Страница 29 из 50
‘This girl told me Matilda Wilson came down one term to help the school dramatic society do A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ said Veronica. ‘They had got permission to act the play at Stourwater. Sir Magnus, wandering round, came across Matilda Wilson dressing up a lot of little girls as elves. That went pretty well.’
It seemed as credible a story as any other. Once involved with Sir Magnus, Matilda had, of course, been ‘seen everywhere’; within the limitations of the fact that Sir Magnus preferred to keep his girl of the moment as much as possible to himself, allowing her to meet no more of his own friends than strictly necessary for his own entertainment when the two of them could not be alone together. Certainly that had been true of the time when Sir Magnus was associated with Baby Wentworth, alleged by Barnby to have ‘given notice’ on this very account. There had been a lot of gossip about Matilda when she was ‘with’ Sir Magnus. When, not long before my own marriage, I had stayed with Quiggin and Mona in the cottage lent them by Erridge, Quiggin had even talked too much about Matilda for Mona’s taste.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mona had said, in her irritated drawl, ‘Matilda Wilson – one of those plain girls men for some extraordinary reason like ru
Norah Tolland had encountered Matilda in quite different circumstances; in fact having drinks with Heather Hopkins, the pianist, who had formerly inhabited one of the lower floors of the house in Chelsea where Norah and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson occupied the attics. At the period of which I am speaking – about two years after my own marriage – Norah and Eleanor had both found themselves jobs and become very ‘serious’, talking a lot about politics and economics and how best to put the world right. They were now rather ashamed of their Heather Hopkins days.
‘Poor old Hopkins,’ Norah said, when I mentioned her once. ‘Such a pity she goes round looking and talking like the most boring kind of man. Her flat might be the bar in a golf club. She is a good-hearted creature in her own way.’
‘You get tired of all that clumping about,’ said Eleanor, kicking some bedroom slippers out of sight under the sofa. ‘And besides, Heather isn’t in the least interested in world affairs. One does ask a little sense of responsibility in people.’
However, things had been very different some years before. Then, Hopkins had thrilled Norah and Eleanor with her eyeglass and her di
‘I thought she was rather wonderful,’ said Norah.
Moreland himself had first met his future wife at a time when Matilda’s co
‘People always treat me as if I was a kind of 1880 bohemian,’ he used to say. ‘On the contrary, I am the sane Englishman with his pipe.’
It was on one of these evenings at the Strasbourg that he a
‘Norman’s friend, Mrs Foxe, is going to give a party for it,’ he said.
‘But how lovely,’ said Isobel. ‘Will Mrs Foxe and Norman stand at the top of the stairs, side by side, receiving the guests?’
‘I hope so,’ said Moreland. ‘An example to all of us. A fidelity extremely rare among one’s friends.’
‘Does Mrs Foxe still live in a house somewhere off Berkeley Square?’ I asked.
‘That’s it,’ said Moreland. ‘With objects like mammoth ice-cream cornets on either side of the front door for putting out the torches after you have paid off your sedan chair.’
‘I am not sure that I like parties at that house,’ said Matilda. ‘We have been there once or twice. I can stand grand parties less and less anyway.’
She was having one of her moods that night, but it was on the whole true to say that since marriage Moreland had increasingly enjoyed going to parties, especially parties like that offered by Mrs Foxe; Matilda, less and less.
‘You talk as if we spent our life in a whirl of champagne and diamonds,’ Moreland said. ‘Anyway, it won’t be as grand as all that. Mrs Foxe has promised just to ask our own sordid friends.’
‘Who,’ asked Isobel, ‘apart from us?’
‘I’d far rather go off quietly by ourselves somewhere after the thing is over and have supper with Isobel and Nick,’ Matilda said. ‘That would be much more fun.’
‘It is rather an occasion, darling,’ said Moreland, vexed at these objections. ‘After all, I am noted among composers for the smallness of my output. I don’t turn out a symphony every week like some people. A new work by me ought to be celebrated with a certain flourish – if only to encourage the composer himself.’
‘I just hate parties nowadays.’
‘There are only going to be about twenty or thirty people,’ Moreland said. ‘I know Edgar Deacon used to assure us that “the saloon, rather than the salon, is the true artist’s milieu”, but his own pictures were no great advertisement for that principle. Personally, I feel neither subservience nor resentment at the prospect of being entertained by Mrs Foxe in luxurious style.’
‘Have you ever talked to her naval husband?’ I asked.
‘There is a smooth, hearty fellow about the house sometimes,’ Moreland said. ‘A well-fed air, and likes a good mahogany-coloured whisky. I once heard him give an anguished cry when the footman began to splash in too much soda. I never knew he was her husband. He doesn’t look in the least like a husband.’
‘Of course he is her husband,’ said Matilda. ‘What an ass you are. He pinched my leg the night we were having supper with them after Turandot. That is one of the reasons I turned against the house.’
‘Darling, I’m sure he didn’t. Just your swank.’
‘I told you when we got home. I even showed you the bruise. You must have been too tight to see it.’
‘He always seems scrupulously well behaved to me,’ Moreland said. ‘Rather afraid of Mrs Foxe, as a matter of fact. I understand why, now she turns out to be his wife.’
Soon after this meeting with the Morelands came the period of crisis leading up to the Abdication, one of those public events which occupied the minds not only of those dedicated by temperament to eternal discussion of what they read about in the newspapers, but of everyone else in the country of whatever age, sex, or social class. The constitutional and emotional issues were left threadbare by debate. Barnby would give his views on the controversy in his most down-to-earth ma