thoroughgoing clear-out. Nowadays I think rather different thoughts about women, and no longer believe in the Hegelian aesthetic that insists that the ideal shines through the material, like the bosom bursting from a torn evening dress. But in those days I did think such thoughts, especially in summer, in the prime of my youth, in the garden in St Cloud, and I am not ashamed of it.

But if pressed for more precise details of the way the woman in question looked, my memory would desert me. I am not generally an observant sort of person, and not really of this world. I was the person, after all, who took years to realise that our editor, poor Ern Osvát, had a beard.

But this much I can reveal, that she was still very young, perhaps sixteen. She was at the age when you might imagine that in time she might even grow into a boy — which would have been a real waste. She was at the age when a girl is raw and doesn’t know yet how to embody her sweetness to come, and so is modest, quiet and full of promise… like those optical instruments in the physics laboratories at school about which we were never told anything. Besides, she was Anglo-Saxon, endowed by nature with eternal and boundless youth.

When she sat down at my table and simply looked at me, seriously and uncritically, a number of thoughts went through my mind: about what I should say to her and what I should do. I might talk about the kiss as a sonnet form, or about my royal demesnes, now so comprehensively lost; I could show off my extraordinary skill in the palm-slapping game called Red Roast; I might seize her by the arm and dash outside with her to see the starry sky — and other such things. But it would all have been incredibly self-centred and, by the same token, pointless. It proved rather more to the purpose to announce myself as a well-known palmist, of Hindu origin, and get straight to the point. That way I could at least hold her hand in mine. The claim was not entirely bogus, because at that moment I really felt that with my intuitive genius I could penetrate the secret enclaves of nature and see into the inner life of things.

Besides, like everyone who dabbles in historical philosophy, I have a very broad palm. First, as a sly captatio benevolentiae, I intoned a few formulae which have never failed to work:

“You are highly self-centred, but when the need arises a wonderful capacity for sacrifice bursts from your soul. You are a fundamentally good person, but capable of extreme anger against those who have hurt your feelings, and you cannot abide people who behave dishonestly towards you. A rather cold and reserved nature, but sincere and loyal to those you love”… and so on.

This succeeded in arousing her curiosity, in so far as one might use the word of an English girl. She looked at me nervously, waiting for me to announce in the next second something she did not know, something no one could know, the either deeply alarming or entirely wonderful meaning and purpose of her life.

I was then able to describe her days, and the story of those days as they flowed ever on in their miraculously vivid drabness. I talked about postcards, railway stations, hotels, dresses, boys, resentments, all charged with some yet-to-be-explained meaning that she would clearly not wish to spell out directly. About how good it was to lie in bed in the morning and how her little brother was a really nasty piece of work, and all the thousands of little things she had to do, all so trivial and yet so profound — the enclosed, saturated world of the flapper, in her world without men, where the time is always taken up with things but unmarked by any variety: the lake of liquid crystal, in the novels of Jókai, waiting for the pebble to fall into it so that the rows of basalt columns beneath the surface aligned with such astronomical precision could at last be seen: her young girlhood, her purity, secrets, secrets…

But I mentioned none of these wonderful things, because they would have frightened her, like something in Latin — she would have thought I was hinting at some bizarre medical abnormality. So I made an effort to talk about more specific, concrete things, and her replies were equally concrete. She spoke about someone called Fred, a friend since childhood. They called on one another every day, went horse-riding and canoeing together, and understood one another completely — only there was one unresolved source of contention between them: she had a big grey dog called Caius who scientifically speaking did not belong to any of the well-known breeds, but was very good-looking nonetheless. But Fred loved cats. He couldn’t stand dogs and always sent Caius into the water after things like his pocket knives, his pocket Shakespeare and live frogs, which instantly sank and made Caius very sad.

We were friends within minutes, and the pretext of palm-reading melted away. Without it I could never have held her hand in mine, but now we did so out of genuine mutual liking. The conversation that ensued took us, on a summer’s day, in a motorboat aflutter with little flags, to visit some islands of fresh coral. Half an hour later, we were onto the central problem of her life: how to reconcile her complicated mind and problematic national identity with the instinctive order of being, and how to choose between Fred and the dog — in other words: was it possible for an English girl to have two friends? But the Fates, ever adept at dividing and separating, did not want it that way. So she had to split either her manner of life or her inner consciousness into two compartments, as people did nowadays, or have it out with Fred face to face.

A general dancing erupted around us. Someone asked her to join them, and I made no objection. Somehow I had lost my sense of the night passing. I was in a world where there was no time, and I thought she’d come back. But that never happened.

Because suddenly Marcelle sat down beside me. Marcelle herself, my beloved, sitting there like the personification of Chaos, that horror of classical scholarship. And not just beside me but somehow all around me, sitting and drinking, steadily drinking, laughing loudly and waving her hands about. There were sundry random items of clothing on her person, but essentially she was naked. Suddenly every carefully repressed anarchic desire rose up in me, and, in the utterly childish images of my fantasy, I pulsed with the urge, as I always do when I see women drunk, to seize them by the arm and drill a hole through them with my head, then look out the other side and put out my tongue, and say to M. Robinet: “do this after me”—or some such impulse. I was filled with a quite uncharacteristic daring.

“I slapped the old Duchess’s pimp across the face,” she announced lightly. “Just imagine, he said he’d had an affair with me when I was still a ten-franc woman. I told him that it wasn’t true. I remember everyone I’ve had a relationship with, and there haven’t been that many.”

“And is that why you slapped him?”

“It just isn’t true that I was a ten-franc woman. But then he also said I’m not Swedish. That’s when I smacked him.”

“Come into the garden, Marcelle. The air would do you good.”

She looked at me in wonderment, as if to say: “How long have you known how these things are done?”

Then she pursed her lips and added: “All right, I don’t mind.”

And she was already there.

It would be a mistake to describe a woman who would flirt with me on such a basis as ‘easy’. What happened was that Love interposed its effect. It’s just as it is with light and sound and every other form of wave motion: when different impulses meet in the heart, the energy level of one side is raised while the other is reduced. Once, when I was in love with two different women, the two loves unfortunately met in my soul in phases that completely cancelled each other out, and I was forced to transfer my affections to a third woman. The opposite happened in St Cloud: the wholesome, nourishing flames of passion kindled in me by that wonderful young girl happened to vibrate in a phase that simply amplified those aroused by Marcelle, and my earlier success in taking the young girl’s hand now emboldened me to attempt rather more decisive action with her. It’s like that sometimes, with these interference patterns.

I led her outside, to a place where thick bushes clustered around a little courtyard. The area housed M. Robinet’s pride and joy, the Champion of All France, an unsurpassably handsome chow chow with a lion’s mane. But now its only manifestation was a loud barking: the night blotted out everything else, and even the barking I didn’t hear for very long. I was attending to my inner voices and trying to calculate, from the movements of Marcelle’s body, how far I might take this.

We made it successfully to the first kiss. It was wet and brandy-flavoured and tasted wonderful, like an alcoholic drink infused with sugar chocolate, and I came once again to the conclusion that our forebears who first discovered how sweet a kiss can be were great poets indeed.

Only one little thing was missing: that the universe had not been blown apart. Look, I had actually kissed Marcelle, the Marcelle I had never believed I ever would be able to — and here I was, not in the least surprised. But the kiss was a fact that could not be undone, and the French champion, the chow chow, carried on happily barking and made no move to erupt out of the desert of the night with his ferocious lion mane standing on end, as he might so easily have, in which case the lion inside my soul would have shrunk to the size of a cur.

After the second kiss, in the eye of the storm, I paused for a moment, following my old custom, and delivered a short speech to myself along the following lines:

“Tamás, ‘these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character’: that these feelings of touch and smell and taste, and to some extent seeing, that now assail your nervous system, do not amount to Woman in general, but to Marcelle, Marcelle herself, your beloved and the beloved of your wonderful friend Pilaszanovits. And never forget that all these feelings put together stand for France; that they are what bring this drunken St Cloud night into life and being; and that you are now taking revenge on Marcelle’s for those long months of cold ‘friendship’, and committing a base act as regards Pilaszanovits. You are a grown man, and though you now partake in the exquisite bliss you have dreamt about so much, you will also feel ashamed when towards evening you wake from your mid-afternoon dream with your whole being filled with a dull drumming.”

But it was no use. I could feel none of the lofty sentiments I rattled off to distract my feelings. Our feelings are probably feminine creatures and totally unpredictable. Sometimes my inner life is driven to distraction by the melancholy tones in which the train conductor intones those marvellous words: “Nogent — Le Perseus — Bry-sur-Marne”. And sometimes the kisses of people like Marcelle, with her exquisite lips, knock on the door in vain. “I’m dreaming,” I tell myself. I register the sensation without enthusiasm, and turn away.

“Do you love me?” I asked doubtfully, and stupidly.

She burst out laughing — with the same unfathomable drunken laughter that had so charmed me earlier. It did not charm me now. Back on the veranda, that earlier laugh had somehow soared into the summer sky, an endearing cry for help addressed to some far-off Dionysus. But now she was laughing at me, and into me, the way any woman might laugh at any man held in an embrace of perhaps half an hour. It was a common, rather vulgar, laugh, an utterly godless laugh, one that could have been heard a thousand times at that moment in any of the parks of Paris and the banlieue—and how was I any different from the thousand other poor wretches who at that precise moment were preparing for the stereotypical games of love?

I thought perhaps the ecstasy would come if I acted as if it were already there. I put a great deal of muscular energy into my movements of embracing and pulling, twisting my boring face about in sexual expressions, and made her sit back on the bench. Oh, what would I have given at this moment for her to slap me on the face! It would have made everything right again: she would have become the old Marcelle in an instant, the moral order would have been re-established, like the pattern of stars in the sky above. But the slap never came — it had gone on a pilgrimage to some purer land — and the malicious little amours from the broken horn of plenty sprinkled every blessing on me: kisses, choice embraces, every pleasure of touch and taste, pleasures which would never be pleasures if our fantasy did not run with blood of ichor.

And my body played out its instinctive games towards their end, while my soul turned away in shame and muttered:

“This is not me. I have no connection with this angry person sitting here on the bench.”

Now that it was absolutely unstoppable, I did what was required and fulfilled my duty as a man, all the while thinking how good it would be the following afternoon in the Bibliothèque nationale, where the formaldehyde-permeated air hints at the eternal and sublime purity of scholarship, and where I would sit enthroned among the sweet-smelling productions of the sixteenth century, immersed in textual problems arising from Montaine’s critical essays, high above every kind of base filth.

As I gazed numbly at her face, asking myself how it could for so long have seemed beautiful to me, I couldn’t suppress another question — one I would have done anything rather than ask a Frenchwoman:

“Why did you let me, if you don’t love me?”

“Pour te faire plaisir,” she said simply and decisively. I had had three and a half months to learn this much about French women — that they could pronounce such a sentence as if it were completely self-explanatory, and not give it a second thought.

Dull of soul, I accompanied Marcelle back to the veranda. It was now perfectly clear to me that, with a bit more courage and the right occasion, I could have got to this point with her long before, and it wouldn’t have taken a Casanova-like daring or her wonderful Day of Judgement clearance sale. The impressive Latin clarity of mind with which she had given herself to me — the way she might have offered me a peanut — had killed every feeling of ecstasy and pleasure. My heart was wan and lustreless as the dawn clouds tearing across the sky, and I was left with only one burning desire — to forget the whole thing, to write the whole business off. Because by now it had become just a business, and Marcelle, the wonderful Marcelle, my beloved, was now just one more Parisienne among all the others whom I did not love.

I do not love coquettes. I can’t help it — I just don’t like them. According to Flaubert this is one of the chief characteristics of the bourgeoisie. But I don’t believe him. I don’t feel free to speak ill of one of the dead lions of literature before he is rehabilitated… but my thoughts run the opposite way. The people who love coquettes are precisely the managers of smaller banks and the fathers of families, because for them the coquette stands for some secret, disturbing, alternative world in whose darkness the atavistic lust of the male for the Mysterious Woman can find a home. But in my view the coquette is no more mysterious than an actress or an eminent ecclesiastical lawyer: all three life forms are akin to my own. Whenever, in those long evenings spent in coffee houses, I have found myself talking with my friends’ girlfriends about the more worrying financial problems in their lives (it’s rather like talking to a civil servant about the differences between mystically graduated levels of staff remuneration), or again when, simply ignoring the ladies’ presence, I have taken up the ongoing debate with my friends about whether or not Jóska Erdélyi is a great poet, I have often thought that if in the course of some naturally occurring process people were divided into two sorts, the coquettes and the intellectuals would both end up on the same side, the side of those who have no faith in God. I love coquettes as my fellow creatures, and sometimes as personal friends, like shadowy younger sisters — but that I don’t like them as women, as hidden secrets, or indeed as enemies, is not a question.

Meanwhile day had broken, with deep colours invading the sky, if rather pallid on people’s faces as they set off shivering towards their beds. By this stage most of us were completely sober, and our mutual farewells contained some embarrassing memories. I shook hands with M. Robinet and whispered in his ear: “You’re a real pimp, old fellow”—which pleased him immensely. I said a few simple words to the elderly Russian Duchess about humility and suffering, and sent my greetings via the English girls to their uncles the majors. I assured the little Scottish girl that ‘my heart was in the Highlands, my heart was (indeed) not there’.

So far, so easy. It was only when I found myself facing the young girl, now standing serenely beside the Highland Scot, that the pain wrenched my guts. The lies I had told, my drunkenness, Marcelle, my bad conscience, everything fell away. I became unusually human as I asked her, in the rising dawn wind:

“Shall I see you again?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Don’t be angry with me,” I said, struggling painfully to find the right voice for the occasion without betraying my deep emotion. “I’m willing to make any sacrifice for you. I’ll learn to play bridge, and I won’t go to the Bibliothèque nationale for a whole month.”

“It’s still not possible,” she said sadly.

“Never?”

“Nevermore.”

“But why?”

“I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Where for?”

“Home. Wellington. New Zealand.”

New Zealand!

The stupendous vastness of the planet, the immense oceans dividing its separate worlds, the journey that takes so long it seems to symbolise death, trains that we watch helplessly in our very worst dreams, and the terrible utterance of Ananke, Goddess of Fate, with her voice of brass, all plunged into my soul like the damned in Michelangelo’s paintings. The sense of universal malice that seconds before had been so doggedly asleep was now up on its hind legs, shrieking and dancing with impotent rage, while my neurotic fears stood by, whimpering. Love, like a trapped bird, hurled itself frantically around inside my breast, while pale-fingered Grief dropped tears in my eyes… producing the sort of orchestrated chaos inside me you would might expect if a disorderly adolescent male were left to wander freely in a girls’ hostel, at bathtime.

And there was nothing to be done. As the cosmic void opened out before me I came face to face with the Not and the Never — all that was left of my imaginary paradise of love. I embraced her, for the first and last time; now it would have made no difference had I simply killed her.

And then, at the very last moment, with the locomotive of fate already blowing its whistle, I remembered that none of this was true. I wasn’t embracing her for the first time, and more had happened between our bodies than just the present tearful moment. Every woman’s body, as I said, has a quite different feel in a man’s hand. These subtle differences cannot be approached through words, or at best, only through similes. There are women whose touch is like holding a flower in your hands; others are more like a solid mass that suddenly explodes; others seem to be on fire. There are those who remind you of ham on buttered bread, and others, the vast majority, who evoke nothing at all.

The New Zealand girl was a vision of touch, if I might coin a phrase. She was entirely of a piece with the girl I had kissed in the depth of that night of song. She was the unknown goddess, the dark lady of the sonnet. She, whom, alas, I would never see again.

Now I shall be silent for a while. The great poets convey the most truly significant moments with the fewest words. “And all my pretty ones?” cries Shakespeare’s Macduff, when he learns that, as was the practice of the time, his wife and babes have been murdered.

A little later, I took Marcelle back through the Parc de St Cloud to Ville-d’Avray on the far side, where we all three (including Pilaszanovits) lived in the same boarding house. On the way I observed a bitter silence, but Marcelle rattled on about one of the waiters, from Cigogne, who had accidentally drunk some petrol instead of an aperitif, after which the poor fellow had to sound a horn if anyone crossed the road in front of him.

In the ancient trees of the park the birds were waking up, thousands and thousands of them, birds of every kind, whose names one never knew, suddenly calling aloud as if in response to some secret alarm signal only they could hear. Every one of them was singing. In the whole of the sky there was not an inch of empty space — every atom of the fresh morning air was filled with birdsong. But what was there for them to shout about? Were they praising God, as St Francis taught, or demanding breakfast, or greeting their spouses, these precious little birds of the sky? And then they started to take off, in all their thousands and thousands, large wings and small flitting about with a freshness for which there are no words, every one soaring on wings… and it was as if the very next moment the trees themselves would fly up after their beloved inhabitants, along with the green marble basins, the slow-footed flights of marble steps, the pale statues of gods, the embankment and the whole park swathed in mist, and a great darkness would arise in its place, and the Earth itself would be completely alone, with only me left behind, and the mutual loneliness of the two of us. The utter, utter loneliness.

At the door to their room I took my leave of Marcelle, with a formal kiss on the hand.

“Tomorrow,” she said grandly.

“Today,” I replied. “It’s been tomorrow for some time.”

I never saw her again. While she slept off her exhaustion after the party, I moved out of the house. After some searching I went to live in La Varenne, beside the Marne, at the other end of the Paris conurbation. At first I had a lot of difficulty: every change of line unnerved me. I had to cross the metro system from right to left, and Vincennes now stood for the way home — previously it had been Maillot, in the opposite direction. For an absent-minded person it was truly horrible. But after a while I got used to it.

1932

FIN DE SIÈCLE

THE CHESHIRE CHEESE PUB in London is famous for having remained exactly as it was when the great Dr Johnson, that commanding figure of eighteenth-century English literature, sat there and delivered his immortal banalities, so faithfully recorded for posterity by the assiduous Boswell. The most distinguished poets of the age have met there ever since. Towards the end of the last century, for example, it was here that Tyrconnel, Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson and John Davidson held their weekly reunions.

On this particular occasion only three of the quartet were present, Tyrconnel, Dowson and Johnson. Tyrconnel was holding forth. He was a languorous, deeply unconventional Irish poet, as signified by the single curl of silky black hair that strayed so casually over his forehead. Hardly a week went by without his having made some new mystical discovery, some fresh instance of telepathy, perhaps, or some interesting notes he had come across inserted by an archangel into a piece of Old Irish prose. He chatted away about such things with the easy familiarity and volubility with which others might discuss a football match. This was in marked contrast to Lionel Johnson, who would deliver his observations about the weather in the manner of a revelation: “There was a thick fog in Chelsea this morning,” he would regularly announce, and glare balefully around the room, his hand clapped on some invisible sword.

“You deal out a pack of cards marked with mystical symbols,” Tyrconnel was saying. “The important thing is the square grid on the back of the card. It gives you the matrix in which the secret meaning is contained. Then, if an adept studies the cards at a particular hour of the night, his visions will correspond directly with the symbols. If the card stands for Public Esteem, he will be looking at his future career. If he draws the symbol for Heaven, he will learn the nature of the greatest happiness that lies in store for him…”

“Very interesting,” observed Lionel Johnson, with his customary decisiveness.

Tyrconnel’s face reddened slightly.

“I wouldn’t be telling you all this, Johnson, if I hadn’t seen some extremely convincing experiments carried out in our little group.”

“In our little group” was a regular saying of his, though it was never quite clear in what species of secret institution or laboratory these improbable researches were conducted. Johnson and Dowson never asked. They were afraid that he might already have told them, only they hadn’t been listening at the time.

After this, Johnson spoke about his new Tractatus, in which he would show once and for all that Bloody Mary had been quite right to send the Protestant martyrs to the stake. Tyrconnel listened with great interest. He did not for a moment believe in Johnson’s Catholicism, any more than Johnson did in his mystical anecdotes. He knew that it was all part of the business of being a poet, the licensed eccentricity of the poet’s view of the world. The precise nature of the world view didn’t matter — what did was the burdensome honour of the vocation, in which verse forms amounted to dogma and symbols represented political affiliations.

Then came that memorable business with the Scots.

Davidson, the one Scottish member of the group, finally arrived. Without a word of forewarning he had brought along two of his fellow Scots — tall, thin, badly dressed young men with grey, baldly staring eyes. They sat themselves down with an air of embittered arrogance, the way Scots often do, and proceeded without the slightest inhibition to pour scorn on Tyrconnel’s mystical revelations. This did not particularly bother Tyrconnel — he was not a man who took himself seriously — but then one of the newcomers suddenly barked at Lionel Johnson:

“And why aren’t you drinking?”

“I never do,” Johnson replied coldly. “You know, when I was still quite young I once fell on my head…”

But his interlocutor was not going to let him digress. He made his contempt for Johnson’s asceticism abundantly clear. He poured scorn on everything he considered unhealthy, decadent, over-refined and self-consciously crafted. In his opinion only the Scottish peasantry were worth anything in this world, and no serious writer could get by without drawing on the ancient, undiluted wisdom of the Gaelic people and the primordial power of the ballad tradition.

The three lyric poets listened to this for some time, with polite smiles on their faces, much as St Sebastian had done on a similar occasion. They stroked and played with the dog under the table, then suddenly stood up and took their leave.

All three knew, without a word being said, that it was the end of their weekly reunions for ever. They could never again return to the Cheshire Cheese without exposing themselves to the risk of a further meeting with the two Scottish representatives of the Primal Force. They themselves were gentlemen of far greater refinement, fin de siècle to the core and Englishmen to boot, and they could think of absolutely nowhere else they might meet, that is to say, without asking Davidson to dispense with his Highland friends. Thus these convivial gatherings, of such great significance in the history of English literature, came to an end.

Having escorted Johnson home, Tyrconnel remained out in the fog, sensing the utter emptiness of his life. As he drifted from gas lamp to gas lamp a strange feeling gnawed away at him — the same sort of half-conscious preoccupation you get when a particularly attractive woman steps onto the train while you’re chatting to your friends: you hardly notice her, and no one quite realises why you all keep turning your heads in one direction, until eventually you spot her. But this particular concern, when he finally identified what it was, was not quite so appealing.

“What would happen,” he asked himself, numb with horror, “if Johnson really were serious about his Catholicism? Might that also mean that those two Scotsmen genuinely believe in their Life Force? Then I’m the only one… the only one…”

But he allowed the absurd idea to drop. His thoughts turned, rather more consolingly, to Dowson, the love poet of transcendent delicacy who, in real life, spent his time playing cards with the father of his beloved — a greengrocer — and chatting away, no doubt, in the lowest form of cockney. Such is human nature.

Thus he arrived at a certain nightclub. Here, behind the sleeping back of the early-retiring Victoria, the nocturnal decadence of a highly moral age seethed and bubbled away like a virulent organism in a sealed bottle. Tyrconnel was well known in the place, not as a mystical poet but as the son of his eminent father, who sent him large remittances every month. His personal decadence found partial expression in telling dirty stories to the Alhambra chorus girls, who pulled their chairs into a ring around him because they enjoyed them so much. But this simply intensified his inner emptiness, and he drank steadily to fill the void, if only physically.

Some time later he was joined by his countryman and fellow poet Oscar Wilde — devastatingly elegant, as always, in his tail-coat, and languidly witty as ever. He had just come from some place or other where he had been the life and soul of the party… but what frightfully hard work it was, keeping up his non-stop brilliance! With the audacity of an ageing voluptuary, and one eye on his audience, he set his hands to work on the chorus girls, all the while murmuring in Tyrconnel’s ear about his one great grief, his unrequited passion for a certain young earl, a blond to boot, to whom he penned sonnets of classical perfection the way Shakespeare once had. How mendacious are the ways of poets! Tyrconnel knew all about the seedy-looking stable boys and hotel flunkeys who hung around outside Wilde’s house, draining off his rapidly diminishing funds. That was the real truth about poor Oscar.

A wave of alcoholic grief swept over him. He leant his head on Wilde’s shoulder and murmured through his tears:

“Babylon and Nineveh…”

Wilde stared at him in astonishment.

“For God’s sake, not you too, old chap? You’re not starting on this religious nonsense yourself? They tell me our dear Lionel—”

“I’ve come to realise,” Tyrconnel explained tremulously, “that I’m just as beastly a humbug as you, and those two… sons of the peasantry, with… with their Primal Force… and Lionel Johnson… who’s never had proper dealings with a woman in his life… But I… I happen to know a real human being… an itinerant tinker… drowned at sea off Inverary…”

And he launched into the story of the tinker, knowing full well that, as with everything else in his life, there wasn’t a grain of truth in any of it.

“I lie only when I speak, you lie even when you don’t — that is the difference between us,” Wilde declared aphoristically, and got up to go and repeat the witticism at several other tables.

Tyrconnel made his way home, taking one of the chorus girls with him, and paying her about as much attention as he would to a bus ticket.

Tyrconnel sat in the presence of the Great Publisher, having politely placed his newly purchased grey top hat on the floor beside him, and his snow-white gloves and ebony walking stick with the onyx handle on top of it.

“I’ve been thinking about a weekly journal,” the Great Publisher announced, “the sort of thing they do in America, something a lady might hold in her hand on the train. The cost would be recovered through advertisements for spas, watering places, that sort of thing. But of course that side of it wouldn’t interest you, as a poet. Naturally, the paper would mostly carry puzzles, photographs of the Royal Family and stories about dogs. But I also want it to print sonnets and Platonic dialogues — in a word, literature.”

“Indeed,” Tyrconnel murmured respectfully.

“But not the sort of ‘literature’ you get in John o’ London’s Weekly and suchlike. Mine will carry only the best, the most refined writing of the day. Nothing but Symbolism and that French stuff that no one understands. Which is why I thought of you, Mr Tyrconnel. You will be in charge of the literary column. Your fellow workers you will naturally choose yourself.”

Tyrconnel immediately thought of Lionel Johnson and Dowson. It was now a full month since he had seen them, and he had begun to miss them almost sincerely. It was not so much a case of the heart going out in friendship — that sort of thing was out of the question between them — rather, he missed the permanent but always stimulating sense of oppression that he felt in their company. What kept them together was a feeling of mutual fear. Tyrconnel was filled with pangs of genuine remorse every time he thought of Johnson’s immense Oxford-educatedness and the stubborn asceticism with which he worked, rewriting and polishing his verses until they were either absolutely perfect or consigned to the bin. He himself wrote swiftly and haphazardly, and then a kind of hysteria amounting almost to panic, or the simple fact that his cigarette had gone out, would be enough to stop him taking any sort of corrective action.

Dowson was different again. He would produce no more than four or five poems a year, but it was precisely this indolence that the prolific Tyrconnel felt as a perpetual reproach. The man who writes very little always has the advantage over the one who writes a lot, since his every phrase is carefully constructed; just as the person who stays silent is always cleverer and wiser than the one speaking.

Naturally, Tyrconnel did not know the actual address of either of his friends. He had often accompanied Johnson home, but had never noticed the name of the street, let alone the number. In truth, the only things he did notice were either written or spoken: just words.

The one positive thing he did know about was the gossip he so regularly repeated, both in his editorial capacity and at literary dinners — that Ernest Dowson spent every evening from eight onwards in a certain little pub the far side of London Bridge, playing cards with his beloved’s father, a greengrocer. Had Tyrconnel been English it would undoubtedly have restrained him from intruding on the hidden other half of his friend’s life. But his Irish soul was tormented by a mischievous delight in causing embarrassment. That evening he roused himself and set off in the direction of London Bridge.

He quickly identified the little pub from its coat of arms. He went in, knocked back an Irish whiskey at the bar (he was a great patriot) and enquired after Dowson. Not a name anyone could recall. But when he wrote it out in large simple letters, and explained that the person regularly played cards with a gentleman who owned a greengrocer’s shop, the barmaid’s face lit up.

“Oh, you must be thinking of Mr Ernest.” And she took him into a back room.

In the thick haze beneath a paraffin lamp several people sat at cards. It took him some time to spot Dawson’s aristocratic profile. By then his friend had already noticed him. He jumped up, came over, and shook his hand vigorously. He was deeply embarrassed.

“Hello, old chap. This really is kind of you… excessively kind… I’ll introduce you to my partners, if you like, but, please” (pulling him closer and whispering), “you won’t let on, will you, that… you know… I sometimes write verse. That sort of thing puts a chap in a rather difficult position here.”

There were three people at the table: Mr Higgins the greengrocer, his shop assistant, and his daughter.

“My friend Mr Smith,” declared Dowson, and blushed furiously. “Mr Smith is in bicycles.”

His connection with the newfangled sport bestowed a certain prestige, and Tyrconnel improvised a couple of highly interesting stories about the problems of the cycle trade, gazing all the while at the girl with friendly admiration.

He was thinking of the Trojan elders — the moment they set eyes on the Fair Helen they knew that the war was justified. Yes, Dowson was absolutely right. It was perfectly logical that a man who counted recent admirals and foreign secretaries among his long line of forebears should revert, in matters of taste, to the earth from which he had sprung.

This Miss Higgins was your typical English country lass, with bulging muscles, the ripe bloom of an apricot on her cheeks and the stereotypical blonde hair that is the especial pride of the Anglo-Saxon race. Her glance was as amiably expressionless as the face of one of the larger domestic animals, and nothing Tyrconnel said was met by the least glimmer of understanding or produced the slightest spark of interest.

They rose soon afterwards, and left. As they crossed London Bridge Tyrconnel filled his friend in on his future plans. The idea of a weekly magazine delighted Dowson, and he promised to be extremely diligent and write a poem for every second number, or at least every third. Moreover, he knew Johnson’s address. They piled into a two-wheeled cab and set off, with the coachman’s white top hat lighting up the London night from the dizzy heights of his seat behind them.

They found Johnson at home. He was sitting at his desk, in his dressing gown. Its subtle resemblance to a monk’s cowl was tactfully offset by its sheer elegance, as if to deprecate any such suggestion.

“I’m sorry I can’t offer you port or cigars, but I don’t keep that sort of thing in the house. But I came by an excellent Devonshire cider the other day.”

The cider was decidedly of the first rank. Johnson did not have any himself. He seemed rather to look on it with disdain.

Meanwhile Tyrconnel was explaining his plans to him, this time in rather more colourful terms. They were standing on the threshold of a new literary movement. The time had come to bring the Symbolist cause to public attention, and only they, the Esotericists, could do this.

Johnson listened with an expression of profound understanding. When Tyrconnel finished, he placed his hands together on his chest and began an even longer exposition.

“My young friends,” he declared—inter a great many alia—“you always concern yourself with the mere Form. But the problem is, what is really important? Naturally I am not thinking here of the fashionable problems of the day — housing conditions in the slums, the origin of species, the still-unclear role of woman and other such trumped-up issues. What we need is a return to the time-honoured questions. Our real concern in the journal must be that great conundrum, never yet properly addressed in the West, the Conflict of Universals. We must give a fresh hearing to the Realists, who established that general propositions do exist in reality, and equally to the Nominalists who regard them as just so many words, flatus vocis—pure wind — as they so delicately put it. We must pave the way for a New Scholasticism.”

There was much more in this vein. It got deeper and cleverer as he went on. But by now his two companions were utterly lost. They had not the slightest idea what to think about Abelard, or why the conclusions of St Thomas Aquinas were so definitive, or where the otherwise so immensely gifted Duns Scotus had gone astray, or indeed why the system proposed by Grosseteste was untenable in the light of the fiendishly clever attacks on his thinking by William of Ockham.

Johnson rose, and took a few steps towards the doorway.

“And then, of course, there’s St Anselm of Canterbury…”

At that precise moment he collapsed and lay stretched out motionless on the floor.

Filled with unspeakable terror, Tyrconnel and Dowson dashed over to him. As they leant over him, they caught a strong whiff of brandy. He was completely drunk.

*

The Kabbalistic cards lay in the drawer of the writing desk, each in its individual leather case. Tyrconnel had been given them by his friend Russell, who wrote under the pseudonym A E. He was considered a leading expert on all things occult, and his crystal-clear verses remain splendidly impenetrable to this day. But Tyrconnel left the cards where they were. He didn’t even glance at them. He had come to regard his mysticism as no more than the sort of passing phase in his development he should put behind him, now that he had discovered his true self. Even so, to ensure that the time he had spent on it had not been wasted — though a dreamer he was also extremely ambitious — he composed a deeply symbolic narrative poem for the journal about the hardships faced by an Irish sea monster called Manannán. The only bit really dear to his heart was the creature’s name — Manannán.

A day or two later there was a knock at his door. It was the famous seer and mystic Mary Spottiswoode, one of the glories of Russell’s little circle. And there she was, fluttering down the vestibule as if on wings, with the air of someone about to swoon. She looked particularly winsome that morning, with her feathered hat, enormous boa and parasol.

“She looks like some kind of bird,” Tyrconnel thought to himself (no doubt with a goose in mind).

“The cards,” she whispered. Her face was interestingly pale, with the desolate world-weariness of someone who is forever losing things.

“Let me get you some water,” Tyrconnel suggested.

“Do you still have those cards?”

“Of course I do.”

“Quick, quick…”

And she sank into the depths of an armchair.

“Which one?”

“Give me the fifteenth, now, quickly. The one with the Greek letter Tau and the picture of a little bull… I mislaid it… it went missing from my pack, I’ve no idea how.”

“What do you need it for?” he asked. He knitted his brow earnestly, in keeping with the occasion. But he had no idea what any of this was about.

“Oh,” the Mystic Goose replied, blushing deeply. “How can I explain? It’s not important, really. I just wanted a word with my late husband, about his will. There’s a question about some of his bank deposits.”

“Mary, you’re not telling me the truth,” Tyrconnel hazarded.

“How do you know? But why do I ask? You know everything. All the same… don’t be too sure of yourself.”

“My dear Mary, once a person such as myself has ascended to the lunar plane, he takes no further interest in the vanities of the world… a calm and comforting melancholy fills his soul, and a profound sense of love.” (If only I knew what this is all about! he thought.)

“I knew you wouldn’t take advantage of my situation. I’m a poor, defenceless woman. That is why I came to you. But tell me… last night, from thirteen minutes past one onwards… were you perhaps looking at the card with the Tau and the little bull?”

“I was, indeed,” he exclaimed. (One way or another, he just possibly might have been.)

“And… oh, my God… what did you see?”

“What did I see?” A host of possibilities raced through his brain: a swan, an apple tree, a lighthouse… But then a rather different inspiration came to him.

“Oh, Mary,” he murmured, taking care to choke briefly. “What did

I see, Mary? It was you, you…” “I knew it!” the Mystic Goose spluttered. The curve of her neck was lovely and white. “And I saw you! — the whole night long. The workings of Fate…”

And she burst into tears.

“Don’t cry, Mary. We would struggle against this in vain. At any rate, perhaps you should take off your hat. A swan sang in my soul all night, a wild swan from the reed beds of Coole, pure white… and how white your face is… do take off that boa… there we are. And I watched them, chasing each another across the face of the moon, with a ceaseless rhythmic motion, back and forth, back and forth — the lines of fate. How lovely your hand is! There are moments in life that rise up before us like a beacon of light in an ocean of mystery. Permit me to unbutton your blouse, Mary. You weren’t wearing one last night.”

“What was I wearing?”

“It was a sort of magical, pendulous dewlap, it was like… like… a shirt… and the clouds were flying beneath the moon, till I no longer knew whether it was the clouds that were moving or the moon itself… but don’t be afraid of me, Mary. There’s nothing wrong in this… somewhere out there, on the cosmic mountain tops, our souls have cast aside every veil and are yielding to their mutual caresses… forgive me… I just need your girdle… yes, that’s it… someone who can foretell the future… oo! oh!.. the unspeakable sadness before the moment of possession… oh, you!.. but sometimes the stars bring us unimaginable happiness… and then one has no right… no… no right to hold out… against the future… just abandon yourself to the waves of destiny… here, Mary, beside me… on the bearskin… yes… yes… yes…”

A few weeks later he met Lionel Johnson again, for the last time. It was just after the arrest of Oscar Wilde — not on account of the stable boys and hotel flunkeys but, more surprisingly, at the instigation of the blond young aristocrat’s father. Public opinion in England, as always on these occasions, had taken a united stand against their former favourite, and people who dared take his side in pubs were beaten senseless.

At this point Johnson called on Tyrconnel, bringing Dowson with him. Dowson was even more hypersensitive and silent than usual. Johnson declared grandiloquently that they simply had to do something for Oscar. To decide what that might be, they took themselves off to a small but well-known restaurant.

Tyrconnel ordered a white Bordeaux and poured a glass for everyone. Johnson knocked his back in one go, and promptly poured himself another…

“Well, it no longer matters, now,” he sighed. But he did not explain his remark.

For as long as the meal and the wine bore them up, one great plan for Wilde’s rescue followed another.

“We’ll produce a pamphlet in which we set out the merits of his writing, under twelve separate points, and have it signed by all the leading writers in England and France,” Tyrconnel suggested.

“I think, on the contrary, we should approach the Queen and propose that she offer Oscar her protection — she has such a motherly heart,” said Dowson. They also thought of enlisting the Prince of Wales’ support, urging the Irish representatives in Parliament to protest, and inciting the colonial regiments to mutiny. Lionel Johnson rather fancied the idea of shooting old Lord Douglas, who had brought the case. After all, St Thomas Aquinas considered assassination permissible in the case of tyrants, and indeed the Jesuit Mariana made it a requirement if the tyrant happened to be a Protestant.

But when dinner was over, the coffee drunk, and they had moved on to the cognac, certain misgivings, and a mood of dejection, took hold. They began to feel like kings in exile — as does anyone who has drunk a great deal of brandy — and the futility of it all became apparent. The stark vision rose up before them of an uncomprehending age, the base multitude, and the obtuse moralising tendency of the British public. In their misery they consumed ever more cognac. Lionel Johnson seemed to cope with this surprisingly well.

Wilde’s fate slowly faded before their own unspoken sorrows.

“Poor Oscar,” said Tyrconnel. “But properly speaking, he was never a really good poet. His work was always too highly polished, too wilfully classical and brilliant. He never understood the importance of what is left unsaid. Never quite attained the elegant pointlessness of true art.”

“The reason for that,” affirmed Dowson, “was his unfortunate upbringing. I hear that the best families in Dublin would have nothing to do with the Wildes. Oscar was equally a parvenu among words. He liked to caress them the way the nouveau riche like running their fingers through their money.”

“And the Church has condemned his crime even more strongly than the civil authorities,” Johnson added. “If he does end up in prison, it’ll give him the opportunity to repent his sins and start his life afresh.”

As night and the cognac weighed ever more heavily down upon them, they began to give increasing vent to their own long-suppressed personal grievances. Tyrconnel was the first. It was easier for him, not being English. He described his desperate, sometimes feverish struggles for self-expression, the battle to liberate his work from the merely prosaic. He told them how bleak his life really was, behind the free-flowing phrases; how there were times when he could think of nothing serious to say at all; and how, in point of fact, whatever he knew about love was simply taken from books. He had become deeply embittered, and found the whole struggle hopeless. (At that stage he had no idea that he would in time become a world-famous poet, and be awarded the Nobel Prize in his old age.)

“Oh, poetry,” said Dowson. “That’s not the problem. I’m like a tree torn up by the roots, or some such thing.”

It transpired that Miss Higgins had been unfaithful to him. The trouble began when the girl was suddenly and incomprehensibly seized with literary ambition. She poured out religious and patriotic verses, and ballads about the great English seafarers. Dowson, being so very discreet by nature, had never quite managed to reveal that he was a man of letters. Somehow he had also kept it hidden that his father was an Admiral of the Fleet and that his ancestors had fought against the Armada. He had always declared, rather evasively, that he worked in the flax and hemp business and was expecting a rise in salary “very soon”. Gradually the girl came more and more to despise him as an ignorant, common sort of man. The end result was that she ran off with the deputy chief sports reporter of a provincial newspaper. “The soul is what matters,” she declared. “I could never love the sort of man who is interested only in flax and hemp.”

“Oh, love,” said Johnson, with a dismissive wave of the hand, “and oh! to everything else in this world, and that includes all your great and sanctified ideas. In the final analysis there is only one true reality, and that is poverty.”

“Between ourselves, what do you know about poverty?” Tyrconnel asked irritably.

“A great deal more than you think. All this time I’ve been living on my capital. I’ve never invested a penny in anything, because I’m not a man of business. And anyway, the medieval Church expressly condemned investment for profit,” he went on, placing his hands together on his chest. “Catholicism has lost a great deal of its lustre since it quietly condoned usury. Anyway, I’ve always funded my spending from my capital, and this is the precise moment when it finally runs out. I shall pay the bill for my meal, and after that I shan’t have a penny in the world. At the very most, the honoraria for my poems, but we’d better not talk about that.”

“And what will you do?”

“I’ve no idea. I’ll give it some thought tonight. But in point of fact, it isn’t just my capital that’s finished. The game’s up with me too. I’ve already done everything I wanted to do, and had to do. I shall never write anything better than I already have. I won’t, because it can’t be done. I’ve come to the end of what is possible in the English language. I’ve written poetry as fine as Shakespeare’s and Keats’s. But I don’t want to brag about that, because it doesn’t amount to very much. The limits to human expression are in the end very narrow. I can’t progress any further, and I’m afraid of falling back. The only logical solution would be suicide. But the Church prohibits nothing so strongly as self-slaughter,” he said, and once again placed his hands together on his chest.

After the restaurant closed they spent the remainder of the evening in Tyrconnel’s lodgings. Dowson lay on the rug in front of the fireplace, Tyrconnel sprawled across the divan, and Johnson sat at the writing table. The more he drank, the more monkish his appearance and manner became. The facial features of the other two seemed to blur — his had grown sharper, as in death.

Tyrconnel turned off the light and they sat like damned souls in the eerie flickering light of a tall candle, deep into the night. They all had the feeling that something was coming to an end, something truly sublime, now beyond all helping.

“Only they are happy,” murmured Tyrconnel, “who, like Cuchulain, come across the Invisible People dancing in the moonlight and lie entranced in a clearing in a great wood, somewhere far, far away…”

“With the help of a little opium, perhaps,” Dowson interjected.

“Most probably. Even I think that now,” Tyrconnel replied. “I used to think I had no need for such chemical and scientific aids to free my soul from time and place. For example, I have those Kabbalistic cards…”

“Tell me, Tyrconnel,” Johnson suddenly asked. “Have you ever actually tried them?”

Tyrconnel replied rather shamefacedly that he hadn’t.

“Then why don’t we try them now?” Johnson returned, rising to his feet. There was a strange excitement in his voice. “I know the Church rigorously condemns the use of magic, but it does to some extent condone the Christian Kabbalah — because it can’t be used to conjure up the devil, or those evil spirits who bring mortal souls into danger. So where are these cards, then?”

With some hesitation Tyrconnel drew them from the leather cases in which they had been silently skulking.

“So, what do you do with them?” asked Dowson, as in a dream.

“Everyone picks a card, takes it home and studies it. The diagram or symbol shown on it will inspire a vision that holds the hidden solution… at least, according to George Russell. I won’t presume to guarantee that this will happen. But if we really are going to put it to the test, let’s each take the same symbol. Then, according to Russell, we should all see the same vision. Tomorrow we can report back to one another, or we could all three of us work our revelations up into separate poems. It’d be interesting to see how they differed.”

“To hell with the individual differences,” said Johnson. “Give us the cards, and let’s be off. It’ll put an end to this very long night.”

“Look, here are four identical cards, for example, all number eights, with a full moon, signifying Love. Here are three with the symbol for Marriage. And three with the Death symbol. Which one shall we choose?”

“Why not Love?” said Dowson.

“Why not Death?” said Johnson. “It’s the one most in fashion these days.”

Johnson and Dowson went home, each with a card in a leather case in his pocket.

After they had gone, Tyrconnel stayed up. His level of fatigue and inebriation had reached the point where a man no longer feels tired and for a while his brain remains clear and sober. He aired the room, tidied it up, then leafed through a Dublin periodical. From time to time he heaved a great sigh. Life, he felt, was utterly incomprehensible.

He decided he really should get to bed. As he was taking off his coat he came upon the leather card case, whose existence he had completely forgotten. It bore the number nine, and a Hebrew letter whose name he did not know. “Obviously the letter for Death,” he thought.

“Should I really look at it?” he wondered. “I suppose I have to, since we all three said we would.” In that instant he realised that it was something more than mere indifference that had made him leave it where it was. Some other feeling was at work in him, a kind of fear… Perhaps, after all…

Wanting to defer the moment, he started to cut the pages of the French novel he intended to read in bed the next morning. He was barely halfway through when he suddenly received what was effectively an order — that he look at the card. He leapt up and dashed across to the candle.

He took the card out of its leather case. At first his shortsighted eyes could make out nothing but the lines that made up the matrix. Then he noticed that they were starting to draw the face of a man. He leant closer, and dropped it in horror. It was the face of Lionel Johnson.

“Well, I did drink a fair amount,” he thought. “How on earth could Johnson’s face get onto the card?”

He picked it up again.

Once again his friend’s image appeared before him. But now it was not as he had seen it earlier. It had definitely changed. The features had become much sharper. Sinister shadows were forming beneath the eyes, and the jaw seemed to have sunk a little, as if all the strength had gone out of it.

He threw on his coat and hat and dashed out into the street. Luckily a cab was waiting at the corner. He shook the driver awake and gave him Johnson’s address.

Arriving, he leapt out of the cab. At that precise moment a second cab stopped at the door, and out jumped Ernest Dowson.

“You too?” Tyrconnel asked, with a frisson of horror.

Dowson nodded in affirmation. They raced up the four steps and began to hammer on the door. No response. They pummelled and kicked it, in a rising frenzy of impatience and hysteria.

The commotion produced a policeman from somewhere. Normally the streets of this well-to-do neighbourhood were completely deserted.

“And what are you up to, then?”

“We’ve come to see Mr Johnson.”

“Mr Johnson came home earlier, perhaps half-an-hour ago. If he wanted to let you gentlemen in he would already have done so. He clearly does not wish to see you. You’d better go home.”

“My God, you must help us get this door open somehow.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Something terrible has happened in there…”

The policeman considered this.

“His doorman went away this morning. Mr Johnson is there on his own. Hm… Right, let’s go.”

He fetched a crowbar and prised the door open.

They found Lionel Johnson in his bedroom. He was lying on the bed, in his dressing gown, which now looked even more like a cowl. His facial features had become much sharper, and the lower jaw had sunk slightly, as if all the strength had gone out of it. His heart had stopped.

Brain haemorrhage, the doctor decided.

1934

A DOG CALLED MADELON

JÁNOS BÁTKY, PhD, took care to protect himself against the greyness of everyday life. As a child he even managed on occasions to convince himself that the chocolate he was eating was in fact salami. Later, he acquired a passion for cocktails. The gin in his vermouth seemed to him to embody the mighty spirit of ancient pine forests. Adding curaçao to red wine conjured up a sixteen-year-old girl — who no doubt had long since married. Women’s actual faces he forgot instantly.

“What does Jenny look like?” he was wondering, one autumn afternoon in London. The walls of the little Welsh chapel that stood before him were overrun with ivy. How wonderful it is that, in the midst of all the traffic, London churches retain that pristine air of rustic piety.

The little aphorism was quickly noted down — he was a methodical man — then his thoughts returned to Jenny. Five minutes to six. If he couldn’t remember what she looked like by then it would be a disaster. True, she usually wore dark blue, but that could not be relied on as an incontrovertible truth. Doubtless there would be something unmistakably Jennyish about her, but it would be as subtle as the difference between two varieties of tea. In the end, all women were Jennys.

“Hello, is it really you?” she said on arrival.

It was a good question. “At any meeting the first requirement, and the most difficult, is to establish identity,” he noted (this time in his head). Here was a completely unfamiliar woman burbling away and absolutely furious because he hadn’t been in the precise place they had agreed on. He waited for her to calm down, then asked:

“Won’t you come back to my place for tea?”

“Oh, no,” she replied, terrified by the prospect. She always was. Then they set off to his place for tea. As they always did.

Jenny was telling him about the customers. An elderly gentleman had bought a Georgian poker, a wooden madonna and a little African carving. But he had taken so long about it! And crocodiles were still very much in demand. Oh, and there were these two young men, obviously artists, who had told her that she looked like an Italian painting. What was the name of that famous Italian painter?

“Giovinezzo Giovinezzi?” Bátky hazarded.

The same. And they had asked her to dinner. But she hadn’t gone. No nice girl would.

She worked in an antique shop.

“And Lady Rothesay was back again.”

“Oh, was she?” he remarked, suddenly interested. (Rothesay… splendid. Such an historic name. One of their forebears was strung up by James I, somewhere in St Albans… he would look it up when he got home.)

“What sort of woman is she?”

“Oh, very odd. Yes, you could certainly say that. She just comes in, points to something or other, let’s say a candelabra, and takes it away.”

Bátky was deep in thought.

They arrived at his flat. While Jenny was making the tea (the bit she most genuinely enjoyed in the whole relationship) he looked up the Rothesays. One had indeed been hanged. His mind’s eye conjured up a Scottish loch… the traditional two greyhounds sitting at the castle entrance… the melancholy Earl (a passionate collector of ivories) tippling the night away in the curve of a bay window, secretly and alone… Her Ladyship, a secret Catholic sympathiser, admitting Jesuit priests disguised as doctors through doors concealed by wallpaper… Clouds drifting across the sky in doom-laden shapes.

Once tea was over Jenny sat passively awaiting her womanly fate. Bátky remained silent.

“Now,” he was thinking, “if this Jenny were Lady Rothesay, I would say to her: ‘My lady, how can you do this? How could you gamble thus with your good name, when Mrs Bird next door is forever spying on us?… And besides… how could a Rothesay, whose ancestor was hanged in such tragic circumstances, lower herself to the level of someone like me, a base commoner, a mere academic? But hark!.. the Earl’s bloodhounds are closing in… you must fly, my lady, fly this instant! And as she was leaving, standing in the doorway with her proud head high, he would declare: ‘Oh my lady, stay, if only for a fleeting moment longer! Stay, whatever cruel Fate may bring…’”

And he threw himself at Jenny’s feet. Somewhat embarrassed, she stroked his hair. She had seen it all many times before.

Then everything took its usual course.

Yet again, Jenny managed to forget some item of her clothing, and when she called back she found Bátky in a terminally bitter mood. He had been reflecting on the way his whole life had been frittered away on a procession of frightful little Jennys, when ever since boyhood he had yearned for a Lady Rothesay. History held the sort of erotic charge for him that others found in actresses’ dressing rooms — a truly great passion required three or four centuries’ historical background at the very least. As for Jenny… it was all just lies and onanism.

“What’s the matter with you?” she asked.

“Nothing. Just don’t bother coming here again. Women with scrubby red hands should stay at home. And get some of that fat off your thighs. Why don’t you just disappear?”

For whole days he mooched about the eternally silent streets where he imagined the English aristocracy resided when in London. Occasionally a large delivery truck would pass through, bearing the name of some famous London firm. “That can only mean a soirée somewhere,” he thought, and his pulse quickened. Once or twice he managed to exchange a few words with the wife and dependents of a doorman.

“The most striking feature of the aristocracy is their invisibility,” he confided to his notebook. After further thought he added: “Blondes are generally averse to fish, but go into ecstasies when served spider crabs.”

By Sunday his aristocratic solitude had begun to oppress him, and he took himself off to Regent’s Park with the idea of adding one of the strolling shop girls to his repertoire of conquests. Most of the time he spent watching the squirrels. There were vast numbers of them entertaining the crowd. There were also dogs. One especially interesting black creature, not unlike a Scottish terrier but much bigger and altogether more diabolical-looking (no doubt some newfangled breed) trotted by in front of him. It was followed by a woman, whom it was dragging along in some agitation. It seemed to be looking for something, sniffing the ground with an air of busy anxiety. Finally it paused before a sort of memorial. With all the happy excitement of a purpose about to be fulfilled it prepared to transact its real business. But some inner obstruction appeared to be frustrating the process, which threatened to become rather drawn out. The dog circled round in a series of bizarre bodily contortions that were painful to behold. A crowd of little boys watched with great interest, providing an expert running commentary. The lady turned her back on the scene in some distress.

“I’ll keep an eye on him, if you like,” said Bátky. “Perhaps you might go and feed the squirrels.”

“Good idea,” she replied, and handed him the leash.

“Excuse me,” he called after her. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Madelon,” she replied, and strolled away.

When Bátky arrived back at his tiny flat that evening he was richer by a dog. He had lost the woman in the crowd. It occurred to him that dogs have very sure instincts, and he decided to entrust himself to her guidance. They went for a stroll on Hampstead Heath, where they paused to admire the artificial lake at the top of the hill. Madelon trotted along in happy silence. They walked for hours. It was late evening by the time they reached Golders Green, where the city proper ends. Here the dog made an abrupt turn and calmly set off back towards town. Bátky realised she had tricked him. Sacrificing the money for the next day’s lunch he hailed a taxi and took her home.

It was a difficult night. She refused to eat or drink. She eyed his furniture suspiciously, then crawled into a corner and howled. Towards dawn he could stand it no longer. He went out to an all-night tearoom, laid his head on the marble table top and caught a few hours’ sleep.

The sun rose next morning in the sign of the dog. Bátky went home. The animal was still alive. She lay on his bed, sleeping soundly, and looking for all the world like a lady’s black shawl with a fringe. The instant she set eyes on him she growled testily. And she still wouldn’t eat.

He flopped into an armchair and attempted to order his thoughts. What was to be done with her? He thought of offering her to the Kensington Museum — they had several stuffed dogs on display — but his kindly heart baulked at the idea. Perhaps he should keep her, train her, and try to make friends with her? Human will-power could sometimes bring about wonders. By degrees he reconciled himself to the notion.

“We’ll get used to one another,” he told himself. “I’ve always longed for a pet, to stop me being so lonely. It’s a pity the only time she’ll ever get off the bed will be to wet the marble slab by the fireplace.”

Whenever the tipsy cleaning lady scolded him he just listened in silence with his head hanging down. He was used to being misunderstood.

“No doubt, after a month or two, I’ll get her to come walking with me. One fine spring afternoon we’ll be strolling in Regent’s Park and we’ll happen to meet the lady I had her from. ‘Madam,’ I shall say, ‘as you see, I have faithfully watched over that which you entrusted to me. Madelon has grown a little since then, it is true, and yes, she has put on a little weight, perhaps, but not enough to harm her figure. Obviously she’s spent the last few months in serious intellectual company. I don’t believe it’s done her any harm.’

“And one thing would lead to another, we’d go and have tea, then to the cinema, who knows…?” The lady, so far as he could remember, was rather attractive and engaging, with wonderfully square shoulders… simply dressed, but in excellent taste. Obviously the wife of a young but successful tobacco merchant… her father a respectable greying functionary in a large insurance company… all living in a little house somewhere, East Ealing perhaps, in one of those streets with sixty addresses on either side of the road, all exactly the same, with more or less identical lives being led inside them. Oh, the English lower middle classes, with their five-o’clock teas, their tranquil winter evenings by the fire, the single words let drop once every half-hour, most probably about the Prince of Wales…

In the afternoon the bell rang. Bátky roused himself from his reverie about the middle classes and opened the door. There stood the lady.

“I’ve come for Madelon,” she said simply.

“Oh… oh… and oh again!” he said, lost in contemplation of the strange workings of fate. “Do take a chair. Madelon is still alive. But how ever did you find me? London is so large…”

“It was very easy,” she replied. “You gave me this book to hold yesterday, while you took care of her. There was a letter inside addressed to János Bátky, Francis Street, London… I thought that must be you. I came in the afternoon hoping to find you at home. I really must apologise… I can imagine what Madelon got up to in the night… you poor man!”

“Oh, we were just beginning to make friends,” Bátky replied modestly. “I stroked her the whole night. I thought you would have done the same. I kept thinking that it was your hand touching her.”

“How very kind,” she said, and took off her hat.

Now for the first time Bátky noticed how handsome she was. (“I’ve always adored tobacconists’ wives. Their hair has something of the rich gold of the finest Virginia.”)

They made tea, and while she was pouring it Bátky took the opportunity to record on a slip of paper: “Love affairs usually start in either September or January.”

After tea he sat at her feet and laid his head on her lap. He imagined that they were now at home, in her home, in East Ealing… family photos hanging on the wall… the grandfather with huge whiskery sideburns… Christmas carols playing on the gramophone… everything serene and unchanging, the British Empire on its mighty foundations, and Madelon playing with a kitten beside the hearth.

Her lips had the taste of home-made strawberry jam. Her movements, as she undressed, were calm and placid, as if tomorrow were another day. Her whole being radiated such complete self-assurance he quite forgot to wonder at his unexpected conquest. Apparently it was what everyone did in this country after tea. Even Jenny.

“I’ll come again,” she said, some time towards evening.

“I’d be delighted,” he replied with conviction. “Won’t you tell me your name?”

“Oh, I thought you’d recognised me. You must have seen my picture in the papers — it’s there often enough. I am Lady Rothesay.”

And off she went.

This parting note unsettled Bátky. He placed a high value on truthfulness in other people. He had many times broken off with a woman because she said she’d been at the dentist when she had in fact been with another man. “Why was she so ashamed to be the wife of a young but successful tobacconist? These English are incurable snobs. If I had a little house in East Ealing, and a whiskery grandfather hanging on the wall, I would never dream of denying it.”

Her falsehood depressed him so much he couldn’t bring himself to fall in love with her. Once more his loneliness pressed down on him like a slowly lowered ceiling. The same gloom as always darkened the London streets. A fine drizzle was falling. On Camden Hill elderly gentlemen strolled towards their eternal rest. In Kensington alone there were two million old ladies. Life was quite meaningless… Somewhere, deep inside a Scottish castle, or in some dark avenue of ancient trees, the deranged wife of an earl was putting an end to it all…

One day she appeared on his doorstep again.

Once again, they spent a very pleasant afternoon. Bátky was in an intimate and sentimental frame of mind, talking about Budapest, where the cafés spilled a warm, cosy light onto the pavement, the waiters knew exactly which paper you liked to read, and the mysterious lower orders cleared the lovely white snow overnight.

“So what is your name?” he asked her, thinking that this time she would be sincere.

“But I’ve already told you. I am Lady Rothesay.”

Bátky became cool and detached. He could see he would never get close to this woman, and what is love without a meeting of souls?

“I’m going away tomorrow, to France. My father is a tower guard at Notre Dame.”

“And when are you coming back?” she enquired.

“I’m not coming back,” he replied grimly.

“As you wish,” she shrugged, and made her way quickly down the stairs.

A few days later the Sunday Pictorial found an occasion to carry yet another picture of Lady Rothesay. It was her all right.

“Women are incomprehensible,” he wrote on a slip of paper, and carefully filed it away.

1934

MUSINGS IN THE LIBRARY

LOOKING BACK on the blissful days of my youth, as they begin to slip away from me, I can now see that the best of them were those spent in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. I won’t deny that the hours I whiled away on night watch at the Scouts camp were also very pleasant, and my first amorous embrace, up in the mountains of Austria, though pure puppy love, comes pretty close — love and nature have seldom let me down. But the very best moments were undoubtedly those spent in the Bibliothèque nationale, especially the winter evenings.

Now, the beauty of penny-pinching is perhaps that it is so typically French. No illumination of any kind was permitted to penetrate the ever-receding mystery of the huge space under the arched ceiling. That would have been wanton extravagance. Instead, tall green lampshades, placed at strictly rational distances apart, burnt directly over the tables. These were of course switched on only after total blindness had set in. Immediately the silence intensified, humming with feverish excitement, since closing time was now imminent and everyone’s life suddenly depended on getting through the next fifty pages. The only sound to be heard was the rhythmic, monotone rustling of pages being turned and the occasional voice raised in protest by some superannuated lunatic at the counter where the all-powerful ushers were enthroned.

At five minutes before a quarter to six, a personage specially assigned to the task would proclaim in a voice of thunder: “Mesdames et Messieurs, on va bientôt fermer”—the closing ‘er’ being wonderfully drawn-out, wavering off to vanish in the remoteness of those never-to-be visited rooms where the library kept its millions of books. Then, at five forty-five precisely, the same functionary would call out, with all the succinctness we have come to expect from ancient prophets of doom: “On ferme!” And everyone trooped out.

My friend Swen Reimer filed out with me. As we made our way across the vast courtyard in the gathering gloom, I spotted the girl I had been admiring on and off throughout the day whenever I needed a break from my reading. Now, as she crossed the space in front of us, there was no difficulty deducing her national origins. In her crisp trench coat, blue student’s cap and powerful stride there were distinct adumbrations of the Prussian military.

“You know, Reimer,” I observed. “If I were German, I’d go straight up to her and declare: ‘Young lady, you are German, I am German. Shall we leave together?’”

Then something dreadful happened. Reimer replied:

“Yes, I might just do that, but I’d have to be on my own.” Then, “Do excuse me,” he continued, in his usual, slightly offended-sounding tone, and promptly abandoned me. He was with the girl in an instant, seemed to strike a chord with her almost at once, and the two of them marched off into some erotic hinterland, leaving me standing there as if turned to stone.

It was an unspeakable disappointment. I had always imagined that Reimer would be just as timid as all the other souls who haunt the libraries of the world. I had no sense of his being in any way superior. I had felt sure of him, I had complacently despised him, and now… That’s what happens when you put your trust in people.

I wandered through the Place du Palais Royal, where I was particularly struck by a display in the window of the Louvre department store. It presented a stork bringing dazzlingly lit presents to dazzlingly lit children sitting in a little house, in which the gifts appeared in rotation and then miraculously disappeared. It reminded me that Christmas — that ritual humiliation of the selfish and the lonely — was creeping up on us. I carried on down the Rue des Saints-Pères, where I lived, thinking how pleasant it would be if there were a letter waiting for me in my room.

“Even better would be one with a cheque inside,” I mused, more pragmatically. “But should some female acquaintance have written, that would at least be something. I wouldn’t even mind going back to the customs office, so long as there really were something for me in the post, something completely unexpected.”

Regarding the customs people: I once had to go there to register my presence while they opened a parcel that had come addressed to me from some person or persons unknown. I stood trembling before three officials while they withdrew a large cardboard box from its brown paper wrapping. They opened it, very cautiously, and discovered a thick wad of cotton wool. The suspicious wadding was then dissected with professional expertise. Hidden in its depths was a tiny flower — an autumn crocus. The ‘amusing’ Gallic anecdotes that followed showed their true mentality. For my part, I smiled a superior smile and thought it ridiculous to have been summoned to the main offices for this. But at the same time I was deeply moved. For, apart from the rose and carnation, which of course everyone knows, the autumn crocus was the one flower I could identify by name. In fact I am always delighted when I see one, as for once I can be sure that it isn’t a snapdragon, or salvia, but incontrovertibly an autumn crocus.

In other ways too the post stands for the element of unpredictability in my otherwise straightforward life. On one occasion I received an invitation to a ball with “I’ll be there” written on it in an unknown hand. On another occasion I was sent an old-fashioned tie-pin that arrived, as I worked out later, just in time for my name day. Then a Mickey Mouse badge appeared one Christmas Eve. And once, at a time when I was asking myself with particular bitterness just why I had to live in Paris — so far from Budapest, my beloved home — to embrace the self-imposed exile in the cause of greater knowledge that afflicted a whole generation of young Hungarians between 1924 and 1930, the postman brought me a perfumed envelope containing a ticket for the Budapest transport system, already punched.

I tried not to think about who the kind sender might be. At the time I had no one in my life. I had arrived from Hungary two years earlier, having cut every tie and entanglement. All my relationships had been decisively terminated, I corresponded only with other men, and then always very briefly. For this steady stream of little surprises I impersonally gave credit to the post office itself, or ascribed it to my fate as written in the stars, and their inscrutable way of protecting me from the mortal sin of terminal loneliness.

Nor had my stars — that celestial arm of the French postal service — forgotten me on this fateful evening. In the box behind the keyhole I found a letter, addressed in a hand which needless to say I did not recognise. I opened it with palpitating heart. For the sake of brevity, I reproduce it verbatim:

Most Respected Doctor X,

I hope you will excuse my writing to you as a stranger. My cousin, whose letter is enclosed, told me that that you wouldn’t mind. I arrived in Paris a few days ago, and would like to work in the Bibliothèque nationale. I would be enormously grateful if you could advise me about what I need to know.

Respectfully yours,

Ilonka Csáth

It was accompanied by a few lines from Edit Wessely, now calling herself Mrs Gyula Somebody.

My dear Tom,

Would you please take my little cousin into your much-vaunted care. She is very pretty. Behave yourself at all times, and don’t cheat on me with all those flappers.

Edit

This same Edit had been my great love at university, the heroine of endless poetical walks in the Buda hills. I had been very fond of her, but since then she had done the dirty on me and married, as had increasing numbers of my former acquaintances. As for this Ilonka Csáth, I knew nothing about her. With my usual inborn pessimism I reckoned she would quite probably be obese, and almost certainly stupid. Never mind. The main thing was that my faith in the old post office had not been disappointed. So far everything that it had brought had been propitious.

I carried on up to my little room. This ‘room’, like that of every other Hungarian intellectual in Paris, was the smallest, ugliest and most humble abode imaginable; and like the room of every other Hungarian intellectual in Paris, it has become so glorified in memory that it outshines all my other paradises in all their variety.

After some humming and hawing I composed the following reply:

Dear Colleague,

I would be happy to put myself at your disposal in the Bibliothèque nationale at any time. You can identify me by the brown handkerchief I wear over my heart, and more particularly, by the fact that I always sit in seat number 266. If not there, I am to be found in the coffee house going off to the right.

Yours etc.

And gradually I forgot all about her.

Then one morning I became aware of a young girl moving hesitantly along the central passageway dividing the two sections of the library. She was behaving the way people do when checking the seat numbers in a cinema to see which is theirs. Finally she stopped next to my table, glanced at the people sitting on either side of me, blushed, took out a work of reference from the nearest bookcase and began flicking aimlessly through it. She was very pretty. All the same, I carried on reading.

It occurred to me that this could well be Ilonka Csáth. She was obviously wracking her brains trying to decide which one was me. (Young lady, I am your man. Perhaps you should speak to me. But then again, perhaps you aren’t Ilonka Csáth. Women can be divided into two groups: those who are Ilonka Csáth, and those who are not. Representatives of the latter greatly outnumber the former. Oh, nonsense…) And I continued with my reading.

Once I had fully understood the next sonnet I glanced up again. The person in question was no longer there. I felt just a little put out, disappointed and betrayed. Something might have come of it. But that’s women for you — they always go away. And she was so very attractive. I read another two sonnets, then stood up and set off for lunch. When I reached the door, the same very attractive young lady got up from the next table and ran over to me.

“Excuse me,” she said, in appalling French, “but aren’t you Tamás X?”

“I am indeed,” I replied in Hungarian, “and you are most probably Ilonka Csáth.”

She was delighted by my perspicacity.

“I thought it must be you, but I was afraid to say anything.”

“How could a grown woman, a university student, be so shy?” I asked, in a rather superior tone. “So, in a word, you would like me to initiate you into the mysteries of the Bibliothèque nationale. I would be delighted. But what would you say to the idea that we first have lunch?”

“Lunch? I… I usually just have coffee.”

“You poor thing. So you’re having to watch the pennies?”

“Not at all. But I’m not yet used to going into restaurants. This is my first time away from home, you know.”

“Then you must get used to it with me. I know a very good, and cheap, little Czech restaurant, where you can get authentic Hungarian food. Real pork chops and cabbage, just like at home.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” she answered uncertainly.

I took her straight there, my behaviour a rather odd mixture of the paternal and the gallant.

Over the meal I asked her for news of the university. She was very chatty, endlessly informative about the ways of the teaching staff and the reaction of the students to their lectures.

She was one of those rare girls who don’t come apart at the seams the moment they open their mouths. For all her shyness, she expressed herself precisely and thoughtfully, and once she warmed to her theme the sentences flowed, sweetly, lyrically, eloquently. She was a second-year arts student, just twenty — which nowadays means little more than adolescent. She was still young enough for intellectual merit to make a strong impression on her.

We got on wonderfully well. She was so much like a colleague I almost forgot that she was such an attractive young woman, and I would have loved to take her to my bosom. I even tried to pay for her meal, despite the state of my finances. But, true to Hungarian custom, she refused so adamantly it was as if I had impugned her respectability.

The afternoon passed in what seemed a moment. How proud I felt, leading her timid steps round the catalogues and the pigeon-holes where orders were placed, and explaining the inner meaning of the pictures, all as if I personally had discovered the art of printing. I taught her everything that mattered. I pointed out the more egregious old-timers, sitting there poring over their books — the old gent with his blue cap who would stand up from time to time and whistle for a few minutes; the one who never stopped munching away; the mad one, and the talkative one who had discovered the primal human language from which all others could be derived. And when we went for coffee, I declared rather fancifully:

“Don’t let it worry you that ninety per cent of the people you see in here are geriatrics, cripples and lost souls. It’s not only an asylum for the likes of them. It’s also a refuge for the eternally young — people like you and me, for example — and in fact all human life…”

I just couldn’t find logical expression for my feelings.

But in fact Ilonka was in little need of reassurance. It was obvious on that first afternoon that she would be completely at home in the library. Perhaps this was because her sensitivity and timidity found a protective calm in the ordered, reliable, studiously innocent world that is scholarship, of which the library is the outward and visible embodiment. How comforting it is to know that everything is in its place, and all so aloof and impersonal. Moods and desires come and go, like so many restless tourists, but the folios remain in place, waiting benignly to be read by succeeding centuries. Buses, taxis and metros rush us about at frantic speed; placards bawl out every grubby little change in our material lives: the library stands for what is pure and true.

At closing time I escorted her back to the students’ hostel where she was staying.

“What are you doing after supper?” I asked.

“Nothing, really. I’ll talk to the girls for a while, then go to bed and read.”

“And the night life of Paris, doesn’t that interest you? Have you been up to Montparnasse?”

“No, and I’ve no wish to. I don’t like being with lots of other people. Besides, I couldn’t go there on my own.”

“Then come with me.”

“I couldn’t. I’ve only spoken to you for the first time today. After all.”

Her moral sense reassured me. It told me she was a proper Hungarian girl.

“Don’t you feel lonely at night? Don’t you miss your mother?”

“Not today. Today I’m really happy.”

I didn’t understand.

“Well… there’s the library. I’m so happy to be working there. And you’ve been so good to me. Will you help me again, some time?”

“But of course, gladly… I really don’t enjoy the evenings. For me, it’s the most difficult part of the day.”

I could have said a great deal more on that theme, but I didn’t want to become sentimental. She would have taken it as a way of pushing myself on her.

“I don’t want you to be sad,” she said.

We looked at one another, and were silent for some time. I’m not saying it was a deeply meaningful silence. I was listening to myself and to the muffled beatings of my soul, something not to be shared with such a young girl. For a true gentleman, loneliness is a private matter.

“Well, then,” I said, and smiled. I waited for her to say something. Then I kissed her hand and left.

I had gone a few steps along the Boulevard St Michel, still sensing the soft touch of her hand on my lips, when I had the sudden feeling that someone was following me. I turned around, and there she stood.

“Please don’t be angry. I wanted to give you this cigarette holder… you were so good to me.”

I was so surprised all I could do was grin. But before I could formulate any meaningful sentence in my head, she had slipped away, swiftly and silently, on weightless steps. The cigarette holder was one of those you can pull out to a really impressive length. I was thrilled with it, but at the same time something told me I should be asking myself why a girl who spent her days in a library should have given it to me. I filed it away as a memento of the Bibliothèque nationale. That seemed to me right and proper — due payment for scholarly services rendered. After all, I had devoted an entire afternoon to her.

After I had known her about a week, I managed to persuade her to come with me after closing time to the Rue d’Antin, to try my favourite vermouth.

There is a rather special little place in the Rue d’Antin where the only drink on offer is the Italian vermouth known as Crocefisso. The place has the sort of odd-looking door you find in English pubs — no top or bottom, just two swinging wooden boards in between to stop people looking in. This strange door seemed to create a strong impression of moral degeneracy in the girl. She recoiled from it in horror, and it took me a full quarter of an hour to persuade her to go in.

The only person inside was the old patronne, who poured the vermouth out into a long-necked glass before each of us in turn. Ilonka spent some time gazing nervously around.

“Do you come and booze here regularly?” she asked.

“Well, if by ‘boozing’ you mean dropping in occasionally with one of my friends and having a few glasses together.”

“I’m sure you’d much rather be here with your friends… Tell me, it really troubles my conscience, the amount of time you’re spending on me.”

I instantly felt an enormous tenderness towards her — the expansive, generous feeling you get when there is something you really ought to do and you actually do it.

“Truly, Ilonka, if only you knew at what a good moment you came into my life. It’s made me see just how much the library, and books, and scholarship really mean to me — and that includes the bookish life itself, with all its moments of bitterness. Because now I’ve been able to share it with you.”

She clapped her hands to her head, and her eyes took on a veiled look, as if I’d made a declaration of love. I hastened to put things right, because I believe in precision in matters of feeling.

“I think that — how can I put this? — only the selfish are beyond consolation.”

“József Eötvös,” she retorted.

“József Eötvös, indeed,” I replied, somewhat irritably. I could not help but feel the irony of her interjection, with its unstated reproach — an irony directed at the perpetual student, with his love of quotations.

“Good,” she said. “But surely I’m allowed to be grateful. Can’t you see? Before I met you I didn’t know which end of a book to pick up. I treated them like objets d’art. I’ve learnt a great deal from you.”

“Please don’t feel you owe me anything for that. I find it just as rewarding. It’s a pleasure for me too. Taking you through those books, into my personal domain, my little empire — it was almost as delightful as initiating a virgin into the secrets of love.”

She looked at me in astonishment. I had no idea where such a crude comparison could have come from, and I felt rather alarmed. But she simply nodded, and put her hand a few encouraging centimetres closer to mine on the table.

I placed mine on hers. It was very beautiful. Nature loves harmony, and the hand rarely belies the nature of the person.

However it is quite difficult to sustain a rational conversation when you are holding hands with someone. There is something intensely emotional about it, in its sheer simplicity. When a grown man takes his girl’s hand he becomes a warm-hearted apprentice boy on a Sunday afternoon outing.

I felt a little more at ease when she finally withdrew hers, glanced at her watch, and said, very quietly: “Shall we go?”

She was so lost in thought she even allowed me to pay for her drink. That was the start of the catastrophe.

On the way home we scarcely spoke, and then only about the simplest things. As we were crossing the Pont des Arts, she suddenly stopped. She stood looking out over the Seine towards the Île de la Cité, and hummed the tune of a popular song to herself. I remember how much that surprised me. I would never have imagined earlier that the sort of banal sentiment you find in such a song could even enter her brain, let alone that she might hum it to herself.

That evening, as usual, I read the eternally great Casanova. Of all my friends among the deceased writers, the notorious adventurer was the one I loved most — the man who managed, in just one short life, to experience the full beauty and squalor of the most beautiful of centuries. He and I had little in common. The essential characteristic of Don Juans is that they are easy to please. Casanova loved every woman his eyes fell upon with equal ardour, and every night of passion he spent was the best of his life. I, on the other hand, am a sort of anti-Don Juan. Women rarely please me, and then only in certain circumstances ordained by fate, when they address me in a certain tone of voice, at specially chosen moments — and even then not very much.

Strolling around the streets of Paris I simply never noticed women (and certainly none of them bothered to cast their nets out for me). I was like the man caught on film, the passer-by hurrying along the street, deep in thought, who sees nothing of what is around him and simply rushes through.

But that evening I thought of Ilonka in the somewhat disreputable light of a Casanova escapade. It had taken me a week to get to the point where she let me hold her hand… My God, how Casanova would have despised my tardiness! Because, in principle, I too was a believer in the life of danger. My heart beat in sympathy with Casanova’s women and the diabolical intrigues that led to such happy endings. So why then was I so comfortably at home in mundane reality?

I shall be as cunning as old Casanova, I thought. I’ll take it very slowly, one step at a time. Today she let me pay for her vermouth. Tomorrow night she’s coming with me to Montparnasse… The transition from the intellectual plane to the erotic will be imperceptible. Books are the most potent aphrodisiacs, as Paolo and Francesca were well aware, and indeed — not to press the point too far — perhaps also Abelard and Héloïse.

But what would Ilonka say to all this? Without question she liked me as a wise friend, but could she accept me in another relation? Would she want to? She was so virginal, so well brought-up. Despair took hold of me once again. But I suddenly started to recall a whole series of little incidents whose significance had somehow escaped my notice: the cigarette holder… her occasional remarks that she would always think of me whenever she read something beautiful, that sort of thing… In fact — I realised in astonishment — she was the one who had been courting me and I, the great scholarly mind, hadn’t even noticed! Oh sainted Casanova… But now I’ll show him, I thought.

The next morning I found a new Ilonka in the library. At first I thought that the alteration was in me, produced by the sudden reverse of direction in my feelings. But then I realised that the change was quite independent of my particular state. It had its own life. She was wearing a gorgeous new hat in place of the old student’s cap, and she had powdered her face. The collected manhood of two tables was gazing at her in admiration — the poets, the geriatrics, even the Chinese, and her own reading seemed altogether less focused. From time to time she smiled across at me, sweetly, without inhibition.

Her change of attitude became even more obvious over lunch. The atmosphere of Paris, which seemed not to have touched her before, had now breached all her defences. She chattered away spontaneously and happily, sprinkling Parisian expressions around her sentences — I’ve no idea where she could have picked them up. She criticised people, found fault with the meal, and made it clear she would rather have been offered something a little more interesting. I could see that the time for Casanova-style chicanery had clearly passed, and that evening we dined on Montparnasse.

That evening, in the genuinely good restaurant, the supposedly timid Ilonka revealed a surprising assertiveness. In the Czech place she hadn’t even picked up the menu. Instead, with a mixture of modesty and unworldliness, she had simply left the ordering to me. This time she scrutinised the list with great cunning, and managed to pick out a meat dish that proved totally inedible. The wine we drank was Haut Sauterne, since I had once heard that that was what you ordered if you wanted to seduce a woman. I don’t know what effect it has on women, but it made me extremely witty. Ilonka, who never betrayed the slightest trace of humour, listened to all my opinions with the greatest deference.

After dinner we went into the Viking Café bar and drank cognac. We sat on a cosy leather sofa, very close together, in the Parisian manner. Reimer was sitting at one of the nearby tables with the German maiden, and we exchanged conspiratorial smiles.

“I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but we’re just like a loving couple,” I observed.

“If it doesn’t bother you, then it certainly doesn’t me. My nine aunties aren’t going to ambush us in here.”

“Tell me, Ilonka… have you ever been in love?”

“I’m not saying. You never tell me anything.”

“Me? What should I be telling you?”

“Who you’ve been in love with, and how much — those sort of things.”

“But you’re not interested in my little life.”

“Not in the least. Only, I would just love to be able to hypnotise you and find out some of your secrets. I’d love to be able to read you like a book. Oh, Tamás, Tamás, you’re so stupid!”

I kissed her hand, with great emphasis.

“My little girl!”

Ecstatic happiness floated down on green clouds from the ceiling above us, with its collection of suspended model boats. For the moment I was indeed in love, and I gazed in adoration at this girl who had turned the compass needle of her heart in my direction. But in that instant Casanova, in his billowing black cloak and rice-powdered wig, stepped back into my consciousness.

“Poetic feelings aren’t quite enough, my young friend,” he said. “There must be action, I humbly suggest. Action.”

But no action followed. Instead it was Ilonka who proposed that we go for a walk.

“It’s only just eleven,” she added. “Let’s take a look at the banks of the Seine.”

“Splendid.”

“But we need to remember, I have to be back at the student hostel before one. Nobody is allowed in after one. The other day a girl was made to wait outside until morning.”

“Well, they’re so highly moral, these French,” I said. “The sort of depraved hussy who isn’t back by one deserves to spend the night with her boyfriend.”

I now knew what I had to do to carry out Casanova’s advice. Somehow I had to fritter away the time, in ways that she wouldn’t notice. If she wasn’t back by one she would come and sleep with me out of sheer insecurity. The flood of ideas pouring in on me made me quite dizzy.

We boarded a taxi and told the driver to take us to the Pont Neuf. After some inner struggle I resolved to kiss her. She leant her head obediently on my shoulder, but most decisively forbade the kiss.

“We mustn’t, we mustn’t.”

“Why ever not? What sort of silliness is this?”

“I’m a good girl. No one has ever kissed me before.”

“That’s no good. Sooner or later someone will have to.”

“No, I don’t like it. What the point of it?”

“Some people say it’s very pleasant.”

“Then you should go and kiss them.”

We were now at the Pont Neuf. We got out and walked, arm snugly in arm, along the bank.

“What a beautiful night,” she remarked. “And how beautiful Notre Dame is. And how good it is it is to be walking here with you. Oh, mon ami, mon ami, mon ami… Throw that cigarette away. How can you possibly smoke at a time like this?”

“Let’s sit down, then.”

We sat on a bench on the deserted bank of the Seine. I made a fresh attempt at a kiss.

“No, no. I’ve already told you, no,” she said irritably. “Why do you want to humiliate me? You’ve treated me like a true friend up to now. You’ve always taken me seriously and talked to me sensibly. And now you want to kiss me, as if I were just any other girl, simply because it’s an evening in Paris and it’s what people do.”

I let her go, and pulled myself away from her, with dull grief in my heart.

“All right, Ilonka,” I said. “Now I shan’t kiss you until you kiss me first. And if never, well then, never. I know you only put up with my presence because I am so terribly clever and you can use me, like a work of reference. But the moment I dare to get closer to you, as one young person with another, one living being with another… Mais passons. Let’s just talk about the sonnets of Maurice Scève and the Lyon school of poets. The whole school was very highly regarded, even more so than your old one in Budapest.”

“Tamás, don’t tease me.”

Slowly, visibly struggling with herself, she leant over to me and kissed me. I could sense the tears running down her face.

And now there was no restraining the kisses, as they came one after the other, with a strange, lachrymose happiness, and went on until we were gasping for breath. They came from the other side of so much loneliness, such barren deserts and fields of ice, these kisses, that they simply froze me as they first arrived on the hearth. But then, slowly, slowly, they became real kisses, ever more magical, intimate and thrilling.

“How clever of you to come to Paris, Ilonka. And how thoughtful of the Good Lord to provide us with the banks of the Seine.”

“Oh, mon ami, how I have loved you, and how lonely you looked, behind your spectacles, with your Maurice Scève. And I was silly enough to think that you had been waiting for me all along, my prince transformed into a reference book. But you’re not lonely now, are you?”

No, I wasn’t lonely. Here was that longed-for Other, in sweet physical proximity, as far as that is possible on an embankment bench. But I still hadn’t forgotten Casanova. Just half-an-hour left, and she would be turned away from the hostel.

“At last I can tell you,” she continued. “My love for you isn’t something that began yesterday. I’ve been thinking of you for two years now.”

“What? But you’ve only known me for ten days.”

She laughed.

“Really, I should be rather cross with you. I’ve known you for two years. Once at Edit’s — but you don’t remember?”

“No. These days my memory for faces is terrible.”

“It’s true I was only a little girl in a school uniform at the time, horribly thin, and my hair was quite different. And you never even noticed me. All you could think about was Edit. But I never took my eyes off you all evening. And I’ve loved you ever since.”

“Ilonka! Is this possible? That someone could have loved me for two whole years, hopelessly, across such a distance, and then suddenly they just walk into my life? This is so like Ibsen’s Master Builder I really can’t believe it. And you didn’t even recognise me in the library.”

“Of course I recognised you, but I was so embarrassed I was too afraid to speak. I was thinking I would just go home and never try to see you again.”

“But tell me… then why didn’t you say anything about this before? Why didn’t you give me any hint or news of yourself, for two whole years?”

“You were in Paris, and you know what a well-brought-up girl I am. Besides, if you really want to know, I did.”

“When?”

“Tell me, Tamás, did you ever get that old-fashioned tie pin I sent for your name day?”

“So that was you?”

“Yes, me. And the Mickey Mouse?”

“I did. Thank you very much. But what made you choose an autumn crocus?”

“Well, I must say, it’s not very nice of you not to understand.”

“The crocus?”

“Yes, exactly. It was the only thing you said to me, that time at Edit’s. That all you knew about the autumn crocus was that that was what it was. So I sent you one. How could you forget such a thing?”

“Sensational. Now all you have left to explain is the bus ticket.”

“Oh, yes. What happened was, one day I went for a walk, all on my own, at Hvösvölgy. I was terribly sad, and I thought about you the whole time. When I got home I felt I really had to send you something from the trip, but the only thing I had brought back was the bus ticket.”

“Ilonka, I am so dreadfully ashamed of myself. And I haven’t given you a thought these past two years. In fact, for the last two years I haven’t thought about anyone. Even now I find it difficult to think of anyone but myself. Tell me, will I ever be able to make up for my shortcomings? I see myself as a sort of water man.”

“What sort of water man?”

“The one they pulled out of the lake at Fert. He had grown membranes between his fingers and forgotten how to speak. His name was Istók Hany.”

“You don’t have to say anything. And you’ve nothing to make up for. Those two years were wonderful for me. I was never alone, and I loved you the way adolescent girls do. And now I am almost grown up, and a university student, I can travel on my own, and I’ve come to Paris to be with you. I’m so glad you’ve been alone for these past two years, and I haven’t had to chase anyone else away. Because if you had been with someone, you can’t imagine the wicked schemes I would have been capable of… But Tamás, what’s the matter? That’s the third time you’ve looked at your watch. My God, I’m not late, am I?”

“Not just yet, Ilonka.”

“What’s the time?”

“Just enough for you to get there in a taxi. It’s ten to one.”

What can I say? I’m no Casanova. Perhaps if I’d been a few years younger and less broken-down, I would have taken the gamble… but principally, of course… if she hadn’t confessed her feelings. But once she had? It would take more than a little bit of love and a miniscule amount of audacity. The whole thing had become too much for me.

I’m a tired, cold, sardonic, bookish sort of chap, I felt. It was no good. I just wasn’t up to the occasion. Like János Arany when summoned by the maiden, I answered: “It’s too late. I’m going home.”

Once in the taxi we exchanged not a word, we just sat there willing the driver to get us to the hostel. That is, I did. I’ve no idea what she was thinking.

The next day she didn’t come to the library. Only on the one after, and then she addressed me only in the polite plural. Over coffee I asked her:

“Do tell me, Ilonka. What’s the matter?”

“With me? Nothing at all. I been giving a lot of thought to what you said the other day about the origins of the Provençal lyric. If Gaston Paris is right, then the line of the true Latin spirit would be unbroken. But that’s far too elegant to be true… I must take a closer look at Vossler.”

She left Paris soon afterwards. And nothing came of the whole affair.

1934

LOVE IN A BOTTLE

SIR LANCELOT, the knight whom blame could never touch, was visiting Chatelmerveil, the castle of Klingsor the magician. They had dined, the host had brought out his finest wines in honour of his distinguished guest, and the two were sitting in the middle of the cavernous Great Hall enjoying a quiet tipple.

“I’m not just saying this out of politeness,” said Lancelot, “but I don’t remember when I last had such a magnificent wine.”

“Home produce,” the magician replied modestly. “It’s a shame so little of it ever gets drunk. Truly, my dear boy, you can’t imagine what a solitary life I lead. No one comes here for years on end. I really do live like a hermit.”

“Well, you can hardly be surprised — as I keep telling you — if you practise the black arts. No gentleman dares set foot in the place.”

“My magical powers, if you please! I gave up that other tedious business long ago. There’s not the least bit of truth in the things they say about me. Believe me, I always acted with the best intentions. For example, when I spirited Orilus’ bride away, and changed Meliacans into a tortoise when he was about to go off to the Holy Land — and all those tales.”

Lancelot was perfectly ready to agree with him. As the evening progressed Klingsor steadily threw off his mood of weary apathy and become ever more congenial. His deep-sunk eyes twinkled with shrewdness and his words sparkled with an old man’s wisdom.

“You’re a good fellow, my dear Klingsor, I’ve always said,” remarked Lancelot. And he gave the magician a hug.

Beside himself with happiness, Klingsor sent for an even better wine, one he never offered to anyone, and as he poured it into the goblets his hand trembled with emotion. It had a glorious colour. Lancelot rose, his face became solemn — transfigured, even — as he declared:

“Klingsor, the time has come… I raise this cup to my noble lady, Queen Guinevere!”

He downed the entire contents, and stood staring straight ahead for what seemed ages. The magician knew this look. He knew that the moment had come when the amorous knight would either burst into tears and pour his heart out, or seize him by the beard. To pre-empt the latter, and struggling manfully to fight back the dry cough that seemed to be troubling his throat, he asked in a tone of suitable reverence:

“Ah, so the peerless Guinevere is your lady? Perhaps you are on an errand for her right now?”

He knew perfectly well that Guinevere was Lancelot’s lady. In those days discretion had not yet been invented, and the most famous loves were peddled by minstrels from country to country. Besides he cared not a whit whether it was Guinevere or Viviane — he no longer had any feeling for women himself.

A fine, unworldly smile played over Lancelot’s lips, straining to soar heavenwards, as he replied:

“For these last seven years all my journeying has been in her service. You must surely have heard of some of my doings. True, people love to exaggerate these stories. Right now I’m on my way to slay a dragon. A few days ago, on St Michael’s Eve, it flew into the Queen’s treasury and stole a shoe, one of the pair she was given by her husband, the illustrious Arthur, when he returned from his expedition to Ireland. Some of these dragons are utterly shameless. The Queen has charged me, as her most loyal knight, to recover it. She really wouldn’t be happy to see it in anyone else’s hand, as I’m sure you will understand.”

“So great a love… you must be very happy,” Klingsor observed wistfully.

Lancelot was furious.

“Me? Happy? I drag my anguish about with me wherever I go. Sometimes I just lie on the ground and howl. I spend two thirds of my days in active misery, and the other third wondering how I can ever bear it.”

“Well, then… I can only assume that the Queen — please don’t mind my saying this — doesn’t love you.”

Lancelot leapt to his feet and clapped his hand on his sword.

“What are you thinking, you old villain, you trader of broken-down horses? How could Queen Guinevere possibly love me when she is King Arthur’s wife? She is the most saintly of all the saintly women whose lives have been a reproach to the base nature of our mother Eve.”

The magician was about to make a little conciliatory speech, but the long-repressed cough finally erupted. His eyes nearly popped out, and he was on the point of falling out of his chair. Lancelot, fearing he might injure himself, rushed to his aid, pummelled him on the back and tried to comfort him.

“You see, you see,” he said. “It seems those scrapes you kept getting into with the jewel of your manhood — before you lost it — clearly weren’t enough for you. Take care you don’t make any more trouble with your tongue, or you’ll end up biting yourself.”

The magician recovered soon after. He led Lancelot to his bedchamber and wished him a restful night. At the word “restful” Lancelot heaved a great sigh. Then he uttered his usual fervent prayer to the heavens to watch over Queen Guinevere, and lay down.

Klingsor was suffering from chronic insomnia at the time. He picked up one of his lighter books of Arabian magic to banish the tedium of the night. But he found little to interest him in what he was reading. Whenever his thoughts turned to Lancelot’s fate his eyes filled with tears. Finally he broke down and sobbed. The old magician was a thoroughly good-hearted man — von Eschenbach, like everyone else in the Middle Ages, was quite wrong about him. He had abducted Orilus’ bride simply because he knew exactly what sort of ruffian the fellow was. A man who won his lady’s hand after his days of knightly battles were over would simply work off his lingering war-like impulses on his wife. He would beat her twice a day, after breakfast and luncheon, and not stop at breaking her wrist. And as for the Meliacans business, he only changed the knight into a tortoise because he knew that if he went to the Holy Land his bride would deceive him with a Jewish stocking merchant.

His heart bled for Lancelot. It seemed inconceivable to him that anyone should suffer so much for love. He too, in his youth, had been something of a ladies’ man. But ever since one grim husband had taken his revenge on him in a manner so cruel that even today one cannot write about it without blushing, he had forgotten what love was, and he felt decidedly the better for it.

He spent a long time wondering whether or not he should help his friend. He knew the world would misconstrue whatever he did, and it could all end up with Lancelot seizing him by the beard yet again. But that wasn’t enough to stop him. His feelings of pity were far too strong.

He rummaged through his instruments, looking for his magic pincers and the blue spectacles that allowed him to see spirits. Then he took off his shoes and crept into Lancelot’s room.

A small candle was burning in the darkness. With the aid of the magic spectacles he could see through the bedclothes, through Lancelot’s shirt and skin, and into his body. Looking closely, he was able to follow the mischievous frolickings of the little life spirits as they chased one another up and down the labyrinth of blood vessels. It took him a while to discover which was the Love spirit, but eventually he succeeded. There it sat, astride Lancelot’s spine, tickling him with a little feather brush. After a while it grew tired of this game. It wriggled its way adroitly between the folds of the lung and set about squeezing the knight’s heart. But it must have got bored with that too, because it then slipped into the aorta, where the flow of blood carried it into the brain. It fiddled about for a while among the convolutions, pulling all sorts of things out of the drawers and then stuffing them back again, got itself tangled up in the network of nerve endings, gave a great yawn and jumped out through Lancelot’s mouth onto the bed. There it sat, dangling its legs over the edge and gazing at itself in a little mirror. Love is always rather vain. But it wasn’t exactly beautiful. It was pale and gaunt, restless and malformed, and its veins were knotted from years of stress. Of course it saw nothing of its own ugliness, for, as we all know, Love is also blind.

The spirit perched on the edge of the bed — this was Klingsor’s chance. He grabbed the pincers and gripped it firmly by the neck. Love uttered a few squawks and dropped the mirror.

The noise woke Lancelot — always a light sleeper. In an instant he was on his feet, his hand on the sword drawn from under the pillow, and he started towards Klingsor. When he realised who was standing there he lowered the weapon, feeling at once confused and rather suspicious.

“Is that you, Klingsor?” Lancelot was sorry to have caught his host in such an embarrassing situation.

“Yes… I came in… I thought I’d see how you were sleeping.”

“But why have you got those pincers in your hand?”

“Well, you know, if an insect happened to be disturbing your sleep, I could catch it.”

“You’d use a thing like that to catch it? I find a sheet of paper works very well.”

“I’m very squeamish by nature.”

“And have you caught anything?”

“Oh, yes… but nothing important.”

And he showed him the Love spirit.

“Phew, it’s ugly,” said Lancelot, and he lay down again, still feeling rather doubtful.

Klingsor went back to his room. He stuffed the spirit into a bottle, carefully capped it with some parchment and string and stamped it with the royal seal of Solomon. On the side he attached a little label bearing the words “Amor, amoris, masc.”, and placed it up on a shelf with the other bottles of spirits. The Love spirit swam round and round in the liquid, like a mournful frog. Satisfied with his night’s work, Klingsor went back to bed.

“If only I could do such a good deed every day,” he sighed earnestly, and quickly fell asleep.

The next day Lancelot woke to something remarkable: the sun was already high in the sky. He was so astonished he simply remained where he was, not moving, for ages. For the last seven years he had woken every day at dawn and leapt out of bed in a state of frantic anxiety, and now he felt little inclination even to get up. He dressed very slowly, and gave little thought to putting his long curls in order. As for shaving, he just didn’t bother.

“I look quite elegant enough for the dragon,” he thought to himself.

Eventually he made his way down to breakfast. Klingsor gave him a delighted reception.

“How did you sleep? And what did you dream about?” he wanted to know.

“What? Oh, yes, that I lost my spurs in a muddy field.”

“That’s a pity. Because the first dream you have in an unfamiliar place usually comes true.”

“That would be a shame. You know, what with the price of wheat these days, my estates aren’t doing as well as they used to, and I really hate unnecessary expense.”

“It might have been better if you had dreamt of the fair Queen.”

The colour drained from Lancelot’s face. It was true! For the last seven years he had dreamt of Guinevere every night, and now… he had even left her blessed name out of his morning prayers, for the simple reason that he had entirely forgotten to say them. And he’d been awake for a whole hour, and if the magician hadn’t mentioned her he wouldn’t have given her a moment’s thought.

Still in a daze, he took his leave of Klingsor and set off for the road that wound up the mountain. The magician stood waving after him.

“Not happy yet,” he murmured, stroking his beard. “He still hasn’t noticed the blissful transformation inside him. But sure enough, in time he’ll come to bless an old man’s memory.”

And he sobbed with emotion.

Lancelot trotted along the road for several hours, deep in thought. Then the way turned into a little beechwood. A woman on a donkey was approaching from the opposite direction. Before her and behind, the donkey’s back was piled high with fine-looking loaves. A baker’s wife, evidently.

“God give you good day,” he called out politely. The knight without a stain always made a point of greeting women first, including peasant women. The baker’s wife returned his greeting.

The wench was not unattractive. Indeed, her plump, homely manner had a fragrance of its own, like the bread.

“Aha, you must be Amalasuntha,” Lancelot began. “Didn’t your late grandfather make wafers for the Bishop, and didn’t you offer three candles last Easter so that you might see the Archangel Gabriel face to face?”

“No,” the woman replied.

“Ah, then your name can only be Merethén. Two of your four children have died of smallpox, but the third is doing wonderfully well. There is a blue hedgehog on the sign over your shop, and you are rather partial to trout?”

“No,” the woman replied.

“Right, that’s enough small talk,” said Lancelot. He dismounted, tied the woman’s donkey to a tree and lifted her down from its back. The loaves on either side stayed where they were.

Some time later they returned to the highway. Lancelot helped her back up onto the donkey, settled her in between the loaves, untied the beast and sent it off down the road. He stood for a while waving after them in a friendly fashion, then mounted his steed and continued on his way.

But he had gone barely five hundred paces when he suddenly tugged on the horse’s bit and stopped, rooted to the spot. He took out a finely embroidered kerchief and mopped his brow. It was dripping with cold sweat.

The penny had dropped.

“Everything seems to confirm,” he said quietly, “that I desire other women than the divine Guinevere.” He remained there for a whole hour, wondering what the explanation might be. During this time, to his horror and embarrassment, the image of the baker’s wife kept rising up before his mind’s eye, followed by a succession of others — a captain’s widow, two grape-picking wenches, a person of ill repute, and Guinevere’s three chambermaids. Only the Queen was missing.

In deep gloom he continued on his way until sunset. As night began to fall he passed through a rather charming little town with a handsome, high-roofed inn calling itself the Famous Griffin. He would gladly have stopped there for dinner, but it would have meant being late for the dragon. It usually emerged from its cave only in the early hours of darkness, to drink.

He arrived at a grim wood, where the strange shape of the trees, the dark green cliffs and fearsome airborne cries signalled the proximity of danger. He steadied the lance in his hand and, following his instinct, rode directly into the place where the air of menace seemed greatest. Only then did he begin to wonder why he had not encountered a single shepherd or ancient mountaineer warning him to proceed no further.

The way was precipitous, and, tormented by hunger, he was becoming ever more impatient. Finally he came across a great pile of human bones. At the start of the next turning he could see a cave. To the expert eye its shape betrayed, quite unmistakably, that it was tailor-made for a dragon. Bearing his lance stiffly before him (he had earlier taken care to remove the little English flag) he advanced warily.

But who could describe the rage he felt when, on reaching the entrance, he spotted a large notice announcing in flowery Gothic lettering that the dragon had since moved house, and now resided in the cave under the peak popularly known as the Dead Mountains’ Carnival Doughnut?

Lancelot knew only too well that the Dead Mountains lay some twenty miles to the north, and that, moreover, with its many precipitous ranges and three infamous passes where thieves waited to plunder travellers, the route, even ignoring the poor transport arrangements of the period, was not generally considered a very agreeable one.

After much humming and hawing, he turned his horse round, went back and stopped for the night at the Famous Griffin. Dinner began with some white breast of chicken, finely sliced, followed by a large carp, a highly spiced and very tasty leg of veal, some rather unusual regional pastries and a basket of superb apples. The wine was no less satisfactory. But the greatest surprise of all was that he wasn’t miserable.

Nor did his misery return the next morning. The sun shone. There was a cheerful clonking of bells under his window as a line of cattle went past on their way to the meadow, and the whole beautiful world was filled with the comforting smell of manure. The breakfast liqueur (a light vermouth) and the rabbit pâté that followed were both extremely pleasant. Lancelot felt an irresistible urge to bathe in the lake and then fall asleep in the grass.

And then he remembered the dragon, the three mountain passes bristling with robbers, and all the dismal hardships of the life of derring-do. For some hours he waged a difficult struggle with himself.

Finally, towards midday, he pulled on his boots and, thus attired, stamped his foot decisively on the floor.

“No, I won’t!”

And he set off, back towards Carreol, without the Queen’s shoe. And the dragon lived happily ever after, in its cave under the peak of the mountain popularly known as the Carnival Doughnut.

“He’s only human, after all,” Lancelot told himself.

A curious dullness crept through his brain. He was living in a new universe, one in which everything was pleasant and amiable — and that was precisely what was so terrifying and incomprehensible. The landscape of this new world was so impossible to find his way around that it simply annihilated thought. He felt like a man who has drunk a great deal of beer. And not without cause. He had knocked back a pint at every hostelry along the way.

And thus he arrived at Carreol, where Arthur held court in those days. He washed off the dust of the road and prepared to enter the exalted presence of the Queen. But he had barely stepped out of the door of his lodgings when he bumped into Gawain, who greeted him with the exciting news that it was two-all at half-time in the crucially important jousting tournament between Cornwall and Wales, and promptly dragged him along to watch. After the match there was a banquet in honour of the victors. Lancelot completely forgot himself in the general jollity, which continued until well after midnight, and it was only the next morning that he remembered his audience with the Queen.

By the time he reached the Palace she was already out walking with her ladies in the park. Fortunately he was very familiar with the route she took, and he dashed off to take his place behind the lime tree whence, according to the courtly custom that had grown up over the years, he would step out into her path, as if by chance, as she came strolling by.

But he arrived too late. She was already in the avenue. To hide behind a tree and then instantly reappear from behind it now seemed a rather pointless formality.

He knelt before her and kissed the hem of her garment. An ambiguous smile played on her lips, and she did not immediately pronounce her usual “Pray rise, worthy knight!” until Lancelot had grown tired of kneeling and a degree of irritation had infused itself into him.

“They tell me you came back yesterday,” she suddenly remarked.

“That is so, my lady,” he replied, blushing.

“Indeed? Then rise, worthy knight,” she declared, but with an offhand brusqueness that reduced the time-honoured phrase to a casual insult. Lancelot was deeply disconcerted. What worried him most was that the Queen’s anger seemed so distant — as if it had not been directed at him at all.

“My lady has grown even more beautiful in my absence, if that were possible,” he ventured, both clumsily and without any of the old sense of his heart in his throat at the sight of Guinevere’s newly enhanced beauty. She was extremely beautiful, to be sure, but some little monster hidden in the trees had whispered in Lancelot’s ear: “So what?”

“From which it is quite clear that you have never loved me,” she continued, somewhat illogically. “I simply do not understand your behaviour. But no matter. The question is — have you brought my shoe? Hand it over!”

“Indeed, my lady,” he stuttered. “That is to say… as regards the shoe… I forgot… I left it in my lodgings.”

“You left it in your lodgings?” (eyebrows raised to an impossible height).

“Strictly speaking, it isn’t actually in my lodgings, it’s…”

“It’s where, precisely?”

“That is to say, on my way back, it was stolen from me…”

“From you, the knight without a stain?”

“Now I remember — it was during a card game. I was forced to offer it as a pledge. To an Ishmaelite.”

“And how many heads did the dragon have?” she suddenly asked.

“Just the one,” he replied guiltily.

“And you didn’t cut it off!” she yelled.

“No. What happened was…”

But he was not allowed to explain. The Queen looked him up and down with unspeakable disdain, then turned her head away and made off at great speed, trailing her female entourage behind her.

Lancelot stood there, his head down on his collar. He had lost the Queen’s favour! He had expected the thunderbolt. He had expected the ground to open under his feet. He had been prepared for his soul to sizzle and flash as it was cleft in twain in indescribable agony. But the lightning had not struck. The ground, and his soul, had not been cleft in twain. In the new world in which he found himself, it seemed there were no thunderstorms, only little squirrels in the branches, and babbling brooks among the trees, and a general beer-swilling happiness. It was horrible.

That evening, over dinner at court, the Queen made his loss of favour clear to all by calling for Gawain to pass her the peaches. The next day the whole town was talking about it. Whenever Lancelot entered a room in the palace, the laughter instantly stopped and the ladies of the court gazed at him with tears in their eyes.

Lancelot threw himself into gambling, won steadily, bought himself three new horses and a first-class sword, and went carefully through his bailiff’s accounts. He took out two books he had purchased in his youth, Cato’s Wise Sayings and Peter Abelard’s enthralling tome on the Holy Trinity that had caused such stir in its day. He resolved to make himself perfect in the Latin language. Suddenly his life had so much more scope than before. And it pained him grievously. What pained him beyond words was that he was no longer miserable.

The time came when he could deny it no longer, and could even say it out loud:

“I do not love Queen Guinevere.”

The whole miracle was both ugly and incomprehensible. Such things did not happen in the course of nature. You might lose a pair of spurs, or an overcoat. You could even mislay, as he once had, a sword. But not Love! Except of course by magic. And he remembered the night he had spent at Chatelmerveil.

Lancelot was a man of action. He was instantly on his horse and speeding towards Klingsor’s castle.

From his tower the magician saw him coming and hurried out to greet him.

“He’s come to thank me for my kindness,” he whispered, and tears welled up in his eyes.

But Lancelot leapt down from the saddle and most decisively seized the magician by the beard.

“You scoundrel!” he bellowed. “Uncle of dogs and lover of bitches! But why do I waste words? Give me back my Love this minute!”

“Oh, oh, oh,” sobbed Klingsor. “So you haven’t been any happier all this time? Don’t you see now how much broader life is, and how full of interesting things, when you’re not bound hand and foot to Love?”

“Stop mouthing, you cousin of toads and hedgehogs, fiend and Devil and all his works!” Lancelot added vigorously, and gave Klingsor’s beard a twist. “Give me back my Love, this minute!”

“As you wish,” Klingsor replied, with a disappointed sigh.

He led Lancelot into the castle. From the row of bottles he took down the one with “Amor, amoris, masc.” on the label, cut the string and lifted the Love spirit out with his pincers. He wrapped it in a wafer and handed it to Lancelot, who swallowed it with a glass of water.

A few seconds later Lancelot shuddered violently. His entire body and soul were torn with pain. His knees shook, his head buzzed and the world darkened before his eyes.

“I have lost the Queen’s favour!” he gasped. He clutched his throat and dashed out without so much as a word of farewell.

The pain was so intense he had difficulty staying on the horse. His tears flowed, and he lowered the crest of his helmet so that no one would notice his shame. But they flowed so copiously that they leaked out under the visor and ran down his armour.

And he was happy.

1935

THE INCURABLE

PETER RARELY was on his way home by train from Inverness in the Scottish Highlands, where he supported a course for students on the bagpipes, at his own expense, since everyone was complaining that with the advance of the gramophone and the radio this illustrious and ancient form of music was dying out. He had just been up for the closing ceremony and was feeling very pleased with the way things had gone. If only my bear sanctuary would do as well, he mused. Another of his great concerns was that these remarkable animals had become extinct in the British Isles, and he had made a home in the Welsh forests for some bears imported from Transylvania.

But his main worry was his number-counters. He had hired some unemployed people to count up to 7,300,000 without stopping. Two had already given up, three were still counting, but when he had left London even the best of them had only managed something like 1,250,000. Where might he have got up to since?

In the express dining car he caught sight of a familiar face. It was the writer Tom Maclean. Maclean was sitting on his own, sipping spoonfuls of mock turtle soup, gazing thoughtfully into the distance, and jotting down the occasional word on his notepad.

“May I?” Rarely asked, settling himself down beside the writer. “I’m not disturbing you?”

“You certainly are, very much so,” Maclean replied with obvious delight. “Please stay and disturb me some more. It would be a real kindness.”

Rarely began to feel somewhat alarmed. The thought had flashed through his mind that he might not be the most eccentric person on the train.

“Because, you see, I’m working,” Maclean continued. “I’m preparing notes for a radio broadcast about my Scottish experiences. At least while I’m talking to you I won’t be working. Sir, the amount I have to do is intolerable. I’m fed up with myself, absolutely fed up. I’ve just been to Scotland for a bit of a rest. I tell you — I was there for a month — in that time I translated a novel from the French, wrote two essays and a novella, eight sketches for the Morning Glory, six book reviews for the Spectator and ten longer articles for a forthcoming lexicon entitled Women, Children and Dogs in the Service of Humanity. And I’ve still got two radio talks waiting to be done.”

“That’s very interesting,” said Rarely. “I always thought that writers like you lay around all day waiting for inspiration, and then wrote only once it had struck. You seem to have a lot more to do than my own rather simpler sort of millionaire.”

“I’ve no idea how hard a millionaire works, because I heartily dislike those sort of people, present company always excepted, of course. But the number of things I have to deal with has become more than I can bear. You’ve just heard what my holiday consisted of. You can imagine how much I do when I’m actually working. I have to submit two novels to my publisher every year, three articles for the paper every week… then there are my book reviews and reader’s reports. I have to dash off the odd novella to show that I am still a creative writer, plus the odd bit of scholarship, so that I don’t get dulled by all the other writing; oh, yes, and the publicity notices for my friend’s books, and the little demolition jobs on those by my enemies… What does all that come to?”

“Monstrous. How do you manage it? When do you do all this writing?”

“You should really be asking, when do I not? I fall asleep writing, and wake up writing. I plan my hero’s fate in my dreams, and the moment I open my eyes the signing-off phrase for my radio broadcast comes into my head.”

“And when do you live?”

“Never. I’ve no time for sport, and none for love. For years the only women I’ve spoken to have been the ones bringing manuscripts, and believe me, they aren’t the most congenial. But that’s not the real problem. The problem is finding time to read.”

“But you’ve just been telling me about your book reviews and reader’s reports… You must surely have to read those, at least.”

“Oh yes, sir, I read an appalling amount — six or seven hours a day. But only the sort of things that publishers and editors lumber me with, or books I need for something I’m writing. Do you know, I would really love to read a book purely for its own sake. Something that’d be of no use to me whatsoever. The stories of Hans Christian Andersen, for example. For years I’ve been dying to read The Ugly Duckling and I’ve never got round to it.”

Rarely pondered this for a moment, then blurted out:

“But why the devil do you work so hard?”

“For a living, my dear sir, to make a living. You of course wouldn’t know this, but ordinary people have to earn their crust. With you, its almost automatic. I’m not a popular writer, my books aren’t suitable for turning into films, I don’t have the sort of brazenness that would enable me to write plays. I’m just a grey literary journeyman, and I have to slave away morning, noon and night simply to make ends meet.”

“If I might ask a rather impertinent question, how much do you earn?”

“Five or six hundred a year.”

“What? For all that work? That is appalling. My heart really goes out to you. And you aren’t even a dying art-form, like the bagpipes.”

“I will be, sooner or later. Nobody wants the sort of thing I do.”

“Listen here, Maclean. I’ve a proposition to make. I’ll pay you a thousand pounds a year. Now, don’t jump up in excitement. Of course I’m not giving it to you for nothing. In return I would ask you, as from today, not to write another word. Not a single one. Do you accept my offer?”

“Do I accept? What a question! Do you think if my guardian angel flew in through the window I’d give her a good kicking? Sir, you are restoring me to life and humanity. There will be tears in my eyes every time I pronounce your name. Sir… my angel… henceforth I shall spend all my time fishing. And chasing women, women who don’t bring me manuscripts, and who never open a book. Illiterates, in fact. And I shall read The Ugly Duckling and the Summa of Thomas Aquinas. And I shall be the first happy writer in the history of literature. Because I won’t be writing.”

A month later Tom Maclean was visiting his sister Jeannie, the wife of Colonel Prescot, who lived in Bournemouth. They were talking over lunch about their far-flung family — Uncle Arthur the country doctor, and his wife who wore such very odd hats; Alastair, the famous seal hunter; John, who had bought a farm in South Africa and sent native penny whistles to the children; Mary, who had just married again; and poor Charles, who would never amount to anything.

“And how are you, Tom? Tell me about yourself,” said Jeannie. Since their mother’s death she had played a somewhat maternal role in his life. “Are you working a lot?”

“I’m not doing anything these days. I haven’t written a word for a month. I go fishing, and I read the foreign papers. I’ve learnt Portuguese — a wonderful language. Now I’ve come home for a week’s walking. I’ve bought myself two puppies — Sealyhams — and I’m training them up. And as for women…” And he lapsed into a bashful silence.

“Splendid. And are you happy?”

“Happy? I’m only now starting to feel really myself. I used to be a slave. The last dirty slave. These days I live like the Good Lord himself. In France.”

“I’m so glad, Tom, really glad. Because I’ve been wanting to say to you for some time that you should relax and join in with things a bit more. But what I don’t understand is why you look so unwell. Your face is rather pale and careworn. Why is that?”

“I’ve no idea. Perhaps all the walking—”

“It’s as if you’re not really satisfied, Tom. Look, I know your face. There’s something missing in your life.”

“No, no. You’re quite wrong about that. I’ve never felt so well. I feel like a god!” he shouted angrily.

Jeannie was so astonished she made no reply.

They took coffee in the sitting room. Then Tom went through to the family library to stretch out and do some reading. There he found his fifteen-year-old nephew Fred sitting at the desk, scratching his head.

“Hello, Freddie. Why such a miserable face? Is something wrong?”

“Wrong? It’s this pesky homework! I’ve got this essay to write for tomorrow, about Shakespeare and Milton. I’m supposed to ‘compare and contrast’ them. Isn’t that crazy? Why were these two blighters ever born? And it’s Bournemouth v Aston Villa this afternoon.”

“Shakespeare and Milton? Hmm. You know what, my lad? You go off to the match, and I’ll write your essay. It’d be a shame to waste such a fine Sunday afternoon. Shakespeare and Milton. What a joke!”

“Would you really, Uncle Tom? I always said you were a thoroughly decent chap, Dad can say what he likes…”

And out he dashed.

Two hours later Jeannie came into the library. She found Tom working away feverishly, surrounded by densely scribbled sheets of paper, with a Shakespeare on the floor and Milton and the other classics scattered everywhere. The moment she entered Tom glanced up at the ceiling to show his irritation. He clearly didn’t take kindly to being interrupted.

“What are you doing, Tom?”

“Oh, er… I’m helping Freddie with his homework. ‘Compare Shakespeare and Milton’, I ask you! At first glance, you’d never think what a good subject it is. I’ve written fifteen sides and still hardly touched on the matter. I think the teacher will be pleased.”

A few days later Tom Maclean called on Peter Rarely. He found the millionaire in his music room, working on an experiment to get thirty parrots to speak in chorus. He nodded briefly as Tom entered. The parrots, who were in the middle of “God Save the King”, fell silent.

“Sir,” Maclean began, very formally and clearly embarrassed. “I am compelled to renege on our agreement. I must ask you not to remit the usual sum next month. I’m terribly sorry. I know it’s not exactly playing the game, but I really have no choice in the matter.”

“What? You want to start writing again?”

“Again? Now I want to start in earnest. So far I’ve just been lazing around. I’ve got the outlines of a five-volume novel sequence, an autobiography of indeterminate length and a life of James IV of Scotland. It’s time I really got going on them.”

“But haven’t you been happy without your writing?”

“No, sir. It’s just no good. If you threw me in prison I’d write in blood on my underwear, like that Mr Kazinczy my Hungarian friend told me about. I wish you good day.”

1937

THE DUKE

ANYONE WHOSE WANDERINGS around Italy have led him to the little town of Cortemiglia, in the Alban hills near Rome, will have been sure to look over the palazzo, the one feature of note in the place apart from the famous paintings in the cathedral, that so greatly resemble those to be seen in the cathedrals of every other little Italian city. Indeed the Palazzo Sant’Agnese itself is hardly different from the thousands of other fine Renaissance and Baroque examples across the land. But if you do ever find yourself there, take a closer look, and you will be struck by the mellow, formally correct beauty of the place, and the magical sense of the past that lingers broodingly over it.

Indeed the building has now arrived at precisely the state most appropriate for such musings — for the past, for history itself, to reach out to you as a living reality. Here there is no glittering spectacle such as you find at Assisi, cleaned and tidied up for the tourist; nor is it so stark in its abandonment as to convey a feeling of oppression, of exhaling the miasma of the ruin of centuries. Virginia creeper clambers the walls at will, with a sort of spontaneous Italian artistry. Grass grows unobtrusively between the paving slabs in the grand courtyard, but nowhere runs to wild profusion. The palazzo is maintained and open to the public, though it takes a full half-hour, with the help of the ever-obliging and undemanding local street urchins, to rouse the custodian from wherever he might be and procure his services.

Once the outside of the building has been properly admired, the interior does not disappoint. Everything inside the rooms is of the finest materials, crafted in the most aristocratic taste — that is to say, nothing produced in our time comes anywhere near it. From the windows of the upper floors a serene, dream-like view opens out towards the haze of blue sunlight on the distant Tyrrhenian Sea. On one of the windows some poetical Englishman, or perhaps Englishwoman, has used a diamond ring to engrave Keats’s well-known line—A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

And like the refrain of a poem, two motifs confront you at every turn. The first is the family coat of arms, depicting two swords and an ostrich feather. The second is the face of the man who commissioned it, Marcantonio Sant’Agnese. The Duke’s portrait, with its prominent nose and meaty cheeks, and their suggestion of opulence, not to say ostentation, is by Rusticaia. The full-length painting, in which he poses before a half-drawn purple-brown curtain, is by Marzio Filiboni. Behind the curtain can be glimpsed a wide, blue-green Renaissance landscape, with rivers and lakes, and tiny, toy-sized mountains. With his brow wreathed in laurel and a purple cloak draped over his ceremonial armour, the Duke stands foursquare. He is magnificently obese. His obesity is even more striking in the equestrian statue, by Mastagli, that stands in pride of place on the main terrace in the ancient park. Next to it is a fountain, on whose rim sits a nymph holding a little elephant in her hand. The water tumbles out though the elephant’s trunk onto an assortment of tritons, who struggle to hold their spiral conches up beneath its downpour — or rather, would struggle, if the water were ever to flow from the spring again. The fountain is later than the statue, executed in the manner of Bernini in the middle of the seventeenth century. Naturally neither the full-length portrait nor the statue gives any clue to the Duke’s psychology, but seeing the portrait one can imagine that behind those two tiny and not very benevolent-looking eyes, between the self-confident and grandiose meatiness of the corpulent cheeks, lurks a strange sense of panic. And the viewer might perhaps wonder what sort of person Marcantonio Sant’Agnese could have been in real life — in his long-ago life, in that long-vanished time.

The origin of the Sant’Agnese family was derived by Renaissance scholars from Agnosos, one of the heroes of The Odyssey, who is known only from a synopsis of the great cyclical epic. It records that this Agnosos was rescued from the waves by Pallas Athene’s owl when the Four Winds were misguidedly let out of their bag and promptly capsized the Greek ships. By happy chance the bird brought him to Italy, where he founded the family line with the help of a mountain nymph. More reliable chronicles assert that the original forebear was a Lombard hero called Balmungo, who took an active part in the assassination of King Alboïn and was rewarded with extensive domains in the vicinity of Benevent. Other accounts propose descent from St Agnes herself, but considering the saint’s well-known virginity this argument runs into certain difficulties. Whatever the truth might be, the fact is that at no time in the sixteenth century did the family play a role of any significance in Italian history, until one of its scions, as Callixtus VII, attained the throne of St Peter. Thereafter his brothers and cousins became bishops, papal generals, treasurers, gonfalonieri (governors of the more distant Christian lands) and lords of various lesser dukedoms. The Pope’s one grievance was that in all his long and illustrious reign he never managed to acquire an independent little principality for his own family. Nonetheless the Sant’Agnese wealth grew in this period to such legendary proportions that it rivalled those other nepotistical dynasties the Borghese, the Barberini and the Pamfili.

Marcantonio Sant’Agnese, who was born in 1561, stepped easily into the possession of wealth, grand titles and princely self-confidence. Of his infancy and youth nothing is known, from which we can infer that he went through all the formative childhood experiences that scholars of the period would consider typical, though none left any discernible mark on his character. As a young nobleman he is known to have played a role both at the papal court and in the diplomatic machinations of the Roman aristocracy, and to have taken part in intrigues prior to papal elections. He forged a treaty with the Duke of Modena, negotiated an alliance with the Viceroy of Naples, took money from the wife of the Catholic Spanish King for working against the rather more Christian-like King of France, and from the King of France for working against the King of Spain… In a word, he was active in all the usual historical and political manoeuvrings of his time.

Such political dealings were conducted in this period partly through protracted and highly secret negotiations, including offers of bribes, and partly by the staging of grand parades and other public spectacles. From detailed contemporary reports we know, for example, that Marcantonio was involved in the procession of unparalleled brilliance arranged in honour of Hassan Bey, the Christian convert half-brother of the Prince of Tunis. Three liveried retainers bearing the huge family coat of arms led the way. Next, robed as Neptune and riding on a camel, was a herald holding aloft an embroidered silk banner depicting the martyrdom of St Agnes. Then came two soldiers, dressed as Moors in chains, followed by two knights in armour. These last carried a banner stretched out between them, printed with the words of a sonnet proclaiming that once the heathens had murdered St Agnes, but now they came to worship her — the point being that Hassan Bey had been received into the Church in Sant’Agnese dei Tre Torri, by none other than Matteo Sant’Agnese, the bishop-uncle of our hero.

There followed twenty noble members of the ducal court, on horseback, with lances at the ready, each lance bedecked with a little olive-green flag, and the heads of the horses and knights all resplendent with huge ostrich feathers. Next came the Duke himself, dressed from head to toe in olive-green brocade, as was his horse, down to its hoofs, with the famed Sant’Agnese jewels, fabulous emeralds, visible below the feathers on its head. Apart from the ring and the legendary clasp pinning the three olive-green ostrich feathers of such fantastic size to his cap, the Duke never wore jewellery himself. This was to signify his contemptus mundi, a fashion newly imported from Spain. His own horse and those of the courtiers in the line ahead had reinforcements of pure gold attached over the usual iron shoes, loosely, so that most of them would drop off during the procession, to the delight and advantage of the Roman populace.

In the footsteps of the Duke trundled a huge theatre-cart of the sort that you can still see in the carnival at Nice today. Drawn by four fully dressed horses, it represented the temple of the goddess Bellona, Marcantonio being a strong believer in military glory. In front of this classical-style temple rose a pyramid composed variously of lances, cannonballs and the decapitated heads of Turks. Behind it stood four women in immense hooped skirts embroidered with olive-green quivers, and wearing gold-embroidered headdresses. These were Bellona’s attendants. The age could not imagine any ladies of stature, whether human or divine, without (even in their more intimate moments) an accompanying flock of attendants.

Inside the temple, the Goddess herself, in the person of Imperia Ottomini, sat enthroned. She was robed alla antica, that is to say, rather scantily, to display her splendidly ample curves. Ladies at this time were much given to dressing up as classical deities, reasoning that as such they could afford greater pleasure to onlookers than would be possible in contemporary costume, which covered the person completely, apart from the face, and revealed nothing of the beauty of the female form. Hence Imperia Ottomini, enthroned as the Goddess of War. But neither she nor the Duke wished to present too grim or uniformly martial an aspect, and what emerged from her quiver was not arrows but little artefacts made of sugar, which she held out to a child and a tiny Maltese terrier standing in front of her. The banner above this scene proclaimed: The Blessings of Warfare.

Love played a large part in the life of Marcantonio Sant’ Agnese, that is to say, the love he bore to Imperia Ottomini. No doubt there were other liaisons too, but about those history is silent — in contrast to some fairly lively accounts of his relations with Imperia, which certainly did leave their mark in the pages of historical scholarship.

Imperia was the wife of a nobleman called Guiliano Ottomini. This Ottomini was a member of the Duke’s innermost circle. He made frequent journeys as his diplomatic representative, and in time became the chief overseer of all his domains. From which it clearly follows that he was not in the least troubled by his wife’s intimate relations with his employer, and no doubt took the same gentlemanly and accommodating line with her children, all of whom carried the Duke’s blood in their veins. Which makes it all the more surprising that in 1589 the Duke had this useful and extremely tolerant man murdered. This event is recorded in many sources, consistent in every important detail.

One night Ottomini, who was in Rome, was visited by a messenger on horseback, sent by Marcantonio to summon him urgently to Cortemiglia. The nobleman leapt onto his steed and set off at once. A few streets down the road, near the ill-lit Teatro Flavio, six desperadoes who had been lurking behind a corner leapt out in front of him, fired their pistols at him, then repeatedly stabbed him as he lay wounded. The papal police rushed to the sound of the shooting, and raced off after the killers. Three of them managed to take refuge in the palazzo of the Spanish legation, where they could not be pursued any further, since it enjoyed diplomatic immunity. But three were caught, among them the popular mountain bandit Luca Perotti, who was generally known to be in Sant’Agnese’s pay. The papal court sentenced the three men to death and, once it became clear that Sant’Agnese would make no objection, carried out the executions. A huge crowd followed Perotti on his last journey, and listened with deep emotion as he confessed his sins on the scaffold, in splendid verses, which he sang.

The reasons for this murder can be only surmised, and then very tentatively. There might possibly have been serious disagreements between the Duke and his steward over the accounts, as Konrad Schneyssen argues in his mighty tome Einführung zur Geschichte der päpstlichen Neffen (An Introduction to the History of Papal Nepotism), but that seems rather unlikely, since all the signs are that up to the very moment of his tragic death Ottomini enjoyed his master’s complete confidence and continued to carry out important assignments on his behalf. It is also difficult to imagine that after so many years he, for his part, would suddenly begin to disapprove of his wife’s conduct. We ourselves — though, in the total absence of hard fact, this is mere conjecture based on the way people thought at the time — would hazard the view that the murder of the unfortunate Ottomini was another example of Marcantonio’s gallantry towards Imperia, a sacrificial offering made by her lover. There is no doubt that Imperia was a very demanding lady, and the Duke did not stint in offering testimony of his passion, showering the woman he loved with jewels, estates, sonnets penned by his own fair hand and portraits of her; and when he could think of no other way to offer even greater witness of his adoration, he had her husband murdered, as proof for her and the whole world of the unquenchable and boundless force of his passion. The fair Imperia seems to have accepted this extreme manifestation of his love, for not long afterwards she finally moved into the Duke’s palazzo, and remained his loyal companion to the end of his days.

The murder of Ottomini seems to have produced a major spiritual convulsion in Marcantonio. His Court Chaplain, the Jesuit father Marcuffini, who was renowned for the great saintliness of his life, took the view that the only road to absolution lay in the sanctity of repentance, and insisted that he should now give Imperia up for ever, on the grounds that the nature of his ‘regrettable error’ meant that to persist in the relationship would expose his soul to continuing mortal danger. Marcantonio, as a deeply religious man, would no doubt have readily undertaken any humiliating act of penance, especially one of the more picturesque and public varieties favoured by the age, but he had no intention of leaving Imperia: time makes every man the slave of custom. His spiritual crisis lasted almost half a year. During that time he lost a great deal of weight and incurred vast expense for the constant attendance of his doctor. Quite how the crisis was resolved is not clear, but what is beyond doubt is that at the end of that half-year he took part in a large-scale religious ceremony in St Peter’s, which seems to confirm that by then he had indeed undergone the ‘sanctity of repentance’.

In his aforementioned work Konrad Schneyssen offers a rather different account of this episode, but we should bear in mind that, as a Protestant, his purpose is to use every weapon at his disposal to place the Church in a bad light. More recent historians have cast considerable doubt on his conclusions. For example, Aldo Lampruzzi, that outstanding representative of the sceptical spirit prevailing at the end of the last century, questions whether Sant’Agnese was implicated in the murder at all. He considers it simply a matter of contemporary gossip, unsupported by any documentary evidence or demonstrable fact. In more recent years, that elegant Neo-Catholic and Royalist French historian François de Kermaniac, in his celebrated Les Taureaux et les aveugles (The Bulls and the Blind), puts an entirely new complexion on the whole affair.

He begins by endorsing Lampruzzi’s argument that Sant’Agnese could not have known that the hired assassins intended to kill Ottomini. Next, the witty Frenchman continues, even if he had, he had no means of stopping them, since it is common knowledge that these brigands cared not a fig for those set in authority over them. But — and this is his most interesting contribution — even if we do think the worst and conclude that Sant’Agnese did have him murdered, we still have no right to affect moral outrage and judge his action in terms of our own altruistic, post-humanist, neo-puritanical, hypocritical and effeminate standards. The age in which Sant’Agnese — the blessed, divinely chosen Sant’Agnese — lived was the great heroic age of Europe, that is to say of the Latin part thereof, when great passions brought about equally great works and deeds, faith threw up cathedrals, Catholic solidarity raised armies against heathen and heretic alike, and love, that finest flower of the heroic spirit, swept aside all pettifogging, petty-bourgeois inhibitions (then unknown) and every other obstacle in the way, like a cleansing storm washing away so many squalid little hovels — or in this case, the smarmy little Ottomini, this “purblind, jumped-up buffoon”.

While we would not wish to endorse de Kermaniac’s somewhat one-sided enthusiasm, we too think it beyond doubt that there was a certain heroism, or at least an element of yearning after it, in Sant’Agnese, and that in the insatiable and sometimes almost grotesque forms this yearning took he was a true child of the age. Through the good offices of the Academy of Rome his surviving poems and letters have recently appeared in print. Among them we find plans for an epic poem the intention of which, judging from the tiny fragment in our possession, was to immortalise the military achievements of his Sant’Agnese forebears, though only a short mythological section was ever completed. In it, his ancestor Bradmart pays a visit to Venus on an Atlantic island. To commemorate the splendid night they have together she presents him with a magic root with the power to dispel even the most painful toothache within minutes.

Among the letters we find one addressed to Zsigmond Báthory, the Prince of Transylvania. In it he writes, among other things: “because you should know, my most illustrious cousin, that since our youth we have nursed no more ardent desire — in these days when Christianity itself is in such danger on its far-eastern boundaries — than to embark on a journey through the Great Wood [he means Transylvania] to wage war on the evil forces of the heathen Crescent, and so seek both atonement for our sins and the reward of the Life Eternal. How happy are you, the people of Transylvania, living so close to that famous theatre of noble warfare, in which you can take part as if on an almost everyday excursion, while we lie separated by so many thousands of miles from that longed-for arena, and our own daily excursions lead us only deeper into that labyrinth, the despised and empty life of the court, where there is nothing but misery and heartache.”

In the same letter he vows that, come the spring, he too, a latter-day Dux Mercurius, will raise an army and dash to the aid of the man who has for so long inspired him to resoluteness of purpose. However, from letters written some time later it appears that previously unforeseen obstacles have arisen — first the death of a “child very dear to him” (one of Imperia’s), then bouts of almost chronic toothache (it seems the legacy of the magic root of Venus had not survived for later generations) and, above all, the ongoing conflict with his neighbour — all combining to spare him that journey of “many thousands of miles” in quest of military glory.

A long-standing source of annoyance to the Duke was the little fortress of San Felice. Located just a mile or two from Cortemiglia, it represented the domain of his old adversaries, the Dukes of Porta. For years he had tried everything in his power, by purchase or litigation, to acquire it. But the Porta family clung stubbornly to what was theirs, refusing to give way even to papal intervention. Having persuaded himself that by opposing the Holy Father’s will they had fallen into the sin of heresy, Marcantonio decided to destroy them by force of arms. For this purpose he bought three new cannon — so-called ‘battle serpents’—and, to supplement the force already at his command, hired the notorious Mascolo band, who had plagued the borders of the Papal state for years. The bandits, who must have numbered around one hundred and fifty, arrived with a mass of weaponry, sporting huge caps, with their extraordinarily long hair tucked into hairnets. Marcantonio had them all fitted out in olive-green uniforms, and gave Mascolo the title of Commissioner-in-Chief for Cortemiglia. Preparations for the expedition proceeded at an extremely gentle pace. Before turning his mind to this hazardous undertaking, the far-sighted Mascolo saw to the needs of his own family. He packed his wife and younger children off to Naples, sent his eldest son to university in Bologna, and married off his daughter to one of the Duke’s secretaries — all, naturally, at Marcantonio’s expense. The bandits spent the entire winter in Cortemiglia, and the spirited independence of their behaviour caused much concern to the Duke and the townspeople alike.

Finally spring arrived, and Commissioner-in-Chief Mascolo set off with his army. He succeeded in crossing the river Nurio without hindrance, and his advance party reported back gleefully that they had penetrated into Porta territory and met with no opposition. A few days later, Mascolo’s second-in-command appeared in Cortemiglia, with his regular escort of ten men, to announce the first victory in person. The troops had come across four bandits in enemy pay helping themselves to some poultry in a village. With great skill Mascolo managed to encircle all four and compel them to surrender. His men took over the village and thoroughly looted it. During the course of the night hostile forces, in an attempt to free the captives, approached with nearly thirty men to a position near Mascolo’s camp. But the ever-vigilant Mascolo was on his guard, and furthermore his troops had not gone to bed that night as they were celebrating their annexation of the village. Observing this, the enemy took to their heels without so much as drawing their swords.

On receiving news of this success Marcantonio hurried off to Rome to order the suit of ceremonial armour and cloak in which he would soon be triumphantly processing into the fortress of San Felice; nor did he lose any time in securing the services of his uncle the bishop to celebrate the Te Deum in honour of his victory over the heretics. But when he arrived back in Cortemiglia there was gloomy news. It appeared that on the following day Mascolo’s troops, confident of success, had advanced onto the plain that lay in front of the fortress. But there a surprise awaited them. The main gates immediately swung open and the opposing army appeared, almost two hundred men, in full armour, with trumpets blaring and extremely war-like demeanour. At this point a detachment of Sant’Agnese’s force, disaffected with Mascolo on account of his allegedly unfair distribution of the first day’s booty, immediately crossed over to the other side, while the rest took to their heels, not stopping until they reached their usual bolt holes up in the hills. Mascolo himself — the only casualty of the battle — was run through from behind.

However we consider this episode, it does little to suggest that Marcantonio’s passionate thirst for glory had continued to grow, which in turn serves only to make him a somewhat more sympathetic figure in the eyes of posterity. We must of course bear in mind that, in the final analysis, and in terms of the great intellectual and religious achievements of the age, of its heroism and extreme fervour, Marcantonio’s contribution is limited to the level of mere aspiration — rather like his little army at the fortress of San Felice. As far as posterity is concerned, the only thing of importance in the whole of this man’s career may well be the one that to him would have been of the very least consequence: that in the last years of his life he formed a connection with Galileo, assisted him financially, and at the height of his persecution remained one of his genuinely loyal supporters.

As is apparent from his correspondence, Marcantonio had read Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Principal World Systems as an early manuscript. In this work the great scientist, following the practice of the time, sets out his defence of the Copernican scheme against the prevailing doctrine of Aristotle in literary form. Sant’Agnese would surely have enjoyed the absurdities put in the mouth of one of the speakers in this dialogue, a man called Simplicius — a device that was used by Galileo’s enemies to persuade the Pope that he was the intended target of the mockery. Urban VIII turned his implacable rage on Galileo, despite efforts by his supporters, among them Sant’Agnese and his uncle the bishop, to mediate between them. Galileo’s now well-known fate was not to be averted, and he was forced to recant his teachings in the cell of the Holy Inquisition.

At about this time Sant’Agnese’s mind was much exercised by the fundamentally new world order that Copernicus and Giordano Bruno had proposed in opposition to the system sanctified by tradition. Although not especially intelligent, through having the time and the right sort of independent mind he was able to foresee the vast possibilities that lay in their discoveries. His initial response to the new vistas opening up to a person of reason and understanding was one of naïve and almost triumphant glee, and it was only later, after he had become a convert to the new way of thinking and it was too late to shed his convictions, that he fully understood the danger.

Marcantonio’s letters written in his final period give us a partial glimpse into the spiritual crisis precipitated, almost certainly, as a result of these experiences. On several occasions he grieves for the lost happiness of his youth, when he still believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and that the sun went round it, along with the moon and the eternal stars. But now he knew that our world was just one among the countless millions, and indeed, seen in that perspective, by no means the largest or the most important, and might even turn out to be an utterly tenth-rate little star, an anonymous and quite insignificant nonentity in the mind-numbing hierarchy of heavenly bodies. And if that were indeed the case, he asks in one of his letters, with a mixture of awe and alarm, then how could it possibly be that God should have sacrificed his Only Begotten Son to redeem the same little tenth-rate star? But then, as if recoiling from the very thought, he immediately begins writing about some marvellous sauce that his new chef has discovered in the French ambassador’s kitchen.

By this stage in his life Marcantonio was hardly an old man, but his tone in the letters becomes increasingly sombre. You feel there is something constantly preying on his mind. If one had to hazard a guess as to what that might have been, perhaps it would be this troubling thought — that if the Earth does not command pride of place among the stars, then what do our worldly hierarchies amount to? Once you realise that the Earth is not an aristocrat among celestial bodies, does that not imply that we can no longer truly believe in our own aristocracy? In the age of Bragmart and his illustrious Sant’Agnese forebears it would never have occurred to anyone to doubt the sovereignty of the Earth…

Marcantonio was also plagued by material concerns. He was reduced to pawning some of the family emeralds. His health was not good, and he was tortured by stomach pains. He complained that his heart was sometimes so heavy he felt he was “piling Pelion upon Ossa”. His obesity at this time reached gargantuan proportions. Eating had increasingly become his sole source of consolation, and it proved responsible for his death. On 8th September 1622, against the express instructions of his doctor, he finished off a meal consisting of thirty courses, and died the following evening.

Taking all in all, it would be going too far to assert that Marcantonio played a significant role in the history of his time and country. When you consider the powerful resources at his command, it points rather to the painful ineffectiveness evident in his having lived such a profoundly unproductive life, always falling so short of his great ideals. And when we consider the truly wicked things he did — those we know of — and reflect that he probably committed many others of which we know nothing, we may well feel inclined to condemn not only the man but also the age, and the social order, that could place every opportunity for greatness in the hands of such a mediocrity.

And yet we should not rush to condemn him. Let us not forget the palazzo at Cortemiglia, with its noble elegance and aristocratic melancholy. If Marcantonio Sant’Agnese had accomplished great and famous deeds they would have vanished without trace in the passage of time, just as his moments of wickedness have passed into oblivion or uncertainty. But the palazzo remains, that exquisite object on whose windows a fine-souled Englishman has scored his sense of eternal beauty. And, taking this idea further, we may well have to conclude that it was the man’s very love of pomp, his insatiable thirst for glory, his passion for that woman, and possibly even his wrongdoings and his physical grossness — and a thousand other deeply repulsive attributes that belong not so much to him as to the age he lived in — the nepotism, the anarchy, the hundred different kinds of decadence that was Italy — that made it possible for him to construct such a building. The golden iridescence of beauty is often distilled from the slime on murky water, and that is why we love the great and troubled river that is history.

1943