The kindly ones (26 page)

‘I didn’t say us, I said
me.’

‘You then?’

‘Of course it would have mattered. It would have been disastrous.’

‘Why?’

‘How can you ask such a question? There are all kind of reasons why it should matter. You know something of my past with that woman. Can’t you understand how painful the sight of her is to me? Besides, you heard what she was shouting. She is a Communist. Did you not understand what the words meant? Your denseness is unbelievable. She is attacking the prosecution of the war. Haven’t you grasped that Russia is now Hitler’s ally? Suppose that woman had suddenly addressed herself to me. That would have been a fine thing. You don’t realise what it means to be in an official position. Let me explain. I am not only an army officer, I am a man with heavy responsibilities. I have been left in charge of a headquarters. I have access to all kind of secret documents. You would not guess the nature of some of them. What if she had been seen speaking to me? Have you ever heard of M.I.5? What if its agents had seen us conversing? There may well have been one of them among the crowd. Such meetings are quite rightly kept under supervision by the contra-espionage department.’

I could think of no answer. Although Widmerpool’s view of himself as a man handling weighty state secrets was beyond belief in its absurdity, I felt at the same time that I had myself shown lack of feeling in treating so lightly his former love for Gypsy Jones. Love is at once always absurd and never absurd; the more grotesque its form, the more love itself confers a certain dignity on the circumstances of those it torments. No doubt Widmerpool had been through a searing experience with Gypsy Jones, an experience even now by no means forgotten. That could be the only explanation of such an outburst. I had rarely seen him so full of indignation. He had paused for breath. Now, his reproaches began again.

‘You come and ask me for advice about getting into the army, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘and because I spare the time to talk of such things – make time, when my duty lies by rights elsewhere – you think I have nothing more serious to occupy me than your own trivial problems. That is not the case. The General Staff of the Wehrmacht would be only too happy to possess even a tithe of the information I locked away before we quitted the Orderly Room.’

‘I don’t doubt it. I realise you are busy. It was kind of you to see me.’

Widmerpool was a little placated. Perhaps he also feared that, if he went too far in his reproofs, I might excuse myself from accompanying him to the Jeavonses’. He tapped me with his stick.

‘Don’t worry further about your remarks,’ he said. ‘The sight of that woman upset me, especially behaving as she was. Did you hear her language? Besides, I have been overworking as usual. You feel the strain at unexpected moments.’

He made no further comment. We found a bus, which transported us in due course to the neighbourhood of the Jeavons house in South Kensington. The bell was not answered for a long time. We waited outside the faintly Dutch edifice with its over ornamented dark red brick facade.

‘I expect Mother has preceded us,’ said Widmerpool.

He was better now, though still not wholly recovered from the sight of Gypsy Jones. The door was opened at last by Jeavons himself. His appearance took me by surprise. Instead of the usual ancient grey suit, he was wearing a blue one-piece overall and a beret. Some people – as General Conyers had remarked – considered Jeavons a bore. Such critics had a case, undeniably, when he was sunk in one of his impenetrable silences, or, worse still, was trying, in a momentary burst of energy, to make some money by selling one of those commodities generically described by Chips Lovell as ‘an automatic boot-jack or infallible cure for the common cold’. To find Jeavons in the latter state was rare, the former, fairly frequent. Even apart from his war wound, Jeavons was not at all fitted for commercial employments. He had hardly done a stroke of work since marrying Molly. His wife did not mind that. Indeed, she may have preferred Jeavons to be dependent on her. Whatever some of her relations may have thought at the time of her marriage, it had turned out a success – allowing for the occasional ‘night out’ on Jeavons’s part, like the one when he had taken me to Dicky Umfraville’s night-club.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘How’s your war going? It’s touch and go whether we’re winning ours. Stanley’s here, and a lady who has come to see about lodging Stanley’s missus in the country. Then Molly met a fellow at Sanderson’s who was trying to find a home for his cat, and she’s gone and asked him to stay. The man, I mean, not the cat.’

‘The lady who has come about moving your – is it sister-in-law? – is my mother,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I spoke to you on the telephone about it. I am Kenneth Widmerpool, you know. We have met in the past.’

‘So you did,’ said Jeavons, ‘and so we have. It went out of my head like most other things. I thought Nick had just come to call and brought a friend. You can talk to Molly about it all when she comes downstairs, but I think your Mum has pretty well fixed everything up as it is.’

Jeavons’s voice, hoarse and faint, sounded as usual as if he had a cold in his head or had been up too late the night before. He seemed restive, disorientated, but in good form.

‘Who is Stanley?’ I asked.

‘Who’s Stanley?’ said Jeavons. ‘My brother, of course. Who did you think he was?’

‘Never knew you had a brother, Ted.’

‘Course I’ve got a brother.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Accountant.’

‘In London?’

‘Nottingham. Given it up now, of course. Back to the army. Staff-Captain at the War House. Fancy your never having heard of Stanley. No reason why you should, I suppose. Still, it strikes me as funny. Rather a great man, Stanley, in his way. Gets things done.’

Among so much that was depressing, the news that Jeavons had a brother was for some reason cheering. It was certainly information to fascinate Isobel, when I next saw her, even to stagger Chips Lovell, who, regarding himself as an authority on his wife’s relations, had certainly never heard of this outgrowth. Jeavons was known only to possess two or three vague connexions, sometimes to be found staying in the house, though never precisely placed in their kinship, in any case always hopelessly submerged in number by his wife’s cousins, nephews and nieces. He had had, it was true, an old aunt, or great-aunt, to whom Molly was said to have been ‘very good’, who had lingered on in the house for months suffering from some illness, finally dying in one of the upstairs rooms. A Jeavons brother was quite another matter, a phenomenon of wartime circumstances. Jeavons, his dark, insistently curly hair now faintly speckled with grey, had himself taken on a subtly different personality since the onset of war. After all, war was the element which had, in a sense, made his career. Obviously he reacted strongly to its impacts. Until now his appearance had always suggested a temporary officer of the ’14-’18 conflict, who had miraculously survived, without in the least ageing, into a much later epoch. The blue overall changed all that. Jeavons had also allowed his Charlie Chaplin moustache to grow outwards towards the corners of his mouth. With his own curious adaptability and sense of survival, he had effortlessly discarded what was in any case no more than a kind of disguise, now facing the world in the more contemporary role, equally artificial, of the man who had come to clean the windows or mend the boiler. We moved up the stairs.

‘Met one of Isobel’s uncles at the warden-post the other night,’ said Jeavons. ‘Alfred Tolland, the one Molly always teases.’

‘How was he?’

‘We had a talk about how difficult it is for people with daughters to bring ’em out properly in wartime,’ Jeavons said.

He spoke without levity. Although he remained always utterly himself, Jeavons, after twenty years of marriage to Molly, had taken on much of his wife’s way of looking at things. It would be more true to say the way the world into which she had been born looked at things, for Molly herself would probably have given little thought to how daughters were to be ‘brought out’ in wartime, even had she any daughters of her own. All the same, she would recognise that, to some people, the matter constituted a problem. Jeavons, who had never made the smallest effort to adopt that world’s manner of talking, its way of dressing, its general behaviour, had at the same time, quite objectively, absorbed certain of its traditional opinions, whether his wife held them or not. Alfred Tolland, for example, had probably found in Jeavons an unusually sympathetic listener to his – no doubt antediluvian – views on how young ladies should conduct themselves or be conducted, certainly more sympathetic than he would ever have found in Molly herself. The fact that Jeavons had no daughters, had no children at all, would never have prevented him from holding strong views on the subject.

‘Take my advice, don’t give up your home-farm,’ Chips Lovell had once heard Jeavons say to Lord Amesbury, admittedly a fairly formidable figure to counsel when it came to discussing the economics of estate management. ‘Eddie Bridgnorth gave up his and never ceased to regret it.’

To have prefaced this recommendation with the avowal that he himself came from a walk of life where people did not own home-farms would have seemed to Jeavons otiose, wearisome, egoistical. Everything about him, he knew, proclaiming that fact, he would have regarded such personal emphasis as in the worst of taste, as well as being without interest. Marriage to Molly had given him opportunities to see how a lot of hitherto unfamiliar forms of life worked. He had developed certain opinions, was prepared to give evidence. Home-farms fell into that category. The notion that he might be trying to pass himself off as a fellow-owner of a home-farm would have seemed to Jeavons laughable. Whether or not Jeavons’s advice tipped the scale was never known, but Chips Lovell reported that Lord Amesbury did not sell, so that he may have been convinced by this objectivity of reasoning. Perhaps it was of such matters that Jeavons was thinking when he would stand for hours in the corner of the drawing-room at one of Molly’s parties for young people (when the rugs would be turned back and they would dance to the gramophone), smiling to himself, gently clinking the money in his pocket.

‘Do help with the drinks, Teddy, dear,’ his wife would say on such occasions. ‘Are you feeling all right or is it your inside again?’

Then Jeavons would move like a sleep-walker towards the bottles.

‘What’s it going to be?’ he would mutter, almost beneath his breath. ‘Rotten tunes they always play nowadays.’

However, although Widmerpool had shown signs of restiveness at our too long delay in the hall, Jeavons was far from one of those comatose, stagnant moods that evening. There could be no doubt that the war had livened him up. He felt at home within its icy grasp. The house was more untidy than ever, the hall, as usual, full of luggage. I noticed that the marquetry cabinet bequeathed by Lady Warminster had reached no farther than the foot of the stairs. Some of the heavier pictures had been taken from their hooks and rested against the wall. Packing cases and trunks were everywhere.

‘People keep on arriving for a night or two,’ said Jeavons. ‘Place might be a doss-house. Of course, Stanley is only here until he can fix himself up. Then Molly must bring this other fellow to stay. Seems a nice bloke. She had to go and see the vet. No avoiding that. Can’t fight a war with quite the number of dogs and cats we normally have in the house. Got to find homes for them.’

‘What happened to Maisky, your pet monkey?’

‘Rather a sad story,’ said Jeavons, but did not enlarge.

The conditions he described were less abnormal here than they would have been in most households. Indeed, war seemed to have accelerated, exaggerated, rather than changed, the Jeavons way of life. The place was always in a mess. Mess there was endemic. People were always coming for a night or two, sometimes for much longer periods. There were always suitcases in the hall, always debris, untidiness, confusion everywhere. That was the way Molly liked to live, possibly her method of recovering from the tedium of married life with John Sleaford. Jeavons, whether he liked it or not, was dragged along in her train. No doubt he liked it, too, otherwise he would have left her, for no one could have stood such an existence unless reasonably sympathetic to him at heart. The sight of Jeavons’s brother sitting on the sofa beside Mrs Widmerpool brought home to one the innate eccentricity of Jeavons. This man in uniform, with a captain’s pips and three ‘First War’ ribbons, was recognisable as a brother more from build than any great similarity of feature. He was far more anonymous than Jeavons: older, solider, greyer, quieter, in general more staid. When you saw Stanley Jeavons, you recognised the adventurer in Ted. I thought of Moreland’s emendation, the distinction he drew between adventurers and those not wholly unadventurous, to both of which categories adventures happened – to the latter, perhaps, more than the former. Jeavons, although tending to play a passive role, could not be said to have led an entirely unadventurous life; perhaps one could go further, say without qualification that Jeavons was an adventurer. There was no time to think longer of such things at that moment, because Jeavons was making some kind of introduction.

‘Stanley’s a brass-hat now,’ he said. ‘God, how we used to hate the staff in our war, Stan, didn’t we? Fancy your ending up one of that mob.’

As we came into the room, Mrs Widmerpool had at once bared her teeth in a smile to indicate that we had met before. I was about to speak to her, when she jumped to her feet and seized Widmerpool by the shoulders, unable to allow Jeavons the undivided honour of presenting him to his brother.

‘My soldier son,’ she said, nodding delightedly like a Japanese doll.

‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Mother,’ said Widmerpool.

He grinned back happily at her through his spectacles, his composure, lately so shattered by Gypsy Jones, now completely restored. Mrs Widmerpool returned to the sofa, continuing to nurse on her knee a cardboard box, which at first I thought might be some sort of present she had brought Widmerpool, but recognised a second later as her gas-mask, carried with her into the drawing-room. She looked, as her son had described her a year earlier, ‘younger than ever’. She was squarely built, her heavy, nearly classical nose set between cheeks shining and pink like an apple. She wore a thick tweed suit and a tweed hat with a peak. Stanley Jeavons, who seemed rather glad to be absolved from talking to her further for the time being, turned his attention to Widmerpool.