A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [19]
All the time he was reading the menu, Tompsitt smiled to himself, as if exceedingly content to exist in a world from which most, if not all, surrounding distractions had been effectively eliminated. It had to be agreed that there was some forcefulness in his complete disregard for the rest of the party. Lady Walpole-Wilson began to look rather despairing. Widmerpool, on the other hand, seemed to share, as if by instinct, Sir Gavin’s approbation for Tompsitt, or at least felt distinct interest in his personality, because after a time he ceased to give his views on the Horse in Sculpture, and cast several searching glances down the table. Sir Gavin, whose conversation was habitually diversified by a murmur of “m’m … m’m…m’m…” repeated under his breath while his interlocutor was speaking—a technique designed to discourage over-long disquisitions on the other side—did no more than nod approvingly at Tompsitt. For the first few minutes of dinner Sir Gavin had contrived to monopolise the conversation of the girls he sat between. Now, however, he concentrated more particularly on Miss Manasch, from whom, with much laughter and by-play on his part, he appeared to be attempting to extract certain concrete opinions supposedly held by her father regarding the expansion of the Donners-Brebner Company in the Balkans. His attitude suggested that he also found Miss Manasch rather unusually attractive physically.
Now that the small, though appreciable, disturbance caused by Tompsitt’s entry had finally settled down, the moment had come for some sort of conversational skirmish to begin between Lady Anne Stepney and myself. Ever since we had been introduced, I had been wondering why her name suggested some episode in the past: an incident vaguely unsatisfactory or disturbing. The mention of Donners-Brebner now reminded me that, the uneasy recollections were in connection with this girl’s sister, Peggy, whom Stringham on that night years before at the Donners-Brebner building had spoken, perhaps not very seriously, of marrying. In fact, I remembered now that he had been on his way to dinner with their parents, the Bridgnorths. That was the last time I had seen Stringham; it must have been—I tried to remember—four or five years before. The link seemed to provide a suitable topic to broach.
“Have you ever come across someone called Charles Stringham? I think he knows your sister.”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “one of Peggy’s pompous friends, isn’t he?”
I found this a staggering judgment. There were all kinds of things to be said against Stringham’s conduct—he could be offhand, even thoroughly bad-mannered—but “pompous” was the last adjective in the world I ever expected to hear applied to him. It occurred to me, a second later, that she used the word with specialised meaning; or perhaps—this was most probable—merely intended to imply that her sister and Stringham were asked to grander parties than herself. Possibly she became aware that her remark had surprised me, because she added: “I hope he isn’t a great friend of yours.”
I was about to reply that Stringham was, indeed, a “great friend” of mine, when I remembered that by now this description could scarcely be held to be true, since I had not seen nor heard of him for so long that I had little or no idea what he was doing with himself; and, for all I knew, he might almost have forgotten my existence. I had to admit to myself that, for my own part, I had not thought much about him either, since we had last met; though this sudden realisation that we now barely knew one another was, for a moment, oddly painful. In any