‘And how is your sister, Lady Molly?’ he asked, when we had moved into the dining-room and taken our places. ‘It is many a year since I had the pleasure. Why, I scarcely seem to have seen her since she was châtelaine of Dogdene. How long ago seem those Edwardian summer afternoons.’
Lady Warminster, who was in one of her more playful moods, received the enquiry with kindly amusement, offering at once some formal statement which suggested no words of hers could do justice to conditions prevailing in the Jeavons house during redecoration. Lady Warminster had few illusions as to St John Clarke’s preference for her sister as Marchioness of Sleaford, rich and presiding over a famous mansion, rather than married to Ted Jeavons and living in disorder and no great affluence in South Kensington. St John Clarke recalled that he had visited the Jeavons house, too, but also a long time ago. A minute or two later I heard her ask him whether he had read any of the two or three books I had written; a question calculated to produce more entertainment for Lady Warminster herself than gratification to St John Clarke or me. Aware, certainly, that I knew Members and Quiggin, he had given me a stiff, distrustful bow when introduced. Memories of his own dealings with that couple must have been unwelcome. Besides, Lady Warminster’s buoyant manner was not of a kind to bring reassurance.
‘Certainly, certainly,’ said St John Clarke guardedly. ‘I remember praising one of them. A laudable piece of work.’
He took a sip of the sickly white Bordeaux poured out for us. Lady Warminster possessed a horror of ‘drink’. As a rule barely enough appeared at her table to satisfy the most modest requirements. This was perhaps her sole characteristic shared with Erridge. St John Clarke was abstemious too. Members, during his secretaryship, had tried to encourage in his master a taste for food and wine, but complained later that the only result had been a lot of talk about rare vintages and little known recipes, while the meals at St John Clarke’s table grew worse than ever.
Yes,’ said St John Clarke, wiping his mouth and refolding the napkin on his knee, ‘yes.’
It was true he had spoken favourably of my first book in a New York paper, when discoursing in general terms of younger English writers. That, so far as I was concerned had been the first indication that St John Clarke – in the hands of Members – was undergoing some sort of aesthetic conversion. Kind words from him only a short time before would have been unthinkable. However, mention of a first novel at the safe remove of an American newspaper’s book-page is one thing: to be brought face to face with its author five or six years later, quite another. So, at least, St John Clarke must have keenly felt. Mutual relationship between writers, whatever their age, is always delicate, not so much – as commonly supposed – on account of jealousy, but because of the intensely personal nature of a writer’s stock in trade. For example, St John Clarke seemed to me a ‘bad’ writer, that is to say a person to be treated (in those days) with reserve, if not thinly veiled hostility. Later, that question – the relationship of writers of different sorts – seemed, like so many others, less easily solved; in fact infinitely complicated. St John Clarke himself had made a living, indeed collected a small fortune, while giving pleasure to many by writing his books (pleasure even to myself when a boy, if it came to that), yet now was become an object of disapproval to me because his novels did not rise to a certain standard demanded by myself. Briefly, they seemed to me trivial, unreal, vulgar, badly put together, odiously phrased and ‘insincere’. Yet, even allowing for these failings, was not St John Clarke still a person more like myself than anyone else sitting round the table? That was a sobering thought. He, too, for longer years, had existed in the imagination, even though this imagination led him (in my eyes) to a world ludicrously contrived, socially misleading, professionally nauseous. On top of that, had he not on this earlier occasion gone out of his way to speak a word of carefully hedged praise for my own work? Was that, therefore, an aspect of his critical faculty for which he should be given credit, or was it an even stronger reason for guarding against the possibility of corruption at the hands of one whose own writings could not be approved? Fortunately these speculations, heavily burdened with the idealistic sentiments of one’s younger days, were put to no practical test; not only because St John Clarke was sitting at some distance from me, but also on account of the steps he himself immediately took to change a subject likely to be unfruitful to both of us. He quickly commented on the flowers in the vases, which were arranged with great skill, and turned out to be the work of Blanche.
‘Flowers mean more to us in a city than in a garden,’ said St John Clarke.
Lady Warminster nodded. She was determined not to abandon the subject of literature without a struggle.
‘I expect you are writing a new book yourself, Mr Clarke,’ she said. ‘We have not had one from you for a long time.’
‘Nor from you, Lady Warminster.’
‘But I am not a famous writer,’ she said. ‘I just amuse myself with people like Maria-Theresa who take my fancy. For you, it is quite another matter.’
St John Clarke shook his head energetically, like a dog emerging from a pond. It was ten or fifteen years since he had published anything but occasional pieces.
‘Sometimes I add a paragraph to my memoirs, Lady Warminster,’ he said. ‘There is little about the critics of the present day to encourage an author of my age and experience to expose his goods in the market place. To tell the truth, Lady Warminster, I get more pleasure from watching the confabulation of sparrows in their parliament on the rooftops opposite my study window, or from seeing the clouds scudding over the Serpentine in windy weather, than I do from covering sheets of foolscap with spidery script that only a few sympathetic souls, some now passed on to the Great Unknown, would even care to read.
No sparrow on any roof was ever lonely
As I am, nor any animal untamed.
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?’