After we had said good night to Francis, who was staying at the Athenaeum, Martin and I sat in the dark taxi, swerving in the windy dark through empty Mayfair streets. Nothing eventful had happened to him, but we went on talking in my drawing-room, talking the small change of brothers, anxiety-free, while the windows rattled. He had nothing to report about Pat, but for once he spoke of his daughter Nina. Yes, she seemed to have a real talent for music, she might be able to make a living at it. She was a great favourite of mine, pretty, diffident, self-effacing. If the luck had fallen the other way, and Pat had had that gift, Martin would have been triumphant. But he was composed and happy that night, and, though he was an expert in sarcasm, that specific sarcasm didn’t get exchanged.
16: Decision About a Party
NOW I had started moving about again in London, I had to pay a duty visit to Austin Davidson. It was not such an ordeal as it had been, Margaret told me, She, except when I was in hospital, went to him each day. In fact, when we called at tea-time, passing by the picture-hung walls, he was able to meet us at his study door and return to his armchair without help or distress, though he waited to get his breath before he spoke.
In the study, strangely dark, as it always seemed, for a connoisseur of visual art, the only picture I could make out hung above his chair. I thought I had not seen it before: a Moore drawing? The December night was already setting in, the reading lamp beside Davidson lit up nothing but our faces.
He looked at me from under his eyebrows: from the cheekbones, the flesh fell translucently away. His eyes, opaque, sepia, bird-bright, had, however, a glint in them.
“I’m sorry about your catastrophe,” he said.
“It’s all over,” I replied.
“You notice that I used the word catastrophe?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Old men get a remarkable amount of satisfaction out of the physical afflictions of their juniors.” He gave his old caustic grin. “There’s nothing to make an old man feel half his age — as much as hearing that someone twenty years younger has just died.”
It might have been an effort. If so, it was a good one. It had the note of the unsubdued, unregenerate Davidson. Margaret and I were laughing. If most men had said that — certainly if I had — it would have sounded guilty. Not so with him. It sounded (just as his talk about his own suicide had sounded) innocent and pure.
He leant back, brown eyes sparkling. He was delighted that he could entertain us. For the next couple of hours, except when he heard himself gasping, he forgot to be morose. Another friend of his came in, whom Margaret and I had often met, a man about my age called Hardisty. He had been a disciple of the set to which Davidson belonged: he was clever, miscellaneously cultivated, good-looking apart from being as nearly bald as a man can be: he believed that Davidson and his friends had been the new Enlightenment, and that it would be a long time before there was another. He did most of the talking, while Davidson nodded, for they formed a united front. Neither Margaret nor I wanted to be abrasive, so we left them to it, Davidson occasionally making some reflection which gave Hardisty a chance to eat a tea young Charles wouldn’t have thought contemptible. Savoury toast: Chelsea buns: éclairs. Davidson’s housekeeper had provided tea for us all. The rest of us ate nothing, but the tea disappeared, and Hardisty chatted away between mouthfuls, the sort of man who did not put on weight.
Davidson recalled when, just before the 1914 war, he had seen his first Kandinsky. It had been uncivilised of the Russians not to understand that that was a step forward. Yes, said Hardisty, perfectly in tune, art, any art, had its own dynamic, nothing could stop it. You mightn’t like it, you mightn’t understand it, but since the first abstracts were painted nothing could have stopped the art of our time. A little later, he said, just as easily, morals had their own dynamic too. In a few years, for example, we should all regard drugs, or at least most drugs, as we now regarded alcohol. It was much too late for any of us to start on them, he said, brimful of health, but still — Again Davidson nodded. Yes, he said, it was interesting how the taboos had been vanishing in his own lifetime.
“In my young days at Cambridge, don’t you know,” he went on, “homosexuality was a very tender plant.”
Hardisty gave an acquiescent smile. For as long as Margaret and I could remember, he had been living with another man. This partner I had seen only once: I had an idea that he didn’t fit into our sort of company: but the arrangement had been as stable as most marriages. Certainly Hardisty was a happy man.
“By and large, this has been a dreadful century,” Davidson was saying. “But in some ways we have become a bit more civilised.”
He seemed satisfied, either by the reflection or because he had not been too tired by the effort to talk. “Do you know,” he said to his daughter, “I think I’m going to allow myself a drink?”
On the way home, Margaret, just because his spirits had lifted (she had begun to feel justified in not giving way to him that summer) looked youthful and gay: youthful, gay, maternal, as though she had just heard that Maurice had passed an examination.
We kept another social engagement that week, this time at one of Azik Schiff’s theatre parties. As the party joggled for position in front of the Aldwych, the lights were washing on to the streaming pavement, but an attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting with an umbrella, another attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting in the foyer to lead us to our place. Our place, to begin with, was a private room which led out of the near-stage box. Waiters were carrying trays loaded with glasses of champagne. On the table were laid out mounds of pâté de foie gras. In the middle of it all stood Schiff, looking like an enormous, good-natured and extremely clever frog. By his side stood his wife Rosalind, looking like a lady of Napoleon’s Empire. Her hair was knotted above her head, her mouth was sly, her eyes full. She was wearing an Empire dress, for which, in her fifties, she didn’t have the bosom. On each of her wrists, thin and freckled, glittered two bracelets, emerald and diamond, ruby and diamond, sapphire and diamond, and (as a modest concession) aquamarine. Jewellery apart, skin-roughening apart, she had not changed much since I first met her. For she was an old acquaintance: she had been Roy Calvert’s wife. But, although immediately after Roy’s death I had written to her for a time, it was not on her initiative that, a few years before this theatre party, we had met again. It was on her second husband’s.
No doubt Azik thought that, in some remote fashion, I might be useful. I didn’t mind that. He had the knack, or the force of nature, to think one might be useful and still have plenty of affection to spare for one on the side. I had a lot of respect for him. He had had a remarkable, and to me in some ways an inexplicable life. In the thirties, when Roy Calvert had been working in the Berlin oriental libraries, Azik also had been in Berlin, a young student, ejected from the university under the Hitler laws. He had escaped to England with a few pounds. Somehow he had completed an English degree, very well. Somehow, when the war came, he escaped internment and fought in the British army, also very well. He finished the war in possession of several decorations, a first class honours degree, and what he had saved out of his pay. He was thirty-three. He then turned his attention to trade, or what seemed to be a complex kind of international barter. Eighteen years later, by the time of this party, he had made a fortune. How large, I wasn’t sure, but certainly larger than the fortunes of Charles March’s family or the other rich Jewish families who had befriended me when I was young.