After the crab soufflé he did seem to be talking to Alison, and all about youth. Fleur listened with one ear.
‘Youth feels… main stream of life… not giving it what it wants. Past and future getting haloes… Quite! Contemporary life no earthly just now… No… Only comfort for us – we’ll be antiquated, some day, like Congreve, Sterne, Defoe… have our chance again… Why? What is driving them out of the main current? Oh! Probably surfeit… newspapers… photographs. Don’t see life itself, only reports… reproductions of it; all seems shoddy, lurid, commercial… Youth says: “Away with it, let’s have the past or the future!”’
He took some salted almonds, and Fleur saw his eyes stray to the upper part of Amabel Nazing. Down there the conversation was like Association football – no one kept the ball for more than one kick. It shot from head to head. And after every set of passes someone would reach out and take a cigarette, and blow a blue cloud across the unclothed refectory table. Fleur enjoyed the glow of her Spanish room – its tiled floor, richly coloured fruits in porcelain, its tooled leather, copper articles, and Soames’s Goya above a Moorish divan. She headed the ball promptly when it came her way, but initiated nothing. Her gift was to be aware of everything at once. ‘Mrs Michael Mont presented’ the brilliant irrelevances of Linda Frewe, the pricks and stimulations of Nesta Gorse, the moonlit sliding innuendoes of Aubrey Greene, the upturning strokes of Sibley Swan, Amabel Nazing’s little cool American audacities, Charles Upshire’s curious bits of lore, Walter Nazing’s subversive contradictions, the critical intricacies of Pauline Upshire; Michael’s happy-go-lucky slings and arrows, even Alison’s knowledgeable quickness, and Gurdon Minho’s silences – she presented them all, showed them off, keeping her eyes and ears on the ball of talk lest it should touch earth and rest. Brilliant evening; but – a success?
On the jade green settee, when the last of them had gone and Michael was seeing Alison home, she thought of Minho’s ‘Youth – not getting what it wants.’ No! Things didn’t fit. ‘They don’t fit, do they, Ting!’ But Ting-a-ling was tired, only the tip of one ear quivered. Fleur leaned back and sighed. Ting-a-ling uncurled himself, and putting his forepaws on her thigh, looked up in her face. ‘Look at me,’ he seemed to say, ‘I’m all right. I get what I want, and I want what I get. At present I want to go to bed.’
‘But I don’t,’ said Fleur, without moving.
‘Just take me up!’ said Ting-a-ling.
‘Well,’ said Fleur, ‘I suppose – It’s a nice person, but not the right person, Ting.’
Ting-a-ling settled himself on her bare arms.
‘It’s all right,’ he seemed to say. ‘There’s a great deal too much sentiment and all that, out of China. Come on!’
Chapter Five
EVE
THE Honourable Wilfrid Desert’s rooms were opposite a picture gallery off Cork Street. The only male member of the aristocracy writing verse that anyone would print, he had chosen them for seclusion rather than for comfort. His ‘junk’, however, was not devoid of the taste and luxury which overflows from the greater houses of England. Furniture from the Hampshire seat of the Cornish nobleman, Lord Mullyon, had oozed into two vans, when Wilfrid settled in. He was seldom to be found, however, in his nest, and was felt to be a rare bird, owing his rather unique position among the younger writers partly to his migratory reputation. He himself hardly, perhaps, knew where he spent his time, or did his work, having a sort of mental claustrophobia, a dread of being hemmed in by people. When the war broke out he had just left Eton; when the war was over he was twenty-three, as old a young man as ever turned a stave. His friendship with Michael, begun in hospital, had languished and renewed itself suddenly, when in 1920 Michael joined Danby and Winter, publishers, of Blake Street, Covent Garden. The scattery enthusiasm of the sucking publisher had been roused by Wilfrid’s verse. Hob-nobbing lunches over the poems of one in need of literary anchorage, had been capped by the firm’s surrender to Michael’s insistence. The mutual intoxication of the first book Wilfrid had written and the first book Michael had sponsored was crowned at Michael’s wedding.
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