At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [52]
Quiggin, too, had begun to placate her with ‘treats’, the impending dinner with Erridge certainly grading in that class. In fact Quiggin began to talk as if he himself had arranged the invitation as an essential aspect of the weekend. Although its potentialities had been reduced for him by my inclusion, there was, I think, nothing personal in that. He would equally have objected to any other friend or acquaintance joining the party. Dinner at Thrubworth was an occasion not to be wasted, for Mona had remarked: ‘We don’t get invited every day of the week.’ I asked how long they had known Erridge.
‘In the days when I was secretary to St. John Clarke,’ said Quiggin, smiling to show how distant, how incongruous, he now regarded that period of his life. ‘St. J. went one afternoon to a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, where he wanted to cast his eye over some of Lenin’s speeches. As you know, St. J. was rather careful about money, and he had suggested I should hold the bookseller in conversation while he looked up just as much as he needed. This was at the beginning of St. J.’s conversion to Marxism. We found Alf pottering about the shop, trying to get through the afternoon. Old habits die hard, and, of course, up to the time I met him, St. J. had been a champion snob—and he wasn’t altogether cured of his liking for a high-sounding name. He often said afterwards, when we knew each other well, that I’d saved him from snobbery. I only wish I could also have saved him from Trotskyism. But that is another story. It happened that St. J. had met Alf quite a time before at the home of one of Alf’s relatives—is there a woman called Lady Molly Jeavons? There is—well, it was at her house. St. J. had a word or two with Alf in the bookshop, and, in spite of his changed view of life, forgot all about Lenin’s speeches and asked him back to tea.’
‘And you have known him ever since?’
‘Alf turned up trumps when St. J. behaved so foolishly about myself and Mona. Since then, I’ve done my best to canalise his enthusiasms.’
‘Has St. John Clarke still got his German boy as secretary?’
‘Not he,’ said Quiggin. ‘Guggenbühl is a shrewd young man, Trotskyist though he be. He has moved on to something more paying. After all, he was smart enough to see Hitler coming and clear out of Germany. I hear he is very patronising to the German refugees arriving now.’
‘He is probably a Nazi agent.’
‘My God,’ said Quiggin. ‘I wouldn’t wonder. I must talk to Mark about that when he comes back from America.’
The possibility that Mark Members and himself had been succeeded in the dynasty of St. John Clarke’s secretaries by one of Hitler’s spies greatly cheered Quiggin. He was in a good mood for the rest of the day, until it was time to start for Thrubworth. Then, as the hour approached, he became once more nervous and agitated. I had supposed that, having secured Erridge for a patron some years before, Quiggin must be used by then to his ways. The contrary seemed true; and I remembered that in his undergraduate days he used to become irritable and perturbed before a party: master of himself only after arrival. He had changed into his suit of that cruel blue colour when at last we set off across the fields.
‘What date is the house?’
‘What house?’
‘Where we are going.’
‘Oh, Thrubworth Park,’ said Quiggin, as if he had forgotten our destination. ‘Seventeenth century, I should say, much altered in the eighteenth. Alf will tell you about it. Though he doesn’t really like the place, he likes talking about it for some reason. You will hear all you want about its history.’
Passing into the wood to be seen from the windows of the cottage, we went through more fields and climbed a stile. Beyond was a deserted road, on the far side of which, set back some distance from the highway, stood an entrance—evidently not the main entrance—to a park, the walls of which I had already seen from another side on my way from the station the day before. A small, unoccupied lodge, now fallen into decay, lay beside two open, wrought-iron gates. We went through these gates, and made our