At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [41]
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ he said.
‘We must meet.’
‘There were some things I wanted to talk about.’
Since we had been undergraduates together my friendship with Quiggin, moving up and down at different seasons, could have been plotted like a temperature chart. Sometimes we seemed on fairly good terms, sometimes on fairly bad terms; never with any very concrete reason for these improvements and deteriorations. However, if Quiggin thought it convenient to meet during a ‘bad’ period, he would always take steps to do so, having no false pride in this or any other aspect of his dealings with the world. After such a meeting, a ‘good’ period would set in; to be dissipated after a time by argument, disagreement or even by inanition. This periodicity of friendship and alienation had rotated, almost like the seasons of the year, until a year or two before: a time when Quiggin had ‘run away’ with Peter Templer’s wife, Mona. This act threatened to complicate more seriously any relationship that might exist between Quiggin and myself.
As things turned out, I had seen nothing either of Templer or Quiggin during the period immediately following the divorce. Templer had always been out or engaged when I had telephoned to him; and, as we had by then little left in common except having been friends at school, our intermittent meetings had entirely ceased. There was perhaps another reason why I feit unwilling to make more strenuous efforts to see him. He reminded me of Jean. That was an additional reason for allowing this course to prevail. I heard quite by chance that he had sold his Maidenhead house. It was said, whatever his inner feelings about losing Mona, that outwardly he was not taking things too hard: demonstrating a principle he had once expressed: ‘Women always think if they’ve knocked a man out, that they’ve knocked him out cold—on the contrary, he sometimes gets up again.’ However, no husband enjoys his wife leaving the house from one day to the next, especially with someone like Quiggin, in Templer’s eyes unthinkable as a rival. Quiggin, indeed, belonged to a form of life entirely separate from Templer’s, so that gossip on the subject of the divorce was exchanged within unconnected compartments; Templer’s City acquaintances on the one hand: on the other, the literary and political associates of Quiggin.
‘You are script-writing now, aren’t you?’ Quiggin asked, when we came within closer range of each other, and without any preliminary beating about the bush. ‘I want to have a talk with you about films.’
My first thought was that he hoped to get a similar job. To be a script-writer was at that period the ambition of almost everyone who could hold a pen. There was no reason why Quiggin should prove an exception to the rule. So far as I knew, he had to yet make the experiment. I noticed that he had almost discarded his North Country accent, or perhaps thought it inappropriate for use at that moment. In his university days, one of his chief social assets had been what Sillery used to call ‘Brother Quiggin’s Doric speech’. He looked well fed, and his squat form was enclosed in a bright blue suit and double-breasted waistcoat. He was hatless, such hair as remained to him carefully brushed. I had never