‘Well, you’ve had a lot of enjoyable parties and country house visits to look back on, St J.,’ he said. ‘Rather a different life from Isbister’s, but a richer one in my eyes.’

‘One week-end at Dogdene twenty years ago,’ St John Clarke had answered bitterly. ‘Forced to play croquet with Lord Lonsdale… Two dinners at the Huntercombes’, both times asked the same night as Sir Horrocks Rusby…’

This was certainly inadequate assessment of St John Clarke’s social triumphs, which, for a man of letters, had been less fruitless than at that moment his despair presented them. Members, knowing what was expected of him, brushed away with a smile such melancholy reminiscences.

‘But it will come…’ he said.

‘It will come, Mark. As I sit here, the Nobel Prize will come.’

‘Alas,’ said Members, concluding the story, ‘it never does.’

As things fell out, the two most alert articles to deal with St John Clarke were written, ironically enough, by Members and Quiggin respectively, both of whom spared a few crumbs of praise for their former master, treating him at no great length as a ‘personality’ rather than a writer: Members, in the weekly of which he was assistant literary editor, referring to ‘an ephemeral, if almost painfully sincere, digression into what was for him the wonderland of jauviste painting’; Quiggin, in a similar, rather less eminent publication to which he contributed when hard up, guardedly emphasising the deceased’s ‘underlying, even when patently bewildered, sympathy with the Workers’ Cause’. No other journal took sufficient interest in the later stages of St John Clarke’s career to keep up to date about these conflicting aspects of his final decade. They spoke only of his deep love for the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens and his contributions to Queen Mary’s Gift Book. Appraisal of his work unhesitatingly placed Fields of Amaranth as the peak of his achievement, with E’en the Longest River or The Heart is Highland – opinion varied – as a poor second. The Times Literary Supplement found ‘the romances of Renaissance Italy and the French Revolution smacked of Wardour Street, the scenes from fashionable life in the other novels tempered with artificiality, the delineations of poverty less realistic than Gissing’s’.

I was surprised by an odd feeling of regret that St John Clarke was gone. Even if an indifferent writer, his removal from the literary scene was like the final crumbling of a well-known landmark; unpleasing perhaps, at the same time possessed of a deserved renown for having withstood demolition for so long. The anecdotes Members and Quiggin put round about him had given St John Clarke a certain solidity in my mind; more, in a way, than his own momentary emergence at Lady Warminster’s. This glimpse of him, then total physical removal, brought home, too, the blunt postscript of death. St John Clarke had merely looked ill at Hyde Park Gardens; now, like John Peel, he had gone far, far away, with his pen and his press-cuttings in the morning; become one of those names to which the date of birth and death may be added in parentheses, as their owners speed to oblivion from out of reference books and ‘literary pages’ of the newspapers.

As an indirect result of Mrs Foxe’s party, relations with the Morelands were complicated by uncertainty and a little embarrassment. No one really knew what was happening between Moreland and Priscilla. They were never seen together, but it was very generally supposed some sort of a love affair was in progress between them. Rather more than usual Priscilla conveyed the impression that she did not want to be bothered with her relations; while an air of discomfort, faint but decided, pervaded the Moreland flat, indicating something was amiss there. Moreland himself had plunged into a flood of work. He took the line now that his symphony had fallen flat – to some extent, he said, deservedly – and he must repair the situation by producing something better. For the first time since the early days when I had known him, he seemed interested only in professionally musical affairs. We heard at second-hand that Matilda was to be tried out for the part of Zenocrate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. This was confirmed by Moreland himself when I met him by chance somewhere. The extent of the gossip about Moreland and Priscilla was revealed to me one day by running into Chips Lovell travelling by Underground. Lovell had by now achieved his former ambition of getting a job on a newspaper, where he helped to write the gossip column, one of a relatively respectable order. He was in the best of form, dressed with the greatest care, retaining that boyish, innocent look that made him in different ways a success with both sexes.

‘How is Priscilla?’ he asked.

‘All right, so far as I know.’

‘I heard something about her and Hugh Moreland.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘That they were having a walk-out together.’

‘Who said so?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘I didn’t know you knew Moreland.’

‘I don’t. Only by name.’

‘It doesn’t sound very probable, does it?’

‘I have no idea. People do these things.’

Although I liked Lovell, I saw no reason to offer help so far as his investigation of the situation of Moreland and Priscilla. As a matter of fact I had not much help to offer. In any case, Lovell, inhabiting by vocation a world of garbled rumour, was to be treated with discretion where the passing of information was concerned. I was surprised at the outspokenness with which he had mentioned the matter. His enquiry seemed stimulated by personal interest, rather than love of gossip for its own sake. I supposed he still felt faint dissatisfaction at having failed to make the mark to which he felt his good looks entitled him.

‘I always liked Priscilla,’ he said, using a rather consciously abstracted manner. ‘I must see her again one of these days.’

‘What has been happening to you, Chips?’

‘Do you remember that fellow Widmerpool you used to tell me about when we were at the film studio? His name always stuck in my mind because he managed to stay at Dogdene. I took my hat off to him for getting there. Uncle Geoffrey is by no means keen on handing out invitations. You told me there was some talk of Widmerpool marrying somebody. A Vowchurch, was it? Anyway, I ran into Widmerpool the other day and he talked about you.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Just mentioned that he knew you. Said it was sensible of you to get married. Thought it a pity you couldn’t find a regular job.’

‘But I’ve got a regular job.’

‘Not in his eyes, you haven’t. He said he feared you were a bit of a drifter with the stream.’

‘How was he otherwise?’

‘I never saw a man so put out by the Abdication,’ said Lovell. ‘It might have been Widmerpool himself who’d had to abdicate. My goodness, he had taken it to heart.’

‘What specially upset him?’

‘So far as I could gather, he had cast himself for a brilliant social career if things had worked out differently.’

‘The Beau Brummell of the new reign?’

‘Not far short of that.’

‘Where did you run across him?’

‘Widmerpool came to see me in my office. He wanted me to slip in a paragraph about certain semi-business activities of his. One of those quiet little puffs, you know, which don’t cost the advertising department anything, but warm the heart of the sales manager.’

‘Did you oblige?’

‘Not me,’ said Lovell.

By no means without a healthy touch of malice, Lovell had also a fine appreciation of the power-wielding side of his job.

‘I hear your brother-in-law, Erry Warminster, is on his way home from Spain,’ he said.

‘First I’ve heard of it.’

‘Erry’s own family are always the last to hear about his goings-on.’

‘What’s your source?’

‘The office, as usual.’

‘Is he bored with the Spanish war?’

‘He is ill – also had some sort of row with his own side.’