Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2

by Anthony Powell

  “What sort of thing?’

  ‘That they were having a walk-out together.’

  ‘Who said so?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew Moreland.’

  ‘I don’t. Only by name.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound very probable, does it?’

  ‘I have no idea. People do these things.’

  Although I liked Lovell, I saw no reason to offer help so far as his investigation of the situation of Moreland and Priscilla. As a matter of fact I had not much help to offer. In any case, Lovell, inhabiting by vocation a world of garbled rumour, was to be treated with discretion where the passing of information was concerned. I was surprised at the outspokenness with which he had mentioned the matter. His enquiry seemed stimulated by personal interest, rather than love of gossip for its own sake. I supposed he still felt faint dissatisfaction at having failed to make the mark to which he felt his good looks entitled him.

  ‘I always liked Priscilla,’ he said, using a rather consciously abstracted manner. ‘I must see her again one of these days.’

  ‘What has been happening to you, Chips?’

  ‘Do you remember that fellow Widmerpool you used to tell me about when we were at the film studio? His name always stuck in my mind because he managed to stay at Dogdene. I took my hat off to him for getting there. Uncle Geoffrey is by no means keen on handing out invitations. You told me there was some talk of Widmerpool marrying somebody. A Vowchurch, was it? Anyway, I ran into Widmerpool the other day and he talked about you.’

  What did he say?’

  ‘Just mentioned that he knew you. Said it was sensible of you to get married. Thought it a pity you couldn’t find a regular job.’

  ‘But I’ve got a regular job.’

  ‘Not in his eyes, you haven’t. He said he feared you were a bit of a drifter with the stream.’

  ‘How was he otherwise?’

  ‘I never saw a man so put out by the Abdication,’ said Lovell. ‘It might have been Widmerpool himself who’d had to abdicate. My goodness, he had taken it to heart.’

  ‘What specially upset him?’

  ‘So far as I could gather, he had cast himself for a brilliant social career if things had worked out differently.’

  ‘The Beau Brummell of the new reign?’

  ‘Not far short of that.’

  ‘Where did you run across him?’

  ‘Widmerpool came to see me in my office. He wanted me to slip in a paragraph about certain semi-business activities of his. One of those quiet little puffs, you know, which don’t cost the advertising department anything, but warm the heart of the sales manager.’

  ‘Did you oblige?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Lovell.

  By no means without a healthy touch of malice, Lovell had also a fine appreciation of the power-wielding side of his job.

  ‘I hear your brother-in-law, Erry Warminster, is on his way home from Spain,’ he said.

  ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Erry’s own family are always the last to hear about his goings-on.’

  ‘What’s your source?’

  ‘The office, as usual.’

  ‘Is he bored with the Spanish war?’

  ‘He is ill – also had some sort of row with his own side.’

  ‘What is wrong with him?’

  ‘Touch of dysentery, someone said.’

  ‘Serious?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  We parted company after arranging that Lovell should come and have a drink with us at the flat in the near future. The following day, I met Quiggin in Members’s office. He was in a sulky mood. I told him I had enjoyed his piece about St John Clarke. Praise was usually as acceptable to Quiggin as to most people. That day the remark seemed to increase his ill humour. However, he confirmed the news about Erridge.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Of course it is true that Alfred is coming back. Don’t his family take any interest in him? They might at least have discovered that.’

  ‘Is he bad?’

  ‘It is a disagreeable complaint to have.’

  ‘But a whole skin otherwise. That is always something if there is a war on.’

  ‘Alfred is too simple a man to embroil himself in practical affairs like fighting an ideological war,’ said Quiggin severely. ‘A typical aristocratic idealist, I’m afraid. Perhaps it is just as well his health has broken down. He has never been strong, of course. He is the first to admit it. In fact he is too fond of talking about his health. As I have said before, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot’.

  I was surprised at Quiggin’s attitude towards Erridge’s illness. I tried to work out who Quiggin himself would be in Dostoevsky’s novel if Erridge was Prince Myshkin and Mona – presumably – Nastasya Filippovna. It was all too complicated. I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity. Quiggin spoke again.

  ‘I have been hearing something of Alf’s difficulties from one of our own agents just back from Barcelona,’ he said. ‘Alf seems to have shown a good deal of political obtuseness – perhaps I should say childlike innocence. He appears to have treated POUM, FAI, CNT, and UGT, as if they were all the same left-wing extension of the Labour Party. I was not surprised to hear that he was going to be arrested at the time he decided to leave Spain. If you can’t tell the difference between a Trotskyite-Communist, an Anarcho-Syndicalist, and a properly paid-up Party Member, you had better keep away from the barricades.’

  ‘You had, indeed.’

  ‘It is not fair on the workers.’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘Alfred’s place was to organise in England.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he go back to his idea of starting a magazine?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed, the subject.

  Erridge was in Quiggin’s bad books; a friend who had disappointed Quiggin to a degree impossible to conceal; a man who had failed to rise to an historic occasion. I supposed that Quiggin regarded Erridge’s imminent return, however involuntary, from the Spanish war in the light of a betrayal. This seemed unreasonable on Quiggin’s part, since Erridge’s breakdown in health was, after all, occasioned by an attempt to further the cause Quiggin himself had so energetically propagated by word of mouth. Even if Erridge had not fought in the field (where Howard Cragg’s nephew had already been killed), he had taken other risks in putting his principles into practice. If it was true that he was marked down for arrest, he might have been executed behind the lines. Quiggin had staked less on his enthusiasms. However, as things turned out there was probably a different reason that afternoon for Quiggin’s displeasure on Erridge’s account.

  Erridge himself arrived in London a day or two later. He was not at all well, and went straight into a nursing home; the nursing home, as it happened, in the passages of which I had encountered Moreland, Brandreth, and Widmerpool. This accommodation was found for her brother by Frederica, ideologically perhaps the furthest removed from Erridge, in certain other respects the closest of the Tollands to him, both from nearness in age and a shared rigidity of individual opinion. The two of them might disagree; they understood each other’s obstinacies. When Erridge had settled down at the nursing home, His brothers and sisters visited him there. They were given lukewarm welcome. Erridge was one of those egotists unable effectively to organise to good effect his own egotism, to make a public profit out of it. He had no doubt enjoyed unusual experiences. These he was unable, or unwilling, to share with others. Isobel brought back a description of a ragged beard protruding over the edge of sheets entirely covered by what appeared to be a patchwork quilt of Boggis & Stone publications dealing with different aspects of the Spanish predicament. Norah, who shared to some extent Erridge’s political standpoint, was openly contemptuous.

  ‘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.’
r />   ‘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 tête-à-tête. 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?’