A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [18]
“You can’t very well have him sitting at his desk,” said Sir Gavin, bluffly, “though I expect that was where he spent a good deal of his time. When I saw him in Paris at the time of the Conference—”
“Why shouldn’t he be on a horse?” demanded Eleanor, angrily. “He used to ride one, didn’t he?”
“We all agree that he used to ride one,” said Widmerpool, indulgently this time. “And that, if commemoration is to take the form proposed, the Field-Marshal should certainly be represented mounted on his charger. I should have supposed there was no doubt upon that point.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Pardoe, shooting out his moustache once more. “Why not put him in a staff-car? You could have the real thing, with his flag flying at the bonnet.”
“Of course if you want to make a joke of it …” said Eleanor, casting a look of great contempt in Pardoe’s direction.
Archie Gilbert and Margaret Budd appeared to hold no strong convictions regarding the statue. Miss Manasch made the practical suggestion that they should pay off the sculptor of the work under discussion, if—as it certainly appeared—this had not met with general approval, and make a fresh start with another candidate who might provide something of a more popular nature.
“I think they ought to have got Mestroviç in the first place,” said Lady Anne, coldly, during the silence that followed Miss Manasch’s proposal.
This unexpected opinion was plainly issued as a challenge; but controversy regarding the memorial was now cut short by the sudden arrival in the dining-room of Tompsitt.
After somewhat perfunctory apology for his lateness, he sat down between Lady Walpole-Wilson and Margaret Budd, though without taking a great deal of notice of either of them. Lady Walpole-Wilson shot him a look to suggest her collusion in his apparent inclination to assume that the time for regrets and excuses was now long past; though her glance was also no doubt intended to urge—even to plead with—him to make amends best by showing himself agreeable to his neighbour, since Eleanor had relapsed into further argument that demanded Widmerpool’s close attention, leaving Margaret Budd, for all her beauty, high and dry so far as personal attention was concerned.
However, now that he had arrived, formal conversation seemed the last thing to which Tompsitt was at all disposed. He smiled across the table to Barbara, who had crooked her finger at him as he entered the room. Then, picking up the menu, he studied it carefully. The card was inscribed for some reason—probably because she had looked in at tea-time and Eleanor hated the job—in Barbara’s own scratchy, laborious hand that I knew so well; not because I had ever received many letters from her in the course of our relationship, but on account of the fact that such scrawled notes as I possessed used to live for months in my pocket, seeming to retain in their paper and ink some atom of Barbara herself to be preserved and secreted until our next meeting. I wondered whether that schoolgirl script breathed any such message to Tompsitt, as it broke the news that he was about to eat the identical meal he must have consumed at every dinner-party—if given specifically for a London dance—that he had ever attended.
He was a large, fair young man, with unbrushed hair and a grey smudge on the left-hand side of his shirt-front: cramming for—perhaps by then even admitted to—the Foreign Office. Sir Gavin held strong views on “broadening the basis” of the selection of candidates for governmental service, and he took an interest in Tompsitt as prototype of a newer and less constricted vehicle for handling foreign affairs. Certainly Tompsitt’s appearance was calculated to dispose effectually of the myth, dear to the public mind, of the “faultlessly dressed diplomat,” and he had been educated—the details were elusive—in some manner not absolutely conventional: though his air of incivility that so delighted Sir Gavin could no doubt have been inculcated with at least equal success at any public school. It was perhaps fair to regard him a young man rather different from