Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [71]
Sweetskin was not the only book to cause Quiggin & Craggs worry. Bagshaw reported a serious row blowing up about Sad Majors. Here the complexities of politics, rather than those of sex, impinged on purely commercial considerations. Bagshaw was very much at home in this atmosphere. He talked a lot about the Odo Stevens manuscript, which he had been allowed to read, and described as ‘full of meat’. However, although written in a lively manner, some of the material dealing with the Communist guerillas with whom Stevens had been in contact was at least as outspoken in its field as Kydd on the subject of sex.
‘It appears a British officer operating with a rival Resistance group got rather mysteriously liquidated. Accidents will happen even with the best-regulated secret police. Of course a lot of Royalists were shot, and quite a fair number of people who weren’t exactly Royalists, not to mention a crowd of heretical Communists too, the whole party ending, as we all know, in wholesale arrests and deportations. This is, of course, rather awkward for a firm of progressive tone. JG thinks it can be hoovered over satisfactorily. He wants to do the book, because it will sell, but Howard’s against. He saw at once there’d be a lot of trouble, if the material appeared in its present form.’
‘What will happen?’
‘Gypsy won’t hear of it.’
‘What’s Gypsy got to do with it?’
‘It’s her affair, isn’t it, if what Stevens has said is damaging to the Party? She’s bloody well consulted, apart from anything else, because Howard’s afraid of her – actually physically afraid. He knows about one or two things Gypsy’s arranged in her day. So do I. I don’t blame him.’
‘Have they turned the book down?’
‘They’re arguing it out.’
The weather was still unthawed when, a month or two later, I dined with Roddy Cutts at the House of Commons. Spring should have been on the way by then, but there was no sign. Our respective wives were both to give birth any day now. Roddy had suggested having a night out together to relieve the strain. A night out with Roddy carried no implications of outrageous dissipation. We talked most of the time about family affairs. He had seen Hugo Tolland the day before, who had been staying at Thrubworth, bringing back an account of how Siegfried, the German POW, was every day growing in local stature.
‘Siegfried gives regular conjuring displays now in the village hall. There’s talk of his getting engaged to one of Skerrett’s granddaughters. He’ll be nursing the constituency before we know where we are. Well, I suppose it’s about time to be getting along. I’ll just see how the debate’s going before we make for home.’
Roddy Cutts’s large handsome face always became drawn with anxiety when, at the close of any party at which he had been host, he glanced at the bill. This time the look indicated the worst; that he was ruined; parliamentary career at an end; he would have to sell up; probably emigrate. An extravagant charge would certainly have been out of place. Whatever the shock, Roddy made no comment. He dejectedly searched through pocket after pocket in apparently vain attempts to find a sum adequate to meet so severe a demand on a man’s resources. The second round through, one of the waistcoat pockets yielded a five-pound note. He smoothed out its paper on the table.
‘Give my love to Isobel, and hopes that all will be well.’
‘And mine to Susie.’
The change arrived. Roddy sorted it lethargically, at the same time giving the impression that the levy might have been less disastrous than at first feared. His manner of picking up coins and examining them used to irritate our brother-in-law George Tolland. We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall, where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking-rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters. Roddy’s personality always took on a new dimension within these walls.
‘If you’ll wait for a minute in the central lobby, I