Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [16]
‘It’s above a shop,’ Barnby said.
Then, suddenly, he crumpled the envelope.
‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘I will come and pick you up here, if that is all right.’
‘As you like.’
She spoke indifferently, as if all had been decided long before and they had been going out together for years.
‘What time?’
She told him; the two of them made some mutual arrangement. Then they smiled at each other, again without any sense of surprise or excitement, as if long on familiar terms, and the waitress retired from the table. Barnby handed the stump of pencil back to Maclintick. We vacated the restaurant.
‘Like Glendower, Barnby,’ said Maclintick, ‘you can call spirits from the vasty deep. With Hotspur, I ask you, will they come?’
‘That’s to be seen,’ said Barnby. ‘By the way, what is her name? I forgot to ask.’
‘Norma,’ said Moreland, speaking without apology.
To complete the story, Barnby (whose personal arrangements were often vague) told me that when the day of assignation came, he arrived, owing to bad timing, three-quarters of an hour late for the appointment. The girl was still waiting for him. She came to his studio, where he began a picture of her, subsequently completing at least one oil painting and several drawings. The painting, which was in his more severe manner, he sold to Sir Magnus Donners; Sir Herbert Manasch bought one of the drawings, which were treated naturistically. Eventually, as might have been foretold, Barnby had some sort of a love affair with his model; although he always insisted she was ‘not his type’, that matters had come to a head one thundery afternoon when an overcast sky made painting impossible. Norma left Casanova’s soon after this episode. She took a job which led to her marrying a man who kept a tobacconist’s shop in Camden Town. There was no ill feeling after Barnby had done with her; keeping on good terms with his former mistresses was one of his gifts. In fact he used to visit Norma and her husband (who sometimes gave him racing tips) after they were married. Through them he found a studio in that part of London; he may even have been godfather to one of their children. All that is beside the point. The emphasis I lay upon the circumstances of this assignation at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is to draw attention to the extreme ease with which Barnby conducted the preliminaries of his campaign. Anyone who heard things being fixed up might have supposed Norma to have spent much of her previous life as an artist’s model; that she regarded making an engagement for a sitting as a matter of routine regulated only by aspects of her own immediate convenience. Perhaps she had; perhaps she did. In such case Barnby showed scarcely less mastery of the situation in at once assessing her potentialities in that role.
‘Of course, Ralph is a painter,’ said Moreland, afterwards. ‘He has a studio. Time, place and a respectable motive for a visit are all at his command. None of these things are to be despised where girls are concerned.’
‘Time and Space, as usual.’
‘Time and Space,’ said Moreland.
The incident was not only an illustration of Barnby’s adroitness in that field, but also an example of Moreland’s diffidence, a diffidence no doubt in part responsible for the admixture of secretiveness and exhibitionism with which he conducted his love affairs. By exhibitionism, I mean, in Moreland’s case, no more than a taste for referring obliquely from time to time to some unrevealed love that possessed him. I supposed that this habit of his explained his talk of marriage the day – five or six years after our first meeting – when we had listened together to the song of the blonde singer; especially when he refused to name the girl – or three girls – he might be