The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [25]
How far Mona herself reciprocated these feelings was less easy to guess. Possibly she was already rather bored with being a wife, and her surfeit in this respect might explain her husband’s conciliatory attitude. She spoke and acted in a manner so affected and absurd that there was something appealing about the artificiality of her gestures and conversation. She was like some savage creature, anxious to keep up appearances before members of a more highly civilised species, although at the same time keenly aware of her own superiority in cunning. There was something hard and untamed about her, probably the force that had attracted Templer and others. She seemed on good terms with Jean, who may have found her sister-in-law’s crude, violent presence emphasised to advantage her own quieter, though still undisclosed nature.
Quiggin had made an impression upon Mona, because, almost immediately after we sat down to dinner, she began to make enquiries about him. Possibly, on thinking it over, she felt that his obvious interest in her had deserved greater notice. In answer to her questions, I explained that he was J. G. Quiggin, the literary critic. She at once asserted that she was familiar with his reviews in one of the ‘weeklies’, mentioning, as it happened, a periodical for which, so far as I knew, he had never written.
‘He was a splendid fellow in his old leather overcoat,’ said Templer. ‘Did you notice his shirt, too? I expect you know lots of people like that, Nick. To think I was rather worried at not having struggled into a dinner-jacket tonight, and he just breezed in wearing the flannel trousers he had been sleeping in for a fortnight, and not caring a damn. I admire that.’
‘I couldn’t remember a thing about meeting him before,’ said Mona. ‘I expect I must have been a bit tight that night, otherwise I should have known his name. He said Mark Members introduced us. Have you heard of him? He is a well-known poet.’
She said this with an ineffable silliness that was irresistible.
‘I was going to meet him here, as a matter of fact, but he never turned up.’
‘Oh, were you?’
She was astonished at this; and impressed. I wondered what on earth Members had told her about himself to have won such respect in her eyes. Afterwards, I found that it was his status as ‘a poet’, rather than his private personality, that made him of such interest to her.
‘I never knew Mark well,’ she said, rather apologetic at having suggested such ambitious claims.
‘He and Quiggin are usually very thick together.’
‘I didn’t realise Nick was waiting for an old friend of yours, sweetie,’ said Templer. ‘Is he one of those fascinating people you sometimes tell me about, who wear beards and sandals and have such curious sexual habits?’
Mona began to protest, but Jean interrupted her by saying: ‘He’s not a bad poet, is he?’
‘I think rather good,’ I said, feeling a sudden unaccountable desire to encourage in her an interest in poetry. ‘He is St. John Clarke’s secretary—or, at least, he was.’
I remembered then that, if Quiggin was to be believed, the situation between Members and St. John Clarke was a delicate one.
‘I used to like St. John Clarke’s novels,’ said Jean. ‘Now I think they are rather awful. Mona adores them.’
‘Oh, but they are too wonderful.’
Mona began to detail some of St. John Clarke’s plots, a formidable undertaking at the best of times. This expression of Jean’s views—that Members was a goodish poet, St. John Clarke a bad novelist—seemed to me to indicate an impressive foothold in literary criticism. I felt now that I wanted to discuss all kind of things with her, but hardly knew where to begin on account of the barrier she seemed to have set up between herself and the rest of the world. I suspected that she might merely be trying to veer away