Anthony Powell - The Acceptance World

‘How are you, Nick?’

‘All right.’

‘Mark and I are going to celebrate the completion of Unburnt Boats,’ he said. ‘It is a wonderful thing to finish a book.’

‘When is it to appear?’

‘Autumn.’

I felt sure Quiggin had stopped like this in order to make some statement that would define more clearly his own position. That would certainly be a reasonable aim on his part. I was curious to know why the two of them were friends again; also to learn what was happening about Quiggin and Mona. Such information as I possessed then had come through Jean, who knew from her brother only that they had gone abroad together. At, the same time, as a friend of Templer ’s, I did not want to appear too obviously willing to condone the fact that Quiggin had eloped with his wife.

‘Mona and I are in Sussex now,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that could almost be described as unctuous, so much did it avoid his usual harsh note. ‘We have been lent a cottage. I am just up for the night to see Mark and make final arrangements with my publisher.’

He talked as if he had been married to Mona, or at least lived with her, for years; just as, a few months earlier, he had spoken as if he had always been St. John Clarke’s secretary. It seemed hard to do anything but accept the relationship as a fait accompli. Such things have to be.

‘Can you deal with St. John Clarke from so far away?’

‘How do you mean?’

Quiggin’s face clouded, taking on an expression suggesting he had heard the name of St. John Clarke, but was quite unable to place its associations.

‘Aren’t you still his secretary?’

‘Oh, good gracious, no,’ said Quiggin, unable to repress a laugh at the idea.

‘I hadn’t heard you’d left him.’

‘But he has become a Trotskyist’

‘What form does it take?’

Quiggin laughed again. He evidently wished to show his complete agreement that the situation regarding St. John Clarke was so preposterous that only a certain degree of jocularity could carry it off. Laughter, his manner indicated, was a more civilised reaction than the savage rage that would have been the natural emotion of most right-minded persons on hearing the news for the first time.

‘The chief form,’ he said, ‘is that he consequently now requires a secretary who is also a Trotskyist’

‘Who has he got?’

‘You would not know him.’

‘Someone beyond the pale?’

‘He has found a young German to pander to him, as a matter of fact. One Guggenbühl.’

‘I have met him as a matter of fact.’

‘Have you?’ said Quiggin, without interest. ‘Then 1 should advise you to steer clear of Trotskyists in the future, if I were you.’

‘Was this very sudden?’

‘My own departure was not entirely involuntary,’ said Quiggin. ‘At first I thought the man would rise above the difficulties of my domestic situation. I — and Mona, too — did everything to assist and humour him. In the end it was no good.’

He had moved off then, at the same time gathering in Members, who had been chatting to a girl in dark glasses sitting at a neighbouring table.

‘We shall stay in the country until the divorce comes through,’ he had said over his shoulder.

The story going round was that Mona had been introduced by Quiggin to St. John Clarke as a political sympathiser. Only later had the novelist discovered the story of her close association with Quiggin. He had begun to make difficulties at once. Quiggin, seeing that circumstances prevented the continuance of his job, made a goodish bargain with St. John Clarke, and departed. Guggenbühl must have stepped into the vacuum. No one seemed to know the precise moment when he had taken Quiggin’s place; nor how matters remained regarding Mrs. Andriadis.

Like Templer, I wondered how Quiggin and Mona would make two ends meet, but these details could hardly be gone into then and there in the Ritz.

‘I suppose Quiggin keeps afloat,’ I said. ‘For one thing, he must have just had an advance for his book. Still, I don’t expect that was anything colossal.’

‘That aunt of Mona’s died the other day,’ said Templer. ‘She left Mona her savings — a thousand or so, I think.’

‘So they won’t starve.’

‘As a matter of fact I haven’t cut her allowance yet,’ he said, reddening slightly. ‘I suppose one will have to in due course.’

He paused.

‘I must say it was the hell of a surprise,’ he said. ‘We’d had plenty of rows, but I certainly never thought she would go off with a chap who looked quite so like something the cat had brought in.’

I could only laugh and agree. These things are capable of no real explanation. Mona’s behaviour was perhaps to be examined in the light of her exalted feelings for Quiggin as a literary figure. Combined with this was, no doubt, a kind of envy of her husband’s former successes with other women; for such successes with the opposite sex put him, as it were, in direct competition with herself. It is, after all, envy rather than jealousy that causes most of the trouble in married life.

‘I’ve really come here tonight to see Widmerpool,’ said Templer, as if he wished to change the subject. ‘Bob Duport is in England again. I think I told you Widmerpool might help him land on his feet.’

I felt a sense of uneasiness that he found it natural to tell me this. Jean had always insisted that her brother knew nothing of the two of us. Probably she was right; though I could never be sure that someone with such highly developed instincts where relations between the sexes were concerned could remain entirely unaware that his sister was having a love affair. On the other hand he never saw us together. No doubt, so far as Jean was concerned, he would have regarded a lover as only natural in her situation. He was an exception to the general rule that made Barnby, for example, puritanically disapproving of an irregular life in others. In any case, he probably spoke of Duport in the way people so often do in such circumstances, ignorant of the facts, yet moved by some unconscious inner process to link significant names together. All the same, I was conscious of a feeling of foreboding. I was going to see Jean that night; after the dinner was at an end.

‘I am rather hopeful things will be patched up with Jean, if Bob’s business gets into running order again,’ Templer said. ‘The whole family can’t be in a permanent state of being deserted by their husbands and wives. I gather Bob is no longer sleeping with Bijou Ardglass, which was the real cause of the trouble, I think.’

‘Prince Theodoric’s girl friend?’

‘That’s the one. Started life as a mannequin. Then married Ardglass as his second wife. When he died the title, and nearly all the money, went to a distant cousin, so she had to earn a living somehow. Still, it was inconvenient she should have picked on Bob.’

By this time we had reached the ante-room where Le Bas’s Old Boys were assembling. Le Bas himself had not yet arrived, but Whitney, Maiden, Simson, Brandreth, Ghika, and Fettiplace-Jones were standing about, sipping drinks, and chatting uneasily. All of them, except Ghika, were already showing signs of the wear and tear of life. Whitney was all but unrecognisable with a moustache; Maiden had taken to spectacles; Simson was prematurely bald; Fettiplace-Jones, who was talking to Widmerpool without much show of enjoyment, although he still looked like a distinguished undergraduate, had developed that ingratiating, almost cringing manner that some, politicians assume to avoid an appearance of thrusting themselves forward. Fettiplace-Jones had been Captain of the House when I had arrived there as a new boy and had left at the end of that term. He was now Member of Parliament for some northern constituency.