A Buyer's Market (12 page)

“May one inquire why you should suppose a splendid society ball to have been agony?” asked Mr. Deacon, rather archly.

There could be no doubt that, at first sight, he had taken a great fancy to Stringham. He spoke in his ironically humorous voice from deep down in his throat.

“In the first place,” said Stringham, “I rather dislike being crowded and uncomfortable—though, heaven knows, dances are not the only places where that happens. A most serious criticism I put forward is that one is expected, when attending them, to keep at least moderately sober.”

When he said this, it struck me that Stringham had already, perhaps, consumed a few drinks before meeting us.

“And otherwise behave with comparative rectitude?” said Mr. Deacon, charmed by this answer. “I believe I understand you perfectly.”

“Exactly,” said Stringham. “For that reason I am now on my way—as I expect you are too—to Milly Andriadis’s. I expect that will be crowded and uncomfortable too, but at least one can behave as one wishes there.”

“Is that woman still extorting her toll from life?” asked Mr. Deacon.

“Giving a party in Hill Street this very night. I assumed you were all going there.”

“This coffee tastes of glue,” said Gypsy Jones, in her small, rasping, though not entirely unattractive voice.

She was dissatisfied, no doubt, with the lack of attention paid to her; though possibly also stimulated by the way events were shaping.

“One heard a lot of Mrs. Andriadis in Paris,” said Mr. Deacon, taking no notice of this interruption. “In fact, I went to a party of hers once—at least I think she was joint hostess with one of the Murats. A deplorable influence she is, if one may say so.”

“One certainly may,” said Stringham. “She couldn’t be worse. As a matter of fact, my name is rather intimately linked with hers at the moment—though naturally we are unfaithful to each other in our fashion, when opportunity arises, which in my case, I have to confess, is not any too often.”

I really had no very clear idea what all this talk was about, and I had never heard of Mrs. Andriadis. I was also uncertain whether Stringham truly supposed that we might all be on our way to this party, or if he were talking completely at random. Mr. Deacon, however, seemed to grasp the situation perfectly, continuing to laugh out a series of deep chuckles.

“Where do you come from now?” I asked.

“I’ve a flat just round the corner,” said Stringham. “At first I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was in the vein for a party, and thought a short walk would help me decide. To tell the truth, I have only just risen from my couch. There had, for one reason and another, been a number of rather late nights last week, and, as I didn’t want to miss poor Milly’s party in case she felt hurt—she is too touchy for words—I went straight home to bed this afternoon so that I might be in tolerable form for the festivities—instead of the limp rag one feels most of the time. It seemed about the hour to stroll across. Why not come, all of you? Milly would be delighted.”

“Is it near?”

“Just past those Sassoon houses. Do come. That is, if none of you mind low parties.”

2

UNCE GILES’S standard of values was, in most matters, ill-adapted to employment by anyone except himself. At the same time, I can now perceive that by unhesitating contempt for all human conduct but his own—judged among his immediate relatives as far from irreproachable—he held up a mirror to emphasise latent imperfections of almost any situation that momentary enthusiasm might, in the first instance, have overlooked. His views, in fact, provided a kind of yardstick to the proportions of which no earthly yard could possibly measure up. This unquestioning condemnation of everyone, and everything, had no doubt supplied armour against some of the disappointments of life; although any philosophical satisfaction derived from reliance on these sentiments had certainly not at all diminished my uncle’s capacity for grumbling, in and out of season, at anomalies of social behaviour to be found, especially since the war, on all sides. To look at things through Uncle Giles’s eyes would never have occurred to me; but—simply as an exceptional expedient for attempting to preserve a sense of proportion, a state of mind, for that matter, neither always acceptable nor immediately advantageous—there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles’s method of approach. This concept of regarding one’s own affairs through the medium of a friend or relative is not, of course, a specially profound one; but, in the case of my uncle, the field of vision surveyed was always likely to be so individual to himself that almost any scene contemplated from this point of vantage required, on the part of another observer, more than ordinarily drastic refocusing.

He would, for example, have dismissed the Huntercombes’ dance as one of those formal occasions that he himself, as it were by definition, found wholly unsympathetic. Uncle Giles disapproved on principle of anyone who could afford to live in Belgrave Square (for he echoed almost the identical words of Mr. Deacon regarding people “with more money than was good for them”), especially when they were, in addition, bearers of what he called “handles to their names”; though he would sometimes, in this same connection, refer with conversational familiarity, more in sorrow than anger, to a few members of his own generation, known to him in a greater or lesser degree in years gone by, who had been brought by inheritance to this unhappy condition. He had, for some reason, nothing like so strong an aversion for recently acquired wealth—from holders of which, it is true, he had from time to time even profited to a small degree—provided the money had been amassed by owners safely to be despised, at least in private, by himself or anyone else; and by methods commonly acknowledged to be indefensible. It was to any form of long-established affluence that he took the gravest exception, particularly if the ownership of land was combined with any suggestion of public service, even when such exertions were performed in some quite unspectacular, and apparently harmless, manner, like sitting on a borough council, of helping at a school-treat. “Interfering beggars,” he used to remark of those concerned.

My uncle’s dislike for the incidence of Mrs. Andriadis’s party—equally, as a matter of course, overwhelming—would have required, in order to avoid involving himself as an auxiliary of more than negative kind in some warring faction, the selection of a more careful approach on his part than that adopted to display potential disapproval of the Huntercombes; for, by taking sides too actively, he might easily find himself in the position of defending one or another of the systems of conducting human existence which he was normally to be found attacking in another sector of the battlefield. At the same time, it would hardly be true to say that Uncle Giles was deeply concerned with the question of consistency in argument. On the contrary, inconsistency in his own line of thought worried him scarcely at all. As a matter of fact, if absolutely compelled to make a pronouncement on the subject, he—or, so far as that went, anyone else investigating the matter—might have taken a fairly firm stand on the fact that immediate impressions at Mrs. Andriadis’s were not, after all, greatly different from those conveyed on first arrival at Belgrave Square.

The house, which had the air of being rented furnished only for a month or two, was bare; somewhat unattractively decorated in an anonymous style which, at least in the upholstery, combined touches of the Italian Renaissance with stripped panelling and furniture of “modernistic” design, these square, metallic pieces on the whole suggesting Berlin rather than Paris. Although smaller than the Huntercombes’, my uncle would have detected there a decided suggestion of wealth, and also—something to which his objection was, if possible, even more deeply ingrained—an atmosphere of frivolity. Like many people whose days are passed largely in a state of inanition, when not of crisis, Uncle Giles prided himself on his serious approach to life, deprecating nothing so much as what he called “trying to laugh things off”; and it was true that a lifetime of laughter would scarcely have sufficed to exorcise some of his own fiascos.

On the whole, Mrs. Andriadis’s guests belonged to a generation older than that attending the dance, and their voices swelled more loudly throughout the rooms. The men were in white ties and the ladies’ dresses were carried in general with a greater flourish than at the Huntercombes’: some of the wearers distinctly to be classed as “beauties.” A minute sprinkling of persons from both sexes still in day clothes absolved Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones from looking quite so out of place as might otherwise have been apprehended; and, during the course of that night, I was surprised to notice how easily these two (who had deposited their unsold copies of
War Never Pays!
in the hall, under a high-backed crimson-and-gold chair, designed in an uneasy compromise between
avant garde
motifs and seventeenth-century Spanish tradition) faded unobtrusively into the general background of the party. There were, indeed, many girls present not at all dissimilar in face and figure to Gypsy Jones; while Mr. Deacon, too, could have found several prototypes of himself among a contingent of sardonic, moderately distinguished, grey-haired men, some of whom smelt of bath-salts, dispersed here and there throughout the gathering. The comparative formality of the scene to be observed on our arrival had cast a certain blight on my own—it now seemed too ready—acceptance of Stringham’s assurance that invitation was wholly unnecessary; for the note of “frivolity,” to which Uncle Giles might so undeniably have taken exception, was, I could not help feeling, infused with an undercurrent of extreme coolness, a chilly consciousness of conflicting egoisms, far more intimidating than anything normally to be met with at Walpole-Wilsons’, Huntercombes’, or, indeed, anywhere else of “that sort.”

However, as the eye separated individuals from the mass, marks of a certain exoticism were here revealed, notably absent from the scene at Belgrave Square: such deviations from a more conventional standard alleviating, so far as they went, earlier implications of stiffness; although these intermittent patches of singularity—if they were to be regarded as singular—were, on the whole, not necessarily predisposed to put an uninvited newcomer any more at his ease; except perhaps in the sense that one act of informality in such surroundings might, roughly speaking, be held tacitly to excuse another.

For example, an elderly gentleman with a neat white moustache and eye-glass, evidently come from some official assemblage—perhaps the reception at the Spanish Embassy—because he wore miniatures, and the cross of some order in white enamel and gold under the points of his collar, was conversing with a Negro, almost tawny in pigmentation, rigged out in an elaborately waisted and square-shouldered tail-coat with exaggeratedly pointed lapels. It was really this couple that had made me think of Uncle Giles, who, in spite of advocacy of the urgent dissolution of the British Empire on grounds of its despotic treatment of backward races, did not greatly care for coloured people, whatever their origin; and, unless some quite exceptional circumstance sanctioned the admixture, he would certainly not have approved of guests of African descent being invited to a party to which he himself had been bidden. In this particular case, however, he would undoubtedly have directed the earlier momentum of his disparagement against the man with the eye-glass, since my uncle could not abide the wearing of medals. “Won ’em in Piccadilly, I shouldn’t wonder,” he was always accustomed to comment, when his eye fell on these outward and visible awards, whoever the recipient, and whatever the occasion.

Not far from the two persons just described existed further material no less vulnerable to my uncle’s censure, for a heavily-built man, with a greying beard and the air of a person of consequence, was unsuccessfully striving, to the accompaniment of much laughter on both sides, to wrest a magnum of champagne from the hands of an ancient dame, black-browed, and wearing a tiara, or jewelled head-dress of some sort, who was struggling manfully to retain possession of the bottle. Here, therefore, were assembled in a single group—as it were of baroque sculpture come all at once to life—three classes of object all equally abhorrent to Uncle Giles; that is to say, champagne, beards, and tiaras: each in its different way representing sides of life for which he could find no good to say; beards implying to him Bohemianism’s avoidance of those practical responsibilities with which he always felt himself burdened: tiaras and champagne unavoidably conjuring up images of guilty opulence of a kind naturally inimical to “radical” principles.

Although these relatively exotic embellishments to the scene occurred within a framework on the whole commonplace enough, the shifting groups of the party created, as a spectacle, illusion of moving within the actual confines of a picture or tapestry, into the depths of which the personality of each new arrival had to be automatically amalgamated; even in the case of apparently unassimilable material such as Mr. Deacon or Gyspy Jones, both of whom, as I have said, were immediately absorbed, at least to the eye, almost as soon as they had crossed the threshold of Mrs. Andriadis.

“Who is this extraordinary old puss you have in tow?” Stringham had asked, while he and I had walked a little ahead of the other three, after we had left the coffee-stall.

“A friend of my parents.”

“Mine know the oddest people too—especially my father. And Miss Jones? Also a friend—or a cousin?”

He only laughed when I attempted to describe the circumstances that had led to my finding myself with Mr. Deacon, who certainly seemed to require some explanation at the stage of life, and of behaviour, that he had now reached. Stringham pretended to think—or was at least unwilling to disbelieve—that Gypsy Jones was my own chosen companion, rather than Mr. Deacon’s. However, he had shown no sign of regarding either of them as noticeably more strange than anyone else, encountered on a summer night, who might seem eligible to be asked to a party given by a friend. It was, indeed, clear to me that strangeness was what Stringham now expected, indeed, demanded from life: a need already become hard to satisfy. The detachment he had always seemed to possess was now more marked than ever before. At the same time he had become in some manner different from the person I had known at school, so that, in spite of the air almost of relief that he had shown at falling in with us, I began to feel uncertain whether, in fact, Anne Stepney had not used the term “pompous” in the usual, and not some specialised, sense. Peter Templer, too, I remembered had employed the same word years before at school when he had inquired about Stringham’s family. “Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?” he had asked. At that time I associated pomposity with Le Bas, or even with Widmerpool, both of whom habitually indulged in mannerisms unthinkable in Stringham. Yet there could be no doubt that he now possessed a personal remoteness, a kind of preoccupation with his own affairs, that gave at least some
prima facie
excuse for using the epithet. All the rather elaborate friendliness, and apparent gratitude for the meeting—almost as if it might offer means of escape from some burdensome commitment—was unquestionably part of a barrier set up against the rest of the world. Trying to disregard the gap, of which I felt so well aware, as it yawned between us, I asked about his family.

“My father sits in Kenya, quarrelling with his French wife.”

“And your mother?”

“Similarly occupied with Buster over here.”

“At Glimber?”

“Glimber—as arranged by Buster—is let to an Armenian. They now live in a house of more reasonable proportions at Sunningdale. You must come there one day—if only to see dawn breaking over the rock garden. I once arrived there in the small hours and had that unforgettable experience.”

“Is Buster still in the Navy?”

“Not he.”

“A gentleman of leisure?”

“But much humbled. No longer expects one to remember every individual stroke he made during the polo season.”

“So you both rub along all right?”

“Like a house on fire,” said Stringham. “All the same, you know parents—especially step-parents—are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years. As a matter of fact, Buster may come to the party if he can get away.”

“And Miss Weedon?”

“Tuffy has left. I see her sometimes. She came into a little money. My mother changes her secretary every week now. She can’t get along with anyone since Tuffy resigned.”

“What about Peggy Stepney?”

“What, indeed?”

“I sat next to her sister, Anne, at dinner to-night.”

“Poor Anne, I hope you were kind to her.”

He gave no hint as to whether or not he was still involved with Peggy Stepney. I presumed that there was at least no longer any question of an engagement.

“Are you still secretary to Sir Magnus Donners?”

“Still to be seen passing from time to time through the Donners-Brebner Buildings,” said Stringham, laughing again. “It might be hard to establish my precise status there.”

“Nice work if you can get it!”