Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [100]
‘You’ve met Glober before.’
I recalled to Moreland the Mopsy Pontner dinner party. The effect was almost startling. The blood came rushing into his face as if he were about to have apoplexy. He began to laugh uncontrollably, quite in the old manner. Then, with an effort, he stopped. He was almost breathless, coughing hard. At the end of this near paroxysm he looked less ill, more exhausted. The information had greatly cheered him.
‘No, really, that’s too much. Am I to be suffocated by nostalgia? Will that be my end? I should not be at all surprised. I can see the headline:
musician dies of nostalgia
They’d put someone like Gossage on to the obit. “Mr Hugh Moreland – probably just Hugh Moreland these days – (writes our Music Critic), at a fashionable gathering last night – I’m sure Gossage still talks about fashionable gatherings – succumbed to an acute attack of nostalgia, a malady to which he had been a martyr for years. His best known works, etc, etc…” Are you aware, quite apart from Matty turning up here tonight, there hangs on the stairs of this very house Barnby’s drawing – in his naturalistic manner, I’m glad to say – of Norma, that little waitress at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant? All this, and Mopsy Pontner too. I can’t bear it. I shall mount the stage, and announce that, instead of Mozart tonight, I am myself going to entertain the company with a potpourri of nostalgic melodies.’
Moreland paused. He stepped back, clasping his hands, intoned gently:
‘Dearest, our day is over,
Ended the dream divine.
You must go back to your life,
I must go back to mine.
Nothing short of some such outward expression of my own nostalgic feelings would be at all adequate. You shouldn’t have told me about Mopsy Pontner. It wasn’t the act of a friend.’
Although still laughing, Moreland, as before sometimes in such moods, had stirred himself emotionally by his own irony, his eyes filling with tears. Stevens came up to us.
‘Look, Hugh, the curtain isn’t going to rise absolutely on time. A substitute Violin was a minute or two late. The regular player went down with flu at the last moment, and a substitute had to be found at short notice. We’ve been assured he’s all right. He’s upstairs peeing at the moment, but he’ll be along when he’s finished, and start fiddling away. Don’t get worked up about the delay.’
‘You speak as if I was a temperamental impresario about to throw a scene. It’s no affair of mine when the curtain goes up. I’d much rather have another drink, which the delay gives me the right to do, whatever Audrey says.’
It was remarkable he should admit to being defiant about what she said. Moreland went off. There was no means of putting a veto on drink into operation. He moved as if his joints were rather stiff these days. Stevens laughed.
‘Isn’t Hugh splendid? Rosie thought he wasn’t well, but he seems perfectly all right to me. I say, who do you think have turned up tonight? The Widmerpools. I suppose he’s celebrating.’
‘What’s he got to celebrate about? I thought he was going to be sent to the Tower, hanged, drawn and quartered.’
‘Not now. It’s been found “not in the public interest” to proceed with the case. I was hearing about it earlier in the day. A journalist I know told me some quite interesting things. Widmerpool was damned lucky. You can take it from me he was in a tight corner. I suppose he thought this a good opportunity to show himself in public. You can’t exactly say with an untarnished reputation, but at least not serving twenty-five years for espionage.’
‘Did he apply to you for a ticket, as a once close friend of his wife’s?’
‘The Widmerpools, old cock, were brought by a friend of Rosie’s, Sir Leonard Short, a civil servant with musical leanings, who used to frequent her parents’ house. As luck will have it, Tompsitt’s here