Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [34]
Fiona’s friendship with Etienne Delavacquerie had never percolated down through the family grapevine. There was no particular reason why it should. Even Fiona’s parents were unlikely to keep track of all their daughter’s current boyfriends. It was a pity Susan and Roddy Cutts had never known about this apparently reliable young man. They would have felt relieved, anyway for a short period of time. Delavacquerie, also regretting the termination of the relationship, was probably in ignorance of the extent to which Fiona could show herself a handful. I asked if he knew about Scorpio Murtlock.
‘I knew she was now mixed up with some mystic cult. I didn’t know Murtlock had anything to do with her. I thought he was a queer.’
‘Hard to say.’
‘All I know about Murtlock is that Quentin Shuckerly picked him up somewhere ages ago. Shuckerly, expecting an easy lay, put Murtlock up in his flat. Shuckerly can be quite tough in such matters – that former intellectual black boyfriend of his used to call him the Narcissus of the Nigger – but his toughness, or his narcissism, didn’t stand up to Murtlock’s. Shuckerly had to leave the country to get Murtlock out of his flat. A new book of Shuckerly poems was held up in publication in consequence. I wouldn’t have thought Murtlock a wise young man to get mixed up with. Etienne never told me that.’
Delavacquerie looked quite disturbed. Here our ways had to part.
‘I should like to bug your conversation with Widmerpool, anyway your opening gambit.’
Delavacquerie made a dramatic gesture.
‘I shall take the bull by the horns – adopt the directness of the CIA man and the Cuban defector.’
‘What was that?’
‘He asked him a question.’
‘Which was?’
‘You know how it is in Havana in the Early Warning?’
Delavacquerie waved goodbye. I went on towards the paper, to get a book for review. In the anxiety he had shown about his son’s abandoned love affair – and Fiona’s own involvement with Murtlock – Delavacquerie had displayed more feeling than he usually revealed. It suggested that Etienne Delavacquerie had been fairly hard hit when Fiona went off. I was interested that Delavacquerie himself had met her, and would have liked to hear more of his views on that subject. There had been no opportunity. In any case the friendships of later life, in contrast with those negotiated before thirty, are apt to be burdened with reservations, constraints, inhibitions. Probably thirty was placing the watershed too late for the age when both parties begin more or less to know (at least think they know) what the other is talking about; as opposed to those earlier friendships – not unlike love affairs, with all sexual element removed – which can exist with scarcely an interest in common, mutual misunderstanding of character and motive all but absolute.
In earlier days, given our comparative intellectual intimacy, there would have been no embarrassment in enquiring about Delavacquerie’s own sexual arrangements. The question would have been an aspect of being friends. In fact, Delavacquerie himself would almost certainly have issued some sort of statement of his own on the matter, a handout likely to have been given early priority, when we were first getting to know one another. That was why the rumoured brush with Matilda remained altogether blurred in outline. There was no doubt that Delavacquerie liked women, got on well with them. His poetry showed that. If he possessed any steady company – hard to believe he did not – the lady herself never seemed to appear with him in public.
Thinking of the information now accumulating about Scorpio Murtlock, an incident that had taken place a few years before came to mind. It might or might not be Murtlock this time, the principle was the same. The occasion also marked the last time I had set eyes on an old acquaintance, Sunny Farebrother. I was in London only for the day. Entering a comparatively empty compartment on a tube train, I saw Farebrother sitting at the far end. Wearing a black overcoat and bowler hat, both ancient