Moreland took this opportunity to guide conversation back into general channels.

‘You can’t tell what families are going to throw up,’ he said. ‘Look at Lortzing whose family were hereditary hangmen in Thuringia for two hundred years. Then suddenly the Lortzings cease to be hangmen and produce a composer.’

‘You could be a musical hangman, I suppose,’ said Maclintick. ‘Hum tunes while you worked.’

‘I could well imagine some of the musicians one knows becoming hangmen,’ said Moreland.

‘Surprising Lortzing didn’t become a critic with an ancestry like that,’ said Maclintick. ‘Had it in his blood to execute people when need be – would also know the right knot to tie when it came to his own turn to shuffle off this mortal coil. Lortzing wrote an opera about your friend Casanova, didn’t he? Do you remember that night at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant years ago? We talked about seducers and Don Juan and that sort of thing. That painter, Barnby, was there. I believe you were with us too, weren’t you, Jenkins? For some reason I have often thought of that evening. I was thinking of it again last night, wondering if Carolo was one of the types.’

Moreland winced slightly. I did not know whether or not Maclintick was aware that Carolo had once been married to Matilda. Probably did not know that, I decided. Maclintick was a man who normally took little interest in the past history of other people. It was even surprising to find him showing such comparative interest in his own past history.

‘Carolo doesn’t come into the Casanova-Don Juan category,’ said Moreland. ‘He hasn’t the vitality. Too passive. Passivity is not a bad method, all the same. Carolo just sits about until some woman either marries him, or runs away with him, from sheer desperation at finding nothing whatever to talk about.’

Maclintick nodded his head several times, showing ponderous enjoyment at this view of Carolo’s technique in seduction. He filled the glasses.

‘I suppose one of the tests of a man is the sort of woman he wants to marry,’ he said. ‘You showed some sense, Moreland, and guessed right. I should have stayed out of the marriage market altogether.’

‘Marriage is quite a problem for a lot of people,’ Moreland said.

‘You know Audrey was my ideal in a sort of way,’ said Maclintick, who after drinking all day-probably several days-was becoming thick in his speech and not always absolutely coherent. ‘I’ve no doubt that was a mistake to start off with. There is probably something wrong about thinking you’ve realised your ideal – in art or anywhere else. It is a conception that should remain in the mind.’

‘It wasn’t for nothing that Petrarch’s Laura was one of the de Sade family,’ said Moreland.

‘My God, I bet it wasn’t,’ said Maclintick. ‘She’d have put him through it if they’d married. I shall always think of her being a de Sade whenever I see that picture of them again. You know the one. It is always to be found on the walls of boarding houses.’

‘The picture you are thinking of, Maclintick, represents Dante and Beatrice,’ Moreland said, ‘not Petrarch and Laura. But I know the one you mean – and I expect the scene in question was no less unlike what actually happened than if depicting the other couple.’

‘You are absolutely right, Moreland,’ said Maclintick, now shaking with laughter. ‘Dante and Beatrice – and a bloody bad picture, as you say. As a matter of fact, it’s the sort of picture I rather like. Pictures play no part in my life. Music fulfils my needs, with perhaps a little poetry, a little German philosophy. You can keep the pictures, whether they tell a story or not.’

‘Nowadays you can have both,’ said Moreland, cheered by the drink and at last recovering his spirits. ‘The literary content of some Picassos makes The Long Engagement or A Hopeless Dawn seem dry, pedantic studies in pure abstraction.’

‘You might as well argue that Ulysses has more “story” than Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Rosary,’’ said Maclintick. ‘I suppose it has in a way. I find all novels lacking in probability.’

‘Probability is the bane of the age,’ said Moreland, now warming up. ‘Every Tom, Dick, and Harry thinks he knows what is probable. The fact is most people have not the smallest idea what is going on round them. Their conclusions about life are based on utterly irrelevant – and usually inaccurate – premises.’

‘That is certainly true about women,’ said Maclintick. ‘But anyway it takes a bit of time to realise that all the odds and ends milling about round one are the process of living. I used to feel with Audrey: “this can’t be marriage” – and now it isn’t.’

Suddenly upstairs the telephone bell began to ring. The noise came from the room where Maclintick worked. The sound was shrill, alarming, like a deliberate warning. Maclintick did not move immediately. He looked greatly disturbed. Then, without saying anything, he took a gulp from his glass and went off up the stairs. Moreland looked at me. He made a face.

‘Audrey coming back?’ he said.

‘We ought to go soon.’

‘We will.’

We could faintly hear Maclintick’s voice; the words inaudible. It sounded as if Maclintick were unable to understand what he was being asked. That was likely enough considering the amount he had drunk. A minute later he returned to the sitting-room.

‘Someone for you, Moreland,’ he said.

Moreland looked very disturbed.

‘It can’t be for me,’ he said. ‘No one knows I’m here.’

‘Some woman,’ said Maclintick.

‘Who on earth can it be?’

‘She kept on telling me I knew her,’ said Maclintick, ‘but I couldn’t get hold of the name. It was a bloody awful line. My head is buzzing about too.’

Moreland went to the stairs. Maclintick heaved himself on to the sofa. Closing his eyes, he began to breathe heavily. I felt I had had a lot to drink without much to show for it. We remained in silence. Moreland seemed to be away for centuries. When he returned to the room he was laughing.

‘It was Matilda,’ he said.

‘Didn’t sound a bit like Matilda,’ said Maclintick, without opening his eyes.

‘She said she didn’t know it was you. You sounded quite different.’

‘I’m never much good at getting a name on the bloody telephone,’ said Maclintick. ‘She said something about her being your wife now I come to think of it.’

‘Matilda forgot her key. I shall have to go back at once. She is on the doorstep.’

‘Just like a woman, that,’ said Maclintick. ‘There was always trouble about Carolo’s key.’

‘We’ll have to go.’

‘You don’t expect me to see you out, do you P Kind of you to come.’

‘You had better go to bed, Maclintick,’ said Moreland. ‘You don’t want to spend the night on the sofa.’

‘Why not?’

‘Too cold. The fire will be out soon.’

‘I’ll be all right.’

‘Do move, Maclintick,’ said Moreland.

He stood looking down with hesitation at Maclintick. Moreland could be assertive about his own views, was said to be good at controlling an orchestra; he was entirely without the power of assuming authority over a friend who needed ‘managing’ after too much to drink. I remembered the scene when Widmerpool and I had put Stringham to bed after the Old Boy Dinner, and wondered whether an even odder version of that operation was to be re-enacted here. However, Maclintick rolled himself over into a sitting position, removed his spectacles, and began to rub his eyes just in the manner of my former housemaster, Le Bas, when he could not make up his mind whether or not one of his pupils was telling the truth.

‘Perhaps you are right, Moreland,’ Maclintick said.

‘Certainly I am right.’

‘I will move if you insist.’

‘I do insist.’

Then Maclintick made that harrowing remark that established throughout all eternity his relationship with Moreland.

‘I obey you, Moreland,’ he said, ‘with the proper respect of the poor interpretative hack for the true creative artist.’