Byzantium Endures Read Free Page B

man. His contemporary cultural references were peculiar - to TV programmes and films in the main - yet he despised the English for their lack of ‘refined sensitivity’. He despised us, also, for our lack of idealism, for our pragmatism and for our hypocrisy, yet blamed almost every problem not attributable to Jews or Bolsheviks on our ‘weakness’ in relinquishing the Empire. Thanks to Lobkowitz’s insights, I realised life had wounded Pyat so deeply that he sought refuge in fantasy and bigotry; but it could sometimes be very hard to listen to the vile, and all-too-familiar, racialism with which he so frequently regaled us, particularly since by now he had come to regard me, at any rate, as a fellow spirit, ‘one of the few real intellectuals I have met in this country of yours’. He would insist that there was virtually no cultural life left in England. What there was, he said, betrayed our appalling decadence. His day-to-day experience was that of many other bourgeois European refugees who, speaking no English and having little money and few friends, arrived in England and America before the War. They had had to settle in the working-class districts of our big cities and encountered insular people ignorant of most of the political issues and cultural background they themselves considered essential. The nuances and humour of working-class Londoners were therefore beyond him and the genial tolerance of the majority seemed to him to support the view that the English were careless and lazy, and had somehow betrayed his trust in them. He had possessed a romantic attachment to this country, as you will see.
     
    It was this limited experience, of course, which led him to suppose that Mrs Cornelius was as famous as the Queen. All the people he met in the area seemed to possess greater interest in Mrs Cornelius (and more familiarity with her name) than they showed in, say, Adolf Hitler or Margaret Thatcher. This was why Pyat honestly believed the present generation would pay him more for his memoirs of a somewhat extraordinary but largely unknown Cockney lady than they would for his personal anecdotes of the great dictators. (I must admit that my own imagination was fired more by Mrs C than by Mussolini, but I realised that there were few who would share my enthusiasm. It could also be argued that I had a vested interest in her fame, as well as the colonel’s, for I had also made fictional use of him in one or two books, even before I had come to know him personally.)
     
    By the time I met him, his appearance had become fairly nondescript. He was an old Central-European, swarthy, hunched, ill-tempered, slightly grubby, with a seamed face, large lips and a big nose. His skin was unhealthy. He wore out-of-date, musty suits or sports clothes and his dress was distinguished only by the white golfing cap he wore winter and summer. He collected junk (the upper rooms of the flat were full of it) and owned a quantity of useless bicycle parts, petrol-engines, old spark-plugs, electrical bric-a-brac and so on: the place often smelled strongly of ancient engine-oil. His collection of photographs and greasy news-cuttings was the only evidence of his claims to have been handsome and agreeable. My wife thought he looked ‘lovable’, but all I saw was a fairly good-looking man with eyes which never seemed to focus on anything in particular. There were pictures of him standing by the gondolas of airships, sitting in the cockpits of seaplanes, taking part in the ceremonial opening of dams and bridges, the launching of ships. He had certainly travelled and been in the company of many well-known people. Mrs Cornelius appeared in only a few of the news-clippings, but most of his snapshots were of her, taken at different times in various countries, verifying her own claims to me to have ‘got about a bit when younger’. He put all this material, together with his manuscripts, into my safe-keeping. There was no question that he regarded me