Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [3]
‘Sit down, Nick, sit down. Leonard and I were talking of an old friend – Bill Truscott. Remember Bill? I’m sure you do. Of course he was a wee bit older than you both’ – Sillery had now perfectly achieved his chronological bearings – ‘but not very much. These differences get levelled out in the sands of time. They do indeed. Going to do great things was Bill. Next Prime Minister but three. We all thought so. No use denying it, is there, Leonard?’
Short smiled a temperate personal acquiescence that could not at the same time be interpreted for a moment as in any way committing his Department.
‘Wrote some effective verse too,’ said Sillery. ‘Even if it was a shade derivative. Mark Members always sneered at Bill as a poet, even when he respected him as a coming man. Rupert Brooke at his most babbling, Mark used to say, Housman at his most lad-ish. Mark’s always so severe. I told him so when he was here the other day addressing one of the undergraduate societies. You know Mark’s hair’s gone snow white. Can’t think what happened to cause that, he’s always taken great care of himself. Rather becoming, all the same. Gives just that air of distinction required by the passing of youth – and nobody got more out of being a professional young man than Mark when the going was good. He was talking of his old friend – our old friend – J. C. Quiggin. JG’s abandoned the pen, I hear, perhaps wisely. A literary caesarean was all but required for that infant of long gestation Unburnt Boats, which I often feared might come to birth prematurely as a puling little magazine article. Now JG’s going to promote literary works rather than write them himself. In brief, he’s to become a publisher.’
‘So I heard,’ said Short. ‘He’s starting a new firm called Quiggin & Craggs.’
‘To think I used to sit on committees with Howard Craggs discussing arms embargoes for Bolivia and Paraguay,’ said Sillery. ‘Sounds like an embargo on arms for the Greeks and Trojans now. Still, I read a good letter from Craggs the other day in one of the papers about the need for Socialists and Communists hammering out a common programme of European reconstruction.’
‘Craggs was a temporary civil servant during the war,’ said Short. ‘Rationing paper, was it? Something of the sort.’
‘That was when JG made himself useful as caretaker at Boggis & Stone,’ said Sillery. ‘I expect that explains why JG dresses like a partisan now, a man straight from the maquis, check shirts, leather jackets, ankle-boots. “Well, Quiggin’s always been in the forefront of the Sales Resistance where clothes were concerned.” That was Brightman’s comment. “Even if he did live ‘reserved and austere’ during hostilities – ‘reserved’ anyway.” We all enjoy Brightman’s rather cruel wit. Brightman and I are buddies now, by the way, all forgiven and forgotten. Besides, I expect JG’s circumscribed by lack of clothing coupons. All right for such as me, still wearing the suit I bought for luncheon with Mr Asquith at Downing Street before the Flood, but then it was a good piece of cloth to start off with, not like those sad old reach-me-downs of JG’s we’re all so familiar with. No doubt they disintegrated under the stress of war conditions. Why not ankle-boots, forsooth? I’d be glad of a pair myself in winter here.’
Sillery paused. He seemed to feel he had allowed himself to rattle on rather too disconnectedly, at the same time could not remember what exactly had been the subject in hand. Like a conjuror whose patter for a specific trick has become misplaced, he had to go back to the beginning again.
‘We were talking of Bill Truscott and his verse. I expect Bill has abandoned the Muse now,