Robertson Davies - The Rebel Angels

What a pitiable bag of tricks Urky was! Could it be that his whole life was as false as his outward man?

Was this charitable thinking? Paul tells us that Charity is many things, but nowhere does he tell us that it is blind.

It would certainly be false to the real Simon Darcourt to leave Urky out of The New Aubrey. And it would be equally false not to seek out and say something friendly to the much-beset Professor Ozias Froats, whom I once had known fairly well, in his great football days.

"No, I cannot give any undertaking that I will not get drunk this time. Why are you so against a pleasing elevation of the spirits, Molly?"

"Because it isn't pleasing. It's noisy and tiresome and makes people stare."

"What a middle-class attitude! I would have expected better from you, a scholar and a Rabelaisian. I expect you to have a scholarly freedom from vulgar prejudice, and a Rabelaisian's breadth of spirit. Get drunk with me, and you won't notice that the common horde is staring."

"I hate drunkenness. I've seen too much of it."

"Have you, indeed? There's a revelation – the first one I have ever had from you, Molly. You're a great girl for secrets."

"Yes, I am."

"It's inhuman, and probably unhealthy. Unbutton a little, Molly. Tell me the story of your life."

"I thought I was to hear the story of your life. A fair exchange. I pay for the dinner: you do the talking."

"But I can't talk into a void."

"I'm not a void; I have a splendid memory for what I hear – better, really, than for what I read."

"That's interesting. Sounds like a peasant background."

"Everybody has a peasant background, if you travel back in the right directions. I hate talking in a place like this. Too noisy."

"Well, you brought me here. The Rude Plenty – a student beanery."

"It's quite a decent Italian restaurant. And it's cheap for what you get."

"Maria, that is gross! You invite a needy and wretched man to dinner – because that's what we call ourselves in the Spook grace, remember, miseri homines et egentes – and you tell him to his face that it's a cheap joint, implying that you could do better for somebody else. You are not a scholar and a gentleman, you are a female pedant and a cad."

"Very likely. You can't bounce me with abuse, Parlabane."

"Brother John, if you please. Damn you, you are always so afraid somebody is going to bounce you, as you put it. What do you mean? Bounce you up and down on some yielding surface? What Rabelais calls the two-backed beast?"

"Oh shut up, you sound like Urky McVarish. Every man who can spell out the words picks up a few nasty expressions from the English Rabelais and tries them on women, and thinks he's a real devil. It gives me a royal pain in the arse, if you want a Rabelaisian opinion. By bounce I mean men always want to disconcert women and put them at a disadvantage; bouncing is genial, patronizing bullying and I won't put up with it."

"You wound me more deeply than I can say."

"No, I don't. You're a cultivated sponger, Brother John. But I don't care. You're interesting, and I'm happy to pay if you'll talk. I call it a fair exchange. I've told you, I hate talking against noise."

"Oh, this overbred passion for quiet! Totally unnatural. We are usually begotten with a certain amount of noise. For our first nine months we are carried in the womb in a positive hubbub – the loud tom-tom of the heart, the croaking and gurgling of the guts, which must sound like the noise of the rigging on a sailing-ship, and a mother's loud laughter – can you imagine what that must be like to Little Nemo, lurching and heaving in his watery bottle while the diaphragm hops up and down? Why are children noisy? Because, literally, they're bred to it. People find fault with their kids when they say they can do their homework better while the radio is playing, but the kids are simply trying to recover the primal racket in which they learned to be everything from a blob, to a fish, to a human creature. Silence is entirely a sophisticated, acquired taste. Silence is anti-human."

"What do you want to eat?"

"Let's start with a big go of shrimp. Frozen, undoubtedly, but as it's the best you mean to do for me, let's give ourselves up to third-class luxury. And lots of very hot sauce. To follow that, an omelette frittata with chicken stuffing. Then spaghetti, again; it was quite passable last time, but double the order, and I'm sure they can manage a more piquant sauce. Tell the chef to throw in a few extra peppers; my friend will pay. Then zabaglione, and don't spare the booze in the mixture. We'll top off with lots and lots of cheese; the goatiest and messiest you have, because I like my cheese opinionated. We'll need at least a loaf of that crusty Italian bread, unsalted butter, some green stuff – a really good belch-lifting radish, if you have such a thing – and some garlic butter to rub on this and that, as we need it. Coffee nicely frothed. Now as for drink – God, what a list! Well, no use complaining; let's have fiasco each of Orvieto and Chianti, and don't chill the Orvieto, because God never intended that and I won't be a party to it. And we'll talk about Strega when things are a little further advanced. And make it quick."

The waitress cocked an eye at me, and I nodded.

"I've ordered well, don't you think? A good meal should be a performance; the Edwardians understood that. Their meals were a splendid form of theatre, like a play by Pinero, with skilful preparation, expectation, denouement, and satisfactory ending. The well-made play: the well-made meal. Drama one can eat. Then of course Shaw and Galsworthy came along and the theatre and the meals became high-minded: the plays were robbed of their delicious adulteries and the meals became messes of pond-weed, and a boiled egg if you were really stuffing yourself?"

"Is this an introduction to the story of your life?"

"Just about anything leads to the story of my life. Well, here goes: I was born of well-off but honest parents in this city of Toronto, forty-five heavily packed years ago. Your historical sense fills in what is necessary: the war-clouds gathering, Hitler bestrides the narrow world like a Colossus and as usual none of the politicians know a bastard when they see one; war, and fear clutches the heart as Mother Britain fights bravely and alone (though of course the French and several other nations don't quite agree). The US stumbles in, late and loud. At last, victory and a new world rises somewhat shakily on the ruins of the old. Russia, once a wartime chum, resumes its status as a peacetime bum. During all this uproar I went to school, and quite a good school it was, because not only did I learn a few things and acquire an early taste for philosophy, but I met some very glittering and rich boys, like David Staunton, and some brilliantly clever boys, like your present boss Clement Hollier. We were friends and contemporaries – he's a few months my senior; he thought I was cleverer than I was, because I was a fast talker and could put all my goods in the shop-window, but I knew that he was really the clever one, though he had great trouble putting words together. He stood by me through a very rough time, and I'm grateful. Then I went to the University and swept through the heavens of Spook like a comet, and was such a fool that I had the gall to feel sorry and a little contemptuous of Clem, who had to work hard for a few not very glittering honours.

"I gloried in the freedom of the University. Of course I had no idea what a university is: it's not a river to be fished, it's an ocean in which the young should bathe, and give themselves up to the tides and the currents. But I was a fisherman, and a successful one. Clem was becoming a strong ocean swimmer, though I couldn't see that. But this is too solemn, and here come the shrimps.