Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2

by Anthony Powell

  There was nothing particularly surprising about Matilda having taken a new name for the stage. Many people did that. It was something to be expected. The manner in which Matilda had first met Sir Magnus was more interesting.

  ‘This girl told me Matilda Wilson came down one term to help the school dramatic society do A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ said Veronica. ‘They had got permission to act the play at Stourwater. Sir Magnus, wandering round, came across Matilda Wilson dressing up a lot of little girls as elves. That went pretty well.’

  It seemed as credible a story as any other. Once involved with Sir Magnus, Matilda had, of course, been ‘seen everywhere’; within the limitations of the fact that Sir Magnus preferred to keep his girl of the moment as much as possible to himself, allowing her to meet no more of his own friends than strictly necessary for his own entertainment when the two of them could not be alone together. Certainly that had been true of the time when Sir Magnus was associated with Baby Wentworth, alleged by Barnby to have ‘given notice’ on this very account. There had been a lot of gossip about Matilda when she was ‘with’ Sir Magnus. When, not long before my own marriage, I had stayed with Quiggin and Mona in the cottage lent them by Erridge, Quiggin had even talked too much about Matilda for Mona’s taste.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mona had said, in her irritated drawl, ‘Matilda Wilson – one of those plain girls men for some extraordinary reason like running after. Because they are not much trouble, I suppose.’

  Norah Tolland had encountered Matilda in quite different circumstances; in fact having drinks with Heather Hopkins, the pianist, who had formerly inhabited one of the lower floors of the house in Chelsea where Norah and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson occupied the attics. At the period of which I am speaking – about two years after my own marriage – Norah and Eleanor had both found themselves jobs and become very ‘serious’, talking a lot about politics and economics and how best to put the world right. They were now rather ashamed of their Heather Hopkins days.

  ‘Poor old Hopkins,’ Norah said, when I mentioned her once. ‘Such a pity she goes round looking and talking like the most boring kind of man. Her flat might be the bar in a golf club. She is a good-hearted creature in her own way.’

  ‘You get tired of all that clumping about,’ said Eleanor, kicking some bedroom slippers out of sight under the sofa. ‘And besides, Heather isn’t in the least interested in world affairs. One does ask a little sense of responsibility in people.’

  However, things had been very different some years before. Then, Hopkins had thrilled Norah and Eleanor with her eyeglass and her dinner-jacket and her barrack-room phrases. Matilda had been brought to the Hopkins flat by a young actress at that time much admired by the hostess. The gathering was, of course, predominantly female, and Matilda, often found attractive by her own sex, but herself preferring men even in an unaggressively masculine form, had spent most of the evening talking to Norman Chandler. She met him for the first time at this Hopkins party. Through Chandler, Matilda had subsequently obtained a foothold in that branch of the theatre which had led in due course to her part in The Duchess of Malfi. Norah, usually sparing of praise, had been impressed by Matilda, to whom, as it happened, she only managed to speak a couple of words in the course of the evening.

  ‘I thought she was rather wonderful,’ said Norah.

  Moreland himself had first met his future wife at a time when Matilda’s connexion with Sir Magnus, if not completely severed, had been at least considerably relaxed. Moreland’s behaviour on this occasion had been characteristic. He had fallen deeply in love, immediately overwhelming Matilda with that combination of attention and forgetfulness which most women found so disconcerting in his addresses. For once, however, that approach worked very well. Matilda was won. There had already been some ups and downs in their relationship by the time I was allowed to meet her, but, in principle, they were satisfied enough with each other before marriage; they still seemed satisfied when we used to meet them and dine together at Foppa’s or the Strasbourg. I discounted Moreland’s casual outbursts against marriage as an institution; indeed, took his word for it that, as he used to explain, these complaints were a sign of living in a world of reality, not a palace of dreams.

  ‘People always treat me as if I was a kind of 1880 bohemian,’ he used to say. ‘On the contrary, I am the sane Englishman with his pipe.’

  It was one one of these evenings at the Strasbourg that he announced his symphony was finished and about to be performed. Although Moreland never talked much about his own compositions, I knew he had been working on the symphony for a long time.

  ‘Norman’s friend, Mrs Foxe, is going to give a party for it,’ he said.

  ‘But how lovely,’ said Isobel. ‘Will Mrs Foxe and Norman stand at the top of the stairs, side by side, receiving the guests?’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Moreland. ‘An example to all of us. A fidelity extremely rare among one’s friends.’

  ‘Does Mrs Foxe still live in a house somewhere off Berkeley Square?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Moreland. ‘With objects like mammoth ice-cream cornets on either side of the front door for putting out the torches after you have paid off your sedan chair.’

  ‘I am not sure that I like parties at that house,’ said Matilda. ‘We have been there once or twice. I can stand grand parties less and less anyway.’

  She was having one of her moods that night, but it was on the whole true to say that since marriage Moreland had increasingly enjoyed going to parties, especially parties like that offered by Mrs Foxe; Matilda, less and less.

  ‘You talk as if we spent our life in a whirl of champagne and diamonds,’ Moreland said. ‘Anyway, it won’t be as grand as all that. Mrs Foxe has promised just to ask our own sordid friends.’

  ‘Who,’ asked Isobel, ‘apart from us?’

  ‘I’d far rather go off quietly by ourselves somewhere after the thing is over and have supper with Isobel and Nick,’ Matilda said. ‘That would be much more fun.’

  ‘It is rather an occasion, darling,’ said Moreland, vexed at these objections. ‘After all, I am noted among composers for the smallness of my output. I don’t turn out a symphony every week like some people. A new work by me ought to be celebrated with a certain flourish – if only to encourage the composer himself.’

  ‘I just hate parties nowadays.’

  ‘There are only going to be about twenty or thirty people,’ Moreland said. ‘I know Edgar Deacon used to assure us that “the saloon, rather than the salon, is the true artist’s milieu”, but his own pictures were no great advertisement for that principle. Personally, I feel neither subservience nor resentment at the prospect of being entertained by Mrs Foxe in luxurious style.’

  ‘Have you ever talked to her naval husband?’ I asked.

  ‘There is a smooth, hearty fellow about the house sometimes,’ Moreland said. ‘A well-fed air, and likes a good mahogany-coloured whisky. I once heard him give an anguished cry when the footman began to splash in too much soda. I never knew he was her husband. He doesn’t look in the least like a husband.’

  ‘Of course he is her husband,’ said Matilda. ‘What an ass you are. He pinched my leg the night we were having supper with them after Turandot. That is one of the reasons I turned against the house.’

  ‘Darling, I’m sure he didn’t. Just your swank.’

  ‘I told you when we got home. I even showed you the bruise. You must have been too tight to see it.’

  ‘He always seems scrupulously well behaved to me,’ Moreland said. ‘Rather afraid of Mrs Foxe, as a matter of fact. I understand why, now she turns out to be his wife.’

  Soon after this meeting with the Morelands came the period of crisis leading up to the Abdication, one of those public events which occupied the minds not only of those dedicated by temperament to eternal discussion of what they read about in the newspapers, but of everyone else in the country of whatever age, sex, or social class. The constitutional and emotional issues
were left threadbare by debate. Barnby would give his views on the controversy in his most down-to-earth manner; Roddy Cutts treated it with antiseptic discretion; Frederica’s connexion with the Court caused her to show herself in public as little as possible, but she did not wholly avoid persecution at the hands of friends and relations vainly hoping for some unreleased titbit.

  ‘I shall have a nervous breakdown if they don’t settle things soon,’ said Robert Tolland. ‘I don’t expect you hear any news, Frederica?’

  ‘I can assure you, Robert, my own position is equally nerve-racking,’ said Frederica. ‘And I hear no news.’

  She certainly looked dreadfully worried. I found Members and Quiggin discussing the ineluctable topic when I went to collect a book for review.

  ‘I am of course opposed in principle to monarchy, like all other feudal survivals,’ Quiggin was saying. ‘But if the country must have a king, I consider it desirable, indeed essential that he should marry a divorcée. Two divorces – double as good. I am no friend of the civilisation of Big Business, but at least an American marriage is better than affiliation with our own so-called aristocracy.’

  Members laughed dryly.

  ‘Have you taken part in a procession of protest yet, J.G.?’ he asked, now in a sufficiently strong economic position vis-à-vis his old friend to treat Quiggin’s indignation with amused irony. ‘I believe all kinds of distinguished people from the intellectual world have been parading the streets with sandwich boards expressing outraged royalist sentiments.’

  ‘I regard the whole matter as utterly trivial in any case,’ said Quiggin, irritably shoving a handful of recently published novels back into the shelf behind Members’s desk, tearing the paper wrappers of two of them by the violence of his action. ‘You asked me my views, Mark, and I’ve told you what they are. Like Gibbon, I dismiss the subject with impatience. Perhaps you will produce a book of some interest this week, a change from these interminable autobiographies of minor criminals which flow so freely from the press and to which I am for ever condemned by you.’

  I met Moreland in the street just after the story had broken in the newspapers.

  ‘Isn’t this just my luck?’ he said. ‘Now nobody is going to listen to music, look at a picture, or read a book, for months on end. We can all settle down happily to discussions every evening about Love and Duty.’

  ‘Fascinating subjects.’

  ‘They are in one’s own life. Less so, where others are concerned.’

  ‘You speak with feeling.’

  ‘Do I? Just my naturally vehement way of expressing myself.’

  As it turned out, once the step had been taken, the Abdication become a matter of history, everything resumed an accustomed routine with much greater ease than popularly foreseen. There appeared no reason to suppose the box office for Moreland’s symphony would suffer. Priscilla (who had eventually taken the job in the organisation raising money for the promotion of opera) reported, for example, that the cross-section of the public seen through this particular microscope seemed to have settled down, after some weeks of upheaval, to its normal condition. Priscilla was not particularly interested in music – less so than Robert – but naturally this employment had brought her in touch to some degree with the musical world. At the same time, I was surprised when, the day before Moreland’s work was to be performed, Priscilla rang up and asked if she could come with us the following evening. Isobel answered the telephone.

  ‘I didn’t know you often went to concerts,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t unless I have a free ticket,’ said Priscilla.

  ‘Did you get a free ticket for this one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who gave it you?’

  ‘One of the persons whose music is going to be played.’

  ‘I thought they were all dead, or living abroad, except Hugh Moreland.’

  ‘Hugh Moreland gave me the ticket.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew him.’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Oh, yes. You met him with us, didn’t you?’

  ‘And other times too. I meet him in my office.’

  ‘You never mentioned it.’

  ‘Look here, can I come with you and Nick, or can’t I?’ said Priscilla. ‘I am just asking. If you think being seen in my company will get you a bad name, I’ll go alone and pretend I don’t know either of you if we meet in the bar. Nothing easier.’

  This conversation was reported later by Isobel, with the information that Priscilla was dining with us the following night.

  ‘Typical of Hugh to present a ticket to Priscilla, who is not in the least interested in music,’ I said, ‘when all sorts of people who might be useful to him would have been delighted to be remembered in that way.’

  The statement was true, at the same time disingenuous. I was a little aware of that at the time. It was a priggish remark; not even genuinely priggish. There seemed no point in adding that it was obviously more fun to give a ticket to a pretty girl like Priscilla, rather than to some uncouth musical hanger-on whose gratification might ultimately pay a doubtful dividend. I felt it one of those occasions when a show of worldliness might be used as a smoke-screen. But why should a smoke-screen be required?

  ‘I suppose Hugh had a few drinks at some party,’ I said, ‘and distributed tickets broadcast.’

  In the end I convinced myself of the probability of this surmise. Isobel did not express any views on the subject. However, when she arrived at the flat, Priscilla explained that Moreland, the day before, had visited, in some professional capacity, the place where the Opera fund was administered. There, ‘rummaging about in his pocket for his cigarettes’, he found this spare ticket ‘crumpled up among a lot of newspaper cuttings, bits of string, and paper-clips’. He had given the ticket to Priscilla, suggesting at the same time that she should come on to Mrs Foxe’s party after the concert. That was a convincing story. It had all the mark of Moreland’s behaviour. We talked of other things; of Erridge, who had cabled for thicker underclothes to be sent him in Barcelona, indicating in this manner that he was not, as some prophesied, likely to return immediately. We discussed Erridge’s prospects in Spain. By the time we reached the concert hall, Priscilla seemed to have come with us that evening by long previous arrangement.

  Moreland was fond of insisting that whatever the critics say, good or bad, all works of art must go through a maturing process before taking their allotted place in the scheme of things. There is nothing particularly original in that opinion, but those who hold firmly to it are on the whole less likely to be spoiled by praise or cast down by blame than others – not necessarily worse artists – who find heaven or hell in each individual press notice. The symphony was, in fact, greeted as a success, but not as an overwhelming success; a solid piece of work that would add to Moreland’s reputation, rather than a detonation of unexampled brilliance. Gossage, fiddling about with the mustard pot at some restaurant, had once remarked (when Moreland was out of the room) that he would be wise to build up his name with a work of just that sort. In the concert hall, there had been a lot of applause; at the same time a faint sense of anti-climax. Even for the most self-disciplined of artists, a public taken by surprise is more stimulating than a public relieved to find that what is offered can be swallowed without the least sharpness on the palate. This was especially true of Moreland, who possessed his healthy share of liking to startle, in spite of his own innate antagonism to professional startlers. However, if the symphony turned out to be a little disappointing to those who may have hoped for something more barbed, the reception was warm enough to cast no suggestion of shadow over a party of celebration.

  ‘That went all right, didn’t it?’ said Isobel.

  ‘It seemed to.’

  ‘I thought it absolutely wonderful,’ said Priscilla.

  I felt great curiosity at the prospect of seeing Mrs Foxe’s house again, not entered since the day when, still a schoolboy, I had lunched there with Stringham and his mot
her. Nothing had changed in the pillared entrance hall. There was, of course, absolutely no reason why anything should have changed, but I had an odd feeling of incongruity about reappearing there as a married man. The transition against this same backcloth was too abrupt. Some interim state, like steps in the gradations of freemasonry, seemed to have been omitted. We were shown up to a crimson damask drawing-room on the first floor, at one end of which sliding doors were open, revealing the room at right angles to be the ‘library – with its huge malachite urn, Romney portrait, Regency bookcases – into which Stringham had brought me on that earlier visit. There I had first encountered the chilly elegance of Commander Foxe; also witnessed Stringham’s method of dealing with his mother’s ‘current husband’.

  Commander Foxe, as it happened, was the first person I saw when we came through the door. He was talking to Lady Huntercombe. From a certain bravado in his manner of addressing her, I suspected he had probably let himself off attending the concert. Mrs Foxe came forward to meet us as we were announced, looking just as she looked at The Duchess of Malfi, changeless, dazzling, dominating. As an old friend of Lady Warminster’s, she had, of course, known Isobel and Priscilla as children. She spoke to them for a moment about their stepmother’s health, then turned to me. I was about to recall to her the circumstances in which we had formerly met in what was now so dim a past, wondering at the same time what on earth I was going to say about Stringham, mention of whose name was clearly unavoidable, when Mrs Foxe herself forestalled me.

  ‘How well I remember when Charles brought you to luncheon here. Do you remember that too? It was just before he sailed for Kenya. We all went to the Russian Ballet that night. Such a pity you could not have come with us. What fun it was in those days . . . Poor Charles . . . He has had such a lot of trouble . . . You know, of course . . . But he is happier now. Tuffy looks after him – Miss Weedon; you met her too when you came here, didn’t you? – and Charles has taken to painting. It has done wonders.’