ZEDELGHEM
16th—VIII—1931
Sixsmith,
Summer has taken a sensuous turn: Ayrs’s wife and I are lovers. Don’t alarm yourself! Only in the carnal sense. One night last week she came to my room, locked the door behind her, and without a word passing between us, disrobed. Don’t wish to brag, but her visit didn’t take me by surprise. In fact, I’d left the door ajar for her. Really, Sixsmith, you should try to enjoy lovemaking in total silence. All that ballyhooing transmutes into bliss if you’ll only seal your lips.
When one unlocks a woman’s body, her box of confidences also spills. (You should try ’em yourself one time, women I mean.) Might this be connected to their hopelessness at cards? After the Act, I am happier just lying still, but Jocasta talked, impulsively, as if to bury our big black secret under littler gray ones. Learnt Ayrs contracted his syphilis at a bordello in Copenhagen in 1915, during an extended separation, and has not pleasured his wife since that year; after Eva’s birth, the doctor told Jocasta she could never conceive another child. She is v. selective about her occasional affairs but unapologetic about her right to conduct same. She insisted that she still loves Ayrs. I grunted, dubiously. That love loves fidelity, she riposted, is a myth woven by men from their insecurities.
Talked about Eva too. She worries that she was so busy instilling a sense of propriety into her daughter, they never became friends, and now, it seems, that horse has bolted. Dozed through these trivial tragedies, but shall be more careful around Danes in future and Danish bordellos in particular.
J. wanted a second bout, as if to glue herself to me. Did not object. She has an equestrienne’s body, more spring than you normally get in a mature woman, and more technique than many a ten-shilling mount I’ve ridden. One suspects there stretches back a long line of youthful stallions invited to forage in her manger. Indeed, just as I nodded off for the last time she said, “Debussy once spent a week at Zedelghem, before the war. He slept in this very bed, if I’m not mistaken.” A minor chord in her tone suggested she was with him. Not impossible. Anything in a skirt, that’s what I heard about Claude, and he was a Frenchman.
When Lucille knocked in the morning with my shaving water, I was quite alone. J.’s performance over breakfast was as nonchalant as my own, happy to note. Was even slightly caustic with me when I spilt a blob of jam on the place mat, prompting V.A. to reprimand her, “Don’t be such a stickleback, Jocasta! Your pretty hands won’t have to scrub the stain out.” Adultery is a tricky duet to pull off, Sixsmith—as in contract bridge, eschew partners clumsier than oneself or one winds up in a ghastly mess.
Guilt? None. A cuckolder’s triumph? Not specially, no. Still rather miffed at Ayrs, if anything. The other evening, the Dhondts came to dinner and Mrs. D. asked for some piano music to help the food go down, so I played that “Angel of Mons” piece I wrote on holiday with you in the Scilly Isles two summers ago, though disclaimed its authorship by saying “a friend” had composed it. I’ve been rewriting it. It’s better and more fluid and subtle than those sherbety Schubertian pastiches V.A. spewed out in his twenties. J. and the Dhondts loved it so much they insisted on an encore. Was only six bars in when V.A. exercised a hitherto unknown veto. “I’d advise your friend to master the Ancients before he frolics with the Moderns.” Sounds like innocuous enough advice? However, he pronounced friend in a precise semitone that told me he was quite aware of my friend’s true identity. Perhaps he used the same ruse himself, at Grieg’s in Oslo? “Without a thorough mastery of counterpoint and harmonics,” V.A. puffed, “this fellow’ll never amount to anything but a hawker of fatuous gimmickry. Tell your friend that from me.” I fumed in silence. V.A. told J. to put on a gramophone recording of his own Sirocco Wind Quintet. She obeyed the truculent old bully. To console myself, I remembered how J.’s body is under her crepe de chine summer dress, and how hungrily she slips into my bed. V. well, I shall gloat a little over my employer’s cuckold’s horns. Serves him right. An old sick prig is still a prig.
Augustowski sent this enigmatic telegram after the performance in Cracow. To translate from the French: FIRST TODTENVOGEL MYSTIFIED STOP SECOND PERFORMANCE FISTICUFFS STOP THIRD ADORED STOP FOURTH TALK OF TOWN STOP. We weren’t sure what to think until newspaper clippings followed, hot on the telegram’s heels, translated by Augustowski on the back of a concert program. Well, our “Todtenvogel” has become a cause célèbre! So far as we can see, the critics interpreted its disintegration of the Wagnerian themes as a frontal assault on the German Republic. A band of nationalist parliamentarians strong-armed the festival authorities into a fifth performance. The theater, eyeing receipts, complied with pleasure. The German ambassador made an official complaint, so a sixth was sold out within another twenty-four hours. The effect of all this is to raise the value of Ayrs’s stock through the roof everywhere but Germany, where apparently, he is denounced as a Jewish devil. National newspapers across the Continent have written to request interviews. I have the pleasure of dispatching a polite but firm pro forma rejection to each. “I’m too busy composing,” grumbles Ayrs. “If they want to know ‘what I mean’ they should listen to my bloody music.” He’s thriving on the attention, though. Even Mrs. Willems admits, since my arrival the Master is invigorated.
Hostilities continue on the Eva front. Of concern is how she sniffs something rotten between my father and me. She wonders, publicly, why I never receive letters from my family, or why I don’t have some clothes of my own sent over. She asked if one of my sisters would like to be her pen-friend. To win time I had to promise to put her proposal to ’em, and I might need you to do another forgery. Make it very good. The devious vixen is almost a female Me.
August in Belgium is blistering this year. The meadow is turning yellow, the gardener is anxious about fires, farmers are worried about the harvest, but show me a placid farmer and I’ll show you a sane conductor. Will seal this envelope now and walk to the village post office through the woods behind the lake. It wouldn’t do to leave these pages lying around for a certain seventeen-year-old snoop to come across.
The important matter. Yes, I will meet Otto Jansch in Bruges to hand over the illuminated manuscripts in person, but you must broker all the arrangements. Don’t want Jansch knowing whose hospitality I’m enjoying. Like all dealers, Jansch is a gluttonous, glabrous grasper, only more so. He wouldn’t hesitate to try blackmail to lower our price—or even dispense with a price altogether. Tell him I’ll expect payment on the nail in crisp banknotes, none of his funny credit arrangements with me. Then I’ll forward a postal order to you, including the sum you loaned me. This way, you won’t be incriminated if any monkey business takes place. I am already disgraced and thus have no reputation to lose by blowing the whistle on him. Tell Jansch that, too.
Sincerely,
R.F.
ZEDELGHEM
EVENING, 16th—VIII—1931
Sixsmith,
Your tedious letter from my father’s “solicitor” was an Ace of Diamonds. Bravo. Read it aloud over breakfast—excited only passing interest. Saffron Walden postmark also a masterly touch. Did you actually drag yourself away from your lab into the sunny Essex afternoon to post it yourself? Ayrs invited our “Mr. Cummings” to see me at Zedelghem, but you’d written time was v. tight, so Mrs. Crommelynck said Hendrick’ll drive me into town to sign the documents there. Ayrs grumbled about losing a day’s work, but he’s only happy when he’s grumbling.