The Act of Roger Murgatroyd by Gilbert Adair Read Free Book Online Page A

garbage’. Oh, I daresay it was a terribly smart thing to say and all, but it quite crushed poor Cynthia and, really, one wanted to slap him.
    Or when Don spoke about his ‘creativity’ as a painter – I’m told he exhibited some very dramatic seascapes at the Art School end-of-term show – all Gentry could find to say was that, just as if you talk too much about suicide you’ll never commit it, so if you talk too much about your creativity it’s a fatal sign you haven’t got any.
    Not even Selina, whose responsibility he was in a way, was immune to his barbs. Since she knew how he detested the music her mother had been playing on the piano, she ventured to propose that she herself execute some Debussy, seeing as, even though he’s modern, he’s also surprisingly melodic.
    ‘I’d really rather you didn’t, Selina,’ he drawled at her inhis most grating voice. ‘Debussy isn’t as easy as he sounds, you know, and your pianism – well, let’s just say “execute” might be all too apt a word. Better if you were to ruin some naice’ – he really did pronounce it ‘naice’ – ‘some naice little piece of cod-Debussy. Like Cyril Scott.’
    Naturally, I bridled at this calumny of my favourite composer and I saw Don itching to biff Raymond one on the jaw. But Selina herself, spirited as always, was determined to put a brave face on it. ‘Why, Ray,’ she said, ‘I played
Clair de lune
at Roy and Deirdre Daimler’s anniversary do, and the Daimlers’ tabby, Mrs Dalloway, who hates music, any music, so much she slinks away in disgust at the first note, perched on my knees and only stopped purring when I’d finished.’
    ‘Did it not occur to you, my sweet faun,’ was Raymond’s reply, ‘that she probably didn’t realise it was supposed to
be
music?’
    By the evening it had got worse, much worse. He’d been drinking pretty steadily during the day and because he mixed his own cocktails – he referred to them as Spanners or Screwdrivers, some-such silly name – and never offered one to anybody else, it was difficult keeping up with just how many he’d got down himself. But a whole new layer of malevolence had begun to transform his face into a mask of rancour and devilry. You could see he was just waiting to be affronted by what he considered to be our philistinism.
    As a result, we didn’t dare talk about all the latest booksand plays. We were afraid of being shot down by him, afraid of being told that the people
we
liked were hopelessly
vieux jeu
, as he would put it, afraid of being ridiculed for believing that Charles Morgan’s
The Fountain
and Sutton Vane’s
Outward Bound
were imperishable masterpieces. Proust,
naturally
, was the thing. Pirandello,
naturally
, was penetrating. You had to be a foreigner to be admired by Raymond Gentry. Unless, of course, you were born a Sitwell!
    So, as I say, we were simply too intimidated to have the kind of gossipy chit-chat we might have expected to enjoy over dinner – which was our big mistake. For, you see, it left the floodgates open for Raymond himself. And that’s when we discovered just how evil – I weigh the word, Trubshawe, I weigh the word – just how evil he really could be.
    It began, as I recall, with Cora here, who can be relied on, as I know too well, to give as good as she gets. She’d been telling us all, with the verve for which she’s become a byword, about playing the lead in Michael Arlen’s
The Green Hat
, which was one of her biggest successes in the twenties. We were having a rollicking good laugh at her inexhaustible fund of anecdotes when Gentry, who’d seemed not to be paying attention at all, suddenly opined that
The Green Hat
was ‘remembered only for having been forgotten’, as he phrased it, and that Michael Arlen was ‘irredeemably
passé
, not so much green hat as old hat, a real has-been!’
    Well, did Cora let him have it! She said somethingextremely funny, as a matter of fact, something that, for once,