At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [70]
‘She has been living in the South of France?’
‘Where she made herself rather notorious, I believe.’
‘Meanwhile, her fiancé is suffering from jaundice.’
‘Indeed,’ said Miss Weedon, smiling thinly again. ‘I expect she will find someone to console her. Commander Foxe, for example.’
‘Buster? How is he?’
‘He might begin to take her out again. He retired from the Navy some years ago. He has got rather fat. It worries him terribly. He does all kinds of things for it. Every sort of diet. Cures at Tring. It is really his sole interest now.’
‘And you thought Mrs. Haycock might take his mind off the weighing machine?’
Miss Weedon’s mouth stiffened. I saw I had gone too far. She probably regretted her own indiscretion about Buster’s past with Mrs. Haycock. I had not thought of Buster Foxe for years. Stringham had never cared for him. It sounded from Miss Weedon’s tone as if Buster had been reduced—like Jeavons—to a purely subordinate position. There was a certain parallel in their situations. I wondered if they had ever met.
‘And how is Mrs. Foxe herself?’
‘Very well, I understand. As social as ever.’
‘What does Charles do about money now?’
‘Money is rather a difficulty,’ said Miss Weedon, abandoning her air of cold malice, and now speaking as if we had returned to serious matters. ‘His father, with that French wife of his in Kenya, has not much to spare. Mrs. Foxe has the Warrington money, but it is only for her lifetime. She spends it like water.’
At that moment Jeavons himself approached us, putting an end to any explanation Miss Weedon was about to offer on the subject of Stringham’s financial resources.
‘What do you make of Maisky?’ asked Jeavons.
He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education.
‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.
‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.
He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the main import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.
‘Molly has taken a great fancy to him,’ he said, at last.
‘I know.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Jeavons. ‘These fancies come and go.’
Miss Weedon made no attempt to deny the truth of that observation. Nor did she elaborate her dislike of monkeys. She continued to smile her arctic smile. Jeavons slowly strolled off again, as if to think out the implications of what Miss Weedon had said. I was aware once more of my strong disagreement with those—amongst whom I suspected Miss Weedon might be numbered—who found Jeavons without interest. On the contrary, he seemed to me, in his own way, rather a remarkable person. An encounter with him away from his own home confirmed that there existed more sides to him than might be apparent in the Jeavons drawing-room.
This episode took place a month or two later, on an evening that had begun with having a drink with Feingold in the pub near the Studio. Feingold had plans to write a satirical novel about life in the film business. He wanted to tell me the plot in the hope that I might be able to suggest a suitable ending to the story. Returning to London later than usual as a result of Feingold’s unwillingness to treat the subject in hand briefly (he himself lived in the neighbourhood of the Studio), I decided to dine off a sandwich and a glass of beer at some bar. The pubs in the neighbourhood of my own flat had not much to offer, so, quite fortuitously, I entered an establishment off the south side of Oxford Street, where an illuminated sign indicated an underground buffet. It was the kind of place my old, deceased friend, Mr. Deacon, used to call a ‘gin palace’.
At the