Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (10 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Nor from you, Lady Warminster.’

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

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

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

No sparrow on any roof was ever lonely
As I am, nor any animal untamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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