Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

4

IF SO TORTUOUS a comparison of mediocre talent could ever be resolved, St John Clarke was probably to be judged a ‘better’ writer than Isbister was painter. However, when St John Clarke died in the early spring, he was less well served than his contemporary in respect of obituaries. Only a few years before, Isbister had managed to capture, perhaps helped finally to expend, what was left of an older, more sententious tradition of newspaper panegyric. There were more reasons for this than the inevitably changing taste in mediocrity. The world was moving into a harassed era. At the time of St John Clarke’s last illness, the National Socialist Party of Danzig was in the headlines; foreign news more and more often causing domestic events to be passed over almost unnoticed. St John Clarke was one of these casualties. If Mark Members was to be believed, St John Clarke himself would have seen this unfair distribution of success, even posthumous success, as something in the nature of things. In what Members called ‘one of St J.’s breakfast table agonies of self-pity’, the novelist had quite openly expressed the mortification he felt in contrasting his old friend’s lot with his own.

‘Isbister was beloved of the gods, Mark,’ he had cried aloud, looking up with a haggard face from The Times of New Year’s Day and its list of awards, ‘R.A. before he was forty-five – Gold Medallist of the Paris Salon – Diploma of Honour at the International Exhibition at Amsterdam – Commander of the Papal Order of Pius IX – refused a knighthood. Think of it, Mark, a man the King would have delighted to honour. What recognition have I had compared with these?’

‘Why did Isbister refuse a knighthood?’ Members had asked.

‘To spite his wife.’

‘That was it, was it?’

‘Those photographs the Press resurrected of Morwenna standing beside him looking out to sea,’ said St John Clarke, ‘they were antediluvian – diluvian possibly. It was the Flood they were looking at, I expect. They’d been living apart for years when he died. Of course Isbister himself said he had decided worldly honours were unbefitting an artist. That didn’t prevent him from telling everyone of the offer. Absolutely everyone. He had it both ways.’

In those days Members was still anxious to soothe his employer.

‘Well, you’ve had a lot of enjoyable parties and country house visits to look back on, St J.,’ he said. ‘Rather a different life from Isbister’s, but a richer one in my eyes.’

‘One week-end at Dogdene twenty years ago,’ St John Clarke had answered bitterly. ‘Forced to play croquet with Lord Lonsdale… Two dinners at the Huntercombes’, both times asked the same night as Sir Horrocks Rusby…’

This was certainly inadequate assessment of St John Clarke’s social triumphs, which, for a man of letters, had been less fruitless than at that moment his despair presented them. Members, knowing what was expected of him, brushed away with a smile such melancholy reminiscences.

‘But it will come…’ he said.

‘It will come, Mark. As I sit here, the Nobel Prize will come.’

‘Alas,’ said Members, concluding the story, ‘it never does.’

As things fell out, the two most alert articles to deal with St John Clarke were written, ironically enough, by Members and Quiggin respectively, both of whom spared a few crumbs of praise for their former master, treating him at no great length as a ‘personality’ rather than a writer: Members, in the weekly of which he was assistant literary editor, referring to ‘an ephemeral, if almost painfully sincere, digression into what was for him the wonderland of jauviste painting’; Quiggin, in a similar, rather less eminent publication to which he contributed when hard up, guardedly emphasising the deceased’s ‘underlying, even when patently bewildered, sympathy with the Workers’ Cause’. No other journal took sufficient interest in the later stages of St John Clarke’s career to keep up to date about these conflicting aspects of his final decade. They spoke only of his deep love for the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens and his contributions to Queen Mary’s Gift Book. Appraisal of his work unhesitatingly placed Fields of Amaranth as the peak of his achievement, with E’en the Longest River or The Heart is Highland – opinion varied – as a poor second. The Times Literary Supplement found ‘the romances of Renaissance Italy and the French Revolution smacked of Wardour Street, the scenes from fashionable life in the other novels tempered with artificiality, the delineations of poverty less realistic than Gissing’s’.

I was surprised by an odd feeling of regret that St John Clarke was gone. Even if an indifferent writer, his removal from the literary scene was like the final crumbling of a well-known landmark; unpleasing perhaps, at the same time possessed of a deserved renown for having withstood demolition for so long. The anecdotes Members and Quiggin put round about him had given St John Clarke a certain solidity in my mind; more, in a way, than his own momentary emergence at Lady Warminster’s. This glimpse of him, then total physical removal, brought home, too, the blunt postscript of death. St John Clarke had merely looked ill at Hyde Park Gardens; now, like John Peel, he had gone far, far away, with his pen and his press-cuttings in the morning; become one of those names to which the date of birth and death may be added in parentheses, as their owners speed to oblivion from out of reference books and ‘literary pages’ of the newspapers.

As an indirect result of Mrs Foxe’s party, relations with the Morelands were complicated by uncertainty and a little embarrassment. No one really knew what was happening between Moreland and Priscilla. They were never seen together, but it was very generally supposed some sort of a love affair was in progress between them. Rather more than usual Priscilla conveyed the impression that she did not want to be bothered with her relations; while an air of discomfort, faint but decided, pervaded the Moreland flat, indicating something was amiss there. Moreland himself had plunged into a flood of work. He took the line now that his symphony had fallen flat – to some extent, he said, deservedly – and he must repair the situation by producing something better. For the first time since the early days when I had known him, he seemed interested only in professionally musical affairs. We heard at second-hand that Matilda was to be tried out for the part of Zenocrate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. This was confirmed by Moreland himself when I met him by chance somewhere. The extent of the gossip about Moreland and Priscilla was revealed to me one day by running into Chips Lovell travelling by Underground. Lovell had by now achieved his former ambition of getting a job on a newspaper, where he helped to write the gossip column, one of a relatively respectable order. He was in the best of form, dressed with the greatest care, retaining that boyish, innocent look that made him in different ways a success with both sexes.

‘How is Priscilla?’ he asked.

‘All right, so far as I know.’

‘I heard something about her and Hugh Moreland.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘That they were having a walk-out together.’

‘Who said so?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘I didn’t know you knew Moreland.’

‘I don’t. Only by name.’

‘It doesn’t sound very probable, does it?’

‘I have no idea. People do these things.’

Although I liked Lovell, I saw no reason to offer help so far as his investigation of the situation of Moreland and Priscilla. As a matter of fact I had not much help to offer. In any case, Lovell, inhabiting by vocation a world of garbled rumour, was to be treated with discretion where the passing of information was concerned. I was surprised at the outspokenness with which he had mentioned the matter. His enquiry seemed stimulated by personal interest, rather than love of gossip for its own sake. I supposed he still felt faint dissatisfaction at having failed to make the mark to which he felt his good looks entitled him.

‘I always liked Priscilla,’ he said, using a rather consciously abstracted manner. ‘I must see her again one of these days.’

‘What has been happening to you, Chips?’

‘Do you remember that fellow Widmerpool you used to tell me about when we were at the film studio? His name always stuck in my mind because he managed to stay at Dogdene. I took my hat off to him for getting there. Uncle Geoffrey is by no means keen on handing out invitations. You told me there was some talk of Widmerpool marrying somebody. A Vowchurch, was it? Anyway, I ran into Widmerpool the other day and he talked about you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Just mentioned that he knew you. Said it was sensible of you to get married. Thought it a pity you couldn’t find a regular job.’

‘But I’ve got a regular job.’

‘Not in his eyes, you haven’t. He said he feared you were a bit of a drifter with the stream.’

‘How was he otherwise?’

‘I never saw a man so put out by the Abdication,’ said Lovell. ‘It might have been Widmerpool himself who’d had to abdicate. My goodness, he had taken it to heart.’

‘What specially upset him?’

‘So far as I could gather, he had cast himself for a brilliant social career if things had worked out differently.’

‘The Beau Brummell of the new reign?’

‘Not far short of that.’

‘Where did you run across him?’

‘Widmerpool came to see me in my office. He wanted me to slip in a paragraph about certain semi-business activities of his. One of those quiet little puffs, you know, which don’t cost the advertising department anything, but warm the heart of the sales manager.’

‘Did you oblige?’

‘Not me,’ said Lovell.

By no means without a healthy touch of malice, Lovell had also a fine appreciation of the power-wielding side of his job.

‘I hear your brother-in-law, Erry Warminster, is on his way home from Spain,’ he said.

‘First I’ve heard of it.’

‘Erry’s own family are always the last to hear about his goings-on.’

‘What’s your source?’

‘The office, as usual.’

‘Is he bored with the Spanish war?’

‘He is ill – also had some sort of row with his own side.’

‘What is wrong with him?’

‘Touch of dysentery, someone said.’

‘Serious?’

‘I don’t think so.’

We parted company after arranging that Lovell should come and have a drink with us at the flat in the near future. The following day, I met Quiggin in Members’s office. He was in a sulky mood. I told him I had enjoyed his piece about St John Clarke. Praise was usually as acceptable to Quiggin as to most people. That day the remark seemed to increase his ill humour. However, he confirmed the news about Erridge.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Of course it is true that Alfred is coming back. Don’t his family take any interest in him? They might at least have discovered that.’

‘Is he bad?’

‘It is a disagreeable complaint to have.’

‘But a whole skin otherwise. That is always something if there is a war on.’

‘Alfred is too simple a man to embroil himself in practical affairs like fighting an ideological war,’ said Quiggin severely. ‘A typical aristocratic idealist, I’m afraid. Perhaps it is just as well his health has broken down. He has never been strong, of course. He is the first to admit it. In fact he is too fond of talking about his health. As I have said before, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.’

I was surprised at Quiggin’s attitude towards Erridge’s illness. I tried to work out who Quiggin himself would be in Dostoevsky’s novel if Erridge was Prince Myshkin and Mona – presumably – Nastasya Filippovna. It was all too complicated. I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity. Quiggin spoke again.

‘I have been hearing something of Alf’s difficulties from one of our own agents just back from Barcelona,’ he said. ‘Alf seems to have shown a good deal of political obtuseness – perhaps I should say childlike innocence. He appears to have treated POUM, FAI, CNT, and UGT, as if they were all the same left-wing extension of the Labour Party. I was not surprised to hear that he was going to be arrested at the time he decided to leave Spain. If you can’t tell the difference between a Trotskyite-Communist, an Anarcho-Syndicalist, and a properly paid-up Party Member, you had better keep away from the barricades.’

‘You had, indeed.’

‘It is not fair on the workers.’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Alfred’s place was to organise in England.’

‘Why doesn’t he go back to his idea of starting a magazine?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed the subject.

Erridge was in Quiggin’s bad books; a friend who had disappointed Quiggin to a degree impossible to conceal; a man who had failed to rise to an historic occasion. I supposed that Quiggin regarded Erridge’s imminent return, however involuntary, from the Spanish war in the light of a betrayal. This seemed unreasonable on Quiggin’s part, since Erridge’s breakdown in health was, after all, occasioned by an attempt to further the cause Quiggin himself had so energetically propagated by word of mouth. Even if Erridge had not fought in the field (where Howard Cragg’s nephew had already been killed), he had taken other risks in putting his principles into practice. If it was true that he was marked down for arrest, he might have been executed behind the lines. Quiggin had staked less on his enthusiasms. However, as things turned out there was probably a different reason that afternoon for Quiggin’s displeasure on Erridge’s account.

Erridge himself arrived in London a day or two later. He was not at all well, and went straight into a nursing home; the nursing home, as it happened, in the passages of which I had encountered Moreland, Brandreth, and Widmerpool. This accommodation was found for her brother by Frederica, ideologically perhaps the furthest removed from Erridge, in certain other respects the closest of the Tollands to him, both from nearness in age and a shared rigidity of individual opinion. The two of them might disagree; they understood each other’s obstinacies. When Erridge had settled down at the nursing home, his brothers and sisters visited him there. They were given a lukewarm welcome. Erridge was one of those egotists unable effectively to organise to good effect his own egotism, to make a public profit out of it. He had no doubt enjoyed unusual experiences. These he was unable, or unwilling, to share with others. Isobel brought back a description of a ragged beard protruding over the edge of sheets entirely covered by what appeared to be a patchwork quilt of Boggis & Stone publications dealing with different aspects of the Spanish predicament. Norah, who shared to some extent Erridge’s political standpoint, was openly contemptuous.

‘Erry always regards himself as the only person in the world who has ever been ill,’ she said. ‘His time in Spain seems to have been a total flop. He didn’t get up to the front and he never met Hemingway.’

Erridge, as Norah – and Quiggin before her – had remarked, was keenly interested in his own health; in general not good. Now that he was ill enough for his condition to be recognised as more than troublesome, this physical state was not unsympathetic to him. The sickness gave his existence an increased reality, a deeper seriousness, elements

Erridge felt denied him by his family. Certainly he could now claim to have returned from an area of action. Although he might prefer to receive his relations coldly, he was at least assured of being the centre of Tolland attention. However, as it turned out, he enjoyed this position only for a short time, when his status was all at once prejudiced by his brother Hugo’s motor accident.

Hugo Tolland had ‘come down’ from the university not long before this period, where, in face of continual pressure of a threatening kind from the authorities, he had contrived to stay the course for three years; even managing, to everyone’s surprise, to scrape some sort of degree. The youngest of the male Tollands, Hugo was showing signs of becoming from the family’s point of view the least satisfactory. Erridge, it was true, even before his father died, had been written off as incurably odd; but Erridge was an ‘eldest son’. Even persons of an older generation – like his uncle, Alfred Tolland – who preferred the conventions to be strictly observed, would display their own disciplined acceptance of convention by recognising the fact that Erridge’s behaviour, however regrettable, was his own affair. An eldest son, by no means beyond the reach of criticism, was at the same time excluded from the utter and absolute public disapproval which might encompass younger sons. Besides, no one could tell how an eldest son might turn out after he ‘succeeded’. This was a favourite theme of Chips Lovell’s, who used to talk of ‘the classic case of Henry V and Falstaff’. Erridge might be peculiar; the fact remained he would be – now was – head of the family. Hugo was quite another matter. Hugo would inherit between three and four hundred a year when twenty-one and have to make his own way in the world.

While still at the university, Hugo showed no sign of wishing to prepare himself for that fate. Outwardly, he was a fairly intelligent, not very good-looking, unhappy, rather amusing young man, who kept himself going by wearing unusual clothes and doing perverse things. Because his own generation of undergraduates tended to be interested in politics and economics, both approached from a ‘leftish’ angle, Hugo liked to ‘pose’ – his own word – as an ‘aesthete’. He used to burn joss-sticks in his rooms. He had bought a half-bottle of Green Chartreuse, a liqueur he ‘sipped’ from time to time, which, like the Widow’s cruse, seemed to last for ever; for only during outbreaks of consciously bad behaviour was Hugo much of a drinker. At first Sillery had taken him up, no doubt hoping Hugo might prove an asset in the field where Sillery struggled for power with other dons. Hugo had turned out altogether intractable. Even Sillery, past master at dealing with undergraduates of all complexions and turning their fallibilities to his own advantage, had been embarrassed by Hugo’s arrival at one of his tea parties laden with a stack of pro-Franco pamphlets, which he had distributed among the assembled guests. The company had included a Labour M.P. – a Catholic, as it happened – upon whom Sillery, for his own purposes, was particularly anxious to make a good impression. The story had been greatly enjoyed by Sillery’s old enemy, Brightman, who used to repeat it night after night – ad nauseam, his colleagues complained, so Short told me – at High Table.

‘Hugo will never find a place for himself in the contemporary world,’ his sister Norah had declared.

Norah’s conclusion, reached after an argument with Hugo about Spain, was not much at variance with the opinion of the rest of the family. However, this judgment turned out to be a mistaken one. Unlike many outwardly more promising young men, Hugo found a job without apparent difficulty. He placed himself with Baldwyn Hodges Ltd, antique dealers, a business which undertook a certain amount of interior decorating as a sideline. Although far from being the sort of firm Molly Jeavons would – or, financially speaking, could – employ for renovating her own house, its managing director, Mrs Baldwyn Hodges herself, like so many other unlikely people, had fetched up at the Jeavonses’ one evening when Hugo was there. Very expert at handling rich people, Mrs Baldwyn Hodges was a middle-aged, capable, leathery woman, of a type Mr Deacon would particularly have loathed had he lived to see the rise of her shop, which had had small beginnings, to fashionable success. Hugo and Mrs Baldwyn Hodges got on well together at the Jeavonses’. They met again at the Surrealist Exhibition. Whatever the reason – probably, in fact, Hugo’s own basic, though not then generally recognised, toughness – Mrs Baldwyn Hodges showed her liking for Hugo in a practical manner by taking him into her business as a learner. He did not earn much money at first; he may even have paid some sort of fee at the start; but he made something on commission from time to time and the job suited him. In fact Hugo had shown signs of becoming rather good at selling people furniture and advising them about their drawing-room walls. Chips Lovell (who had recently been told about Freud) explained that Hugo was ‘looking for a mother’. Perhaps he was right. Mrs Baldwyn Hodges certainly taught Hugo a great deal.

All the same, Hugo’s employment did not prevent him from frequenting the society of what Mr Deacon used to call ‘naughty young men’. When out on an excursion with companions of this sort, a car was overturned and Hugo’s leg was broken. As a result of this accident, Hugo was confined to bed for some weeks at Hyde Park Gardens, where he set up what he himself designated ‘a rival salon’ to Erridge’s room at the nursing home. This situation, absurd as the reason may sound, had, I think, a substantial effect upon the speed of Erridge’s recovery. Hugo even attempted to present his own indisposition as a kind of travesty of Erridge’s case, pretending that the accident to the car had been the result of political sabotage organised by his sister Norah and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. It was all very silly, typical of Hugo. At the same time, visiting Hugo in these circumstances was agreed to be more amusing than visiting Erridge. However, even if Erridge made no show of enjoying visitors, and was unwilling to reveal much of his Spanish experiences, he tolerated the interest of other people in what had happened to him in Spain. It was another matter if his relations came to his bedside only to retail the antics of his youngest brother, who represented to Erridge the manner of life of which he most disapproved. The consequence was that Erridge returned to Thrubworth sooner than expected. There he met with a lot of worry on arrival, because his butler, Smith, immediately went down with bronchitis.

At about the same time that Erridge left London, Moreland rang me up. Without anything being said on either side, our meetings had somehow lapsed. We had spoken together only at parties or on such occasions when other people had been around us. It was ages since we had had one of those long talks about life, or the arts, which had been such a predominant aspect of knowing Moreland in the past. On the telephone his voice sounded restrained, practical, colourless; as he himself would have said ‘the sane Englishman with his pipe’.

‘How is Matilda?’

‘Spending a good deal of time out on her own with rehearsals and so on. She is going out with some of her theatre people tonight as a matter of fact.’

‘Come and dine.’

‘I can’t. I’m involved in musical business until about ten. I said I would drop in on Maclintick then. I thought you might feel like coming too.’

‘Why?’

‘The suggestion was made to help myself out really. I agree it isn’t a very inviting prospect.’

‘Less inviting than usual? Do you remember our last visit?’

‘Well, you know what has happened?’

‘No.’

‘Maclintick’s wife has walked out on him.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘With Carolo.’

‘How rash.’

‘On top of that Maclintick has lost his job.’

‘I never thought of him as having a job.’

‘He did, all the same. Now he hasn’t.’

‘Did a paper sack him?’

‘Yes. I thought we might meet at a pub, then go on to see Maclintick at his house. He just sits there working all the time. I have been talking to Gossage about Maclintick. We are a bit worried. A visit might cheer him up.’

‘I am sure he would much rather see you alone.’

‘That is just what I want to avoid.’

‘Why not take Gossage?’

‘Gossage is busy tonight. Anyway, he is too old a friend. He gets on Maclintick’s nerves.’

‘But so do I.’

‘In a different way. Besides, you don’t know anything about music. It is musical people Maclintick can’t stand.’

‘I only see Maclintick once every two years. We never hit it off particularly well even spaced out at those intervals.’

‘It is because Maclintick never sees you that I want you to come. I don’t want an embarrassing time with him téte-à-téte. I am not up to it these days. I have troubles of my own.’

‘All right. Where shall we meet?’

Moreland, from his extensive knowledge of London drinking places, named a pub in the Maclintick neighbourhood. I told Isobel what had been arranged.

‘Try and find out what is happening about Priscilla,’ she said. ‘For all we know, they may be planning to run away together too. One must look ahead.’

The Nag’s Head, the pub named by Moreland, was a place of no great attraction. I recalled it as the establishment brought to Mrs Maclintick’s mind by her husband’s uncouth behaviour at Mrs Foxe’s party. Moreland looked tired when he arrived. He said he had been trudging round London all day. I asked for further details about the Maclintick situation.

‘There are none to speak of,’ Moreland said. ‘Audrey and Carolo left together one afternoon last week. Maclintick had gone round to have a talk with his doctor about some trouble he was having with his kidneys. Not flushing out properly or something. He found a note when he returned home saying she had gone for good.’

‘And then he lost his job on top of it?’

‘He had written rather an astringent article about a concert he was covering. The paper didn’t put it in. Maclintick made a fuss. The editor suggested Maclintick might be happier writing for a periodical aiming at a narrower public. Maclintick agreed that he himself had been feeling that for some time. So they parted company.’

‘He is absolutely broke?’

‘Probably a few minor irons in the fire. I don’t know. Maclintick is not a chap who manages his business affairs very well.’

‘Is he looking for another job?’

‘He has either been working at his book or knocking them back pretty hard since all this happened – and who shall blame him?’

We set off for Maclintick’s house.

‘When is Madlda’s play coming on?’

‘They don’t seem to know exactly.’

Moreland showed no sign of wishing to pursue the subject of Madlda’s stage career. I did not press the question. I wondered whether he knew that Matilda had told me of her former marriage to Carolo. We passed once more through those shadowy, desolate squares from which darkness had driven even that small remnant of life that haunted them by day. Moreland was depressed and hardly spoke at all. The evening before us offered no prospect to stimulate cheerfulness. At last we reached Maclintick’s horrible little dwelling. There was a light upstairs. I felt at low ebb. However, when Maclintick opened the front door he appeared in better condition than I had been led to expect. He wore no collar and had not shaved for several days, but these omissions seemed deliberate badges of emancipation from the servitudes of marriage and journalism, rather than neglect provoked by grief or despair. On the contrary, the nervous tensions to which he had been subjected during the previous few days had to some extent galvanised his normally crabbed manner into a show of geniality.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘You’ll need a drink.’

There was a really colossal reek of whiskey as we crossed the threshold.

‘How are things?’ said Moreland, sounding not very sure of himself.

‘Getting the sack keeps you young,’ said Maclintick. ‘You ought to try it, both of you. I have been able to settle down to some real work at last, now that I am quit of that bloody rag – and freer in other respects too, I might add.’

In spite of this rather aggressive equanimity displayed by Maclintick himself, an awful air of gloom hung over the house. The sitting-room was unspeakably filthy, dirty tea cups along the top of the glass-fronted bookcase, tumblers stained with beer dregs among the hideous ornaments of the mantelpiece. In the background, an atmosphere of unmade beds and unwashed dishes was dominated by an abominable, indefinable smell. As people do when landed in a position of that sort, Maclintick began at once to discuss his own predicament; quite objectively, as if the experience was remote from himself, as if – which in a sense was true – there was no earthly point in our talking of anything else but Maclintick’s personal affairs.

‘When I realised she had gone,’ he said, ‘I heaved a great sigh of relief. That was my first reaction. Later, I grasped the fact that I had to get my own supper. Found something I liked for a change – sardines and plenty of red pepper – and a stiff drink with them. Then I started turning things over in my mind. I began to think of Carolo.’

Moreland laughed uneasily. He was a person not well equipped to deal with human troubles. His temperament was without that easy, unthinking sympathy which reacts in a simple manner, indicating instinctively the right thing to say to someone desperately unhappy. He also lacked that subjective, ruthless love of presiding over other people’s affairs which often makes basically heartless people adept at offering effective consolation. ‘I never know the right moment to squeeze the bereaved’s arm at a funeral,’ he had once said. ‘Some people can judge it to a nicety.’ In short, nothing but true compassion for Maclintick’s circumstances could have brought Moreland to the house that night. It was an act of friendship of some magnitude.

‘Is Carolo in a job?’ Moreland asked.

‘Carolo taking a job seems to have touched off matters,’ said Maclintick, ‘or perhaps vice versa. He has at last decided that his genius will allow him to teach. Somewhere in the North – Midlands, I was told, his own part of the world. I can’t remember now. He spoke about it a short time before they went off together. Left without paying his rent, need I say? I wonder how he and Audrey will hit it off. I spent yesterday with a solicitor.’

‘You are getting a divorce?’

Maclintick nodded.

‘Why not,’ he said, ‘when you’ve got the chance? She might change her mind. Let me fill your glasses.’

All this talk was decidedly uncomfortable. I did not think Moreland, any more than myself, knew whether Maclintick was in fact glad to have ridded himself of his wife, or, on the contrary, was shattered by her leaving him. Either state was credible. To presume that because they were always quarrelling, Maclintick necessarily wished to be parted from her could be wholly mistaken. In the same way, it was equally difficult to know whether Maclintick was genuinely relieved at ceasing to work for the paper that had employed him until the previous week, or was, on the contrary, desperately worried at the prospect of having to look for another job. So far as the job was concerned, both states of mind probably existed simultaneously; perhaps so far as the wife was concerned too. Moreland clearly felt uncertain what line to take in his replies to Maclintick, who himself appeared to enjoy keeping secret his true feelings while he discussed the implications of his own position.

‘Did I ever tell you how I met Audrey?’ he asked suddenly.

We had been talking for a time about jobs on papers. Moreland had been pronouncing on the subject of musical journalism in particular; but sooner or later Maclintick abandoned the subject in hand, always returning to the matter of his wife. The question did not make Moreland look any happier.

‘Never,’ he said.

‘It was through Gossage,’ Maclintick said.

‘How very unexpected.’

‘There was a clerk in Gossage’s bank who was keen on Sibelius,’ said Maclintick. ‘They used to talk about music together whenever Gossage went to the bank to cash a cheque or have a word about his overdraft – if Gossage ever has anything so irregular as an overdraft, which I doubt.’

‘When Gossage went there to bank the bribes given him by corrupt musicians who wanted good notices,’ suggested Moreland.

‘Possibly,’ said Maclintick. ‘I wish some of them offered an occasional bribe to me. Well, Gossage invited this young man, Stanley by name, to come with him to a private performance of some chamber music.’

Moreland laughed loudly at this, much louder than the story demanded at this stage. That was from nerves. I found myself laughing a lot too.

‘Stanley asked if he might bring his sister along,’ said Maclintick. ‘I too had to go to the chamber music for my sins. The sister turned out to be Audrey.’

Moreland seemed as much surprised by this narration as I was myself. To produce such autobiographical details was altogether unlike Maclintick. The upheaval in his life had changed his whole demeanour.

‘I took a fancy to her as soon as I set eyes on her,’ Maclintick said. ‘Funny that, because she hasn’t much in the way of looks. That was a bad day for me – a bad day for both of us, I suppose.’

‘What happened?’ asked Moreland.

His curiosity had been aroused. Even Moreland, who knew Maclintick so much better than myself, found these revelations surprising.

‘Do you know,’ said Maclintick, speaking slowly as if still marvelling at his own ineptitude in such matters, ‘do you know I did not exchange a word with her the whole evening. We were just introduced. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She drifted off somewhere. I went home early.’

‘What did you do next?’

‘I had to make Gossage arrange another meeting. It took the hell of a lot of doing. Gossage didn’t care for the idea at all. He liked Stanley, but he didn’t want to get mixed up with his sister.’

‘And then?’

‘I didn’t know anything about the machinery for taking women out, even when Gossage brought us together again.’

‘How did you manage to get married then?’

‘God knows,’ said Maclintick. ‘I often wonder.’

‘There must have been a moment when some agreement was reached.’

‘There was never much agreement about it,’ said Maclintick. ‘We started having rows straight away. But one thing is interesting. Gossage told me afterwards that on the night of the chamber music Audrey only opened her lips once – that was to ask him to tell her my name again and enquire what I did for a living.’

‘No use fighting against fate,’ said Moreland laughing. ‘I’ve always said it.’

‘Gossage told her I was a musician,’ said Maclintick. ‘Her comment was “Oh, God”.’

‘I find that a very natural one to make,’ said Moreland.

‘She isn’t absolutely tone-deaf,’ said Maclintick, speaking as if he had given the matter deep thought. ‘She has her likes and dislikes. Quite good at remembering facts and contradicting you about them later. She’d been dragged by her brother to the chamber music. I never quite know why.’

‘Brought her as a chaperone,’ said Moreland.

‘All the music in the family went into Stanley,’ said Maclintick. ‘I shall miss seeing Stanley once in a while. We used to have beer evenings together twice a year. Stanley can’t drink Irish whiskey. But you know, it’s astonishing what technical jargon women will pick up. Audrey would argue about music with me-with anyone. I’ve heard her make Gossage contradict himself about his views on Les Six. Odd the way music comes out in a family. I get it through my mother who was half Jewish. My father and grandfather were in the linen trade. They may have gone to a concert occasionally. That was about the extent of it.’

Moreland took this opportunity to guide conversation back into general channels.

‘You can’t tell what families are going to throw up,’ he said. ‘Look at Lortzing whose family were hereditary hangmen in Thuringia for two hundred years. Then suddenly the Lortzings cease to be hangmen and produce a composer.’

‘You could be a musical hangman, I suppose,’ said Maclintick. ‘Hum tunes while you worked.’

‘I could well imagine some of the musicians one knows becoming hangmen,’ said Moreland.

‘Surprising Lortzing didn’t become a critic with an ancestry like that,’ said Maclintick. ‘Had it in his blood to execute people when need be – would also know the right knot to tie when it came to his own turn to shuffle off this mortal coil. Lortzing wrote an opera about your friend Casanova, didn’t he? Do you remember that night at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant years ago? We talked about seducers and Don Juan and that sort of thing. That painter, Barnby, was there. I believe you were with us too, weren’t you, Jenkins? For some reason I have often thought of that evening. I was thinking of it again last night, wondering if Carolo was one of the types.’

Moreland winced slightly. I did not know whether or not Maclintick was aware that Carolo had once been married to Matilda. Probably did not know that, I decided. Maclintick was a man who normally took little interest in the past history of other people. It was even surprising to find him showing such comparative interest in his own past history.

‘Carolo doesn’t come into the Casanova-Don Juan category,’ said Moreland. ‘He hasn’t the vitality. Too passive. Passivity is not a bad method, all the same. Carolo just sits about until some woman either marries him, or runs away with him, from sheer desperation at finding nothing whatever to talk about.’

Maclintick nodded his head several times, showing ponderous enjoyment at this view of Carolo’s technique in seduction. He filled the glasses.

‘I suppose one of the tests of a man is the sort of woman he wants to marry,’ he said. ‘You showed some sense, Moreland, and guessed right. I should have stayed out of the marriage market altogether.’

‘Marriage is quite a problem for a lot of people,’ Moreland said.

‘You know Audrey was my ideal in a sort of way,’ said Maclintick, who after drinking all day-probably several days-was becoming thick in his speech and not always absolutely coherent. ‘I’ve no doubt that was a mistake to start off with. There is probably something wrong about thinking you’ve realised your ideal – in art or anywhere else. It is a conception that should remain in the mind.’

‘It wasn’t for nothing that Petrarch’s Laura was one of the de Sade family,’ said Moreland.

‘My God, I bet it wasn’t,’ said Maclintick. ‘She’d have put him through it if they’d married. I shall always think of her being a de Sade whenever I see that picture of them again. You know the one. It is always to be found on the walls of boarding houses.’

‘The picture you are thinking of, Maclintick, represents Dante and Beatrice,’ Moreland said, ‘not Petrarch and Laura. But I know the one you mean – and I expect the scene in question was no less unlike what actually happened than if depicting the other couple.’

‘You are absolutely right, Moreland,’ said Maclintick, now shaking with laughter. ‘Dante and Beatrice – and a bloody bad picture, as you say. As a matter of fact, it’s the sort of picture I rather like. Pictures play no part in my life. Music fulfils my needs, with perhaps a little poetry, a little German philosophy. You can keep the pictures, whether they tell a story or not.’

‘Nowadays you can have both,’ said Moreland, cheered by the drink and at last recovering his spirits. ‘The literary content of some Picassos makes The Long Engagement or A Hopeless Dawn seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction.’

‘You might as well argue that Ulysses has more “story” than Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Rosary,’’ said Maclintick. ‘I suppose it has in a way. I find all novels lacking in probability.’

‘Probability is the bane of the age,’ said Moreland, now warming up. ‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant – and usually inaccurate – premises.’

‘That is certainly true about women,’ said Maclintick. ‘But anyway it takes a bit of time to realise that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living. I used to feel with Audrey: “this can’t be marriage” – and now it isn’t.’

Suddenly upstairs the telephone bell began to ring. The noise came from the room where Maclintick worked. The sound was shrill, alarming, like a deliberate warning. Maclintick did not move immediately. He looked greatly disturbed. Then, without saying anything, he took a gulp from his glass and went off up the stairs. Moreland looked at me. He made a face.

‘Audrey coming back?’ he said.

‘We ought to go soon.’

‘We will.’

We could faintly hear Maclintick’s voice; the words inaudible. It sounded as if Maclintick were unable to understand what he was being asked. That was likely enough considering the amount he had drunk. A minute later he returned to the sitting-room.

‘Someone for you, Moreland,’ he said.

Moreland looked very disturbed.

‘It can’t be for me,’ he said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

‘Some woman,’ said Maclintick.

‘Who on earth can it be?’

‘She kept on telling me I knew her,’ said Maclintick, ‘but I couldn’t get hold of the name. It was a bloody awful line. My head is buzzing about too.’

Moreland went to the stairs. Maclintick heaved himself on to the sofa. Closing his eyes, he began to breathe heavily. I felt I had had a lot to drink without much to show for it. We remained in silence. Moreland seemed to be away for centuries. When he returned to the room he was laughing.

‘It was Matilda,’ he said.

‘Didn’t sound a bit like Matilda,’ said Maclintick, without opening his eyes.

‘She said she didn’t know it was you. You sounded quite different.’

‘I’m never much good at getting a name on the bloody telephone,’ said Maclintick. ‘She said something about her being your wife now I come to think of it.’

‘Matilda forgot her key. I shall have to go back at once. She is on the doorstep.’

‘Just like a woman, that,’ said Maclintick. ‘There was always trouble about Carolo’s key.’

‘We’ll have to go.’

‘You don’t expect me to see you out, do you P Kind of you to come.’

‘You had better go to bed, Maclintick,’ said Moreland. ‘You don’t want to spend the night on the sofa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too cold. The fire will be out soon.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Do move, Maclintick,’ said Moreland.

He stood looking down with hesitation at Maclintick. Moreland could be assertive about his own views, was said to be good at controlling an orchestra; he was entirely without the power of assuming authority over a friend who needed ‘managing’ after too much to drink. I remembered the scene when Widmerpool and I had put Stringham to bed after the Old Boy Dinner, and wondered whether an even odder version of that operation was to be re-enacted here. However, Maclintick rolled himself over into a sitting position, removed his spectacles, and began to rub his eyes just in the manner of my former housemaster, Le Bas, when he could not make up his mind whether or not one of his pupils was telling the truth.

‘Perhaps you are right, Moreland,’ Maclintick said.

‘Certainly I am right.’

‘I will move if you insist.’

‘I do insist.’

Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland.

‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’

Moreland and I both laughed a lot, but it was a horrible moment. Maclintick had spoken with that strange, unearthly dignity that a drunk man can suddenly assume. We left him making his way unsteadily upstairs. By a miracle there was a taxi at the other end of the street.

‘I hope Maclintick will be all right,’ said Moreland, as we drove away.

‘He is in rather a mess.’

‘I am in a mess myself,’ Moreland said. ‘You probably know about that. I won’t bore you with the complications of my own life. I hope Matty will not be in too much of a fret when I get there. What can she be thinking of, forgetting her key? Something Freudian, I suppose. I am glad we went to see Maclintick. What did you think about him?’

‘I thought he was in a bad way.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maclintick is in a bad way,’ said Moreland. ‘It is no good pretending he isn’t. I don’t know where it will end, I don’t know where anything will end. It was strange Maclintick bringing up Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.’

‘Dragging up your past.’

‘Barnby went straight to the point,’ said Moreland. ‘I was struck by that. One ought to make decisions where women are concerned.’

‘What are your plans-roughly?’

‘I have none, as usual. You are already familiar with my doctrine that every man should have three wives. I accept the verdict that under the existing social order such an arrangement is not viable. That is why so many men are in such a quandary.’

We drove on to where I lived. Moreland continued in the taxi on his way to find Matilda. Isobel was asleep. She woke up at one moment and asked: ‘Did you hear anything interesting?’ I told her, ‘No’. She went to sleep again. I went to sleep for an hour or two, then woke up with a start, and lay there thinking how grim the visit to Maclintick had been; not only grim, but curiously out of focus; a pocket in time; an evening that pertained in character to life some years before. Marriage reduced in number interludes of that kind. They belonged by their nature to an earlier period: the days of the Mortimer and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. Maclintick’s situation was infinitely depressing; yet people found their way out of depressing situations. Nothing was more surprising than man’s capacity for survival. Before one could look round, Maclintick would be in a better job, married to a more tolerable wife. All the same, I felt doubtful about that happening. Thinking uneasy thoughts, I fell once more into a restless, disenchanted sleep.

The atmosphere of doom that hung over Maclintick’s house, indeed over the whole quarter in which he lived – or so it seemed the night Moreland and I had called on him – proved categorical enough. Two or three days later a paragraph appeared in the evening paper stating that Maclintick’s body had been found ‘in a gas-filled room’: no doubt the room in which he worked designated by his wife as the ‘only one where you can keep warm in the house’. The escape of gas had been noticed; the police broke in. The paper described Maclintick as a ‘writer on musical subjects’. As with the passing of St John Clarke, new disturbing developments of the European situation prevented Maclintick’s case from gaining the attention that a music critic’s suicide might attract in more peaceful times. The news was horrifying, yet there was no shock about it. It was cold, slow-motion horror, the shaping of a story recognisably unfinished. I tried to get in touch with Moreland. There was no reply to the telephone. The Morelands’ flat seemed always empty. Then one day when I tried again, Matilda answered. She began talking about Moreland at once.

‘The poor boy has been having an awful time about Maclintick,’ she said. ‘You know how he hates even the mildest business talks. Now he is landed with inquests and goodness knows what.’

Matilda had always got on well with Maclintick. He was one of those uncomfortably poised men whom she handled to perfection. There was every reason to suppose that Maclintick’s death would distress her. At the same time, I was immediately aware from the sound of her voice on the line that she was pleased about something; the fact of Maclintick’s suicide had eased her life for one reason or another. We talked for a time about Maclintick and his affairs.

‘Poor old Carolo,’ she said.

‘You think he is in for it?’

‘He has caught something this time.’

‘And your play?’

‘Coming on soon. I think it will be a success.’

I arranged to see Moreland. The meeting took place a day or two later. He looked as if he had been having a disagreeable time. I asked about Maclintick.

‘Gossage and I had to do all the clearing up,’ Moreland said. ‘It was pretty good hell.’

‘Why you two?’

‘There did not seem to be anyone else. I can’t tell you what we were let in for. It was an awful thing to happen. Of course, one saw it coming. Nothing more certain. That didn’t make it any better. Maclintick was a great friend of mine in a way. He could be tiresome. He had some very good points too. It was nice of him not to have done himself in, for example, the night we left him there. That would have been even more awkward.’

‘It certainly would.’

‘I’ve no reason to suppose he didn’t feel just as much like taking the jump then as three days later.’

‘Do you remember when he talked of suicide in Casanova’s?’

‘Suicide was always one of Maclintick’s favourite subjects.

‘It was?’

‘Of course.’

‘He said then that he gave himself five years.’

‘He lasted about eight or nine. Gossage has been very good about sorting the musical stuff. There is a mass of it to deal with.’

‘Any good?’

Moreland shook his head.

‘The smell in the house was appalling,’ he said. ‘Absolutely frightful. Gossage had to go and stand in the street for a time to recover.’

‘Anything been heard of Mrs Maclintick?’

‘I had a line from her asking me to deal with certain things. I think Carolo wants to keep out of it as much as possible for professional reasons – rather naturally.’

‘Do you think Maclintick just could not get on without that woman?’

‘Maclintick always had his fair share of melancholia, quite apart from anything brought on by marriage or the lack of it.’

‘But his wife clearing out brought matters to a head?’

‘Possibly. It must be appalling to commit suicide, even though one sometimes feels a trifle like it. Anyway, the whole Maclintick business has made certain things clearer to me.’

‘As for example?’

‘Do you remember when we used to talk about the Ghost Railway and say how like everyday life it was – or at least one’s own everyday life?’

‘You mean rushing downhill in total darkness and crashing through closed doors?’

‘Yes – and the body lying across the line. The Maclintick affair has reminded me of the disagreeable possibilities of the world one inhabits – the fact that the fewer persons one involves in it the better.’

‘How do you mean? However you live there are always elements of that sort.’

‘I know, but you get familiar with the material you yourself have to cope with. You may have heard that I have been somewhat entangled with a person not far removed from your own family circle.’

‘Rumours percolate.’

‘So I supposed.’

‘But you would be surprised to learn my own ignorance of detail.’

‘Glad to hear it. Need I say more? You must surely appreciate the contrast between the sort of thing I have been engaged upon in connexion with poor old Maclintick’s mortal remains during the last few days, and the kind of atmosphere one prefers when attempting to conduct an idyllic love affair.’

‘I can see that.’

‘I do not suggest my daily routine comes within several million light-years of an idyll – but it normally rises a few degrees above what life has been recently.’

I began to understand the reason why Matilda had sounded relieved when we had spoken on the telephone a day or two before.

‘The fact is,’ said Moreland, ‘very few people can deal with more than a limited number of emotional problems at any given moment. At least I can’t. Up to a point, I can walk a tightrope held at one end by Matilda, and at the other by the person of whom you tell me you are already apprised. But I can’t carry Maclintick on my back. Maclintick gassing himself was just a bit too much.’

‘But what are you explaining to me?’

‘That any rumours you hear in future can be given an unqualified denial.’

‘I see.’

‘Forgive my bluntness.’

‘It suits you.’

‘I hope I have made myself dear.’

‘You haven’t, really. There is still a lot I should like to know. For example, did you really contemplate terminating your present marriage?’

‘It looked like that at one moment.’

‘With the agreement of the third party?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now she knows you think differently?’

‘She sees what I mean.’

‘And thinks the same?’

‘Yes.’

I too could see what he meant. At least I thought I could. Moreland meant that Maclintick, in doing away with himself, had drawn attention, indeed heavily underlined, the conditions of life to which Moreland himself was inexorably committed; a world to which Priscilla did not yet belong, even if she were on her way to belonging there. I do not think Moreland intended this juxtaposition of lot to be taken in its crudest aspect; that is to say in the sense that Priscilla was too young, too delicate a flower by birth and upbringing to be associated with poverty, unfaithfulness, despair, and death. If he supposed that – which I doubt – Moreland made a big mistake. Priscilla, like the rest of her family, had a great deal of resilience. I think Moreland’s realisation was in the fact of Maclintick’s desperate condition; Maclintick’s inability to regulate his own emotional life; Maclintick’s lack of success as a musician; in short the mess of things Maclintick had made, or perhaps had had visited upon him. Moreland was probably the only human being Maclintick had whole-heartedly liked. In return, Moreland had liked Maclintick; liked his intelligence; liked talking and drinking with him. By taking his own life, Maclintick had brought about a crisis in Moreland’s life too. He had ended the triangular relationship between Moreland, Priscilla, and Matilda. Precisely in what that relationship consisted remained unrevealed. What Matilda thought, what Priscilla thought, remained a mystery. All sides of such a situation are seldom shown at once, even if they are shown at all. Only one thing was certain. Love had received one of those shattering jolts to which it is peculiarly vulnerable from extraneous circumstance.

‘This Maclintick business must have held up all work.’

‘As you can imagine, I have not done a stroke. I think Matilda and I may try and go away for a week or two, if I can raise the money.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘France, I suppose.’

The Morelands went abroad the following week. That Sunday, Isobel’s eldest sister, Frederica, rang up and asked if she could come to tea. This suggestion, on the whole a little outside the ordinary routine of things with Frederica, who was inclined to make plans some way ahead, suggested she had something special to say. As it happened, Robert, too, had announced he would look in that afternoon; so the day took on a distinctly family aspect. Frederica and Robert could be received at close quarters, be relied upon to be reasonably cordial to one another. That would not have been true of Frederica and Norah. Hugo was another dangerous element, preferably to be entertained without the presence of his other brothers and sisters. With Frederica and Robert there was nothing to worry about.

As soon as Frederica arrived, it was evident she had recently learnt something that had surprised her a great deal. She was a person of controlled, some – Chips Lovell, for example – thought even rather forbidding exterior; a widow who showed no sign of wanting to remarry and found her interests, her work and entertainment, in her tours of duty as Lady-in-Waiting. However, that afternoon she was freely allowing herself to indulge in the comparatively undisciplined relaxation of arousing her relations’ curiosity.

‘I expect you have heard of a writer called St John Clarke,’ she said, almost as soon as she had sat down.

This supposition, expressed by some of my friends, would have been a method of introducing St John Clarke’s name within a form of words intended to indicate that in their eyes, no doubt equally in my own, St John Clarke did not grade as a sufficiently eminent literary figure for serious persons like ourselves ever to have heard of him. The phrase would convey no sense of enquiry; merely a scarcely perceptible compliment, a very minor demonstration of mutual self-esteem. With Frederica, however, one could not be sure. She had received a perfectly adequate education, indeed rather a good one, to fit her for her position in life, but she did not pretend to ‘know’ about writing. Indeed, she was inclined to pride herself on rising above the need to discuss the ways and means of art in which some of her relations and friends interminably indulged.

‘I like reading books and going to plays,’ she had once remarked, ‘but I do not want to talk about them all the time.’

If Frederica had, in practice, wholly avoided an uninstructed predisposition to lay down the law on aesthetic matters, there would have been much to be said for this preference. Unhappily, you could never be certain of her adherence to such a rule of conduct. She seemed often to hold just as strong views on such matters as those who felt themselves most keenly engaged. Besides, her disinclination to discuss these subjects in general, left an area of uncertainty as to how far her taste, for example, in books and plays, had taken her; her self-esteem could be easily, disastrously, impaired by interpreting too literally her disavowal of all intellectual interests. In the same way, Frederica lumped together in one incongruous, not particularly acceptable agglomeration, all persons connected with painting, writing and music. I think she suspected them, in that time-honoured, rather engaging habit of thought, of possessing morals somehow worse than other people’s. Her mention of St John Clarke’s name was for these reasons unexpected.

‘Certainly I have heard of St John Clarke,’ I said. ‘He has just died. Isobel and I met him lunching at Hyde Park Gardens not long before he was taken ill.’

‘Not me,’ said Isobel, ‘I was being ill myself.’

‘St John Clarke used to lunch at Hyde Park Gardens?’ said Frederica. ‘I did not know that. Was he often there?’

‘He used to turn up at Aunt Molly’s too,’ said Isobel. ‘You must remember the story of Hugo and the raspberries -’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Frederica, showing no sign of wishing to hear that anecdote again, ‘I had forgotten it was St John Clarke. But what about him?’

‘Surely you read Fields of Amaranth secretly when you were growing up?’ said Isobel. ‘There was a copy without the binding in that cupboard in the schoolroom at Thrubworth.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frederica, brushing off this literary approach as equally irrelevant. ‘But what sort of a man was St John Clarke?’

That was a subject upon which I felt myself something of an expert. I began to give an exhaustive, perhaps too exhaustive, account of St John Clarke’s life and character. No doubt this searching analysis of the novelist was less interesting to others – certainly less interesting to Frederica – than to myself, because she broke in almost immediately with a request that I should stop.

‘It really does not matter about all that,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what he was like.’

‘That was what I was trying to tell you.’

I felt annoyed at being found so inadequate at describing St John Clarke. No doubt it would have been better to have contained him in one single brief, brilliant epigram; I could not think of one at that moment. Besides, that was not the kind of conversational technique Frederica approved. I was attempting to approach St John Clarke from another angle, when Robert arrived. Whatever Frederica had been leading up to was for the moment abandoned. Robert, in his curiously muted manner, showed signs of animation.

‘I have got a piece of news,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Frederica. ‘Have you heard too, Robert?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Robert. ‘So far as I am aware, I am the sole possessor of this particular item.’

‘What is it?’

‘You will all know pretty soon anyway,’ said Robert, in a leisurely way, ‘but one likes to get in first. We are going to have a new brother-in-law.’

‘Do you mean Priscilla is engaged?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Priscilla – not Blanche.’

‘Who to?’

‘Who do you think?’

A few names were put forward.

‘Come on,’ said Isobel. ‘Tell us.’

‘Chips Lovell.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Chips had just been accepted when I arrived back at the house.’

‘He was almost a relation before,’ said Frederica.

On the whole she sounded well disposed, at least looking on the bright side; because there must have been much about Chips Lovell which did not recommend itself to Frederica. She may have feared worse. Moreland’s name was unlikely to have reached her, but she could have heard vague, unsubstantiated gossip stemming ultimately from the same source.

‘I guessed something must be in the air when Priscilla told me she was leaving that opera job of hers,’ said Robert. ‘At one moment she thought of nothing else.’

We talked about Chips Lovell for a time.

‘Now,’ said Frederica, ‘after that bit of news, I shall get back to my own story.’

‘What is your story?’ asked Robert. ‘I arrived in the middle.’

‘I was talking about St John Clarke.’

‘What about him?’

‘Whom do you think St John Clarke would leave his money to?’ said Frederica.

‘That is a big question, Frederica,’ I said.

Revelation coming from Frederica on the subject of St John Clarke’s last will and testament would be utterly unexpected. I had certainly wondered, at the time of St John Clarke’s death, who would get his money. Then the matter had gone out of my head. The beneficiary was unlikely to be anyone I knew. Now, at Frederica’s words, I began to speculate again about what surprising bequest, or bequests, might have been made. St John Clarke was known to possess no close relations. Members and Quiggin had often remarked on that fact after they left his employment, when it was clear that neither of them could hope for anything but a small legacy for old times’ sake; and even that was to the greatest degree improbable. There was the German secretary, Guggenbühl. He had moved on from St John Clarke without a quarrel, although with some encouragement, so Quiggin said, because of St John Clarke’s growing nervousness about the orthodoxy of Guggenbühl’s Marxism. The choice was on this account unlikely to have fallen on Guggenbühl. There remained the possibility of some forgotten soul from that earlier dynasty of secretaries – back before the days of Members and Quiggin – who might have been remembered in St John Clarke’s last months; a line whose names, like those of prehistoric kings, had not survived, or at best were to be met with only in the garbled forms of popular legend, in this case emanating from the accumulated conflux of St John Clarke myth propagated by Members and Quiggin. Again, the Communist Party was a possible legatee; St John Clarke seeking amends for his days of bourgeois licence, like a robber baron endowing the Church with his lands.

Even if St John Clarke had left his worldly goods to ‘the Party’, Frederica would scarcely bother about that, finally though such a bequest might confirm her distrust for men of letters. I was at a loss to know what had happened. Frederica saw she had said enough to command attention. To hold the key to information belonging by its essential nature to a sphere quite other than one’s own gives peculiar satisfaction. Frederica was well aware of that. She paused for a second or two. The ransoming of our curiosity was gratifying to her.

‘Who?’ I asked.

‘Whom do you think?’

‘We can’t spend the afternoon guessing things,’ said Isobel. ‘Our invention has been exhausted by Priscilla’s possible fiancés.’

Robert, who probably saw no reason to concern himself with St John Clarke’s affairs, and was no doubt more interested in speculating on the prospect of Chips Lovell as a brother-in-law, began to show loss of interest. He strolled across the room to examine a picture. Frederica saw that to hold her audience, she must come to the point.

‘Erridge,’ she said.

That was certainly an eye-opener.

‘How did you discover this?’

‘Erry told me himself.’

‘When?’

‘I stayed a night at Thrubworth. There were some legal papers of mine Erry had to sign. Taking them there seemed the only way of running him to earth. He just let out this piece of information quite casually as he put his pen down.’

‘How much is it?’ asked Robert, brought to heel by the nature of this disclosure.

‘That wasn’t so easy to find out.’

‘Roughly?’

‘St John Clarke seems to have bought an annuity of some sort that no one knew about,’ said Frederica. ‘So far as I can gather, there is about sixteen or seventeen thousand above that. It will be in the papers, of course, when the will is proved.’

‘Which Erry will get?’

‘Yes.’

‘He will hand it over to his Spanish friends,’ said Robert tranquilly.

‘Oh, no, he won’t,’ said Frederica, with some show of bravado.

‘Don’t be too sure.’

‘One can’t be sure,’ said Frederica, speaking this time more soberly. ‘But it sounded as if Erry were not going to do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘He didn’t leave Spain on very good terms with anyone.’

‘The money would pay off the overdraft on the estate account,’ said Isobel.

‘Exactly.’

‘And the woods would not have to be sold.’

‘In fact,’ said Robert, ‘this windfall might turn out to be most opportune.’

‘I don’t want to speak too soon,’ said Frederica, ‘especially where Erry is concerned. All the same, so far as I could see, there seemed hope of his showing some sense for once.’

‘But will his conscience allow him to show sense?’ said Robert.

I understood now why Quiggin had been so irritable when we had last met. He must already have known of St John Clarke’s legacy to Erridge. By that time Quiggin could scarcely have hoped himself for anything from St John Clarke, but that this golden apple should have fallen at Erridge’s feet was another matter. To feel complete unconcern towards the fact of an already rich friend unexpectedly inheriting so comparatively large a capital sum would require an indifference to money that Quiggin never claimed to possess. Apart from that was the patron-protégé relationship existing between Erridge and Quiggin, complicated by the memory of Mona’s elopement. Quiggin’s ill humour was not surprising in the circumstances. It was, indeed, pretty reasonable. If St John Clarke had been often provoked by Members and Quiggin during his life, the last laugh had to some extent fallen to St John Clarke after death. At the same time, it was not easy to see what motives had led St John Clarke to appoint Erridge his heir. He may have felt that Erridge was the most likely among the people he knew to use the money in some manner sympathetic to his own final fancies. On the other hand, he may have reverted on his death-bed to a simpler, more old-world snobbery of his early years, or to that deep-rooted, time honoured tradition that money should go to money. It was impossible to say. These, and many other theories, were laid open to speculation by this piece of news, absurd in its way; if anything to do with money can, in truth, be said to be absurd.

‘Did Chips mention when he and Priscilla are going to be married?’ asked Isobel.

The question reminded me that Moreland, at least in a negative manner, had taken another decisive step. I thought of his recent remark about the Ghost Railway. He loved these almost as much as he loved mechanical pianos. Once, at least, we had been on a Ghost Railway together at some fun fair or on a seaside pier; slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.