Anthony Powell - Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

‘This Maclintick business must have held up all work.’

‘As you can imagine, I have not done a stroke. I think Matilda and I may try and go away for a week or two, if I can raise the money.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘France, I suppose.’

The Morelands went abroad the following week. That Sunday, Isobel’s eldest sister, Frederica, rang up and asked if she could come to tea. This suggestion, on the whole a little outside the ordinary routine of things with Frederica, who was inclined to make plans some way ahead, suggested she had something special to say. As it happened, Robert, too, had announced he would look in that afternoon; so the day took on a distinctly family aspect. Frederica and Robert could be received at close quarters, be relied upon to be reasonably cordial to one another. That would not have been true of Frederica and Norah. Hugo was another dangerous element, preferably to be entertained without the presence of his other brothers and sisters. With Frederica and Robert there was nothing to worry about.

As soon as Frederica arrived, it was evident she had recently learnt something that had surprised her a great deal. She was a person of controlled, some – Chips Lovell, for example – thought even rather forbidding exterior; a widow who showed no sign of wanting to remarry and found her interests, her work and entertainment, in her tours of duty as Lady-in-Waiting. However, that afternoon she was freely allowing herself to indulge in the comparatively undisciplined relaxation of arousing her relations’ curiosity.

‘I expect you have heard of a writer called St John Clarke,’ she said, almost as soon as she had sat down.

This supposition, expressed by some of my friends, would have been a method of introducing St John Clarke’s name within a form of words intended to indicate that in their eyes, no doubt equally in my own, St John Clarke did not grade as a sufficiently eminent literary figure for serious persons like ourselves ever to have heard of him. The phrase would convey no sense of enquiry; merely a scarcely perceptible compliment, a very minor demonstration of mutual self-esteem. With Frederica, however, one could not be sure. She had received a perfectly adequate education, indeed rather a good one, to fit her for her position in life, but she did not pretend to ‘know’ about writing. Indeed, she was inclined to pride herself on rising above the need to discuss the ways and means of art in which some of her relations and friends interminably indulged.

‘I like reading books and going to plays,’ she had once remarked, ‘but I do not want to talk about them all the time.’

If Frederica had, in practice, wholly avoided an uninstructed predisposition to lay down the law on aesthetic matters, there would have been much to be said for this preference. Unhappily, you could never be certain of her adherence to such a rule of conduct. She seemed often to hold just as strong views on such matters as those who felt themselves most keenly engaged. Besides, her disinclination to discuss these subjects in general, left an area of uncertainty as to how far her taste, for example, in books and plays, had taken her; her self-esteem could be easily, disastrously, impaired by interpreting too literally her disavowal of all intellectual interests. In the same way, Frederica lumped together in one incongruous, not particularly acceptable agglomeration, all persons connected with painting, writing and music. I think she suspected them, in that time-honoured, rather engaging habit of thought, of possessing morals somehow worse than other people’s. Her mention of St John Clarke’s name was for these reasons unexpected.

‘Certainly I have heard of St John Clarke,’ I said. ‘He has just died. Isobel and I met him lunching at Hyde Park Gardens not long before he was taken ill.’

‘Not me,’ said Isobel, ‘I was being ill myself.’

‘St John Clarke used to lunch at Hyde Park Gardens?’ said Frederica. ‘I did not know that. Was he often there?’

‘He used to turn up at Aunt Molly’s too,’ said Isobel. ‘You must remember the story of Hugo and the raspberries -’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Frederica, showing no sign of wishing to hear that anecdote again, ‘I had forgotten it was St John Clarke. But what about him?’

‘Surely you read Fields of Amaranth secretly when you were growing up?’ said Isobel. ‘There was a copy without the binding in that cupboard in the schoolroom at Thrubworth.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Frederica, brushing off this literary approach as equally irrelevant. ‘But what sort of a man was St John Clarke?’

That was a subject upon which I felt myself something of an expert. I began to give an exhaustive, perhaps too exhaustive, account of St John Clarke’s life and character. No doubt this searching analysis of the novelist was less interesting to others – certainly less interesting to Frederica – than to myself, because she broke in almost immediately with a request that I should stop.

‘It really does not matter about all that,’ she said. ‘Just tell me what he was like.’

‘That was what I was trying to tell you.’

I felt annoyed at being found so inadequate at describing St John Clarke. No doubt it would have been better to have contained him in one single brief, brilliant epigram; I could not think of one at that moment. Besides, that was not the kind of conversational technique Frederica approved. I was attempting to approach St John Clarke from another angle, when Robert arrived. Whatever Frederica had been leading up to was for the moment abandoned. Robert, in his curiously muted manner, showed signs of animation.

‘I have got a piece of news,’ he said.

‘What?’ said Frederica. ‘Have you heard too, Robert?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Robert. ‘So far as I am aware, I am the sole possessor of this particular item.’

‘What is it?’

‘You will all know pretty soon anyway,’ said Robert, in a leisurely way, ‘but one likes to get in first. We are going to have a new brother-in-law.’

‘Do you mean Priscilla is engaged?’

‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Priscilla – not Blanche.’

‘Who to?’

‘Who do you think?’

A few names were put forward.

‘Come on,’ said Isobel. ‘Tell us.’

‘Chips Lovell.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘How did you find out?’

‘Chips had just been accepted when I arrived back at the house.’

‘He was almost a relation before,’ said Frederica.

On the whole she sounded well disposed, at least looking on the bright side; because there must have been much about Chips Lovell which did not recommend itself to Frederica. She may have feared worse. Moreland’s name was unlikely to have reached her, but she could have heard vague, unsubstantiated gossip stemming ultimately from the same source.

‘I guessed something must be in the air when Priscilla told me she was leaving that opera job of hers,’ said Robert. ‘At one moment she thought of nothing else.’

We talked about Chips Lovell for a time.

‘Now,’ said Frederica, ‘after that bit of news, I shall get back to my own story.’

‘What is your story?’ asked Robert. ‘I arrived in the middle.’

‘I was talking about St John Clarke.’

‘What about him?’

‘Whom do you think St John Clarke would leave his money to?’ said Frederica.

‘That is a big question, Frederica,’ I said.

Revelation coming from Frederica on the subject of St John Clarke’s last will and testament would be utterly unexpected. I had certainly wondered, at the time of St John Clarke’s death, who would get his money. Then the matter had gone out of my head. The beneficiary was unlikely to be anyone I knew. Now, at Frederica’s words, I began to speculate again about what surprising bequest, or bequests, might have been made. St John Clarke was known to possess no close relations. Members and Quiggin had often remarked on that fact after they left his employment, when it was clear that neither of them could hope for anything but a small legacy for old times’ sake; and even that was to the greatest degree improbable. There was the German secretary, Guggenbühl. He had moved on from St John Clarke without a quarrel, although with some encouragement, so Quiggin said, because of St John Clarke’s growing nervousness about the orthodoxy of Guggenbühl’s Marxism. The choice was on this account unlikely to have fallen on Guggenbühl. There remained the possibility of some forgotten soul from that earlier dynasty of secretaries – back before the days of Members and Quiggin – who might have been remembered in St John Clarke’s last months; a line whose names, like those of prehistoric kings, had not survived, or at best were to be met with only in the garbled forms of popular legend, in this case emanating from the accumulated conflux of St John Clarke myth propagated by Members and Quiggin. Again, the Communist Party was a possible legatee; St John Clarke seeking amends for his days of bourgeois licence, like a robber baron endowing the Church with his lands.