‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he asked brusquely.
‘Visiting my wife.’
‘Like me.’
‘Is Matilda in this awful place too?’
‘But of course.’
He, too, had seemed in the depths of gloom when I first saw him; now, delighted at encountering a friend in these unpromising surroundings, he began to laugh and slap a rolled-up newspaper against his leg. Matilda had made him buy a new suit, in general cleaned up his appearance.
‘So you have come back to London.’
‘Inevitably.’
‘For good?’
‘I had to. I couldn’t stand the seaside any longer. Matilda is about to have a baby, as a matter of fact. That is why I am haunting these portals.’
‘Isobel has just had a miscarriage.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said Moreland, ‘I am always hearing about miscarriages. I used to think such things were quite out of date, and took place only in Victorian times when ladies – as Sir Magnus Donners would say – laced themselves up “a teeny, teeny little bit too tight”. Rather one of Sir Magnus’s subjects. I may add I shall be quite bankrupt unless Matilda makes up her mind fairly soon. She keeps on having false alarms. It is costing a fortune.’
He began to look desperately worried. The man with the black bag took a step forward.
‘Both you gentlemen might be surprised if I told you incidence of abortion,’ he said in a thin rasping voice, ‘recently quoted in medical journals.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ said Moreland. ‘This is Dr Brandreth.’
I saw the man to be the Brandreth who had been at school with me. Four or five years older, he had probably been unaware of my existence at that time, but I had seen him again at least once in later life, notably at that Old Boy Dinner at which our former housemaster, Le Bas, had fainted, an occasion when Brandreth, as a doctor, had taken charge of the situation. Tall and bony, with hair like the locks of a youngish actor who has dusted over his skull to play a more aged part in the last act, Brandreth possessed those desiccated good looks which also suggest the theatre. I began to explain that I knew him already, that we had been schoolboys together, but he brushed the words aside with a severe ‘Yes, yes, yes…’ at the same time taking my hand in a firm, smooth, interrogatory, medical grip, no doubt intended to give confidence to a patient, but in fact striking at once a disturbing interior dread at the possibilities of swift and devastating diagnosis.
‘Another of my woman patients,’ he went on, ‘happens to be in here. Rather a difficult case for the gynaecologist. I’ve been giving him a hand with the after-treatment – from the temperamental point of view.’
Brandreth continued to hold Moreland with his eye, as if to make sure his attention did not wander too far afield. At the same time he took up a position closer to myself that seemed to imply appeal to me, as one probably familiar with Moreland’s straying mind, to help if necessary in preventing his escape before the time was ripe. Penning us both in, Brandreth was evidently determined to obstruct with all the forces at his command further conversation between us which, by its personal nature, might exclude himself. However, at the critical moment, just as Brandreth was beginning to speak, he was interrupted by the competition of a new, impelling force. A stoutly built man, wearing a Jaeger dressing-gown, pushed past us without ceremony, making towards a door of frosted glass in front of which we were grouped. In his manner of moving, this person gave the impression that he thought we were taking up too much room in the passage – which may have been true – and that he himself was determined to convey, if necessary by calculated discourtesy, demonstrated by his own aggressive, jerky progress, a sense of strong moral disapproval towards those who had time to waste gossiping. Brandreth had already opened his mouth, probably to make some further pronouncement about obstetrics, but now he closed it quickly, catching the man in the dressing-gown by the sleeve.
‘Widmerpool, my dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I want you to meet another patient of mine – one of England’s most promising young musicians.’
Widmerpool, whose well-worn dressing-gown covered a suit of grubby pyjamas in grey and blue stripe, stopped unwillingly. Without friendliness, he rotated his body towards us. Brandreth he disregarded, staring first at Moreland, then myself, frowning hard through his thick spectacles, relaxing this severe regard a little when he recognised in me a person he knew.
‘Why, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘what are you doing here?’
Like Moreland, Widmerpool too seemed aggrieved at finding me within the precincts of the nursing home.
‘Ha!’ said Brandreth. ‘Of course you know one another. Fellow pupils of Le Bas. Strange coincidence. I could tell you some stranger ones. We were speaking of the high incidence of abortion, my dear Widmerpool.’
Widmerpool started violently.
‘Not abortion, Dr Brandreth,’ said Moreland, laughing. ‘Miscarriage – nothing against the law.’
‘I’m using the word,’ said Brandreth, treating our ignorance with genial amusement, ‘in the strictly medical sense that doesn’t necessarily connote anything illegal. I had been talking to Mr Moreland,’ he added, ‘about Wagner, a chronic sufferer, I understand, from some form of dermatitis, though he finally succumbed, I believe, to a cardiac lesion – unlike Schubert with his abdominal trouble. They were both, I imagine, temperamental men.’
The fact that Widmerpool and I knew each other at least as well as Brandreth knew Widmerpool, prevented Brandreth from dominating the situation so completely as he had intended before Widmerpool’s arrival. His tone in addressing Widmerpool was at once hearty and obsequious, almost servile in its unconcealed desire to make a good impression by play with Moreland’s musical celebrity. Brandreth obviously considered Widmerpool a person of greater importance than Moreland, but also one who might be interested to come in contact with sides of life different from his own. In supposing this, Brandreth showed his acquaintance with Widmerpool to be superficial. Widmerpool remained totally unimpressed by the arts. He was even accustomed to show an open contempt for them in tête-à-tête conversation. In public, for social reasons, he had acquired the merest working knowledge to carry him through a dinner party, content with St John Clarke as a writer, Isbister as a painter.
‘I don’t know about those things,’ he had once said to me. ‘If I don’t know about things, they do not interest me. Even if artistic matters attracted me – which they do not – I should not allow myself to dissipate my energies on them.’
Now, he stood staring at me as if my presence in the nursing home was an insoluble, an irritating, mystery. I explained once more that I had been visiting Isobel.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Widmerpool. ‘You married one of the Tollands, did you not, Nicholas? I was sorry not to have come to your wedding. That was some time ago… nearly… as a matter of fact, I was far too busy. I should like to give you a wedding present. You must tell me something you want, even though I was not able to turn up at the ceremony. After all, we have known each other a long time now. A little piece of silver perhaps. I will consult my mother who arranges such things. Your wife is not suffering from anything serious, I hope. I believe I once met her at her aunt’s, Lady Molly Jeavons. Perhaps it was one of her sisters.’
The meeting had, indeed, taken place. Isobel had mentioned it. She had not cared for Widmerpool. That was one of the reasons why I had made no effort to keep in touch with him. In any case I should never have gone out of my way to seek him, knowing, as one does with certain people, that the rhythm of life would sooner or later be bound to bring us together again. However, I remembered that I owed him a meal. Guilt as to this unfulfilled obligation was strengthened by awareness that he was capable of complaining publicly that I had never invited him in return. Preferring to avoid this possibility, I decided on the spot to ask Widmerpool, before we parted company, to lunch at my club; in fact while Isobel’s convalescence gave an excuse for not bringing him to our flat.