Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [21]
The last time I had seen Pamela in church had been at Stringham’s wedding, child bridesmaid of six or seven, an occasion when, abandoning responsibilities in holding up the bride’s train, she had walked away composedly, later, so it was alleged, causing herself to be lifted in order to be sick into the font. ‘That little girl’s a fiend,’ someone had remarked afterwards at the reception. Now she sat, so to speak, between Henry Lucius and his descendant Alfred Tolland. Would Henry Lucius, ‘not indifferent to the charms of the fair sex’, rise from the dead? She had closed her eyes, either in prayer, or to express the low temperature of the nave, but did not kneel. Neither did Quiggin, Craggs or Gypsy kneel, but Widmerpool leant forward for a few seconds in a noncommittally devotional attitude that did not entirely abandon a sitting posture, and might have been attributable merely to some interior discomfort.
The dead silence that had momentarily fallen was broken by Widmerpool levering himself back on the seat. He removed his spectacles and began to wipe them. He was rather thinner, or civilian clothes gave less impression of bulk than the ‘utility’ uniform that enclosed him when last seen. The House of Commons had already left its indefinable, irresoluble mark. His thick features, the rotundities of his body, always amenable to caricature, now seemed more than ever simplified in outline, positively demanding treatment in political cartoon. The notion that a few months at Westminster had brought this about was far fetched. Alteration, if alteration there were, was more likely to be accountable to marriage.
Craggs too shared some of this air of a figure from newspaper caricature, a touch of the Mad Hatter mingling with that of King Lear. His shabbiness, almost griminess, was certainly designed to convey to the world that he was a person of sufficient importance to rise above bourgeois convention, whatever its form. Smiling to himself, snuffling, fidgeting, he gazed round the church in a manner to register melodramatic wonder that such places could still exist, even for the purpose that had brought him there. Such views were certainly held by Gypsy too – who had refused to attend her old friend Mr Deacon’s funeral on strictly anti-religious grounds – but unmitigated anger now appeared to prevent her from knowing, or caring, where she found herself. Quiggin looked as if his mind were occupied with business problems. On the other hand, he might have been thinking of the time when Erridge had taken Mona, Quiggin’s girl, to the Far East. That difference had been long made up, but circumstances could have recalled it, giving Quiggin a strained uneasy expression.
One of the least resolvable problems posed by Widmerpool’s presence was his toleration of Gypsy as member of the party. Once – haunted by that dire incident in the past when he had paid for her ‘operation’ – he would have gone to any lengths to avoid even meeting her. If, as Craggs’s wife, she had to come, that would have been sufficient to keep Widmerpool away. Some overriding political consideration must explain this, such as the idea of attaching himself to a kind of unofficial deputation paying last respects to a ‘Man of the Left’. In Widmerpool’s case that would be a way of establishing publicly his own bona fides, sentiments not sufficiently recognized in himself. Acceptance of Gypsy could be regarded as a gesture of friendship to the extremities of Left-Wing thought, an olive branch appropriate (or not) to Erridge’s memory.
The more one thought about it, the more relevant – to employ one of their own favourite terms – were Quiggin and Craggs, in fact the whole group, to consign Erridge to the tomb; in certain respects more so than his own relations. It was true that Erridge’s abnegation of the family as a social unit was capable of exaggeration, by no means so total as he himself liked to pretend, or his cronies, many of those unsympathetic