'You mustn't disappoint the children.'
'No.' Her children, my art, the two mysteries of our trades.
'Will you come for the week-end?'
'If I can.'
'All British passports to the smoking-room, please,' said a steward.
'I've arranged with that sweet Foreign Office man at our table to get us off early with him,' said my wife.
[2]
IT was my wife's idea to hold the private view on Friday.
'We are out to catch the critics this time, I she said. 'It's high time they began to take you seriously, and they know it. This is their chance. If you open on Monday, they'll most of them have just come up from the country, and they'll dash off a few paragraphs before dinner - I'm only worrying about the weeklies of course. If we give them the week-end to think about it, we shall have them in an urbane Sunday-in-the-country mood. They'll settle down after a good luncheon, tuck up their cuffs, and turn out a nice, leisurely full-length essay, which they'll reprint later in a nice little book. Nothing less will do this time.'
She was up and down from the Old Rectory several times during the month of preparation, revising the list of invitations and helping with the hanging.
On the morning of the private view I telephoned to Julia and said: 'I'm sick of the pictures already and never want to see them again, but I suppose I shall have to put in an appearance.'
'D'you want me to come?'
'I'd much rather you didn't.'
'Celia sent a card with "Bring everyone" written across it in green ink. When do we meet?'
'In the train. You might pick up my luggage.'
'If you'll have it packed soon I'll pick you up, too, and drop you at the gallery. I've got a fitting next door at twelve.'
When I reached the gallery my wife was standing looking through the window to the street. Behind her half a dozen unknown picture-lovers were moving from canvas to canvas, catalogue in hand; they were people who had once bought a wood: cut and were consequently on the gallery's list of patrons.
'No one has come yet,' said my wife. 'I've been here since ten and it's been very dull. Whose car was that you came in?'
'Julia's.'
'Julia's? Why didn't, you bring her in? Oddly enough, I've just been talking about Brideshead to a funny little man who seemed to know us very well. He said he was called Mr Samgrass. Apparently he's one of Lord Copper's middle-aged young men on the Daily Beast. I tried to feed him some paragraphs, but he seemed to know more about you than I do. He said he'd met me years ago at Brideshead. I wish Julia had come in; then we could have asked her about him.'
'I remember him well.He's a crook.'
'Yes, that stuck out a mile. He's been talking all about what he calls the "'Brideshead set", Apparently Rex Mottram has made the place a nest of party mutiny. Did you know? What would Teresa Marchmain have thought?'
'I'm going there tonight.'
'Not tonight, Charles; you can't go there tonight. You're expected at home. You promised, as soon as the exhibition was ready, you'd come home. Johnjohn and Nanny have made a banner with "Welcome" on it. And you haven't seen Caroline yet.'
'I'm sorry, it's all settled.'
'Besides, Daddy will think it so odd. And Boy is home for Sunday. And you haven't seen the new studio. You can't go tonight. Did they ask me?'
'Of course; but I knew you wouldn't be able to come.'
'I can't now. I could have, if you'd let me know earlier. I should adore to see the "Brideshead set" at home. I do think you re perfectly beastly, but this is no time for a family rumpus. The Clarences promised to come in before luncheon; they may be here any minute.'
We were interrupted, however, not by royalty, but by a woman reporter from one of the dailies, whom the manager of the gallery now led up to us. She had not come to see the pictures but to get a "human story" of the dangers of my journey. I left her to my wife, and next day read in her paper: 'Charles "Stately Homes" Ryder steps off the map. That the snakes and vampires of the jungle have nothing on Mayfair is the opinion of socialite artist Ryder, who has, abandoned the houses of the great for the ruins of equatorial Africa...'
The rooms began to fill and I was soon busy being civil. My wife was everywhere, greeting people, introducing people, deftly transforming the crowd into a party. I saw her lead friends forward one after another to the subscription list that had been opened for the book of Ryder's Latin America I heard her say: 'No, darling, I'm not at all surprised, but you wouldn't expect me to be, would you? You see Charles lives for one thing - Beauty. I think he got bored with finding it ready-made in England; he had to go and create it for himself. He wanted new worlds to conquer. After all, he has said the last word about country houses, hasn't he? Not, I mean, that he's given that up altogether. I'm sure he'll always do one or two more for friends.' A photographer brought us together, flashed a lamp in our faces, and let us part.
Presently there was the slight hush and edging away which follows the entry of a royal party. I saw my wife curtsey and heard her say: 'Oh, sir, you are sweet'; then I was led into the clearing and the Duke of Clarence said: 'Pretty hot out there I should think.'
'It was, sir.'
'Awfully clever the way you've hit off the impression of heat. Makes me feel quite uncomfortable in my greatcoat.'
'Ha, ha.'
When they had gone my wife said: 'Goodness, we're late for lunch. Margot's giving a party in your honour, and in the taxi she said: 'I've just thought of something. Why don't you write and ask the Duchess of Clarence's permission to dedicate Latin America to her?'
'Why should I?'
'She'd love it so.'
'I wasn't thinking of dedicating it to anyone.'
'There you are; that's typical of you, Charles. Why miss an opportunity to give pleasure?'
There were a dozen at luncheon, and though it pleased my hostess and my wife to say that they were there in my honour, it was plain to me that half of them did not know of my exhibition and had come because they had been invited and had no other engagement. Throughout luncheon they talked, without stopping, of Mrs Simpson, but they all, or nearly all, came back with us to the gallery.
The hour after luncheon was the busiest time. There were representatives of the Tate Gallery and the National Art Collections Fund, who all promised to return shortly with colleagues and, in the meantime, reserved certain pictures for further consideration. The most influential critic, who in the past had dismissed me with a few wounding commendations, peered out at me from between his slouch hat and woollen muffler, gripped my arm, and said: 'I knew you had it. I saw it there. I've been waiting for it.'
From fashionable and unfashionable lips alike I heard fragments of praise. 'If you'd asked me to guess,' I overheard, 'Ryder's is the last name would have occurred to me. They're so virile, so passionate.'
They all thought they had found something new. It had not been thus at my last exhibition in these same rooms, shortly before my going abroad. Then there had been an unmistakable note of weariness. Then the talk had been less of me than of the houses, anecdotes of their owners. That same woman, it came back to me, who now applauded my virility and passion, had stood quite near me, before a painfully laboured canvas, and said, 'So facile.'
I remembered the exhibition, too, for another reason; it was the week I detected my wife in adultery. Then, as now, she was, a tireless hostess, and I heard her say: 'Whenever I see anything lovely nowadays - a building or a piece of scenery - I think to myself, "that's by Charles". I see everything through his eyes. He is England to me.'
I heard her say that; it was the sort of thing she had the habit of saying. Throughout our married life, again and again, I had felt my bowels shrivel within me at the things she said. But that day, in this gallery, I heard her unmoved, and suddenly realized that she was powerless to hurt me any more; I was a free man; she had given me my manumission in that brief, sly lapse of hers; my cuckold's horns made me lord of the forest.
At the end of the day my wife said: 'Darling, I must go. It's been a terrific success, hasn't it? I'll think of something to tell them at home, but I wish it hadn't got to happen quite this way.'
'So she knows,' I thought. 'She's a sharp one. She's had her nose down since luncheon and picked up the scent.'
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 comer of a hothouse at T-t-rent or T-t-tring? What gorgeous usurer nurture.d 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-c-conquests.'
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 comer. 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-b-bratt'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 sniggenng 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."
