A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [33]
“Off to get my bonnet and shawl,” she remarked, delighted that for her, at least, another dance was at an end.
I handed in the ticket, and was waiting while they looked for my hat, when Widmerpool himself appeared from the back regions of the house. He, and no doubt others too, had engaged in a thorough scouring of his person and clothes, most of, the sugar having been by now removed, though a few grains still glistened round the button-hole of his silk lapel. He appeared also to have recovered his normal self-possession, such as it was. One of the servants handed him an opera hat, which he opened with a sharp crepitation, placing it on his head at a tilt as we went down the steps together. The night was a little cooler, though still mild enough.
“Which way do you go?” he asked.
“Piccadilly.”
“Are you taxi-ing?”
“I thought I might walk.”
“It sounds as if you lived in a rather expensive area,” said Widmerpool, assuming that judicial air which I remembered from France.
“Shepherd Market. Quite cheap, but rather noisy.”
“A flat?”
“Rooms—just beside an all-night garage and opposite a block of flats inhabited almost exclusively by tarts.”
“How convenient,” said Widmerpool; rather insincerely, I suspected.
“One of them threw a lamp out of her window the other night.”
“I go towards Victoria,” said Widmerpool.
He had evidently heard enough of a subject that might reasonably be regarded as an unpleasant one, because the local prostitutes were rowdy and aggressive: quite unlike the sad sisterhood of innumerable novels, whose members, by speaking of the days of their innocence, bring peace to lonely men, themselves compromised only to unburden their hearts. My neighbours quarrelled and shouted all night long; and, when business was bad, were not above tapping on the ground-floor window in the small hours.
“My mother’s flat is near the Roman Catholic Cathedral,” Widmerpool added. “We usually let it for a month or two later on in the summer, if we can find a tenant, and take a cottage in the country. Last year we went quite near the Walpole-Wilsons at Hinton Hoo. We are going to do the same next month. I take my holiday then, and, if working, come up every day.”
We strolled towards Grosvenor Place. I hardly knew whether or not to condole with him on the sugar incident. Widmerpool marched along, breathing heavily, rather as if he were taking part in some contest.
“Are you going to the Whitneys’ on Thursday!” he asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Neither am I.”
He spoke with resignation; perhaps with slight relief that he had met another who remained uninvited to the Whitneys’ dance.
“What about Mrs. Soundness?”
“I can’t think why, but I haven’t been asked to Mrs. Soundness’s,” said Widmerpool, almost petulantly. “I was taken to dinner there not so long ago—at rather short notice, I agree. But I expect I shall see you at Bertha, Lady Drum’s and Mrs. Arthur Clinton’s.”
“Probably.”
“I am dining with Lady Augusta Cutts for the Drum-Clinton dance,” said Widmerpool. “One eats well at Lady Augusta’s. But I feel annoyed—even a little hurt—about Mrs. Soundness. I don’t think I could possibly have done or said anything at dinner to which exception might have been taken.”
“The card may have gone astray in the post.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Widmerpool, “one gets very tired of these dances.”
Everyone used to say that dances bored them; especially those young men—with the honourable exception of Archie Gilbert—who never failed to respond to an invitation, and stayed, night after night, to the bitter end. Such complaints were made rather in the spirit of people who grumble at the inconvenience they suffer from others falling in love with them. There was, of course, nothing out of the way in Widmerpool, who had apparently been attending dances for several years, showing by that time signs of disillusionment, especially in the light of his experience at the Huntercombes’; although the way he was talking suggested that