At Lady Molly's: A Novel by Anthony Powell
‘I was wondering whether it would be better for you to be secretary instead of Craggs,’ he said.
‘What makes you think so?’ asked Quiggin cautiously.
‘Craggs always seems to have something else to do. The fact is, Craggs is so keen on running committees that he can never give any of them the right amount of attention. He is on to German refugees now. Quite right, of course, that something should be done. But last week I couldn’t get hold of him because he was occupied with Sillery about the embargo on arms to Bolivia and Paraguay. Then there’s the “Smash Fascism” group he is always slipping off to. He would like us to pay more attention to Mosley. He wants to be doing the latest thing all the time, whether it’s the independence of Catalonia or free meals for school-children.’
‘Anti-fascism comes first,’ said Quiggin. ‘Even before pacifism. In my opinion, the Sedition Bill can wait. After all, didn’t Lenin say something about Liberty being a bourgeois illusion?’
Quiggin had added this last remark in not too serious a tone, but Erridge seemed to take it seriously, shifting about uncomfortably on his hard wooden seat as if he were a galley-slave during an interval of rest.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I know he did.’
‘Well, then?’
‘I don’t always think like the rest of you about that.’
He rose suddenly from his chair.
‘I want to have a talk about the magazine some time,’ he said. ‘Not now, I think.’
‘Oh, that,’ said Quiggin.
He sounded as if he would have preferred ‘the magazine’ not to have been so specifically named.
‘What magazine?’ asked Mona.
‘Oh, it’s nothing, ducks,’ said Quiggin. ‘Just an idea Alf and I were talking about.’
‘Are you going to start a magazine?’
Mona sounded quite excited.
‘We might be,’ said Erridge, moving his feet about.
‘It is all very vague still,’ said Quiggin, in a voice that closed the matter.
Mona was not to be so easily silenced. Whether her interest had been genuinely aroused or whether she saw this as a means expressing her own views or teasing Quiggin was not clear.
‘But how thrilling,’ she said. ‘Do tell me all about it, Alf.’
Erridge smiled in an embarrassed way, and pulled at his beard.
‘It is all very vague, as J.G. has explained,’ he said. ‘Look here, why not come to dinner tomorrow night? We could talk about it then.’
‘Or perhaps later in the week,’ said Quiggin.
‘I’ve got to go away again on Monday,’ Erridge said.
There was a pause. Quiggin glared at me.
‘I expect you will have to go back to London on Sunday night, won’t you, Nick?’ he said.
‘Oh, do come too,’ said Erridge, at once. ‘I’m so sorry. Of course I meant to ask you as well if you are staying until then.’
He seemed distressed at having appeared in his own eyes bad mannered. I think he lived in a dream, so shut off from the world that he had not bothered for a moment to consider whether I was staying with Quiggin, or had just come in that night for a meal. Even if he realised that I was staying, he was probably scarcely aware that I might still be there twenty-four hours later. His reactions placed him more and more as a recognisable type, spending much of his time in boredom and loneliness, yet in some way inhibited from taking in anything relevant about other people: at home only with ‘causes’.
‘The trains are not too good in the morning,’ said Quiggin. ‘I don’t know when you have to be at the Studio—’
‘The Studio is closed all this week owing to the strike,’ I said. ‘So I had thought of going up on Monday morning in any case—if that is all right.’
‘Oh, are you on strike?’ asked Erridge, brightening up at once, as if it were for him a rare, unexpected pleasure to find himself in such close contact with a real striker. ‘In that case you simply must come and have a meal with me.’
‘I’d love to, but it is not me on strike, I am afraid—the electricians.’
‘Oh, yes, the strike, of course, the strike,’ said Quiggin, as if he himself had organised the stoppage of work, but, in the light of his many similar responsibilities, had forgotten about its course. ‘In that case we would all like to come, Alf. It’s an early supper, as I remember.’
So far as Quiggin was concerned, it had been one of those great social defeats; and, in facing the fact squarely, he had done something to retrieve his position. Presumably he was making plans for Erridge to put up the money to install him as editor of some new, Left Wing magazine. It was perhaps reasonable that he should wish to keep their plans secret in case they should miscarry. However, now that the dinner had been decided upon, he accepted the matter philosophically. Erridge seemed to have no similar desire to discuss matters in private. He was, I think, quite unaware of Quiggin’s unwillingness to allow others to know too much of their life together. I could see, too, that he was determined not to abandon the idea that I was myself a striker.
‘But you support them by not going,’ he said. ‘Yes, come early. You might possibly like to look round the house—though there really is nothing to see there that is of the slightest interest, I’m afraid.’
He moved once more towards the door, sunk again in deep despair, perhaps at the thought of the lack of distinction of his house and its contents. Shuffling his espadrilles against the stone floor, he caught his foot in the mat, swore gently and a trifle self-consciously, as if aspiring to act as roughly as he was dressed, and left with hardly a further word. Quiggin accompanied him to the door, and shouted a farewell. Then he returned to the room in which we sat. No one spoke for a minute or two. Quiggin slowly corked up the gin bottle, and put it away in a cupboard.
‘Alf is rather sweet, isn’t he?’ said Mona.
‘Alf is a good fellow,’ agreed Quiggin, a shade sourly.
‘Where does he live?’ I asked.
‘Thrubworth Park. It is a big house heyond the trees you see from our windows.’
Quiggin had been put out by this sudden appearance of Erridge. It had been a visit for which he was unprepared: a situation he had not bargained for. Now he seemed unable to decide what line he himself should take about his friend.
‘How much do you know about him?’ he asked at last.
‘Hardly anything, except that he is said to have been a tramp. And, as I said just now, I met some of his sisters the other day.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Quiggin, impatiently. ‘I am not at all interested in the rest of his family. He never sees anything of them, anyway. A lot of social butterflies, that’s all they are. Just what you might expect. Alf is different. I don’t know what you mean by being a tramp, though. Where did you get that story? I suppose you think everyone is a tramp who wears a beard.’
‘Aren’t they? Some of his relations told me he had been experimenting in life as a tramp.’
‘Just the sort of thing they would put about,’ said Quiggin. ‘Isn’t it like people of that class? It is true he has been making some study of local condidons. I don’t think he stayed anywhere very luxurious, but he certainly didn’t sleep in casual wards.’
‘His relations suppose he did. I think they rather admire him for it.’
‘Well, they suppose wrong,’ said Quiggin. ‘Alf is a very good fellow, but I don’t know whether he is prepared to make himself as uncomfortable as that.’
‘What did he do then?’
‘Useful work collecting information about unemployment,’ Quiggin conceded. ‘Distributed pamphlets at the same time. I don’t want to belittle it in any way, but it is absurd to go round saying he was a tramp. All the same, the experience he had will be of political value to him.’
‘I think he is rather attractive,’ said Mona.
For some reason this did not seem to please Quiggin.
‘Did you ever meet a girl called Gypsy Jones?’ he said. ‘A Communist. Rather a grubby litt
‘What do you mean, “waste time over women”?’ said Mona. ‘Anyway, nobody could blame you for that. You think about yourself too much.’
‘I think about you too, ducks,’ said Quiggin mildly, no doubt judging it advisable to pacify her. ‘But Alf is an idealist. Rather too much of one sometimes, when it comes to getting things done. All the same, he has most of the right ideas. Shall I get that bottle out again? Supper doesn’t seem to be nearly ready.’
‘Yes, get it out,’ said Mona. ‘I can’t imagine why you put it away.’
All this was reminiscent of the Templer household before Mona left her husband. During the twenty-four hours that followed, this recollection was more than once repeated.
Quiggin, too, had begun to placate her with ‘treats’, the impending dinner with Erridge certainly grading in that class. In fact Quiggin began to talk as if he himself had arranged the invitation as an essential aspect of the weekend. Although its potentialities had been reduced for him by my inclusion, there was, I think, nothing personal in that. He would equally have objected to any other friend or acquaintance joining the party. Dinner at Thrubworth was an occasion not to be wasted, for Mona had remarked: ‘We don’t get invited every day of the week.’ I asked how long they had known Erridge.
‘In the days when I was secretary to St. John Clarke,’ said Quiggin, smiling to show how distant, how incongruous, he now regarded that period of his life. ‘St. J. went one afternoon to a bookshop in Charing Cross Road, where he wanted to cast his eye over some of Lenin’s speeches. As you know, St. J. was rather careful about money, and he had suggested I should hold the bookseller in conversation while he looked up just as much as he needed. This was at the beginning of St. J.’s conversion to Marxism. We found Alf pottering about the shop, trying to get through the afternoon. Old habits die hard, and, of course, up to the time I met him, St. J. had been a champion snob—and he wasn’t altogether cured of his liking for a high-sounding name. He often said afterwards, when we knew each other well, that I’d saved him from snobbery. I only wish I could also have saved him from Trotskyism. But that is another story. It happened that St. J. had met Alf quite a time before at the home of one of Alf’s relatives—is there a woman called Lady Molly Jeavons? There is—well, it was at her house. St. J. had a word or two with Alf in the bookshop, and, in spite of his changed view of life, forgot all about Lenin’s speeches and asked him back to tea.’
‘And you have known him ever since?’
‘Alf turned up trumps when St. J. behaved so foolishly about myself and Mona. Since then, I’ve done my best to canalise his enthusiasms.’
‘Has St. John Clarke still got his German boy as secretary?’
‘Not he,’ said Quiggin. ‘Guggenbühl is a shrewd young man, Trotskyist though he be. He has moved on to something more paying. After all, he was smart enough to see Hitler coming and clear out of Germany. I hear he is very patronising to the German refugees arriving now.’
‘He is probably a Nazi agent.’
‘My God,’ said Quiggin. ‘I wouldn’t wonder. I must talk to Mark about that when he comes back from America.’
The possibility that Mark Members and himself had been succeeded in the dynasty of St. John Clarke’s secretaries by one of Hitler’s spies greatly cheered Quiggin. He was in a good mood for the rest of the day, until it was time to start for Thrubworth. Then, as the hour approached, he became once more nervous and agitated. I had supposed that, having secured Erridge for a patron some years before, Quiggin must be used by then to his ways. The contrary seemed true; and I remembered that in his undergraduate days he used to become irritable and perturbed before a party: master of himself only after arrival. He had changed into his suit of that cruel blue colour when at last we set off across the fields.
‘What date is the house?’
‘What house?’
‘Where we are going.’
‘Oh, Thrubworth Park,’ said Quiggin, as if he had forgotten our destination. ‘Seventeenth century, I should say, much altered in the eighteenth. Alf will tell you about it. Though he doesn’t really like the place, he likes talking about it for some reason. You will hear all you want about its history.’
Passing into the wood to be seen from the windows of the cottage, we went through more fields and climbed a stile. Beyond was a deserted road, on the far side of which, set back some distance from the highway, stood an entrance—evidently not the main entrance—to a park, the walls of which I had already seen from another side on my way from the station the day before. A small, unoccupied lodge, now fallen into decay, lay beside two open, wrought-iron gates. We went through these gates, and made our way up a drive that disappeared among large trees. The park was fairly well kept, though there was an unfriended, melancholy air about the place, characteristic of large estates for which the owner feels no deep affection.
‘I hope there will be something to drink tonight,’ said Mona.
‘Is it a bit short as a rule?’ I asked.
‘Doesn’t exactly flow.’
‘Why didn’t you have a pint of gin before you came out then,’ asked Quiggin, gratingly, ‘if you can’t ever get through an evening without wanting to feel tipsy at the end of it? There always seems enough to me. Not buckets but enough.’
His nerves were still on edge.
‘All right,’ said Mona. ‘Don’t bite my head off. You grumbled yourself the last time you came here.’
‘Did I, ducks?’
He took her arm.
‘We’ll have a nice drink when we get back,’ he said, ‘if Alf should happen to be in one of his moods.’
1 felt apprehensive at the thought that Erridge might be ‘in one of his moods’. Quiggin had not mentioned these ‘moods’ before, although their nature was easy to imagine from what had been said. I wished we could continue to walk, as we were doing, through glades of oak and chestnut trees in the cool twilight, without ever reaching the house and the grim meal which now seemed to lie ahead of us. We had continued for about ten minutes when roofs came suddenly into view, a group of buildings of some dignity, though without much architectural distinction: a seventeenth-century mansion such as Quiggin had described, brick at the back and fronted in the eighteenth century with stone. The façade faced away from us across a wide stretch of lawn, since we had arrived at the side of the house amongst a network of small paths and flowerbeds, rather fussily laid out and not too well kept. Quiggin led the way through these borders, making for a projection of outbuildings and stables. We passed under an arch into a cobbled yard. Quiggin made for a small door, studded with brass nails. By the side of this door hung an iron bell-pull. He stopped short and turned towards me, looking suddenly as if he had lost heart. Then he took hold of himself and gave the bell a good jerk.
‘Does one always come in this way?’
‘The front of the house is kept shut,’ he said.
‘What happens inside?’
‘The state rooms—if that is what you call them—are closed. Alf just lives in one corner of the place.’
‘In the servants’ quarters?’
‘More or less. That is probably what they used to be.’
We waited for a long time. Quiggin appeared unwilling to ring again, but, under pressure from Mona, at last decided to repeat his wrench at the bell. There was another long pause. Then steps could be heard moving very slowly and carefully down the stairs. Inner fumbling with the door-knob took place, and the door was opened by a man-servant. I recognised Smith, the butler temporarily employed by the Jeavonses on my first visit to their house.
‘Lord Warminster?’ muttered Quiggin, interrogatively.
Smith made no answer. A kind of grimace had crossed his features when he saw Quiggin and Mona; naturally enough, he gave me no sign of recognition. Apart from this brief, indeed scarcely perce
‘Mr. and Mrs. Quiggin—and what other name?’
Fancy made him seem to emphasise the word ‘Mrs.’, as if he wished to cast doubt on the legal union of the two of them. Quiggin started, then mumbled my name grudgingly. Smith threw open the door, bawling out his announcement, and propelled us within.