Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [61]
During that year, among many other events in one’s life, two things happened that could have suggested achievement of the mutually desired meeting between Widmerpool and Murtlock. The month of both indications was roughly dated as December, by the arrival of Canon Fenneau’s reminder about books for his bazaar, and the fact that, when Greening and I ran across each other in London, we were doing our Christmas shopping. Neither event positively brought home the Widmerpool/Murtlock alliance at the time. The first of these was the bare announcement in the paper that Widmerpool, having resigned the chancellorship of the university, was to be replaced by some other more or less appropriate figure. After his various public pronouncements there seemed nothing particularly notable in Widmerpool preferring to disembarrass himself of official duties of any sort whatsoever.
Greening’s information was rather another matter. It should have given a clue. We met in the gift department of some big shop. Greening, who had been badly wounded in the Italian campaign, had a limp, but was otherwise going strong. He had been ADC to the General at the Divisional Headquarters on which we had both served in the early part of the war; later rejoined his regiment, and, it had been rumoured, died of wounds. He looked older, of course, but his habit of employing a kind of schoolboy slang that seemed to predate his own generation had not changed. He still blushed easily. He said he was a forestry consultant, married, with three children. We talked in a desultory way of the time when we had soldiered together.
‘Do you remember the DAAG at that HQ?’
‘Widmerpool?’
‘That’s the chap. Major Widmerpool. Rather a shit.’
‘Of course I remember him.’
‘He was always getting my goat, but what I thought was really bloody awful about him was the way he behaved to an old drunk called Bithel, who commanded the Mobile Laundry.’
‘I remember Bithel too.’
‘Bithel had to be shot out, the old boy had to go all right, but Widmerpool boasted in the Mess about his own efficiency in getting rid of Bithel, and how Bithel had broken down, when told he’d got to go. It may have happened, but we didn’t all want to hear about it from Widmerpool.’
‘If it’s any consolation, Widmerpool’s become very odd himself now.’
‘You know that already? I was coming on to that. He’s gone round the bend. Nothing less.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘I was looking at some timber – woodland off my usual beat – and was told an extraordinary story by the johnny I was dealing with. Widmerpool – it must be the same bugger, from what he said – runs a kind of – well, I don’t know what the hell to call it – sort of colony for odds and sods, not far away from the property I was inspecting. Widmerpool’s place has been going for a year or two – a kind of rest-home for layabouts – but lately things have considerably hotted up, my client said. A new lot had arrived who wore even stranger togs, and went in for even gaudier monkey-tricks. This chap talked of Widmerpool as having made himself a sort of Holy Man. Not bad going after starting as a DAAG.’
Greening, unable to paraphrase the narrative of the owner of the woodland, could produce no revelation beyond that. Nevertheless the account of Widmerpool had evidently made a strong impression on him. I don’t think the possibility of the new arrivals being Murtlock’s adherents occurred to me at the time. If that had been at all conveyed, the conclusion would have been that Murtlock had been absorbed into Widmerpool’s larger organization. In short, what Greening spoke of seemed little more than what had been initially outlined some time before by Delavacquerie’s son. Greening began to collect