Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [73]
‘If you think I don’t know most of the people here,’ said Mrs Maclintick, uncertain whether to be pleased or offended at this comment, ‘you are quite wrong. I have met nearly all of them.’
‘Then you have the advantage of me in that respect,’ said Stringham, ‘and so you must tell me who everyone is. For example, what is the name of the fat man wearing a dinner jacket a size too small for him – the one drinking something from a tumbler?’
If there was any doubt about the good impression Stringham had already made on Mrs Maclintick, this enquiry set him immediately at the topmost peak of her estimation.
‘That’s my husband,’ she said, speaking at once with delight and all the hatred of which she was capable. ‘He has just been vilely rude to me. He hates wearing evening clothes. The state they were in – even though he never gets into them – you wouldn’t have believed. I had to tack the seam of the trousers before he could be seen in them. He isn’t properly shaved either. I told him so. He said he had run out of new blades. He looks a fright, doesn’t he?’
‘He does indeed,’ said Stringham. ‘You have put the matter in a nutshell.’
‘If you had heard some of the things he has been shouting at me in this very room,’ said Mrs Maclintick, ‘you would not have credited your hearing. The man has not a spark of gratitude.’
‘What do you expect with a thick neck like that?’ said Stringham. ‘Not gratitude, surely?’
‘Language of the gutter,’ said Mrs Maclintick, as if relishing her husband’s phrases in retrospect. ‘Filthy words.’
‘Think no more of his trivial invective,’ said Stringham. ‘Come with me and forget the ineptitudes of married life – with which I was once myself only too familiar – in a glass of wine. Let me persuade you to drown your sorrows.
While the Rose blows along the River Brink
With old Stringham the Ruby Vintage drink …
It isn’t ruby in this case, but none the worse for that. Buster’s taste in champagne is not too bad. It is one of his redeeming features.’
Mrs Maclintick was about to reply, no doubt favourably, but, before she could speak, Stringham, smiling in my direction, led her away. Why he wished to involve himself with Mrs Maclintick I could not imagine: drink; love of odd situations; even attraction to a woman he found wholly unusual; any of those might have been the reason. Mrs Maclintick was tamed, almost docile, under his treatment. I was still reflecting on the eccentricity of Stringham’s behaviour when brought suddenly within the orbit of Lord Huntercombe, who was moving round the room in a leisurely way, examining the pictures and ornaments there. He had just taken up Truth Unveiled by Time, removed his spectacles, and closely examined the group’s base. He now replaced the cast on its console table, at the same time smiling wryly in my direction and shaking his head, as if to imply that such worthless bric-à-brac should not be allowed to detain great connoisseurs like ourselves. Smethyck (a museum official, whom I had known as an undergraduate) had introduced us not long before at an exhibition of seventeenth-century pictures and furniture Smethyck himself had helped to organise, to which Lord Huntercombe had lent some of his collection.
‘Have you seen your friend Smethyck lately?’ asked Lord Huntercombe, still smiling.
‘Not since we talked about picture-cleaning at that exhibition.’
‘Before the exhibition opened,’ said Lord Huntercombe, ‘Smethyck showed himself anxious to point out that Prince Rupert Conversing with a Herald was painted by Dobson, rather than Van Dyck. Fortunately I had long ago come to the same conclusion and had recently caused its label to be altered. I was even able to carry the war into Smethyck’s country by enquiring whether he felt absolutely confident of the authenticity of that supposed portrait of Judge Jeffreys, attributed to Lely, on loan from his own gallery. What nice china there is in this house. It looks to me as if there were some Vienna porcelain mixed up with the Meissen in this cabinet. I believe Warrington