At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [85]
Although that evening when we had dined at Thrubworth had been by no means the sole occasion when Quiggin had announced that he wanted to ‘see China and judge for himself’, no one among his acquaintances supposed him at all likely to set sail at once for the Far East. The words were generally—and, as it turned out, correctly—assumed to be in the main rhetorical: merely buttressing opinions already propagated by him about the ominous situation in Asia. There was, for example, the matter of fare. High as his reputation stood as a critic, it was doubtful whether any publisher would be prepared to advance enough on a projected travel book, with a political bias, to transport Quiggin so far; while Erridge, sympathetic to the wish, had at the same time shown no impulse to foot the bill. Doubts had been maliciously expressed by Mark Members, just returned from his lecture tour in America, as to whether, when it came to the point, Quiggin would be impatient to enter an area in which the Japanese Army was at that time engaged in active operations. Members may have been unjust. He was certainly applying to Quiggin the heartless criticism of an old friend. All the same, I should have been surprised to hear that Quiggin had set out upon that journey.
On the other hand, when Erridge for the same reason—to see for himself’—turned out to be on his way to China, there was less to wonder at. Erridge had already shown himself prepared to undergo uncomfortable forms of travel; he was undoubtedly in a restless state of mind; he was interested in the political implications of the situation: finally, he could afford to buy a ticket. The enterprise might be the result of Quiggin’s advocacy, or his own gnawing sense of moral obligation. The motive was almost immaterial. There was another far more absorbing aspect of his departure when it came about. He did not go alone. He took Mona with him.
Naturally this affair was discussed at great length at houses such as the Jeavonses’, where no details were available, beyond the fact that Erridge and Mona were together on a P. & O. liner bound for the East; while Quiggin had been left in England. Their precise destination was unknown. The immediate Tolland family were, naturally, in a ferment of interest. Even so, the story made on the whole less stir than might be thought; for Erridge had by then so firmly established a reputation for eccentricity that those who knew him personally were prepared for anything. Since he inhabited no particular social milieu, his doings affected few individuals directly. Such persons were chiefly a small group of hangers-on, like Quiggin or Howard Craggs, the Left Wing publisher, and the members of some of Erridge’s committees. For the rest of the world, those to whom his name alone was familiar, his behaviour as usual took on the unsubstantial shape of a minor paragraph in the newspaper, momentarily catching the attention, without at the same time giving a conviction of its subject’s existence in ‘real life’. Uncle Giles, with his very different circumstances, was in much the same case, in that no one knew, or, for that matter, greatly cared what he would do next, provided he made no disastrous marriage and kept out of prison. In Erridge’s position, the question of marriage now loomed steeply for his relations, a matter of keen speculation, particularly since this was the first occasion when he was known to have been closely associated with any woman.
All this had considerable bearing on my own life at the time, because my engagement was made public in the same week that the Erridge-Mona story broke, and was naturally overshadowed—especially upon my first meeting with Katherine, Lady Warminster