A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [103]
“He is J. G. Quiggin, you know,” said Gypsy. “You must have read things by him.”
She may have thought that the importance she had ascribed to Quiggin as a potential source of nocturnal persecution of herself had been under-estimated by me, through ignorance of his relative eminence as a literary figure; and it was certainly true that I was unfamiliar with the name of the magazine mentioned by her as the organ to which he was said most regularly to contribute.
“No doubt about Quiggin’s talent,” said Mr. Deacon. “Though I don’t like all his ideas. He’s got a rough manner, too. All the same, he made himself very useful disposing of some books of a rather awkward sort—you need not snigger like that, Barnby—that I wanted to get rid of.”
Trying to recall terms of our mutual relationship when we had last seen anything of each other, I could remember only that I had met Quiggin from time to time up to the early part of my second year at the university, when, for some reason, he had passed completely out of my life. In this process of individual drifting apart, there was, where university circles were concerned, of course, nothing out of the way: undergraduate acquaintance flourishing and decaying often within a matter of weeks. I could remember commenting at one of Sillery’s tea-parties that Quiggin seemed not to have been about for some time, at which, so far as I could recall, Sillery, through the medium of considerable verbal convolution, had indicated, or at least implied, that Quiggin’s scholarship had been withdrawn by his college on grounds of idleness, or some other cause of dissatisfaction to the authorities; and that, not long after this had happened, he had been “sent down.” That story had been, I thought, more or less substantiated by Brightman, a don at Quiggin’s college. Certainly Brightman, at some luncheon party, had referred to “that path trodden by scholarship boys whose mental equipment has been somewhat over-taxed at an earlier stage of their often injudiciously promoted education,” and it was possible that he had used the case of Quiggin as an illustration.
I was rather impressed to hear that in the unfamiliar form of “J. G. Quiggin” this former acquaintance was already known as a “writer”; and admired, if only by Gypsy Jones. I also felt a little ashamed, perhaps merely on account of this apparent notoriety of his, to think, after finding in him something that had interested, if not exactly attracted, me, I had so easily forgotten about his existence.
My first sight of him at the party suggested that he had remained remarkably unchanged. He was still wearing his shabby black suit, the frayed trousers of which were maintained insecurely by a heavy leather belt with a brass buckle. His hair had grown a shade sparser round the sides of his dome-like forehead, and he retained that look of an undomesticated animal of doubtful temper. At the same time there was also his doggy, rather pathetic look about the eyes that had reminded me of Widmerpool, and which is a not uncommon feature of those who have decided to live by the force of the will. When we talked, I found that he had abandoned much of the conscious acerbity of manner that had been so much a part of social equipment at the university. It was not that he was milder—on the contrary, he seemed more anxious than ever to approach on his own terms every matter that arose—but he appeared to have come much nearer to perfection of method in his particular method of attacking life, so that for others there was not, as in former days, the same field of conversational pitfalls to be negotiated. No doubt this greater smoothness of intercourse was also to be explained by the fact that we had both “grown up” in the year or two that had passed. He asked some searching questions, comparable to Widmerpool