Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (25 page)

The atmosphere of doom that hung over Maclintick’s house, indeed over the whole quarter in which he lived – or so it seemed the night Moreland and I had called on him – proved categorical enough. Two or three days later a paragraph appeared in the evening paper stating that Maclintick’s body had been found ‘in a gas-filled room’: no doubt the room in which he worked designated by his wife as the ‘only one where you can keep warm in the house’. The escape of gas had been noticed; the police broke in. The paper described Maclintick as a ‘writer on musical subjects’. As with the passing of St John Clarke, new disturbing developments of the European situation prevented Maclintick’s case from gaining the attention that a music critic’s suicide might attract in more peaceful times. The news was horrifying, yet there was no shock about it. It was cold, slow-motion horror, the shaping of a story recognisably unfinished. I tried to get in touch with Moreland. There was no reply to the telephone. The Morelands’ flat seemed always empty. Then one day when I tried again, Matilda answered. She began talking about Moreland at once.

‘The poor boy has been having an awful time about Maclintick,’ she said. ‘You know how he hates even the mildest business talks. Now he is landed with inquests and goodness knows what.’

Matilda had always got on well with Maclintick. He was one of those uncomfortably poised men whom she handled to perfection. There was every reason to suppose that Maclintick’s death would distress her. At the same time, I was immediately aware from the sound of her voice on the line that she was pleased about something; the fact of Maclintick’s suicide had eased her life for one reason or another. We talked for a time about Maclintick and his affairs.

‘Poor old Carolo,’ she said.

‘You think he is in for it?’

‘He has caught something this time.’

‘And your play?’

‘Coming on soon. I think it will be a success.’

I arranged to see Moreland. The meeting took place a day or two later. He looked as if he had been having a disagreeable time. I asked about Maclintick.

‘Gossage and I had to do all the clearing up,’ Moreland said. ‘It was pretty good hell.’

‘Why you two?’

‘There did not seem to be anyone else. I can’t tell you what we were let in for. It was an awful thing to happen. Of course, one saw it coming. Nothing more certain. That didn’t make it any better. Maclintick was a great friend of mine in a way. He could be tiresome. He had some very good points too. It was nice of him not to have done himself in, for example, the night we left him there. That would have been even more awkward.’

‘It certainly would.’

‘I’ve no reason to suppose he didn’t feel just as much like taking the jump then as three days later.’

‘Do you remember when he talked of suicide in Casanova’s?’

‘Suicide was always one of Maclintick’s favourite subjects.

‘It was?’

‘Of course.’

‘He said then that he gave himself five years.’

‘He lasted about eight or nine. Gossage has been very good about sorting the musical stuff. There is a mass of it to deal with.’

‘Any good?’

Moreland shook his head.

‘The smell in the house was appalling,’ he said. ‘Absolutely frightful. Gossage had to go and stand in the street for a time to recover.’

‘Anything been heard of Mrs Maclintick?’

‘I had a line from her asking me to deal with certain things. I think Carolo wants to keep out of it as much as possible for professional reasons – rather naturally.’

‘Do you think Maclintick just could not get on without that woman?’

‘Maclintick always had his fair share of melancholia, quite apart from anything brought on by marriage or the lack of it.’

‘But his wife clearing out brought matters to a head?’

‘Possibly. It must be appalling to commit suicide, even though one sometimes feels a trifle like it. Anyway, the whole Maclintick business has made certain things clearer to me.’

‘As for example?’

‘Do you remember when we used to talk about the Ghost Railway and say how like everyday life it was – or at least one’s own everyday life?’

‘You mean rushing downhill in total darkness and crashing through closed doors?’

‘Yes – and the body lying across the line. The Maclintick affair has reminded me of the disagreeable possibilities of the world one inhabits – the fact that the fewer persons one involves in it the better.’

‘How do you mean? However you live there are always elements of that sort.’

‘I know, but you get familiar with the material you yourself have to cope with. You may have heard that I have been somewhat entangled with a person not far removed from your own family circle.’

‘Rumours percolate.’

‘So I supposed.’

‘But you would be surprised to learn my own ignorance of detail.’

‘Glad to hear it. Need I say more? You must surely appreciate the contrast between the sort of thing I have been engaged upon in connexion with poor old Maclintick’s mortal remains during the last few days, and the kind of atmosphere one prefers when attempting to conduct an idyllic love affair.’

‘I can see that.’

‘I do not suggest my daily routine comes within several million light-years of an idyll – but it normally rises a few degrees above what life has been recently.’

I began to understand the reason why Matilda had sounded relieved when we had spoken on the telephone a day or two before.

‘The fact is,’ said Moreland, ‘very few people can deal with more than a limited number of emotional problems at any given moment. At least I can’t. Up to a point, I can walk a tightrope held at one end by Matilda, and at the other by the person of whom you tell me you are already apprised. But I can’t carry Maclintick on my back. Maclintick gassing himself was just a bit too much.’

‘But what are you explaining to me?’

‘That any rumours you hear in future can be given an unqualified denial.’

‘I see.’

‘Forgive my bluntness.’

‘It suits you.’

‘I hope I have made myself dear.’

‘You haven’t, really. There is still a lot I should like to know. For example, did you really contemplate terminating your present marriage?’

‘It looked like that at one moment.’

‘With the agreement of the third party?’

‘Yes.’

‘And now she knows you think differently?’

‘She sees what I mean.’

‘And thinks the same?’

‘Yes.’

I too could see what he meant. At least I thought I could. Moreland meant that Maclintick, in doing away with himself, had drawn attention, indeed heavily underlined, the conditions of life to which Moreland himself was inexorably committed; a world to which Priscilla did not yet belong, even if she were on her way to belonging there. I do not think Moreland intended this juxtaposition of lot to be taken in its crudest aspect; that is to say in the sense that Priscilla was too young, too delicate a flower by birth and upbringing to be associated with poverty, unfaithfulness, despair, and death. If he supposed that – which I doubt – Moreland made a big mistake. Priscilla, like the rest of her family, had a great deal of resilience. I think Moreland’s realisation was in the fact of Maclintick’s desperate condition; Maclintick’s inability to regulate his own emotional life; Maclintick’s lack of success as a musician; in short the mess of things Maclintick had made, or perhaps had had visited upon him. Moreland was probably the only human being Maclintick had whole-heartedly liked. In return, Moreland had liked Maclintick; liked his intelligence; liked talking and drinking with him. By taking his own life, Maclintick had brought about a crisis in Moreland’s life too. He had ended the triangular relationship between Moreland, Priscilla, and Matilda. Precisely in what that relationship consisted remained unrevealed. What Matilda thought, what Priscilla thought, remained a mystery. All sides of such a situation are seldom shown at once, even if they are shown at all. Only one thing was certain. Love had received one of those shattering jolts to which it is peculiarly vulnerable from extraneous circumstance.

‘This Maclintick business must have held up all work.’

‘As you can imagine, I have not done a stroke. I think Matilda and I may try and go away for a week or two, if I can raise the money.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘France, I suppose.’

The Morelands went abroad the following week. That Sunday, Isobel’s eldest sister, Frederica, rang up and asked if she could come to tea. This suggestion, on the whole a little outside the ordinary routine of things with Frederica, who was inclined to make plans some way ahead, suggested she had something special to say. As it happened, Robert, too, had announced he would look in that afternoon; so the day took on a distinctly family aspect. Frederica and Robert could be received at close quarters, be relied upon to be reasonably cordial to one another. That would not have been true of Frederica and Norah. Hugo was another dangerous element, preferably to be entertained without the presence of his other brothers and sisters. With Frederica and Robert there was nothing to worry about.

As soon as Frederica arrived, it was evident she had recently learnt something that had surprised her a great deal. She was a person of controlled, some – Chips Lovell, for example – thought even rather forbidding exterior; a widow who showed no sign of wanting to remarry and found her interests, her work and entertainment, in her tours of duty as Lady-in-Waiting. However, that afternoon she was freely allowing herself to indulge in the comparatively undisciplined relaxation of arousing her relations’ curiosity.

‘I expect you have heard of a writer called St John Clarke,’ she said, almost as soon as she had sat down.

This supposition, expressed by some of my friends, would have been a method of introducing St John Clarke’s name within a form of words intended to indicate that in their eyes, no doubt equally in my own, St John Clarke did not grade as a sufficiently eminent literary figure for serious persons like ourselves ever to have heard of him. The phrase would convey no sense of enquiry; merely a scarcely perceptible compliment, a very minor demonstration of mutual self-esteem. With Frederica, however, one could not be sure. She had received a perfectly adequate education, indeed rather a good one, to fit her for her position in life, but she did not pretend to ‘know’ about writing. Indeed, she was inclined to pride herself on rising above the need to discuss the ways and means of art in which some of her relations and friends interminably indulged.

‘I like reading books and going to plays,’ she had once remarked, ‘but I do not want to talk about them all the time.’

If Frederica had, in practice, wholly avoided an uninstructed predisposition to lay down the law on aesthetic matters, there would have been much to be said for this preference. Unhappily, you could never be certain of her adherence to such a rule of conduct. She seemed often to hold just as strong views on such matters as those who felt themselves most keenly engaged. Besides, her disinclination to discuss these subjects in general, left an area of uncertainty as to how far her taste, for example, in books and plays, had taken her; her self-esteem could be easily, disastrously, impaired by interpreting too literally her disavowal of all intellectual interests. In the same way, Frederica lumped together in one incongruous, not particularly acceptable agglomeration, all persons connected with painting, writing and music. I think she suspected them, in that time-honoured, rather engaging habit of thought, of possessing morals somehow worse than other people’s. Her mention of St John Clarke’s name was for these reasons unexpected.

‘Certainly I have heard of St John Clarke,’ I said. ‘He has just died. Isobel and I met him lunching at Hyde Park Gardens not long before he was taken ill.’

‘Not me,’ said Isobel, ‘I was being ill myself.’

‘St John Clarke used to lunch at Hyde Park Gardens?’ said Frederica. ‘I did not know that. Was he often there?’

‘He used to turn up at Aunt Molly’s too,’ said Isobel. ‘You must remember the story of Hugo and the raspberries —’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Frederica, showing no sign of wishing to hear that anecdote again, ‘I had forgotten it was St John Clarke. But what about him?’

‘Surely you read
Fields of Amaranth
secretly when you were growing up?’ said Isobel. ‘There was a copy without the binding in that cupboard in the schoolroom at Thrubworth.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frederica, brushing off this literary approach as equally irrelevant. ‘But what sort of a man was St John Clarke?’

That was a subject upon which I felt myself something of an expert. I began to give an exhaustive, perhaps too exhaustive, account of St John Clarke’s life and character. No doubt this searching analysis of the novelist was less interesting to others – certainly less interesting to Frederica – than to myself, because she broke in almost immediately with a request that I should stop.

‘It really does not matter about all that,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what he was like.’

‘That was what I was trying to tell you.’

I felt annoyed at being found so inadequate at describing St John Clarke. No doubt it would have been better to have contained him in one single brief, brilliant epigram; I could not think of one at that moment. Besides, that was not the kind of conversational technique Frederica approved. I was attempting to approach St John Clarke from another angle, when Robert arrived. Whatever Frederica had been leading up to was for the moment abandoned. Robert, in his curiously muted manner, showed signs of animation.

‘I have got a piece of news,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Frederica. ‘Have you heard too, Robert?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Robert. ‘So far as I am aware, I am the sole possessor of this particular item.’

‘What is it?’

‘You will all know pretty soon anyway,’ said Robert, in a leisurely way, ‘but one likes to get in first. We are going to have a new brother-in-law.’

‘Do you mean Priscilla is engaged?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Priscilla – not Blanche.’

‘Who to?’

‘Who do you think?’

A few names were put forward.