After the Fireworks (7 page)

“And what about the daughter?” Dodo asked, after a silence.

He shrugged his shoulders. “In reaction against the mother, so far as I could judge. In reaction, but also influenced by her, unconsciously. And the influence is effective because, after all, she's her mother's daughter and probably resembles her mother, congenitally. But consciously, on the surface, she knows she doesn't want to live as though she were in a novel. And yet can't help it, because that's her nature, that's how she was brought up. But she's miserable, because she realizes that fiction-life
is
fiction. Miserable and very anxious to get out—out through the covers of the novel into the real world.”

“And are you her idea of the real world?” Dodo enquired.

He laughed, “Yes, I'm the real world. Strange as it may seem. And also, of course, pure fiction. The Writer, the Great Man—the Official Biographer's fiction, in a word. Or, better still, the autobiographer's fiction. Chateaubriand, shall we say. And her breaking out—that's fiction too. A pure Miles Fanningism, if ever there was one. And, poor child, she knows it. Which makes her so cross with herself. Cross with me too, in a curious obscure way. But at the same time she's thrilled. What a thrilling situation! And herself
walking about in the middle of it. She looks on and wonders and wonders what the next instalment of the feuilleton's going to contain.”

“Well, there's one thing we're quite certain it's not going to contain, aren't we? Remember your promise, Miles.”

“I think of nothing else,” he bantered.

“Seriously, Miles, seriously.”

“I think of nothing else,” he repeated in a voice that was the parody of a Shakespearean actor's.

Dodo shook her finger at him. “Mind,” she said, “mind!” Then, pushing back her chair, “Let's move into the drawing-room,” she went on. “We shall be more comfortable there.”

A
ND TO THINK,” PAMELA WAS WRITING IN HER
diary, “how nervous I'd been beforehand, and the trouble I'd taken to work out the whole of our first meeting, question and answer, like the Shorter Catechism, instead of which I was like a fish in water, really at home, for the first time in my life, I believe. No, perhaps not more at home than with Ruth and Phyllis, but then they're girls, so they hardly count. Besides, when you've once been at home in the sea, it doesn't seem much fun being at home in a little glass bowl, which is rather unfair to Ruth and Phyllis, but after all it's not their fault and they can't help being little bowls, just as M. F. can't help being a sea, and when you've swum about a bit in all that intelligence and knowledge and really
devilish
understanding, well, you find the bowls rather narrow, though of course they're sweet little bowls and I shall always be very fond of them, especially Ruth. Which makes me wonder if what he said about Clare and me—unnatural by nature—is always true, because hasn't every unnatural person got somebody she can be natural with, or even that she can't help being natural with, like oxygen and that other
stuff making water? Of course it's not guaranteed that you find the other person who makes you natural, and I think perhaps Clare never did find her person, because I don't believe it was Daddy. But in my case there's Ruth and Phyllis and now to-day M. F.; and he really proves it, because I
was
natural with him more than with any one, even though he did say I was unnatural by nature. No, I feel that if I were with him always, I should always be my
real
self, just kind of easily spouting, like those lovely fountains we went to look at this afternoon, not all tied up in knots and squirting about vaguely in every kind of direction, and muddy at that, but beautifully clear in a big gushing spout, like what Joan in
The Return of Eurydice
finally became when she'd escaped from that awful, awful man and found Walter. But does that mean I'm in love with him?”

Pamela bit the end of her pen and stared, frowning, at the page before her. Scrawled large in orange ink, the question stared back. Disquietingly and insistently stared. She remembered a phrase of her mother's. “But if you knew,” Clare had cried (Pamela could
see
her, wearing the black afternoon dress from Patou, and there were yellow roses in the bowl on the table under the window), “if you knew what certain writers were to me!
Shrines
—there's no other word. I could worship the Tolstoy of Anna Karenina.” But Harry Braddon, to whom the words were addressed, had laughed at her. And, though she hated Harry Braddon, so had Pamela, mockingly. For it was absurd; nobody was a shrine, nobody. And anyhow, what
was
a shrine? Nothing. Not nowadays, not when one had stopped being a child. She told herself these things with a rather unnecessary emphasis, almost truculently, in the style of the professional atheists in
Hyde Park. One didn't worship—for the good reason that she herself once had worshipped. Miss Figgis, the classical mistress, had been her pash for more than a year. Which was why she had gone to Early Service so frequently in those days and been so keen to go up to Oxford and take Greats. (Besides, she had even, at that time, rather liked and admired Miss Huss. Ghastly old Hussy! It seemed incredible now.) But oh, that grammar! And Caesar was such a bore, and Livy still worse, and as for Greek . . . She had tried very hard for a time. But when Miss Figgis so obviously preferred that priggish little beast Kathleen, Pamela had just let things slide. The bad marks had come in torrents and old Hussy had begun being more sorrowful than angry, and finally more angry than sorrowful. But she hadn't cared. What made not caring easier was that she had her mother behind her. “I'm so delighted,” was what Clare had said when she heard that Pamela had given up wanting to go to Oxford. “I'd have felt so terribly inferior if you'd turned out a blue-stocking. Having my frivolity rebuked by my own daughter!” Clare had always boasted of her frivolity. Once, under the influence of old Hussy and for the love of Miss Figgis, an earnest disapprover, Pamela had become an apostle of her mother's gospel. “After all,” she had pointed out to Miss Figgis, “Cleopatra didn't learn Greek.” And though Miss Figgis was able to point out, snubbingly, that the last of the Ptolemies had probably spoken nothing but Greek, Pamela could still insist that in principle she was quite right: Cleopatra hadn't learnt Greek, or what, if you were a Greek, corresponded to Greek. So why should she? She began to parade a violent and childish cynicism, a cynicism which was still (though she had learnt, since leaving school, to temper
the ridiculous expression of it) her official creed. There were no shrines—though she sometimes, wistfully and rather shamefacedly, wished there were. One didn't, determinedly didn't worship. She herself might admire Fanning's books,
did
admire them, enormously. But as for worshipping—no, she absolutely declined. Clare had overdone it all somehow—as usual. Pamela was resolved that there should be no nonsense about
her
feelings.

“But does that mean I'm in love with him?” insisted the orange scrawl.

As though in search of an answer, Pamela turned back the pages of her diary (she had already covered nearly eight of them with her account of this memorable twelfth of June). “His face,” she read, “is very brown, almost like an Arab's, except that he has blue eyes, as he lives mostly in the South, because he says that if you don't live in the sun, you go slightly mad, which is why people in the North, like us and the Germans and the Americans are so tiresome, though of course you go still madder where there's too much sun, like in India, where they're even more hopeless. He's very good looking and you don't think of him as being either old or young, but as just being there, like that, and the way he smiles is really very extraordinary, and so are his eyes, and I simply
adored
his white silk suit.” But the question was not yet answered. His silk suit wasn't him, nor was his voice, even though he had “an awfully nice one, rather like that man who talks about books on the wireless, only nicer.” She turned over a page. “But M. F. is different from most clever people,” the orange scrawl proclaimed, “because he doesn't make you feel a fool, even when he does laugh at you, and never, which is so
ghastly
with men like Professor Cobley,
talks down to you in that awful patient, gentle way, which makes you feel a million times more of a worm than being snubbed or ignored, because, if you have any pride, that sort of intelligence without tears is just loathsome, as though you were being given milk pudding out of charity. No, M. F. talks to you on the level and the extraordinary thing is that, while he's talking to you and you're talking to him, you
are
on a level with him, or at any rate you feel as though you were, which comes to the same thing. He's like influenza, you catch his intelligence.” Pamela let the leaves of the notebook flick past, one by one, under her thumb. The final words on the half-blank page once more stared at her, questioningly. “But does that mean I'm in love with him?” Taking her pen from between her teeth, “Certainly,” she wrote, “I do find him terribly attractive physically.” She paused for a moment to reflect, then added, frowning as though with the effort of raising an elusive fact from the depths of memory, of solving a difficult problem in algebra: “Because really, when he put his hand on my shoulder, which would have been simply intolerable if any one else had done it, but somehow with him I didn't mind, I felt all thrilled with the absolute frisson.” She ran her pen through the last word and substituted “thrill,” which she underlined to make it seem less lamely a repetition. “Frisson” had been one of Clare's favourite words; hearing it pronounced in her mother's remembered voice, Pamela had felt a sudden mistrust of it; it seemed to cast a kind of doubt on the feelings it stood for, a doubt of which she was ashamed—it seemed so disloyal and the voice had sounded so startlingly, so heart-rendingly clear and near—but which she still couldn't help experiencing. She defended herself; “frisson” had simply had to go, be
cause the thrill was genuine, absolutely genuine, she insisted. “For a moment,” she went on, writing very fast, as though she were trying to run away from the sad, disagreeable thoughts that had intruded upon her, “I thought I was going to faint when he touched me, like when one's coming to after chloroform, which I've certainly never felt like with any one else.” As a protest against the doubts inspired by that unfortunate frisson she underlined “never,” heavily. Never; it was quite true. When Harry Braddon had tried to kiss her, she had been furious and disgusted—disgusting beast! Saddening and reproachful, Clare's presence hovered round her once more; Clare had liked Harry Braddon. Still, he was a beast. Pamela had never told her mother about that kiss. She shut her eyes excludingly and thought instead of Cecil Rudge, poor, timid, unhappy little Cecil, whom she liked so much, was so genuinely sorry for. But when, that afternoon at Aunt Edith's, when at last, after an hour's visibly laborious screwing to the sticking point, he had had the courage to take her hand and say “Pamela” and kiss it, she had just laughed, oh! unforgivably, but she simply couldn't help it; he was so ridiculous. Poor lamb, he had been terribly upset. “But I'm so sorry,” she had gasped between the bursts of her laughter, “so dreadfully sorry. Please don't be hurt.” But his face, she could see, was agonized. “Please! Oh, I feel so miserable.” And she had gone off into another explosion of laughter which almost choked her. But when she could breathe again, she had run to him where he stood, averted and utterly unhappy, by the window, she had taken his hand and, when he still refused to look at at her, had put her arm round his neck and kissed him. But the emotion that had filled her eyes with tears was nothing like passion. As for
Hugh Davies—why, it certainly had been rather thrilling when Hugh kissed her. It had been thrilling, but certainly not to a fainting point. But then had she
really
felt like fainting to-day, a small voice questioned. She drowned the small voice with the scratching of her pen. “Consult the oracles of passion,” she wrote and, laying down her pen, got up and crossed the room. A copy of
The Return of Eurydice
was lying on the bed; she picked it up and turned over the pages. Here it was! “Consult the oracles of passion,” she read aloud and her own voice sounded, she thought, strangely oracular in the solitude. “A god speaks in them, or else a devil, one can never tell which beforehand, nor even, in most cases, afterwards. And, when all is said, does it very much matter? God and devil are equally supernatural, that is the important thing; equally supernatural and therefore, in this all too flatly natural world of sense and science and society, equally desirable, equally significant.” She shut the book and walked back to the table. “Which is what he said this afternoon,” she went on writing, “but in that laughing way, when I said I could never see why one shouldn't do what one liked, instead of all this Hussy and Hippo rigmarole about service and duty, and he said yes, that was what Rabelais had said” (there seemed to be an awful lot of “saids” in this sentence, but it couldn't be helped; she scrawled on;) “which I pretended I'd read—why can't one tell the truth? particularly as I'd just been saying at the same time that one ought to say what one thinks as well as do what one likes; but it seems to be hopeless—and he said he entirely agreed, it was perfect, so long as you had the luck to like the sort of things that kept you on the right side of the prison bars and think the sort of things that don't get you murdered when you say
them. And I said I'd rather say what I thought and do what I liked and be murdered and put in gaol than be a Hippo, and he said I was an idealist, which annoyed me and I said I certainly wasn't, all I was was some one who didn't want to go mad with inhibitions. And he laughed, and I wanted to quote him his own words about the oracles, but somehow it was so shy-making that I didn't. All the same, it's what I intensely feel, that one
ought
to consult the oracles of passion. And I shall consult them.” She leaned back in her chair and shut her eyes. The orange question floated across the darkness: “But does that mean I'm in love with him?” The oracle seemed to be saying yes. But oracles, she resolutely refused to remember, can be rigged to suit the interests of the questioner. Didn't the admirer of
The Return of Eurydice
secretly
want
the oracle to say yes? Didn't she think she'd almost fainted, because she'd wished she'd almost fainted, because she'd come desiring to faint? Pamela sighed; then, with a gesture of decision, she slapped her notebook to and put away her pen. It was time to get ready for dinner; she bustled about efficiently and distractingly among her trunks. But the question returned to her as she lay soaking in the warm other-world of her bath. By the time she got out she had boiled herself to such a pitch of giddiness that she could hardly stand.

For Pamela, dinner in solitude, especially the public solitude of hotels, was a punishment. Companionlessness and compulsory silence depressed her. Besides, she never felt quite eye-proof; she could never escape from the obsession that every one was looking at her, judging, criticizing. Under a carapace of rather impertinent uncaringness she writhed distressfully. At Florence her loneliness had driven her to
make friends with two not very young American women who were staying in her hotel. They were a bit earnest and good and dreary. But Pamela preferred even dreariness to solitude. She attached herself to them inseparably. They were touched. When she left for Rome, they promised to write to her, they made her promise to write to them. She was so young; they felt responsible; a steadying hand, the counsel of older friends. . . . Pamela had already received two steadying letters. But she hadn't answered them, never would answer them. The horrors of lonely dining cannot be alleviated by correspondence.