Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [30]
‘We’ve finished it at last,’ she said, indicating the puzzle. ‘It took five months in all – with everyone who came to the house having a go. Then one afternoon the cats broke most of it up. The last few pieces were due to Priscilla’s brilliance.’
She showed a huge representation of Venice, a blue-grey Santa Maria della Salute, reflected in blue-grey waters of the canal, against a blue-grey sky. Priscilla, six or seven years younger than her sister, longer-legged, with fairer, untidy hair, was then about twenty. In spite of his own good resolutions to marry an heiress, Chips Lovell had shown interest in her for a time; apparently without things coming to much. Priscilla had at present several beaux, successfully concealing her own feelings about them. She was not at all like her sister, Norah, in disparaging the whole male sex, but the young men she met at dances never seemed quite what she required. There was talk of her taking a job. A fund was being organised for the promotion of opera, and Robert, who knew some of the members of the board, thought he could find her a place in its office.
‘How is Isobel?’ Priscilla asked rather truculently, as if she had not yet forgiven her immediately elder sister, even after two years, for getting married before herself.
‘Pretty well all right now. I am going to see her this afternoon.’
‘I looked in the day before yesterday,’ said Priscilla. ‘It is a grimmish place, isn’t it. I say, have you heard about Erry?’
‘Robert told me this moment.’
‘Erry is mad, of course. Do you know, I realised that for the first time when I was seven years old and he was grown up. Something about the way he was eating his pudding. I knew I must be growing up myself when I grasped that. Hullo, Veronica, hullo, George.’
The manner in which he wore his immensely discreet suit, rather than a slight, fair, fluffy moustache, caused George Tolland to retain the flavour of his service with the Brigade of Guards. Years before, when still a schoolboy, I had travelled to London with Sunny Farebrother, that business friend of Peter Templer’s father, and he had remarked in the train: ‘It helps to look like a soldier in the City. Fellows think they can get the better of you even before they start. That is always an advantage in doing a deal.’ Perhaps George Tolland held the same theory. Certainly he had done nothing to modify this air of having just come off parade. Whether assumed consciously or not, the style rather suited him, and was quite unlike Ted Jeavons’s down-at-heel look of being a wartime ex-officer. George was said to work like a slave in the City and seemed quite content with a social life offered chiefly by his own relations.
However, George had astonished everyone about eighteen months earlier by making an unexpected marriage. In some ways even Erridge’s adventure with Mona had surprised his family less. Erridge was a recognised eccentric. He made a virtue of behaving oddly. In taking Mona abroad he had even, in a sense, improved his reputation for normality by showing himself capable of such an act. George, on the other hand, was fond of drawing attention – especially in contrasting himself with Erridge – to the exemplary, even, as he insisted, deliberately snobbish lines upon which his own life was run. ‘I can never see the objection to being a snob,’ George used to say. ‘It seems far the most sensible thing to be.’ Apparent simplicity of outlook is always suspicious. This