This time the silence was longer, and Quail thought he might as well enquire after the whereabouts of his silk hat. It was drearily clear that Miss Fontaney had meant all for the best. But what she had achieved was like some queer drab variant of an old comedy of intrigue. The Tandons – husband and wife – were now perhaps driving prosaically through Slough on their way to London Airport and the Continent. But an arrant fortune-hunter, ingeniously duped into eloping to Gretna Green with a supposed heiress who in fact possessed little more than a frock, a shift, and a conviction of being adored – this was the sort of image for the situation which it required very little inventiveness to supply.
And there was nothing – Quail thought – to be done; nothing at all, except to get out of it. But Miss Fontaney couldn’t get out. She must stay put, in her loneliness and perhaps her pain in the despoiled house, extracting what comfort she could from having surrounded her sister’s marriage with the sort of dispositions held essential by Victorian family lawyers. And now, when about to take his leave, Quail very gently asked her one more question. “But was this not—a very great wrench?”
Miss Fontaney bowed her head. “I think I may be said, Mr Quail, to have suffered three great losses in my life. The first was when my father died. The others have taken effect, it may be said, on the same day. I have lost the companionship of my sister – in a fashion common enough, indeed, but at a later age than that at which such a change is endured easily. And I have parted – in these dear rooms – with much that it has been my honour and privilege to cherish. At first, the house will seem a little bare.” For a moment Eleanor Fontaney was silent, and he noticed again the odd way in which her lips continued to move, nevertheless. This time, she might have been telling over to herself the roll of objects she must particularly mourn. Then she held out her hand to him – as she had done to so many guests taking their leave that morning. “But—need I say?—I count it a small thing, in the comparison of having contributed to Marianne’s happiness.”
CHAPTER IV
Eleanor Fontaney died within the year. The fact came to Quail only because he had a secretary who kept an eye on the London Times. He wrote to Marianne and received a reply from her husband, briefly but decently expressed. Marianne had been ill, and her sister’s death had occasioned a relapse. But an improvement, Tandon added, was looked for soon; and no doubt Marianne would later write to him herself. It wasn’t a cordial letter. In fact, it was quite bleak. But then Tandon was a bleak man. Nothing was said of Arthur Fontaney, or of the journals, or of Jopling. And nothing was said about the circumstances of Tandon’s new domesticity. The letter certainly did little to induce in Quail a more cheerful view of Marianne’s marriage.
And she didn’t, in fact, write. The silence left her a hovering enigma to which Quail’s mind returned often enough; and neither a fear of being meddlesome nor much rather pressing preoccupation with merely business interests would long have prevented him from making some effort of investigation. But quite private affairs suddenly beset him – marked marital misfortune having turned up, in fact, in quite another quarter. His younger sister had appeared without warning on his doorstep, accompanied by her considerable family, in retreat from a husband who had proved unsatisfactory in rather complicated ways. The resolving of this perplexity in the aspect of its personal relationships was hard work, and it brought in its train a number of conundrums in the field of property which he had to acknowledge himself as the man pre-eminently qualified to cope with. When all this had cleared up a further eighteen months was gone by. But if the mere effluxion of time might thus have been viewed as carrying Marianne Tandon away from him, the painful issues with which he had been wrestling made her image, when it did appear, more poignant to the mind. He had been favoured with a close-up of conjugal infelicity. And he hadn’t liked it.
He had written to Lady Elizabeth shortly after hearing from Tandon, and received no reply. She was by habit a prompt as well as a voluminous correspondent, and he was afraid that her silence told its own tale. Later he had a letter from Robin Warboys. It appeared that the engaging youth had turned down detergents, at least for the time, and established himself as a sort of professor of English in the Bolivian Navy. His letter was more taken up with a lively account of this stroke of enterprise than with news of Oxford, which appeared indeed to have sunk entirely below his horizon. He did, however, mention that Lady Liz was said to be failing. This news saddened Quail, although he recognised it as not precisely sad in itself. Unlike Dr Hercus, Lady Elizabeth had been making no point of reaching her century. But it came to him that his not having heard from her was scarcely a reason why she should not hear from him again; and he sat down and wrote at once. This time, against all expectation, he had a reply almost by return. It was as long as ever, but a good deal of it was not decipherable. And the image of the old lady, bracing herself to pass the pen over her paper with no consciousness that the result had ceased to represent intelligible communication, seemed to him one more shadow upon what, across the Atlantic, was an almost pervasively gloomy scene.
The letter contained something about Marianne Tandon, though of this too a part was illegible. It had all looked like being too much for Mrs Tandon – this appeared to be the burden of what was said – and then Lady Elizabeth had herself in some obscure fashion intervened. Lady Elizabeth hoped that the situation had a little improved as a result.
When Quail ceased struggling with this letter it was to reach for the telephone and require that he be set down in England on the following morning. But in the making of this decision Lady Elizabeth’s news was only one of two factors. He had met, only a few days before, a professor from Princeton – lately returned, as is the familiar condition of Princeton professors, from Oxford. From this acquaintance he had gleaned a piece of intelligence which, as he meditated upon it, had grown progressively more significant. If only vaguely at first, it suggested the possibility of action. And action, it seemed to him, was what in the whole affair he had notably failed of. He would try to take it now.
In Oxford he went to his old hotel, and they gave him his old room. It was a nook that could be described as modest and indeed obscure; nevertheless, he was made to feel that it came to him only as a matter of privilege. The Summer Term was just ended, and except for a depressed class of young persons involved in the Second Public Examination, and going about their dismal business in the sort of proleptic mourning traditionally prescribed, the place was keyed and crowded for this, the social efflorescence of its year. In the grey quadrangles vast marquees rose like exotic pleasure domes, strange exhalations, mushrooms, half-inflated balloons; and when Quail went to sleep it was to the music of the Samba and the Gay Gordons mingling with the solemn chime of midnight from a score of ancient bells. And he was awakened, this time, not by a military convoy but by voices – by a chatter which took him to his window to observe, in the clear morning light, a group of tail-coated youths, and of girls all gloriously in what Mrs Jopling would call grande tenue, roaming the city in search of breakfast. He had forgotten the wonderful nonsense of Commemoration balls, of brothers producing sisters and sisters brothers from the outer darkness of Cambridge or London, of a pageant from which the elderly, wrapped in their own queer garishness of variegated hoods and doctors’ gowns, withdrew to murky proceedings in the Sheldonian followed by decorous convivialities pivoting upon tea-cups and ice-cream. Unfortunately Quail wasn’t in tune with it all. And when he made his way, once more, within the portals of his own college – where he had a transaction of some moment to put through – and when he there came upon crimson carpets being rolled up, and lorries being loaded with cutlery and folding chairs and musical instruments and potted palms, he was only sharply reminded of the similar aftermath of a smaller festivity that had taken place – long ago, it seemed to him now – in the Bradmore Road.
But it wasn’t to the Bradmore Road that he directed his steps when he walked north that afternoon. He would never, he soberly knew, turn at that
corner again. Norham Gardens was his destination, for a quick dip into a directory had told him that G. S. Tandon now lived in one of the flats in Lady Elizabeth’s house. There was in this perhaps some explanation of the obscurely intimated way in which Lady Elizabeth had interested herself in Mrs Tandon’s difficulties. It suggested, moreover, that the marriage did, in fact, still exist; and that Tandon, however cheated in what had been his almost fanatical expectations, hadn’t, at least, fallen into any of the unsuitable courses of which Quail had lately been the spectator in his own brother-in-law. Not that the contrary supposition wouldn’t, of course, be absurd – and as he approached the familiar Venetian mansion Quail managed a grin for the notion of a Gavin Tandon kicking over the matrimonial traces in favour of a frantic gallop through the whole broad paddock of the more esoteric depravities.
And the joke reminded him that he had a sense of proportion to retain. He possessed a reasonable confidence that Tandon would, in a fashion, have thought it all out; would have taken what he called healthful walks for the purpose of scrutinising his own reaction to the perfidy – as he must have regarded it – of the late Miss Fontaney; and would have taken sundry resolves with which no fault could be found. But he certainly wasn’t likely to have managed, even if from the first moment he’d striven for it, a bearing that would keep from Marianne the single piercing discovery that she had been viewed not as a wife but as an instrument, and that her dot had been all disastrously and ironically the wrong one. Quail’s assessment of the resulting situation had been as careful as much thought and all his knowledge of human nature could make it. It might be said of husband and wife that each had been caught in a different snare, and that a common prison had then promptly closed about them. What would then for a space happen might be briefly expressed by saying that they would patch the thing up and make do; but it would be truer to say that their several predicaments must acknowledge a sort of relation, and that the simple human instinct for solidarity in the face of misfortune might in a fashion bring and hold them together for a while. Of course the marriage might have gone hopelessly wrong already; and there was Lady Elizabeth’s ominous fragmentary intimation of something that had been entirely too much for Mrs Tandon. But Quail’s guess – the guess upon which he was acting – saw the deepest danger rather in the passing months and years. The relationship had begun in a wound, and it wasn’t a wound that would heal. It was a wound likely to give its worst trouble later on – unless something could be done about it.
The untidy line of hurdles had been replaced by a wooden fence which was somehow mildly repellent and still smelt of creosote. It had a sort of meagre efficiency that he found reminding him of the new tenant who was presumably lurking beyond it. But when he pushed open the garden gate nothing else seemed much changed. There was still a line of washing across the garden. Where he remembered three Ethiopians, indeed, there was now only one – a white-robed figure planted in a deck-chair with a large gently-flapping sheet directly behind him like an advertisement for one of those detergents which Robin Warboys had rashly turned down. Again, the two prams had shrunk to one pram, but as this was of an extra-capacious sort and contained twins, the innovation here didn’t seem considerable. Somewhere or other there was music, and not far round a corner there was certainly a rout of children who at any moment might appear in full cry. Quail hastened to the front door and examined a small tier of bells. The name Tandon stood against the lowest of them, and he gave it a push. There was a minute’s delay during which the twins – whom he vaguely conjectured both to be boys – turned round and made gurgling noises at him. He had embarked upon some sort of cautious response to these advances when a door at his elbow opened and Tandon appeared. It occurred to Quail that his former acquaintance might no longer recognise him, and he was about to re-introduce himself when Tandon spoke first. “Nothing today, thank you,” Tandon said.
Standing with bright sunlight behind him, Quail was perhaps no more than a silhouette. And Tandon’s sight was not good. Nevertheless, this was a disconcerting start. “You may scarcely remember me,” Quail said. “But I’m Willard Quail.”
“Ah, yes—Mr Quail. Or rather—Quail.” Tandon, having made this very proper correction, paused as if considering whether there might be anything more to say. “Would you care to come in?” he asked.
Nothing of this was precisely felicitous, but Quail’s first reaction was an indefinable relief. Perhaps it was reassuring that the old Tandon was, so to speak, still on the job. “I’d like very much to come in,” he replied – and as he did so noticed that the Senior Tutor was in his shirtsleeves. “If it isn’t an inconvenient time,” he added.
“Not at all . . . not at all. I’ve just been dealing with a tap. Plumbers appear to be most unreliable – and they’re often entirely unsound.”
“Unsound?”
“One perceives their technique to be at fault immediately one considers it in the light of elementary hydraulic and hydrostatic principles. And the bills are often exorbitant . . . this way.”
Tandon turned and led the way across a small hall into a yet smaller room. Books went up two-deep to the ceiling on every wall; a square table was almost invisible beneath a silt of papers; there appeared to be only one chair. Tandon turned again and achieved that measure of familiar communion with his visitor which consisted in glaring past his left ear. “This man at the Sorbonne,” he said, “what do you think of his notion of an existentialist aesthetic? Don’t you consider it unsound . . . pretentious? For my own part, I’ll be absolutely frank. I distrust it.” Getting no immediate reply, Tandon made a rather surprising dip into awareness of his immediate surroundings and swept a pile of note-books from the chair. “I’m afraid,” he said, “that there’s some disorder here. I’m trying to get a paper written. And it must be finished by the end of July, you know . . . decidedly by the end of July. I wonder if you’d care to sit down?”
It seemed to Quail that one just couldn’t, with Gavin Tandon, begin with the ordinary preliminaries of a polite call. One couldn’t even with any confident expectation of being attended to venture on civil enquiries about his wife. Probably the best thing to do was to come straight to the point. “Look,” he said abruptly, “I’ve come to see you about the journals.”
“The journals?” Ever so slightly, Tandon swayed on his toes. The room was so crowded, Quail thought, that he probably couldn’t indulge this mannerism to its former degree without bumping the back of his head or grazing his nose. “Do you mean,” Tandon asked, “Arthur Fontaney’s journals?”
“Of course I do. I’ve got them.”
“Dear me.” Tandon was now undeniably uneasy. “I’m very glad to hear it. I hope you’ll edit them.”
“I hope you will.”
There was a long odd silence. Tandon edged himself into a window and for some reason peered through it in some anxiety. Then he turned back to Quail. “But surely the Warden—”
“I heard from a Princeton friend that Jopling was disappointed in them. His interest was never other than frivolous and irresponsible. So I wasn’t wholly surprised at getting a hint that he’d be glad to part with them – and with everything else – at a price.”
“And you gave it?” There was a tremor in Tandon’s voice that Quail thought he remembered.
“This morning. He named a sum and I wrote the cheque.” Quail couldn’t quite avoid a tone that was a trifle grim. “The journals are to be delivered to my hotel this evening. I wish to give them to your wife and yourself.”
“This is very unexpected.” Tandon was looking about him strangely, as if he had been precipitated into a situation in which he decidedly needed help. “It would, of course, be for my wife to decide on the proper reply to so extraordinary an offer.”
“But what I have in mind, my dear Tandon, is the fact that you yourself are so unquestionably the man who ought to be working on the material. The whole learned world, you know, would acknowledge that. And I don’t believe that Eleanor Fontaney was un
aware of it. Unfortunately she let her financial anxieties over Marianne’s future carry her another way. It was a decision which came, I don’t doubt, as a great shock to you. But now—”
“Stop!” The husky voice of Gavin Tandon had taken on a sudden sharp authority. “I couldn’t undertake the work. We need pursue the matter no further.”
“You couldn’t undertake it!”
“No.” Rocking on his toes, Tandon glared past Quail as if in some desperate consultation with infinity. “It ought to go, for one thing, to a younger man. Someone with a research fellowship would be the ideal. I myself, you know, am getting on. I understand my own range, Quail. I can measure what you might call the twitch of my tether. When I’ve coped with my routine teaching duties, and with my work as Senior Tutor, I have left just what will take me through my present very limited researches – such as this paper that I’m determined to finish before we go off to Hove.”
“Hove?”
“I simply couldn’t think of a big thing like the Fontaney journals.” Tandon had ignored the interjection, and now there was a certain quality of indignation in his voice. “Dash it all, Quail, it wouldn’t—would it?—be fair to my wife. Think of my responsibilities here. A man must keep some sort of personal life, after all.” Tandon paused, and appeared to feel that he had perhaps been discourteously abrupt. “Of course, I’m quite glad the stuff is out of Jopling’s hands. He isn’t sound . . . at least in our field.”
“Isn’t sound?” Quail’s bewilderment had its odd issue in a flash of anger. “The man acted like a scoundrel!”
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