‘The act of conversion does, though.’
‘Besides, this will open up a new, much more lively world of social life. One must admit that.’
‘Of course.’
‘You are probably right.’
Perhaps it was surprising that nothing of the kind had happened earlier, because St. John Clarke had employed a whole dynasty of secretaries before Members. But former secretaries had been expected to work hard in the background, rather than to exist as an important element in the household. Members had built up the post to something far more influential than anything achieved by those who had gone before him. The fact was that, as St. John Clarke grew older, he wrote less, while his desire to cut a social figure gained in volume. He began to require a secretary who was something more than a subordinate to answer the telephone and remember the date of invitations. It was natural enough that St. John Clarke, who was unmarried, should wish to delegate power in his establishment, and rely on someone to help him plan his daily life. He was fortunate in finding a young man so well equipped for the job; for even those who did not much care for Members personally had to admit that his methods, often erratic, were on the whole admirably suited to the life St. John Clarke liked to lead.
‘Nothing equivocal about the position of Members in that ménage, do you think?’ said Barnby.
‘Not in the least.’
‘I don’t think St. John Clarke is interested in either sex,’ said Barnby. ‘He fell in love with himself at first sight and it is a passion to which he has always remained faithful.’
‘Self-love seems so often unrequited.’
‘But not in the case of St. John Clarke,’ said Barnby. ‘He is entirely capable of getting along without what most of the rest of us need.’
I had often heard that particular question discussed. Although his novels not uncommonly dealt with the intricate problems of married life, St. John Clarke did not, in general, greatly care for the society of women, except that of ladies in a position to invite him to agreeable dinners and week-end parties. Such hospitality was, after all, no more than a small and fitting return for the labours of a lifetime, and one that few but the envious would have begrudged him. However, this lack of interest in the opposite sex had from time to time given rise to gossip. Those persons who make a hobby, even a kind of duty, of tracking down malicious whispers to their source were forced to report in the case of St. John Clarke that nothing in the smallest degree reprobate could be confirmed. This did not prevent the circulation of a certain amount of rather spiteful badinage on the subject of his secretary. Members was impervious to any such innuendo, perhaps even encouraging it to screen his own affairs with women. St. John Clarke, indifferent to this indulgence himself, naturally disapproved of an irregular life in others: especially in someone at such close quarters.
‘So there he goes,’ said Barnby. ‘Head-first into the contemporary world.’
He hunched his shoulders, and made a grimace, as if to express the violence, even agony, that had accompanied St. John Clarke’s æsthetic metamorphosis. By easy stages we moved off to dinner at Foppa’s.
2.
A YEAR OR more later Isbister died. He had been in bad health for some little time, and caught pneumonia during a period of convalescence. The question of the introduction, pigeon-holed indefinitely, since St. John Clarke utterly refused to answer letters on the subject, was now brought into the light again by the obituaries. Little or no general news was about at the time, so these notices were fuller than might have been expected. One of them called Isbister ‘the British Franz Hals’. There were photographs of him, with his Van Dyck beard and Inverness cape, walking with Mrs. Isbister, a former model, the ‘Morwenna’ of many of his figure subjects. This was clearly the occasion to make another effort to complete and publish The Art of Horace Isbister. Artists, especially academic artists, can pass quickly into the shadows: forgotten as if they had never been.
Almost as a last resort, therefore, it had been arranged that I should meet Mark Members out of office hours, and talk things over ‘as man to man’. For this assignation Members had chosen—of all places—the Ritz. Since becoming St. John Clarke’s secretary he had acquired a taste for rich surroundings. It was that prolonged, flat, cheerless week that follows Christmas. My own existence seemed infinitely stagnant, relieved only by work on another book. Those interminable latter days of the dying year create an interval, as it were, of moral suspension: one form of life already passed away before another has had time to assert some new, endemic characteristic. Imminent change of direction is for some reason often foreshadowed by such colourless patches of time.
Along Piccadilly a north wind was blowing down the side streets, roaring hoarsely for a minute or two at a time, then dropping suddenly into silence; then again, after a brief pause, beginning to roar once more, as if perpetually raging against the inconsistency of human conduct. The arches of the portico gave some shelter from this hurricane, at the same time forming a sort of antechamber leading on one side, through lighted glass, into another, milder country, where struggle against the forces of nature was at least less explicit than on the pavements. Outside was the northern winter; here among the palms the climate was almost tropical.
Although a Saturday evening, the place was crowded. A suggestion of life in warmer cities, far away from London, was increased by the presence of a large party of South Americans camped out not far from where I found a seat at one of the grey marble-topped tables. They were grouped picturesquely beneath the figure of the bronze nymph perched in her grotto of artificial rocks and fresh green ferns, a large family spreading over three or four of the tables while they chatted amicably with one another. There were swarthy young men with blue chins and pretty girls in smart frocks, the latter descending in point of age to mere children with big black eyes and brightly coloured bows in their hair. A bald, neat, elderly man, the rosette of some order in his buttonhole, his grey moustache closely clipped, discoursed gravely with two enormously animated ladies, both getting a shade plump in their black dresses.
Away on her pinnacle, the nymph seemed at once a member of this Latin family party, and yet at the same time morally separate from them: an English girl, perhaps, staying with relations possessing business interests in South America, herself in love for the first time after a visit to some neighbouring estancia. Now she had strayed away from her hosts to enjoy delicious private thoughts in peace while she examined the grimacing face of the river-god carved in stone on the short surface of wall by the grotto. Pensive, quite unaware of the young tritons violently attempting to waft her away from the fountain by sounding their conches at full blast, she gazed full of wonder that no crystal stream gushed from the water-god’s contorted jaws. Perhaps in such a place she expected a torrent of champagne. Although stark naked, the nymph looked immensely respectable; less provocative, indeed, than some of the fully dressed young women seated below her, whose olive skins and silk stockings helped to complete this most unwintry scene.
Waiting for someone in a public place develops a sense of individual loneliness, so that amongst all this pale pink and sage green furniture, under decorations of rich cream and dull gold, I felt myself cut off from the rest of the world. I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed. Those South Americans sitting opposite, coming from a Continent I had never visited, regarding which I possessed only the most superficial scraps of information, seemed in some respects easier to conceive in terms of a novel than most of the English people sitting round the room. Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony—in which all classes of this island converse—upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.
How, I asked myself, could a writer attempt to describe in a novel such a young man as Mark Members, for example, possessing so mu
ch in common with myself, yet so different? How could this difference be expressed to that grave middle-aged South American gentleman talking to the plump ladies in black? Viewed from some distance off, Members and I might reasonably be considered almost identical units of the same organism, scarcely to be differentiated even by the sociological expert. We were both about the same age, had been to the same university, and were committed to the same profession of literature; though Members could certainly claim in that sphere a more notable place than myself, having by then published several books of poems and made some name for himself as a critic.
Thinking about Members that evening, I found myself unable to consider him without prejudice. He had been, I now realised, responsible for preventing St. John Clarke from writing the Isbister introduction. That was in itself understandable. However, he had also prevaricated about the matter in a way that showed disregard for the fact that we had known each other for a long time; and had always got along together pretty well. There were undoubtedly difficulties on his side too. Prejudice was to be avoided if—as I had idly pictured him—Members were to form the basis of a character in a novel. Alternatively, prejudice might prove the very element through which to capture and pin down unequivocally the otherwise elusive nature of what was of interest, discarding by its selective power the empty, unprofitable shell making up that side of Members untranslatable into terms of art; concentrating his final essence, his position, as it were, in eternity, into the medium of words.
Any but the most crude indication of my own personality would be, I reflected, equally hard to transcribe; at any rate one that did not sound a little absurd. It was all very well for Mrs. Erdleigh to generalise; far less easy to take an objective view oneself. Even the bare facts had an unreal, almost satirical ring when committed to paper, say in the manner of innumerable Russian stories of the nineteenth century: ‘I was born in the city of L——, the son of an infantry officer . . .’ To convey much that was relevant to the reader’s mind by such phrases was in this country hardly possible. Too many factors had to be taken into consideration. Understatement, too, had its own banality; for, skirting cheap romanticism, it could also encourage evasion of unpalatable facts.
However, these meditations on writing were dispersed by the South Americans, who now rose in a body, and, with a good deal of talking and shrill laughter, trooped down the steps, making for the Arlington Street entrance. Their removal perceptibly thinned the population of the palm court. Among a sea of countenances, stamped like the skin of Renoir’s women with that curiously pink, silky surface that seems to come from prolonged sitting about in Ritz hotels, I noticed several familiar faces. Some of these belonged to girls once encountered at dances, now no longer known, probably married; moving at any rate in circles I did not frequent.
Margaret Budd was there, with a lady who looked like an aunt or mother-in-law. In the end this ‘beauty’ had married a Scotch landowner, a husband rather older than might have been expected for such a lovely girl. He was in the whisky business, said to be hypochondriacal and bad-tempered. Although by then mother of at least two children, Margaret still looked like one of those golden-haired, blue-eyed dolls which say, ‘Ma-Ma’ and ‘Pa-Pa’, closing their eyes when tilted backward: unchanged in her possession of that peculiarly English beauty, scarcely to be altered by grey hair or the pallor of age. Not far from her, on one of the sofas, sandwiched between two men, both of whom had the air of being rather rich, sat a tall, blonde young woman I recognised as Lady Ardglass, popularly supposed to have been for a short time mistress of Prince Theodoric. Unlike Margaret Budd—whose married name I could not remember—Bijou Ardglass appeared distinctly older: more than a little ravaged by the demands of her strenuous existence. She had lost some of that gay, energetic air of being ready for anything which she had so abundantly possessed when I had first seen her at Mrs. Andriadis’s party. That occasion seemed an eternity ago.
As time passed, people leaving, others arriving, I began increasingly to suspect that Members was not going to show up. That would not be out of character, because cutting appointments was a recognised element in his method of conducting life. This habit—to be in general associated with a strong, sometimes frustrated desire to impose the will—is usually attributed on each specific occasion to the fact that ‘something better turned up’. Such defaulters are almost as a matter of course reproached with trying to make a more profitable use of their time. Perhaps, in reality, self-interest in its crudest form plays less part in these deviations than might be supposed. The manœuvre may often be undertaken for its own sake. The person awaited deliberately withholds himself from the person awaiting. Mere absence is in this manner turned into a form of action, even potentially violent in its consequences.
Possibly Members, from an inner compulsion, had suddenly decided to establish ascendancy by such an assertion of the will. On the other hand, the action would in the circumstances represent such an infinitesimal score against life in general that his absence, if deliberate, was probably attributable to some minor move in domestic politics vis-à-vis St. John Clarke. I was thinking over these possibilities, rather gloomily wondering whether or not I would withdraw or stay a few minutes longer, when an immensely familiar head and shoulders became visible for a second through a kind of window, or embrasure, looking out from the palm court on to the lower levels of the passage and rooms beyond. It was Peter Templer. A moment later he strolled up the steps.
For a few seconds Templer gazed thoughtfully round the room, as if contemplating the deterioration of a landscape, known from youth, once famed for its natural beauty, now ruined beyond recall. He was about to turn away, when he caught sight of me and came towards the table. It must have been at least three years since we had met. His sleekly brushed hair and long, rather elegant stride were just the same. His face was perhaps a shade fuller, and his eyes at once began to give out that familiar blue mechanical sparkle that I remembered so well from our schooldays. With a red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark suit, his shirt cuffs cut tightly round the wrist so that somehow his links asserted themselves unduly, Templer’s air was distinctly prosperous. But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.
‘I suppose you are waiting for someone, Nick,’ he said, drawing up a chair. ‘Some ripe little piece?’
‘You’re very wide of the mark.’
‘Then a dowager is going to buy your dinner—after which she will make you an offer?’
‘No such luck.’
‘What then?’
‘I’m waiting for a man.’
‘I say, old boy, sorry to have been so inquisitive. Things have come to that, have they?’
‘You couldn’t know.’
‘I should have guessed.’
‘Have a drink, anyway.’
I remembered reading, some years before, an obituary notice in the Morning Post, referring to his father’s death. This paragraph, signed ‘A.S.F.’, was, in fact, a brief personal memoir rather than a bald account of the late Mr. Templer’s career. Although the deceased’s chairmanship of various companies was mentioned—his financial interests had been chiefly in cement—more emphasis was laid on his delight in sport, especially boxing, his many undisclosed benefactions to charity, the kind heart within him, always cloaked by a deceptively brusque manner. The initials, together with a certain banality of phrasing, suggested the hand of Sunny Farebrother, Mr. Templer’s younger City associate I had met at their house. That visit had been the sole occasion when I had seen Templer’s father. I had wondered vaguely—to use a favourite expression of his son’s—‘how much he had cut up for’. Details about money are always of interest; even so, I did not give the matter much thought. Already I had begun to think of Peter Templer as a friend of my schooldays rather than one connected with that more recent period of occasional luncheons together, during the year following my own establishment in London after coming down from the university. When, once i
n a way, I had attended the annual dinner for members of Le Bas’s House, Templer had never been present.
That we had ceased to meet fairly regularly was due no doubt to some extent to Templer’s chronic inability—as our housemaster Le Bas would have said—to ‘keep up’ a friendship. He moved entirely within the orbit of events of the moment, looking neither forward nor backward. If we happened to run across each other, we arranged to do something together; not otherwise. This mutual detachment had been brought about also by the circumstances of my own life. To be circumscribed by people constituting the same professional community as myself was no wish of mine; rather the contrary. However, an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is. Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle. Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession; those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasure of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with reflective or imaginative pursuits are for ever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.
Perhaps Templer himself lay somewhere within the range of this definition. If so, he gave little indication of it. In fact, if taxed, there can be no doubt that he would have denied any such thing. The outward sign that seemed to place him within this category was his own unwillingness ever wholly to accept the people amongst whom he had chosen to live. A curious streak of melancholy seemed to link him with a less arid manner of life than that to which he seemed irrevocably committed. At least I supposed something of that sort could still be said of his life; for I knew little or nothing of his daily routine, in or out of the office, though suspecting that neither his activities, nor his friends, were of a kind likely to be very sympathetic to myself.