Anthony Powell - Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

‘Absolutely.’

‘I knew you would. I can’t tell you how good Norman has been for my mother. Brilliant ideas and helpful comment don’t exactly gush from Buster, with all his manly qualities. Besides, when it comes to doing odd jobs about the house, Buster is no good with his hands. What, you say, a sailor and no good with his hands? I don’t believe you. It’s the perfect truth. I sometimes tease him about it. He doesn’t always take that in good part. Now, at last there is someone in the house who can turn to when it comes to hanging a picture or altering the place of a piece of furniture without smashing the thing to a thousand fragments. Not only that, but Norman decides what detective stories ought to come from the Times Book Club, settles what plays must be seen, gives good advice to my mother about hats – in fact excels at all the things poor old Buster fails at so lamentably. On top of that, Norman won’t be bullied. He gets his own way. He is just about the only person who deals with my mother who does get his own way.’

‘Jolly good.’

‘Look here, Nick, you are not being serious. I want to be serious. People are always charging me with not being sufficiently serious. There is something serious I want to ask you. You know the Abdication?’

‘I heard something about it.’

‘Well, I thought it was a good thing. A frightfully good thing. The only possible thing. I wish to goodness Buster would abdicate one of these days.’

‘Not a hope.’

‘You’re right. Not a hope. I say, Nick, it is awfully nice meeting you again after all these years. Let me get you another drink. You see the extraordinary thing is that I don’t feel the smallest need for drink myself. I rise above it. That shows an advance, doesn’t it? Not everyone we know can make that boast with truth. I must mention to you that there are some awfully strange people at this party tonight. Not at all like the people my mother usually collects. I suppose it is them, and not me. You agree? Yes, I thought I was right. They remind me more of the days when I used to know Milly Andriadis. Poor old Milly. I wonder what has happened to her. Perhaps they have put her away too.’

While he was speaking his eyes were on Mrs Maclintick, who was now making her way towards us.

‘This lady, for example,’ said Stringham. ‘What could have induced her to dress like that?’

‘She is coming to talk to us.’

‘My God, I believe you’re right.’

Mrs Maclintick arrived within range. Cold rage still possessed her. She addressed herself to me.

‘That was a nice way to be spoken to by your husband,’ she said. ‘Did you ever hear anything like it?’

Before I could reply, Stringham caught her by the arm.

‘Hullo, Little Bo-Peep,’ he said. ‘What have you done with your shepherdess’s crook? You will never find your sheep at this rate. Don’t look so cross and pout at me like that, or I shall ruffle up all those dainty little frills of yours – and then where will you be?’

The effect on Mrs Maclintick of this unconventional approach was electric. She flushed with pleasure, contorting her body into an attitude of increased provocation. I saw at once that this must be the right way to treat her; that a deficiency of horseplay on the part of her husband and his friends was probably the cause of her endemic sulkiness. No doubt something in Stringham’s manner, the impression he gave that evening of having cut himself off from all normal restraints, played a part in Mrs Maclintick’s submission. He was in a mood to carry all before him. Even so, she made an effort to fight back.

‘What an extraordinary thing to say,’ she remarked. ‘And who are you, I should like to know?’

I introduced them, but neither was inclined to pay much attention to names or explanations. Stringham, for some reason, seemed set on pursuing the course he had begun. Mrs Maclintick showed no sign of discouraging him, beyond a refusal entirely to abandon her own traditional acerbity of demeanour.

‘Fancy a little girl like you being allowed to come to a grown-up party like this one,’ said Stringham. ‘You ought to be in bed by now I’m sure.’

‘If you think I don’t know most of the people here,’ said Mrs Maclintick, uncertain whether to be pleased or offended at this comment, ‘you are quite wrong. I have met nearly all of them.’

‘Then you have the advantage of me in that respect,’ said Stringham, ‘and so you must tell me who everyone is. For example, what is the name of the fat man wearing a dinner jacket a size too small for him – the one drinking something from a tumbler?’

If there was any doubt about the good impression Stringham had already made on Mrs Maclintick, this enquiry set him immediately at the topmost peak of her estimation.

‘That’s my husband,’ she said, speaking at once with delight and all the hatred of which she was capable. ‘He has just been vilely rude to me. He hates wearing evening clothes. The state they were in – even though he never gets into them – you wouldn’t have believed. I had to tack the seam of the trousers before he could be seen in them. He isn’t properly shaved either. I told him so. He said he had run out of new blades. He looks a fright, doesn’t he?’

‘He does indeed,’ said Stringham. ‘You have put the matter in a nutshell.’

‘If you had heard some of the things he has been shouting at me in this very room,’ said Mrs Maclintick, ‘you would not have credited your hearing. The man has not a spark of gratitude.’

‘What do you expect with a thick neck like that?’ said Stringham. ‘Not gratitude, surely?’

‘Language of the gutter,’ said Mrs Maclintick, as if relishing her husband’s phrases in retrospect. ‘Filthy words.’

‘Think no more of his trivial invective,’ said Stringham. ‘Come with me and forget the ineptitudes of married life – with which I was once myself only too familiar – in a glass of wine. Let me persuade you to drown your sorrows.

While the Rose blows along the River Brink

With old Stringham the Ruby Vintage drink…

It isn’t ruby in this case, but none the worse for that. Buster’s taste in champagne is not too bad. It is one of his redeeming features.’

Mrs Maclintick was about to reply, no doubt favourably, but, before she could speak, Stringham, smiling in my direction, led her away. Why he wished to involve himself with Mrs Maclintick I could not imagine: drink; love of odd situations; even attraction to a woman he found wholly unusual; any of those might have been the reason. Mrs Maclintick was tamed, almost docile, under his treatment. I was still reflecting on the eccentricity of Stringham’s behaviour when brought suddenly within the orbit of Lord Huntercombe, who was moving round the room in a leisurely way, examining the pictures and ornaments there. He had just taken up Truth Unveiled by Time , removed his spectacles, and closely examined the group’s base. He now replaced the cast on its console table, at the same time smiling wryly in my direction and shaking his head, as if to imply that such worthless bric-à-brac should not be allowed to detain great connoisseurs like ourselves. Smethyck (a museum official, whom I had known as an undergraduate) had introduced us not long before at an exhibition of seventeenth-century pictures and furniture Smethyck himself had helped to organise, to which Lord Huntercombe had lent some of his collection.

‘Have you seen your friend Smethyck lately?’ asked Lord Huntercombe, still smiling.

‘Not since we talked about picture-cleaning at that exhibition.’

‘Before the exhibition opened,’ said Lord Huntercombe, ‘Smethyck showed himself anxious to point out that Prince Rupert Conversing with a Herald was painted by Dobson, rather than Van Dyck. Fortunately I had long ago come to the same conclusion and had recently caused its label to be altered. I was even able to carry the war into Smethyck’s country by enquiring whether he felt absolutely confident of the authenticity of that supposed portrait of Judge Jeffreys, attributed to Lely, on loan from his own gallery. What nice china there is in this house. It looks to me as if there were some Vienna porcelain mixed up with the Meissen in this cabinet. I believe Warrington knew something of china. That was why Kitchener liked him. You know, I think I shall have to inspect these a little more thoroughly.’