‘It’s my house, isn’t it?’

‘You say you don’t want him in the sitting-room. Why did you tell him he could work in the room off the kitchen if you don’t want him there?’

‘I am not grumbling,’ said Maclintick, ‘I am just warning these two gendemen what to expect – that is to say Carolo scribbling away at a sheet of music at one end of the room, and some cold beef and pickles at the other.’

‘Mutton,’ said Mrs Maclintick.

‘Mutton, then. We can get some beer in a jug from the local.’

‘Doesn’t Carolo ever eat himself?’ Moreland asked.

‘He often meals with us as a matter of fact,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘I don’t know why Maclintick should make all this fuss suddenly. It is just when Carolo has other plans that he works while we are having supper. Then he eats out later. He likes living on snacks. I tell him it’s bad for him, but he doesn’t care. What is so very extraordinary about all that?’

Her husband disregarded her.

‘Then you are both going to stay,’ he said, almost anxiously. ‘That is fixed. Where is the big jug, Audrey? I’ll get some beer. What does everyone like? Bitter? Mild-and-bitter?’

Moreland had probably been expecting this invitation from the start, but the Maclinticks’ bickering about Carolo seemed to have put him out, so that, giving a hasty glance in my direction as if to learn whether or not I was prepared to fall in with this suggestion, he made some rambling, inconclusive answer which left the whole question in the air. Moreland was subject to fits of jumpiness of that sort; certainly the Maclinticks, between them, were enough to make anyone ill at ease. However, Maclintick now obviously regarded the matter as settled. The prospect of enjoying Moreland’s company for the rest of the evening evidently cheered him. His tone in suggesting different brews of beer sounded like a gesture of conciliation towards his wife and the world in general. I did not much look forward to supper at the Maclinticks, but there seemed no easy way out. Moreland’s earlier remarks about Maclintick’s need for occasional companionship were certainly borne out by this visit. The Maclinticks, indeed, as a married couple, gave the impression of being near the end of their tether. When, for example, Mona and Peter Templer had quarrelled – or, later, when Mona’s interlude with Quiggin had been punctuated with bad temper and sulkiness – the horror had been less acute, more amenable to adjustment, than the bleak despair of the Maclinticks’ union. Mrs Maclintick’s hatred of everything and everybody – except, apparently, Carolo, praise of whom was in any case apparently little more than a stick with which to beat Maclintick – caused mere existence in the same room with her to be disturbing. She now made for the basement, telling us she would shout in due course an invitation to descend. Simultaneously, Maclintick set off for the pub at the end of the street, taking with him a large, badly chipped china jug to hold the beer.

‘I am afraid I’ve rather let you in for this,’ said Moreland, when we were alone.

His face displayed that helpless, worried look which it would sometimes take on; occasions when Matilda, nowadays probably took charge of the situation. No doubt he found life both worrying and irksome, waiting for her to give birth, himself by this time out of the habit of living on his own.

‘Is it usually like this here?’

‘Rather tougher than usual.’

We waited for some minutes in the sitting-room, Moreland returning to the life of Chabrier, while I turned over the pages of an illustrated book about opera, chiefly looking at the pictures, but thinking, too, of the curious, special humour of musicians, and also of the manner in which they write; ideas, words and phrases gushing out like water from a fountain, so utterly unlike the stiff formality of painters’ prose. After a time, Mrs Maclintick yelled from the depths that we were to join her. Almost at the same moment, Maclintick returned with the beer. We followed him downstairs to the basement. There, in a room next to the kitchen, a table was laid. We settled ourselves round it. Maclintick filled some tumblers; Mrs Maclintick began to carve the mutton. Carolo was immediately manifest. Although, architecturally speaking, divided into separate parts, the Maclinticks’ dining-room was not a large one, the table taking up most of one end. Maclintick’s objection to their lodger working while he and his wife were making a meal seemed valid enough when the circumstances revealed themselves. Carolo sat, his face to the wall, engrossed with a pile of music. He looked round when Moreland and I entered the room, at the same time giving some sort of a hurried greeting, but he did not rise, or pause from his work, for more than a second. Mrs Maclintick’s temper had improved again; now she appeared almost glad that Moreland and I had stayed.

‘Have some beetroot,’ she said. ‘It is fresh today.’

Moreland and Maclintick did not take long to penetrate into a region of musical technicality from which I was excluded by ignorance; so that while they talked, and Carolo scratched away in the corner, just as Maclintick had described, I found Mrs Maclintick thrown on my hands. In her latest mood, she turned out to have a side to her no less tense than her temper displayed on arrival, but more loquacious. In fact a flow of words began to stem from her which seemed to have been dammed up for months. No doubt Maclintick was as silent in the home as out of it, and his wife was glad of an outlet for her reflexions. Indeed, her desire to talk was now so great that it was hard to understand why we had been received in the first instance with so little warmth. Mrs Maclintick’s dissatisfaction with life had probably reached so advanced a stage that she was unable to approach any new event amiably, even when proffered temporary alleviation of her own chronic spleen. Possibly Moreland’s friendship with her husband irked her, suggesting a mental intimacy from which she was excluded, more galling in its disinterested companionship than any pursuit of other women on Maclintick’s part. She began to review her married life aloud.

‘I can’t think why Maclintick goes about looking as he does. He just won’t buy a new suit. He could easily afford one. Of course, Maclintick doesn’t care what he looks like. He takes no notice of anything I say. I suppose he is right in one way. It doesn’t matter what he looks like the way we live. I don’t know what he does care about except Irish whiskey and the Russian composers and writing that book of his. Do you think it will ever get finished? You know he has been at it for seven years. That’s as long as we’ve been married No, I’m wrong. He told me he started it before he met me. Eight or nine years, then. I tell him no one will read it when it is finished. Who wants to read a book about the theory of music, I should like to know? He says himself there is too much of that sort of thing published as it is. It is not that the man hasn’t got ability. He is bright enough in his way. It is just that he doesn’t know how to go about things. Then all these friends of his, like Moreland and you, encourage him, tell him he’s a genius, and the book will sell in thousands. What do you do? Are you a musician? A critic, I expect. I suppose you are writing a book yourself.’

‘I am not a music critic. I am writing a book.’

‘Musical?’

‘No – a novel.’

‘A novel?’ said Mrs Maclintick.

The idea of writing a novel seemed to displease her only a little less than the production of a work on musical theory.

‘What is it to be called?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Have you written any other novels?’

I told her. She shook her head, no more in the mood for literature than music. All the time she treated Maclintick as if he were not present in the flesh; and, since he and Moreland were deeply engaged with questions of pitch and rhythm, both were probably unaware of these reflections on her domestic situation.