At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [84]
‘Wasn’t your father the chap who rode his horse upstairs after dinner?’ asked Jeavons, wholly unexpectedly.
‘Yes, of course he was,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘His favourite hunter. That was before I was born. I think he was supposed to be celebrating something. “Peace with Honour”, would it have been? That kind of thing. I believe that was the story. We had a hunting-box at Melton Mowbray that season. They had to demolish the side wall of the house to retrieve the animal. It cost the hell of a lot of money, I know.’
Once again, when she spoke of her father, I was reminded of Mrs. Conyers, even though the phraseology of the narrative was so different from any her sister would have employed.
‘And then there was some other story,’ insisted Jeavons. ‘Setting fire to a fellow’s newspaper in a train. Something like that.’
This interest in Lord Vowchurch on the part of Jeavons I found astonishing.
‘There are absolutely hundreds, darling,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘Do you know about when he squirted mauve ink over an archbishop at a wedding?’
‘I met such a sweet archbishop at the Theatrical Garden Party last year,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t an archbishop, but just a bishop. He wore a hat just like one of Heather’s.’
‘I might get a clerical hat,’ said Hopkins. ‘That’s not a bad idea. There is a place off Oxford Street where they sell black boaters. I’ve always wanted one.’
I asked if she had been seeing much of Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.
‘Oh, those two girls,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d met you before somewhere. No, I haven’t been seeing them. I found out Eleanor had said a very unkind thing about me. I thought she was a friend, but I see I made a mistake.’
‘Look here,’ said Jeavons, who had cast off inertia and was now in his most lively mood. ‘Do you remember how that song used to go:
“He ran a pin
In Gwendolyn,
In Lower Grosvenor Place …”
I can’t remember the exact words.’
By this time I was becoming tired of Umfraville’s night club. Like Widmerpool, I wished to go home. Jeavons’s companionship demanded an almost infinite capacity for adaptation to changed moods and circumstances. In many ways sympathetic, he lacked any of that familiar pattern of behaviour to be found, say, in Quiggin, so that in the last resort his company was exhausting rather than stimulating. Umfraville went off to attend to the club’s administration. Discussion began once mere as to whether the party should move elsewhere.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘If you all want to go to the Slip-in, why not leave me here with Ted. He and I will talk about old times for a bit. Then he can see me home.’
That was agreed. There was still a lot of talk. I left before the final plan was put into execution. Out in the passage, Umfraville was instructing the villainous, blue-nosed custodian as to who could, and who could not, wisely be admitted to the club.
‘Not going?’ he said. ‘It’s early yet.’
‘I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and write filmscripts.’
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘But, look here, just before you go, what’s happened to Mildred Haycock these days? I hadn’t seen her in an age. She seems to be holding up pretty well. I know Peter Templer, but who was the other chap who left the party early on?’
‘He is called Widmerpool. She is engaged to him.’
‘Is she, indeed? What does he do?’
‘A bill-broker.’
Umfraville nodded his head sagely.
‘Come again,’ he said. ‘Now that you know the way.’
I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.
5
A BACKGROUND of other events largely obscured the steps leading up to my engagement to Isobel Tolland. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place. Marriage, as I have said, is a form of