The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [30]
‘Oh, yes,’ said Barnby. ‘I read about it too. Stringham was the Great Industrialist’s secretary at one moment, wasn’t he? I met him with Baby and liked him. He has that very decorative mother, Mrs. Foxe, whom really I wouldn’t——’
He became silent; then returned to the subject of the girl.
‘Her parents are called Bridgnorth?’
‘That’s it.’
‘One starts these things,’ Barnby said, ‘and then the question arises: how is one to continue them? Before you know where you are, you are thoroughly entangled. That is what we all have to remember.’
‘We do, indeed.’
Lying in bed in the Templers’ house, feeling more than a little unwilling to rise into a chilly world, I thought of these words of Barnby’s. There could be no doubt that I was now, as he had said, ‘thoroughly entangled’.
Everyone came down late to breakfast that morning. Mona was in a decidedly bad temper. Her irritation was perhaps due to an inner awareness that a love affair was in the air, the precise location of which she was unable to identify; for I was fairly certain that neither of the Templers guessed anything was ‘on’ between Jean and myself. They seemed, indeed, fully occupied by the discord of their own relationship. As it happened, I found no opportunity to be alone with Jean. She seemed almost deliberately to arrange that we should always be chaperoned by one of the other two. She would once more have appeared as calm, distant, unknown to me, as when first seen, had she not twice smiled submissively, almost shyly, when our eyes met.
Mona’s sulkiness cast a gloom over the house. Although obviously lazy and easy-going in her manner of life, she possessed also an energy and egotism that put considerable force behind this display of moodiness. Templer made more than one effort to cheer her up, from time to time becoming annoyed himself at his lack of success; when conciliation would suddenly turn to teasing. However, his continued attempts to fall in with his wife’s whims led in due course to an unexpected development in the composition of the party.
We were sitting in a large room of nebulous character, where most of the life of the household was carried on, reading the Sunday papers, talking, and playing the gramophone. The previous night’s encounter with Quiggin had enflamed Mona’s memories of her career as an artist’s model. She began to talk of the ‘times’ she had had in various studios, and to question me about Mark Members; perhaps regretting that she had allowed this link with her past to be severed so entirely. Professionally, she had never come across such figures as Augustus John, or Epstein, trafficking chiefly with a group of the lesser academic painters; though she had known a few young men, like Members and Barnby, who frequented more ‘advanced’ circles. She had never even sat for Isbister, so she told me. All the same, that period of her life was now sufficiently far away to be clouded with romance; at least when compared in her own mind with her married circumstances.
When I agreed that both Members and Quiggin were by then, in their different ways, quite well-known ‘young writers’, she became more than ever enthusiastic about them, insisting that she must meet Quiggin again. In fact conversation seemed to have been deliberately steered by her into these channels with that end in view. Templer, lying in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, listened indifferently to her talk while he idly turned the pages of the News of the World. His wife’s experiences among ‘artists’ probably cropped up fairly often as a subject: a regular, almost legitimate method of exciting a little domestic jealousy when life at home seemed flat. Her repeated questions at last caused me to explain the change of secretary made by St. John Clarke.
‘But this is all too thrilling,’ she said. ‘I told you St. John Clarke was my favourite author. Can’t we get Mr. Quiggin to lunch and ask him what really has happened?’
‘Well——’
‘Look, Pete,’ she exclaimed noisily. ‘Do let’s ask J. G. Quiggin