Lyne had been in love with Basil Seal. It was one of those affairs which, beginning light-heartedly as an adventure and accepted light-heartedly by their friends as an amusing scandal, seemed somehow petrified by a Gorgon glance and endowed with an intolerable permanence; as though in a world of capricious and fleeting alliances, the ironic Fates had decided to set up a standing, frightful example of the natural qualities of man and woman, of their basic aptitude to fuse together; a label on the packing case “These chemicals are dangerous” ? an admonitory notice, like the shattered motorcars erected sometimes at dangerous turns in the road; so that the least censorious were chilled by the spectacle and recoiled saying, “Really, you know, there’s something rather squalid about those two.”
It was a relationship which their friends usually described as “morbid,” by which they meant that sensuality played a small part in it, for Basil was only attracted to very silly girls and it was by quite other bonds that he and Angela were fettered together.
Cedric Lyne, pottering disconsolately in his baroque solitudes and watching with dismay the progress of his blustering son, used to tell himself, with the minimum of discernment, that a beguin like that could not possibly last. For Angela there seemed no hope of release. Nothing, she felt in despair, would ever part them but death. Even the flavour of the Vichy water brought thoughts of Basil as she remembered the countless nights in the last seven years when she had sat late with him, while he got drunk and talked more and more wildly, and she sipping her water waited her turn to strike, hard and fierce, at his conceit, until as he got more drunk he became superior to her attacks and talked her down and eventually came stupidly away.
She turned to the window as the train slackened to walking pace, passing truck after truck of soldiers. Il faut en finir, Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts. A hard-boiled people, the French. Two nights ago at Cannes, an American had been talking about the mutinous regiments decimated in the last war. “It’s a pity they haven’t got anyone like old Petain to command them this time,” he had said.
The villa at Cannes was shut now and the key was with the gardener. Perhaps she would never go back. This year she remembered it only as the place where she had waited in vain for Basil. He had telegraphed “International situation forbids joy-riding.” She had sent him the money for his journey but there had been no answer. The gardener would make a good thing out of the vegetables. A hard-boiled people, the French; Angela wondered why that was thought to be a good thing; she had always had a revulsion from hard-boiled eggs, even at picnics in the nursery ? hard-boiled; overcooked; over-praised for their cooking. When people professed a love of France, they meant a love of eating; the ancients located the deeper emotions in the bowels. She had heard a commercial traveller in the Channel packet welcome Dover and English food: “I can’t stomach that French messed-up stuff.” A commonplace criticism, thought Angela, that applied to French culture for the last two generations ? “messed-up stuff,” stale ingredients from Spain and America and Russia and Germany, disguised in a sauce of white wine from Algeria. France died with her monarchy. You could not even eat well, now, except in the provinces. It all came back to eating. “What’s eating you?”…Basil claimed to have eaten a girl once in Africa; he had been eating Angela now for seven years. Like the Spartan boy and the fox … Spartans at Thermopylae, combing their hair before the battle; Angela had never understood that, because Alcibiades had cut off his hair in order to make himself acceptable. What did the Spartans think about hair really? Basil would have to cut his hair when he went into the Army. Basil the Athenian would have to sit at the public tables of Sparta, clipped blue at the neck where before his dark hair had hung untidily to his collar. Basil in the pass at Thermopylae…
Angela’s maid returned from gossiping with the conductor. “He says he doesn’t think the sleeping cars will go any further than Dijon. We shall have to change into day coaches. Isn’t it wicked, madam, when we’ve paid?”
“Well, we’re at war now. I expect there’ll be a lot to put up with.”
“Will Mr. Seal be in the Army?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“He will look different, won’t he, madam?”
“Very different.”
They were both silent, and in the silence Angela knew, by an intuition which defied any possible doubt, exactly what her maid was thinking. She was thinking, “Supposing Mr. Seal gets himself killed. Best thing really for all concerned.”
…Flaxman Greeks reclining in death among the rocks of Thermopylae; riddled scarecrows sprawling across the wire of no man’s land…Till death us do part…Through the haphazard trail of phrase and association, a single, unifying thought recurred, like the sentry posts at the side of the line, monotonously in Angela’s mind. Death. “Death the Friend” of the sixteenth-century woodcuts, who released the captive and bathed the wounds of the fallen; Death in frock coat and whiskers, the discreet undertaker, spreading his sable pall over all that was rotten and unsightly; Death the macabre paramour in whose embrace all earthly loves were forgotten; Death for Basil, that Angela might live again…that was what she was thinking as she sipped her Vichy water, but no one, seeing the calm and pensive mask of her face, could ever possibly have guessed.
Rupert Brooke, Old Bill, the Unknown Soldier ? thus three fond women saw him, but Basil breakfasting late in Poppet Green’s studio fell short and wide of all these ideals. He was not at his best that morning, both by reason of his heavy drinking with Poppet’s friends the night before and the loss of face he was now suffering with Poppet in his attempts to explain his assertion that there would be no war. He had told them this the night before, not as a speculation, but as a fact known only to himself and a half a dozen leading Germans; the Prussian military clique, he had told them, were allowing the Nazis to gamble just as long as their bluff was not called; he had had this, he said, direct from von Fritsch. The Army had broken the Nazi Party in the July purge of 1936; they had let Hitler and Goering and Goebbels and Ribbentrop remain as puppets just as long as they proved valuable. The Army, like all Armies, was intensely pacifist; as soon as it became clear that Hitler was heading for war, he would be shot. Basil had expounded this theme not once but many times, over the table of the Charlotte Street restaurant, and because Poppet’s friends did not know Basil, and were unused to people who claimed acquaintance with the great, Poppet had basked in vicarious esteem. Basil was little used to being heard with respect and was correspondingly resentful at being reproached with his own words.
“Well,” Poppet was saying crossly, from the gas stove. “When does the Army step in and shoot Hitler?”
She was a remarkably silly girl, and, as such, had commanded Basil’s immediate attention when they met, three weeks earlier, with Ambrose Silk. With her Basil had spent the time he had promised to Angela at Cannes; on her he had spent the twenty pounds Angela had sent him for the journey. Even now, when her fatuous face pouted in derision, she found a soft place in Basil’s heart.
Evidence of her silliness abounded in the canvases, finished and unfinished, which crowded the studio. Eighty years ago her subjects would have been knights in armour, ladies in wimples and distress; fifty years ago “nocturnes”; twenty years ago Pierrots and willow trees; now, in 1939, they were bodiless heads, green horses and violet grass, seaweed, shells and funguses, neatly executed, conventionally arranged in the manner of Dali. Her work in progress on the easel was an overlarge, accurate but buttercup-coloured head of the Aphrodite of Melos, poised against a background of bull’s-eyes and barley-sugar.
“My dear,” Ambrose had said, “you can positively hear her imagination creaking as she does them, like a pair of old, old corsets, my dear, on a harridan.”
