The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [33]
‘It is a question Barnby would consider absurd.’
‘Nevertheless, I put it to you. Can the mere haver be said to live more intensely than the least successful lover? That is if action is to live with intensity. Or is action only when you bring off both – loving and having – leaving your money on, so to speak, like a double-event in racing. Speaking for myself, I get the worst of all worlds, failing to have the people I love, wasting time over the others, whom I equally fail to have.’
‘You should commit a crime passionnel to liven things up.’
‘When I read about crimes passionnels in the papers,’ said Moreland, scraping his plate from which the last vestige of egg had already been long removed, ‘I am struck not by the richness of the emotions, but by their desperate poverty. On the surface, the people concerned may seem to live with intensity. Underneath, is an abject egotism and lack of imagination.’
‘Stendhal did not think so. He said he would rather his wife tried to stab him twice a year than greeted him every evening with a sour face.’
‘Still, he remained unmarried. I’ve no doubt my own wife will do both. Besides, Stendhal was equally keen on the glance, the kiss, the squeeze of the hand. He was not really taken in by the tyranny of action.’
‘But surely some crimes passionnels are fascinating. Suppose one of his girls murdered Sir Magnus Donners in fantastic circumstances – I leave the setting to your own fevered imagination.’
‘Now, Sir Magnus Donners,’ said Moreland. ‘Is he a man of action? In the eyes of the world, certainly. But does he, in fact, live intensely?’
‘Like Stendhal, he has never married.’
‘Hardly a sine qua non of action,’ said Moreland, now rubbing the plate with a lump of bread.
‘But a testing experience, surely. The baronet’s wife’s subsequent married life with the gamekeeper opens up more interesting possibilities than any of their adulterous frolics.’
‘D. H. Lawrence’s ideas about sexual stimulation,’ said Moreland, ‘strike me as no less unreal – no less artificial, if you prefer-than any attributed to Sir Magnus Donners. Suburban, narcissistic daydreams, a phallic never-never-land for middle-aged women. However, that is beside the point, which is that I grant, within the sphere of marriage and family life, Sir Magnus has not lived intensely. Setting marriage aside, on the other hand, he has built up a huge fortune, risen to all but the highest peaks in politics, appreciates the arts in a coarse but perfectly genuine manner, always has a succession of pretty girls in tow. Is he to be styled no man of action because he has never married? The proposition is absurd. After all, we are not married ourselves.’
‘And, what’s more, must cease to live intensely. It’s nearly three o’clock.’
‘So it is. How time flies.’
‘Raining, too.’
‘And the buses have stopped.’
‘We will return to action on another occasion.’
‘Certainly, we will.’
The interest of this conversation, characteristic of Moreland in a discursive mood, lay, of course, in the fact that he subsequently married Matilda Wilson, one of Sir Magnus’s ‘girls’. The modest account he gave during this discussion at the Hay Loft of his own exploits at that period probably did Moreland less than justice. He was not unattractive to women. At the same time, his own romantic approach to emotional relationships had already caused him to take some hard knocks in that very knockabout sphere. At the moment when we were eating bacon-and-eggs, neither Moreland nor I had yet heard of Matilda. In those days, I think, she had not even come the way of Sir Magnus himself. In fact, that was about the stage in her life when she was married to Carolo, the violinist, a marriage undertaken when she was very young, lasting only about eighteen months. However, ‘the great industrialist’ – as Barnby used to call Sir Magnus – was already by then one of Moreland’s patrons, having commissioned him not long before to write the incidental music for a highbrow film which