"Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powell Anthony)

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CROSSING THE ROAD by the bombed-out public house on the corner and pondering the mystery which dominates vistas framed by a ruined door, I felt for some reason glad the place had not yet been rebuilt. A direct hit had excised even the ground floor, so that the basement was revealed as a sunken garden, or site of archaeological excavation long abandoned, where great sprays of willow herb and ragwort flowered through cracked paving stones; only a few broken milk bottles and a laceless boot recalling contemporary life. In the midst of this sombre grotto five or six fractured steps had withstood the explosion and formed a projecting island of masonry on the summit of which rose the door. Walls on both sides were shrunk away, but along its lintel, in niggling copybook handwriting, could still be distinguished the word Ladies. Beyond, on the far side of the twin pillars and crossbar, nothing whatever remained of that promised retreat, the threshold falling steeply to an abyss of rubble; a triumphal arch erected laboriously by dwarfs, or the gateway to some unknown, forbidden domain, the lair of sorcerers.

Then, all at once, as if such luxurious fantasy were not already enough, there came from this unexplored country the song, strong and marvellously sweet, of the blonde woman on crutches, that itinerant prima donna of the highways whose voice I had not heard since the day, years before, when Moreland and I had listened in Gerrard Street, the afternoon he had talked of getting married; when we had bought the bottle labelled Tawny Wine (port flavour) which even Moreland had been later unwilling to drink. Now once more above the rustle of traffic that same note swelled on the grimy air, contriving a transformation scene to recast those purlieus into the vision of an oriental dreamland, artificial, if you like, but still quite alluring under the shifting clouds of a cheerless Soho sky.

‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?’

In the end most things in life – perhaps all things – turn out to be appropriate. So it was now, for here before me lay the vestigial remains of the Mortimer where we had first met, the pub in which our friendship had begun. As an accompaniment to Moreland’s memory music was natural, even imperative, but the repetition of a vocal performance so stupendously apt was scarcely to be foreseen. A, floorless angle of the wall to which a few lumps of plaster and strips of embossed paper still adhered was all that remained of the alcove where we had sat, a recess which also enclosed the mechanical piano into which, periodically, Moreland would feed a penny to invoke one of those fortissimo tunes belonging to much the same period as the blonde singer’s repertoire. She was closer now, herself hardly at all altered by the processes of time – perhaps a shade plumper – working her way down the middle of the empty street, until, framed within the rectangle of the doorway, she seemed to be gliding along under the instrumentality of some occult power and about to sail effortlessly through its enchanted portal:

‘Pale hands, pink-tipped, like lotus buds that float

On those cool waters where we used to dwell…’

Moreland and I had afterwards discussed the whereabouts of the Shalimar, and why the locality should have been the haunt of pale hands and those addicted to them.

‘A nightclub, do you think?’ Moreland had said. ‘A bordel, perhaps. Certainly an establishment catering for exotic tastes – and I expect not very healthy ones either. How I wish there were somewhere like that where we could spend the afternoon. That woman’s singing has unsettled me. What nostalgia. It was really splendid. “Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway far?” What a pertinent question. But where can we go? I feel I must be amused. Do have a brilliant idea. I am in the depths of gloom to be precise. Let’s live for the moment.’

‘Tea at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant? That would be suitably oriental after the song.’

‘What do you think? I haven’t been there for ages. It wasn’t very exciting on my last visit. Besides, I never felt quite the same about Casanova’s after that business of Barnby and the waitress. It would be cheaper to drink tea at home – and no less Chinese as I have a packet of Lapsang.’

‘As you like.’

‘But why did they dwell on the cool waters? I can’t understand the preposition. Were they in a boat?’

A habit of Moreland’s was to persist eternally with any subject that caught his fancy, a characteristic to intensify in him resolute approach to a few things after jettisoning most outward forms of seriousness; a love of repetition sometimes fatiguing to friends, when Moreland would return unmercifully to some trivial matter less amusing to others than to himself.

‘Do you think they were in a boat?’ he went on. ‘The poem is called a Kashmiri Love Song. My aunt used to sing it. Houseboats are a feature of Kashmir, aren’t they?’

‘Kipling characters go up there to spend their leave.’

‘When we lived in Fulham my aunt used to sing that song to the accompaniment of the pianoforte.’

He paused in the street and offered there and then a version of the piece as loudly trilled by his aunt, interrupting himself once or twice to emphasise contrast with the rendering we had just heard. Moreland’s parents had died when he was a child. This aunt, who played a large part in his personal mythology, had brought him up. Oppressed, no doubt, by her nephew’s poor health and by thought of the tubercular complaint that had killed his father (who had some name as teacher of music), she was said to have ‘spoiled’ Moreland dreadfully. There were undeniable signs of something of the sort. She had probably been awed, too, by juvenile brilliance; for although Moreland had never been, like Carolo, an infant prodigy – that freakish, rather uncomfortable humour of only musical genius – he showed alarming promise as a boy. The aunt was also married to a musician, a man considerably older than herself whose generally impecunious circumstances had not prevented shadowy connexions with a more sublime world than that in which most of his daily life was spent. He had heard Wagner conduct at the Albert Hall; Liszt play at the Crystal Palace, seen the Abbé’s black habit and shock of iron-grey hair pass through Sydenham; drunk a glass of wine with Tchaikowsky at Cambridge when the Russian composer had come to receive an honorary degree. These peaks are not to be exaggerated. Moreland had been brought up impecuniously too, but in a tradition of hearing famous men discussed on familiar terms; not merely prodigies read of in books, but also persons having to knock about the world like everyone else. The heredity was not unlike Barnby’s, with music taking the place of the graphic arts.

‘Perhaps this was a houseboat of ill fame.’

‘What an enjoyable idea,’ Moreland said. ‘At the rapturous moments referred to in the lyric one would hear the water, if I may be so nautical, lapping beneath the keel. An overwhelming desire for something of the sort besets me this afternoon. Active emotional employment – like chasing an attractive person round some wet laurels.’

‘Out of the question, I’m afraid.’

‘What a pity London has not got a Luna Park. I should like to ride on merry-go-rounds and see freaks. Do you remember when we went on the Ghost Railway – when you dash towards closed doors and tear down hill towards a body across the line?’

In the end we decided against Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant that day, instead experimenting, as I have said, with the adventitious vintages of Shaftesbury Avenue, a thoroughfare traversed on the way to Moreland’s flat, which lay in an undistinguished alley on the far side of Oxford Street, within range of Mr Deacon’s antique shop. Once there, after climbing an interminable staircase, you found an unexpectedly neat room. Unconformist, without discipline in many ways, Moreland had his precise, tidy side, instilled in him perhaps by his aunt; mirrored – so Maclintick used to say – in his musical technique. The walls were hung with framed caricatures of dancers in Diaghilev’s early ballets, coloured pictures drawn by the Legat brothers, found by Moreland in a portfolio outside a second-hand book shop; Pavlova; Karsavina; Fokine; others, too, whom I have forgotten. The few books in a small bookcase by the bed included a tattered paper edition of Apollinaire’s Alcools; one of the Sherlock Holmes volumes; Grinling’s History of the Great Northern Railway. An upright piano stood against one wall, although Moreland, so he always insisted, was no great performer on that instrument. There were always flowers in the vase on the table when Moreland could afford them, which in those days was not often.

‘Do you mind drinking wine from teacups, one of them short of a handle? Rather sordid, I’m afraid. I managed to break my three glasses the other night when I came home from a party and was trying to put them away so that the place might look more habitable when I woke up in the morning.’

Following a preliminary tasting, we poured the residue of the bottle down the lavatory.

‘If you were legally allowed three wives,’ asked Moreland, as we watched the cascade of amber foam gush noisily away, ‘whom would you choose?’

Those were the days when I loved Jean Duport. Moreland knew nothing of her, nor did I propose to tell him. Instead, I offered three names from the group of female acquaintances we enjoyed in common, speaking without undue concern in making this triple decision. To tell the truth, in spite of what I felt for Jean, marriage, although looming up on all sides, still seemed a desperate venture to be postponed almost indefinitely.

‘And you?’

Moreland possessed that quality, rather rare among men, of not divulging names. At the same time, the secretiveness he employed where his own love affairs were concerned was not without an element of exhibitionism. He was always willing to arouse a little unsatisfied curiosity.

‘I am going to marry,’ said Moreland, ‘I have decided that. To make up my mind is always a rare thing with me, but the moment for decision has arrived. Otherwise I shall become just another of those depressed and depressing intellectual figures who wander from party to party, finding increasing difficulty in getting off with anyone – and in due course suspected of auto-erotic habits. Besides, Nietzsche advocates living dangerously.’

‘If you have decided to base your life on the philosophy of writers of that period, Strindberg considered even the worst marriage better than no marriage at all.’

‘And Strindberg earned the right to speak on that subject. As you probably know, his second wife kept a nightclub, within living memory, not a thousand miles from this very spot. Maclintick, of all people, was once taken there.’

‘But you haven’t told me who your wife – your three wives – will be.’

‘There is only one really. I don’t know whether she will accept me.’

‘Oh, come. You are talking like a Victorian novel.’

‘I will tell you when we next meet.’

‘This is intolerable after I offered my names.’

‘But I am serious.’

I dismissed the notion that Moreland could be contemplating marriage with the heroine of a recent story of Barnby’s about one of Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies.

‘Moreland pawned the gold cigarette case Sir Magnus Donners gave him after writing the music for that film,’ Barnby had said, ‘just in order to stand her dinner at the Savoy. The girl had a headache that night – curse, too, I expect – and most of the money went on taking her back to Golders Green in a taxi.’

Even if that story were untrue, the toughness of Moreland’s innate romanticism in matters of the heart certainly remained unimpaired by gravitating from one hopeless love affair to another. That fact had become clear after knowing him for even a few months. Wit, shrewdness about other aspects of life, grasp of the arts, fundamental good nature, none seemed any help in solving his emotional problems; to some extent these qualities, as displayed by him, were even a hindrance. Women found him amusing, were intrigued by his unusual appearance and untidy clothes, heard that he was brilliant, so naturally he had his ‘successes’; but these, on the whole, were ladies with too desperate an enthusiasm for music. Moreland did not care for that. He liked wider horizons. His delicacy in coping with such eventualities need not be exaggerated. Undoubtedly, he allowed himself reasonable latitude with girls of that sort. Even so, the fact remained that, although fully aware of the existence, the greater effectiveness, of an attitude quite contrary to his own, he remained a hopeless addict of what he used to call, in the phrase of the day, a ‘princesse lointaine complex’. This approach naturally involved him in falling in love with women connected in one way or another with the theatre.

‘It doesn’t matter whether it is the Leading Lady or Second Slave,’ he said, ‘I myself am always cast as a stage-door johnny of thirty or forty years back. As a matter of fact the hours I have to keep in my profession compel association with girls who have to stay up late – by which I do not necessarily mean tarts.’

All this was very alien to Barnby, himself enjoying to such a high degree the uncomplicated, direct powers of attack that often accompany a gift for painting or sculpture.

‘Barnby never has to be in the mood to work,’ Moreland used to say. ‘The amount of material he can get through is proportionate to the hour he rises in the morning. In much the same way, if he sees a girl he likes, all he has to do is to ask her to sleep with him. Some do, some don’t it is one to him.’

Barnby would not in the least have endorsed this picture of himself. His own version was that of a man chronically overburdened, absolutely borne down by sensitive emotional stresses. All the same, in contrasting the two of them, there was something to be said for Moreland’s over-simplification. Their different methods were, as it happened, displayed in high relief on the occasion of my first meeting with Moreland.

The Mortimer (now rebuilt in a displeasingly fashionable style and crowded with second-hand-car salesmen) was even in those days regarded by the enlightened as a haunt of ‘bores’; but, although the beer was indifferent and the saloon bar draughty, a sprinkling of those connected with the arts, especially musicians, was usually to be found there. The chief charm of the Mortimer for Moreland, who at that time rather prided himself on living largely outside that professionally musical world which, towards the end of his life, so completely engulfed him, was provided by the mechanical piano. The clientele was anathema; this Moreland always conceded, using that very phrase, a favourite one of his.

For my own part, I never cared for the place either. I had been introduced there by Barnby (met for the first time only a few weeks before) who was coming on to the Mortimer that evening after consultation with a frame-maker who lived in the neighbourhood. Barnby was preparing for a show in the near future. Those were the days when his studio was above Mr Deacon’s antique shop; when he was pursuing Baby Wentworth and about to paint those murals for the Donners-Brebner Building, which were destroyed, like the Mortimer, by a bomb during the war. I had recently returned, I remember, from staying in the country with the Walpole-Wilsons. It must, indeed, have been only a week before Mr Deacon injured himself fatally by slipping on the stair at the Bronze Monkey (disqualified as licensed premises the same month as the result of a police raid), and died in hospital some days later, much regretted by the many elements – some of them less than tolerable – who made his antique shop their regular port of call.

It was pouring with rain that night and the weather had turned much colder. Barnby had not yet arrived when I came into the bar, which was emptier than usual. Two or three elderly women dressed in black, probably landladies off duty, were drinking Guinness and grumbling in one corner. In the other, where the mechanical piano was situated, sat Mr Deacon himself, hatless as usual, his whitening hair hanging lankly over a woollen muffler, the coarse mesh of which he might himself have knitted. His regular autumn exhalation of eucalyptus, or some other specific against the common cold (to which Mr Deacon was greatly subject), hung over that end of the room. He was always preoccupied with his health and the Mortimer’s temperature was too low for comfort. His long, arthritic fingers curled round half a pint of bitter, making an irregular mould or beading about the glass, recalling a medieval receptacle for setting at rest a drinking horn. The sight of Mr Deacon always made me think of the Middle Ages because of his resemblance to a pilgrim, a mildly sinister pilgrim, with more than a streak of madness in him, but then in every epoch a proportion of pilgrims must have been sinister, some mad as well. I was rather snobbishly glad that the streets had been too wet for his sandals. Instead, his feet were encased in dark blue felt snowboots against the puddles. That evening Barnby and I had planned to see a von Stroheim revival – was it Foolish Wives? Possibly Barnby had suggested that Mr Deacon should accompany us to the cinema, although as a rule he could be induced to sit through only Soviet films, and those for purely ideological reasons. Mr Deacon was in the best of form that night. He was surrounded by a group of persons none of whom I knew.

‘Good evening, Nicholas,’ he said, in his deep, deep, consciously melodious voice, which for some reason always made me feel a trifle uneasy, ‘what brings you to this humble hostelry? I thought you frequented marble halls.’

‘I am meeting Ralph here. We are going to a film. Neither of us had an invitation to a marble hall tonight.’

‘The cinema!’ said Mr Deacon, with great contempt. ‘I am astonished you young men can waste your time in the cinema. Have you nothing else to do with yourselves? I should have thought better of Barnby. Why, I’d as soon visit the Royal Academy. Sooner, in fact. There would be the chance of a good laugh there.’

Although it was by then many years since he had set brush to canvas, and in spite of his equal disdain for all manifestations of ‘modern art’, Mr Deacon never tired of expressing contempt for Academicians and their works.

‘Are cinemas worse than haunting taverns on your part?’

‘A just rebuke,’ said Mr Deacon, delighted at this duplication of his own sententious tone, ‘infinitely just. But, you see, I have come here to transact a little business. Not only to meet les jeunes. True, I would much rather be forwarding the cause of international disarmament tonight by selling War Never Pays! outside the Albert Hall, but we must all earn our bread and butter. My poor little broadsheet would bring in nothing to me personally. Just a penny for a noble cause. For my goods I have to make a charge. You seem to forget, Nicholas, that I am just a poor antiquaire these days.’

Mr Deacon spoke this last sentence rather unctuously. Inclined to mark his prices high, he was thought to make at least a respectable livelihood from his wares. The fact that a certain air of transgression still attached to his past added attraction in the eyes of some customers. It was a long time since the days when, as an artist of independent means living at Brighton, he had been acquainted with my parents; days before that unfortunate incident in Battersea

Park had led to Mr Deacon’s prolonged residence abroad. A congenital taste for Greco-Roman themes, which had once found expression in his own paintings, now took the form of a pronounced weakness for buying up statuettes and medallions depicting gods and heroes of classical times. These objects, not always easily saleable, cluttered the shop, the fashion for such ornaments as an adjunct to Empire or Regency furniture having by then scarcely begun. Occasionally he would find on his hands some work of art too pagan in its acceptance of sexual licence to be openly displayed. Such dubious items were kept, according to Barnby, in a box under Mr Deacon’s bed. In the underworld through which he now moved, business and pleasure, art and politics, life – as it turned out finally – death itself, all had become a shade disreputable where Mr Deacon was concerned. However, even in these morally reduced circumstances, he preferred to regard himself as not wholly cut off from a loftier society. He still, for example, enjoyed such triumphal contacts as the afternoon when Lady Huntercombe (wearing one of her Mrs Siddons hats) had arrived unexpectedly on his doorstep; after an hour bearing away with her an inlaid tea-caddy in Tunbridge-ware, for which, in spite of creditable haggling on her own part, she had been made to pay almost as much as if purchased in Bond Street. She had promised to return – in a phrase Mr Deacon loved to repeat – ‘When my ship comes in.’

‘Ridiculous woman,’ he used to say delightedly, ‘as if we did not all know that the Huntercombes are as rich as Crœsus.’

One of the persons surrounding Mr Deacon at the table in the Mortimer, a young man muffled to the ears in a manner which gave him the appearance of a taxi-driver wearing several overcoats, now broke off the energetic conversation he had been carrying on with his neighbour, a fattish person in gold-rimmed spectacles, and tapped Mr Deacon lightly on the arm with a rolled-up newspaper.

‘I should certainly not go near the Albert Hall if I were you, Edgar,’ he said. ‘It would be too great a risk. Someone might seize you and compel you to listen to Brahms. In fact, after the way you have been talking this evening, you would probably yield to temptation and enter of your own free will. I would not trust you an inch where Brahms is concerned, Edgar. Not an inch.’

Letting go his glass, Mr Deacon lifted a gnarled hand dramatically, at the same time crooking one of his heavily jointed fingers.

‘Moreland,’ he said, ‘I wish to hear no more of your youthful prejudices – certainly no more of your sentiments regarding the orchestration of the Second Piano Concerto.’

The young man began to laugh derisively. Although giving this impression of wearing several overcoats, he was in fact dressed only in one, a threadbare, badly stained garment, from the pockets of which protruded several more newspapers in addition to that with which he had demanded Mr Deacon’s attention.

‘As I was remarking, Nicholas,’ said Mr Deacon, turning once more in my own direction and giving at the same time a smile to express tolerance for youthful extremism of whatever colour, ‘I have come to this gin palace primarily to inspect an object of virtu – a classical group in some unspecified material, to be precise. I shall buy it, if its beauty satisfies me. Truth Unveiled by Time – in the Villa Borghese, you remember. I must say in the original marble Bernini has made the wench look as unpalatable as the heartless quality she represents. A reproduction of this work was found at the Caledonian Market by a young person with whom I possess a slight acquaintance. He thought I might profitably dispose of same on his behalf.’

‘I hope the young person is an object of virtue himself,’ said Moreland. ‘I presume the sex is masculine. We don’t want anything in the nature of Youth, rather than Truth, being unveiled by Time. Can we trust you, Edgar?’

Mr Deacon gave one of his deep, rather stagy chuckles. He lightly twitched his shoulders.

‘Nothing could be more proper than my relationship with this young gentleman,’ he said. ‘I met his mother in the summer when we were both reinvigorating ourselves at the same vegetarian communal holiday – she, I think, primarily as a measure of economy rather than on account of any deeply felt anti-carnivorous convictions on her own part. A most agreeable, sensible woman I found her, quite devoted to her boy. She reminded me in some ways of my own dear Mama, laid to rest in Kensal Green this many a long year. Her lad turned up to meet her at Paddington when we travelled back together. That was how he and I first came to know one another. Does that satisfy your rapacious taste for scandal, Moreland? I hope so.’

Mr Deacon spoke archly, rather than angrily. It was clear from his manner that he liked, even admired Moreland, from whom he seemed prepared to accept more teasing than he would ever have allowed to most of his circle.

‘Anyway, the lad was not here when I arrived,’ he went on, briskly turning once more towards myself, ‘so I joined this little party of music-makers sitting by their desolate stream. I have been having some musical differences with Moreland here who becomes very dictatorial about his subject. I expect you know each other already. What? No? Then I must introduce you. This is Mr Jenkins – Mr Moreland, Mr Gossage, Mr Maclintick, Mr Carolo.’

The revolutionary bent of his political opinions had never modified the formality of Mr Deacon’s manners. His companions, on the other hand, with the exception of Gossage who gave a smirk, displayed no outward mark of conventional politeness. In fact none of the rest of them showed the smallest wish to meet anyone outside their own apparently charmed circle. All the same, I immediately liked something about Hugh Moreland. Although I had never seen him in Mr Deacon’s shop, nor in Barnby’s studio, I knew of him already as a figure of some standing in the musical world: composer: conductor: pianist: I was uncertain of his precise activities. Barnby, talking about Moreland, had spoken of incidental music for a semi-private venture (a film version of Lysistrata made in France) which Sir Magnus Donners had backed. Since music holds for me none of that hard, cold-blooded, almost mathematical pleasure I take in writing and painting, I could only guess roughly where Moreland’s work – enthusiastically received in some circles, heartily disliked in others – stood in relation to the other arts. In those days I had met no professional musicians. Later, when I ran across plenty of these through Moreland himself, I began to notice their special peculiarities, moral and physical. Several representative musical types were present, as it happened, that evening in addition to Moreland himself, Maclintick and Gossage being music critics, Carolo a violinist.

Only since knowing Barnby had I begun to frequent such society as was collected that night in the Mortimer, which, although it soon enough absorbed me, still at that time represented a world of high adventure. The hiatus between coming down from the university and finding a place for myself in London had comprised, with some bright spots, an eternity of boredom. I used to go out with unexciting former undergraduate acquaintances like Short (now a civil servant); less often with more dashing, if by then more remote, people like Peter Templer. Another friend, Charles Stringham, had recently risen from the earth to take me to Mrs Andriadis’s party, only to disappear again; but that night had nevertheless opened the road that led ultimately to the Mortimer: as Mr Deacon used to say of Barnby’s social activities, ‘the pilgrimage from the sawdust floor to the Aubusson carpet and back again’. At the time, of course, none of this took shape in my mind; no pattern was apparent of the kind eventually to emerge.

Moreland, like myself, was then in his early twenties. He was formed physically in a ‘musical’ mould, classical in type, with a massive, Beethoven-shaped head, high forehead, temples swelling outwards, eyes and nose somehow bunched together in a way to make him glare at times like a High Court judge about to pass sentence. On the other hand, his short, dark, curly hair recalled a dissipated cherub, a less aggressive, more intellectual version of Folly in Bronzino’s picture, rubicund and mischievous, as he threatens with a fusillade of rose petals the embrace of Venus and Cupid; while Time in the background, whiskered like the Emperor Franz-Josef, looms behind a blue curtain as if evasively vacating the bathroom. Moreland’s face in repose, in spite of this cherubic, humorous character, was not without melancholy too; his flush suggesting none of that riotously healthy physique enjoyed by Bronzino’s – and, I suppose, everyone else’s – Folly. Moreland had at first taken little notice of Mr Deacon’s introduction; now he suddenly caught my eye, and, laughing loudly, slapped the folded newspaper sharply on the table.

‘Tell us more about your young friend, Edgar,’ he said, still laughing and looking across at me. ‘What does he do for a living? Are we to understand that he wholly supports himself by finding junk at the Caledonian Market and vending it to connoisseurs of beauty like yourself?’

‘He has stage connexions, Moreland, since you are so inquisitive,’ said Mr Deacon, still speaking with accentuated primness. ‘He was trained to dance – as he quaintly puts it – “in panto”. Drury Lane was the peg upon which he hung his dreams. Now he dares to nourish wider ambitions. I am told, by the way, that the good old-fashioned harlequinade which I used so much to enjoy as a small boy has become a thing of the past. This lad would have made a charming Harlequin. Another theatrical friend of mine – rather a naughty young man – knows this child and thinks highly of his talent.’

‘Why is your other friend naughty?’

‘You ask too many questions, Moreland.’

‘But I am intrigued to know, Edgar. We all are.’

‘I call him naughty for many reasons,’ said Mr Deacon, giving a long-drawn sigh, ‘not the least of them because some years ago at a party he introduced me to an Italian, a youth whose sole claim to distinction was his alleged profession of gondolier, who turned out merely to have worked for a short time as ticket-collector on the vaporetto. A delightfully witty pleasantry, no doubt.’

There was some laughter at this anecdote, in which Maclintick did not join. Indeed, Maclintick had been listening to the course of conversation with unconcealed distaste. It was clear that he approved neither of Mr Deacon himself, nor of the suggestions implicit in Moreland’s badinage. Like Moreland, Maclintick belonged to the solidly built musical type, a physical heaviness already threatening obesity in early middle age. Broad-shouldered, yet somehow narrowing towards his lower extremities, his frontal elevation gave the impression of a large triangular kite about to float away into the sky upon the fumes of Irish whiskey, which, even above the endemic odours of the Mortimer and the superimposed insistence of Mr Deacon’s eucalyptus, freely emanated from the quarter in which he sat. Maclintick’s calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.

The minute circular lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles, set across the nose of a pug dog, made one think of caricatures of Thackeray or President Thiers, imposing upon him the air of a bad-tempered doctor. Maclintick, as I discovered in due course, was indeed bad-tempered, his manner habitually grumpy and disapproving, even with Moreland, to whom he was devoted; a congenital lack of amiability he appeared perpetually, though quite unsuccessfully, attempting to combat with copious draughts of Irish whiskey, a drink always lauded by him to the disadvantage of Scotch.

‘I should be careful what you handle from the Caledonian Market, Deacon,’ Maclintick said, ‘I’m told stolen goods often drift up there. I don’t expect you want a stiff sentence for receiving.’

He spoke for the first time since I had been sitting at the table, uttering the words in a high, caustic voice.

‘Nonsense, Maclintick, nonsense,’ said Mr Deacon shortly.

His tone made obvious that any dislike felt by Maclintick for himself – a sentiment not much concealed – was on his own side heartily reciprocated.

‘Are you suggesting our friend Deacon is really a “fence”?’ asked Gossage giggling, as if coy to admit knowledge of even this comparatively unexotic piece of thieves’ jargon. ‘I am sure he is nothing of the sort. Why, would you have us take him for a kind of modern Fagin?’

‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ said Maclintick speaking more amicably this time, probably not wanting to exacerbate Mr Deacon beyond a certain point. ‘Just warning him to take proper care of his reputation which I should not like to see tarnished.’

He smiled a little uneasily at Moreland to show this attack on Mr Deacon (which the victim seemed rather to enjoy) was not intended to include Moreland. I learnt later how much Moreland was the object of admiration, almost of reverence, on the part of Maclintick. This high regard was not only what Maclintick himself – on that rather dreadful subsequent occasion – called ‘the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist’, but also because of an affection for Moreland as a friend that surpassed ordinary camaraderie, becoming something protective, almost maternal, if that word could be used of someone who looked like Maclintick. Indeed, under his splenetic exterior Maclintick harboured all kind of violent, imperfectly integrated sentiments. Moreland, for example, impressed him, perhaps rightly, as a young man of matchless talent, ill equipped to face a materialistic world. At the same time, Maclintick’s own hag-ridden temperament also punished him for indulging in what he regarded as sentimentality. His tremendous disapproval of sexual inversion, encountered intermittently in circles he chose to frequent, was compensation for his own sense of guilt at this hero-worshipping of Moreland; his severity with Gossage, another effort to right the balance.

‘It’s nice when you meet someone fresh like that once in a while,’ said Gossage.

He was a lean, toothy little man, belonging to another common musical type, whose jerky movements gave him no rest. He toyed nervously with his bow tie, pince-nez and moustache, the last of which carried little conviction of masculinity. Gossage’s voice was like that of a ventriloquist’s doll. He giggled nervously, no doubt fearing Maclintick’s castigation of such a remark.

‘Personal charm,’ said Mr Deacon trenchantly, ‘has unfortunately no connexion with personal altruism. However, I fully expect to be made to wait at my age. Lateness is one of the punishments justly visited by youth upon those who have committed the atrocious crime of coming to riper years. Besides, quite apart from this moral and æsthetic justification, none of the younger generation seem to know the meaning of punctuality even when the practice of that cardinal virtue is in their own interests.’

All this time Carolo, the last member of the party to be introduced, had not opened his mouth. He sat in front of a mixed vermouth with an air of slighted genius. I thought, that evening, Carolo was about the same age as Moreland and myself, but found afterwards he was older than he appeared. His youthful aspect was perhaps in part legacy of his years as a child prodigy.

‘Carolo’s real name is Wilson or Wilkinson or Parker,’ Moreland told me later, ‘something rather practical and healthy like that. A surname felt to ring too much of plain common sense. Almost the first public performance of music I remember being taken to by my aunt was to hear Carolo play at the Wigmore Hall. I never thought then that one of these days Carolo and I would rub shoulders in the Mortimer.’

Carolo’s face was pale and drawn, his black hair arranged in delicate waves, this consciously ‘romantic’ appearance and demeanour altogether misrepresenting his character, which was, according to Moreland, far from imaginative.

‘Carolo is only interested in making money,’ Moreland said, ‘and who shall blame him? Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem much good at getting it these days. He also likes the girls a bit.’

Daydreams of wealth or women must have given Carolo that faraway look which never left him; sad and silent, he contemplated huge bank balances and voluptuous revels.

‘Why, there is my young friend,’ said Mr Deacon, rising to his feet. ‘If you will forgive me, Nicholas… Moreland… and the rest of you…’

On the whole Mr Deacon was inclined to conceal from his acquaintances such minor indiscretions in which he might still, in this his later life, indulge. He seemed to regret having allowed himself to give the impression that one of his ‘petites folies’, as he liked to term them, was on foot that night. The temptation to present matters by implication in such a light had been too much for his vanity. Now, too late, he tried to be more guarded, striding forward hastily and blocking the immediate advance of the young man who had just entered the Mortimer, carrying in his arms, as if it were a baby, a large brown paper parcel.

‘Why,’ said Moreland, ‘after all that, Edgar’s mysterious friend turns out to be Norman. Did you ever hear such a thing?’

By suddenly sidestepping with an artificial elegance of movement, the young man bearing the parcel avoided Mr Deacon’s attempt to exclude him from our company, and approached the table. He was lightly built, so thin that scarcely any torso seemed to exist under his coat. It was easy to see why Mr Deacon had assigned him the role of Harlequin. Sad-eyed and pert, he was an urchin with good looks of that curiously puppet-like formation which designate certain individuals as actors or dancers; anonymity of feature and flexibility of body fitting them from birth to play an assumed part.

‘Hullo, my dear,’ he said, addressing himself to Moreland. ‘I hear you saw the new Stravinsky ballet when you were in Paris.’

His voice came out in a drawl, half cockney, half drawing-room comedy, as he changed the position of his feet, striking a pose that immediately proclaimed a dancer’s professional training.

‘Speaking choreographically-’ Moreland began.

Mr Deacon, put out at finding his ‘young friend’ already known to most of the company, once more made an effort to intervene and keep the boy to himself, determined that any negotiations conducted between them should be transacted in at least comparative privacy.

‘What?’ he said, scarcely trying to hide his annoyance. ‘You know each other, do you? How nice we should all be friends. However, Norman and I must discuss business of our own. The sacred rites of bargaining must not be overheard.’

He tittered angrily, and laid one of those gothic hands of his on the shoulder of the young man called Norman, who, as if to indicate that he must bow to the inevitable, waved dramatically to Moreland, as he allowed himself to be shepherded to the far end of the bar. There, he and Mr Deacon untied the parcel between them, at the same time folding the brown paper round it, so that they themselves should be, if possible, the sole persons to observe the contents. Mr Deacon must have felt immediately satisfied that he wanted to buy the cast (which reached his shop, although, as it turned out, only for a brief moment), because, after a muttered conversation, they wrapped up the parcel again and left the Mortimer together. As they went through the door Moreland shouted goodnight, a farewell to which only the young man responded by giving another wave of his hand.

‘Who is the juvenile lead?’ asked Gossage.

He smiled vigorously, at the same time removing his pince-nez to polish them, as if he did not wish Maclintick to think him unduly interested in Mr Deacon and his friend.

‘Don’t you know Norman Chandler?’ said Moreland. ‘I should have thought you would have come across him. He is an actor. Also dances a bit. Rather a hand at the saxophone.’

‘A talented young gentleman,’ said Gossage.

Moreland took another newspaper from his pocket, flattened it out on the surface of the table, and began to read a re-hash of the Croydon murder. Maclintick’s face had expressed the strongest distaste during the conversation with Chandler; now he dismissed his indignation and began to discuss the Albert Hall concert Gossage was attending that night. I caught the phrases ‘rhythmic ensemble’ and ‘dynamic and tonal balance’. Carolo sat in complete silence, from time to time tasting his vermouth without relish. Maclintick and Gossage passed on to the Delius Festival at the Queen’s Hall. All this musical ‘shop’, to which Moreland, without looking up from his paper, would intermittently contribute comment, began to make me feel rather out of it. I wished I had been less punctual. Moreland came to the end of the article and pushed the paper from him.

‘Edgar was quite cross at my turning out to know Norman,’ he said to me, speaking in a detached, friendly tone. ‘Edgar loves to build up mystery about any young man he meets. There was a lot of excitement about an “ex-convict from Devil’s Island” he met at a fancy dress party the other day dressed as a French matelot.’

He leaned forward and deftly thrust a penny into the slot of the mechanical piano, which took a second or two to digest the coin, then began to play raucously.

‘Oh, good,’ said Moreland.‘The Missouri Waltz.’

‘Deacon is probably right in assuming some of the persons he associates with are sinister enough,’ said Maclintick sourly.

‘It is the only pleasure he has left,’ said Moreland. ‘I can’t imagine what Norman was selling. It looked like a bed-pan from the shape of the parcel.’

Gossage sniggered, incurring a frown from Maclintick.

Probably fearing Maclintick might make him a new focus of disapproval, he remarked that he must be ‘going soon’.

‘Deacon will be getting himself into trouble one of these days,’ Maclintick said, shaking his head and speaking as if he hoped the blow would fall speedily. ‘Don’t you agree, Gossage?’

‘Oh, couldn’t say, couldn’t say at all,’ said Gossage hurriedly. ‘I hardly know the man, you see. Met him once or twice at the Proms last year. Join him sometimes over a mug of ale.’

Maclintick ignored these efforts to present a more bracing picture of Mr Deacon’s activities.

‘And it won’t be the first time Deacon got into trouble,’ he said in his grim, high-pitched voice.

‘Well, I shall really have to go,’ repeated Gossage, in answer to this further rebuke, speaking as if everyone present had been urging him to stay in the Mortimer for just a few minutes longer.

‘You will read my views on Friday. I am keeping an open mind. One has to do that. Goodbye, Moreland, goodbye… Maclintick, goodbye…’

‘I must be going too,’ said Carolo unexpectedly.

He had a loud, harsh voice, and a North Country accent like Quiggin’s. Tossing back the remains of his vermouth as if to the success of a desperate venture from which he was unlikely to return with his life, he finished the dregs at a gulp, and, inclining his head slightly in farewell to the company with an unconcerned movement in keeping with this devil-may-care mood, he followed Gossage from the saloon bar.

‘Carolo wasn’t exactly a chatterbox tonight,’ said Moreland.

‘Never has much to say for himself,’ Maclintick agreed.

‘Always brooding on the old days when he was playing Sarasate up and down the country clad as Little Lord Fauntleroy.’

‘He must have been at least seventeen when he last appeared in his black velvet suit and white lace collar,’ said Moreland. ‘The coat was so tight he could hardly draw his bow across the fiddle.’

‘They say Carolo is having trouble with his girl,’ said Maclintick. ‘Makes him even gloomier than usual.’

‘Who is his girl?’ asked Moreland indifferently.

‘Quite young, I believe,’ said Maclintick. ‘Gossage was asking about her. Carolo doesn’t find it as easy to get engagements as he used – and he won’t teach.’

‘Wasn’t there talk of Mrs Andriadis helping him?’ said Moreland. ‘Arranging a performance at her house or something.’

I listened to what was being said without feeling – as I came to feel later – that I was, in one sense, part and parcel of the same community; that when people gossiped about matters like Carolo and his girl, one was listening to a morsel, if only an infinitesimal morsel, of one’s own life. However, I heard no more about Carolo at that moment, because Barnby could now be seen standing in the doorway of the saloon bar, slowly apprising himself of the company present, the problem each individual might pose. By that hour the Mortimer had begun to fill. A man with a yellowish beard and black hat was buying drinks for two girls drawn from that indeterminate territory eternally disputed between tarts and art students; three pimply young men were arguing about economics; a couple of taxi-drivers conferred with the barmaid. For several seconds Barnby stared about him, viewing the people in the Mortimer with apparent disapproval. Then, thickset, his topcoat turned up to his ears, he moved slowly forward, at the same time casting an expert, all-embracing glance at the barmaid and the two art girls. Reaching the table at last by these easy stages, he nodded to the rest of us, but did not sit down. Instead, he regarded the party closely. Such evolutions were fairly typical of Barnby’s behaviour in public; demeanour effective with most strangers, on whom he seemed ultimately to force friendliness by at first withholding himself. Later he would unfreeze. With women, that apparently negative method almost always achieved good results. It was impossible to say whether this manner of Barnby’s was unconscious or deliberate. Moreland, for example, saw in Barnby a consummate actor.

‘Ralph is the Garrick of our day,’ Moreland used to say, ‘or at least the Tree or Irving. Barnby never misses a gesture with women, not an inflection of the voice.’

The two of them, never close friends, used to see each other fairly often in those days. Moreland liked painting and held stronger views about pictures than most musicians.

‘I can see Ralph has talent,’ he said of Barnby, ‘but why use combinations of colour that make you think he is a Frenchman or a Catalan?’

‘I know nothing of music,’ Barnby had, in turn, once remarked, ‘but Hugh Moreland’s accompaniment to that film sounded to me like a lot of owls quarrelling in a bicycle factory.’

All the same, in spite of mutual criticism, they were in general pretty well disposed to one another.

‘Buy us a drink, Ralph,’ said Moreland, as Barnby stood moodily contemplating us.

‘I’m not sure I can afford that,’ said Barnby. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’

‘Take a generous view,’ said Moreland, who liked being stood plenty of drinks.

After a minute or two’s meditation Barnby drew some money from his pocket, glanced at the coins in the palm of his hand, and laid some of them on the bar. Then he brought the glasses across to the table.

‘Had a look at the London Group this afternoon,’ he said.

Barnby sat down. He and Moreland began to talk of English painting. The subject evidently bored Maclintick, who seemed to like Barnby as little as he cared for Mr Deacon. Conversation moved on to painting in Paris. Finally, the idea of going to a film was abandoned. It was getting late in the evening. The programme would be too far advanced. Instead, we agreed to dine together. Maclintick went off upstairs to telephone to his wife and tell her he would not be home until later.

‘There will be a row about that,’ said Moreland, after Maclintick had disappeared.

‘Do they quarrel?’

‘Just a bit.’

‘Where shall we dine?’ said Barnby. ‘Foppa’s?’

‘No, I lunched at Foppa’s,’ Moreland said. ‘I can’t stand Foppa’s twice in a day. It would be like going back to one’s old school. Do you know Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant? It hasn’t been open long. Let’s eat there.’

‘I am not sure my stomach is up to Chinese food,’ said Barnby. ‘I didn’t get to bed until three this morning.’

‘You can have eggs or something like that.’

‘Won’t the eggs be several hundred years old? Still, we will go there if you insist. Anything to save a restaurant argument. Where is the place?’

Maclintick returned from telephoning. He bought himself a final Irish whiskey and drank it off. Conversation with his wife had been, as Moreland predicted, acrimonious. When told our destination was Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant Maclintick made a face; but he failed to establish any rival claim in favour of somewhere he would prefer to eat, so the decision was confirmed. I asked how such a recklessly hybrid name had ever been invented.

‘There used to be the New Casanova,’ said Moreland, ‘where the cooking was Italian and the decoration French eighteenth century – some way, some considerable way, after Watteau. Further up the street was the Amoy, called by some Sam’s Chinese Restaurant. The New Casanova went into liquidation. Sam’s bought it up and moved over their pots and pans and chopsticks, so now you can eat eight treasure rice, or bamboo shoots fried with pork ribbons, under panels depicting scenes from the career of the Great Lover.’

‘What are prices like?’ asked Barnby.

‘One might almost say cheap. On Sunday there is an orchestra of three and dainty afternoon tea is served. You can even dance. Maclintick has been there, haven’t you, Maclintick?’

‘Must it be Chinese food tonight?’ said Maclintick peevishly. ‘I’ve a touch of enteritis as it is.’

‘Remember some of the waitresses are rather attractive,’ said Moreland persuasively.

‘Chinese?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Moreland, ‘English.’

He laughed a little self-consciously.

‘Bet you’ve got your eye on one,’ said Barnby.

I think Barnby made this remark as a matter of routine, either without bothering to consider the matter at all carefully, or on the safe assumption that no one would take the trouble to mention the fact that any given group of girls was above the average in looks without having singled out at least one of them for himself. That would unquestionably have been Barnby’s own procedure. Alternatively, Moreland may have spoken of Casanova’s on an earlier occasion, thereby giving Barnby reason to suspect there must be something special that attracted Moreland personally to the place. In any case, the imputation was not surprising, although Barnby’s own uninterrupted interest in the subject always made him perceptive where the question of a woman, or women, was concerned. However, Moreland went red at the enquiry. He was in one sense, easily embarrassed about any matter that touched him intimately; although, at the same time, his own mind moved too quickly for him to be placed long at a disadvantage by those who hoped to tease. In such situations he was pretty adept at turning the tables.

‘I had my eye on a girl there formerly,’ he said, ‘I admit that. It wasn’t entirely the excellent pig’s trotter soup that brought me back to Casanova’s. However, I can visit that restaurant now without a tremor – not a concupiscent thought. My pleasure in the place has become purely that of gourmet of Cathay. A triumph of self-mastery. I will point the girl out to you, Ralph.’

‘What happened?’ asked Barnby. ‘Did she leave you for the man who played the trombone?’

‘One just wasn’t a success,’ said Moreland, reddening again. ‘Anyway, I will show you the problem as it stood – no doubt as it stands. Nothing altered, so far as I know, except my own point of view. But let’s be moving. I’m famished.’

The name Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant offered one of those unequivocal blendings of disparate elements of the imagination which suggest a whole new state of mind or way of life. The idea of Casanova giving his name to a Chinese restaurant linked not only the East with the West, the present with the past, but also, more parochially, suggested by its own incongruity an immensely suitable place for all of us to have dinner that night. We arrived in two large rooms, in which most of the tables were filled. The clientele, predominantly male and Asiatic, had a backbone of Chinese businessmen and Indian students. A few negroes sat with very blonde white girls; a sprinkling of diners belonged to those ethnically indefinable races which colonise Soho and interbreed there. Along the walls frescoes tinted in pastel shades, executed with infinite feebleness of design, appealed to Heaven knows what nadir of æsthetic degradation. Almost as soon as we found a table, I marked down Moreland’s waitress. She was tall, very thin, fair-haired and blue-eyed, at that moment carrying a lot of glasses on a tray. The girl was certainly noticeable in her white lace cap and small frilled white apron above a black dress and black cotton stockings, the severity of this uniform, her own pale colouring, lending a curious exoticism to her appearance in these pseudo-oriental surroundings. There was an air of childlike innocence about her that could easily be deceptive. Indeed, when more closely observed, she had some of the look of a very expensive, rather wicked little doll. Moreland’s answer to Barnby’s almost immediate request to have ‘the girl we have come to see’ pointed out to him, confirmed the correctness of this guess. Barnby took one of his lingering, professional stares.

‘Rather an old man’s piece, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘Still, I see your point. Poorish legs, though.’

‘You mustn’t concentrate on legs if your interest is in waitresses,’ said Moreland. ‘The same is true of ballet dancers, I’m afraid.’

‘She looks as if she might well be a nymphomaniac,’ said Maclintick, ‘those very fair, innocent-looking girls often are. I think I mentioned that to Moreland when he brought me here before.’

Maclintick had hardly spoken since we left the Mortimer. Now he uttered these words in a tone of deep pessimism, as if, so far, he had resented every moment of the evening. He greatly disapproved of Barnby, whose inclination for women was as irksome to him as Mr Deacon’s so downright repudiation of the opposite sex. Maclintick possibly thought Barnby had a bad influence on Moreland.

‘She showed no sign of being a nympho,’ Moreland said. ‘On the contrary. I could have done with a little nymphomania – anyway at the start.’

‘What are we going to eat?’ said Barnby. ‘I can’t make head or tail of this menu.’

Maclintick and Barnby ordered something unadventurous from the dishes available; under Moreland’s guidance, I embarked upon one of the specialities of the house. Moreland’s waitress came to take our order for drinks. Although a restaurant of some size, Casanova’s had no licence, so that a member of the staff collected beer from the pub opposite, or wine from the shop round the corner. When she came up to the table the waitress gave Moreland a cold, formal smile of recognition, which freely acknowledged him as a regular customer, but suggested no more affectionate relationship. Close up, she looked, I thought, as hard as nails; I did not feel at all tempted to enter into competition. Barnby eyed her. She took no notice of him whatever, noting our orders in silence and disappearing.

‘Too thin for my taste,’ said Barnby. ‘I like a good armful.’

‘This lascivious conversation is very appropriate to the memory of the distinguished Venetian gentleman after whom the restaurant is named,’ said Maclintick harshly. ‘What a bore he must have been.’

He leant across the table, and, like an angry woodpecker, began to tap out his pipe against the side of a large Schweppes ashtray.

‘Do you suppose one would have known Casanova?’ I said.

‘Oh, but of course,’ said Moreland. ‘In early life, Casanova played the violin – like Carolo. Casanova played in a band – I doubt if he would have been up to a solo performance. I can just imagine what he would have been like to deal with if one had been the conductor. Besides, he much fancied himself as a figure at the opera and musical parties. One would certainly have met him. At least I am sure I should.’

‘Think of having to listen to interminable stories about his girls,’ said Maclintick. ‘I could never get through Casanova’s Memoirs. Why should he be considered a great man just because he had a lot of women? Most men would have ended by being bored to death.’

‘That is why he was a great man,’ said Moreland. ‘It wasn’t the number of women he had, it was the fact that he didn’t get bored. But there are endless good things there apart from the women. Do you remember when in London he overhears someone remark: “Tommy has committed suicide and he did quite right” – to which another person replies: “On the contrary, he did a very foolish thing, for I am one of his creditors and know that he need not have made away with himself for six months”.’

Barnby and I laughed at this anecdote. Maclintick did not smile. At the same time he seemed struck by the story. He was silent for some moments. When he spoke again it was in a manner at once more serious, more friendly, than any tone he had previously employed that evening.

‘I see nothing particularly funny in their conversation,’ he said. ‘That is how I propose to behave myself when the time comes. But I agree that Tommy was a fool to misjudge his term of days. I shall not do that. I give myself at least five more years at the present rate. That should allow me time to finish my book.’

‘Still,’ said Moreland, ‘however bent one may be on the idea of eventual suicide oneself, you must admit, Maclintick, that such sentiments must have sounded odd to a man of Casanova’s joie de vivre. Anyway, professional seducers never commit suicide. They haven’t time.’

‘The notable thing about professional seducers,’ said Maclintick, now returning to his former carping tone of voice, ‘is the rot they talk when they are doing their seducing. There is not a single cliché they leave unsaid.’

‘Although by definition the most egotistical of men,’ said Moreland, ‘they naturally have to develop a certain anonymity of style to make themselves acceptable to all women. It is the case of the lowest common factor – or is it the highest common denominator? If you hope to rise to the top class in seducing, you must appeal to the majority. As the majority are not very intelligent, you must conceal your own intelligence – if you have the misfortune to possess such a thing – in order not to frighten the girls off. There is inevitably something critical, something alarming to personal vanity, in the very suggestion of intelligence in another. That is almost equally true of dealing with men, so don’t think I hold it against women. All I say is, that someone like myself ought to restrict themselves to intelligent girls who see my own good points. Unfortunately, they are rarely the sort of girls I like.’

Barnby grunted, no doubt feeling some of these strictures in part applicable to himself.

‘What do you expect to do?’ he asked. ‘Give readings from The Waste Land?’

‘Not a bad idea,’ said Moreland.

‘In my experience,’ Barnby said, ‘women like the obvious.’

‘Just what we are complaining about,’ said Maclintick, ‘the very thing.’

‘Seduction is to do and say/The banal thing in the banal way,’ said Moreland. ‘No one denies that. My own complaint is that people always talk about love affairs as if you spent the whole of your time in bed. I find most of my own emotional energy – not to say physical energy – is exhausted in making efforts to get there. Problems of Time and Space as usual.’

The relation of Time and Space, then rather fashionable, was, I found, a favourite subject of Moreland’s.

‘Surely we have long agreed the two elements are identical?’ said Maclintick. ‘This is going over old ground – perhaps I should say old hours.’

‘You must differentiate for everyday purposes, don’t you?’ urged Barnby. ‘I don’t wonder seduction seems a problem, if you get Time and Space confused.’

‘I suppose one might be said to be true to a woman in Time and unfaithful to her in Space,’ said Moreland. ‘That is what Dowson seems to have thought about Cynara – or is it just the reverse? The metaphysical position is not made wholly clear by the poet. Talking of pale lost lilies, how do you think Edgar and Norman are faring in their deal?’

‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ said Maclintick sententiously. ‘Besides, we have a cruet on the table. Here are the drinks at last, thank God. You know Pope says every woman is at heart a rake. I’d be equally prepared to postulate that every rake is at heart a woman. Don Juan – Casanova – Byron – the whole bloody lot of them.’

‘But Don Juan was not at all the same as Casanova,’ said Moreland. ‘The opera makes that quite clear. Ralph here sometimes behaves like Casanova. He isn’t in the least like Don Juan – are you, Ralph?’

I was myself not sure this assessment of Barnby’s nature was wholly accurate; but, if distinction were to be drawn between those two legendary seducers, the matter was at least arguable. Barnby himself was now showing signs of becoming rather nettled by this conversation.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘My good name keeps on being bandied about in a most uncalled for manner. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind defining the differences between these various personages with whom I am being so freely compared. I had better be told for certain, otherwise I shall be behaving in a way that is out of character, which would never do.’

‘Don Juan merely liked power,’ said Moreland. ‘He obviously did not know what sensuality was. If he knew it at all, he hated it. Casanova, on the other hand, undoubtedly had his sensual moments, even though they may not have occurred very often. With Henriette, for example, or those threesomes with the nun, M.M. Of course, Casanova was interested in power too. No doubt he ended as a complete Narcissus, when love naturally became intolerable to him, since love involved him with another party emotionally. Every Narcissus dislikes that. None of us regards Ralph as only wanting power where a woman is concerned. We think too highly of you for that, Ralph.’

Barnby did not appear flattered by this analysis of his emotional life.

‘Thanks awfully,’ he said. ‘But, to get down to more immediate matters, how would you feel, Hugh, if I asked that waitress to sit for me? For reasons of trade, rather than power or sensuality. Of course she is bound to think I am trying to get off with her. Nothing could be further from the case – no, I assure you, Maclintick. Anyway, I don’t expect she will agree. No harm in trying, though. I just wanted to make sure you had no objection. To show how little of a Casanova I am – or is it a Don Juan?’

‘Take any step you think best,’ said Moreland laughing, although perhaps not best pleased by what Barnby had asked. ‘I have resigned all claims. I don’t quite see her in your medium, but that is obviously the painter’s own affair. If I have a passion for anyone, I prefer an academic, even pedestrian, naturalism of portraiture. It is a limitation I share with Edgar Deacon. Nothing I’d care for less than to have my girl painted by Lhote or Gleizes, however much I may admire those painters – literally – in the abstract.’

All the same, although he put a good face on it, Moreland looked a little cast down. No more was said on the subject until the time came to make our individual contributions to the bill. The waitress appeared again. She explained that she had omitted at an earlier stage of the meal to collect some of the money due for what we had drunk. She now presented her final account. At this point Barnby took the opportunity to allow himself certain pleasantries – these a trifle on the ponderous side, as he himself admitted later – to the effect that she was demanding money under false pretences. The waitress received these comments in good part, unbending so far as to hint that she had not levied the charge before, because, having taken one look at Barnby, she had been sure he would give a further order for drink; she had accordingly decided to wait until the account was complete. Barnby listened to this explanation gravely, making no attempt to answer in the breezy manner he had employed a few seconds earlier this imputation of possessing a bibulous appearance. Just as the girl was about to withdraw, he spoke.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m an artist – I paint people’s pictures.’

She did not look at him, or answer, but she stopped giggling, while at the same time making no attempt to move away from the table.

‘I’d like to paint you.’

She still did not speak. Her expression changed in a very slight degree, registering what might have been embarrassment or cunning.

‘Could you come and be painted by me some time?’

Barnby put the question in a quiet, almost exaggeratedly gentle voice; one I had never before heard him use.

‘Don’t know that I have time,’ she said, very coolly.

‘What about one week-end?’

‘Can’t come Sunday. Have to be here.’

‘Saturday, then?’

‘Saturday isn’t any good either.’

‘You can’t have to work all the week.’

‘Might manage a Thursday.’

‘All right, let’s make it a Thursday then.’

There was a pause. Maclintick, unable to bear the sight and sound of these negotiations, had taken a notebook from his pocket and begun a deep examination of his own affairs; making plans for the future; writing down great thoughts; perhaps even composing music. Moreland, unable to conceal his discomfort at what was taking place, started a conversation with me designed to carry further his Time-Space theories.

‘What about next Thursday?’ asked Barnby, in his most wheedling tone.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Say you will.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’

‘I suppose so, then.’

Barnby reached forward and took Maclintick’s pencil from his hand – not without protest on Maclintick’s part – and wrote something on the back of an envelope. I suppose it was just the address of his studio, but painters form the individual letters of their handwriting so carefully, so separately, that he seemed to be drawing a picture specially for her.

‘It’s above a shop,’ Barnby said.

Then, suddenly, he crumpled the envelope.

‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘I will come and pick you up here, if that is all right.’

‘As you like.’

She spoke indifferently, as if all had been decided long before and they had been going out together for years.

‘What time?’

She told him; the two of them made some mutual arrangement. Then they smiled at each other, again without any sense of surprise or excitement, as if long on familiar terms, and the waitress retired from the table. Barnby handed the stump of pencil back to Maclintick. We vacated the restaurant.

‘Like Glendower, Barnby,’ said Maclintick, ‘you can call spirits from the vasty deep. With Hotspur, I ask you, will they come?’

‘That’s to be seen,’ said Barnby. ‘By the way, what is her name? I forgot to ask.’

‘Norma,’ said Moreland, speaking without apology.

To complete the story, Barnby (whose personal arrangements were often vague) told me that when the day of assignation came, he arrived, owing to bad timing, three-quarters of an hour late for the appointment. The girl was still waiting for him. She came to his studio, where he began a picture of her, subsequently completing at least one oil painting and several drawings. The painting, which was in his more severe manner, he sold to Sir Magnus Donners; Sir Herbert Manasch bought one of the drawings, which were treated naturistically. Eventually, as might have been foretold, Barnby had some sort of a love affair with his model; although he always insisted she was ‘not his type’, that matters had come to a head one thundery afternoon when an overcast sky made painting impossible. Norma left Casanova’s soon after this episode. She took a job which led to her marrying a man who kept a tobacconist’s shop in Camden Town. There was no ill feeling after Barnby had done with her; keeping on good terms with his former mistresses was one of his gifts. In fact he used to visit Norma and her husband (who sometimes gave him racing tips) after they were married. Through them he found a studio in that part of London; he may even have been godfather to one of their children. All that is beside the point. The emphasis I lay upon the circumstances of this assignation at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is to draw attention to the extreme ease with which Barnby conducted the preliminaries of his campaign. Anyone who heard things being fixed up might have supposed Norma to have spent much of her previous life as an artist’s model; that she regarded making an engagement for a sitting as a matter of routine regulated only by aspects of her own immediate convenience. Perhaps she had; perhaps she did. In such case Barnby showed scarcely less mastery of the situation in at once assessing her potentialities in that role.

‘Of course, Ralph is a painter,’ said Moreland, afterwards. ‘He has a studio. Time, place and a respectable motive for a visit are all at his command. None of these things are to be despised where girls are concerned.’

‘Time and Space, as usual.’

‘Time and Space,’ said Moreland.

The incident was not only an illustration of Barnby’s adroitness in that field, but also an example of Moreland’s diffidence, a diffidence no doubt in part responsible for the admixture of secretiveness and exhibitionism with which he conducted his love affairs. By exhibitionism, I mean, in Moreland’s case, no more than a taste for referring obliquely from time to time to some unrevealed love that possessed him. I supposed that this habit of his explained his talk of marriage the day – five or six years after our first meeting – when we had listened together to the song of the blonde singer; especially when he refused to name the girl – or three girls – he might be considering as a wife. It was therefore a great surprise to me when his words turned out to be spoken seriously. However, I did not at first realise how serious they were; nor even when, some weeks later, more about the girl herself was revealed.

He suggested one day that we should go together to The Duchess of Malfi, which was being performed at a small theatre situated somewhat off the beaten track; one of those ventures that attempt, by introducing a few new names and effects, momentarily to dispel the tedium of dramatic routine.

‘Webster is always a favourite of mine,’ Moreland said. ‘Norman Chandler has for the moment abandoned dancing and the saxophone, and is playing Bosola.’

‘That should be enjoyable. Has he quite the weight?’

Chandler had moved a long way since the day when I had first seen him at the Mortimer, when Mr Deacon had spoken so archly of having acquired his friendship through a vegetarian holiday. Now Chandler had made some name for himself, not only as a dancer, but also as an actor; not in leading roles, but specialising in smaller, unusual parts suitable to his accomplished, but always intensely personal, style. I used to run across him occasionally with Moreland, whose passion for mechanical pianos Chandler shared; music for which they would search London.

‘I also happen to know the Cardinal’s mistress,’ said Moreland, speaking very casually.

This remark suddenly struck a chord of memory about something someone had said a few days before about the cast of this very play.

‘But wasn’t she Sir Magnus Donners’s mistress too? I was hearing about that. It is Matilda Wilson, isn’t it, who is playing that part – the jolie laide Donners used to be seen about with a year or two ago? I have always wanted to have a look at her.’

Moreland turned scarlet. I realised that I had shown colossal lack of tact. This must be his girl. I saw now why he had spoken almost apologetically about going to the play, as if some excuse were required for attending one of Webster’s tragedies, even though Moreland himself was known by me to be greatly attached to the Elizabethan dramatists. When he made the suggestion that we should see the play together I had suspected no ulterior motive. Now, it looked as if something were on foot.

‘She was mixed up with Donners for a time,’ he said, ‘that is quite true. But several years ago now. I thought we might go round and see her after the performance. Then we could have a drink – even eat if we felt like it – at the Café Royal or somewhere like that.’

To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself. Close friends probably fall in love with the same woman less often in life than in books, though the female spirit of emulation will sometimes fix on a husband or lover’s friend out of a mere desire to show that a woman can do even better than her partner in the same sphere. Moreland and I used to agree that, in principle, we liked the same kind of girl; but never, so long as I knew him, did we ever find ourselves in competition.

The news that he was involved with Matilda Wilson, might even be thinking of marrying her – for that was the shape things seemed to be taking – was surprising in a number of ways. I had never seen the girl herself, although often hearing about her during her interlude with Sir Magnus, a person round whom gossip accumulated easily, not only because he was very rich, but also on account of supposedly unconventional tastes in making love. Sir Magnus was said to be reasonably generous with his girls, and, provided he was from time to time indulged in certain respects, not unduly demanding. It was characteristic of the situations in which love lands people that someone as sensitive as Moreland to life’s grotesque aspects should find himself handling so delicate an affair, where perhaps even marriage was the goal. When we arrived at the theatre we found Mark Members waiting in the foyer. Members was the kind of person who would know by instinct that Moreland was interested in Matilda Wilson, and might be expected to make some reference to her past with Sir Magnus with the object of teasing Moreland with whom he was on prickly terms. However, the subject did not arise. Members had just finished straightening his tie in a large looking-glass. He was now looking disdainfully round him.

‘What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight,’ he said, when he saw us. ‘It makes me ashamed to be one.’

‘Nobody guesses you are, Mark,’ said Moreland. ‘Not in that natty new suit. They think you are an actuary or an average adjuster.’

Members laughed his tinny laugh.

‘How is sweet music?’ he asked. ‘How are your pale tunes irresolute, Moreland? When is that opera of yours we hear so much about going to appear?’

‘I’ve knocked off work on the opera for the moment,’ said Moreland. ‘I’m concentrating on something slighter which I think should appeal to music-lovers of your temperament. It is to be called Music for a Maison de Passe: A Suite.’

We passed on to where Gossage was standing a short way off by the curtain that screened the foyer from the passage leading to the auditorium. Gossage was talking with a great display of respect to a lady dressed rather too exquisitely for the occasion; the audience that night, as Members had truly remarked, being decidedly unkempt. This lady, slight in figure, I recognised at once as Mrs Foxe, mother of my old friend, Charles Stringham. I had not seen Stringham since Widmerpool and I had put him to bed after too much to drink at an Old Boy Dinner. Mrs Foxe herself I had not set eyes on for ten years; the day she and Commander Foxe had lunched with Stringham in his rooms in college to discuss whether or not he should ‘go down’ before taking a degree.

Mrs Foxe was quite unchanged. Beautiful in early middle age, she remained still untouched by time. She was accompanied by a girl of seventeen or eighteen, and two young men who looked like undergraduates. Evidently she was hostess to this party, whom I supposed to be relations; connexions possibly of her first husband, Lord Warrington, or her third husband, Buster Foxe. Stringham, child of the intermediate marriage of this South African millionaire’s daughter, used to boast he had no relations; so they were presumably not cousins of his. Gossage, parting now from Mrs Foxe with many smiles and bows, nodded to Moreland with an air of considerable satisfaction as he hurried past. When we reached our seats I saw that Mrs Foxe and her party were sitting a long way away from us. Since I hardly supposed she would remember me, I decided not to approach her during the entr’actes. In any case, she and I had little in common except Stringham himself, of whom I then knew nothing except that his marriage had broken up and he was said to be still drinking too much. He had certainly drunk a lot the night Widmerpool and I had put him to bed. Another reason for taking no step in Mrs Foxe’s direction was that a stage in my life had been reached when I felt that to spend even a short time with a party of that kind would be ‘boring’. For the moment, I had put such things behind me. Perhaps at some future date I should return to them; for the time being I rather prided myself on preferring forms of social life where white ties were not worn. I was even glad there was no likelihood of chance recognition.

Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress in The Duchess of Malfi, does not come on to the stage until the fourth scene of the first act. Moreland was uneasy until that moment, fidgeting in his seat, giving deep breaths, a habit of his when inwardly disturbed. At the same time, he showed a great deal of enjoyment in Norman Chandler’s earlier speeches as Bosola. Chandler had brought an unexpected solidity to this insidious part. The lightness of his build, and general air of being a dancer rather than an actor, had prepared neither Moreland nor myself for the rendering he presented of ‘this fellow seven years in the galleys for a notorious murder’.

‘Do you think Norman talked like Bosola the night he was bargaining with Edgar Deacon about that statuette?’ said Moreland, in an undertone. ‘If so, he must have got the best of it. Did I ever tell you that he hadn’t been paid when Edgar died, so Norman nipped round to the shop and took the thing away again? That was in the Bosola tradition.’

When at last Matilda Wilson appeared as Julia, Moreland’s face took on a look of intensity, almost of strain, more like worry than love. I had been looking forward to seeing her with the interest one feels in being shown for the first time the woman a close friend proposes to marry; for I now had no doubt from the manner in which the evening had been planned that Matilda must be the girl whom Moreland had in mind when he had spoken of taking a wife. When she first came towards the footlights I was disappointed. I have no talent for guessing what an actress will look like off the stage, but, even allowing for an appearance greatly changed by the removal of make-up and the stiffly angled dress in which she was playing the part, she seemed altogether lacking in conventional prettiness. A minute or two later I began to change my mind. She certainly possessed a forceful, enigmatic personality; none of the film-star looks of the waitress in Casanova’s, but something, one of those resemblances impossible to put into words, made me recall that evening. Matilda Wilson moved gracefully. Apart from that, and the effectiveness of her slow, clear voice and sardonic enunciation, she was not a very ‘finished’ actress. Once or twice I was aware of Moreland glancing in my direction, as if he hoped to discover what I thought of her; but he asked no questions and made no comment when the curtain fell. He shuddered slightly when she replied to Bosola’s lines: ‘Know you me, I am a blunt soldier’, with: ‘The better; sure there wants fire where there are no lively sparks of roughness’.

When the play was over, we went round to the stage door, penetrating into regions where the habitually cramped accommodation of theatrical dressing-rooms was more than usually in evidence. For a time we wandered about narrow passages filled with little young men who had danced the Masque of Madmen, now dressing, undressing, chattering, washing, playing noisy games of their own, which gave the impression that the action of the play was continuing its course even though the curtain had come down. We found Matilda Wilson’s room at last. She was wearing hardly any clothes, removing her make-up, while Norman Chandler, dressed in a mauve dressing-gown of simulated brocade, sat on a stool beside her, reading a book. I never feel greatly at ease ‘backstage’, and Moreland himself, although by then certainly used enough to such surroundings, was obviously disturbed by the responsibility of having to display his girl for the first time. He need not have worried; Matilda herself was completely at ease. I saw at once, now she was off the stage, how effortless her conquest of Moreland must have been. He possessed, it was true, a certain taste for rather conventional good looks which had to be overcome in favour of beauty of a less obvious kind; in other respects she seemed to have everything he demanded, yet never could find. Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured. Moreland held different views.

‘I don’t want what Rembrandt or Cezanne or Barnby or any other painter may happen to want,’ he used to say. ‘I simply cling to my own preferences. I don’t know what’s good, but I know what I like – not a lot of intellectual snobbery about fat peasant women, or technical talk about masses and planes. After all, painters have to contend professionally with pictorial aspects of the eternal feminine which are quite beside the point where a musician like myself is concerned. With women, I can afford to cut out the chiaroscuro. Choosing the type of girl one likes is about the last thing left that one is allowed to approach subjectively. I shall continue to exercise the option.’

Matilda Wilson jumped up from her stool as soon as she saw Moreland. Throwing her arms round his neck, she kissed him on the nose. When a woman is described as a ‘jolie laide’ the same particular combination of looks is, for some reason, implied; you expect a brunette, small rather than tall, with a face emphasised by eyebrows and mouth, features which would be too insistent if the eyes did not finally control the general effect – in fact what is also known as beauté de singe. Matilda Wilson was not at all like that. Off the stage, she was taller and thinner than I had supposed, her hair fairish, with large, rather sleepy green eyes. The upper half of her face was pretty enough; the lower, forcefully, even rather coarsely modelled. You felt the beauty of her figure was in some manner the consequence of her own self-control; that a less intelligent woman might have ‘managed’ her body without the same effectiveness.

‘Oh, darling,’ she said, in a voice that at once suggested her interlude in the world of Sir Magnus Donners, ‘I am so glad you have turned up at last. Various awful men have been trying to make me go out with them. But I said you were calling for me. I hoped you would not forget as you did last week.’

‘Oh, last week,’ said Moreland, looking dreadfully put out, and making a characteristic gesture with his hand, as if about to begin conducting. ‘That muddle was insane of me. Will you ever forgive me, Matty? It upset me so much. Do let me off further mention of it. I am so hopelessly forgetful.’

He looked rather wildly round him, as if he expected to find some explanation of the cause of bad memory in the furthest recesses of the dressing-room, finally turning to me for support.

‘Nick, don’t you find it absolutely impossible nowadays to remember anything?’ he began. ‘Do you know, I was in the Mortimer the other day-’

Up to that time he had made no attempt to tell Matilda Wilson my name, although no doubt she had been warned that I was probably going to join them at the end of the play. He would certainly have launched into a long train of reminiscence about something or other that had happened to him in the Mortimer, if she had not burst out laughing and kissed him again, this time on the ear. She held out her hand to me, still laughing, and Moreland, now red in the face, insisted that the time had passed for introductory formalities. Meanwhile, Norman Chandler had been finishing his chapter without taking any notice of what was going on round him. Now, he put a marker in his book (which I saw to be Time and Western Man), and, drawing the billowing robes of his rather too large dressing-gown more tightly round him, he rose to his feet.

‘ “A lot of awful men”?’ he said, speaking in a voice of old-time melodrama. ‘What do you mean, Matilda? I offered you a bite with Max and me, if your boy friend did not arrive. That was only because you said he was so forgetful, and might easily think he had made a date for the day after tomorrow. I never heard such ingratitude.’

Matilda put her arm round Chandler’s waist and attempted to smoothe his hair with her brush.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean you, darling, of course I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t call you a man. I love you much too much. I mean an awful man who telephoned – and then another awful man who left a note. How could anyone call you awful, Norman, darling?’

‘Oh, I don’t know so much about that,’ said Chandler, now abandoning the consciously sinister, masculine tones of Bosola, and returning to his more familiar chorus-boy drawl. ‘I’m not always adored as much as you might think from looking at me. I don’t quite know why that is.’

He put his head on one side, forefinger against cheek, transforming himself to some character of ballet, perhaps the Faun from L’Après-midi.

‘You are adored by me,’ said Matilda, kissing him twice before throwing down the hairbrush on the dressing-table. ‘But I really must put a few clothes on.’

Chandler broke away from her, executing a series of little leaps in the air, although there was not much room for these entrechats. He whizzed round several times, collapsing at last upon his stool.

‘Bravo, bravo,’ said Matilda, clapping her hands. ‘You will rival Nijinsky yet, Norman, my sweetie.’

‘Be careful,’ said Chandler. ‘Your boy friend will be jealous. I can see him working himself up. He can be very violent when roused.’

Moreland had watched this display of high spirits with enjoyment, except when talk had been of other men taking out Matilda, when his face had clouded. Chandler had probably noticed that. So far from being jealous of Chandler, which would certainly have been absurd in the circumstances, Moreland seemed to welcome these antics as relaxing tension between himself and Matilda. He became more composed in manner. Paradoxically enough, something happened a moment later which paid an obvious tribute to Chandler’s status as a ladies’ man, however little regarded in that role by Moreland and the world at large.

‘I will be very quick now,’ said Matilda, ‘and then we will go. I am dying for a bite.’

She retired behind a small screen calculated to heighten rather than diminish the dramatic effect of her toilet, since her long angular body was scarcely at all concealed, and, in any case, she continually reappeared on the floor of the room to rescue garments belonging to her which lay about there. The scene was a little like those depicted in French eighteenth-century engravings where propriety is archly threatened in the presence of an amorous abbé or two-powdered hair would have suited Matilda, I thought; Moreland, perhaps, too. However, the picture’s static form was interrupted by the sound of some commotion in the passage which caused Chandler to stroll across the room and stand by the half-open door. Some people were passing who must have recognised him, because he suddenly said: ‘Why, hullo, Mrs Foxe,’ in a tone rather different from that used by him a moment before; a friendly tone, but one at the same time faintly deferential, possibly even a shade embarrassed. There was the sudden suggestion that Chandler was on his best behaviour.

‘We were looking for you,’ said a woman’s voice, speaking almost appealingly, yet still with a note of command in it. ‘We thought you would not mind if we came behind the scenes to see you. Such an adventure for us, you know. In fact we even wondered if there was any chance of persuading you to come to supper with us.’

The people in the passage could not be seen, but this was undoubtedly Stringham’s mother. She introduced Chandler to the persons with her, but the names were inaudible.

‘It would be so nice if you could come,’ she said, quite humbly now. ‘Your performance was wonderful. We adored it.’

Chandler had left the dressing-room now and was some way up the passage, but his voice could still be heard.

‘It is terribly sweet of you, Mrs Foxe,’ he said, with some hesitation. ‘It would have been quite lovely. But as a matter of fact I was supposed to be meeting an old friend this evening.’

He seemed undecided whether or not to accept the invitation, to have lost suddenly all the animation he had been showing in the dressing-room a minute or two before. Moreland and Matilda had stopped talking and had also begun to listen, evidently with great enjoyment, to what was taking place outside.

‘Oh, but if he is an old friend,’ said Mrs Foxe, who seemed to make no doubt whatever of the sex of Chandler’s companion for dinner, ‘surely he might join us too. It would be so nice. What is his name?’

Although she was almost begging Chandler to accept her invitation, there was also in her voice the imperious note of the beauty of her younger days, the rich woman, well known in the world and used to being obeyed.

‘Max Pilgrim.’

Chandler’s voice, no less than Mrs Foxe’s, suggested conflicting undertones of feeling: gratification at being so keenly desired as a guest; deference, in spite of himself, for the air of luxury and high living that Mrs Foxe bestowed about her; determination not to be jockeyed out of either his gaminerie or accustomed manner of ordering his own life by Mrs Foxe or anyone else.

‘Not the Max Pilgrim?’

‘He is at the Café de Madrid now. He sings there.’

‘But, of course. “I want to dazzle Lady Sybil…” What a funny song that one is. Does he mean it to be about Sybil Huntercombe, do you think? It is so like her. We must certainly have Mr Pilgrim too. But will he come? He has probably planned something much more amusing. Oh, I do hope he will.’

‘I think-’

‘But how wonderful, if he would. Certainly you must ask him. Do telephone to him at once and beg him to join us.’

The exact words of Chandler’s reply could not be heard, but there could be little doubt that he had been persuaded. Perhaps he was afraid of Max Pilgrim’s annoyance if the supper party had been refused on behalf of both of them. In dealing with Mrs Foxe, Chandler seemed deprived, if only temporarily, of some of his effervescence of spirit. It looked as if he might be made her prisoner. This was an unguessed aspect of Mrs Foxe’s life, a new departure in her career of domination. The party moved off, bearing Chandler with them; their voices died away as they reached the end of the passage. Moreland and Matilda continued to laugh. I asked what it was all about.

‘Norman’s grand lady,’ said Matilda. ‘She is someone called Mrs Foxe. Very smart. She sits on all sorts of committees and she met Norman a week or two ago at some charity performance. It was love at first sight.’

‘You don’t mean they are having an affair?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ said Moreland, speaking as if he were quite shocked at the notion, ‘how absurd to suggest such a thing. You can have a passion for someone without having an affair with them. That is one of the things no one seems able to understand these days.’

‘What is it then?’

‘Just one of those fascinating mutual attractions between improbable people that take place from time to time. I should like to write a ballet round it.’

‘Norman is interested too? He sounded a bit unwilling to go out to supper.’

‘Perhaps not interested in the sense you mean,’ said Moreland, ‘but everyone likes being fallen in love with. People who pretend they don’t are always the ones, beyond all others, to wring the last drop of pleasure – usually sadistic pleasure-out of it. Besides, Norman has begun to live rather a Ritzy life with her, he tells me. Some people like that too.’

‘I think Norman is quite keen,’ said Matilda, adding some final touches to her face that made completion of her toilet seem promising. ‘Did you hear the way he was talking? Not at all like himself. I think the only thing that holds him back is fear of old friends like Max Pilgrim laughing.’

‘Norman obviously represents the physical type of the future,’ Moreland said, abandoning, as he so often did, the particular aspect of the matter under discussion in favour of a more general aesthetic bearing. ‘The great artists have always decided beforehand what form looks are to take in the world, and Norman is pure Picasso – one of those attenuated, androgynous mountebanks of the Blue Period, who haven’t had a meal for weeks.’

‘Come along, sweetie, and don’t talk so much,’ said Matilda, closing her bag and getting up from the dressing-table. ‘If we don’t have something to eat pretty soon we shall become attenuated, androgynous mountebanks ourselves.’

No phrase could have better described what she looked like. She had emerged at last in a purple satin dress and sequin mittens, the ultimate effect almost more exotic than if she had remained in the costume of the play. I found her decidedly impressive. It was evident from the manner in which she had spoken of Mrs Foxe that she was on easy terms with a world which Moreland, in principle, disliked, indeed entered only for professional purposes. A wife who could handle that side of his life would undoubtedly be an advantage to him. Conversationally, too, Matilda was equipped to meet him on his own ground. Moreland’s talk when pursuing a girl varied little, if at all, from his conversation at any other time. Some women found this too severe an intellectual burden; others were flattered, even when incapable of keeping pace. With Matilda, this level of dialogue seemed just what was required. She was a clever girl, with a good all-round knowledge of the arts: one who liked being treated as a serious person. This was apparent by the time we reached the restaurant, where Moreland at once began to discuss the play.

‘ “The lusty spring smells well; but drooping autumn tastes well,” ’ he said. ‘How like:

Pauvre automne

Meurs en blancheur et en richesse

De neige et de fruits mûrs

or:

Je suis soumis au Chef du Signe de I’Automne

Partant j’aime les fruits je déteste les fleurs

I was thinking the other day one might make an anthology of the banker poets… Guillaume Apollinaire… T. S. Eliot… Robert W. Service…’

He put down the menu which he had been studying.

‘A wonderful idea,’ said Matilda, who had been adding magenta to her lips to emphasise the whiteness of her skin or offset the colour of her dress, ‘but first of all make up your mind what you are going to eat. I have already decided on Sole Bonne Femme, but I know we shall have to start all over again when the waiter comes.’

Clearly she possessed a will of her own, and had already learnt something of Moreland’s habits; for example, that persuading him to choose a dish at a restaurant was a protracted affair. When faced with a menu Moreland’s first thought was always to begin some lengthy discussion that postponed indefinitely the need to make a decision about food.

‘What do you think I should like?’ he said.

‘Oeufs Meyerbeer,’ she said. ‘You always enjoy them.’

Moreland took up the menu again irresolutely.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I hate being hurried about any of my appetites. What are you going to eat, Nick? I am afraid you may order something that will make me regret my own choice. You have done that in the past. It is very disloyal of you. You know I think Gossage – in as much as he possesses any sexual feelings at all – derives a certain vicarious satisfaction from contemplating the loves of Norman Chandler and Mrs Foxe. The situation manages to embrace within one circumference Gossage’s taste for rich ladies and good-looking young men – together with a faint spice of musical background.’

‘Gossage says there is talk of putting on Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great,” said Matilda.

Moreland once again abandoned the menu.

‘ “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,” ’ he cried. ‘ “What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?” That is rather what I feel about the newspaper criticism of Gossage and Maclintick. I should like them to drag me to concerts, as the kings drew Tamerlaine, in a triumphal coach. They would be far better employed doing that than pouring out all that stuff for their respective periodicals every week. Perhaps that is not fair to Maclintick. It is certainly true of Gossage.’

‘I am sure Maclintick would draw you to the Queen’s Hall in a rickshaw if you asked him,’ said Matilda. ‘He admires you so much.’

She turned to the waiter, ordered whatever she and I had agreed to eat, and Oeufs Meyerbeer for Moreland, who, still unable to come to a decision about food, accepted her ruling on this matter without dissent.

‘I think there is just a chance I might be cast for Zenocrate,’ she said, ‘if they did ever do Tamburlaine. In any case, the show wouldn’t be coming on for ages.’

‘I wouldn’t limit it to Maclintick and Gossage,’ Moreland said. ‘I should like to be dragged along by all the music critics, arranged in order of height, tallest in front, midgets at the back. That will give you some clue to what the procession would look like. I have always been interested in Tamerlaine. I found myself thinking of him the other day as part of that cruel, parched, Central Asian feeling one gets hearing Prince Igor. I am sure it was his bad leg that made him such a nuisance.’

‘You may be interested in Tamerlaine, darling,’ said Matilda, ‘but you are not in the least interested in my career.’

‘Oh, Matty, I am. I’m sorry. I am really. I want you to be the Duse of our time.’

He took her hand.

‘I don’t believe you, you old brute.’

In spite of saying that she smiled, and did not seem seriously annoyed. On the whole they appeared to understand one another pretty well. When the moment came to pay the bill, I flicked a note across to Moreland to cover my share. Matilda at once took charge of this, at the same extracting another note from Moreland himself – always a great fumbler with money. These she handed over with a request for change. When the waiter returned with some money on a plate, she apportioned the silver equitably between Moreland and myself, leaving the correct tip; a series of operations that would have presented immense problems of manipulation to Moreland. All this enterprise made her appear to possess ideal, even miraculous, qualifications for becoming his wife. They were, indeed, married some months later. The ceremony took place in a registry office, almost secretly, because Moreland hated fuss. Not long after, perhaps a year, almost equally unexpectedly, I found myself married too; married to Isobel Tolland. Life – the sort of life Moreland and I used to live in those days – all became rather changed.