A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [31]
Then she walked slowly towards the house, humming to herself, and swinging her racket at the grass borders. Peter shouted after her: “Has Sunny arrived yet?.”
“He turned up just after you left.”
She made this answer without turning her head. It conveyed no implication of disapproval; no enthusiasm either. I watched her disappear from sight.
“Leave your stuff here,” said Peter. “Someone is bound to collect it. Let’s have some tea. What bloody bad manners my sisters have.”
Wearing a soft hat squashed down in the shape of a pork-pie, he already showed signs of having freed himself from whatever remaining restraints school had imposed. He had spent a month or two in Amsterdam, where his father had business interests. Mr. Templer’s notion was that Peter should gain in this way some smattering of commercial life before going into the City; as all further idea of educating or improving his son had now been abandoned by him. Peter could give no very coherent account of Dutch life, except to say that the canals smelt bad, and that there were two night-clubs which were much better than the others in that city. Apart from such slightly increased emphasis on characteristics already in evidence, he was quite unchanged.
“Who is Sunny?”
“He is called Sunny Farebrother, a friend of my father’s. He was staying in the neighbourhood for a funeral and has come over to talk business.”
“Your father’s contemporary?”
“Oh, no,” said Peter. “Much younger. Thirty or thirty-five. He is supposed to have done well in the war. At least I believe he got rather a good D.S.O.”
The name “Sunny Farebrother” struck me as almost redundant in its suggestion of clear-cut, straightforward masculinity. It seemed hardly necessary for Peter to add that someone with a name like that had “done well” in the war, so unambiguous was the portrait conjured up by the syllables. I imagined a kind of super-Buster, in whom qualities of intrepidity and simplicity of heart had been added to those of dash and glitter.
“Why is he called Sunny?” I asked, expecting some confirmation of this imaginary personality with which I had invested Mr. Farebrother.
“Because his Christian name is Sunderland,” said Peter. “I expect we shall have to listen to a lot of pretty boring conversation between the two of them.”
We entered the house at a side door. The walls of the greater part of the ground floor were faced with panelling, coloured and grained like a cigar-box. At the end of a large hall two men were sitting on a sofa by a tea-table at which Jean was pouring out cups of tea. The elder of this couple, a wiry, grim little fellow, almost entirely bald, and smoking a pipe, was obviously Peter’s father. His identity was emphasised by the existence of a portrait of himself in the room – representing its subject in a blue suit and hard white collar. The canvas, from the hand of Isbister, the R.A. had been tackled in a style of decidedly painful realism, the aggressive nature of the pigment intensified by the fact that each feature had been made to appear a little larger than life.
“Hallo, Jenkins,” said Mr. Templer, raising his hand. “Have some tea. Pour him out some tea, Jean. Well, go on, Farebrother – but try and stick to the point this time.”
He turned again to the tall, dark man sitting beside him. This person, Sunny Farebrother presumably, had shaken hands warmly, and given a genial smile when I approached the table. At Mr. Templer’s interpellation, this smile faded from his face