Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [33]
George’s line about Erridge was pity rather than blame. That was the tone in which these words had been spoken. Lady Warminster smiled to herself. She was known to regard the whole question of the stained glass window not only as at best a potential waste of money (out-of-date sentiment, threatening active production of ugliness) but also, no doubt correctly, as a matter to which Erridge would in no circumstances ever turn his attention; one, therefore, which was an even greater waste of time to discuss. She may have smiled for that reason alone. In addition, she was going to enjoy communicating to George news so highly charged with novelty as Erridge’s latest project.
‘You will have to be quick, George, if you want to get hold of Erry,’ she said gently. ‘Why?’
‘He is going abroad again.’
‘Where is he off to this time?’
‘Spain.’
‘What to join in the war?’
‘So he says.’
George took the information pretty well. He was by no means a fool, even if people like Chips Lovell did not find him a specially amusing companion. Like others who knew Erridge well, George had probably observed a cloud of that particular shape already forming on the horizon. Roddy Cutts, on the other hand, who, in the course of a couple of years of marriage to Susan, had only managed to meet her eldest brother once, was more surprised. Indeed, the whole Erridge legend, whenever it cropped up, always disturbed Roddy. He had clear-cut, practical ideas how people behaved. Erridge did not at all fit in with these.
‘But surely Erridge isn’t going to fight?’ Roddy said. ‘I suppose he has gone into the legal status of a British national taking part in a continental civil war. It is a most anomalous position-not to mention a great embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government, whatever the party in power. I presume he will be anti-Franco, holding the views he does.’
‘Of course he will be anti-Franco,’ said George. ‘But I agree with you, Roddy, that I should not have thought actual fighting would have been in his line.’
All this talk was going on outside Lady Warminster’s immediate orbit. Now she turned towards us to give one of her semi-official warnings.
‘I believe Mr Clarke has something he wants to tell me about Erridge,’ she said. ‘It might entail a more or less private talk with him after luncheon. Don’t any of you feel you have got to stay, if he decides to tell me some long rigmarole.’
She did not say, perhaps did not know, whether St John Clarke wanted to discuss Erridge’s latest move or some more general matter that concerned Erridge’s affairs. I had not heard that Erridge had been seeing more of St John Clarke recently. This indicated that their previous casual acquaintance must have grown in intimacy. The escapade with Mona, the decision to take part in the Spanish war, such things showed Erridge’s more picturesque side, the aspect at which his beard and tattered clothes freely hinted There were other, less dramatic matters to cause his family concern. The chief of these was the reopening of the question of death duties; but, in addition, the Thrubworth agent had died while Erridge was in China, revealing by vacation of office a situation often suspected by the rest of the family, that is to say gross, perhaps disastrous, mismanagement of the estate, which had been taking place over a long period. The account was seriously overdrawn at the bank. Thrubworth woods would probably have to be sold to meet the deficit. At least, selling the woods was Erridge’s idea of the easiest way out; the trustees, too, were thought to be amenable to this solution.