Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [81]
Matilda Donners had died. She had told Delavacquerie that she was not returning to London after the end of the summer. He had assumed her to mean that she had decided to live in the country or abroad. When questioned as to her plans Matilda had been evasive. Only after her death was it clear that she must have known what was going to happen. That was like Matilda. She had always been mistress of her own life. The organ began playing a voluntary. Frederica attempted to check Umfraville’s chatter, which was becoming louder.
‘Do be quiet, darling. The whole congregation don’t want to hear about your hangovers.’
‘What?’
‘Speak more quietly.’
Umfraville indicated that he could not hear what his wife was talking about, but said no more for the moment. He was not alone in taking part in murmured conversation, the bride’s grandmother, a small jolly woman, also conversing animatedly with relations in the pew behind that in which she sat. Umfraville began again.
‘Who’s the handsome lady next to the one in a funny hat?’
‘The one in the hat, who’s talking a lot, like you, is Lady Akworth. The one you mean is the bride’s mother.’
‘What about her?’
‘She was called Jamieson – one of the innumerable Ardglass ramifications, not a close relation – her husband was in Shell or BP, and caught a tropical disease in Africa that killed him.’
That seemed to satisfy Umfraville for the moment. He closed his eyes, showing signs of nodding off to sleep. Sebastian Cutts, the bridegroom, tall, sandy-haired like his father, also shared Roddy’s now ended political ambitions. He and his brother, Jonathan, resembled their father, too, in delivering a flow of information, and figures, about their respective computers and art sales. Hard work at his computers had not engrossed Sebastian Cutts to the exclusion of what was judged – by his own generation – as a not less than ample succession of love affairs; a backlog of ex-girlfriends Clare Akworth was thought well able to dispose of. An only child, she had been working as typist-secretary in an advertising firm. Her pleasing beauté de singe – the phrase Umfraville’s – was of a type calculated to raise the ghost of Sir Magnus Donners in the Stourwater corridors. Perhaps it had done so, when she was a schoolgirl. Her spell at Stourwater had been later than that of the Quiggin twins (recently much publicized in connexion with Toilet Paper, a newly founded ‘underground’ magazine), both withdrawn from the school before Clare Akworth’s arrival there. Umfraville, coming-to suddenly, showed signs of impatience.
‘Buck up. Get cracking. We can’t sit here all day. Ah, here she is.’
The congregation rose. Clare Akworth, who had an excellent figure, came gracefully up the aisle on the arm of her uncle, Rupert Akworth, one of her father’s several brothers. He was employed in the rival firm of fine arts auctioneers to that of Jonathan Cutts. There were several small children in attendance. I did not know which families they represented. The best-man was Jeremy Warminster, the bridegroom’s first-cousin. Junior Research Fellow in Science at my own former college, Jeremy Warminster was a young man of severe good looks, offhand manner, reputation for brilliance at whatever was his own form of biological studies. A throwback to his great-great-uncle, the so-called Chemist-Earl (specialist in marsh gases, though more renowned in family myth for contributions to the deodorization of sewage), Jeremy had always known exactly what he wanted