The Acceptance World

2

A YEAR or more later Isbister died. He had been in bad health for some little time, and caught pneumonia during a period of convalescence. The question of the introduction, pigeon-holed indefinitely, since St. John Clarke utterly refused to answer letters on the subject, was now brought into the light again by the obituaries. Little or no general news was about at the time, so these notices were fuller than might have been expected. One of them called Isbister ‘the British Franz Hals’. There were photographs of him, with his Van Dyck beard and Inverness cape, walking with Mrs. Isbister, a former model, the ‘Morwenna’ of many of his figure subjects. This was clearly the occasion to make another effort to complete and publish The Art of Horace Isbister. Artists, especially academic artists, can pass quickly into the shadows: forgotten as if they had never been.

Almost as a last resort, therefore, it had been arranged that I should meet Mark Members out of office hours, and talk things over ‘as man to man’. For this assignation Members had chosen — of all places — the Ritz. Since becoming St. John Clarke’s secretary he had acquired a taste for rich surroundings. It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.

Along Piccadilly a north wind was blowing down the side streets, roaring hoarsely for a minute or two at a time, then dropping suddenly into silence; then again, after a brief pause, beginning to roar once more, as if perpetually raging against the inconsistency of human conduct. The arches of the portico gave some shelter from this hurricane, at the same time forming a sort of antechamber leading on one side, through lighted glass, into another, milder country, where struggle against the forces of nature was at least less explicit than on the pavements. Outside was the northern winter; here among the palms the climate was almost tropical.

Although a Saturday evening, the place was crowded. A suggestion of life in warmer cities, far away from London, was increased by the presence of a large party of South Americans camped out not far from where I found a seat at one of the grey marble-topped tables. They were grouped picturesquely beneath the figure of the bronze nymph perched in her grotto of artificial rocks and fresh green ferns, a large family spreading over three or four of the tables while they chatted amicably with one another. There were swarthy young men with blue chins and pretty girls in smart frocks, the latter descending in point of age to mere children with big black eyes and brightly coloured bows in their hair. A bald, neat, elderly man, the rosette of some order in his buttonhole, his grey moustache closely clipped, discoursed gravely with two enormously animated ladies, both getting a shade plump in their black dresses.

Away on her pinnacle, the nymph seemed at once a member of this Latin family party, and yet at the same time morally separate from them: an English girl, perhaps, staying with relations possessing business interests in South America, herself in love for the first time after a visit to some neighbouring estancia. Now she had strayed away from her hosts to enjoy delicious private thoughts in peace while she examined the grimacing face of the river-god carved in stone on the short surface of wall by the grotto. Pensive, quite unaware of the young tritons violently attempting to waft her away from the fountain by sounding their conches at full blast, she gazed full of wonder that no crystal stream gushed from the water-god’s contorted jaws. Perhaps in such a place she expected a torrent of champagne. Although stark naked, the nymph looked immensely respectable; less provocative, indeed, than some of the fully dressed young women seated below her, whose olive skins and silk stockings helped to complete this most unwintry scene.

Waiting for someone in a public place develops a sense of individual loneliness, so that amongst all this pale pink and sage green furniture, under decorations of rich cream and dull gold, I felt myself cut off from the rest of the world. I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed. Those South Americans sitting opposite, coming from a Continent I had never visited, regarding which I possessed only the most superficial scraps of information, seemed in some respects easier to conceive in terms of a novel than most of the English people sitting round the room. Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony — in which all classes of this island converse — upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.

How, I asked myself, could a writer attempt to describe in a novel such a young man as Mark Members, for example, possessing so much in common with myself, yet so different? How could this difference be expressed to that grave middle-aged South American gentleman talking to the plump ladies in black? Viewed from some distance off, Members and I might reasonably be considered almost identical units of the same organism, scarcely to be differentiated even by the sociological expert. We were both about the same age, had been to the same university, and were committed to the same profession of literature; though Members could certainly claim in that sphere a more notable place than myself, having by then published several books of poems and made some name for himself as a critic.

Thinking about Members that evening, I found myself unable to consider him without prejudice. He had been, I now realised, responsible for preventing St. John Clarke from writing the Isbister introduction. That was in itself understandable. However, he had also prevaricated about the matter in a way that showed disregard for the fact that we had known each other for a long time; and had always got along together pretty well. There were undoubtedly difficulties on his side too. Prejudice was to be avoided if — as I had idly pictured him — Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very element through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words.

Any but the most crude indication of my own personality would be, I reflected, equally hard to transcribe; at any rate one that did not sound a little absurd. It was all very well for Mrs. Erdleigh to generalise; far less easy to take an objective view oneself. Even the bare facts had an unreal, almost satirical ring when committed to paper, say in the manner of innumerable Russian stories of the nineteenth century. ‘I was born in the city of L—, the son of an infantry officer …’ To convey much that was relevant to the reader’s mind by such phrases was in this country hardly possible. Too many factors had to be taken into consideration. Understatement, too, had its own banality; for, skirting cheap romanticism, it could also encourage evasion of unpalatable facts.

However, these meditations on writing were dispersed by the South Americans, who now rose in a body, und, with a good deal of talking and shrill laughter, trooped down the steps, making for the Arlington Street entrance. Their removal perceptibly thinned the population of the palm court. Among a sea of countenances, stamped like the skin of Renoir’s women with that curiously pink, silky surface that seems to come from prolonged sitting about in Ritz hotels, I noticed several familiar faces. Some of these belonged to girls once encountered at dances, now no longer known, probably married; moving at any rate in circles I did not frequent.

Margaret Budd was there, with a lady who looked like an aunt or mother-in-law. In the end this ‘beauty’ had married a Scotch landowner, a husband rather older than might have been expected for such a lovely girl. He was in the whisky business, said to be hypochondriacal and bad-tempered. Although by then mother of at least two children, Margaret still looked like one of those golden-haired, blue-eyed dolls which say, ‘Ma-Ma’ and ‘Pa-Pa’, closing their eyes when tilted backward: unchanged in her possession of that peculiarly English beauty, scarcely to be altered by grey hair or the pallor of age. Not far from her, on one of the sofas, sandwiched between two men, both of whom had the air of being rather rich, sat a tall, blonde young woman I recognised as Lady Ardglass, popularly supposed to have been for a short time mistress of Prince Theodoric. Unlike Margaret Budd — whose married name I could not remember — Bijou Ardglass appeared distinctly older: more than a little ravaged by the demands of her strenuous existence. She had lost some of that gay, energetic air of being ready for anything which she had so abundantly possessed when I had first seen her at Mrs. Andriadis’s party. That occasion seemed an eternity ago.

As time passed, people leaving, others arriving, I began increasingly to suspect that Members was not going to show up. That would not be out of character, because cutting appointments was a recognised element in his method of conducting life. This habit — to be in general associated with a strong, sometimes frustrated desire to impose the will — is usually attributed on each specific occasion to the fact that ‘something better turned up’. Such defaulters are almost as a matter of course reproached with trying to make a more profitable use of their time. Perhaps, in reality, self-interest in its crudest form plays less part in these deviations than might be supposed. The manoeuvre may often be undertaken for its own sake. The person awaited deliberately withholds himself from the person awaiting. Mere absence is in this manner turned into a form of action, even potentially violent in its consequences.

Possibly Members, from an inner compulsion, had suddenly decided to establish ascendancy by such an assertion of the will. On the other hand, the action would in the circumstances represent such an infinitesimal score against life in general that his absence, if deliberate, was probably attributable to some minor move in domestic politics vis-à-vis St. John Clarke. I was thinking over these possibilities, rather gloomily wondering whether or not I would withdraw or stay a few minutes longer, when an immensely familiar head and shoulders became visible for a second through a kind of window, or embrasure, looking out from the palm court on to the lower levels of the passage and rooms beyond. It was Peter Templer. A moment later he strolled up the steps.

For a few seconds Templer gazed thoughtfully round the room, as if contemplating the deterioration of a landscape, known from youth, once famed for its natural beauty, now ruined beyond recall. He was about to turn away, when he caught sight of me and came towards the table. It must have been at least three years since we had met. His sleekly brushed hair and long, rather elegant stride were just the same. His face was perhaps a shade fuller, and his eyes at once began to give out that familiar blue mechanical sparkle that I remembered so well from our schooldays. With a red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark suit, his shirt cuffs cut tightly round the wrist so that somehow his links asserted themselves unduly, Templer’s air was distinctly prosperous. But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.

‘I suppose you are waiting for someone, Nick,’ he said, drawing up a chair. ‘Some ripe little piece?’

‘You’re very wide of the mark.’

‘Then a dowager is going to buy your dinner — after which she will make you an offer?’

‘No such luck.’

‘What then?’

‘I’m waiting for a man.’

‘I say, old boy, sorry to have been so inquisitive. Things have come to that, have they?’

‘You couldn’t know.’

‘I should have guessed.’

‘Have a drink, anyway.’

I remembered reading, some years before, an obituary notice in the Morning Post, referring to his father’s death. This paragraph, signed ‘A.S.F.’, was, in fact, a brief personal memoir rather than a bald account of the late Mr. Templer’s career. Although the deceased’s chairmanship of various companies was mentioned — his financial interests had been chiefly in cement — more emphasis was laid on his delight in sport, especially boxing, his many undisclosed benefactions to charity, the kind heart within him,always cloaked by a deceptively brusque manner. The initials, together with a certain banality of phrasing, suggested the hand of Sunny Farebrother, Mr. Templer’s younger City associate I had met at their house. That visit had been the sole occasion when I had seen Templer’s father. I had wondered vaguely — to use a favourite expression of his son’s—’how much he had cut up for’. Details about money are always of interest; even so, I did not give the matter much thought. Already I had begun to think of Peter Templer as a friend of my schooldays rather than one connected with that more recent period of occasional luncheons together, during the year following my own establishment in London after coming down from the university. When, once in a way, I had attended the annual dinner for members of Le Bas’s House, Templer had never been present.

That we had ceased to meet fairly regularly was due no doubt to some extent to Templer’s chronic inability — as our housemaster Le Bas would have said — to ‘keep up’ a friendship. He moved entirely within the orbit of events of the moment, looking neither forward nor backward. If we happened to run across each other, we arranged to do something together; not otherwise. This mutual detachment had been brought about also by the circumstances of my own life. To be circumscribed by people constituting the same professional community as myself was no wish of mine; rather the contrary. However, an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is. Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle. Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession; those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasure of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with reflective or imaginative pursuits are for ever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.

Perhaps Templer himself lay somewhere within the range of this definition. If so, he gave little indication of it. In fact, if taxed, there can be no doubt that he would have denied any such thing. The outward sign that seemed to place him within this category was his own unwillingness ever wholly to accept the people amongst whom he had chosen to live. A curious streak of melancholy seemed to link him with a less arid manner of life than that to which he seemed irrevocably committed. At least I supposed something of that sort could still be said of his life; for I knew little or nothing of his daily routine, in or out of the office, though suspecting that neither his activities, nor his friends, were of a kind likely to be very sympathetic to myself.

However, various strands, controlled without much method and then invisible to me, imparted a certain irregular pattern to Templer’s personal affairs. For example, he liked his friends to be rich and engrossed in whatever business occupied them. They had to be serious about money, though relatively dissipated in their private lives; to possess no social ambitions whatever, though at the same time to be disfigured by no grave social defects. The women had to be good-looking, the men tolerably proficient at golf and bridge, without making a fetish of those pastimes. Both sexes, when entertained by him, were expected to drink fairly heavily; although, here again, intoxication must not be carried to excess. In fact, broadly speaking, Templer disliked anything that could be labelled ‘bohemian’, as much as anything with claims to be ‘smart’. He did not fancy even that sort of ‘smartness’ to be found to a limited extent in the City, a form of life which had, after all, so much in common with his own tastes.

‘You know, I really rather hate the well-born,’ he used to say. ‘Not that I see many of them these days.’

Nothing might be thought easier than gratification of these modest requirements among a circle of intimates; and the difficulty Templer found in settling down to any one set of persons limited by these terms of reference, and at the same time satisfactory to himself, was really remarkable. This side of him suggested a kind of ‘spoiled intellectual’. There was also the curious sympathy he could extend to such matters as the story of the St. John Clarke introduction, which he now made me outline after I had explained my purpose in the Ritz. The facts could scarcely have been very interesting to him, but he followed their detail as if alteration of the bank rate or fluctuations of the copper market were ultimately concerned. Perhaps this capacity for careful attention to other people’s affairs was the basis of his own success in business.

‘Of course I know about Isbister, R.A.,’ he said. ‘He painted that shocking picture of my old man. I tried to pop it when he dropped off the hooks, but there were no takers. I know about St. John Clarke, too. Mona reads his books. Absolutely laps them up, in fact.’

‘Who is Mona?’

‘Oh, yes, you haven’t met her yet, have you? Mona is my wife.’

‘But, my dear Peter, I had no idea you were married.’

‘Strange, isn’t it? Our wedding anniversary, matter of fact. Broke as I am, I thought we could gnaw a cutlet at the Grill to celebrate. Why not join us? Your chap is obviously not going to turn up.’

He began to speak of his own affairs, talking in just the way he did when we used to have tea together at school. Complaining of having lost a lot of money in ‘the slump’, he explained that he still owned a house in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead.

‘More or less camping out there now,’ he said. ‘With a married couple looking after us. The woman does the cooking. The man can drive a car and service it pretty well, but he hasn’t the foggiest idea about looking after my clothes.’

I asked about his marriage.

‘We met first at a road-house near Staines. Mona was being entertained there by a somewhat uncouth individual called Snider, an advertising agent. Snider’s firm was using her as a photographer’s model. You’ll know her face when you see her. Laxatives — halitosis — even her closest friend wouldn’t tell her — and so on.’

I discovered in due course that Mona’s chief appearance on the posters had been to advertise toothpaste; but both she and her husband were inclined to emphasise other more picturesque possibilities.

‘She’d already had a fairly adventurous career by then,’ Templer said.

He began to enlarge on this last piece of information, like a man unable to forgo irritating the quiescent nerve of a potentially aching tooth. I had the impression that he was still very much in love with his wife, but that things were perhaps not going as well as he could wish. That would explain a jerkiness of manner that suggested worry. The story itself seemed commonplace enough, yet containing implications of Templer’s own recurrent desire to escape from whatever world enclosed him.

‘She says she’s partly Swiss,’ he said. ‘Her father was an engineer in Birmingham, always being fired for being tight. ‘However, both parents are dead. The only relation she’s got is an aunt with a house in Worthing — a boarding-house, I think.’

I saw at once that Mona, whatever else her characteristics, was a wife liberally absolving Templer from additional family ties. That fact, perhaps counting for little compared with deeper considerations, would at the same time seem a great advantage in his eyes. This desire to avoid new relations through marriage was connected with an innate unwillingness to identify himself too closely with any one social group. In that taste, oddly enough, he resembled Uncle Giles, each of them considering himself master of a more sweeping mobility of action by voluntary withdrawal from competition at any given social level of existence.

At the time of narration, I did not inwardly accept all Templer’s highly coloured statements about his wife, but I was impressed by the apparent depths of his feeling for Mona. Even when telling the story of how his marriage had come about, he had completely abandoned any claim to have employed those high-handed methods he was accustomed to advocate for controlling girls of her sort. I asked what time she was due at the Ritz.

‘When she comes out of the cinema,’ he said. ‘She was determined to see Madchen in Uniform. I couldn’t face it. After all, one meets quite enough lesbians in real life without going to the pictures to see them.’

‘But it isn’t a film about lesbians.’

‘Oh, isn’t it?’ said Templer. ‘Mona thought it was. She’ll be disappointed if you’re right. However, I’m sure you’re wrong. Jimmy Brent told me about it. He usually knows what’s what in matters of that kind. My sister Jean is with Mona. Did you ever meet her? I can’t remember. They may be a little late, but I’ve booked a table. We can have a drink or two while we wait.’

Jean’s name recalled the last time I had seen her at that luncheon party at Stourwater where I had been taken by the Walpole-Wilsons. I had not thought of her for ages, though some small residue of inner dissatisfaction, which survives all emotional expenditure come to nothing, now returned.

‘Jean’s having a spot of trouble with that husband of hers,’ said Templer. ‘That is why she is staying with us for the moment. She married Bob Duport, you know. He is rather a handful.’

‘So I should imagine.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘We met when you drove us all into the ditch in your famous second-hand Vauxhall.’

‘My God,’ said Templer, laughing. ‘That was a shambles, wasn’t it? Fancy your remembering that. It must be nearly ten years ago now. The row those bloody girls made. Old Bob was in poor form that day, I remember. He thought he’d picked up a nail after a binge he’d been on a night or two before. Completely false alarm, of course.’

‘As Le Bas once said: “I can’t accept ill health as a valid excuse for ill manners.”‘

‘Bob’s not much your sort, but he’s not a bad chap when you get to know him. I was surprised you’d ever heard of him. I’ve had worse brothers-in-law, although, God knows, that’s not saying much. But Bob is difficult. Bad enough running after every girl he meets, but when he goes and loses nearly all his money on top of that, an awkward situation is immediately created.’

‘Are they living apart?’

‘Not officially. Jean is looking for a small flat in town for herself and the kid.’

‘What sex?’

‘Polly, aged three.’

‘And Duport?’

‘Gone abroad, leaving a trail of girl-friends and bad debts behind him. He is trying to put through some big stuff on the metal market. I think the two of them will make it up in due course. I used to think she was mad about him, but you can never tell with women.’

The news that Polly was to be born was the last I had heard of her mother. Little as I could imagine how Jean had brought herself to marry Duport — far less be ‘mad about him’—I had by then learnt that such often inexplicable things must simply be accepted as matters of fact. His sister’s matrimonial troubles evidently impressed Templer as vexatious, though in the circumstances probably unavoidable; certainly not a subject for prolonged discussion.

‘Talking of divorces and such things,’ he said. ‘Do you ever see Charles Stringham now?’

There had been little or no scandal connected with the break-up of Stringham’s marriage. He and Peggy Stepney had parted company without apparent reason, just as their reason for marrying had been outwardly hard to understand. They had bought a house somewhere north of the Park, but neither ever seemed to have lived there for more than a few weeks at a time, certainly seldom together. The house itself, decorated by the approved decorator of that moment, was well spoken of, but I had never been there. The marriage had simply collapsed, so people said, from inanition. I never heard it suggested that Peggy had taken a lover. Stringham, it was true, was seen about with all kinds of women, though nothing specific was alleged against him either. Soon after the decree had been made absolute, Peggy married a cousin, rather older than herself, and went to live in Yorkshire, where her husband possessed a large house, noted in books of authentically recorded ghost stories for being rather badly haunted.

‘That former wife of his — The Lady Peggy — was a good-looking piece,’ said Templer. ‘But, as you know, such grand life is not for me. I prefer simpler pleasures—

‘ “Oh, give me a man to whom naught comes amiss,

One horse or another, that country or this….”’

‘You know you’ve always hated hunting and hunting people. Anyway, whose sentiments were those?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘chaps like you think I’m not properly educated, in spite of the efforts of Le Bas and others, and that I don’t know about beautiful poetry. You find you’re wrong. I know all sorts of little snatches. As a matter of fact I was thinking of women, really, rather than horses, and taking ‘em as you find ‘em. Not being too choosy about it as Charles has always been. Of course they are easier to take than to find, in my experience — though of course it is not gentlemanly to boast of such things. Anyway, as you know, I have given up all that now.’

At school I could remember Templer claiming that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life; and, although an occasional Edgar Wallace was certainly to be seen in his hand during the period of his last few terms, the quotation was surprising. That was a side of him not entirely unexpected, but usually kept hidden. Incidentally, it was a conversational trick acquired — perhaps consciously copied — from Stringham.

‘You remember the imitations Charles used to do of Widmerpool?’ he said. ‘I expect he is much too grand to remember Widmerpool now.’

‘I saw Widmerpool not so long ago. He is with Donners-Brebner.’

‘But not much longer,’ said Templer. ‘Widmerpool is joining the Acceptance World.’

‘What on earth is that?’

‘Well, actually he is going to become a bill-broker,’ said Templer, laughing. ‘I should have made myself clearer to one not involved in the nefarious ways of the City.’

‘What will he do?’

‘Make a lot of heavy weather. He’ll have to finish his lunch by two o’clock and spend the rest of the day wasting the time of the banks.’

‘But what is the Acceptance World?’

‘If you have goods you want to sell to a firm in Bolivia, you probably do not touch your money in the ordinary way until the stuff arrives there. Certain houses, therefore, are prepared to ‘accept’ the debt. They will advance you the money on the strength of your reputation. It is all right when the going is good, but sooner or later you are tempted to plunge. Then there is an alteration in the value of the Bolivian exchange, or a revolution, or perhaps the firm just goes bust — and you find yourself stung. That is, if you guess wrong.’

‘I see. But why is he leaving Donners-Brebner? He always told me he was such a success there and that Sir Magnus liked him so much.’

‘Widmerpool was doing all right in Donners-Brebner — in fact rather well, as you say,’ said Templer. ‘But he used to bore the pants off everyone in the combine by his intriguing. In the end he got on the nerves of Donners himself. Did you ever come across a fellow called Truscott? Widmerpool took against him, and worked away until he had got him out. Then Donners regretted it, after Truscott had been sacked, and decided Widmerpool was getting too big for his boots. He must go too. The long and the short of it is that Widmerpool is joining this firm of bill-brokers — on the understanding that a good deal of the Donners-Brebner custom follows him there.’

I had never before heard Templer speak of Widmerpool in this matter-of-fact way. At school he had disliked him, or, at best, treated him as a harmless figure of fun. Now, however, Widmerpool had clearly crystallised in Templer’s mind as an ordinary City acquaintance, to be thought of no longer as a subject for laughter, but as a normal vehicle for the transaction of business; perhaps even one particularly useful in that respect on account of former associations.

‘I was trying to get Widmerpool to lend a hand with old Bob,’ said Templer.

‘What would he do?’

‘Bob has evolved a scheme for collecting scrap metal from some place in the Balkans and shipping it home. At least that is the simplest way of explaining what he intends. Widmerpool has said he will try to arrange for Bob to have the agency for Donners-Brebner.’

I was more interested in hearing of this development in Widmerpool’s career than in examining its probable effect on Duport, whose business worries were no concern of mine. However, my attention was at that moment distracted from such matters by the sudden appearance in the palm court of a short, decidedly unconventional figure who now came haltingly up the steps. This person wore a black leather overcoat. His arrival in the Ritz — in those days — was a remarkable event.

Pausing, with a slight gesture of exhaustion that seemed to imply arduous travel over many miles of arid desert or snowy waste (according to whether the climate within or without the hotel was accepted as prevailing), he looked about the room; gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design: then turning his eyes to the chandeliers and the glass of the roof. His bearing was at once furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers. He seemed to be surveying the tables as if searching for someone, at the same time unable to believe his eyes, while he did so, at the luxuriance of the oasis in which he found himself. He carried no hat, but retained the belted leather overcoat upon which a few drops of moisture could be seen glistening as he advanced farther into the room, an indication that snow or sleet had begun to fall outside. This black leather garment gave a somewhat official air to his appearance, obscurely suggesting a Wellsian man of the future, hierarchic in rank. Signs of damp could also be seen in patches on his sparse fair hair, a thatch failing to roof in completely the dry, yellowish skin of his scalp.

This young man, although already hard to think of as really young on account of the maturity of his expression, was J. G. Quiggin. I had been reflecting on him only a short time earlier in connexion with Mark Members; for the pair of them — Members and Quiggin — were, for some reason, always associated together in the mind. This was not only because I myself had happened to meet both of them during my first term at the university. Other people, too, were accustomed to link their names together, as if they were a business firm, or, more authentically, a couple whose appearance together in public inevitably invoked the thought of a certain sort of literary life. Besides that, a kind of love-hate indissolubly connected them.

Whether or not the birth of this relationship had in fact taken place at that tea party in Sillery’s rooms in college, where we had all met as freshmen, was not easy to say. There at any rate I had first seen Quiggin in his grubby starched collar and subfusc suit. On that occasion Sillery had rather maliciously suggested the acquaintance of Members and Quiggin dated from an earlier incarnation; in fact boyhood together — like Isbister and St. John Clarke — in some Midland town. So far as I knew, that assertion had neither been proved nor disproved. Some swore Quiggin and Members were neighbours at home; others that the story was a pure invention, produced in malice, and based on the fact that Sillery had found the two names in the same provincial telephone directory. Sillery certainly devoted a good deal of his time to the study of such works of reference as telephone books and county directories, from which he managed to extract a modicum of information useful to himself. At the same time there were those who firmly believed Members and Quiggin to be related; even first cousins. The question was largely irrelevant; although the acutely combative nature of their friendship, if it could be so called, certainly possessed all that intense, almost vindictive rivalry of kinship.

Quiggin had quietly disappeared from the university without taking a degree. Now, like Members, he had already made some name for himself, though at a somewhat different literary level. He was a professional reviewer of notable ability, much disliked by some of the older critics for the roughness with which he occasionally handled accepted reputations. One of the smaller publishing houses employed him as ‘literary adviser’; a firm of which his friend Howard Craggs (formerly of the Vox Populi Press, now extinct, though partly reincorporated as Boggis & Stone) had recently become a director. A book by Quiggin had been advertised to appear in the spring, but as a rule his works never seemed, at the last moment, to satisfy their author’s high standard of self-criticism. Up to then his manuscripts had always been reported as ‘burnt’, or at best held back for drastic revision.

Quiggin, certainly to himself and his associates, represented a more go-ahead school of thought to that of Members and his circle. Although not himself a poet, he was a great adherent of the new trends of poetry then developing, which deprecated ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine in a general way propagated by Members. However, Members, too, was moving with the times, his latest volume of verse showing a concern with psychoanalysis; but, although ‘modern’ in the eyes of a writer of an older generation like St. John Clarke, Members — so Quiggin had once remarked—’drooped too heavily over the past, a crutch with which we younger writers must learn to dispense’. Members, for his part, had been heard complaining that he himself was in sympathy with ‘all liberal and progressive movements’, but ‘J.G. had advanced into a state of mind too political to be understood by civilised people’. In spite of such differences, and reported statements of both of them that they ‘rarely saw each other now’, they were not uncommonly to be found together, arguing or sulking on the banquettes of the Cafe Royal.

When Quiggin caught sight of me in the Ritz he immediately made for our table. As he moved across the white marble floor his figure seemed thicker than formerly. From being the spare, hungry personage I had known as an undergraduate he had become solid, almost stout. It was possible that Members, perhaps maliciously, perhaps as a matter of convenience to himself, had arranged for Quiggin to pick him up for dinner at an hour when our business together would be at an end. Supposing this had been planned, I was preparing to explain that Members had not turned up, when all at once Quiggin himself began to speak in his small, hard, grating North Country voice; employing a tone very definitely intended to sweep aside any question of wasting time upon the idle formalities of introduction, or indeed anything else that might postpone, even momentarily, some matter that was his duty to proclaim without delay.

‘I could not get away earlier,’ he began, peremptorily. ‘St. J. is rather seriously ill. It happened quite suddenly. Not only that, but a difficult situation has arisen. I should like to discuss things with you.’

This introductory speech was even less expected than Quiggin’s own arrival, although the tense, angry seriousness with which he had invested these words was not uncommon in his way of talking. Once I had thought this abrupt, aggressive manner came from a kind of shyness; later that theory had to be abandoned when it became clear that Quiggin’s personality expressed itself naturally in this form. I was surprised to hear him refer to St. John Clarke as ‘St. J.’, a designation appropriated to himself by Mark Members, and rarely used by others; in fact a nickname almost patented by Members as an outward sign of his own intimacy with his friend and employer.

I could not imagine why Quiggin, on that particular night, should suddenly wish that we should dine tête-à-tête. In the past we had occasionally spent an evening together after meeting at some party, always by accident rather than design. We were on quite good terms, but there was no subject involving St. John Clarke likely to require urgent discussion between us. At the university, where he had seemed a lonely, out-of-the-way figure, I had felt an odd interest in Quiggin; but our acquaintance there, such as it was, he now treated almost as a matter to live down. Perhaps that was natural as he came to invest more and more of his personality in his own literary status. At that moment, for example, his manner of speaking implied that any of his friends should be prepared to make sacrifices for an exceptional occasion like this one: a time when opportunity to be alone with him and talk seriously was freely offered.

‘Did you come to meet Mark?’ I asked. ‘He hasn’t turned up. It is not very likely he will appear now.’

Quiggin, refusing an invitation to sit down, stood upright by the table, still enveloped in his black, shiny livery. He had unfastened the large buttons of the overcoat, which now flapped open like Bonaparte’s, revealing a dark grey jumper that covered all but the knot of a red tie. The shirt was also dark grey. His face wore the set, mask-like expression of an importunate beggar tormenting a pair of tourists seated on the perimeter of a cafe’s terrasse. I felt suddenly determined to be no longer a victim of other people’s disregard for their social obligations. I introduced Templer out of hand — an operation Quiggin had somehow prevented until that moment — explaining at the same time that I was that evening already irrevocably booked for a meal.

Quiggin showed annoyance at this downright refusal to be dislodged, simultaneously indicating his own awareness that Members had been unable to keep this appointment. It then occurred to me that Members had persuaded Quiggin to make the excuses for his own absence in person. Such an arrangement was unlikely, and would in any case not explain why Quiggin should expect me to dine with him. However, Quiggin shook his head at this suggestion, and gave a laugh expressing scorn rather than amusement. Templer watched us with interest.

‘As a matter of fact St. J. has a new secretary,’ said Quiggin slowly, through closed lips. ‘That is why Mark did not come this evening.’

‘What, has Mark been sacked?’

Quiggin was evidently not prepared to reply directly to so uncompromising an enquiry. He laughed a little, though rather more leniently than before.

‘Honourably retired, perhaps one might say.’

‘On a pension?’

‘You are very inquisitive, Nicholas.’

‘You have aroused my interest. You should be flattered.’

‘Life with St. J. never really gave Mark time for his own work.’

‘He always produced a fair amount.’

‘Too much, from one point of view,’ said Quiggin, savagely; adding in a less severe tone: ‘Mark, as you know, always insists on taking on so many things. He could not always give St. J. the attention a man of his standing quite reasonably demands. Of course, the two of them will continue to see each other. I think, in fact, Mark is going to look in once in a way to keep the library in order. After all, they are close friends, first and foremost, quite apart from whether or not Mark is St. J.’s secretary. As you probably know, there have been various difficulties from time to time. Minor ones, of course. Still, one (thing leads to another. Mark can be rather querulous when he does not get his own way.’

‘Who is taking Mark’s place?’

‘It is not exacdy a question of one person taking another’s place. Merely coping with the practical side of the job more — well — conscientiously.’

Quiggin bared his teeth, as if to excuse this descent on his own part to a certain smugness of standpoint.

‘Yourself?’

‘At first just as an experiment on both sides.’

I saw at once that in this change, if truly reported, all kind of implications were inherent. Stories had circulated in the past of jobs for which Quiggin and Members had been in competition, most of them comparatively unimportant employments in the journalistic field. This was rather larger game; because, apart from other considerations, there was the question of who was to be St. John Clarke’s heir. He was apparently alone in the world. It was not a vast fortune, perhaps, but a tidy sum. A devoted secretary might stand in a favourable position for at least a handsome bequest. Although I had never heard hints that Quiggin was anxious to replace Members in the novelist’s household, such an ambition was by no means unthinkable. In fact the change was likely to have been brought about by long intrigue rather than sudden caprice. The news was surprising, though of a kind to startle by its essential appropriateness rather than from any sense of incongruity.

Although I did not know St. John Clarke, I could not help feeling a certain pity for him, smitten down among his first editions, press cuttings, dinner invitations, and signed photographs of eminent contemporaries, a sick man of letters, fought over by Members and Quiggin.

‘That was why I wanted to have a talk about St. J.’s affairs,’ said Quiggin, continuing to speak in his more conciliatory tone. ‘There have been certain changes lately in his point of view. You probably knew that. I think you are interested in getting this introduction. I see no reason why he should not write it. But I am of the opinion that he will probably wish to approach Isbister’s painting from a rather different angle. The pictures, after all, offer a unique example of what a capitalist society produces where art is concerned. However, I see we shall have to discuss that another time.’

He stared hard at Templer as chief impediment to his plans for the evening. It was at that point that ‘the girls’ arrived; owing to this conversation, entering the room unobserved by me until they were standing beside us. I was immediately aware that I had seen Templer’s wife before. Then I remembered that he had warned me I should recognise the stylised, conventionally smiling countenance, set in blonde curls, that had formerly appeared so often, on the walls of buses and underground trains, advocating a well-known brand of toothpaste. She must have been nearly six foot in height: in spite of a rather coarse complexion, a beautiful girl by any standards.

‘It was too wonderful,’ she said, breathlessly.

She spoke to Templer, but turned almost at once in the direction of Quiggin and myself. At the sight of her, Quiggin went rather red in the face and muttered inaudible phrases conveying that they already knew one another. She replied civilly to these, though evidently without any certainty as to where that supposed meeting had taken place. She was obviously longing to talk about the film, but Quiggin was not prepared for the matter of their earlier encounter to be left vague.

‘It was years ago at a party over an antique shop,’ he insisted, ‘given by an old queen who died soon after. Mark Members introduced us.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, indifferently, ‘I haven’t seen Mark for ages.’

‘Deacon, he was called.’

‘I believe I remember.’

‘Off Charlotte Street.’

‘There were a lot of parties round there,’ she agreed.

Then I knew that something other than the toothpaste advertisements had caused Mona’s face to seem so familiar. I, too, had seen her at Mr. Deacon’s birthday party. Since then she had applied peroxide to her naturally dark hair. When Templer had spoken of his wife’s former profession I had not connected her with ‘Mona’, the artist’s model of whom Barnby, and others, used sometimes to speak. Barnby had not mentioned her for a long time.

In due course I found that Mona had abandoned that ‘artist’s’ world for commercial employments that were more lucrative. The people she met in these less pretentious circles were also no doubt on the whole more sympathetic to her, although she would never have admitted that. Certainly the impact of her earlier career as a model for painters and sculptors was never erased from her own mind. With the extraordinary adaptability of women, she had managed to alter considerably the lines of her figure, formerly a striking synthesis of projections and concavities that certainly seemed to demand immediate expression in bronze or stone. Now her body had been disciplined into a fashionable, comparatively commonplace mould. She smiled in a friendly way at Quiggin, but made no effort to help him out in his efforts to suggest that they really already knew each other.

Quiggin himself continued to stand for a time resentfully beside us, giving the impression not so much that he wished to join the Templer party, as that he hoped for an invitation to do so, which would at once be curtly refused; though whether, had the chance arisen, he would in fact have withheld his company was, of course, speculative. Mona threw him another smile, her regular rows of teeth neatly displayed between pink lips parted in a cupid’s bow: an ensemble invoking more than ever her career on the hoardings. For some reason this glance confirmed Quiggin’s intention to depart. After a final word with me to the effect that he would ring up early the following week and arrange a meeting, he nodded in an offended manner to the world in general, and tramped away across the room and down the steps. He held himself tautly upright, as if determined to avoid for ever in future such haunts of luxury and those who frequent them.

Just as he was making this move, Lady Ardglass, followed by her spruce, grey-haired admirers, at heel like a brace of well-groomed, well-bred, obedient sporting dogs, passed us on the way out. A natural blonde, Bijou Ardglass possessed a fleeting facial resemblance to Mona. She was said to have been a mannequin before her marriage. My attention had been caught momentarily by Quiggin’s words, but, even while he was speaking, I was aware of this resemblance as Lady Ardglass approached; although her smooth hair and mink made a strong contrast with Mona’s camel-hair coat and rather wild appearance. All the same there could be no doubt that the two of them possessed something in common. As the Ardglass cortege came level with us, I saw exchanged between the two of them one of those glances so characteristic of a woman catching sight of another woman who reminds her of herself: glances in which deep hatred and also a kind of passionate love seem to mingle voluptuously together for an instant of time.

Templer, at the same moment, shot out an all-embracing look, which seemed in an equally brief space to absorb Bijou Ardglass in her entirety. He appeared to do this more from force of habit than because she greatly interested him. It was a memorandum for some future date, should the need ever arise, recording qualities and defects, charms and blemishes, certainties and potentialities, both moral and physical. Jean saw Lady Ardglass too. Just as Quiggin was making his final remark to me, I was conscious that she touched her brother’s arm and muttered something to him that sounded like ‘Bob’s girl’: words at which Templer raised his eyebrows.

I did not fully take in Jean’s appearance until that moment. She was wearing a red dress with a black coat, and some kind of a scarf, folded over like a stock, emphasised the long, graceful curve of her neck. Mona’s strident personality occupied the centre of the stage, and, besides, I felt for some reason a desire to postpone our meeting. Now, as she spoke to her brother, her face assumed an expression at once mocking and resigned, which had a sweetness about it that reminded me of the days when I had thought myself in love with her. I could still feel the tension her presence always brought, but without any of that hopeless romantic longing, so characteristic of love’s very early encounters: perhaps always imperfectly recaptured in the more realistic love-making of later life. Now, I experienced a kind of resentment at the reserve which enclosed her. It suggested a form of self- love, not altogether attractive. Yet the look of irony and amusement that had come into her face when she whispered the phrase about ‘Bob’s girl’ seemed to add something unexpected and charming to her still mysterious personality.

She was taller than I remembered, and carried herself well. Her face, like her brother’s, had become a shade fuller, a change that had coarsened his appearance, while in her the sharp, almost animal look I remembered was now softened. She had not entirely lost her air of being a schoolgirl; though certainly, it had to be admitted, a very smartly dressed school-girl. I thought to myself, not without complacence, that I was able to appreciate her without in any way losing my head, as I might once have done. There was still a curious fascination about her grey-blue eyes, slanting a little, as it were caught tightly between soft, lazy lids and dark, luxurious lashes. Once she had reminded me of Rubens’s Chapeau de Paille. Now for some reason — though there was not much physical likeness between them — I thought of the woman smoking the hookah in Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement. Perhaps there was something of the odalisque about Jean, too. She looked pale and rather tired. Any girl might excusably have appeared pale beside Mona, whose naturally high colouring had been increased by her own hand, almost as if for the stage or a cabaret performance.

‘Do you remember where we last met?’ she said, when Quiggin was gone.

‘At Stourwater.’

‘What a party.’

‘Was it awful?’

‘Some of it wasn’t very nice. Terrible rows between Baby and our host.’

‘But I thought they never had rows in public.’

‘They didn’t. That was what was so awful. Sir Magnus tremendously bland all the time and Baby absolutely bursting with bad temper.’

‘Do you ever hear from Baby Wentworth now?’

‘I had a card at Christmas. She is cloudlessly happy with her Italian.’

‘What is his profession?’

‘I don’t think I know you well enough to tell you. Perhaps after dinner.’

This, I remembered, was the way things had been at Stourwater: brisk conversation that led in the end to acres of silence. I made up my mind that this time I would not feel put out by her behaviour, whatever form it took.

‘Let’s have some food,’ said Templer, ‘I’m famished. So must you girls be, after your intellectual film.’

Afterwards, I could never recall much about that dinner in the Grill, except that the meal conveyed an atmosphere of powerful forces at work beneath the conversation. The sight of her husband’s mistress had no doubt been disturbing to Jean, who as usual spoke little. It soon became clear that the Templers’ mutual relationship was not an easy one. Different couples approach with varied technique the matrimonial vehicle’s infinitely complicated machinery. In the case of the Templers, their method made it hard to believe that they were really married at all. Clearly each of them was accustomed to a more temporary arrangement. Their conduct was normal enough, but they remained two entirely separate individuals, giving no indication of a life in common. This was certainly not because Templer showed any lack of interest in his wife. On the contrary, he seemed extravagantly, almost obsessively fond of her, although he teased her from time to time. In the past he had sometimes spoken of his love affairs to me, but I had never before seen him, as it were, in action. I wondered whether he habitually showed this same tremendous outward enthusiasm when pursuing more casual inclinations; or whether Mona had touched off some hitherto unkindled spark.

How far Mona herself reciprocated these feelings was less easy to guess. Possibly she was already rather bored with being a wife, and her surfeit in this respect might explain her husband’s conciliatory attitude. She spoke and acted in a manner so affected and absurd that there was something appealing about the artificiality of her gestures and conversation. She was like some savage creature, anxious to keep up appearances before members of a more highly civilised species, although at the same time keenly aware of her own superiority in cunning. There was something hard and untamed about her, probably the force that had attracted Templer and others. She seemed on good terms with Jean, who may have found her sister-in-law’s crude, violent presence emphasised to advantage her own quieter, though still undisclosed nature.

Quiggin had made an impression upon Mona, because, almost immediately after we sat down to dinner, she began to make enquiries about him. Possibly, on thinking it over, she felt that his obvious interest in her had deserved greater notice. In answer to her questions, I explained that he was J. G. Quiggin, the literary critic. She at once asserted that she was familiar with his reviews in one of the ‘weeklies’, mentioning, as it happened, a periodical for which, so far as I knew, he had never written.

‘He was a splendid fellow in his old leather overcoat,’ said Templer. ‘Did you notice his shirt, too? I expect you know lots of people like that, Nick. To think I was rather worried at not having struggled into a dinner-jacket tonight, and he just breezed in wearing the flannel trousers he had been sleeping in for a fortnight, and not caring a damn. I admire that.’

‘I couldn’t remember a thing about meeting him before,’ said Mona. ‘I expect I must have been a bit tight that night, otherwise I should have known his name. He said Mark Members introduced us. Have you heard of him? He is a well-known poet.’

She said this with an ineffable silliness that was irresistible.

‘I was going to meet him here, as a matter of fact, but he never turned up.’

‘Oh, were you?’

She was astonished at this; and impressed. I wondered what on earth Members had told her about himself to have won such respect in her eyes. Afterwards, I found that it was his status as ‘a poet’, rather than his private personality, that made him of such interest to her.

‘I never knew Mark well,’ she said, rather apologetic at having suggested such ambitious claims.

‘He and Quiggin are usually very thick together.’

‘I didn’t realise Nick was waiting for an old friend of yours, sweetie,’ said Templer. ‘Is he one of those fascinating people you sometimes tell me about, who wear beards and sandals and have such curious sexual habits?’

Mona began to protest, but Jean interrupted her by saying: ‘He’s not a bad poet, is he?’

‘I think rather good,’ I said, feeling a sudden unaccountable desire to encourage in her an interest in poetry. ‘He is St. John Clarke’s secretary — or, at least, he was.’

I remembered then that, if Quiggin was to be believed, the situation between Members and St. John Clarke was a delicate one.

‘I used to like St. John Clarke’s novels,’ said Jean. ‘Now I think they are rather awful. Mona adores them.’

‘Oh, but they are too wonderful.’

Mona began to detail some of St. John Clarke’s plots, a formidable undertaking at the best of times. This expression of Jean’s views — that Members was a goodish poet, St. John Clarke a bad novelist — seemed to me to indicate an impressive foothold in literary criticism. I felt now that I wanted to discuss all kind of things with her, but hardly knew where to begin on account of the barrier she seemed to have set up between herself and the rest of the world. I suspected that she might merely be trying to veer away conversation from a period of Mona’s life that would carry too many painful implications for Templer as a husband. It could be design, rather than literary interest. However, Mona herself was unwilling to be deflected from the subject.

‘Do you run round with all those people?’ she went on. ‘I used to myself. Then — oh, I don’t know — I lost touch with them. Of course Peter doesn’t much care for that sort of person, do you, sweetie?’

‘Rubbish,’ said Templer. ‘I’ve just said how much I liked Mr. J. G. Quiggin. In fact I wish I could meet him again, and find out the name of his tailor.’

Mona frowned at this refusal to take her remark seriously. She turned to me and said: ‘You know, you are not much like most of Peter’s usual friends yourself.’

That particular matter was all too complicated to explain, even if amenable to explanation, which I was inclined to doubt. I knew, of course, what she meant. Probably there was something to be said for accepting that opinion. The fact that I was not specially like the general run of Templer’s friends had certainly been emphasised by the appearance of Quiggin. I was rather displeased that the Templers had seen Quiggin. To deal collectively with them on their own plane would have been preferable to that to which Quiggin had somehow steered us all.

‘What was the flick like?’ Templer enquired.

‘Marvellous,’ said Mona. ‘The sweetest — no, really — but the sweetest little girl you ever saw.’

‘She was awfully good,’ said Jean.

‘But what happened?’

‘Well, this little girl — who was called Manuela — was sent to a very posh German school.’

‘Posh?’ said Templer. ‘Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.’

Rather to my surprise, Mona accepted this rebuke meekly: even blushing slightly.

‘Well, Manuela went to this school, and fell passionately in love with one of the mistresses.’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Templer. ‘Nick insisted the film wasn’t about lesbians. You see he just poses as a man of the world, and hasn’t really the smallest idea what is going on round him.’

‘It isn’t a bit what you mean,’ said Mona, now bursting with indignation. ‘It was a really beautiful story. Manuela tried to kill herself. I cried and cried and cried.’

‘It really was good,’ said Jean to me. ‘Have you seen it?’

‘Yes. I liked it.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Templer. ‘If he had seen the film, he would have known it was about lesbians. Look here, Nick, why not come home with us for the week-end? We can run you back to your flat and get a toothbrush. I should like you to see our house, uncomfortable as staying there will be.’

‘Yes, do come, darling,’ said Mona, drawing out the words with her absurd articulation. ‘You will find everything quite mad, I’m afraid.’

She had by then drunk rather a lot of champagne.

‘You must come,’ said Jean, speaking in her matter-of- fact tone, almost as if she were giving an order. ‘There are all sorts of things I want to talk about.’

‘Of course he’ll come,’ said Templer. ‘But we might have the smallest spot of armagnac first.’

Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned — or everything is — because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

While we were at dinner heavy snow was descending outside. This downfall had ceased by the time my things were collected, though a few flakes were still blowing about in the clear winter air when we set out at last for the Templers’ house. The wind had suddenly dropped. The night was very cold.

‘Had to sell the Buick,’ Templer said. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much room at the back of this miserable vehicle.’

Mona, now comatose after the wine at dinner, rolled herself up in a rug and took the seat in front. Almost immediately she went to sleep. Jean and I sat at the back of the car. We passed through Hammersmith, and the neighbourhood of Chiswick: then out on to the Great West Road. For a time I made desultory conversation. At last she scarcely answered, and I gave it up. Templer, smoking a cigar in the front, also seemed disinclined to talk now that he was at the wheel. We drove along at a good rate.

On either side of the highway, grotesque buildings, which in daytime resembled the temples of some shoddy, utterly unsympathetic Atlantis, now assumed the appearance of an Arctic city’s frontier forts. Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid beneath were scalding hot.

Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.

The exact spot must have been a few hundred yards beyond the point where the electrically illuminated young lady in a bathing dress dives eternally through the petrol- tainted air; night and day, winter and summer, never reaching the water of the pool to which she endlessly glides. Like some image of arrested development, she returns for ever, voluntarily, to the springboard from which she started her leap. A few seconds after I had seen this bathing belle journeying, as usual, imperturbably through the frozen air, I took Jean in my arms.

Her response, so sudden and passionate, seemed surprising only a minute or two later. All at once everything was changed. Her body felt at the same time hard and yielding, giving a kind of glow as if live current issued from it. I used to wonder afterwards whether, in the last resort, of all the time we spent together, however ecstatic, those first moments on the Great West Road were not the best.

To what extent the sudden movement that brought us together was attributable to sentiment felt years before; to behaviour that was almost an obligation within the Templer orbit; or, finally, to some specific impetus of the car as it covered an unusually bad surface of road, was later impossible to determine with certainty. All I knew was that I had not thought it all out beforehand. This may seem extraordinary in the light of what had gone before; but the behaviour of human beings is, undeniably, extraordinary. The incredible ease with which this evolution took place was almost as if the two of us had previously agreed to embrace at that particular point on the road. The timing had been impeccable.

We had bowled along much farther through the winter night, under cold, glittering stars, when Templer turned the car off the main road. Passing through byways lined with beech trees, we came at last to a narrow lane where snow still lay thick on the ground. At the end of this, the car entered a drive, virginally white. In the clear moonlight the grotesquely gabled house ahead of us, set among firs, seemed almost a replica of that mansion by the sea formerly inhabited by Templer’s father. Although smaller in size, the likeness of general outline was uncanny. I almost expected to hear the crash of wintry waves beneath a neighbouring cliff. The trees about the garden were powdered with white. Now and then a muffled thud resounded as snow fell through the branches on to the thickly coated ground. Otherwise, all was deathly silent.

Templer drew up with a jerk in front of the door, the wheels churning up the snow. He climbed quickly from his seat, and went round to the back of the car, to unload from the boot some eatables and wine they had brought from London. At the same moment Mona came out of her sleep or coma. With the rug still wrapped round her, she jumped out of her side of the car, and ran across the Sisley landscape to the front door, which someone had opened from within. As she ran she gave a series of little shrieks of agony at the cold. Her footprints left deep marks on the face of the drive, where the snow lay soft and tender, like the clean, clean sheets of a measureless bed.

‘Where shall I find you?’

‘Next to you on the left.’

‘How soon?’

‘Give it half an hour.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘Don’t be too long.’

She laughed softly when she said that, disengaging herself from the rug that covered both of us.

The interior of the house was equally reminiscent of the Templers’ former home. Isbister’s huge portrait of Mr. Templer still hung in the hall, a reminder of everyday life and unsolved business problems. Such things seemed far removed from this mysterious, snowy world of unreality, where all miracles could occur. There were the same golf clubs and shooting-sticks and tennis racquets; the same barometer, marking the weather on a revolving chart; the same post-box for letters; even the same panelling in light wood that made the place seem like the interior of a vast, extravagant cabinet for cigars.

‘What we need,’ said Templer, ‘is a drink. And then I think we shall all be ready for bed.’

For a second I wondered whether he were aware that something was afoot; but, when he turned to help Mona with the bottles and glasses, I felt sure from their faces that neither had given a thought to any such thing.