G. (12 page)

Occasionally there is a noise which suggests a marble dropped into water. It is made by a perch, basking on the surface of the water, abruptly plunging. Umberto cannot enjoy the peacefulness of the garden alone. Alone he feels old and nervous. He will agree to anything Laura asks in exchange for being able to have his son in Livorno.

Umberto thinks that his son is not like a modern Italian but like a youth painted during the Renaissance; his face is like a window onto his soul. He finds the gaps in the boy’s teeth a little disconcerting when he smiles, but these he will have stopped with gold. He tells Laura of all the advantages which the boy would enjoy if he lived in Livorno. Laura does not say what she thinks. Instead she complains, hints, contradicts herself. The more persuasive Umberto becomes, the less encouraging she is. He pleads with her, he begs her on his knees.

No, No, she cries, holding his arms to make him get to his feet.

He reminds her of times they have spent together.

Ah my little one you were mad, quite quite mad.

Italy, she insists, is not a country for a child.

Come with him, says Umberto becoming more agitated, I’ll buy a house. I’ll buy you …

The father’s sentimentality will ensure that the mother has her way.

Whilst his unknown mother and newly-discovered father argue about where he should live and with whom, the son returns again and again to his memory of being led into the yard where the water-tap was. Again the Roman girl throws water on his face. Again he is amazed by her expression. Again something is revealed to him. The revelation is as wordless as the water she threw was colourless.

Where he is (in the garden in Livorno) or where he was (in the Via Manin) is unimportant; what he sees in front of him (his mother’s round face and her hair impeccably arranged in a bun) or what he
saw (the Roman girl’s blemished open mouth) belongs to the particular moment; what he hears (the sound of the fountain playing) or what he heard (screams and curses of women) are simple alternatives; what matters is what her expression in the yard confirmed but what, until this moment, was wordless. What matters is not being dead.

It has begun, the struggle unto death against what is.

The veil of St Veronica: a kerchief with the image of Christ’s head wearing the crown of thorns imprinted upon it.

I see another image miraculously printed on cloth. Her body with her head thrown back and her eyes shut. The image is naturalistic, quite unstylized. Dark areas of hair. Her pale skin almost indistinguishable from the colour of the linen sheet on which she lay.

Again and again two pigeons fly into the wood and out of it: the male always in pursuit. As the pair approach the wood with the hen bird in the lead, she checks herself in mid-air by holding herself vertical, with her tail down and her outstretched wings now acting as a brake. Her head is thrown back, her beak points to the sky. She hangs there motionless and yet not falling. The male bird finds himself at her side. She begins to drop, puts her head down and her tail up, dives, and they enter the wood together. A moment later they emerge from the far side of the wood to circle once more and repeat the same flight.

The description so far as it goes is accurate. But my power to select (both the facts and the words describing them) impregnates the text with a notion of choice which encourages the reader to infer a false range and type of choice being open to the two pigeons. Description distorts.

On an afternoon in late May 1902 (a few weeks before the end of
the Boer War), Beatrice seduces him. What happens happens like an undescribed natural event.

When Laura and her son returned from Milan at the end of May 1898 they found that Beatrice was engaged to be married to Captain Patrick Bierce of the 17th Lancers. The boy was sent to a boarding school. During most school holidays he stayed alone with Jocelyn on the farm. (Beatrice accompanied her husband when he was posted to South Africa.)

The type of school to which he was sent has been frequently described. Its daily routine was spartan: its ideology imperialistic and religious: its social life authoritarian and sadistic. The purpose of the education which the school offered was to produce empire-builders.

Like many other boys he adapted himself to school life. A certain aloofness reinforced what his companions immediately recognized as his foreignness. He was not, however, unduly persecuted. His very indifference was a kind of protection. He was nicknamed Garibaldi because he claimed that his father was Italian. He spent an unusual amount of his free time playing the piano in the school music rooms. His interest in music was entirely disproportionate to his small talent.

At the age of fourteen his face was no longer that of a child. The change is sometimes thought of as a coarsening process; this misses the point. The change—which may occur any time between fourteen and twenty-four—involves a simultaneous gain and loss in expressiveness. The texture of the skin, the form of the flesh over the bones, become mute; their appearance becomes a covering, whereas in childhood it is a declaration of being. (Compare our response to children and to adults: we give to the existence of children the value we give to the intentions of adults.) However, the openings in the covering—especially the eyes and mouth—
become more expressive, precisely because they now offer indications of what lies hidden behind.

The process of maturing and, later, of ageing involves a gradual but increasing withdrawal of the self from the exterior surface of the body. The skin of the very old is like a garment. The mouth of the man next to the boy—it was Jocelyn—was already inexpressive; he had withdrawn from his mouth: his lips were no more than a flange of the outer covering. This covering offered a certain amount of information: country gentleman, outdoor life, taciturn, disappointed. It was only through his eyes that one could still sometimes glimpse that part of his self still capable of response.

They were walking up a steep winding path with high hedges on either side. It was a late November afternoon (1900), very similar to the one when the men in sack-cloth had shown the boy the dead dray-horses. He had spoken to nobody of this incident. He remembered it vividly without seeking any explanation. It had acquired the isolated absoluteness of a vision. For him his experiencing it was its explanation.

It had been raining hard during the day. Beside the path water was running fast downhill along a stone-bedded ditch, overgrown with grass. They could hear but not see the water. Both carried guns under their arms.

Earlier, the boy had been telling Jocelyn about a dream he had had.

 … I was down in the Martin and it was very hot, like it was last summer. I was swimming and there were big birds flying very low over the water—not predatory birds. Sometimes a bird’s foot touched my hair. Then more and more birds came so that I was forced to swim to the bank and climb out.

Tedder was telling me it’s going to be an exceptional year for duck on the estuary, said Jocelyn.

I started looking for my clothes. But somebody had changed them. They weren’t the same clothes as before. They were a uniform, a soldier’s uniform. It was a perfect fit—I mean it must have been a uniform made for me.

Do you remember what regiment? asked Jocelyn.

I didn’t know in my dream what regiment it was.

Were you a cavalry officer? I didn’t know.

Perhaps the Eighth Hussars, said Jocelyn. They had arrived at a gate. Jocelyn put his hand on the barrel of the boy’s gun to remind him to break it before climbing over. As he did so he looked at the boy, and was suddenly overwhelmed by how foreign he looked. He looked like an Italian: he looked like the son of his Italian shopkeeper father. His rigid mouth hardly moving, but in a kindly tone, he said: No, not the Eighth Hussars, even when you are dreaming.

I put my hand into the tunic pocket, continued the boy, and inside was—a crab! A large crab and it nipped me. I pulled out my hand and the extraordinary thing was that my hand was the crab! I had an arm, a wrist, and a crab for a hand.

What a preposterous dream! Why do you tell it to me?

I think it means that if I join the army I shall be wounded.

A light wound perhaps.

No, severely.

I saw a sow badger this morning, said Jocelyn, you should have come with me.

I heard you go off. You shouted at Tedder about the mare being under-bitted.

I haven’t found the key to that mare’s mouth yet, said Jocelyn.

Then they had both fallen silent.

In the narrow steep lane the boy asked: Have you heard from Aunt Beatrice?

Jocelyn appeared not to hear. The boy glanced sideways at him.

The man’s eyes were screwed up and his face was thrust forward into the damp, increasingly cold air. He could have been trying to spot something in the light which was beginning to fail. Or he could have been a man leaving his house with the determination never to return, a man thrusting his face forward so that it might the sooner be immersed in the unknown and the indifferent.

Several minutes later he said: She says they’re saying in Durban, that the war is as good as over. Lord Roberts is on his way home.

She’ll be here soon then.

You forget that she’s married, said Jocelyn.

Where will they live?

I’ve no idea.

Why are all the things still kept in her room?

Because it is still her room.

Will they both come here?

Again Jocelyn appeared not to hear. They emerged from the lane into a spinney. At the end of the lane Jocelyn’s dog was awaiting him. A springer spaniel called Silver.

Do you know why you have bad dreams, said Jocelyn, it’s because you spend too much time indoors. You don’t exercise yourself enough. Too much in the house. It’s a woman’s life that. Not a man’s. You should come out with me more.

I’m sorry if I disappoint you, said the boy. He said it insolently as though it were inconceivable that the man could have any real grounds for disappointment. When I give my first concert you’ll be proud of me.

We’ve only got about twenty minutes more in this light, said Jocelyn, let’s clear the wood and cross the quarry field. You work the left and I’ll take the right below. Silver, come here Silver!

His voice changed when he spoke to the dog, becoming both firmer and softer. To the boy be spoke more loudly and yet hesitantly.

They separated and began to go forward through the wood. The trees and the slope of the ground made it impossible for them to keep in sight of one another.

Hup! Hup! cried Jocelyn to show how far forward he was.

Hup! Hup! replied the boy to show that they were advancing in level line.

It is a cry which is thought not to alert the birds. It sounds more like a wooden stick striking a hollow wooden vessel (the wood of the vessel water-logged) than a voice speaking.

Nothing stirred in the wood. The tree trunks looked grey. The spaniel was seeking half-heartedly as if it found the damp entirely vegetable odour of the wet leaves disagreeable.

Hup! Hup!

For Jocelyn the cry belonged to a language which was theoretically infinite. Those two repeated wooden monosyllables filled the spinney with the splendour of a tradition as no sentence or speech or music ever could. Through the cry and the response to it, was invoked the understanding of honourable men acting in concert, disinterestedly, to experience certain moments of pure style.

Hup! Hup!

This time Jocelyn’s cry was addressed gently and specifically to the boy. He was talking to the boy, including him in the tradition. The boy noticed the difference in the man’s cry, but he answered as before.

Hup! Hup!

The tradition envisages men in close but special contact with nature. The men are unspoilt by comfort yet they are free of the necessity of having to exploit nature. They enter into nature rather as a
swimmer, who has no need to cross it, enters a river. They play in the current: in it and yet not of it. What prevents them being swept away are time-honoured rules to which they adhere without question. The rules all concern ways of treating or handling specific objects or situations—guns, boots, bags, dogs, trees, deer, etc. Thus the force of nature (either from within or from without) is never allowed to accumulate; the rules always establish calm, as locks do in a river. Such men feel like gods because they have the impression of imposing an aesthetic order upon nature merely by the timing and style of their own formal interventions.

Hup! Hup!

If Silver puts up a woodcock, thought Jocelyn, it will be almost too dark now.

The tradition envisages that at the end of the day tiredness finally forces the men to cease. They return home stiff, hungry, chilled or soaked, caked with mud. At home they offer to women and friends the invisible unmade masterpieces which they have fleetingly constructed in nature; they offer them in the soiled or torn clothes they throw off, in their stiff bodies, in their excited distant eyes, in the names they possess and the names of where they have been with whom.

Hup! Hup!

It was the boy’s turn to respond. He did so, as before, flatly—without the conspiratorial intensity of his uncle.