Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (5 page)

Barnby grunted, no doubt feeling some of these strictures in part applicable to himself.

‘What do you expect to do?’ he asked. ‘Give readings from
The Waste Land
?’

‘Not a bad idea,’ said Moreland.

‘In my experience,’ Barnby said, ‘women like the obvious.’

‘Just what we are complaining about,’ said Maclintick, ‘the very thing.’

‘Seduction is to do and say/The banal thing in the banal way,’ said Moreland. ‘No one denies that. My own complaint is that people always talk about love affairs as if you spent the whole of your time in bed. I find most of my own emotional energy – not to say physical energy – is exhausted in making efforts to get there. Problems of Time and Space as usual.’

The relation of Time and Space, then rather fashionable, was, I found, a favourite subject of Moreland’s.

‘Surely we have long agreed the two elements are identical?’ said Maclintick. ‘This is going over old ground – perhaps I should say old hours.’

‘You must differentiate for everyday purposes, don’t you?’ urged Barnby. ‘I don’t wonder seduction seems a problem, if you get Time and Space confused.’

‘I suppose one might be said to be true to a woman in Time and unfaithful to her in Space,’ said Moreland. ‘That is what Dowson seems to have thought about Cynara – or is it just the reverse? The metaphysical position is not made wholly clear by the poet. Talking of pale lost lilies, how do you think Edgar and Norman are faring in their deal?’

‘Remember Lot’s wife,’ said Maclintick sententiously. ‘Besides, we have a cruet on the table. Here are the drinks at last, thank God. You know Pope says every woman is at heart a rake. I’d be equally prepared to postulate that every rake is at heart a woman. Don Juan – Casanova – Byron – the whole bloody lot of them.’

‘But Don Juan was not at all the same as Casanova,’ said Moreland. ‘The opera makes that quite clear. Ralph here sometimes behaves like Casanova. He isn’t in the least like Don Juan – are you, Ralph?’

I was myself not sure this assessment of Barnby’s nature was wholly accurate; but, if distinction were to be drawn between those two legendary seducers, the matter was at least arguable. Barnby himself was now showing signs of becoming rather nettled by this conversation.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘My good name keeps on being bandied about in a most uncalled for manner. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind defining the differences between these various personages with whom I am being so freely compared. I had better be told for certain, otherwise I shall be behaving in a way that is out of character, which would never do.’

‘Don Juan merely liked power,’ said Moreland. ‘He obviously did not know what sensuality was. If he knew it at all, he hated it. Casanova, on the other hand, undoubtedly had his sensual moments, even though they may not have occurred very often. With Henriette, for example, or those threesomes with the nun, M.M. Of course, Casanova was interested in power too. No doubt he ended as a complete Narcissus, when love naturally became intolerable to him, since love involved him with another party emotionally. Every Narcissus dislikes that. None of us regards Ralph as only wanting power where a woman is concerned. We think too highly of you for that, Ralph.’

Barnby did not appear flattered by this analysis of his emotional life.

‘Thanks awfully,’ he said. ‘But, to get down to more immediate matters, how would you feel, Hugh, if I asked that waitress to sit for me? For reasons of trade, rather than power or sensuality. Of course she is bound to think I am trying to get off with her. Nothing could be further from the case – no, I assure you, Maclintick. Anyway, I don’t expect she will agree. No harm in trying, though. I just wanted to make sure you had no objection. To show how little of a Casanova I am – or is it a Don Juan?’

‘Take any step you think best,’ said Moreland laughing, although perhaps not best pleased by what Barnby had asked. ‘I have resigned all claims. I don’t quite see her in your medium, but that is obviously the painter’s own affair. If I have a passion for anyone, I prefer an academic, even pedestrian, naturalism of portraiture. It is a limitation I share with Edgar Deacon. Nothing I’d care for less than to have my girl painted by Lhote or Gleizes, however much I may admire those painters – literally – in the abstract.’

All the same, although he put a good face on it, Moreland looked a little cast down. No more was said on the subject until the time came to make our individual contributions to the bill. The waitress appeared again. She explained that she had omitted at an earlier stage of the meal to collect some of the money due for what we had drunk. She now presented her final account. At this point Barnby took the opportunity to allow himself certain pleasantries – these a trifle on the ponderous side, as he himself admitted later – to the effect that she was demanding money under false pretences. The waitress received these comments in good part, unbending so far as to hint that she had not levied the charge before, because, having taken one look at Barnby, she had been sure he would give a further order for drink; she had accordingly decided to wait until the account was complete. Barnby listened to this explanation gravely, making no attempt to answer in the breezy manner he had employed a few seconds earlier this imputation of possessing a bibulous appearance. Just as the girl was about to withdraw, he spoke.

‘Look here,’ he said, ‘I’m an artist – I paint people’s pictures.’

She did not look at him, or answer, but she stopped giggling, while at the same time making no attempt to move away from the table.

‘I’d like to paint you.’

She still did not speak. Her expression changed in a very slight degree, registering what might have been embarrassment or cunning.

‘Could you come and be painted by me some time?’

Barnby put the question in a quiet, almost exaggeratedly gentle voice; one I had never before heard him use.

‘Don’t know that I have time,’ she said, very coolly.

‘What about one week-end?’

‘Can’t come Sunday. Have to be here.’

‘Saturday, then?’

‘Saturday isn’t any good either.’

‘You can’t have to work all the week.’

‘Might manage a Thursday.’

‘All right, let’s make it a Thursday then.’

There was a pause. Maclintick, unable to bear the sight and sound of these negotiations, had taken a notebook from his pocket and begun a deep examination of his own affairs; making plans for the future; writing down great thoughts; perhaps even composing music. Moreland, unable to conceal his discomfort at what was taking place, started a conversation with me designed to carry further his Time-Space theories.

‘What about next Thursday?’ asked Barnby, in his most wheedling tone.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Say you will.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’

‘I suppose so, then.’

Barnby reached forward and took Maclintick’s pencil from his hand – not without protest on Maclintick’s part – and wrote something on the back of an envelope. I suppose it was just the address of his studio, but painters form the individual letters of their handwriting so carefully, so separately, that he seemed to be drawing a picture specially for her.

‘It’s above a shop,’ Barnby said.

Then, suddenly, he crumpled the envelope.

‘On second thoughts,’ he said, ‘I will come and pick you up here, if that is all right.’

‘As you like.’

She spoke indifferently, as if all had been decided long before and they had been going out together for years.

‘What time?’

She told him; the two of them made some mutual arrangement. Then they smiled at each other, again without any sense of surprise or excitement, as if long on familiar terms, and the waitress retired from the table. Barnby handed the stump of pencil back to Maclintick. We vacated the restaurant.

‘Like Glendower, Barnby,’ said Maclintick, ‘you can call spirits from the vasty deep. With Hotspur, I ask you, will they come?’

‘That’s to be seen,’ said Barnby. ‘By the way, what is her name? I forgot to ask.’

‘Norma,’ said Moreland, speaking without apology.

To complete the story, Barnby (whose personal arrangements were often vague) told me that when the day of assignation came, he arrived, owing to bad timing, three-quarters of an hour late for the appointment. The girl was still waiting for him. She came to his studio, where he began a picture of her, subsequently completing at least one oil painting and several drawings. The painting, which was in his more severe manner, he sold to Sir Magnus Donners; Sir Herbert Manasch bought one of the drawings, which were treated naturistically. Eventually, as might have been foretold, Barnby had some sort of a love affair with his model; although he always insisted she was ‘not his type’, that matters had come to a head one thundery afternoon when an overcast sky made painting impossible. Norma left Casanova’s soon after this episode. She took a job which led to her marrying a man who kept a tobacconist’s shop in Camden Town. There was no ill feeling after Barnby had done with her; keeping on good terms with his former mistresses was one of his gifts. In fact he used to visit Norma and her husband (who sometimes gave him racing tips) after they were married. Through them he found a studio in that part of London; he may even have been godfather to one of their children. All that is beside the point. The emphasis I lay upon the circumstances of this assignation at Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant is to draw attention to the extreme ease with which Barnby conducted the preliminaries of his campaign. Anyone who heard things being fixed up might have supposed Norma to have spent much of her previous life as an artist’s model; that she regarded making an engagement for a sitting as a matter of routine regulated only by aspects of her own immediate convenience. Perhaps she had; perhaps she did. In such case Barnby showed scarcely less mastery of the situation in at once assessing her potentialities in that role.

‘Of course, Ralph is a painter,’ said Moreland, afterwards. ‘He has a studio. Time, place and a respectable motive for a visit are all at his command. None of these things are to be despised where girls are concerned.’

‘Time and Space, as usual.’

‘Time and Space,’ said Moreland.

The incident was not only an illustration of Barnby’s adroitness in that field, but also an example of Moreland’s diffidence, a diffidence no doubt in part responsible for the admixture of secretiveness and exhibitionism with which he conducted his love affairs. By exhibitionism, I mean, in Moreland’s case, no more than a taste for referring obliquely from time to time to some unrevealed love that possessed him. I supposed that this habit of his explained his talk of marriage the day – five or six years after our first meeting – when we had listened together to the song of the blonde singer; especially when he refused to name the girl – or three girls – he might be considering as a wife. It was therefore a great surprise to me when his words turned out to be spoken seriously. However, I did not at first realise how serious they were; nor even when, some weeks later, more about the girl herself was revealed.

He suggested one day that we should go together to
The Duchess of Malfi
, which was being performed at a small theatre situated somewhat off the beaten track; one of those ventures that attempt, by introducing a few new names and effects, momentarily to dispel the tedium of dramatic routine.

‘Webster is always a favourite of mine,’ Moreland said. ‘Norman Chandler has for the moment abandoned dancing and the saxophone, and is playing Bosola.’

‘That should be enjoyable. Has he quite the weight?’

Chandler had moved a long way since the day when I had first seen him at the Mortimer, when Mr Deacon had spoken so archly of having acquired his friendship through a vegetarian holiday. Now Chandler had made some name for himself, not only as a dancer, but also as an actor; not in leading roles, but specialising in smaller, unusual parts suitable to his accomplished, but always intensely personal, style. I used to run across him occasionally with Moreland, whose passion for mechanical pianos Chandler shared; music for which they would search London.

‘I also happen to know the Cardinal’s mistress,’ said Moreland, speaking very casually.

This remark suddenly struck a chord of memory about something someone had said a few days before about the cast of this very play.

‘But wasn’t she Sir Magnus Donners’s mistress too? I was hearing about that. It is Matilda Wilson, isn’t it, who is playing that part – the
jolie laide
Donners used to be seen about with a year or two ago? I have always wanted to have a look at her.’

Moreland turned scarlet. I realised that I had shown colossal lack of tact. This must be his girl. I saw now why he had spoken almost apologetically about going to the play, as if some excuse were required for attending one of Webster’s tragedies, even though Moreland himself was known by me to be greatly attached to the Elizabethan dramatists. When he made the suggestion that we should see the play together I had suspected no ulterior motive. Now, it looked as if something were on foot.

‘She was mixed up with Donners for a time,’ he said, ‘that is quite true. But several years ago now. I thought we might go round and see her after the performance. Then we could have a drink – even eat if we felt like it – at the Café Royal or somewhere like that.’

To hold a friend in the background at a certain stage of a love affair is a technique some men like to employ; a method which spreads, as it were, the emotional load, ameliorating risks of dual conflict between the lovers themselves, although at the same time posing a certain hazard in the undue proximity of a third party unencumbered with emotional responsibility – and therefore almost always seen to better advantage than the lover himself. Close friends probably fall in love with the same woman less often in life than in books, though the female spirit of emulation will sometimes fix on a husband or lover’s friend out of a mere desire to show that a woman can do even better than her partner in the same sphere. Moreland and I used to agree that, in principle, we liked the same kind of girl; but never, so long as I knew him, did we ever find ourselves in competition.