A Dance to the Music of Time: 1st Movement

  Quiggin had made an impression upon Mona, because, almost immediately after we sat down to dinner, she began to make enquiries about him. Possibly, on thinking it over, she felt that his obvious interest in her had deserved greater notice. In answer to her questions, I explained that he was J. G. Quiggin, the literary critic. She at once asserted that she was familiar with his reviews in one of the ‘weeklies’, mentioning, as it happened, a periodical for which, so far as I knew, he had never written.

  ‘He was a splendid fellow in his old leather overcoat,’ said Templer. ‘Did you notice his shirt, too? I expect you know lots of people like that, Nick. To think I was rather worried at not having struggled into a dinner-jacket tonight, and he just breezed in wearing the flannel trousers he had been sleeping in for a fortnight, and not caring a damn. I admire that.’

  ‘I couldn’t remember a thing about meeting him before,’ said Mona. ‘I expect I must have been a bit tight that night, otherwise I should have known his name. He said Mark Members introduced us. Have you heard of him? He is a well-known poet.’

  She said this with an ineffable silliness that was irresistible.

  ‘I was going to meet him here, as a matter of fact, but he never turned up.’

  ‘Oh, were you?’

  She was astonished at this; and impressed. I wondered what on earth Members had told her about himself to have won such respect in her eyes. Afterwards, I found that it was his status as ‘a poet’, rather than his private personality, that made him of such interest to her.

  ‘I never knew Mark well,’ she said, rather apologetic at having suggested such ambitious claims.

  ‘He and Quiggin are usually very thick together.’

  ‘I didn’t realise Nick was waiting for an old friend of yours, sweetie,’ said Templer. ‘Is he one of those fascinating people you sometimes tell me about, who wear beards and sandals and have such curious sexual habits?’

  Mona began to protest, but Jean interrupted her by saying: ‘He’s not a bad poet, is he?’

  ‘I think rather good,’ I said, feeling a sudden unaccountable desire to encourage in her an interest in poetry. ‘He is St. John Clarke’s secretary—or, at least, he was.’

  I remembered then that, if Quiggin was to be believed, the situation between Members and St. John Clarke was a delicate one.

  ‘I used to like St. John Clarke’s novels,’ said Jean. ‘Now I think they are rather awful. Mona adores them.’

  ‘Oh, but they are too wonderful.’

  Mona began to detail some of St. John Clarke’s plots, a formidable undertaking at the best of times. This expression of Jean’s views—that Members was a goodish poet, St. John Clarke a bad novelist—seemed to me to indicate an impressive foothold in literary criticism. I felt now that I wanted to discuss all kind of things with her, but hardly knew where to begin on account of the barrier she seemed to have set up between herself and the rest of the world. I suspected that she might merely be trying to veer away conversation from a period of Mona’s life that would carry too many painful implications for Templer as a husband. It could be design, rather than literary interest. However, Mona herself was unwilling to be deflected from the subject.

  ‘Do you run round with all those people?’ she went on. ‘I used to myself. Then—oh, I don’t know—I lost touch with them. Of course Peter doesn’t much care for that sort of person, do you, sweetie?’

  ‘Rubbish,’ said Templer. ‘I’ve just said how much I liked Mr. J. G. Quiggin. In fact I wish I could meet him again, and find out the name of his tailor.’

  Mona frowned at this refusal to take her remark seriously. She turned to me and said: ‘You know, you are not much like most of Peter’s usual friends yourself.’

  That particular matter was all too complicated to explain, even if amenable to explanation, which I was inclined to doubt. I knew, of course, what she meant. Probably there was something to be said for accepting that opinion. The fact that I was not specially like the general run of Templer’s friends had certainly been emphasised by the appearance of Quiggin. I was rather displeased that the Templers had seen Quiggin. To deal collectively with them on their own plane would have been preferable to that to which Quiggin had somehow steered us all.

  ‘What was the flick like?’ Templer enquired.

  ‘Marvellous,’ said Mona. ‘The sweetest—no, really—but the sweetest little girl you ever saw.’

  ‘She was awfully good,’ said Jean.

  ‘But what happened?’

  ‘Well, this little girl—who was called Manuela—was sent to a very posh German school.’

  ‘Posh?’ said Templer. ‘Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.’

  Rather to my surprise, Mona accepted this rebuke meekly: even blushing slightly.

  ‘Well, Manuela went to this school, and fell passionately in love with one of the mistresses.’

  ‘What did I tell you?’ said Templer. ‘Nick insisted the film wasn’t about lesbians. You see he just poses as a man of the world, and hasn’t really the smallest idea what is going on round him.’

  ‘It isn’t a bit what you mean,’ said Mona, now bursting with indignation. ‘It was a really beautiful story. Manuela tried to kill herself. I cried and cried and cried.’

  ‘It really was good,’ said Jean to me. ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Yes. I liked it.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Templer. ‘If he had seen the film, he would have known it was about lesbians. Look here, Nick, why not come home with us for the week-end? We can run you back to your flat and get a toothbrush. I should like you to see our house, uncomfortable as staying there will be.’

  ‘Yes, do come, darling,’ said Mona, drawing out the words with her absurd articulation. ‘You will find everything quite mad, I’m afraid.’

  She had by then drunk rather a lot of champagne.

  ‘You must come,’ said Jean, speaking in her matter-of-fact tone, almost as if she were giving an order. ‘There are all sorts of things I want to talk about.’

  ‘Of course he’ll come,’ said Templer. ‘But we might have the smallest spot of armagnac first.’

  Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.

  While we were at dinner heavy snow was descending outside. This downfall had ceased by the time my things were collected, though a few flakes were still blowing about in the clear winter air when we set out at last for the Templers’ house. The wind had suddenly dropped. The night was very cold.

  ‘Had to sell the Buick,’ Templer said. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much room at the back of this miserable vehicle.’

  Mona, now comatose after the wine at dinner, rolled herself up in a rug and took the seat in front. Almost immediately she went to sleep. Jean and I sat at the back of the car. We passed through Hammersmith, and the neighbourhood of Chiswick: then out on to the Great West Road. For a time I made desultory conversation. At last she scarcely answered, and I gave it up. Templer, smoking a cigar in the front, also seemed disinclined to talk now that he was at the wheel. We drove along at a good rate.

  On either side of the highway, grotesque buildings, which in daytime resembled the temples of some shoddy, utterly unsympathetic Atlantis, now assumed the appearance of an Arctic city’s frontier forts. Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid beneath were scalding hot.

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nbsp; Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.

  The exact spot must have been a few hundred yards beyond the point where the electrically illuminated young lady in a bathing dress dives eternally through the petrol-tainted air; night and day, winter and summer, never reaching the water of the pool to which she endlessly glides. Like some image of arrested development, she returns for ever, voluntarily, to the springboard from which she started her leap. A few seconds after I had seen this bathing belle journeying, as usual, imperturbably through the frozen air, I took Jean in my arms.

  Her response, so sudden and passionate, seemed surprising only a minute or two later. All at once everything was changed. Her body felt at the same time hard and yielding, giving a kind of glow as if live current issued from it. I used to wonder afterwards whether, in the last resort, of all the time we spent together, however ecstatic, those first moments on the Great West Road were not the best.

  To what extent the sudden movement that brought us together was attributable to sentiment felt years before; to behaviour that was almost an obligation within the Templer orbit; or, finally, to some specific impetus of the car as it covered an unusually bad surface of road, was later impossible to determine with certainty. All I knew was that I had not thought it all out beforehand. This may seem extraordinary in the light of what had gone before; but the behaviour of human beings is, undeniably, extraordinary. The incredible ease with which this evolution took place was almost as if the two of us had previously agreed to embrace at that particular point on the road. The timing had been impeccable.

  We had bowled along much farther through the winter night, under cold, glittering stars, when Templer turned the car off the main road. Passing through byways lined with beech trees, we came at last to a narrow lane where snow still lay thick on the ground. At the end of this, the car entered a drive, virginally white. In the clear moonlight the grotesquely gabled house ahead of us, set among firs, seemed almost a replica of that mansion by the sea formerly inhabited by Templer’s father. Although smaller in size, the likeness of general outline was uncanny. I almost expected to hear the crash of wintry waves beneath a neighbouring cliff. The trees about the garden were powdered with white. Now and then a muffled thud resounded as snow fell through the branches on to the thickly coated ground. Otherwise, all was deathly silent.

  Templer drew up with a jerk in front of the door, the wheels churning up the snow. He climbed quickly from his seat, and went round to the back of the car, to unload from the boot some eatables and wine they had brought from London. At the same moment Mona came out of her sleep or coma. With the rug still wrapped round her, she jumped out of her side of the car, and ran across the Sisley landscape to the front door, which someone had opened from within. As she ran she gave a series of little shrieks of agony at the cold. Her footprints left deep marks on the face of the drive, where the snow lay soft and tender, like the clean, clean sheets of a measureless bed.

  ‘Where shall I find you?’

  ‘Next to you on the left.’

  ‘How soon?’

  ‘Give it half an hour.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Don’t be too long.’

  She laughed softly when she said that, disengaging herself from the rug that covered both of us.

  The interior of the house was equally reminiscent of the Templers’ former home. Isbister’s huge portrait of Mr. Templer still hung in the hall, a reminder of everyday life and unsolved business problems. Such things seemed far removed from this mysterious, snowy world of unreality, where all miracles could occur. There were the same golf clubs and shooting-sticks and tennis racquets; the same barometer, marking the weather on a revolving chart; the same post-box for letters; even the same panelling in light wood that made the place seem like the interior of a vast, extravagant cabinet for cigars.

  ‘What we need,’ said Templer, ‘is a drink. And then I think we shall all be ready for bed.’

  For a second I wondered whether he were aware that something was afoot; but, when he turned to help Mona with the bottles and glasses, I felt sure from their faces that neither had given a thought to any such thing.

  3.

  EARLY IN THE morning, snow was still drifting from a darkened sky across the diamond lattices of the window-panes; floating drearily down upon the white lawns and grey muddy paths of a garden flanked by pines and fir trees. Through these coniferous plantations, which arose above thick laurel bushes, appeared at no great distance glimpses of two or three other houses similar in style to the one in which I found myself; the same red brick and gables, the same walls covered with ivy or virginia creeper.

  This was, no doubt, a settlement of prosperous business men; a reservation, like those created for indigenous inhabitants, or wild animal life, in some region invaded by alien elements: a kind of refuge for beings unfitted to battle with modern conditions, where they might live their own lives, undisturbed and unexploited by an aggressive outer world. In these confines the species might be saved from extinction. I felt miles away from everything, lying there in that bedroom: almost as if I were abroad. The weather was still exceedingly cold. I thought over a conversation I had once had with Barnby.

  ‘Has any writer ever told the truth about women?’ he had asked.

  One of Barnby’s affectations was that he had read little or nothing, although, as a matter of fact, he knew rather thoroughly a small, curiously miscellaneous collection of books.

  ‘Few in this country have tried.’

  ‘No one would believe it if they did.’

  ‘Possibly. Nor about men either, if it comes to that.’

  ‘I intend no cheap cynicism,’ Barnby said. ‘It is merely that in print the truth is not credible for those who have not thought deeply of the matter.’

  ‘That is true of almost everything.’

  ‘To some extent. But painting, for example—where women are concerned—is quite different from writing. In painting you can state everything there is to be said on the subject. In other words, the thing is treated purely æsthetically, almost scientifically. Writers always seem to defer to the wishes of the women themselves.’

  ‘So do painters. What about Reynolds or Boucher?’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Barnby, whose capacity for disregarding points made against him would have supplied the foundation for a dazzling career at the Bar. ‘But in writing—perhaps, as you say, chiefly writing in this country—there is no equivalent, say, of Renoir’s painting. Renoir did not think that all women’s flesh was literally a material like pink satin. He used that colour and texture as a convention to express in a simple manner certain pictorial ideas of his own about women. In fact he did so in order to get on with the job in other aspects of his picture. I never find anything like that in a novel.’

  ‘You find plenty of women with flesh like that sitting in the Ritz.’

  ‘Maybe. And I can paint them. But can you write about them?’

  ‘No real tradition of how women behave exists in English writing. In France there is at least a good rough and ready convention, perhaps not always correct—riddled with every form of romanticism—but at least a pattern to which a writer can work. A French novelist may conform with the convention, or depart from it. His readers know, more or less, which he is doing. Here, every female character has to be treated empirically.’

  ‘Well, after all, so does every woman,’ said Barnby, another of whose dialectical habits was suddenly to switch round and argue against himself. ‘One of the troubles, I think, is that there are too many novelists like St. John Clarke.’

  ‘But novelists of the first rank have not always been attracted to women physically.’

  ‘If of the first rank,’ said Barnby, ‘they may rise above it. If anything less, homosexual no
velists are, I believe, largely responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour.’

  Barnby’s sententious tone had already indicated to me that he was himself entangled in some new adventure. Those utterances, which Mr. Deacon used to call ‘Barnby’s generalisations about women’, were almost always a prelude to a story involving some woman individually. So it had turned out on that occasion.

  ‘When you first make a hit with someone,’ he had continued, ‘you think everything is going all right with the girl, just because it is all right with you. But when you are more used to things, you are always on your guard—prepared for trouble of one sort or another.’

  ‘Who is it this time?’

  ‘A young woman I met on a train.’

  ‘How promiscuous.’

  ‘She inspired a certain confidence.’

  ‘And things are going wrong?’

  ‘On the contrary, going rather well. That is what makes me suspicious.’

  ‘Have you painted her?’

  Barnby rummaged among the brushes, tubes of paint, newspapers, envelopes and bottles that littered the table; coming at last to a large portfolio from which he took a pencil drawing. The picture was of a girl’s head. She looked about twenty. The features, suggested rather than outlined, made her seem uncertain of herself, perhaps on the defensive. Her hair was untidy. There was an air of self-conscious rebellion. Something about the portrait struck me as familiar.

  ‘What is her name?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She won’t tell me.’

  ‘How very secretive.’

  ‘That’s what I think.’

  ‘How often has she been here?’

  ‘Two or three times.’

  I examined the drawing again.

  ‘I’ve met her.’