At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [36]
‘This wretched car won’t start,’ she shouted.
‘Can I help?’
At that moment the engine came to life.
‘Shall I give you a lift?’ she said.
‘Which way are you going?’
‘Chelsea.’
I, too, was on my way to Chelsea that evening. It was a period of my life when, in recollection, I seem often to have been standing in a cinema queue with a different girl. One such evening lay ahead of me.
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Jump in,’ she said.
Now that she had invited me into her car, and we were driving along together, her manner, momentarily relaxed while she had been pressing the self-starter, became once more impersonal and remote; as if ‘a lift’ was not considered an excuse for undue familiarity between us. When the car had refused to start she had seemed younger and less chilly: less part of the impeccable Conyers world. Now she returned to an absolutely friendly, but also utterly impregnable outpost of formality.
‘You have known Bertha and the General for a long time?’
‘Since I was a child.’
‘That was when you met Mildred?’
‘Yes.’
‘You probably know all the stories about their father, Lord Vowchurch?’
‘I’ve heard some of them.’
‘The remark he is said to have made to King Edward just after Bertha’s engagement had been announced?’
‘I don’t know that one.’
‘It was on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes. The King is supposed to have said: “Well, Vowchurch, I hear you are marrying your eldest daughter to one of my generals”, and Bertha’s father is said to have replied: “By Gad, I am, sir, and I trust he’ll teach the girl to lead out trumps, for they’ll have little enough to live on”. Edward VII was rather an erratic bridge-player, you know. Sir Thomas Lipton told me the story in broad Scotch, which made it sound funnier. Of course, the part that appealed to Sir Thomas Lipton was the fact that it took place on the Squadron Lawn.’
‘How did the King take it?’
‘I think he was probably rather cross. Of course it may not be true. But Lord Vowchurch certainly was always getting into trouble with the King. Lord Vowchurch was supposed to be referring to some special game of bridge when he had been dummy and things had gone badly wrong with King Edward’s play. You said you’d met my Uncle Alfred, didn’t you?’
‘A couple of times.’
‘And you know whom I mean by Brabazon?’
‘The Victorian dandy—“Bwab”?’
‘Yes, that one.’
‘Who said he couldn’t remember what regiment he had exchanged into—after leaving the Brigade of Guards because it was too expensive—but “they wore green facings and you got to them by Waterloo Station”?’
‘That’s him. How clever of you to know about him. Well, when Uncle Alfred was a young man, he was dining at Pratt’s, and Colonel Brabazon came in from the Marlborough Club, where he had been in the card-room when the game was being played. According to Uncle Alfred, Colonel Brabazon said: “Vowchurch expwessed weal wesentment while his Woyal Highness played the wottenest wubber of wecent seasons—nothing but we-deals and wevokes.”’
‘I had no idea your uncle had a fund of stories of that kind.’
‘He hasn’t. That is his only one. He is rather a shy man, you see, and nothing ever happens to him.’
This was all very lively; although there was at the same time always something a shade aloof about the manner in which these anecdotes were retailed. However, they carried us down the King’s Road