A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [22]
The autumn of the year of Le Bas’s arrest turned to winter. Stringham was leaving at Christmas. Before going up to the university, he was to stay for some months with his father in Kenya, a trip for which he showed little enthusiasm, his periods of gloom becoming, if anything, of longer duration and more intense. As the time drew near, he used to give prolonged imitations of his father’s probable demeanour in handling the natives of his new African home, in the course of which the elder Stringham – reputed to drink too much, though noted for elaborately good manners – employed circumlocutions a little in the manner of Lord Chesterfield to faithful coloured retainers envisaged in terms of Man Friday or Uncle Tom. “I imagine everyone in Kenya will be terribly hearty and wear shorts and drink sun-downers and all that sort of thing,” Stringham used to say. “However, it will be nice to leave school and be on one’s own at last, even though it is to be one’s own in darkest Africa in those great open spaces where men are men.” It was arranged that I should lunch at his mother’s house on my way through London on the first day of the holidays. The weather, from being wet and mild, had changed to frost and bright sun; and we travelled up together through white and sparkling fields.
“You will probably meet Buster at lunch,” Stringham said.
“Who is Buster?”
“My mother’s current husband.”
I knew nothing of this figure except that he was called Lieutenant-Commander Foxe, and that Stringham had once described him as “a polo-playing sailor.” When asked what Buster was like, Stringham had replied that he preferred naval officers who were “not so frightfully grand.” He had not elaborated this description, which did not at that time convey much to me, most of the naval officers I had come across being accustomed to speak of themselves as far from grand and chronically hard-up; though he added in amplification – as if the presence of a husband in his mother’s house was in itself odd enough in all conscience – that Buster was “always about the place.”
“Doesn’t he ever go to sea?”
“At present he is at the Admiralty; and, I believe, starting some leave at any moment. However, I suppose it is better to have him living in the house than arriving there at all hours of the day and night disturbing the servants.”
This sketch of Buster evoked an impression of behaviour decidedly unsatisfactory; and for the rest of the journey I was curious to meet someone of mature years and such apparently irregular habits. When we arrived in London, Stringham explained that he wanted to buy some tropical clothes; and, as this proved an amusing occupation, we did not reach the house again until late in the morning; having delivered the luggage there on our arrival. It was a rather gloomy double-fronted façade in a small street near Berkeley Square: the pillars of the entrance flanked on either side with hollow cones for the linkmen to extinguish their torches,
“Come up to the library,” Stringham said. “We shall probably find Buster there.”
I followed up the stairs into a room on the first floor, generally crimson in effect, containing a couple of large Regency bookcases. A female portrait, by appearance a Romney, hung over the fireplace, and there was a malachite urn of immense size on a marble-topped table by the window: presented, I learnt later, by the Tsar to one of the Warringtons who had headed some diplomatic mission to Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Buster was standing beside this urn, cleaning a cigarette-holder with the end of a match-stick. He was tall, and at once struck me as surprisingly young; with the slightly drawn expression that one recognises in later life as the face of a man who does himself pretty well, while not ceasing to take plenty of exercise. His