‘The opposite process to entertaining angels unawares?’
‘I don’t quite know what you mean,’ said Widmerpool. ‘But tell me about yourself, your married life, Nicholas. Where are you living? I dined with your brother-in-law, George Tolland, not long ago. I am never sure that it is a wise thing for soldiers to go into business. If fellows enter the army, let them stay in the army. That is true of most professions. However, he gave me some acceptable advice regarding raising money for my Territorials. The mess fund balance always seems low.’
Widmerpool rarely showed great interest in other people’s affairs, but his good humour that day was such that he listened with more attention than usual when subjects unconnected with himself were ventilated. I wondered if some business deal had put him in such a genial mood. Conversation drifted to such matters.
‘Things are looking up a little in the City,’ he said, when luncheon was over. ‘I foresee that the rhythm of the trade circle is moving towards improvement. I have been doing some small calculations on my own account to verify how matters stand. It will interest you to hear my findings. As you know, the general level of dividends is the major determinant of general stock values and market prices over a long period of time. Over shorter periods stock prices fluctuate more widely than dividends. That is obvious, of course. I worked out, for example, that since the Slump, stock prices have risen between 217* per cent and 218½ per cent. So far as I could ascertain, dividends have not exceeded 62¾ per cent to 64* per cent. Those are my own figures. I do not put them forward as conclusive. You follow me?’
‘Perfectly.’
‘Setting aside a European war,’ said Widmerpool, ‘which I do not consider a strong probability in spite of certain disturbing features, I favour a reasoned optimism. I hold views, as it happens, on the interplay of motions and emotions of the Stock Exchange, which, in my opinion, are far more amenable to appraisement than may be supposed by the tyro. My method could not be simpler. I periodically divide the market price of stocks – as expressed by some reliable index – by the dividend paid on the index. What could be easier than that. You agree?’
‘Of course.’
‘But lest I should seem to pontificate upon my own subject, to be over-occupied with the sordid details of commerce, let me tell you, Nicholas, that I have been allowing myself certain relaxations.’
‘You have?’
‘As you know, my mother has always urged me to spend more time seeking amusement. She thinks I work too hard.’
‘I remember your telling me.’
I did not know what he was aiming at. There was no doubt he was pleased about something. He seemed uncertain whether or not to reveal the reason for that. Then, suddenly, his gratification was explained.
‘I have been moving in rather exalted circles lately,’ he said, giving a very satisfied smile.
‘Indeed?’
‘Not exactly royal – that is hardly the word yet … You understand me …?’
‘I think so.’
‘It was an interesting experience.’
‘Have you actually met …’
Widmerpool bowed his head, suggesting by this movement the knowledge of enviable secrets. At the same time he would allow no admission that might be thought compromising either to himself or those in high places whose reputation must rightly be shielded. I tried to extort more from him without any success.
‘When did this happen?’
‘Please do not press me for details.’
He was now on his dignity. There was a moment of silence. Widmerpool took a deep breath, as if drawing into his lungs all the health-giving breezes of the open sea of an elevated social life.
‘I think we are going to see some great changes, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘and welcome ones. There is much – as I have often said before – to be swept away. I feel sure the things I speak of will be swept away. A new broom will soon get to work. I venture to hope that I may even myself participate in this healthier society to which we may look forward.’
‘And you think we shall avoid war?’
‘Certainly, I do. But I was speaking for once of society in its narrower sense – the fashionable world. There is much in the prospect before us that attracts me.’
I wondered if he were again planning to marry. Widmerpool, as I had noticed in the past, possessed certain telepathic powers, sometimes to be found in persons insensitive to the processes of thought of other people except in so far as they concern themselves; that is to say he seemed to know immediately that some idea about him was germinating in a given person’s mind – in this case that I was recalling his fiasco with Mrs Haycock.
‘I expect you remember that the last time you were lunching with me I was planning matrimony myself,’ he said ‘How fortunate that nothing came of it. That would have been a great mistake. Mildred would not have made at all a suitable wife for me. Her subsequent conduct has caused that to become very plain. It was in the end a relief to my mother that things fell out as they did.’
‘How is your mother?’
‘As usual, she is positively growing younger,’ said Widmerpool, pleased by this enquiry. ‘And together with her always keen appreciation of youth, she tries, as I have said, to persuade me to venture more often into a social world. She is right. I know she is right. I made an effort to follow her advice – with the satisfactory consequence that I have more than half imparted to you.’
It was no good hoping to hear any more. Like Moreland dropping hints about his love affairs, Widmerpool hoped only to whet my curiosity. He seemed anxious to convince me that, although his own engagement had been broken off in embarrassing circumstances, he had been left without any feeling of bitterness.
‘I hear Mildred Haycock has returned to the South of France,’ he said. ‘Really the best place for her. I won’t repeat to you a story I was told about her the other day. For my own part, I see no reason to hurry into marriage. Perhaps, after all, forty is the age at which to find a mate. I believe Leon Blum says so in his book. He is a shrewd man, Monsieur Blum.’
3
PEOPLE TALKED as if it were a kind of phenomenon that Matilda should ever have given birth to a child at all: the unwillingness of the world to believe that anyone – especially a girl who has lived fairly adventurously – might exist for a time in one manner, then at a later date choose quite another way of life. The baby, a daughter, survived only a few hours. Matilda herself was very ill. Even when she recovered, Moreland remained in the deepest dejection. He had worried so much about his wife’s condition before the child was born that he seemed almost to have foreseen what would happen. That made things no better. About that time, too, there was a return of trouble with his lung: money difficulties obtruded: everything went wrong: depression reigned. Then, after some disagreeable weeks, two unexpected jobs turned up. Almost from one day to the next Moreland recovered his spirits. There was, after all, no reason why they should not in due course have another child. The financial crisis was over: the rent paid: things began to look better. All the same, it had to be admitted the Morelands did not live very domestically. The routine into which married life is designed inexorably to fall was still largely avoided by them. They kept rigorously late hours. They were always about together. A child would not have fitted easily into the circumstances of their small, rather bleak flat (no longer what Moreland had begun to call ‘my former apolaustic bachelor quarters’) where they were, in fact, rarely to be found.
We used to see a good deal of the Morelands in those days dining together sometimes at Foppa’s, sometimes at the Strasbourg, afterwards going to a film, or, as Moreland really preferred, sitting in a pub and talking. He would develop a passion for one particular drinking place – never the Mortimer after marriage – then tire of it, inclination turning to active aversion. Isobel and Matilda got on well together. They were about the same age; they had the nursing home in common. Matilda had recovered quickly, after an unpromising start. She found apparent relief in descr
ibing the discomfort she had suffered, although speaking always in a manner to cast a veil of unreality over the experience. Lively, violent, generous, she was subject, like Moreland himself, to bouts of deep depression. On the whole the life they lived together – so wholly together – seemed to suit her. Perhaps, after all, people were right to think of her as intended by nature for a man’s mistress and companion, rather than as cast for the role of mother.
‘Matilda’s father was a chemist,’ Moreland once remarked, when we were alone together, ‘but he is dead now – so one cannot get special terms for purges and sleeping pills.’
‘And her mother?’
‘Married again. They were never on very good terms. Matty left home very young. I think everyone was rather glad when she struck out on her own.’
Two of my sisters-in-law, as it happened, had come across Matilda in pre-Moreland days. These were Veronica, George Tolland’s wife, and Norah, who shared a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Veronica, whose father was an auctioneer in a country town not far from Stourwater Castle, was one of the few people to know something of Matilda’s early life. They had, indeed, been at school together.
‘I was much older, of course,’ Veronica said. ‘I just remember her right down at the bottom of the junior school, a little girl you couldn’t help noticing. She was called Betty Updike then.’
‘How did you ever discover Matilda was the same girl?’
‘When I was living at home and divorcing Fred, I met a local girl in the High Street who’d got a job on the Daily Mail. She began to talk about Sir Magnus Donners and said: “Do you know the piece called Matilda Wilson he is always seen around with is really Betty Updike”.’
There was nothing particularly surprising about Matilda having taken a new name for the stage. Many people did that. It was something to be expected. The manner in which Matilda had first met Sir Magnus was more interesting.
‘This girl told me Matilda Wilson came down one term to help the school dramatic society do A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ said Veronica. ‘They had got permission to act the play at Stourwater. Sir Magnus, wandering round, came across Matilda Wilson dressing up a lot of little girls as elves. That went pretty well.’
It seemed as credible a story as any other. Once involved with Sir Magnus, Matilda had, of course, been ‘seen everywhere’; within the limitations of the fact that Sir Magnus preferred to keep his girl of the moment as much as possible to himself, allowing her to meet no more of his own friends than strictly necessary for his own entertainment when the two of them could not be alone together. Certainly that had been true of the time when Sir Magnus was associated with Baby Wentworth, alleged by Barnby to have ‘given notice’ on this very account. There had been a lot of gossip about Matilda when she was ‘with’ Sir Magnus. When, not long before my own marriage, I had stayed with Quiggin and Mona in the cottage lent them by Erridge, Quiggin had even talked too much about Matilda for Mona’s taste.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mona had said, in her irritated drawl, ‘Matilda Wilson – one of those plain girls men for some extraordinary reason like running after. Because they are not much trouble, I suppose.’
Norah Tolland had encountered Matilda in quite different circumstances; in fact having drinks with Heather Hopkins, the pianist, who had formerly inhabited one of the lower floors of the house in Chelsea where Norah and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson occupied the attics. At the period of which I am speaking – about two years after my own marriage – Norah and Eleanor had both found themselves jobs and become very ‘serious’, talking a lot about politics and economics and how best to put the world right. They were now rather ashamed of their Heather Hopkins days.
‘Poor old Hopkins,’ Norah said, when I mentioned her once. ‘Such a pity she goes round looking and talking like the most boring kind of man. Her flat might be the bar in a golf club. She is a good-hearted creature in her own way.’
‘You get tired of all that clumping about,’ said Eleanor, kicking some bedroom slippers out of sight under the sofa. ‘And besides, Heather isn’t in the least interested in world affairs. One does ask a little sense of responsibility in people.’
However, things had been very different some years before. Then, Hopkins had thrilled Norah and Eleanor with her eyeglass and her dinner-jacket and her barrack-room phrases. Matilda had been brought to the Hopkins flat by a young actress at that time much admired by the hostess. The gathering was, of course, predominantly female, and Matilda, often found attractive by her own sex, but herself preferring men even in an unaggressively masculine form, had spent most of the evening talking to Norman Chandler. She met him for the first time at this Hopkins party. Through Chandler, Matilda had subsequently obtained a foothold in that branch of the theatre which had led in due course to her part in The Duchess of Malfi. Norah, usually sparing of praise, had been impressed by Matilda, to whom, as it happened, she only managed to speak a couple of words in the course of the evening.
‘I thought she was rather wonderful,’ said Norah.
Moreland himself had first met his future wife at a time when Matilda’s connexion with Sir Magnus, if not completely severed, had been at least considerably relaxed. Moreland’s behaviour on this occasion had been characteristic. He had fallen deeply in love, immediately overwhelming Matilda with that combination of attention and forgetfulness which most women found so disconcerting in his addresses. For once, however, that approach worked very well. Matilda was won. There had already been some ups and downs in their relationship by the time I was allowed to meet her, but, in principle, they were satisfied enough with each other before marriage; they still seemed satisfied when we used to meet them and dine together at Foppa’s or the Strasbourg. I discounted Moreland’s casual outbursts against marriage as an institution; indeed, took his word for it that, as he used to explain, these complaints were a sign of living in a world of reality, not a palace of dreams.
‘People always treat me as if I was a kind of 1880 bohemian,’ he used to say. ‘On the contrary, I am the sane Englishman with his pipe.’
It was on one of these evenings at the Strasbourg that he announced his symphony was finished and about to be performed. Although Moreland never talked much about his own compositions, I knew he had been working on the symphony for a long time.
‘Norman’s friend, Mrs Foxe, is going to give a party for it,’ he said.
‘But how lovely,’ said Isobel. ‘Will Mrs Foxe and Norman stand at the top of the stairs, side by side, receiving the guests?’
‘I hope so,’ said Moreland. ‘An example to all of us. A fidelity extremely rare among one’s friends.’
‘Does Mrs Foxe still live in a house somewhere off Berkeley Square?’ I asked.
‘That’s it,’ said Moreland. ‘With objects like mammoth ice-cream cornets on either side of the front door for putting out the torches after you have paid off your sedan chair.’
‘I am not sure that I like parties at that house,’ said Matilda. ‘We have been there once or twice. I can stand grand parties less and less anyway.’
She was having one of her moods that night, but it was on the whole true to say that since marriage Moreland had increasingly enjoyed going to parties, especially parties like that offered by Mrs Foxe; Matilda, less and less.
‘You talk as if we spent our life in a whirl of champagne and diamonds,’ Moreland said. ‘Anyway, it won’t be as grand as all that. Mrs Foxe has promised just to ask our own sordid friends.’
‘Who,’ asked Isobel, ‘apart from us?’
‘I’d far rather go off quietly by ourselves somewhere after the thing is over and have supper with Isobel and Nick,’ Matilda said. ‘That would be much more fun.’
‘It is rather an occasion, darling,’ said Moreland, vexed at these objections. ‘After all, I am noted among composers for the smallness of my output. I don’t turn out a symphony every week like some people. A new work by me ought to be celebrated with a certain flourish – if only to encourage the composer himsel
f.’
‘I just hate parties nowadays.’
‘There are only going to be about twenty or thirty people,’ Moreland said. ‘I know Edgar Deacon used to assure us that “the saloon, rather than the salon, is the true artist’s milieu”, but his own pictures were no great advertisement for that principle. Personally, I feel neither subservience nor resentment at the prospect of being entertained by Mrs Foxe in luxurious style.’
‘Have you ever talked to her naval husband?’ I asked.
‘There is a smooth, hearty fellow about the house sometimes,’ Moreland said. ‘A well-fed air, and likes a good mahogany-coloured whisky. I once heard him give an anguished cry when the footman began to splash in too much soda. I never knew he was her husband. He doesn’t look in the least like a husband.’
‘Of course he is her husband,’ said Matilda. ‘What an ass you are. He pinched my leg the night we were having supper with them after Turandot. That is one of the reasons I turned against the house.’
‘Darling, I’m sure he didn’t. Just your swank.’
‘I told you when we got home. I even showed you the bruise. You must have been too tight to see it.’
‘He always seems scrupulously well behaved to me,’ Moreland said. ‘Rather afraid of Mrs Foxe, as a matter of fact. I understand why, now she turns out to be his wife.’
Soon after this meeting with the Morelands came the period of crisis leading up to the Abdication, one of those public events which occupied the minds not only of those dedicated by temperament to eternal discussion of what they read about in the newspapers, but of everyone else in the country of whatever age, sex, or social class. The constitutional and emotional issues were left threadbare by debate. Barnby would give his views on the controversy in his most down-to-earth manner; Roddy Cutts treated it with antiseptic discretion; Frederica’s connexion with the Court caused her to show herself in public as little as possible, but she did not wholly avoid persecution at the hands of friends and relations vainly hoping for some unreleased titbit.