Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [74]
‘Give my love to Isobel, and hopes that all will be well.’
‘And mine to Susie.’
The change arrived. Roddy sorted it lethargically, at the same time giving the impression that the levy might have been less disastrous than at first feared. His manner of picking up coins and examining them used to irritate our brother-in-law George Tolland. We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall, where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking-rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters. Roddy’s personality always took on a new dimension within these walls.
‘If you’ll wait for a minute in the central lobby, I’ll just hear how National Assistance Payments are going.’
Callot-like figures pervaded labyrinthine corridors. Cavernous alcoves were littered with paraphernalia of scaffolding and ropes, Piranesian frameworks hinting of torture and execution, but devised only to repair bomb damage to structure and interior ornament. Roddy reappeared.
‘Come along.’
We crossed the top of the flight of steps leading down into St Stephen’s Hall, the stairs seeming to offer a kind of emergency exit from contemporary affairs into a mysterious submerged world of mediaeval shadows, tempting to explore if one were alone, in spite of icy draughts blowing up from these spectral depths. Suddenly, from the opposite direction to which we were walking, Widmerpool appeared. He was pacing forward slowly, deliberately, solemnly, swinging his arms in a regular motion from the body, as if carefully balancing himself while he trod a restricted bee-line from one point to another. At first he was too deep in thought to notice our advance towards him. Roddy shouted a greeting.
‘Widmerpool, just the man I’m looking for.’
He could never resist accosting anyone he knew, and buttonholing them. Now he began a long dissertation about ‘pairing’. Surprised out of his own meditations, Widmerpool seemed at first only aware that he was being addressed by a fellow MP. A second later he grasped the linked identities of Roddy and myself, our relationship, the fact that were brothers-in-law evidently striking him at once as a matter of significance to himself. He brushed aside whatever Roddy was talking about – conversation in any case designed to keep alive a contact with a member of the other side, rather than reach a conclusion – beginning to speak of another subject that seemed already on his mind, possibly the question he had been so deeply pondering.
‘I’m glad to come on you both. First of all, my dear Cutts, I wanted to approach you regarding a little non-party project I have on hand – no, no, not the Roosevelt statue – it is connected with an Eastern European cultural organization in which I am interested. However, before we come to public concerns, there are things to be settled about the late Lord Warminster’s letter of instructions. They are rather complicated – personal rather than legal bearings, though the Law comes in – so that to explain some of the points to you might save a lot of correspondence in the future. You could then pass on the information by word of mouth to your appropriate relatives, decisions thereby reached in a shorter time.’
Roddy showed attention to the phrase ‘non-party project’, but, with the professional politician’s immediate instinct for executing a disengaging movement from responsibilities that promised