‘Your wife has so kindly asked us to dine with you. It’s very hospitable, because I know how absolutely impossible it is to give dinner parties these days, not only rationing, but all sorts of other things. They are difficult enough even if you have official supplies and staff to draw on like ourselves. Carlos and I would so much have loved to come, but there has been a surprise. We have just received news from our Defence Ministry that we must go home.’
‘Already?’
‘We have to leave London almost at once. There has been a change of Government and a big reorganization.’
‘Promotion, I hope?’
‘Carlos has been given a military area in the Northern Province. It is quite unexpected and might lead to big things. There are, well, political implications. It is not just the same as being in the army here. So we have to make immediate arrangements to pack up, you see.’
She smiled.
‘I should offer congratulations as well as regrets?’
‘Of course Carlos is delighted, though he pretends not to be. He is quite ambitious. He makes very good speeches. We are both pleased really. It shows the new Government is being sensible. To tell the truth we were sent here partly to get Carlos out of the country. Now all that is changed — but the move must be done in such a hurry.’
‘How foolish of them not to have wanted such a nice man about the place.’
She laughed at that.
‘I was hoping to take Polly round a little in London. However, she is going to stay in England for a time in any case. She has ambitions to go on the stage.’
‘I haven’t seen her at your party?’
‘She’s with her father at the moment — I think you’ve met my first husband, Bob Duport?’
‘Several times — during the war among others. He’d been ill in the Middle East, and we ran across each other in Brussels.’
‘Gyppy tummy and other things left poor Bob rather a wreck. He ought to marry somebody who’d look after him properly, keep him in order too, which I never managed to do. He’s rather a weak man in some ways.’
‘Yes, poor Bob. No good being weak.’
She laughed again at this endorsement of her own estimate of Duport’s character, but at the same time without giving anything away, or to the smallest degree abandoning the determined formality of her manner. That particular laugh, the way she had of showing she entirely grasped the point of what one had said, once carried with it powerful intoxications; now — a relief to ascertain even after so long — not a split second of emotional tremor.
‘What’s he doing now?’
‘Bob? Oil. Something new for him — produced by an old friend of his called Jimmy Brent. You may have met him with my brother Peter. How I miss Peter, although we never saw much of each other.’
‘I came across Jimmy Brent in the war too.’
‘Jimmy’s a little bit awful really. He’s got very fat, and is to marry a widow with two grown-up sons. Still, he’s fixed up Bob, which is the great thing.’
To make some comment that showed I knew she had slept with Brent — by his own account, been in love with him — was tempting, but restraint prevailed. Nevertheless, recollecting that sudden hug watching a film, her whisper, ‘You make me feel so randy,’ I saw no reason why she should go scot free, escape entirely unteased.
‘How well you speak English, Madame Flores.’
‘People are always asking if I was brought up in this country.’
She laughed again in that formerly intoxicating manner. A small dark woman, wearing an enormous spray of diamonds set in the shape of rose petals trembling on a stalk, came through the crowd.
‘Rosie, how lovely to see you again. Do you know each other? Of course you do. I see Carlos is making signs that I must attend to the Moroccan colonel.’
Jean left us together. Rosie Manasch took a handful of stuffed olives from a plate, and offered one.
‘I saw you once at a meeting about Polish military hospitals. You were much occupied at the other end of the room, and I had to move on to the Titian halfway through. Besides, I didn’t know whether you’d remember me.’
The Red Cross, Allied charities, wartime activities of that sort, explained why she was at this party. It was unlikely that she had known Jean before the war, when Rosie had been married to her first husband, Jock Udall, heir apparent to the newspaper proprietor of that name, arch-enemy of Sir Magnus Donners. Rosie Manasch’s parents, inveterate givers of musical parties and buyers of modern pictures, had been patrons of both Moreland and Barnby in the past. Mark Members had made a bid to involve them in literature too, but without much success, enjoying a certain amount of their hospitality, but never bringing off anything spectacular in the way of plunder. It had been rumoured in those days that Barnby had attempted to start up some sort of a love affair with Rosie. If so, the chances were that nothing came of it. Possessing that agreeable gift of making men feel pleased with themselves by the way she talked, she was in general held to own a less sensual temperament than her appearance suggested. Quite how she accomplished this investiture of male self-satisfaction was hard to analyse, perhaps simply because, unlike some women, she preferred men that way.
Udall was shot by the SS, on recapture, after a mass escape from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. The marriage — in the estimation of those always prepared to appraise explicitly other people’s intimate relationships — was judged to have been only moderately happy. There were no children. There was also, even the most inquisitorial conceded, no gossip about infidelities on either side, although Udall was always reported to be ‘difficult’. Quite soon after her husband’s death, Rosie married a Pole called Andreszlwsiski, a second-lieutenant, though not at all young. I never came across him at the Titian during my period of liaison duty, but his appointment there, Polish GHQ in London, sounded fairly inconsiderable even within terms of the rank. Andreszlwsiski, as it turned out, was suffering from an incurable disease. He died only a few months after the wedding. Rosie resumed her maiden name.
‘I’ve just been talking to your wife. We’d never met before, though I knew her sister Susan Tolland before she married. I hear you didn’t guess that I was the mysterious lady in the background of Fission.’
‘Was this arranged by Widmerpool?’
‘The Frog Footman? Yes, indirectly. He used to do business when he was at Donners-Brebner with my cousin James Klein. Talking of Donners-Brebner, did you go to the Donners picture sale? I can’t think why Lady Donners did not keep more of them herself. There must be quite a lot of money left in spite of death duties — though one never knows how a man like Sir Magnus Donners may have left everything.’
‘If I’d been Matilda, I’d have kept the Toulouse-Lautrec.’
‘Of course you must have known Matilda Donners when she was married to Hugh Moreland. Matilda and I don’t much like each other, though we pretend to. Do you realize that a relation of mine — Isadore Manasch — was painted by Lautrec? Isn’t that smart? A café scene, in the gallery at Albi. Isadore’s slumped on a chair in the background. The Lautrec picture’s the only thing that keeps his slim volume of Symbolist verse from complete oblivion. Isadore’s branch of the family are still embarrassed if you talk about him. He was very disreputable.’