He addressed himself to her:
“Your love affairs—what are they worth? and your famous strength that supports us? I know you’re a strong woman, with your stunt of opening doors every sane person knows are better shut. I’m your brother and you’ll not take me in. Twenty-three bodies, twenty-three pictures of death have taught me the worth of your tricks. And I don’t flatter myself I shall do anything on my own. You’ve sucked me too dry for that—”
Carston saw her swing the crystal slung from her neck he knew the boy had given her.
“Dearie,” said Picus, “let your back hair down, and be yourself.”
“Go away,” said Ross.
“Go and look for what you want where you think you’ll find it,” she said. Temperately, ineffectually, the reserve showing how she loved him.
Carston wanted to kick him. Clarence yawned. The boy took no notice. Carston thought: Ways of clearing the house. A full well at Tollerdown, and Biarritz the brighter by one cub.
Whose adieux were being made separately.
“And Clarence can nurse his fancy heartbreak and Picus his second-rate chic. And Ross make his appetites serve his art, or whichever way round he does it. And Carston get kick out of being taken in by our fake aristocracy. And Nanna slave and tell you how wonderful you are. I’m going where there won’t be any more fairy-stories, and my complexes can rot me or—”
“All right,” said his sister, “we’ll try not to overwork Nanna, or impose on Carston too much.”
Well, well
, thought the latter: the new type of child: Biarritz, bars. What every little boy in a bar knows. And how far had her love got Scylla?
His newfound confidence working easily in him, he smiled at Felix.
“ ‘Portrait of the artist as young man,’ ” he said. “Good luck.”
But the boy answered:
“D’you fancy my sister so much that you’ve learned her tricks? She is keeping them for someone else than me, that’s all.”
She wondered as she left the room, and for once ordered Nanna to iron his linen immediately, if his version of the truth was refreshing him, as any contact should. And, pitifully, how long it would last. And anxiously, what he would do. And, maliciously until she felt better what sort of a fool he would make of himself, what gaping mouth would snap him up.
So he lost her until he should come to look for her, Grail vanished, girl and all.
Incidentally, he settled which of the rest should go or stay. Next day, contrary to custom, the wind fell, and a torrent of soft mist packed in rain brimmed the land, refilled ceaselessly off the falling sea as it passed in over the hills. They could hear the water slowly thundering and not much else but their rather distressed voices. Carston alone had the serenity of plans. After he had persuaded Scylla to go up to London, Clarence said that he would go over to the cottage or the dust and damp would get in and annoy his young man. Picus had gone already, flitted off, the raining fog hiding him for a time. Carston meant the same landscape to swallow him on the trail of old Mr. Tracy. He asked Ross for his plans.
“Stay here and get on with things. I’ll wait till you come back.”
Felix
Felix bolted black and stormy to his hotel and emerged again into the gold light, fresh as roses. He crossed the river, and on the brink of the Champs-Élysées felt the rhythm of Paris begin to stir him and caress. A movement of tireless youth, each instant crystallized a century, illustrated by details small and intimate, grandiose or chic. His lost goodness returned, recomposed out of adoring attention, until like a polished bay, the Place de la Concorde opened before him. There the fragile Paris façades grouped themselves round the bronze ladies washing their faces, round a boy wandering out among the skimming taxis, in love.
He walked some way before he remembered that he had a rendezvous with a person as well as Paris, and turned back along the Rue de Rivoli, drowned in the evening sky. He had forgotten what he had left behind, novice at his first ceremony of mystery, he turned up the Rue Boissy d’Anglas and found himself indoors again.
His friend was with a band. Felix hated bands. No setting for him when he felt that he was not really there. He knew he had an inferiority complex, but there were too many draped legs and wrapped coats, and he might not have heard the last story, would have to pretend it had arrived stale from London. He would be found out, and no one would care how he loved Paris, or how much he knew about art. And with what was left of his generous simplicity, he did not count at all on his clothes which were the original of many replicas, or on his money, which was not borrowed.
Here was a different kind of loneliness. With his own generation, not as at home with the half-generation ahead. Loneliness all the same, self-imposed. In the French-American group he was a distinguishable figure. Boys fresh as roses in a shopwindow, as picked and perfect. Only a close observer might have said that Felix was still on his bush. Or having left it, that his stalk was not down in the water.
How to pretend to be the devil you are afraid to be.
How to be a grand seigneur on nothing a year.
How to be yourself when you do not know that self, and are afraid to find out.
How to get tight when you don’t do it regularly.
The café walls were black, filled with mirror panels squared with small red and gold lights. Like an old mirror that has a circle of miniature mirrors inlaid in its glass, the place reflected and repeated a great deal of what is going on in the world. And Felix, with his
