Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [39]
‘What you could do, Uncle Ted, is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that? It would be a great help.’
‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’ said Jeavons.
He often showed an unexpected awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.
‘I’ll duly render a return of wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on such occasions.’
Never finding it easy to set his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo stretched himself out on the sofa.
‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he said.
‘And the men to do them,’ said Jeavons.
Later, as he worked away, he could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall refrain from his younger days:
‘When Father went down to Southend,
To spend a happy day,
He didn’t see much of the water,
But he put some beer away.
When he landed home,
Mother went out of her mind,
When he told her he’d lost the seaweed,
And left the cockles behind.’
A footnote to the events of Erridge’s funeral was supplied by Dicky Umfraville after our return to London. It was to be believed or not, according to taste. Umfraville produced the imputation, if that were what it was to be called, when we were alone together. Pamela Widmerpool’s name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Latterly, Umfraville’s character-acting had become largely an impersonation of himself, Dr Jekyll, even without the use of the transforming drug, slipping into the skin of the larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses, Umfraville’s normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape, the bright bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair – the formalized army officer of caricature – suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque shape as vehicle for improvisation.
‘Remember my confessing in my outspoken way I’d been pretty close to Flavia Stringham in the old days of the Happy Valley?’
‘You put it more bluntly than that, Dicky – you said you’d taken her virginity.’
‘What a cad I am – well, one sometimes wonders.’
‘Whether you’re a cad, Dicky, or whether you were the first?’
‘Our little romance was scarcely over before she married Cosmo Flitton. Now the only reason a woman like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a hurry, and at any price. Unfortunately my own circumstances forbade me aspiring to her hand.’
‘Dicky, this is pure fantasy.’
Umfraville looked sad. Even at his most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him. He was a pure Burton type, when one came to think of it. Melancholy as expressed by giving imitations would have made another interesting sub-section in the Anatomy.
‘All right, old boy, all right. Keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups.’
‘Not a positive one?’
‘There was nothing positive about