‘Oh, Angus is all right at last,’ said George, speaking before his wife could reply. ‘We have been looking about for a school for him. I am going down to see another next week.’
‘They are both off to their Granny’s on Friday,’ said Veronica, ‘where they will get fussed over a lot and probably catch colds all over again. But there it is. They have to go. The rest of the year will be spent getting them out of bad habits.’
‘Talking of grandparents,’ said George, who, although reputed to be very ‘good’ about Veronica’s children, probably preferred relations on their father’s side to be kept, in so far as possible, out of sight and out of mind, ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try and reopen with Erry the question of getting the stained glass window put up to our own grandfather. I saw Uncle Alfred the other day-he has not been at all well, he tells me – who complained the matter had been allowed to drift for a number of years. I thought I would leave it for a time until Erry had settled down after his Chinese trip, then tackle him about it. There are always a mass of things to do after one has come home from abroad, especially after a long tour like that. I don’t know what state of mind he is in at the moment. Do you happen to have seen anything of him lately?’
George’s line about Erridge was pity rather than blame. That was the tone in which these words had been spoken. Lady Warminster smiled to herself. She was known to regard the whole question of the stained glass window not only as at best a potential waste of money (out-of-date sentiment, threatening active production of ugliness) but also, no doubt correctly, as a matter to which Erridge would in no circumstances ever turn his attention; one, therefore, which was an even greater waste of time to discuss. She may have smiled for that reason alone. In addition, she was going to enjoy communicating to George news so highly charged with novelty as Erridge’s latest project.
‘You will have to be quick, George, if you want to get hold of Erry,’ she said gently. ‘Why?’
‘He is going abroad again.’
‘Where is he off to this time?’
‘Spain.’
‘What to join in the war?’
‘So he says.’
George took the information pretty well. He was by no means a fool, even if people like Chips Lovell did not find him a specially amusing companion. Like others who knew Erridge well, George had probably observed a cloud of that particular shape already forming on the horizon. Roddy Cutts, on the other hand, who, in the course of a couple of years of marriage to Susan, had only managed to meet her eldest brother once, was more surprised. Indeed, the whole Erridge legend, whenever it cropped up, always disturbed Roddy. He had clear-cut, practical ideas how people behaved. Erridge did not at all fit in with these.
‘But surely Erridge isn’t going to fight?’ Roddy said. ‘I suppose he has gone into the legal status of a British national taking part in a continental civil war. It is a most anomalous position-not to mention a great embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government, whatever the party in power. I presume he will be anti-Franco, holding the views he does.’
‘Of course he will be anti-Franco,’ said George. ‘But I agree with you, Roddy, that I should not have thought actual fighting would have been in his line.’
All this talk was going on outside Lady Warminster’s immediate orbit. Now she turned towards us to give one of her semi-official warnings.
‘I believe Mr Clarke has something he wants to tell me about Erridge,’ she said. ‘It might entail a more or less private talk with him after luncheon. Don’t any of you feel you have got to stay, if he decides to tell me some long rigmarole.’
She did not say, perhaps did not know, whether St John Clarke wanted to discuss Erridge’s latest move or some more general matter that concerned Erridge’s affairs. I had not heard that Erridge had been seeing more of St John Clarke recently. This indicated that their previous casual acquaintance must have grown in intimacy. The escapade with Mona, the decision to take part in the Spanish war, such things showed Erridge’s more picturesque side, the aspect at which his beard and tattered clothes freely hinted There were other, less dramatic matters to cause his family concern. The chief of these was the reopening of the question of death duties; but, in addition, the Thrubworth agent had died while Erridge was in China, revealing by vacation of office a situation often suspected by the rest of the family, that is to say gross, perhaps disastrous, mismanagement of the estate, which had been taking place over a long period. The account was seriously overdrawn at the bank. Thrubworth woods would probably have to be sold to meet the deficit. At least, selling the woods was Erridge’s idea of the easiest way out; the trustees, too, were thought to be amenable to this solution. It was possible that Erridge, having no taste for meeting his step-mother to discuss business, had entrusted St John Clarke with some message on the subject, before he himself set off for Spain, where he could forget the trivialities of estate management in the turmoil of revolution. Perhaps Lady Warminster’s last aside was intended to convey that, if business affairs were to be discussed at all, they were not to be interrupted. If so, she made her announcement just in time, because a second later St John Clarke himself was announced. He came hurriedly into the room, a hand held out in front of him as if to grasp the handle of a railway carriage door before the already moving train gathered speed and left the platform.
‘Lady Warminster, I am indeed ashamed of myself,’ he said in a high, rich, breathless, mincing voice, like that of an experienced actor trying to get the best out of a minor part in Restoration comedy. ‘I must crave the forgiveness of you and your guests.’
He gave a rapid glance round the room to discover whom he had been asked to meet, at the same time diffusing about him a considerable air of social discomfort. Lady Warminster accepted St John Clarke’s hand carefully, almost with surprise, immediately relinquishing it, as if the texture or temperature of the flesh dissatisfied her.
‘I hope you were not expecting a grand luncheon party, Mr Clarke,’ she said. ‘There are only a few of the family here, I am afraid.’
Plainly, that was only too true. There could be no doubt from St John Clarke’s face, flushed with running up the stairs, that he had hoped for something better than what he found; perhaps even a téte-à-téte with his hostess, rather than this unwieldy domestic affair, offering neither intimacy nor splendour. However, if disappointed at first sight, he was an old campaigner in the ups and downs of luncheon parties; he knew how to make the best of a bad job.
‘Much, much pleasanter,’ he murmured, still gazing suspiciously round the room. ‘And I am sure you will agree with me, Lady Warminster, in thinking, so far as company is concerned, enough is as bad as a feast, and half a loaf in many ways preferable to the alternative of a whole one or the traditional no bread. How enjoyable, therefore, to be just as we are.’
Although his strongly outlined features were familiar from photographs in the papers, I had never before met this well-known author. Something about St John Clarke put him in the category – of which Widmerpool was another example – of persons at once absurd and threatening. St John Clarke’s head recalled Blake’s, a resemblance no doubt deliberately cultivated, because the folds and crannies of his face insistently suggested a self-applauding interior activity, a desire to let everyone know about his own ‘mental strife’. I had seen him in person on a couple of occasions, though never before closely: once, five or six years earlier, walking up Bond Street with his then secretary Mark Members; a second time, on that misty afternoon in Hyde Park, propelled in a wheeled chair by Mona and Quiggin (who had replaced Members), while the three of them marched in procession as part of a political demonstration. Although he still carried himself with some degree of professional panache, St John Clarke did not look well. He might have been thought older than his years; his colour was not that of a man in good health. Once tall and gaunt in appearance, he had grown fat and flabby, a physical state which increased for some reason his air of being a dignitary of the Church temporarily passing, for some not very edifying reason, as a layman. Longish grey hair and sunken, haunted eyes recalled Mr Deacon’s appearance, probably because both belonged to the same generation, rather than on account of much similarity about the way their lives had been lived. Certainly St John Clarke had never indulged himself in Mr Deacon’s incurable leanings towards the openly disreputable. On the contrary, St John Clarke had been straitlaced, as much from inclination as from policy, during his decades of existence as a writer taken reasonably seriously. Even now, forgotten by the critics but remembered fairly faithfully by the circulating libraries, he had remained a minor public figure, occasionally asked to broadcast on some non-literary, non-political subject like the problem of litter or the abatement of smoke, talks into which he would always inject – so Members alleged – some small admixture of Marxist lore.