Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [7]
‘Why is your other friend naughty?’
‘You ask too many questions, Moreland.’
‘But I am intrigued to know, Edgar. We all are.’
‘I call him naughty for many reasons,’ said Mr Deacon, giving a long-drawn sigh, ‘not the least of them because some years ago at a party he introduced me to an Italian, a youth whose sole claim to distinction was his alleged profession of gondolier, who turned out merely to have worked for a short time as ticket-collector on the vaporetto. A delightfully witty pleasantry, no doubt.’
There was some laughter at this anecdote, in which Maclintick did not join. Indeed, Maclintick had been listening to the course of conversation with unconcealed distaste. It was clear that he approved neither of Mr Deacon himself, nor of the suggestions implicit in Moreland’s badinage. Like Moreland, Maclintick belonged to the solidly built musical type, a physical heaviness already threatening obesity in early middle age. Broad-shouldered, yet somehow narrowing towards his lower extremities, his frontal elevation gave the impression of a large triangular kite about to float away into the sky upon the fumes of Irish whiskey, which, even above the endemic odours of the Mortimer and the superimposed insistence of Mr Deacon’s eucalyptus, freely emanated from the quarter in which he sat. Maclintick’s calculatedly humdrum appearance, although shabby, seemed aimed at concealing bohemian affiliations.
The minute circular lenses of his gold-rimmed spectacles, set across the nose of a pug dog, made one think of caricatures of Thackeray or President Thiers, imposing upon him the air of a bad-tempered doctor. Maclintick, as I discovered in due course, was indeed bad-tempered, his manner habitually grumpy and disapproving, even with Moreland, to whom he was devoted; a congenital lack of amiability he appeared perpetually, though quite unsuccessfully, attempting to combat with copious draughts of Irish whiskey, a drink always lauded by him to the disadvantage of Scotch.
‘I should be careful what you handle from the Caledonian Market, Deacon,’ Maclintick said, ‘I’m told stolen goods often drift up there. I don’t expect you want a stiff sentence for receiving.’
He spoke for the first time since I had been sitting at the table, uttering the words in a high, caustic voice.
‘Nonsense, Maclintick, nonsense,’ said Mr Deacon shortly.
His tone made obvious that any dislike felt by Maclintick for himself – a sentiment not much concealed – was on his own side heartily reciprocated.
‘Are you suggesting our friend Deacon is really a “fence”?’ asked Gossage giggling, as if coy to admit knowledge of even this comparatively unexotic piece of thieves’ jargon. ‘I am sure he is nothing of the sort. Why, would you have us take him for a kind of modern Fagin?’
‘I wouldn’t go as far as that,’ said Maclintick speaking more amicably this time, probably not wanting to exacerbate Mr Deacon beyond a certain point. ‘Just warning him to take proper care of his reputation which I should not like to see tarnished.’
He smiled a little uneasily at Moreland to show this attack on Mr Deacon (which the victim seemed rather to enjoy) was not intended to include Moreland. I learnt later how much Moreland was the object of admiration, almost of reverence, on the part of Maclintick. This high regard was not only what Maclintick himself – on that rather dreadful subsequent occasion – called ‘the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist’, but also because of an affection for Moreland as a friend that surpassed ordinary camaraderie, becoming something protective, almost maternal, if that word could be used of someone who looked like Maclintick. Indeed, under his splenetic exterior Maclintick harboured all kind of violent, imperfectly integrated sentiments. Moreland, for example, impressed him, perhaps rightly, as a young man of matchless talent, ill equipped to face a materialistic world. At the same time, Maclintick’s own hag-ridden temperament also punished him for indulging in what he regarded as sentimentality. His tremendous disapproval of sexual inversion, encountered intermittently in circles he chose to frequent, was compensation for his own sense of guilt at this hero-worshipping of Moreland; his severity with Gossage, another effort to right the balance.