Casanova's Chinese Restaurant

by Anthony Powell

  ‘It looked like that at one moment.’

  ‘With the agreement of the third party?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And now she knows you think differently?’

  ‘She sees what I mean.’

  ‘And thinks the same?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I too could see what he meant. At least I thought I could. Moreland meant that Maclintick, in doing away with himself, had drawn attention, indeed heavily underlined, the conditions of life to which Moreland himself was inexorably committed; a world to which Priscilla did not yet belong, even if she were on her way to belonging there. I do not think Moreland intended this juxtaposition of lot to be taken in its crudest aspect; that is to say in the sense that Priscilla was too young, too delicate a flower by birth and upbringing to be associated with poverty, unfaithfulness, despair, and death. If he supposed that – which I doubt – Moreland made a big mistake. Priscilla, like the rest of her family, had a great deal of resilience. I think Moreland’s realisation was in the fact of Maclintick’s desperate condition; Maclintick’s inability to regulate his own emotional life; Maclintick’s lack of success as a musician; in short the mess of things Maclintick had made, or perhaps had had visited upon him. Moreland was probably the only human being Maclintick had whole-heartedly liked. In return, Moreland had liked Maclintick; liked his intelligence; liked talking and drinking with him. By taking his own life, Maclintick had brought about a crisis in Moreland’s life too. He had ended the triangular relationship between Moreland, Priscilla, and Matilda. Precisely in what that relationship consisted remained unrevealed. What Matilda thought, what Priscilla thought, remained a mystery. All sides of such a situation are seldom shown at once, even if they are shown at all. Only one thing was certain. Love had received one of those shattering jolts to which it is peculiarly vulnerable from extraneous circumstance.

  ‘This Maclintick business must have held up all work.’

  ‘As you can imagine, I have not done a stroke. I think Matilda and I may try and go away for a week or two, if I can raise the money.’

  ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘France, I suppose.’

  The Morelands went abroad the following week. That Sunday, Isobel’s eldest sister, Frederica, rang up and asked if she could come to tea. This suggestion, on the whole a little outside the ordinary routine of things with Frederica, who was inclined to make plans some way ahead, suggested she had something special to say. As it happened, Robert, too, had announced he would look in that afternoon; so the day took on a distinctly family aspect. Frederica and Robert could be received at close quarters, be relied upon to be reasonably cordial to one another. That would not have been true of Frederica and Norah. Hugo was another dangerous element, preferably to be entertained without the presence of his other brothers and sisters. With Frederica and Robert there was nothing to worry about.

  As soon as Frederica arrived, it was evident she had recently learnt something that had surprised her a great deal. She was a person of controlled, some – Chips Lovell, for example – thought even rather forbidding exterior; a widow who showed no sign of wanting to remarry and found her interests, her work and entertainment, in her tours of duty as Lady-in-Waiting. However, that afternoon she was freely allowing herself to indulge in the comparatively undisciplined relaxation of arousing her relations’ curiosity.

  ‘I expect you have heard of a writer called St John Clarke,’ she said, almost as soon as she had sat down.

  This supposition, expressed by some of my friends, would have been a method of introducing St John Clarke’s name within a form of words intended to indicate that in their eyes, no doubt equally in my own, St John Clarke did not grade as a sufficiently eminent literary figure for serious persons like ourselves ever to have heard of him. The phrase would convey no sense of enquiry; merely a scarcely perceptible compliment, a very minor demonstration of mutual self-esteem. With Frederica, however, one could not be sure. She had received a perfectly adequate education, indeed rather a good one, to fit her for her position in life, but she did not pretend to ‘know’ about writing. Indeed, she was inclined to pride herself on rising above the need to discuss the ways and means of art in which some of her relations and friends interminably indulged.

  ‘I like reading books and going to plays,’ she had once remarked, ‘but I do not want to talk about them all the time.’

  If Frederica had, in practice, wholly avoided an uninstructed predisposition to lay down the law on aesthetic matters, there would have been much to be said for this preference. Unhappily, you could never be certain of her adherence to such a rule of conduct. She seemed often to hold just as strong views on such matters as those who felt themselves most keenly engaged. Besides, her disinclination to discuss these subjects in general, left an area of uncertainty as to how far her taste, for example, in books and plays, had taken her; her self-esteem could be easily, disastrously, impaired by interpreting too literally her disavowal of all intellectual interests. In the same way, Frederica lumped together in one incongruous, not particularly acceptable agglomeration, all persons connected with painting, writing and music. I think she suspected them, in that time-honoured, rather engaging habit of thought, of possessing morals somehow worse than other people’s. Her mention of St John Clarke’s name was for these reasons unexpected.

  ‘Certainly I have heard of St John Clarke,’ I said. ‘He has just died. Isobel and I met him lunching at Hyde Park Gardens not long before he was taken ill.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Isobel, ‘I was being ill myself.’

  ‘St John Clarke used to lunch at Hyde Park Gardens?’ said Frederica. ‘I did not know that. Was he often there?’

  ‘He used to turn up at Aunt Molly’s too,’ said Isobel. ‘You must remember the story of Hugo and the raspberries —’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Frederica, showing no sign of wishing to hear that anecdote again, ‘I had forgotten it was St John Clarke. But what about him?’

  ‘Surely you read Fields of Amaranth secretly when you were growing up?’ said Isobel. ‘There was a copy without the binding in that cupboard in the schoolroom at Thrubworth.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Frederica, brushing off this literary approach as equally irrelevant. ‘But what sort of a man was St John Clarke?’

  That was a subject upon which I felt myself something of an expert. I began to give an exhaustive, perhaps too exhaustive, account of St John Clarke’s life and character. No doubt this searching analysis of the novelist was less interesting to others – certainly less interesting to Frederica – than to myself, because she broke in almost immediately with a request that I should stop.

  ‘It really does not matter about all that,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what he was like.’

  ‘That was what I was trying to tell you.’

  I felt annoyed at being found so inadequate at describing St John Clarke. No doubt it would have been better to have contained him in one single brief, brilliant epigram; I could not think of one at that moment. Besides, that was not the kind of conversational technique Frederica approved. I was attempting to approach St John Clarke from another angle, when Robert arrived. Whatever Frederica had been leading up to was for the moment abandoned. Robert, in his curiously muted manner, showed signs of animation.

  ‘I have got a piece of news,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ said Frederica. ‘Have you heard too, Robert?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Robert. ‘So far as I am aware, I am the sole possessor of this particular item.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You will all know pretty soon anyway,’ said Robert, in a leisurely way, ‘but one likes to get in first. We are going to have a new brother-in-law.’

  ‘Do you mean Priscilla is engaged?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Priscilla – not Blanche.’

  ‘Who to?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  A few names were put forward.

  ‘Come o
n,’ said Isobel. ‘Tell us.’

  ‘Chips Lovell.’

  ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘This afternoon.’

  ‘How did you find out?’

  ‘Chips had just been accepted when I arrived back at the house.’

  ‘He was almost a relation before,’ said Frederica.

  On the whole she sounded well disposed, at least looking on the bright side; because there must have been much about Chips Lovell which did not recommend itself to Frederica. She may have feared worse. Moreland’s name was unlikely to have reached her, but she could have heard vague, unsubstantiated gossip stemming ultimately from the same source.

  ‘I guessed something must be in the air when Priscilla told me she was leaving that opera job of hers,’ said Robert. ‘At one moment she thought of nothing else.’

  We talked about Chips Lovell for a time.

  ‘Now,’ said Frederica, ‘after that bit of news, I shall get back to my own story.’

  ‘What is your story?’ asked Robert. ‘I arrived in the middle.’

  ‘I was talking about St John Clarke.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Whom do you think St John Clarke would leave his money to?’ said Frederica.

  ‘That is a big question, Frederica,’ I said.

  Revelation coming from Frederica on the subject of St John Clarke’s last will and testament would be utterly unexpected. I had certainly wondered, at the time of St John Clarke’s death, who would get his money. Then the matter had gone out of my head. The beneficiary was unlikely to be anyone I knew. Now, at Frederica’s words, I began to speculate again about what surprising bequest, or bequests, might have been made. St John Clarke was known to possess no close relations. Members and Quiggin had often remarked on that fact after they left his employment, when it was clear that neither of them could hope for anything but a small legacy for old times’ sake; and even that was to the greatest degree improbable. There was the German secretary, Guggenbühl. He had moved on from St John Clarke without a quarrel, although with some encouragement, so Quiggin said, because of St John Clarke’s growing nervousness about the orthodoxy of Guggenbühl’s Marxism. The choice was on this account unlikely to have fallen on Guggenbühl. There remained the possibility of some forgotten soul from that earlier dynasty of secretaries – back before the days of Members and Quiggin – who might have been remembered in St John Clarke’s last months; a line whose names, like those of prehistoric kings, had not survived, or at best were to be met with only in the garbled forms of popular legend, in this case emanating from the accumulated conflux of St John Clarke myth propagated by Members and Quiggin. Again, the Communist Party was a possible legatee; St John Clarke seeking amends for his days of bourgeois licence, like a robber baron endowing the Church with his lands.

  Even if St John Clarke had left his worldly goods to ‘the Party’, Frederica would scarcely bother about that, finally though such a bequest might confirm her distrust for men of letters. I was at a loss to know what had happened. Frederica saw she had said enough to command attention. To hold the key to information belonging by its essential nature to a sphere quite other than one’s own gives peculiar satisfaction. Frederica was well aware of that. She paused for a second or two. The ransoming of our curiosity was gratifying to her.

  ‘Who?’ I asked.

  ‘Whom do you think?’

  ‘We can’t spend the afternoon guessing things,’ said Isobel. ‘Our invention has been exhausted by Priscilla’s possible fiancés.’

  Robert, who probably saw no reason to concern himself with St John Clarke’s affairs, and was no doubt more interested in speculating on the prospect of Chips Lovell as a brother-in-law, began to show loss of interest. He strolled across the room to examine a picture. Frederica saw that to hold her audience, she must come to the point.

  ‘Erridge,’ she said.

  That was certainly an eye-opener.

  ‘How did you discover this?’

  ‘Erry told me himself.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I stayed a night at Thrubworth. There were some legal papers of mine Erry had to sign. Taking them there seemed the only way of running him to earth. He just let out this piece of information quite casually as he put his pen down.’

  ‘How much is it?’ asked Robert, brought to heel by the nature of this disclosure.

  ‘That wasn’t so easy to find out.’

  ‘Roughly?’

  ‘St John Clarke seems to have bought an annuity of some sort that no one knew about,’ said Frederica. ‘So far as I can gather, there is about sixteen or seventeen thousand above that. It will be in the papers, of course, when the will is proved.’

  ‘Which Erry will get?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He will hand it over to his Spanish friends,’ said Robert tranquilly.

  ‘Oh, no, he won’t,’ said Frederica, with some show of bravado.

  ‘Don’t be too sure.’

  ‘One can’t be sure,’ said Frederica, speaking this time more soberly. ‘But it sounded as if Erry were not going to do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He didn’t leave Spain on very good terms with anyone.’

  ‘The money would pay off the overdraft on the estate account,’ said Isobel.

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And the woods would not have to be sold.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Robert, ‘this windfall might turn out to be most opportune.’

  ‘I don’t want to speak too soon,’ said Frederica, ‘especially where Erry is concerned. All the same, so far as I could see, there seemed hope of his showing some sense for once.’

  ‘But will his conscience allow him to show sense?’ said Robert.

  I understood now why Quiggin had been so irritable when we had last met. He must already have known of St John Clarke’s legacy to Erridge. By that time Quiggin could scarcely have hoped himself for anything from St John Clarke, but that this golden apple should have fallen at Erridge’s feet was another matter. To feel complete unconcern towards the fact of an already rich friend unexpectedly inheriting so comparatively large a capital sum would require an indifference to money that Quiggin never claimed to possess. Apart from that was the patron-protégé relationship existing between Erridge and Quiggin, complicated by the memory of Mona’s elopement. Quiggin’s ill humour was not surprising in the circumstances. It was, indeed, pretty reasonable. If St John Clarke had been often provoked by Members and Quiggin during his life, the last laugh had to some extent fallen to St John Clarke after death. At the same time, it was not easy to see what motives had led St John Clarke to appoint Erridge his heir. He may have felt that Erridge was the most likely among the people he knew to use the money in some manner sympathetic to his own final fancies. On the other hand, he may have reverted on his death-bed to a simpler, more old-world snobbery of his early years, or to that deep-rooted, time honoured tradition that money should go to money. It was impossible to say. These, and many other theories, were laid open to speculation by this piece of news, absurd in its way; if anything to do with money can, in truth, be said to be absurd.

  ‘Did Chips mention when he and Priscilla are going to be married?’ asked Isobel.

  The question reminded me that Moreland, at least in a negative manner, had taken another decisive step. I thought of his recent remark about the Ghost Railway. He loved these almost as much as he loved mechanical pianos. Once, at least, we had been on a Ghost Railway together at some fun fair or on a seaside pier; slowly climbing sheer gradients, sweeping with frenzied speed into inky depths, turning blind corners from which black, gibbering bogeys leapt to attack, rushing headlong towards iron-studded doors, threatened by imminent collision, fingered by spectral hands, moving at last with dreadful, ever increasing momentum towards a shape that lay across the line.

 

 
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