Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (23 page)

‘Erry always regards himself as the only person in the world who has ever been ill,’ she said. ‘His time in Spain seems to have been a total flop. He didn’t get up to the front and he never met Hemingway.’

Erridge, as Norah – and Quiggin before her – had remarked, was keenly interested in his own health; in general not good. Now that he was ill enough for his condition to be recognised as more than troublesome, this physical state was not unsympathetic to him. The sickness gave his existence an increased reality, a deeper seriousness, elements

Erridge felt denied him by his family. Certainly he could now claim to have returned from an area of action. Although he might prefer to receive his relations coldly, he was at least assured of being the centre of Tolland attention. However, as it turned out, he enjoyed this position only for a short time, when his status was all at once prejudiced by his brother Hugo’s motor accident.

Hugo Tolland had ‘come down’ from the university not long before this period, where, in face of continual pressure of a threatening kind from the authorities, he had contrived to stay the course for three years; even managing, to everyone’s surprise, to scrape some sort of degree. The youngest of the male Tollands, Hugo was showing signs of becoming from the family’s point of view the least satisfactory. Erridge, it was true, even before his father died, had been written off as incurably odd; but Erridge was an ‘eldest son’. Even persons of an older generation – like his uncle, Alfred Tolland – who preferred the conventions to be strictly observed, would display their own disciplined acceptance of convention by recognising the fact that Erridge’s behaviour, however regrettable, was his own affair. An eldest son, by no means beyond the reach of criticism, was at the same time excluded from the utter and absolute public disapproval which might encompass younger sons. Besides, no one could tell how an eldest son might turn out after he ‘succeeded’. This was a favourite theme of Chips Lovell’s, who used to talk of ‘the classic case of Henry V and Falstaff’. Erridge might be peculiar; the fact remained he would be – now was – head of the family. Hugo was quite another matter. Hugo would inherit between three and four hundred a year when twenty-one and have to make his own way in the world.

While still at the university, Hugo showed no sign of wishing to prepare himself for that fate. Outwardly, he was a fairly intelligent, not very good-looking, unhappy, rather amusing young man, who kept himself going by wearing unusual clothes and doing perverse things. Because his own generation of undergraduates tended to be interested in politics and economics, both approached from a ‘leftish’ angle, Hugo liked to ‘pose’ – his own word – as an ‘aesthete’. He used to burn joss-sticks in his rooms. He had bought a half-bottle of Green Chartreuse, a liqueur he ‘sipped’ from time to time, which, like the Widow’s cruse, seemed to last for ever; for only during outbreaks of consciously bad behaviour was Hugo much of a drinker. At first Sillery had taken him up, no doubt hoping Hugo might prove an asset in the field where Sillery struggled for power with other dons. Hugo had turned out altogether intractable. Even Sillery, past master at dealing with undergraduates of all complexions and turning their fallibilities to his own advantage, had been embarrassed by Hugo’s arrival at one of his tea parties laden with a stack of pro-Franco pamphlets, which he had distributed among the assembled guests. The company had included a Labour M.P. – a Catholic, as it happened – upon whom Sillery, for his own purposes, was particularly anxious to make a good impression. The story had been greatly enjoyed by Sillery’s old enemy, Brightman, who used to repeat it night after night –
ad nauseam
, his colleagues complained, so Short told me – at High Table.

‘Hugo will never find a place for himself in the contemporary world,’ his sister Norah had declared.

Norah’s conclusion, reached after an argument with Hugo about Spain, was not much at variance with the opinion of the rest of the family. However, this judgment turned out to be a mistaken one. Unlike many outwardly more promising young men, Hugo found a job without apparent difficulty. He placed himself with Baldwyn Hodges Ltd, antique dealers, a business which undertook a certain amount of interior decorating as a sideline. Although far from being the sort of firm Molly Jeavons would – or, financially speaking, could – employ for renovating her own house, its managing director, Mrs Baldwyn Hodges herself, like so many other unlikely people, had fetched up at the Jeavonses’ one evening when Hugo was there. Very expert at handling rich people, Mrs Baldwyn Hodges was a middle-aged, capable, leathery woman, of a type Mr Deacon would particularly have loathed had he lived to see the rise of her shop, which had had small beginnings, to fashionable success. Hugo and Mrs Baldwyn Hodges got on well together at the Jeavonses’. They met again at the Surrealist Exhibition. Whatever the reason – probably, in fact, Hugo’s own basic, though not then generally recognised, toughness – Mrs Baldwyn Hodges showed her liking for Hugo in a practical manner by taking him into her business as a learner. He did not earn much money at first; he may even have paid some sort of fee at the start; but he made something on commission from time to time and the job suited him. In fact Hugo had shown signs of becoming rather good at selling people furniture and advising them about their drawing-room walls. Chips Lovell (who had recently been told about Freud) explained that Hugo was ‘looking for a mother’. Perhaps he was right. Mrs Baldwyn Hodges certainly taught Hugo a great deal.

All the same, Hugo’s employment did not prevent him from frequenting the society of what Mr Deacon used to call ‘naughty young men’. When out on an excursion with companions of this sort, a car was overturned and Hugo’s leg was broken. As a result of this accident, Hugo was confined to bed for some weeks at Hyde Park Gardens, where he set up what he himself designated ‘a rival
salon’
to Erridge’s room at the nursing home. This situation, absurd as the reason may sound, had, I think, a substantial effect upon the speed of Erridge’s recovery. Hugo even attempted to present his own indisposition as a kind of travesty of Erridge’s case, pretending that the accident to the car had been the result of political sabotage organised by his sister Norah and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. It was all very silly, typical of Hugo. At the same time, visiting Hugo in these circumstances was agreed to be more amusing than visiting Erridge. However, even if Erridge made no show of enjoying visitors, and was unwilling to reveal much of his Spanish experiences, he tolerated the interest of other people in what had happened to him in Spain. It was another matter if his relations came to his bedside only to retail the antics of his youngest brother, who represented to Erridge the manner of life of which he most disapproved. The consequence was that Erridge returned to Thrubworth sooner than expected. There he met with a lot of worry on arrival, because his butler, Smith, immediately went down with bronchitis.

At about the same time that Erridge left London, Moreland rang me up. Without anything being said on either side, our meetings had somehow lapsed. We had spoken together only at parties or on such occasions when other people had been around us. It was ages since we had had one of those long talks about life, or the arts, which had been such a predominant aspect of knowing Moreland in the past. On the telephone his voice sounded restrained, practical, colourless; as he himself would have said ‘the sane Englishman with his pipe’.

‘How is Matilda?’

‘Spending a good deal of time out on her own with rehearsals and so on. She is going out with some of her theatre people tonight as a matter of fact.’

‘Come and dine.’

‘I can’t. I’m involved in musical business until about ten. I said I would drop in on Maclintick then. I thought you might feel like coming too.’

‘Why?’

‘The suggestion was made to help myself out really. I agree it isn’t a very inviting prospect.’

‘Less inviting than usual? Do you remember our last visit?’

‘Well, you know what has happened?’

‘No.’

‘Maclintick’s wife has walked out on him.’

‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘With Carolo.’

‘How rash.’

‘On top of that Maclintick has lost his job.’

‘I never thought of him as having a job.’

‘He did, all the same. Now he hasn’t.’

‘Did a paper sack him?’

‘Yes. I thought we might meet at a pub, then go on to see Maclintick at his house. He just sits there working all the time. I have been talking to Gossage about Maclintick. We are a bit worried. A visit might cheer him up.’

‘I am sure he would much rather see you alone.’

‘That is just what I want to avoid.’

‘Why not take Gossage?’

‘Gossage is busy tonight. Anyway, he is too old a friend. He gets on Maclintick’s nerves.’

‘But so do I.’

‘In a different way. Besides, you don’t know anything about music. It is musical people Maclintick can’t stand.’

‘I only see Maclintick once every two years. We never hit it off particularly well even spaced out at those intervals.’

‘It is because Maclintick never sees you that I want you to come. I don’t want an embarrassing time with him
téte-à-téte.
I am not up to it these days. I have troubles of my own.’

‘All right. Where shall we meet?’

Moreland, from his extensive knowledge of London drinking places, named a pub in the Maclintick neighbourhood. I told Isobel what had been arranged.

‘Try and find out what is happening about Priscilla,’ she said. ‘For all we know, they may be planning to run away together too. One must look ahead.’

The Nag’s Head, the pub named by Moreland, was a place of no great attraction. I recalled it as the establishment brought to Mrs Maclintick’s mind by her husband’s uncouth behaviour at Mrs Foxe’s party. Moreland looked tired when he arrived. He said he had been trudging round London all day. I asked for further details about the Maclintick situation.

‘There are none to speak of,’ Moreland said. ‘Audrey and Carolo left together one afternoon last week. Maclintick had gone round to have a talk with his doctor about some trouble he was having with his kidneys. Not flushing out properly or something. He found a note when he returned home saying she had gone for good.’

‘And then he lost his job on top of it?’

‘He had written rather an astringent article about a concert he was covering. The paper didn’t put it in. Maclintick made a fuss. The editor suggested Maclintick might be happier writing for a periodical aiming at a narrower public. Maclintick agreed that he himself had been feeling that for some time. So they parted company.’

‘He is absolutely broke?’

‘Probably a few minor irons in the fire. I don’t know. Maclintick is not a chap who manages his business affairs very well.’

‘Is he looking for another job?’

‘He has either been working at his book or knocking them back pretty hard since all this happened – and who shall blame him?’

We set off for Maclintick’s house.

‘When is Madlda’s play coming on?’

‘They don’t seem to know exactly.’

Moreland showed no sign of wishing to pursue the subject of Madlda’s stage career. I did not press the question. I wondered whether he knew that Matilda had told me of her former marriage to Carolo. We passed once more through those shadowy, desolate squares from which darkness had driven even that small remnant of life that haunted them by day. Moreland was depressed and hardly spoke at all. The evening before us offered no prospect to stimulate cheerfulness. At last we reached Maclintick’s horrible little dwelling. There was a light upstairs. I felt at low ebb. However, when Maclintick opened the front door he appeared in better condition than I had been led to expect. He wore no collar and had not shaved for several days, but these omissions seemed deliberate badges of emancipation from the servitudes of marriage and journalism, rather than neglect provoked by grief or despair. On the contrary, the nervous tensions to which he had been subjected during the previous few days had to some extent galvanised his normally crabbed manner into a show of geniality.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘You’ll need a drink.’

There was a really colossal reek of whiskey as we crossed the threshold.

‘How are things?’ said Moreland, sounding not very sure of himself.

‘Getting the sack keeps you young,’ said Maclintick. ‘You ought to try it, both of you. I have been able to settle down to some real work at last, now that I am quit of that bloody rag – and freer in other respects too, I might add.’

In spite of this rather aggressive equanimity displayed by Maclintick himself, an awful air of gloom hung over the house. The sitting-room was unspeakably filthy, dirty tea cups along the top of the glass-fronted bookcase, tumblers stained with beer dregs among the hideous ornaments of the mantelpiece. In the background, an atmosphere of unmade beds and unwashed dishes was dominated by an abominable, indefinable smell. As people do when landed in a position of that sort, Maclintick began at once to discuss his own predicament; quite objectively, as if the experience was remote from himself, as if – which in a sense was true – there was no earthly point in our talking of anything else but Maclintick’s personal affairs.

‘When I realised she had gone,’ he said, ‘I heaved a great sigh of relief. That was my first reaction. Later, I grasped the fact that I had to get my own supper. Found something I liked for a change – sardines and plenty of red pepper – and a stiff drink with them. Then I started turning things over in my mind. I began to think of Carolo.’

Moreland laughed uneasily. He was a person not well equipped to deal with human troubles. His temperament was without that easy, unthinking sympathy which reacts in a simple manner, indicating instinctively the right thing to say to someone desperately unhappy. He also lacked that subjective, ruthless love of presiding over other people’s affairs which often makes basically heartless people adept at offering effective consolation. ‘I never know the right moment to squeeze the bereaved’s arm at a funeral,’ he had once said. ‘Some people can judge it to a nicety.’ In short, nothing but true compassion for Maclintick’s circumstances could have brought Moreland to the house that night. It was an act of friendship of some magnitude.

‘Is Carolo in a job?’ Moreland asked.

‘Carolo taking a job seems to have touched off matters,’ said Maclintick, ‘or perhaps
vice versa.
He has at last decided that his genius will allow him to teach. Somewhere in the North – Midlands, I was told, his own part of the world. I can’t remember now. He spoke about it a short time before they went off together. Left without paying his rent, need I say? I wonder how he and Audrey will hit it off. I spent yesterday with a solicitor.’

‘You are getting a divorce?’

Maclintick nodded.

‘Why not,’ he said, ‘when you’ve got the chance? She might change her mind. Let me fill your glasses.’

All this talk was decidedly uncomfortable. I did not think Moreland, any more than myself, knew whether Maclintick was in fact glad to have ridded himself of his wife, or, on the contrary, was shattered by her leaving him. Either state was credible. To presume that because they were always quarrelling, Maclintick necessarily wished to be parted from her could be wholly mistaken. In the same way, it was equally difficult to know whether Maclintick was genuinely relieved at ceasing to work for the paper that had employed him until the previous week, or was, on the contrary, desperately worried at the prospect of having to look for another job. So far as the job was concerned, both states of mind probably existed simultaneously; perhaps so far as the wife was concerned too. Moreland clearly felt uncertain what line to take in his replies to Maclintick, who himself appeared to enjoy keeping secret his true feelings while he discussed the implications of his own position.

‘Did I ever tell you how I met Audrey?’ he asked suddenly.

We had been talking for a time about jobs on papers. Moreland had been pronouncing on the subject of musical journalism in particular; but sooner or later Maclintick abandoned the subject in hand, always returning to the matter of his wife. The question did not make Moreland look any happier.

‘Never,’ he said.

‘It was through Gossage,’ Maclintick said.