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‘Do you mind drinking wine from teacups, one of them short of a handle? Rather sordid, I’m afraid. I managed to break my three glasses the other night when I came home from a party and was trying to put them away so that the place might look more habitable when I woke up in the morning.’
Following a preliminary tasting, we poured the residue of the bottle down the lavatory.
‘If you were legally allowed three wives,’ asked Moreland, as we watched the cascade of amber foam gush noisily away, ‘whom would you choose?’
Those were the days when I loved Jean Duport. Moreland knew nothing of her, nor did I propose to tell him. Instead, I offered three names from the group of female acquaintances we enjoyed in common, speaking without undue concern in making this triple decision. To tell the truth, in spite of what I felt for Jean, marriage, although looming up on all sides, still seemed a desperate venture to be postponed almost indefinitely.
‘And you?’
Moreland possessed that quality, rather rare among men, of not divulging names. At the same time, the secretiveness he employed where his own love affairs were concerned was not without an element of exhibitionism. He was always willing to arouse a little unsatisfied curiosity.
‘I am going to marry,’ said Moreland, ‘I have decided that. To make up my mind is always a rare thing with me, but the moment for decision has arrived. Otherwise I shall become just another of those depressed and depressing intellectual figures who wander from party to party, finding increasing difficulty in getting off with anyone – and in due course suspected of auto-erotic habits. Besides, Nietzsche advocates living dangerously.’
‘If you have decided to base your life on the philosophy of writers of that period, Strindberg considered even the worst marriage better than no marriage at all.’
‘And Strindberg earned the right to speak on that subject. As you probably know, his second wife kept a nightclub, within living memory, not a thousand miles from this very spot. Maclintick, of all people, was once taken there.’
‘But you haven’t told me who your wife – your three wives – will be.’
‘There is only one really. I don’t know whether she will accept me.’
‘Oh, come. You are talking like a Victorian novel.’
‘I will tell you when we next meet.’
‘This is intolerable after I offered my names.’
‘But I am serious.’
I dismissed the notion that Moreland could be contemplating marriage with the heroine of a recent story of Barnby’s about one of Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies.
‘Moreland pawned the gold cigarette case Sir Magnus Do
Even if that story were untrue, the toughness of Moreland’s i
‘It doesn’t matter whether it is the Leading Lady or Second Slave,’ he said, ‘I myself am always cast as a stage-door joh
All this was very alien to Barnby, himself enjoying to such a high degree the uncomplicated, direct powers of attack that often accompany a gift for painting or sculpture.
‘Barnby never has to be in the mood to work,’ Moreland used to say. ‘The amount of material he can get through is proportionate to the hour he rises in the morning. In much the same way, if he sees a girl he likes, all he has to do is to ask her to sleep with him. Some do, some don’t it is one to him.’
Barnby would not in the least have endorsed this picture of himself. His own version was that of a man chronically overburdened, absolutely borne down by sensitive emotional stresses. All the same, in contrasting the two of them, there was something to be said for Moreland’s over-simplification. Their different methods were, as it happened, displayed in high relief on the occasion of my first meeting with Moreland.
The Mortimer (now rebuilt in a displeasingly fashionable style and crowded with second-hand-car salesmen) was even in those days regarded by the enlightened as a haunt of ‘bores’; but, although the beer was indifferent and the saloon bar draughty, a sprinkling of those co
For my own part, I never cared for the place either. I had been introduced there by Barnby (met for the first time only a few weeks before) who was coming on to the Mortimer that evening after consultation with a frame-maker who lived in the neighbourhood. Barnby was preparing for a show in the near future. Those were the days when his studio was above Mr Deacon’s antique shop; when he was pursuing Baby Wentworth and about to paint those murals for the Do
It was pouring with rain that night and the weather had turned much colder. Barnby had not yet arrived when I came into the bar, which was emptier than usual. Two or three elderly women dressed in black, probably landladies off duty, were drinking Gui