A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [50]
“I don’t care for this at all,” said Mr. Deacon. “To begin with, I do not entirely understand the meaning of the words—if they have any meaning—and, in the second place, the singer once behaved to me in what I consider an objectionable manner. I can’t think how Mrs. Andriadis can have him in the house. It can’t do her reputation any good.”
The appearance of Max Pilgrim at the piano had thoroughly put out Mr. Deacon. In an attempt to relieve the gloom that had fallen on him I inquired about Mrs. Andriadis’s past.
“Barnby knows more about her than I do,” he said, rather resentfully. “She is said to have been mistress of a Royal Personage for a time. Personally I am not greatly stimulated by such revelations.”
“Is she still kept?”
“My dear boy, you have the crudest way of putting things,” said Mr. Deacon, smiling at this, and showing signs of cheering up a little. “No—so far as I am aware—our hostess is no longer ‘kept,’ as you are pleased to term the former state of life to which she was called by Providence. A client of mine told me that her present husband—there have been several—possessed comprehensive business interests in Manchester, or that region. My friend’s description suggested at least a sufficient competence on the latest husband’s part for the condition of dependence you mention to be, financially speaking, no longer necessary for his lady—even, perhaps, undesirable. Apart from this, I know little of Mr. Andriadis, though I imagine him to be a man of almost infinite tolerance. You are, I expect, familiar, with Barnby’s story of the necklace?”
“What necklace?”
“Milly,” said Mr. Deacon, pronouncing Mrs. Andriadis’s name with affected delicacy, “Milly saw a diamond-and-emerald necklace in Cartier’s. It cost, shall we say, two million francs. She approached the Royal Personage, who happened to be staying at the Crillon at that moment, and asked for the money to buy herself the necklace as a birthday present. The Royal Personage handed her the banknotes—which he was no doubt accustomed to keep in his pocket—and Milly curtsied her way out. She went round the corner to the apartment of a well-known French industrialist—I cannot remember which, but you would know the name—who was also interested in her welfare, and requested him to drive there and then to Cartier’s and buy the necklace on the spot. This the industrialist was obliging enough to do. Milly, was, therefore, two million francs to the good, and could, at the same time, give pleasure to both her protectors by wearing the necklace in the company of either. Simple—like all great ideas.”
Mr Deacon paused. He seemed all at once to regret this sudden, and uncharacteristic, outburst of sophistication on so mundane a subject. The anecdote had certainly been told in a manner entirely foreign to his accustomed tone in dealing with worldly matters; discussed by him in general, at least publicly—as I found at a later date, as if all practical transactions were wrapped in mystery impenetrable for one of his simple outlook. Such an approach had been, indeed, habitual with him at all times, and, even so far back as the days when my parents used to speak of him, I could recall banter about Mr. Deacon’s repeatedly expressed ignorance of the world. This attitude did not, of course, repudiate on his part a certain insistence on his own knowingness in minor, and more “human,” affairs, such as the running of his shop, described so precisely by him a short time earlier at the coffee-stall. The story of the necklace was, I thought, in some way vaguely familiar to me. It had possibly figured in the repertoire of Peter Templer at school, the heroine of Templer’s anecdote, so I believed, represented as a well-known actress rather than Mrs. Andriadis herself.
“Not that I know anything of such gallivanting,” said Mr. Deacon, as if by now ashamed of his momentary abandonment of the unassailable position vouchsafed to him by reliance, in all circumstances, on an artist’s traditional innocence of heart. “Personally I should be