Tender Shoots Read online

  “I’m glad you’ve come.”

  “How long have you been here, Aurora?”

  “Since yesterday evening. I slept out in the open. On leaving the theatre, Gina drove me here and left me. I climbed up to the Hollow Oak; stretched out on the grass, I ate apples; I could see London between the branches. This morning, I went down to the village, from where I telephoned you.”

  “This outfit, Aurora, you’re going to get yourself arrested.”

  “The forest warden is a friend. I imagine you’ll get undressed too?”

  I refuse to. She takes me by the hand, leads me over to a hut covered in dried oak branches. Squatting in front of me, she rekindles the fire, lays the frying pan between two stones and cooks bacon and eggs. I am not used to seeing her like this, her knees black with earth, her hands oily, dirty and unadorned, her tunic pulled up, revealing to the rosy sunlight polished, muscular thighs, those exquisite recesses that a long family inheritance had made so secret and so desirable to me.

  I have to give in to Aurora and I take off my socks, my collar. At a glance from her, I relinquish my braces. And here I am undressed in turn with, on my neck, the red mark from my stiff collar, on my legs, the blue mark from my suspenders, blinded by the acrid smoke of the fresh herbs, and like a general in a kepi, stripped by the Touaregs, naked, but still wearing his crown of oak leaves.

  Wood pigeons dart through the sky. Aurora takes my stick, aims at them, fires twice, but the birds continue, in a hurry to arrive at Nelson’s column before nightfall.

  “I was born in Canada,” Aurora says, “on the lakes. The men there use coloured flies to catch large salmon, which two men carry back between them having passed a stick through the gills. Women give of themselves freely upon beds of white heather. I became poor very young with all that a fortune used up within a few years is worth to us in experience and pleasure. My parents are both dead. They came from Westmoreland originally. My mother had been very beautiful. I scarcely knew her. She had the smallest foot in the world (I could not fit even a toe into any of her shoes). She had black hair and the complexion of a heroine from The Keepsake.

  “Like waves on a lake came her hair

  To die on the strand of her brow,

  “Wordsworth has written. When she came to London for the season, she broke every heart. But she loved my father. She followed him to Canada when he decided to live there. She spent most of her life in bed and died young.

  “I get my feelings for the wild from my father. He used to allow me to climb trees, and cliffs from the top of which I took gulls’ eggs, and from the bottom, seashells. I always went with him when he went hunting. From my earliest childhood he put me on a horse. I followed him like a dog. And my education was really that of a hunting dog. I learned to judge cities from their smell, people by their footsteps, to know which way the wind is blowing, to retrieve game from the most difficult places, and in midwinter I would wade into the water up to my waist to search for the ducks he shot and that fell into the lakes. I can still see him waiting on the shore with his checked trousers, his velvet cap with flaps and his duck-shooting gun; he smiled into his white beard.”

  I am very cold, but I want to stay here this evening. I have discarded the man-about town; the simple life is good and beautiful; I am giving up my room in Mayfair and the steaming bath that is being run for me at this moment and my fresh, starched shirt that awaits me, unfolded, on the bed. I am relinquishing the benefits of clothes with padded shoulders, of sleek hair, of witty conversation. I do not care about a salary at the end of the month, a pension in my later years, I have no further needs, I expect nothing from anyone, social upheavals do not frighten me and I despise working people who need cinemas and drinks. All I own are the two hundred and eight pieces of my skeleton. I am on a level with the earth, the first to benefit from the magnetic currents in the ground; I am the one burning all the oxygen in the air. It is Aurora whom I shall rely on to look after me, to think healthily and to live according to the law of nature.

  “Good night, child,” she says. “May God watch over you!”

  She leaves me to this nocturnal journey as if it were a perilous enterprise from which we may not return. Already, I can hear trumpets sounding. The pure air anaesthetises me; I am sleeping beneath the sky for the first time in my life.

  I have acquired a sore throat from sleeping out in the open. Aurora is making me herbal teas by the fire, in the studio. Then she says:

  “I arrived in India in the autumn of 1909, sailing from Aden. One autumn morning, on a tin-plate sea over which our speed had been cut to twelve knots, Bombay turned its brick façade towards me. Like a silk canopy, the sky stretched out above the factory chimneys, to the right, and to the left, the Elephanta rocks. The trail of smoke in the sky altered less than did the wake from the propellers in the water.

  “I stayed on the peninsula for six weeks. I yearned for solitude, for treks in the dry air, which were not satisfied by remaining on low-lying land. The rivers were like corrosive swamps for me, and the ports were dreadfully depressing. I loathe suffocating valleys where there are only small creatures to hunt. I resolved to set off for Kashmir, then Tibet. Leaving Srinagar, I arrived in a country of high lakes, planted with fir trees. The higher we climbed, the lower the temperature dropped. The natives, overcome with torpor, slept as they walked. I had to whip them to wake them up. Cutting out steps in the ice, we continued to climb …”

  Aurora points to the studio window from where night was about to fall, for a few all too brief hours. Then her hand took mine once more. Why should it have need of mine, this hand which cuts steps in the ice, which bends pennies as if they were marshmallow? Here are her feet that have only ever worn sandals, that have trod the burning snow, the red sand of Somaliland and scattered the underground palaces of ants in Gabon which, at night, spend their time sawing the earth in two.

  Over her body has passed ice, salt, rain, mud, sweat, showers, perfumes. Iron, lead, stone have inscribed wounds on it. In my hands I hold her round head, hard as a paving stone and her thick hair does not deaden the touch. Incomparable caress over the short, bushy hair, which, layered initially by the scissors, ends abruptly on the neck shorn by the clippers. I burnish my fingers on her granite forehead, then on her cheekbones that protrude like pebbles. While she talks, I amuse myself by moving her arms and legs about. The muscles fluctuate silently.

  Aurora is covered in scars. One by one I point them out to her and she explains. Here, trampled by a buffalo in Rhodesia; there, in Carolina, a dangerous double jump with her horse, beneath which she was left as if for dead. This hole in her head, a fall at the Olympia, at the bottom of a trap door.

  So many accidents and so few adventures. Such a lot of shipwrecks and so great a love of ships, of departures, of all of life if life is movement. No habits—just a few cooking recipes, a few tips on hygiene. A courage acquired from meals without meat, from rooms without heating. So much goodness; silent, practical goodness; basic teaching that I had never been given, that you won’t find written down anywhere. Finally, an organic gaiety that never changes, drawn from the oxygen in the air and reproduced all around, the kind of gaiety that endears one more than vice, snobbery or love. A soul cleansed like the body, like the barrels of a gun; helpful hands, a generous heart, a transformer of energy; sweet fruit of the earth, product of my quest, precious beast momentarily captured, Aurora …

  Aurora has rented a shed in Dulwich where she has deposited her saddlery and her hunting and fishing equipment. She also has a few wild beasts’ heads at a taxidermist’s shop in Covent Garden. But her real wealth, her guns, they are at Kent’s.

  They are shapeless things, wrapped up in old cloths, makeshift bandages for steel damaged by oxidation. But as Aurora unwinds the strips, the weapon appears gleaming and primed. Aurora places on her index finger, in perfect balance, a Holland and Holland sixteen-bore rifle. The barrel is blue. The screws, loosened, inactive, can be turned by the fingernail. The gun, wi
th a duplex-choke, is shaped initially in a rounded horse-pistol butt from which the straight barrel emerges. Carried beneath its heavy belly, like pointed eggs, are the reinforced bullets.

  “This is my favourite—a Wollaston ten-bore, for big game,” says Aurora. “It came from Major X’s sale … This gun’s a pal, a real pal. We kill hippopotamuses like rabbits.”

  And she runs her hand over the hammerless rifle from backsight to butt.

  Hippopotamuses, your monstrous innards steaming in the mud of the deltas, crocodiles with your small, round bellies soft as lettuces, hamadryads sitting on your cheeks, brown bears, the pads of your paws more delectable than honey, hyenas like bags stuffed with bones, all of you who died by Aurora’s hand, victims of the ten-bore, am I going to fall in love with her?

  No. Things turned out differently.

  That evening, which was the last, had nevertheless started well. We had dined, Aurora and I, at Old Shepherd’s, in Glasshouse Street, which I like for its huge tables, its low ceiling, its toasting fork, its cold buffet adorned with daffodils in ginger ale bottles. We were separated from other people by wooden partitions, above which we could catch a glimpse of Sargent’s opulent baldness and Roger Fry’s mop of hair.

  Aurora was explaining to me how she hunted in Abyssinia, in East Africa, in Nigeria. Well-known hunters granted her their company. They were simple people, “strong and silent men”, trappers, solitary individuals hunting wholeheartedly, ruggedly, fearlessly, “of the great breed of those who have slogged away through Africa” when ivory was a trade, before it became a sportsman’s trophy; these men held their lives into their own hands, with only an old rifle that took a minute to load standing between them and death, man against beast, men who ate what they had killed and who—the excuse for hunting—when they had not killed anything, ate nothing.

  Aurora despises the rich young man of today who sets out from Mombasa with sixty bearers for hunting grounds that are easy and healthy.

  Aurora’s stories made me drowsy. It was past nine o’clock. The nightclub, like an old hulk from the time of Nelson, had already closed its shutters shaped like portholes. We were eating cheese spread and drinking port.

  And thus I arrived, with her, in lands that were inaccessible and unhealthy where little by little you have to leave behind you, firstly objects that are of no use, then the bearers suddenly struck down by a mysterious disease, then the friends killed by luminous flies …

  I thought: “Will Aurora abandon me like this one day, in the antipodes, to return on my own, after such extraordinary years, or will she desert me on a bench tomorrow morning? Everything is possible. Deep down I don’t much care for extreme adventures.”

  Another glass of fruity port.

  “No, Aurora shall not influence me. She amuses me, nothing more. She will pass and I shall remain all alone slumbering beneath my old Buddha’s sallow fat …”

  We leave. Aurora suggests the Café Royal. It is the hour for absinth, taken there, ritually, after dinner. Human beings slowly materialise in the acrid smoke of Burmese cheroots, beneath a gilt ceiling, red velvet, and mirrors with a thousand pillars. Artists in khaki, with Polish inflections, are playing dominoes with their mistresses, their sisters. One recognises sour YMCA females, once encountered in exhibitions of woodcuts. Musicians of the “eligible for call-up” school are preparing distant propaganda tours. Jewish special constables, with their armbands and an eye-glass chained to their protruding ears, await the moment to climb up to the searchlights.

  Art provides war with only conditional support. While the Royal Academy paints fervently at General Headquarters, the Independents, weighed down with their conscientious objections, concern themselves with the trucks.

  Daniel comes to our table.

  “Montjoye is giving a supper party this evening. He has asked me to tell you that he’s been trying in vain to ’phone you and that he would like you to bring Aurora, whom he would like to get to know.”

  Montjoye, or rather Aronsohn (old Norman family, says Daniel), is the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s private secretary. He has a set, decorated in the Adams style, in Albany, containing still lifes (still, due to a violent death) against a blue background, armchairs in black satin painted by Conder, and some of those Coromandel pieces carved with thick leaves for sideboards. He is happy to offer post-theatre drinks.

  “I won’t go to Montjoye’s,” Aurora says. “He’s an unwholesome man. He exudes a stench of corruption.”

  “You talk like the Archbishop of Westminster.”

  “He’s been asking me to come to his house for a long time. I’ve never wanted to go there. Let’s call it pure unsociability on my part …”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  How irritating remarkable human beings are. I know that Aurora will go to Montjoye’s. She wants to go there. She will go just as she goes everywhere, when she is invited. Just as she stays in town extolling the virtues of the forests, just as she dines at the Carlton declaring that she likes to cook her food between two stones; just as she goes naked, out of snobbery and shyness; just as she claims to have introduced order into her life which is nothing but incoherence, ineptitude and confusion. What is the point of these rituals if they culminate in the absurd and ephemeral existence of those women one meets on ocean liners, in hotel lobbies, at fund-raising shows, and who, for their part at least, have the merit of naivety, of vice, or of foolishness?

  I know, from having often attended them, that Montjoye’s parties are not suitable for Aurora, or for any woman one cares about. But she has to go; she will learn for herself that there are not only boars, but boors too.

  “I’ve got a taxi,” says Fred. “I’ll drop you.”

  Montjoye himself opens the door to us. His bulk stands out against a yellow curtain in the entrance hall. He opens the door with a mixture of curiosity and fear, as though he were frightened that the interest he shows in one might be punished with a slap. (Whenever he happens to call on me, his words of greeting are always: “I must be going.” Then, he hovers in the doorway until I say to him: “Well, close the door.” “In front of me or behind me?” he ventures timidly.) He has eyes only for Aurora, takes no notice of Fred and me, and greets our friend familiarly.

  “Aurora! You’ve come, at last.”

  He takes both her wrists, strokes them, leads her beneath the lantern with black tassels, uncovers her shoulders with that degree of nerve that only he possesses.

  “How beautiful you are!”

  In the circular drawing room, supper is served for eight. Grünfeld, the Bolsheviks’ unofficial agent, the Duchess of Inverness, a Dutchman by the name of Bismark, Gina and several actors.

  Montjoye takes Aurora by the arm, laughs at her embarrassment, pours her a drink and seats her next to the duchess. I loathe Montjoye. He is the person who comes to mind when I try to recall how long I have had a horror of people of taste. I cannot describe the irritating minutiae of his home. From the tongs to the doorknobs, from the candelabras with their green candles to the engraved glasses, everything is perfect. On the work table, which has been pushed into a corner of the room so that people can dance, there are a pile of documents: Credits to the Allies, Loans to the Banque de France, Special Expenses. All of the minister’s work is there, in a jumble, amid tuberoses and photographs. But with his genius for figures, his work that can be done in an instant, Montjoye will be able to make sense of it all overnight, on his boss’s behalf, the day before questions in the House or a conference.

  “We can’t manage to get you drunk, Aurora. However, promise me you will drink this, which I have prepared specially with you in mind.”

  Feverishly, he shakes a bottle that contains four compartments for liqueurs and walks over to the fireplace where his strange face, his large head, his grey hair, are lit up.

  Fred sits down at the piano. Grünfeld, having discovered some Pushkin in the library, recites—

  “Don’t believe a word of it,” says Montjoye. “He does
n’t know Russian.”

  From behind her lorgnette, the duchess, sitting motionless, appraises each of us with her cold eyes. She has that sterile youthfulness of fifty-year-old American women, exquisite feet, grey hair, teeth of white jade. She is dressed in nurse’s uniform with a large ruby cross over her forehead.

  Aurora is enjoying herself in a gloomy sort of way. She is accompanying Fred at the piano. I try to get closer to her and to join in myself singing All Dressed up and Nowhere to Go, which Hitchcock, who created it and who is dozing in an armchair, professes not to know. Aurora turns away from me moodily. On a corner couch, Montjoye is talking in a low voice with muffled laughter to the duchess.

  “Aurora’s going to dance,” he cries, suddenly jumping to his feet.

  And he leads her to the middle of the room.

  “Wait, Aurora, I’m going to make a carpet for you, a carpet of flowers, a carpet of pearls, a carpet for your beauty, for your grace …”

  He hesitates, no longer knowing what he is saying, demolishes the vases and scatters the flowers on the ground.

  Everything spins round. Everything still spins round in my memory, and Grünfeld’s red beard and Montjoye’s pale features, and Aurora, especially Aurora, scantily clad, between four lotus-shaped lanterns, her arms outstretched, streaming with sweat, as if possessed, making mad leaps from one end of the room to the other, twirling round with machine-like speed, impressing on our retinas something resembling a Hindu image, with multiple legs and arms. She falls to the ground. Montjoye kneels down beside her, wipes her brow with his handkerchief. He bends over her to inhale her, his eyes closed. I can see the vein in the middle of his forehead bulging, his neck bursting out from under his collar. His head moves closer and closer, then draws back; then, unable to control himself any longer, Montjoye places his lips on Aurora. Aurora shudders, opens her eyes, gets to her feet and, with the speed of a pugilist, sends Montjoye sprawling across to the firedog with a punch to the jaw. Montjoye screams in agony. A bottle of crème de menthe spills its emerald contents over the floor.