Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [80]
‘Now – a drink?’
‘Who is Avril?’
‘One of my stepdaughters.’
‘I didn’t know — ’
‘Three of them. Avril’s not a bad girl. Not very bright. A bit sub, to tell the truth. She’s in rather a jam at the moment. Can’t be helped.’
Bagshaw made a despairing, consciously theatrical gesture, no doubt developed from his professional life.
‘Are the other stepchildren upstairs?’
He looked surprised. Certainly the ages seemed wrong, if anything were to be inferred from the noises being made.
‘No, no. The ones upstairs are my own. The stepchildren are more or less grown-up. Getting into tangles with boyfriends all the time. You see I’m quite a family man now.’
Bagshaw said that in a whimsical, rather faraway voice, probably another echo of his programme. His whole demeanour had become more histrionic, at least histrionic in a different manner from formerly. He sat down without pouring himself out a drink, something not entirely without precedent, though unlikely to be linked now with curative abstinences of the past.
‘Aren’t you having anything?’
‘I hardly drink at all these days. Find I feel better. Get through more work. Here’s May. How’s your migraine, dear? Have a drink, it may make you feel better. No? Too busy?’
Mrs Bagshaw, in her forties, with traces of the same blonde good-looks as her daughter, had the air of being dreadfully harassed. She was also rather lame. Evidently used to people coming to see her husband about matters connected with his work, perfectly polite, she obviously hoped to get out of the room as soon as possible, after giving some sort of a progress report about the cooking-stove crisis. This problem solved, or postponed, she excused herself and retired again. Bagshaw, who had listened gravely, replied with apparent good sense to his wife’s statements and questions, clearly accepted this new incarnation of himself. In any case, it was no longer new to him. When Mrs Bagshaw had gone, he settled down again to his professionally avuncular manner.
‘Where will this American friend of yours stay in London, Nicholas?’
‘In one of those bleak hotels X used to frequent. He hopes to get the atmosphere first-hand. He really is very keen on doing the book well.’
‘Which one?’
Bagshaw groaned at the name, and shook his head. To judge from the exterior of the place, that reaction was justified.
‘I spent a night there myself once years ago – rather a sordid story I won’t bore you with – in fact recommended the place to Trappy in the first instance. The bathroom accommodation doesn’t exactly measure up to the highest mod. con. standards. You know how strongly Americans feel about these things.’
‘Gwinnett wants the Trapnel ethos, not the best place in London to take a bath.’
‘I see.’
That fact impressed Bagshaw. He thought about it for a moment.
‘Look here, this idea occurred to me as soon as you mentioned your American. Why doesn’t Professor Gwinnett – I mean only when he’s completed his stint of Trapnel ports of call, not before – come and PG with us? The spare room’s free at the moment. Our Japanese statistician went back to Osaka. I think we made him comfortable during his stay. At least he never complained. That may have been Zen, of course, overcoming of illusory dualisms. I got quite interested in Zen while he was with us.’
The idea of lodging with Bagshaw, a guest paying or non-paying, would once have seemed almost as extraordinary as the fact of his possessing a house. Even in the reformed state of his ménage there were disrecommendations. If anyone were to be ‘lodger’, Bagshaw himself had always appeared prototype of the kind, one of Nature’s lodgers; coaxing the landlady, when behind with the rent, seducing her daughter, storing (in his revolutionary days) subversive pamphlets