At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [42]
‘We’ve had a cottage lent us,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to come down for the week-end. Mona wants to see you again too.’
My first instinct was to make some excuse about weekends being difficult owing to the oppressive manner in which the film business was organised: in itself true enough. However, as it happened, an electricians’ strike had just been called at the Studio, with the result that work was likely to be suspended for at least a week or two. I was unwilling to seem to condone too easily the appropriation of an old friend’s wife; although it had to be admitted that Templer himself had never been over- squeamish about accepting, within in his own circle, such changes of partnership. Apart from such scruples, I knew enough of Quiggin to be sure that his cottage would be more than ordinarily uncomfortable. Nothing I had seen of Mona gave cause to reconsider this want of confidence in their combined domestic economy. It was generally supposed by then that they were married, although no one seemed to know for certain whether or not any ceremony had been performed.
‘Whereabouts is your cottage?’ I asked, playing for time.
The place turned out to be rather further afield than the destination of the usual week-end visit. While this conversation had been taking place, the queue had been moving forward, so that at that moment my own turn came at the booking office; simultaneously, the crowd behind Quiggin launched themselves on and outwards in a sudden violent movement that carried him bodily at their head, as if unwillingly leading a mob in a riot.
‘I’ll write the address to you,’ he bawled over his shoulder. ‘You must certainly come and stay.’
I nodded my head, fumbling with tickets and money. Almost immediately Quiggin, driven ahead by his seemingly fanatical followers, was forced through the doors and lost in the night.
‘Who was that?’ asked the girl accompanying me.
‘J. G. Quiggin.’
‘The critic?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think he has gone off rather lately.’
‘I expect he goes up and down like the rest of us.’
‘Don’t be so philosophical,’ she said. ‘I can’t bear it.’
We passed into the darkness and Man of Aran.
3
CURIOSITY, which makes the world go round, brought me in the end to accept Quiggin’s invitation. There was, indeed, some slight mystery about its origin, for after our last meeting—late one evening in the days before he had gone off with Mona—there had been disagreement between us either about Milton as a poet, or (various writers had been discussed) Meredith as a novelist, as a result of which I thought myself finally in disgrace. Of recent years, so everyone agreed, Quiggin had become increasingly dogmatic on such subjects, unable to bear contradiction, and almost equally offended by verbal evasion that sought to conceal views differing from his own. Although publication of his long-promised work, Unburnt Boats, had been once more at the last moment postponed, Quiggin’s occasional writings were at this time much in evidence. The subject matter of Unburnt Boats, thought to be largely autobiographical, remained, in spite of a good deal of speculation on the part of his friends, a closely guarded secret. His journalism was chiefly contributed to papers in which politics and literature attempted some fusion; and letters signed by him appeared with regularity in the ‘weeklies’ on the subject of public liberties or unworthy conduct on the part of the police. In private, Quiggin considered that there was too much freedom in modern life; but he was a great champion of individual liberty in his letters to the Press.
Accustomed, like so many literary men of that decade, to describe himself as a communist, he may indeed have been a member of the Communist Party. Later, at different stages of his career, he disseminated such contradictory statements on the subject of his own political history that card-holding membership remains uncertain. Most of his acquaintances inclined to think that at one moment or another he had belonged to some not very distinguished grade of the communist hierarchy.