A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [109]
“That was a desperate affair,” Barnby had said, as we returned to the shop together.
We climbed the stairs to his studio, where, in preparation for tea, he put a kettle on a gas-ring, and, although it was still warm, lighted the fire; then, changing into overalls, began to prepare a canvas. I lay on the divan. We talked of Mr. Deacon for a time, until conversation fell into more general channels, and Barnby began to discourse on the subject of love.
“Most of us would like to be thought of as the kind of man who has a lot of women,” he said. “But take such fellows as a whole, there are few enough of them one would wish to be at all like.”
“Do you wish to change your identity?”
“Not in the least. Merely to improve my situation in certain specific directions.”
“Which particular Don Juan were you thinking of?”
“Oh, myself, of course,” said Barnby. “Funerals make one’s mind drift in the direction of moral relaxation—though it’s unaccountable to me the way intimate relations between the sexes are always spoken of, and written about, as if of necessity enjoyable or humorous. In practice they might much more truly be described as encompassing the whole range of human feeling from the height of bliss to the depths of misery.”
“Is something on your mind?”
Barnby agreed that this diagnosis was correct. He was about to enter into some further explanation, when as if making a kind of rejoinder to the opinion just expressed, the bell of the telephone began to ring from below. Barnby wiped his hands on a cloth, and went off down the stairs to where the instrument stood on a ledge by the back entrance to the shop. For a time I heard him talking. Then he returned to the room, greatly exhilarated.
“That was Mrs. Wentworth,” he said. “I was about to tell you when the telephone went that she was, in fact, the matter on my mind.”
“Is she coming round here?”
“Better than that. She wants me to go round and see her right away. Do you mind? Finish your tea, of course, and stay here as long as you like.”
He tore off his overalls, and, without attempting to tidy up the material of his painting, was gone almost immediately. I had never before seen him so agitated. The front door slammed. A sense of emptiness fell on the house.
In the circumstances, I could not possibly blame Barnby for absenting himself so precipitately, experiencing at the same time a distinct feeling of being left in a void, not less so on account of the substance of our conversation that had been in this way terminated so abruptly. I poured out another cup of tea, and thought over some of the things he had been saying. I could not help envying the opportune nature, so far as Barnby himself was concerned, of the telephone call, which seemed an outward indication of the manner in which he had—so it seemed to me in those days—imposed his will on the problem at hand.
His life’s unusual variety of form provided a link between what I came, in due course, to recognise as the world of Power, as represented, for example, by the ambitions of Widmerpool and Truscott, and that imaginative life in which a painter’s time is of necessity largely spent: the imagination, in such a case, being primarily of a visual kind. In the conquest of Mrs. Wentworth, however, other spheres—as the figures of Sir Magnus Donners and Prince Theodoric alone sufficiently illustrated—had inevitably to be invaded by him. These hinterlands are frequently, even compulsively, crossed at one time or another by almost all who practise the arts, usually in the need to earn a living; but the arts themselves, so it appeared to me as I considered the matter, by their ultimately sensual essence, are,