Brideshead Revisited(86)
I let her get clear of the place and was about to follow — the rooms were nearly empty — when I heard a voice at the turnstile I had not heard for many years, an unforgettable self-taught stammer, a sharp cadence of remonstration.
‘No. I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know whether I received one. I have not come to a social function — I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures. Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a personal interest in the artist — if that word has any meaning for you.’
‘Antoine’ I said, ‘come in.’
‘My dear, there is a g-g-gorgon here who thinks I am g-g-gate-crashing. I only arrived in London yesterday, and heard quite by chance at luncheon that you were having an exhibition, so, of course I dashed impetuously to the shrine to pay homage. Have I changed? Would you recognize me? Where are, the pictures? Let me explain them to you.’
Anthony Blanche had not changed from when I last saw him; not, indeed, from when I first saw him. He swept lightly across the room to the most prominent canvas — a jungle landscape paused a moment, his head cocked like a knowing terrier, and asked: ‘Where, my dear Charles, did you find this sumptuous greenery? The corner of a hothouse at T-t-rent or T-t-tring? What gorgeous usurer nurtured these fronds for your pleasure?’ Then he made a tour of the two rooms; once or twice he sighed deeply, otherwise he kept silence. When he came to the end he sighed once more, more deeply than ever, and said: ‘But they tell me, My dear, you are happy in love. That is everything, is it not, or nearly everything?’
‘Are they as bad as that?’
Anthony dropped his voice to a piercing whisper: ‘My dear, let us not expose your little imposture before these good, plain people’ — he gave a conspiratorial glance to the last remnants of the crowd — ‘let us not spoil their innocent pleasure. We know, you and I, that this is all t-t-terrible t-t-tripe. Let us go, before we offend the connoisseurs. I know of a louche little bar quite near here. Let us go there and talk of your other c-cconquests.’
It needed this voice from the past to recall me; the indiscriminate chatter of praise all that crowded day had worked on me like a succession of advertisement hoardings on a long road, kilometre after kilometre between the poplars, commanding one to stay at some new hotel, so that when at the end of the drive, stiff and dusty, one arrives at the destination, it seems inevitable to turn into the yard under the name that had first bored, then angered one, and finally become an inseparable part of one’s fatigue.
Anthony led me from the gallery and down a side street to a door between a disreputable newsagent and a disreputable chemist, painted with the words ‘Blue Grotto Club. Members only.’
‘Not quite your milieu, my dear, but mine, I assure you. After all, you have been in your milieu all day.’
He led me downstairs, from a smell of cats to a smell of gin and cigarette-ends and the sound of a wireless.
‘I was given the address by a dirty old man in the Boeuf sur le Toit. I am most grateful to him. I have been out of England so long, and really sympathetic little joints like this change so fast. I presented myself here for the first time yesterday evening, and already I feel quite at home. Good evening, Cyril.’
‘‘Lo, Toni, back again?’ said the youth behind the bar.
‘We will take our drinks and sit in a corner. You must remember, my dear, that here you are just as conspicuous and, may I say, abnormal, my dear, as I should be in B-bbratt’s.’
The place was painted cobalt; there was cobalt lineoleum on the floor. Fishes of silver and gold paper had been pasted haphazard on ceiling and walls. Half a dozen youths were drinking and playing with the slot-machines; an older, natty, crapulous-looking man seemed to be in control; there was some sniggering round the fruit-gum machine; then one of the youths came up to us and said, ‘Would your friend care to rhumba?’
‘No, Tom, he would not, and I’m not going to give you a drink; not yet, anyway. That’s a very impudent boy, a regular little gold-digger, my dear.’
‘Well,’ I said, affecting an ease I was far from feeling in that den, what have you been up to all these years?’
‘My dear, it is what you have been up to that we are here to talk about. I’ve been watching you, my dear. I’m a faithful old body and I’ve kept my eye on you.’ As he spoke the bar and the bar-tender, the blue wicker furniture, the gambling-machines, the gramophone, the couple of youths dancing on the oilcloth, the youths sniggering round the slots,. the purple-veined, stiffly-, dressed elderly man drinking in the corner opposite us, the whole drab and furtive joint seemed to fade, and I was back in Oxford looking out over Christ Church meadow through a window of Ruskin-Gothic. ‘I went to your first exhibition,’ said Anthony; ‘I found it — charming. There was an interior of Marchmain House, very English, very correct, but quite delicious. “Charles has done something,” I said; “not all he will do, not all he can do, but something.”
‘Even then, my dear, I wondered a little. It seemed to me that there was something a little gentlemanly about your painting. You must remember I am not English; I cannot understand this keen zest to be well-bred. English snobbery is more macabre to me even than English morals. However, I said, “Charles has done something delicious. What will he do next?”