Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [103]
Lust is a spirit, which whosoe’er doth raise,
The next man that encounters boldly, lays.
There seems a foot too many in the first line. They may have elided those relatives in a different way at that period.’
‘How does the thieves’ slang poem come into the Middleton play?’
‘The Roaring Girl sings it herself, with a character called Tearcat. The Roaring Girl dresses like a man, smokes, carries a sword, fights duels. A narcissistic type, rather than specifically lesbian, one would say. At least there are no scenes where she dallies with her own sex.’
Delavacquerie’s good memory, eye for things that were unusual, had certainly been useful to him as a PR-man; for which he also possessed the requisite toughness. What he said next was a side he much less often revealed. It suggested reflections on Fiona.
‘It’s odd how one gets acclimatized to other people’s sexual experiences. At a younger age, they strike one so differently. For instance, during the war I knew a married woman – a captain’s wife – who told me of her first seduction. She was seventeen or eighteen, and on the way to her art-school one morning. Running to catch a bus, she just missed it. Two men, cruising by in a car, laughed at her standing breathless on the pavement. They stopped and offered her a lift. When they dropped her at the art-school door, the one who wasn’t driving asked if she’d dine with him later in the week. She agreed. They went to a road-house outside London. In the course of dinner – establishing his bonafides as homme sérieux – her host remarked that he had lived with one girl for two years. Telling the story to me, she commented that – in those days – she thought love was for ever. Anyway, the chap gave her dinner, they had a good deal to drink – which she wasn’t used to – and, afterwards, went into the garden of the roadhouse where he had her in the shrubbery. When she got home, finding her knickers all over blood, she thought to herself: I’ve been a silly girl. That’s what she told me.’
‘What’s the moral of all that?’
‘There isn’t one, except that the story used to haunt me. I don’t quite know why. It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.’
‘She never saw the bloke again?’
‘No. I don’t think it really made a ha’p’orth of difference to her. All I say is that for a while the story haunted me.’
‘You were in love with the heroine?’
‘Naturally. In a way that wasn’t the point, which is that, in due course, you find girls are really perfectly well able to look after themselves, most of them. Even allowing for the fact that les chiens sont fidèles, mais pas aux chiennes. To retain the metaphor – bring it up to date – in sexual matters, as in others, the dogs bark, the Caravelle takes off.’
I never knew what Delavacquerie really felt about the Fiona business. Afterwards I wondered whether the heroine of the story he had told was really his dead wife. As Canon Fenneau had observed, we go through life lacking understanding of many things, though I think the Canon inwardly made something of an exception of his own case, where knowledge was concerned. That, at least, was modestly implied in an article I came across later that year, in which he contrasted Chaldean Magic with the worship of Isis and Osiris.
7
BAD WEATHER, OTHER ODD JOBS, mere lack of energy, had all contributed to allowing the unlit bonfire, projected as a few hours’ clearing and burning, to become an untidy pile of miscellaneous debris; laurel (cut down months before), briars, nettles, leaves, unsold rubbish from a jumble sale, on top of it all several quite large branches of oak and copper beech snapped off by the gales. In spite of fog, something calm, peaceful, communicative, about the afternoon suggested the time had come to end this too long survival. A livid sky could mean snow. That dense muffled feeling pervaded the air. The day was not cold for the season, but an autumnal spell of mild weather – short, though notably warm that year – was now over. It had given place