At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [74]
‘The nurse who gave you the glad eye.’
‘Oh yes, that. In the interval we managed to have a word together in the bar or somewhere. Next thing I knew, I was spending my leave with her.’
‘And this was—’
‘Mrs. Haycock—or, as she then was, the Honourable Mildred Blaides.’
Jeavons’s expression was so oracular, his tone so solemn, when he pronounced the name with the formal prefix attached, that I laughed. However, he himself remained totally serious in his demeanour. He sat there looking straight at me, as if the profound moral beauty of his own story delighted him rather than any purely anecdotal quality, romantic or banal, according to how you took it.
‘And you never saw her again from that time until the other night?’
‘Never set eyes on her. Of course, I’ve often heard Molly speak of Mildred Blaides and her goings-on, but I never knew it was the same girl. She and Molly used to meet sometimes. It so happened, for one reason or another, I was never there.’
‘Did she say anything about it the other night?’
‘Not a word. Didn’t recognise me. After all, I suppose I’ve got to take my place in what must be a pretty long list by now.’
‘You didn’t say anything yourself?’
‘Didn’t want to seem to presume on a war-time commission, so I kept mum. Besides, it’s just as well Molly shouldn’t know. If you gas about that sort of thing too much, the story is bound to get round. Silly of me to tell you, I expect. You’ll keep your trap shut, won’t you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Just thought it might interest you—especially as you know Widmerpool.’
‘It does—enormously.’
‘That’s the sort of thing that happens in a war. Happens to some chaps in peace-time too, I suppose. Not chaps like me. Haven’t the temperament. Things have changed a lot now anyway. I don’t mean people don’t sleep with each other any longer. Of course they do. More than ever, if what everyone says nowadays is true. But the whole point of view is different somehow. I expect you were too young to have seen The Bing Boys?’
‘No, I wasn’t too young. I saw the show as a schoolboy.’
The band had momentarily ceased its hubbub. Jeavons leant forward. I thought he had something further to say which he wished to run no danger of being overheard. Instead, he suddenly began to sing, quite loud and in an unexpectedly deep and attractive voice:
‘I could say such—wonderful things to you,
There would be such—wonderful things to do . .
Taking this, perhaps not unnaturally, as a kind of summons, two of the girls at a neighbouring table rose and prepared to join us, a tall, muscular blonde, not altogether unlike Mona, and a small, plump brunette, who reminded me of a girl I used to know called Rosie Manasch. (Peter Templer liked to say that you could recognise all the girls you had ever met in a chorus: like picking out your friends from a flock of sheep.) Jeavons immediately checked this threatened incursion before it could take serious form by explaining that we were waiting for the ‘rest of the party’. The girls withdrew. Jeavons condnued the song as if there had been no interruption:
‘If you were the only—girl in the world,
And I was the only boy …’
He had only just time to finish before the band broke out again in a deafening volume of sound, playing some tune of very different tempo from that sung by Jeavons.
‘People don’t think the same way any longer,’ he bawled across the table. ‘The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always feel rather sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our—what do you call ’em—you know—somebody used the word in our house the other night—saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know—when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?’
‘Illusions?’
‘Illusions! That’s the one. We’ve lost all our bloody illusions. Put ’em all in the League of Nations, or somewhere like that. Illusions, my God. I had a few of ’em when I started. You wouldn