Doesn’t Petrarch say that somewhere ? He is a great stay to me. Childish pleasures, you may tell me, Lady Warminster but I answer you that growing old consists abundantly in growing young.’
Lady Warminster was about to reply, whether in agreement or not with this paradox was never revealed, because St John Clarke suddenly realised that his words belonged to an outdated, even decadent state of mind, wholly inconsistent with political regeneration. He could hardly have been carried away by the white wine. Probably it was some time since he had attended a luncheon party of this sort, the comparative unfamiliarity of which must have made him feel for a minute or two back in some much earlier sequence of his social career.
‘Of course I was speaking of when the errant mind strays,’ he added in a different, firmer tone, ‘as I fear the mind of that unreliable fellow, the intellectual, does from time to time. I meant to imply that, when there are so many causes to claim one’s attention, it seems a waste of time to write about the trivial encounters of an individual like myself, who has spent so much of his time pursuing selfish, and, I fear, often frivolous aims. We shall have to learn to live more collectively, Lady Warminster. There is no doubt about it.’
‘That was just what a fellow in the City was saying to me the other day,’ said George. ‘We were talking about those trials for treason in Russia. I can’t make head or tail of them. He seemed full of information about Zinoviev and Kamenev and the rest of them. He was quite well disposed to Russia. A bill-broker named Widmerpool. You probably remember him at school, Nick. Some story about an overcoat, wasn’t there?’
‘I’ve met him,’ said Roddy. ‘Used to be with Donners-Brebner. Heavy-looking chap with thick spectacles. As a matter of fact, he was always regarded as rather a joke in our family at the time when my sister, Mercy, was going to dances. He was the absolute last resort when a man had dropped out for a dinner party. Didn’t some girl pour sugar over his head once at a ball?’
‘What’s happened to Widmerpool?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen him for a year or two. Not since Isobel and I were married, as a matter of fact. I’ve known him for ages.’
‘Fettiplace-Jones was giving him dinner at the House,’ said Roddy, ‘the night of the India debate.’
‘Is he thinking of standing?’ George asked. ‘He is rather the type.’
‘Not as a Tory,’ Roddy said. ‘Widmerpool is far from being a Tory.’
Roddy looked a shade resentful at George’s probably quite artless judgment that Widmerpool was the sort of man likely to make an M.P.
‘I ran across him somewhere,’ said George. ‘Then he was sitting at the next table one day at Sweeting’s. He struck me as a knowledgeable chap. We had him to dinner as a matter of fact. Now I come to think of it, he said he knew you, Nick. My firm does a certain amount of business with Donners-Brebner, where Widmerpool used to be. He may be going back there in an advisory capacity, anyway temporarily, he told me.’
‘I didn’t at all take to Mr Widmerpool,’ said Veronica, breaking off conversation with Susan on the subject of the best place to buy curtain material. ‘He could talk of nothing but Mrs Simpson the night he came to us. You couldn’t get him off the subject.’
St John Clarke, who had begun to look a little petulant at all this chatter about persons in general unknown to him, brightened at that name. He seemed about to speak; then some inner prompting must have caused him to think better of expressing any reflections stirring within his mind because finally he remained silent, crumbling his bread thoughtfully.
‘I met Mr Widmerpool once at Aunt Molly’s,’ said Susan ‘There was that business of his engagement being broken off, wasn’t there – with that rather dreadful lady, one of the Vowchurches?’
‘I hear poor Uncle Ted is a little better,’ said Lady Warminster.
She referred to the war wound from which Jeavons intermittently suffered, at the same time managing to convey also a sense of moral or social improvement in Jeavons’s condition which appeared for some reason to forbid further discussion of Widmerpool’s unsuccessful attempt of a year or two before to marry Mrs Haycock.
‘Roddy and I were at the Jeavonses’ last week,’ said Susan. ‘The worst of the redecorating is over now, although one still falls over ladders and pails of whitewash. Aunt Molly’s friend Miss Weedon – whom I can’t stand – has moved in permanently now. She has a kind of flat on the top floor. And do you know who is living there too? Charles Stringham of all people. Do you remember him? Miss Weedon is said to be “looking after him”.’
‘Was that the Stringham we were at school with?’ George asked me, but with no idea of what amazement I felt at this news, ‘He was another contemporary of Widmerpool’s.’
‘I used to think Charles Stringham so attractive when he occasionally turned up at dances,’ said Susan reminiscently, speaking as if at least half a century had passed since she herself had been seen on a dance floor. ‘Then he absolutely disappeared from the scene. What happened to him? Why does he need “looking after”?’
‘Charles Stringham isn’t exactly a teetotaller, darling,’ said Roddy, showing slight resentment at the expression by his own wife of such unqualified praise of another man’s charms.
Lady Warminster shuddered visibly at the thought of what that understatement about Stringham’s habits must comprehend. I asked Susan how this indeed extraordinary situation had come about: that Miss Weedon and Stringham should be living under the same roof at the Jeavonses’.
‘Charles Stringham went to see Miss Weedon there one evening – she was his mother’s secretary once, and has always been friends with Charles. He was in an awful state apparently, with ’flu coming on, practically delirious. So Miss Weedon kept him there until he recovered. In fact he has been there ever since. That is Aunt Molly’s story.’
‘Molly mentioned something about it to me,’ said Lady Warminster.
She spoke very calmly, as if in reassuring confirmation that there was really nothing whatever for anyone to worry about. Having once registered her own illimitable horror of alcohol, Lady Warminster was fully prepared to discuss Stringham’s predicament, about which, as usual, she probably knew a great deal more than her own family supposed. The information about Stringham was not only entirely new to me, but full of all kind of implications of other things deep rooted in the past; far more surprising, far more dramatic, for example, than Erridge’s setting off for Spain.
‘Charles is Amy Foxe’s son by her second husband,’ said Lady Warminster. ‘There was a daughter, too – divorced from that not very nice man with one arm – who is married to an American called Wisebite. Amy has had trouble with both her children.’
Stringham’s mother was an old friend of Lady Warminster’s, although the two of them now saw each other rarely. That was chiefly because Mrs Foxe’s unrelenting social activities allowed little time for visits to the drowsy unruffled backwater in which the barque of Lady Warminster’s widowhood had come to rest; unruffled, that is to say, in the eyes of someone like Mrs Foxe. In fact, life at Hyde Park Gardens could not always be so described although its tenor was very different from the constant rotation of parties, committee meetings, visits, through which Mrs Foxe untiringly moved. Perhaps this description of Mrs Foxe’s existence was less exact since she had become so taken up with Norman Chandler; but, although she might now frequent a less formal social world (her charity organising remained unabated), she had been, on the other hand, correspondingly drawn into Chandler’s own milieu of the theatre and music.
‘It is really very good of Miss Weedon to look after Charles Stringham,’ Lady Warminster continued. ‘His mother, what with her hospitals and those terrible wars over them with Lady Bridgnorth, is always so dreadfully busy. Miss Weedon – Tuffy, everyone used to call her – was Flavia Stringham’s governess before she became her mother’s secretary. Such a nice, capable woman. I don’t know why you should not like her, Sue.’
This speech did not make absolutely clear whether Lady Warmins
ter cared as little as Susan for Mrs Foxe’s former secretary, or whether, as the words outwardly indicated, she indeed approved of Miss Weedon and liked meeting her. Lady Warminster’s pronouncements in such fields were often enigmatic. Possibly we were all intended to infer from her tone a shade of doubt as to whether Miss Weedon should have been allowed to take such absolute control over Stringham as now seemed to prevail. I felt uncertainty on that subject myself. This new situation might be good; it might be bad. I remembered Miss Weedon’s unconcealed adoration for him when still a boy; the signs she had shown later t the Jeavonses’ of hoping to play some authoritarian role in Stringham’s life.
‘I am doing what I can to help,’ Miss Weedon had said, when we had met at the Jeavons house not long before my marriage.
Then, I had wondered what she meant. Now I saw that restraint, even actual physical restraint, might have been in her mind. Perhaps nothing short of physical restraint would meet Stringham’s case. It was at least arguable. Miss Weedon seemed to be providing something of the sort.
‘Molly will be glad of the additional rent,’ said Lady Warminster, who seemed to be warming to the subject, now that its alcoholic aspects had faded into the background. ‘She has been complaining a lot lately about being hard up. I tremble to think what Ted’s doctor’s bill must be like at any time. What difficulties he has with his inside. However, he is off slops again, I hear.’
‘Have the Stringhams any money?’ George asked.
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ said Lady Warminster, speaking as if the mere suggestion of anyone, let alone the Stringhams, having any money was in itself a whimsical enough notion. ‘But I believe Amy was considered quite an heiress when she first appeared in London and old Lady Amesbury took her about a lot. She was South African, you know. Most of it spent now, I should think. Amy has always been quite thoughtless about money. She is very wilful. People said she was brought up in a very silly way. I suppose she probably lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust. I don’t think Charles’s father – ”Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with. He used to be very handsome, and so amusing. He looked wonderful on a horse. He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya. Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’
In making this last comment, Lady Warminster was no doubt thinking of Norman Chandler; although no one could say how much, or how little, she knew of this association, nor what she thought about it. Robert caught my eye across the table. Within the family, he was regarded as the chief authority on their step-mother’s obliquity of speech Robert, strangely enough, had turned out to be one of the young men I had seen with Mrs Foxe at that performance of The Duchess of Malfi three or four years before. Mrs Foxe’s other two guests had been John Mountfichet, the Bridgnorths’ eldest son, and Venetia Penistone, one of the Huntercombes’ daughters. After we had become brothers-in-law, and later talked of this occasion, Robert had described to me the excitement shown by Mrs Foxe that night at the prospect of seeing Chandler after the play was over. It was only a week or two since they had met for the first time.
‘You know Mrs Foxe is rather daunting in her way,’ Robert had said. ‘At least she always rather daunts me. Well, she was trembling that night like a leaf. I think she was absolutely mad about that young actor we eventually took out to supper. She didn’t get much opportunity to talk to him, because Max Pilgrim came too and spent the whole evening giving imitations of elderly ladies.
This companionship between Mrs Foxe and Chandler still flourished. She was said to give him ‘wonderful’ presents, expecting nothing in return but the pleasure of seeing him when he had the time to spare. That one of the most exigent of women should find satisfaction in playing this humble role was certainly remarkable. Chandler, lively and easy-going, was quite willing to fall in with her whim. They were continually seen about together, linked in a relationship somewhere between lover with mistress and mother to son.
‘I could understand it if Norman were a sadist,’ Moreland used to say. ‘A mental one, I mean, who cut her dates and suchlike. On the contrary, he is always charming to her. Yet it still goes on. Women are inexplicable.’
During all this talk about Stringham and his parents, St John Clarke had once more dropped out of the conversation. His face was beginning to show that, although aware a self-invited guest must submit to certain periods of inattention on the part of his hostess, these had been allowed to become too frequent to be tolerated by a man of his position. He began to shift about in his chair as if he had something on his mind, perhaps wondering if he would finally be given a chance of being alone with Lady Warminster, or whether he had better say whatever he had to say in public. He must have decided that a téte-à-téte was unlikely, because he now spoke to her in a low confidential tone.
‘There was a matter I wanted to put to you, Lady Warminster, which, in the hurried circumstances of our meeting at Bumpus’s, I hardly liked to bring up. That was why I invited myself so incontinently to your house, to which you so graciously replied with an invitation to this charming lunch party. Lord Warminster – your eldest stepson – Alfred, I have begun to call him.’ St John Clarke paused, laughed a little coyly, and put his head on one side.
‘We call him Erridge,’ said Lady Warminster kindly, ‘I never quite know why. It was not the custom in my own family, but then we were different from the Tollands in many ways. The Tollands have always called their eldest son by the second title. I suppose he could perfectly well be called Alfred. And yet, somehow, Erridge is not quite an Alfred.’
She considered a moment, her face clouding, as if the problem of why Erridge was not quite an Alfred worried her more than a little, even made her momentarily sad.
‘Lady Priscilla mentioned her brother’s political sympathies just now,’ said St John Clarke, smiling gently in return as if to express the ease with which he could cope with social fences of the kind Lady Warminster set in his way. ‘I expect you may know he is leaving for Spain almost immediately.’
‘He told me so himself,’ said Lady Warminster.
‘The fact is,’ said St John Clarke, getting rather red in the face and losing some of his courtliness of manner, ‘the fact is, Lady Warminster, your stepson has asked me to look after his business affairs while he is away. Of course I do not mean his estate, nothing like that. His interests of a politico-literary kind—’
He took up his glass, but it was empty.
‘Lord Warminster and I have been seeing a good deal of each other since his return from the East,’ he said, stifling a sigh probably caused by thought of Mona.
‘At Thrubworth?’ asked Lady Warminster.
She showed sudden interest. In fact everyone at the table pricked up their ears at the supposition that St John Clarke had been received at Thrubworth. Guests at Thrubworth were rare. A new name in the visitors’ book would be a significant matter.
‘At Thrubworth,’ said St John Clarke reverently. ‘We talked there until the wee, small hours. During the past few years both of us have undergone strains and stresses, Lady Warminster. Alfred has been very good to me.’
He stared glassily down the table, as if he thought I myself might well be largely to blame for Members and Quiggin; for the disturbances the two of them must have evoked in his personal life.
‘No one can tell what may happen to Lord Warminster in Spain,’ St John Clarke said, speaking now more dramatically.
He knows me to be a strong supporter of the democratically elected Spanish Government. He knows I feel an equally strong admiration for himself.’
‘Yes of course,’ said Lady Warminster encouragingly.
‘At the same time, Lady Warminster, I am an author, a man of letters, not a man of affairs. I thought it only right you should know the position. I want to do nothing behind your back. Besides that, Alfred has occasional dealings with persons known to me in the past with whom I should be unwilling … I do n
ot mean of course …’
These phrases, which seemed to appeal to Lady Warminster’s better feelings, certainly referred in the main to Quiggin.
‘Oh, I am sure he does,’ said Lady Warminster fervently. ‘I do so much sympathise with you in feeling that.’
She plainly accepted St John Clarke’s halting sentences as reprobating every friend Erridge possessed.
‘In short I wondered if I could from time to time ask your advice, Lady Warminster – might get in touch with you if necessary, perhaps even rely on you to speak with acquaintances of your stepson’s with whom-for purely personal reasons, nothing worse I assure you – I should find it distasteful to deal.’
St John Clarke made a gesture to show that he was throwing himself on Lady Warminster’s mercy. She, on her part, did not appear at all unwilling to learn something of Erridge’s affairs in this manner, although she can have had no very clear picture of St John Clarke’s aims, which were certainly not easy to clarify. No doubt he himself liked the idea of interfering in Erridge’s business, but at the same time did not wish to be brought once more in contact with Quiggin. Lady Warminster must have found it flattering to be offered the position of St John Clarke’s confidante, which would at once satisfy curiosity and be in the best interests of the family. If Erridge never came back from Spain – an eventuality which had to be considered – there was no knowing what messes might have to be cleared up. Besides, Erridge’s plans often changed. His doings had to be coped with empirically. Like less idealistic persons, he was primarily interested in pleasing himself, even though his pleasures took unusual form. Little could be guessed from an outward examination of these enthusiasms at any given moment.
‘Write to me, Mr Clarke, or telephone,’ said Lady Warminster, ‘whenever you think I can be of help. Should my health not allow me to see you at that moment, we will arrange something later.’
I had by then seen too much of Lady Warminster and her stepchildren to be surprised by the calm with which news of this sort was accepted. My own temper was in sympathy with such an attitude of mind. I looked forward to hearing Quiggin’s account of the current Erridge situation. Possibly Quiggin himself might decide to go to Spain. Such a move was not to be ruled out. No doubt he too intended to keep an eye on Erridge’s affairs; the best way to do that might be to attach himself to Erridge’s person. The development of St John Clarke as a close friend of Erridge must be very unsympathetic to Quiggin. St John Clarke’s appeal to Lady Warminster was unexpected. He had managed to get most of it said without attracting much attention from the rest of the party, who were discussing their own affairs, but the general drift of his muttered words probably caused the turn conversation took when it became general once more.