Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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But the Larnimans were ancient history now. Their place had been taken, first, by a detective; then (after Sebastian had read his father’s book about the Russian Revolution) by Trotsky; then by Odysseus, whose adventures, during that summer and autumn of 1926, were wilder than anything that Homer had ever reported. It was with the coming of Odysseus that girls first made their appearance in Sebastian’s stories. True, they had figured to some extent in the earlier epics, but only as the victims of doctors, cannibals, cobras and revolutionaries. (Anything to make Susan’s flesh creep, to elicit that horrified squeal of protest!) But in the new Odyssey they started to play another kind of part. They were pursued and kissed, they were looked at through keyholes without their clothes on, they were discovered bathing at midnight in a phosphorescent sea, and Odysseus would also go swimming.
Forbidden themes, repulsively fascinating, disgustingly attractive! Sebastian would embark on them with a quiet casualness — pianissimo, so to speak, and senza espressione, as though he were hurrying over some boring transitional passage, some patch of mere five-finger exercises interpolated into the romantic rhapsody of his Odyssey. Pianissimo, senza espressione — and then, bang! like a chord by Scriabin in the middle of a Haydn quartet, out he’d come with some frightful enormity! And in spite of all her efforts to take it casually, matter-of-factly, as Pamela would have taken it, Susan would be startled into an exclamation, a blush, a covering of the ears, a rushing away, as though she didn’t mean to listen to another word. But always she did listen; and sometimes, when he broke off his narrative to ask her some direct and horribly indiscreet question, she would even speak herself about the impossible subject, muttering with averted eyes, or else in a voice uncontrolledly loud, and modulating, against her will, into a burst of laughter.
Gradually the new Odyssey had petered out. Susan had her music and her School Certificate, and Sebastian spent all his leisure reading Greek and the English poets, and writing verses of his own. There seemed to be no time for story-telling, and if ever they did find themselves together for a little, he liked to recite his latest poems. When she praised them, as she generally did — for she really did think they were wonderful — Sebastian’s face would light up.
‘Oh, it’s not too bad,’ he would say deprecatingly; but his smile and the irrepressible brightness of his eyes betrayed what he really thought. Sometimes, however, there were lines she didn’t understand, or didn’t like; and then, if she ventured to say so, he’d flush with anger and call her a fool and a Philistine; or else sarcastically remark that it was only to be expected, seeing that women had the minds of hens, or seeing it was notorious that musicians had no brains, only fingers and a solar plexus. Sometimes his words hurt her; but more often they only evoked a smile and made her feel, by comparison with his transparent childishness, delightfully old, wise and, in spite of his dazzling gifts, superior. When he behaved like that, Sebastian proclaimed himself an infant as well as a prodigy, and invited her to love him in yet another way — protectively and maternally.
And then suddenly, a few weeks after the beginning of the current term, the stories had started again — but with a difference; for this time they were not fiction, they were autobiography: he had begun to tell her about Mrs. Esdaile. The child in him was still there, still urgently in need of mothering, of being preserved from the consequences of his own childishness; but the grown boy she secretly worshipped with quite another passion was now the lover of a woman — older than herself and prettier, and a million times more experienced; rich too, and with lovely clothes and manicures and make-up; utterly beyond the possibility of competition and rivalry. Susan had never let him see how much she minded; but her diary had been full of bitterness, and in bed at night she had often cried herself to sleep. And tonight she would again have reason to be miserable.
Frowning, Susan glanced sideways at her companion. Sebastian was still pensively caressing his nose.
‘That’s it,’ she burst out with a sudden uprush of resentment; ‘rub your beastly little snout till you’ve got it all pat!’
Sebastian started and looked round. An expression of disquiet appeared on his face.
‘Got what all pat?’ he asked defensively.
‘All your beautiful speeches and witty repartees,’ she answered. ‘You think I don’t know you, I suppose. Why, I bet you’re too shy to say anything, even when you’re …’ She broke off, unable to give utterance to the words that would evoke the odious picture of their love-making.
At another time this taunting reference to his timidity — to the humiliating dumbness and incoherence with which he was afflicted whenever he found himself in strange or impressive Company — would have roused him to anger. But on this occasion he was merely amused.
‘Mayn’t I tell even the tiniest lie?’ he said. ‘Just for art’s sake?’
‘You mean for your sake — to make yourself look like something out of Noel Coward.’
‘Out of Congreve,’ he protested.
‘Out of anybody you like,’ said Susan, happy to have this opportunity of venting her accumulated bitterness without betraying its real nature and cause. ‘Any old lie, so long as you don’t have to show yourself as you really are….’
‘A Don Juan without the courage of his conversation,’ he put in. It was a phrase he had invented to console himself for having cut such a lamentable figure at the Boveneys’ Christmas party. ‘And you’re annoyed because I put the conversation where it ought to have been. Don’t be so horribly literal.’
He smiled at her so enchantingly that Susan had to capitulate.
‘All right,’ she grumbled. ‘I’ll believe you even when I know it’s a lie.’
His smile broadened; he was the gayest of Della Robbia angels.
‘Even when you know,’ he repeated, and laughed aloud. It was the most exquisite of jokes. Poor old Susan! She knew that the accounts of his conversational prowess were false; but she also knew that he had got talking with a beautiful dark-haired young woman on the top of a Finchley Road bus, that this woman had asked him to tea at her flat, had listened to his poetry, had told him how unhappy she was with her husband, had made an excuse to leave the drawing-room and then, five minutes later, had called him, ‘Mr. Barnack, Mr. Barnack,’ — and he had walked out after her, and across the landing and through a half-opened door into a room that was pitch dark, and suddenly had felt her bare arms round him and her lips on his face. Susan knew all that, and a great deal more besides; and the beauty of it was that Mrs. Esdaile didn’t exist, that he had found her name in the telephone book, her pale oval face in a volume of Victorian steel engravings, and all the rest in his imagination. And all that poor Susan objected to was the elegance of his conversation!
‘She was wearing black lace underclothes today,’ he improvised, carried away by his amusement into an emphatic Beardsleyism that at ordinary times he would have despised.
‘She would!’ said Susan, bitterly thinking of her own stout white cotton.
With his inward eye Sebastian was contemplating a Callipyge in needle-point, patterned all over with spidery arabesques. Like one of those ornamental china horses, on whose flanks the dapplings are leaves and tendrils. He laughed to himself.
‘I told her she was the latest archaeological discovery — the Dappled Aphrodite of Hampstead.’
‘Liar!’ said Susan emphatically. ‘You didn’t tell her anything of the kind.’
‘I shall write a poem about the Dappled Aphrodite,’ Sebastian went on, ignoring her.
A fire-works display of lovely phrases began to blaze and crackle in his mind.
‘Stippled with scrolls her withers, her velvet croup tattooed with Brussels roses. And round the barrel,’ he murmured, rubbing his nose, ‘round the rich barrel, like a net of flowery moles, gardens and trellises of bobbin-work.’
And, by golly, there was a perfectly good rhyme! Scrolls and moles — two stout pegs on which one could hang any amount of lace and goddess-skin.
; ‘Oh, shut up!’ said Susan.
But his lips continued to move.
‘Inked on those creamy quarters, what artful calligraphy, swelling and shrinking with each alternate movement.’
Suddenly he heard his name being shouted and the sound of running feet from behind them.
‘Who the devil …?’
They stopped and turned round.
‘It’s Tom Boveney,’ said Susan.
So it was! Sebastian smiled.
‘I’ll bet you five bob he says, “Hullo, Suse, how’s the booze?”’
Six and a half feet high, three feet wide, two feet thick, sandy-haired and grinning, Tom came rushing up like the Cornish Riviera Express.
‘Basty Boy,’ he shouted, ‘you’re just the man I was looking for. Oh, and there’s young Suse. — How’s the booze, Suse?’
He laughed, and was delighted when Susan and Sebastian also laughed — laughed with unaccustomed heartiness.
‘Well,’ he went on, turning back to Sebastian, ‘it’s all settled.’
‘What’s settled?’
‘The dinner problem. Seeing you’re going abroad as soon as term’s over, I’ve arranged to put it off to the end of the hols.’
He grinned and patted Sebastian’s shoulder affectionately. He too, Susan said to herself. And she went on to reflect that almost everyone felt that way about Sebastian — and he exploited it. Yes, he exploited it.
‘Pleased?’ Tom questioned.
Basty was his mascot, his child, and at the same time the exquisite and brilliant object of a love which he was too congenitally heterosexual to avow, or even to understand and give a name to. He’d do anything to please little Basty.
But instead of beaming delightedly, Sebastian looked almost dismayed.
‘But, Tom,’ he stammered, ‘you mustn’t … I mean, you shouldn’t put yourself out for me.’
Tom laughed and gave his shoulder a reassuring squeeze.
‘I’m not putting myself out.’
‘But the other fellows,’ said Sebastian, clutching at every straw.
Tom pointed out that the other fellows didn’t care whether his farewell party was at the beginning of the hols or at the end.
‘A binge is always a binge,’ he was saying philosophically, when Sebastian cut him short with a vehemence altogether unjustified by considerations of mere politeness.
‘No, I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he cried in a tone of finality.
There was a silence. Tom Boveney looked down at him wonderingly.
‘You almost sound as if you didn’t want to come,’ he began in bewilderment.
Sebastian realized his mistake and made haste to protest that of course there was nothing he’d have liked better. Which was true. Dinner at the Savoy, a show, and a night club to wind up with — it would be an unprecedented experience. But he had to refuse the invitation, and for the most humiliating and childish reason: he had no evening clothes. And now, when he thought that everything had been settled so satisfactorily, here was Tom reopening the question. Damn him, damn him! Sebastian positively hated the great lout for his officious friendliness.
‘But if you want to come,’ Tom insisted with exasperating common sense, ‘what on earth are you saying no for?’ He turned to Susan. ‘Can you throw any light on the mystery?’
Susan hesitated. She knew, of course, all about Uncle John’s refusal to get Sebastian a suit of evening clothes. It was mean of him. But after all there wasn’t anything for Sebastian to be ashamed of. Why didn’t he frankly come out with it?
‘Well,’ she said slowly, ‘I suppose it’s because …’
‘Shut up. Shut up, I tell you.’ In his fury, Sebastian gave her arm such a pinch that she cried out in pain.
‘Serves you right,’ he whispered savagely, and turned again to Tom. Susan was astonished to hear him saying that of course he’d come, and it was really terribly nice of Tom to have taken all that trouble to change the date. Terribly nice — and he actually managed to give Tom one of his angelic smiles.
‘You didn’t think I’d have a party without you, Basty?’ Once more Tom Boveney squeezed the shoulder of his mascot, his only child, his infant prodigy and exquisite beloved.
‘Now of all times, when I’m going to Canada — and God knows when I shall be seeing you again. You or any of the other Haverstock fellows,’ he added hastily; and to build up the alibi, he addressed himself jocularly to Susan: ‘And if it weren’t a stag party, I’d ask you too. Plenty of booze for good old Suse.’ He slapped her on the back, and laughed.
‘And now I’ve got to fly. Oughtn’t to have stopped to talk to you by rights; but it was such a stroke of luck running into you. So long, Suse. So long, Basty.’ He turned and started to run, elegantly in spite of his size and weight, like a professional half-miler, into the darkness out of which he had come. The others resumed their walk.
‘What I can’t understand,’ said Susan, after a long silence, ’is why you don’t just tell the truth. It isn’t your fault that you don’t have a dinner jacket. And it’s not as if there was a law against wearing your blue serge suit. They won’t turn you out of the restaurant, you know.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ cried Sebastian, driven almost to frenzy by the maddening reasonableness of what she was saying.
‘But if you’d only explain to me why you don’t tell him,’ she persisted.
‘I don’t wish to explain,’ he said with a dignified finality.
Susan glanced at him, thought how ridiculous he looked, and shrugged her shoulders.
‘You mean, you can’t explain.’
In the silence that ensued, Sebastian chewed on the bitter cud of his abasement. He didn’t wish to explain because, as Susan had said, he couldn’t explain. And he couldn’t explain, not because he lacked reasons, but because the reasons he had were so excruciatingly intimate. First that old cow in the library; even that dead son was no excuse for her slobbering over him as though he were still in diapers. Then Pfeiffer and his stinking cigars. And now this last humiliation. It was not only that he looked like a child, when he knew himself to be a hundred times abler than the oldest of them. It was also that he lacked the outward accoutrement and paraphernalia belonging to his real age. If he’d had decent clothes and enough pocket money, the other humiliations would have been tolerable. By his easy spendings and the cut of his coats he could have refuted the specious evidence of his face and stature. But his father gave him only a shilling a week, made him wear his shoddy reach-me-downs till they were threadbare and short in the sleeves, and absolutely refused to get him a dinner jacket. His garments confirmed the testimony of the body they so shabbily covered; he was a child in child’s clothing. And here was that fool, Susan, asking him why he didn’t tell Tom Boveney the truth!
‘Amor Fati,’ she quoted. ‘Didn’t you say that was your motto now?’ Sebastian did not deign to make a reply.
Looking at him, as he walked beside her, his face set, his body curiously rigid and constrained, Susan felt her irritation melting away into a maternal tenderness. Poor darling! How miserable he managed to make himself! And for such idiotic reasons! Worrying about a dinner jacket! But she’d be prepared to bet that Tom Boveney didn’t have an affair with a beautiful married woman. And, remembering how he had cheered up just now at the mention of Mrs. Esdaile, Susan charitably tried again.
‘You didn’t finish telling me about those black lace underclothes,’ she said at last, breaking the dismal silence.
But this time there was no response; Sebastian merely shook his head without even looking in her direction.
‘Please,’ she cajoled.
‘I don’t want to.’ And when Susan tried to insist, ‘I tell you, I don’t want to,’ he repeated more emphatically.
There was nothing funny any longer about Susan’s gullibility. Seen soberly, in its proper light, this Esdaile business was just another of his humiliations.
His mind harked back to that hideous evening two months before. O
utside the Camden Town tube station, a girl in blue, coarsely pretty, with painted mouth and a lot of yellow hair. He walked up and down two or three times, trying to screw up his courage and feeling rather sick, just as he did before one of those ghastly interviews with the headmaster about his maths. The nausea of the threshold. But finally, when one had knocked and gone in and sat down opposite that large and extraordinarily clean-shaven face, it wasn’t really so bad. ‘You seem to think, Sebastian, that because you’re highly gifted in one direction you’re excused from working at anything you don’t happen to enjoy.’ And it would end up with his being kept in for two or three hours on half-holiday afternoons, or having to do a couple of extra problems every day for a month. Nothing so very bad, after all, nothing to justify that nausea. Taking courage from these reflections, Sebastian walked up to the girl in blue and said, ‘Good evening.’
In the beginning she wouldn’t even take him seriously. ‘A kid like you! I’d be ashamed of myself.’ He had to show her the inscription in his copy of the Oxford Book of Greek Verse, which he happened to be carrying in his pocket. ‘For Sebastian, on his seventeenth birthday, from his uncle, Eustace Barnack. 1928.’ The girl in blue read the words aloud, glanced dubiously into his face, then back at the book. From the fly-leaf she turned to a page chosen at random in the middle of the volume. ‘Why, it’s Yiddish!’ She looked curiously into his face. ‘I’d never have guessed it,’ she said. Sebastian set her right. ‘And you mean to tell me you can read it?’ He demonstrated his ability on a chorus from the Agamemnon. That convinced her; anybody who could do that must be more than just a kid. But did he have any money? He produced his wallet and showed her the pound-note that still remained to him from Uncle Eustace’s Christmas present. ‘All right,’ said the girl. But she had no place of her own; where did he mean to go?
Aunt Alice and Susan and Uncle Fred had all gone away for the week-end, and there was nobody left in the house except old Ellen — and Ellen always went to bed sharp at nine, and was as deaf as a post anyway. They could go to his place, he suggested; and he hailed a taxi.