Casanova's Chinese Restaurant - Anthony Powell [37]
‘I’ve met him,’ said Roddy. ‘Used to be with Donners-Brebner. Heavy-looking chap with thick spectacles. As a matter of fact, he was always regarded as rather a joke in our family at the time when my sister, Mercy, was going to dances. He was the absolute last resort when a man had dropped out for a dinner party. Didn’t some girl pour sugar over his head once at a ball?’
‘What’s happened to Widmerpool?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t seen him for a year or two. Not since Isobel and I were married, as a matter of fact. I’ve known him for ages.’
‘Fettiplace-Jones was giving him dinner at the House,’ said Roddy, ‘the night of the India debate.’
‘Is he thinking of standing?’ George asked. ‘He is rather the type.’
‘Not as a Tory,’ Roddy said. ‘Widmerpool is far from being a Tory.’
Roddy looked a shade resentful at George’s probably quite artless judgment that Widmerpool was the sort of man likely to make an M.P.
‘I ran across him somewhere,’ said George. ‘Then he was sitting at the next table one day at Sweeting’s. He struck me as a knowledgeable chap. We had him to dinner as a matter of fact. Now I come to think of it, he said he knew you, Nick. My firm does a certain amount of business with Donners-Brebner, where Widmerpool used to be. He may be going back there in an advisory capacity, anyway temporarily, he told me.’
‘I didn’t at all take to Mr Widmerpool,’ said Veronica, breaking off conversation with Susan on the subject of the best place to buy curtain material. ‘He could talk of nothing but Mrs Simpson the night he came to us. You couldn’t get him off the subject.’
St John Clarke, who had begun to look a little petulant at all this chatter about persons in general unknown to him, brightened at that name. He seemed about to speak; then some inner prompting must have caused him to think better of expressing any reflections stirring within his mind because finally he remained silent, crumbling his bread thoughtfully.
‘I met Mr Widmerpool once at Aunt Molly’s,’ said Susan ‘There was that business of his engagement being broken off, wasn’t there – with that rather dreadful lady, one of the Vowchurches?’
‘I hear poor Uncle Ted is a little better,’ said Lady Warminster.
She referred to the war wound from which Jeavons intermittently suffered, at the same time managing to convey also a sense of moral or social improvement in Jeavons’s condition which appeared for some reason to forbid further discussion of Widmerpool’s unsuccessful attempt of a year or two before to marry Mrs Haycock.
‘Roddy and I were at the Jeavonses’ last week,’ said Susan. ‘The worst of the redecorating is over now, although one still falls over ladders and pails of whitewash. Aunt Molly’s friend Miss Weedon – whom I can’t stand – has moved in permanently now. She has a kind of flat on the top floor. And do you know who is living there too? Charles Stringham of all people. Do you remember him? Miss Weedon is said to be “looking after him”.’
‘Was that the Stringham we were at school with?’ George asked me, but with no idea of what amazement I felt at this news, ‘He was another contemporary of Widmerpool’s.’
‘I used to think Charles Stringham so attractive when he occasionally turned up at dances,’ said Susan reminiscently, speaking as if at least half a century had passed since she herself had been seen on a dance floor. ‘Then he absolutely disappeared from the scene. What happened to him? Why does he need “looking after”?’
‘Charles Stringham isn’t exactly a teetotaller, darling,’ said Roddy, showing slight resentment at the expression by his own wife of such unqualified praise of another man’s charms.
Lady Warminster shuddered visibly at the thought of what that understatement about Stringham’s habits must comprehend. I asked Susan how this indeed extraordinary situation had come about: that Miss Weedon and Stringham should be living under the same roof at the Jeavonses’.
‘Charles Stringham went to see Miss Weedon there one evening – she was his