The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [71]
I had wondered that, too, especially in the light of an experience of a few weeks before, when sitting in the Café Royal with Barnby. In those days there was a female orchestra raised on a dais at one side of the huge room where you had drinks. They were playing In a Persian Market, and in that noisy, crowded, glaring, for some reason rather ominus atmosphere, which seemed specially designed to hear such confidences, Barnby had been telling me that matters were at an end between Anne Stepney and himself. That had not specially surprised me after the evening at Foppa’s. Barnby had reached the climax of his story when Quiggin and Mark Members passed our table, side by side, on their way to the diners’ end of the room. That was, to say the least, unexpected. They appeared to be on perfectly friendly terms with each other. When they saw us, Members had given a distant, evasive smile, but Quiggin stopped to speak. He seemed in an excellent humour.
‘How are you, Nick?’
‘All right.’
‘Mark and I are going to celebrate the completion of Unburnt Boats,’ he said. ‘It is a wonderful thing to finish a book.’
‘When is it to appear?’
‘Autumn.’
I felt sure Quiggin had stopped like this in order to make some statement that would define more clearly his own position. That would certainly be a reasonable aim on his part. I was curious to know why the two of them were friends again; also to learn what was happening about Quiggin and Mona. Such information as I possessed then had come through Jean, who knew from her brother only that they had gone abroad together. At, the same time, as a friend of Templer’s, I did not want to appear too obviously willing to condone the fact that Quiggin had eloped with his wife.
‘Mona and I are in Sussex now,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that could almost be described as unctuous, so much did it avoid his usual harsh note. ‘We have been lent a cottage. I am just up for the night to see Mark and make final arrangements with my publisher.’
He talked as if he had been married to Mona, or at least lived with her, for years; just as, a few months earlier, he had spoken as if he had always been St. John Clarke’s secretary. It seemed hard to do anything but accept the relationship as a fait accompli. Such things have to be.
‘Can you deal with St. John Clarke from so far away?’
‘How do you mean?’
Quiggin’s face clouded, taking on an expression suggesting he had heard the name of St. John Clarke, but was quite unable to place its associations.
‘Aren’t you still his secretary?’
‘Oh, good gracious, no,’ said Quiggin, unable to repress a laugh at the idea.
‘I hadn’t heard you’d left him.’
‘But he has become a Trotskyist’
‘What form does it take?’
Quiggin laughed again. He evidently wished to show his complete agreement that the situation regarding St. John Clarke was so preposterous that only a certain degree of jocularity could carry it off. Laughter, his manner indicated, was a more civilised reaction than the savage rage that would have been the natural emotion of most right-minded persons on hearing the news for the first time.
‘The chief form,’ he said, ‘is that he consequently now requires a secretary who is also a Trotskyist’
‘Who has he got?’
‘You would not know him.’
‘Someone beyond the pale?’
‘He has found a young German to pander to him, as a matter of fact. One Guggenbühl .’
‘I have met him as a matter of fact.’
‘Have you?’ said Quiggin, without interest. ‘Then 1 should advise you to steer clear of Trotskyists in the future, if I were you.’
‘Was this very sudden?’
‘My own departure was not entirely involuntary,’ said Quiggin. ‘At first I thought the man would rise above the difficulties of my domestic situation. I—and Mona, too—did everything to assist and humour him. In the end it was no good.’
He had moved off then, at the same time gathering in Members, who had been chatting to a girl in dark glasses sitting at a neighbouring table.
‘We shall stay in the country until the divorce comes through,’ he had said over his shoulder.
The story going round