“If anyone so much as mentions concentration camps again,” said Ambrose Silk, “I shall go frankly haywire.” (“He had an unhappy love affair in Munich,” one of Poppet’s friends explained to another, “then they found he was half-Jewish and the Brown Shirt was shut away.”) “Let’s look at Poppet’s pictures and forget the war. Now that,” he said, pausing before the Aphrodite, “that I consider good. I consider it good, Poppet. The moustache…it shows you have crossed one of the artistic rubicons and feel strong enough to be facetious. Like those wonderfully dramatic old chestnuts in Parsnip’s Guernica Revisited. You’re growing up, Poppet, my dear.”
“I wonder if it’s the effect of that old adventurer of hers.”
“Poor Basil, it’s sad enough for him to be an enfant terrible at the age of thirty-six; but to be regarded by the younger generation as a kind of dilapidated Bulldog Drummond…”
Ambrose Silk was older than Poppet and her friends; he was, in fact, a contemporary of Basil’s, with whom he had maintained a shadowy, mutually derisive acquaintance since they were undergraduates. In those days, the mid-twenties at Oxford, when the last of the ex-service men had gone down and the first of the puritanical, politically minded had either not come up or, at any rate, had not made himself noticed, in those days of broad trousers and high-necked jumpers and cars parked nightly outside the Spread Eagle at Thame, there had been few subdivisions; a certain spiritual extravagance in the quest for pleasure had been the sole common bond between friends, who in subsequent years had drifted far apart, beyond hailing distance, on the wider seas. Ambrose, in those days, had ridden ridiculously and ignominiously in the Christ Church Grind, and Peter Pastmaster had gone to a palais de danse in Reading dressed as a woman. Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, absorbed in immature experiments into the question of how far various lewd debutantes would go with him, still had time when tippling his port at Mickleham to hear, without disapproval, Ambrose’s recitals of unrequited love for a rowing blue. Nowadays Ambrose saw few of his old friends except Basil. He fancied that he had been dropped and sometimes in moments of vainglory, to the right audience, represented himself as a martyr to Art; as one who made no concessions to Mammon. “I can’t come all the way with you,” he said once to Parsnip and Pimpernell when they explained that only by becoming proletarian (an expression to which they attached no pedantic suggestion of childbearing; they meant that he should employ himself in some ill-paid, unskilled labour of a mechanical kind) could he hope to be a valuable writer, “I can’t come all the way with you, dear Parsnip and Pimpernell. But at least you know I have never sold myself to the upper class.” In this mood he saw himself as a figure in a dream, walking down an endless fashionable street; every door stood open and the waiting footmen cried, “Come in and join us; flatter our masters and we will feed you,” but Ambrose always marched straight ahead unheeding. “I belong, hopelessly, to the age of the ivory tower,” he said.
It was his misfortune to be respected as a writer by almost everyone except those with whom he most consorted. Poppet and her friends looked on him as a survival from the Yellow Book. The more conscientiously he strove to put himself in the movement and to ally himself with the dour young proletarians of the new decade, the more antiquated did he seem to them. His very appearance, with the swagger and flash of the young Disraeli, made him a conspicuous figure among them. Basil with his natural shabbiness was less incongruous.
Ambrose knew this, and repeated the phrase “old adventurer” with relish.
Alastair and Sonia Trumpington changed house, on an average, once a year, ostensibly for motives of economy, and were now in Chester Street. Wherever they went they carried with them their own inalienable, inimitable disorder. Ten years ago, without any effort or desire on their part, merely by pleasing themselves in their own way, they had lived in the full blaze of fashionable notoriety; to-day without regret, without in fact being aware of the change, they formed a forgotten cove, where the wreckage of the “roaring twenties,” long tossed on the high seas, lay beached, dry and battered, barely worth the attention of the most assiduous beachcomber. Sonia would sometimes remark how odd it was that the papers nowadays never seemed to mention anyone one had ever heard of; they had been such a bore once, never leaving one alone.
Basil, when he was in England, was a constant visitor. It was really, Alastair said, in order to keep him from coming to stay that they had to live in such painfully cramped quarters.
Wherever they lived Basil developed a homing instinct towards them; an aptitude which, in their swift moves from house to house, often caused consternation to subsequent tenants, who, before he had had time to form new patterns of behaviour, would quite often wake in the night to hear Basil swarming up the drainpipes and looming tipsily in the bedroom window, or, in the morning, to find him recumbent and insensible in the area. Now, on this catastrophic morning, Basil found himself orientated to them as surely as though he were in wine, and he arrived on their new doorstep without conscious thought of direction. He went upstairs immediately, for, wherever they lived, it was always in Sonia’s bedroom, as though it were the scene of an unending convalescence, that the heart of the household beat.
Basil had attended Sonia’s levees (and there were three or four levees daily for, whenever she was at home, she was in bed) off and on for nearly ten years, since the days of her first, dazzling loveliness, when, almost alone among the chaste and daring brides of London, she had admitted mixed company to her bathroom. It was an innovation, or rather the revival of a more golden age, which, like everything Sonia did, was conceived without any desire for notoriety; she enjoyed company, she enjoyed her bath. There were usually three or four breathless and giddy young men, in those days, gulping Black Velvet in the steam, pretending to take their reception as a matter of common occurrence.
Basil saw little change in her beauty now and none in the rich confusion of letters, newspapers, half-opened parcels and half-empty bottles, puppies, flowers and fruit which surrounded the bed where she sat sewing (for it was one of the vagaries of her character to cover acres of silk, yearly, with exquisite embroidery).
“Darling Basil, have you come to be blown up with us? Where’s your horrible girl friend?”
“She took fright.”
“She was a beast, darling, one of your very worst. Look at Peter. Isn’t it all crazy?” Peter Pastmaster sat at the foot of her bed in uniform. Once, for reasons he had now forgotten, he had served, briefly, in the cavalry; the harvest of that early sowing had ripened, suddenly, overnight. “Won’t it be too ridiculous, starting all over again, lunching with young men on guard?”
“Not young, Sonia. You should see us. The average age of the subalterns is about forty, the Colonel finished the last war as a brigadier, and our troopers are all either weatherbeaten old commissionaires or fifteen-stone valets.”
Alastair came in from the bathroom. “How’s the art-tart?” He opened bottles and began mixing stout and champagne in a deep jug. “Blackers?” They had always drunk this sour and invigorating draught.
“Tell us all about the war,” said Sonia.
“Well ” Basil began.
“No, darling, I didn’t mean that. Not all. Not about who’s going to win or why we are fighting. Tell us what everyone is going to do about it. From what Margot tells me the last war was absolute heaven. Alastair wants to go for a soldier.”
“Conscription has rather taken the gilt off that particular gingerbread,” said Basil. “Besides, this isn’t going to be a soldier’s war.”
“Poor Peter,” said Sonia, as though she were talking to one of the puppies. “It isn’t going to be your war, sweetheart.”