Mrs. Andriadis herself was lying in an armchair, her legs resting on a pouf. Her features had not changed at all from the time when I had last seen her. Her powder-grey hair remained beautifully trim; her dark eyebrows still arched over very bright brown eyes. She looked as pretty as before, and as full of energy. She wore no jewellery except a huge square cut diamond on one finger.
Her clothes, on the other hand, had undergone a strange alteration. Her small body was now enveloped in a black cloak, its velvet collar clipped together at the neck by a short chain of metal links. The garment suggested an Italian officer’s uniform cloak, which it probably was. Beneath this military outer covering was a suit of grey flannel pyjamas, mean in design and much too big for her: in fact obviously intended for a man. One trouser leg was rucked up, showing her slim calf and ankle. She did not rise, but made a movement with her hand to show that she desired us all to find a place to sit.
‘Well, Dicky,’ she said, ‘why the hell do you want to bring a crowd of people to see me at this time of night?’
She spoke dryly, though without bad temper, in that distinctly cockney drawl that I remembered.
‘Milly, darling, they are all the most charming people imaginable. Let me tell you who they are.’
Mrs. Andriadis laughed.
‘I know him,’ she said, nodding in the direction of Barnby.
‘Lady Anne Stepney,’ said Umfraville. ‘Do you remember when we went in her father’s party to the St. Leger?’
‘You’d better not say anything about that,’ said Mrs. Andriadis. ‘Eddie Bridgnorth has become a pillar of respectability. How is your sister, Anne? I’m not surprised she had to leave Charles Stringham. Such a charmer, but no woman could stay married to him for long.’
Anne Stepney looked rather taken aback at this peremptory approach.
‘And Mrs. Duport,’ said Umfraville.
‘Was it your house I took in Hill Street?’
‘Yes,’ said Jean, ‘it was.’
I wondered whether there would be an explosion at this disclosure. The trouble at the house had involved some question of a broken looking-glass and a burnt-out boiler. Perhaps there had been other items too. Certainly there had been a great deal of unpleasantness. However, in the unexpected manner of persons who live their lives at a furious rate, Mrs. Andriadis merely said in a subdued voice:
‘You know, my dear, I want to apologise for all that happened in that wretched house. If I told you the whole story, you would agree that I was not altogether to blame. But it is all much too boring to go into now. At least you got your money. I hope it really paid for the damage.’
‘We’ve got rid of the house now,’ Jean said, laughing. ‘I didn’t ever like it much anyway.’
‘And Mr. Jenkins,’ Umfraville said. ‘A friend of Charles’s—’
She gave me a keen look.
‘I believe I’ve seen you before, too,’ she said.
I hoped she was not going to recall the scene Mr. Deacon had made at her party. However, she carried the matter no further.
‘Ethel,’ she shouted, ‘bring some glasses. There is beer for those who can’t drink whisky.’
She turned towards Umfraville.
‘I’m quite glad to see you all,’ she said; ‘but you mustn’t stay too long after Werner appears. He doesn’t approve of people like you.’
‘Your latest beau, Milly?’
‘Werner Guggenbühl. Such a charming German boy. He will be terribly tired when he arrives. He has been walking in a procession all day.’
‘To meet the Hunger-Marchers?’ I asked.
It had suddenly struck me that in the complicated pattern life forms, this visit to Mrs. Andriadis was all part of the same diagram as that in which St. John Clarke, Quiggin and Mona had played their part that afternoon.
‘I think so. Were you marching too?’
‘No—but I knew some people who were.’
‘What an extraordinary world we live in,’ said Umfraville. ‘All one’s friends marching about in the park.’
‘Rather sweet of Werner, don’t you agree?’ said Mrs. Andriadis. ‘Considering this isn’t his own country and all the awful things we did to Germany at the Versailles Treaty.’
Before she could say more about him, Guggenbühl himself arrived in the room. He was dark and not bad-looking in a very German style. His irritable expression recalled Quiggin’s. He bowed slightly from the waist when introduced, but took no notice of any individual, not even Mrs. Andriadis herself, merely glancing round the room and then glaring straight ahead of him. There could be no doubt that he was the owner of the grey pyjamas. He reminded me of a friend of Mr. Deacon’s called ‘Willi’: described by Mr. Deacon as having ‘borne much of the heat of the day over against Verdun when nation rose against nation’. Guggenbühl was a bit younger than Willi, but in character they might easily have a good deal in common.
‘What sort of a day did you have, Werner?’ asked Mrs. Andriadis.
She used a coaxing voice, quite unlike the manner in which she had spoken up to that moment. The tone made me think of Templer trying to appease Mona. It was equally unavailing, for Guggenbühl made an angry gesture with his fist.
‘What was it like, you ask,’ he said. ‘So it was like everything in this country. Social-Democratic antics. Of it let us not speak.’
He turned away in the direction of the model theatre. Taking no further notice of us, he began to manipulate the scenery, or play about in some other manner with the equipment at the back of the stage.
‘Werner is writing a play,’ explained Mrs. Andriadis, speaking now in a much more placatory manner. ‘We sometimes run through the First Act in the evening. How is it going, Werner?’
‘Oh, are you?’ said Anne Stepney. ‘I’m terribly interested in the Theatre. Do tell us what it is about.’
Guggenbühl turned his head at this.
‘I think it would not interest you,’ he said. ‘We have done with old theatre of bourgeoisie and capitalists. Here is Volksbühnen—for actor that is worker like industrial worker—actor that is machine of machines.’
‘Isn’t it too thrilling?’ said Mrs. Andriadis. ‘You know the October Revolution was the real turning point in the history of the Theatre.’
‘Oh, I’m sure it was,’ said Anne Stepney. ‘I’ve read a lot about the Moscow Art Theatre.’
Guggenbühl made a hissing sound with his lips, expressing considerable contempt.
‘Moscow Art Theatre is just to tolerate,’ he said, ‘but what of biomechanics, of Trümmer-Kunst, has it? Then Shakespeare’s Ein Sommernachtstraum or Toller’s Masse-Mensch will you take? The modern ethico-social play I think you do not like. Hauptmann, Kaiser, plays to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, yes. The new corporate life. The socially conscious form. Drama as highest of arts we Germans know. No mere entertainment, please. Lebens-stimmung it is. But it is workers untouched by middle class that will make spontaneous. Of Moscow Art Theatre you speak. So there was founded at Revolution both Theatre and Art Soviet, millions, billions of roubles set aside by Moscow Soviet of Soldier Deputies. Hundreds, thousands of persons. Actors, singers, clowns, dancers, musicians, craftsmen, designers, mechanics, electricians, scene-shifters, all kinds of manual workers, all trained, yes, and supplying themselves to make. Two years to have one perfect single production—if needed so, three, four, five, ten years. At other time, fifty plays on fifty successive nights. It is not be getting money, no.’
His cold, hard voice, offering instruction, stopped abruptly.
‘Any ventriloquists?’ Umfraville asked.
The remark passed unnoticed, because Anne Stepney broke in again.
‘I can’t think why we don’t have a revolution here,’ she said, ‘and start something of that sort.’
‘You would have a revolution here?’ said Guggenbühl , smiling rather grimly. ‘So? Then I am in agreement with you.’
‘Werner thinks the time has come to act,’ said Mrs. Andriadis, returning
to her more decisive manner. ‘He says we have been talking for too long.’
‘Oh, I do agree,’ said Anne Stepney.
I asked Guggenbühl if he had come across St. John Clarke that afternoon. At this question his manner at once changed.
‘You know him? The writer.’
‘I know the man and the girl who were pushing him.’
‘Ach, so.’
He seemed uncertain what line to take about St. John Clarke. Perhaps he was displeased with himself for having made disparaging remarks about the procession in front of someone who knew two of the participants and might report his words.
‘He is a famous author, I think.’
‘Quite well known.’
‘He ask me to visit him.’
‘Are you going?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did you meet Quiggin—his secretary—my friend?’
‘I think he goes away soon to get married.’
‘To the girl he was with?’
‘I think so. Mr. Clarke ask me to visit him when your friend is gone for some weeks. He says he will be lonely and would like to talk.’
Probably feeling that he had wasted enough time already with the company assembled in the room, and at the same time unwilling to give too much away to someone he did not know, Guggenbühl returned, after saying this, to the model theatre. Ostentatiously, he continued to play about with its accessories. We drank our beer. Even Umfraville seemed a little put out of countenance by Guggenbühl , who had certainly brought an atmosphere of peculiar unfriendliness and disquiet into the room. Mrs. Andriadis herself perhaps took some pleasure in the general discomfiture for which he was responsible. The imposition of one kind of a guest upon another is a form of exercising power that appeals to most persons who have devoted a good deal of their life to entertaining. Mrs. Andriadis, as a hostess of long standing and varied experience, was probably no exception. In addition to that, she, like St. John Clarke, had evidently succumbed recently to a political conversion, using Guggenbühl as her vehicle. His uncompromising behaviour no doubt expressed to perfection the role to which he was assigned in her mind: the scourge of frivolous persons of the sort she knew so well.
One of the essential gifts of an accomplished hostess is an ability to dismiss, quietly and speedily, guests who have overstayed their welcome. Mrs. Andriadis must have possessed this ingenuity to an unusual degree. I can remember no details of how our party was shifted. Perhaps Umfraville made a movement to go that was quickly accepted. Brief good-byes were said. One way or another, in an unbelievably short space of time, we found ourselves once more in Park Lane.
‘You see,’ said Umfraville. ‘Even Milly …’
Some sort of a discussion followed as to whether or not the evening should be brought to a close at this point. Umfraville and Anne Stepney were unwilling to go home; Barnby was uncertain what he wanted to do; Jean and I agreed that we had had enough. The end of it was that the other two decided to accompany Umfraville to a place where a ‘last drink’ could be obtained. Other people’s behaviour were unimportant to me; for in some way the day had righted itself, and once more the two of us seemed close together.
5
WHEN, in describing Widmerpool’s new employment, Templer had spoken of ‘the Acceptance World’, I had been struck by the phrase. Even as a technical definition, it seemed to suggest what we are all doing; not only in business, but in love, art, religion, philosophy, politics, in fact all human activities. The Acceptance World was the world in which the essential element—happiness, for example—is drawn, as it were, from an engagement to meet a bill. Sometimes the goods are delivered, even a small profit made; sometimes the goods are not delivered, and disaster follows; sometimes the goods are delivered, but the value of the currency is changed. Besides, in another sense, the whole world is the Acceptance World as one approaches thirty; at least some illusions discarded. The mere fact of still existing as a human being proved that.
I did not see Templer himself until later in the summer, when I attended the Old Boy Dinner for members of Le Bas’s house. That year the dinner was held at the Ritz. We met in one of the subterranean passages leading to the private room where we were to eat. It was a warm, rather stuffy July evening. Templer, like a Frenchman, wore a white waistcoat with his dinner-jacket, a fashion of the moment, perhaps by then already a little outmoded.
‘We always seem to meet in these gorgeous halls,’ he said.
‘We do.’
‘I expect you’ve heard that Mona bolted,’ he went on quickly. ‘Joined up with that friend of yours of the remarkable suit and strong political views.’
His voice was casual, but it had a note of obsession as if his nerves were on edge. His appearance was unchanged, possibly a little thinner.
Mona’s elopement had certainly been discussed widely. In the break-up of a marriage the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame. In the Templers’ case public opinion had turned out unexpectedly favourable to Mona, probably because Templer himself was unknown to most of the people who talked to me of the matter. Normal inaccuracies of gossip were increased by this ignorance. In one version, Mona was represented as immensely rich, ill treated by an elderly, unsuccessful stockbroker; another described Templer as unable to fulfil a husband’s role from physical dislike of women. A third account included a twenty- minute hand-to-hand struggle between the two men, at the end of which Quiggin had gained the victory: a narrative sometimes varied to a form in which Templer beat Quiggin unconscious with a shooting-stick. In a different vein was yet another story describing Templer, infatuated with his secretary, paying Quiggin a large sum to take Mona off his hands.
On the whole people are unwilling to understand even comparatively simple situations where husband and wife are concerned; indeed, a simple explanation is the last thing ever acceptable. Here, certainly, was something complicated enough, a striking reversal of what might be thought the ordinary course of events. Templer, a man undoubtedly attractive to women, loses his wife to Quiggin, a man usually ill at ease in women’s company: Mona, as Anna Karenin, directing her romantic feelings towards Karenin as a lover, rather than Vronsky as a husband. For me, the irony was emphasised by Templer being my first schoolboy friend to seem perfectly at home with the opposite sex; indeed, the first to have practical experience in that quarter. But conflict between the sexes might be compared with the engagement of boxers in which the best style is not always victorious.
‘What will they live on?’ Templer said. ‘Mona is quite an expensive luxury in her way.’
I had wondered that, too, especially in the light of an experience of a few weeks before, when sitting in the Café Royal with Barnby. In those days there was a female orchestra raised on a dais at one side of the huge room where you had drinks. They were playing In a Persian Market, and in that noisy, crowded, glaring, for some reason rather ominus atmosphere, which seemed specially designed to hear such confidences, Barnby had been telling me that matters were at an end between Anne Stepney and himself. That had not specially surprised me after the evening at Foppa’s. Barnby had reached the climax of his story when Quiggin and Mark Members passed our table, side by side, on their way to the diners’ end of the room. That was, to say the least, unexpected. They appeared to be on perfectly friendly terms with each other. When they saw us, Members had given a distant, evasive smile, but Quiggin stopped to speak. He seemed in an excellent humour.
‘How are you, Nick?’
‘All right.’
‘Mark and I are going to celebrate the completion of Unburnt Boats,’ he said. ‘It is a wonderful thing to finish a book.’
‘When is it to appear?’
‘Autumn.’
I felt sure Quiggin had stopped like this in order to make some statement that would define more clearly his own position. That would certainly be a reasonable aim on his part. I was curious to know why the two of them were friends again
; also to learn what was happening about Quiggin and Mona. Such information as I possessed then had come through Jean, who knew from her brother only that they had gone abroad together. At, the same time, as a friend of Templer’s, I did not want to appear too obviously willing to condone the fact that Quiggin had eloped with his wife.
‘Mona and I are in Sussex now,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that could almost be described as unctuous, so much did it avoid his usual harsh note. ‘We have been lent a cottage. I am just up for the night to see Mark and make final arrangements with my publisher.’
He talked as if he had been married to Mona, or at least lived with her, for years; just as, a few months earlier, he had spoken as if he had always been St. John Clarke’s secretary. It seemed hard to do anything but accept the relationship as a fait accompli. Such things have to be.
‘Can you deal with St. John Clarke from so far away?’
‘How do you mean?’
Quiggin’s face clouded, taking on an expression suggesting he had heard the name of St. John Clarke, but was quite unable to place its associations.
‘Aren’t you still his secretary?’
‘Oh, good gracious, no,’ said Quiggin, unable to repress a laugh at the idea.
‘I hadn’t heard you’d left him.’
‘But he has become a Trotskyist’
‘What form does it take?’
Quiggin laughed again. He evidently wished to show his complete agreement that the situation regarding St. John Clarke was so preposterous that only a certain degree of jocularity could carry it off. Laughter, his manner indicated, was a more civilised reaction than the savage rage that would have been the natural emotion of most right-minded persons on hearing the news for the first time.
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