The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [37]
To explain why you see less of a friend, though there has been no quarrel, no gradual feeling of coldness, is not always easy. In this case, the drawing apart seemed to date from the time when something had been ‘on’ between Moreland and Isobel’s sister, Priscilla. During that period, with Moreland’s own marriage in the balance, we had seen little or nothing of him, because the situation was inevitably an awkward one. Now, the Morelands seemed to have settled down again pretty well; Priscilla was married to Chips Lovell. However, married life must always be a little different after an upheaval of that kind. With the Morelands, certain changes were observable from the outside; within, no doubt even more radical adjustments had taken place. Now, as a matter of course, Matilda accepted such parts as she could obtain as an actress. She had made some success in the role of Zenocrate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. She was often away from home for weeks at a time. Moreland himself, moving inexorably into a world exclusively musical in its interests, spent increasing periods working in his room. That was at first the reason why we saw less of him than ever, even after the business with Priscilla had come to an end. By that time, as easily happens, the habit of regular meetings had already passed. We would sometimes talk on the telephone or run across each other casually. Then a further barrier was raised, when, to the surprise of his friends, Moreland announced that he had decided to leave London.
‘I’m not going to settle in the country for ever,’ he said, ‘just retreat for a time from the telephone.’
Moreland, dependent for most of his social life on restaurants and bars, had never been a great hand at entertaining in his own house. Accordingly, after the move, contact ceased almost entirely. That was, in any case, a decidedly eerie period in which to be living. Unlike the Stonehurst epoch, when, whatever jocular references to a German invasion might be made by persons like Bracey, war had come for most people utterly without warning-like being pushed suddenly on a winter’s day into a swirling whirlpool of ice-cold water by an acquaintance, unpredictable perhaps, but not actively homicidal – war was now materialising in slow motion. Like one of the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’, war towered by the bed when you awoke in the morning; unlike those more transient, more accommodating spectres, its tall form, so far from dissolving immediately, remained, on the contrary, a looming, menacing shape of ever greater height, ever thickening density. The grey, flickering sequences of the screen showed with increased persistence close-ups of stocky demagogues, fuming, gesticulating, stamping; oceans of raised forearms; steel-helmeted men tramping in column; armoured vehicles rumbling over the pavé of broad boulevards. Crisis was unremitting, cataclysm not long to be delayed.
Such an atmosphere was not at all favourable to writing novels, the activity which chiefly occupied my own thoughts, one that may require from time to time some more or less powerful outside stimulus in the life of a writer, but needs, in between any such disturbances, long periods of comparative calm. Besides, the ancillaries of a writer’s profession, the odd jobs that make such an existence financially surmountable, were at that period in by no means a flourishing condition. I was myself in lowish water and, what was worse, found it difficult, almost impossible, to work on a book while waiting for the starting pistol. Even Chips Lovell, who possessed relatively well-paid employment on a newspaper (contributing to a column of innocuous, almost self-respecting ‘gossip’), lived, like others in Fleet Street, in recurrent fear of being told his services were redundant.
Since Chips had married Priscilla, he had shown signs of turning into a model husband. Some people regarded him as an incurably raffish young man, but now the interest he had always taken in