Spencer The Victims of Love

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32687-7
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 308 Seiten

First published in 1978, The Victims of Love was the last in a quartet of novels by Colin Spencer concerning the Simpson family and their charged relationships across the generations. Now we are in the 1960s, as Sundy Simpson attempts a reclusive existence as a single mother and Matthew struggles with the aftermath of a superficially civilised divorce and the continued rage of passion within. In a new preface Colin Spencer recalls how he drew inspiration from his own life and the lives of others, intending 'to be as honest to my experience as I can be, to be ruthless in my vision of others as I have been to myself'. 'Affecting, hilarious, and grave . . . [the Generation Quartet] is a tapestry of unforgettable characters in all their seaminess and sadness, their idealism and desires. It is a delight to meet them again.' Sir Huw Weldon

Colin Spencer

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spencer, Colin

Leseproben

1

The oily black canal runs from the harbour and serves the gasworks, the banks are flecked with coal dust and grit, heaps of refuse and garbage, marred by old remnants: rusted bedsteads, tyres and torn sheets of polythene. Between the rotting hulks of old barges and the harbour which still trades, there are wharfs crammed with pleasure-craft of every style, from a rowing boat to a three-masted schooner. Over this area there hangs a feeling of neglect; trade and industry seem arbitrary and the yachts symbols of idleness and waste.

At noon it grew dark. In his studio on the wharf, Matthew, turning away from the empty easel, watched from the window. Black bars of cloud rode upon the heaving sea, looming over the coast, a regiment of masked giants, their heads a spumy tangle that moved across the slate-grey sky. The sea, all whirlpool and waterspouts, laced with changing furious patterns of spray, seemed to obey no fixed law of physics.

The sound – a distant roar – awoke in him a sense of alienation, immediately stressed by the friends surrounding him. On this weekend before Christmes he had been trapped in an impromptu party; wine was drunk, toasts were made, anecdotes were told with relish.

The masts of the moored craft below the studio began to swing like pendulums, and with their movement sounds started, lonely and individual: chains rasped against stone, corrugated roofs rattled from their loose bolts, people shouted in warning and inquiry. He saw tarpaulins heave and arch beneath restraining ropes, then unroll, rear up and flail like shapes of drowning men. On a pad he began to draw rough impressions of this change, fascinated at the violence. Pebbles and gravel were thrown on to the wharf and the road beyond, the rain descended with the virulence of an equatorial storm. Now Matthew could not see through the window and he lighted oil lamps, placing them among his guests.

‘My dears, what a passion Zeus is in, let’s pour another libation to him at once, to thank him that we’re not at his mercy in my houseboat,’ Tommy Needham spoke: now in his late sixties, a war correspondent of past distinction, a pederast of obsessive inclination, independent but penniless, reminiscent of a turtle as his wrinkled head with its beaked nose craned upwards. ‘My little coracle will be sunk and then, dear Ainley,’ he placed his mottled hands together in mock prayer, ‘you’ll have to buy me another.’

‘You old rascal,’ Lord Clough replied, laughing – though his bank account felt unease – ‘I know you’ve got your beady eye on that smarter boat. Well, I can’t possibly afford it.’ He was a novelist of fame, a playwright and traveller, a searcher for the elusive Adonis who would combine passion with servitude. A quest of infinite frustration, as Matthew had told him.

‘I’m quite sure Tommy’s cwaft must have been damaged in Dunkirk,’ Count de Rosenbeau said; his dentures made a hissing noise which, together with his inability to pronounce the rolling ‘r’, made him difficult to understand.

‘Dear Bernie,’ Tommy said, clapping his hands in delight. ‘You desire always to give aristocratic lineage to any battered hulk.’ It was an ambiguous reference to the count’s heritage, for he claimed to be descended from a European monarch whose mistress, his grandmother, had been a cross between Lola Montez and Mata Hari. ‘Whether the holes were made with German bullets or not is quite irrelevant, the rain still pours through and I have a choice of either dying of pneumonia or hypothermia.’ His mouth sank at the corners into a grimace of gloom.

(I must ring Jane, Matthew thought: I said I’d be back for lunch and I’d promised Nicholas a war game.)

Gavin, an erudite literary reviewer, was speaking to Tommy of Karen Blixen. ‘Extraordinary revelation, for we had the same great, great, great-grandfather, Count Tychson, the friend of Tycho Brahe.’

(Lineage, family, roots: his forebears were an Essex wheelwright, a Romany on Epsom Heath and a baker in Battersea.)

‘A hydrocele is very nasty,’ Ainley pronounced. ‘It’s when the balls blow up.’

‘It is fluid upon one ball,’ Tommy spoke. He had a pedantic nature and constantly corrected his acquaintances.

‘There is too a dedicatory epigram by Lucillius,’ Gavin interrupted. ‘“Dionysius, the only one saved out of forty sailors, dedicated her the image of this hydrocele, tying which close to his thighs he swam to shore.” So even a hydrocele brings luck on some occasions.’

Tommy laughed, beating his thighs with the flats of his palms.

(He saw through the windows a sudden shaft of lightning. He felt how meaningless his work was, how false all hopes were, how insubstantial were these people who drank and chatted in his studio.)

Matthew flung an old raincoat over his shoulders.

‘My dear boy,’ Tom cried out in alarm, ‘you can’t go out in this.’

‘I must ring Jane. I told her I had to work, but I promised it would only be in the morning.’

‘She has the disposition of Medea,’ Tom whispered to Gavin with a smile of mischief. ‘Though as far as I can perceive she has never managed to acquire a golden fleece for him.’

Outside the fierce wind tore at people’s clothing, distorting the human form; the weird figures seemed like echoes from an old nightmare.

Matthew shouted into the telephone. ‘I’ve never seen such a storm. No, I can’t get back, no buses … the road is flooded.’

‘Please darling, I get frightened … I hate storms … Nicholas is wanting you…’

‘I’ll get back as soon as I can.’

‘I suppose you’re with Tom, drinking?’ she stated acidly.

‘I’ve been working.’

‘But it’s dark as night here,’ her comment was heavy with suspicion.

He ran back to the studio, the rain hit his uncovered head with a clash of knives. He saw that a rotting hulk was floating down the canal towards the furnace of the gasworks, which glowed with flashes of vivid orange.

‘My dear boy,’ Tom cried out, ‘you’re soaked.’ For a moment he fussed maternally over Matthew, lighting the extra oil fire and pouring him out another glass of wine. Yet the subject of his conversation with Gavin drew him back to his chair. ‘Yes, do go on. Snobbery.’ He raised his voice with a mocking side-glance at the lord – whom in secret they termed His Pumpship – and the count, both in their view bogus.

Gavin lowered his voice, stroked his beard and continued. ‘I have often been sustained in the ghastly vicissitudes of life by a sense of family pride, a sort of Gascon arrogance. Ridiculous, no doubt, but if kept to oneself of great pragmatic value. Is this snobbish? I find it difficult to call it that. It certainly enabled Norman Douglas to support many buffets of fortune and he was certainly no snob, although no lover of the middle classes. But one has to keep mum about it or it loses its efficacy. I trust in your discretion to let this fearful secret go no further.’

Tom patted his hand indulgently. ‘Ah yes, but dear Norman let himself become gross. Taking one’s false teeth out in order to suck off a boy of fourteen lacks Theocritan grace and charm.’

‘My American producer is absolutely thrilled by my new play,’ Ainley, fuelled by wine, became more bombastic.

‘We’re out of wine,’ Tom intoned in a voice of doom.

‘Come back for a late luncheon,’ Ainley invited them all with a magnanimous sweep of his arms. ‘Please do, I insist, it’s been so delightful.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Tom agreed impatiently. ‘But we must have more wine now, I’ve got a hoard on my houseboat.’

Matthew was happy at the excuse to leave again.

The chords of wind and rain echoed around him, the canal was bursting over the quay; leaky guttering spat old slime, beach pebbles shuttled back and forth, frail as autumn leaves: the deafening clamour seemed to be inside his skull. He thrust the door of the houseboat open, then going to the prow he bent down, opened a locker and brought out two bottles. As he stood up again he saw the pale image of a young boy’s face staring in at the window, the only colour that of scarlet which ran down the side of his cheek. The image was so vivid, the shock so horrific, that he dropped the bottles and rushed outside, knowing as he did so that the image had faded. He clung to the side of the boat. There was no sign of a boy or any figure, the boats either side were battened down. He returned inside, picked up the bottles and stared again at the window, wondering if the rain’s patterns could have created such an illusion – yet there had been a wound and a flow of blood.

As he returned to the studio in the storm’s lull, he saw the evidence of chaos and confusion. The tornado had disturbed the thin crust of civilization, exposing the refuse beneath. He was struck with a terrible image: that all real life had deserted this planet, that it was left with shadows and reflections, that the storm was part of original creation searching again for its nursery, and failing to find it had now moved on.

*

On some weekends, if Jane wished to be alone to prepare lessons or mark exam papers, Matthew took Nicholas to the studio and there they would paint together. The child would sit on the floor, smearing colour on with his hands. At times they would create objects together, made up from driftwood, cork, feathers and bottle-tops glued onto boards, give them titles and use them as subjects in a story.

Jane knew that Matthew had left them: left her and Nicholas: they were abandoned. Her senses cried out that...