At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [34]
‘I’ve dipped into it from time to time. I can’t say I’m much of an expert.’
‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud—Jung—haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’
Once more he fell into a state of coma. It was astonishing to me that he should have been reading about psychoanalysis, although his mental equipment was certainly in no way inferior to that of many persons who talked of such things all day long. When he had used the word ‘introverted’ I had thought that no more than repetition of a current popular term. I saw now that the subject had thoroughly engaged his attention. However, he wished to discuss it no further at that moment. Neither of the two ladies seemed to share his interest.
‘Is it true that your sister, Mildred, is going to marry again?’ asked Frederica. ‘Someone told me so the other day. They could not remember the name of the man. It hasn’t been in the papers yet, has it?’
She spoke casually. Mrs. Conyers was well prepared for the question, because she answered without hesitation, allowing no suggestion to appear of the doubts she had revealed to me only a short time earlier.
‘The engagement is supposed to be a secret,’ she said, ‘but, as everybody will hear about it quite soon, there is really no reason to deny the rumour.’
‘Then it is true?’
‘It certainly looks as if Mildred is going to marry again.’
No one, however determined to make a good story, could have derived much additional information on the subject from the manner in which Mrs. Conyers spoke, except in so far that she could not be said to show any obvious delight at the prospect of her sister taking a third husband. That was the farthest implication offered. There was not a hint of disapproval or regret; on the contrary, complete acceptance of the situation was manifest, even mild satisfaction not openly disavowed. It was impossible to withhold admiration from this façade, so effortlessly presented.
‘And he—?’
‘Nicholas, here, was at school with him,’ said Mrs. Conyers, tranquilly.
She spoke as if most people must, as a matter of course, be already aware of that circumstance; for it now seemed that, in spite of her husband’s doubts, she had finally accepted the fact that I was within a few years of Widmerpool’s age. The remark only stimulated Frederica’s curiosity.
‘Oh, do tell me what he is like,’ she said. ‘Mildred was just that amount older than me to make her rather a thrilling figure at the time when I first came “out”. She was at the Huntercombes’ once when I stayed there not long after the war. She was rather a dashing war widow and wore huge jade ear-rings, and smoked all the time and said the most hair-raising things. What is her new name to be, first of all?’
‘Widmerpool,’ I said, since the question was addressed to me.
‘Where do they come from?’ asked Mrs. Conyers, anxious to profit herself from Frederica’s interrogation.
‘Nottinghamshire, I believe.’
This reply was at worst innocuous, and might be taken, in general, to imply a worthy family background. It was also—as I understood from Widmerpool himself—in no way a departure from the truth. Fearing that I might, if pressed, be compelled ultimately to admit some hard things about Widmerpool, I felt that the least I could do for an old acquaintance in these circumstances was to suggest, however indirectly, a soothing picture of generations of Widmerpools in a rural setting; an ancient, if dilapidated, manor house: Widmerpool tombs in the churchyard: tankards of ale at The Widmerpool Arms.
‘You haven’t said what his Christian name is,’ said Frederica, apparently accepting, anyway at this stage, the regional superscription.
‘Kenneth.’
‘Brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
I admired the thoroughness with which Frederica set to work on an enquiry of this kind, as much as I had admired