At Lady Molly's (18 page)

Erridge was not enthusiastic about this proposal. There was some discussion. However, he could not very well turn his sisters out of the house at that hour of the night, so that in the end he agreed; at the same time conveying a warning that the sheets might not be properly aired.

‘All right,’ said Isobel. ‘We’ll get rheumatic fever. We don’t mind. I can’t tell you how smart Roddy’s car is, by the way. If we get up reasonably early, we shall reach London in no time.’

‘It is rather a grand car,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t know whether anyone would like a lift in the morning.’

This seemed an opportunity not to be missed. I asked if I might accept the offer.

‘Yes, do come,’ said Isobel. ‘It will be too boring otherwise, driving all the way to London with Susy talking of nothing but arrangements for her wedding.’

‘We will pick you up when we come past the cottage, which we do, anyway,’ said Susan. ‘I warn you I am frightfully punctual.’

Quiggin did not look too pleased at this, but, having enjoyed his evening, he was by that time in a mood to allow such an arrangement to pass. Erridge, already suppressing one or two yawns, seemed anxious now that we should go, and give him an opportunity to make for bed. Mona, too, had been silent for a long ume, as if lost in thought. She looked tired. It was time to say good-night.

‘See you in the morning,’ said Isobel.

‘I will be waiting at the gate.’

Erridge came to the door and let us out. We passed once more through the dim glades of the melancholy park, now dramatised by moonlight. It was a warm night, damp, though without rain, and no wind stirred the trees. There was a smell of hay and wet timber in the air. The noise of owls came faintly as they called to each other under the stars.

‘Alf is a champion lad,’ said Quiggin. ‘His sisters are grand girls too. You didn’t take long to press your company on them, I must say.’

‘I’ve got to get back to London somehow.’

‘I didn’t think the girls were up to much,’ said Mona. ‘They behaved as if they owned the place. I hate those tweed suits.’

‘You know, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkyn in
The Idiot
,’ said Quiggin. ‘A Myshkyn with political grasp. You wouldn’t believe the money spent on good causes that he has got through, one way and another.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘He has helped a lot of individual cases that have been recommended to hirn from time to time. Howard Craggs got quite a bit out of him a year or two back, which I bet he never repaid. Then Alf has founded several societies and financed them. Refugees, too.’

‘Mind he doesn’t meet Guggenbühl.’

‘I’ll see to that,’ said Quiggin, laughing sourly.

‘He ought to marry a nice girl who would teach him to look after his money instead of handing it out to all these wasters,’ said Mona.

One of her bad moods seemed on the way.

‘All very good causes,’ said Quiggin, who seemed to enjoy contemplating this subject. ‘But sums that would make you gasp.’

‘Bloody fool,’ said Mona.

4

IN the Jeavonses’ house everything was disposed about the rooms as if the owners had moved in only a week or two before, and were still picknicking in considerable disorder among their unsorted belongings. Whether the better pieces were Sleaford spoils, or derived from Molly’s side of the family, Lovell was uncertain. Certainly Molly herself had not bought them; still less, Jeavons. Lovell said the only object the two of them were known to have acquired throughout their married life together was a cabinet made of some light, highly polished wood, designed—though never, I think, used—to enclose the wherewithal for mixing cocktails. In practice, bottles, glasses and ice were always brought into the drawing-room on a tray, the cabinet serving only as a plinth upon which to rest the cage enclosing two budgerigars. You could never tell who would carry in this drink tray; or, for that matter, who would open the front door. Regular servants were employed only spasmodically, their duties on the whole undertaken by such temporary figures as Erridge’s Smith, or superannuated nurses and governesses of the Ardglass family, whose former dependants were legion. Even personal friends of Molly’s, down on their luck for one reason or another, would from time to time lend a hand on the domestic side, while a succession of charwomen, gloomy or jocular, haunted the passages by day.

No one was ever, so to speak, turned away from the Jeavons table. The place was a hinterland where none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply and persons of every sort were to be encountered. Perhaps that description makes the company sound too diverting. Certainly Lovell was less complimentary. ‘Of course you hardly ever meet intelligent people there,’ he used to say, for some reason cherishing in his mind that category of person, without too closely defining means of recognition. ‘And you rarely see anyone whom
I
would call really smart.’ Then he was accustomed to relent a little, and add: ‘All the same, you may find absolutely anybody at Aunt Molly’s.’

In making this practical—even brutal—analysis, I think Lovell merely meant that individuals deeply ambitious of receiving a lot of grand invitations would never dream of wasting time among the rag, tag and bobtail normally to be found at the Jeavonses’; but he probably intended at the same time to imply that such over-eager people might sometimes be surprised—possibly even made envious—by the kind of visitor from Molly’s past—or, for that matter, her unconformable present—who was the exception in the house rather than the rule. A powerful substratum of relations was usually to be found there, Ardglass and Sleaford connexions, as a rule: not, on the whole, the most eminent members of those families. Jeavons, certainly no snob in the popular and derogatory sense (although he had acquired for everyday purposes a modicum of lore peculiar to his wife’s world) would from time to time produce a relation of his own—for example, a nephew who worked in Wolverhampton—but, even had he so desired, he could never have attempted to compete in point of number with the ramifications of Molly’s family: the descendants of her grandfather’s ninety-seven first cousins. It was at the Jeavonses’ that I met the Tolland sisters again.

Lovell, probably unreliable, I thought, upon such a point, said that Jeavons used occasionally to kick over the traces of married life.

‘He goes off by himself and gets tight and picks up a woman,’ Lovell said. ‘Just once in a way, you know. One evening he brought an obvious tart to the house to have a drink.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Someone told me. One of the Tollands, I think.’

I questioned the truth of the story, not so much because I wholly disbelieved it, as on account of the implications of such behaviour, suggesting additionally mysterious avenues of Jeavons’s life, which for some reason I felt unwilling, almost too squeamish, to face. However, Lovell himself agreed that whichever Tolland sister had produced the story was probably no very capable judge of the degrees of fallen womanhood, and might easily have used the term without professional connotation: admitting, too, had any such incident taken place, that the girl was unlikely to have been remarked as someone very unusual in such a social no man’s land as the Jeavons drawing-room. He conceded finally that Molly would be more than equal to dealing with an intrusion of just that sort, even had she decided—something very unlikely—that the trespassing guest had unexpectedly passed beyond some invisible, though as it were platonically defined, limit as to who might, and who might not, be suitably received under the Jeavons’ roof.

All the same, the story, even if untrue, impressed me as of interest in its bearing on a sense of strain suffered, perhaps continuously, by Jeavons himself. At worst, the supposed introduction of a ‘tart’ into his house was a myth somehow come into existence, which represented in highly coloured terms a long since vanquished husband’s vain efforts publicly to demonstrate his own independence from a wife’s too evident domination. The legend itself was a kind of tribute to Molly’s strength: a strength of which her first husband too, for all I knew, might in his time have been made equally aware; although Lord Sleaford, at least outwardly, was better equipped to control a wife of Molly’s sort.

‘I don’t think she was unhappy when she was married to Uncle John,’ Lovell used to say. ‘Of course, he was rather a dull dog. Still, lots of women have to put up with dull dogs—not to say dirty dogs—without the advantage of lots of money and a stately home. Besides, Ted is a dull dog, too. I suppose Aunt Molly prefers husbands like that.’

My own feeling was that Jeavons could not be described as ‘dull’: even though he had appeared so, in that very phrase, to Widmerpool equally with Lovell. On the contrary, Jeavons seemed to me a person oddly interesting.

‘Molly never really got on with her contemporaries,’ Lovell said. ‘The kind of people one associates with Lady Diana—and all that. She knew some of them, of course, very well, but she couldn’t be called one of that, or any other, set. I dare say Uncle John was afraid of his wife being thought “fast”. She was very shy, too, I believe, in those days. Quite different from what she is like now.’

A picture of Molly Jeavons was beginning to emerge: separateness from her ‘young married’ contemporaries: perhaps a certain recoil from their flamboyance: in any case, nothing in common with the fleeting interest in the arts of that new fashionable world. She might have the acquisitive instinct to capture from her first marriage (if that was indeed their provenance) such spoils as the Wilson and the Greuze, while remaining wholly untouched by the intellectual emancipation, however skin-deep, of her generation: the Russian Ballet: the painters of the Paris School: novels and poetry of the period: not even such a mournful haunt of the third-rate as the Celtic Twilight had played a part in her life. She had occupied a position many women must have envied, jogging along there for a dozen years without apparent dissatisfaction or a breath of scandal; then contentedly taking on an existence of such a very different kind, hardly noticing the change. All that was interesting. The fact was, perhaps, that her easy going, unambitious manner of life had passed unremarked in a vast house like Dogdene, organised in the last resort by the industrious Sleaford, who, according to Lovell, possessed rather a taste for interfering in domestic matters. While married to him, Molly remained a big, charming, noisy young woman, who had never entirely ceased to be a schoolgirl. When the Dogdene frame was removed, like the loosening of a corset of steel, the unconventional, the eccentric, even the sluttish side of her nature became suddenly revealed to the world.

So far as ‘getting on’ with her second husband was concerned, the strongest protest she ever seemed to make was: ‘Oh, Teddy, dear, do you ever catch hold of the right end of the stick?’, spoken kindly, and usually not without provocation; for Jeavons could be slow in grasping the point of a story. Some husbands might certainly take even that rebuke amiss, but Jeavons never seemed to question Molly’s absolute sway over himself, the house and all those who came there. I heard her say these words on subsequent visits after Lovell had introduced me there. Neither Widmerpool nor Mrs. Haycock had turned up again since that first night, and I made some enquiry about them.

‘Oh, you know Mr. Widmerpool?’ said Molly, at once beginning to laugh. ‘How extraordinary that you should know him. But perhaps you said so before. He has got jaundice. What a thing to happen when you are going to get married.’

‘How disagreeable for him. But I am not altogether surprised. He always makes a great fuss about his health. I think he has had jaundice before.’

‘You know him well then?’

‘Fairly well—though I don’t often see him.’

‘He is rather amusing, isn’t he?’ said Molly. ‘Quite a wit in his way. But he must look awful now that he is bright yellow.’

I agreed that the disease would give Widmerpool an unattractive appearance. It seemed to me extraordinary that she should have thought him ‘amusing’. I sometimes found his company enjoyable, because we had experienced much in common; but I could never remember him making an entertaining remark. I wondered what he could have said to cause that judgment: learning in due course that she was quite reckless in the characteristics she attributed to individuals. A chance remark would have the effect of swaying her entirely in favour of one person, or of arousing the bitterest opposition to another. She was very critical of many of the people who came to see her, and hoarded an accumulation of largely unfounded inferences about their character. These inaccuracies seemed to cancel each other out in some manner, so that in the last resort Molly was no worse informed, indeed in point of acuteness often better placed, than what might be regarded as ‘the average’.

‘Do you think he is in love with Mildred?’ she asked sharply.

‘I really don’t know. I suppose so. If he wants to marry her.’

I was not at all prepared for the question.

‘Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all,’ she said. ‘I feel rather sorry for him in some ways. Mildred is not an easy person. I’ve known her such a long time. She isn’t a bit easy. But now you simply must come up to my bedroom and see the monkey. I bought him today from a man in Soho, where I went to get some pimentos.’

A good deal of the life of the Jeavons’ household was, in fact, lived in Molly’s bedroom, either because a sick animal was established there (with the budgerigars, four principal dogs and at least as many cats inhabited the house), or simply because Molly herself had risen late, or retired early to rest, in either case holding a kind of reception from her bed, a Victorian fourposter that took up most of the room. On a chest of drawers beside the bed stood a photograph of Jeavons in uniform: breeches: puttees: at the back of his head a floppy service cap of the kind stigmatised by Mrs. Haycock in her youth as a ‘gorblimey’. He held a knotted bamboo swagger cane under one arm, and, wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the M.C. (awarded after the action in which he had been so seriously wounded), he looked the complete subaltern of war-time musical comedy.

‘Come along, all of you,’ said Molly. ‘You must all see the monkey. You too, Tuffy. You simply must see him.’

I had already recognised the tall, dark, beaky-nosed woman to whom she spoke as Miss Weedon, former secretary of my old friend Charles Stringham’s mother, Mrs. Foxe. Miss Weedon, now in her late forties, had been his sister Flavia’s governess. After Flavia grew up, she had stayed on to help with Mrs. Foxe’s social engagements and charities. I had been waiting an opportunity to have a word with her. I reintroduced myself as we climbed the stairs with the other people who wished—or were being compelled—to visit the monkey. Miss Weedon, wholly unchanged, still sombrely dressed, gave me a keen look.

‘But of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Charles brought you to luncheon in the London house before he went to Kenya to stay with his father. They had forgotten to get a ticket for Charles in a theatre party that had been made up—the Russian Ballet, I think. I was put to all kind of trouble to produce the extra ticket. However, I got it for him in the end.’

I, too, remembered the incident; and also the look of adoration Miss Weedon had given Stringham when she entered the room. I well recalled that passionate glance, although even then—that night at the Jeavonses’—I had not yet guessed the depths of her devotion. I wondered what she did with herself now. Stringham, when last we had seen something of each other, had told me: ‘Tuffy has come into a little money,’ and that she was no longer his mother’s secretary. I found in due course that Miss Weedon was a close friend of Molly’s; in fact that she re-enacted at the Jeavonses’ many of her former duties when in the employment of Mrs. Foxe, although, of course, in a household organised on very different terms. It was impossible to know from her manner how unexpected, or the reverse, she found the fact that we had met again at this place. In her profound, though mysterious, dimness, she was typical of the background of Jeavons gatherings.

‘I always regret that Charles ever made that journey to Kenya.’ she said.

She spoke severely, as if I had myself been in part to blame for allowing such a thing ever to have taken place; even though at the same time she freely forgave me for such former thoughtlessness.

‘Why?’

‘He was never the same afterwards.’

I had to admit to myself there was some truth in that. Stringham had never been the same after Kenya. It had been a water-shed in his life.

‘Perhaps it was just because he became a man,’ she said. ‘Of course, his upbringing was impossible—always, from the beginning. But he changed so much after that trip to Africa. He was a boy when he went—and such a charming boy—and he really came back a man.’

‘People do grow up. At least some do.’

‘I am afraid Charles was not one of them,’ she said gravely. ‘He became a man, but he did not grow up. He is not grown up now.’

I hardly knew what to answer. It was one of those headfirst dives into generalisation that usually precedes between two persons a greater conversational intimacy. However, Miss Weedon made no attempt to expand her statement; nor, so to speak, to draw closer in her approach to the problem of Stringham. She merely continued to look at me with a kind of chilly amiability; as if, by making an immediate confession that I was a former friend of his, I had, so far as she was concerned, just managed to save my bacon. When a boy, I had regarded her as decidedly formidable. I still found her a trifle alarming. She gave an impression of complete singleness of purpose: the impression of a person who could make herself very disagreeable if thwarted.