At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [3]
‘Oh, those floppy army caps,’ said Miss Blaides, carelessly. ‘They take the stiffening out, you know. Of course they have to do that when they are up at the Front, to prevent bits of wire getting blown into their cocoanuts, but they might try and look properly turned out when they are over here.’
She puffed away at her cigarette.
‘I really must check all these gaspers,’ she said, flicking ash on to the carpet. ‘By now it’s got up to about thirty a day. It just won’t do. By the way, Molly Sleaford wants to come and see you, Bertha. Something about the distribution of “comforts”. I told her to look you up on Wednesday, when she is next going to be in London.’
For some reason this announcement threw Mrs. Conyers into a state of great discomposure.
‘But I can’t possibly see Lady Sleaford on Wednesday,’ she said, ‘I’ve got three committee meetings on that day and Aylmer wants me to have five Serbian officers to tea. Besides, dear, Lady Sleaford is Red Cross, like you—and you remember how I am rather wedded, through Lady Bridgnorth, to St. John’s. You see I really hardly know Lady Sleaford, who always keeps very much to herself, and I don’t want to seem disloyal to Mary Bridgnorth. I—’
Her sister cut her short.
‘Oh, I say, what a bally nuisance,’ she remarked. ‘I quite forgot about beastly old St. John’s. They are always cropping up, aren’t they? I really think they do more than the Germans to hold up winning the war.’
After voicing this alarming conjecture, she paced up and down the room, emitting from each nostril a long eddy of smoke like the trail of a ship briskly cutting the horizon. Throughout the room I was increasingly aware of the hardening of disapproval, just perceptible at first even on the immediate arrival of Miss Blaides: now not by any means to be denied. In fact a sense of positive disquiet swept through the small drawing-room so powerfully that mute condemnation seemed to rise in a thick cloud above the ‘comforts’, until its disturbing odour reached the ceiling and hung about the whole flat in vexed, compelling waves. This disapproval was on the part not only of Mrs. Conyers, but also—I felt sure—of my mother as well, who now began to make preparations to leave.
‘A blinking bore,’ said Miss Blaides, casting away her cigarette-end into the grate, where it lay smouldering on the tiles. ‘That’s what it is. So I suppose I shall have to tell Molly it’s a wash-out. Give me another cup of tea, Bertha. I mustn’t stay too long. I’ve got plans to scramble into some glad rags and beetle off to a show tonight.’
After that, we said good-bye; on my own part with deep regret. Later, when we were in the train, my mother said: ‘I think it a pity for a girl like Miss Blaides to put on such a lot of make-up and talk so much slang. I was rather interested to see her, though. I had heard so much about her from different people.’
I did not mention the fact in reply, but, to tell the truth, Miss Blaides had seemed to me a figure of decided romance, combining with her nursing capacity of a young Florence Nightingale, something far more exciting and perhaps also a shade sinister. Nor did I realise at that time the implications contained in the phrase to ‘hear a lot about’ someone of Miss Blaides’s age and kind. However, the episode as a whole—the Conyers’ flat, the General’s photograph, the jewelled scimitar, the ‘comforts’ stacked round the room, Miss Blaides in her V.A.D. uniform—all made a vivid impression on my mind; although, naturally enough, these things became soon stored away, apparently forgotten, in the distant background of memory. Only subsequent events revived them in strong colours.
That afternoon was also the first time I ever heard Dogdene mentioned. Later, of course, I knew it as the name of a ‘great house’ about which people talked. It came into volumes of memoirs like those of Lady Amesbury, which I read (with some disappointment) at an early age after hearing some grown-up person describe the book as ‘scurrilous’. I also knew Constable’s picture in the National Gallery, which shows the mansion itself