‘I don’t want what Rembrandt or Cezanne or Barnby or any other painter may happen to want,’ he used to say. ‘I simply cling to my own preferences. I don’t know what’s good, but I know what I like – not a lot of intellectual snobbery about fat peasant women, or technical talk about masses and planes. After all, painters have to contend professionally with pictorial aspects of the eternal feminine which are quite beside the point where a musician like myself is concerned. With women, I can afford to cut out the chiaroscuro. Choosing the type of girl one likes is about the last thing left that one is allowed to approach subjectively. I shall continue to exercise the option.’
Matilda Wilson jumped up from her stool as soon as she saw Moreland. Throwing her arms round his neck, she kissed him on the nose. When a woman is described as a ‘jolie laide’ the same particular combination of looks is, for some reason, implied; you expect a brunette, small rather than tall, with a face emphasised by eyebrows and mouth, features which would be too insistent if the eyes did not finally control the general effect – in fact what is also known as beauté de singe. Matilda Wilson was not at all like that. Off the stage, she was taller and thinner than I had supposed, her hair fairish, with large, rather sleepy green eyes. The upper half of her face was pretty enough; the lower, forcefully, even rather coarsely modelled. You felt the beauty of her figure was in some manner the consequence of her own self-control; that a less intelligent woman might have ‘managed’ her body without the same effectiveness.
‘Oh, darling,’ she said, in a voice that at once suggested her interlude in the world of Sir Magnus Donners, ‘I am so glad you have turned up at last. Various awful men have been trying to make me go out with them. But I said you were calling for me. I hoped you would not forget as you did last week.’
‘Oh, last week,’ said Moreland, looking dreadfully put out, and making a characteristic gesture with his hand, as if about to begin conducting. ‘That muddle was insane of me. Will you ever forgive me, Matty? It upset me so much. Do let me off further mention of it. I am so hopelessly forgetful.’
He looked rather wildly round him, as if he expected to find some explanation of the cause of bad memory in the furthest recesses of the dressing-room, finally turning to me for support.
‘Nick, don’t you find it absolutely impossible nowadays to remember anything?’ he began. ‘Do you know, I was in the Mortimer the other day-’
Up to that time he had made no attempt to tell Matilda Wilson my name, although no doubt she had been warned that I was probably going to join them at the end of the play. He would certainly have launched into a long train of reminiscence about something or other that had happened to him in the Mortimer, if she had not burst out laughing and kissed him again, this time on the ear. She held out her hand to me, still laughing, and Moreland, now red in the face, insisted that the time had passed for introductory formalities. Meanwhile, Norman Chandler had been finishing his chapter without taking any notice of what was going on round him. Now, he put a marker in his book (which I saw to be Time and Western Man), and, drawing the billowing robes of his rather too large dressing-gown more tightly round him, he rose to his feet.
‘ “A lot of awful men”?’ he said, speaking in a voice of old-time melodrama. ‘What do you mean, Matilda? I offered you a bite with Max and me, if your boy friend did not arrive. That was only because you said he was so forgetful, and might easily think he had made a date for the day after tomorrow. I never heard such ingratitude.’
Matilda put her arm round Chandler’s waist and attempted to smoothe his hair with her brush.
‘Oh, I didn’t mean you, darling, of course I didn’t,’ she said. ‘I don’t call you a man. I love you much too much. I mean an awful man who telephoned – and then another awful man who left a note. How could anyone call you awful, Norman, darling?’
‘Oh, I don’t know so much about that,’ said Chandler, now abandoning the consciously sinister, masculine tones of Bosola, and returning to his more familiar chorus-boy drawl. ‘I’m not always adored as much as you might think from looking at me. I don’t quite know why that is.’
He put his head on one side, forefinger against cheek, transforming himself to some character of ballet, perhaps the Faun from L’Après-midi.
‘You are adored by me,’ said Matilda, kissing him twice before throwing down the hairbrush on the dressing-table. ‘But I really must put a few clothes on.’
Chandler broke away from her, executing a series of little leaps in the air, although there was not much room for these entrechats. He whizzed round several times, collapsing at last upon his stool.
‘Bravo, bravo,’ said Matilda, clapping her hands. ‘You will rival Nijinsky yet, Norman, my sweetie.’
‘Be careful,’ said Chandler. ‘Your boy friend will be jealous. I can see him working himself up. He can be very violent when roused.’
Moreland had watched this display of high spirits with enjoyment, except when talk had been of other men taking out Matilda, when his face had clouded. Chandler had probably noticed that. So far from being jealous of Chandler, which would certainly have been absurd in the circumstances, Moreland seemed to welcome these antics as relaxing tension between himself and Matilda. He became more composed in manner. Paradoxically enough, something happened a moment later which paid an obvious tribute to Chandler’s status as a ladies’ man, however little regarded in that role by Moreland and the world at large.
‘I will be very quick now,’ said Matilda, ‘and then we will go. I am dying for a bite.’
She retired behind a small screen calculated to heighten rather than diminish the dramatic effect of her toilet, since her long angular body was scarcely at all concealed, and, in any case, she continually reappeared on the floor of the room to rescue garments belonging to her which lay about there. The scene was a little like those depicted in French eighteenth-century engravings where propriety is archly threatened in the presence of an amorous abbé or two-powdered hair would have suited Matilda, I thought; Moreland, perhaps, too. However, the picture’s static form was interrupted by the sound of some commotion in the passage which caused Chandler to stroll across the room and stand by the half-open door. Some people were passing who must have recognised him, because he suddenly said: ‘Why, hullo, Mrs Foxe,’ in a tone rather different from that used by him a moment before; a friendly tone, but one at the same time faintly deferential, possibly even a shade embarrassed. There was the sudden suggestion that Chandler was on his best behaviour.