Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market

However, the shop was shut. Through the plate glass, obscured in watery depths, dark green like the interior of an aquarium’s compartments, Victorian work-tables, papier-mâché trays, Staffordshire figures, and a varnished scrap screen — upon the sombrely coloured montage of which could faintly be discerned shiny versions of Bubbles and For He Had Spoken Lightly Of A Woman’s Name—swam gently into further aqueous recesses that eddied back into yet more remote alcoves of the double room: additional subterranean grottoes, hidden from view, in which, like a grubby naiad, Gypsy Jones, as described so vividly by Mr. Deacon, was accustomed, from time to time, to sleep, or at least to recline, beneath the monotonous, conventionalised arabesques of rare, if dilapidated, Oriental draperies. For some reason, the thought roused a faint sense of desire. The exoticism of the place as a bedroom was undeniable. I had to ring the bell of the side door twice before anyone answered the summons. Then, after a long pause, the door was half opened by a young man in shirt-sleeves, carrying a dustpan and brush.

“Yes?” he asked abruptly.

My first estimate of Barnby, whom I immediately guessed this to be, the raisonneur so often quoted at the party by Mr. Deacon as inhabiting the top floor of the house, was not wholly favourable; nor, as I learnt later, was his own assessment of myself. He looked about twenty-six or twenty-seven, dark, thick-set, and rather puffed under the eyes. There was the impression of someone who knew how to look after his own interests, though in a balanced and leisurely manner. I explained that I had come to see Mr. Deacon.”

“Have you an appointment?”

“No.”

“Business?”

“No.”

“Mr. Deacon is not here.”

“Where is he?”

“Cornwall.”

“For long?”

“No idea.”

This allegedly absolute ignorance of the duration of a landlord’s retirement to the country seemed scarcely credible in a tenant whose life, at least as presented in Mr. Deacon’s anecdotes, was lived at such close range to the other members of the household. However, the question, put in a somewhat different form, achieved no greater success. Barnby stared hard, and without much friendliness. I saw that I should get no further with him at this rate, and requested that he would inform Mr. Deacon, on his return, of my call.

“What name?”

“Jenkins.”

At this, Barnby became on the spot more accommodating. He opened the door wider and came out on to the step.

“Didn’t you take Edgar to Milly Andriadis’s party?” he asked, in a different tone.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“He was in an awful state the next day,” Barnby said. “Worried, too, about losing so many copies of that rag he hawks round. I believe he had to pay for them out of his own pocket. Anyway, Edgar is too old for that kind of thing.”

He spoke this last comment sadly, though without implication of disapproval. I mentioned the unusual circumstances that had brought Mr. Deacon and myself to the party. Barnby listened in a somewhat absent manner, and then made two or three inquiries regarding the names of other guests. He seemed, in fact, more interested in finding out who had attended the party than in hearing a more specific account of how Mr. Deacon had received his invitation, or had behaved while he was there.

“Did you run across a Mrs. Wentworth?” he asked. “Rather a handsome girl.”

“She was pointed out to me. We didn’t meet.”

“Was she with Donners?”

“Later in the evening. She was talking to a Balkan royalty when I first saw her.”

“Theodoric?”

“Yes.”

“Had Theodoric collected anyone else?”

“Lady Ardglass.”

“I thought as much,” said Barnby. “I wish I’d managed to get there. I’ve met Mrs. Andriadis — but I can’t say I really know her.”

He nodded gravely, more to himself than in further comment to me, seeming to admit by this movement the justice of his own absence from the party. For a moment or two there was silence between us. Then he said: “Why not come in for a minute? You know, all sorts of people ask for Edgar. He likes some blackmailers admitted, but by no means all of them. One has to be careful.”

I explained that I had not come to blackmail Mr. Deacon.

“Oh, I guessed that almost at once,” said Barnby. “But I was doing a bit of cleaning when you rang — the studio gets filthy — and the dust must have confused my powers of differentiation.”

All this was evidently intended as some apology for earlier gruffness. As I followed up a narrow staircase, I assured him that I had no difficulty in grasping that caution might be prudent where Mr. Deacon’s friends were concerned. In answer to this Barnby expressed himself very plainly regarding the majority of Mr. Deacon’s circle of acquaintance. By this time we had reached the top of the house, and entered a fairly large, bare room, with a north light, used as a studio. Barnby pointed to a rickety armchair, and throwing dustpan and brush in the corner by the stove, sat down on a kind of divan that stood against one wall.

“You’ve known Edgar for a long time?”

“Since I was a child. But the other night was the first time I ever heard him called that.”

“He doesn’t let everyone use the name,” said Barnby. “In fact, he likes to keep it as quiet as he can. As it happens, my father was at the Slade with him.”

“He has given up painting, hasn’t he?”

“Entirely.”

“Is that just as well?”

“Some people hold that as a bad painter Edgar carries all before him,” said Barnby. “I know good judges who think there is literally no worse one. I can’t say I care for his work myself — but I’m told Sickert once found a good word to say for some of them, so there may have been something there once.”

“Is he making a success of the antique business?”

“He says people are very kind. He marks the prices up a bit. Still, there always seems someone ready to pay — and I know he is glad to be back in London.”

“But I thought he liked Paris so much.”

“Only for a holiday, I think. He had to retire there for a number of years. There was a bit of trouble in the park, you know.”

This hint of a former contretemps explained many things about Mr. Deacon’s demeanour. For example, the reason for his evasive manner in the Louvre was now made plain; and I recalled Sillery’s words at Mrs. Andriadis’s party. They provided an illustration of the scope and nature of Sillery’s stock of gossip. Mr. Deacon’s decided air of having “gone downhill” was now also to be understood. I began to review his circumstances against a more positive perspective.

“What about War Never Pays!, and Gypsy Jones?”

“The pacifism came on gradually,” said Barnby. “I think it followed the period when he used to pretend the war had not taken place at all. Jones’s interests are more political — world revolution, at least.”

“Is she in residence at the moment?”

“Returned to the bosom of her family. Her father is a schoolmaster in the neighbourhood of Hendon. But may I ask if you, too, are pursuing her?”

After the remarks, largely incoherent, though apparently pointed enough, made by Mr. Deacon at the party, to the effect that Barnby’s disapproval of Gypsy Jones’s presence in the house was radically vested in his own lack of success in making himself acceptable to her, I assumed this question to be intended to ascertain whether or not I was myself to be considered a rival in that quarter. I therefore assured him at once that he could set his mind at rest upon that point, explaining that my inquiry had been prompted by the merest curiosity.

The inference on my part may have been a legitimate one in the light of what Mr. Deacon had said, but it proved to be a long way wide of the mark. Barnby appeared much annoyed at the suggestion that his own feelings for Gypsy Jones could be coloured by any sentiment short of the heartiest dislike: stating in the most formidable terms at hand his ineradicable unwillingness for that matter actual physical incapacity, to be inveigled into any situation that might threaten intimacy with her. These protests struck me at the time as perhaps a shade exaggerated, since I had to admit that, for my own part, I had found Gypsy Jones, sluttish though she might be, less obnoxious than the impression of her conveyed by Barnby’s words. However, I tried to make amends for the unjust imputation laid upon him, although, owing to their somewhat uncomplimentary nature, I was naturally unable to explain in precise terms the form taken by Mr. Deacon’s misleading comments.

“I meant the chap with spectacles,” said Barnby. “Isn’t he a friend of yours? He always seems to be round here when Jones is about. I thought she might have made a conquest of you as well”

The second that passed before I was able to grasp that Barnby referred to Widmerpool was to be attributed to that deep-seated reluctance that still remained in my heart, in the face of a volume of evidence to the contrary, to believe Widmerpool capable of possessing a vigorous emotional life of his own. He was a person outwardly unprepossessing, and therefore, according to a totally misleading doctrine, confined to an inescapable predicament that allowed no love affairs: or, at best, love affairs of so obscure and colourless a kind as to be of no possible interest to the world at large. Apart from its many other flaws, this approach was entirely subjective in its assumption that Widmerpool must of necessity appear, even to persons of the opposite sex, as physically unattractive as he seemed to me; though there could probably be counted on my side, in support of this misapprehension, the opinion of most, perhaps all, of our contemporaries at school. On the other hand, I could claim a certain degree of vindication regarding this particular point at issue by insisting, with some justice, that Gypsy Jones, on the face of it, was the last girl on earth who might be expected to occupy Widmerpool’s attention; which, on his own comparatively recent showing, seemed so unhesitatingly concentrated on making a success, in the most conventional manner, of his own social life.

At least that was how matters struck me when I was talking to Barnby; though I remembered then how the two of them — Gypsy Jones and Widmerpool — had apparently found each other’s company congenial at the party. It was a matter to which I had given no thought at the time. Now I considered some of the facts. Although the theory that, in love, human beings like to choose an “opposite” may be genetically unsound, there is also, so it seems, a basic validity in such emotional situations as Montague and Capulet, Cavalier and Roundhead. If certain individuals fall in love from motives of convenience, they can be contrasted with plenty of others in whom passion seems principally aroused by the intensity of administrative difficulty in procuring its satisfaction. In fact, history is full of examples of hard-headed personages — to be expected to choose partners in love for reasons helpful to their own career — who were, as often as not, the very people most to embarrass themselves, even to the extent of marriage, in unions that proved subsequently formidable obstacles to advancement.

This digression records, naturally, a later judgment; although even at the time, thinking things over, I could appreciate that there was nothing to be regarded as utterly unexpected in Widmerpool, after the sugar incident, taking a fancy to someone, “on the rebound,” however surprisingly in contrast with Barbara the next girl might be. When I began to weigh the characteristics of Gypsy Jones, in so far as I knew them, I wondered whether, on examination, they made, indeed, so violent an antithesis to Barbara’s qualities as might at first sight have appeared. Arguments could unquestionably be brought forward to show that these two girls possessed a good deal in common. Perhaps, after all, Barbara Goring and Gypsy Jones, so far from being irreconcilably different, were in fact notably alike; Barbara’s girls’ club, or whatever it was, in Bermondsey even pointing to a kind of sociological preoccupation in which there was — at least debatably — some common ground.

These speculations did not, of course, occur to me all at once. Still less did I think of a general law enclosing, even in some slight degree, all who share an interest in the same woman. It was not until years later that the course matters took in this direction became more or less explicable to me along such lines — that is to say, the irresistible pressure in certain emotional affairs of the most positive circumstantial inconvenience to be found at hand. Barnby, satisfied that I was clear regarding his own standpoint, was now prepared to make concessions.

“Jones has her admirers, you know,” he said. “In fact, Edgar swears that she is the toast of the 1917 Club. It’s my belief that in a perverted sort of way he rather fancies her himself — though, of course, he would never admit as much.”

“He talked a lot about her at the party.”

“What did he say?”

“He was deploring that she found herself in rather an awkward spot.”

“You know about that, do you?”

“Mr. Deacon seemed very concerned.”

“You make me laugh when you call Edgar ‘Mr. Deacon’,” said Barnby. “It certainly makes a new man of him. As a matter of fact, I rather think Jones has solved her problem. You know, she is older than you’d think — too old to get into that sort of difficulty. What do you say to going across the road for a drink?”

On the way out of the studio I asked if one of the unframed portraits standing against the easel could be a likeness of Mrs. Wentworth. Barnby, after scarcely perceptible hesitation, agreed that the picture represented that lady.

“She is rather paintable,” he explained.

“Yes?”

“But tricky at times.”

The subject of Mrs. Wentworth seemed to dispirit him a little, and he remained silent until we were sitting in front of our drinks in the empty saloon bar of the pub on the corner.

“Do you have any dealings with Donners?” he asked at last.

“A friend of mine called Charles Stringham had some sort of a job with him.”

“I’ve heard Baby speak of Stringham. Wasn’t there something about a divorce?”

“His sister’s.”

“That was it,” said Barnby. “But the point is — what is happening about Baby and Donners?”

“How do you mean?”

“They are seen about a lot together. Baby has been appearing with some rather nice diamond clips, and odds and ends of that sort, which seem to be recent acquisitions.”

Barnby screwed up his face in thought.

“Of course,” he said. “I realise that a poor man competing with a rich one for a woman should be in a relatively strong position if he plays his cards well. Even so, Donners possesses to a superlative degree the advantages of his handicaps — so that one cannot help feeling a bit agitated at times. Especially with Theodoric cutting in, though I don’t think he carries many guns.”