A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [36]
For a minute or two we had been standing by the edge of the pavement. Widmerpool was no doubt preparing to say good night, because he took a sudden step backward. Like so many of his movements, this one was effected awkwardly, so that he managed to precipitate himself into the path of two persons proceeding, side by side, in the direction of Hyde Park Corner. There was, in fact, a minor collision of some force, in which the other parties were at once established as a comparatively elderly man, unusually tall, and a small woman, or girl. Upon the last of these Widmerpool had apparently trodden heavily, because she exclaimed in a raucous voice: “Hi, you, why the bloody hell can’t you go where you’re looking!”
So aggressive was the manner in which this question was put that at first I thought the pair of them were probably drunk: a state which, in addition, the discrepancy between their respective heights for some reason quite illogically helped to suggest. Widmerpool began to apologise, and the man now answered at once in a deep tone: “No, no. Of course it was an accident. Gypsy, I have told you before that you must control yourself when you are out with me. I will not tolerate gratuitous rudeness.”
There was something strangely familiar about these words. He was grey-haired and hatless, carrying a fairly bulky parcel of newspapers, or so they appeared, under his left arm. His voice bore with it memories of time long past. Its tone was, indeed, laden with forgotten associations of childhood; those curious, rather fearful responses weighted with a sense of restriction and misgiving. Even so, there was also something about the stranger that seemed to belong to the immediate present; something that made me feel that a matter which had to do with him, even on that very evening, had already been brought to my notice. Yet his presence conveyed, too, an instant and vertiginous sense of being “abroad,” this last impression suddenly taking shape as that of a far-off visit to Paris. The same scattered records of sight and sound that Boyhood of Cyrus had suggested when first seen at the Walpole-Wilsons’. I had another look at the whitening hairs, and saw that they were Mr. Deacon’s, last surveyed, years before, on that day in the Louvre among the Peruginos.
He looked much the same, except that there was now something wilder—even a trifle sinister—in his aspect; a representation of Lear on the heath, or Peter the Hermit, in some nineteenth-century historical picture, preaching a crusade. Sandals worn over black socks gave an authentically medieval air to his extremities. The former role was additionally suggested by the undeniably boyish exterior of his companion, whose hair was cut short: barbered, in fact, in a most rough-and-ready fashion in the style then known as an “Eton crop.” This young woman might, so far as outward appearances were concerned, have passed easily on the stage for the aged king’s retainer, for, although her manner was more actively combative than the Fool’s, the shortness of her skirt, and bare knees, made her seem to be clad in a smock, or tunic, of the kind in which the part is sometimes played.
When I think of that encounter in Grosvenor Place, my attempt to reintroduce myself to Mr. Deacon in such circumstances seems to me strange, foolhardy even, and the fact still more extraordinary that he should almost immediately have succeeded in grasping my own identity. It was an occasion that undoubtedly did more credit to Mr. Deacon’s social adroitness than to my own, because I was still young enough to be only dimly aware that there are moments when mutual acquaintance may be allowed more wisely to pass unrecognised. For example, to find a white-haired gentleman wandering about the streets in the small