Anthony Powell: Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

‘You know Audrey was my ideal in a sort of way,’ said Maclintick, who after drinking all day-probably several days-was becoming thick in his speech and not always absolutely coherent. ‘I’ve no doubt that was a mistake to start off with. There is probably something wrong about thinking you’ve realised your ideal – in art or anywhere else. It is a conception that should remain in the mind.’

‘It wasn’t for nothing that Petrarch’s Laura was one of the de Sade family,’ said Moreland.

‘My God, I bet it wasn’t,’ said Maclintick. ‘She’d have put him through it if they’d married. I shall always think of her being a de Sade whenever I see that picture of them again. You know the one. It is always to be found on the walls of boarding houses.’

‘The picture you are thinking of, Maclintick, represents Dante and Beatrice,’ Moreland said, ‘not Petrarch and Laura. But I know the one you mean – and I expect the scene in question was no less unlike what actually happened than if depicting the other couple.’

‘You are absolutely right, Moreland,’ said Maclintick, now shaking with laughter. ‘Dante and Beatrice – and a bloody bad picture, as you say. As a matter of fact, it’s the sort of picture I rather like. Pictures play no part in my life. Music fulfils my needs, with perhaps a little poetry, a little German philosophy. You can keep the pictures, whether they tell a story or not.’

‘Nowadays you can have both,’ said Moreland, cheered by the drink and at last recovering his spirits. ‘The literary content of some Picassos makes The Long Engagement or A Hopeless Dawn seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction.’

‘You might as well argue that Ulysses has more “story” than Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Rosary,’’ said Maclintick. ‘I suppose it has in a way. I find all novels lacking in probability.’

‘Probability is the bane of the age,’ said Moreland, now warming up. ‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant – and usually inaccurate – premises.’

‘That is certainly true about women,’ said Maclintick. ‘But anyway it takes a bit of time to realise that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living. I used to feel with Audrey: “this can’t be marriage” – and now it isn’t.’

Suddenly upstairs the telephone bell began to ring. The noise came from the room where Maclintick worked. The sound was shrill, alarming, like a deliberate warning. Maclintick did not move immediately. He looked greatly disturbed. Then, without saying anything, he took a gulp from his glass and went off up the stairs. Moreland looked at me. He made a face.

‘Audrey coming back?’ he said.

‘We ought to go soon.’

‘We will.’

We could faintly hear Maclintick’s voice; the words inaudible. It sounded as if Maclintick were unable to understand what he was being asked. That was likely enough considering the amount he had drunk. A minute later he returned to the sitting-room.

‘Someone for you, Moreland,’ he said.

Moreland looked very disturbed.

‘It can’t be for me,’ he said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

‘Some woman,’ said Maclintick.

‘Who on earth can it be?’

‘She kept on telling me I knew her,’ said Maclintick, ‘but I couldn’t get hold of the name. It was a bloody awful line. My head is buzzing about too.’

Moreland went to the stairs. Maclintick heaved himself on to the sofa. Closing his eyes, he began to breathe heavily. I felt I had had a lot to drink without much to show for it. We remained in silence. Moreland seemed to be away for centuries. When he returned to the room he was laughing.

‘It was Matilda,’ he said.

‘Didn’t sound a bit like Matilda,’ said Maclintick, without opening his eyes.

‘She said she didn’t know it was you. You sounded quite different.’

‘I’m never much good at getting a name on the bloody telephone,’ said Maclintick. ‘She said something about her being your wife now I come to think of it.’

‘Matilda forgot her key. I shall have to go back at once. She is on the doorstep.’

‘Just like a woman, that,’ said Maclintick. ‘There was always trouble about Carolo’s key.’

‘We’ll have to go.’

‘You don’t expect me to see you out, do you P Kind of you to come.’

‘You had better go to bed, Maclintick,’ said Moreland. ‘You don’t want to spend the night on the sofa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too cold. The fire will be out soon.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Do move, Maclintick,’ said Moreland.

He stood looking down with hesitation at Maclintick. Moreland could be assertive about his own views, was said to be good at controlling an orchestra; he was entirely without the power of assuming authority over a friend who needed ‘managing’ after too much to drink. I remembered the scene when Widmerpool and I had put Stringham to bed after the Old Boy Dinner, and wondered whether an even odder version of that operation was to be re-enacted here. However, Maclintick rolled himself over into a sitting position, removed his spectacles, and began to rub his eyes just in the manner of my former housemaster, Le Bas, when he could not make up his mind whether or not one of his pupils was telling the truth.

‘Perhaps you are right, Moreland,’ Maclintick said.

‘Certainly I am right.’

‘I will move if you insist.’

‘I do insist.’

Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland.

‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’

Moreland and I both laughed a lot, but it was a horrible moment. Maclintick had spoken with that strange, unearthly dignity that a drunk man can suddenly assume. We left him making his way unsteadily upstairs. By a miracle there was a taxi at the other end of the street.

‘I hope Maclintick will be all right,’ said Moreland, as we drove away.

‘He is in rather a mess.’

‘I am in a mess myself,’ Moreland said. ‘You probably know about that. I won’t bore you with the complications of my own life. I hope Matty will not be in too much of a fret when I get there. What can she be thinking of, forgetting her key? Something Freudian, I suppose. I am glad we went to see Maclintick. What did you think about him?’

‘I thought he was in a bad way.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Maclintick is in a bad way,’ said Moreland. ‘It is no good pretending he isn’t. I don’t know where it will end, I don’t know where anything will end. It was strange Maclintick bringing up Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant.’

‘Dragging up your past.’

‘Barnby went straight to the point,’ said Moreland. ‘I was struck by that. One ought to make decisions where women are concerned.’

‘What are your plans-roughly?’

‘I have none, as usual. You are already familiar with my doctrine that every man should have three wives. I accept the verdict that under the existing social order such an arrangement is not viable. That is why so many men are in such a quandary.’

We drove on to where I lived. Moreland continued in the taxi on his way to find Matilda. Isobel was asleep. She woke up at one moment and asked: ‘Did you hear anything interesting?’ I told her, ‘No’. She went to sleep again. I went to sleep for an hour or two, then woke up with a start, and lay there thinking how grim the visit to Maclintick had been; not only grim, but curiously out of focus; a pocket in time; an evening that pertained in character to life some years before. Marriage reduced in number interludes of that kind. They belonged by their nature to an earlier period: the days of the Mortimer and Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant. Maclintick’s situation was infinitely depressing; yet people found their way out of depressing situations. Nothing was more surprising than man’s capacity for survival. Before one could look round, Maclintick would be in a better job, married to a more tolerable wife. All the same, I felt doubtful about that happening. Thinking uneasy thoughts, I fell once more into a restless, disenchanted sleep.