Chips Lovell (with whom I had formerly been teamed up as a fellow script-writer in the film business), who was inclined to call almost everyone of an older generation than himself either ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunt’, and was always prepared at a moment’s notice to provide an a priori account of the personal history and problems of all his relations and acquaintances, had said: ‘Like every other Ardglass, Aunt Katherine only really enjoys pottering about.’ It was certainly true that Lady Warminster, as a widow, divided her time between her own ailments, real or imagined – opinion differed within the family on this point – and the writing of biographical studies devoted to the dominating, Amazonian women of history. Maria-Theresa, at the time of which I speak, had offered a theme sympathetic to the fashion of the moment for things Austrian. Lady Warminster enjoyed the reputation of having ‘got on’ pretty well with her stepchildren, even if no outstandingly warm sentiments existed between herself and any individual member of the family, except perhaps Blanche. In the past there had been, of course, occasional rows. Frederica and George found their step-mother’s way of life too eccentric to wish to play much part in it themselves; Erridge and Norah, on the other hand thought her hopelessly conventional. Such divergence of view was only to be expected in a large family, and most of her own contemporaries agreed on the whole that Katherine Warminster, so far as her step-children were concerned, was to be congratulated on having made a fairly good job of it. For my own part, I liked Lady Warminster, although at the same time never wholly at ease in her presence. She was immaculately free from any of the traditional blemishes of a mother-in-law; agreeable always; entertaining; even, in her own way, affectionate; but always a little alarming: an elegant, deeply experienced bird – perhaps a bird of prey – ready to sweep down and attack from the frozen mountain peaks upon which she preferred herself to live apart.
Robert Tolland, seventh child and third son of his parents, was in the drawing-room at Hyde Park Gardens when, rather too early for the appointed time of the meal, I arrived there. He was a tall, cadaverous young man of about twenty-four, with his family’s blue eyes and characteristic angularity of frame. Of my wife’s brothers, Robert was the one with whom I felt myself generally most at home. He had some of the oddness, some of that complete disregard for public opinion, that distinguished Erridge (as I shall continue to call the eldest of the Tollands, since that was the name by which he was known within the family, rather than ‘Alfred’, or even ‘Alf, preferred by his left-wing cronies like J. G. Quiggin), although at the same time Robert was without Erridge’s political enthusiasms. He was not so conformist – ‘not so bloody boring’, Chips Lovell had said – as his second brother, George Tolland (retired from the Brigade of Guards, now working in the City), although Robert to some extent haunted George’s – to Chips Lovell – rather oppressive social world. In fact, outwardly, Robert was just as ‘correct’ as George, to use the term Molly Jeavons liked to apply to any of her relations whom she suspected of criticising her own manner of life. All the same, a faint suggestion of dissipation was also to be found in Robert; nothing like that thick sea mist of gossip which at an early age already encompassed his younger brother, Hugo, but something that affirmed to those with an instinct for recognising such things at long range, the existence in the neighbourhood of vaguely irregular behaviour. Chips Lovell, whose stories were always to be accepted with caution, used to hint that Robert, a school contemporary of his, had a taste for night-club hostesses not always in their first youth. The case was non-proven. Robert would take girls out occasionally – girls other than the hypothetical ‘peroxide blondes old enough to be his mother’, so designated, probably imaginatively, by Lovell – but he never showed much interest in them for more than a week or two. By no means to be described as ‘dotty’ himself, there was perhaps something in Robert of his ‘dotty’ sister, Blanche: a side never fully realised, emotionally undeveloped. He sometimes reminded me of Archie Gilbert, that ‘dancing man’ of my early London days, whose life seemed exclusively lived at balls. Robert was, of course, more ‘intelligent’ than Archie Gilbert, intelligent at least in the crudest sense of being able to discourse comprehensibly about books he had read, or theatres, concerts and private views he had attended; conversational peaks to which Archie Gilbert had never in the least aspired. Robert, as it happened, was rather a keen concert-goer and frequenter of musical parties. He had a job in an export house trading with the Far East, employment he found perfectly congenial. No one seemed to know whether or not he was any good at the work, but Robert was thought by his sisters to possess a taste for making money. When I arrived in the drawing-room he was playing Iberia on the gramophone.
‘How is Isobel?’
He threw the newspaper he had been reading to the ground and jumped to his feet, giving at the same time one of those brilliant smiles that suggested nothing could have come as a more delightful, a less expected, surprise than my own arrival in the room at just that moment. Although I was not exactly taken in by this reception, Robert’s habitual exhibition of good manners never failed to charm me.
‘Pretty well all right now. She is emerging tomorrow. I am going to see her this afternoon.’
‘Do please give her my best love. I ought to have gone to see her in the nursing home myself. Somehow one never gets time for anything. What a bore it has been for you both. I was so sorry to hear about it.’
He spoke with solicitude, at the same time giving the impression that he was still, even at this late stage, unable wholly to conceal his wonder that someone should have chosen Isobel – or any other of his sisters – as a wife; nice girls, no doubt, beings for whom he felt the warmest affection, but creatures to be thought of always in terms of playing shops or putting their dolls to bed.
‘Who will be at lunch?’
‘I’ll tell you. But shall we have the other side of this record first? I am playing them all in the wrong order. I love Les Parfums de la Nuit. I think that is really the bit I like best.’
‘Do you adapt your music to the foreign news, Robert?’
‘Rather suitable, isn’t it? Now that the Alcazar has been relieved things seem to have become a bit static. I wonder who will win.’
He closed the lid of the gramophone, which began once more to diffuse the sombre, menacing notes adumbrating their Spanish background: tawny skies: dusty plains: bleak sierras: black marble sarcophagi of dead kings under arabesqued ceilings: art nouveau blocks of flats past which the squat trams rattled and clanged: patent-leather cocked hats of the Guardia Civiclass="underline" leather cushions cast upon the sand under posters promulgating cures for impotence and the pox… these and a hundred other ever-changing cubist abstractions, merging their visual elements with the hurdy-gurdy music of the bull-ring… now – through this landscape-baked by the sun, lorries, ramshackle as picadors’ horses, crawled uphill in bottom gear and a stink of petrol now, frozen by the wind and hooded like the muffled trio in Goya’s Winter, Moorish levies convoyed pack-mules through the gorges veiled in snow…
‘I expect you have heard about Erridge,’ said Robert.
‘That the Thrubworth woods will have to be sold?’
‘Well, that, of course. But I mean his latest.’
‘No?’
‘He is going out there.’
‘Where?’
Robert jerked his head in the direction of the shiny wooden cabinet from which Debussy quavered and tinkled and droned.
‘Spain.’
‘Indeed?’
‘Can you imagine.’
‘The International Brigade?’
‘I don’t know whether he will actually fight. As you know, he holds pacifist views. However, he will certainly be on the opposite side to General Franco. We can at least be sure of that. I can’t think that Erry would be any great help to any army he joined, can you?’