The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [1]
We always had tea in an apartment called ‘the lounge’, the back half of a large double drawing-room, the inner doors of which were kept permanently closed, thus detaching ‘the lounge’ from ‘the writing-room’, the half overlooking the street. (Perhaps, like the doors of the Temple of Janus, they were closed only in time of Peace; because, years later, when I saw the Ufford in war-time these particular doors had been thrown wide open.) The lace-curtained windows of the lounge gave on to a well; a bleak outlook, casting the gloom of perpetual night, or of a sky for ever dark with rain. Even in summer the electric light had to be switched on during tea.
The wallpaper’s intricate floral design in blue, grey and green ran upwards from a cream-coloured lincrusta dado to a cornice also of cream lincrusta. The pattern of flowers, infinitely faded, closely matched the chintz-covered sofa and armchairs, which were roomy and unexpectedly comfortable. A palm in a brass pot with ornamental handles stood in one corner: here and there were small tables of Moorish design upon each of which had been placed a heavy white globular ash-tray, equipped with an attachment upon which to rest a cigar or cigarette. Several circular gilt looking-glasses hung about the walls, but there was only one picture, an engraving placed over the fireplace, of Landseer’s Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time. Beneath this crowded scene of medieval plenty—presenting a painful contrast with the Ufford’s cuisine—a clock, so constructed that pendulum and internal works were visible under its glass dome, stood eternally at twenty minutes past five. Two radiators kept the room reasonably warm in winter, and the coal, surrounded in the fireplace with crinkled pink paper, was never alight. No sign of active life was apparent in the room except for several much-thumbed copies of The Lady lying in a heap on one of the Moorish tables.
‘I think we shall have this place to ourselves,’ Uncle Giles used invariably to remark, as if we had come there by chance on a specially lucky day, ‘so that we shall be able to talk over our business without disturbance. Nothing I hate more than having some damn’d fellow listening to every word I say.’
Of late years his affairs, in so far as his relations knew anything of them, had become to some extent stabilised, although invitations to tea were inclined to coincide with periodical efforts to extract slightly more than his agreed share from ‘the Trust’. Either his path had grown more tranquil than formerly, or crises were at longer intervals and apparently less violent. This change did not imply that he approached life itself in a more conciliatory spirit, or had altered his conviction that worldly success was a matter of ‘influence’. The country’s abandonment of the Gold Standard at about this time—and the formation of the National Government—had particularly annoyed him. He propagated contrary, far more revolutionary, economic theories of his own as to how the European monetary situation should be regulated.
He was, however, a shade less abrupt in personal dealings. The anxiety of his relations that he might one day get into a really serious financial tangle, never entirely at rest, had considerably abated in comparison with time past; nor had there been recently any of those once recurrent rumours that he was making preparations for an unsuitable marriage. He still hovered about the Home Counties, seen intermittently at Reading, Aylesbury, Chelmsford, or Dover—and once so far afield as the Channel Islands—his ‘work’ now connected with the administration of some charitable organisation