Anthony Powell - At Lady Mollys

‘I like Jeavons,’ he said. ‘I only met him once, but I took to him. Lady Molly I hardly know. Her first husband, John Sleaford, was a pompous fellow. The present Sleaford — Geoffrey — I knew in South Africa. We see them from time to time. Bertha tells me Lady Molly was teasing your Uncle Alfred a lot the other night. People say she always does that. Is it true?’

The General laughed a deep ho-ho-ho laugh again, like the demon king in pantomime. He evidently enjoyed the idea of people teasing Alfred Tolland.

‘I think she may rag Uncle Alfred a bit,’ said Frederica, without emotion. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he shouldn’t go there. I expect Erridge came up for discussion too, didn’t he?’

I suspected this was said to forestall comment about Erridge on the part of the General himself. There was a distinct rivalry between them. Men of action have, in any case, a predisposition to be jealous of women, especially if the woman is young, good looking or placed in some relatively powerful position. Beauty, particularly, is a form of power of which, perhaps justly, men of action feel envious. Possibly there existed some more particular reason: the two of them conceivably representing rival factions in their connexion with the Court. I supposed from her tone and general demeanour that Frederica could hardly approve of her eldest brother’s way of life, but, unlike her uncle, was not prepared to acquiesce in all criticism of Erridge.

‘Do you know my brother, Erridge — Warminster, rather?’ she asked me, suddenly.

She smiled like someone who wishes to encourage a child who possesses information more accurate, or more interesting, than that available to grown-ups; but one who might be too shy or too intractable to impart such knowledge.

‘I used to know him by sight.’

‘He has some rather odd ideas,’ she said. ‘But I expect you heard plenty about that at Molly Jeavons’s. They have hardly anything else to talk about there. He is a real blessing to them.’

‘Oh, I think they have got plenty to talk about,’ said Mrs. Conyers. ‘Too much, in fact.’

‘I don’t deny that Erridge has more than one bee in his bonnet,’ said the General, unexpectedly. ‘But I doubt if he is such a fool as some people seem to think him. He is just what they call nowadays introverted.’

‘Oh, Erry isn’t a fool,’ said Frederica. ‘He is rather too clever in a way — and an awful nuisance as an eldest brother. There may be something to be said for his ideas. It is the way he sets about them.’

‘Is it true that he has been a tramp?’ I asked.

‘Not actually been one, I think,’ said Frederica. ‘Making a study of them, isn’t it?’

‘Is he going to write a book about it?’ asked Mrs. Conyers. ‘There have been several books of that sort lately, haven’t there? Have you read anything else interesting, Nicholas? I always expect people like you to tell me what to put down on my library list.’

‘I’ve been reading something called Orlando,’’ said the General. ‘Virginia Woolf. Ever heard of it?’

‘I read it when it first came out.’

‘What do you think of it?’

‘Rather hard to say in a word.’

‘You think so?’

‘Yes.’

He turned to Frederica.

‘Ever read Orlando?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’ve heard of it.’

‘Bertha didn’t like it,’ he said.

‘Couldn’t get on with it,’ said Mrs. Conyers, emphatically. ‘I wish St. John Clarke would write a new one. He hasn’t published a book for years. I wonder whether he is dead. I used to love his novels, especially Fields of Amaranth.’

‘Odd stuff, Orlando,’ said the General, who was not easily shifted from his subject. ‘Starts about a young man in the fifteen-hundreds. Then, about eighteen-thirty, he turns into a woman. You say you’ve read it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you like it? Yes or no?’

‘Not greatly.’

‘You didn’t?’

‘No.’

‘The woman can write, you know.’

‘Yes, I can see that. I still didn’t like it.’

The General thought again for some seconds.

‘Well, I shall read a bit more of it,’ he said, at last. ‘Don’t want to waste too much time on that sort of thing, of course. Now, psychoanalysis. Ever read anything about that? Sure you have. That was what I was on over Christmas.’

‘I’ve dipped into it from time to time. I can’t say I’m much of an expert.’

‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud — Jung — haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’

Once more he fell into a state of coma. It was astonishing to me that he should have been reading about psychoanalysis, although his mental equipment was certainly in no way inferior to that of many persons who talked of such things all day long. When he had used the word ‘introverted’ I had thought that no more than repetition of a current popular term. I saw now that the subject had thoroughly engaged his attention. However, he wished to discuss it no further at that moment. Neither of the two ladies seemed to share his interest.

‘Is it true that your sister, Mildred, is going to marry again?’ asked Frederica. ‘Someone told me so the other day. They could not remember the name of the man. It hasn’t been in the papers yet, has it?’

She spoke casually. Mrs. Conyers was well prepared for the question, because she answered without hesitation, allowing no suggestion to appear of the doubts she had revealed to me only a short time earlier.

‘The engagement is supposed to be a secret,’ she said, ‘but, as everybody will hear about it quite soon, there is really no reason to deny the rumour.’

‘Then it is true?’

‘It certainly looks as if Mildred is going to marry again.’

No one, however determined to make a good story, could have derived much additional information on the subject from the manner in which Mrs. Conyers spoke, except in so far that she could not be said to show any obvious delight at the prospect of her sister taking a third husband. That was the farthest implication offered. There was not a hint of disapproval or regret; on the contrary, complete acceptance of the situation was manifest, even mild satisfaction not openly disavowed. It was impossible to withhold admiration from this façade, so effortlessly presented.

‘And he—?’

‘Nicholas, here, was at school with him,’ said Mrs. Conyers, tranquilly.

She spoke as if most people must, as a matter of course, be already aware of that circumstance; for it now seemed that, in spite of her husband’s doubts, she had finally accepted the fact that I was within a few years of Widmerpool’s age. The remark only stimulated Frederica’s curiosity.

‘Oh, do tell me what he is like,’ she said. ‘Mildred was just that amount older than me to make her rather a thrilling figure at the time when I first came “out”. She was at the Huntercombes’ once when I stayed there not long after the war. She was rather a dashing war widow and wore huge jade ear-rings, and smoked all the time and said the most hair-raising things. What is her new name to be, first of all?’

‘Widmerpool,’ I said, since the question was addressed to me.

‘Where do they come from?’ asked Mrs. Conyers, anxious to profit herself from Frederica’s interrogation.

‘Nottinghamshire, I believe.’

This reply was at worst innocuous, and might be taken, in general, to imply a worthy family background. It was also — as I understood from Widmerpool himself — in no way a departure from the truth. Fearing that I might, if pressed, be compelled ultimately to admit some hard things about Widmerpool, I felt that the least I could do for an old acquaintance in these circumstances was to suggest, however indirectly, a soothing picture of generations of Widmerpools in a rural setting; an ancient, if dilapidated, manor house: Widmerpool tombs in the churchyard: tankards of ale at The Widmerpool Arms.

‘You haven’t said what his Christian name is,’ said Frederica, apparently accepting, anyway at this stage, the regional superscription.

‘Kenneth.’

‘Brothers or sisters?’

‘No.’

I admired the thoroughness with which Frederica set to work on an enquiry of this kind, as much as I had admired Mrs. Conyers’s earlier refusal to give anything away.

‘And he is in the City?’

‘He is supposed to be rather good at making money,’ interpolated Mrs. Conyers.

She had begun to smile indulgently at Frederica’s unconcealed curiosity. Now she employed a respectful yet at the same time deprecatory tone, as if this trait of Widmerpool’s — his supposed facility for ‘making money’—was, extraordinary as this might appear, a propensity not wholly unpleasant when you became accustomed to it. At the same time she abandoned her former position of apparent neutrality, openly joining in the search. Indeed, she put the next question herself.

‘His father is dead, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘Nottinghamshire, did you say?’

‘Or Derbyshire. I don’t remember for certain.’

Widmerpool had once confided the fact that his grandfather, a business man from the Scotch Lowlands, had on marriage changed his name from ‘Geddes’; but such an additional piece of information would sound at that moment too esoteric and genealogical: otiose in its exactitude. In a different manner, to repeat Eleanor Walpole-Wilson’s remark made years before—‘Uncle George used to get his liquid manure from Mr. Widmerpool’s father’—might strike, though quite illogically, a disobliging, even objectionably facetious note. Eleanor’s ‘Uncle George’ was Lord Goring. It seemed best to omit all mention of liquid manure; simply to say that Widmerpool had known the Gorings and the Walpole-Wilsons.

‘Oh, the Walpole-Wilsons,’ said Frederica sharply, as if reminded of something she would rather forget. ‘Do you know the Walpole-Wilsons? My sister, Norah, shares a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Do you know them?’

‘I haven’t seen Eleanor for years. Nor her parents, for that matter.’

The General now came to life again, after his long period of rumination.

‘Walpole-Wilson was that fellow in the Diplomatic Service who made such a hash of things in South America,’ he said. ‘Got unstuck for it. I met him at a City dinner once, the Mercers — or was it the Fishmongers? Had an argument over Puccini.’

‘I don’t know the Gorings,’ said Frederica, ignoring the General. ‘You mean the ones called “Lord” Goring?’

‘Yes. He is a great fruit farmer, isn’t he? He talked about fruit on the only occasions when I met him.’

‘I remember,’ she said. ‘He is.’

She had uttered the words ‘Lord Goring’ with emphasis on the title, seeming by her tone almost to suggest that all members of that particular family, male and female, might for some unaccountable reason call themselves “Lord”: at least implying that, even if she did not really suppose anything so absurd, she wished to indicate that I should have been wiser to have steered clear of the Gorings: in fact, that informed persons considered the Gorings themselves mistaken in burdening themselves with the rather ridiculous pretension of a peerage. When I came to know her better I realised that her words were intended to cast no particular slur on the Gorings; merely, since they were not personal friends of hers, to build up a safe defence in case they turned out, in her own eyes, undesirable.

‘I think Widmerpool père was mixed up with the fruit-farming side of Goring life.’

‘But look here,’ said General Conyers, suddenly emerging with terrific violence from the almost mediumistic trance in which he had sunk after the mention of Puccini. ‘The question is simply this. Can this fellow Widmerpool handle Mildred? It all turns on that. What do you think, Nicholas? You say you were at school with him. You usually know a fellow pretty well when you have been boys together. What’s your view? Give us an appreciation of the situation.’

‘But I don’t know Mrs. Haycock. I was only nine or ten when I first met her. Last night I barely spoke to her.’

There was some laughter at that, and the necessity passed for an immediate pronouncement on the subject of Widmerpool’s potentialities.

‘You must meet my sister again,’ said Mrs. Conyers, involuntarily smiling to herself, I suppose at the thought of Widmerpool as Mildred’s husband.

After that, conversation drifted. Mrs. Conyers began once more to talk of clothes and of how her daughter, Charlotte, had had a baby in Malta. The General relapsed once more into torpor, occasionally murmuring faint musical intonations that might still be ringing the changes on ‘… nunc et in hora …’ Frederica rose to go. I gave her time to get down the stairs, and then myself said goodbye. It was agreed that so long a period must not again elapse before I paid another visit. Mrs. Conyers was one of those persons who find it difficult to part company quickly, so that it was some minutes before I reached the hall of the block of flats. In front of the entrance Frederica Budd was still sitting in a small car, which was making the horrible flat sound that indicates an engine refusing to fire.

‘This wretched car won’t start,’ she shouted.

‘Can I help?’

At that moment the engine came to life.

‘Shall I give you a lift?’ she said.

‘Which way are you going?’

‘Chelsea.’

I, too, was on my way to Chelsea that evening. It was a period of my life when, in recollection, I seem often to have been standing in a cinema queue with a different girl. One such evening lay ahead of me.

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Jump in,’ she said.

Now that she had invited me into her car, and we were driving along together, her manner, momentarily relaxed while she had been pressing the self-starter, became once more impersonal and remote; as if ‘a lift’ was not considered an excuse for undue familiarity between us. When the car had refused to start she had seemed younger and less chilly: less part of the impeccable Conyers world. Now she returned to an absolutely friendly, but also utterly impregnable outpost of formality.

‘You have known Bertha and the General for a long time?’

‘Since I was a child.’

‘That was when you met Mildred?’

‘Yes.’

‘You probably know all the stories about their father, Lord Vowchurch?’

‘I’ve heard some of them.’

‘The remark he is said to have made to King Edward just after Bertha’s engagement had been announced?’

‘I don’t know that one.’

‘It was on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes. The King is supposed to have said: “Well, Vowchurch, I hear you are marrying your eldest daughter to one of my generals”, and Bertha’s father is said to have replied: “By Gad, I am, sir, and I trust he’ll teach the girl to lead out trumps, for they’ll have little enough to live on”. Edward VII was rather an erratic bridge-player, you know. Sir Thomas Lipton told me the story in broad Scotch, which made it sound funnier. Of course, the part that appealed to Sir Thomas Lipton was the fact that it took place on the Squadron Lawn.’