However, various strands, controlled without much method and then invisible to me, imparted a certain irregular pattern to Templer’s personal affairs. For example, he liked his friends to be rich and engrossed in whatever business occupied them. They had to be serious about money, though relatively dissipated in their private lives; to possess no social ambitions whatever, though at the same time to be disfigured by no grave social defects. The women had to be good-looking, the men tolerably proficient at golf and bridge, without making a fetish of those pastimes. Both sexes, when entertained by him, were expected to drink fairly heavily; although, here again, intoxication must not be carried to excess. In fact, broadly speaking, Templer disliked anything that could be labelled ‘bohemian’, as much as anything with claims to be ‘smart’. He did not fancy even that sort of ‘smartness’ to be found to a limited extent in the City, a form of life which had, after all, so much in common with his own tastes.
‘You know, I really rather hate the well-born,’ he used to say. ‘Not that I see many of them these days.’
Nothing might be thought easier than gratification of these modest requirements among a circle of intimates; and the difficulty Templer found in settling down to any one set of persons limited by these terms of reference, and at the same time satisfactory to himself, was really remarkable. This side of him suggested a kind of ‘spoiled intellectual’. There was also the curious sympathy he could extend to such matters as the story of the St. John Clarke introduction, which he now made me outline after I had explained my purpose in the Ritz. The facts could scarcely have been very interesting to him, but he followed their detail as if alteration of the bank rate or fluctuations of the copper market were ultimately concerned. Perhaps this capacity for careful attention to other people’s affairs was the basis of his own success in business.
‘Of course I know about Isbister, R.A.,’ he said. ‘He painted that shocking picture of my old man. I tried to pop it when he dropped off the hooks, but there were no takers. I know about St. John Clarke, too. Mona reads his books. Absolutely laps them up, in fact.’
‘Who is Mona?’
‘Oh, yes, you haven’t met her yet, have you? Mona is my wife.’
‘But, my dear Peter, I had no idea you were married.’
‘Strange, isn’t it? Our wedding anniversary, matter of fact. Broke as I am, I thought we could gnaw a cutlet at the Grill to celebrate. Why not join us? Your chap is obviously not going to turn up.’
He began to speak of his own affairs, talking in just the way he did when we used to have tea together at school. Complaining of having lost a lot of money in ‘the slump’, he explained that he still owned a house in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead.
‘More or less camping out there now,’ he said. ‘With a married couple looking after us. The woman does the cooking. The man can drive a car and service it pretty well, but he hasn’t the foggiest idea about looking after my clothes.’
I asked about his marriage.
‘We met first at a road-house near Staines. Mona was being entertained there by a somewhat uncouth individual called Snider, an advertising agent. Snider’s firm was using her as a photographer’s model. You’ll know her face when you see her. Laxatives—halitosis—even her closest friend wouldn’t tell her—and so on.’
I discovered in due course that Mona’s chief appearance on the posters had been to advertise toothpaste; but both she and her husband were inclined to emphasise other more picturesque possibilities.
‘She’d already had a fairly adventurous career by then,’ Templer said.
He began to enlarge on this last piece of information, like a man unable to forgo irritating the quiescent nerve of a potentially aching tooth. I had the impression that he was still very much in love with his wife, but that things were perhaps not going as well as he could wish. That would explain a jerkiness of manner that suggested worry. The story itself seemed commonplace enough, yet containing implications of Templer’s own recurrent desire to escape from whatever world enclosed him.
‘She says she’s partly Swiss,’ he said. ‘Her father was an engineer in Birmingham, always being fired for being tight. However, both parents are dead. The only relation she’s got is an aunt with a house in Worthing—a boarding-house, I think.’
I saw at once that Mona, whatever else her characteristics, was a wife liberally absolving Templer from additional family ties. That fact, perhaps counting for little compared with deeper considerations, would at the same time seem a great advantage in his eyes. This desire to avoid new relations through marriage was connected with an innate unwillingness to identify himself too closely with any one social group. In that taste, oddly enougn, he resembled Uncle Giles, each of them considering himself master of a more sweeping mobility of action by voluntary withdrawal from competition at any given social level of existence.
At the time of narration, I did not inwardly accept all Templer’s highly coloured statements about his wife, but I was impressed by the apparent depths of his feeling for Mona. Even when telling the story of how his marriage had come about, he had completely abandoned any claim to have employed those high-handed methods he was accustomed to advocate for controlling girls of her sort. I asked what time she was due at the Ritz.
‘When she comes out of the cinema,’ he said. ‘She was determined to see Mädchen in Uniform. I couldn’t face it. After all, one meets quite enough lesbians in real life without going to the pictures to see them.’
‘But it isn’t a film about lesbians.’
‘Oh, isn’t it?’ said Templer. ‘Mona thought it was. She’ll be disappointed if you’re right. However, I’m sure you’re wrong. Jimmy Brent told me about it. He usually knows what’s what in matters of that kind. My sister Jean is with Mona. Did you ever meet her? I can’t remember. They may be a little late, but I’ve booked a table. We can have a drink or two while we wait.’
Jean’s name recalled the last time I had seen her at that luncheon party at Stourwater where I had been taken by the Walpole-Wilsons. I had not thought of her for ages, though some small residue of inner dissatisfaction, which survives all emotional expenditure come to nothing, now returned.
‘Jean’s having a spot of trouble with that husband of hers,’ said Templer. ‘That is why she is staying with us for the moment. She married Bob Duport, you know. He is rather a handful.’
‘So I should imagine.’
‘You don’t know him.’
‘We met when you drove us all into the ditch in your famous second-hand Vauxhall.’
‘My God,’ said Templer, laughing. ‘That was a shambles, wasn’t it? Fancy your remembering that. It must be nearly ten years ago now. The row those bloody girls made. Old Bob was in poor form that day, I remember. He thought he’d picked up a nail after a binge he’d been on a night or two before. Completely false alarm, of course.’
‘As Le Bas once said: “I can’t accept ill health as a valid excuse for ill manners.”’
‘Bob’s not much your sort, but he’s not a bad chap when you get to know him. I was surprised you’d ever heard of him. I’ve had worse brothers-in-law, although, God knows, that’s not saying much. But Bob is difficult. Bad enough running after every girl he meets, but when he goes and loses nearly all his money on top of that, an awkward situation is immediately created.’
‘Are they living apart?’
‘Not officially. Jean is looking for a small flat in town for herself and the kid.’
‘What sex?’
‘Polly, aged three.’
‘And Duport?’
‘Gone abroad, leaving a trail of girl-friends and bad debts behind him. He is trying to put through some big stuff on the metal market. I think the two of them will make it up in due course. I used to think she was mad about him, but you can never tell with women.’
The news that Polly was to be born was the last I had heard of her mother. Little as I could imagine how Jean had brought herself to marry Duport—far less be ‘mad ab
out him’—I had by then learnt that such often inexplicable things must simply be accepted as matters of fact. His sister’s matrimonial troubles evidently impressed Templer as vexatious, though in the circumstances probably unavoidable; certainly not a subject for prolonged discussion.
‘Talking of divorces and such things,’ he said. ‘Do you ever see Charles Stringham now?’
There had been little or no scandal connected with the break-up of Stringham’s marriage. He and Peggy Stepney had parted company without apparent reason, just as their reason for marrying had been outwardly hard to understand. They had bought a house somewhere north of the Park, but neither ever seemed to have lived there for more than a few weeks at a time, certainly seldom together. The house itself, decorated by the approved decorator of that moment, was well spoken of, but I had never been there. The marriage had simply collapsed, so people said, from inanition. I never heard it suggested that Peggy had taken a lover. Stringham, it was true, was seen about with all kinds of women, though nothing specific was alleged against him either. Soon after the decree had been made absolute, Peggy married a cousin, rather older than herself, and went to live in Yorkshire, where her husband possessed a large house, noted in books of authentically recorded ghost stories for being rather badly haunted.
‘That former wife of his—The Lady Peggy—was a good-looking piece,’ said Templer. ‘But, as you know, such grand life is not for me. I prefer simpler pleasures——
‘“Oh, give me a man to whom naught comes amiss,
One horse or another, that country or this. . . .”’
‘You know you’ve always hated hunting and hunting people. Anyway, whose sentiments were those?’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘chaps like you think I’m not properly educated, in spite of the efforts of Le Bas and others, and that I don’t know about beautiful poetry. You find you’re wrong. I know all sorts of little snatches. As a matter of fact I was thinking of women, really, rather than horses, and taking ’em as you find ’em. Not being too choosy about it as Charles has always been. Of course they are easier to take than to find, in my experience—though of course it is not gentlemanly to boast of such things. Anyway, as you know, I have given up all that now.’
At school I could remember Templer claiming that he had never read a book for pleasure in his life; and, although an occasional Edgar Wallace was certainly to be seen in his hand during the period of his last few terms, the quotation was surprising. That was a side of him not entirely unexpected, but usually kept hidden. Incidentally, it was a conversational trick acquired—perhaps consciously copied—from Stringham.
‘You remember the imitations Charles used to do of Widmerpool?’ he said. ‘I expect he is much too grand to remember Widmerpool now.’
‘I saw Widmerpool not so long ago. He is with Donners-Brebner.’
‘But not much longer,’ said Templer. ‘Widmerpool is joining the Acceptance World.’
‘What on earth is that?’
‘Well, actually he is going to become a bill-broker,’ said Templer, laughing. ‘I should have made myself clearer to one not involved in the nefarious ways of the City.’
‘What will he do?’
‘Make a lot of heavy weather. He’ll have to finish his lunch by two o’clock and spend the rest of the day wasting the time of the banks.’
‘But what is the Acceptance World?’
‘If you have goods you want to sell to a firm in Bolivia, you probably do not touch your money in the ordinary way until the stuff arrives there. Certain houses, therefore, are prepared to ‘accept’ the debt. They will advance you the money on the strength of your reputation. It is all right when the going is good, but sooner or later you are tempted to plunge. Then there is an alteration in the value of the Bolivian exchange, or a revolution, or perhaps the firm just goes bust—and you find yourself stung. That is, if you guess wrong.’
‘I see. But why is he leaving Donners-Brebner? He always told me he was such a success there and that Sir Magnus liked him so much.’
‘Widmerpool was doing all right in Donners-Brebner—in fact rather well, as you say,’ said Templer. ‘But he used to bore the pants off everyone in the combine by his intriguing. In the end he got on the nerves of Donners himself. Did you ever come across a fellow called Truscott? Widmerpool took against him, and worked away until he had got him out. Then Donners regretted it, after Truscott had been sacked, and decided Widmerpool was getting too big for his boots. He must go too. The long and the short of it is that Widmerpool is joining this firm of bill-brokers—on the understanding that a good deal of the Donners-Brebner custom follows him there.’
I had never before heard Templer speak of Widmerpool in this matter-of-fact way. At school he had disliked him, or, at best, treated him as a harmless figure of fun. Now, however, Widmerpool had clearly crystallised in Templer’s mind as an ordinary City acquaintance, to be thought of no longer as a subject for laughter, but as a normal vehicle for the transaction of business; perhaps even one particularly useful in that respect on account of former associations.
‘I was trying to get Widmerpool to lend a hand with old Bob,’ said Templer.
‘What would he do?’
‘Bob has evolved a scheme for collecting scrap metal from some place in the Balkans and shipping it home. At least that is the simplest way of explaining what he intends. Widmerpool has said he will try to arrange for Bob to have the agency for Donners-Brebner.’
I was more interested in hearing of this development in Widmerpool’s career than in examining its probable effect on Duport, whose business worries were no concern of mine. However, my attention was at that moment distracted from such matters by the sudden appearance in the palm court of a short, decidedly unconventional figure who now came haltingly up the steps. This person wore a black leather overcoat. His arrival in the Ritz—in those days—was a remarkable event.
Pausing, with a slight gesture of exhaustion that seemed to imply arduous travel over many miles of arid desert or snowy waste (according to whether the climate within or without the hotel was accepted as prevailing), he looked about the room; gazing as if in amazement at the fountain, the nymph, the palms in their pots of Chinese design: then turning his eyes to the chandeliers and the glass of the roof. His bearing was at once furtive, resentful, sagacious, and full of a kind of confidence in his own powers. He seemed to be surveying the tables as if searching for someone, at the same time unable to believe his eyes, while he did so, at the luxuriance of the oasis in which he found himself. He carried no hat, but retained the belted leather overcoat upon which a few drops of moisture could be seen glistening as he advanced farther into the room, an indication that snow or sleet had begun to fall outside. This black leather garment gave a somewhat official air to his appearance, obscurely suggesting a Wellsian man of the future, hierarchic in rank. Signs of damp could also be seen in patches on his sparse fair hair, a thatch failing to roof in completely the dry, yellowish skin of his scalp.
This young man, although already hard to think of as really young on account of the maturity of his expression, was J. G. Quiggin. I had been reflecting on him only a short time earlier in connexion with Mark Members; for the pair of them—Members and Quiggin—were, for some reason, always associated together in the mind. This was not only because I myself had happened to meet both of them during my first term at the university. Other people, too, were accustomed to link their names together, as if they were a business firm, or, more authentically, a couple whose appearance together in public inevitably invoked the thought of a certain sort of literary life. Besides that, a kind of love-hate indissolubly connected them.
Whether or not the birth of this relationship had in fact taken place at that tea party in Sillery’s rooms in college, where we had all met as freshmen, was not easy to say. There at any rate I had first seen Quiggin in his grubby starched collar and subfusc suit. On that occasion Sillery had rather maliciously suggested the acquaintance of Members and Quiggin da
ted from an earlier incarnation; in fact boyhood together—like Isbister and St. John Clarke—in some Midland town. So far as I knew, that assertion had neither been proved nor disproved. Some swore Quiggin and Members were neighbours at home; others that the story was a pure invention, produced in malice, and based on the fact that Sillery had found the two names in the same provincial telephone directory. Sillery certainly devoted a good deal of his time to the study of such works of reference as telephone books and county directories, from which he managed to extract a modicum of information useful to himself. At the same time there were those who firmly believed Members and Quiggin to be related; even first cousins. The question was largely irrelevant; although the acutely combative nature of their friendship, if it could be so called, certainly possessed all that intense, almost vindictive rivalry of kinship.
Quiggin had quietly disappeared from the university without taking a degree. Now, like Members, he had already made some name for himself, though at a somewhat different literary level. He was a professional reviewer of notable ability, much disliked by some of the older critics for the roughness with which he occasionally handled accepted reputations. One of the smaller publishing houses employed him as ‘literary adviser’; a firm of which his friend Howard Craggs (formerly of the Vox Populi Press, now extinct, though partly reincorporated as Boggis & Stone) had recently become a director. A book by Quiggin had been advertised to appear in the spring, but as a rule his works never seemed, at the last moment, to satisfy their author’s high standard of self-criticism. Up to then his manuscripts had always been reported as ‘burnt’, or at best held back for drastic revision.
Quiggin, certainly to himself and his associates, represented a more go-ahead school of thought to that of Members and his circle. Although not himself a poet, he was a great adherent of the new trends of poetry then developing, which deprecated ‘Art for Art’s sake’, a doctrine in a general way propagated by Members. However, Members, too, was moving with the times, his latest volume of verse showing a concern with psychoanalysis; but, although ‘modern’ in the eyes of a writer of an older generation like St. John Clarke, Members—so Quiggin had once remarked—‘drooped too heavily over the past, a crutch with which we younger writers must learn to dispense’. Members, for his part, had been heard complaining that he himself was in sympathy with ‘all liberal and progressive movements’, but ‘J.G. had advanced into a state of mind too political to be understood by civilised people’. In spite of such differences, and reported statements of both of them that they ‘rarely saw each other now’, they were not uncommonly to be found together, arguing or sulking on the banquettes of the Café Royal.