The Stand-In Read online

  You take my point, patient while I sip my water, and of course some of you will wonder whether I told the truth, whether there may not be a little vodka or a touch of gin. No, of course not, though we all know that while speech and truth may sleep in the same bed, they never marry.

  Madeleine drank vodka. If we went to their house after a badminton game, she would sometimes take a bottle of vodka out of the freezer, pour some, put a little pepper on top and drink it down. In an emergency—and there were emergencies, but that was in another age—she drank it warm. After three drinks she became vague and slack and easy. It was a kind of happiness, I suppose.

  Battledore and shuttlecock, that’s what the game was called originally, or perhaps that was the name of the children’s sport that was the origin of badminton, named, we are told, for the country estate of the duke of Beaufort where it is supposed to have originated around 1873. J. W. Morrice, our prince of all the greens, was then eight years old, a schoolboy in Montreal, attending school in a building which is now the site of the Ritz Carlton, where I eat from time to time.

  Badminton was the favourite form of exercise of another of the great Edwardians, H. G. Wells. Some of you will have heard the story of the pleasant odour of Wells’ skin, how he smelt like honey and though odd looking, was irresistible to women. There are men like that, blessed by the gods, while the rest of us are judged by our behaviour. Madeleine told me that Tarrington’s skin smelled like fresh-cut hay.

  They were an oddly assorted lot, the Edwardians, Wells, with his honey skin, Maugham trying to hide his inversion, Bennett, like Maugham a stammerer, making himself a writer of out sheer vulgar determination. They were between two worlds. Propriety made its demands, but certain kinds of freedom called out. There is the story of how Bennett, settled in Paris to write The Old Wives’ Tale, offered to share his mistress with Maugham. She had two evenings a week free, and she liked writers, he said. The new bohemians, struggling to break free from the rigid proprieties of Victorian England, went to France where sexual release was more easily available. It was the city of maisons de tolérance, the place where certain celebrated courtesans were known as les grandes horizontales, where Degas returned obsessively to the brothels to draw his lean, accurate sketches of the women at leisure between customers.

  A kind of freedom, freedom for men, and for some few women, those who could turn the conventions of the time to their own advantage. Once when I met Tarrington in Paris—we were both there doing research and met in a little café on the Quai des Grands Augustins, in the green light under the plane trees where he drank wine while I consoled myself with a café-crème—he spoke as if such a city still existed. Perhaps for him it did. He had left Madeleine behind in Canada, and he had two regular lovers, an American who was at the Sorbonne, and a young Frenchwoman he had picked up somewhere.

  Madeleine was slow to suspect what he was up to. I found this out when I arrived back. She told me about it. That summer. She told me many things, some that I kept to myself for years after. That was the last summer that the Tarringtons lived among us here. Belle will remember the farewell parties as they prepared to go off into the great world. A last blowout in their small bungalow, a corn roast on the beach. And the rest of it. The end of it all. Yes, Belle, we both remember.

  I have seen you, Mr. President, glancing at your watch, but you know my assignment. Fill the time. I am doing it. If you think my course as indirect as that of the river Meander, I will admit you are right, but it is surely no more roundabout than, let us say, the memoir by Clive Bell which is one of the sources of information about our artist. He wrote it many years after his first days in Paris, and he had reached the age when there are no straight lines in the tale of human experience.

  Bell writes of Morrice’s flute playing, beautiful until he grew short of breath. He remembers Morrice telling him that he played in the Hallé orchestra—which is almost certainly untrue, but then it is a story and as good as any story. I might tell you that I taught introductory physics at Harvard and met my wife there, a story no more unlikely. Both stories may be true. They ought to be. I must have met my wife somewhere, just as I lost her somewhere, and the scenes that are observed beyond the window, in the far distance, down the long vistas of perspective are always unclear, tiny figures performing unidentified acts, the tiny dabs of black in the rich colour of a Paris evening. It was a conversation we had about just such things that led Tarrington to the writing of one of his first famous essays, “The Triumph of the Background.” In those days the two of us were teaching sections of An Introduction to Civilization, the course which attempted to bring our students into a little intimacy with art, music, literature and philosophy through the ages. An Introduction to Glibness, the head of the French department called it.

  I was speaking about the colour green. Morrice’s Canadian paintings don’t use it as one of their keynotes. There are lovely pink and purple shadows on the snow, and the light is usually the light of winter, grey and blue—though the original of his famous picture of the Quebec ferry, if examined carefully, has strokes of green in the ice, though they are almost impossible to see in small reproductions. There is so much we never see. Morrice chose not to see the greens of the green season in the Quebec countryside, because of its rapidity perhaps, the way the golden green of spring vanishes, is touched by darkness so soon and then gone, or because he was artistically blind to them. Part of the genius of any artist is his blindness. What he cannot see makes possible what he can. The long slow greens of rainy Paris hang in the air like the scent of smoke.

  I’ve always enjoyed fine phrases. My record of publications is scant partly because ideas come to me in a likely phrase, a short paragraph, and the struggle to move from that to a coherently argued essay has been inordinately difficult. In youth, I was full of ambition, but the silences between the words conquered. In front of students, I was able to summarize and quote and add my own little insights. The repeated pattern from year to year, new faces in the same old seats, made it seem sufficiently commonplace that I didn’t listen to my words. Here in front of you, it is something else, but I came knowing it was an emergency, inspired, perhaps, by the thought of that body lying dead on the tiles, and I will do my duty, after my fashion. I have often thought to write about Morrice, and I make regular trips to the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal to look at the collection of sketches on wood.

  I can now count only two striped ties in the audience in front of me. Two ties in two seats of Madden Hall, where once there were three, and yet I was unaware of a departure. Perhaps my mind was on other things, as it should be, on history, art, and badminton. Perhaps the man wearing the third tie did not in fact leave but slipped it quickly off. It might even be one of those ties that clips on to the collar, though I haven’t seen one of those for years, but with such a tie, it would be the work of a second to remove it. In a moment of self-consciousness or cunning after I was bold enough to mention the presence of these three men with the strip of stripes that would identify them to each other. That they have been observed before. Now one has abandoned his team, his clip-on tie hidden in his pocket. Take that, cravat. Or perhaps he only got bored and angry and slipped out when I was staring up to the ceiling for energy and inspiration.

  Bored and angry: Tarrington’s rage, la furia di Tarrington, that remarkable piece of baroque nonsense for the keyboard.

  Biography, you will have noticed in your past reading, and I’m certain you are one of those who has, Mr. President, is often an invitation to bad writing, what is thought to evoke the times and places of the past, usually with the direst consequences.

  In old Quebec Morrice would see the happy peasants tramping in from the countryside with their baskets of fresh farm produce, charming and colourful personages in brightest homespun. Then he came to Paris, the streets of the yellow fiacres, with his most magic flute, his passion for the pigments, and his great and high purpose. You know the sort of thing. A
n attempt to make the mélange of fact and opinion and rumour that is the source of biography into a story, usually the imitation of tawdry fictions already existing, whereas life, as we all know, is not a story at all. It is the music of no mind.

  The shuttlecock summer. Back and forth. You will excuse my pun. Those of you who play badminton, will know the excitement of the slow rise and soft fall of the shuttlecock. It has about it a rare beauty, lovelier than the meaningless bouncing of rubber balls in tennis and squash and handball. It is a quiet game, only the sudden soft exhalations of breath as the player runs into position and lifts the bird high over the court or niftily slices it into the corner by the net. As I have explained, my wife Anne and I could usually defeat Denman and Madeleine. We were never so close as with rackets in our hands, had the unspoken ability to share the court even in the quickest passages of the game, whereas Madeleine’s long elegant legs were, in the stress of competition, a little ungainly and her husband tried to play the whole game himself, pushing her out of the way now and then to get at the bird, preventing her from making shots that she could have returned if left to herself. After every loss, we were treated to la furia di Tarrington, and one sometimes wondered what Madeleine had to endure once he got her home. Anne, though she had shorter legs, pink and soft-thighed, breasts that slithered and bounced, was very quick on her feet and had an intuitive sense of where the opponent would move next so that the shuttlecock dropped just where the enemy used to be. It was my duty to drive Denman to the back of the court with long lobs and smashes while Anne finished the point with finesse.

  After the game, we would recover our baby daughter from the sitter, and we might go to their house, or sometimes Denman and Madeleine would come round for an Ovaltine against the cold winter night. In the hour we spent together, as Denman and I bragged about the clever things we had said in lectures and set out our plans for the books we were to write, la furia di Tarrington would, I hoped, calm itself so that Madeleine would have less to endure when they got home.

  To move on, move on. I have a story about Picasso, which I recall from Clive Bell’s book of memories. I have said that one of Bell’s subjects was J. W. Morrice, whose friend he became on his first trip to Paris. Like all personal accounts of the painter, it is affectionate and favourable. He seems to have maintained his charm even when far gone in drink, an unusual enough characteristic, as we all know, who have been among the bores and vulgarians of late-night gatherings. In a journal, Arnold Bennett remarked of Morrice that he had the joy of life in a high degree, and he gave this characteristic, the delight in every detail of existence observed, to the character he based on his friend. Clive Bell claimed that it was from Morrice that he learned to enjoy Paris. That faculty of enjoyment was surely linked to the speed and small size of his oil sketches.

  But Picasso. Picasso and the bath: in a discussion of miracles, the great Pablo said that he thought it a miracle that he didn’t melt in his morning bath. This was during the days of his first marriage and rich respectability, and someone who heard him remarked that a few years before, one wouldn’t have believed he knew what a bath was for.

  In those days, in France, it was possible to have a bath sent in. A team of men carried in the tub and hot water and disposed of it when you were done. Bell knew a man who knew an actress who had one sent in to her top floor flat once a week. Women bathing, it has been a subject from Degas and Bonnard to the TV commercial. The peeper’s delight. The long slender body in subtle tones of iridescent milky white, with touches of mauve and perhaps a little hint of green reflected from the leaves outside the window. She is bent to dry herself with the blue towel, and that too casts a little reflection on the hospitable skin. Outside the open window, a chirping of sparrows and the sound of a car driving by. Didn’t know whose car, wondered.

  I am not aware that our man Morrice ever painted a woman bathing. There are a few finely done nudes, and one astonishing portrait, now in the possession of the National Gallery in Ottawa, which is as sexual as any nude, though in fact only the head and bare shoulders of the model are seen, as she looks toward us from the top right corner of the painting, while most of the canvas is the remarkably delicate and sensual painting of the bedsheets. Though the model is unidentified, the name Jane is painted into the texture in large pale letters, and the small canvas evokes the greatest possible intimacy. The woman naked beneath the covers. The commonplace miracle.

  Tarrington lying naked on the tiles after his last ecstasy.

  This is not easy to believe, and I am myself astonished, but now suddenly I see only one striped tie among you. Is this a game? My eyes, at least with the aid of these spectacles, are accurate enough, and I know what I see. Three striped appendages. Now only one. Certainly I have noticed one or two people departing from the dim back corner, but the striped ties were, each one of them, buried among you, well forward in the light.

  Wake up, Frank Puncheon. I see you there with your eyes closed. I know as an astronomer emeritus, you are compelled to be up half the night staring at stars, but it’s only proper to pinch yourself and pay attention. In front of you, the three short-haired young female lecturers are doing me the courtesy of smiling and nodding even though I am a Dead White Male. You can do as much. You know badminton yourself. We used to play from time to time. I remember a particularly vicious slashing game just after we both had proposals for conference papers turned down. Tarrington, then creeping toward fame, was on my committee, though I fail to remember who was on yours.

  One of the errors in your introduction, Mr. President, was in the matter of my involvement with the local Naturalist’s society. I was not merely one of those involved in bringing the annual bird count to the district, I was in fact the first of those to bring the bird count to this part of the country, and my birding columns were not merely published in the local press but were syndicated throughout eastern Canada and certain of the New England States. Credit where credit is due. Though I never became a celebrity, I played my part in life. An attendant lord? One would hope not just that. You will be able to place the quotation, Mr. President, from your memories of Introductory Civilization. You were, of course, in Tarrington’s section, and I remember he said you were not much inclined to work but didn’t need to as you would inherit a thriving chain of stores. It has been observed often enough that you have been good about passing on some of your profits to this institution and bringing your moneyed friends into the fold. Thus the Jakeson lectures, funded by your in-laws, Jakeson and Jakeson. So, as I acknowledge your good works, you will allow me the cavils of an old scholar.

  Now in all this, we have forgotten someone. We have forgotten that man in a small office in Ottawa, an upstairs office on Sparks Street. It was a street in those days, a dim street of heavy buildings, though it is now a pedestrian mall where buskers come out to amuse the tourists who are in town to see the Parliament building all sharp and Gothic on their hill above the wide river. I often take an early morning bus from Montreal to Ottawa and go to the National Gallery to see the Morrices, some other things by his friend Cullen, and a few other favourites. There is a charming painting by a certain W. Blair Bruce, an artist contemporary with Morrice and Cullen. It’s called Joy of the Nereids and is a bubbling waterfall of nudes, a big painting, perhaps eight feet square, and in splendidly garish colours. It brings a smile to my face when all else fails. I recommend it. A sovereign cure for melancholy, and a splendid spread of naked belles.

  Belles with an ‘e’. An old-fashioned term, but appropriate enough to the period. Belle as in Annabelle, and you were, weren’t you? Nous n’irons plus au bois.

  The man in the office, we are forgetting him again. He thinks, sometimes, that he was born to be forgotten. A few years before, he was a manager for a large firm selling office supplies, but the business failed in the Depression, and he was thrown on the street. For a short while he was reduced to selling insurance, but a friend who felt sorry for him told the Canadia
n Committee that he was the perfect man to manage their office. Until then he had thought very little about his patriotic duties, and early in life had considered moving to Chicago, but he was willing enough to become a patriot if there was a job in it. His children are beginning to be grown, and in fact his son, a feckless boy who quit school last year and delivers groceries on his bicycle, spending his pocket money on smokes, will come of age just in time to join the army for the war which is now imminent. He will die on the beach at Dieppe, and his father will wonder forever afterward if they might have been friends someday. Our man keeps very busy during the war, for the Canadian Committee takes on a number of contributions to the war effort, some of them in collaboration with the YMCA, and at the end of the war, he will find a job running the Ottawa branch of the Y, and he will stay there until retirement. He has two daughters, but we will not enquire as to what destiny intends for them.