At Lady Molly's (6 page)

Mrs. Conyers smiled a little slyly.

‘Who are the two girls who have just come in and are talking to Chips Lovell?’

‘He is the young man you arrived with, isn’t he? The nearest is one of the Tolland girls, Priscilla, I think. She was going to see a film with a former school friend of hers whose name I was not told.’

Priscilla Tolland looked more than seventeen: even so, she had not entirely lost a long-legged, childish awkwardness in the manner in which she stood with her legs crossed. I could see she bore a strong likeness to the ‘dotty’ Blanche, though certainly free herself from any such disability. The girl with her, prototype of all school friends, was small and dark with horn-rimmed spectacles and an air of bossing everyone about. I thought I would have a word with them in a minute or two; when Mrs. Conyers had finished speaking of the misty past, into which she was now making a deep excursion. However, opportunity to approach the girls never came, because a second later, just as Mrs. Conyers had invited me to tea with herself and the General the following Sunday, two more persons, a man and woman, entered the room.

‘Ah, there is Mildred at last,’ said Mrs. Conyers, fumbling with her lorgnette, her thin hands, almost pale mauve in colour, shaking with excitement and anxiety.

I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides—or rather Mildred Haycock—might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette. But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention. Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one. This was just such a performance. The fiancé was Widmerpool. Scarlet in the face, grinning agitatedly through the thick lenses of his spectacles, he advanced into the room, his hand on Mrs. Haycock’s arm. He was wearing a new dark suit. Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored, unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. There was something a little frightening about him. That could not be denied. Molly Jeavons, this time supported by her husband, closed in on these new arrivals immediately.

‘Well, he is no beauty,’ said Mrs. Conyers.

She spoke with such deep relief at her discovery of the unpleasingness of Widmerpool’s features that she must have feared the worst of her sister’s choice on account of the reported difference of age. Probably she had pictured some golden-haired gigolo of altogether unacceptable personal appearance. The truth was a great consolation to her. Certainly, to look at them, they seemed on the score of age to be a couple very reasonably to be associated together. Mrs. Haycock was in the neighbourhood of forty, and looked no younger, but Widmerpool, although only a year or so over thirty, had always appeared comfortably middle-aged even as a boy.

‘I know him.’

‘Who is he?’

‘He is called Kenneth Widmerpool. I was at school with him as a matter of fact. He is in the City.’

‘I know his name of course. And that he is in the City. But what is he like?’

Mrs. Conyers did not attempt to conceal her own impatience. The reason of her anxiety was now made plain. She had no confidence in her sister’s choice of husband. She wanted to know the worst as soon as possible. Her first, and most serious, fears were passed; she wished to move on to a later stage of enquiry. Widmerpool, although giving her reason to be thankful that the outlook was not more threatening, had evidently made no very captivating impression.

‘Is he nice?’

‘I’ve known him a long time         ‘

By then we were both involved in general introductions taking place round the room, so that I was not forced to answer the question. Afterwards, when I got home, I pondered what I should most properly have said in reply. The fact was that Widmerpool could hardly be described as ‘nice’. Energetic: able: successful: all kinds of things that had never been expected of him in the past; but ‘nice’ he had never been, and showed little sign of becoming. Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road; perhaps it would be more apt to say that his course, as one jogged round the track, was run from time to time, however different the pace, in common with my own. As an aspect of my past he was an element to be treated with interest, if not affection, like some unattractive building or natural feature of the landscape which brought back the irrational nostalgia of childhood. A minute later I found myself talking to him.

‘No, I haven’t seen you for a long time,’ he said, breathing heavily as usual, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you, as a matter of fact, to tell you I was getting married.’

‘Many congratulations.’

‘Time to settle down,’ he said.

This remark was fatuous, since he had never been anything but ‘settled down’, at least in my eyes. I could not imagine why he should specially wish to tell me about his marriage, although there could be no doubt from his manner that he was in a great state of excitement at the thought of being engaged. His nose and lips, beneath the huge headlamps of his now rimless spectacles, were twitching slightly. Lunging out towards Mrs. Haycock, who stood not far from him, he seized her arm and drew her in our direction.

‘This is Nicholas Jenkins, my dear. An old friend of mine. He was somewhat my junior at school.’

Mrs. Haycock, who had been talking to her sister, now turned and faced me, so that for the first time since she had entered the room I had an opportunity of observing closely the woman he hoped to make his wife. I could at once appreciate the strong impression she might have made on him the moment she showed herself prepared to accept him as an admirer. Tall, elegant, brassy, she was markedly of the same generation as Molly Jeavons, without personally at all resembling her. Mrs. Haycock’s moral separateness from Widmerpool, immediately noticeable, was not on account of any difference of age, as such, for—as I have said—Widmerpool had never looked young. It was a separateness imposed upon her by the war. Like Jeavons, that was the epoch to which she belonged by some natural right. Life on the Riviera had no doubt left its mark too: a society in which Widmerpool was unlikely hitherto to have participated. She retained some of her sunburn from the previous summer, and, although dressed quite normally—indeed, rather well—her clothes seemed in some indefinable manner more adapted to a plage or casino than the Jeavons drawing-room.

I had always felt an interest in what might be called the theoretical side of Widmerpool’s life: the reaction of his own emotions to the severe rule of ambition that he had from the beginning imposed upon himself: the determination that existence must be governed by the will. However, the interest one takes in the lives of other people is, at best, feeble enough, so that, knowing little of his affairs in recent years, I had in truth largely forgotten about him. Now, for the second time that evening, I recalled the night when that noisy little girl, Barbara Goring, had poured sugar over his head at the Huntercombes’ dance. He had been in love with her; and I, too, for that matter, or had thought so at the time. Then there had been his brief, painful association with Gipsy Jones, the grubby Left Wing nymph, whose ‘operation’ he had defrayed unrewarded. After the Gipsy Jones business, he had told me he would never again have anything to do with a woman who ‘took his mind off his work.’ I wondered whether Mrs. Haycock would satisfy that condition: whether he had proposed to her under stress of violent emotion, or had decided such a marriage would help his career. Perhaps there was an element of both motives; in any case, to attempt to disengage motives in marriage is a fruitless task. Mrs. Haycock took my hand, smiling absently, and gave it a good squeeze; the clutch of a woman pretty familiar with men and their ways.

‘One always has to meet such crowds of people when one gets married,’ she said, ‘It is really too, too exhausting. Did you say we had met before? Was it at Cannes? I seem to know your face.’

She spoke breathlessly, almost asthmatically, in which she resembled Widmerpool, but using that faint hint of cockney, an accent in part bequeathed by the overtones of the Prince of Wales to the world to which she belonged. I tried, quite unsuccessfully and perhaps not very tactfully, to explain the circumstances of our infinitely distant former meeting. It was plainly years since she had listened to any remarks addressed to her, either serious or trivial, so that perhaps deservedly—for the exposition was a formidable rigmarole upon which to embark at that moment—she swiftly disengaged herself from its demands.

‘I’m absolutely longing for a drink, Molly,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank you so much, Mr. Jeavons, what an angel you are. I have been having the most awful time tonight. You know I abominate making plans.. Never make them, as a matter of fact. I just won’t. Well, this evening I got caught up by one of the most awful bores you ever met.’

She drank deeply of the glass brought by Jeavons, and began telling him the story. Widmerpool took me aside.

‘Did I hear you say you had met Mildred before?’

He spoke anxiously.

‘When I was about nine or ten.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’

He sounded quite angry at this statement of mine, intended to set his mind at rest. He supposed I wanted to tease him.

‘Just what I said. It was years ago—with her sister, Mrs. Conyers, to whom you were introduced a second ago. My family have always known General Conyers.’

I hardly knew why I added this last piece of information which sounded somehow a trifle absurd and unnecessary, emphasing the fact that Widmerpool and the General would become brothers-in-law. However, Widmerpool was appeased by this amplification.

‘Quite so,’ he said. ‘Quite so.’

All at once he became abstracted in manner.

‘Look here,’ he said. ‘Come and have luncheon with me. We haven’t had a talk for a long time. What about next Sunday—at my club?’

‘All right. Thanks very much.’

The name of the club surprised me a little. There was no reason at all why he should not belong there, yet its mild suggestion of cosmopolitan life and high card stakes evoked an environment seemingly unsuited to his nature. When employed at Donners-Brebners, Widmerpool must have spent a fair amount of his time with foreign businessmen. Indeed, his professional background at that time might well have been described as international. There was nothing against him on that count. Equally, if he ever played cards, he might, for all I knew, venture high stakes. He could presumably afford such a risk. Neither of these aspects of the scene altered the sense of incongruity. To eyes that had known him as a boy, even the smallest pretension to swagger appeared, for Widmerpool, out of place. That was the point. The verdict was inescapable. Only an atmosphere of quiet hard work and dull, serious conversation were appropriate to him. Such a demand on my part, even though unvoiced, was, of course, absurd. Widmerpool’s conduct was, in any case, no concern of mine. Besides, these sentiments were utterly at variance with Widmerpool’s own view of himself; a view that would obviously play the chief part in his choice of club—or, for that matter, of wife. If such a club was inappropriate to him, how much more incongruous would be a wife like Mrs. Haycock. I could not help thinking that. We talked for a time of general matters. Later on Lovell came across the room.

‘I am giving Priscilla Tolland and her friend a lift home,’ he said. ‘Do you want to be taken as far as your flat?’

I had no difficulty in perceiving the reason for this offer and resigned myself to sitting in the back with the friend.

‘Come and see us again,’ said Molly Jeavons, when saying good-bye. ‘Make Chips bring you, or just drop in.’

‘So long, old man, come again,’ said Jeavons.

He had been standing for a long time by the drink tray, plunged in deep thought, perhaps still contemplating the subject of film stars and their varied, disturbing charms. Now he took me by the hand, as if his thoughts were far away. I followed Lovell and the girls downstairs to the car. Outside there was a hint of fog in the air. The river mist seemed to have pursued us from the Studio. Nothing of note happened on the way home. The school friend talked incessantly of the visit she was going to pay to Florence. We dropped her at an address in Wimpole Street, after disposing of Priscilla Tolland at her stepmother’s house in Hyde Park Gardens.

2

‘We might go straight in to lunch,’ said Widmerpool, when we met a day or two later. ‘If you so wish, you can drink a glass of pale sherry at the table. We are sometimes crowded at the luncheon hour. Incidentally, you will probably see the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Home Office at one table. He honours us with his presence most days—but I forgot. It is Sunday today, so that he may not be with us. I am afraid, now I come to think of it, that it is a long time since I went to church. I shall attend a service next week when I stay with my mother in the country.’

‘How is your mother?’

‘Better than ever. You know she literally grows younger. A wonderful woman.’

‘Does she still have the cottage near Hinton?’

‘It is a little small, but it suits us both. We could well afford something larger nowadays, but she loves it. Her roses are the admiration of the neighbourhood.’

‘You still see something of the Walpole-Wilsons and Sir Magnus Donners?’

‘The Walpole-Wilsons I have lost all touch with,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Sir Magnus is, of course, an old friend. Whatever his faults—some of which it would be foolish to disregard—he has rendered me in the past inestimable service. As it happens, he has not asked me over to Stourwater recently. I must ring him up. But come along. To lunch, to lunch.’

He spoke with that air of bustle that infected all his dealings. During the few seconds in which we talked he had managed to convey the sensation that we were physically too close together. More than once I edged away. He seemed all the time pressing at one’s elbow, like a waiter who breathes heavily over you as he irritably proffers a dish awkward to handle. Widmerpool, too, gave the impression of irritation, chronic irritation, as if he felt all the time that the remedy to alleviate his own annoyances lay in the hands of the people round him, who would yet at the same time take no step to relieve his mounting discomfort; for his manner conveyed always a suspicion that he knew only too well that things were almost as bad for those who were with him as for himself.

He swept me forward into the dining-room. The club steward, no doubt familiar with Widmerpool’s predispositions, indicated a table by the window, flanked on one side by two yellow-faced men conversing in suited, sing-song French: on the other, by an enormously fat old fellow who was opening his luncheon with dressed crab and half a bottle of hock. One of the men talking French I thought I recognised as the Balkan diplomatist seen at the Jeavonses and said to be of Prince Theodoric’s entourage.

‘Have anything you like to eat or drink,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Consult the menu here. Personally I am on a diet—a little gastric trouble—and shall restrict myself to cold tongue and a glass of water.’

He handed me the card, and I ordered all I decently could in the face of this frugality.

‘You are still—publishing—advertising   ?’ he asked.

‘Was it not something of the sort?’

His manner of asking personal questions was of that kind not uncommonly to be found which is completely divorced from any interest in the answer. He was always prepared to embark on a lengthy cross-examination of almost anyone he might meet, at the termination of which—apart from such details as might chance to concern himself—he had absorbed no more about the person interrogated than he knew at the outset of the conversation. At the same time this process seemed somehow to gratify his own egotism.

‘I was in publishing. Art books. Now it is the film business.’

‘Indeed? What unusual ways you choose to earn a living. Not acting, surely?’

‘Hardly. I am on what is called the “scenario side”. I help to write that part of the programme known as the “second feature”. For every foot of American film shown in this country, a proportionate length of British film must appear. The Quota, in fact.’

‘Ah, yes, the Quota, the Quota,’ said Widmerpool, cutting short any further explanation, which would certainly have been tedious enough. ‘Well, I never expected to sit at the same table as host of a man who wrote films for the Quota. Do you like the work?’

‘Not greatly.’

‘It may lead to something better. If you are industrious, you get on. That is true of all professions, even the humblest. You will probably end up in Hollywood, or somewhere like that. But tell me, do you still see those friends of yours, Stringham and Templer?’

‘Stringham I haven’t seen since the night he got so tight, and you and I helped to put him to bed. I rang up a day or two later and found he had gone abroad. From what I hear, he is drinking enough to float a battleship. There was even a question of taking a cure.’

‘And Templer?’

‘I see him occasionally. Not for rather a long time, as it happens. You know his marriage broke up?’

‘Like Stringham’s,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Your friends do not seem very fortunate in their matrimonial ventures. I run across Templer sometimes in the City. We have even done a little business together. I was able to fix up a job for Bob Duport, that rather disreputable brother-in-law of his.’

‘So I heard.’

‘Oh, he told you, did he?’ said Widmerpool, gratified at this action of his being so widely known. ‘I believe there were various repercussions from that good turn I was able to do him. For instance, Duport was living apart from his wife. He had behaved rather badly, so people say. When he got this job, the two of them patched things up again, and she went back to him. I was glad to have been the cause of that. We all three had dinner together. Rather an odd woman. Moody, I should think. She didn’t seem particularly pleased at the reunion. Not at all grateful to me, at least.’

‘Why not?’

‘I couldn’t say. She hardly spoke a word throughout the course of an extremely good dinner at the Savoy. I may say it cost me quite a lot of money. Not that I grudge it. They are in South America now, I believe. Did you ever meet either of them?’

‘Met him once with Templer when I was an undergraduate.’

‘And her?’

‘I knew her a bit. In fact I first met her ages ago when I stayed with the Templers. Peter’s father was still alive then.’

‘Not unattractive.’

‘No.’

‘Quite elegant in her way too.’

‘Yes.’

‘Too good for Duport, I should have thought.’

‘Possibly.’

Widmerpool could not have had the smallest notion of anything that had taken place between Jean Duport and myself; but people are aware of things like this within themselves without knowing of their own awareness. In any case, conscious or unconscious, Widmerpool had the knack of treading on the corns of others. His next question seemed to show the extraordinary telepathic connection of ideas that so often takes place in the mind when anything in the nature of being in love is concerned.

‘You are not married yourself, are you, Nicholas?’

‘No.’

‘Not—like me—about to take the plunge?’

‘I haven’t properly congratulated you yet.’

Widmerpool bowed his head in acknowledgment. The movement could almost have been called gracious. He beamed across the table. At that moment the prospect of marriage seemed all he could desire.

‘I do not mind informing you that my lady mother thinks well of my choice,’ he said.

There was no answer to that beyond agreeing that Mrs. Widmerpool’s approval was gratifying. If Mrs. Haycock could face such a mother-in-law, one hurdle at least—and no minor one, so it seemed to me—had been cleared.

‘There are, of course, a few small matters my mother will expect to be satisfactorily arranged.’

‘I expect so.’

‘But Mildred will fall in with these, I am sure.’

I thought the two of them, Mrs. Widmerpool and Mrs. Haycock, were probably worthy of the other’s steel. Perhaps Widmerpool, in his heart, thought so too, for his face clouded over slightly, after the first look of deep satisfaction. He fell into silence. When pondering a matter of importance to himself, his jaws would move up and down as if consuming some immaterial substance. Although he had finished his slices of tongue, this movement now began. I guessed that he intended to pose some question, the precise form of which he could not yet decide. The men with yellow faces at the next table were talking international politics.

‘C’est incontestable, cher ami, Hitler a renonce a son intention d’engouffrer l’Autriche par une agression directe.’

‘A mon avis—et d’ailleurs je l’ai toujours dit—la France avait tort de s’opposer a I’union douaniere en ’31.’

The fat man had moved on to steak-and-kidney pudding, leeks and mashed potato, with a green salad. Widmerpool cleared his throat. Something was on his mind. He began in a sudden burst of words.

‘I had a special reason for inviting you to lunch today, Nicholas. I wanted to speak of my engagement. But it is not easy for me to explain in so many words what I desire to say.’

He spoke sententiously, breaking off abruptly. I had an uneasy feeling, unlikely as this would be, that he might be about to ask me to act as best man at his wedding. I began to think of excuses to avoid such a duty. However, it turned out he had no such intention. It seemed likely, on second thoughts, that he wanted to discuss seriously some matter regarding himself which he feared might, on ventilation, cause amusement. Certainly I found it difficult to take his engagement seriously. There is, for some reason, scarcely, any subject more difficult to treat with gravity if you are not yourself involved. Obviously two people were contemplating a step which would affect their future lives in the most powerful manner; and yet the outward appearance of the two of them, and Widmerpool’s own self-sufficiency, made it impossible to consider the matter without inner amusement.

‘Years ago I told you I was in love with Barbara Goring,’ said Widmerpool slowly.

‘I remember.’

‘Barbara is a thing of the past. I want her entirely forgotten.’

‘Why not? I shan’t stand up at your wedding and say: “This ceremony cannot continue—the bridegroom once loved another!”.’

‘Quite so, quite so,’ said Widmerpool, grunting out a laugh. ‘You are absolutely right to make a joke of it. At the same time, I thought I should mention my feelings on that subject. One cannot be too careful.’

‘And I presume you want Gipsy Jones forgotten too?’

Widmerpool flushed.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘She too, of course.’

His complacency seemed to me at that time intolerable. Now, I can see he required only to discuss his own situation with someone he had known for a long period, who was at the same time not too closely associated with his current life. For that role I was peculiarly eligible. More than once before, he had told me of his emotional upheavals—it was only because of that I knew so much about Barbara Goring and Gipsy Jones—and, when a confessor has been chosen, the habit is hard to break. At the same time, his innate suspicion of everyone inhibited even his taste for talking about himself.

‘Mildred is, of course, rather older than I,’ he said.

I felt in some manner imprisoned by his own self-preoccupation. He positively forced one to agree that his own affairs were intensly important: indeed, the only existing question of any real interest. At the same time his intense egoism somehow dried up all sympathy for him. Clearly there was much about his present circumstances that made him nervous. That was, after all, natural enough for anyone contemplating marriage. Yet there seemed more here than the traditionally highly-strung state of a man who has only lately proposed and been accepted. I remembered that he had never asked Barbara Goring to marry him, because in those days he was not rich enough to marry. He read my thoughts, as people do when their intuition is sharpened by intensity of interest excited by discussing themselves.

‘She was left with a bit of money by Haycock,’ he said. ‘Though her financial affairs are in an appalling mess.’

‘I see.’

‘How long have you known Lady Molly?’

‘That was the first night I had been there.’

‘I wish I had known her in the great days,’ he said. ‘I cannot say that I greatly care for the atmosphere of her present home.’

‘You would prefer Dogdene?’

‘I believe that in many ways Dogdene was far from ideally run either,’ said Widmerpool curtly. ‘But at least it provided a suitable background for a grande dame. Mildred is a friend of the present Lady Sleaford, so that I dare say in due course I shall be able to judge how Lady Molly must have looked there.’

This manner of describing Molly Jeavons somehow affronted me, not so much from disagreement, or on account of its pretentious sound, but because I had not myself given Widmerpool credit for thus estimating her qualities, even in his own crude terms. I was, indeed, surprised that he did not dismiss her as a failure, noting at the same time his certainty of invitation to Dogdene. From what Chips Lovell used to say on that subject, I was not sure that Widmerpool might not be counting his chickens before they were hatched.

‘It is because of Dogdene, as you know yourself, that Mildred is such an old friend of Lady Molly’s. Perhaps not a very close friend, but they have known each other a long time.’

‘Yes?’

I could not guess what he was getting at.

‘In fact we first met at Lady Molly’s.’

‘I see.’

‘Mildred is—how shall I put it—a woman of the world like Lady Molly—but—well—hardly with Lady Molly’s easy-going manner of looking at things—I don’t mean that exactly—in some ways Mildred is very easy-going—but she likes her own way—and—in her own manner—takes life rather seriously—’

He suddenly began to look wretched, much as I had often seen him look as a schoolboy: lonely: awkward: unpopular: odd; no longer the self-confident business-man into which he had grown. His face now brought back the days when one used to watch him plodding off through the drizzle to undertake the long, solitary runs across the dismal fields beyond the sewage farms: runs which were to train him for teams in which he was never included. His jaws ceased to move up and down. He drank off a second glass of water.

‘Anyway, you know General and Mrs. Conyers,’ he said.

He added this rather lamely, as if he lacked strength of mind to pursue the subject upon which he hoped to embark.