“I want to know,” Waldo said, putting on a mildly accusatory expression, “the name of the Italian lake.”
“Which one?” Dulcie asked. “There are several.”
She was bent above her post-cards, trying, it seemed, to disguise herself as an absorbed little girl, to whom the names of lakes meant less than their colours and gloss. But for Waldo the withheld name was a source of increasing resentment, as though she had been unfaithful to him intellectually.
“Como, Lugarno,
Have a banarno … ”
Arthur began to sing; he loved to join in the singing in the streets.
Waldo was afraid his brother would become dangerous that afternoon, particularly when Arthur suggested to Mrs Feinstein that he should take the tray out to the kitchen. Waldo waited for the crash.
It had not yet happened, when Arthur burst back into the room, wearing, his shouting seemed to emphasize, the capple Mr Feinstein had kept as a symbol of his emancipation.
“Who am Ieeehhh?
Guess! Guess! Guesss!”
Arthur hissed rather than sang.
Waldo could only sit holding his kneecaps, from which sharp blades had shot out on Arthur’s re-appearance.
Arthur sang the answer to his question without waiting for anyone to try:
“Peerrot d’amor
At half-past four,
That’s what I am!
How the leaves twitter —
And titter!
No one is all that dry,
But Ieeehhh!”
Mrs Feinstein, who had behaved so piano since her welcome, with hands in the sleeves of a coat she was wearing although it wasn’t cold, began to shriek with laughter.
“I am the bottom of the bottom,”
Arthur sang,
“But shall not dwell
On which well.
Might see my face
At the bott-urrhm!”
There he stopped abruptly, and his face, which had become impasted with the thick white substance of his song, returned to what was for Arthur normal, as he hung his ruff together with Mr Feinstein’s capple on the knob of a chair.
“What a lovely song! Where did you learn it?” Dulcie finished laughing, and asked.
Her upper lip was encrusted with little pearly beads.
“I made it up,” said Arthur, primly.
Not so prim as Waldo.
Waldo said: “I think you’d better sit down. Otherwise you’ll over-excite yourself.”
Arthur obeyed, and when he was again seated, they heard Mrs Feinstein’s throat settling itself back, as though to suggest they were all as they were in the beginning.
Presently Waldo asked Dulcie: “Don’t you still play the piano?”
“Yes,” she answered guiltily.
“Can you play us the Moonlight Sonata?”
Now, he thought, he’d show her up.
“It might be disastrous,” Dulcie said, but got out of her chair to prepare for it.
It seemed as though they were all under compulsion with the exception of Arthur, who had contributed enough to their dissolution, and fallen asleep, masticating a few last crumbs of Arnotts’ biscuit.
The moon was rising, however jerkily, as Dulcie began to play.
Waldo at once knew how wrong he had been to encourage her to make an exhibition of herself. Needn’t have accepted, of course, if she hadn’t wanted to. But it was going to be a heroic struggle. Not in the beginning, not in the Adagio what’s-it. There she could lay the atmosphere on, and did, in almost visible slabs. Dulcie’s ever so slightly hairy arms were leaning on the solid air, first one side, then the other. Building up her defences against inevitable suicide somewhere along that road which was never moonlit enough. Her shoulders, however, were getting above themselves. If she had started humbly, the music had made her proud. It was kidding her all over again into becoming the genius she was never intended to be, dissolving the bones in her arms with a promise of release, offering a universe of passion instead of plunketty-plunk on the home upright. For moments Waldo was truly tortured by that innocence in others to which he was periodically subjected. He could, at last, have been responsible.
Not Mrs Feinstein. She was responsible for nothing. She was beating time, chasing the tail end of a tune, out of her fur sleeve.
Waldo frowned. He wished he could remember what Mrs Feinstein’s nose.
He yawned. They had entered on a boring stretch, during which he watched himself opening the Private Papers on a Sunday — such an abuse, but Sunday was the day of abuse — taking out his pen to immortalize a false moment, bottling the essence of Dulcie Feinstein’s sostenuto.
When a succession of little pure notes trickled from her fingers into the living-room, suddenly and unexpectedly, but right. He could have sunk his teeth in the nape of her neck where the little curls were unfurling, from beneath the bun, with the logic of notes of music on the page.
With less logic than tenacity Dulcie began to shape the Allegretto. The paper moon was dangling. Unwisely she allowed herself to indulge in coy skips and pretty side-steps for the Allegretto, and did not recover her balance in time for arrival at the precipice.
Dulcie plainly wasn’t prepared, and never would be, for Beethoven’s prestiferous night. It made her lunge at the piano as if to crack, to tear the walnut open. Her arms lashing. Her fingers clutching at the keyboard. From the muscles in her neck, her throat must have been swelling, knotting, reddening, strangling with the poetry which had got into it.
Would it escape without his assistance? Or someone else’s? Waldo could only look at her back and wonder. By now his pants were a network of creases. He thought he loved Dulcie, increasingly, if moodily.
But her back presented itself as a wall which had to be scaled. Was he strong enough? A weak character — oh no, no character is weak if the obsessions are only strong enough. Besides, his obsession was acquiring the surge of Beethoven’s proposition. B. was certainly strong enough, if a mightily unpleasant old man writing music on a lavatory wall.
At that moment Waldo Brown realized Mrs Feinstein’s nose reminded him of the uncircumcised penis of an Anglican bishop he had noticed in a public lavatory. The connection was too obvious, too obscene to resist, and he was forced to bring out his handkerchief to sneeze.
So much for Dad, he decided. And the Jews. He was sorry about Dad, the brown burrowing but never arriving eyes, and the twitch of a moustache on your skin years ago.
Dulcie broke off just then, saying: “I can’t go any farther.”
Immediately afterwards she turned round, her appearance dishevelled, as though she had walked out between storms. Branches still wet and aggressive had hit her in the face, without however breaking her trance, deepening it even, by making her gasp and swallow down the black draught of sky which otherwise she might have shuddered back from. As she sat looking out at them from her irrelevant body with such a pure candour of expression Waldo saw it was he who had lost. He might never be able to forgive her the difficulties she put in the way of loving her.
“I bit off more than I could chew,” she admitted with that same awful honesty.
“It was my fault, I’m afraid,” Waldo answered politely.
It could have made it worse if Dulcie hadn’t been so cool and reasonable, hands in her lap, still seated on the carpet-covered music-stool. Because of this innate reasonableness, which was another surprise silly, frivolous, mysterious Dulcie had sprung on him, he would have liked to counter it with something really good, of such truth, simplicity, and directness, say, Der Jüngling an der Quelle, that he would have shamed her further, even deeply, for her pretentious performance of the Beethoven. But he feared Schubert might not collaborate in this. He would have to rely on a few ballads to decorate his passable voice.