Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [39]
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Lady Warminster, speaking as if the mere suggestion of anyone, let alone the Stringhams, having any money was in itself a whimsical enough notion. ‘But I believe Amy was considered quite an heiress when she first appeared in London and old Lady Amesbury took her about a lot. She was South African, you know. Most of it spent now, I should think. Amy has always been quite thoughtless about money. She is very wilful. People said she was brought up in a very silly way. I suppose she probably lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust. I don’t think Charles’s father – ”Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with. He used to be very handsome, and so amusing. He looked wonderful on a horse. He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya. Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’
In making this last comment, Lady Warminster was no doubt thinking of Norman Chandler; although no one could say how much, or how little, she knew of this association, nor what she thought about it. Robert caught my eye across the table. Within the family, he was regarded as the chief authority on their step-mother’s obliquity of speech Robert, strangely enough, had turned out to be one of the young men I had seen with Mrs Foxe at that performance of The Duchess of Malfi three or four years before. Mrs Foxe’s other two guests had been John Mountfichet, the Bridgnorths’ eldest son, and Venetia Penistone, one of the Huntercombes’ daughters. After we had become brothers-in-law, and later talked of this occasion, Robert had described to me the excitement shown by Mrs Foxe that night at the prospect of seeing Chandler after the play was over. It was only a week or two since they had met for the first time.
‘You know Mrs Foxe is rather daunting in her way,’ Robert had said. ‘At least she always rather daunts me. Well, she was trembling that night like a leaf. I think she was absolutely mad about that young actor we eventually took out to supper. She didn’t get much opportunity to talk to him, because Max Pilgrim came too and spent the whole evening giving imitations of elderly ladies.
This companionship between Mrs Foxe and Chandler still flourished. She was said to give him ‘wonderful’ presents, expecting nothing in return but the pleasure of seeing him when he had the time to spare. That one of the most exigent of women should find satisfaction in playing this humble role was certainly remarkable. Chandler, lively and easy-going, was quite willing to fall in with her whim. They were continually seen about together, linked in a relationship somewhere between lover with mistress and mother to son.
‘I could understand it if Norman were a sadist,’ Moreland used to say. ‘A mental one, I mean, who cut her dates and suchlike. On the contrary, he is always charming to her. Yet it still goes on. Women are inexplicable.’
During all this talk about Stringham and his parents, St John Clarke had once more dropped out of the conversation. His face was beginning to show that, although aware a self-invited guest must submit to certain periods of inattention on the part of his hostess, these had been allowed to become too frequent to be tolerated by a man of his position. He began to shift about in his chair as if he had something on his mind, perhaps wondering if he would finally be given a chance of being alone with Lady Warminster, or whether he had better say whatever he had to say in public. He must have decided that a téte-à-téte was unlikely, because he now spoke to her in a low confidential tone.
‘There was a matter I wanted to put to you, Lady Warminster, which, in the hurried circumstances of our meeting at Bumpus’s, I hardly liked to bring up. That was why I invited myself so incontinently to your house, to which you so graciously replied with an invitation to this charming lunch party. Lord Warminster – your eldest stepson – Alfred, I have begun to call him.’ St John Clarke paused, laughed a little coyly,