Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

  ‘What a shabby lot of highbrows have turned out tonight,’ he said, when he saw us. ‘It makes me ashamed to be one.’

  ‘Nobody guesses you are, Mark,’ said Moreland. ‘Not in that natty new suit. They think you are an actuary or an average adjuster.’

  Members laughed his tinny laugh.

  ‘How is sweet music?’ he asked. ‘How are your pale tunes irresolute, Moreland? When is that opera of yours we hear so much about going to appear?’

  ‘I’ve knocked off work on the opera for the moment,’ said Moreland. ‘I’m concentrating on something slighter which I think should appeal to music-lovers of your temperament. It is to be called Music for a Maison de Passe: A Suite.’

  We passed on to where Gossage was standing a short way off by the curtain that screened the foyer from the passage leading to the auditorium. Gossage was talking with a great display of respect to a lady dressed rather too exquisitely for the occasion; the audience that night, as Members had truly remarked, being decidedly unkempt. This lady, slight in figure, I recognised at once as Mrs Foxe, mother of my old friend, Charles Stringham. I had not seen Stringham since Widmerpool and I had put him to bed after too much to drink at an Old Boy Dinner. Mrs Foxe herself I had not set eyes on for ten years; the day she and Commander Foxe had lunched with Stringham in his rooms in college to discuss whether or not he should ‘go down’ before taking a degree.

  Mrs Foxe was quite unchanged. Beautiful in early middle age, she remained still untouched by time. She was accompanied by a girl of seventeen or eighteen, and two young men who looked like undergraduates. Evidently she was hostess to this party, whom I supposed to be relations; connexions possibly of her first husband, Lord Warrington, or her third husband, Buster Foxe. Stringham, child of the intermediate marriage of this South African millionaire’s daughter, used to boast he had no relations; so they were presumably not cousins of his. Gossage, parting now from Mrs Foxe with many smiles and bows, nodded to Moreland with an air of considerable satisfaction as he hurried past. When we reached our seats I saw that Mrs Foxe and her party were sitting a long way away from us. Since I hardly supposed she would remember me, I decided not to approach her during the entr’actes. In any case, she and I had little in common except Stringham himself, of whom I then knew nothing except that his marriage had broken up and he was said to be still drinking too much. He had certainly drunk a lot the night Widmerpool and I had put him to bed. Another reason for taking no step in Mrs Foxe’s direction was that a stage in my life had been reached when I felt that to spend even a short time with a party of that kind would be ‘boring’. For the moment, I had put such things behind me. Perhaps at some future date I should return to them; for the time being I rather prided myself on preferring forms of social life where white ties were not worn. I was even glad there was no likelihood of chance recognition.

  Julia, the Cardinal’s mistress in The Duchess of Malfi, does not come on to the stage until the fourth scene of the first act. Moreland was uneasy until that moment, fidgeting in his seat, giving deep breaths, a habit of his when inwardly disturbed. At the same time, he showed a great deal of enjoyment in Norman Chandler’s earlier speeches as Bosola. Chandler had brought an unexpected solidity to this insidious part. The lightness of his build, and general air of being a dancer rather than an actor, had prepared neither Moreland nor myself for the rendering he presented of ‘this fellow seven years in the galleys for a notorious murder’.

  ‘Do you think Norman talked like Bosola the night he was bargaining with Edgar Deacon about that statuette?’ said Moreland, in an undertone. ‘If so, he must have got the best of it. Did I ever tell you that he hadn’t been paid when Edgar died, so Norman nipped round to the shop and took the thing away again? That was in the Bosola tradition.’

  When at last Matilda Wilson appeared as Julia, Moreland’s face took on a look of intensity, almost of strain, more like worry than love. I had been looking forward to seeing her with the interest one feels in being shown for the first time the woman a close friend proposes to marry; for I now had no doubt from the manner in which the evening had been planned that Matilda must be the girl whom Moreland had in mind when he had spoken of taking a wife. When she first came towards the footlights I was disappointed. I have no talent for guessing what an actress will look like off the stage, but, even allowing for an appearance greatly changed by the removal of make-up and the stiffly angled dress in which she was playing the part, she seemed altogether lacking in conventional prettiness. A minute or two later I began to change my mind. She certainly possessed a forceful, enigmatic personality; none of the film-star looks of the waitress in Casanova’s, but something, one of those resemblances impossible to put into words, made me recall that evening. Matilda Wilson moved gracefully. Apart from that, and the effectiveness of her slow, clear voice and sardonic enunciation, she was not a very ‘finished’ actress. Once or twice I was aware of Moreland glancing in my direction, as if he hoped to discover what I thought of her; but he asked no questions and made no comment when the curtain fell. He shuddered slightly when she replied to Bosola’s lines: ‘Know you me, I am a blunt soldier’, with: ‘The better; sure there wants fire where there are no lively sparks of roughness’.

  When the play was over, we went round to the stage door, penetrating into regions where the habitually cramped accommodation of theatrical dressing-rooms was more than usually in evidence. For a time we wandered about narrow passages filled with little young men who had danced the Masque of Madmen, now dressing, undressing, chattering, washing, playing noisy games of their own, which gave the impression that the action of the play was continuing its course even though the curtain had come down. We found Matilda Wilson’s room at last. She was wearing hardly any clothes, removing her make-up, while Norman Chandler, dressed in a mauve dressing-gown of simulated brocade, sat on a stool beside her, reading a book. I never feel greatly at ease ‘backstage’, and Moreland himself, although by then certainly used enough to such surroundings, was obviously disturbed by the responsibility of having to display his girl for the first time. He need not have worried; Matilda herself was completely at ease. I saw at once, now she was off the stage, how effortless her conquest of Moreland must have been. He possessed, it was true, a certain taste for rather conventional good looks which had to be overcome in favour of beauty of a less obvious kind; in other respects she seemed to have everything he demanded, yet never could find. Barnby always dismissed the idea of intelligence in a woman as no more than a characteristic to be endured. Moreland held different views.

  ‘I don’t want what Rembrandt or Cezanne or Barnby or any other painter may happen to want,’ he used to say. ‘I simply cling to my own preferences. I don’t know what’s good, but I know what I like – not a lot of intellectual snobbery about fat peasant women, or technical talk about masses and planes. After all, painters have to contend professionally with pictorial aspects of the eternal feminine which are quite beside the point where a musician like myself is concerned. With women, I can afford to cut out the chiaroscuro. Choosing the type of girl one likes is about the last thing left that one is allowed to approach subjectively. I shall continue to exercise the option.’

  Matilda Wilson jumped up from her stool as soon as she saw Moreland. Throwing her arms round his neck, she kissed him on the nose. When a woman is described as a ‘jolie laide’ the same particular combination of looks is, for some reason, implied; you expect a brunette, small rather than tall, with a face emphasised by eyebrows and mouth, features which would be too insistent if the eyes did not finally control the general effect – in fact what is also known as beauté de singe. Matilda Wilson was not at all like that. Off the stage, she was taller and thinner than I had supposed, her hair fairish, with large, rather sleepy green eyes. The upper half of her face was pretty enough; the lower, forcefully, even rather coarsely modelled. You felt the beauty of her figure was in some manner the consequence of her own self-control; that a less intelligent woman might ha
ve ‘managed’ her body without the same effectiveness.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she said, in a voice that at once suggested her interlude in the world of Sir Magnus Donners, ‘I am so glad you have turned up at last. Various awful men have been trying to make me go out with them. But I said you were calling for me. I hoped you would not forget as you did last week.’

  ‘Oh, last week,’ said Moreland, looking dreadfully put out, and making a characteristic gesture with his hand, as if about to begin conducting. ‘That muddle was insane of me. Will you ever forgive me, Matty? It upset me so much. Do let me off further mention of it. I am so hopelessly forgetful.’

  He looked rather wildly round him, as if he expected to find some explanation of the cause of bad memory in the furthest recesses of the dressing-room, finally turning to me for support.

  ‘Nick, don’t you find it absolutely impossible nowadays to remember anything?’ he began. ‘Do you know, I was in the Mortimer the other day—’

  Up to that time he had made no attempt to tell Matilda Wilson my name, although no doubt she had been warned that I was probably going to join them at the end of the play. He would certainly have launched into a long train of reminiscence about something or other that had happened to him in the Mortimer, if she had not burst out laughing and kissed him again, this time on the ear. She held out her hand to me, still laughing, and Moreland, now red in the face, insisted that the time had passed for introductory formalities. Meanwhile, Norman Chandler had been finishing his chapter without taking any notice of what was going on round him. Now, he put a marker in his book (which I saw to be Time and Western Man), and, drawing the billowing robes of his rather too large dressing-gown more tightly round him, he rose to his feet.

  ‘ “A lot of awful men”?’ he said, speaking in a voice of old-time melodrama. ‘What do you mean, Matilda? I offered you a bite with Max and me, if your boy friend did not arrive. That was only because you said he was so forgetful, and might easily think he had made a date for the day after tomorrow. I never heard such ingratitude.’

  Matilda put her arm round Chandler’s waist and attempted to smoothe his hair with her brush.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t mean you, darling, of course I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t call you a man. I love you much too much. I mean an awful man who telephoned – and then another awful man who left a note. How could anyone call you awful, Norman, darling?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know so much about that,’ said Chandler, now abandoning the consciously sinister, masculine tones of Bosola, and returning to his more familiar chorus-boy drawl. ‘I’m not always adored as much as you might think from looking at me. I don’t quite know why that is.’

  He put his head on one side, forefinger against cheek, transforming himself to some character of ballet, perhaps the Faun from L’Après-midi.

  ‘You are adored by me,’ said Matilda, kissing him twice before throwing down the hairbrush on the dressing-table. ‘But I really must put a few clothes on.’

  Chandler broke away from her, executing a series of little leaps in the air, although there was not much room for these entrechats. He whizzed round several times, collapsing at last upon his stool.

  ‘Bravo, bravo,’ said Matilda, clapping her hands. ‘You will rival Nijinsky yet, Norman, my sweetie.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Chandler. ‘Your boy friend will be jealous. I can see him working himself up. He can be very violent when roused.’

  Moreland had watched this display of high spirits with enjoyment, except when talk had been of other men taking out Matilda, when his face had clouded. Chandler had probably noticed that. So far from being jealous of Chandler, which would certainly have been absurd in the circumstances, Moreland seemed to welcome these antics as relaxing tension between himself and Matilda. He became more composed in manner. Paradoxically enough, something happened a moment later which paid an obvious tribute to Chandler’s status as a ladies’ man, however little regarded in that role by Moreland and the world at large.

  ‘I will be very quick now,’ said Matilda, ‘and then we will go. I am dying for a bite.’

  She retired behind a small screen calculated to heighten rather than diminish the dramatic effect of her toilet, since her long angular body was scarcely at all concealed, and, in any case, she continually reappeared on the floor of the room to rescue garments belonging to her which lay about there. The scene was a little like those depicted in French eighteenth-century engravings where propriety is archly threatened in the presence of an amorous abbé or two—powdered hair would have suited Matilda, I thought; Moreland, perhaps, too. However, the picture’s static form was interrupted by the sound of some commotion in the passage which caused Chandler to stroll across the room and stand by the half-open door. Some people were passing who must have recognised him, because he suddenly said: ‘Why, hullo, Mrs Foxe,’ in a tone rather different from that used by him a moment before; a friendly tone, but one at the same time faintly deferential, possibly even a shade embarrassed. There was the sudden suggestion that Chandler was on his best behaviour.

  ‘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.’