A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [82]
I had been placed next to Rosie Manasch, who was, at the moment of seating herself, engaged in talk with her neighbour on the far side; and—curious to investigate some of the by-products of indulgence depicted in this sequence of animated, and at times enigmatic, incidents—I found myself fully occupied in examining unobtrusively the scenes spread out on the tapestry. There had been, I was dimly aware, some rearrangement of places on my right-hand side, where a chair had remained empty for a moment or two. Now a girl sat down there, next to me, to whom I had not yet, so far as I knew, been introduced, with some muttered words from Truscott, who had instigated the change of position—possibly to relieve Mrs. Wentworth from further strain of making conversation with Prince Theodoric’s equerry.
“I don’t think you remember me,” she said, almost at once, in a curiously harsh voice that brought back, in fact, that same sense of past years returning that Stringham’s inquiry for matches had caused me at the coffee-stall. “I used to be called Jean Templer. You are a friend of Peter’s, and you came to stay with us years ago.”
It was true that I had not recognised her. I think we might even have exchanged words without my guessing her identity, so little had she been in my thoughts, so unexpected a place was this to find her. That was not because she had changed greatly. On the contrary, she still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not—like the two other girls with whom I had been talking, and round whom my thoughts, before the distraction of the tapestry, had been drifting—exactly a “beauty;” but all the same, mysterious and absorbing: certainly pretty enough, so far as that went, just as she had seemed when I had visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy. I saw also, with a kind of relief, that she seemed to express none of the qualities I had liked in Barbara, There was a sense of restraint here, a reserve at present unpredictable. I tried to excuse my bad manners in having failed at once to remember her. She gave one of those quick, almost masculine laughs. I was not at all sure how I felt about her, though conscious suddenly that being in love with Barbara, painful as some of its moments had been, now seemed a rather amateurish affair; just as my feelings for Barbara had once appeared to me so much more mature than those previously possessed for Suzette; or, indeed, for Jean herself.
“You were so deep in the tapestry,” she said.
“I was wondering about the couple in the little house on the hill.”
“They have a special devil—or is he a satyr?—to themselves.”
“He seems to be collaborating, doesn’t he?”
“Just lending a hand, I think.”
“A guest, I suppose—or member of the staff?”
“Oh, a friend of the family,” she said. “All newly-married couples have someone of that sort about. Sometimes several. Didn’t you know? I see you can’t be married.”
“But how do you know they are newly married?”
“They’ve got such a smart little house,” she said. “They must be newly married. And rather well off, too, I should say.”
I was left a trifle breathless by this exchange, not only because it was quite unlike the kind of luncheon-table conversation I had expected to come my way in that particular place, but also on account of its contrast with Jean’s former deportment, when we had met at her home. At that moment I hardly considered the difference that age had made, no doubt in both of us. She was, I thought, about a couple of years younger than myself. Feeling unable to maintain this show of detachment towards human—and, in especial, matrimonial