“Admirable!” Spandrell applauded. And even Walter had to laugh; but the depths of his unhappiness remained undisturbed.
“It must have taken him a good five minutes,” Lucy went on, “to screw himself up to the talking point. I was in an agony, as you can imagine. But guess what it was he wanted to say.”
“What?”
“Guess.” And all at once Lucy began to laugh again, uncontrollably. She covered her face with her hands, her whole body shook, as though she were passionately weeping. “It’s too good,” she gasped, dropping her hands and leaning back in her chair. Her face still worked with laughter; there were tears on her cheeks. “Too good.” She opened the little beaded bag that lay on the table in front of her and, taking out a handkerchief, began to wipe her eyes. A gust of perfume came out with the handkerchief, reinforcing those faint memories of gardenias that surrounded her, that moved with her wherever she went like a second ghostly personality. Walter looked up; the strong gardenia perfume was in his nostrils; he was breathing what was for him the very essence of her being, the symbol of her power, of his own insane desires. He looked at her with a kind of terror.
“He told me,” Lucy went on, still laughing spasmodically, still dabbing at her eyes, “he told me that he had heard that I sometimes allowed young men to kiss me at dances, in conservatories. Conservatories!” she repeated. “What a wonderful touch! So marvellously in period. The eighties. The old Prince of Wales. Zola’s novels. Conservatories! Poor dear man! He said he hoped I wouldn’t let it happen again. My mother’d be so dreadfully distressed if she knew. Oh dear, oh dear!” She drew a deep breath. The laughter finally died down.
Walter looked at her and breathed her perfume, breathed his own desires and the terrible power of her attraction. And it seemed to him that he was seeing her for the first time. Now, for the first time—with the half-emptied glass in front of her, the bottle, the dirty ash tray; now, as she leaned back in her chair, exhausted with laughter, and wiping the tears of laughter from her eyes.
“Conservatories,” Spandrell was repeating. “Conservatories. Yes, that’s very good. That’s very good indeed.”
“Marvellous,” said Lucy. “The old are really marvellous. But hardly possible, you must admit. Except, of course, Walter’s father.”
John Bidlake climbed slowly up the stairs. He was very tired. “These awful parties,” he was thinking. He turned on the light in his bedroom. Over the mantelpiece one of Degas’s realistically unlovely women sat in her round tin bath trying to scrub her back. On the opposite wall a little girl by Renoir played the piano between a landscape of his own and one of Walter Sickert’s visions of Dieppe. Above the bed hung two caricatures of himself by Max Beerbohm and another by Rouveyre. There was a decanter of brandy on the table, with a siphon and glass. Two letters were propped conspicuously against the edge of the tray. He opened them. The first contained press cuttings about his latest show. The Daily Mail called him “the veteran of British Art” and assured its readers that “his hand has lost nothing of its cunning.” He crumpled up the cutting and threw it angrily into the fireplace.
The next was from one of the superior weeklies. The tone was almost contemptuous. He was judged by his own earlier performance and condemned. “It is difficult to believe that works so cheap and flashy—ineffectively flashy, at that—as those collected in the present exhibition should have been produced by the painter of the Tate Gallery Haymakers and the still more magnificent Bathers, now at Tantamount House. In these empty and trivial pictures we look in vain for those qualities of harmonious balance, of rhythmic calligraphy, of three-dimensional plasticity which …” What a rigmarole! What tripe! He threw the whole bunch of cuttings after the first. But his contempt for the critics could not completely neutralize the effects of their criticism. “Veteran of British Art”—it was the equivalent of “poor old Bidlake.” And when they complimented him on his hand having lost none of its cunning, they were patronizingly assuring him that he still painted wonderfully well for an old dotard in his second childhood. The only difference between the hostile and the favourable critic was that one said brutally in so many words what the other implied in his patronizing compliment. He almost wished that he had never painted those bathers.
He opened the other envelope. It contained a letter from his daughter Elinor. It was dated from Lahore.
The bazaars are the genuine article—maggoty. What with the pullulations and the smells, it is like burrowing through a cheese. From the artist’s point of view, the distressing thing about all this oriental business is that it’s exactly like that painting of Eastern scenes they did in France in the middle of last century. You know the stuff, smooth and shiny, like those pictures that used to be printed on tea canisters. When you’re here, you see that the style is necessary. The brown skin makes the faces uniform and the sweat puts a polish on the skin. One would have to paint with a surface at least as slick as an Ingres.
He read on with pleasure. The girl always had something amusing to say in her letters. She saw things with the right sort of eye. But suddenly he frowned.
Yesterday, who should come to see us but John Bidlake Junior. We had imagined him in Waziristan; but he was down here on leave. I hadn’t seen him since I was a little girl. You can imagine my surprise when an enormous military gentleman with a grey moustache stalked in and called me by my Christian name. He had never seen Phil, of course. We killed
