Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [44]
‘Widmerpool, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet another patient of mine – one of England’s most promising young musicians.’
Widmerpool, whose well-worn dressing-gown covered a suit of grubby pyjamas in grey and blue stripe, stopped unwillingly. Without friendliness, he rotated his body towards us. Brandreth he disregarded, staring first at Moreland, then myself, frowning hard through his thick spectacles, relaxing this severe regard a little when he recognised in me a person he knew.
‘Why, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’
Like Moreland, Widmerpool too seemed aggrieved at finding me within the precincts of the nursing home.
‘Ha!’ said Brandreth. ‘Of course you know one another. Fellow pupils of Le Bas. Strange coincidence. I could tell you some stranger ones. We were speaking of the high incidence of abortion, my dear Widmerpool.’
Widmerpool started violently.
‘Not abortion, Dr Brandreth,’ said Moreland, laughing. ‘Miscarriage – nothing against the law.’
‘I’m using the word,’ said Brandreth, treating our ignorance with genial amusement, ‘in the strictly medical sense that doesn’t necessarily connote anything illegal. I had been talking to Mr Moreland,’ he added, ‘about Wagner, a chronic sufferer, I understand, from some form of dermatitis, though he finally succumbed, I believe, to a cardiac lesion – unlike Schubert with his abdominal trouble. They were both, I imagine, temperamental men.’
The fact that Widmerpool and I knew each other at least as well as Brandreth knew Widmerpool, prevented Brandreth from dominating the situation so completely as he had intended before Widmerpool’s arrival. His tone in addressing Widmerpool was at once hearty and obsequious, almost servile in its unconcealed desire to make a good impression by play with Moreland’s musical celebrity. Brandreth obviously considered Widmerpool a person of greater importance than Moreland, but also one who might be interested to come in contact with sides of life different from his own. In supposing this, Brandreth showed his acquaintance with Widmerpool to be superficial. Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.
‘I don’t know about those things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don’t know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me – which they do not – I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’
Now, he stood staring at me as if my presence in the nursing home was an insoluble, an irritating, mystery. I explained once more that I had been visiting Isobel.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Widmerpool. ‘You married one of the Tollands, did you not, Nicholas? I was sorry not to have come to your wedding. That was some time ago … nearly … as a matter of fact, I was far too busy. I should like to give you a wedding present. You must tell me something you want, even though I was not able to turn up at the ceremony. After all, we have known each other a long time now. A little piece of silver perhaps. I will consult my mother who arranges such things. Your wife is not suffering from anything serious, I hope. I believe I once met her at her aunt’s, Lady Molly Jeavons. Perhaps it was one of her sisters.’
The meeting had, indeed,