I remembered, too, that in those days Lathom had earned a reputation for himself by making caricatures of the masters. This fascinating gift had earned him still more toleration. I was not surprised to hear that he had become an artist. He said he was looking for a studio, and had seen just the thing in Bayswater, only he couldn’t afford to take it.
I asked, why Bayswater, of all places? Why not Chelsea or Bloomsbury? But Lathom said no, the rents were too high, and besides, Chelsea and Bloomsbury were hopelessly arty and insincere. They lived at second-hand and had no beliefs. To see life lived in the raw, one ought really to go to Harringay or Tooting, but they were really not central enough. Bayswater was near enough to be convenient and far enough out to be a healthy suburb.
‘The suburbs are the only places left,’ said Lathom, ‘where men and women will die and persecute for their beliefs. Artists believe in nothing — not even in art. They live in little cliques and draw the fashionable outlines in the fashionable colours. They can’t love — they can only fornicate and talk. I’ve had some. And the aristocracy has lost the one belief that made it tolerable — its belief in itself. It’s fool enough to pretend to believe in the people, and what is the good of an aristocracy playing at being democratic? And the people. .’ He made a violent gesture. ‘Cheap scientific textbooks — cheap atheism — cheap sociology — cheap clothes — your blasted educationists have left them no beliefs at all. They marry, and then the woman comes howling to the magistrate for a separation order on any pretext, so as to get money for nothing and go to cheap dance-halls. And the man goes yelping away for a dole to shuffle all his responsibilities on to the State. But the blessed people of the suburbs — they do believe in something. They believe in Respectability. They’ll lie, die, commit murder to keep up appearances. Look at Crippen. Look at Bywaters. Look at the man who hid his dead wife in a bath and ate his meals on the lid for fear somebody should suspect a scandal. My God! Those people are living, living with all their blood and their bones. That’s reality — in the suburbs — life, guts — something to chew at, there!’
At the time I was rather struck by this.
It ended, of course, in my consenting to share the maisonette with Lathom. An hour earlier, the very word would have put me off, but under the spell of Lathom’s enthusiasm, and stupefied with food and public-school spirit, I began to think there was really something raw, red and life-like about living in a maisonette with an Old Wincastrian. And perhaps Lathom was right after all. The trouble is that raw, red life is possibly better seen at second-hand. A good still-life of a piece of rump-steak has none of the oozing clamminess of the real thing.
I wish, all the same, that I had tried to play up to Lathom better. It was irritating, of course, to find that he was still regardless of other people’s convenience. I did not object to his bagging the best room for his studio — that was in the bond — but it was tiresome to have him overflowing into my room all day when I was at work. Lathom is one of those spasmodic workers who need constant applause and excitement. He would work like fury for several hours, snarling at me if I came in to retrieve a garment or lighter that he had borrowed; but, the fit over, he would wander in to where I was grimly struggling with a knotty piece of biography and talk. He talks well, but his interests are lopsided. He is a real creator — narrow, eager, headlong, and loathing introspection and compromise. He questions nothing; I question everything. I am only semi-creative, and that is why I cannot settle and dismiss questions, as he does, in one burst of inspired insight or equally inspired contempt. Lathom is all light and dark — a Rembrandt. I am flat, cold, tentative, uneasily questioning, a labourer in detail. I caught no fire from Lathom, and I quenched his. It is my disease to doubt and to modify — to be unable to cry at a tragedy or shout in a chorus. It was my fault that I did not help Lathom more, for, just because of my uneasy sensitiveness, I understood him far better than he ever understood me. It would have suited him better if I had violently disagreed with him. But I had the fatal knack of seeing his point and cautiously advancing counter-arguments, and that satisfied neither of us. I see this now, and, indeed, I saw it then; it is characteristic of people like me to see a thing and do nothing about it.
This, of course, was where the Harrisons came in. I liked Harrison. If I had not liked him, I should not be making this statement, which is, I am afraid, entirely contrary to the public-school tradition. Harrison was a man of very great sincerity, no imagination and curiously cursed with nerves. It is all wrong for a man of his type to have nerves — nobody believes or understands it. In theory, he was extremely broad-minded, generous and admiringly devoted to his wife; in practice, he was narrow, jealous and nagging. To hear him speak of her, one would have thought him the ideal of chivalrous consideration; to hear him speak to her, one would have thought him a suspicious brute. Her enormous vitality, her inconsequence, her melodrama (that is the real point, I think), got on his nerves, and produced an uncontrollable reaction of irritability. He would have liked her to shine for him and for him only; yet a kind of interior shyness prompted him to repress her demonstrations and choke off her confidences. ‘That will do, my dear’; ‘Pull yourself together, my girl,’ checked a caress or an enthusiasm; a grunt, a ‘Can’t you see I’m busy,’ a ‘Why have you suddenly got these ideas about’ music or astronomy or whatever the latest interest might be. Into the muffling of his outer manner, her radiance sank and was quenched. Yet to others he spoke with earnest pride of his wife’s brilliance and many-sided intelligence.
Harrison’s instinct was to dominate, but by nature and training he was unfitted to dominate that particular woman. It could have been done in two ways — by capturing the limelight, or by sheer physical exuberance. But neither of these things was in his power; he was inexpressive and sexually unimaginative, as so many decent men are.
He had his means of self-expression: his water-colours and his cookery. It was his misfortune that in the former he should have been weak, conventional and sentimental, and bold and free only in the latter. I believe, indeed, that all the imagination he possessed ran to the composition of sauces and flavourings. It is surely a matter for investigation whether cookery is not one of the subtlest and most severely intellectual of the arts; else, why do its more refined manifestations appeal to women hardly at all and to men only in their later and more balanced age? Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind. If Harrison could have made a big public splash with anything, she could have understood that and preened herself happily as the wife of a notoriety. But she had no eyes for the half-lights.
At first it was amazing to me that Lathom showed so much patience with Harrison. Lathom is a barbarian about food and magnificently intolerant of bad painting. Twaddle about Art and Atmosphere got short shrift with him. Yet he let Harrison bore him to any extent with his prattle and his picturesque bits. Harrison did, indeed, treat him with a deference flattering in a man of his age, but under ordinary circumstances that would merely have infuriated Lathom, who, to do him justice, is no drawing-room lion. It was not that Harrison provided the response which I gave so awkwardly. In time I realised that, though I had my selfish reasons for refusing to see it. Mrs Harrison was the radiant prism for Lathom’s brilliance, and Lathom used Harrison in that service as carelessly as in the old days he had used the prefects’ toasting-forks. He saw the tool ready to his hand and took it, without shame and without remorse.