‘What a couple,’ he commented.
I had to admit they were extraordinary enough. Quiggin had resumed his account of St. John Clarke, his state of health and his eccentricities, the last of which were represented by his new secretary in a decidedly different light from that in which they had been displayed by Members. St. John Clarke’s every action was now expressed in Marxist terms, as if some political Circe had overnight turned the novelist into an entirely Left Wing animal. No doubt Quiggin judged it necessary to handle his new situation firmly on account of the widespread gossip regarding St. John Clarke’s change of secretary; for in circles frequented by Members and Quiggin ceaseless argument had taken place as to which of them had ‘behaved badly’.
Thinking it best from my firm’s point of view to open diplomatic relations, as it were, with the new government, I had asked if there was any hope of our receiving the Isbister introduction in the near future. Quiggin’s answer to this had been to make an affirmative gesture with his hands. I had seen Members employ the same movement, perhaps derived by both of them from St. John Clarke himself.
‘That was exactly what I wanted to discuss when I came to the Ritz,’ Quiggin had said. ‘But you insisted on going out with your wealthy friends.’
‘You must admit that I arranged for you to meet my wealthy friends, as you call them, at the first opportunity—within twenty-four hours, as a matter of fact.’
Quiggin smiled and inclined his head, as if assenting to my claim that some amends had been attempted.
‘As I have tried to explain,’ he said, ‘St. J.’s views have changed a good deal lately. Indeed, he has entirely come round to my own opinion—that the present situation cannot last much longer. We will not tolerate it. All thinking men are agreed about that. St. J. wants to do the introduction when his health gets a bit better—and he has time to spare from his political interests—but he has decided to write the Isbister foreword from a Marxist point of view.’
‘You ought to have obtained some first-hand information for him when Marx came through on Planchette.’
Quiggin frowned at this levity.
‘What rot that was,’ he said. ‘I suppose Mark and his psychoanalyst gang would explain it by one of their dissertations on the subconscious. Perhaps in that particular respect they would be right. No doubt they would add a lot of irrelevant stuff about Surrealism. But to return to Isbister’s pictures, I think they would not make a bad subject treated in that particular manner.’
‘You could preach a whole Marxist sermon on the portrait of Peter Templer’s father alone.’
‘You could, indeed,’ said Quiggin, who seemed not absolutely sure that the matter in hand was being negotiated with sufficient seriousness. ‘But what a charming person Mrs. Templer is. She has changed a lot since her days as a model, or mannequin, or whatever she was. It is a great pity she never seems to see any intelligent people now. I can’t think how she can stand that stockbroker husband of hers. How rich is he?’
‘He took a bit of a knock in the slump.’
‘How do they get on together?’
‘All right, so far as I know.’
‘St. J. always says there is “nothing sadder than a happy marriage”.’
‘Is that why he doesn’t risk it himself?’
‘I should think Mona will go off with somebody,’ said Quiggin, decisively.
I considered this comment impertinent, though there was certainly no reason why Quiggin and Templer should be expected to like one another. Perhaps Quiggin’s instinct was correct, I thought, however unwilling I might be to agree openly with him. There could be no doubt that the Templers’ marriage was not going very well. At the same time, I did not intend to discuss them with Quiggin, to whom, in any case, there seemed no point in explaining Templer’s merits. Quiggin would not appreciate these even if they were brought to his notice; while, if it suited him, he would always be ready to reverse his opinion about Templer or anyone else.
By then I had become sceptical of seeing the Isbister introduction, Marxist or otherwise. In itself, this latest suggestion did not strike me as specially surprising. Taking into account the fact that St. John Clarke had made the plunge into ‘modernism’, the project seemed neither more nor less extraordinary than tackling Isbister’s pictures from the point of view of Psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Roman Catholicism, Social Credit, or any other specialised approach. In fact some such doctrinal method of attack was then becoming very much the mode; taking the place of the highly coloured critical flights of an earlier generation that still persisted in some quarters, or the severely technical criticism of the æsthetic puritans who had ruled the roost since the war.
The foreword would now, no doubt, speak of Isbister ‘laughing up his sleeve’ at the rich men and public notabilities he had painted; though Members, who, with St. John Clarke, had once visited Isbister’s studio in St. John’s Wood for some kind of a reception held there, had declared that nothing could have exceeded the painter’s obsequiousness to his richer patrons. Members was not always reliable in such matters, but it was certainly true that Isbister’s portraits seemed to combine as a rule an effort to flatter his client with apparent attempts to make some comment to be easily understood by the public. Perhaps it was this inward struggle that imparted to his pictures that peculiar fascination to which I have already referred. However, so far as my firm was concerned, the goal was merely to get the introduction written and the book published.
‘What is Mark doing now?’ I asked.
Quiggin looked surprised at the question; as if everyone must know by now that Members was doing very well for himself.
‘With Boggis & Stone—you know they used to be the Vox Populi Press—we got him the job.’
‘Who were “we”?’
‘St. J. and myself. St. J. arranged most of it through Howard Craggs. As you know, Craggs used to be the managing director of the Vox Populi.’
‘But I thought Mark wasn’t much interested in politics. Aren’t all Boggis & Stone’s books about Lenin and Trotsky and Litvinov and the Days of October and all that?’
Quiggin agreed, with an air of rather forced gaiety.
‘Well, haven’t most of us been living in a fool’s paradise far too long now?’ he said, speaking as if to make an appeal to my better side. ‘Isn’t it time that Mark—and others too—took some notice of what is happening in the world?’
‘Does he get a living wage at Boggis & Stone’s?’
‘With his journalism he can make do. A small firm like that can’t afford to pay a very munificent salary, it’s true. He still gets a retainer from St. J. for sorting out the books once a month.’
I did not imagine this last arrangement was very popular with Quiggin from the way he spoke of it.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I persuaded St. J. to arrange for Mark to have some sort of a footing in a more politically alive world before he got rid of him. That is where the future lies for all of us.’
‘Did Gypsy Jones transfer from the Vox Populi to Boggis & Stone?’
Quiggin laughed now with real amusement.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I forgot you knew her. She left quite a time before the amalgamation took place. She has something better to do now.’
He paused and moistened his lips; adding rather mysteriously:
‘They say Gypsy is well looked on by the Party.’
This remark did not convey much to me in those days. I was more interested to see how carefully Quiggin’s plans must have been laid to have prepared a place for Members even before he had been ejected from his job. That certainly showed forethought.
‘Are you writing another book?’ said Quiggin.
‘Trying to—and you?’
‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.
He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.
‘Personally, I am not too keen to rush into prin
t,’ he said.
‘I am still collecting material for my survey, Unburnt Boats.’
I did not meet Members to hear his side of the story until much later, in fact on that same afternoon of the Isbister Memorial Exhibition. I ran into him on my way through Hyde Park, not far from the Achilles Statue. (As it happened, it was close to the spot where I had come on Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, the day we had visited the Albert Memorial together.)
The weather had turned colder again, and the park was dank, with a kind of sea mist veiling the trees. Members looked shabbier than was usual for him: shabby and rather worried. In our undergraduate days he had been a tall, willowy, gesticulating figure, freckled and beady-eyed; hurrying through the lanes and byways of the university, abstractedly alone, like the Scholar-Gypsy, or straggling along the shopfronts of the town in the company of acquaintances, seemingly chosen for their peculiar resemblance to himself. Now he had grown into a terse, emaciated, rather determined young man, with a neat profile and chilly manner: a person people were beginning to know by name. In fact the critics, as a whole, had spoken so highly of his latest volume of verse—the one through which an undercurrent of psychoanalytical phraseology had intermittently run—that even Quiggin (usually as sparing of praise as Uncle Giles himself) had, in one of his more unbending moments at a sherry party, gone so far as to admit publicly:
‘Mark has arrived.’
As St. John Clarke’s secretary, Members had been competent to deal at a moment’s notice with most worldly problems. For example, he could cut short the beery protests of some broken-down crony of the novelist’s past, arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep—or, to be more precise, on the landing of the block of flats where St. John Clarke lived—with a view to borrowing ‘a fiver’ on the strength of ‘the old days’. Any such former boon companion, if strong-willed, might have got away with ‘half a sovereign’ (as St. John Clarke always called that sum) had he gained entry to the novelist himself. With Members as a buffer, he soon found himself escorted to the lift, having to plan, as he descended, both then and for the future, economic attack elsewhere.
Alternatively, the matter to be regulated might be the behaviour of some great lady, aware that St. John Clarke was a person of a certain limited eminence, but at the same time ignorant of his credentials to celebrity. Again, Members could put right a situation that had gone amiss. Lady Huntercombe must have been guilty of some such social dissonance at her own table (before a secretary had come into existence to adjust such matters by a subsequent word) because Members was fond of quoting a mot of his master’s to the effect that dinner at the Huntercombes’ possessed ‘only two dramatic features—the wine was a farce and the food a tragedy’.
In fact to get rid of a secretary who performed his often difficult functions so effectively was a rash step on the part of a man who liked to be steered painlessly through the shoals and shallows of social life. Indeed, looking back afterwards, the dismissal of Members might almost be regarded as a landmark in the general disintegration of society in its traditional form. It was an act of individual folly on the part of St. John Clarke; a piece of recklessness that well illustrates the mixture of self-assurance and ennui which together contributed so much to condition the state of mind of people like St. John Clarke at that time. Of course I did not recognise its broader aspects then. The duel between Members and Quiggin seemed merely an entertaining conflict to watch, rather than the significant crumbling of social foundations.
On that dank afternoon in the park Members had abandoned some of his accustomed coldness of manner. He seemed glad to talk to someone—probably to anyone—about his recent ejection. He began on the subject at once, drawing his tightly-waisted overcoat more closely round him, while he contracted his sharp, beady brown eyes. Separation from St. John Clarke, and association with the firm of Boggis & Stone, had for some reason renewed his former resemblance to an ingeniously constructed marionette or rag doll.
‘There had been a slight sense of strain for some months between St. J. and myself,’ he said. ‘An absolutely trivial matter about taking a girl out to dinner. Perhaps rather foolishly, I had told St. J. I was going to a lecture on the Little Entente. Howard Craggs—whom I am now working with—happened to be introducing the lecturer, and so of course within twenty-four hours he had managed to mention to St. J. the fact that I had not been present. It was awkward, naturally, but I did not think St. J. really minded.
‘But why did you want to know about the Little Entente?’
‘St. J. had begun to be rather keen on what he called “the European Situation”,’ said Members, brushing aside my surprise as almost impertinent. ‘I always liked to humour his whims.’
‘But I thought his great thing was the Ivory Tower?’
‘Of course, I found out later that Quiggin had put him up to “the European Situation”,’ admitted Members, grudgingly. ‘But after all, an artist has certain responsibilities. I expect you are a supporter of the League yourself, my dear Nicholas.’
He smiled as he uttered the last part of the sentence, though speaking as if he intended to administer a slight, if well deserved, rebuke. In doing this he involuntarily adopted a more personal rendering of Quiggin’s own nasal intonation, which rendered quite unnecessary the explanation that the idea had been Quiggin’s. Probably the very words he used were Quiggin’s, too.
‘But politics were just what you used to complain of in Quiggin.’
‘Perhaps Quiggin was right in that respect, if in no other,’ said Members, giving his tinny, bitter laugh.
‘And then?’
‘It turned out that St. J.’s feelings were rather hurt.’
Members paused, as if he did not know how best to set about explaining the situation further. He shook his head once or twice in his old, abstracted Scholar-Gypsy manner. Then he began, as it were, at a new place in his narrative.
‘As you probably know,’ he continued, ‘I can say without boasting that I have done a good deal to change—why should I not say it?—to improve St. J.’s attitude towards intellectual matters. Do you know, when I first came to him he thought Matisse was a plage—no, I mean it.’
He made no attempt to relax his features, nor join in audible amusement at such a state of affairs. Instead, he continued to record St. John Clarke’s shortcomings.
‘That much quoted remark of his: “Gorki is a Russian d’Annunzio”—he got it from me. I happened to say at tea one day that I thought if d’Annunzio had been born in Nijni Novgorod he would have had much the same career as Gorki. All St. J. did was to turn the words round and use them as his own.’
‘But you still see him from time to time?’
Members shied away his rather distinguished profile like a high-bred but displeased horse.
‘Yes—and no,’ he conceded. ‘It’s rather awkward. I don’t know how much Quiggin told you, nor if he spoke the truth.’
‘He said you came in occasionally to look after the books.’
‘Only once in a way. I’ve got to earn a living somehow. Besides, I am attached to St. J.—even after the way he has behaved. I need not tell you that he does not like parting with money. I scarcely get enough for my work on the books to cover my bus fares. It is a strain having to avoid that âme de boue, too, whenever I visit the flat. He is usually about somewhere, spying on everyone who crosses the threshold.’
‘And what about St. John Clarke’s conversion to Marxism?’
‘When I first persuaded St. J. to look at the world in a contemporary manner,’ said Members slowly, adopting the tone of one determined not to be hurried in his story by those whose interest in it was actuated only by vulgar curiosity—‘When I first persuaded him to that, I took an early opportunity to show him Quiggin. After all, Quiggin was supposed to be my friend—and, whatever one may think of his behaviour as a friend, he has—or had—some talent.’
Members waited for my agreement before continuing, as if the thought of displacement by a talentless
Quiggin would add additional horror to his own position. I concurred that Quiggin’s talent was only too apparent.
‘From the very beginning I feared the risk of things going wrong on account of St. J.’s squeamishness about people’s personal appearance. For example, I insisted that Quiggin should put on a clean shirt when he came to see St. J. I told him to attend to his nails. I even gave him an orange stick with which to do so.’
‘And these preparations were successful?’
‘They met once or twice. Quiggin was even asked to the flat. They got on better than I had expected. I admit that. All the same, I never felt that the meetings were really enjoyable. I was sorry about that, because I thought Quiggin’s ideas would be useful to St. J. I do not always agree with Quiggin’s approach to such things as the arts, for example, but he is keenly aware of present-day tendencies. However, I decided in the end to explain to Quiggin that I feared St. J. was not very much taken with him.’
‘Did Quiggin accept that?’
‘He did,’ said Members, again speaking with bitterness. ‘He accepted it without a murmur. That, in itself, should have put me on my guard. I know now that almost as soon as I introduced them, they began to see each other when I was not present.’
Members checked himself at this point, perhaps feeling that to push his indictment to such lengths bordered on absurdity.
‘Of course, there was no particular reason why they should not meet,’ he allowed. ‘It was just odd—and rather unfriendly—that neither of them should have mentioned their meetings to me. St. J. always loves new people. “Unmade friends are like unmade beds,” he has often said. “They should be attended to early in the morning.”’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 1 Page 59
