Anthony Powell - Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

‘Amy needs a good deal of looking after,’ he said. ‘I am sometimes rather busy. Get caught up in things. Business engagements and so on. Most husbands are like that, I suppose. Can’t give a wife all the attention she requires. Know what I mean?’

This self-revelation was so unlike the Buster I remembered, that I was not sure whether to attribute the marked alteration in his bearing in some degree to changes in myself. Perhaps development in both of us had made a mutually new attitude possible. However, before Buster could particularise further on the subject of married life, a subject about which I should have liked to hear more from him, Maclintick, moving with the accustomed lurching walk he employed drunk or sober, at that moment approached us.

‘Any hope of getting Irish in a house like this?’ he asked me in an undertone. ‘Champagne always gives me diarrhoea. It would be just like the rich only to keep Scotch. Do you think it would be all right if I accosted one of the flunkeys? I don’t want to let Moreland down in front of his grand friends.’

I referred to Buster this demand for Irish whiskey on Maclintick’s part.

‘Irish?’ said Buster briskly. ‘I believe you’ve got us there. I can’t think why we shouldn’t have any in the cellar, because I rather like the stuff myself. Plenty of Scotch, of course. I expect they told you that. Wait here. I’ll go and make some investigations.’

‘Who is that kind and beautiful gentleman?’ asked Maclintick acidly, not showing the least gratitude at Buster’s prompt effort to satisfy his need for Irish whiskey. ‘Is he part of the management?’

‘Commander Foxe.’

‘I am no wiser.’

‘Our hostess’s husband.’

‘I thought she was married to Chandler. He is the man I always see her with at the ballet – if you can call him a man. I suppose I have shown my usual bad manners again. I ought never to have come to a place like this. Quite against my principles. All the same, I hope Baron Scarpia will unearth a drop of Irish. Must be an unenviable position to be married to a woman like his wife.’

His own matrimonial state seemed to me so greatly worse than Commander Foxe’s that I was surprised to find Maclintick deploring any other marriage whatever. Gossage – ‘that old witch’, as Chandler had called him – joined us before I could answer. He seemed to be enjoying the party, clasping together his fingers and agitating his hands up and down in the air.

‘What did you think of Moreland’s work, Maclintick?’ he asked. ‘A splendid affair, splendidly received. Simply wonderful. I rarely saw such enthusiasm. Didn’t you think so, Maclintick?’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Maclintick, speaking with finality. ‘So far as reception was concerned, I thought it just missed being a disaster. The work itself was all right. I liked it.’

Gossage was not in the least put out by the acerbity of Maclintick’s disagreement. He stood on his toes, placing the tips of his fingers together in front of him like a wedge.

‘You judged that, did you, Maclintick?’ he said thoughtfully, as if a whole new panorama had been set in front of him. ‘You judged that. Well, perhaps there is something in what you say. All the same, I considered it a great personal triumph for Moreland, a great triumph.’

‘You know as well as I do, Gossage, that it was not a triumph,’ said Maclintick, whose temper had risen suddenly. ‘We are all friends of Moreland’s – we shouldn’t have come to this bloody awful party tonight, dressed up in these clothes, if we weren’t – but it is no help to Moreland to go round saying his symphony was received as a triumph, that it is the greatest piece of music ever written, when we all know it wasn’t and it isn’t. It is a very respectable piece of work. I enjoyed it. But it wasn’t a triumph.’

Gossage looked as if he did not at all agree with Maclintick’s strictures on Mrs Foxe’s party and the burden of wearing evening clothes, but was prepared at the same time to allow these complaints to pass, as well as any views on Moreland as a composer, in the light of his colleague’s notorious reputation for being cantankerous.

There may be opposition from some quarters,’ Gossage said. ‘I recognise that. Some of the Old Gang may get on their hind legs. A piece of music is none the worse for causing that to happen.’

‘I don’t see why there should be opposition,’ said Maclintick, as if he found actual physical relief in contradicting Gossage on all counts. ‘A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise. That happens at different moments in different careers. This may turn out to be the moment with Moreland. I don’t know. I doubt it. All I know is that going round pretending the symphony is a lot of things it isn’t, does Moreland more harm than good.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Gossage, speaking now with conscious resignation, ‘we shall see what everyone says by the weekend. I liked the thing myself. It seemed to have a lot of life in it. Obvious failings, of course. All the same, I fully appreciate the points you make, Maclintick. But here is Mrs Maclintick. And how is Mrs Maclintick this evening?’

Mrs Maclintick had the air of being about to make trouble. She was wearing a fluffy, pale pink dress covered with rosettes and small bows, from which her arms and neck emerged surrounded by concentric circles of frills. On her head was set a cap, medieval or pre-Raphaelite in conception, which, above dark elfin locks, swarthy skin and angry black eyes, gave her the appearance of having come to the party in fancy dress.

‘Do take your hands out of your pockets, Maclintick,’ she said at once. ‘You always stand about everywhere as if you were in a public bar. I don’t know what the people here must think of you. We are are not in the Nag’s Head now, you know. Try to remember not to knock your pipe out on the carpet.’

Maclintick took no notice of his wife whatsoever. Instead, he addressed to Gossage some casual remarks about Smetana which seemed to have occurred to him at that moment. Mrs Maclintick turned to me.

‘I don’t expect you are any more used to this sort of party than I am,’ she said. ‘As for Maclintick, he wouldn’t have been here at all if it hadn’t been for me. I got him into those evening trousers somehow. Of course he never wants to wear evening clothes. He couldn’t find a black bow-tie at the last moment. Had to borrow a made-up one Carolo used to wear. He is tramping about in his ordinary clodhopping black shoes too.’

Maclintick continued to ignore his wife, although he must have heard all this.

‘What did you think of Moreland’s symphony?’ she continued. ‘Not much of a success, Maclintick thinks. I agree with him for once.’

Maclintick caught her words. He swung round in such a rage that for a moment I thought he was going to strike her; just as I had thought she might stick a dinner knife into him when I had been to their house. There was certainly something about her manner this evening which would almost have excused physical violence even in the circumstances of Mrs Foxe’s party.

‘I didn’t say anything of the sort, you bloody bitch,’ Maclintick said, ‘so keep your foul mouth shut and don’t go round repeating that I did, unless you want to get hurt. It is just like your spite to misrepresent me in that manner. You are always trying to make trouble between Moreland and myself, aren’t you? What I said was that the music was “not Moreland’s most adventurous” – that the critics had got used to him as an enfant terrible and therefore might underestimate the symphony’s true value. That was all. That was what I said. You know yourself that was all. You know yourself that was what I said.’