Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [82]
‘Did you oblige?’
‘Not me,’ said Lovell.
By no means without a healthy touch of malice, Lovell had also a fine appreciation of the power-wielding side of his job.
‘I hear your brother-in-law, Erry Warminster, is on his way home from Spain,’ he said.
‘First I’ve heard of it.’
‘Erry’s own family are always the last to hear about his goings-on.’
‘What’s your source?’
‘The office, as usual.’
‘Is he bored with the Spanish war?’
‘He is ill – also had some sort of row with his own side.’
‘What is wrong with him?’
‘Touch of dysentery, someone said.’
‘Serious?’
‘I don’t think so.’
We parted company after arranging that Lovell should come and have a drink with us at the flat in the near future. The following day, I met Quiggin in Members’s office. He was in a sulky mood. I told him I had enjoyed his piece about St John Clarke. Praise was usually as acceptable to Quiggin as to most people. That day the remark seemed to increase his ill humour. However, he confirmed the news about Erridge.
‘Yes, yes,’ he said impatiently. ‘Of course it is true that Alfred is coming back. Don’t his family take any interest in him? They might at least have discovered that.’
‘Is he bad?’
‘It is a disagreeable complaint to have.’
‘But a whole skin otherwise. That is always something if there is a war on.’
‘Alfred is too simple a man to embroil himself in practical affairs like fighting an ideological war,’ said Quiggin severely. ‘A typical aristocratic idealist, I’m afraid. Perhaps it is just as well his health has broken down. He has never been strong, of course. He is the first to admit it. In fact he is too fond of talking about his health. As I have said before, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot.’
I was surprised at Quiggin’s attitude towards Erridge’s illness. I tried to work out who Quiggin himself would be in Dostoevsky’s novel if Erridge was Prince Myshkin and Mona – presumably – Nastasya Filippovna. It was all too complicated. I could not remember the story with sufficient clarity. Quiggin spoke again.
‘I have been hearing something of Alf’s difficulties from one of our own agents just back from Barcelona,’ he said. ‘Alf seems to have shown a good deal of political obtuseness – perhaps I should say childlike innocence. He appears to have treated POUM, FAI, CNT, and UGT, as if they were all the same left-wing extension of the Labour Party. I was not surprised to hear that he was going to be arrested at the time he decided to leave Spain. If you can’t tell the difference between a Trotskyite-Communist, an Anarcho-Syndicalist, and a properly paid-up Party Member, you had better keep away from the barricades.’
‘You had, indeed.’
‘It is not fair on the workers.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Alfred’s place was to organise in England.’
‘Why doesn’t he go back to his idea of starting a magazine?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed the subject.
Erridge was in Quiggin’s bad books; a friend who had disappointed Quiggin to a degree impossible to conceal; a man who had failed to rise to an historic occasion. I supposed that Quiggin regarded Erridge’s imminent return, however involuntary, from the Spanish war in the light of a betrayal. This seemed unreasonable on Quiggin’s part, since Erridge’s breakdown in health was, after all, occasioned by an attempt to further the cause Quiggin himself had so energetically propagated by word of mouth. Even if Erridge had not fought in the field (where Howard Cragg’s nephew had already been killed), he had taken other risks in putting his principles into practice. If it was true that he was marked down for arrest, he might have been executed behind the lines. Quiggin had staked less on his enthusiasms. However, as things turned out there was probably a different reason that afternoon for Quiggin’s displeasure on Erridge’s account.
Erridge himself arrived in London a day or two later. He was not at all well, and went straight into a nursing home; the nursing home, as it happened, in the passages of which I had encountered Moreland, Brandreth, and Widmerpool. This accommodation was found for her brother by Frederica, ideologically perhaps the furthest removed from Erridge, in certain other respects the closest of the Tollands to him, both from nearness in age and a shared rigidity of individual opinion. The two of them might disagree; they understood each other