At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [16]
‘I once met Mrs. Patrick Campbell when I was a young man,’ he said, speaking as if the statement was an afterthought. ‘Heard her read aloud High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire. Wonderful experience. Felt different all the evening. Couldn’t sleep after it. Lay awake—well—till the morning, nearly.’
Possibly Molly Jeavons felt that for a brief second the tables had been turned on her, because she now returned to the charge in the game of baiting him about his family, probably feeling in that activity on safer ground.
‘Tell us more about the stained-glass window, Alfred,’ she said.
This request galvanised him once again to the point of anger. She seemed to have touched some specially sensitive nerve.
‘I’ve told you already, Molly,’ he said, ‘the window has never been put up as it should have been. Erridge isn’t interested.’
‘Surely somebody in the family can tell him to do it,’ she said. ‘Why can’t you tell him to get on with the job yourself? He must do it, that’s all.’
She spoke as if her own decision made the matter final. Alfred Tolland shook his head gloomily.
‘As well ask him to lead the glass himself,’ he said. ‘Better, in fact. He might have a try at that. Dignity of labour or something. But as for taking an interest in his own grandfather’s memorial —’
Tolland shook his head, finding metaphor, as applied to Erridge, impotent.
‘Can’t George take it on?’ insisted Molly Jeavons. ‘You think so highly of George.’
Tolland shook his head again.
‘Difficult for George,’ he said. ‘Delicate, with Erridge the eldest son. George doesn’t want to be snubbed.’
‘Oh, goodness,’ said Molly Jeavons, throwing up her hands, ‘you Tollands drive me mad.’
Some new guests came into the room at that moment, so that her own plan for solving the problem of the stained-glass window was never revealed. In the reshuffle of places, I found myself tête-à-tête with Mrs. Conyers. After a few preliminary enquiries about my parents, she explained that the General was indisposed, though not seriously, having fallen headlong from the stable loft where the poodles’ food was stored. He must at that time have been a few years short of eighty.
‘But I did not remember you knew Lady Molly,’ said Mrs. Conyers in a low voice.
‘I did not, until tonight.’
‘Rather a happy-go-lucky household. That very extraordinary butler. One does not know what is going to be said next.’
‘So I should think.’
‘Too much so for me. I am old-fashioned, I’m afraid. I do not at all mind admitting it.’
I was reminded of Hugo Tolland, said to like being ‘dated’, but thought it wiser not to remind Mrs. Conyers of the parallel. I wondered why she had agreed to dine with the Jeavonses if she felt so inimical to them.
‘But you yourself must have known Lady Molly for a long time?’
‘Of course we have known her for years and years. But never well. When she was Lady Sleaford my youngest sister, Mildred, knew her, and we used to meet sometimes. I have hardly seen her since her second marriage. We know the present Sleafords, but I don’t think Lady Molly ever sees anything of them. That is to be expected, perhaps.’
‘You dined here?’
‘It was really on account of my sister. I can’t remember whether you have ever met Mildred.’
‘Only when I was a child. When you showed me the sword the sultan gave the General.’
Mrs. Conyers smiled.
‘That was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘Then you really do not know her.’
Some of the subsequent history of Mildred Blaides was, in fact, familiar to me from occasional talk on the part of my parents. Considered rather ‘fast’ in her early days—as might be expected from my memory of her—she had married a Flying Corps officer called M’Cracken, who had been killed not long after the wedding in a raid over Germany. Then there had been a period of widowhood, when her behaviour had been thought ‘flighty’. From the manner in which this interlude in her career used to be discussed, I imagine that my parents’ generation supposed her to be about to go to the bad in a spectacular manner. However,