Hearing Secret Harmonies

2

TWO COMPENSATIONS FOR GROWING OLD are worth putting on record as the condition asserts itself. The first is a vantage point gained for acquiring embellishments to narratives that have been unfolding for years beside one’s own, trimmings that can even appear to supply the conclusion of a given story, though finality is never certain, a dimension always possible to add. The other mild advantage endorses a keener perception for the authenticities of mythology, not only of the traditional sort, but — when such are any good — the latterday mythologies of poetry and the novel. One such fragment, offering a gloss on the crayfishing afternoon, cropped up during the summer months of the same year, when I was reading one night after dinner.

The book, Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso — bedside romance of every tolerably well-educated girl of Byron’s day — now requires, if not excuse, at least some sort of explanation. Twenty years before, writing a book about Robert Burton and his Anatomy of Melancholy, I had need to glance at Ariosto’s epic, Burton being something of an Ariosto fan. Harington’s version (lively, but inaccurate) was then hard to come by; another (less racy, more exact), just as suitable for the purpose. Although by no means all equally readable, certain passages of the poem left a strong impression. Accordingly, when a new edition of Harington’s Orlando Furioso appeared, I got hold of it. I was turning the pages that evening with the sense — essential to mature enjoyment of any classic — of being entirely free from responsibility to pause for a second over anything that threatened the least sign of tedium.

In spite of the title, Orlando’s madness plays a comparatively small part in the narrative’s many convolutions. This does not mean Ariosto himself lacked interest in that facet of his story. On the contrary, he is profoundly concerned with the cause — and cure — of Orlando’s mental breakdown. What happened? Orlando (Charlemagne’s Roland), a hero, paladin, great man, had gone off his head because his girl, Angelica, beautiful, intelligent, compassionate, everything a nice girl should be — so to speak female counterpart of Orlando himself — had abandoned him for a nonentity. She had eloped with a good-looking utterly boring young man. Ariosto allows the reader to remain in absolutely no doubt as to the young man’s total insignificance. The situation is clearly one that fascinates him. He emphasizes the vacuity of mind shown by Angelica’s lover in a passage describing the young man’s carving of their intertwined names on the trunks of trees, a whimsicality that first reveals to Orlando himself his own banal predicament.

Orlando’s ego (his personal myth, as General Conyers would have said) was murderously wounded. He found himself altogether incapable of making the interior adjustment required to continue his normal routine of living the Heroic Life. His temperament allowing no half measures, he chose, therefore, the complete negation of that life. Discarding his clothes, he lived henceforth in deserts and waste places, roaming hills and woods, gaining such sustenance as he might, while waging war against a society he had renounced. In short, Orlando dropped out.

Ariosto describes how one of Orlando’s friends, an English duke named Astolpho, came to the rescue. Riding a hippogryph (an intermediate beast Harington calls his ‘Griffith Horse’, like the name of an obscure poet), Astolpho undertook a journey to the Moon. There, in one of its valleys, he was shown all things lost on Earth: lost kingdoms: lost riches: lost reputations: lost vows: lost hours: lost love. Only lost foolishness was missing from this vast stratospheric Lost Property Office, where by far the largest accretion was lost sense. Although he had already discovered in this store some of his lost days and lost deeds, Astolpho was surprised to come across a few of his own lost wits, simply because he had never in the least missed them. He had a duty to perform here, which was to bring back from his spacetrip the wits (mislaid on an immeasurably larger scale than his own) of his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Orlando. It was Astolpho’s achievement — if so to be regarded — to restore to Orlando his former lifestyle, make feasible for him the resumption of the Heroic Life.

Journeys to the Moon were in the news at that moment (about a year before the astronauts actually landed there) because Pennistone had just published his book on Cyrano de Bergerac, whose Histoire comique des états et empires de la lune he used to discuss, when we were in the War Office together. Pennistone was more interested in his subject as philosopher and heresiarch than space-traveller, but, all the same, Cyrano had to be admitted as an example of a remark once made by X. Trapnel: ‘A novelist writes what he is. That is equally true of authors who deal with mediaeval romance or journeys to the Moon.’ I don’t think Trapnel had ever read Ariosto, feel pretty sure he had never attempted Cyrano — though he could surprise by unexpected authors dipped into — but, oddly enough, Orlando Furioso does treat of both Trapnel’s off-the-cuff fictional categories, mediaeval romance and an interplanetary journey.

Among other adventures on the Moon, during this expedition, Astolpho sees Time at work. Ariosto’s Time — as you might say, Time the Man — was, anthropomorphically speaking, not necessarily everybody’s Time. Although equally hoary and naked, he was not Poussin’s Time, for example, in the picture where the Seasons dance, while Time plucks his lyre to provide the music. Poussin’s Time (a painter’s Time) is shown in a sufficiently unhurried frame of mind to be sitting down while he strums his instrument. The smile might be thought a trifle sinister, nevertheless the mood is genial, composed.

Ariosto’s Time (a writer’s Time) is far less relaxed, indeed appallingly restless. The English duke watched Ariosto’s Time at work. The naked ancient, in an eternally breathless scramble with himself, collected from the Fates small metal tablets (one pictured them like the trinkets hanging from the necks of Murtlock and Henderson), then moved off at the double to dump these identity discs in the waters of Oblivion. A few of them (like Murtlock’s medallion at the pond) were only momentarily submerged, being fished out, and borne away to the Temple of Fame, by a pair of well disposed swans. The rest sank to the bottom, where they were likely to remain.

On the strength of this not too obscure allegory, I decided to go to bed. Just before I closed the book, my eye was caught by a stanza in an earlier sequence.

And as we see straunge cranes are woont to do,

First stalke a while er they their wings can find,

Then soare from ground not past a yard or two,

Till in their wings they gather’d have the wind,

At last they mount the very clouds unto,

Triangle wise according to their kind:

So by degrees this Mage begins to flye,

The bird of Jove can hardly mount so hye;

And when he sees his time and thinks it best,

He falleth downe like lead in fearfull guise,

Even as the fawlcon doth the foule arrest,

The ducke and mallard from the brooke that rise.

The warm windy afternoon, cottonwool clouds, ankle-deep wild garlic, rankness of fox, laboratory exhalations from the quarry, parade ground evolutions of the duck, hawk’s precipitate flight towards the pool, all were suddenly recreated. Duck, of course, rather than cranes, had risen ‘triangle wise’, but the hawk, as in Ariosto’s lines (or rather Harington’s), had hung pensively in the air, then swooped to strike. I tried to rationalize to myself this coincidental passage. There was nothing at all unusual in mallard getting up from the water at that time of day, nor a kestrel hovering over the neighbouring meadows. For that matter, reference to falconry in a Renaissance poem was far from remarkable. Something in addition to all that held the attention. It was the word Mage. Mage carried matters a stage further.

Mage summoned up the image of Dr Trelawney, a mage if ever there was one. I thought of the days when, as a child, I used to watch the Doctor and his young disciples, some of them no more than children themselves, trotting past the Stonehurst gate on their way to rhythmical callisthenics — whatever the exercises were — on the adjacent expanse of heather. In those days (brink of the first war) Dr Trelawney was still building up a career. He had not yet fully transformed himself into the man of mystery, the thaumaturge, he was in due course to become. The true surname was always in doubt (Grubb or Tibbs, put forward by Moreland), anyway something with less body to it than Trelawney. In his avatar of the Stonehurst period he had been less concerned with the predominantly occult engagement of later years; then seeking The Way (to use his own phrase) through appropriate meditations, exercises, diet, apparel.

Once a week Dr Trelawney and his neophytes would jog down the pine-bordered lane from which our Indian-type bungalow was set a short distance back. The situation was remote, a wide deserted common next door. Dr Trelawney himself would be leading, dark locks flowing to the shoulder, biblical beard, grecian tunic, thonged sandals. The Doctor’s robe (like the undefiled of Sardis) was white, somewhat longer and less diaphanous than the single garment — identical for both sexes and all weathers — worn by the disciples, tunics tinted in the pastel shades fashionable at that epoch. People who encountered Dr Trelawney by chance in the village post-office received an invariable greeting:

‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True.’

The appropriate response can have been rarely returned.

‘The Vision of Visions heals the Blindness of Sight.’

One of the firmest tenets — so Moreland always said — in the later teachings of Dr Trelawney was that coincidence was no more than ‘magic in action’. There had just been an example of that. Orlando Furioso had not only produced that evening a magical reconstruction of considerable force, it had also brought to mind the reason why such activities as Dr Trelawney’s were already much in the air. A recent newspaper colour supplement article, dealing with contemporary cults, had mentioned that — with much of what Hugo Tolland called the good old Simple Life — a revival of Trelawneyism had come about among young people. That was probably where Murtlock had acquired the phrases about killing, and no death in Nature. It was Dr Trelawney’s view — also that of his old friend and fellow occultist, Mrs Erdleigh — that death was no more than transition, blending, synthesis, mutation. To be fair to them both, they seemed to some extent to have made their point. However much the uninstructed might regard them both as ‘dead’, there were still those for whom they were very much alive. Mrs Erdleigh (quoting the alchemist, Thomas Vaughan) had spoken of how the ‘liberated soul ascends, looking at the sunset towards the west wind, and hearing secret harmonies’. Perhaps Vaughan’s words, filtered through a kind of Neo-Trelawneyism, explained the girls’ T-shirts.

In any case it was impossible to disregard the fact that, while a dismantling process steadily curtails members of the cast, items of the scenery, airs played by the orchestra, in the performance that has included one’s own walk-on part for more than a few decades, simultaneous derequisitionings are also to be observed. Mummers return, who might have been supposed to have made their final exit, even if — like Dr Trelawney and Mrs Erdleigh — somewhat in the rôle of Hamlet’s father. The touching up of time-expired sets, reshaping of derelict props, updating of old refrains, are none of them uncommon. An event some days later again brought forcibly to mind these lunar rescues from the Valley of Lost Things. This was a television programme devoted to the subject of the all-but-forgotten novelist, St John Clarke.

Above all others, St John Clarke might be judged, critically speaking, as gone for good. Not a bit of it. Here was a consummate instance of a lost reputation — in this case a literary one — salvaged from the Moon, St John Clarke’s Astolpho being Ada Leintwardine. Keen on transvestism, Ariosto would have found nothing incongruous in a woman playing the part of the English duke. Maidens clad in armour abound throughout the poem. Ada Leintwardine, as a successful novelist married to the well-known publisher, J. G. Quiggin, could be accepted as a perfectly concordant Ariosto character. In any case she had latterly been taking an increasingly executive part in forming the policy of the firm of which her husband was chairman. Quiggin used to complain that St John Clarke’s novels (all come finally to rest under his firm’s imprint) sold ‘just the wrong amount’, too steady a trickle to be ruthlessly disregarded, not enough comfortably to cover production costs. Nor was there compensatory prestige — rather the reverse — in having a name in the list unknown to a younger generation. In fact Quiggin himself did not deny that he was prepared to allow such backnumbers to fall out of print. Ada, on the other hand, would not countenance that. Her reasons were not wholly commercial; not commercial, that is, on the short-term basis of her husband’s approach.

Ada’s goal was to have a St John Clarke novel turned into a film. This had become almost an obsession with her. Ten years before she had failed — she alleged by a hair’s breadth — to persuade Louis Glober to make a picture of Match Me Such Marvel, and, after Glober’s death, vigorous canvassing of other film producers, American or British, had been no less fruitless. Meanwhile, St John Clarke’s literary shares continued to slump. Ada, though she made fairly frequent appearances on television, had not herself produced a novel for some years. Remaining preoccupied with the St John Clarke project, she at last achieved the small advance in her plans that a television programme should be made about the novelist’s life and work. This she regarded as a start, something to prepare the ground for later adaptation of one of the books.

Even their old friend, Mark Members, agreed that the Quiggins’ marriage, whatever its ups and downs, had been on the whole a success. Members, who had no children himself, used to laugh at the disparity between Quiggin’s former views on rebellion, and present attitude towards his twin daughters, Amanda and Belinda, now of university age and troublemakers. Quiggin’s grumbling on that subject usually took place when Ada was not about. One of the twins had recently been concerned (only as a witness) in a drug prosecution; the other, about the same time, charged (later acquitted) with kicking a policeman. Quiggin was less reconciled to that sort of thing than, say, Roddy Cutts in relation to Fiona’s caprices. In business matters the Quiggins got on well together too, showed a united front. It was the exception that there should be disagreement about St John Clarke.

Quiggin was doubtful as to the wisdom of propagating the novelist’s name at this late stage. He feared that a small temporary increase in demand for the books would merely add to his own embarrassments as their publisher. His objection did not hold out very long. In due course Ada had her way. She seems to have brought about her husband’s conversion to the idea by pointing out that he himself, as former secretary of St John Clarke, would play a comparatively prominent part in any documentary produced. Quiggin finally gave in at one of their literary dinner parties, choosing the moment after his wife had produced an aphorism.

‘The television of the body brings the sales everlasting.’

Quiggin bowed his head.

‘Amen, then. I resign St John Clarke to the makers of all things televisible.’

As a fellow ex-secretary of St John Clarke, Members would also have to be included in any programme about the novelist. That was no great matter. Members and Quiggin had been on goodish terms now for years, even admitting the kinship (second-cousins apparently), always alleged by Sillery, nowadays disputing with each other only who had enjoyed the more modest home. Both had come to look rather distinguished, Quiggin’s dome-like forehead, sparse hair, huge ears, gave him a touch of grotesquerie, not out of place in a prominent publisher. Members, his white hair worn long, face pale and lined, had returned to the Romantic Movement overtones of undergraduate days. His air was that of an eighteenth-century sage too highminded to wear a wig — Blake, Benjamin Franklin, one of the Encyclopaedists — suitable image for a figure of his eminence in the cultural world. When in London, his American wife, Lenore, fell in with this historical mood, doing so with easy assurance. They remained married, though Lenore spent increasingly long spells in her own country, an arrangement that seemed to suit both of them.

A graver problem than Members, in relation to the St John Clarke programme, was Vernon Gainsborough — now generally styled Dr Gainsborough, as holding an academic post in political theory — who (under his original name of Wernher Guggenbühl) had as a young man, finally displaced both Members and Quiggin in St John Clarke’s employment. Quiggin (in those days writing letters to the papers in defence of the Stalinist purges) used to complain that Guggenbiihl (as he then was) had perverted St John Clarke to Trotskyism. Some sort of a rapprochement had taken place after the war, when the firm of Quiggin & Craggs had published the recantation of Gainsborough (as he had become) in his study Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue? Gainsborough could not, therefore, be omitted from the programme. The only other performer who had known St John Clarke in the flesh was L. O. Salvidge, the critic. In his early days, when in low water, Salvidge had done some devilling, when St John Clarke was without a secretary, collecting French Revolution material for Dust Thou Art. The cast was made up with several self-constituted friends of the deceased novelist, professional extras, who appeared in all such literary resuscitations on the TV screen.

Isobel and I watched this rescue job from the Valley of Lost Things, to which another small item was added by the opening shot, St John Clarke’s portrait (butterfly collar, floppy bow tie), painted by his old friend, Horace Isbister, RA. A few minutes later, Isbister’s name appeared again, this time in an altogether unexpected connexion, only indirectly related to painting.

For some years now fashion had inclined to emphasize, rather than overlook, the sexual habits of the dead. To unearth anything about a man so discreet as St John Clarke had proved impossible, but Salvidge ventured to put forward the possibility that the novelist’s ‘fabulous parsimony’ had its origins in repressed homosexuality. Members then let off a mild bombshell. He suggested that the friendship with Isbister had been a homosexual one. The contention of Members was that the central figure in an early genre picture of Isbister’s — Clergyman eating an apple — was not at all unlike St John Clarke himself as a young man, Members advancing the theory that Isbister could have possessed a fetishist taste for male lovers dressed in ecclesiastical costume.

Quiggin questioned this possibility on grounds that Isbister had finally married his often painted model, Morwenna. Members replied that Morwenna was a lesbian. Gainsborough — who had never heard of Morwenna, and found some difficulty with the name — attempted to shift the discussion to St John Clarke’s politics. He was unsuccessful. Something of an argument ensued, Gainsborough’s German accent thickening, as he became more irritable. St John Clarke, rather a prudish man in conversation, would have been startled to hear much surmised, before so large an audience, on the subject of his sexual tastes. It was not a very exciting forty minutes, of which Ada was to be judged the star. Isbister’s portrait of his friend — perhaps more than friend — flashed on the screen again as finale.

‘Shall we stay for the News?’

‘All right.’

There was some routine stuff: the Prime Minister in a safety helmet at a smelting plant; royalty launching a ship; strike pickets; tornado damage. Then, from out of the announcer’s patter, a name brought attention — ’… Lord Widmerpool, where he was recently appointed the university’s chancellor …’

The last time I had seen Widmerpool, nearly ten years before, was soon after the troubles in which he had been involved: his wife’s grim end; official enquiries into his own clandestine dealings with an East European power. We had met in Parliament Square. He said he was making for the House of Lords. He looked in poor shape, his manner wandering, distracted. We had talked for a minute or two, then parted. Whatever business he had been about that morning, must have been the last transacted by him for a longish period. The following week he disappeared for the best part of a year. He was probably on his way to wind up for the time being his House of Lords affairs.

Pamela Widmerpool’s death, in itself, had caused less stir than might be supposed. Apart from the bare fact that she had taken an overdose in an hotel bedroom, nothing specially scandalous had come to light. Admittedly the hotel — as Widmerpool had complained in Parliament Square — had been a sordid one. Russell Gwinnett, the man with whom Pamela was believed to be in love, was staying there, but Gwinnett had an explicable reason for doing so, the place being a haunt of the novelist, X. Trapnel, whose biography he was writing. Pamela had occupied a room of her own. In any case her behaviour had long burst the sound barrier of normal gossip. It was thought even possible that, having heard of the hotel through Gwinnett, she had booked a room there as a suitably anonymous setting to close her final act. Sympathetic comment gave Pamela credit for that.

From the point of view of ‘news’, Gwinnett’s scholarly affiliations, adding a touch of drabness, detracted from such public interest as the story possessed. The suicide of a life peer’s wife obviously called for some coverage. That was likely to be diminished by the addition of professorial research work on a novelist unknown to the general public. The coroner went out of his way to express regret that a young American academic’s visit to London should have been clouded by such a mishap. Gwinnett had apparently made an excellent impression at the inquest. In short, the whole business was consigned to the ragbag of memories too vague to remain at all dear in the mind. That was equally true of Widmerpool’s dubious international dealings, regarding which, by now, no one could remember whether he was the villain or the hero.

‘People say he was framed by the CIA,’ said Lenore Members. ‘The CIA may have fixed his wife’s death too.’

By the time that theory had been put forward — and largely accepted — Widmerpool himself had recovered sufficiendy to have crossed the Adantic, reappearing in the United States after his year’s withdrawal from the world. Whether by luck, or astute manipulations, no one seemed to know, he had been offered an appointment of some kind at the Institute for Advanced Study of an Ivy League university; ideal post for making a dignified retreat for a further period from everyday life in London. His years of engagement on the Eastern Seaboard were succeeded by a Westward pilgrimage. He was next heard of established at a noted Californian centre for political research. That was where Lenore Members had come across him. Widmerpool had impressed her as a man who had ‘been through’ a great deal. That was now his own line about himself, she said, one that could not reasonably be denied. Lenore Members was a woman with considerable descriptive powers. She conveyed a picture of undoubted change. Among other things, Widmerpool had spoken with contempt of parliamentary institutions. In public addresses he had been very generally expressing his scorn for such a vehicle of government. In his opinion the remedy lay in the hands of the young.

‘Lord Widmerpool said he was working on a book that puts forward his views. It’s to be called Pogrom of Youth.’

‘How does he go down in the States?’

‘He has strong adherents — strong opponents too. There’s a pressure group to put his name forward for the Nobel Prize. Others say he’s crazy.’

‘You mean actually mad?’

‘Mentally disturbed.’

‘How long is he going to stay in the US?’

‘He said he might be taking out naturalization papers.’

Whatever the reason, Widmerpool’s vision of American citizenship must have been abandoned. He had returned to England. How, in general, he had been occupying himself, I did not know. During the past two or three years since arriving back there had been fairly regular appearances on television. These were usually in connexion with the sort of subjects Lenore Members had indicated as his latest interest, his new axis for power focus. He had played no part in the Labour administration of 1964. He may not even have been back in England by then. I had not watched any of his TV appearances, nor heard about this appointment to a university chancellorship. The post would not be at all inconsistent with the latest line he seemed to be designing for himself. I had no idea what were its duties and powers, probably a job that was much what the holder made of it.

The university to which Widmerpool had been nominated was a newish one. Malcolm Crowding (main authority on the last hours of X. Trapnel) taught English there. Crowding was not to be observed in the procession of capped and gowned figures on the screen; nor, for that matter, was Widmerpool. They had just reached the foot of a flight of steps. In the background were buildings in a contemporary style of scholastic architecture. The persons composing the crocodile of dons and recipients of honorary degrees were preceded by a man in uniform bearing a mace. The cortege was making its way across an open space, shut in by what were probably lecture-halls. A fairly large crowd, students of both sexes, parents, friends, onlookers of one sort or another, stood on either side of the route, watching the ceremony. It was probably a more grandiose affair than usual owing to the installation of the new chancellor. I did not pick out Widmerpool immediately, my attention being caught for a moment by a black notability in national dress of his country, walking between two academically gowned ladies, all three recipients of doctoral degrees. Then Widmerpool came into sight. As he did so there was scarcely time to take in more of him than that he was wearing a mortarboard and gold brocaded robe, its train held up by a page.

Widmerpool, advancing towards the camera, had turned to say a word to this small boy, apparently complaining that the hinder part of his official dress was being borne in a manner inconvenient to its wearer, when the scene suddenly took on a new and starding aspect. What followed was acted out so quickly that only afterwards was it possible to disentangle specific incident from overall confusion. On different sides of the path, at two points, the watching crowd seemed to part. From each of these gaps figures of indeterminate sex briefly emerged, then withdrew themselves again. Some sort of a scuffle arose. An object, perhaps two objects, shot up in the air. In the background a flimsy poster, inscribed with illegible words outlined in shaky capital letters, fluttered for a second in the air, hoisted on the end of a long pole, then appeared to collapse. All these things, flitting by too quickly to be taken into proper account, were accompanied by the sound of singing or chanting. By the time I had grasped the fact that some sort of a demonstration was afoot, Widmerpool was no longer in sight.

Before the scene changed — which it did in a flash — I had just time to recollect Moreland’s words, uttered at Stourwater nearly thirty years before. It was the night we had all dressed up as the Seven Deadly Sins, and been photographed by Sir Magnus Donners, with whom we were dining — ’One is never a student at all in England, except possibly a medical student or an art student. Undergraduates have nothing in common with what is understood abroad by a student — young men for ever rioting, undertaking political assassination, overturning governments.’

Moreland had offered that opinion about the time of ‘Munich’. Sir Magnus Donners had not shown much interest. Perhaps the innate shrewdness of his own instincts in such matters already told him that, within a few decades, Moreland’s conviction about students would fall badly out of date, an epoch not far distant when the sort of student Moreland adumbrated would be accepted as a matter of course. This Stourwater memory had scarcely time to formulate, dissolve, before the announcer’s voice drew attention to a close-up of Widmerpool, now standing alone.

‘Lord Widmerpool, newly installed chancellor, wishes to give his own comments on what happened.’

At first sight, so ghastly seemed Widmerpool’s condition that it was a wonder he was alive, much less able to stand upright and address an audience. He had evidently been the victim of an atrocious assault. His wounds were appalling. Dark stains, apparently blood, covered the crown of his bald head (now capless), streaking down the side of his face, dripping from shoulder and sleeve of the gold embroidered robe. When he raised his hands, they too were smeared with the dark sticky marks of gore. Nevertheless, mangled as the fingers must have been to display this condition, he removed his bespattered spectacles. It was amazing that he had the strength to do so.

‘Not the smallest resentment. Even glad this has taken place. Let me congratulate those two girls on being such excellent shots with the paint pot …’

All was explained. There were no wounds. The dark clots, at first seeming to flow from dreadful gashes, were no more than paint. Widmerpool was covered with paint. Paint spread all over him, shining in the sun, dripping off face and clothes, since it was not yet dry. He ignored altogether the inconceivable mess he was in. Now the origin of his condition was revealed he looked like a clown, a clown upon whom divine afflatus had suddenly descended. He was in a state of uncontrolled excitement, gesticulating wildly in a manner quite uncharacteristic of himself. It was like revivalist frenzy. Face gaunt, eyes sunk into the back of his head, he had lost all his former fleshiness. What Lenore Members had tried to convey was now apparent. He said a few words more. They were barely intelligible owing to excitement. It was noticeable that his delivery had absorbed perceptibly American intonations and technique, superimposed on the old hearty unction that had formerly marked his style. Before more could be assimilated, the scene, like the previous one, was wiped away, the announcer’s professional tones taking over again, as the News moved on to other topics.

‘That was livelier than the St John Clarke programme.’

‘It certainly was.’

Setting aside the occasion — a very different one — when Glober had hit him after the Stevenses’ musical party, the last time Widmerpool had suffered physical assault at all comparable with the paint-throwing was, so far as I knew, forty years before, the night of the Huntercombes’ dance, when Barbara Goring had poured sugar over his head. More was to be noted in this parallel than that, on the one hand, both assaults were at the hands of young women; on the other, paint created a far more injurious deluge than castor sugar. The measure of the latest incident seemed to be the extent to which the years had taught Widmerpool to cope with aggressions of that kind. In many other respects, of course, the circumstances were far from identical. Widmerpool had been in love with Barbara Goring; for the girls who had thrown the paint — he had spoken of them as girls — there was no reason to suppose that he felt more than general approval of a politico-social intention on their part. Possibly love would follow, rather than precede, persecution at their hands. Yet even if it were argued that all the two attacks possessed in common was personal protest against Widmerpool himself, the fact remained that, while he had endured the earlier onslaught with unconcealed wretchedness, he had now learnt to convert such occasions — possibly always sexually gratifying — to good purpose where other ends were concerned.

What would have been the result, I wondered, had he been equipped with that ability forty years before? Would he have won the heart of Barbara Goring, proposed to her, been accepted, married, produced children by her? On the whole such a train of events seemed unlikely, apart from objections the Goring parents might have raised in days before Widmerpool had launched himself on a career. Probably nothing would have altered the fates of either Widmerpool or Barbara (whose seventeen-year-old granddaughter had recently achieved some notoriety by marrying a celebrated Pop star), and the paint-throwing incident, like the cascade of sugar, was merely part of the pattern of Widmerpool’s life. It was not considered of sufficient importance to be reported in any newspaper. On running across L. O. Salvidge in London, I heard more of its details.

‘I enjoyed your appearance in the St John Clarke programme.’

Salvidge, who had a glass eye — always impossible to tell which — laughed about the occasion. He seemed well satisfied with the figure he had cut.

‘I was glad to have an opportunity to say what I thought about the old fraud. Did you watch the News that night, see the Quiggin twins throw red paint over the chancellor of their university?’

‘It was the Quiggin twins?’

‘The famous Amanda and Belinda. What a couple. I was talking about it to JG yesterday. At least I tried to, but he would not discuss it. He changed the subject to the Magnus Donners Prize. He’s got a grievance that no book published by his firm has ever won the award. Who are you giving it to this year?’

‘Nothing suitable has turned up at present. Something may appear in the autumn. Has JG’s firm got anything special? We’ll see it, no doubt, if they have. It’s my last year on the Magnus Donners panel. Do you want to take my place there?’

‘Not me.’

Both Salvidge’s eyes looked equally glassy at the suggestion. That was no surprise. Almost as veteran a figure on literary prize committees as Mark Members, Salvidge always had a dozen such commissions on hand. They took up more time than might be supposed. I was glad of my own approaching release from the board of the Magnus Donners judges. This was my fourth and final year.

The origins of the Magnus Donners Memorial Prize went back a long way, in fact to the days when Sillery used to speculate about a project of Sir Magnus Donners to endow certain university scholarships for overseas students, young men drawn from places where the Company’s interests were paramount. They were to be called Donners-Brebner Fellowships. Such a possibility naturally opened up a legitimate field for academic intrigue, Sillery in the forefront, if the fellowships were to take practical shape. Sillery (in rivalry, he lamented, with at least three other dons) made no secret of his aim to control the patronage. He had entangled in this matter Prince Theodoric (lately deceased in Canada, where his business ventures, after exile, had been reasonably successful), in those days always anxious to draw his country into closer contacts with Great Britain.

The Donners-Brebner Fellowships were referred to in Sillery’s obituary notices (highly laudatory in tone, as recording a sole survivor of his own genus, who had missed his century only by a year or two), where it appeared that the project had been to some extent implemented before the outbreak of war in 1939. Post-war changes in the international situation prevented much question of the fellowships’ revival in anything like their original form. Sir Magnus himself, anxious to re-establish a benefaction of a similar kind, seems to have been uncertain how best it should be reconstituted, leaving behind several contradictory memoranda on the subject. In practice, this fund seems to have been administered in a rather haphazard fashion after his death, a kind of all-purposes charitable trust in Donners-Brebner gift. That, any rate, was the version of the story propagated by his widow, Matilda Donners, when she first asked me to sit as one of the judges at the initiation of the Prize. That was four years before. Now — as I had told Salvidge — my term on the Prize committee was drawing to an end.

In Matilda’s early days of widowhood it looked as if the memory of Sir Magnus was to be allowed to fade. She continued to circulate for some years in the world of politics and big business to which he had introduced her, to give occasional parties in rivalry with Rosie Stevens, more musically, less politically inclined, than herself. Latterly Matilda had not only narrowed down her circle of friends, but begun to talk of Sir Magnus again. She also moved to smaller premises. Sir Magnus had left her comfortably off, if in command of far smaller resources than formerly, bequeathing most of his considerable fortune to relations, and certain public benefactions. No doubt such matters had been gone into at the time of their marriage, Matilda being a practical person, one of the qualities Sir Magnus had certainly admired in her. Moreland, too, had greatly depended on that practical side of Matilda as a wife. In short, disappointment at having received less than expected at the demise of Sir Magnus was unlikely to have played any part in earlier policy that seemed to consign him to oblivion.

Then there was a change. Matilda began, so to speak, to play the part of Ariosto’s swans, bringing the name of Donners — she had always referred to him by his surname — into the conversation. A drawing of him, by Wyndham Lewis, was resurrected in her sitting-room. She was reported to play the music he liked — Parsifal, for instance, Norman Chandler said — and to laugh about the way he would speak of having shed tears over the sufferings of the Chinese slavegirl in Turandot, no less when watching Ida Rubinstein in The Martyrdom of St Sebastian. Chandler remarked that, at one time, Matilda would never have referred to ‘that side’ of Sir Magnus. No doubt this new mood drew Matilda’s attention to the more or less quiescent fund lying at Donners-Brebner. On investigation it appeared to be entirely suitable, anyway a proportion of it, for consecration to a memorial that would bear the name of its originator. One of the papers left on the file seemed even to envisage something of the sort. Matilda went to the directors of Donners-Brebner, with whom she had always kept up. They made no difficulties, taking the view that an award of that nature was not at all to be disregarded in terms of publicity.

Why Matilda waited not much less than fifteen years to commemorate Sir Magnus was never clear. Perhaps it was simply a single aspect of the general reconstruction of her life, desire for new things to occupy her as she grew older. Regarded as a jolie laide when young, Matilda would now have passed as a former ‘beauty’. That was not undeserved. Relentless discipline had preserved her appearance, especially her figure. Once fair hair had been dyed a darker colour, a tone that suited the green eyes — a feature shared with Sir Magnus, though his eyes lacked her sleepy power — which had once captivated Moreland. A touch of ‘stageyness’ in Matilda’s clothes was not out of keeping with her personality.

Another change had been a new inclination towards female friends. Matilda had always been on good terms with Isobel, other wives of men Moreland had known, but in those days, anyway ostensibly, she seemed to possess no female circle of her own. Now she had begun to show a taste for ladies high-powered as herself. They did not exactly take the place of men in her life, but the sexes were more evenly balanced. With men she had always been discreet. There had been no stories circulated about her when married to Sir Magnus. In widowhood there had been the brief affair with Odo Stevens, before his marriage to Rosie Manasch; that affair thought more to tease Rosie than because she specially liked Stevens. Hardly any other adventure had even been lightly attributed.

Some people believed Gibson Delavacquerie had been for a short time Matilda’s lover. That was not my own opinion, although a closer relationship than that of friends was not entirely to be ruled out as a possibility. Matilda was, of course, appreciably the elder of the two. If there were anything in such gossip, its truth would have suggested a continued preference for the sort of man with whom her earlier life had been spent, rather than those who had surrounded her in middle years. She had certainly known Delavacquerie quite well before the Magnus Donners Prize was instituted.

His job — Delavacquerie was employed on the public relations side of Donners-Brebner — offered a good listening-post for Matilda to keep in touch with the affairs of the Company. Undoubtedly she liked him. That could very well have been all there was to the association.

This Delavacquerie connexion may well have played a part in the eventual decision to raise a memorial in literary form. Books were by no means the first interest of Sir Magnus. Notwithstanding Moreland’s story that, as a young man, believing himself on the brink of an early grave, ‘Donners had spoken of steeping himself in all that was best in half-a-dozen literatures’, his patronage had always been directed in the main towards painting and music. According to Matilda various alternative forms of remembrance were put forward, a literary prize thought best, as easiest to administer. Delavacquerie may not only have influenced that conclusion, but, once the principle was established, carried weight as to the type of book to be encouraged.

In the end it was settled that the Prize (quite a handsome sum) should be presented annually for a biographical study dealing with (not necessarily written by) a British subject, male or female, born not earlier than the date of Sir Magnus’s own birth. I think discretion was allowed to the judges, if the birth was reasonably close, the aim being to begin with the generation to which Sir Magnus himself belonged. Just how this choice was arrived at I do not know. It is worth bearing in mind that an official ‘life’ of Sir Magnus himself had not yet appeared. Possibly Matilda — or the Company — hoped that a suitable biographer might come to light through this constitution of the Prize. Any such writer would have to be equal to dealing with formidable perplexities, if the biography was to be attempted during the lifetime of its subject’s widow; especially in the light of new freedoms of expression, nowadays to be expected, in the manner of the St John Clarke TV programme.

The possibility that a Donners biographer might be sought was borne out by the additional condition that preference would be given to works dealing with a man of affairs, even though representatives of the arts and sciences were also specifically mentioned in the terms of reference.

Delavacquerie, known to me only casually when Matilda opened up the question of the Magnus Donners committee, was then in his middle forties. He was peculiarly fitted to the role in which he found himself — that is to say a sort of unofficial secretary to the board of judges — having been one of the few, possibly the sole candidate, to have benefited by a Donners-Brebner fellowship, when these first came into being. This had brought him to an English university (he had somehow slipped through Sillery’s fingers) just before the outbreak of war. During the war he had served, in the Middle East and India, with the Royal Signals; after leaving the army, working for a time in a shipping firm. No doubt earlier connexion with the Company, through the fellowship, played a part in ultimately securing him a job at Donners-Brebner. Although a British subject, Delavacquerie was of French descent, a family settled in the Caribbean for several generations. He would speak of that in his characteristically dry manner.

‘They’ve been there a century and a half. An established family. You understand there are no good families. The island does not run to good families. The Gibsons were an established family too.’

Small, very dark, still bearing marks of French origins, Delavacquerie talked in a quick, harsh, oddly attractive voice. Between bouts of almost crippling inertia — according to himself — he was immensely energetic in all he did. We had met before, on and off, but became friends through the Magnus Donners Prize committee. By that time Delavacquerie had achieved some fame as a poet; fame, that is, over and above what he himself always called his ‘colonial’ affiliations. Matilda asserted, no doubt truly, that the Company was rather proud of employing in one of its departments a poet of Delavacquerie’s distinction. She reported that a Donners-Brebner director had assured her that Delavacquerie displayed the same grasp of business matters that he certainly brought to literary criticism, on the comparatively rare occasions when he wrote articles or reviews, there being no easy means of measuring business ability against poetry. This same Donners-Brebner tycoon had added that Delavacquerie could have risen to a post of considerably greater responsibility in the Company had he wished. A relatively subordinate position, more congenial in the nature of its duties, tied him less to an office, allowing more time for his ‘own work’. Moreland — not long before he died — had spoken appreciatively of Delavacquerie’s poetry, in connexion with one of Moreland’s favourite themes, the artist as businessman.

‘I never pay my insurance policy,’ Moreland said, ‘without envisaging the documents going through the hands of Aubrey Beardsley and Kafka, before being laid on the desk of Wallace Stevens.’

Before we knew each other at all well, Delavacquerie mentioning army service in India, I asked whether he had ever come across Bagshaw or Trapnel, both of whom had served in the subcontinent in RAF public relations, Bagshaw as squadron-leader, Trapnel as orderly-room clerk. It was a long shot, no contacts had taken place, but Bagshaw, Delavacquerie said, had published one of his earlier poems in Fission, and Trapnel had been encountered in a London pub. Although I had read other Delavacquerie poems soon after that period, I had no recollection of that which had appeared when I had been ‘doing the books’ for the magazine. I had then liked his poetry in principle, without gaining more than a rough idea where he stood among the young emergent writers of the post-war era. Most of his early verse had been written in the army, most of it rhymed and scanned. Trapnel, prepared to lay down the law on poets and poetry, as much as any other branch of literature, a great commentator on his own contemporaries, had never mentioned Delavacquerie’s name. At that period, before Delavacquerie’s reputation began to take shape — kept busy earning a living — he was not often to be seen about. Trapnel, living in a kaleidoscope world of pub and party frequenters, must have forgotten their own meeting. Perhaps he had not taken in Delavacquerie’s name.

‘When I was working in the shipping firm I didn’t know London at all well. I wanted to explore all its possibilities — and of course meet writers.’

Delavacquerie made a slight grimace when he said that.

‘Somebody told me The Hero of Acre was a pub where you found artists and poets. I went along there one night. Trapnel was at the bar, with his beard, and swordstick mounted with the ivory skull. I thought him rather a Ninetyish figure, and was surprised when his work turned out to be good. He was about the only one in the pub to qualify as a writer at all. Even he had only published a few stories then. Still, to my colonial eyes, it was something that he looked the part, even the part as played fifty years before. I didn’t talk to him that night, but on another occasion we discussed Apollinaire over a bitter, a drink I have never learned to like. Trapnel’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Died in the early nineteen-fifties.’

This conversation between Delavacquerie and myself had taken place several years before Matilda’s invitation to join the Magnus Donners Prize committee, which at first I refused, on general grounds of reducing such commitments to a minimum. Matilda, explaining she wanted to start off with a panel known to her personally, was more pressing than expected. She added that she was determined to get as much fun out of the Prize as possible, one aspect of that being a committee made up of friends.

‘One never knows how long one’s going to last,’ she said.

I still declined. Matilda added an inducement. It was a powerful one.

‘I’ve found the photographs Donners took, when we all impersonated the Seven Deadly Sins at Stourwater in 1938. I’ll show them to you, if you join the committee. Otherwise not.’

In supposing these documents from a bygone age would prove irresistible as the Sins themselves, Matilda was right. I accepted the bribe. With some people it might have been possible to refuse, then persuade them to produce the photographs in any case. Matilda was not one of those. The board met twice annually at a luncheon provided by the Company. The judges, as constituted in the first instance, were Dame Emily Brightman, Mark Members, and myself. Delavacquerie sat with us, representing the Company, supplying a link with Matilda, acting as secretary. He arranged for publishers to submit books (or proofs of forthcoming books), kept in touch with the press, undertook all the odd jobs required. These were the sort of duties in which he took comparative pleasure, carried out with notable efficiency. He did not himself vote on final decisions about works that came up for judgment, though he joined in discussions, his opinions always useful. He particularly enjoyed arguing with Emily Brightman (created DBE a couple of years before for her work on The Triads, and polemical study of Boethius), who would allow Delavacquerie more range of teasing than was her usual custom, though sometimes he might receive a sharp rebuke, if he went too far.

Members, on the other hand (once publicly admonished by Dame Emily for a slip about the Merovingians), was rather afraid of her. His inclusion was almost statutory in assembling a body of persons brought together to judge a literary award of any type, quite apart from his own long acquaintance with Matilda Donners. It was from this semiofficial side of his life, rather than the verse and other writings, that he had come to know Matilda, whose interests had always been in the Theatre, rather than books. Members had been included in her parties when Sir Magnus was alive. Emily Brightman, in contrast, was a more recent acquisition, belonging to that sorority of distinguished ladies Matilda now seemed to seek out. It was clear, at the first of these Magnus Donners luncheons, that Emily Brightman (whom I had seen only once or twice since the Cultural Conference in Venice, where Pamela Widmerpool first met Gwinnett) had lost none of her energy. The unobtrusive smartness of her clothes also remained unaltered.

‘I have a confession to make. It should be avowed in the Dostoevskian fashion on the knees. You will forgive me if I dispense with that. To kneel would cause too much stir in a restaurant of this type. During our Venetian experience, you will remember visiting Jacky Bragadin’s palazzo — our host didn’t long survive our visit, did he? — the incomparable Tiepolo ceiling? Candaules showing Gyges his naked wife? How it turned out that Lord Widmerpool — such an unattractive man — had done much the same thing, if not worse? You remember, of course. That poor little Lady Widmerpool. I took quite a fancy to her, in spite of her naughtinesses.’

Emily Brightman paused; at the thought of those perhaps.

‘It turns out that I was scandalously misinformed, accordingly misleading, in supposing Gautier to have invented the name Nysia for Candaules’s queen. The one he exhibited in so uncalled for a manner. Nysia was indeed the name of the nude lady in Tiepolo’s picture. I came on the fact, quite by chance, last year, when I was reading in bed one night. She is categorically styled Nysia in the New History of Ptolemy Chennus — first century, as you know, so respectably far back — and I was up half the night establishing the references. In fact I wandered about almost as lightly clad as Nysia herself. I hope there was no Gyges in the College at that hour. It was sweltering weather, I had not been able to sleep, and allowed myself a gin and tonic, with some ice in it, while I was doing so. I found that Nicholas of Damascus calls her Nysia, too, in his Preparatory Exercises. He also ridicules the notion of an oriental potentate of the Candaules type becoming enamoured of his own wife. I thought that showed the narrowness of Greek psychology in dealing with a subtle people like the Lydians. Another matter upon which Nicholas of Damascus — wasn’t he Herod the Great’s secretary? — throws doubt is the likelihood of the ladies of Sardis undressing before they went to bed. He may have a point there.’

‘Perhaps the sheer originality of his queen undressing was what so enthralled Candaules,’ said Members. ‘I can never sufficiently regret having missed that Conference. Ada Leintwardine and Quentin Shuckerly talk of it to this day. What was the name of the American who got so involved with Kenneth Widmerpool’s wife there?’

‘Russell Gwinnett. An old friend of mine. He was put in an unfortunate position.’

Emily Brightman said that rather sharply. Members took the hint. I asked if she had seen anything of Gwinnett lately.

‘Not a word from him personally. Another American friend, former colleague of both of us, said Russell was back in academic life again. The name of his college escapes me.’

‘Has he returned to the book he was writing about X. Trapnel?’

‘There was no mention of what he was writing, if anything. I had myself always thought Trapnel, as a subject, a little lightweight. I hear, by the way, that Matilda Donners has some amusing photographs of the Seven Deadly Sins, in which you yourself figure. I must persuade her to produce them for me.’

Matilda had made good her promise by showing the photographs to Isobel and myself a few weeks before. The Eaton Square flat, where she lived (on the upper floors of a house next door to the former Walpole-Wilson residence, now an African embassy), was neither large, nor outstandingly luxurious, except for some of the drawings and small oil paintings. Matilda had sold the larger canvases bequeathed to herself. Apart from the high quality of what remained, the flat bore out that law which causes people to retain throughout life the same general characteristics in any place they inhabit. Matilda’s Eaton Square flat at once called to mind the garret off the Gray’s Inn Road, where she had lived when married to Moreland. The similarities of decoration may even have been deliberate. Moreland had certainly remained a little in love with Matilda until the end of his days. Something of the sort may have been reciprocally true of herself. Unlike Matilda’s long silence about Sir Magnus, she had never been unwilling to speak of Moreland, often talking of their doings together, which seemed, some of them, happy in retrospect.

‘Norman Chandler’s coming to see the photographs. I thought he would enjoy the Sins. They belong to his period. Norman was always such a support to Hugh, when there was anything to do with the Theatre. The Theatre was never really Hugh’s thing. He wasn’t at all at ease there, even when he used to come round and see me after the performance. I particularly didn’t want Norman to miss Hugh’s splendid interpretation of Gluttony.’

‘What’s Norman directing now?’

‘Polly Duport’s new play. I haven’t seen it yet. It sounds rather boring. Do you know her? She was here the other night. Polly’s having a very worrying time. Her mother’s married to a South American — more or less head of the government, I believe — and there are a lot of upheavals there. Here’s Norman. Norman, my pet, how are you? We were just saying how famous you’d become. That new fringe makes you look younger than ever — like Claudette Colbert. And what a suit. Where did you get it?’

Chandler, whose air, even in later life, was of one dancing in a perpetual ballet, was not at all displeased by these comments on his personal appearance. He looked down critically at what he was wearing.

‘This little number? It’s from the Boutique of the Impenitent Bachelor — Vests & Transvests, we regular customers call the firm. The colour’s named Pale Galilean. To tell the truth I can hardly sit down in these trousers.’

‘Our brother-in-law, Dicky Umfraville, always refers to his tailor as Armpits & Crotch.’

‘Their cutter must have moved over to the Boutique. How are you both? Oh, Isobel, I can’t tell you how much I miss your uncle, Ted Jeavons. Watching the telly will never be the same without his comments. Still, with that piece of shrapnel, or whatever it was from the first war, inside him, he never thought he’d last as long as he did. Ted was always saying how surprised he was to be alive.’

Inhabiting flats, both of them, in what had formerly been the Jeavons house in South Kensington, Chandler and Jeavons had developed an odd friendship, one chiefly expressed in watching television together. Jeavons, who had always possessed romantic feelings about theatrical life, used to listen in silence, an expression of deep concentration on his face, while Chandler rattled on about actors, directors, producers, stage designers, most of whose names could have meant little or nothing to Jeavons. Umfraville — who always found Jeavons a bore — used to pretend there was a homosexual connexion between them, weaving elaborate fantasies in which they indulged in hair-raising orgies at the South Kensington house. Umfraville himself did not change much as the years advanced, spells of melancholy alternating with bursts of high spirits, the last latterly expressed by a rather good new impersonation of himself as an old-fashioned drug-fiend.

When Matilda spread out the photographs on a table the manner in which the actual photography ‘dated’ was immediately noticeable; their peculiarity partly due to the individual technique of Sir Magnus as photographer, efficient at everything he did, but altogether unversed in any approach to the camera prompted by art. This was especially true of his figure subjects. Painfully clear in outline (setting aside the superimposed exoticism of the actions portrayed), they might have been taken from the pages of a mail-order catalogue, the same suggestion of waxworks, in this case, rather sinister waxworks. Details of costume scrupulously distinct, the character of the models was scarcely at all transmitted. This method did not at all diminish the interest of the pictures themselves. Sir Magnus had remarked at the time that he had taken up photography with a view to depicting his own collections — china, furniture, armour — in the manner he himself wished them photographically recorded, something in which no professional photographer had ever satisfied him. One speculated whether — the Seven Deadly Sins pointing the way — he had later developed this hobby in a manner to include his own tastes as a voyeur. A certain harshness of technique would not necessarily have vitiated that sphere of interest. That Sir Magnus had actually introduced Widmerpool to the practices of which Pamela had so publicly accused her husband at Venice, was less likely, though there, too, photography, of a dubious intention, was alleged. Matilda set out the photographs, as if playing a game of Patience.

‘So few of one’s friends qualify for all the Sins. Quite a lot of people can offer six, then break down at the seventh. They’re full of Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Pride, Anger, Sloth — then fall down on Avarice. One knows plenty of good performers at Avarice, but they so often lack Gluttony or Sloth. Of course it helps if you’re allowed to include drink, in place of food, for Gluttony.’

She picked up the picture of herself as Envy.

‘It was unjust of Donners to make me take on Envy. I’m not at all an envious person.’

That was probably true, notwithstanding her green eyes. Matilda had never shown any strong signs of being envious. Then one thought of her rivalry with Rosie Stevens. Even that was scarcely Envy in the consuming sense that certain persons display the trait. It was competitive jealousy, something rather different, even if partaking of certain envious strains too. Matilda liked her friends to be successful, rather than the reverse. That in itself was a rare characteristic.

‘I suppose Donners thought I was envious of that silly girl he was then having one of his fancies for. What is she called now? Her maiden name was Lady Anne Stepney. She’s married to a Negro much younger than herself, rather a successful psychedelic painter. Donners knew at the time that Anne was conducting a romance with your friend Peter Templer. Do you remember? You and Isobel were staying at our cottage. This man, Peter Templer, picked us up in his car, and drove us over to Stourwater for dinner that night? There’s Anne herself, as Anger, which wasn’t bad. She had a filthy temper. Here she is again, with Isobel as Pride. That’s not fair on Isobel either, anyway not the wrong sort of Pride. And Sloth’s absurd for you, Nick. Look at all those books you’ve written.’

‘Sloth means Accidie too. Feeling fed up with life. There are moments when I can put forward claims.’

‘Hugh, too, I can assure you. Better ones than yours, I feel certain. But Hugh was so good as Gluttony, one wouldn’t wish him doing anything else. Look at him.’

Even the lifeless renderings of Sir Magnus’s photography had failed to lessen the magnificence of Mordand’s Gluttony. He had climbed right on top of the dining-room table, where he was lying supported on one elbow, gripping the neck of a bottle of Kiimmel. He had already upset a full glass of the liqueur — to the visible disquiet of Sir Magnus — the highlights of the sticky pool on the table’s surface caught by the lens. Moreland, surrounded by fruit that had rolled from an overturned silver bowl, was laughing inordinately. The spilt liqueur glass recalled the story told by Mopsy Pontner (whom Moreland had himself a little fancied), her romp on another dining-room table with the American film producer, Louis Glober. That was a suitable inward reminiscence to lead on to the photographs of Templer as Lust; three in number, since he had insisted on representing the Sin’s three ages, Youth, Middle Years, Senility.

‘It was Senile Lust that so upset that unfortunate wife of his. She rushed out of the room. What was her name? Donners made her play Avarice. The poor little thing wasn’t in the least avaricious. Probably very generous, if given a chance. Somebody had to do Avarice, as we were only seven all told. She might have seen that without kicking up such a to-do. Of course she was pretty well nuts by then. Peter Templer as a husband had sent her up the wall. Donners insisted she should go through with Avarice. That was Donners at his worst. He could be very sadistic, unless you stood up to him, then he might easily become masochistic. Betty — that’s what she was called. She ought to have seen it was only a game, and numbers were short. I believe she had to be put away altogether for a time, but came out after her husband was killed, and had lots of proposals. You know how men adore mad women.’

‘Women like mad men, too, Matty, you must admit that. Besides, she wasn’t really mad. Did she accept any of the Proposals?’

‘She married a man in the Foreign Office, and became an ambassadress. They were very happy, I believe. He’s retired now. Most of these pictures are pretty mediocre. Hugh’s the only star.’

Chandler turned the pictures over.

‘I think they’re wonderful, Matty. What fun it all was in those days.’

Matilda made a face.

‘Oh, it wasn’t. Do you truly think that, Norman? I always felt it was dreadfully grim. I don’t believe that was only because the war was going to happen. Do you remember that awful man Kenneth Widmerpool coming in wearing uniform? He ought to have played the eighth Sin — Humbug.’

I was a little surprised by the violence of Matilda’s comment. So far as I knew Widmerpool had taken no particular part in her life, though she might have heard about him from Sir Magnus. She was, in any case, a woman who said — and did — unexpected things, a strangeness of character reflected by her marriages to Carolo, Moreland and Sir Magnus, even if the marriage to the violinist had been a very brief one.

‘I think I rather like humbugs,’ said Chandler. ‘People like old Gossage, the music critic, he’s always been quite a friend of mine.’

Matilda laughed.

‘I mean something much above poor old Gossage’s bumblings. I’m speaking of making claims to a degree of virtue, purity, anything you like to call it — morals, politics, the arts, any field you prefer — which the person concerned neither possesses, nor is seriously attempting to attain. They just flatter themselves they are like that. How solemn I’m getting. That sounds just like the speeches I used to make in my early days from behind the footlights. Tell Norman about the Magnus Donners Memorial Prize, Nick.’

She began to put the photographs away. I described the Prize to Chandler.

‘My dear, you ought to link the Prize with the photographs. Do the Seven Deadly Sins in rotation. The book wins, which best enhances the Sin-of-the-Year.’

‘Oh, Norman, I wish we could.’

That emendation would have added spice to the Magnus Donners Prize, which got off to an unspirited start, with a somewhat pedestrian biography of Sir Horrocks Rusby. A contemporary of Sir Magnus, this once celebrated advocate’s life-story was the only book of that year falling within the terms required. The frontispiece, a florid portrait of Rusby in wig and gown, was from the brush of Isbister, foreshadowing the painter’s later resurgence. The following year there were sufficient eligible candidates to make me regret ever having let myself in for so much additional reading of an unexciting kind. It was won with a lively study of a wartime commander, written by a military historian of repute. The third year’s choice, reflecting a new mood of free expression, was of greater interest than its forerunners; a politician, public personality rather than statesman, chronicled by a journalist friend, who provided, in generous profusion, details of his subject’s adventures (he had been homosexual), which would have remained unrecorded only a few years before. Emily Brightman made one of her pronouncements, when this book had been finally adopted for the Prize.

‘In its vulgar way, a painstaking piece of work, although one must always remember — something often forgotten today — that because things are generally known, they are not necessarily the better for being written down, or publicly announced. Some are, some aren’t. As in everything else, good sense, taste, art, all have their place. Saying you prefer to disregard art, taste, good sense, does not mean that those elements do not exist — it merely means you lack them yourself.’

On the fourth and final year of the panel, the existing committee was confronted with much the same situation as that of the first presentation of the award, except that then there had been at least one eligible book, if no very inspiring one. This year, as I had told Salvidge, nothing at all seemed available. For one reason or another every biography to appear, or billed to appear within the publishing period required, fell outside the Magnus Donners category. When I arrived at the table for the second annual meeting, Emily Brightman and Mark Members were discussing procedure for announcing that, this year, the Prize would not be presented. A minute or two later Delavacquerie came into the restaurant. He held under his arm what looked like the proof copy of a book. When he sat down Emily Brightman tried to take it from him. Delavacquerie resisted. He would not even let her see the title, though admitting he had found a possible entrant for the Prize.

‘The publishers got in touch with me yesterday.’

‘Who’s it about?’

‘I’d like to speak of a few things first, before we get on to the actual merits of the book. There are complications. Other copies of this proof are in the post to the private addresses of all members of the Magnus Donners committee. If you decide in favour, the publishers can get the book out within the appointed time. Let’s order luncheon before we go into the various problems.’

Delavacquerie kept the proof copy hidden on his knee. He always gave the impression of knowing exactly what he wanted to say, how he was going to behave. Emily Brightman, aware that to show impatience would undermine the strength of her position, displayed self-control. Delavacquerie possessed several of her own characteristics, firmness, directness, grasp of whatever subject had to be considered-

If they opposed each other, she was prepared to accept him on equal terms as an adversary, by no means true of everyone. When food and drink had been ordered, Delavacquerie began to make his statement. Even at the outset this was a sufficiently startling one.

‘You remember, a long time ago, the name came up at one of these meetings of the novelist, X. Trapnel, author of Camel Ride to the Tomb, Dogs Have No Uncles, and other works? He died in the nineteen-fifties. You knew him quite well, I think, Nick?’

Members broke in.

‘I knew Trapnel well too. We all knew him. Did he leave a posthumous biography of somebody, which has just been discovered?’

‘I never knew Trapnel,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘Not personally, that is. I’m always promising myself to read his books, but this must be — ’

‘Please,’ said Delavacquerie.

Smiling, he held Emily Brightman in check.

‘I’m sorry, Gibson, but I’m sure I know more about this subject than you do.’

Delavacquerie, still smiling, shook his head. He continued. In relation to Trapnel he was determined to clarify his own position before anything else was said.

‘I met Trapnel himself only once, and that not for long, more than twenty years ago, but I believe him to be a good writer. We have a life of Trapnel here. His career was not altogether uneventful. This book is by an American professor, a doctoral dissertation, none the worse for that. I have read the book. I think you will like it.’

Emily Brightman was not to be held in any longer. She raised a fork threateningly, as if about to stab Delavacquerie, tf he did not come quickly to the point. Members, too, was showing signs of wanting to ventilate his own Trapnel experiences, before things went much further. I myself felt the same impelling urge.

‘Gibson, this book must be written by Russell Gwinnett.’

Delavacquerie, who, reasonably enough, had forgotten that Emily Brightman once announced herself an old friend of Gwinnett’s, looked a little surprised that she should know the name of the biographer.

‘Have the publishers sent your proof copy already, Emily?’

‘Not yet, but I knew Russell Gwinnett was writing a life of Trapnel. So did Nicholas. We could have told you at once, Gibson, had we been allowed to speak. Russell is an old friend of mine. Nicholas, too, met him when we were in Venice. We talked of it at the first meeting of this committee. You could not have been attending, Gibson. You see you sometimes underrate our capabilities.’

Delavacquerie laughed. Before he could defend himself, Members pegged out his own claim.

‘I don’t know Gwinnett, but I knew Trapnel. You count as knowing a man reasonably well after he’s borrowed five pounds off you. Is that incident mentioned? I hope so.’

If Delavacquerie considered Gwinnett’s book good, the judgment was likely to be sound. I was less surprised to hear that Gwinnett’s biography of Trapnel was well done, than that it had ever been completed at all. If the work was accomplished, Gwinnett was likely to have brought to it the powers he certainly possessed. Personally, I had doubted that the study would ever see light. Emily Brightman must have thought the same. She was greatly excited by the news. When they had both been teaching at the same women’s college in America, in a sense Gwinnett had been a protégé of hers. She had always supported a belief in his abilities as a writer. How much she was prepared to face another, more enigmatic, even more sinister, side of his character, was less easy to assess.

‘I told you Russell was an industrious young man, Nicholas. A capable one too. I suppose he can’t be spoken of as young any longer. He must be well into his forties. At last it looks as if we’ve found someone for the Prize. There is no writer to whom I would rather award it than Russell. It’s just what he needs to give him self-assurance, and what the Prize itself needs, to lift it out of the rut of the commonplace. Show me the proof at once, Gibson.’

Delavacquerie continued to withhold the proof copy.

‘Not yet, Emily.’

‘Gibson, you are intolerable. Don’t be absurd. Hand it over immediately.’

‘I’m prepared to be magnanimous about the fiver,’ said Members. ‘I could ill afford forfeiture of five pounds at the time, but we were all penniless writers together, and bygones shall be bygones. The point is whether the book is good.’

‘The merits of Gwinnett’s book are not so much the issue,’ said Delavacquerie. ‘The difficulty is quite another matter.’

‘I know what you’re going to put forward,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘Libel. Am I right? I can see a book of that sort might be libellous, but that is surely the publisher’s affair. We shall have given the Prize before the row starts.’

‘That is not exactly the problem. At least the publishers are not worried in a general way on that ground. They think the possibility of anything of the sort very remote. The libel, if any, would be in connexion with Trapnel’s love affair with Pamela Widmerpool. As you know, she destroyed the manuscript of his last novel. That business was largely responsible for Trapnel’s final débâcle.’

‘An interesting legal point,’ said Members. ‘Is it libellous to write that someone’s deceased wife was unfaithful to him? I always understood, in days when I myself worked in a publisher’s office, that you can’t libel the dead. That was one of the firmest foundations of the publishing profession. On the other hand, I suppose the surviving partner might consider himself libelled, as being put on record as a trompé’d husband. At the time I was speaking of, my ancient publishing days, there also existed the element Emily brought up, rather severely, at one of our meetings — good taste — but fortunately we don’t have to bother about that now — even if it does platonically exist, as Emily assures us. Don’t say it’s good taste that makes you waver, Gibson. I believe you’re frightened of Emily’s disapproval.’

Members and Delavacquerie, outwardly well disposed towards each other, anyway conversationally, were not much in sympathy at base. Delavacquerie, formal as always, may all the same have revealed on some occasion his own sense of mutual disharmony. If so, Members was now getting his own back. Delavacquerie, recognizing that, smiled.

‘You may be right, Mark. At the same time you will agree, I think, when I state the problem, that it is a rather special one. Meanwhile, let me release these proofs.’

He handed the bundle to Emily Brightman, who almost snatched it from his hands. She turned at once to the title page. I read the layout over her arm.

DEATH’S-HEAD SWORDSMAN

The Life and Works of X. TRAPNEL

by

RUSSELL GWINNETT

In due course the proofs came my way. Gwinnett’s academic appointment, named at the beginning of the book, was held at an American college to be judged of fairly obscure status, though lately in the news, owing to exceptionally severe student troubles on its campus. On the page where a dedication might have stood, an epigraph was set.

My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,

Once the bright face of my betrothed lady.

The Revenger’s Tragedy.

For those who knew anything of Gwinnett, or of Trapnel for that matter, the quotation was, to say the least, ambiguous. The longer the lines were considered, the more profuse in private meaning they seemed to become. Moreland, too, had been keen on the plays of Cyril Tourneur. He used often to quote a favourite image from one of them: ‘… and how quaintly he died, like a politician, in hugger-mugger, made no man acquainted with it…’

Tourneur, as Gwinnett himself, was obsessed with Death. The skull, carried by the actor, his ‘study’s ornament’, was no doubt, in one sense, intended to strike the opening note of Gwinnett’s book, his own ‘study’. The couplet drew attention also to the melodramatic title (referring presumably to the death’s-head, mentioned by Delavacquerie, on the top of Trapnel’s sword-stick); but had it deeper meaning as well? If so, who was intended? The lines could be regarded as, say, dedication to the memory of Gwinnett’s earlier girlfriend (at whose death he had been involved in some sort of scandal); alternatively, as allusion to Pamela Widmerpool herself. If the latter, were the words conceived as spoken by Trapnel, by Gwinnett, by both — or, indeed, by all Pamela’s lovers? Even if ironical, they were appropriate enough. At least they defined the tone of the book. Then another thought came. Not only was the quotation about a skull, the title of Tourneur’s play had also to be considered. It was called The Revenger’s Tragedy. Did revenge play some part in writing the book? If so, Gwinnett’s revenge on whom? Trapnel? Pamela? Widmerpool? There were too many “questions to sort out at that moment. Delavacquerie allowed everyone to examine the proofs as long as they wished, before he brought out the information he was holding in reserve.

‘With regard to libel,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘I see that neither Lord Widmerpool, nor his late wife, is named in what is evidently a very full index. I am, by the way, hearing all sorts of strange stories about Lord Widmerpool’s behaviour as a university chancellor. He seems to have the oddest ideas how the duties of that office should be carried out.’

I, too, had noticed the omission of the names of the Widmerpools, husband and wife, from the book’s index. That did not mean that their identities were necessarily unrecognizable in the text. Members protested at all this talk about libel.

‘I can’t see that we need be punctilious about the susceptibilities of Lord Widmerpool, whatever Emily feels as to maintaining standards of good taste. Especially as she herself now draws attention to his much advertised broad-mindedness, in various recent statements made by him, on the subject of students at his own university.’

This gave Delavacquerie the opportunity he was waiting for to produce an effective climax to what he had been saying.

‘What you put forward, Mark, is quite true. Only last week I was watching a programme of Lord Widmerpool’s dealing with protest, counterculture, alternative societies, all the things that he is now interested in. That does not entirely meet our problem, which is a rather more delicate one. The fact is that Lord Widmerpool acts as one of the trustees of the fund from which the Magnus Donners Memorial Prize derives.’

This piece of information naturally made a considerable impression. None of the committee came out with an immediate response. My own first thought was how on earth Widmerpool could have come to occupy such a position in relation to this literary prize, or any other. He might be planning to write a book, but, after all, he had been talking of doing that from his earliest days. More than this was needed as explanation. Who could have been insane enough to have made him trustee of the Magnus Donners Prize? Then, when Delavacquerie continued, the reason became plain.

‘Lord Widmerpool, in his early business life, was for quite a long time associated with Donners-Brebner. He did many miscellaneous jobs for Sir Magnus himself. At one time he might almost have been called Sir Magnus’s right-hand man, so I’ve been told, though I’ve never known Lord Widmerpool personally, only seen him at meetings.’

‘The term jackal has been used,’ said Members.

Delavacquerie ignored the comment. He was always determined that the formalities should be observed.

‘Putting in work on organizing this fund for the Donners-Brebner Fellowships was one of the tasks allotted. In that capacity, as benefiting from them myself, I might even be considered in his debt. For some reason when the Prize was, so to speak, detached from the general sum, Lord Widmerpool’s name remained as a trustee.’

Even Members agreed that a ticklish problem was posed. Any hypothetical question of libel sank into the background, compared with the propriety of awarding a substantial monetary prize, administered — at least in theory — by Widmerpool himself, to an author, who had been one of his wife’s lovers, and written the biography of another man, of whom she had also been the mistress. Besides, Gwinnett had not merely been Pamela’s lover, he was considered by some to be at least the indirect cause of her death; even if she herself had chosen that to be so. After quite a long pause, Emily Brightman spoke.

‘I feel dreadfully sure that I am going to vote for Russell getting the Prize, but I do agree that we are faced with a very delicate situation.’

Delavacquerie, who had no doubt given a good deal of thought to the perplexity which he knew would confront the panel, appeared quite prepared for its attitude to be one of irresolution.

‘The first thing to do is for the committee to read the book, decide whether or not you want the Prize to be given to Professor Gwinnett. If you do, I am prepared to take the next step myself. I will approach Lord Widmerpool in person, and ask him where he stands on the matter. It will no doubt be necessary for him to read Death’s-head Swordsman too, before he can make up his mind.’

Members showed uneasiness about that. I felt a little doubtful myself. It seemed going out of the way to meet trouble.

‘But Kenneth Widmerpool may forbid publication. What shall we do then? Why should we be bullied by him? Surely it would be better to leave Widmerpool alone. What can he do?’

Delavacquerie was firm.

‘The question to some extent involves the Company. The directors may not care tuppence what Widmerpool feels in the matter, but they would not wish attention to be drawn to the fact that he is still connected with the Company to that extent, and at the same time objects to publication. I should like to get Lord Widmerpool’s attitude clearly stated, if I have to consult them. His name could be quietly removed. All sorts of things might be done. They can be gone into, when we know his own views. To remove his name right away, for instance, might induce trouble, rather than curtail it.’

That sounded reasonable. Members withdrew his objection. What had worried him, he said, was thought that the award could turn on Widmerpool’s whim. In other respects, the idea that the committee’s choice might cause a stir greatly pleased Members, who always enjoyed conflict.

‘This is a courageous offer, Gibson,’ said Emily Brightman.

Delavacquerie laughed.

‘In not knowing Lord Widmerpool personally, I have the advantage of ignorance. That is sometimes a useful weapon. I am perhaps not so foolhardy as you all seem to think. There are aspects of the Trapnel story with which, in his latest frame of mind, Lord Widmerpool might even welcome association. I mean Trapnel the despised and rejected — insomuch as Trapnel was despised and rejected.’

I felt confidence in Delavacquerie’s judgment, and could grasp some of what he meant. Nevertheless his train of thought was not wholly clear.

‘But even the new Widmerpool will hardly stomach such an association with Gwinnett, will he?’

‘We’ll see. I may be wrong. It’s worth a try.’

Delavacquerie was giving nothing away at this stage. During what remained of the meeting no matter of consequence was discussed. Death’s-head Swordsman had first to be read. That was the next step. Luncheon came to an end. Emily Brightman said she was on her way to the British Museum. Members was going to his hairdresser, before attending another literary prize committee later that afternoon. After saying goodbye to the others, Delavacquerie and I set off for Fleet Street.

‘How do you propose to tackle Widmerpool?’

Delavacquerie’s manner changed a little from its carefully screened air employed at the table.

‘Tell me, Nicholas, did not Pamela Widmerpool take an overdose that she might be available to the necrophilic professor?’

‘That was how things looked at the time. She may have decided to do herself in anyway.’

‘But it might be said that Gwinnett — by, perhaps only indirectly, being the cause of her end — avenged Trapnel for destruction of his novel, and consequent downfall?’

‘You could look at it that way.’

‘In a sense Gwinnett represents Widmerpool’s revenge on Pamela too?’

‘That also occurred to me. The Revenger’s Tragedy. All the same, the point is surely not going to be easy to put, as man-to-man, when you confront Widmerpool?’

‘Nevertheless, I shall bear it in mind.’

‘I never thought Gwinnett would get the book finished. He gave up academic life when all the trouble happened. I last heard of him teaching water-skiing.’

‘A promising profession for a man keen on Death?’

‘I don’t think Gwinnett does away with his girls. He is not a murderer. He just loves where Death is. The subject enraptures him. Emily Brightman says there was an earlier incident of his breaking into a mortuary, where a dead love of his lay.’

Delavacquerie thought for a moment.

‘I can understand the obsession, like most others. People love where Beauty is, where Money is, where Power is — why not where Death is? An American poet said Death is the Mother of Beauty. No, I was being perhaps unduly secretive at lunch. I’ll tell you. I have a special line on Lord Widmerpool. My son is at the university of which he is the chancellor.’

I knew Delavacquerie’s wife had died ten or fifteen years before. I had never met her. They had come across each other in England, the marriage, so far as I knew, a happy one. Delavacquerie sometimes spoke of his wife. The son he had never before mentioned.

‘In the ordinary way, of course, Etienne would scarcely know who was the chancellor of the university. Lord Widmerpool, as we were saying at lunch, has for some little time been laying stress on his own closeness to the younger generation, and its upheavals. You may have seen his letters — always signed nowadays “Ken Widmerpool”, rather than just “Widmerpool”, as a peer of the realm — a matey approach habitually brought into play so far as students of the university are concerned. He has made his house a centre for what might be called the more difficult cases.’

‘Was your son involved in the Quiggin twins’ paint-throwing?’

Delavacquerie laughed at the suggestion.

‘On the contrary, Etienne is a hard-working boy, who wants to get a good economics degree, but naturally he does the things his own contemporaries do up to a point — knows all about them, I mean, even if he isn’t the paint-throwing type. He has talked a lot about Lord Widmerpool. Quite a personality cult has been established there. Lord Widmerpool has made himself a powerful figure in the student world — which, I need hardly remind you, is by no means entirely made up of students.’

‘You think your knowledge of Widmerpool’s latest stance is such as to persuade him to create no difficulties about Gwinnett’s book?’

‘It is my own self-esteem that prompts me to attempt this. That is what I am like. I want to come back to the Magnus Donners Prize committee, and inform them that Lord Widmerpool is perfectly agreeable to Death’s-head Swordsman receiving the award — that is, if you and the rest of the panel wish the book to be chosen.’

This statement of his own feelings in the matter was very typical of Delavacquerie; to admit ambitions of a kind not necessarily to be expected from a poet, anyway the poet of popular imagination. By the time we had this conversation the habit had grown up of our lunching together in London at fairly regular intervals (quite apart from the Magnus Donners meetings), so that I was already familiar with a side of him that was competitive in a manner he rather liked to emphasize. Then he came out with something for which I was not at all prepared.

‘Isn’t a girl called Fiona Cutts some sort of a relation of yours?’

‘A niece.’

‘She used to be a friend of Etienne’s.’

‘Lately?’

‘A year or two ago. For a short time she and Etienne saw quite a lot of each other — I mean enough for me to have met her too. A nice girl. I think in the end she found Etienne too humdrum, though they got on well for a while.’

‘Did they meet with the odd crowd Fiona is now going round with?’

‘No, not at all. At some musical get-together, I think. The thing broke up when this other business started.’

Fiona’s friendship with Etienne Delavacquerie had never percolated down through the family grapevine. There was no particular reason why it should. Even Fiona’s parents were unlikely to keep track of all their daughter’s current boyfriends. It was a pity Susan and Roddy Cutts had never known about this apparently reliable young man. They would have felt relieved, anyway for a short period of time. Delavacquerie, also regretting the termination of the relationship, was probably in ignorance of the extent to which Fiona could show herself a handful. I asked if he knew about Scorpio Murtlock.

‘I knew she was now mixed up with some mystic cult. I didn’t know Murtlock had anything to do with her. I thought he was a queer.’

‘Hard to say.’

‘All I know about Murtlock is that Quentin Shuckerly picked him up somewhere ages ago. Shuckerly, expecting an easy lay, put Murtlock up in his flat. Shuckerly can be quite tough in such matters — that former intellectual black boyfriend of his used to call him the Narcissus of the Nigger — but his toughness, or his narcissism, didn’t stand up to Murtlock’s. Shuckerly had to leave the country to get Murtlock out of his flat. A new book of Shuckerly poems was held up in publication in consequence. I wouldn’t have thought Murtlock a wise young man to get mixed up with. Etienne never told me that.’

Delavacquerie looked quite disturbed. Here our ways had to part.

‘I should like to bug your conversation with Widmerpool, anyway your opening gambit.’

Delavacquerie made a dramatic gesture.

‘I shall take the bull by the horns — adopt the directness of the CIA man and the Cuban defector.’

‘What was that?’

‘He asked him a question.’

‘Which was?’

‘You know how it is in Havana in the Early Warning?’

Delavacquerie waved goodbye. I went on towards the paper, to get a book for review. In the anxiety he had shown about his son’s abandoned love affair — and Fiona’s own involvement with Murtlock — Delavacquerie had displayed more feeling than he usually revealed. It suggested that Etienne Delavacquerie had been fairly hard hit when Fiona went off. I was interested that Delavacquerie himself had met her, and would have liked to hear more of his views on that subject. There had been no opportunity. In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties begin more or less to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about; as opposed to those earlier friendships — not unlike love affairs, with all sexual element removed — which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.

In earlier days, given our comparative intellectual intimacy, there would have been no embarrassment in enquiring about Delavacquerie’s own sexual arrangements. The question would have been an aspect of being friends. In fact, Delavacquerie himself would almost certainly have issued some sort of statement of his own on the matter, a handout likely to have been given early priority, when we were first getting to know one another. That was why the rumoured brush with Matilda remained altogether blurred in outline. There was no doubt that Delavacquerie liked women, got on well with them. His poetry showed that. If he possessed any steady company — hard to believe he did not — the lady herself never seemed to appear with him in public.

Thinking of the information now accumulating about Scorpio Murtlock, an incident that had taken place a few years before came to mind. It might or might not be Murtlock this time, the principle was the same. The occasion also marked the last time I had set eyes on an old acquaintance, Sunny Farebrother. I was in London only for the day. Entering a comparatively empty compartment on a tube train, I saw Farebrother sitting at the far end. Wearing a black overcoat and bowler hat, both ancient as his wartime uniforms, he was as usual holding himself very upright. He did not look like a man verging on eighty. White moustache neatly trimmed, he could have passed for middle sixties. In one sense a figure conspicuously of the past in turnout, there was also something about him that was extremely up-to-date, not to say brisk. He was smiling to himself. I took the vacant seat next to him.

‘Hullo, Sunny.’

Farebrother’s face at once lost its smile. Instead, it assumed an expression of rueful compassion. It was the face he had put on when Widmerpool, then a major on the staff, seemed likely to be sacked from Divisional Headquarters. Farebrother, an old enemy, had dropped in to announce that fact.

‘Nicholas, how splendid to meet again after all these years. You find me on my way back from a sad occasion. I am returning from Kensal Green Cemetery. The last tribute to an old friend. One of these fellows I’d known for a mighty long time. Life will never be quite the same again without him. We didn’t always hit it off together — but, my goodness, Nicholas, he was someone known to you too. I’ve just been to Jimmy Stripling’s funeral. Poor old Jimmy. You must remember him. You and I stayed at the Templers’, a hundred years ago, when Jimmy was there. He was the old man’s son-in-law in those days. Tall chap, hair parted in the middle, keen on motor-racing. I always remember how Jimmy, and some of the rest of the house-party, tried to play a trick on me, after we’d come back from a ball, and I had gone up to bed. Poor old Jimmy hoped to put a po in my hatbox. I was too sharp for him.’

Farebrother shook his head in sadness at the folly of human nature, folly so abjectly displayed by Jimmy Stripling in hoping to outwit Farebrother in a matter of that sort. I saw now that a black tie added to the sombre note struck by the rest of his clothes.

‘Jimmy and I used to do a lot of business together in our early City days. He always pretended we didn’t get on well. Then, poor old boy, he gave up the City — he was in Lloyd’s, hadn’t done too badly there, and elsewhere — gave up his motor-racing, got a divorce from Peter Templer’s sister, and began mixing himself up with all sorts of strange goings-on that couldn’t have been at all good for the nerves. Old Jimmy was a highly strung beggar in his way. Took up with a strange lady, who told fortunes. Occultism, all that. Not a good thing. Bad thing, in fact. The last time I saw him, only a few years ago, he was driving along Piccadilly in a car that could have been fifty years old, if it was a day. Jimmy must have lost all his money. His cars were once his pride and joy. Always had the latest model before anyone else. Now he was grinding along in this old crock. I could have wept at seeing Jimmy reduced to an old tin can like that.’

Farebrother, a habit of his when he told almost any story, suddenly lowered his voice, at the same time looking round to see if we were likely to be overheard, though no one else was sitting at our end of the compartment.

‘It was even worse than that, I fear. There weren’t many at the funeral but those who were looked a rum lot, to say the least. I got into conversation with one of the few mourners who was respectably dressed. Turned out he was a member of Lloyd’s, like Jimmy, though he hadn’t seen him for a long time. Do you know what had happened? When that fortune-telling lady of Jimmy’s was gathered in, he took up with a boy. Would you have believed it? Jimmy may have behaved like a crackpot at times, but no one ever guessed he had those tastes. This bloke I talked to told me he’d heard that a lot of undesirables used to live off Jimmy towards the end. I don’t think he’d have invented the tale on account of the funny types at the funeral. Jimmy’s boy was there. In fact he was more or less running the show. He wore a sort of coloured robe, hair not much short of his shoulders. Good-looking lad in his way, if you’d cleaned him up a bit. Funnily enough, I didn’t at all take against him, little as I’m drawn to that type as a rule. Even something I rather liked, if you can believe that. He had an air of efficiency. That always gets me. It was a cremation, and this young fellow showed himself perfectly capable of taking charge. All these strange types in their robes sang a sort of dirge for Jimmy at the close of the proceedings.’

‘Perhaps it was the efficiency Jimmy Stripling liked?’

‘I hope you’re right, Nicholas. I hadn’t thought of that. Jimmy just needed somebody to look after him in his old age. I expect that was it. We all need that. I see I’ve been uncharitable. I’m glad I went to the funeral, all the same. I make a point of going to funerals and memorial services, sad as they are, because you always meet a lot of people at them you haven’t seen for years, and that often comes in useful later. Jimmy’s was the exception. I never expect to set eyes on mourners like his again, Kensal Green, or anywhere else.’

The train was approaching my station.

‘How are you yourself, Sunny?’

‘Top-hole form, top-hole. Saw my vet last week. Said he’d never inspected a fitter man of my age. As you probably know, Nicholas, I’m a widower now.’

‘I didn’t. I’m sorry to hear —’

‘Three years ago. A wonderful woman, Geraldine. Marvellous manager. Knew just where to save. Never had any money of her own, left a sum small but by no means to be disregarded. A wonderful woman. Happy years together. Fragrant memories. Yes, I’m in the same little place in the country. I get along somehow. Everyone round about is very kind and helpful. You and your wife must come and see my roses. I can always manage a cup of tea. Bless you, Nicholas, bless you …’

As I walked along the platform towards the Exit staircase the train moved on past me. I saw Farebrother once more through the window as the pace increased. He was still sitting bolt upright, and had begun to smile again. On the visit to which he had himself referred, the time when Stripling’s practical joke had fallen so flat, Peter Templer had pronounced a judgment on Farebrother. It remained a valid one.

‘He’s a downy old bird.’