A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [56]
Widmerpool went brick-red. He said: “I would rather not speak of that, if you don’t mind.”
“Don’t let’s then.”
“I suppose Templer got sacked in the end?” Widmerpool went on: no doubt conscious that he might have sounded over-emphatic, and evidently trying to bring some jocularity into his tone.
“More or less asked to leave.”
“How badly used he really to behave?”
He moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.
“He had a woman before he left.”
If Widmerpool had been upset by the news that Stringham had played the Braddock alias Thorne trick on Le Bas, and more personally embarrassed by reference to the Akworth scandal, this piece of information, regarding Templer’s crowning exploit, threw him almost entirely off his balance. He made a strange sound, half-way between a low laugh and a clearing of the throat, simultaneously swallowing hard. He also went, if possible, redder than ever. Took off his spectacles and began to polish them, as he usually did when his nerves were on edge. I did not feel entirely at ease with the subject myself. To help out the situation, I added: “I have just been staying with the Templers as a matter of fact.”
Widmerpool clearly welcomed this shift of interest in our conversation, enquiring almost eagerly about the Templers’ house, and the manner in which they lived. We talked about the Templers for a time, and I found to my surprise that Widmerpool knew Sunny Farebrother by name, though they had never met. He said: “A very sharp fellow, they tell me.”
“I liked him.”
“Naturally you did,” said Widmerpool. “He can make himself very agreeable.”
I found Widmerpool’s remarks in this vein so tiresome that I was almost inclined to try and shock him further by describing in detail the various incidents that had taken place while I was staying at the Templers’. In the end I decided that those happenings needed too much explanation before they could be appreciated, anyway by Widmerpool, that there was nothing to be gained by trying to impress him, or attempting to modify his point of view. I told him that Peter was going straight into business, without spending any time at the university. Rather unexpectedly, Widmerpool approved this decision, almost in Sunny Farebrother’s own phrase.
“Much better get down to work right away,” he said. “There was not much money when my father died, so 1 talked things over with my mother – she has a wonderful grasp of business matters – and we decided we would do the same thing, and cut out Oxford or Cambridge.”
By using the first person plural, he made the words sound as if there had been some question of his mother going up to the university with him. He said: “This effort to polish up my French is merely in the nature of a holiday.”
“A holiday from what?”
“I am articled to a firm of solicitors.”
“Oh, yes.”
“I do not necessarily propose to remain a solicitor all my life,” said Widmerpool. “I look to wider horizons.”
“What sort?”
“Business, Politics.”
This all seemed to me such rubbish that I changed the subject, asking where he lived. He replied, rather stiffly, that his mother had a flat in Victoria. It was convenient, he said; but without explaining the advantages. I enquired what life was like in London.
“That depends what you do,” said Widmerpool, guardedly.
“So I suppose.”
“What profession are you going to follow?”
“I don’t know.”
It seemed almost impossible to make any remark without in one manner or another disturbing Widmerpool’s equanimity. He was almost as shocked at hearing that I had no ready-made plans for a career as he had been scandalised a few minutes earlier at the information regarding the precocious dissipation of Templer’s life.
“But surely you have some bent?” he said. “An ambition