A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [55]
“I want to find Edgar and go to The Merry Thought.”
She clung on to me desperately, whether as an affectionate gesture, a means of encouraging sympathy, or merely to maintain her balance, I was uncertain. The condition of excitement which she had reached to some extent communicated itself to me, for her flushed face rather improved her appearance, and she had lost all her earlier ill-humour.
“Why don’t you come to The Merry Thought?” she said. “I got a bit worked up a moment ago, I’m feeling better now.”
Just for a second I wondered whether I would not fall in with this suggestion, but the implications seemed so many, and so varied, that I decided against accompanying her. I felt also that there might be yet more to experience in Mrs. Andriadis’s house; and I was not uninfluenced by the fact that I had, so far as I could remember, only a pound on me.
“Well, if Edgar can’t be found, I shall go without him,” said Gypsy Jones, speaking as if such a deplorable lack of gallantry was unexpected in Mr. Deacon.
She seemed to have recovered her composure. While she proceeded down the stairs, somewhat unsteadily, I called after her, over the banisters, a reminder that her copies of War Never Pays! should preferably not be allowed to lie forgotten under the chair in the hall, as I had no wish to share, even to a small degree, any responsibility for having imported that publication into Mrs. Andriadis’s establishment. Gypsy Jones disappeared from sight. It was doubtful whether she had heard this admonition. I felt, perhaps rather ignobly, that she were better out of the house.
Returning through one of the doorways a minute or two later, I collided with Widmerpool, also red in the face, and with hair, from which customary grease had perhaps been dried out by sugar, ruffled into a kind of cone at the top of his head. He, too, seemed to have drunk more than he was accustomed.
“Have you seen Miss Jones?” he asked, in his most breathless manner.
Even though I had been speaking with her so recently, I could not immediately grasp, under this style, the identity of the person sought.
“The girl we came in with,” he muttered impatiently.
“She has just gone off to a night-club.”
“Is someone taking her there?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Do you mean she has gone by herself?”
“That was what she said.”
Widmerpool seemed more fussed than ever. I could not understand his concern.
“I don’t feel she should have set off like that alone,” he said. “She had had rather a lot to drink—more than she is used to, I should imagine—and she is in some sort of difficulty, too. She was telling me about it.”
There could be no doubt at all that Widmerpool himself had been equally indiscreet in taking more champagne than usual.
“We were having rather an intimate talk together,” he went on. “And then I saw a man I had been wanting to speak to for weeks. Of course, I could have rung him up, but I preferred to wait for a chance meeting. One can often achieve so much more at such moments than at an interview. I crossed the room to have a word with him—explaining to her, as I supposed quite clearly, that I was going to return after a short business discussion—and when I came back she had vanished.”
“Too bad.”
“That was very foolish of me,” said Widmerpool, in a tone almost as if he were apologising abjectly for some grave error of taste. “Rather bad-mannered, too…
He paused, seemingly thoroughly upset: much as he had looked—I called to mind—on the day when he had witnessed Le Bas’s arrest when we had been at school together. At the moment when he spoke those words, if I could have laid claim to a more discerning state of mind, I might have taken greater notice of the overwhelming change that had momentarily come over him. As it was, I attributed his excitement simply to drink: an entirely superficial view that even brief reflection could have corrected.