The kindly ones (24 page)

‘Absolutely.’

‘After all, it is I who am getting married, not they.’

‘Of course.’

‘They can mind their own business, what?’

‘Certainly.’

‘That’s a thing no one likes to do.’

General Conyers laughed very heartily at this thought of the horrible destiny pursuing his critics, that they would have to mind their own business, most dreaded of predicaments.

‘So I should like you to stay and meet my future wife,’ he said.

I wondered what my parents were going to say to this. From their point of view it would be the final nail in the coffin of Aylmer Conyers. There was nothing of which they would more disapprove. At that moment the front-door bell rang.

‘Forgive me,’ said the General, ‘as I explained before, I have no longer any domestic staff.’

He went off to open the door. I heard a woman’s voice in the hall; soft laughter, as if at a too violent embrace. I thought how furious Uncle Giles would have been had he lived to hear that General Conyers was contemplating remarriage. Certainly the news was unexpected enough. I wondered who on earth was going to appear. A succession of possibilities, both ludicrous and conventional, presented themselves to the mind: ash-blondes of seventeen; red-wigged, middle-aged procuresses, on the lines of Mrs Erdleigh; silver-haired, still palely-beautiful widows of defunct soldiers, courtiers, noblemen. I even toyed for a moment with the fantasy that the slight asperity that had always existed between the General and my sister-in-law, Frederica, might really have concealed love, dismissing such a possibility almost as soon as it took shape. Even that last expectation scarcely came up to the reality. I could not have guessed it in a million years. A tall, dark, beaky-nosed lady of about fifty came into the room. I rose. She was distinctly well dressed, with a businesslike, rather than frivolous, air.

‘We have often met before,’ she said, holding out her hand.

It was Miss Weedon.

‘At Lady Molly’s,’ she said, ‘and long before that too.’

The General took my arm between his forefinger and thumb, as if about to break it neatly just above the elbow with one sharp movement of his wrist.

‘So you know each other already?’ he said, not absolutely sure he was pleased by that fact. ‘I might have guessed you would have met with Molly Jeavons. I’d forgotten she was an aunt of Isobel’s.’

‘But we knew each other in much more distant days as well,’ said Miss Weedon, speaking in a gayer tone than I had ever heard her use before.

She looked enormously delighted at what was happening to her.

‘I ran into Jeavons the other day in Sloane Street,’ said General Conyers. ‘Have you seen him lately, Nick?’

‘Not for a month or two. There has been such a lot to do about Isobel going to the country and so on. We haven’t been to Molly’s house for ages. How are they?’

‘Jeavons is an air-raid warden,’ said the General. ‘We had quite a talk. I like Jeavons. Don’t know him well. Hear some people complain he is a bore. I don’t think so. He put me on to a first-rate place to buy cheap shirts many years ago. Shopped there ever since.’

‘I believe Lady Molly is going back to Dogdene,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘They have evacuated a girls’ school to the house. She may help to run it – not teach, of course. How strange to return after being châtelaine of the place.’

‘Of course, she was once married to that pompous fellow, John Sleaford, wasn’t she?’ said the General. ‘One forgets things. Sleaford must be dead these twenty years. How King Edward abominated him.’

‘I don’t think the present marchioness will be too pleased to find her former sister-in-law in residence at Dogdene again,’ said Miss Weedon, with one of those icy, malicious smiles I well remembered. ‘Lady Molly has always been so funny about what she calls “the latest Dogdene economy”.’

‘Poor Alice Sleaford,’ said the General. ‘You must not be unkind to her, Geraldine.’

I had never before heard Miss Weedon addressed as ‘Geraldine’. When secretary to Stringham’s mother, Mrs Foxe, she had always been ‘Tuffy’. That was what Molly Jeavons called her, too. I wanted to ask about Stringham, but, in the existing circumstances, hesitated to do so. As bride of General Conyers, Miss Weedon had suddenly become such a very different sort of person, almost girlish in her manner, far from the Medusa she had once been designated by Moreland. At the same time, she still retained some of her secretary’s formality in speaking of people. However, she herself must have decided that her present position would be weakened, rather than strengthened, by all avoidance of the subject of Stringham, which, certain to turn up sooner or later, was best put at once on a solid basis. She now raised it herself.

‘I expect you want to hear about Charles,’ she said, very cheerfully.

‘Of course. How is he?’

‘Quite all right now.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Charles is the fellow you were helping to look after his mother’s house, is he?’ asked General Conyers, speaking with that small touch of impatience, permissible, even to be applauded, in the light of his own engagement. ‘You knew Charles Stringham, did you, Nicholas? At school with him, were you? I hear he drank too much, but has given it up. Good thing.’

‘Is he still at Glimber?’

‘Glimber has been taken over as an evacuated government office. Charles is in London now, looking for a job. He wants to get into the army. Of course his health isn’t very good, even though he has stopped drinking. It isn’t going to be easy. There have been money troubles too. His father died in Kenya and left such money as he had to his French wife. Mrs Foxe is not nearly so rich as she was. Commander Foxe is so terribly extravagant. He has gone back to the navy, of course.’

‘Good old Buster.’

Miss Weedon laughed. She deeply detested Buster Foxe.

‘Nicholas wants to get into the army too,’ said General Conyers, anxious to dismiss the subject of Stringham and his relations. ‘He is also having difficulties. Didn’t you say so, Nicholas? Now, tell me, don’t I remember a former servant of your parents manages a hotel somewhere? Some seaside place. Very good cook, wasn’t he? I remember his soufflés. Thought we might perhaps honeymoon at his hotel. Not going to make it a long affair. Just a week or ten days. Quite enough.’

‘They have probably requisitioned the place. I was down there a month or two ago for Uncle Giles’s funeral.’

‘Saw his death in the paper. Made rather a mess of his life, didn’t he? Don’t think I set eyes on him since a week or two before the earlier war broke out.’

‘Do you remember Dr Trelawney? He was staying in the hotel.’

‘That old scoundrel. Was he, indeed? How is he?’

‘He got locked in the bathroom.’

‘Did he, did he?’ said the General thoughtfully. ‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True … may be something in it. Always meant to go and have a look at Trelawney on his own ground … all that stuff about the Astral Plane …’

He pondered; then, with an effort, brought himself back to earth, when I said that I must be going.

‘Sorry not to have been more use about your own problem, Nick. Have another talk with your father. Better still, get some young fellow to help you. No good trying too high up. Somebody quite junior, like a lieutenant-colonel. That’s the kind of fellow. Very nice to have seen you. You must come and visit us after we get back. Don’t know where we shall go yet.’

I left them together, discussing that question, Miss Weedon still looking immensely pleased about everything. As the flat door closed, I heard her laughter, now quite shrill, begin again. She had reason to be pleased. Stringham, so it appeared, had been cured by her of ‘drink’; now she had captured General Conyers. The one achievement was as remarkable as the other. They were perhaps not so disparate as might at first sight appear. There was a kind of dash about Stringham comparable with the General’s manner of facing the world; at the same time, the General’s advanced age, like Stringham’s taste for the bottle, gave Miss Weedon something ponderable upon which to exercise her talent for ‘looking after’ people, her taste, in short, for power. General Conyers had seemed as enchanted with Miss Weedon as she with him. I wondered what other men – in addition to Stringham – had been ‘in her life’, as Mrs Erdleigh would have said; what, for that matter, had been Miss Weedon’s true relationship with Stringham. One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

‘Valery asks why one has been summoned to this carnival,’ Moreland once said, ‘but it’s more like blind man’s buff. One reels through the carnival in question, blundering into persons one can’t see, and, without much success, trying to keep hold of a few of them.’

There could be no doubt that General Conyers had taken on a formidable woman; equally no doubt that he was a formidable man. If he could handle Billson naked, he could probably handle Miss Weedon clothed – or naked, too, if it came to that. I felt admiration for his energy, his determination to cling to life. There was nothing defeatist about him. However, my parents, as I had expected, were not at all pleased by the news. They had, of course, never heard of Miss Weedon. The engagement was, indeed, quite a shock to them. In fact, the whole affair made my father very cross. Now that Uncle Giles was no more, he may have felt himself permitted a greater freedom of expression in openly criticising General Conyers. He did so in just the terms the General had himself envisaged.

‘No fool like an old fool,’ my father said. ‘I shouldn’t have believed it of him, Bertha hardly cold in her grave.’

‘I hope he hasn’t made a silly mistake,’ said my mother. ‘I like old Aylmer, with all his funny ways of behaving.’

‘Very awkward for his daughter too. Why, some of his grandchildren must be almost grown up.’

‘Oh, no,’ said my mother, who loved accuracy in such matters, ‘not grown up.’

‘Where did he meet this woman?’

‘I really don’t know.’

It turned out later that General Conyers had sat next to Miss Weedon at a concert some months before the outbreak of war. They had fallen into conversation. Finding they knew many people in common, they had arranged to meet at another concert the following week. That was how their friendship had begun. In short, General Conyers had ‘picked up’ Miss Weedon. There was no denying it. It was a true romance.

‘Adventures only happen to adventurers,’ Mr Deacon had said one evening when we were sitting drinking in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.

‘That depends on what one calls adventurers,’ said Moreland, who was in a hair-splitting mood. ‘What you mean, Edgar, is that people to whom adventures happen are never wholly unadventurous. That is not the same thing. It’s the latter class who have the real adventures – people like oneself.’

‘Don’t be pedantic, Moreland,’ Mr Deacon had answered.

Certainly General Conyers was not unadventurous. Was he an adventurer? I considered his advice about the army. Then the answer came to me. I must get in touch with Widmerpool. I wondered why I had not thought of that earlier. I telephoned to his office. They put me through to a secretary.

‘Captain Widmerpool is embodied,’ she said in an unfriendly voice.

I could tell from her tone, efficient, charmless, unimaginative, that she had been given special instructions by Widmerpool himself to use the term ’embodied’ in describing his military condition. I asked where he was to be found. It was a secret. At last, not without pressure on my own part, she gave me a telephone number. This turned out to be that of his Territorial battalion’s headquarters. I rang him up.

‘Come and see me by all means, my boy,’ he boomed down the wire in a new, enormously hearty voice, ‘but bring your own beer. There won’t be much I can do for you. I’m up to my arse in bumph and don’t expect I shall be able to spare you more than a minute or two for waffling.’

I was annoyed by the phrase ‘bring your own beer’, also by being addressed as ‘my boy’ by Widmerpool. They were terms he had never, so to speak, earned the right to use, certainly not to me. However, I recognised that a world war was going to produce worse situations than Widmerpool’s getting above himself and using a coarsely military boisterousness of tone to which his civilian personality could make no claim. I accepted his invitation; he named a time. The following day, after finishing my article for the paper and looking at some books I had to review, I set out for the Territorial headquarters, which was situated in a fairly inaccessible district of London. I reached there at last, feeling in the depths of gloom. Entry into the most arcane recesses of the Secret Service could not have been made more difficult. Finally an NCO admitted me to Widmerpool’s presence. He was sitting, surrounded by files, in a small, horribly stuffy office, which was at the same time freezingly cold. I was still unused to the sight of him in uniform. He looked anything but an army officer – a railway official, perhaps, of some obscure country.

‘Been left in charge of details consequent on the unit’s move to a training area,’ he said brusquely, as I entered the room. ‘Suppose I shouldn’t have told you that. Security – security – and then security. Everyone must learn that. Well, my lad, what can I do for you? You need not stand. Take a pew.’

I sat on a kitchen chair with a broken back, and outlined my situation.

‘The fact is,’ said Widmerpool, glaring through his spectacles and puffing out his cheeks, as if rehearsing a tremendous blowing up he was going to give some subordinate in the very near future, ‘you ought to have joined the Territorials before war broke out.’

‘I know.’

‘No good just entering your name on the Reserve.’

‘There were difficulties about age.’

‘Only after you’d left it too late.’

‘It was only a matter of months.’

‘Never mind. Think how long I’ve been a Territorial officer. You should have looked ahead.’

‘You said there wasn’t going to be a war after “Munich”.’

‘You thought there was, so you were even more foolish.’

There was truth in that.

‘I only want to know the best thing to do,’ I said.