At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [50]
‘Anti-fascism comes first,’ said Quiggin. ‘Even before pacifism. In my opinion, the Sedition Bill can wait. After all, didn’t Lenin say something about Liberty being a bourgeois illusion?’
Quiggin had added this last remark in not too serious a tone, but Erridge seemed to take it seriously, shifting about uncomfortably on his hard wooden seat as if he were a galley-slave during an interval of rest.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know he did.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I don’t always think like the rest of you about that.’
He rose suddenly from his chair.
‘I want to have a talk about the magazine some time,’ he said. ‘Not now, I think.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Quiggin.
He sounded as if he would have preferred ‘the magazine’ not to have been so specifically named.
‘What magazine?’ asked Mona.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, ducks,’ said Quiggin. ‘Just an idea Alf and I were talking about.’
‘Are you going to start a magazine?’
Mona sounded quite excited.
‘We might be,’ said Erridge, moving his feet about.
‘It is all very vague still,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed the matter.
Mona was not to be so easily silenced. Whether her interest had been genuinely aroused or whether she saw this as a means expressing her own views or teasing Quiggin was not clear.
‘But how thrilling,’ she said. ‘Do tell me all about it, Alf.’
Erridge smiled in an embarrassed way, and pulled at his beard.
‘It is all very vague, as J.G. has explained,’ he said. ‘Look here, why not come to dinner tomorrow night? We could talk about it then.’
‘Or perhaps later in the week,’ said Quiggin.
‘I’ve got to go away again on Monday,’ Erridge said.
There was a pause. Quiggin glared at me.
‘I expect you will have to go back to London on Sunday night, won’t you, Nick?’ he said.
‘Oh, do come too,’ said Erridge, at once. ‘I’m so sorry. Of course I meant to ask you as well if you are staying until then.’
He seemed distressed at having appeared in his own eyes bad mannered. I think he lived in a dream, so shut off from the world that he had not bothered for a moment to consider whether I was staying with Quiggin, or had just come in that night for a meal. Even if he realised that I was staying, he was probably scarcely aware that I might still be there twenty-four hours later. His reactions placed him more and more as a recognisable type, spending much of his time in boredom and loneliness, yet in some way inhibited from taking in anything relevant about other people: at home only with ‘causes’.
‘The trains are not too good in the morning,’ said Quiggin. ‘I don’t know when you have to be at the Studio—’
‘The Studio is closed all this week owing to the strike,’ I said. ‘So I had thought of going up on Monday morning in any case—if that is all right.’
‘Oh, are you on strike?’ asked Erridge, brightening up at once, as if it were for him a rare, unexpected pleasure to find himself in such close contact with a real striker. ‘In that case you simply must come and have a meal with me.’
‘I’d love to, but it is not me on strike, I am afraid—the electricians.’
‘Oh, yes, the strike, of course, the strike,’ said Quiggin, as if he himself had organised the stoppage of work, but, in the light of his many similar responsibilities, had forgotten about its course. ‘In that case we would all like to come, Alf. It’s an early supper, as I remember.’
So far as Quiggin was concerned, it had been one of those great social defeats; and, in facing the fact squarely, he had done something to retrieve his position. Presumably he was making plans for Erridge to put up the money to install him as editor of some new, Left Wing magazine. It was perhaps reasonable that he should wish to keep their plans secret in case they should miscarry.