Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

  ‘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.’

  After Erridge’s return from the Far East, he and Quiggin had met at – of all places – a party given by Mrs Andriadis, whose sole interest now, so it appeared, was the Spanish war. Common sympathy in this cause made reconciliation possible without undue abasement on Quiggin’s part, but the earlier project of founding a paper together was not revived for the moment, although Quiggin re-entered the sphere of Erridge’s patronage.

  ‘I correspond a certain amount with your brother-in-law,’ he had remarked when we had last met, speaking, as he sometimes did, with that slight hint of warning in his voice.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Alf.’

  ‘What do you correspond with him about?’

  ‘Medical supplies for the Spanish Loyalists,’ said Quiggin, pronouncing the words with quiet doggedness, ‘Basque children – there is plenty to do for those with a political conscience.’

  The whole business of Mona had made some strongly self-assertive action to be expected from Erridge; to be, in fact, all but certain to take place sooner or later. After leaving Quiggin, with whom she had been living during the period immediately prior to my own marriage, and setting sail with Erridge for China (where he planned to investigate the political situation), Mona had returned to England only a few months later by herself. No one had been told the cause of this severed relationship, although various stories – largely circulated by Quiggin himself – were current on the subject of Mona’s adventures on the way home. She was the first woman in whom Erridge was known to have taken more than the most casual interest. It was not surprising that they should have found each other mutually incompatible. There was nothing easy-going about Mona’s temperament; while Erridge, notwithstanding passionately humane and liberal principles, was used to having his own way in the smallest respect, his high-minded nonconformity of life in general absolving him, where other people were concerned, from even the irksome minor disciplines of everyday convention.

  By leaving her husband, Peter Templer, in the first instance, Mona had undeniably shown aims directed to something less banal than mere marriage to a comparatively rich man. She would certainly never have put herself out for Erridge in order to retain him as husband or lover. What she did, in fact, desire from life was less explicable; perhaps, as Templer said after she left him, ‘just to raise hell’. She had never, as once had been supposed, got herself married to Quiggin, so no question existed of further divorce proceedings. The Tolland family were less complacent about that fact than might have been expected.

  ‘Personally, I think it was the greatest pity Erry failed to hold on to Minna, or whatever her name was,’ Norah said. ‘She sounds as if she might have done him a lot of good.’

  Only George and Frederica dissented from this view among Erridge’s brothers and sisters. More distant relations were probably divided about equally between those who resented, and those who thoroughly enjoyed, the idea of Erridge making a mésalliance. Lady Warminster’s opinion was unknown. Possibly she too, in secret, considered – like Strindberg – any marriage better than none at all. Erridge himself, since his return from Asia, had remained alone, shut up in Thrubworth, occupying himself with those Spanish activities now to take a more decided form, refusing to attend to other more local matters, however pressing. The question of death duties had recently been reopened by the taxation authorities, the payment of which threatened a considerable sale of land to raise the money required. Only

  Norah, in face of opposition, had effected an entry into Thrubworth not long before this, reporting afterwards that her eldest brother had been ‘pretty morose’. No one knew whether Erridge had achieved any degree of success in getting to the bottom of Far Eastern problems. Probably China and Japan, like his own estate, were now forgotten in contrast with a more fashionable preoccupation with Spain. To someone of Erridge’s views and temperament, finding himself in the position he found himself, the Spanish war clearly offered a solution. Robert agreed in seeing nothing surprising in his brother’s decision.

  ‘Like big-game hunting in Edwardian days,’ said Robert, ‘or going to the Crusades a few years earlier. There will be one or two newspaper paragraphs about “the Red Earl”, I suppose. Bound to be. Still, Erry gets remarkably little publicity as a rule, which is just as well. For some reason he has never become news. I hope he doesn’t go and get killed. I shouldn’t think he would, would you? Very well able to look after himself in his own way. All the same, a man I used to sit next to at school was shot in the street in Jerusalem the other day. In the back, just as he was getting into a taxi to go and have a spot of dinner. But he was a professional soldier and they have to expect that sort of thing. Rather different for someone like Erry who is a pacifist. I can’t see the point of being a pacifist if you don’t keep out of the way of fighting. Anyway, we can none of us be certain of surviving when the next war comes.’

  ‘What will Erry do?’

  ‘I suppose there will be a lot of the sort of people he likes out there already,’ said Robert. ‘His beard and those clothes will be all the go. He’ll hang about Barcelona, lending a hand with the gardening, or the washing up, to show he isn’t a snob. I think it is rather dashing of him to take this step considering his hypochondria. Of course, George would at least make some effort to keep up Thrubworth properly if he inherited. I say, I hope everyone is not going to be late. I am rather hungry this morning.’

  ‘You haven’t told me who is coming yet.’

  ‘Nor I have. Well, the guest of honour is St John Clarke, the novelist. I expect you know him of old, as a brother of the pen.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, Robert, I have never met St John Clarke. Who else?’

  ‘Blanche, Priscilla-George and Veronica-Sue and Roddy.’
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  ‘But why St John Clarke?’

  ‘I gather he more or less asked himself. His name is held on the books, you know. He used to turn up occasionally at Aunt Molly’s. I remember Hugo being sick over him as a child. Probably St John Clarke sheered off the place after that. Of course he may be going to lend a hand with the Maria-Theresa book. I have only just thought of that possibility.’

  Lady Warminster used sometimes to announce that she was receiving ‘help’ with one or another of her biographies from some fairly well-known figure – usually a distinguished politician or civil servant – although it was never explained what form this help took. Probably they adjusted the grammar.

  ‘They tell me about punctuation,’ she used to say.

  This intermittent publication of an historical biography had in no way brought Lady Warminster into the literary world, nor could her house be said to present any of the features of a ‘salon’ . A well-known author like St John Clarke was therefore an unexpected guest. At the Jeavonses’ everything was possible. There was no one on earth who could occasion surprise there. Lady Warminster, on the contrary, living a very different sort of life, saw only relations and a few old friends. Even minor celebrities were rare, and, when they appeared, tended to be submerged by the family.

  Blanche and Priscilla entered the room at that moment, bearing between them on a tray a jigsaw puzzle, newly completed and brought downstairs to be admired.

  When people called Blanche ‘dotty’, no question of incipient madness was implied, nor even mild imbecility. Indeed, after a first meeting it was possible to part company from her without suspicion that something might be slightly amiss. However, few who knew her well doubted that something, somewhere, had unquestionably gone a little wrong. Quieter than the rest of her sisters, good-looking, always friendly, always prepared to take on tedious tasks, Blanche would rarely initiate a conversation. She would answer with a perfectly appropriate phrase if herself addressed, but she never seemed to feel the need to comment on any but the most trivial topics. The world, the people amongst whom she moved, appeared to make no impression on her. Life was a dream that scarcely even purported to hold within its promise any semblance of reality. The cumulative effect of this chronic sleep-walking through her days – which far surpassed that vagueness of manner often to be found in persons well equipped to look after their own interest – together with her own acceptance of the fact that she was not quite like other people, did not care at all that she was different, had finally established Blanche’s reputation for ‘dottiness’. That was all. The impression of being undeveloped, unawakened, which perhaps in some degree Robert shared, may have caused both to prefer rather secret lives. Publicly, Blanche was almost always occupied with good works: girls’ clubs in the East End; charities in which her uncle, Alfred Tolland, was concerned for which he sought her help. Blanche’s practical activities were usually very successful so far as the end in view, although she herself never troubled to take much credit for them. Nor did she show any interest in getting married, though in her time not without admirers.

  ‘We’ve finished it at last,’ she said, indicating the puzzle. ‘It took five months in all – with everyone who came to the house having a go. Then one afternoon the cats broke most of it up. The last few pieces were due to Priscilla’s brilliance.’

  She showed a huge representation of Venice, a blue-grey Santa Maria della Salute, reflected in blue-grey waters of the canal, against a blue-grey sky. Priscilla, six or seven years younger than her sister, longer-legged, with fairer, untidy hair, was then about twenty. In spite of his own good resolutions to marry an heiress, Chips Lovell had shown interest in her for a time; apparently without things coming to much. Priscilla had at present several beaux, successfully concealing her own feelings about them. She was not at all like her sister, Norah, in disparaging the whole male sex, but the young men she met at dances never seemed quite what she required. There was talk of her taking a job. A fund was being organised for the promotion of opera, and Robert, who knew some of the members of the board, thought he could find her a place in its office.

  ‘How is Isobel?’ Priscilla asked rather truculently, as if she had not yet forgiven her immediately elder sister, even after two years, for getting married before herself.

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

  ‘I looked in the day before yesterday,’ said Priscilla. ‘It is a grimmish place, isn’t it. I say, have you heard about Erry?’

  ‘Robert told me this moment.’

  ‘Erry is mad, of course. Do you know, I realised that for the first time when I was seven years old and he was grown up. Something about the way he was eating his pudding. I knew I must be growing up myself when I grasped that. Hullo, Veronica, hullo, George.’

  The manner in which he wore his immensely discreet suit, rather than a slight, fair, fluffy moustache, caused George Tolland to retain the flavour of his service with the Brigade of Guards. Years before, when still a schoolboy, I had travelled to London with Sunny Farebrother, that business friend of Peter Templer’s father, and he had remarked in the train: ‘It helps to look like a soldier in the City. Fellows think they can get the better of you even before they start. That is always an advantage in doing a deal.’ Perhaps George Tolland held the same theory. Certainly he had done nothing to modify this air of having just come off parade. Whether assumed consciously or not, the style rather suited him, and was quite unlike Ted Jeavons’s down-at-heel look of being a wartime ex-officer. George was said to work like a slave in the City and seemed quite content with a social life offered chiefly by his own relations.

  However, George had astonished everyone about eighteen months earlier by making an unexpected marriage. In some ways even Erridge’s adventure with Mona had surprised his family less. Erridge was a recognised eccentric. He made a virtue of behaving oddly. In taking Mona abroad he had even, in a sense, improved his reputation for normality by showing himself capable of such an act. George, on the other hand, was fond of drawing attention – especially in contrasting himself with Erridge – to the exemplary, even, as he insisted, deliberately snobbish lines upon which his own life was run. ‘I can never see the objection to being a snob,’ George used to say. ‘It seems far the most sensible thing to be.’ Apparent simplicity of outlook is always suspicious. This remark should have put everyone on their guard. It was a sign that something was taking place under the surface of George’s immaculate facade. However, since the vast majority accept at face value the personality any given individual puts forward as his own, no one in the least expected George to marry the woman he did. Veronica was the former wife of a businessman called Collins, whose job took him to Lagos for most of the year. She had two children by her first husband (‘Native women,’ said Chips Lovell, ‘also some trouble about a cheque,’) whom she had divorced a year or two before meeting George at some party given by City friends. A big brunette, not pretty, but with plenty of ‘attack’, Veronica was popular with her ‘in-laws’, especially Lady Warminster. She was older than George, now to all appearances completely under her thumb.

  ‘How is Isobel, Nick?’ Veronica asked. ‘I went to see her last week. She was looking a bit washed out. I’d have gone again, but one of the kids was running a temperature and I got stuck in the house for a day or two. I hear St John Clarke is coming to lunch. Isn’t that exciting? I used to love Fields of Amaranth when I was a girl. I never seem to get any time for reading now.’

  George and Veronica were almost immediately followed into the room by Susan and her husband, Roddy Cutts, also in the City, now an M.P. Tall, sandy-haired, bland, Roddy smiled ceaselessly. The House of Commons had, if anything, increased a tendency, probably congenital, to behave with a shade more assiduity than ordinary politeness required; a trait that gave Roddy some of the bearing of a clergyman at a school-treat. Always smiling, his eyes roved for ever round the room, while he offered his hosts their own food, and made a point of talking chie
fly to people he did not know, as if he felt these could not be altogether comfortable if still unacquainted with himself. In spite of accepting, indeed courting, this duty of putting young and old at their ease, he lacked the powerful memory – perhaps also the interest in individual differences of character – required to retain in the mind names and personal attributes; a weakness that sometimes impaired this eternal campaign of universal good-will. All the same, Roddy was able, ambitious, quite a formidable figure.

  George and Roddy did not exactly dislike one another, but a certain faint sense of tension existed between them. Roddy, who came of a long line of bankers on his father’s side, while his mother, Lady Augusta’s, family could claim an almost equal tradition of shrewd business grasp, undoubtedly regarded George as an amateur where money matters were concerned. George, on the other hand, was clearly made impatient when Roddy, speaking as a professional politician, explained in simple language the trend of public affairs, particularly the military implications of world strategy in relation to the growing strength of Germany. Besides, Susan was George’s favourite sister, so there may have been a touch of jealousy about her too. Susan was a pretty girl, not a beauty, but lively and, like her husband, ambitious; possessing plenty of that taste for ‘occasion’ so necessary to the wife of a man committed to public life.

  Lady Warminster now appeared in the room. She had probably mastered her habitual unpunctuality at meals in honour of St John Clarke. Slighter in build than her sister, Molly Jeavons, she looked as usual like a very patrician sibyl about to announce a calamitous disaster of which she had personally given due and disregarded warning. This Cassandra-like air of being closely in touch with sacred mysteries, even with the Black Arts themselves, was not entirely misleading. Lady Warminster was prone to fortune-tellers and those connected with divination. She was fond of retailing their startling predictions. I found that, in her day, she had even consulted Uncle Giles’s fortune-telling friend, Mrs Erdleigh, whom she rated high as an oracle, although the two of them had long been out of touch, and had not ‘put the cards out’ together for years.