At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [58]
‘We had a bite at the Tolland Arms,’ said Isobel, taking a banana from the dish and beginning to peel it. ‘And very disgusting the food was there, too. We didn’t know you would be entertaining on a huge scale, Erry. In fact we were not even certain you were in residence. We thought you might be away on one of your jaunts.’
She cast a glance at us from under her eyelashes to indicate that she was not laughing openly at her brother, but, at the same time, we must realise that the rest of the family considered his goings-on pretty strange. Quiggin caught her eye, and, with decided disloyalty to Erridge, smiled silently back at her: implying that he too shared to the fullest extent the marrow of that particular joke. Isobel threw herself haphazard into an armchair, her long legs stretched out in front of her.
‘Where have you come from?’ asked Erridge.
He spoke formally, almost severely, as if forcing himself to take an interest in his sisters’ behaviour, however extraordinary; behaviour which, owing to the fortunate dispensations of circumstance, could never affect him personally to the smallest degree. Indeed, he spoke as if utter remoteness from his own manner of life, for that very reason, made a subject otherwise unexciting, even distasteful, possess aspects impossible for him to disregard. It was as if his sisters, in themselves, represented customs so strange and incalculable that even the most detached person could not fail to allow his attention to be caught for a second or two by such startling oddness.
‘We’ve been at the Alfords’,’ said Isobel, discarding the banana skin into the waste-paper basket. ‘Throw me an orange, Susy. Susan had an adventure there.’
‘Not an adventure exactly,’ said her sister. ‘And, anyway, it’s my story, not yours, Isobel. Hardly an adventure. Unless you call getting married an adventure. I suppose some people might.’ ‘Why, have you got married, Susan?’ asked Erridge.
He showed no surprise whatever, and very little interest, at the presentation of this possibility: merely mild, on the whole benevolent, approval.
‘I haven’t yet,’ said Susan, suddenly blushing deeply. ‘But I am going to.’
She was, I think, suddenly overwhelmed at the thought of marriage and all it implied. The announcement of her engagement, planned with great dash, had not been entirely carried off with the required air of indifference. I even wondered for a moment whether she was not going to cry. However, she mastered herself immediately. At the sight of her sister’s face, Isobel began to blush violently too.
‘To whom?’ asked Erridge, still completely calm. ‘I am so glad to hear the news.’
‘Roddy Cutts.’
The name clearly conveyed nothing whatever to her brother, who still smiled amiably, unable to think of anything to say.
‘There was a Lady Augusta Cutts who used to give dances when I was a young man,’ he said, at last.
He spoke as if he were at least as old as General Conyers. No doubt the days when he had occasionally gone to dances seemed by then infinitely distant: indeed, much further off, and no less historic, than the General’s cavalry charge.
‘Lady Augusta is his mother.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘She is rather a terror.’
There was a pause.
‘What does he do?’ asked Erridge, as if conscious that it might seem bad-mannered to drop the subject altogether, however much he himself hoped to move on to something more interesting.
‘I can’t tell you exactly,’ said Susan. ‘But he has something he does. I mean he doesn’t absolutely beg his bread from door to door. He looks into the Conservative Central Office once in a way too.’
Erridge’s face fell at the mention of this last establishment. Quiggin, however, came to the rescue.
‘Much as I hate the Tories,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard that Cutts is one of their few promising young men.’
Everyone, including Susan Tolland herself, was surprised by this sudden avowal on the part of Quiggin, who was showing at least as much enthusiasm on the subject of the engagement as might have been expected from Erridge himself.
‘I grant it may not