The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [49]
I did pot imagine this last arrangement was very popular with Quiggin from the way he spoke of it.
‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I persuaded St. J. to arrange for Mark to have some sort of a footing in a more politically alive world before he got rid of him. That is where the future lies for all of us.’
‘Did Gypsy Jones transfer from the Vox Populi to Boggis & Stone?’
Quiggin laughed now with real amusement.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I forgot you knew her. She left quite a time before the amalgamation took place. She has something better to do now.’
He paused and moistened his lips; adding rather mysteriously :
‘They say Gypsy is well looked on by the Party.’
This remark did not convey much to me in those days. I was more interested to see how carefully Quiggin’s plans must have been laid to have prepared a place for Members even before he had been ejected from his job. That certainly showed forethought.
‘Are you writing another book?’ said Quiggin.
‘Trying to—and you?’
‘I liked your first,’ said Quiggin.
He conveyed by these words a note of warning that, in spite of his modified approval, things must not go too far where books were concerned.
‘Personally, I am not too keen to rush into print,’ he said.
‘I am still collecting material for my survey, Unburnt Boats’
I did not meet Members to hear his side of the story until much later, in fact on that same afternoon of the Isbister Memorial Exhibition. I ran into him on my way through Hyde Park, not far from the Achilles Statue. (As it happened, it was close to the spot where I had come on Barbara Goring and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, the day we had visited the Albert Memorial together.)
The weather had turned colder again, and the park was dank, with a kind of sea mist veiling the trees. Members looked shabbier than was usual for him: shabby and rather worried. In our undergraduate days he had been a tall, willowy, gesticulating figure, freckled and beady-eyed; hurrying through the lanes and byways of the university, abstractedly alone, like the Scholar-Gypsy, or straggling along the shopfronts of the town in the company of acquaintances, seemingly chosen for their peculiar resemblance to himself. Now he had grown into a terse, emaciated, rather determined young man, with a neat profile and chilly manner: a person people were beginning to know by name. In fact the critics, as a whole, had spoken so highly of his latest volume of verse—the one through which an undercurrent of psychoanalytical phraseology had intermittently run—that even Quiggin (usually as sparing of praise as Uncle Giles himself) had, in one of his more unbending moments at a sherry party, gone so far as to admit publicly:
‘Mark has arrived.’
As St. John Clarke’s secretary, Members had been competent to deal at a moment’s notice with most worldly problems. For example, he could cut short the beery protests of some broken-down crony of the novelist’s past, arrived unexpectedly on the doorstep—or, to be more precise, on the landing of the block of flats where St. John Clarke lived—with a view to borrowing ‘a fiver’ on the strength of ‘the old days’. Any such former boon companion, if strong-willed, might have got away with ‘half a sovereign’ (as St. John Clarke always called that sum) had he gained entry to the novelist himself. With Members as a buffer, he soon found himself escorted to the lift, having to plan, as he descended, both then and for the future, economic attack elsewhere.
Alternatively, the matter to be regulated might be the behaviour of some great lady, aware that St. John Clarke was a person of a certain limited eminence, but at the same time ignorant of his credentials to celebrity. Again, Members could put right a situation that had gone amiss. Lady Huntercombe must have been guilty of some such social dissonance at her own table (before a secretary had come into existence to adjust such matters by a subsequent word) because Members