The Black Prince (Penguin Classics) (7 page)

‘Anything the matter?’ said Francis.

‘No.’

‘I heard you say something about a doctor.’

‘The wife of a friend of mine has had an accident. She fell. I’m just going over.’

‘Shall I come too?’ said Francis. ‘I might be useful. After all, I am still a doctor in the eyes of God.’

I thought for a moment and said, ‘All right.’ We got a taxi.

 

 

I pause here to say another word or two about my protégé Arnold Baffin. I am anxious (this is not just a phrase, I feel
anxiety
) about the clarity and justice of my presentation of Arnold, since this story is, from a salient point of view, the story of my relations with Arnold and the astounding climax to which these relations led. I ‘discovered’ Arnold, a considerably younger man, when I was already modestly established as a writer, and he, recently out of college, was just finishing his first novel. I had by then ‘got rid of’ my wife and was experiencing one of those ‘fresh starts’ which I have so often hoped would lead on to achievement. He was a schoolmaster, having lately graduated in English literature at the university of Reading. We met at a meeting. He coyly confessed his novel. I expressed polite interest. He sent me the almost completed typescript. (This was, of course,
Tobias and the Fallen Angel
. Still, I think, his best work.) I thought the piece had some merits and I helped him to find a publisher for it. I also reviewed it quite favourably when it came out. Thus began one of the most, commercially speaking, successful of recent literary careers. Arnold at once, contrary as it happens to my advice, gave up his job as a teacher and devoted himself to ‘writing’. He wrote easily, producing every year a book which pleased the public taste. Wealth, fame followed.

It has been suggested, especially in the light of more recent events, that I envied Arnold’s success as a writer. I would like at once and categorically to deny this. I sometimes envied his freedom to write at a time when I was tied to my desk. But I did not in general feel envy of Arnold Baffin for one very simple reason: it seemed to me that he achieved success at the expense of merit. As his discoverer and patron I felt from the start identified with his activities. And I felt, rather, distress that a promising young writer should have laid aside true ambition and settled so quickly into a popular mould. I respected his industry and I admired his ‘career’. He had many gifts other than purely literary ones. I did not, however, much like his books. Tact readily supervened however and, as I have said, we soon instinctively avoided certain topics of conversation.

I was present at Arnold’s marriage to Rachel. (I am speaking of a time which is now getting on for twenty-five years ago.) And after this for many years I used to have lunch with the Baffins every Sunday, and would usually see Arnold at least once during the week as well. It was like a family relationship. At one time Arnold even used to refer to me as his ‘spiritual father’. The close regularity of these customs ceased after Arnold made a remark, which I will not retail here, about my work. Friendship survived however. It became even, in test and in tribulation, rather more intense, certainly more complicated. I will not go so far as to say that Arnold and I were obsessed with each other. But we were certainly of abiding mutual interest. I felt that the Baffins needed me. I felt, in relation to them, like a tutelary deity. Arnold was always grateful, even devoted, though there is no doubt that he feared my criticisms. He had perhaps, as he increasingly embraced literary mediocrity, a very similar critic inside his own breast. Often one identifies with what would otherwise prove a menace. Dislike of another’s work is a deep source of enmity in artists. We are a vain crew and can be irrevocably estranged by criticism. It is a tribute to Arnold and myself, two demonic men, that we ingeniously preserved, for whatever reason, our affection for each other.

I should make clear that Arnold was not in any crude sense ‘spoilt’ by success. He was no tax-dodger with a yacht and a house in Malta. (We sometimes laughingly discussed tax-avoidance, but never tax-evasion.) He lived in a fairly large, but not immodest, suburban villa in a ‘good class’ housing estate in Ealing. His domestic life was, even to an irritating extent, lacking in style. It was not that he put on an act of being ‘the ordinary chap’. In some way he
was
‘the ordinary chap’, and eschewed the vision which might, for better as well as worse, have made a very different use of his money. I never knew Arnold to purchase any object of beauty. He was indeed quite deficient in visual taste, though he was rather aggressively fond of music. As to his person, he continued to look like a schoolmaster, dressed shapelessly, and retained a raw shy boyish appearance. It never occurred to him to play ‘the famous writer’. Or perhaps intelligence, of which he had plenty, suggested this way of playing it. He wore steel rimmed specs, behind which his eyes were a very pale bluish-green, rather striking. His nose was pointed, his face always rather greasy, but healthy looking. There was a general lack of colour. Something of an albino? He was accounted, and perhaps was, good-looking. He was always combing his hair.

 

 

Arnold stared at me and pointed mutely at Francis. We were standing in the hall. Arnold looked unlike himself, his face waxy, his hair jagged, his eyes without glasses crazed and vague. There was a red mark like a Chinese character upon his cheek.

‘This is Dr Marloe. Dr Marloe – Arnold Baffin. Dr Marloe happened to be with me when you rang up about your wife’s
accident.
’ I stressed the last word.

‘Doctor,’ said Arnold. ‘Yes, you see – she—’

‘She fell?’ I suggested.

‘Yes. Is he – is this chap a — medical doctor?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A friend of mine.’ This untruth at least conveyed important information.

‘Are you
the
Arnold Baffin ?’ said Francis.

‘Yes, he is,’ I said.

‘I say, I do admire your books – I’ve read – ’

‘What’s the situation?’ I said to Arnold. I thought he looked as if he was drunk, and immediately after I could smell drink.

Arnold, making some sort of effort, said slowly, ‘She locked herself into our bedroom. After it – happened – She was bleeding a lot-I thought-I don’t quite know what – the injury was – At any rate – At any rate -’ He stopped.

‘Go on, Arnold. Look, you’d better sit down. Hadn’t he better sit down?’

‘Arnold Baffin,’ said Francis, to himself.

Arnold leaned back against the hall stand. He leaned his head back into a coat that was hanging there, closed his eyes for a moment, and then went on. ‘Sorry. You see. She was sort of crying and wailing in there for a time. I mean in the bedroom. Now it’s all quiet and she doesn’t answer at all. I’m afraid she may be unconscious or—’

‘Can’t you break open the door?’

‘I tried to, I
tried
to, but the chisel, the – outside woodwork just broke away and I couldn’t get any—’

‘Sit down, Arnold, for Christ’s sake.’ I pushed him on to a chair.

‘And you can’t see through the keyhole because the key—’

‘She’s probably just upset and won’t answer out of – you know—’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to – If it’s alla-I don’t know quite what – You go and try, Bradley – ’

‘Where’s your chisel?’

‘Up there. But it’s a small one. I can’t find – ’

‘Well, you two stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ll just go up and see what’s going on. I bet you anything – Arnold, stay here and
sit down
!’

I stood outside the bedroom door, which had been mildly disfigured by Arnold’s efforts. A lot of paint had flaked off and lay like white pearls upon the fawn carpet. The chisel lay there too. I tried the handle and called, ‘Rachel. It’s Bradley. Rachel!’

Silence.

‘I’ll get a hammer,’ I could hear Arnold, invisible, saying downstairs.

‘Rachel, Rachel, please answer – ’ The real panic had got inside me now. I pressed all my weight on the door. It was solid and well made. ‘Rachel!’

Silence.

I hurled myself at the door, shouting, ‘Rachel!’ Then I stopped, and listened very carefully.

There was a tiny sound from within, a sort of little creeping mouse-like sound. I said, ‘Oh let her be all right, let her be all right.’

More creeping. Then very softly in a scarcely audible whisper. ‘Bradley.’

‘Rachel, Rachel, are you all right?’

Silence. Creeping. Then a little hissing sigh. ‘Yes.’

I shouted to the others, ‘She’s all right! She’s all right!’

I heard them saying something behind me on the stairs. ‘Rachel, let me in, can you? Let me in.’

There was a scuffling sound, then Rachel’s voice, breathy and low down, close against the door, ‘You come in. Not anyone else.’

I heard the key turn in the lock and I pushed quickly into the room catching a glimpse of Arnold who was standing on the stairs with Francis behind him a little lower down. I saw the two faces very clearly, like faces in a crucifixion crowd which represent the painter and his friend. Arnold’s face was distorted into a sort of sneer of anguish. Francis’s was bright with malign curiosity. Suitable expressions for a crucifixion. Inside I nearly fell over Rachel who was sitting on the floor. She was moaning softly now, trying frantically to turn the key again in the lock. I turned it for her and then sat down on the floor beside her.

Since Rachel Baffin is one of the main actors, in a crucial sense perhaps the main actor, in my drama I should like now to pause briefly to describe her. I had known her for over twenty years, almost as long as I had known Arnold, yet at the time that I speak of I did not really, as I later realized, know her well. There was a sort of vagueness. Some women, in fact in my experience many women, have a sort of ‘abstract’ quality about them. Is this a real sex difference? Perhaps this quality is really just unselfishness. (In this respect, you know where you are with men!) In Rachel’s case it was certainly not lack of intelligence. There was a vagueness which womanly affection and the custom of my quasi-family friendship with the Baffins did not dispel, even increased. Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. This may be to make a mystery of what had simpler causes. Rachel was an intelligent woman married to a famous man: and instinctively such a woman behaves as a function of her husband, she reflects, as it were, all the light on to him. Her ‘blankness’ repelled even curiosity. One does not expect such a woman to have ambition: whereas Arnold and I were both, in quite different ways, tormented, perhaps even defined, by ambition. Rachel was (in a way in which one would never think this of a man) a ‘good specimen’, a ‘good sort’. One relied on her. There she was. She looked (then) just like a big handsome sweet contented woman, the efficient wife of a well-known charmer. She was a large, smooth-faced, slightly freckled, reddish-blonde person, with straightish gingery wiry hair and a pale complexion, a bit tall for a woman and generally on a larger scale physically than her husband. She had been putting on weight and some might have called her fat. She was always busy, often with charities and mild left-wing politics. (Arnold cared nothing for politics.) She was an excellent ‘housewife’, and often referred to herself by this title.

‘Rachel, are you all right?’

There was a darkening reddish bruise under one eye and the eye was narrowed, though this was hard to see because the eyelids of both eyes were so grossly red and swollen with weeping. Her upper lip was also swollen on one side. There were traces of blood on her neck and on her dress. Her hair was tangled and looked darker as if wet; perhaps it was literally wet with the flow of her tears. She was panting now, almost gasping. She had undone the front of her dress and I could see some white lace of her brassière and a plump pallor of flesh bulging above. She had been crying so much that her face was almost unrecognizably puffed up, all wet and shiny and hot to look at. She started now to cry again, pulling away from my convulsive sympathetic gesture and plucking at the collar of the dress in a distraught way.

‘Rachel, are you hurt? I’ve got a doctor here – ’

She began awkwardly to get up, again pushing away my assisting hand. I got a whiff of alcohol from her panting breath. She knelt upon her dress and I heard it tear. Then she half ran half fell across the room to the disordered bed, where she flopped on her back, tugging at the bedclothes, ineffectually because she was half lying on them, then covering her face with both hands and crying in an appalling wailing manner, lying with her feet wide apart in a graceless self-absorption of grief.

‘Rachel, please control yourself. Drink some water.’ The sound of that abandoned weeping was scarcely bearable, and something far too intense to be called embarrassment, yet of that quality, made me both reluctant and anxious to look at her. A woman’s crying can sicken one with fright and guilt, and this was terrible crying.

Arnold outside shouted, ‘Please let me in, please, please – ’

‘Stop it, Rachel,’ I said. ‘I can’t bear this. Stop it. I’m going to open the door.’

‘No, no,’ she whispered, a sort of voiceless whine. ‘Not Arnold, not—’ Was she still afraid of him?

‘I’m going to let the doctor in,’ I said.

‘No, no.’

I opened the door and placed my hand on Arnold’s chest. ‘Go in and look at her,’ I said to Francis. ‘There’s some blood.’

Arnold began to call out, ‘Let me see you, please, darling, don’t be angry, oh please – ’

I pushed him back towards the head of the stairs. Francis went inside and locked the door again, whether out of delicacy or professional caution.

Arnold sat down on the stairs and began to moan. ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear – ’ My awkward appalled embarrassment mingled now with a horrible fascinated interest. Arnold, beyond caring about what impression he made, was running his hands again and again through his hair. ‘Oh I am a bloody fool, I am a bloody fool—’