At Lady Molly's (23 page)

‘I shall go then,’ he said. ‘I will ring you up tomorrow, Mildred. Make my apologies to Peter.’

‘Night, night,’ she said, not unkindly.

Widmerpool nodded to the rest of us, then turned, and picked his way through the dancers.

‘But this is too, too amusing,’ said Mrs. Haycock, taking Jeavons by the arm. ‘To think we should meet again like this after all these years.’

She poured out another drink for himself, and passed the bottle round the table, so delighted by the discovery of Jeavons that Widmerpool seemed now dismissed entirely from her mind. The sentiments of Jeavons himself at that moment were hard to estimate; even to know how drunk he was. He might have reminded Mrs. Haycock of their former encounter with some motive in his mind, or merely on impulse. The information could even have emerged quite fortuitously in the course of one of his long, rambling anecdotes. No one could predict where his next step would lead. Outwardly, he gave no impression of intoxication, except for those intermittent bouts of sleepiness, in which, for that matter, he probably often indulged himself at home when dead sober. Templer and his girl returned to the table.

‘This is really rather a grim place,’ said Templer. ‘What do you say to moving on somewhere else—the Slip-in, or somewhere like that?’

‘Oh, but darling Peter,’ said Mrs. Haycock, who had, so it appeared, met Templer for the first time that evening. ‘I’ve just begun to enjoy myself so much. Kenneth decided he wasn’t feeling well enough to stay, so he has gone home—with many apologies—and now I have just found one of my oldest, my very oldest, friends here.’

She pointed to Jeavons.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Templer.

He looked a bit surprised; but there was, after all, no reason why Jeavons should not be one of her oldest friends, even if, in Templer’s eyes, he was rather an oddity. If Tcmpler’s first predisposition had been embarrassment at being caught in a party with Widmerpool, his mood had later changed to one of amusement at the insoluble problem of why I myself was visiting a night club with Jeavons. Jeavons was not an easy man to explain. Templer had none of Chips Lovell’s appreciation of the subtleties of such matters. The Jeavons house, irretrievably tinged, in however unconventional a manner, with a kind of life against which he had rigidly set his face, would have bored Templer to death. Mrs. Haycock was, for some reason, another matter; he could tolerate her. Patently rackety, and habituated to association with what Uncle Giles called ‘all sorts’—different, for some reason, from Molly Jeavons’s ‘all sorts’—she presented no impediment to Templer. He sat down beside her and began to discuss other places that might be more amusing than Umfraville’s club. Umfraville himself now returned, bringing with him Max Pilgrim and Heather Hopkins.

‘May we join you for a moment?’ he said. ‘You know, Mildred, I don’t believe we have met since that terrible night at Cannes in—what was it?—about 1923, when Milly Andriadis gave that great party, and we walked round the port together and watched the sunrise.’

We made room for them. Hopkins and Pilgrim were on their best behaviour. Templer’s girl seemed for the moment almost to have forgotten him in the excitement of sitting with such celebrities. I found myself next to Templer and we had a moment to talk.

‘How are you, Nick,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for centuries.’

‘No worse—and you?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Templer. ‘Family worries of various kinds, though there is a lot to be said for no longer being married. The usual trouble is raging with Bob and that sister of mine. No sooner does Bob get a good job than he goes off with some girl. All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law. I believe Jean has left him again, and gone to stay in Rome with Baby Wentworth—or whatever Baby Wentworth is now called after marrying that Italian.’

It was quite a good test, and I came out of it with flying colours; that is to say, without any immediate desire to buy an air ticket to Rome.

‘You did know my sister, Jean, didn’t you?’ he said. “I mean I haven’t been telling you a long story about someone you’ve never met?’

‘Of course I knew her. And your other sister, too. I met her ages ago.’

‘Baby Wentworth is a cousin of mine,’ said Mrs. Haycock, suddenly breaking off an argument with Hopkins regarding the private life of the barman at the Carlton Hotel at Cannes. ‘What a pretty girl she is. When my father died, he hadn’t managed to produce a son, so Baby’s father succeeded. Her brother, Jack Vowchurch, is rather hell, I believe. I’ve never met him. They were quite distant cousins, and we never saw anything of them. Then one day at Andbes someone pointed out Baby to me. Didn’t Sir Magnus Donners have rather a fancy for her? She was with him then.’

‘Wasn’t your father the chap who rode his horse upstairs after dinner?’ asked Jeavons, wholly unexpectedly.

‘Yes, of course he was,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘His favourite hunter. That was before I was born. I think he was supposed to be celebrating something. “Peace with Honour”, would it have been? That kind of thing. I believe that was the story. We had a hunting-box at Melton Mowbray that season. They had to demolish the side wall of the house to retrieve the animal. It cost the hell of a lot of money, I know.’

Once again, when she spoke of her father, I was reminded of Mrs. Conyers, even though the phraseology of the narrative was so different from any her sister would have employed.

‘And then there was some other story,’ insisted Jeavons. ‘Setting fire to a fellow’s newspaper in a train. Something like that.’

This interest in Lord Vowchurch on the part of Jeavons I found astonishing.

‘There are absolutely hundreds, darling,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘Do you know about when he squirted mauve ink over an archbishop at a wedding?’

‘I met such a sweet archbishop at the Theatrical Garden Party last year,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t an archbishop, but just a bishop. He wore a hat just like one of Heather’s.’

‘I might get a clerical hat,’ said Hopkins. ‘That’s not a bad idea. There is a place off Oxford Street where they sell black boaters. I’ve always wanted one.’

I asked if she had been seeing much of Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

‘Oh, those two girls,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d met you before somewhere. No, I haven’t been seeing them. I found out Eleanor had said a very unkind thing about me. I thought she was a friend, but I see I made a mistake.’

‘Look here,’ said Jeavons, who had cast off inertia and was now in his most lively mood. ‘Do you remember how that song used to go:

“He ran a pin
In Gwendolyn,
In Lower Grosvenor Place …”

I can’t remember the exact words.’

By this time I was becoming tired of Umfraville’s night club. Like Widmerpool, I wished to go home. Jeavons’s companionship demanded an almost infinite capacity for adaptation to changed moods and circumstances. In many ways sympathetic, he lacked any of that familiar pattern of behaviour to be found, say, in Quiggin, so that in the last resort his company was exhausting rather than stimulating. Umfraville went off to attend to the club’s administration. Discussion began once mere as to whether the party should move elsewhere.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘If you all want to go to the Slip-in, why not leave me here with Ted. He and I will talk about old times for a bit. Then he can see me home.’

That was agreed. There was still a lot of talk. I left before the final plan was put into execution. Out in the passage, Umfraville was instructing the villainous, blue-nosed custodian as to who could, and who could not, wisely be admitted to the club.

‘Not going?’ he said. ‘It’s early yet.’

‘I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and write filmscripts.’

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘But, look here, just before you go, what’s happened to Mildred Haycock these days? I hadn’t seen her in an age. She seems to be holding up pretty well. I know Peter Templer, but who was the other chap who left the party early on?’

‘He is called Widmerpool. She is engaged to him.’

‘Is she, indeed? What does he do?’

‘A bill-broker.’

Umfraville nodded his head sagely.

‘Come again,’ he said. ‘Now that you know the way.’

I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.

5

A BACKGROUND of other events largely obscured the steps leading up to my engagement to Isobel Tolland. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place. Marriage, as I have said, is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will. Its orbit is not to be charted with precision, if misrepresentation and contrivance are to be avoided. Its facts can perhaps only be known by implication. It is a state from which all objectivity has been removed. I shall say something, however, of the incident which at this juncture chiefly distracted attention from my own affairs.

Although that evening when we had dined at Thrubworth had been by no means the sole occasion when Quiggin had announced that he wanted to ‘see China and judge for himself’, no one among his acquaintances supposed him at all likely to set sail at once for the Far East. The words were generally—and, as it turned out, correctly—assumed to be in the main rhetorical: merely buttressing opinions already propagated by him about the ominous situation in Asia. There was, for example, the matter of fare. High as his reputation stood as a critic, it was doubtful whether any publisher would be prepared to advance enough on a projected travel book, with a political bias, to transport Quiggin so far; while Erridge, sympathetic to the wish, had at the same time shown no impulse to foot the bill. Doubts had been maliciously expressed by Mark Members, just returned from his lecture tour in America, as to whether, when it came to the point, Quiggin would be impatient to enter an area in which the Japanese Army was at that time engaged in active operations. Members may have been unjust. He was certainly applying to Quiggin the heartless criticism of an old friend. All the same, I should have been surprised to hear that Quiggin had set out upon that journey.

On the other hand, when Erridge for the same reason—to see for himself’—turned out to be on his way to China, there was less to wonder at. Erridge had already shown himself prepared to undergo uncomfortable forms of travel; he was undoubtedly in a restless state of mind; he was interested in the political implications of the situation: finally, he could afford to buy a ticket. The enterprise might be the result of Quiggin’s advocacy, or his own gnawing sense of moral obligation. The motive was almost immaterial. There was another far more absorbing aspect of his departure when it came about. He did not go alone. He took Mona with him.

Naturally this affair was discussed at great length at houses such as the Jeavonses’, where no details were available, beyond the fact that Erridge and Mona were together on a P. & O. liner bound for the East; while Quiggin had been left in England. Their precise destination was unknown. The immediate Tolland family were, naturally, in a ferment of interest. Even so, the story made on the whole less stir than might be thought; for Erridge had by then so firmly established a reputation for eccentricity that those who knew him personally were prepared for anything. Since he inhabited no particular social milieu, his doings affected few individuals directly. Such persons were chiefly a small group of hangers-on, like Quiggin or Howard Craggs, the Left Wing publisher, and the members of some of Erridge’s committees. For the rest of the world, those to whom his name alone was familiar, his behaviour as usual took on the unsubstantial shape of a minor paragraph in the newspaper, momentarily catching the attention, without at the same time giving a conviction of its subject’s existence in ‘real life’. Uncle Giles, with his very different circumstances, was in much the same case, in that no one knew, or, for that matter, greatly cared what he would do next, provided he made no disastrous marriage and kept out of prison. In Erridge’s position, the question of marriage now loomed steeply for his relations, a matter of keen speculation, particularly since this was the first occasion when he was known to have been closely associated with any woman.

All this had considerable bearing on my own life at the time, because my engagement was made public in the same week that the Erridge-Mona story broke, and was naturally overshadowed—especially upon my first meeting with Katherine, Lady Warminster—by this far more striking family convulsion. Some people considered Mona’s abandonment of Quiggin less remarkable than the fact that she should have stayed with him for several years. Others took the opportunity to recall that, after crossing the Rubicon of leaving Templer, further changes of partner were inevitable. That was all very well, but I had to admit to myself that, when I had seen them together at Thrubworth, I had never guessed they were about to run away together. Erridge had shown no sign whatever of having any so desperate a plan in view, while Mona’s interest in him had appeared to be no more than the natural product of her own boredom at the cottage. Possibly at that time neither had contemplated any such development. All at once the urgency of action had swept irresistibly down upon them: a sudden movement that altered the value of every piece on the board. This would deal a serious blow to Quiggin. Even if he had never gone through the ceremony of marriage with Mona (which now seemed probable), his close relations with Erridge would scarcely survive such conduct; or would, at best, take some little time to repair on Erridge’s return from China.

This escapade of Erridge’s—at present it was spoken of merely as an escapade, because any question of marriage must in the first instance depend upon whether or not Mona was already Quiggin’s wife—very considerably magnetised the atmosphere when for the first time I came to see his stepmother. No one yet knew how much Lady Warminster, on the whole alarmingly well informed on all topics connected with her relations, had up to that time been able to discover about Erridge and Mona. She was suspected, as usual, of possessing more information than she was prepared to admit. Like a foreign statesman, who, during important international negotiations, insists upon the medium of an interpreter in spite of his own familiarity with the language in which discussion is being conducted, she preferred every approach to be devious, and translated into her own idiom.

Although, by then, I had often visited the house in Hyde Park Gardens, she and I had not met on those earlier occasions, chiefly because Lady Warminster’s health kept her for weeks at a time confined to her room. Views differed as to the extent to which hypochondria governed her life, some alleging that no one enjoyed better health, others taking her side in insisting that, delicate since childhood, she bore her ailments courageously. Smaller, older, quieter in manner and more handsome than Molly Jeavons, she was also much more awe-inspiring. Something of the witch haunted her delicate, aquiline features and transparent ivory skin: a calm, autumnal beauty that did not at all mask the amused, malicious, almost insane light that glinted all the time in her infinitely pale blue eyes. When young, she must have been very good looking indeed.

Unlike her sister, who was entirely detached from intellectual interests of any sort, Lady Warminster lived largely in a world of the imagination. Her house, a complete contrast to the Jeavonses’, reflected the more ordered side of her nature, surprising by the conventionality of its taste and air of stylised repose; at least until the rooms given over to her stepchildren were reached. These quiet, rich, rather too heavy decorations and furniture were deceptive. Little about the house could be thought quiet, or conventional, when closely examined. Perhaps, after all, when closely examined, no sort of individual life can truly be so labelled. However, against this formal background, when her health allowed, Lady Warminster wrote her books, historical studies of the dominating women of the past: Catherine the Great: Christina of Sweden: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough: volumes rarely mentioned in the press, though usually kindly treated by such critics as noticed them, on account of their engaging impetuosity of style and complete lack of pretension to any serious scholarship.

This literary preoccupation with feminine authority had come to Katherine Warminster, so it appeared, only after her second widowhood. Like her sister, Molly, she had no child by either husband, the first of whom had been one of those ‘well-born’ City men for whom Peter Templer used to express such aversion. He had been a fairly successful stockbroker, fond of hunting and shooting, a man, so far as could be judged, with no salient characteristic. His wife had spent most of her days with friends who belonged to a world quite other than his own; latterly submitting to him in their marriage only to the extent of living in the country, where she was bored to death. She can have seen little more of Lord Warminster, when married to him, much of whose time was spent abroad unaccompanied by his wife, fishing in Iceland or pig-sticking in Bengal. This status of having twice married, without, so it might seem, great attachment to either husband, perhaps gave Lady Warminster the mysterious, witch-like quality she dispensed so pervasively about her.

The second marriage was said—quite unexpectedly—to have improved, on the whole, Erridge’s relations with his father, with whom, without any open quarrel, he had never been on good terms. Lord Warminster had accepted his son’s idiosyncrasies stoically, together with anything else of which he disapproved in his children, attributing everything to their mother’s Alford blood. The rest of the Tolland brothers and sisters had lived—Norah was an exception—amicably with their stepmother: the younger ones entirely brought up by her. Lady Warminster, eccentric herself, showed a decent respect for eccentricity. She had no wish to interfere with other people, her stepchildren or anyone else, provided her own convenience was not threatened, so that the Tollands were left largely to their own devices. Life at Hyde Park Gardens might be ruthless, but it was played out on a reasonably practical basis, in which every man was for himself and no quarter was given; while at the same time a curtain of relatively good humour was usually allowed to cloak an inexorable recognition of life’s inevitable severities.

I was fortunate enough already to have established myself to some small extent in Lady Warminster’s good graces by a book written a year or two before which she happened to have enjoyed, so that my own reception might have been a worse one. Even so, with a person of her sort that was not a matter upon which to presume. For a time we discussed affairs personal to Isobel and myself, and then, as soon as these could be politely, and quite kindly, dismissed, Lady Warminster gave a smile that showed plainly we should turn to more intriguing topics.

‘I think you are one of the few people, either in or out of the family, who have met Erridge lately,’ she said. ‘So that you must now tell me what you think about this trip of his to China.’

I assured her that I knew little or nothing of Erridge and his movements, but that the journey seemed a reasonable one for him to make in the light of his interests and way of life. I admitted that I had heard him discuss a visit to China.

‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘Erridge is much too much by himself. He will not be alone on the voyage, I think, will he?’

That was not easy to answer. I did not wish, at this early stage in our relationship, to be detected telling, or, indeed, implying, a deliberate lie. I hoped equally to avoid revealing all that was known about Erridge and Mona, scanty as that might be. I said that I knew no details about the arrangements made by Erridge for his journey.

‘There are always plenty of people to talk to on boats,’ I suggested, with a sense of descending into banality of the most painful kind.

‘Of course,’ she said, as if that notion had never before been so well presented to her. ‘Do you like the sea?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Nor me,’ she said. ‘There is nothing I detest more than a sea voyage. But surely he is taking a secretary, or someone of that sort. I think he will. It will be so lonely otherwise. Especially as he is used to living by himself. You are never so lonely as when among a lot of people you do not know.’

It was impossible to tell whether the reference to ‘a secretary’ designated Mona, or some new figure in Erridge’s life; or was merelv a random shot to draw information.

‘I don’t think I know about a secretary.’

‘Perhaps I am mistaken. Someone may have said something cf the sort. What did you think of Thrubworth? Erridge does not take much interest in the house, I am afraid. Still less in the grounds.’

‘I commented on Thrubworth and its surroundings, again aware that banality had not been avoided. Lady War minster sighed. She moved her thin, pale hands, covered with a network of faint blue veins, lightly over the surface of a cushion.

‘You were staying in the neighbourhood, I think.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not, by any chance, with the writer, J. G. Quiggin?’

‘Yes—with J. G. Quiggin. I have known him a long time. Do you read his articles?’

‘I was so interested when I heard Erridge had him living in that cottage. I enjoy Mr. Quiggin’s reviews so much, even when I do not agree with them. They have not been appearing lately.’

‘No. I haven’t seen any of them lately.’

‘Is there a Mrs. Quiggin?’

‘Yes, she —’

‘But I do not know why I am asking you this, because Susan and Isobel told me how they met you and the Quiggins, both of them, at Thrubworth. She is a great beauty, is she not?’

‘I think she might certainly be called a great beauty.’

‘An actress?’

‘No, a model. But she thinks of going on the films.’

‘Does she? And what does Mr. Quiggin think about that?’

‘He seemed quite to like the idea.’

‘Did he?’ she said. ‘Did he? How strange.’

She paused for a moment.

‘I like his articles so much,’ she went on, after a few seconds. ‘He is such—such a broad-minded man. So few critics are broad-minded. You know I want to talk to you about the new book I am writing myself. Will you give me your advice about it?’

For the time being the subject of Erridge was abandoned. I was glad of that. Lady Warminster had either learnt enough, or decided that for the moment, whatever her available knowledge, she would pursue the matter no further. Instead she talked for a time about Frederica, explaining that she had been so named on account of a Tolland great- uncle, a secretary of legation in Prussia, who, sharing an interest in painting, had been on friendly terms with the Empress Frederick. That was how the name had come into the family; that explained why Alfred Tolland had wanted to hear Mrs. Conyers’s anecdote about the Empress, the night we had met at the Jeavonses’. Lady Warminster represented to a high degree that characteristic of her own generation that everything may be said, though nothing indecorous discussed openly. Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable. Afterwards, thinking over the interview when I had left the house, I knew something of what Alfred Tolland could feel after one of Molly Jeavons’s interrogations. Lady Warminster might be outwardly quieter than her sister: her capacity for teasing was no less highly developed. A long time later, when the subject of Erridge and Mona had become a matter of common talk at the Jeavonses’—gossip which she must have known from her sister, even though they met rather rarely—Lady Warminster continued to refer to the association under enigmatic pseudonyms.