‘Oeufs Meyerbeer,’ she said. ‘You always enjoy them.’
Moreland took up the menu again irresolutely.
‘What do you think?’ he said. ‘I hate being hurried about any of my appetites. What are you going to eat, Nick? I am afraid you may order something that will make me regret my own choice. You have done that in the past. It is very disloyal of you. You know I think Gossage – in as much as he possesses any sexual feelings at all – derives a certain vicarious satisfaction from contemplating the loves of Norman Chandler and Mrs Foxe. The situation manages to embrace within one circumference Gossage’s taste for rich ladies and good-looking young men – together with a faint spice of musical background.’
‘Gossage says there is talk of putting on Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great,” said Matilda.
Moreland once again abandoned the menu.
‘ “Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia,” ’ he cried. ‘ “What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?” That is rather what I feel about the newspaper criticism of Gossage and Maclintick. I should like them to drag me to concerts, as the kings drew Tamerlaine, in a triumphal coach. They would be far better employed doing that than pouring out all that stuff for their respective periodicals every week. Perhaps that is not fair to Maclintick. It is certainly true of Gossage.’
‘I am sure Maclintick would draw you to the Queen’s Hall in a rickshaw if you asked him,’ said Matilda. ‘He admires you so much.’
She turned to the waiter, ordered whatever she and I had agreed to eat, and Oeufs Meyerbeer for Moreland, who, still unable to come to a decision about food, accepted her ruling on this matter without dissent.
‘I think there is just a chance I might be cast for Zenocrate,’ she said, ‘if they did ever do Tamburlaine. In any case, the show wouldn’t be coming on for ages.’
‘I wouldn’t limit it to Maclintick and Gossage,’ Moreland said. ‘I should like to be dragged along by all the music critics, arranged in order of height, tallest in front, midgets at the back. That will give you some clue to what the procession would look like. I have always been interested in Tamerlaine. I found myself thinking of him the other day as part of that cruel, parched, Central Asian feeling one gets hearing Prince Igor. I am sure it was his bad leg that made him such a nuisance.’
‘You may be interested in Tamerlaine, darling,’ said Matilda, ‘but you are not in the least interested in my career.’
‘Oh, Matty, I am. I’m sorry. I am really. I want you to be the Duse of our time.’
He took her hand.
‘I don’t believe you, you old brute.’
In spite of saying that she smiled, and did not seem seriously annoyed. On the whole they appeared to understand one another pretty well. When the moment came to pay the bill, I flicked a note across to Moreland to cover my share. Matilda at once took charge of this, at the same extracting another note from Moreland himself – always a great fumbler with money. These she handed over with a request for change. When the waiter returned with some money on a plate, she apportioned the silver equitably between Moreland and myself, leaving the correct tip; a series of operations that would have presented immense problems of manipulation to Moreland. All this enterprise made her appear to possess ideal, even miraculous, qualifications for becoming his wife. They were, indeed, married some months later. The ceremony took place in a registry office, almost secretly, because Moreland hated fuss. Not long after, perhaps a year, almost equally unexpectedly, I found myself married too; married to Isobel Tolland. Life – the sort of life Moreland and I used to live in those days – all became rather changed.
2
SUNDAY LUNCHEON at Katherine, Lady Warminster’s, never, as it were, specially dedicated to meetings of the family, had in the course of time grown into an occasion when, at fairly regular intervals, several – sometimes too many – of the Tollands were collected together. Now and then more distant relations were present, once in a way a friend; but on the whole immediate Tollands predominated. Everyone expected to meet their ‘in-laws’; and, among other characteristics, these parties provided, at least superficially, a kind of parade of different approaches to marriage. There was in common a certain sense of couples being on their best behaviour in Lady Warminster’s presence, but, in spite of that limited uniformity, routine at Hyde Park Gardens emphasised any individuality of matrimonial technique. Blanche, Robert, Hugo, and Priscilla Tolland still lived under the same roof as their step-mother, so that the two girls attended the meal more often than not; Robert, his social life always tempered with secrecy, was intermittently present; while Hugo, still tenuously keeping university terms accentuated by violent junctures when to be ‘sent down’ seemed unavoidable, could be seen there only during the vacation. This accommodation in the house of several younger members of the family had not resulted in much outward gaiety of atmosphere. On the contrary, the note struck as one entered the hall and ascended the staircase was quiet, almost despondent. The lack of exhilaration confirmed a favourite proposition of Moreland’s as to the sadness of youth.
‘I myself look forward ceaselessly to the irresponsibility of middle-age,’ he was fond of stating.
It may, indeed, have been true that ‘the children’, rather than Lady Warminster herself, were to blame for this distinct air of melancholy. Certainly the environment was very different from the informality, the almost calculated disorder, surrounding the Jeavonses in South Kensington, a household I had scarcely visited since my marriage. Ted Jeavons’s health had been even worse than usual; while Molly had given out that she was much occupied with reorganisation of the top floor (where her husband’s old, bedridden – and recently deceased – cousin had lived), which was now to be done up as a flat for some friend or dependent. No doubt this reconditioning had reduced the Jeavons house to a depth of untidiness unthinkably greater than that which habitually prevailed there. The interior of Hyde Park Gardens was altogether in contrast with any such circumstance of invincible muddle. Hyde Park Gardens was unexceptional, indeed rather surprisingly ordinary, considering the personalities enclosed within, decorations and furniture expressing almost as profound an anonymity as Uncle Giles’s private hotel, the Ufford; although, of course, more luxurious than the Ufford’s, and kept just the right side of taste openly to be decried as ‘bad’, or even aggressively out of fashion.
Appreciably older than her sister Molly Jeavons – and, like her, childless – Lady Warminster had largely withdrawn from the world since her second husband’s death in Kashmir eight or nine years before. Lord Warminster, who could claim some name as a sportsman, even as an amateur explorer, had formed the habit of visiting that country from time to time, not, so far as was known, on account of the sensual attractions extolled in the Kashmiri Love Song, but for pleasure in the more general beauty of its valleys, and the shooting of ibex there. On this last occasion, grazing his hand while opening a tin, he had contracted blood poisoning, an infection from which he subsequently died. Grieved in a remote way at her loss, although their comparatively brief married life together had been marked on his part by prolonged travel abroad, Lady Warminster had also been delighted to hand over Thrubworth to her eldest step-son, Erridge; to settle herself permanently in London. She had always hated country life. Erridge had been less pleased to find himself head of the family at the age of eighteen or nineteen, saddled with the responsibilities of a large house and estate. Indeed, from that moment he had contended as little as possible with any but the most pressing duties contingent upon his ‘position’, devoting himself to his left-wing political interests, which merged into a not too exacting study of sociology.