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

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SUNDAY LUNCHEON at Katherine, Lady Warminster’s, never, as it were, specially dedicated to meetings of the family, had in the course of time grown into an occasion when, at fairly regular intervals, several – sometimes too many – of the Tollands were collected together. Now and then more distant relations were present, once in a way a friend; but on the whole immediate Tollands predominated. Everyone expected to meet their ‘in-laws’; and, among other characteristics, these parties provided, at least superficially, a kind of parade of different approaches to marriage. There was in common a certain sense of couples being on their best behaviour in Lady Warminster’s presence, but, in spite of that limited uniformity, routine at Hyde Park Gardens emphasised any individuality of matrimonial technique. Blanche, Robert, Hugo, and Priscilla Tolland still lived under the same roof as their step-mother, so that the two girls attended the meal more often than not; Robert, his social life always tempered with secrecy, was intermittently present; while Hugo, still tenuously keeping university terms accentuated by violent junctures when to be ‘sent down’ seemed unavoidable, could be seen there only during the vacation. This accommodation in the house of several younger members of the family had not resulted in much outward gaiety of atmosphere. On the contrary, the note struck as one entered the hall and ascended the staircase was quiet, almost despondent. The lack of exhilaration confirmed a favourite proposition of Moreland’s as to the sadness of youth.

‘I myself look forward ceaselessly to the irresponsibility of middle-age,’ he was fond of stating.

It may, indeed, have been true that ‘the children’, rather than Lady Warminster herself, were to blame for this distinct air of melancholy. Certainly the environment was very different from the informality, the almost calculated disorder, surrounding the Jeavonses in South Kensington, a household I had scarcely visited since my marriage. Ted Jeavons’s health had been even worse than usual; while Molly had given out that she was much occupied with reorganisation of the top floor (where her husband’s old, bedridden – and recently deceased – cousin had lived), which was now to be done up as a flat for some friend or dependent. No doubt this reconditioning had reduced the Jeavons house to a depth of untidiness unthinkably greater than that which habitually prevailed there. The interior of Hyde Park Gardens was altogether in contrast with any such circumstance of invincible muddle. Hyde Park Gardens was unexceptional, indeed rather surprisingly ordinary, considering the personalities enclosed within, decorations and furniture expressing almost as profound an anonymity as Uncle Giles’s private hotel, the Ufford; although, of course, more luxurious than the Ufford’s, and kept just the right side of taste openly to be decried as ‘bad’, or even aggressively out of fashion.

Appreciably older than her sister Molly Jeavons – and, like her, childless – Lady Warminster had largely withdrawn from the world since her second husband’s death in Kashmir eight or nine years before. Lord Warminster, who could claim some name as a sportsman, even as an amateur explorer, had formed the habit of visiting that country from time to time, not, so far as was known, on account of the sensual attractions extolled in the Kashmiri Love Song, but for pleasure in the more general beauty of its valleys, and the shooting of ibex there. On this last occasion, grazing his hand while opening a tin, he had contracted blood poisoning, an infection from which he subsequently died. Grieved in a remote way at her loss, although their comparatively brief married life together had been marked on his part by prolonged travel abroad, Lady Warminster had also been delighted to hand over Thrubworth to her eldest step-son, Erridge; to settle herself permanently in London. She had always hated country life. Erridge had been less pleased to find himself head of the family at the age of eighteen or nineteen, saddled with the responsibilities of a large house and estate. Indeed, from that moment he had contended as little as possible with any but the most pressing duties contingent upon his ‘position’, devoting himself to his left-wing political interests, which merged into a not too exacting study of sociology.

Chips Lovell (with whom I had formerly been teamed up as a fellow script-writer in the film business), who was inclined to call almost everyone of an older generation than himself either ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, and was always prepared at a moment’s notice to provide an a priori account of the personal history and problems of all his relations and acquaintances, had said: ‘Like every other Ardglass, Aunt Katherine only really enjoys pottering about.’ It was certainly true that Lady Warminster, as a widow, divided her time between her own ailments, real or imagined – opinion differed within the family on this point – and the writing of biographical studies devoted to the dominating, Amazonian women of history. Maria-Theresa, at the time of which I speak, had offered a theme sympathetic to the fashion of the moment for things Austrian. Lady Warminster enjoyed the reputation of having ‘got on’ pretty well with her stepchildren, even if no outstandingly warm sentiments existed between herself and any individual member of the family, except perhaps Blanche. In the past there had been, of course, occasional rows. Frederica and George found their step-mother’s way of life too eccentric to wish to play much part in it themselves; Erridge and Norah, on the other hand thought her hopelessly conventional. Such divergence of view was only to be expected in a large family, and most of her own contemporaries agreed on the whole that Katherine Warminster, so far as her step-children were concerned, was to be congratulated on having made a fairly good job of it. For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.

Robert Tolland, seventh child and third son of his parents, was in the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gardens when, rather too early for the appointed time of the meal, I arrived there. He was a tall, cadaverous young man of about twenty-four, with his family’s blue eyes and characteristic angularity of frame. Of my wife’s brothers, Robert was the one with whom I felt myself generally most at home. He had some of the oddness, some of that complete disregard for public opinion, that distinguished Erridge (as I shall continue to call the eldest of the Tollands, since that was the name by which he was known within the family, rather than ‘Alfred’, or even ‘Alf, preferred by his left-wing cronies like J. G. Quiggin), although at the same time Robert was without Erridge’s political enthusiasms. He was not so conformist – ‘not so bloody boring’, Chips Lovell had said – as his second brother, George Tolland (retired from the Brigade of Guards, now working in the City), although Robert to some extent haunted George’s – to Chips Lovell – rather oppressive social world. In fact, outwardly, Robert was just as ‘correct’ as George, to use the term Molly Jeavons liked to apply to any of her relations whom she suspected of criticising her own manner of life. All the same, a faint suggestion of dissipation was also to be found in Robert; nothing like that thick sea mist of gossip which at an early age already encompassed his younger brother, Hugo, but something that affirmed to those with an instinct for recognising such things at long range, the existence in the neighbourhood of vaguely irregular behaviour. Chips Lovell, whose stories were always to be accepted with caution, used to hint that Robert, a school contemporary of his, had a taste for night-club hostesses not always in their first youth. The case was non-proven. Robert would take girls out occasionally – girls other than the hypothetical ‘peroxide blondes old enough to be his mother’, so designated, probably imaginatively, by Lovell – but he never showed much interest in them for more than a week or two. By no means to be described as ‘dotty’ himself, there was perhaps something in Robert of his ‘dotty’ sister, Blanche: a side never fully realised, emotionally undeveloped. He sometimes reminded me of Archie Gilbert, that ‘dancing man’ of my early London days, whose life seemed exclusively lived at balls. Robert was, of course, more ‘intelligent’ than Archie Gilbert, intelligent at least in the crudest sense of being able to discourse comprehensibly about books he had read, or theatres, concerts and private views he had attended; conversational peaks to which Archie Gilbert had never in the least aspired. Robert, as it happened, was rather a keen concert-goer and frequenter of musical parties. He had a job in an export house trading with the Far East, employment he found perfectly congenial. No one seemed to know whether or not he was any good at the work, but Robert was thought by his sisters to possess a taste for making money. When I arrived in the drawing-room he was playing Iberia on the gramophone.

‘How is Isobel?’

He threw the newspaper he had been reading to the ground and jumped to his feet, giving at the same time one of those brilliant smiles that suggested nothing could have come as a more delightful, a less expected, surprise than my own arrival in the room at just that moment. Although I was not exactly taken in by this reception, Robert’s habitual exhibition of good manners never failed to charm me.

‘Pretty well all right now. She is emerging tomorrow. I am going to see her this afternoon.’

‘Do please give her my best love. I ought to have gone to see her in the nursing home myself. Somehow one never gets time for anything. What a bore it has been for you both. I was so sorry to hear about it.’

He spoke with solicitude, at the same time giving the impression that he was still, even at this late stage, unable wholly to conceal his wonder that someone should have chosen Isobel – or any other of his sisters – as a wife; nice girls, no doubt, beings for whom he felt the warmest affection, but creatures to be thought of always in terms of playing shops or putting their dolls to bed.

‘Who will be at lunch?’

‘I’ll tell you. But shall we have the other side of this record first? I am playing them all in the wrong order. I love Les Parfums de la Nuit. I think that is really the bit I like best.’

‘Do you adapt your music to the foreign news, Robert?’

‘Rather suitable, isn’t it? Now that the Alcazar has been relieved things seem to have become a bit static. I wonder who will win.’

He closed the lid of the gramophone, which began once more to diffuse the sombre, menacing notes adumbrating their Spanish background: tawny skies: dusty plains: bleak sierras: black marble sarcophagi of dead kings under arabesqued ceilings: art nouveau blocks of flats past which the squat trams rattled and clanged: patent-leather cocked hats of the Guardia Civil: leather cushions cast upon the sand under posters promulgating cures for impotence and the pox… these and a hundred other ever-changing cubist abstractions, merging their visual elements with the hurdy-gurdy music of the bull-ring… now – through this landscape-baked by the sun, lorries, ramshackle as picadors’ horses, crawled uphill in bottom gear and a stink of petrol now, frozen by the wind and hooded like the muffled trio in Goya’s Winter, Moorish levies convoyed pack-mules through the gorges veiled in snow…

‘I expect you have heard about Erridge,’ said Robert.

‘That the Thrubworth woods will have to be sold?’

‘Well, that, of course. But I mean his latest.’

‘No?’

‘He is going out there.’

‘Where?’

Robert jerked his head in the direction of the shiny wooden cabinet from which Debussy quavered and tinkled and droned.

‘Spain.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Can you imagine.’

‘The International Brigade?’

‘I don’t know whether he will actually fight. As you know, he holds pacifist views. However, he will certainly be on the opposite side to General Franco. We can at least be sure of that. I can’t think that Erry would be any great help to any army he joined, can you?’

The news that Erridge contemplated taking a comparatively active part in the Spanish civil war came as no great surprise to me. Politically, his sympathies would naturally be engaged with the extreme Left, whether Communist or Anarchist was not known. Possibly Erridge himself had not yet decided. He had been, of course, a supporter of Blum’s ‘Popular Front’, but, within the periphery of ‘Leftism’, his shifting preferences were unpredictable; nor did he keep his relations informed on such matters. The only fact by then established was that Erridge had contributed relatively large sums of money to several of the organisations recently come into being, designed to assist the Spanish Republican forces. This news came from Quiggin, who like myself, visited from time to time the office of the weekly paper of which Mark Members was now assistant literary editor.

The fortunes of these two friends, Quiggin and Members, seemed to vary inversely. For a time Quiggin had been the more successful, supplanting Members as St John Clarke’s secretary, finding congenial odd jobs in the world of letters, running away with the beautiful Mona, battening on Erridge; but ever since Mona had, in turn, deserted Quiggin for Erridge, Quiggin had begun to undergo a period of adversity. From taking a patronising line about Members, he now – like myself – found himself professionally dependent upon his old friend for books to review. The tide, on the other hand, seemed to be flowing in favour of Members. He had secured this presentable employment, not requiring so much work that he was unable to find time to write himself; his travel book, Baroque Interlude, had been a notable success; there was talk of his marrying a rich girl, who was also not bad-looking. So far as the affair of Mona was concerned, Quiggin had ‘made it up’ with Erridge; even declaring in his cups that Erridge had done him a good turn by taking her off his hands.

‘After all,’ said Quiggin, ‘Mona has left him too. Poor Alf has nothing to congratulate himself about. He has just heaped up more guilt to carry round on his own back.’

After Erridge’s return from the Far East, he and Quiggin had met at – of all places – a party given by Mrs Andriadis, whose sole interest now, so it appeared, was the Spanish war. Common sympathy in this cause made reconciliation possible without undue abasement on Quiggin’s part, but the earlier project of founding a paper together was not revived for the moment, although Quiggin re-entered the sphere of Erridge’s patronage.

‘I correspond a certain amount with your brother-in-law,’ he had remarked when we had last met, speaking, as he sometimes did, with that slight hint of warning in his voice.

‘Which one?’

‘Alf.’

‘What do you correspond with him about?’

‘Medical supplies for the Spanish Loyalists,’ said Quiggin, pronouncing the words with quiet doggedness, ‘Basque children – there is plenty to do for those with a political conscience.’

The whole business of Mona had made some strongly self-assertive action to be expected from Erridge; to be, in fact, all but certain to take place sooner or later. After leaving Quiggin, with whom she had been living during the period immediately prior to my own marriage, and setting sail with Erridge for China (where he planned to investigate the political situation), Mona had returned to England only a few months later by herself. No one had been told the cause of this severed relationship, although various stories – largely circulated by Quiggin himself – were current on the subject of Mona’s adventures on the way home. She was the first woman in whom Erridge was known to have taken more than the most casual interest. It was not surprising that they should have found each other mutually incompatible. There was nothing easy-going about Mona’s temperament; while Erridge, notwithstanding passionately humane and liberal principles, was used to having his own way in the smallest respect, his high-minded nonconformity of life in general absolving him, where other people were concerned, from even the irksome minor disciplines of everyday convention.

By leaving her husband, Peter Templer, in the first instance, Mona had undeniably shown aims directed to something less banal than mere marriage to a comparatively rich man. She would certainly never have put herself out for Erridge in order to retain him as husband or lover. What she did, in fact, desire from life was less explicable; perhaps, as Templer said after she left him, ‘just to raise hell’. She had never, as once had been supposed, got herself married to Quiggin, so no question existed of further divorce proceedings. The Tolland family were less complacent about that fact than might have been expected.

‘Personally, I think it was the greatest pity Erry failed to hold on to Minna, or whatever her name was,’ Norah said. ‘She sounds as if she might have done him a lot of good.’

Only George and Frederica dissented from this view among Erridge’s brothers and sisters. More distant relations were probably divided about equally between those who resented, and those who thoroughly enjoyed, the idea of Erridge making a mésalliance. Lady Warminster’s opinion was unknown. Possibly she too, in secret, considered – like Strindberg – any marriage better than none at all. Erridge himself, since his return from Asia, had remained alone, shut up in Thrubworth, occupying himself with those Spanish activities now to take a more decided form, refusing to attend to other more local matters, however pressing. The question of death duties had recently been reopened by the taxation authorities, the payment of which threatened a considerable sale of land to raise the money required. Only

Norah, in face of opposition, had effected an entry into Thrubworth not long before this, reporting afterwards that her eldest brother had been ‘pretty morose’. No one knew whether Erridge had achieved any degree of success in getting to the bottom of Far Eastern problems. Probably China and Japan, like his own estate, were now forgotten in contrast with a more fashionable preoccupation with Spain. To someone of Erridge’s views and temperament, finding himself in the position he found himself, the Spanish war clearly offered a solution. Robert agreed in seeing nothing surprising in his brother’s decision.

‘Like big-game hunting in Edwardian days,’ said Robert, ‘or going to the Crusades a few years earlier. There will be one or two newspaper paragraphs about “the Red Earl”, I suppose. Bound to be. Still, Erry gets remarkably little publicity as a rule, which is just as well. For some reason he has never become news. I hope he doesn’t go and get killed. I shouldn’t think he would, would you? Very well able to look after himself in his own way. All the same, a man I used to sit next to at school was shot in the street in Jerusalem the other day. In the back, just as he was getting into a taxi to go and have a spot of dinner. But he was a professional soldier and they have to expect that sort of thing. Rather different for someone like Erry who is a pacifist. I can’t see the point of being a pacifist if you don’t keep out of the way of fighting. Anyway, we can none of us be certain of surviving when the next war comes.’

‘What will Erry do?’

‘I suppose there will be a lot of the sort of people he likes out there already,’ said Robert. ‘His beard and those clothes will be all the go. He’ll hang about Barcelona, lending a hand with the gardening, or the washing up, to show he isn’t a snob. I think it is rather dashing of him to take this step considering his hypochondria. Of course, George would at least make some effort to keep up Thrubworth properly if he inherited. I say, I hope everyone is not going to be late. I am rather hungry this morning.’

‘You haven’t told me who is coming yet.’

‘Nor I have. Well, the guest of honour is St John Clarke, the novelist. I expect you know him of old, as a brother of the pen.’

‘As a matter of fact, Robert, I have never met St John Clarke. Who else?’

‘Blanche, Priscilla-George and Veronica-Sue and Roddy.’

‘But why St John Clarke?’

‘I gather he more or less asked himself. His name is held on the books, you know. He used to turn up occasionally at Aunt Molly’s. I remember Hugo being sick over him as a child. Probably St John Clarke sheered off the place after that. Of course he may be going to lend a hand with the Maria-Theresa book. I have only just thought of that possibility.’

Lady Warminster used sometimes to announce that she was receiving ‘help’ with one or another of her biographies from some fairly well-known figure – usually a distinguished politician or civil servant – although it was never explained what form this help took. Probably they adjusted the grammar.

‘They tell me about punctuation,’ she used to say.

This intermittent publication of an historical biography had in no way brought Lady Warminster into the literary world, nor could her house be said to present any of the features of a ‘salon’. A well-known author like St John Clarke was therefore an unexpected guest. At the Jeavonses’ everything was possible. There was no one on earth who could occasion surprise there. Lady Warminster, on the contrary, living a very different sort of life, saw only relations and a few old friends. Even minor celebrities were rare, and, when they appeared, tended to be submerged by the family.

Blanche and Priscilla entered the room at that moment, bearing between them on a tray a jigsaw puzzle, newly completed and brought downstairs to be admired.

When people called Blanche ‘dotty’, no question of incipient madness was implied, nor even mild imbecility. Indeed, after a first meeting it was possible to part company from her without suspicion that something might be slightly amiss. However, few who knew her well doubted that something, somewhere, had unquestionably gone a little wrong. Quieter than the rest of her sisters, good-looking, always friendly, always prepared to take on tedious tasks, Blanche would rarely initiate a conversation. She would answer with a perfectly appropriate phrase if herself addressed, but she never seemed to feel the need to comment on any but the most trivial topics. The world, the people amongst whom she moved, appeared to make no impression on her. Life was a dream that scarcely even purported to hold within its promise any semblance of reality. The cumulative effect of this chronic sleep-walking through her days – which far surpassed that vagueness of manner often to be found in persons well equipped to look after their own interest – together with her own acceptance of the fact that she was not quite like other people, did not care at all that she was different, had finally established Blanche’s reputation for ‘dottiness’. That was all. The impression of being undeveloped, unawakened, which perhaps in some degree Robert shared, may have caused both to prefer rather secret lives. Publicly, Blanche was almost always occupied with good works: girls’ clubs in the East End; charities in which her uncle, Alfred Tolland, was concerned for which he sought her help. Blanche’s practical activities were usually very successful so far as the end in view, although she herself never troubled to take much credit for them. Nor did she show any interest in getting married, though in her time not without admirers.

‘We’ve finished it at last,’ she said, indicating the puzzle. ‘It took five months in all – with everyone who came to the house having a go. Then one afternoon the cats broke most of it up. The last few pieces were due to Priscilla’s brilliance.’

She showed a huge representation of Venice, a blue-grey Santa Maria della Salute, reflected in blue-grey waters of the canal, against a blue-grey sky. Priscilla, six or seven years younger than her sister, longer-legged, with fairer, untidy hair, was then about twenty. In spite of his own good resolutions to marry an heiress, Chips Lovell had shown interest in her for a time; apparently without things coming to much. Priscilla had at present several beaux, successfully concealing her own feelings about them. She was not at all like her sister, Norah, in disparaging the whole male sex, but the young men she met at dances never seemed quite what she required. There was talk of her taking a job. A fund was being organised for the promotion of opera, and Robert, who knew some of the members of the board, thought he could find her a place in its office.

‘How is Isobel?’ Priscilla asked rather truculently, as if she had not yet forgiven her immediately elder sister, even after two years, for getting married before herself.

‘Pretty well all right now. I am going to see her this afternoon.’

‘I looked in the day before yesterday,’ said Priscilla. ‘It is a grimmish place, isn’t it. I say, have you heard about Erry?’

‘Robert told me this moment.’

‘Erry is mad, of course. Do you know, I realised that for the first time when I was seven years old and he was grown up. Something about the way he was eating his pudding. I knew I must be growing up myself when I grasped that. Hullo, Veronica, hullo, George.’

The manner in which he wore his immensely discreet suit, rather than a slight, fair, fluffy moustache, caused George Tolland to retain the flavour of his service with the Brigade of Guards. Years before, when still a schoolboy, I had travelled to London with Sunny Farebrother, that business friend of Peter Templer’s father, and he had remarked in the train: ‘It helps to look like a soldier in the City. Fellows think they can get the better of you even before they start. That is always an advantage in doing a deal.’ Perhaps George Tolland held the same theory. Certainly he had done nothing to modify this air of having just come off parade. Whether assumed consciously or not, the style rather suited him, and was quite unlike Ted Jeavons’s down-at-heel look of being a wartime ex-officer. George was said to work like a slave in the City and seemed quite content with a social life offered chiefly by his own relations.

However, George had astonished everyone about eighteen months earlier by making an unexpected marriage. In some ways even Erridge’s adventure with Mona had surprised his family less. Erridge was a recognised eccentric. He made a virtue of behaving oddly. In taking Mona abroad he had even, in a sense, improved his reputation for normality by showing himself capable of such an act. George, on the other hand, was fond of drawing attention – especially in contrasting himself with Erridge – to the exemplary, even, as he insisted, deliberately snobbish lines upon which his own life was run. ‘I can never see the objection to being a snob,’ George used to say. ‘It seems far the most sensible thing to be.’ Apparent simplicity of outlook is always suspicious. This remark should have put everyone on their guard. It was a sign that something was taking place under the surface of George’s immaculate facade. However, since the vast majority accept at face value the personality any given individual puts forward as his own, no one in the least expected George to marry the woman he did. Veronica was the former wife of a businessman called Collins, whose job took him to Lagos for most of the year. She had two children by her first husband (‘Native women,’ said Chips Lovell, ‘also some trouble about a cheque,’) whom she had divorced a year or two before meeting George at some party given by City friends. A big brunette, not pretty, but with plenty of ‘attack’, Veronica was popular with her ‘in-laws’, especially Lady Warminster. She was older than George, now to all appearances completely under her thumb.

‘How is Isobel, Nick?’ Veronica asked. ‘I went to see her last week. She was looking a bit washed out. I’d have gone again, but one of the kids was running a temperature and I got stuck in the house for a day or two. I hear St John Clarke is coming to lunch. Isn’t that exciting? I used to love Fields of Amaranth when I was a girl. I never seem to get any time for reading now.’

George and Veronica were almost immediately followed into the room by Susan and her husband, Roddy Cutts, also in the City, now an M.P. Tall, sandy-haired, bland, Roddy smiled ceaselessly. The House of Commons had, if anything, increased a tendency, probably congenital, to behave with a shade more assiduity than ordinary politeness required; a trait that gave Roddy some of the bearing of a clergyman at a school-treat. Always smiling, his eyes roved for ever round the room, while he offered his hosts their own food, and made a point of talking chiefly to people he did not know, as if he felt these could not be altogether comfortable if still unacquainted with himself. In spite of accepting, indeed courting, this duty of putting young and old at their ease, he lacked the powerful memory – perhaps also the interest in individual differences of character – required to retain in the mind names and personal attributes; a weakness that sometimes impaired this eternal campaign of universal good-will. All the same, Roddy was able, ambitious, quite a formidable figure.

George and Roddy did not exactly dislike one another, but a certain faint sense of tension existed between them. Roddy, who came of a long line of bankers on his father’s side, while his mother, Lady Augusta’s, family could claim an almost equal tradition of shrewd business grasp, undoubtedly regarded George as an amateur where money matters were concerned. George, on the other hand, was clearly made impatient when Roddy, speaking as a professional politician, explained in simple language the trend of public affairs, particularly the military implications of world strategy in relation to the growing strength of Germany. Besides, Susan was George’s favourite sister, so there may have been a touch of jealousy about her too. Susan was a pretty girl, not a beauty, but lively and, like her husband, ambitious; possessing plenty of that taste for ‘occasion’ so necessary to the wife of a man committed to public life.

Lady Warminster now appeared in the room. She had probably mastered her habitual unpunctuality at meals in honour of St John Clarke. Slighter in build than her sister, Molly Jeavons, she looked as usual like a very patrician sibyl about to announce a calamitous disaster of which she had personally given due and disregarded warning. This Cassandra-like air of being closely in touch with sacred mysteries, even with the Black Arts themselves, was not entirely misleading. Lady Warminster was prone to fortune-tellers and those connected with divination. She was fond of retailing their startling predictions. I found that, in her day, she had even consulted Uncle Giles’s fortune-telling friend, Mrs Erdleigh, whom she rated high as an oracle, although the two of them had long been out of touch, and had not ‘put the cards out’ together for years.

‘I asked Mr Clarke for half-past one,’ said Lady Warminster. ‘You know I had not seen him since one of those rum parties Aunt Molly used to give, when I noticed him at Bumpus’s last week, browsing about among the books. I think he only goes there to read the new ones, because he showed no sign of wanting to buy anything. When he caught sight of me, he immediately followed me out into Oxford Street and began to talk about Shelley. He told me a long story of how he wanted to see me again, how people no longer liked him on account of his political opinions. He is rather an old humbug, but I remember enjoying the first part of Fields of Amaranth when it came out. I always think one ought to be grateful to an author if one has liked even a small bit of a book.’

I had heard little of St John Clarke since the days when Mark Members and J. G. Quiggin had been, one after another in quick succession, his secretary; to be followed by the ‘Trotskyist’ German boy, Werner Guggenbühl; Guggenbühl, so Quiggin hinted, had been sacked as a result of political pressure, but did not mind leaving as he had found a better job. By this time, so many people of relative eminence were writing, speaking, or marching in one or another form of militant political expression that St John Clarke’s adhesion to the Left was a matter of little general interest. He was said to have become at times resentful of a brand of politics he felt to lay a burden on his social life.

‘The man has got it in him to be a traitor to any cause,’ Quiggin said, when he reported this. ‘We shall never see Clarke manning a machine-gun.’

This supposed backsliding on the part of St John Clarke was certainly not because any potential hostess objected to his being a ‘Communist’. On the contrary, as an elderly, no longer very highly esteemed writer, such views may even have done something to re-establish his name. The younger people approved, while in rich, stuffy houses, where he was still sometimes to be seen on the strength of earlier reputation as a novelist, a left-wing standpoint was regarded as suitable to a man of letters, even creditable in a widely known, well-to-do author, who might at his age perfectly well have avoided the controversies of politics. However, St John Clarke himself apparently felt less and less capable, in practice, of taking part in the discussion of Marxist dialectic, with its ever-changing bearings. As a consequence of this laxity in ‘keeping up’, he had lost ground in the more exacting circles of the intellectual Left. His name was rarely seen except in alphabetical order among a score of nonentities signing at the foot of some letter to the press. St John Clarke, according to Members (himself suspected by Quiggin of ‘political cynicism’) yearned for his former unregenerate life. If so, he must have felt himself too deeply committed, perhaps too old, to make a reversal of programme – which, at that period, would in any case have entailed swimming against a stream that brought to a writer certain advantages. Lady Warminster was probably better informed about St John Clarke than he supposed. Her phrase ‘rather an old humbug’ established within the family her own, as it were, official attitude. She now made some enquiry about the colds from which Veronica’s two children, Angus and Iris, had been suffering.

‘Oh, Angus is all right at last,’ said George, speaking before his wife could reply. ‘We have been looking about for a school for him. I am going down to see another next week.’

‘They are both off to their Granny’s on Friday,’ said Veronica, ‘where they will get fussed over a lot and probably catch colds all over again. But there it is. They have to go. The rest of the year will be spent getting them out of bad habits.’

‘Talking of grandparents,’ said George, who, although reputed to be very ‘good’ about Veronica’s children, probably preferred relations on their father’s side to be kept, in so far as possible, out of sight and out of mind, ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try and reopen with Erry the question of getting the stained glass window put up to our own grandfather. I saw Uncle Alfred the other day-he has not been at all well, he tells me – who complained the matter had been allowed to drift for a number of years. I thought I would leave it for a time until Erry had settled down after his Chinese trip, then tackle him about it. There are always a mass of things to do after one has come home from abroad, especially after a long tour like that. I don’t know what state of mind he is in at the moment. Do you happen to have seen anything of him lately?’

George’s line about Erridge was pity rather than blame. That was the tone in which these words had been spoken. Lady Warminster smiled to herself. She was known to regard the whole question of the stained glass window not only as at best a potential waste of money (out-of-date sentiment, threatening active production of ugliness) but also, no doubt correctly, as a matter to which Erridge would in no circumstances ever turn his attention; one, therefore, which was an even greater waste of time to discuss. She may have smiled for that reason alone. In addition, she was going to enjoy communicating to George news so highly charged with novelty as Erridge’s latest project.

‘You will have to be quick, George, if you want to get hold of Erry,’ she said gently. ‘Why?’

‘He is going abroad again.’

‘Where is he off to this time?’

‘Spain.’

‘What to join in the war?’

‘So he says.’

George took the information pretty well. He was by no means a fool, even if people like Chips Lovell did not find him a specially amusing companion. Like others who knew Erridge well, George had probably observed a cloud of that particular shape already forming on the horizon. Roddy Cutts, on the other hand, who, in the course of a couple of years of marriage to Susan, had only managed to meet her eldest brother once, was more surprised. Indeed, the whole Erridge legend, whenever it cropped up, always disturbed Roddy. He had clear-cut, practical ideas how people behaved. Erridge did not at all fit in with these.

‘But surely Erridge isn’t going to fight?’ Roddy said. ‘I suppose he has gone into the legal status of a British national taking part in a continental civil war. It is a most anomalous position-not to mention a great embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government, whatever the party in power. I presume he will be anti-Franco, holding the views he does.’

‘Of course he will be anti-Franco,’ said George. ‘But I agree with you, Roddy, that I should not have thought actual fighting would have been in his line.’

All this talk was going on outside Lady Warminster’s immediate orbit. Now she turned towards us to give one of her semi-official warnings.

‘I believe Mr Clarke has something he wants to tell me about Erridge,’ she said. ‘It might entail a more or less private talk with him after luncheon. Don’t any of you feel you have got to stay, if he decides to tell me some long rigmarole.’

She did not say, perhaps did not know, whether St John Clarke wanted to discuss Erridge’s latest move or some more general matter that concerned Erridge’s affairs. I had not heard that Erridge had been seeing more of St John Clarke recently. This indicated that their previous casual acquaintance must have grown in intimacy. The escapade with Mona, the decision to take part in the Spanish war, such things showed Erridge’s more picturesque side, the aspect at which his beard and tattered clothes freely hinted There were other, less dramatic matters to cause his family concern. The chief of these was the reopening of the question of death duties; but, in addition, the Thrubworth agent had died while Erridge was in China, revealing by vacation of office a situation often suspected by the rest of the family, that is to say gross, perhaps disastrous, mismanagement of the estate, which had been taking place over a long period. The account was seriously overdrawn at the bank. Thrubworth woods would probably have to be sold to meet the deficit. At least, selling the woods was Erridge’s idea of the easiest way out; the trustees, too, were thought to be amenable to this solution. It was possible that Erridge, having no taste for meeting his step-mother to discuss business, had entrusted St John Clarke with some message on the subject, before he himself set off for Spain, where he could forget the trivialities of estate management in the turmoil of revolution. Perhaps Lady Warminster’s last aside was intended to convey that, if business affairs were to be discussed at all, they were not to be interrupted. If so, she made her announcement just in time, because a second later St John Clarke himself was announced. He came hurriedly into the room, a hand held out in front of him as if to grasp the handle of a railway carriage door before the already moving train gathered speed and left the platform.

‘Lady Warminster, I am indeed ashamed of myself,’ he said in a high, rich, breathless, mincing voice, like that of an experienced actor trying to get the best out of a minor part in Restoration comedy. ‘I must crave the forgiveness of you and your guests.’

He gave a rapid glance round the room to discover whom he had been asked to meet, at the same time diffusing about him a considerable air of social discomfort. Lady Warminster accepted St John Clarke’s hand carefully, almost with surprise, immediately relinquishing it, as if the texture or temperature of the flesh dissatisfied her.

‘I hope you were not expecting a grand luncheon party, Mr Clarke,’ she said. ‘There are only a few of the family here, I am afraid.’

Plainly, that was only too true. There could be no doubt from St John Clarke’s face, flushed with running up the stairs, that he had hoped for something better than what he found; perhaps even a téte-à-téte with his hostess, rather than this unwieldy domestic affair, offering neither intimacy nor splendour. However, if disappointed at first sight, he was an old campaigner in the ups and downs of luncheon parties; he knew how to make the best of a bad job.

‘Much, much pleasanter,’ he murmured, still gazing suspiciously round the room. ‘And I am sure you will agree with me, Lady Warminster, in thinking, so far as company is concerned, enough is as bad as a feast, and half a loaf in many ways preferable to the alternative of a whole one or the traditional no bread. How enjoyable, therefore, to be just as we are.’

Although his strongly outlined features were familiar from photographs in the papers, I had never before met this well-known author. Something about St John Clarke put him in the category – of which Widmerpool was another example – of persons at once absurd and threatening. St John Clarke’s head recalled Blake’s, a resemblance no doubt deliberately cultivated, because the folds and crannies of his face insistently suggested a self-applauding interior activity, a desire to let everyone know about his own ‘mental strife’. I had seen him in person on a couple of occasions, though never before closely: once, five or six years earlier, walking up Bond Street with his then secretary Mark Members; a second time, on that misty afternoon in Hyde Park, propelled in a wheeled chair by Mona and Quiggin (who had replaced Members), while the three of them marched in procession as part of a political demonstration. Although he still carried himself with some degree of professional panache, St John Clarke did not look well. He might have been thought older than his years; his colour was not that of a man in good health. Once tall and gaunt in appearance, he had grown fat and flabby, a physical state which increased for some reason his air of being a dignitary of the Church temporarily passing, for some not very edifying reason, as a layman. Longish grey hair and sunken, haunted eyes recalled Mr Deacon’s appearance, probably because both belonged to the same generation, rather than on account of much similarity about the way their lives had been lived. Certainly St John Clarke had never indulged himself in Mr Deacon’s incurable leanings towards the openly disreputable. On the contrary, St John Clarke had been straitlaced, as much from inclination as from policy, during his decades of existence as a writer taken reasonably seriously. Even now, forgotten by the critics but remembered fairly faithfully by the circulating libraries, he had remained a minor public figure, occasionally asked to broadcast on some non-literary, non-political subject like the problem of litter or the abatement of smoke, talks into which he would always inject – so Members alleged – some small admixture of Marxist lore.

‘And how is your sister, Lady Molly?’ he asked, when we had moved into the dining-room and taken our places. ‘It is many a year since I had the pleasure. Why, I scarcely seem to have seen her since she was châtelaine of Dogdene. How long ago seem those Edwardian summer afternoons.’

Lady Warminster, who was in one of her more playful moods, received the enquiry with kindly amusement, offering at once some formal statement which suggested no words of hers could do justice to conditions prevailing in the Jeavons house during redecoration. Lady Warminster had few illusions as to St John Clarke’s preference for her sister as Marchioness of Sleaford, rich and presiding over a famous mansion, rather than married to Ted Jeavons and living in disorder and no great affluence in South Kensington. St John Clarke recalled that he had visited the Jeavons house, too, but also a long time ago. A minute or two later I heard her ask him whether he had read any of the two or three books I had written; a question calculated to produce more entertainment for Lady Warminster herself than gratification to St John Clarke or me. Aware, certainly, that I knew Members and Quiggin, he had given me a stiff, distrustful bow when introduced. Memories of his own dealings with that couple must have been unwelcome. Besides, Lady Warminster’s buoyant manner was not of a kind to bring reassurance.

‘Certainly, certainly,’ said St John Clarke guardedly. ‘I remember praising one of them. A laudable piece of work.’

He took a sip of the sickly white Bordeaux poured out for us. Lady Warminster possessed a horror of ‘drink’. As a rule barely enough appeared at her table to satisfy the most modest requirements. This was perhaps her sole characteristic shared with Erridge. St John Clarke was abstemious too. Members, during his secretaryship, had tried to encourage in his master a taste for food and wine, but complained later that the only result had been a lot of talk about rare vintages and little known recipes, while the meals at St John Clarke’s table grew worse than ever.

Yes,’ said St John Clarke, wiping his mouth and refolding the napkin on his knee, ‘yes.’

It was true he had spoken favourably of my first book in a New York paper, when discoursing in general terms of younger English writers. That, so far as I was concerned had been the first indication that St John Clarke – in the hands of Members – was undergoing some sort of aesthetic conversion. Kind words from him only a short time before would have been unthinkable. However, mention of a first novel at the safe remove of an American newspaper’s book-page is one thing: to be brought face to face with its author five or six years later, quite another. So, at least, St John Clarke must have keenly felt. Mutual relationship between writers, whatever their age, is always delicate, not so much – as commonly supposed – on account of jealousy, but because of the intensely personal nature of a writer’s stock in trade. For example, St John Clarke seemed to me a ‘bad’ writer, that is to say a person to be treated (in those days) with reserve, if not thinly veiled hostility. Later, that question – the relationship of writers of different sorts – seemed, like so many others, less easily solved; in fact infinitely complicated. St John Clarke himself had made a living, indeed collected a small fortune, while giving pleasure to many by writing his books (pleasure even to myself when a boy, if it came to that), yet now was become an object of disapproval to me because his novels did not rise to a certain standard demanded by myself. Briefly, they seemed to me trivial, unreal, vulgar, badly put together, odiously phrased and ‘insincere’. Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? Fortunately these speculations, heavily burdened with the idealistic sentiments of one’s younger days, were put to no practical test; not only because St John Clarke was sitting at some distance from me, but also on account of the steps he himself immediately took to change a subject likely to be unfruitful to both of us. He quickly commented on the flowers in the vases, which were arranged with great skill, and turned out to be the work of Blanche.

‘Flowers mean more to us in a city than in a garden,’ said St John Clarke.

Lady Warminster nodded. She was determined not to abandon the subject of literature without a struggle.

‘I expect you are writing a new book yourself, Mr Clarke,’ she said. ‘We have not had one from you for a long time.’

‘Nor from you, Lady Warminster.’

‘But I am not a famous writer,’ she said. ‘I just amuse myself with people like Maria-Theresa who take my fancy. For you, it is quite another matter.’

St John Clarke shook his head energetically, like a dog emerging from a pond. It was ten or fifteen years since he had published anything but occasional pieces.

‘Sometimes I add a paragraph to my memoirs, Lady Warminster,’ he said. ‘There is little about the critics of the present day to encourage an author of my age and experience to expose his goods in the market place. To tell the truth, Lady Warminster, I get more pleasure from watching the confabulation of sparrows in their parliament on the rooftops opposite my study window, or from seeing the clouds scudding over the Serpentine in windy weather, than I do from covering sheets of foolscap with spidery script that only a few sympathetic souls, some now passed on to the Great Unknown, would even care to read.

No sparrow on any roof was ever lonely

As I am, nor any animal untamed.

Doesn’t Petrarch say that somewhere? He is a great stay to me. Childish pleasures, you may tell me, Lady Warminster but I answer you that growing old consists abundantly in growing young.’

Lady Warminster was about to reply, whether in agreement or not with this paradox was never revealed, because St John Clarke suddenly realised that his words belonged to an outdated, even decadent state of mind, wholly inconsistent with political regeneration. He could hardly have been carried away by the white wine. Probably it was some time since he had attended a luncheon party of this sort, the comparative unfamiliarity of which must have made him feel for a minute or two back in some much earlier sequence of his social career.

‘Of course I was speaking of when the errant mind strays,’ he added in a different, firmer tone, ‘as I fear the mind of that unreliable fellow, the intellectual, does from time to time. I meant to imply that, when there are so many causes to claim one’s attention, it seems a waste of time to write about the trivial encounters of an individual like myself, who has spent so much of his time pursuing selfish, and, I fear, often frivolous aims. We shall have to learn to live more collectively, Lady Warminster. There is no doubt about it.’

‘That was just what a fellow in the City was saying to me the other day,’ said George. ‘We were talking about those trials for treason in Russia. I can’t make head or tail of them. He seemed full of information about Zinoviev and Kamenev and the rest of them. He was quite well disposed to Russia. A bill-broker named Widmerpool. You probably remember him at school, Nick. Some story about an overcoat, wasn’t there?’

‘I’ve met him,’ said Roddy. ‘Used to be with Donners-Brebner. Heavy-looking chap with thick spectacles. As a matter of fact, he was always regarded as rather a joke in our family at the time when my sister, Mercy, was going to dances. He was the absolute last resort when a man had dropped out for a dinner party. Didn’t some girl pour sugar over his head once at a ball?’

‘What’s happened to Widmerpool?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen him for a year or two. Not since Isobel and I were married, as a matter of fact. I’ve known him for ages.’

‘Fettiplace-Jones was giving him dinner at the House,’ said Roddy, ‘the night of the India debate.’

‘Is he thinking of standing?’ George asked. ‘He is rather the type.’

‘Not as a Tory,’ Roddy said. ‘Widmerpool is far from being a Tory.’

Roddy looked a shade resentful at George’s probably quite artless judgment that Widmerpool was the sort of man likely to make an M.P.

‘I ran across him somewhere,’ said George. ‘Then he was sitting at the next table one day at Sweeting’s. He struck me as a knowledgeable chap. We had him to dinner as a matter of fact. Now I come to think of it, he said he knew you, Nick. My firm does a certain amount of business with Donners-Brebner, where Widmerpool used to be. He may be going back there in an advisory capacity, anyway temporarily, he told me.’

‘I didn’t at all take to Mr Widmerpool,’ said Veronica, breaking off conversation with Susan on the subject of the best place to buy curtain material. ‘He could talk of nothing but Mrs Simpson the night he came to us. You couldn’t get him off the subject.’

St John Clarke, who had begun to look a little petulant at all this chatter about persons in general unknown to him, brightened at that name. He seemed about to speak; then some inner prompting must have caused him to think better of expressing any reflections stirring within his mind because finally he remained silent, crumbling his bread thoughtfully.

‘I met Mr Widmerpool once at Aunt Molly’s,’ said Susan ‘There was that business of his engagement being broken off, wasn’t there – with that rather dreadful lady, one of the Vowchurches?’

‘I hear poor Uncle Ted is a little better,’ said Lady Warminster.

She referred to the war wound from which Jeavons intermittently suffered, at the same time managing to convey also a sense of moral or social improvement in Jeavons’s condition which appeared for some reason to forbid further discussion of Widmerpool’s unsuccessful attempt of a year or two before to marry Mrs Haycock.

‘Roddy and I were at the Jeavonses’ last week,’ said Susan. ‘The worst of the redecorating is over now, although one still falls over ladders and pails of whitewash. Aunt Molly’s friend Miss Weedon – whom I can’t stand – has moved in permanently now. She has a kind of flat on the top floor. And do you know who is living there too? Charles Stringham of all people. Do you remember him? Miss Weedon is said to be “looking after him”.’

‘Was that the Stringham we were at school with?’ George asked me, but with no idea of what amazement I felt at this news, ‘He was another contemporary of Widmerpool’s.’

‘I used to think Charles Stringham so attractive when he occasionally turned up at dances,’ said Susan reminiscently, speaking as if at least half a century had passed since she herself had been seen on a dance floor. ‘Then he absolutely disappeared from the scene. What happened to him? Why does he need “looking after”?’

‘Charles Stringham isn’t exactly a teetotaller, darling,’ said Roddy, showing slight resentment at the expression by his own wife of such unqualified praise of another man’s charms.

Lady Warminster shuddered visibly at the thought of what that understatement about Stringham’s habits must comprehend. I asked Susan how this indeed extraordinary situation had come about: that Miss Weedon and Stringham should be living under the same roof at the Jeavonses’.

‘Charles Stringham went to see Miss Weedon there one evening – she was his mother’s secretary once, and has always been friends with Charles. He was in an awful state apparently, with ’flu coming on, practically delirious. So Miss Weedon kept him there until he recovered. In fact he has been there ever since. That is Aunt Molly’s story.’

‘Molly mentioned something about it to me,’ said Lady Warminster.

She spoke very calmly, as if in reassuring confirmation that there was really nothing whatever for anyone to worry about. Having once registered her own illimitable horror of alcohol, Lady Warminster was fully prepared to discuss Stringham’s predicament, about which, as usual, she probably knew a great deal more than her own family supposed. The information about Stringham was not only entirely new to me, but full of all kind of implications of other things deep rooted in the past; far more surprising, far more dramatic, for example, than Erridge’s setting off for Spain.

‘Charles is Amy Foxe’s son by her second husband,’ said Lady Warminster. ‘There was a daughter, too – divorced from that not very nice man with one arm – who is married to an American called Wisebite. Amy has had trouble with both her children.’

Stringham’s mother was an old friend of Lady Warminster’s, although the two of them now saw each other rarely. That was chiefly because Mrs Foxe’s unrelenting social activities allowed little time for visits to the drowsy unruffled backwater in which the barque of Lady Warminster’s widowhood had come to rest; unruffled, that is to say, in the eyes of someone like Mrs Foxe. In fact, life at Hyde Park Gardens could not always be so described although its tenor was very different from the constant rotation of parties, committee meetings, visits, through which Mrs Foxe untiringly moved. Perhaps this description of Mrs Foxe’s existence was less exact since she had become so taken up with Norman Chandler; but, although she might now frequent a less formal social world (her charity organising remained unabated), she had been, on the other hand, correspondingly drawn into Chandler’s own milieu of the theatre and music.

‘It is really very good of Miss Weedon to look after Charles Stringham,’ Lady Warminster continued. ‘His mother, what with her hospitals and those terrible wars over them with Lady Bridgnorth, is always so dreadfully busy. Miss Weedon – Tuffy, everyone used to call her – was Flavia Stringham’s governess before she became her mother’s secretary. Such a nice, capable woman. I don’t know why you should not like her, Sue.’

This speech did not make absolutely clear whether Lady Warminster cared as little as Susan for Mrs Foxe’s former secretary, or whether, as the words outwardly indicated, she indeed approved of Miss Weedon and liked meeting her. Lady Warminster’s pronouncements in such fields were often enigmatic. Possibly we were all intended to infer from her tone a shade of doubt as to whether Miss Weedon should have been allowed to take such absolute control over Stringham as now seemed to prevail. I felt uncertainty on that subject myself. This new situation might be good; it might be bad. I remembered Miss Weedon’s unconcealed adoration for him when still a boy; the signs she had shown later t the Jeavonses’ of hoping to play some authoritarian role in Stringham’s life.

‘I am doing what I can to help,’ Miss Weedon had said, when we had met at the Jeavons house not long before my marriage.

Then, I had wondered what she meant. Now I saw that restraint, even actual physical restraint, might have been in her mind. Perhaps nothing short of physical restraint would meet Stringham’s case. It was at least arguable. Miss Weedon seemed to be providing something of the sort.

‘Molly will be glad of the additional rent,’ said Lady Warminster, who seemed to be warming to the subject, now that its alcoholic aspects had faded into the background. ‘She has been complaining a lot lately about being hard up. I tremble to think what Ted’s doctor’s bill must be like at any time. What difficulties he has with his inside. However, he is off slops again, I hear.’

‘Have the Stringhams any money?’ George asked.

‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Lady Warminster, speaking as if the mere suggestion of anyone, let alone the Stringhams, having any money was in itself a whimsical enough notion. ‘But I believe Amy was considered quite an heiress when she first appeared in London and old Lady Amesbury took her about a lot. She was South African, you know. Most of it spent now, I should think. Amy has always been quite thoughtless about money. She is very wilful. People said she was brought up in a very silly way. I suppose she probably lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust. I don’t think Charles’s father – ”Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with. He used to be very handsome, and so amusing. He looked wonderful on a horse. He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya. Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’

In making this last comment, Lady Warminster was no doubt thinking of Norman Chandler; although no one could say how much, or how little, she knew of this association, nor what she thought about it. Robert caught my eye across the table. Within the family, he was regarded as the chief authority on their step-mother’s obliquity of speech Robert, strangely enough, had turned out to be one of the young men I had seen with Mrs Foxe at that performance of The Duchess of Malfi three or four years before. Mrs Foxe’s other two guests had been John Mountfichet, the Bridgnorths’ eldest son, and Venetia Penistone, one of the Huntercombes’ daughters. After we had become brothers-in-law, and later talked of this occasion, Robert had described to me the excitement shown by Mrs Foxe that night at the prospect of seeing Chandler after the play was over. It was only a week or two since they had met for the first time.

‘You know Mrs Foxe is rather daunting in her way,’ Robert had said. ‘At least she always rather daunts me. Well, she was trembling that night like a leaf. I think she was absolutely mad about that young actor we eventually took out to supper. She didn’t get much opportunity to talk to him, because Max Pilgrim came too and spent the whole evening giving imitations of elderly ladies.

This companionship between Mrs Foxe and Chandler still flourished. She was said to give him ‘wonderful’ presents, expecting nothing in return but the pleasure of seeing him when he had the time to spare. That one of the most exigent of women should find satisfaction in playing this humble role was certainly remarkable. Chandler, lively and easy-going, was quite willing to fall in with her whim. They were continually seen about together, linked in a relationship somewhere between lover with mistress and mother to son.

‘I could understand it if Norman were a sadist,’ Moreland used to say. ‘A mental one, I mean, who cut her dates and suchlike. On the contrary, he is always charming to her. Yet it still goes on. Women are inexplicable.’

During all this talk about Stringham and his parents, St John Clarke had once more dropped out of the conversation. His face was beginning to show that, although aware a self-invited guest must submit to certain periods of inattention on the part of his hostess, these had been allowed to become too frequent to be tolerated by a man of his position. He began to shift about in his chair as if he had something on his mind, perhaps wondering if he would finally be given a chance of being alone with Lady Warminster, or whether he had better say whatever he had to say in public. He must have decided that a téte-à-téte was unlikely, because he now spoke to her in a low confidential tone.

‘There was a matter I wanted to put to you, Lady Warminster, which, in the hurried circumstances of our meeting at Bumpus’s, I hardly liked to bring up. That was why I invited myself so incontinently to your house, to which you so graciously replied with an invitation to this charming lunch party. Lord Warminster – your eldest stepson – Alfred, I have begun to call him.’ St John Clarke paused, laughed a little coyly, and put his head on one side.

‘We call him Erridge,’ said Lady Warminster kindly, ‘I never quite know why. It was not the custom in my own family, but then we were different from the Tollands in many ways. The Tollands have always called their eldest son by the second title. I suppose he could perfectly well be called Alfred. And yet, somehow, Erridge is not quite an Alfred.’

She considered a moment, her face clouding, as if the problem of why Erridge was not quite an Alfred worried her more than a little, even made her momentarily sad.

‘Lady Priscilla mentioned her brother’s political sympathies just now,’ said St John Clarke, smiling gently in return as if to express the ease with which he could cope with social fences of the kind Lady Warminster set in his way. ‘I expect you may know he is leaving for Spain almost immediately.’

‘He told me so himself,’ said Lady Warminster.

‘The fact is,’ said St John Clarke, getting rather red in the face and losing some of his courtliness of manner, ‘the fact is, Lady Warminster, your stepson has asked me to look after his business affairs while he is away. Of course I do not mean his estate, nothing like that. His interests of a politico-literary kind-’

He took up his glass, but it was empty.

‘Lord Warminster and I have been seeing a good deal of each other since his return from the East,’ he said, stifling a sigh probably caused by thought of Mona.

‘At Thrubworth?’ asked Lady Warminster.

She showed sudden interest. In fact everyone at the table pricked up their ears at the supposition that St John Clarke had been received at Thrubworth. Guests at Thrubworth were rare. A new name in the visitors’ book would be a significant matter.

‘At Thrubworth,’ said St John Clarke reverently. ‘We talked there until the wee, small hours. During the past few years both of us have undergone strains and stresses, Lady Warminster. Alfred has been very good to me.’

He stared glassily down the table, as if he thought I myself might well be largely to blame for Members and Quiggin; for the disturbances the two of them must have evoked in his personal life.

‘No one can tell what may happen to Lord Warminster in Spain,’ St John Clarke said, speaking now more dramatically.

He knows me to be a strong supporter of the democratically elected Spanish Government. He knows I feel an equally strong admiration for himself.’

‘Yes of course,’ said Lady Warminster encouragingly.

‘At the same time, Lady Warminster, I am an author, a man of letters, not a man of affairs. I thought it only right you should know the position. I want to do nothing behind your back. Besides that, Alfred has occasional dealings with persons known to me in the past with whom I should be unwilling… I do not mean of course…’

These phrases, which seemed to appeal to Lady Warminster’s better feelings, certainly referred in the main to Quiggin.

‘Oh, I am sure he does,’ said Lady Warminster fervently. ‘I do so much sympathise with you in feeling that.’

She plainly accepted St John Clarke’s halting sentences as reprobating every friend Erridge possessed.

‘In short I wondered if I could from time to time ask your advice, Lady Warminster – might get in touch with you if necessary, perhaps even rely on you to speak with acquaintances of your stepson’s with whom-for purely personal reasons, nothing worse I assure you – I should find it distasteful to deal.’

St John Clarke made a gesture to show that he was throwing himself on Lady Warminster’s mercy. She, on her part, did not appear at all unwilling to learn something of Erridge’s affairs in this manner, although she can have had no very clear picture of St John Clarke’s aims, which were certainly not easy to clarify. No doubt he himself liked the idea of interfering in Erridge’s business, but at the same time did not wish to be brought once more in contact with Quiggin. Lady Warminster must have found it flattering to be offered the position of St John Clarke’s confidante, which would at once satisfy curiosity and be in the best interests of the family. If Erridge never came back from Spain – an eventuality which had to be considered – there was no knowing what messes might have to be cleared up. Besides, Erridge’s plans often changed. His doings had to be coped with empirically. Like less idealistic persons, he was primarily interested in pleasing himself, even though his pleasures took unusual form. Little could be guessed from an outward examination of these enthusiasms at any given moment.

‘Write to me, Mr Clarke, or telephone,’ said Lady Warminster, ‘whenever you think I can be of help. Should my health not allow me to see you at that moment, we will arrange something later.’

I had by then seen too much of Lady Warminster and her stepchildren to be surprised by the calm with which news of this sort was accepted. My own temper was in sympathy with such an attitude of mind. I looked forward to hearing Quiggin’s account of the current Erridge situation. Possibly Quiggin himself might decide to go to Spain. Such a move was not to be ruled out. No doubt he too intended to keep an eye on Erridge’s affairs; the best way to do that might be to attach himself to Erridge’s person. The development of St John Clarke as a close friend of Erridge must be very unsympathetic to Quiggin. St John Clarke’s appeal to Lady Warminster was unexpected. He had managed to get most of it said without attracting much attention from the rest of the party, who were discussing their own affairs, but the general drift of his muttered words probably caused the turn conversation took when it became general once more.

‘Do you hold any view on what the outcome in Spain will be, Mr Clarke?’ asked George.

St John Clarke made a gesture with his fingers to be interpreted as a much watered-down version of the Popular Front’s clenched fist. Now that he had had his word with Lady Warminster about Erridge, he seemed more cheerful, although I was again struck by the worn, unhealthy texture of his skin. He still possessed plenty of nervous energy, but had lost his earlier flush. His cheeks were grey and pasty in tone. He looked a sick man.

‘Franco cannot win,’ he said.

‘What about the Germans and Italians?’ said George. ‘It doesn’t look as if non-intervention will work. It has been a failure from the start.’

‘In that case,’ said St John Clarke, evidently glad to find an opportunity to pronounce this sentence, ‘can you blame Caballero for looking elsewhere for assistance.’

‘Russia?’

‘In support of Spain’s elected government.’

‘Personally, I am inclined to think Franco will win,’ said George.

‘Is that to your taste?’ asked St John Clarke mildly.

‘Not particularly,’ George said. ‘Especially if that has got to include Hitler and Mussolini. But then Russia isn’t to my taste either. It is hard to feel much enthusiasm for the way the Government side go on, or, for that matter, the way they were going before the war broke out.’

‘People like myself look forward to a social revolution in a country that has remained feudal far too long,’ said St John Clarke, speaking now almost benignly, as if the war in Spain was being carried on just to please him personally, and he himself could not help being flattered by the fact. ‘We cannot always be living in the past.’

This expressed preference for upheaval for its own sake roused Roddy Cutts. He began to move forward his knives and forks so that they made a pattern on the table, evidently a preliminary to some sort of a speech. St John Clarke was about to expand his view on revolution, when Roddy cut him short in measured, moderate, parliamentary tones.

‘The question is,’ Roddy said, ‘whether the breakdown of the internal administration of Spain – and nobody seriously denies the existence of a breakdown – justified a military coup d’état. Some people think it did, others disagree entirely. My own view is that we should not put ourselves in the position of seeming to encourage a political adventurer of admittedly Fascist stamp, while at the same time expressing in no uncertain terms our complete lack of sympathy for any party or parties which allow the country’s rapid disintegration into a state of lawlessness, which can only lead, through Soviet intrigue, to the establishment of a Communist regime.’

‘I think both sides are odious,’ said Priscilla. ‘Norah backs the Reds, like Erry. She and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson have got a picture of La Pasionaria stuck up on the mantelpiece of their sitting-room. I asked them if they approved of shooting nuns.’

St John Clarke’s expression suggested absolute neutrality on that point.

‘The tradition of anti-clericalism in Spain goes back a long way, Lady Priscilla,’ he said, ‘especially in Catalonia.’

Roddy Cutts had no doubt been studying Spanish history too, because he said: ‘You will find an almost equally unbroken record of Royalism in Navarre, Mr Clarke.’

‘I haven’t been in Spain for years,’ said Lady Warminster, in her low, musical voice, speaking scarcely above a whisper. ‘I liked the women better than the men. Of course they all have English nannies.’

Luncheon at an end, St John Clarke established himself with Blanche in a corner of the drawing-room, where he discoursed of the humour of Dickens in a rich, sonorous voice, quite unlike the almost falsetto social diction he had employed on arrival. Blanche smiled gently, while with many gestures and grimaces St John Clarke spoke of Mr Micawber and Mrs Nickleby. They were still there, just beginning on Great Expectations, when I set out for the nursing home, carrying messages of good-will to Isobel from the rest of the family.

A future marriage, or a past one, may be investigated and explained in terms of writing by one of its parties, but it is doubtful whether an existing marriage can ever be described directly in the first person and convey a sense of reality. Even those writers who suggest some of the substance of married life best, stylise heavily, losing the subtlety of the relationship at the price of a few accurately recorded, but isolated, aspects. To think at all objectively about one’s own marriage is impossible, while a balanced view of other people’s marriage is almost equally hard to achieve with so much information available, so little to be believed. Objectivity is not, of course, everything in writing; but, even after one has cast objectivity aside, the difficulties of presenting marriage are inordinate. Its forms are at once so varied, yet so constant, providing a kaleidoscope, the colours of which are always changing, always the same. The moods of a love affair, the contradictions of friendship, the jealousy of business partners, the fellow feeling of opposed commanders in total war, these are all in their way to be charted. Marriage, partaking of such – and a thousand more – dual antagonisms and participations, finally defies definition. I thought of some of these things on the way to the nursing home.

‘How were they all?’ asked Isobel.

We went over the luncheon party in detail; discussed the news about Erridge. Isobel was returning the following day, so that there were domestic arrangements to be rehearsed, mysteries of the labyrinth of married life fallen into abeyance with her imprisonment, now to be renewed with her release.

‘I shan’t be sorry to come home.’

‘I shan’t be sorry for you to be home again.’

Late in the afternoon I left the place. Its passages somewhat like those of Uncle Giles’s pied-à-terre, the Ufford, were additionally laden with the odour of disinfectant, more haunted with human kind. As in the Ufford, it was easy to lose your way. Turning a corner that led to the stairs, I suddenly saw in front of me, of all people, Moreland, talking to a tall, grey-haired man, evidently a doctor, because he carried in his hand, like a stage property in a farce, a small black bag. Moreland looked hopelessly out of place in these surroundings, so that the two of them had some of the appearance of taking part in a play. The doctor was talking earnestly, Moreland fidgeting about on his feet, evidently trying to get away without too great a display of bad manners. We had not met for over a year – although occasionally exchanging picture postcards – because Moreland had taken a job at a seaside resort known for pride in its musical activities. Sooner or later to be a conductor in the provinces was a destiny Moreland had often predicted for himself in moods of despondency. I knew little or nothing about his life there, nor how his marriage was going. The postcards dealt usually with some esoteric matter that had caught his attention – a peculiar bathing dress on the beach, peepshows on the pier, the performance of pierrots – rather than the material of daily life. In the earlier stages of marriage, Matilda was keeping pace pretty well with circumstances not always easy from shortage of money. When he caught sight of me, Moreland looked quite cross, as if I had surprised him in some situation of which he was almost ashamed.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he asked brusquely.

‘Visiting my wife.’

‘Like me.’

‘Is Matilda in this awful place too?’

‘But of course.’

He, too, had seemed in the depths of gloom when I first saw him; now, delighted at encountering a friend in these unpromising surroundings, he began to laugh and slap a rolled-up newspaper against his leg. Matilda had made him buy a new suit, in general cleaned up his appearance.

‘So you have come back to London.’

‘Inevitably.’

‘For good?’

‘I had to. I couldn’t stand the seaside any longer. Matilda is about to have a baby, as a matter of fact. That is why I am haunting these portals.’

‘Isobel has just had a miscarriage.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Moreland, ‘I am always hearing about miscarriages. I used to think such things were quite out of date, and took place only in Victorian times when ladies – as Sir Magnus Donners would say – laced themselves up “a teeny, teeny little bit too tight”. Rather one of Sir Magnus’s subjects. I may add I shall be quite bankrupt unless Matilda makes up her mind fairly soon. She keeps on having false alarms. It is costing a fortune.’

He began to look desperately worried. The man with the black bag took a step forward.

‘Both you gentlemen might be surprised if I told you incidence of abortion,’ he said in a thin rasping voice, ‘recently quoted in medical journals.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Moreland. ‘This is Dr Brandreth.’

I saw the man to be the Brandreth who had been at school with me. Four or five years older, he had probably been unaware of my existence at that time, but I had seen him again at least once in later life, notably at that Old Boy Dinner at which our former housemaster, Le Bas, had fainted, an occasion when Brandreth, as a doctor, had taken charge of the situation. Tall and bony, with hair like the locks of a youngish actor who has dusted over his skull to play a more aged part in the last act, Brandreth possessed those desiccated good looks which also suggest the theatre. I began to explain that I knew him already, that we had been schoolboys together, but he brushed the words aside with a severe ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ at the same time taking my hand in a firm, smooth, interrogatory, medical grip, no doubt intended to give confidence to a patient, but in fact striking at once a disturbing interior dread at the possibilities of swift and devastating diagnosis.

‘Another of my woman patients,’ he went on, ‘happens to be in here. Rather a difficult case for the gynaecologist. I’ve been giving him a hand with the after-treatment – from the temperamental point of view.’

Brandreth continued to hold Moreland with his eye, as if to make sure his attention did not wander too far afield. At the same time he took up a position closer to myself that seemed to imply appeal to me, as one probably familiar with Moreland’s straying mind, to help if necessary in preventing his escape before the time was ripe. Penning us both in, Brandreth was evidently determined to obstruct with all the forces at his command further conversation between us which, by its personal nature, might exclude himself. However, at the critical moment, just as Brandreth was beginning to speak, he was interrupted by the competition of a new, impelling force. A stoutly built man, wearing a Jaeger dressing-gown, pushed past us without ceremony, making towards a door of frosted glass in front of which we were grouped. In his manner of moving, this person gave the impression that he thought we were taking up too much room in the passage – which may have been true – and that he himself was determined to convey, if necessary by calculated discourtesy, demonstrated by his own aggressive, jerky progress, a sense of strong moral disapproval towards those who had time to waste gossiping. Brandreth had already opened his mouth, probably to make some further pronouncement about obstetrics, but now he closed it quickly, catching the man in the dressing-gown by the sleeve.

‘Widmerpool, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet another patient of mine – one of England’s most promising young musicians.’

Widmerpool, whose well-worn dressing-gown covered a suit of grubby pyjamas in grey and blue stripe, stopped unwillingly. Without friendliness, he rotated his body towards us. Brandreth he disregarded, staring first at Moreland, then myself, frowning hard through his thick spectacles, relaxing this severe regard a little when he recognised in me a person he knew.

‘Why, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’

Like Moreland, Widmerpool too seemed aggrieved at finding me within the precincts of the nursing home.

‘Ha!’ said Brandreth. ‘Of course you know one another. Fellow pupils of Le Bas. Strange coincidence. I could tell you some stranger ones. We were speaking of the high incidence of abortion, my dear Widmerpool.’

Widmerpool started violently.

‘Not abortion, Dr Brandreth,’ said Moreland, laughing. ‘Miscarriage – nothing against the law.’

‘I’m using the word,’ said Brandreth, treating our ignorance with genial amusement, ‘in the strictly medical sense that doesn’t necessarily connote anything illegal. I had been talking to Mr Moreland,’ he added, ‘about Wagner, a chronic sufferer, I understand, from some form of dermatitis, though he finally succumbed, I believe, to a cardiac lesion – unlike Schubert with his abdominal trouble. They were both, I imagine, temperamental men.’

The fact that Widmerpool and I knew each other at least as well as Brandreth knew Widmerpool, prevented Brandreth from dominating the situation so completely as he had intended before Widmerpool’s arrival. His tone in addressing Widmerpool was at once hearty and obsequious, almost servile in its unconcealed desire to make a good impression by play with Moreland’s musical celebrity. Brandreth obviously considered Widmerpool a person of greater importance than Moreland, but also one who might be interested to come in contact with sides of life different from his own. In supposing this, Brandreth showed his acquaintance with Widmerpool to be superficial. Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.

‘I don’t know about those things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don’t know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me – which they do not – I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’

Now, he stood staring at me as if my presence in the nursing home was an insoluble, an irritating, mystery. I explained once more that I had been visiting Isobel.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Widmerpool. ‘You married one of the Tollands, did you not, Nicholas? I was sorry not to have come to your wedding. That was some time ago… nearly… as a matter of fact, I was far too busy. I should like to give you a wedding present. You must tell me something you want, even though I was not able to turn up at the ceremony. After all, we have known each other a long time now. A little piece of silver perhaps. I will consult my mother who arranges such things. Your wife is not suffering from anything serious, I hope. I believe I once met her at her aunt’s, Lady Molly Jeavons. Perhaps it was one of her sisters.’

The meeting had, indeed, taken place. Isobel had mentioned it. She had not cared for Widmerpool. That was one of the reasons why I had made no effort to keep in touch with him. In any case I should never have gone out of my way to seek him, knowing, as one does with certain people, that the rhythm of life would sooner or later be bound to bring us together again. However, I remembered that I owed him a meal. Guilt as to this unfulfilled obligation was strengthened by awareness that he was capable of complaining publicly that I had never invited him in return. Preferring to avoid this possibility, I decided on the spot to ask Widmerpool, before we parted company, to lunch at my club; in fact while Isobel’s convalescence gave an excuse for not bringing him to our flat.

‘I have been enjoying a brief rest here,’ he said. ‘An opportunity to put right a slight mischief with boils. Some tests have been made. I leave tomorrow, agog for work again.’

‘Isobel goes tomorrow, too. She will keep rather quiet for a week or two.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Widmerpool, dismissing the subject.

He turned abruptly on his heel, muttering something about ‘arranging a meeting in the near future’, at the same time making a rapid movement towards the door of frosted glass at which he had been aiming when first accosted by Brandreth.

‘Can you lunch with me next Tuesday – at my club?’

Widmerpool paused for a second to give thought to this question, once more began to frown.

‘Tuesday? Tuesday? Let me think. I have something on Tuesday. I must have. No, perhaps I haven’t. Wait a minute. Let me look at my book. Yes… Yes. As it happens, I can lunch with you on Tuesday. But not before half-past one. Certainly not before one-thirty. More likely one-thirty-five.’

Quickening his step, drawing his dressing-gown round him as if to keep himself more separate from us, he passed through the door almost at a run. His displacement immediately readjusted in Moreland’s favour Brandreth’s social posture.

‘To return to Wagner,’ Brandreth said, ‘you remember Wanderlust, Mr Moreland, of course you do, when Siegfried sings: “From the wood forth I wander, never to return!” – how does it go? – ”Aus dem Wald fort in die Welt zieh ’n; nimmer kehr’ich zurüch!” Now, it always seems to me the greatest pity that in none of the productions of The Ring I have ever heard, has the deeper pessimism of these words been given full weight…’

Brandreth began to make movements with his hands as if he were climbing an invisible rope. Moreland disengaged us brutally from him. We descended the stairs.

‘Who was the man in the dressing-gown with spectacles?’ Moreland asked, when we had reached the street.

‘He is called Kenneth Widmerpool. In the City. I have known him a long time.’

‘I can’t say I took to him,’ Moreland said. ‘But, look here, what a business married life is. I hope to goodness Matilda will be all right. There are various worrying aspects. I sometimes think I shall go off my head. Perhaps I am off it already. That would explain a lot. What are you doing tonight? I am on my way to the Maclinticks. Why not come too?’

Without waiting for an answer, he began to recount all that had been happening to Matilda and himself since we had last met; various absurd experiences they had shared; how they sometimes got on each other’s nerves; why they had returned to London; where they were going to live. There had been some sort of a row with the municipal authorities at the seaside resort. Moreland held decided professional opinions; he could be obstinate. Some people, usually not the most intelligent, found working with him difficult. I heard some of his story, telling him in return how the film company for which I had been script-writing had decided against renewing my contract; that I was now appearing on the book page of a daily paper; also reviewing from time to time for the weekly of which Mark Members was assistant literary editor.

‘Mark recommended Dr Brandreth to us,’ Moreland said. ‘A typical piece of malice on his part. Brandreth is St John Clarke’s doctor – or was when Mark was St John Clarke’s secretary. Gossip is the passion of his life, his only true emotion – but he can also put you on the rack about music.’

‘Is he looking after Matilda?’

‘A gynaecologist does that. He is not a music-lover, thank God. Of course, a lot of women have babies. One must admit that. No doubt it will be all right. It just makes one a bit jumpy. Look here, Nick, you must come to the Maclinticks’. It would be more cheerful if there were two of us.’

‘Should I be welcome?’

‘Why not? Have you developed undesirable habits since we last met?’

‘I never think Maclintick much likes me.’

‘Likes you?’ said Moreland. ‘What egotism on your part. Of course he doesn’t like you. Maclintick doesn’t like anybody.’

‘He likes you.’

‘We have professional ties. As a matter of fact, Maclintick doesn’t really hate everyone as much as he pretends. I was being heavily humorous.’

‘All the same, he shows small visible pleasure in meeting most people.’

‘One must rise above that. It is a kindness to do so. Maclintick does not get on too well with his wife. The occasional company of friends eases the situation.’

‘You do make this social call sound tempting.’

‘If nobody ever goes there, I am afraid Maclintick will jump into the river one of these days, or hang himself with his braces after a more than usually gruelling domestic difference. You must come.’

‘All right. Since you present it as a matter of life and death.’

We took a bus to Victoria, then passed on foot into a vast, desolate region of stucco streets and squares upon which a doom seemed to have fallen. The gloom was cosmic. We traversed these pavements for some distance, proceeding from haunts of seedy, grudging gentility into an area of indeterminate, but on the whole increasingly unsavoury, complexion.

‘Maclintick is devoted to this part of London,’ Moreland said. ‘I am not sure that I agree with him. He says his mood is for ever Pimlico. I grant that a sympathetic atmosphere is an important point in choosing a residence. It helps one’s work. All the same, tastes differ. Maclintick is always to be found in this neighbourhood, though never for long in the same place.’

‘He never seems very cheerful when I meet him.’

I had run across Maclintick only a few times with Moreland since our first meeting in the Mortimer.

‘He is a very melancholy man,’ Moreland agreed. ‘Maclintick is very melancholy. He is disappointed, of course.’

‘About himself as a musician?’

‘That – and other things. He is always hard up. Then he has an aptitude for quarrelling with anyone who might be of use to him professionally. He is writing a great tome on musical theory which never seems to get finished.’

‘What is his wife like?’

‘Like a wife.’

‘Is that how you feel about marriage?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ said Moreland laughing. ‘But you know one does begin to understand all the music-hall jokes and comic-strips about matrimony after you have tried a spell of it yourself. Don’t you agree?’

‘And Mrs Maclintick is a good example?’

‘You will see what I mean.’

‘What is Maclintick’s form about women? I can never quite make out.’

‘I think he hates them really – only likes whores.’

‘Ah.’

‘At least that is what Gossage used to say.’

‘That’s a known type.’

‘All the same, Maclintick is also full of deeply romantic, hidden away sentiments about Wein, Weib und Gesang. That is his passionate, carefully concealed side. The gruffness is intended to cover all that. Maclintick is terrified of being thought sentimental. I suppose all his bottled-up feelings came to the surface when he met Audrey.’

‘And the prostitutes?’

‘He told Gossage he found them easier to converse with than respectable ladies. Of course, Gossage – you can imagine how he jumped about telling me this – was speaking of a period before Maclintick’s marriage. No reason to suppose that sort of thing takes place now.’

‘But if he hates women, why do you say he is so passionate?’

‘It just seems to have worked out that way. Audrey is one of the answers, I suppose.’

The house, when we reached it, turned out to be a small, infinitely decayed two-storey dwelling that had seen better days; now threatened by a row of mean shops advancing from one end of the street and a fearful slum crowding up from the other. Moreland’s loyalty to his friends – in a quiet: way considerable – prevented me from being fully prepared for Mrs Maclintick. That she should have come as a surprise was largely my own fault. Knowing Moreland, I ought to have gathered more from his disjointed, though on the whole decidedly cautionary, account of the Maclintick household. Besides, from the first time of meeting Maclintick – when he had gone to the telephone in the Mortimer – the matrimonial rows of the Maclinticks had been an accepted legend. However much one hears about individuals, the picture formed in the mind rarely approximates to the reality. So it was with Mrs Maclintick. I was not prepared for her in the flesh. When she opened the door to us, her formidable discontent with life swept across the threshold in scorching, blasting waves. She was a small dark woman with a touch of gipsy about her, this last possibility suggested by sallow skin and bright black eyes. Her black hair was worn in a fringe. Some men might have found her attractive. I was not among them, although at the same time not blind to the fact that she might be capable of causing trouble where men were concerned. Mrs Maclintick said nothing at the sight of us, only shrugging her shoulders. Then, standing starkly aside, as if resigned to our entry in spite of an overpowering distaste she felt for the two of us, she held the door open wide. We passed within the Maclintick threshold.

‘It’s Moreland – and another man.’

Mrs Maclintick shouted, almost shrieked these words, while at the same time she twisted her head sideways and upwards towards a flight of stairs leading to a floor above, where Maclintick might be presumed to sit at work. We followed her into a sitting-room in which a purposeful banality of style had been observed; only a glass-fronted bookcase full of composers’ biographies and works of musical reference giving some indication of Maclintick’s profession.

‘Find somewhere to sit,’ said Mrs Maclintick, speaking if the day, bad enough before, had been finally ruined by arrival. ‘He will be down soon.’

Moreland seemed no more at ease in face of this reception than myself. At the same time he was evidently used to such welcomes in that house. Apart from reddening slightly, he showed no sign of expecting anything different in the way of reception. After telling Mrs Maclintick my name, he spoke a few desultory words about the weather, then made for the bookcase. I had the impression this was his accustomed gambit on arrival in that room. Opening its glass doors, he began to examine the contents of the shelves, as if – a most unlikely proposition – he had never before had time to consider Maclintick’s library. After a minute or two, during which we all sat in silence, he extracted a volume and began to turn over its pages. At this firm treatment, which plainly showed he was not going to allow his hostess’s ill humour to perturb him, Mrs Maclintick unbent a little.

‘How is your wife, Moreland?’ she asked, after picking up and rearranging some sewing upon which she must have been engaged on our arrival. ‘She is having a baby, isn’t she?’

‘Any day now,’ said Moreland.

Either he scarcely took in what she said, or did not consider her a person before whom he was prepared to display the anxiety he had earlier expressed to me on that subject, because he did not raise his eyes from the book, and, a second after she had spoken, gave one of his sudden loud bursts of laughter. This amusement was obviously caused by something he had just read. For a minute or two he continued to turn the pages, laughing to himself.

‘This life of Chabrier is enjoyable,’ he said, still without looking up. ‘How wonderful he must have been dressed as a bull-fighter at the fancy dress ball at Granada. What fun it all was in those days. Much gayer than we are now. Why wasn’t one a nineteenth-century composer living in Paris and hobnobbing with the Impressionist painters?’

Mrs Maclintick made no reply to this rhetorical question which appeared in no way to fire within her nostalgic daydreams. She was about to turn her attention, as if unwillingly, towards myself, with the air of a woman who had given Moreland a fair chance and found him wanting, when Maclintick came into the room. He was moving unhurriedly, as if he had arrived downstairs to search for something he had forgotten, and was surprised to find his wife entertaining guests. Despondency, as usual, seemed to have laid an icy grip on him. He wore bedroom slippers and was pulling at a pipe. However, he brightened a little when he saw Moreland, screwing up his eyes behind the small spectacles and beginning to nod his head as if humming gently to himself. I offered some explanation of my presence in the house, to which Maclintick muttered a brief, comparatively affirmative acknowledgement. Without saying more, he made straight for a cupboard from which he took bottles and glasses.

‘What have you been up to all day?’ asked Mrs Maclintick. ‘I thought you were going to get the man to see about the gas fire. You haven’t moved from the house as far as I know. I wish you’d stick to what you say. I could have got hold of him myself, if I’d known you weren’t going to do it.’

Maclintick did not answer. He removed the cork from a bottle, the slight ‘pop’ of its emergence appearing to embody the material of a reply to his wife, at least all the reply he intended to give.

‘I’ve been looking at this book on Chabrier,’ said Moreland. ‘What an enjoyable time he had in Spain.’

Maclintick grunted. He hummed a little. Chabrier did not appear to interest him. He poured out liberal drinks for everyone and handed them round. Then he sat down.

‘Have you become a father yet, Moreland?’ he asked.

He spoke as if he grudged having to make so formal an enquiry of so close a friend.

‘Not yet,’ said Moreland. ‘I find it rather a trial waiting. Like the minute or two before the lights go out when you are going to conduct.’

Maclintick continued to hum.

‘Can’t imagine why people want a row of kids,’ he said. ‘Life is bad enough without adding that worry to the rest of one’s other troubles.’

Being given a drink must have improved Mrs Maclintick’s temper for the moment, because she asked me if I too were married. I told her about Isobel being about to leave a nursing home.

‘Everyone seems to want babies nowadays,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘It’s extraordinary. Maclintick and I never cared for the idea.’

She was about to enlarge on this subject when the bell rang, at the sound of which she went off to open the front door.

‘How are you finding things now that you are back in London?’ Maclintick asked.

‘So-so,’ said Moreland. ‘Having to do a lot of hack work to keep alive.’

From the passage came sounds of disconnected talk. It was a man’s voice. Whomever Mrs Maclintick had admitted to the house, instead of joining us in the sitting-room continued downstairs to the basement, making a lot of noise with his boots on the uncarpeted stairs. Mrs Maclintick returned to her chair and the knickers she was mending. Maclintick raised his eyebrows.

‘Carolo?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What’s happened to his key?’

‘He lost it.’

‘Again?’

‘Yes.’

‘Carolo is always losing keys,’ said Maclintick. ‘He’ll have to pay for a new one himself this time. It costs a fortune keeping him in keys. I can’t remember whether I told you Carolo has come to us as a lodger, Moreland.’

‘No,’ said Moreland, ‘you didn’t. How did that happen?’

Moreland seemed surprised, for some reason not best pleased at this piece of information.

‘He was in low water,’ Maclintick said, speaking as if he were himself not specially anxious to go into detailed explanations. ‘So were we. It seemed a good idea at the time. I’m not so sure now. In fact I’ve been thinking of getting rid of him.’

‘How is he doing?’ asked Moreland. ‘Carolo is always very particular about what jobs he will take on. All that business about teaching being beneath his dignity.’

‘He says he likes time for that work of his he is always tinkering about with,’ said Maclintick. ‘I shall be very surprised if anything ever comes of it.’

‘I like Carolo here,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘He gives very little trouble. I don’t want to die of melancholia, never seeing a soul.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Maclintick. ‘Look at the company we have got tonight. What I can’t stick is having Carolo scratching away at the other end of the room when I am eating. Why can’t he keep the same hours as other people?’

‘You are always saying artists ought to be judged by different standards from other people,’ said Mrs Maclintick fiercely. ‘Why shouldn’t Carolo keep the hours he likes? He is an artist, isn’t he?’

‘Carolo may be an artist,’ said Maclintick, puffing out a long jet of smoke from his mouth, ‘but he is a bloody unsuccessful one nowadays. One of those talents that have dried up in my opinion. I certainly don’t see him blossoming out as a composer. Look here, you two had better stay to supper. As Audrey says, we don’t often have company. You can see Carolo then. Judge for yourselves. It is going to be one of his nights in. I can tell from the way he went down the stairs.’

‘He has got to work somewhere, hasn’t he?’ said Mrs Maclintick, whose anger appeared to be rising again after a period of relative calm. ‘His bedroom is much too cold in this weather. You use the room with a gas fire in it yourself, the only room where you can keep warm. Even then you can’t be bothered to get it repaired. Do you want Carolo to freeze to death?’

‘It’s my house, isn’t it?’

‘You say you don’t want him in the sitting-room. Why did you tell him he could work in the room off the kitchen if you don’t want him there?’

‘I am not grumbling,’ said Maclintick, ‘I am just warning these two gendemen what to expect – that is to say Carolo scribbling away at a sheet of music at one end of the room, and some cold beef and pickles at the other.’

‘Mutton,’ said Mrs Maclintick.

‘Mutton, then. We can get some beer in a jug from the local.’

‘Doesn’t Carolo ever eat himself?’ Moreland asked.

‘He often meals with us as a matter of fact,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘I don’t know why Maclintick should make all this fuss suddenly. It is just when Carolo has other plans that he works while we are having supper. Then he eats out later. He likes living on snacks. I tell him it’s bad for him, but he doesn’t care. What is so very extraordinary about all that?’

Her husband disregarded her.

‘Then you are both going to stay,’ he said, almost anxiously. ‘That is fixed. Where is the big jug, Audrey? I’ll get some beer. What does everyone like? Bitter? Mild-and-bitter?’

Moreland had probably been expecting this invitation from the start, but the Maclinticks’ bickering about Carolo seemed to have put him out, so that, giving a hasty glance in my direction as if to learn whether or not I was prepared to fall in with this suggestion, he made some rambling, inconclusive answer which left the whole question in the air. Moreland was subject to fits of jumpiness of that sort; certainly the Maclinticks, between them, were enough to make anyone ill at ease. However, Maclintick now obviously regarded the matter as settled. The prospect of enjoying Moreland’s company for the rest of the evening evidently cheered him. His tone in suggesting different brews of beer sounded like a gesture of conciliation towards his wife and the world in general. I did not much look forward to supper at the Maclinticks, but there seemed no easy way out. Moreland’s earlier remarks about Maclintick’s need for occasional companionship were certainly borne out by this visit. The Maclinticks, indeed, as a married couple, gave the impression of being near the end of their tether. When, for example, Mona and Peter Templer had quarrelled – or, later, when Mona’s interlude with Quiggin had been punctuated with bad temper and sulkiness – the horror had been less acute, more amenable to adjustment, than the bleak despair of the Maclinticks’ union. Mrs Maclintick’s hatred of everything and everybody – except, apparently, Carolo, praise of whom was in any case apparently little more than a stick with which to beat Maclintick – caused mere existence in the same room with her to be disturbing. She now made for the basement, telling us she would shout in due course an invitation to descend. Simultaneously, Maclintick set off for the pub at the end of the street, taking with him a large, badly chipped china jug to hold the beer.

‘I am afraid I’ve rather let you in for this,’ said Moreland, when we were alone.

His face displayed that helpless, worried look which it would sometimes take on; occasions when Matilda, nowadays probably took charge of the situation. No doubt he found life both worrying and irksome, waiting for her to give birth, himself by this time out of the habit of living on his own.

‘Is it usually like this here?’

‘Rather tougher than usual.’

We waited for some minutes in the sitting-room, Moreland returning to the life of Chabrier, while I turned over the pages of an illustrated book about opera, chiefly looking at the pictures, but thinking, too, of the curious, special humour of musicians, and also of the manner in which they write; ideas, words and phrases gushing out like water from a fountain, so utterly unlike the stiff formality of painters’ prose. After a time, Mrs Maclintick yelled from the depths that we were to join her. Almost at the same moment, Maclintick returned with the beer. We followed him downstairs to the basement. There, in a room next to the kitchen, a table was laid. We settled ourselves round it. Maclintick filled some tumblers; Mrs Maclintick began to carve the mutton. Carolo was immediately manifest. Although, architecturally speaking, divided into separate parts, the Maclinticks’ dining-room was not a large one, the table taking up most of one end. Maclintick’s objection to their lodger working while he and his wife were making a meal seemed valid enough when the circumstances revealed themselves. Carolo sat, his face to the wall, engrossed with a pile of music. He looked round when Moreland and I entered the room, at the same time giving some sort of a hurried greeting, but he did not rise, or pause from his work, for more than a second. Mrs Maclintick’s temper had improved again; now she appeared almost glad that Moreland and I had stayed.

‘Have some beetroot,’ she said. ‘It is fresh today.’

Moreland and Maclintick did not take long to penetrate into a region of musical technicality from which I was excluded by ignorance; so that while they talked, and Carolo scratched away in the corner, just as Maclintick had described, I found Mrs Maclintick thrown on my hands. In her latest mood, she turned out to have a side to her no less tense than her temper displayed on arrival, but more loquacious. In fact a flow of words began to stem from her which seemed to have been dammed up for months. No doubt Maclintick was as silent in the home as out of it, and his wife was glad of an outlet for her reflexions. Indeed, her desire to talk was now so great that it was hard to understand why we had been received in the first instance with so little warmth. Mrs Maclintick’s dissatisfaction with life had probably reached so advanced a stage that she was unable to approach any new event amiably, even when proffered temporary alleviation of her own chronic spleen. Possibly Moreland’s friendship with her husband irked her, suggesting a mental intimacy from which she was excluded, more galling in its disinterested companionship than any pursuit of other women on Maclintick’s part. She began to review her married life aloud.

‘I can’t think why Maclintick goes about looking as he does. He just won’t buy a new suit. He could easily afford one. Of course, Maclintick doesn’t care what he looks like. He takes no notice of anything I say. I suppose he is right in one way. It doesn’t matter what he looks like the way we live. I don’t know what he does care about except Irish whiskey and the Russian composers and writing that book of his. Do you think it will ever get finished? You know he has been at it for seven years. That’s as long as we’ve been married No, I’m wrong. He told me he started it before he met me. Eight or nine years, then. I tell him no one will read it when it is finished. Who wants to read a book about the theory of music, I should like to know? He says himself there is too much of that sort of thing published as it is. It is not that the man hasn’t got ability. He is bright enough in his way. It is just that he doesn’t know how to go about things. Then all these friends of his, like Moreland and you, encourage him, tell him he’s a genius, and the book will sell in thousands. What do you do? Are you a musician? A critic, I expect. I suppose you are writing a book yourself.’

‘I am not a music critic. I am writing a book.’

‘Musical?’

‘No – a novel.’

‘A novel?’ said Mrs Maclintick.

The idea of writing a novel seemed to displease her only a little less than the production of a work on musical theory.

‘What is it to be called?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Have you written any other novels?’

I told her. She shook her head, no more in the mood for literature than music. All the time she treated Maclintick as if he were not present in the flesh; and, since he and Moreland were deeply engaged with questions of pitch and rhythm, both were probably unaware of these reflections on her domestic situation.

‘And then this house. You can see for yourself it is like a pig-sty. I slave sixteen hours a day to keep it clean. No good. Might as well not attempt it. Maclintick isn’t interested in whether his house is clean or not. What I say is, why can’t we go and live in Putney? Where I want to live is never considered, of course. Maclintick likes Pimlico, so Pimlico it has to be. The place gives me the pip. Well, don’t you agree yourself? Even if we move, it has to be somewhere else in Pimlico, and the packing up is more trouble than it is worth. I should like a bit of garden. Can’t have that here. Not even a window-box. Of course Maclintick hates the sight of a flower.’

I quoted St John Clarke’s opinion that the beauty of flowers is enhanced by metropolitan surroundings. Mrs Maclintick did not reply. Her attention had been distracted by Carolo who had begun to pile his sheets of music together and stow them away in a portfolio.

‘Come and have a drink with us, Carolo, before you go,’ she said, with greater warmth than she had shown until that moment. ‘Maclintick will get some more beer. We could all do with another drop. Here is the jug, Maclintick. Don’t take all the cheese, Moreland. Leave a little for the rest of us.’

Maclintick did not look specially pleased at this suggestion of Carolo joining us at the table, but he too welcomed the idea of more beer, immediately picking up the chipped jug and once more setting off with it to the pub. A chair was drawn up for Carolo, who accepted the invitation with no more than mumbled, ungracious agreement; to which he added the statement that he would not be able to stay long. I had not set eyes on him since that night in the Mortimer. Carolo looked just the same: pale; unromantic; black wavy hair a shade longer and greasier than before. Mrs Maclintick gave him a glance that was almost affectionate.

‘Have you got to go out tonight, Carolo?’ she said. ‘There is a little mutton left.’

Carolo shook his head, looking wearily at the residue of the joint, the remains of which were not specially tempting. He seemed in a thoughtful mood, but, when Maclintick reappeared with the jug and poured him out a glass, he drank a deep draught of the beer with apparent gratification. After wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, he spoke in his harsh, North Country voice.

‘How have you been, Moreland?’ he asked.

‘Much as usual,’ said Moreland. ‘And you?’

‘Pretty middling. How’s Matilda?’

‘Having a baby,’ said Moreland flushing; and, as if he referred to speak no more for the moment about that particular subject, went on: ‘You know, in that book I was reading upstairs, Chabrier says that the Spanish fleas have their own national song – a three-four tune in F major that Berlioz introduces into the Damnation of Faust.’

‘The Spanish fleas must be having a splendid time nowadays,’ said Maclintick, ‘biting both sides indiscriminately.’

‘The International Brigade could certainly make a tasty dish,’ said Moreland, ‘not to mention the German and Italian “volunteers”. As a matter of fact the fleas probably prefer the Germans. More blonds.’

‘I hope to God Franco doesn’t win,’ said Mrs Maclintick, as if that possibility had at this moment just struck her.

‘Who do you want to win?’ said Maclintick gruffly. ‘The Communists?’

Up till then Maclintick had been on the whole in a better temper than usual. The arrival at the table of Carolo had unsettled him. He now showed signs of wanting to pick a quarrel with someone. His wife was clearly the easiest person present with whom to come into conflict. Biting and sucking noisily at his pipe he glared at her. It looked as if the Spanish war might be a matter of controversy of some standing between them; a source of contention as a married couple, rather than a political difference. Maclintick’s views on politics could never be foretold. Violent, changeable, unorthodox, he tended to dislike the Left as much as the Right. He had spoken very bitterly.

‘I would rather have the Communists than the Fascists,’ said Mrs Maclintick, compressing her lips.

‘Only because you think it is the done thing to be on the Left,’ said Maclintick, with an enraging smile. ‘There isn’t a middle-brow in the country who isn’t expressing the same sentiment. They should try a little practical Communism and see how they like it. You are no exception, I assure you.’

He removed his pipe from his mouth and swallowed hard. Moreland was obviously becoming uneasy at the turn things were taking. He began kicking his foot against the side of his chair.

‘I am Pinkish myself,’ he said laughing.

‘And you want the Communists?’ asked Maclintick.

‘Not necessarily.’

‘And Marxist music?’

‘I long to hear some.’

‘Shostakovich, Russia’s only reputable post-Revolution composer, not allowed to have his opera performed because the dictatorship of the proletariat finds that work musically decadent, bourgeois, formalist?’

‘I’m not defending the Soviet regime,’ said Moreland, still laughing. ‘I’m all for Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District – my favourite title. Wasn’t there a period in the Middle Ages when the Pope forbade certain chords under pain of excommunication? All I said – apropos of the war in Spain – I am Pinkish. No more, no less.’

This attempt to lighten the tension was not very successful. Maclintick leaned down and tapped his pipe against his heel. Mrs Maclintick, though silent, was white with anger.

‘What about Toscanini?’ she demanded suddenly.

‘What about him?’ said Maclintick.

‘The Fascists slapped his face.’

‘Well?’

‘I suppose you approve of that.’

‘I don’t like the Fascists any more than you do,’ said Maclintick. ‘You know that perfecdy well. It was me that Blackshirt insisted on taking to the police station in Florence, not you. You tried to truckle to him.’

’Anyway,’ said Mrs Maclintick, ‘I want the Government in Spain to win – not the Communists.’

‘How are you going to arrange that, if they do defeat Franco? As it is, the extremists have taken over on the side of “the Government”, as you call it. How are you going to arrange that the nice, liberal ones come out on top?’

‘What do you know about it?’ said his wife, speaking now with real hatred. ‘What do you know about politics?’

‘More than you.’

‘I doubt it.’

‘Doubt it, then.’

There was a moment during the pause that followed this exchange of opinion when I thought she might pick up one of the battered table knives and stick it into him. All this time, Carolo had remained absolutely silent, as if unaware that anything unusual was going on round him, unaware of Spain, unaware of civil war there, unaware of Communists, unaware of Fascists, his expression registering no more than its accustomed air of endurance of the triviality of those who inhabited the world in which he unhappily found himself. Now he finished the beer, wiped his mouth again with the pocket handkerchief, and rose from the table.

‘Got to remove myself,’ he said in his North Country burr.

‘What time will you be back?’ asked Maclintick.

‘Don’t know.’

‘I suppose someone will have to let you in.’

‘Suppose they will.’

‘Oh, shut up,’ burst out Mrs Maclintick. ‘I’ll let him in, you fool. What does it matter to you? You never open a door for anyone, not even your precious friends. It’s me that does all the drudgery in this house. You never do a hand’s turn, except sitting upstairs messing about with a lot of stuff that is really out of your reach – that you are not quite up to ‘

By this time everyone was standing up.

‘I think probably Nick and I ought to be going too,’ said Moreland, the extent of his own discomposure making him sound more formal than usual. ‘I’ve got to get up earlv tomorrow… go and see Madlda… one thing and another…’

He succeeded in suggesting no more than the fact that the Maclinticks’ house had become unbearable to him. Maclintick showed no sign of surprise at this sudden truncation of our visit, although he smiled to himself rather grimly.

‘Do you want to take the book about Chabrier?’ he asked. ‘Borrow it by all means if you would like to read the rest of it.’

‘Not at the moment, thanks,’ said Moreland. ‘I have got too much on hand.’

Carolo had already left the house by the time we reached the front door. Without bidding us farewell, Mrs Maclintick had retired in silence to the kitchen, where she could be heard clattering pots and pans and crockery. Maclintick stood on the doorstep biting his pipe.

‘Come again,’ he said, ‘if you can stand it. I’m not sure how long I shall be able to.’

‘It won’t be till after Matilda has given birth,’ Moreland said.

‘Oh, I forgot about that,’ said Maclintick. ‘You’re going to become a father. Well, good night to you both. Pleasant dreams.’

He shut the door. We set off up the street.

‘Let’s walk by the river for a bit to recover,’ Moreland said. ‘I’m sorry to have let you in for all that.’

‘Was it a representative Maclintick evening?’

‘Not one of their best. But they understand each other in an odd way. Of course, that is the sort of thing people say before murder takes place. Still, you grasp what I mean when I insist it is good for Maclintick to see friends occasionally. But what on earth can Carolo be doing there? Everyone must be pretty short of cash for Carolo to live with the Maclinticks as a lodger. I should not have thought either party would have chosen that. All the pubs are shut by now in this area, aren’t they?’

Cutting down to the Embankment, we walked for a time beside the moonlit, sparkling river, towards Vauxhall Bridge and along Millbank, past the Donners-Brebner Building dominating the far shore like a vast penitentiary, where I had called for Stringham one night years before, when he had been working there.

‘Married life is unquestionably difficult,’ Moreland said. ‘One may make a slightly better shot at it than the Maclinticks, but that doesn’t mean one has no problems. I shall be glad when this baby is born. Matilda has not been at all easy to deal with since it started. Of course, I know that is in the best possible tradition. All the same, it makes one wonder, with Maclintick, how long one will be able to remain married. No, I don’t mean that exactly. It is not that I am any less fond of Matilda, so much as that marriage – this quite separate entity – somehow comes between us. However, I expect things will be all right as soon as the baby arrives. Forgive these morbid reflections. I should really write them for the Sunday papers, get paid a huge fortune for it and receive an enormous fan-mail. The fact is, I am going through one of those awful periods when I cannot work. You know what hell that is.’

Moreland and I parted company, making arrangements to meet soon. The subject of marriage cropped up again, although in a different manner, when Widmerpool lunched with me the following week.

We will not take too long over our meal, if you do not mind,’ he said, speaking only after he had hung his hat topcoat and umbrella on a peg in the hall. ‘I am, as usual, very busy. That is why I am a minute or two after time. There is a lot of work on hand as a matter of fact. You probably know that I have accepted the commitment of advising Donners-Brebner regarding the investment of funds for their pension scheme. Sir Magnus, in general an excellent man of business for immediate negotiation, is sometimes surprisingly hesitant in matters of policy. Unexpectedly changeable, too. In short Sir Magnus doesn’t always know his own mind. Above all, he is difficult to get hold of. He will think nothing of altering the hour of appointment three or four times. I have had to point out to his secretary more than once that I must make a schedule of my day just as much as Sir Magnus must plan his.’

All the same, in spite of petty annoyances like Sir Magnus’s lack of decision, Widmerpool was in far better form than at our last luncheon together, two or three years before, a time when he had himself been thinking of marriage. He ate more than on that occasion, although for drink he still restricted himself to a glass of water, swallowing pills both before and after the meal.

‘Brandreth recommended these tablets,’ he said. ‘He says they are soothing. I find him on the whole a satisfactory medical adviser. He is rather too fond of the sound of his own voice, but he has a sensible attitude towards things. Brandreth is by no means a fool. Nothing narrow about him like so many doctors.’

‘Did you go to him because you knew him at school?’

‘No, no,’ said Widmerpool. ‘What an idea. For a man to have shared one’s education is, in my eyes, no special recommendation to my good graces. I suppose I could have formed some early impression of his character and efficiency. I regret to say that few, if any, of my school contemporaries struck sufficiently favourably for me to go out of my way to employ their services. In any case, Brandreth was that amount older than myself to make it difficult to judge his capabilities – certainly his capabilities as a medical man. At the same time, it is true to say that our connexion has something to do with the fact we were at school together. Do you remember that Old Boy Dinner at which Le Bas fainted? I was impressed by the manner in which Brandreth handled that situation – told the rest of the party to go about their business and leave Le Bas to him. I liked that. It is one of my principles in life to surround myself with persons whose conduct has satisfied me. Usually the people themselves are quite unaware that they have benefited by the fact that, at one time or another, they made a good impression on me. Brandreth is a case in point.’

‘The opposite process to entertaining angels unawares?’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean,’ said Widmerpool. ‘But tell me about yourself, your married life, Nicholas. Where are you living? I dined with your brother-in-law, George Tolland, not long ago. I am never sure that it is a wise thing for soldiers to go into business. If fellows enter the army, let them stay in the army. That is true of most professions. However, he gave me some acceptable advice regarding raising money for my Territorials. The mess fund balance always seems low.’

Widmerpool rarely showed great interest in other people’s affairs, but his good humour that day was such that he listened with more attention than usual when subjects unconnected with himself were ventilated. I wondered if some business deal had put him in such a genial mood. Conversation drifted to such matters.

‘Things are looking up a little in the City,’ he said, when luncheon was over. ‘I foresee that the rhythm of the trade circle is moving towards improvement. I have been doing some small calculations on my own account to verify how matters stand. It will interest you to hear my findings. As you know, the general level of dividends is the major determinant of general stock values and market prices over a long period of time. Over shorter periods stock prices fluctuate more widely than dividends. That is obvious, of course. I worked out, for example, that since the Slump, stock prices have risen between 217* per cent and 218½ per cent. So far as I could ascertain, dividends have not exceeded 62¾ per cent to 64* per cent. Those are my own figures. I do not put them forward as conclusive. You follow me?’

‘Perfectly.’

‘Setting aside a European war,’ said Widmerpool, ‘which I do not consider a strong probability in spite of certain disturbing features, I favour a reasoned optimism. I hold views, as it happens, on the interplay of motions and emotions of the Stock Exchange, which, in my opinion, are far more amenable to appraisement than may be supposed by the tyro. My method could not be simpler. I periodically divide the market price of stocks – as expressed by some reliable index – by the dividend paid on the index. What could be easier than that. You agree?’

‘Of course.’

‘But lest I should seem to pontificate upon my own subject, to be over-occupied with the sordid details of commerce, let me tell you, Nicholas, that I have been allowing myself certain relaxations.’

‘You have?’

‘As you know, my mother has always urged me to spend more time seeking amusement. She thinks I work too hard.’

‘I remember your telling me.’

I did not know what he was aiming at. There was no doubt he was pleased about something. He seemed uncertain whether or not to reveal the reason for that. Then, suddenly, his gratification was explained.

‘I have been moving in rather exalted circles lately,’ he said, giving a very satisfied smile.

‘Indeed?’

‘Not exactly royal – that is hardly the word yet… You understand me…?’

‘I think so.’

‘It was an interesting experience.’

‘Have you actually met…’

Widmerpool bowed his head, suggesting by this movement the knowledge of enviable secrets. At the same time he would allow no admission that might be thought compromising either to himself or those in high places whose reputation must rightly be shielded. I tried to extort more from him without any success.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Please do not press me for details.’

He was now on his dignity. There was a moment of silence. Widmerpool took a deep breath, as if drawing into his lungs all the health-giving breezes of the open sea of an elevated social life.

‘I think we are going to see some great changes, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘and welcome ones. There is much – as I have often said before – to be swept away. I feel sure the things I speak of will be swept away. A new broom will soon get to work. I venture to hope that I may even myself participate in this healthier society to which we may look forward.’

‘And you think we shall avoid war?’

‘Certainly, I do. But I was speaking for once of society in its narrower sense – the fashionable world. There is much in the prospect before us that attracts me.’

I wondered if he were again planning to marry. Widmerpool, as I had noticed in the past, possessed certain telepathic powers, sometimes to be found in persons insensitive to the processes of thought of other people except in so far as they concern themselves; that is to say he seemed to know immediately that some idea about him was germinating in a given person’s mind – in this case that I was recalling his fiasco with Mrs Haycock.

‘I expect you remember that the last time you were lunching with me I was planning matrimony myself,’ he said ‘How fortunate that nothing came of it. That would have been a great mistake. Mildred would not have made at all a suitable wife for me. Her subsequent conduct has caused that to become very plain. It was in the end a relief to my mother that things fell out as they did.’

‘How is your mother?’

‘As usual, she is positively growing younger,’ said Widmerpool, pleased by this enquiry. ‘And together with her always keen appreciation of youth, she tries, as I have said, to persuade me to venture more often into a social world. She is right. I know she is right. I made an effort to follow her advice – with the satisfactory consequence that I have more than half imparted to you.’

It was no good hoping to hear any more. Like Moreland dropping hints about his love affairs, Widmerpool hoped only to whet my curiosity. He seemed anxious to convince me that, although his own engagement had been broken off in embarrassing circumstances, he had been left without any feeling of bitterness.

‘I hear Mildred Haycock has returned to the South of France,’ he said. ‘Really the best place for her. I won’t repeat to you a story I was told about her the other day. For my own part, I see no reason to hurry into marriage. Perhaps, after all, forty is the age at which to find a mate. I believe Leon Blum says so in his book. He is a shrewd man, Monsieur Blum.’