Anthony Powell - Soldier's Art

This was an unexpected trump card for Stevens to play. Moreland, always modest about his own works, showed permissible signs of pleasure at this sudden hearty praise from such an unexpected source. Music was an entirely new line from Stevens, so far as I knew him, until this moment. Obviously it constituted a weapon in his armoury, perhaps a formidable one. He had certainly opened up operations on an extended front since our weeks together at Aldershot. Mrs. Maclintick broke in at this point.

“Vieux Port’s the one Maclintick always liked,” she said. “He used to go on about that piece of music until I told him never to mention the thing to me again.”

“When it was performed at Birmingham, Maclintick was about the only critic who offered any praise,” said Moreland. “Even that old puss Gossage was barely civil. The rest of the critics buried my music completely and me with it. I feel now like Nero meeting in Hades the unknown mourner who strewed flowers on his grave.”

“You’re not in your grave yet, Moreland,” said Mrs. Maclintick, “nor even in Hades, though you always talk as if you were. I never knew such a morbid man.”

“I meant the grave of my works rather than my own,” said Moreland. “That’s what it looked like that year at Birmingham. Anyway, not being dead’s no argument against feeling like Nero. Quite the reverse.”

“Not much hope of a Roman orgy here,” said Stevens. “Even the food’s hard to wallow in, don’t you agree, Mrs. Maclintick?”

He turned his attention to her, in the manner of his particular brand of narcissism, determined to make a conquest, separate and individual, of everyone sitting at the table.

“From the way you talk,” he said, “you don’t sound as great a Moreland fan as you should be. Fancy saying you got tired of hearing Vieux Port praised. I’m surprised at you.”

“I’m a fan all right,” said Mrs. Maclintick. “Not half, I am. You should see him in bed in the morning before he’s shaved. You couldn’t help being a fan then.”

There was some laughter at that, in which Moreland himself joined loudly, though he would probably have preferred his relationship with Mrs. Maclintick to have been expressed less explicitly in the presence of Priscilla. At the same time, Mrs. Maclintick’s tone had been not without affection of a kind. The reply she had made, whether or not with that intention, hindered Stevens from continuing to discuss Moreland’s music more or less seriously, an object he seemed to have in view. However, this did not prevent him from increasing, if only in a routine manner, his own air of finding Mrs. Maclintick attractive, a policy that was beginning to make a good impression on her. This behaviour, however light-hearted, was perhaps displeasing to Priscilla, no doubt unwilling to admit to herself that, for Stevens, one woman was, at least up to a point, as good as another; anyway when sitting in a restaurant. She may reasonably have felt that no competition should be required of her to keep him to herself. There was, of course, no question of Stevens showing any real interest in Mrs. Maclintick, but, in circumstances prevailing, Priscilla probably regarded all his attention as belonging to herself alone. Whether or not this was the reason, she had become quite silent. Now she interrupted the conversation.

“Listen …”

“What?”

“I believe there’s a blitz on.”

We all stopped talking for a moment. A faint suggestion of distant gunfire merged into the noise of traffic from the street, the revving up of a lorry’s engine somewhere just outside the back of the building. No one else at the other tables round about showed any sign of noticing indications of a raid.

“I don’t think so,” said Moreland. “Living in London all the time, one gets rather a good ear for the real thing.”

“Raids when I’m on leave make me bloody jumpy,” said Stevens. “Going into action you’ve got a whole lot of minor responsibilities to keep your mind off the danger. A gun, too. In an air-raid I feel they’re after me, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

I asked how much hand-to-hand fighting he had been engaged in.

“The merest trifle.”

“What was it like?”

“Not too bad.”

“Hard on the nerves?”

“Difficult to describe,” he said. “You feel worked up just before, of course, rather like going to school for the first time or the morning of your first job. Those prickly sensations, but exciting too.”

“Going back to school?” said Moreland. “You make warfare sound most disturbing. I shouldn’t like that at all. In London, it’s the sheer lack of sleep gets one down. However, there’s been quite a let-up the last day or two. Do you have raids where you are, Nick?”

“We do.”

“I thought it was all very peaceful there.”

“Not always.”

“I have an impression of acute embarrassment when bombed,” said Moreland. “That rather than gross physical fear — at present anyway. It’s like an appalling display of bad manners one has been forced to witness. The utter failure of a party you are giving — a friend’s total insensitiveness about some delicate matter — suddenly realising you’ve lost your note-case, your passport, your job, your girl. All those things combined and greatly multiplied.”

“You didn’t like it the other night when the glass shattered in the bathroom window,” said Mrs. Maclintick. “You were trembling like a leaf, Moreland.”

“I don’t pretend to be specially brave,” said Moreland, put out by this comment. “Anyway, I’d just run up three flights of stairs and nearly caught it in the face. I was just trying to define the sensation one feels — don’t you agree, Nick, it’s a kind of embarrassment?”

“Absolutely.”

“Depends on such a lot of different things,” said Stevens. “People you’re with, sleep, food, drink, and so on. This show I was in —”

He did not finish the sentence, because Priscilla interrupted. She had gone rather white. For a second one saw what she would be like when she was old.

“For God’s sake don’t talk about the war all the time,” she said. “Can’t we sometimes get away from it for a few seconds?”

This was quite different from her earlier detached tone. She seemed all at once in complete despair. Stevens, not best pleased at having his story wrecked, mistook the reason, whatever it was, for Priscilla’s sudden agitation. He thought she was afraid, altogether a misjudgment.

“But it isn’t a blitz, sweetie,” he said. “There’s nothing to get worked up about.”

Although, in the light of his usual manner of addressing people, he might easily have called Mrs. Maclintick “sweetie,” this was, in fact, the first time he had spoken to Priscilla with that mixture of sharpness and affection that can suddenly reveal an intimate relationship.

“I know it isn’t a blitz,” she said. “We long ago decided that. I was just finding the conversation boring.”

“All right. Let’s talk of something else,” he said.

He spoke indulgently, but without grasping that something had gone badly wrong.

“I’ve got rather a headache.”

“Oh, sorry, darling. I thought you had the wind up.”

“Not in the least.”

“Why didn’t you say you had a head?”

“It’s only just started.”

She was looking furious now, furious and upset. I knew her well enough to be fairly used to Priscilla’s quickly changing moods, but her behaviour was now inexplicable to me, as it obviously was to Stevens. I imagined that, having decided a mistake had been made in allowing him to join our table, she had now settled on a display of bad temper as the best means of getting him away.