“And then sometimes he remembers, and picks them up again in a very enfeebled condition, and coaxes them to take a little nourishment.”
“What I want to know,” Zoe clattered in with an assortment of plates, knives and forks, “is how much he believes in them himself?”
Antonia expressed her opinion that he believed in them altogether; was possessed of an illimitable imagination which did not timidly boggle at fact or possibility, but soared in ascending spirals of ecstasy to a heaven wherein as he spoke them all things were.
“Well, what I say is that it’s all very well when he’s just creating people that don’t exist, to fill a gap in the conversation, or to point a moral, or draw attention to himself. But he’s dangerous when he prods about for material about his friends. The things he’s said about me....”
“Oh, you, Zoe!” Antonia affectionately ruffled the other girl’s hair. “You outstep even Cliffe’s genius! Have the good people on these premises been warned about the curse you bring?”
For Zoe carried about with her an atmosphere of sensational happenings—police-court happenings. When she moved into new quarters, they were bound presently to be the scene of a murder with some novel attendant features; or a burglary on a particularly large scale; or a police-raid would reveal the premises to be a house of lurid ill-fame; or a criminal would be found taking refuge.... And in all these violent happenings, Zoe, wide-eyed as ever and volubly innocent, somehow contrived to take the stage as a central figure; she it was who all unsuspecting had inspired the Polish barrow-vendor with the passion which had aroused his wife’s homicidal frenzy; she who had detained the master-burglar—God only knows how!—while the police were being stealthily summoned; she whom the procureuse on the first floor had essayed to tempt into white slavery.... “My dear, she thought I was only seventeen and knew nothing!” and afterwards testified the same to a genial and admiring magistrate; she in whose flat the criminal was discovered in hiding—“poor fellow—you simply should have seen how he looked at me!”
So, like a Banshee visiting a parvenu Irish family who didn’t even know they had one, Zoe was now dwelling above a gradation of Jewish tailors—a tailor and his family to each floor—all in feud with one another. Cliffe Kennedy foretold an imminent pogrom as being novel and appropriate to her present surroundings. Zoe’s subsequent description of events were always a delight to her audiences—and to herself; for though she pretended to extreme indignation at her victimage, yet no doubt but that her vanity was elated at being so conspicuously selected for the limelight.
It was during these narratives, animated by a complete pantomime of imitation, that a quality in Zoe which usually puzzled by its intangibility was washed broadly to the surface—a quality of eighteenth-century coarse heartiness, a fleshy stridency recalling the pictures of Hogarth....
Zoe read mostly of the Smollett, Fielding, Richardson and Sterne period. She had an odd liking for Dr Johnson and also for Dan Chaucer. The latter’s robust sensuality appealed to her. Though she often aped the loveable baby, she was a shrewd little body, well qualified to look after herself and to deal with her swarming adorers, of whom at least half as many existed in reality as in her rollicking fancy. Competent, too, at cooking and housekeeping—Pinto had seen to that.