My Last Duchess Read online

  MY LAST DUCHESS

  IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

  This eBook edition published in 2015 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  Copyright © Iain Crichton Smith, 1974

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 9780857907356

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Contents

  Ferrara

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  Part Three

  1

  Also Available from Polygon

  FERRARA

  THAT’S my last Duchess painted on the wall,

  Looking as if she were alive. I call

  That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands

  Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

  Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

  ‘Frà Pandolf’ by design, for never read

  Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

  The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

  But to myself they turned (since none puts by

  The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

  And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

  How such a glance came there; so, not the first

  Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

  Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

  Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek: perhaps

  Frà Pandolf chanced to say ‘Her mantle laps

  Over my lady’s wrist too much,’ or ‘Paint

  Must never hope to reproduce the faint

  Half-flush that dies along her throat:’ such stuff

  Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

  For calling up that spot of joy. She had

  A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,

  Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

  She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

  Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

  The dropping of the daylight in the West,

  The bough of cherries some officious fool

  Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

  She rode with round the terrace—all and each

  Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

  Or blush, at least. She thanked men,—good! but thanked

  Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

  My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

  With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

  This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

  In speech—(which I have not)—to make your will

  Quite clear to such an one, and say, ‘Just this

  Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

  Or there exceed the mark’—and if she let

  Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

  Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,

  —E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

  Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,

  Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

  Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

  Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

  As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

  The company below, then. I repeat,

  The Count your master’s known munificence

  Is ample warrant that no just pretence

  Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

  Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

  At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

  Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, through,

  Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

  Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

  ROBERT BROWNING

  PART ONE

  1

  He knocked on the door of the small house, which, slanted and as if squashed like plasticine, reminded him of a painting he had once received by post from an Arts Club. It was called “Church at Auvers” and showed under a marine sky a church with squashed roof and squashed windows and, all in all, looked like the sort of thunderstruck place where a witch might worship. Along one of the yellow patches in the foreground a woman was walking as if into a high wind; the whole painting was eerie and odd, the product of Van Gogh’s queer imagination.

  He knocked on the small door (the house did not collapse) and a small dog leaping up at him did not subside till a large bony red-cheeked woman came to the door and said:

  “What is it you want?”

  And, indeed, unshaven, wearing three jerseys one on top of each other because he could not stop shivering, and with shoes which were scuffed and lacking even the memory of polish because he had been walking so long, and his thick brown coat the pockets of which were filled with a miscellany of trash—including a bunch of keys, a ring, a bottle of aspirins, a Penguin book picked up but unread, and a shaving bag—and also weighed down by the coins which had dropped through a hole right to the very bottom lining, he must to others look odd, and especially to this woman who looked like a tough Saxon peasant, her face ridged and red, her eyes hard, her coarse dress practically reaching her ankles.

  “I wish to see Mr. Frith, the novelist,” he said.

  He said it as if he were the only novelist, as indeed to him he was, the one to whom in his incredible pain he might come, to sit at his feet and listen, the one who had written that moving short novel which was said to be based on the death of his first wife, where even a chair or a brooch glowed with the incandescence of terrible disaster and guilt, leaping up and striking at him as if it were a snake out of a hallway with its flat narrow head. It was to him he was pilgrimaging (Frith had of course gone on to write thicker and thicker and more convoluted books lacking however that radiance as of streets seen in youth which seem to lead straight into the recesses of the heart): and for whom else would he have taken that long journey by bus, winding its tedious way over hills and beside walls till, eventually given directions by a bucolic peasant leaning on a fence and smoking a pipe which emitted sparks in the cold wind, he had arrived. To whom else would he, like a ghost, naked as an egg, have made his blind way?

  “What do you want to see him about?” She stood there guarding the inmate, a dragon at the door, a wedge against which like an insurance man he must push. Trying to control his pain and rage he said as reasonably as he could:

  “I am an admirer. I wish to talk to him if I may. I have come a long distance. I want him to help me. I have come a long way and I should like to get back to the town tonight.”

  She gazed at him, he thought, with jealousy and disgust as if, day after day, she was allowing into her house people like him, failures, those who could not cope with the lightning strokes that levelled them to the brown earth, as if she had hoped instead to invite a man in a shining green car who would tell his chauffeur to wait while he handed in the coveted ribbon or star, the very latest in ribands or coronets. She must, he thought, be the third wife. She didn’t answer him but opened the door and
let him through. Then, as if washing her hands of him, she disappeared and left him standing at an open door from which he could see Frith himself standing as if in a cage, looking out of the window, his bald head smooth and white as an egg, his lilac bow-tie neatly tied, his green jacket beautifully pressed, his white hands resting delicately on the window sill, as if he might take off into the distances into which he was gazing.

  He found himself at length (after some mute counterchangings) sitting in a chair opposite Frith who was chewing an apple which he had removed from a dish on the table, behind him row after row of books, magazines, pamphlets, in different languages, Italian, French, Greek and German. Frith drew his chair closer to the fire as if he were cold and he himself adjusted the blue scarf which coiled shapelessly over his three jerseys and which, no matter how hard he tried, he could not get to look stylish and raffish and elegant as scarves always seemed to be on people the same build and size and age as himself. The fire hummed companionably and he sat in the chair as if drugged. Frith gazed at him affably as if about to receive from him some new admiration expressed in a more perfect and understanding language than he had ever heard before and in the small slightly dimmed eyes he sensed the voracity of one who wished by all possible means to retain that power which had once made him emperor and which in age he still had the illusion of retaining.

  “I was actually expecting Robin. My son, that is,” said the novelist. “He sometimes comes on a Saturday.” He put the remains of his apple down, the expression on his small neat appley face not altering at all in the light of the fire, which the freezing day drove him closer to. Now and again he would appear to lose memory of his visitor as if there was something else that he wished to have which the visit was depriving him of.

  “I did not catch your name,” he said at last.

  “Mark Simmons.”

  “You are a professor, perhaps?”

  “No, I have lectured but I am not a professor.”

  “I see. I get a lot of professors. They come from Europe and America. They come from everywhere. They are writing theses on my work although I have still much to do.”

  Mark gazed at him as if over the rim of a hollow. This small neat dapper man, in the rays of extinction—was it truly he who had written that novel?—Those famous passages for instance about coming home at midnight through deserted streets and seeing his dead wife waiting for him at corner after corner as if duplicated by mirrors inviting him to go with her, young prostitute in all her arrogance and hauteur, into the Hades of her youth and death? No wonder the latest wife was hard and cold, competing daily against eternity, in her poor mortal skin, the queen under whose regime nothing of the slightest value had been written.

  Sometimes he felt the shape of the ring in his pocket and was again stabbed by pain rising and subsiding in wave after wave as if he was in a boat.

  “Tell me,” he began, and stopped, petrified by a revulsion of ennui and meaninglessness. He fought his way forward through the gluey lumpish porridge of his exhaustion.

  “Tell me,” he said, “how long did it take you to write A Night of Sorrows?”

  As he looked into the face, it was as if a drawbridge had suddenly been pulled up, as if he could actually see the shadows of chains on the cheeks and jaw and reflected in the eyes.

  “A lot of students are writing theses about me too, but one must expect that when one reaches my age, that is, if one is any good.” He pointed to a magazine which he had evidently been glancing through, if not exactly reading.

  “Tell me, is Tallons any good? He seems to be very successful, appearing here and there. I must say I can’t fathom him. But then that isn’t uncommon with me nowadays. They write such unfinished stuff nowadays, like belisha beacons.”

  “I don’t suppose you know Malone?” he continued. “He’s trying to get me to do a book on old age. He was here not so long ago with his wife wearing corduroys, both of them actually. His wife is quite a beautiful woman. She seemed to me to be very knowledgeable as well, about certain things, you know. They all wear corduroys and demon glasses, all these American women. Not of course the sort of person you could have a discussion about Faulkner with but quite remarkably intelligent—in the way some of these American women are. We chatted about this and that and then Malone came out with this extraordinary proposal, you see. I must say that I laughed. ‘Old age,’ I said to him, ‘What do I know about old age? I still feel like a boy’.”

  “Do you?” said Mark

  “Do I what?”

  “Feel as young as a boy?”

  “Of course I do. I certainly don’t feel old. What was I to say? I have lived a long time but that doesn’t mean that I feel old. I can stand quite steady on my feet, converse with my children. After that we discussed a book on genealogies which I’m afraid I haven’t read but Malone is very keen on. I can’t stand genealogies myself. People who write stuff about genealogy seem to me to be high-powered gossips and busy-bodies. They make noseyparkerism respectable. In any case they are usually little men with bald heads who cart around with them books bigger than themselves. Extraordinary thing, Malone was wearing corduroys and sandals. I thought his feet looked a bit dirty. In my childhood I used to run about barefoot but my feet never seemed dirty.” Mark knew for a fact that Frith had been brought up in the city and wondered for a fleeting uninterested moment why he should have told the lie. “This book on genealogies has apparently been written by a man who keeps popping in and out of asylums. In the intervals of lucidity he writes another page and adds another footnote.”

  Mark flinched and wondered. What is he thinking of me, the sparse-haired quondam lecturer in his long tweedy coat bulging with all sorts of random paraphernalia, and was about to ask him again about his first novel when a figure appeared, striding briskly past the window and in a moment entering the house.

  “That’s my son now,” said Frith proudly. And so indeed it proved, for after some preliminary conversation with Frith’s third wife—whose stepson this was—the latter entered.

  He was a very clean looking man with a clear white large face and curly brown hair boyishly combed back from a tall white forehead. He wore the neat black clothes of the professional and had large white bony hands which, when he sat down, he rested on his knees. He gazed at Mark in a hostile way and then turned to his father who was speaking eagerly.

  “And how is the school these days? Still the efficient automaton, eh?”

  “It functions,” said his son briefly. “I was talking to Mrs. Mason yesterday. She said she called on you.”

  “That’s right. She wants me to do a tape of readings from some of my prose for her classes. She’s quite a bright if tiring woman.”

  “Yes. I have been asked myself to give a talk to the Association to explain my ideas on Secondary Education as a continuation of Primary.”

  “Have you? That’s quite interesting. I’m very pleased. What are you going to say?”

  “What I’ve always maintained, that one cannot have an artificial dichotomy, that there must be continuity and that there should be no interruption in the spectrum.”

  “And why not?” said his father who seemed to be crowing with delight. “I thought that Green …”

  “Green? What does he know of it? His school isn’t the proper size and in any case he lives in an academic dream. It seems to me indisputable that children learn through play and discovery and I see no reason why the same methods should not be applied to the Secondary School.”

  “You mean you don’t really care whether they spell correctly or not?”

  “Spelling, father, as you well know, is a recent convention. Shakespeare is supposed to have spelt his name in different ways. If Shakespeare could get along without spelling, then so can they. Not, of course, that that is desirable as long as correct spelling remains a fetish, but this may not be the case in the future.”

  “My son, Mr. Simmons, is very revolutionary, as you can see. He is the headmaster of a large school. I’m sure
you would be interested in joining in the discussion. Mr. Simmons came to pay his respects,” he said to his son.

  “You are an admirer of the novel?” said the son, regarding Mark with undiminished distaste.

  “I suppose you might say that,” said Mark, wishing that he could think of some devastating remark but unable to do other than sit listening to words which were meaningless to him.

  “My father is all for comprehensive education in theory,” said the son, “but not in practice.”

  “No no no, that is not what I …”

  “In effect it is what it comes down to. Because of your socialist ideas you agree with it but your literary ideas lead you to demand perfection. I think that is the hub of it. You must go the whole hog. Perfection is not possible. The so called perfection of the academic school was a cold uninteresting one. Everyone was arranged in a rectangle facing their Socrates or rather their Solon. Now the teacher is no longer a law giver. He is himself a Columbus. Previously he knew exactly what he would find at the end of the lesson for he had put it there himself. Now he doesn’t. He begins with no preconceived notions. He has no fixed ideas. He is not to be regarded as a master but as an inquirer.”

  His words came from him in huge slabs as from a noiseless cement mixer, the voice resonant, the convictions implacable. Curious, thought Mark, how Frith, crowing at his son’s cleverness, does not see the contradiction between the positiveness of the conviction and the creative chaos of which it spoke.

  “My son, you see, does not take after me,” said the novelist delightedly. “He is one of our competent men. The man with the grey flannel drawers. They tell me that there is a good chance of your getting an MBE, or should I not have said that?”

  “Who mentioned it to you?”

  “Oh, there are rumours. Someone mentioned it to Hilda when she was shopping. My own honours will be less than yours. I was more impertinent than you and that’s why only the Maori University would give me an honorary degree.” He laughed joyously, with his arms around himself, an evil contorted dwarf. “By the way, that Society has asked me back again to talk to them. You know, the one where they sing ‘God save the Queen’ and they’ve got a big portrait of her behind the table and the chairman usually plays rugby on Saturdays.”