A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [90]
“What does his father do then, Harold?” asked Short, who was quite used to being contradicted by Brightman; and, indeed, by almost everyone else in the university.
“Deceased.”
“But what did he do?”
“A builder – keen on municipal politics. So keen, he nearly landed in jail. He got off on appeal.”
Brightman could not help smiling to himself at the ease with which he could dispose of Short.
“But he may have worked on the railway line all the same.”
“The only work Quiggin the Elder ever did on the railway line,” said Brightman, becoming more assertive at encountering argument, “was probably to travel without a ticket.”
“But that doesn’t prove that his son has got any money,” said Humble, who did not care for Brightman.
“He was left a competence,” Brightman said. “Quiggin lives with his mother, who is a town councillor. Isn’t that true, Mark?”
A more vindictive man than Short might have been suspected of having raised the subject of Quiggin primarily to punish Members for his former attack on the strawberries; but Short was far too good-natured ever to have thought of such a revenge. Besides, he would never have considered baiting anyone whom he admired on intellectual grounds. Brightman, on the other hand, had no such scruples, and he went on to say: “Come on, Mark. Let’s hear your account of Quiggin. You are neighbours, according to Sillers.”
Members must have seen that there was no way of avoiding the subject. Shaking his hair out of his eyes, he said: “There is a disused railway-siding that was turned into allotments. He probably worked there. It adjoins one of the residential suburbs.”
There was a general laugh at this answer, which was certainly a neat way of settling the questions of both Quiggin and Brightman himself, so far as Members was concerned. Smethwyck began to talk of a play he had seen in London, and conversation took a new course. However, the feelings of self-reproach that contact with Quiggin, or discussions about him, commonly aroused in me were not entirely set at rest by this description of his circumstances. Brightman’s information was notoriously unreliable: and Members’s words had clearly been actuated by personal dislike. The work on the railway line might certainly have been of a comparatively recreational nature: that had to be admitted in the light of Mark Members’s knowledge of the locality; but, even were this delineation of the background true, that would not prevent Quiggin from finding in his life some element chronically painful to him. Even though he might exaggerate to himself, and to others, his lack of means in relation to the financial circumstances of his contemporaries, this in itself pointed to a need for other – and deeply felt – discontents. It was possibly that, in the eyes of Quiggin, money represented some element in which he knew himself deficient: rather in the same way that Widmerpool, when he wanted to criticise Stringham, said that he had too much money: no doubt in truth envying the possession of assets that were, in fact, not material ones. It was some similar course of speculation that seemed to give shape to Quiggin’s character and outward behaviour.
Short’s luncheon took place the day before I was to meet Mrs. Foxe again, and I thought over the question of Quiggin on my way to Stringham’s rooms.
“This may be rather a ghastly meal,” Stringham said, while we waited for his mother, and Sillery, to arrive.
Sillery appeared first. He had cleaned himself up a little for the occasion, trimmed his moustache at the corners, and exchanged his usual blue bow for a black silk tie with white spots. Stringham offered him sherry, which was refused. Like many persons more interested in power than sensual enjoyment, Sillery touched no strong drink. Prowling about the room for a minute or two, he glanced at the invitations on the mantelpiece: a London dance or two, and some undergraduate parties. He found nothing there that appeared to interest him, because he turned,