Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (24 page)

‘How very unexpected.’

‘There was a clerk in Gossage’s bank who was keen on Sibelius,’ said Maclintick. ‘They used to talk about music together whenever Gossage went to the bank to cash a cheque or have a word about his overdraft – if Gossage ever has anything so irregular as an overdraft, which I doubt.’

‘When Gossage went there to bank the bribes given him by corrupt musicians who wanted good notices,’ suggested Moreland.

‘Possibly,’ said Maclintick. ‘I wish some of them offered an occasional bribe to me. Well, Gossage invited this young man, Stanley by name, to come with him to a private performance of some chamber music.’

Moreland laughed loudly at this, much louder than the story demanded at this stage. That was from nerves. I found myself laughing a lot too.

‘Stanley asked if he might bring his sister along,’ said Maclintick. ‘I too had to go to the chamber music for my sins. The sister turned out to be Audrey.’

Moreland seemed as much surprised by this narration as I was myself. To produce such autobiographical details was altogether unlike Maclintick. The upheaval in his life had changed his whole demeanour.

‘I took a fancy to her as soon as I set eyes on her,’ Maclintick said. ‘Funny that, because she hasn’t much in the way of looks. That was a bad day for me – a bad day for both of us, I suppose.’

‘What happened?’ asked Moreland.

His curiosity had been aroused. Even Moreland, who knew Maclintick so much better than myself, found these revelations surprising.

‘Do you know,’ said Maclintick, speaking slowly as if still marvelling at his own ineptitude in such matters, ‘do you know I did not exchange a word with her the whole evening. We were just introduced. I couldn’t think of anything to say. She drifted off somewhere. I went home early.’

‘What did you do next?’

‘I had to make Gossage arrange another meeting. It took the hell of a lot of doing. Gossage didn’t care for the idea at all. He liked Stanley, but he didn’t want to get mixed up with his sister.’

‘And then?’

‘I didn’t know anything about the machinery for taking women out, even when Gossage brought us together again.’

‘How did you manage to get married then?’

‘God knows,’ said Maclintick. ‘I often wonder.’

‘There must have been a moment when some agreement was reached.’

‘There was never much agreement about it,’ said Maclintick. ‘We started having rows straight away. But one thing is interesting. Gossage told me afterwards that on the night of the chamber music Audrey only opened her lips once – that was to ask him to tell her my name again and enquire what I did for a living.’

‘No use fighting against fate,’ said Moreland laughing. ‘I’ve always said it.’

‘Gossage told her I was a musician,’ said Maclintick. ‘Her comment was “Oh, God”.’

‘I find that a very natural one to make,’ said Moreland.

‘She isn’t absolutely tone-deaf,’ said Maclintick, speaking as if he had given the matter deep thought. ‘She has her likes and dislikes. Quite good at remembering facts and contradicting you about them later. She’d been dragged by her brother to the chamber music. I never quite know why.’

‘Brought her as a chaperone,’ said Moreland.

‘All the music in the family went into Stanley,’ said Maclintick. ‘I shall miss seeing Stanley once in a while. We used to have beer evenings together twice a year. Stanley can’t drink Irish whiskey. But you know, it’s astonishing what technical jargon women will pick up. Audrey would argue about music with me-with anyone. I’ve heard her make Gossage contradict himself about his views on
Les Six.
Odd the way music comes out in a family. I get it through my mother who was half Jewish. My father and grandfather were in the linen trade. They may have gone to a concert occasionally. That was about the extent of it.’

Moreland took this opportunity to guide conversation back into general channels.

‘You can’t tell what families are going to throw up,’ he said. ‘Look at Lortzing whose family were hereditary hangmen in Thuringia for two hundred years. Then suddenly the Lortzings cease to be hangmen and produce a composer.’

‘You could be a musical hangman, I suppose,’ said Maclintick. ‘Hum tunes while you worked.’

‘I could well imagine some of the musicians one knows becoming hangmen,’ said Moreland.

‘Surprising Lortzing didn’t become a critic with an ancestry like that,’ said Maclintick. ‘Had it in his blood to execute people when need be – would also know the right knot to tie when it came to his own turn to shuffle off this mortal coil. Lortzing wrote an opera about your friend Casanova, didn’t he? Do you remember that night at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant years ago? We talked about seducers and Don Juan and that sort of thing. That painter, Barnby, was there. I believe you were with us too, weren’t you, Jenkins? For some reason I have often thought of that evening. I was thinking of it again last night, wondering if Carolo was one of the types.’

Moreland winced slightly. I did not know whether or not Maclintick was aware that Carolo had once been married to Matilda. Probably did not know that, I decided. Maclintick was a man who normally took little interest in the past history of other people. It was even surprising to find him showing such comparative interest in his own past history.

‘Carolo doesn’t come into the Casanova-Don Juan category,’ said Moreland. ‘He hasn’t the vitality. Too passive. Passivity is not a bad method, all the same. Carolo just sits about until some woman either marries him, or runs away with him, from sheer desperation at finding nothing whatever to talk about.’

Maclintick nodded his head several times, showing ponderous enjoyment at this view of Carolo’s technique in seduction. He filled the glasses.

‘I suppose one of the tests of a man is the sort of woman he wants to marry,’ he said. ‘You showed some sense, Moreland, and guessed right. I should have stayed out of the marriage market altogether.’

‘Marriage is quite a problem for a lot of people,’ Moreland said.

‘You know Audrey was my ideal in a sort of way,’ said Maclintick, who after drinking all day-probably several days-was becoming thick in his speech and not always absolutely coherent. ‘I’ve no doubt that was a mistake to start off with. There is probably something wrong about thinking you’ve realised your ideal – in art or anywhere else. It is a conception that should remain in the mind.’

‘It wasn’t for nothing that Petrarch’s Laura was one of the de Sade family,’ said Moreland.

‘My God, I bet it wasn’t,’ said Maclintick. ‘She’d have put him through it if they’d married. I shall always think of her being a de Sade whenever I see that picture of them again. You know the one. It is always to be found on the walls of boarding houses.’

‘The picture you are thinking of, Maclintick, represents Dante and Beatrice,’ Moreland said, ‘not Petrarch and Laura. But I know the one you mean – and I expect the scene in question was no less unlike what actually happened than if depicting the other couple.’

‘You are absolutely right, Moreland,’ said Maclintick, now shaking with laughter. ‘Dante and Beatrice – and a bloody bad picture, as you say. As a matter of fact, it’s the sort of picture I rather like. Pictures play no part in my life. Music fulfils my needs, with perhaps a little poetry, a little German philosophy. You can keep the pictures, whether they tell a story or not.’

‘Nowadays you can have both,’ said Moreland, cheered by the drink and at last recovering his spirits. ‘The literary content of some Picassos makes
The Long Engagement
or
A Hopeless Dawn
seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction.’

‘You might as well argue that
Ulysses
has more “story” than
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
or
The Rosary,’’
said Maclintick. ‘I suppose it has in a way. I find all novels lacking in probability.’

‘Probability is the bane of the age,’ said Moreland, now warming up. ‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant – and usually inaccurate – premises.’

‘That is certainly true about women,’ said Maclintick. ‘But anyway it takes a bit of time to realise that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living. I used to feel with Audrey: “this can’t be marriage” – and now it isn’t.’

Suddenly upstairs the telephone bell began to ring. The noise came from the room where Maclintick worked. The sound was shrill, alarming, like a deliberate warning. Maclintick did not move immediately. He looked greatly disturbed. Then, without saying anything, he took a gulp from his glass and went off up the stairs. Moreland looked at me. He made a face.

‘Audrey coming back?’ he said.

‘We ought to go soon.’

‘We will.’

We could faintly hear Maclintick’s voice; the words inaudible. It sounded as if Maclintick were unable to understand what he was being asked. That was likely enough considering the amount he had drunk. A minute later he returned to the sitting-room.

‘Someone for you, Moreland,’ he said.

Moreland looked very disturbed.

‘It can’t be for me,’ he said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

‘Some woman,’ said Maclintick.

‘Who on earth can it be?’

‘She kept on telling me I knew her,’ said Maclintick, ‘but I couldn’t get hold of the name. It was a bloody awful line. My head is buzzing about too.’

Moreland went to the stairs. Maclintick heaved himself on to the sofa. Closing his eyes, he began to breathe heavily. I felt I had had a lot to drink without much to show for it. We remained in silence. Moreland seemed to be away for centuries. When he returned to the room he was laughing.

‘It was Matilda,’ he said.

‘Didn’t sound a bit like Matilda,’ said Maclintick, without opening his eyes.

‘She said she didn’t know it was you. You sounded quite different.’

‘I’m never much good at getting a name on the bloody telephone,’ said Maclintick. ‘She said something about her being your wife now I come to think of it.’

‘Matilda forgot her key. I shall have to go back at once. She is on the doorstep.’

‘Just like a woman, that,’ said Maclintick. ‘There was always trouble about Carolo’s key.’

‘We’ll have to go.’

‘You don’t expect me to see you out, do you P Kind of you to come.’

‘You had better go to bed, Maclintick,’ said Moreland. ‘You don’t want to spend the night on the sofa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too cold. The fire will be out soon.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Do move, Maclintick,’ said Moreland.

He stood looking down with hesitation at Maclintick. Moreland could be assertive about his own views, was said to be good at controlling an orchestra; he was entirely without the power of assuming authority over a friend who needed ‘managing’ after too much to drink. I remembered the scene when Widmerpool and I had put Stringham to bed after the Old Boy Dinner, and wondered whether an even odder version of that operation was to be re-enacted here. However, Maclintick rolled himself over into a sitting position, removed his spectacles, and began to rub his eyes just in the manner of my former housemaster, Le Bas, when he could not make up his mind whether or not one of his pupils was telling the truth.

‘Perhaps you are right, Moreland,’ Maclintick said.

‘Certainly I am right.’

‘I will move if you insist.’

‘I do insist.’

Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland.

‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’

Moreland and I both laughed a lot, but it was a horrible moment. Maclintick had spoken with that strange, unearthly dignity that a drunk man can suddenly assume. We left him making his way unsteadily upstairs. By a miracle there was a taxi at the other end of the street.

‘I hope Maclintick will be all right,’ said Moreland, as we drove away.

‘He is in rather a mess.’

‘I am in a mess myself,’ Moreland said. ‘You probably know about that. I won’t bore you with the complications of my own life. I hope Matty will not be in too much of a fret when I get there. What can she be thinking of, forgetting her key? Something Freudian, I suppose. I am glad we went to see Maclintick. What did you think about him?’

‘I thought he was in a bad way.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maclintick is in a bad way,’ said Moreland. ‘It is no good pretending he isn’t. I don’t know where it will end, I don’t know where anything will end. It was strange Maclintick bringing up Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.’

‘Dragging up your past.’

‘Barnby went straight to the point,’ said Moreland. ‘I was struck by that. One ought to make decisions where women are concerned.’

‘What are your plans-roughly?’

‘I have none, as usual. You are already familiar with my doctrine that every man should have three wives. I accept the verdict that under the existing social order such an arrangement is not viable. That is why so many men are in such a quandary.’

We drove on to where I lived. Moreland continued in the taxi on his way to find Matilda. Isobel was asleep. She woke up at one moment and asked: ‘Did you hear anything interesting?’ I told her, ‘No’. She went to sleep again. I went to sleep for an hour or two, then woke up with a start, and lay there thinking how grim the visit to Maclintick had been; not only grim, but curiously out of focus; a pocket in time; an evening that pertained in character to life some years before. Marriage reduced in number interludes of that kind. They belonged by their nature to an earlier period: the days of the Mortimer and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. Maclintick’s situation was infinitely depressing; yet people found their way out of depressing situations. Nothing was more surprising than man’s capacity for survival. Before one could look round, Maclintick would be in a better job, married to a more tolerable wife. All the same, I felt doubtful about that happening. Thinking uneasy thoughts, I fell once more into a restless, disenchanted sleep.