Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (7 page)

‘We were looking for you,’ said a woman’s voice, speaking almost appealingly, yet still with a note of command in it. ‘We thought you would not mind if we came behind the scenes to see you. Such an adventure for us, you know. In fact we even wondered if there was any chance of persuading you to come to supper with us.’

The people in the passage could not be seen, but this was undoubtedly Stringham’s mother. She introduced Chandler to the persons with her, but the names were inaudible.

‘It would be so nice if you could come,’ she said, quite humbly now. ‘Your performance was wonderful. We adored it.’

Chandler had left the dressing-room now and was some way up the passage, but his voice could still be heard.

‘It is terribly sweet of you, Mrs Foxe,’ he said, with some hesitation. ‘It would have been quite lovely. But as a matter of fact I was supposed to be meeting an old friend this evening.’

He seemed undecided whether or not to accept the invitation, to have lost suddenly all the animation he had been showing in the dressing-room a minute or two before. Moreland and Matilda had stopped talking and had also begun to listen, evidently with great enjoyment, to what was taking place outside.

‘Oh, but if he is an old friend,’ said Mrs Foxe, who seemed to make no doubt whatever of the sex of Chandler’s companion for dinner, ‘surely he might join us too. It would be so nice. What is his name?’

Although she was almost begging Chandler to accept her invitation, there was also in her voice the imperious note of the beauty of her younger days, the rich woman, well known in the world and used to being obeyed.

‘Max Pilgrim.’

Chandler’s voice, no less than Mrs Foxe’s, suggested conflicting undertones of feeling: gratification at being so keenly desired as a guest; deference, in spite of himself, for the air of luxury and high living that Mrs Foxe bestowed about her; determination not to be jockeyed out of either his
gaminerie
or accustomed manner of ordering his own life by Mrs Foxe or anyone else.

‘Not
the
Max Pilgrim?’

‘He is at the Café de Madrid now. He sings there.’

‘But, of course. “I want to dazzle Lady Sybil …” What a funny song that one is. Does he mean it to be about Sybil Huntercombe, do you think? It is so like her. We must certainly have Mr Pilgrim too. But will he come? He has probably planned something much more amusing. Oh, I do hope he will.’

‘I think—’

‘But how wonderful, if he would. Certainly you must ask him. Do telephone to him at once and beg him to join us.’

The exact words of Chandler’s reply could not be heard, but there could be little doubt that he had been persuaded. Perhaps he was afraid of Max Pilgrim’s annoyance if the supper party had been refused on behalf of both of them. In dealing with Mrs Foxe, Chandler seemed deprived, if only temporarily, of some of his effervescence of spirit. It looked as if he might be made her prisoner. This was an unguessed aspect of Mrs Foxe’s life, a new departure in her career of domination. The party moved off, bearing Chandler with them; their voices died away as they reached the end of the passage. Moreland and Matilda continued to laugh. I asked what it was all about.

‘Norman’s grand lady,’ said Matilda. ‘She is someone called Mrs Foxe. Very smart. She sits on all sorts of committees and she met Norman a week or two ago at some charity performance. It was love at first sight.’

‘You don’t mean they are having an affair?’

‘No, no, of course not,’ said Moreland, speaking as if he were quite shocked at the notion, ‘how absurd to suggest such a thing. You can have a passion for someone without having an affair with them. That is one of the things no one seems able to understand these days.’

‘What is it then?’

‘Just one of those fascinating mutual attractions between improbable people that take place from time to time. I should like to write a ballet round it.’

‘Norman is interested too? He sounded a bit unwilling to go out to supper.’

‘Perhaps not interested in the sense you mean,’ said Moreland, ‘but everyone likes being fallen in love with. People who pretend they don’t are always the ones, beyond all others, to wring the last drop of pleasure – usually sadistic pleasure-out of it. Besides, Norman has begun to live rather a Ritzy life with her, he tells me. Some people like that too.’

‘I think Norman is quite keen,’ said Matilda, adding some final touches to her face that made completion of her toilet seem promising. ‘Did you hear the way he was talking? Not at all like himself. I think the only thing that holds him back is fear of old friends like Max Pilgrim laughing.’

‘Norman obviously represents the physical type of the future,’ Moreland said, abandoning, as he so often did, the particular aspect of the matter under discussion in favour of a more general aesthetic bearing. ‘The great artists have always decided beforehand what form looks are to take in the world, and Norman is pure Picasso – one of those attenuated, androgynous mountebanks of the Blue Period, who haven’t had a meal for weeks.’

‘Come along, sweetie, and don’t talk so much,’ said Matilda, closing her bag and getting up from the dressing-table. ‘If we don’t have something to eat pretty soon we shall become attenuated, androgynous mountebanks ourselves.’

No phrase could have better described what she looked like. She had emerged at last in a purple satin dress and sequin mittens, the ultimate effect almost more exotic than if she had remained in the costume of the play. I found her decidedly impressive. It was evident from the manner in which she had spoken of Mrs Foxe that she was on easy terms with a world which Moreland, in principle, disliked, indeed entered only for professional purposes. A wife who could handle that side of his life would undoubtedly be an advantage to him. Conversationally, too, Matilda was equipped to meet him on his own ground. Moreland’s talk when pursuing a girl varied little, if at all, from his conversation at any other time. Some women found this too severe an intellectual burden; others were flattered, even when incapable of keeping pace. With Matilda, this level of dialogue seemed just what was required. She was a clever girl, with a good all-round knowledge of the arts: one who liked being treated as a serious person. This was apparent by the time we reached the restaurant, where Moreland at once began to discuss the play.

‘ “The lusty spring smells well; but drooping autumn tastes well,” ’ he said. ‘How like:

Pauvre automne
Meurs en blancheur et en richesse
De neige et de fruits mûrs

or:

Je suis soumis au Chef du Signe de I’Automne
Partant j’aime les fruits je déteste les fleurs

I was thinking the other day one might make an anthology of the banker poets … Guillaume Apollinaire … T. S. Eliot … Robert W. Service …’

He put down the menu which he had been studying.

‘A wonderful idea,’ said Matilda, who had been adding magenta to her lips to emphasise the whiteness of her skin or offset the colour of her dress, ‘but first of all make up your mind what you are going to eat. I have already decided on Sole Bonne Femme, but I know we shall have to start all over again when the waiter comes.’

Clearly she possessed a will of her own, and had already learnt something of Moreland’s habits; for example, that persuading him to choose a dish at a restaurant was a protracted affair. When faced with a menu Moreland’s first thought was always to begin some lengthy discussion that postponed indefinitely the need to make a decision about food.

‘What do you think I should like?’ he said.

‘Oeufs Meyerbeer,’ she said. ‘You always enjoy them.’

Moreland took up the menu again irresolutely.

‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I hate being hurried about any of my appetites. What are you going to eat, Nick? I am afraid you may order something that will make me regret my own choice. You have done that in the past. It is very disloyal of you. You know I think Gossage – in as much as he possesses any sexual feelings at all – derives a certain vicarious satisfaction from contemplating the loves of Norman Chandler and Mrs Foxe. The situation manages to embrace within one circumference Gossage’s taste for rich ladies and good-looking young men – together with a faint spice of musical background.’

‘Gossage says there is talk of putting on Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine the Great,”
said Matilda.

Moreland once again abandoned the menu.

‘ “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,” ’ he cried. ‘ “What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?” That is rather what I feel about the newspaper criticism of Gossage and Maclintick. I should like them to drag me to concerts, as the kings drew Tamerlaine, in a triumphal coach. They would be far better employed doing that than pouring out all that stuff for their respective periodicals every week. Perhaps that is not fair to Maclintick. It is certainly true of Gossage.’

‘I am sure Maclintick would draw you to the Queen’s Hall in a rickshaw if you asked him,’ said Matilda. ‘He admires you so much.’

She turned to the waiter, ordered whatever she and I had agreed to eat, and Oeufs Meyerbeer for Moreland, who, still unable to come to a decision about food, accepted her ruling on this matter without dissent.

‘I think there is just a chance I might be cast for Zenocrate,’ she said, ‘if they did ever do
Tamburlaine
. In any case, the show wouldn’t be coming on for ages.’

‘I wouldn’t limit it to Maclintick and Gossage,’ Moreland said. ‘I should like to be dragged along by all the music critics, arranged in order of height, tallest in front, midgets at the back. That will give you some clue to what the procession would look like. I have always been interested in Tamerlaine. I found myself thinking of him the other day as part of that cruel, parched, Central Asian feeling one gets hearing
Prince Igor.
I am sure it was his bad leg that made him such a nuisance.’

‘You may be interested in Tamerlaine, darling,’ said Matilda, ‘but you are not in the least interested in my career.’

‘Oh, Matty, I am. I’m sorry. I am really. I want you to be the Duse of our time.’

He took her hand.

‘I don’t believe you, you old brute.’

In spite of saying that she smiled, and did not seem seriously annoyed. On the whole they appeared to understand one another pretty well. When the moment came to pay the bill, I flicked a note across to Moreland to cover my share. Matilda at once took charge of this, at the same extracting another note from Moreland himself – always a great fumbler with money. These she handed over with a request for change. When the waiter returned with some money on a plate, she apportioned the silver equitably between Moreland and myself, leaving the correct tip; a series of operations that would have presented immense problems of manipulation to Moreland. All this enterprise made her appear to possess ideal, even miraculous, qualifications for becoming his wife. They were, indeed, married some months later. The ceremony took place in a registry office, almost secretly, because Moreland hated fuss. Not long after, perhaps a year, almost equally unexpectedly, I found myself married too; married to Isobel Tolland. Life – the sort of life Moreland and I used to live in those days – all became rather changed.

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How is Isobel?’

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

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

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

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

‘Who will be at lunch?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No?’

‘He is going out there.’

‘Where?’

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

‘Spain.’

‘Indeed?’

‘Can you imagine.’

‘The International Brigade?’

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

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

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

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