A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [86]
Members must have seen that there was no way of avoiding the subject. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, he said: “There is a disused railway-siding that was turned into allotments. He probably worked there. It adjoins one of the residential suburbs.”
There was a general laugh at this answer, which was certainly a neat way of settling the questions of both Quiggin and Brightman himself, so far as Members was concerned. Smethwyck began to talk of a play he had seen in London, and conversation took a new course. However, the feelings of self-reproach that contact with Quiggin, or discussions about him, commonly aroused in me were not entirely set at rest by this description of his circumstances. Brightman’s information was notoriously unreliable: and Members’s words had clearly been actuated by personal dislike. The work on the railway line might certainly have been of a comparatively recreational nature: that had to be admitted in the light of Mark Members’s knowledge of the locality; but, even were this delineation of the background true, that would not prevent Quiggin from finding in his life some element chronically painful to him. Even though he might exaggerate to himself, and to others, his lack of means in relation to the financial circumstances of his contemporaries, this in itself pointed to a need for other – and deeply felt – discontents. It was possibly that, in the eyes of Quiggin, money represented some element in which he knew himself deficient: rather in the same way that Widmerpool, when he wanted to criticise Stringham, said that he had too much money: no doubt in truth envying the possession of assets that were, in fact, not material ones. It was some similar course of speculation that seemed to give shape to Quiggin’s character and outward behaviour.
Short’s luncheon took place the day before I was to meet Mrs. Foxe again, and I thought over the question of Quiggin on my way to Stringham’s rooms.
“This may be rather a ghastly meal,” Stringham said, while we waited for his mother, and Sillery, to arrive.
Sillery appeared first. He had cleaned himself up a little for the occasion, trimmed his moustache at the corners, and exchanged his usual blue bow for a black silk tie with white spots. Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused. Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink. Prowling about the room for a minute or two, he glanced at the invitations on the mantelpiece: a London dance or two, and some undergraduate parties. He found nothing there that appeared to interest him, because he turned, and, stepping between Stringham and myself, took each of us by an arm, resting his weight slightly.
“I hear you have been seeing something of Brother Quiggin,” he said to me.
“We met at one of Brightman’s lectures, Sillers.”
“You both go to Brightman’s lectures, do you?” said Sillery. “I hope they are being decently attended,”
“Moderate.”
“Mostly women, I fear.”
“A sprinkling of men.”
“I heard they were getting quite painfully empty. It’s a pity, because Brightman is such an able fellow. He won golden opinions as a young man,” said Sillery.
“But tell me, how do you find Brother Quiggin?”
I hardly knew what to say. However, Sillery seemed to require no answer. He said: “Brother Quiggin is an able young man, too. We must not forget that.”
Stringham did not seem much in the mood for Sillery. He moved away towards the window. A gramophone was playing in the rooms above. Outside, the weather was hot and rather stuffy.
“I hope my mother is not going to be really desperately late,” he said.
We waited. Sillery began to describe a walking tour he had once taken in Sicily with two friends, one of whom had risen to be Postmaster-General: the other, dead in his twenties, having shown promise of even higher things. He was in the middle of an anecdote about an amusing experience they had had with a German professor in a church at Syracuse, when there was a step on the stairs outside. Stringham went to the door, and out on to the landing. I heard him say: “Why, hallo, Tuffy. Only you?”
Miss Weedon’s reply was not audible with