A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [89]
“I am glad to have an opportunity for speaking to you alone for a moment,” he said. “I have been worried to death lately.”
This statement sent my thoughts back to his confession about Barbara on the night of the Huntercombes’ dance, and I supposed that he had been suddenly visited with one of those spasms of frustrated passion that sometimes, like an uncured disease, break out with renewed virulence at a date when treatment seemed no longer necessary. After all, it was only in a fit of anger, however justifiable, that he had sworn he would not see her again. No one can choose, or determine, the duration of such changes of heart. Indeed, the circumstances of his decision to break with her after the sugar incident made such a renewal far from improbable.
“Barbara?”
He tried to shake his head, apparently in vehement negation, but was prevented by the bars from making this movement at all adequately to convey the force of his feelings.
“I was induced to do an almost insanely indiscreet thing about the girl you introduced me to.”
The idea of introducing Widmerpool to any girl was so far from an undertaking I was conscious ever of having contemplated, certainly a girl in relation to whom serious indiscretion on his part was at all probable, that I began to wonder whether success in securing the Donners-Brebner job had been too much for his brain, already obsessed with self-advancement, and that he was, in fact, raving. It then occurred to me that I might have brought him into touch with someone or other at the Huntercombes’, although no memory of any introduction remained in my mind. In any case, I could not imagine how such a meeting might have led to a climax so ominous as that suggested by his tone.
“Gypsy,” he said, hesitating a moment over the name, and speaking so low as to be almost inaudible4
“What about her?”
The whole affair was hopelessly tangled in my head. I could remember that Barnby had said something about Widmerpool being involved with Gypsy Jones, but I have already spoken of the way of looking at life to which, in those days, I subscribed—the conception that sets individuals and ideas in hermetically sealed receptacles—and the world in which such things could happen at which Widmerpool seemed to hint appeared infinitely removed, I cannot now think why, from Stourwater and its surroundings. However, it was at last plain that Widmerpool had, in some manner, seriously compromised himself with Gypsy Jones. A flood of possible misadventures that could have played an unhappy part in causing his distress now invaded my imagination.
“A doctor was found,” said Widmerpool.
He spoke in a voice hollow with desperation, and this news did not allay the suspicion that whatever was amiss must be fairly serious; though for some reason the exact cause of his anxiety still remained uncertain in my mind.
“I believe everything is all right now,” he said. “But it cost a lot of money. More than I could afford. You know, I’ve never even committed a technical offence before—like using the untransferable half of somebody else’s return ticket, or driving a borrowed car insured only in the owner’s name.”
Giving expression to his dismay seemed to have done him good: at least to have calmed him.
“I felt I could mention matters to you as you were already familiar with the situation,” he said. “That fellow Barnby told me you knew. I don’t much care for him.”
Now, at last, I remembered the gist of what Mr. Deacon had told me, and, incredible as I should have supposed their course to be, the sequence of events began to become at least dimly visible: though much remained obscure. I have spoken before of the difficulties involved in judging other people’s behaviour by a consistent standard—for, after all, one must judge them, even at the price of being judged oneself—and, had I been told of some similar indiscretion on the part, say, of Peter Templer I should have been particularly disturbed. There is, or, at least, should be, a fitness in the follies each individual pursues and uniformity of pattern is, on the whole,