Art and Love had led him to this inhospitable room.
Love for a long succession of louts?rugger blues, all-in wrestlers, naval ratings; tender, hopeless love that had been rewarded at the best by an occasional episode of rough sensuality, followed, in sober light, with contempt, abuse and rapacity.
A pansy. An old queen. A habit of dress, a tone of voice, an elegant, humorous deportment that had been admired and imitated, a swift, epicene felicity of wit, the art of dazzling and confusing those he despised ? these had been his; and now they were the current exchange of comedians; there were only a few restaurants, now, which he could frequent without fear of ridicule, and there he was surrounded, as though by distorting mirrors, with gross reflections and caricatures of himself. Was it thus that the rich passions of Greece and Arabia and the Renaissance had worn themselves out? Did they simper when Leonardo passed and imitate with mincing grace the warriors of Sparta? Was there a snigger across the sand outside the tents of Saladin? They burned the Knights Templars at the stake; their loves, at least, were monstrous and formidable, a thing to call down destruction from heaven if man neglected his duty of cruelty and repression. Beddoes had died in solitude, by his own hand; Wilde had been driven into the shadows, tipsy and garrulous, but, to the end, a figure of tragedy looming big in his own twilight. But Ambrose, thought Ambrose, what of him? Born after his time, in an age which made a type of him, a figure of farce; like mothers-in-law and kippers, the century’s contribution to the national store of comic objects; akin with the chorus boys who tittered under the lamps of Shaftesbury Avenue…And Hans, who at last, after so long a pilgrimage, had seemed to promise rest, Hans so simple and affectionate, like a sturdy young terrier, Hans lay in the unknown horrors of a Nazi concentration camp.
The huge, yellow face with scrawled moustaches offered Ambrose no comfort.
There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”
“No, Tom,” they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t a conscience.”
“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”
“…Peter’s here and Basil. We’re all feeling very gay and warlike. May we come to luncheon? Basil says there’s bound to be an enormous air raid tonight so it may be the last time we shall ever see each other…what’s that? Yes, I told you I’m (What am I, Basil?) ? I’m M.I.9. (There’s a ridiculous woman on the line saying, ‘Is this a private call?’)…Well, Margot, then we’ll all come round to you. That’ll be heaven…Hello, hello…I do believe that damned woman has cut us off.”
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art. Nature in the raw is seldom mild: red in tooth and claw; matelots in Toulon smelling of wine and garlic, with tough brown necks, cigarettes stuck to the lower lip, lapsing into unintelligible contemptuous argot.
Art: this was where Art had brought him, to this studio, to these coarse and tedious youngsters, to that preposterous yellow face among the boiled sweets.
It had been a primrose path in the days of Diaghilev; at Eton he had collected Lovat-Fraser Rhyme-sheets; at Oxford he had recited “In Memoriam” through a megaphone to an accompaniment hummed on combs and tissue paper; in Paris he had frequented Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein; he had written and published his first book there, a study of Montparnasse Negroes that had been banned in England by Sir William Joynson-Hicks. That way the primrose path led gently downhill to the world of fashionable photographers, stage sets for Cochrane, Cedric Lyne and his Neapolitan grottoes.
He had made his decision then, turned aside from the primrose path; had deliberately chosen the austere and the heroic; it was the year of the American slump, a season of heroic decisions, when Paul had tried to enter a monastery and David had succeeded in throwing himself under a train. Ambrose had gone to Germany, lived in a workmen’s quarter, found Hans, begun a book ? a grim, abstruse, interminable book, a penance for past frivolity; the unfinished manuscript lay somewhere in an old suitcase in Central Europe; and Hans was behind barbed wire; or worse, perhaps, had given in ? as, with his simple easygoing acceptance of things, was all too likely; was back among the Brown Shirts, a man with a mark against his name, never again to be trusted, but good enough for the firing line, good enough to be jostled into battle.
The redheaded girl was asking inconvenient questions again. “But Tom,” she was saying. “Surely if it was a good thing to share the life of the worker in a canned fruit factory, why isn’t it a good thing to serve with him in the Army?”
“Julia’s just the type who used to go about distributing white feathers.”
“If it comes to that, why the hell not?” said Julia.
Ars longa, thought Ambrose, a short life but a grey one.
Alastair plugged his electric razor into the lamp on Sonia’s writing table and shaved in the bedroom, so as not to miss what was going on. He had once in the past seen Peter in full dress uniform at a Court Ball and had felt sorry for him because it meant that he could not come on afterwards to a night club; this was the first time he had seen him in khaki and he was jealous as a schoolboy. There was still a great deal of the schoolboy about Alastair; he enjoyed winter sports and sailing and squash racquets and the chaff round the bar at Bratt’s; he observed certain immature taboos of dress, such as wearing a bowler hat in London until after Goodwood Week; he had a firm, personal sense of schoolboy honour. He felt these prejudices to be peculiar to himself; none of them made him at all censorious of anyone else; he accepted Basil’s outrageous disregard for them without question. He kept his sense of honour as he might have kept an expensive and unusual pet; as, indeed, once, for a disastrous month, Sonia had kept a small kangaroo named Molly. He knew himself to be eccentric, in his own way, as Ambrose Silk. For a year, at the age of twenty- one, he had been Margot Metroland’s lover; it was an apprenticeship many of his friends had served; they had forgotten about it now, but at the time all their acquaintances knew about it; but never, even to Sonia, had Alastair alluded to the fact. Since marriage he had been unfaithful to Sonia for a week every year, during Bratt’s Club golf tournament at Le Touquet, usually with the wife of a fellow member. He did this without any scruple because he believed Bratt’s Week to be in some way excluded from the normal life of loyalties and obligations; a Saturnalia when the laws did not run. At all other times he was a devoted husband.
Alastair had never come nearer to military service than in being senior private in the Corps at Eton; during the General Strike he had driven about the poorer quarters of London in a closed van to break up seditious meetings and had clubbed several unoffending citizens; that was his sole contribution to domestic politics, for he had lived, in spite of his many moves, in uncontested constituencies. But he had always held it as axiomatic that, should anything as preposterous and antiquated as a large-scale war occur, he would take a modest but vigorous part. He had no illusions about his abilities, but believed, justly, that he would make as good a target as anyone else for the King’s enemies to shoot at. It came as a shock to him now, to find his country at war and himself in pyjamas, spending his normal Sunday noon with a jug of Black Velvet and some chance visitors. Peter’s uniform added to his uneasiness. It was as though he had been taken in adultery at Christmas or found in mid-June on the steps of Bratt’s in a soft hat.
He studied Peter, with the rapt attention of a small boy, taking in every detail of his uniform, the riding boots, Sam Browne belt, the enamelled stars of rank, and felt disappointed but, in a way, relieved, that there was no sword; he could not have borne it if Peter had had a sword.
