Richard Temple. Patrick O’Brian

possible to be late for one of these indefinite meetings, which took place at night: later, at any rate, than he intended; for in that rabbit-warren of a house, now abandoned to a multitude of people with one room apiece, the servants’ staircase forked into three, and dark passages wandered here and there among the cisterns, promising short cuts. However, he had reached the door and he was in the act of feeling for the handle when on the other side of the matchboard partition a voice as clear as a bell said, ‘Richard Temple.’

      ‘Richard Temple, the new person in Andromeda’s old room, is also a painter.’

      ‘So she told me. Tell us about him.’

      ‘Oh, he is not so bad, really,’ said a man, as if he had been appealed to; and content with this tepid recommendation Richard would have opened the door if another voice had not cried out passionately, ‘No, no, no. He is a silly bastard. Temple is a very silly bastard.’

      Richard could not for the moment decide what face to put on this, and he stayed where he was.

      ‘That is no news,’ said Julia (and the treachery pierced him where he stood). ‘He told me he was the illegitimate son of somebody or other, but it was a great secret, and not to be known. By way of keeping it dark he told Kate Hassel, too.’

      ‘I mean bastard in the sense you say he’s a bastard. If you want to be literal you say basstard.’

      ‘Everybody has hoped they were illegits or foundlings at some period.’

      ‘Yes, but they do not go on with their mysterious nods and becks after sixteen. Missing heirs and strawberry marks are not grown up.’

      ‘Who is this? Who is your bastard?’

      ‘Richard Temple. The young man who has Andromeda’s old room.’

      ‘I know him. He is one of those popular phalluses.’

      ‘I do not know him.’

      ‘Of course you do. He is the young man who got Anne with child, the one she said practically invented art.’

      ‘He is at the Reynolds. They say he is very good.’

      ‘No they do not,’ said Spado, a fellow-student. ‘He is very slick and clever, if you like, but nobody says he is very good except the duller members of the staff. He came as protégé of Atherton’s, so naturally old Dover and old Wilson loved him from the first. He is just their cup of tea: very dainty and competent.’

      ‘No one could call poor Spado competent. Everybody else at the school says Temple is very good – he won the Haydon.’

      ‘Exactly,’ cried Spado, with an immense sneer in his voice to show how discreditable it was to win an official prize. ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit: that’s exactly what I object to. Painting is not an amusement.’ There was a great deal of confused noise at this, and the conversation broke up into several parts; there was movement, changing of seats, and suddenly, right next to the door, so near that his voice resonated in Richard’s ear like the diaphragm of an earphone, a new man said very confidentially, ‘There are always contacts, isn’t it absurd? I heard of him a great while ago, from my aunt’s cousins: an extraordinary fellow, who burgled his school, and set fire to it.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘This chap they are talking about – Temple.’

      ‘Oh? I do not know anything about him. But I am glad he set fire to his school; it sounds spirited. Most of these people are so wet.’

      At a little distance the bell-like voice called out, ‘Plage, Plage, come and sit with us, and tell us about our new neighbour. Plage knows him well.’

      ‘He has, I am afraid, no settled system of any sort,’ said Plage, ‘so that his conduct must not be strictly scrutinised. His affections are social and generous, perhaps; but his desire for imaginary consequence predominates over his attention to truth.’

      ‘He is also a frightful snob.’

      ‘He says that he has been at Munich, a fiction so easily detected that it is wonderful how he should have been so inconsiderate as to hazard it.’

      ‘He told me that he had visited the Isles of Langerhans too.’

      ‘The trouble with him …’ began Spado trenchantly, but he was overborne and no more could be heard except ‘Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit’ again and, ‘It is one of these little showy talents that fizzle out in a flood of decoration. He reminds me of Sert.’

      ‘We will not attend to poor jealous Spado. They all say that he is good but they all admit he is an ass; which is very strange.’

      ‘Why do you find it strange? What makes you think there is any relation between painting and common intelligence?’

      Spado repeated, ‘One of these talents that fizzle out in decoration,’ and an electric light, turned on by some lower switch, suddenly illuminated Richard, while a couple of even later guests came swarming up the stairs, peering upwards and hooting: retreat was impossible, and with as even a countenance as he could manage he opened the door and walked in. It was strange to see how the voices paired with the faces and how their knowing looks were all dissembled. Judas Julia smiled at him; his hosts looked welcoming; and it occurred to him that people often spoke like this behind his back.

      He had suspected for some time that he was not doing very well, but this whole-hearted, unequivocal confirmation went far beyond the worst of his dim, vague apprehension. (As for their praise, he did not reckon it any comfort; he scarcely noticed it – there was not one of them whose good opinion of his work meant anything at all.)

      Yet now from this remote impartial view what surprised him was not the way some of them ganged up on him while they let still more offensive youths get away with more, but rather the tolerance of others; for indeed he must have been a monster at that stage.

      Such elaborate, unnecessary poses, such attitudes … through the prodigious distance he could still see some of them. He beheld them without any tenderness, for the person back there was so disguised by fermenting youth, so drunk with it and removed from his ordinary nature, that he could feel little responsibility; he looked at them rather with astonishment, for he could no longer make out what some of the attitudes were meant to signify. Perhaps they were literally meaningless, like those profound looks of the young, in which it is hoped that someone else will supply the significance: perhaps they only meant that to épater les bourgeois was the highest aim in life.

      It was this ferment that caused him to depart from his natural solitude and to dread the loneliness that he had always accepted: he was a natural solitary, and he had little social talent or discrimination. How much was nature and how much circumstance? He had been brought up alone and he had passed many of his formative years without the ordinary contacts; yet on the other hand his father, with a totally different upbringing, had much the same want of tact. Whatever the cause, the result was much the same: he danced with the grace of a half-taught bear. Just as homosexuals often find life in a heterosexual society difficult because the heterosexual culture is concerned with handing on heterosexual experience, discussing heterosexual attitudes and providing literary bases for conduct, so that the homosexual has no great corpus of information and accepted attitudes to draw upon but is obliged to work out everything for himself from the start (a task beyond the capacity of most), so the solitary finds life in a gregarious society laborious and baffling. He is not provided with some of the natural qualities of the rest, and he does not understand the wider sense of the common social rules but clings to them as arbitrary formulæ: though indeed the comparison is not very just, for the solitary is rarely as committed to his solitude as the pederast to his boys. Yet however lame the comparison, Richard certainly found reality difficult to make out, and he certainly floundered more than most.

      The world in which he lived, it is true, was concerned more with things of the spirit than was the Stock Exchange; but this did not make it all of a piece nor prevent it from being pretty phoney in a great many of its aspects – there were the inevitable hordes of silly and dirty people in search of a literary justification