A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [38]
“Sorry, Jimmy,” said Farebrother. “That collar must have been washed too often.”
“But it was practically new,” said Stripling. “You did it the wrong way.”
Stripling chose a collar, and himself ran the clippers along it. They slipped from his grip half-way down, so that the collar was caused to fold more or less diagonally.
“Your collars are a different shape from mine,” Farebrother said. “They don’t seem to have the same ‘give’ in them.”
Farebrother had another try, with results rather similar to his first attempt; and, after that, everyone insisted on making the experiment. The difficulty consisted in holding the instrument tight and, at the same time, running it straight. Babs and Lady McReith both crumpled their collars: Peter and I tore ours on the last inch or so of the run. Then Farebrother tried again, bringing off a perfect turn.
“There you are,” he said. “What could be better than that?”
However, as three collars were ruined and had to be thrown into the waste-paper basket, and three more had to be sent to the laundry, Stripling was not very pleased. Although the utility of Farebrother’s collar-turner had certainly been called into question, he evidently felt that to some extent the joke had been turned against him.
“It is something about your collars, old boy,” Farebrother repeated. “It is not at all easy to make the thing work on them. It might pay you in the long run to get a more expensive kind.”
“They are damned expensive as it is,” said Stripling. “Anyway, quite expensive enough to have been made hay of like this.”
However, everyone, including his wife, had laughed a great deal throughout the various efforts to make the machine work, so that, angry as he was, Stripling had to let the matter rest there. Farebrother, I think, felt that he had not provided a demonstration very satisfactory from the commercial point of view, so that his victory over Stripling was less complete on this account than it might otherwise have seemed. Soon after this he went upstairs, carrying the collar-turner with him, and saying that he had “work to do,” a remark that was received with a certain amount of facetious comment, which he answered by saying: “Ah, Jimmy, I’m not a rich man like you. I have to toil for my daily bread.”
Stripling was, no doubt, glad to see him go. He probably wanted time to recover from what he evidently looked upon as a serious defeat over the collars. Peter turned on the gramophone, and Stripling retired to the corner of the room with him, where while Stripling’s temper cooled they played some game with matches. It was soon after this that I made a decidedly interesting discovery about Lady McReith, who had begun to discuss dance steps with Babs, while I looked through some of the records that Peter had been arranging in piles. In order to illustrate some point she wanted to make about fox-trotting, Lady McReith suddenly jumped from the sofa, took my arm and, sliding it round her waist, danced a few steps. “Like this?” she said, turning her face towards Babs; and then, as she continued to cling to me, tracing the steps back again in the other direction: “Or like that?” The transaction took place so swiftly, and, so far as Lady McReith was concerned, so unselfconsciously, that Peter and Stripling did not look up from their game; but – although employed merely as a mechanical dummy – I had become aware, with colossal impact, that Lady McReith’s footing in life was established in a world of physical action of which at present I knew little or nothing. Up to that moment I had found her almost embarrassingly difficult to deal with as a fellow guest: now the extraordinary smoothness with which she glided across the polished boards, the sensation that we were holding each other close, and yet, in spite of such proximity, she remained at the same time aloof and separate, the pervading scent with which she drenched herself, and, above all, the feeling that all this offered something further, some additional and violent assertion of the will, was – almost literally – intoxicating. The revelation