Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘I don’t think Gwinnett does away with his girls. He is not a murderer. He just loves where Death is. The subject enraptures him. Emily Brightman says there was an earlier incident of his breaking into a mortuary, where a dead love of his lay.’

Delavacquerie thought for a moment.

‘I can understand the obsession, like most others. People love where Beauty is, where Money is, where Power is — why not where Death is? An American poet said Death is the Mother of Beauty. No, I was being perhaps unduly secretive at lunch. I’ll tell you. I have a special line on Lord Widmerpool. My son is at the university of which he is the chancellor.’

I knew Delavacquerie’s wife had died ten or fifteen years before. I had never met her. They had come across each other in England, the marriage, so far as I knew, a happy one. Delavacquerie sometimes spoke of his wife. The son he had never before mentioned.

‘In the ordinary way, of course, Etienne would scarcely know who was the chancellor of the university. Lord Widmerpool, as we were saying at lunch, has for some little time been laying stress on his own closeness to the younger generation, and its upheavals. You may have seen his letters — always signed nowadays “Ken Widmerpool”, rather than just “Widmerpool”, as a peer of the realm — a matey approach habitually brought into play so far as students of the university are concerned. He has made his house a centre for what might be called the more difficult cases.’

‘Was your son involved in the Quiggin twins’ paint-throwing?’

Delavacquerie laughed at the suggestion.

‘On the contrary, Etienne is a hard-working boy, who wants to get a good economics degree, but naturally he does the things his own contemporaries do up to a point — knows all about them, I mean, even if he isn’t the paint-throwing type. He has talked a lot about Lord Widmerpool. Quite a personality cult has been established there. Lord Widmerpool has made himself a powerful figure in the student world — which, I need hardly remind you, is by no means entirely made up of students.’

‘You think your knowledge of Widmerpool’s latest stance is such as to persuade him to create no difficulties about Gwinnett’s book?’

‘It is my own self-esteem that prompts me to attempt this. That is what I am like. I want to come back to the Magnus Donners Prize committee, and inform them that Lord Widmerpool is perfectly agreeable to Death’s-head Swordsman receiving the award — that is, if you and the rest of the panel wish the book to be chosen.’

This statement of his own feelings in the matter was very typical of Delavacquerie; to admit ambitions of a kind not necessarily to be expected from a poet, anyway the poet of popular imagination. By the time we had this conversation the habit had grown up of our lunching together in London at fairly regular intervals (quite apart from the Magnus Donners meetings), so that I was already familiar with a side of him that was competitive in a manner he rather liked to emphasize. Then he came out with something for which I was not at all prepared.

‘Isn’t a girl called Fiona Cutts some sort of a relation of yours?’

‘A niece.’

‘She used to be a friend of Etienne’s.’

‘Lately?’

‘A year or two ago. For a short time she and Etienne saw quite a lot of each other — I mean enough for me to have met her too. A nice girl. I think in the end she found Etienne too humdrum, though they got on well for a while.’

‘Did they meet with the odd crowd Fiona is now going round with?’

‘No, not at all. At some musical get-together, I think. The thing broke up when this other business started.’

Fiona’s friendship with Etienne Delavacquerie had never percolated down through the family grapevine. There was no particular reason why it should. Even Fiona’s parents were unlikely to keep track of all their daughter’s current boyfriends. It was a pity Susan and Roddy Cutts had never known about this apparently reliable young man. They would have felt relieved, anyway for a short period of time. Delavacquerie, also regretting the termination of the relationship, was probably in ignorance of the extent to which Fiona could show herself a handful. I asked if he knew about Scorpio Murtlock.

‘I knew she was now mixed up with some mystic cult. I didn’t know Murtlock had anything to do with her. I thought he was a queer.’

‘Hard to say.’

‘All I know about Murtlock is that Quentin Shuckerly picked him up somewhere ages ago. Shuckerly, expecting an easy lay, put Murtlock up in his flat. Shuckerly can be quite tough in such matters — that former intellectual black boyfriend of his used to call him the Narcissus of the Nigger — but his toughness, or his narcissism, didn’t stand up to Murtlock’s. Shuckerly had to leave the country to get Murtlock out of his flat. A new book of Shuckerly poems was held up in publication in consequence. I wouldn’t have thought Murtlock a wise young man to get mixed up with. Etienne never told me that.’

Delavacquerie looked quite disturbed. Here our ways had to part.

‘I should like to bug your conversation with Widmerpool, anyway your opening gambit.’

Delavacquerie made a dramatic gesture.

‘I shall take the bull by the horns — adopt the directness of the CIA man and the Cuban defector.’

‘What was that?’

‘He asked him a question.’

‘Which was?’

‘You know how it is in Havana in the Early Warning?’

Delavacquerie waved goodbye. I went on towards the paper, to get a book for review. In the anxiety he had shown about his son’s abandoned love affair — and Fiona’s own involvement with Murtlock — Delavacquerie had displayed more feeling than he usually revealed. It suggested that Etienne Delavacquerie had been fairly hard hit when Fiona went off. I was interested that Delavacquerie himself had met her, and would have liked to hear more of his views on that subject. There had been no opportunity. In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties begin more or less to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about; as opposed to those earlier friendships — not unlike love affairs, with all sexual element removed — which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.

In earlier days, given our comparative intellectual intimacy, there would have been no embarrassment in enquiring about Delavacquerie’s own sexual arrangements. The question would have been an aspect of being friends. In fact, Delavacquerie himself would almost certainly have issued some sort of statement of his own on the matter, a handout likely to have been given early priority, when we were first getting to know one another. That was why the rumoured brush with Matilda remained altogether blurred in outline. There was no doubt that Delavacquerie liked women, got on well with them. His poetry showed that. If he possessed any steady company — hard to believe he did not — the lady herself never seemed to appear with him in public.

Thinking of the information now accumulating about Scorpio Murtlock, an incident that had taken place a few years before came to mind. It might or might not be Murtlock this time, the principle was the same. The occasion also marked the last time I had set eyes on an old acquaintance, Sunny Farebrother. I was in London only for the day. Entering a comparatively empty compartment on a tube train, I saw Farebrother sitting at the far end. Wearing a black overcoat and bowler hat, both ancient as his wartime uniforms, he was as usual holding himself very upright. He did not look like a man verging on eighty. White moustache neatly trimmed, he could have passed for middle sixties. In one sense a figure conspicuously of the past in turnout, there was also something about him that was extremely up-to-date, not to say brisk. He was smiling to himself. I took the vacant seat next to him.