At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [7]
‘The thing about the Sleafords,’ said Lovell, ‘is that they’ve always been absolutely mad on primogeniture. That’s all very well in a way, but they’ve been so bloody mean to their widows and younger children that they are going to die out. They are a splendid example of upper-class stinginess. Geoffrey got married at once, as people do when they come into a peerage, however dim. Of course, in this case—with Dogdene thrown in—it was something worth having. Unfortunately they’ve never managed to knock up an heir.’
Lovell went on to describe his ‘first Sleaford uncle’, who seems to have been a chilly, serious-minded, competent peer, a great organiser of charitable institutions, who would have done well for himself in any walk of life. For a time he had been taken up with politics and held office under Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.
‘He resigned at the time of the Marconi scandal,’ said Lovell. ‘He hadn’t been making anything on the side himself, but he thought some of his Liberal colleagues had been a bit too liberal in the ethics of their own financial dealings. He was a selfish old man, but had what is called an exaggerated sense of honour.’
‘I think I’ve seen Isbister’s portrait of him.’
‘Wearing the robes of the Garter. He took himself pretty seriously. Molly married him from the ballroom. She was only eighteen. Never seen a man before.’
‘When did he die?’
‘Spanish ’flu in 1919,’ said Lovell. ‘Molly first met Jeavons when Dogdene was a military hospital in the war. He was rather badly wounded, you know. The extraordinary thing was they didn’t start a love affair or anything. If Uncle John hadn’t died, she would still be—in the words of an Edwardian song my father hums whenever her name is mentioned—“Molly the Marchioness.”’
‘Where did she re-meet her second husband?’
‘At the Motor Show. Went to Olympia in her widow’s weeds and saw Jeavons again. He was acting as a polisher on one of the stalls. I can’t remember which make, but not a car anyone would be proud to own. That represented just about the height of what he could rise to in civil life. They were married about six months later.’
‘How does it go?’
‘Very well. Molly never seems to regret the Dogdene days in the least. I can’t think what they use for money, because, if I know the Sleafords, she didn’t get much in the way of a jointure—and I doubt if she has a hundred a year of her own. The Ardglass family have been hopelessly insolvent since the Land Act. However, she manages to support herself—and Jeavons—somehow. And also get some fun out of life.’
‘Doesn’t Jeavons bring in anything?’
‘Not a cent. I think he feels pretty ill most of the time. He often looks like death itself. Besides, he is quite unemployable. As a matter of fact, it isn’t true to say he does nothing. Once in a way he has some appliance he is marketing—an automatic bootjack or new cure for the common cold. Something he gets a commission on, or perhaps some firm is paying him a trifle to recommend the thing.’
The description made an impression on me. The picture of Jeavons took on a more positive shape: not a particularly attractive one. ‘Realism goes with good birth,’ Lovell used to say, and he himself certainly showed this quality where his own relations were concerned. The statement might be hard to substantiate universally, but, by recognising laws of behaviour operating within the microcosm of a large, consanguineous network of families, however loosely connected, individuals born into such a world often gain an unsentimental grasp of human conduct: a grasp sometimes superior to that of apparently more perceptive persons whose minds are unattuned by early association to the constant give and take of an ancient and tenacious social organism. Of course, it does not always work that way, but Lovell, with his many limitations, was himself a good example of the principle.
‘The chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly,’ he said, ‘is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.’
‘A sister of Blanche Tolland?’
‘Yes.