Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [32]
I had heard little of St John Clarke since the days when Mark Members and J. G. Quiggin had been, one after another in quick succession, his secretary; to be followed by the ‘Trotskyist’ German boy, Werner Guggenbühl; Guggenbühl, so Quiggin hinted, had been sacked as a result of political pressure, but did not mind leaving as he had found a better job. By this time, so many people of relative eminence were writing, speaking, or marching in one or another form of militant political expression that St John Clarke’s adhesion to the Left was a matter of little general interest. He was said to have become at times resentful of a brand of politics he felt to lay a burden on his social life.
‘The man has got it in him to be a traitor to any cause,’ Quiggin said, when he reported this. ‘We shall never see Clarke manning a machine-gun.’
This supposed backsliding on the part of St John Clarke was certainly not because any potential hostess objected to his being a ‘Communist’. On the contrary, as an elderly, no longer very highly esteemed writer, such views may even have done something to re-establish his name. The younger people approved, while in rich, stuffy houses, where he was still sometimes to be seen on the strength of earlier reputation as a novelist, a left-wing standpoint was regarded as suitable to a man of letters, even creditable in a widely known, well-to-do author, who might at his age perfectly well have avoided the controversies of politics. However, St John Clarke himself apparently felt less and less capable, in practice, of taking part in the discussion of Marxist dialectic, with its ever-changing bearings. As a consequence of this laxity in ‘keeping up’, he had lost ground in the more exacting circles of the intellectual Left. His name was rarely seen except in alphabetical order among a score of nonentities signing at the foot of some letter to the press. St John Clarke, according to Members (himself suspected by Quiggin of ‘political cynicism’) yearned for his former unregenerate life. If so, he must have felt himself too deeply committed, perhaps too old, to make a reversal of programme – which, at that period, would in any case have entailed swimming against a stream that brought to a writer certain advantages. Lady Warminster was probably better informed about St John Clarke than he supposed. Her phrase ‘rather an old humbug’ established within the family her own, as it were, official attitude. She now made some enquiry about the colds from which Veronica’s two children, Angus and Iris, had been suffering.
‘Oh, Angus is all right at last,’ said George, speaking before his wife could reply. ‘We have been looking about for a school for him. I am going down to see another next week.’
‘They are both off to their Granny’s on Friday,’ said Veronica, ‘where they will get fussed over a lot and probably catch colds all over again. But there it is. They have to go. The rest of the year will be spent getting them out of bad habits.’
‘Talking of grandparents,’ said George, who, although reputed to be very ‘good’ about Veronica’s children, probably preferred relations on their father’s side to be kept, in so far as possible, out of sight and out of mind, ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try and reopen with Erry the question of getting the stained glass window put up to our own