The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [6]
I could think of no possible reply to this indictment. ‘You are thought cold, but you possess deep affections, sometimes for people worthless in themselves. Often you are at odds with those who might help you. You like women, and they like you, but you often find the company of men more amusing. You expect too much, and yet you are also too resigned. You must try to understand life.’
Somewhat awed by this searching, even severe analysis, I promised I would do better in future.
‘People can only be themselves,’ she said. ‘If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.”
‘That is what I should like them to be.’
‘Sometimes you are too serious, sometimes not serious enough.’
‘So I have been told.’
‘You must make a greater effort in life.’
‘I can see that.’
These strictures certainly seemed just enough; and yet any change of direction would be hard to achieve. Perhaps I was irrevocably transfixed, just as she described, half-way between dissipation and diffidence. While I considered the matter, she passed on to more circumstantial things. It turned out that a fair woman was not very pleased with me; and a dark one almost equally vexed. Like my uncle—perhaps some family failing common to both of us—I was encompassed by gossip.
‘They do not signify at all,’ said Mrs. Erdleigh, referring thus rather ruthlessly to the women of disparate colouring. ‘This is a much more important lady—medium hair, I should say—and I think you have run across her once or twice before, though not recently. But there seems to be another man interested, too. He might even be a husband. You don’t like him much. He is tallish, I should guess. Fair, possibly red hair. In business. Often goes abroad.’
I began to turn over in my mind every woman I had ever met.
‘There is a small matter in your business that is going to cause inconvenience,’ she went on. ‘It has to do with an elderly man—and two young ones connected with him.’
‘Are you sure it is not two elderly men and one young man?’
It had immediately struck me that she might be en rapport with my firm’s growing difficulties regarding St. John Clarke’s introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister. The elderly men would be St. John Clarke and Isbister themselves—or perhaps St. John Clarke and one of the partners—and the young man was, of course, St. John Clarke’s secretary, Mark Members.
‘I see the two young men quite plainly,’ she said. ‘Rather a troublesome couple, I should say.’
This was all credible enough, including the character sketch, though perhaps not very interesting. Such trivial comment, mixed with a few home truths of a personal nature, provide, I had already learnt, the commonplaces of fortune-telling. Such was all that remained in my mind of what Mrs. Erdleigh prophesied on that occasion. She may have foretold more. If so, her words were forgotten by me. Indeed, I was not greatly struck by the insight she had shown; although she impressed me as a woman of dominant, even oddly attractive personality, in spite of a certain absurdity of demeanour. She herself seemed well pleased with the performance.
At the end of her sitting it was time to go. I was dining that evening with Barnby, picking him up at his studio. I rose to say good-bye, thanking her for the trouble she had taken.
‘We shall meet again.’ ‘I hope so.’
‘In about a year from now.’
‘Perhaps before.’
‘No,’ she said, smiling with the complacence of one to whom the secrets of human existence had been long since occultly revealed. ‘Not before.’
I did not press the point. Uncle Giles accompanied me to the hall. He had by then returned to the subject of money, the mystique of which was at least as absorbing to him as the rites upon which we had been engaged.
‘… and then one could not foresee that San Pedro Warehouses Deferred would become entirely valueless,’ he was saying. ‘The expropriations were merely the result of a liberal dictator coming in—got to face these changes. There was one of those quite natural revulsions against foreign capital…’
He broke off.