At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [63]
‘I think he probably used to score off Wellington,’ said Susan. ‘And that was why the Duke was so sharp with him. Erridge was probably the more cunning of the two.’
‘Oh, rot,’ said Isobel. ‘I bet he wasn’t. Dukes are much more cunning than earls.’
‘What makes you think so?’ said her brother.
Not greatly pleased by this opinion, he did not wait for an answer, but moved on down the stairs. Denigration of ancestors was more agreeable to him than banter regarding the order of peerage to which he belonged. Not for the first time that evening one was conscious of the bones of an old world pomposity displayed beneath the skin of advanced political thought. However, he soon recovered from this momentary discomposure.
‘Of course the Tollands were really nobody much at the beginning of the fourteenth century,’ he said. ‘That is when they first appear. Lesser gentry, I suppose you might call them. I think they probably made their money out of the Black Death.’
As such a foundation of the family fortunes seemed of interest, I enquired further. Erridge was taken back by the question.
‘Oh, I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘There was a big industrial and social upheaval then, as you probably know. The Tollands may have turned it to good account. I think they were a pretty awful lot.’
He appeared a little disturbed by this perhaps over close attention on my own part to the detail of the history he provided. The girls giggled—Quiggin came to the rescue.
‘When did these kulaks begin their career of wholesale exploitation?’ he asked.
He sweetened the enquiry with some harsh laughter. Erridge laughed too, more at home with Quiggin in his political phraseology than in domestic raillery with his sisters.
‘Kulaks is the word,’ he said. ‘I think they first went up in the world when one of them was knighted by Edward IV. Then another was Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, whatever that may have been, and lost his job under Bloody Mary. They’ve been an awfully undistinguished lot on the whole. They were Cavaliers in the Civil War and got a peerage under Queen Anne. John Toland, the deist, was no relation, so I’ve been told. I should rather like to have claimed him.’
We entered a long room hung with portraits. The younger Pitt’s hat stood within a glass case in one corner by the window. The furniture, as described by Lovell, was under dust-sheets.
‘I never use any of these rooms,’ said Erridge.
He pulled away the dust-sheets without ceremony; leaving in the centre of the room a heap of linen on the floor. The furniture was on the whole mediocre; although, as at the Jeavonses’, there was a good piece here and there. The pictures, too, apart from the Lawrence—the bravura of which gave it some charm—were wholly lacking in distinction. Erridge seemed aware of these deficiencies, referring more than once to the ‘rubbish’ his forbears had accumulated. Yet, at the same time, in his own peculiar way, he seemed deeply to enjoy this opportunity of displaying the house: a guilty enjoyment, though for that reason no less keen.
‘We really ought to have my Uncle Alfred here,’ said Erridge. ‘He regards himself as rather an authority on family history—and, I must say, is a very great bore on the subject. Nothing is worse than someone who takes that sort of thing up, and hasn’t had enough education to carry it through.’
I recalled Alfred Tolland’s own remarks about his nephew’s failure to erect a memorial window. Erridge, whose last words revealed a certain intellectual arrogance, until then dormant, probably found it convenient to diminish his own scrutiny of family matters where tedious negotiation was concerned. In any case, however much an oblique contemplation of his race might gratify