Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

by Anthony Powell

  ‘No use fighting against fate,’ said Moreland laughing. ‘I’ve always said it.’

  ‘Gossage told her I was a musician,’ said Maclintick. ‘Her comment was “Oh, God”.’

  ‘I find that a very natural one to make,’ said Moreland.

  ‘She isn’t absolutely tone-deaf,’ said Maclintick, speaking as if he had given the matter deep thought. ‘She has her likes and dislikes. Quite good at remembering facts and contradicting you about them later. She’d been dragged by her brother to the chamber music. I never quite know why.’

  ‘Brought her as a chaperone,’ said Moreland.

  ‘All the music in the family went into Stanley,’ said Maclintick. ‘I shall miss seeing Stanley once in a while. We used to have beer evenings together twice a year. Stanley can’t drink Irish whiskey. But you know, it’s astonishing what technical jargon women will pick up. Audrey would argue about music with me-with anyone. I’ve heard her make Gossage contradict himself about his views on Les Six. Odd the way music comes out in a family. I get it through my mother who was half Jewish. My father and grandfather were in the linen trade. They may have gone to a concert occasionally. That was about the extent of it.’

  Moreland took this opportunity to guide conversation back into general channels.

  ‘You can’t tell what families are going to throw up,’ he said. ‘Look at Lortzing whose family were hereditary hangmen in Thuringia for two hundred years. Then suddenly the Lortzings cease to be hangmen and produce a composer.’

  ‘You could be a musical hangman, I suppose,’ said Maclintick. ‘Hum tunes while you worked.’

  ‘I could well imagine some of the musicians one knows becoming hangmen,’ said Moreland.

  ‘Surprising Lortzing didn’t become a critic with an ancestry like that,’ said Maclintick. ‘Had it in his blood to execute people when need be – would also know the right knot to tie when it came to his own turn to shuffle off this mortal coil. Lortzing wrote an opera about your friend Casanova, didn’t he? Do you remember that night at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant years ago? We talked about seducers and Don Juan and that sort of thing. That painter, Barnby, was there. I believe you were with us too, weren’t you, Jenkins? For some reason I have often thought of that evening. I was thinking of it again last night, wondering if Carolo was one of the types.’

  Moreland winced slightly. I did not know whether or not Maclintick was aware that Carolo had once been married to Matilda. Probably did not know that, I decided. Maclintick was a man who normally took little interest in the past history of other people. It was even surprising to find him showing such comparative interest in his own past history.

  ‘Carolo doesn’t come into the Casanova-Don Juan category,’ said Moreland. ‘He hasn’t the vitality. Too passive. Passivity is not a bad method, all the same. Carolo just sits about until some woman either marries him, or runs away with him, from sheer desperation at finding nothing whatever to talk about.’

  Maclintick nodded his head several times, showing ponderous enjoyment at this view of Carolo’s technique in seduction. He filled the glasses.

  ‘I suppose one of the tests of a man is the sort of woman he wants to marry,’ he said. ‘You showed some sense, Moreland, and guessed right. I should have stayed out of the marriage market altogether.’

  ‘Marriage is quite a problem for a lot of people,’ Moreland said.

  ‘You know Audrey was my ideal in a sort of way,’ said Maclintick, who after drinking all day-probably several days-was becoming thick in his speech and not always absolutely coherent. ‘I’ve no doubt that was a mistake to start off with. There is probably something wrong about thinking you’ve realised your ideal – in art or anywhere else. It is a conception that should remain in the mind.’

  ‘It wasn’t for nothing that Petrarch’s Laura was one of the de Sade family,’ said Moreland.

  ‘My God, I bet it wasn’t,’ said Maclintick. ‘She’d have put him through it if they’d married. I shall always think of her being a de Sade whenever I see that picture of them again. You know the one. It is always to be found on the walls of boarding houses.’

  ‘The picture you are thinking of, Maclintick, represents Dante and Beatrice,’ Moreland said, ‘not Petrarch and Laura. But I know the one you mean – and I expect the scene in question was no less unlike what actually happened than if depicting the other couple.’

  ‘You are absolutely right, Moreland,’ said Maclintick, now shaking with laughter. ‘Dante and Beatrice – and a bloody bad picture, as you say. As a matter of fact, it’s the sort of picture I rather like. Pictures play no part in my life. Music fulfils my needs, with perhaps a little poetry, a little German philosophy. You can keep the pictures, whether they tell a story or not.’

  ‘Nowadays you can have both,’ said Moreland, cheered by the drink and at last recovering his spirits. ‘The literary content of some Picassos makes The Long Engagement or A Hopeless Dawn seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction.’

  ‘You might as well argue that Ulysses has more “story” than Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Rosary,’’ said Maclintick. ‘I suppose it has in a way. I find all novels lacking in probability.’

  ‘Probability is the bane of the age,’ said Moreland, now warming up. ‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant – and usually inaccurate – premises.’

  ‘That is certainly true about women,’ said Maclintick. ‘But anyway it takes a bit of time to realise that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living. I used to feel with Audrey: “this can’t be marriage” – and now it isn’t.’

  Suddenly upstairs the telephone bell began to ring. The noise came from the room where Maclintick worked. The sound was shrill, alarming, like a deliberate warning. Maclintick did not move immediately. He looked greatly disturbed. Then, without saying anything, he took a gulp from his glass and went off up the stairs. Moreland looked at me. He made a face.

  ‘Audrey coming back?’ he said.

  ‘We ought to go soon.’

  ‘We will.’

  We could faintly hear Maclintick’s voice; the words inaudible. It sounded as if Maclintick were unable to understand what he was being asked. That was likely enough considering the amount he had drunk. A minute later he returned to the sitting-room.

  ‘Someone for you, Moreland,’ he said.

  Moreland looked very disturbed.

  ‘It can’t be for me,’ he said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

  ‘Some woman,’ said Maclintick.

  ‘Who on earth can it be?’

  ‘She kept on telling me I knew her,’ said Maclintick, ‘but I couldn’t get hold of the name. It was a bloody awful line. My head is buzzing about too.’

  Moreland went to the stairs. Maclintick heaved himself on to the sofa. Closing his eyes, he began to breathe heavily. I felt I had had a lot to drink without much to show for it. We remained in silence. Moreland seemed to be away for centuries. When he returned to the room he was laughing.

  ‘It was Matilda,’ he said.

  ‘Didn’t sound a bit like Matilda,’ said Maclintick, without opening his eyes.

  ‘She said she didn’t know it was you. You sounded quite different.’

  ‘I’m never much good at getting a name on the bloody telephone,’ said Maclintick. ‘She said something about her being your wife now I come to think of it.’

  ‘Matilda forgot her key. I shall have to go back at once. She is on the doorstep.’

  ‘Just like a woman, that,’ said Maclintick. ‘There was always trouble about Carolo’s key.’

  ‘We’ll have to go.’

  ‘You don’t expect me to see you out, do you P Kind of you to come.’

  ‘You had better go to bed, Maclintick,’ said Moreland. ‘You don’t want to spend the night on the sofa.’

  ‘Why not?�
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  ‘Too cold. The fire will be out soon.’

  ‘I’ll be all right.’

  ‘Do move, Maclintick,’ said Moreland.

  He stood looking down with hesitation at Maclintick. Moreland could be assertive about his own views, was said to be good at controlling an orchestra; he was entirely without the power of assuming authority over a friend who needed ‘managing’ after too much to drink. I remembered the scene when Widmerpool and I had put Stringham to bed after the Old Boy Dinner, and wondered whether an even odder version of that operation was to be re-enacted here. However, Maclintick rolled himself over into a sitting position, removed his spectacles, and began to rub his eyes just in the manner of my former housemaster, Le Bas, when he could not make up his mind whether or not one of his pupils was telling the truth.

  ‘Perhaps you are right, Moreland,’ Maclintick said.

  ‘Certainly I am right.’

  ‘I will move if you insist.’

  ‘I do insist.’

  Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland.

  ‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’

  Moreland and I both laughed a lot, but it was a horrible moment. Maclintick had spoken with that strange, unearthly dignity that a drunk man can suddenly assume. We left him making his way unsteadily upstairs. By a miracle there was a taxi at the other end of the street.

  ‘I hope Maclintick will be all right,’ said Moreland, as we drove away.

  ‘He is in rather a mess.’

  ‘I am in a mess myself,’ Moreland said. ‘You probably know about that. I won’t bore you with the complications of my own life. I hope Matty will not be in too much of a fret when I get there. What can she be thinking of, forgetting her key? Something Freudian, I suppose. I am glad we went to see Maclintick. What did you think about him?’

  ‘I thought he was in a bad way.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maclintick is in a bad way,’ said Moreland. ‘It is no good pretending he isn’t. I don’t know where it will end, I don’t know where anything will end. It was strange Maclintick bringing up Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.’

  ‘Dragging up your past.’

  ‘Barnby went straight to the point,’ said Moreland. ‘I was struck by that. One ought to make decisions where women are concerned.’

  ‘What are your plans-roughly?’

  ‘I have none, as usual. You are already familiar with my doctrine that every man should have three wives. I accept the verdict that under the existing social order such an arrangement is not viable. That is why so many men are in such a quandary.’

  We drove on to where I lived. Moreland continued in the taxi on his way to find Matilda. Isobel was asleep. She woke up at one moment and asked: ‘Did you hear anything interesting?’ I told her, ‘No’. She went to sleep again. I went to sleep for an hour or two, then woke up with a start, and lay there thinking how grim the visit to Maclintick had been; not only grim, but curiously out of focus; a pocket in time; an evening that pertained in character to life some years before. Marriage reduced in number interludes of that kind. They belonged by their nature to an earlier period: the days of the Mortimer and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. Maclintick’s situation was infinitely depressing; yet people found their way out of depressing situations. Nothing was more surprising than man’s capacity for survival. Before one could look round, Maclintick would be in a better job, married to a more tolerable wife. All the same, I felt doubtful about that happening. Thinking uneasy thoughts, I fell once more into a restless, disenchanted sleep.

  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?’

&nbs
p; ‘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?’