Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [77]
‘You are getting off the point, my dear sir,’ said Moreland. ‘We are discussing marriage, not racing. Matrimony is the point at issue.’
Stringham made a gesture to silence him. I had never before seen Moreland conversationally so completely mastered. It was hard to imagine what the two of them would have made of each other in more sober circumstances. They were very different. Stringham had none of Moreland’s passionate self-identification with the arts; Moreland was without Stringham’s bitter grasp of social circumstance. At the same time they had something in common. There was also much potential antipathy. Each would probably have found the other unsympathetic over a long period.
‘And then,’ said Stringham, lowering his voice and raising his eyebrows slightly, ‘one wonders about making love … counts up on one’s fingers … No … It can’t be that …’
Mrs Maclintick gave a raucous laugh.
‘I know!’ Stringham now almost shouted, as if in sudden enlightenment. ‘I’ve got it. It was going on about what a charming girl Rosie Manasch is. That was a bloody silly thing to do, when I know Peggy hates Rosie like poison. But I’m wandering … talking of years ago … of the days before Rosie married Jock Udall …’
‘Heavens,’ said Moreland. ‘Do you know the Manasches? I once conducted at a charity concert in their house.’
Stringham ignored him.
‘But then, on the other hand,’ he went on, in a slower, much quieter voice, ‘Rosie may have nothing whatever to do with it. One’s wife may be ill. Sickening for some terrible disease. Something to which one has never given a thought. She is sinking. Wasting away under one’s eyes. It is just one’s own callousness about her state. That is all that’s wrong. You begin to get really worried. Should you get up and summon a doctor right away?’
‘The doctor always tells Maclintick to drink less,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘Always the same story. “Put a drop more water in it,” he says, “then you will feel better.” You might just as well talk to a brick wall. Maclintick is not going to drink less because a doctor tells him to. If he won’t stop after what I’ve said to him, is it likely he will knock off for a doctor? Why should he?’
‘Why, indeed, you little rogue?’ said Stringham, tapping Mrs Maclintick’s knee with a folded copy of the concert programme, which had somehow found its way into his hand. ‘Well, of course, in the end you discover that all this ill humour is nothing to do with yourself at all. In fact your wife is hardly aware that she is living in the same house with you. It was something that somebody said about her to someone who gossiped to somebody she knew when that somebody was having her hair done. Neither less nor more than that. All the same, it is you, her husband, who has to bear the brunt of those ill-chosen remarks by somebody about something. I’ve talked it all over with Ted Jeavons and he quite agrees.’
‘I adore Uncle Ted,’ said Priscilla, anxious to show that she herself had perfectly followed this dissertation.
‘And you, Black-eyed Susan,’ said Stringham, turning again in the direction of Mrs Maclintick, at the same time raising the programme interrogatively, ‘do you too suffer in your domestic life – of which you speak with such a wealth of disillusionment – from the particular malaise I describe: the judgment of terrible silences?’
That was a subject upon which Mrs Maclintick felt herself in a position to speak authoritatively; the discussion, if uninterrupted, might have proceeded for a long