Casanova's Chinese Restaurant by Anthony Powell

author, who might at his age perfectly well have avoided the controversies of politics. However, St John Clarke himself apparently felt less and less capable, in practice, of taking part in the discussion of Marxist dialectic, with its ever-changing bearings. As a consequence of this laxity in ‘keeping up’, he had lost ground in the more exacting circles of the intellectual Left. His name was rarely seen except in alphabetical order among a score of nonentities signing at the foot of some letter to the press. St John Clarke, according to Members (himself suspected by Quiggin of ‘political cynicism’) yearned for his former unregenerate life. If so, he must have felt himself too deeply committed, perhaps too old, to make a reversal of programme – which, at that period, would in any case have entailed swimming against a stream that brought to a writer certain advantages. Lady Warminster was probably better informed about St John Clarke than he supposed. Her phrase ‘rather an old humbug’ established within the family her own, as it were, official attitude. She now made some enquiry about the colds from which Veronica’s two children, Angus and Iris, had been suffering.
    ‘Oh, Angus is all right at last,’ said George, speaking before his wife could reply. ‘We have been looking about for a school for him. I am going down to see another next week.’
    ‘They are both off to their Granny’s on Friday,’ said Veronica, ‘where they will get fussed over a lot and probably catch colds all over again. But there it is. They have to go. The rest of the year will be spent getting them out of bad habits.’
    ‘Talking of grandparents,’ said George, who, although reputed to be very ‘good’ about Veronica’s children, probably preferred relations on their father’s side to be kept, in so far as possible, out of sight and out of mind, ‘I was wondering whether I ought to try and reopen with Erry the question of getting the stained glass window put up to our own grandfather. I saw Uncle Alfred the other day-he has not been at all well, he tells me – who complained the matter had been allowed to drift for a number of years. I thought I would leave it for a time until Erry had settled down after his Chinese trip, then tackle him about it. There are always a mass of things to do after one has come home from abroad, especially after a long tour like that. I don’t know what state of mind he is in at the moment. Do you happen to have seen anything of him lately?’
    George’s line about Erridge was pity rather than blame. That was the tone in which these words had been spoken. Lady Warminster smiled to herself. She was known to regard the whole question of the stained glass window not only as at best a potential waste of money (out-of-date sentiment, threatening active production of ugliness) but also, no doubt correctly, as a matter to which Erridge would in no circumstances ever turn his attention; one, therefore, which was an even greater waste of time to discuss. She may have smiled for that reason alone. In addition, she was going to enjoy communicating to George news so highly charged with novelty as Erridge’s latest project.
    ‘You will have to be quick, George, if you want to get hold of Erry,’ she said gently. ‘Why?’
    ‘He is going abroad again.’
    ‘Where is he off to this time?’
    ‘Spain.’
    ‘What to join in the war?’
    ‘So he says.’
    George took the information pretty well. He was by no means a fool, even if people like Chips Lovell did not find him a specially amusing companion. Like others who knew Erridge well, George had probably observed a cloud of that particular shape already forming on the horizon. Roddy Cutts, on the other hand, who, in the course of a couple of years of marriage to Susan, had only managed to meet her eldest brother once, was more surprised. Indeed, the whole Erridge legend, whenever it cropped up, always disturbed Roddy. He had clear-cut, practical ideas