‘And again,’ said Joanna. ‘We’ve just got time before supper. I’ll read the first stanza, then you follow on.’
At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows,
And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those
Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes
A cloud on the moon in the autumn night.
4
It was July 1945, three weeks before the general election.
They are lying in rows there, under the gloomy beams;
On the sagging floor; they gather the silver streams
Out of the moon, those moonlit apples of dreams
And quiet is the steep stair under.
‘I wish she would stick to
‘Do you? I rather like
We come now to Nicholas Farringdon in his thirty-third year. He was said to be an anarchist. No one at the May of Teck Club took this seriously as he looked quite normal; that is to say, he looked slightly dissipated, like the disappointing son of a good English family that he was. That each of his brothers — two accountants and one dentist — said of him from the time he left Cambridge in the mid 1930s, ‘Nicholas is a bit of a misfit, I’m afraid,’ would not have surprised anyone.
Jane Wright applied for information about him to Rudi Bittesch who had known Nicholas throughout the 1930s. ‘You don’t bother with him. He is a mess by the way,’ Rudi said. ‘I know him well, he is a good friend of mine.’ From Rudi she gathered that before the war he had been always undecided whether to live in England or France, and whether he preferred men or women, since he alternated between passionate intervals with both. Also, he could never make up his mind between suicide and an equally drastic course of action known as Father D’Arcy. Rudi explained that the latter was a Jesuit philosopher who had the monopoly for converting the English intellectuals. Nicholas was a pacifist up to the outbreak of war, Rudi said, then he joined the Army. Rudi said, ‘I have met him one day in Piccadilly wearing his uniform, and he said to me the war has brought him peace. Next thing he is psychoanalysed out of the Army, a wangle, and he is working for the Intelligence. The anarchists have given him up but he calls himself an anarchist, by the way.’
Far from putting Jane against Nicholas Farringdon, the scraps of his history that came to her by way of Rudi gave him an irresistible heroism in her mind, and, through her, in the eyes of the top-floor girls.
‘He must be a genius,’ said Nancy Riddle.
Nicholas had a habit of saying ‘When I’m famous … ‘when referring to the remote future, with the same cheerful irony that went into the preface of the bus conductor on the No. 73 route to his comments on the law of the land: ‘When I come to power …
Jane showed Rudi
‘George must be out of his mind to publish this,’ Rudi said when he brought it back to Jane. They sat in the recreation room at the other end of which, cornerwise by the open French window, a girl was practising scales on the piano with as much style as she could decently apply to the scales. The music-box tinkle was far enough away, and sufficiently dispersed by the Sunday morning sounds from the terrace, not to intrude too strongly on Rudi’s voice, as he read out, in his foreign English, small passages from Nicholas’s book in order to prove something to Jane. He did this as a cloth merchant, perhaps wishing to persuade a customer to buy his best quality of goods, might first produce samples of inferior stuff, feel it, invite comment, shrug, and toss it away. Jane was convinced that Rudi was right in his judgement of what he was reading, but she was really more fascinated by what small glimpses of Nicholas Farringdon’s personality she got from Rudi’s passing remarks. Nicholas was the only presentable intellectual she had met.
‘It is. not bad, not good,’ said Rudi, putting his head this way, that way, as he said it. ‘It is mediocrity. I recall he composed this in 1938 when he had a freckled bed-mate of the female sex; she was an anarchist and pacifist. Listen, by the way …‘ He read out:
X is writing a history of anarchism. Anarchism properly has no history in the sense that X intends — i.e. in the sense of continuity and development. It is a spontaneous movement of people in particular times and circumstances. A history of anarchism would not be in the nature of political history, it would be analogous to a history of the heart-beat. One may make new discoveries about it, one may compare its reactions under varying conditions, but there is nothing new of itself.
Jane was thinking of the freckled girl-friend whom Nicholas had slept with at the time, and she almost fancied they had taken
Jane said, ‘What happened to the girl?’
‘She went to prison for pacifism maybe, I don’t know. If I would be George I would not touch this book. Listen …’
Every communist has a fascist frown; every fascist has a communist smile.
‘Ha!‘ said Rudi.
‘I thought that was a very profound bit,’ Jane said, as it was the only bit she could remember.
‘That is why he writes it in, he counts that the bloody book has got to have a public, so he puts in some little bit of aphorism, very clever, that a girl like you likes to hear, by the way. It means nothing, this, where is the meaning?’ Most of Rudi’s last words were louder-sounding than he had intended, as the girl at the piano had paused for rest.
‘There’s no need to get excited,’ said Jane loudly.
The girl at the piano started a new set of rippling tinkles.
‘We move to the drawing-room,’ said Rudi.
‘No, everyone’s in the drawing-room this morning,’ Jane said. ‘There’s not a quiet corner in the drawing-room.’
