‘Hugh’s name isn’t on the programme?’
‘He didn’t want it there. The word “Africa” did it. Moreland’s cracked about Africa. Always has been, always will be, I suppose. Goes off on the quiet to the British Museum to gaze on the African idols there. Mrs Stevens only had to say the money was going to Africa for Moreland to knock off all his other work, and set about the Mozart. Doesn’t matter what worry it causes me. Of course, Moreland knew Mrs Stevens in what he loves to call The Old Days, so The Old Days might have been sufficient anyway, without being clinched by Africa. Whatever I said wasn’t going to make any difference.’
Moreland, it was true, had always responded strongly to things African, rather as fountainhead of fetish and voodoo, than aspects of the African continent likely to be benefited by funds raised that night. The fascination exercised on his imagination by such incantatory cults was not unlike Bagshaw’s unquenched curiosity about the ritual and dogma of Marxism, neither believers, both enthralled. Once Moreland’s attention had been imaginatively aroused, he would find no difficulty in ignoring the fact that Witchdoctors, zombies, cults of the dead, might not greatly profit from his help. Moreland himself came up at that moment Audrey Maclintick did not give him time to speak.
‘I expect you’ve seen who’s here tonight—Lady Donners. That was bound to happen. Just her sort of party. I don’t expect she wants to see me, any more than I do her. Well, I’ll leave you two together to have a talk about The Old Days, which I’ve no doubt you’ll start off on at once. Don’t let Moreland have another drink before the curtain goes up. It isn’t good for him. He ought to be in bed in any case, not mooning about at a place like this.’
She made off. So far as Moreland having another drink, she was probably right. He did not look at all well. Once, he would have been put out by such an injunction from wife, mistress, anyone else, made a great fuss about being treated as if not able to look after himself. Now, he was not at all concerned, taking the admonition as a matter of course, almost a demonstration of affection, which no doubt in a sense it was. Audrey Maclintick was said to look after him well, in what were not always easy circumstances. Moreland, too, showed signs of accepting her view that his own presence in the Stevens house required excuse.
‘Never again. Not after what I’ve been through with the Seraglio committee ladies. Valmont’s valet remarked the big difference between persuading a woman to sleep with you, which she really wants to do—though personally I’ve often found to the contrary—and inducing her to agree to something that offers no comparable satisfaction. My God, he was right.
Put me
To yoking foxes, milking of he-goats,
Gathering all the leaves fall’n this autumn.
Drawing farts from dead bodies,
Mustering of ants and numbering of atoms,
There is no hell to a lady of fashion.
I don’t mean Rosie. She’s all right. It was the rest of them. They expected me to do just the very things I’ve mentioned—every one of them.’
‘You’ve been saying for years you live beyond the pleasure principle. Why boggle at ladies of fashion? Do they still exist?’
‘Believe me they do. Matty’s one now. I’ve just been having a word with her. Almost the first since we were husband and wife, beyond saying hullo, when we saw each other at the Ballet or the Opera. She seems to have supported the death of the Great Industrialist remarkably well.’
Matilda Donners was standing on the far side of the room. I had the impression Moreland had never managed to fall entirely out of love with her.
‘I got her to introduce me to Polly Duport, whom she’s talking to now. I’ve always been rather a fan. What I mean about Matty’s social manner is that, having brought Polly Duport and myself together, she then had to suggest that I do the musical settings for some film Polly Duport’s going to play the lead in. It’s made from a St John Clarke novel, if you can imagine anything more grotesque. I remember my aunt thinking me too young to read Fields of Amaranth, but it isn’t that one, and that isn’t my objection. The producer, an American called Glober, was also pressed on me by Matty. He’s that tall, bald, melodramatic character, talking to her now, looking as if he’s going to play Long John Silver in a Christmas production of Treasure Island.’
‘You’ve met Glober before.’
I recalled to Moreland the Mopsy Pontner dinner party. The effect was almost startling. The blood came rushing into his face as if he were about to have apoplexy. He began to laugh uncontrollably, quite in the old manner. Then, with an effort, he stopped. He was almost breathless, coughing hard. At the end of this near paroxysm he looked less ill, more exhausted. The information had greatly cheered him.
‘No, really, that’s too much. Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be at all surprised. I can see the headline:
MUSICIAN DIES OF NOSTALGIA
They’d put someone like Gossage on to the obit. “Mr Hugh Moreland—probably just Hugh Moreland these days—(writes our Music Critic), at a fashionable gathering last night—I’m sure Gossage still talks about fashionable gatherings—succumbed to an acute attack of nostalgia, a malady to which he had been a martyr for years. His best known works, etc, etc …” Are you aware, quite apart from Matty turning up here tonight, there hangs on the stairs of this very house Barnby’s drawing—in his naturalistic manner, I’m glad to say—of Norma, that little waitress at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant? All this, and Mopsy Pontner too. I can’t bear it. I shall mount the stage, and announce that, instead of Mozart tonight, I am myself going to entertain the company with a potpourri of nostalgic melodies.’
Moreland paused. He stepped back, clasping his hands, intoned gently:
‘Dearest, our day is over,
Ended the dream divine.
You must go back to your life,
I must go back to mine.
Nothing short of some such outward expression of my own nostalgic feelings would be at all adequate. You shouldn’t have told me about Mopsy Pontner. It wasn’t the act of a friend.’
Although still laughing, Moreland, as before sometimes in such moods, had stirred himself emotionally by his own irony, his eyes filling with tears. Stevens came up to us.
‘Look, Hugh, the curtain isn’t going to rise absolutely on time. A substitute Violin was a minute or two late. The regular player went down with flu at the last moment, and a substitute had to be found at short notice. We’ve been assured he’s all right. He’s upstairs peeing at the moment, but he’ll be along when he’s finished, and start fiddling away. Don’t get worked up about the delay.’
‘You speak as if I was a temperamental impresario about to throw a scene. It’s no affair of mine when the curtain goes up. I’d much rather have another drink, which the delay gives me the right to do, whatever Audrey says.’
It was remarkable he should admit to being defiant about what she said. Moreland went off. There was no means of putting a veto on drink into operation. He moved as if his joints were rather stiff these days. Stevens laughed.
‘Isn’t Hugh splendid? Rosie thought he wasn’t well, but he seems perfectly all right to me. I say, who do you think have turned up tonight? The Widmerpools. I suppose he’s celebrating.’
‘What’s he got to celebrate about? I thought he was going to be sent to the Tower, hanged, drawn and quartered.’
‘Not now. It’s been found “not in the public interest” to proceed with the case. I was hearing about it earlier in the day. A journalist I know told me some quite interesting things. Widmerpool was damned lucky. You can take it from me he was in a tight corner. I suppose he thought this a good opportunity to show himself in public. You can’t exactly say with an untarnished reputation, but at least not serving twenty-five years for espionage.’
‘Did he apply to you for a ticket, as a once close friend of his wife’s?’
‘The Widmerpools, old cock, were brought by a friend of Rosie’s, Sir Leonard Short, a civ
il servant with musical leanings, who used to frequent her parents’ house. As luck will have it, Tompsitt’s here too, our ambassador in the place where Widmerpool was having his trouble. They’ll be able to dish it up together. All very respectable.’
‘Is the large grim lady Tompsitt’s wife?’
‘She’s rather rich. Schweizer Deutsch. Been married before. Ah, things are moving quicker now. I see Rosie is making signs. Do you and Isobel know where your seats are? I want to talk to Isobel. I haven’t seen her for ages.’
He obviously had no idea how much Isobel disliked him. We all passed into the marquee. The Widmerpools, with Short (knighted at the last Birthday Honours), were several rows in front. Short, although his prim buttoned-up exterior allowed few inner doubts to be observed, looked less happy than the occasion seemed to demand, if what Stevens reported about Widmerpool were true. Pressure had perhaps been put on him to arrange this public appearance signalizing exculpation. Less dramatically than that, Widmerpool could simply have wished to hear the opera performed because he hoped to be identified with this particular charity. Love of music was unlikely to have brought him, whatever other reason. He, too, was looking more aggrieved than triumphant. Short’s apparent uneasiness—Widmerpool’s too, for that matter—may have been due to discovering that Pamela was far from popular with her hostess. If it came to that, Short was not at all well disposed to Pamela himself. She sat beside him, a look of utter contempt on her face, at the same time, rare with her, smiling faintly. She had got herself up in her smartest manner. Only those who knew her reputation might have reflected that, in another, more perverse mood, she might easily have turned up to watch the Seraglio wearing an old pair of jeans.
Rosie, Stevens, the Tory Cabinet Minister, his wife, Matilda Donners (who seemed to have brought the last two), were all sitting rather to the side of the front row. Their group, which included Polly Duport and Glober, had probably dined together. Behind the Widmerpools sat the Tompsitts, whom I had noticed on arrival. I had not set eyes on Tompsitt since hearing him, at the close of some inter-service committee, deplore, with Widmerpool, the Poles’ lack of circumspection in making representations about Katyn to the International Red Cross. The air of disorder, marking out Tompsitt in his early days as a young diplomatist free from the conventionality ascribed to his kind, had settled down to a middle-aged unkemptness, implying chronic irritability, as much as a free spirit. The exceptionally peevish expression on his face at that moment could be attributed to Widmerpool himself, who, leaning back in a manner threatening to repeat his wife’s chair-breaking incident at the French Embassy, showed no sign of ceasing to talk, in deference to the opening notes of the Overture. Finally, Tompsitt’s wife raised her programme menacingly. Widmerpool, bowing to force, turned away from them. The curtain rose revealing the Pasha’s palace.
During the first interval, on the way out of the marquee, we came on Glober. He was holding Polly Duport lightly by the arm.
‘Why, hullo, Nick. Fancy meeting you here. What a hell of a good time we all had in Venice. I’m not going to forget your Major Tokenhouse in years. I had that picture of his packaged, and sent back to the States, where it’s to become one of the treasures of the Glober collection of twentieth-century primitives. Why didn’t you stop over for the Film Festival, and meet Polly here?’
In saying all this Glober managed also to convey an odd sense of added remoteness, not only in speaking of our Venetian meeting, also somehow in relation to himself. He was not in the least unfriendly, absolutely the reverse, still enormously cordial, at the same time in a manner that set him at a distance, put a cordon round him, entrenched his position. It was a little like the rays people seem to emit when they have promised a job, promotion, invitation, satisfaction of one sort or another, then withdrawn the offer. He continued to speak for a minute or two about the Tokenhouse picture, imprisoning all around him within the net of his own social technique, moving on to the Film Festival, then the St John Clarke novel. He was not quite prepared for Isobel’s knowledge (in certain areas rivalling Trapnel’s) of obscure or forgotten fiction.
‘How will you handle the scene where Phyllida and Prosper get lost in the mist on the glacier at Schwarenbach?’
While Glober dealt with that question, I reminded Polly Duport of our drive back from the St Paul’s service, with her mother and stepfather. Undeniably a beauty, less remarkably so off the stage, she had now, I thought, come to resemble Duport more than Jean. She had her father’s cool, wary scepticism, as well as Jean’s figure and grey eyes. In her thirties, already well known, she had in the film at Venice somehow achieved this additional prestige, a flowering which had instinctively caught Glober’s fancy, aroused his untiring interest in the immediate.
‘I remember an English officer joining us. So that was you? I suppose you were keeping an eye on my stepfather, making sure he behaved properly in church?’
The comment recalled her mother.
‘How is Colonel Flores?’
‘Very well indeed. He’s a general now, but more or less retired from the army, and in politics.’
‘And your mother?’
‘She’s all right. Fine, in fact. Carlos’s new job suits her. You see, he’s head of the Government.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘For a year now.’
‘Dictator?’
‘We don’t call it that.’
‘Your mother must enjoy being Dictatress—Dictatrix, more correctly.’
Polly Duport laughed. She was charming, in spite of resemblance to her father, much ‘nicer’, one felt, than her mother, but without, so far as I was myself concerned, any of her mother’s former bowling-over endowments. Glober must have felt the reverse. Her professionalism of the Theatre, a seriousness her mother could never have achieved, in the Theatre, or any other of the arts, possibly exerting some of that effect on him.
‘I think Mama would certainly rather do the job herself.’
‘And your father?’
‘Do you know him too? You are well up in our family. Papa’s in the crude still.’
‘The crude?’
This seemed an enormously suitable calling, whatever it was, for Duport to follow, but one could not in the least imagine financial or administrative shape taken by such employment.
‘Crude oil. That’s how it’s known in the trade. His business is mixed up with importing into Canada for processing. He doesn’t do too badly. That’s his life. Has been for quite a long time now. He’s rather crotchety these days. Trouble with his inside. He never really recovered from that upset in the war. Still, Papa has his moments.’
The way she said that recalled Jean again. Glober, who had been explaining to Isobel how he was going to shoot Match Me Such Marvel in Spain, returned to holding Polly Duport’s arm.
‘More Mozart now. We’ll see you at the next intermission.’
The Widmerpools, Tompsitts, and Short, were standing not far away, the men discussing something in an undertone. Mrs Tompsitt, no beauty, looked less than pleased. As Stevens remarked, she had the air of being rich. She and Pamela were not talking together. Pamela’s eye was on us. She was still smiling a little to herself. Glober glanced in her direction, raising his hand slightly in greeting. From the gesture, they appeared not to have met earlier that evening. Pamela made no sign in return, not altering her faint smile. If Glober felt himself in a delicate position, he gave no outward evidence of that. As he strolled away, hand on Polly Duport’s elbow, he was perfectly at ease.
‘That was the American who planned to run away with Lady Widmerpool, but is to do so no longer?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘She’s looking rather frightening tonight.’
Isobel’s comment, although it could not possibly have been heard by Pamela at that range, appeared in some manner to react on her. As we approached the marquee again, she broke off from the Tompsitt group, and came towards us. We said good evening.
‘I’ve j
ust this afternoon found where Gwinnett’s staying.’
Pamela spoke that like a comment on something we had already discussed together.
‘You have?’
‘He’s been in hiding.’
She laughed. The laugh sounded a little mad.
‘You’ll never guess who gave me the address.’
‘I’m sure I can’t.’
‘A tart.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Does it surprise you, him knowing a tart?’
‘I’ll have to think about the answer to that.’
‘Perhaps you know her too?’
‘I’ve no reason to suppose so.’
‘She’s called Pauline.’
‘As it happens, I never met her.’
‘A girl of X’s.’
‘Of course.’
‘So it’s all above board, so far as Gwinnett’s concerned.’
‘I agree.’
The music began. She laughed again, and turned away. We found our seats. The Second Act took place, the drunken scenes, the setting to rest of fears that the girls might join the Pasha’s harem. When we came out for the second interval, Moreland reappeared. Gossage and Chandler came up.
‘I’m always fond of the English maid, Blonde,’ Moreland said. ‘Unlike the Pasha’s gardener, I find that vixenish touch sympathetic.’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 4 Page 46