A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

  Although the demise was not a violent one in the most usual sense of the word, it unquestionably partook at the same time of that spirit of carelessness and informality always so vigorously advocated by Mr Deacon as a precept for pursuing what Sillery liked to call ‘The Good Life’. Sillery’s ideas upon that subject were, of course, rather different, on the whole, from Mr. Deacon’s, in spite of the fact that both of them, even according to their own lights, were adventurers. But, although each looked upon himself as a figure almost Promethean in spirit of independence—godlike, and following ideals of his own, far from the well-worn tracks of fellow men—their chosen roads were also acknowledged by each to be set far apart.

  Mr. Deacon and Sillery must, in fact, have been just about the same age. Possibly they had known each other in their troubled youth (for even Sillery had had to carve out a career for himself in his early years), and some intersection of those unrestricted paths to which each adhered no doubt explained at least a proportion of Sillery’s disapproval of Mr. Deacon’s habits. Any such strictures on Sillery’s part were at least equally attributable to prudence: that sense of self-preservation, and desire to ‘keep on the safe side’, of which Sillery, among the many other qualities to which he could lay claim, possessed more than a fair share.

  When, in an effort to complete the picture, I had once asked Mr. Deacon whether, in the course of his life, he had ever run across Sillery, he had replied in his deep voice, accompanied by that sardonic smile: ‘My father, a man of modest means, did not send me to the university, I sometimes think—with due respect, my dear Nicholas, to your own Alma Mater—that he was right.’

  In that sentence he avoided a direct answer, while framing a form of words not specifically denying possibility of the existence of an ancient antagonism; his careful choice of phrase at the same time excusing him from commenting in any manner whatsoever on the person concerned. It was as if he insisted on upon Sillery’s status as an essentially academical celebrity: a figure not properly to be discussed by one who had never been—as Mr. Deacon was accustomed to put it in the colloquialism of his own generation—‘a ’varsity man’. There was also more than a hint of regret implicit in the deliberately autobiographical nature of this admission, revealing an element to be taken into account in any assessment of Mr. Deacon’s own outlook.

  At the time of his death, few, if any, of Mr. Deacon’s friends knew the jealously guarded secret of his age more exactly than within a year or two; in spite of the fatal accident having taken place on his birthday—or, to be pedantic about chronology, in the small hours of the day following his birthday party. I was myself not present at the latter stages of this celebration, begun at about nine o’clock on the evening before, having preferred, as night was already well advanced, to make for home at a moment when Mr. Deacon, with about half a dozen remaining guests, had decided to move on to a night-club. Mr. Deacon had taken this desertion—my own and that of several other friends, equally weak in spirit—in bad part, quoting: ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind . . .’ rather as if enjoyment of his hospitality had put everyone on his honour to accept subjection to the host’s will for at least a period of twelve hours on end. However, the dissolution of the party was clearly inevitable. The club that was their goal, newly opened, was expected by those conversant with such matters to survive no more than a week or two, before an impending police raid: a punctual visit being, therefore, regarded as a matter of comparative urgency for any amateur of ‘night life’. In that shady place, soon after his arrival there, Mr. Deacon fell down the stairs.

  Even in this undignified mishap there had been, as ever, that touch of martyrdom inseparable from the conduct of his life, since he had been on his way, so it was learnt afterwards, to lodge a complaint with the management regarding the club’s existing sanitary arrangements: universally agreed to be deplorable enough. It was true that he might have taken a little more to drink than was usual for someone who, after the first glass or two, was relatively abstemious in his habit. His behaviour at Mrs. Andriadis’s, occasioned, of course, far more by outraged principles than unaccustomed champagne, had been, so I discovered from Barnby, quite exceptional in its unbridled nature, and had proved, indeed, a source of great worry to Mr. Deacon in the weeks that followed.

  As a matter of fact, I had never learnt how the question of his exit from the house in Hill Street had been finally settled. Whether Mr. Deacon had attempted to justify himself with Mrs. Andriadis, or whether she, on her part, compelled him—with, or without, the assistance of men-servants, Max Pilgrim, or the negro—to clear up the litter of papers in the hall, the future never revealed. Mr. Deacon himself, on subsequent occasions, chose to indicate only in the most general terms that he had found Mrs. Andriadis’s party unenjoyable. When her name had once cropped up in conversation, he echoed a sentiment often expressed by Uncle Giles, in remarking: ‘People’s manners have changed a lot since the war—not always for the better.’ He did not disclose, even to Barnby, who acted in some respects almost as his conscience, the exact reason for his quarrel with the singer, apart from the fact that he had taken exception to specific phrases in the song, so that the nature of his difference with Pilgrim on some earlier occasion remained a matter for speculation.

  However, if undeniable that at Hill Street Mr. Deacon had taken perhaps a glass or two more of champagne than was wise, the luxurious style of the surroundings had no doubt also played their part in stimulating that quixotic desire, never far below the surface in all his conduct, to champion his ideals, wherever he found himself, however unsuitable the occasion. At the night-club he was, of course, in more familiar environment, and it was agreed by everyone present that the fall had been in no way attributable to anything more than a rickety staircase and his own habitual impetuosity. The truth was that, as a man no longer young, he would have been wiser in this, and no doubt in other matters too, to have shown less frenzied haste in attempting to bring about the righting of so many of life’s glaring wrongs.

  At such an hour, in such a place, nothing much was thought of the fall at the time, neither by Mr. Deacon nor the rest of his party. He had complained, so it was said, only of a bruise on his thigh and a ‘shaking up’ inside. Indeed, he had insisted on prolonging the festivities, if they could be so called, until four o’clock in the morning: an hour when Barnby, woken at last after repeated knocking, had been roused to admit him, with Gypsy, once more to the house, because the latch-key had by that time been lost or mislaid. Mr. Deacon had gone into hospital a day or two later. He must have sustained some internal injury, for he died within the week.

  We had met fairly often in the course of renewed acquaintance, for I had taken to dropping in on Barnby once or twice a week, and we would sometimes descend to the shop, or Mr. Deacon’s sitting-room, for a talk, or go across with him to the pub for a drink. Now he was no more. Transition between the states of life and death had been effected with such formidable rapidity that his anniversary seemed scarcely completed before he had been thus silently called away; and, as Barnby remarked some time later, it was ‘hard to think of Edgar without being overwhelmed with moralisings of a somewhat banal kind’. I certainly felt sad that I should not see Mr. Deacon again. The milestones provided by him had now come suddenly to an end. The road stretched forward still.

  ‘Edgar’s sister is picking up the pieces,’ Barnby said. ‘She is a clergyman’s wife, living in Norfolk, and has already had a shattering row with Jones.’

  He had made this remark when informing me by telephone of arrangements made for the funeral, which was to take place on a Saturday: the day, as it happened, upon which I had agreed to have supper with Widmerpool and his mother at their flat. This invitation, arriving in the form of a note from Mrs. Widmerpool, had added that she was looking forward to meeting ‘so old a friend’ of her son’s. I was not sure that this was exactly the light in which I wished, or, indeed, had any right, to appear; although I had to admit to myself that I was curious to learn from Widm
erpool’s lips, as I had not seen him since Stourwater, an account, told from his own point of view, of the course events had taken in connexion with himself and Gypsy Jones. I had already received one summary from Barnby on my first visit to Mr. Deacon’s shop after return from the Walpole-Wilsons’. He had spoken of the subject at once, so that no question of betraying Widmerpool’s confidence arose.

  ‘Your friend paid,’ Barnby had said. ‘And that was all.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Jones told me.’

  ‘Is she to be believed?’

  ‘No statement on that subject can ever be unreservedly accepted,’ said Barnby. ‘But he has never turned up here since. Her story is that he left in a rage.’

  ‘I don’t wonder.’

  Barnby shook his head and laughed. He did not like Gypsy, nor she him, and, so far as he was concerned, that was an end of the matter. I saw his point, though personally I did not share the obduracy of his views. In fact there were moments when Gypsy turned up at the shop and we seemed to get on rather well together. Her egotism was of that entirely unrestrained kind, always hard to resist when accompanied by tolerable looks, a passionate self-absorption of the crudest kind, extending almost far enough to threaten the limits of sanity: with the added attraction of unfamiliar ways and thought. Besides, there was something disarming, almost touching, about her imperfectly concealed respect for ‘books’, which played a considerable part in her conversation when not talking of ‘chalking’ and other political activities. However—as Barbara might have said—there was no need to become sentimental. Gypsy usually showed herself, on the whole, more agreeable than on the first night we had met, but she could still be tiresome enough if the mood so took her.

  ‘Jones is an excellent specimen of middle-class female education brought to its logical conclusions,’ Barnby used to say. ‘She couldn’t be more perfect even if she had gone to the university. Her head is stuffed full of all the most pretentious nonsense you can think of, and she is incapable—but literally incapable—of thought. The upper and lower classes can sometimes keep their daughters in order—the middle classes rarely, if ever. I belong to the latter, and I know.’

  I felt this judgment unnecessarily severe. Claiming, as she did, some elementary knowledge of typing and shorthand, Gypsy was temporarily employed in some unspecified capacity, next-door to Mr. Deacon’s, at the offices of the Vox Populi Press: duties alleged by Barnby to be contingent on ‘sleeping with Craggs’, managing director of that concern. There seemed no reason either to accept or refute this statement, for, as Mr. Deacon used to remark, not without a touch of pride in his voice: ‘Indiscretion is Gypsy’s creed.’ There could be no doubt that she lived up to this specification, although, as a matter of fact, shared political sympathies might equally well have explained close association with Craggs, since the Press (which was, in truth, merely a small publishing business, and did not, as its name implied, print its own publications) was primarily concerned with producing books and pamphlets of an insurgent tone.

  Mr. Deacon had talked a lot about his birthday party before it had taken place, discussing at great length who should, and who should not, be invited. He had determined, for some reason, that it was to be a ‘respectable’ gathering, though no one, not even Barnby and Gypsy Jones, knew where—or rather at whom—Mr. Deacon was likely to draw the line. Naturally, these two were themselves to be present, and they were to ask, at Mr. Deacon’s suggestion, some of their own friends. However, when the names of prospective candidates for invitation were actually put forward, there had been a good deal of argument on Mr. Deacon’s part as to whether or not he could agree to allow some of the postulants ‘in the house’—using the phrase I remembered Stringham attaching to Peter Templer years before—because a great many people, often unknown to themselves, had, at one time or another, caused offence to him in a greater or lesser degree. In the end he relented, vetoing only a few of Barnby’s female acquaintances: procedure which certainly caused no hard feelings on Barnby’s part.

  Speaking for myself, I had been prepared for anything at Mr. Deacon’s party. I was conscious, as it happened, of a certain sense of disappointment, even of annoyance, in my own life, and weariness of its routine. This was because, not many days before, I had rung up the Duports’ house in Hill Street, and a caretaker, or whoever had answered the telephone, had informed me that the Duports had gone abroad again, and were coming back in the spring. This statement was accompanied by various hypotheses and suggestions on the part of the speaker, embedded in a suitable density of hesitation and subterfuge, that made the fact that Jean was, as my informant put it, ‘expecting’, no longer a secret even before this definitive word itself dropped into our conversation. This eventuality, I realised at once, was something to be inevitably associated with the married state; certainly not to be looked upon as unreasonable, or—as Mr. Deacon would say—‘indiscreet’.

  All the same, I felt, as I have said, disappointed, although aware that I could hardly claim that anything had taken place to justify even the faintest suspicion of a broken ‘romance’. In fact, I could not even explain to myself why it was, for some reason, necessary to make this denial—that a relatively serious hope had been blighted—sufficiently clear in my own mind. In short, the situation encouraged the kind of mood that made the prospect of an entertainment such as Mr. Deacon’s party promised to be, acceptable rather than the reverse. The same pervading spirit of being left, emotionally speaking, high and dry on a not specially Elysian coast, had also caused a faint pang, while having my hair cut, at seeing a picture of Prince Theodoric, sitting on the sands of the Lido between Lady Ardglass and a beautiful Brazilian, a reminder of the visit to Stourwater that now seemed so long past, and also of the perennial charm of female companionship in attractive surroundings. On thinking over this photograph, however, I recalled that, even apart from circumstances inherent in our different walks of life, the Prince’s own preferred associate had been Mrs. Wentworth, so that he, too, had probably suffered a lack of fulfilment. Barnby had been delighted when his attention had been drawn to this snapshot.

  ‘I knew Baby would ditch Theodoric,’ he said. ‘I wonder who the Brazilian girl was.’

  He had even expressed a hope that he might succeed in bringing Mrs. Wentworth to Mr. Deacon’s party.

  ‘Somewhere where she would at least be sure of not meeting Donners,’ he had added.

  Certainly, Sir Magnus had not turned up at Mr. Deacon’s, nor, for that matter, anyone at all like him. The sitting-room had been largely cleared of the many objects overflowed from the shop that were usually contained there. Chairs and sofa had been pushed back to the walls, which were hung on all sides, frame to frame, with his own paintings, making a kind of memorial hall of Mr. Deacon’s art. Even this drastic treatment of the furniture did not entirely exempt the place from its habitually old-maidish air, which seemed, as a rule, to be vested in the extraordinary number of knick-knacks, tear-bottles and tiny ornamental cases for needles or toothpicks, that normally littered every available space.

  At either end of the mantelpiece stood a small oval frame—the pair of them uniformly ornamented with sea shells—one of which contained a tinted daguerreotype of Mr. Deacon’s mother, the other enclosing a bearded figure, the likeness, so it appeared, of Walt Whitman, for whom Mr. Deacon possessed a profound admiration. The late Mrs. Deacon’s features so much resembled her son’s as for the picture, at first sight, almost to cause the illusion that he had himself posed, as a jeu d’esprit, in crinoline and pork-pie hat. Juxtaposition of the two portraits was intended, I suppose, to suggest that the American poet, morally and intellectually speaking, represented the true source of Mr. Deacon’s otherwise ignored paternal origins.

  The atmosphere of the room had already become rather thick when I arrived upstairs that night, and a good many bottles and glasses were set about on occasional tables. After the meticulous process of selection to which they had been subjected, the first sight
of the people assembled there came as something of an anti-climax; and Mr. Deacon’s method of choosing was certainly not made at once apparent by a casual glance round the room. A few customers had been invited, picked from the ranks of those specially distinguished in buying expensive ‘antiques’. These were mostly married couples, middle-aged to elderly, their position in life hard to define with any certainty. They laughed rather uneasily throughout the evening, in due course leaving early. The rest of the gathering was predominantly made up of young men, some of whom might reasonably have been considered to fall within Mr. Deacon’s preferential category of ‘respectable’, together with others whose claim to good repute was, at least outwardly, less pronounced: in some cases, even widely open to question.

  There were, however, two persons present who, as it now seems to me, first revealed themselves at Mr. Deacon’s party as linked together in that mysterious manner that circumscribes certain couples, and larger groups of human beings: a subject of which I have already spoken in connexion with Widmerpool and myself. These two were Mark Members and Quiggin; although at that period I was, of course, unable to appreciate that this pair had already begun the course of their long pilgrimage together, regarding them as no more connected with each other than with myself. I had not set eyes upon Quiggin since coming down from the university, although, as it happened, I had already learnt that he was to be invited as the result of a chance remark let fall by Gypsy during discussion of arrangements to be made for the party.