At Lady Mollys - Anthony Powell

‘They certainly seem a mixed bag.’

‘They are worse than that, some of them.’

‘Really?’

‘At the same time, you may find yourself talking to someone like Charles’s former father-in-law, Lord Bridgnorth — whom Charles detests and thinks the most conceited, pompous man in the world — who eats out of Lady Molly’s hand. He even takes her advice about his horses. Lady Plynlimmon was here at tea the other day. She really seemed quite interested in what Mr. Jeavons was saying about Germany, although usually she won’t speak to anyone who is not in the Cabinet. Not long ago Lord Amesbury looked in on his way to a court ball, wearing knee breeches and the Garter. Lady Molly was giving the vet a meal she had cooked herself, because everyone else was out for one reason or another and she had made him come in from miles away in the suburbs to see a cat that had fever. I happened to drop in, and found all three of them eating scrambled eggs together.’

By that time we had once more reached the drawing-room. Miss Weedon ceased to enlarge upon these occasional — indeed, very occasional — glories of the Jeavons’ salon; which were, as it happened, in marked contrast to the company gathered together that evening. I asked if she knew Mrs. Haycock.

‘Certainly I do,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘Do you remember a boy called Widmerpool who was at school with Charles and yourself? I think you were all in the same house together, were you not? Charles used to give imitations of him. I am sure you must remember. Well, Mrs. Haycock is going to marry Mr. Widmerpool.’

She nodded her head sharply, to emphasise what she had said. I was amazed that she should be familiar with Stringham’s mimicry of Widmerpool. I could have found it within the bounds of possibility that she had heard of Widmerpool, but that Stringham should have shared with her such jokes as his brilliant, though essentially esoteric, Widmerpool imitations, I should never have guessed. This new light on Stringham’s relationship with Miss Weedon suggested quite a different sort of intimacy to any I had previously surmised. I told her that I already knew of Widmerpool’s engagement. That had been my reason for enquiry. Miss Weedon smiled her thin freezing smile.

‘I think Mildred Haycock was quite glad to find someone to marry,’ she said. ‘Especially a man with such a good future in front of him. Of course he is a bit young for her. All the same, it is easier for a woman like Mrs. Haycock — who has two children, both quite old now — to be married. Then, also, although she is not badly off, she is very extravagant. Everyone says so.’

‘She has been living in the South of France?’

‘Where she made herself rather notorious, I believe.’

‘Meanwhile, her fiancé is suffering from jaundice.’

‘Indeed,’ said Miss Weedon, smiling thinly again. ‘I expect she will find someone to console her. Commander Foxe, for example.’

‘Buster? How is he?’

‘He might begin to take her out again. He retired from the Navy some years ago. He has got rather fat. It worries him terribly. He does all kinds of things for it. Every sort of diet. Cures at Tring. It is really his sole interest now.’

‘And you thought Mrs. Haycock might take his mind off the weighing machine?’

Miss Weedon’s mouth stiffened. I saw I had gone too far. She probably regretted her own indiscretion about Buster’s past with Mrs. Haycock. I had not thought of Buster Foxe for years. Stringham had never cared for him. It sounded from Miss Weedon’s tone as if Buster had been reduced — like Jeavons — to a purely subordinate position. There was a certain parallel in their situations. I wondered if they had ever met.

‘And how is Mrs. Foxe herself?’

‘Very well, I understand. As social as ever.’

‘What does Charles do about money now?’

‘Money is rather a difficulty,’ said Miss Weedon, abandoning her air of cold malice, and now speaking as if we had returned to serious matters. ‘His father, with that French wife of his in Kenya, has not much to spare. Mrs. Foxe has the Warrington money, but it is only for her lifetime. She spends it like water.’

At that moment Jeavons himself approached us, putting an end to any explanation Miss Weedon was about to offer on the subject of Stringham’s financial resources.

‘What do you make of Maisky?’ asked Jeavons.

He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education.

‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.

‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.

He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the main import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.

‘Molly has taken a great fancy to him,’ he said, at last.

‘I know.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Jeavons. ‘These fancies come and go.’

Miss Weedon made no attempt to deny the truth of that observation. Nor did she elaborate her dislike of monkeys. She continued to smile her arctic smile. Jeavons slowly strolled off again, as if to think out the implications of what Miss Weedon had said. I was aware once more of my strong disagreement with those — amongst whom I suspected Miss Weedon might be numbered — who found Jeavons without interest. On the contrary, he seemed to me, in his own way, rather a remarkable person. An encounter with him away from his own home confirmed that there existed more sides to him than might be apparent in the Jeavons drawing-room.

This episode took place a month or two later, on an evening that had begun with having a drink with Feingold in the pub near the Studio. Feingold had plans to write a satirical novel about life in the film business. He wanted to tell me the plot in the hope that I might be able to suggest a suitable ending to the story. Returning to London later than usual as a result of Feingold’s unwillingness to treat the subject in hand briefly (he himself lived in the neighbourhood of the Studio), I decided to dine off a sandwich and a glass of beer at some bar. The pubs in the neighbourhood of my own flat had not much to offer, so, quite fortuitously, I entered an establishment off the south side of Oxford Street, where an illuminated sign indicated an underground buffet. It was the kind of place my old, deceased friend, Mr. Deacon, used to call a ‘gin palace’.

At the foot of the stairs was a large, low-ceilinged room filled with shiny black-topped tables and red wicker armchairs. The bar, built in the shape of an L, took up most of two sides of this saloon, of which the pillars and marbled wall decoration again recalled Mr. Deacon’s name by their resemblance to the background characteristic of his pictures: Pupils of Socrates, for example, or By the Will of Diocletian. No doubt this bar had been designed by someone who had also brooded long and fruitlessly on classical themes, determined to express in whatever medium available some boyhood memory of Quo Vadis? or The Last Days of Pompeii. The place was deserted except for the barman, and a person in a mackintosh who sat dejectedly before an empty pint tankard in the far corner of the room. In these oppressively Late Roman surroundings, after climbing on to a high stool at the counter, I ordered food.

I had nearly finished eating, when I became obscurely aware that the man in the corner had risen and was making preparations to leave. He walked across the room, but instead of mounting the stairs leading to the street, he came towards the bar where I was sitting. I heard him pause behind me. I thought that, unable at the last moment to tear himself away from the place, he was going to buy himself another drink. Instead, I suddenly felt his hand upon my shoulder.

‘Didn’t recognise you at first. I was just on my way out. Come and have one with me in the corner after you’ve finished your tuck-in.’

It was Jeavons. As a rule he retained even in his civilian clothes a faded military air, comparable with — though quite different from — that of Uncle Giles: both of them in strong contrast with the obsolete splendours of General Conyers. A safety pin used to couple together the points of Jeavons’s soft collar under the knot of what might be presumed to be the stripes of a regimental tie. That night, however, in a somewhat Tyrolese hat with the brim turned down all the way round, wearing a woollen scarf and a belted mackintosh, the ensemble gave him for some reason the appearance of a plain-clothes man. His face was paler than usual. Although perfectly steady on his feet, and speaking in his usual slow, deliberate drawl, I had the impression he had been drinking fairly heavily. We ordered some more beer, and carried it across the room to where he had been sitting.

‘This your local?’ he asked.

‘Never been here before in my life. I dropped in quite by chance.’

‘Same here.’

‘It’s a long way from your beat.’

‘I’ve been doing a pub crawl,’ he said. ‘Feel I have to have one — once in a way. Does you good.’

There could be no doubt, after that, that Jeavons was practising one of those interludes of dissipation to which Lovell had referred, during which he purged himself, as it were, of too much domesticity.

‘Think there is going to be a war?’ he asked, very unexpectedly.

‘Not specially. I suppose there might be — in a year or two.’

‘What do you think we ought to do about it?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Shall I tell you?’

‘Please do.’

‘Declare war on Germany right away,’ said Jeavons. ‘Knock this blighter Hitler out before he gives further trouble.’

‘Can we very well do that?’

‘Why not?’

‘No government would dream of taking it on. The country wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ said Jeavons.

‘Well?’

‘Well, we’ll just have to wait,’ said Jeavons.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Wait and see,’ said Jeavons. ‘That was what Mr. Asquith used to say. Didn’t do us much good in 1914. I expect you were too young to have been in the last show?’

I thought that enquiry rather unnecessary, not by then aware that, as one grows older, the physical appearance of those younger than oneself offers only a vague indication of their precise age. To me, ‘the Armistice’ was a distant memory of my preparatory school: to Jeavons, the order to ‘cease fire’ had happened only the other day. The possibility that I might have been ‘in the war’ seemed perfectly conceivable to him.

‘Some of it wasn’t so bad,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘Most of it perfect hell, of course. Absolute bloody hell on earth. Bloody awful. Gives me the willies even to think of it sometimes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Joined up at Thirsk. Started off in the Green Howards. Got a commission after a bit in one of the newly-formed battalions of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. I’d exchanged from the Duke’s into the Machine-Gun Corps when I caught it in the tummy at Le Bassée.’

‘Pretty unpleasant?’

‘Not too good. Couldn’t digest anything for ages. Can’t always now, to tell the truth. Some of those dinners Molly gives. Still, digestion is a funny thing. I once knew a chap who took a bet he could eat a cut-off-the-joint-and-two-veg at a dozen different pubs between twelve o’clock and three on the same day.’

‘Did he win his bet?’

‘The first time,’ said Jeavons, screwing up his face painfully at the thought of his friend’s ordeal, ‘someone else at the table lit a cigarette, and he was sick — I think he had got to about eight or nine by then. We all agreed he ought to have another chance. A day or two later he brought it off. Funny what people can do.’

Conversation could be carried no further because at this point ‘closing time’ was announced. Jeavons, rather to my surprise, made no effort to prolong our stay until the last possible moment. On the contrary, the barman had scarcely announced ‘Time, gendemen, please,’ when Jeavons made for the stairs. I followed him. He seemed to have a course for himself clearly mapped out. When we reached the street, he turned once more to me.

‘Going home?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Wouldn’t like to prolong this night of giddy pleasure with me for a bit?’

‘If you have any ideas.’

‘There is a place I thought of visiting tonight. A club of some sort — or a ‘bottie party’ as they seem to call it these days — that has just opened. Care to come?’

‘All right.’

‘A fellow came to see Molly some weeks ago, and gave us a card to get in any time we wanted. You know, you buy a bottle and all that. Makes you a member. Chap used to know Molly years ago. Gone the pace a bit. Now he is rather hard up and managing this hide-out.’

‘I see.’

‘Ever heard of Dicky Umfraville?’

‘Yes. In fact I met him once years ago.’

‘That’s all right then. Umfraville is running the place. Molly would never dream of going near it, of course. Thought I might go and have a look-see myself.’

‘Is Dicky Umfraville still married to Anne Stepney?’

‘Don’t think he is married to anyone at the moment,’ said Jeavons. ‘That would make his third or fourth, wouldn’t it?’

‘His fourth. She was quite young.’

‘Come to think of it, Molly did say he’d had another divorce fairly recently,’ said Jeavons. ‘Anyway, he is more than usually on the rocks at the moment. He used to stay at Dogdene when Molly’s first husband was alive. Gilded youth in those days. Not much left now. First-class rider, of course, Umfraville. Second in the National one year.’

While we talked, Jeavons had been making his way in a south-easterly direction. We continued in silence for some time, threading a path through a tangle of mean streets, past the plate-glass windows of restaurants opaque with steam.

‘I think we must be close now,’ said Jeavons, at last. ‘I know more or less where the place is, and Dicky has drawn a sort of map at the back of the card.’

By that time we were in the neighbourhood of the Trouville Restaurant, a haunt of Uncle Giles, where one night, years before, I had joined him for a meal. The entrance to the club was concealed in an alleyway, by no means easy to find. We discovered the door at last. The name of the place was inscribed upon it on a minute brass plate, as if any kind of display was to be avoided. At the end of a narrow, dimly-lit passage a villainous-looking fellow with watery eyes and a nose covered with blue veins sat behind a rickety table. On the mention of Umfraville’s name and production of the card, this Dickensian personage agreed that we might enter the precincts, after he had with his own hand laboriously inscribed our names in a book.