‘I think he goes away soon to get married.’
‘To the girl he was with?’
‘I think so. Mr. Clarke ask me to visit him when your friend is gone for some weeks. He says he will be lonely and would like to talk.’
Probably feeling that he had wasted enough time already with the company assembled in the room, and at the same time unwilling to give too much away to someone he did not know, Guggenbühl returned, after saying this, to the model theatre. Ostentatiously, he continued to play about with its accessories. We drank our beer. Even Umfraville seemed a little put out of countenance by Guggenbühl, who had certainly brought an atmosphere of peculiar unfriendliness and disquiet into the room. Mrs. Andriadis herself perhaps took some pleasure in the general discomfiture for which he was responsible. The imposition of one kind of a guest upon another is a form of exercising power that appeals to most persons who have devoted a good deal of their life to entertaining. Mrs. Andriadis, as a hostess of long standing and varied experience, was probably no exception. In addition to that, she, like St. John Clarke, had evidently succumbed recently to a political conversion, using Guggenbühl as her vehicle. His uncompromising behaviour no doubt expressed to perfection the role to which he was assigned in her mind: the scourge of frivolous persons of the sort she knew so well.
One of the essential gifts of an accomplished hostess is an ability to dismiss, quietly and speedily, guests who have overstayed their welcome. Mrs. Andriadis must have possessed this ingenuity to an unusual degree. I can remember no details of how our party was shifted. Perhaps Umfraville made a movement to go that was quickly accepted. Brief good-byes were said. One way or another, in an unbelievably short space of time, we found ourselves once more in Park Lane.
‘You see,’ said Umfraville. ‘Even Milly . . .’
Some sort of a discussion followed as to whether or not the evening should be brought to a close at this point. Umfraville and Anne Stepney were unwilling to go home; Barnby was uncertain what he wanted to do; Jean and I agreed that we had had enough. The end of it was that the other two decided to accompany Umfraville to a place where a ‘last drink’ could be obtained. Other people’s behaviour were unimportant to me; for in some way the day had righted itself, and once more the two of us seemed close together.
5.
WHEN, IN DESCRIBING Widmerpool’s new employment, Templer had spoken of ‘the Acceptance World’, I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element—happiness, for example—is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.
I did not see Templer himself until later in the summer, when I attended the Old Boy Dinner for members of Le Bas’s house. That year the dinner was held at the Ritz. We met in one of the subterranean passages leading to the private room where we were to eat. It was a warm, rather stuffy July evening. Templer, like a Frenchman, wore a white waistcoat with his dinner-jacket, a fashion of the moment, perhaps by then already a little outmoded.
‘We always seem to meet in these gorgeous halls,’ he said.
‘We do.’
‘I expect you’ve heard that Mona bolted,’ he went on quickly. ‘Joined up with that friend of yours of the remarkable suit and strong political views.’
His voice was casual, but it had a note of obsession as if his nerves were on edge. His appearance was unchanged, possibly a little thinner.
Mona’s elopement had certainly been discussed widely. In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame. In the Templers’ case public opinion had turned out unexpectedly favourable to Mona, probably because Templer himself was unknown to most of the people who talked to me of the matter. Normal inaccuracies of gossip were increased by this ignorance. In one version, Mona was represented as immensely rich, ill treated by an elderly, unsuccessful stockbroker; another described Templer as unable to fulfil a husband’s role from physical dislike of women. A third account included a twenty-minute hand-to-hand struggle between the two men, at the end of which Quiggin had gained the victory: a narrative sometimes varied to a form in which Templer beat Quiggin unconscious with a shooting-stick. In a different vein was yet another story describing Templer, infatuated with his secretary, paying Quiggin a large sum to take Mona off his hands.
On the whole people are unwilling to understand even comparatively simple situations where husband and wife are concerned; indeed, a simple explanation is the last thing ever acceptable. Here, certainly, was something complicated enough, a striking reversal of what might be thought the ordinary course of events. Templer, a man undoubtedly attractive to women, loses his wife to Quiggin, a man usually ill at ease in women’s company: Mona, as Anna Karenin, directing her romantic feelings towards Karenin as a lover, rather than Vronsky as a husband. For me, the irony was emphasised by Templer being my first schoolboy friend to seem perfectly at home with the opposite sex; indeed, the first to have practical experience in that quarter. But conflict between the sexes might be compared with the engagement of boxers in which the best style is not always victorious.
‘What will they live on?’ Templer said. ‘Mona is quite an expensive luxury in her way.’
I had wondered that, too, especially in the light of an experience of a few weeks before, when sitting in the Café Royal with Barnby. In those days there was a female orchestra raised on a dais at one side of the huge room where you had drinks. They were playing In a Persian Market, and in that noisy, crowded, glaring, for some reason rather ominus atmosphere, which seemed specially designed to hear such confidences, Barnby had been telling me that matters were at an end between Anne Stepney and himself. That had not specially surprised me after the evening at Foppa’s. Barnby had reached the climax of his story when Quiggin and Mark Members passed our table, side by side, on their way to the diners’ end of the room. That was, to say the least, unexpected. They appeared to be on perfectly friendly terms with each other. When they saw us, Members had given a distant, evasive smile, but Quiggin stopped to speak. He seemed in an excellent humour.
‘How are you, Nick?’
‘All right.’
‘Mark and I are going to celebrate the completion of Unburnt Boats,’ he said. ‘It is a wonderful thing to finish a book.’
‘When is it to appear?’
‘Autumn.’
I felt sure Quiggin had stopped like this in order to make some statement that would define more clearly his own position. That would certainly be a reasonable aim on his part. I was curious to know why the two of them were friends again; also to learn what was happening about Quiggin and Mona. Such information as I possessed then had come through Jean, who knew from her brother only that they had gone abroad together. At the same time, as a friend of Templer’s, I did not want to appear too obviously willing to condone the fact that Quiggin had eloped with his wife.
‘Mona and I are in Sussex now,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that could almost be described as unctuous, so much did it avoid his usual harsh note. ‘We have been lent a cottage. I am just up for the night to see Mark and make final arrangements with my publisher.’
He talked as if he had been married to Mona, or at least lived with her, for years; just as, a few months earlier, he had spoken as if he had always been St. John Clarke’s secretary. It seemed hard to do anything but accept the relationship as a fait accompli. Such things have to be.
‘Can you deal with St. John Clarke from
so far away?’
‘How do you mean?’
Quiggin’s face clouded, taking on an expression suggesting he had heard the name of St. John Clarke, but was quite unable to place its associations.
‘Aren’t you still his secretary?’
‘Oh, good gracious, no,’ said Quiggin, unable to repress a laugh at the idea.
‘I hadn’t heard you’d left him.’
‘But he has become a Trotskyist.’
‘What form does it take?’
Quiggin laughed again. He evidently wished to show his complete agreement that the situation regarding St. John Clarke was so preposterous that only a certain degree of jocularity could carry it off. Laughter, his manner indicated, was a more civilised reaction than the savage rage that would have been the natural emotion of most right-minded persons on hearing the news for the first time.
‘The chief form,’ he said, ‘is that he consequently now requires a secretary who is also a Trotskyist.’
‘Who has he got?’
‘You would not know him.’
‘Someone beyond the pale?’
‘He has found a young German to pander to him, as a matter of fact. One Guggenbühl.’
‘I have met him as a matter of fact.’
‘Have you?’ said Quiggin, without interest. ‘Then I should advise you to steer clear of Trotskyists in the future, if I were you.’
‘Was this very sudden?’
‘My own departure was not entirely involuntary,’ said Quiggin. ‘At first I thought the man would rise above the difficulties of my domestic situation. I—and Mona, too—did everything to assist and humour him. In the end it was no good.’
He had moved off then, at the same time gathering in Members, who had been chatting to a girl in dark glasses sitting at a neighbouring table.
‘We shall stay in the country until the divorce comes through,’ he had said over his shoulder.
The story going round was that Mona had been introduced by Quiggin to St. John Clarke as a political sympathiser. Only later had the novelist discovered the story of her close association with Quiggin. He had begun to make difficulties at once. Quiggin, seeing that circumstances prevented the continuance of his job, made a goodish bargain with St. John Clarke, and departed. Guggenbühl must have stepped into the vacuum. No one seemed to know the precise moment when he had taken Quiggin’s place; nor how matters remained regarding Mrs. Andriadis.
Like Templer, I wondered how Quiggin and Mona would make two ends meet, but these details could hardly be gone into then and there in the Ritz.
‘I suppose Quiggin keeps afloat,’ I said. ‘For one thing, he must have just had an advance for his book. Still, I don’t expect that was anything colossal.’
‘That aunt of Mona’s died the other day,’ said Templer. ‘She left Mona her savings—a thousand or so, I think.’
‘So they won’t starve.’
‘As a matter of fact I haven’t cut her allowance yet,’ he said, reddening slightly. ‘I suppose one will have to in due course.’
He paused.
‘I must say it was the hell of a surprise,’ he said. ‘We’d had plenty of rows, but I certainly never thought she would go off with a chap who looked quite so like something the cat had brought in.’
I could only laugh and agree. These things are capable of no real explanation. Mona’s behaviour was perhaps to be examined in the light of her exalted feelings for Quiggin as a literary figure. Combined with this was, no doubt, a kind of envy of her husband’s former successes with other women; for such successes with the opposite sex put him, as it were, in direct competition with herself. It is, after all, envy rather than jealousy that causes most of the trouble in married life.
‘I’ve really come here tonight to see Widmerpool,’ said Templer, as if he wished to change the subject. ‘Bob Duport is in England again. I think I told you Widmerpool might help him land on his feet.’
I felt a sense of uneasiness that he found it natural to tell me this. Jean had always insisted that her brother knew nothing of the two of us. Probably she was right; though I could never be sure that someone with such highly developed instincts where relations between the sexes were concerned could remain entirely unaware that his sister was having a love affair. On the other hand he never saw us together. No doubt, so far as Jean was concerned, he would have regarded a lover as only natural in her situation. He was an exception to the general rule that made Barnby, for example, puritanically disapproving of an irregular life in others. In any case, he probably spoke of Duport in the way people so often do in such circumstances, ignorant of the facts, yet moved by some unconscious inner process to link significant names together. All the same, I was conscious of a feeling of foreboding. I was going to see Jean that night; after the dinner was at an end.
‘I am rather hopeful things will be patched up with Jean, if Bob’s business gets into running order again,’ Templer said. ‘The whole family can’t be in a permanent state of being deserted by their husbands and wives. I gather Bob is no longer sleeping with Bijou Ardglass, which was the real cause of the trouble, I think.’
‘Prince Theodoric’s girl friend?’
‘That’s the one. Started life as a mannequin. Then married Ardglass as his second wife. When he died the title, and nearly all the money, went to a distant cousin, so she had to earn a living somehow. Still, it was inconvenient she should have picked on Bob.’
By this time we had reached the ante-room where Le Bas’s Old Boys were assembling. Le Bas himself had not yet arrived, but Whitney, Maiden, Simson, Brandreth, Ghika, and Fettiplace-Jones were standing about, sipping drinks, and chatting uneasily. All of them, except Ghika, were already showing signs of the wear and tear of life. Whitney was all but unrecognisable with a moustache; Maiden had taken to spectacles; Simson was prematurely bald; Fettiplace-Jones, who was talking to Widmerpool without much show of enjoyment, although he still looked like a distinguished undergraduate, had developed that ingratiating, almost cringing manner that some politicians assume to avoid an appearance of thrusting themselves forward. Fettiplace-Jones had been Captain of the House when I had arrived there as a new boy and had left at the end of that term. He was now Member of Parliament for some northern constituency.
Several others came in behind Templer and myself. Soon the room became fairly crowded. Most of the new arrivals were older or younger than my own period, so that I knew them only by sight from previous dinners. As it happened, I had not attended a Le Bas dinner for some little time. I hardly knew why I was there that year, for it was exceptional for an old friend like Templer to turn up. I think I had a subdued curiosity to see if Dicky Umfraville would put in an appearance, and fulfil his promise to ‘tear the place in half’. A chance meeting with Maiden, one of the organisers had settled it, and I came. Maiden now buttonholed Templer, and, at the same moment, Fettiplace-Jones moved away from Widmerpool to speak with Simson, who was said to be doing well at the Bar. I found Widmerpool beside me.
‘Why, hullo—hullo—Nicholas——’ he said.
He glared through his thick glasses, the side pieces of which were becoming increasingly embedded in wedges of fat below his temples. At the same time he transmitted one of those skull-like smiles of conventional friendliness to be generally associated with conviviality of a political sort. He was getting steadily fatter. His dinner-jacket no longer fitted him: perhaps had never done so with much success. Yet he carried this unhappy garment with more of an air than he would have achieved in the old days; certainly with more of an air than he had ever worn the famous overcoat for which he had been notorious at school.
We had met once or twice, always by chance, during the previous few years. On each occasion he had been going abroad for the Donners-Brebner Company. ‘Doing pretty well,’ he had always remarked, when asked how things were with him. His small eyes had glistened behind his spectacles when he had said this. There was no reason to disbelieve in his success, though I suspected at the time
that his job might be more splendid in his own eyes than when regarded by some City figure like Templer. However, after Templer’s more recent treatment of him, I supposed that I must be wrong in presuming exaggeration on Widmerpool’s part. Although two or three years older than myself, he could still be little more than thirty. No doubt he was ‘doing well’. With the self-confidence he had developed, he moved now with a kind of strut, a curious adaptation of that uneasy, rubber-shod tread, squeaking rhythmically down the interminable linoleum of our school-days. I remembered how Barbara Goring (whom we had both been in love with, and now I had not thought of for years) had once poured sugar over his head at a dance. She would hardly do that today. Yet Widmerpool had never entirely overcome his innate oddness; one might almost say, his monstrosity. In that he resembled Quiggin. Perhaps it was the determination of each to live by the will alone. At any rate, you noticed Widmerpool immediately upon entering a room. That would have given him satisfaction.
‘Do you know, I nearly forgot your Christian name,’ he said, not without geniality. ‘I have so many things to remember these days. I was just telling Fettiplace-Jones about North Africa. In my opinion we should hand back Gibraltar to Spain, taking Ceuta in exchange. Fettiplace-Jones was in general agreement. He belongs to a group in Parliament particularly interested in foreign affairs. I have just come back from those parts.’
‘For Donners-Brebner?’
He nodded, puffing out his lips and assuming the appearance of a huge fish.
‘But not in the future,’ he said, breathing inward hard. ‘I’m changing my trade.’
‘I heard rumours.’
‘Of what?’
‘That you were joining the Acceptance World.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’
Widmerpool sniggered.
‘And you?’ he asked.
‘Nothing much.’
‘Still producing your art books? It was art books, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes—and I wrote a book myself.’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 1 Page 64
