Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [99]
‘No other messages for Gibson?’
‘No, just the book.’
By the time I next saw Delavacquerie he was aware that Fiona was married to Gwinnett. I don’t know whether he heard directly from her, or the news just got round. She appeared to have left the flat without warning, taking her belongings with her. He smiled rather grimly when I passed on the request to send the Middleton book to Gwinnett’s college.
‘As a matter of fact I read some of the plays myself in consequence – The Roaring Girle, which Dekker also had a hand in. I enjoyed the thieves’ cant. Listen to this:
A gage of ben rom-bouse
In a bousing ken of Rom-vile,
Is benar than a caster,
Peck, pennam, lay, or popler,
Which we mill in deuse a vile.
O I wud lib all the lightmans,
O I wud lib all the darkmans
By the salomon, under the ruffmans,
By the saloman, in the hartmans,
And scour the queer cramp ring,
And couch till a palliard docked my dell,
So my bousy nab might skew rom-bouse well.
Avast to the pad, let us bing;
Avast to the pad, let us bing.
Not bad, is it?’
‘It all sounds very contemporary. What does it mean?’
‘Roughly, that a quart of good wine in London is better than anything to be stolen in the country, and, as long as wine’s to be drunk, it doesn’t matter if you’re in the stocks, while some heel is stuffing your tart – that’s a palliard docking your dell. Owing to Gwinnett, I came across a good couplet in Tourneur too:
Lust is a spirit, which whosoe’er doth raise,
The next man that encounters boldly, lays.
There seems a foot too many in the first line. They may have elided those relatives in a different way at that period.’
‘How does the thieves’ slang poem come into the Middleton play?’
‘The Roaring Girl sings it herself, with a character called Tearcat. The Roaring Girl dresses like a man, smokes, carries a sword, fights duels. A narcissistic type, rather than specifically lesbian, one would say. At least there are no scenes where she dallies with her own sex.’
Delavacquerie’s good memory, eye for things that were unusual, had certainly been useful to him as a PR-man; for which he also possessed the requisite toughness. What he said next was a side he much less often revealed. It suggested reflections on Fiona.
‘It’s odd how one gets acclimatized to other people’s sexual experiences. At a younger age, they strike one so differently. For instance, during the war I knew a married woman – a captain’s wife – who told me of her first seduction. She was seventeen or eighteen, and on the way to her art-school one morning. Running to catch a bus, she just missed it. Two men, cruising by in a car, laughed at her standing breathless on the pavement. They stopped and offered her a lift. When they dropped her at the art-school door, the one who wasn’t driving asked if she’d dine with him later in the week. She agreed. They went to a road-house outside London. In the course of dinner – establishing his bonafides as homme sérieux – her host remarked that he had lived with one girl for two years. Telling the story to me, she commented that – in those days – she thought love was for ever. Anyway, the chap gave her dinner, they had a good deal to drink – which she wasn’t used to – and, afterwards, went into the garden of the roadhouse where he had her in the shrubbery. When she got home, finding her knickers all over blood, she thought to herself: I’ve been a silly girl. That’s what she told me.’
‘What’s the moral of all that?’
‘There isn’t one, except that the story used to haunt me. I don’t quite know why. It seemed to start so well, and end so badly. Perhaps that’s how well constructed stories ought to terminate.’
‘She never saw the bloke again?’
‘No. I don’t think it really made a ha’p’orth of difference to her. All I say is that for a while the story haunted me.’
‘You were in love with the heroine?’
‘Naturally. In a way that wasn’t the point, which is that, in due course, you find girls are really perfectly well able to look after themselves, most of them. Even allowing for the fact that les chiens sont fidèles, mais pas aux chiennes. To retain the metaphor