At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [89]
‘I shall have to be going now,’ said Alfred Tolland, snatching this offer of release. ‘I expect I shall see you at the dinner next …’
‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t know what our circumstances will be.’
‘Of course, of course. You can’t say. I quite understand. Pity you weren’t at the last one. Nice to feel that we …’
Exact expression of what it was nice for both of us to feel either evaded him, or was too precarious a sentiment to express in words. He merely nodded his head several times. Then he made for the door. Members sighed. He was in a bad humour.
‘What on earth is this party?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Did that man say something about your being engaged?’
‘Yes. I am engaged.’
‘To whom?’
‘Isobel Tolland—over there.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Members, without any exaggerated effusiveness, as if he disapproved of any such step in principle. ‘Many congratulations. I was stuck with that appalling bore for about twenty minutes. It was impossible to get away. Is he absolutely right in the head? What a strange house this is. I met Lady Molly Jeavons quite a long time ago at the Manaschs’. She asked me to come and see her. I called once or twice, but no one answered the bell, though I rang half a dozen times—and knocked too. Then she suddenly telephoned this invitation to me yesterday. She never mendoned your name. I did not think it would be quite like this.’
‘It is often different. You never know what it is going to be.’
‘Have you met her husband?’ said Members, quite plaintively. ‘I talked to him for a while when I first arrived. He asked me if I ever played snooker. Then he introduced me to the man you found me with.’
By then Members had several jobs of a literary kind which, since he was still a bachelor, must bring him in a respectable income. His American trip was said to have been a success. He no longer wrote verse with Freudian undertones, and he had abandoned anything so extreme as Quiggin’s professional ‘communism’, in the wake of which he had for a while half-heartedly trailed. Now he tended to be associated with German literature. Kleist; Grillparzer: Stifter: those were names to be caught on the echoes of his conversadon. Latterly, he was believed to be more taken up with Kierkegaard, then a writer not widely read in this country. Members, no fool, was always a little ahead of the fashion. He was a lively talker when not oppressed, as at that moment, by a party he did not enjoy. His distinguished appearance and terse manner made him a popular spare man at intellectual dinners. ‘But one really does not want to eat amateur paella and drink Chelsea Médoc for ever,’ he used to say: a world into which he felt himself somewhat rudely thrust immediately after losing his job as secretary to St. John Clarke. For a time now Members had been reappearing, so it was said, in the rather more elegant of the circles frequented by the famous novelist before his conversion to Marxism. In the light of this effort to maintain and expand his social life, Members found the Jeavons house a disappointment. He had expected something more grandiose. I tried to explain the household, but was glad when he brushed this aside, because I wanted to ask if he knew further details about Erridge and Mona. Members turned almost with relief to this subject.
‘Of course I knew J.G. had got hold of Lord Warminster,’ he said impatiently. ‘Surely everyone has known that for a long time. We had dinner together before I went to America. J.G. told me about the magazine he hoped to persuade Warminster to start. I saw at once that nothing would come of it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Warminster is too much of a crank.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No, but I know of him.’
‘How did the Mona situation arise?’
All at once Members was on his guard.
‘But there is every prospect of Warminster becoming your brother-in-law, isn’t there?’
‘Most certainly there is.’
Members laughed, not in his most friendly manner, and remained silent.
‘Come on—out with it,’ I said.
We had by then known each other for a long time. It was not an occasion to stand on ceremony, as Members was well aware. He thought for a second or two, pondering whether it would be preferable to circulate a good piece of gossip, or to tease more effectively by withholding any information he might himself possess. In the end he decided that communication of the news would be more pleasurable.