The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [17]
Mrs Conyers was one of the few people with whom my mother liked to chat of ‘old times’: the days before she set out on the nomadic existence of a soldier’s wife. Mrs Conyers’s gossip, well informed, gently expressed, was perfectly adapted to recital at length. This mild manner of telling sometimes hair-raising stories was very much to the taste of my mother, never at ease with people she thought to be ‘worldly’, at the same time not unwilling to enjoy an occasional glimpse of ‘the world’, viewed through the window briefly opened by Mrs Conyers. The General had become a Gentleman-at-Arms after leaving the army, so that her stories included, with a touch of racing at its most respectable, some glimpse of the outskirts of Court life.
‘Bertha Conyers has such an amusing way of putting things,’ my mother would say. ‘But I really don’t believe all her stories, especially the one about Mrs Asquith and the man who asked her if she danced the tango.’
The fact that General Conyers was occasionally on duty at palaces rather irked my father, not so much because the General took this side of his life too seriously – to which my father would have been quite capable of objecting – but because he apparently did not take his court duties seriously enough.
‘If I were the King and I heard Aylmer Conyers talking like that, I’d sack him,’ he once said in a moment of irritation.
The General and his wife were coming to Stonehurst after staying with one of Mrs Conyers’s sisters, whose husband commanded a Lancer regiment in the area. Rather adventurously for that period, they were undertaking the journey by motor-car, a vehicle recently acquired by the General, which he drove himself. Indeed, the object of the visit was largely to display this machine, to compare it with the car my father had himself bought only a few months before. There was a good deal of excitement at the prospect of seeing a friend’s ‘motor’, although I think my father a little resented the fact that a man so much older than himself should be equally prepared to face such grave risks, physical and financial. As a matter of fact, General Conyers, who always prided himself on being up-to-date, was even rumoured to have been ‘up’ in a flying machine. This story was dismissed by my parents as being unworthy of serious credence.
‘Aylmer Conyers will never get to the top of that damned hill,’ said my father more than once during the week before their arrival.
‘Did you tell him about it? * said my mother.
‘I warned him in my letter. He is a man who never takes advice. I’m told he was just the same at Pretoria. Just a bit of luck that things turned out as well as they did for him – due mostly to Boer stupidity, I believe. Obstinate as a mule. Was up before Bobs himself once for disobeying an order. Talked himself out of it, even got promotion a short time after. Wonderful fellow. Well, so much the worse for him if he gets stuck – slip backwards more likely. That may be a lesson to him. Bad luck on Bertha Conyers if there’s an accident. It’s her I feel sorry for. I’ve worried a lot about it. He’s a selfish fellow in some ways, is old Aylmer.’
‘Do you think I ought to write to Bertha again myself?’ asked my mother, anxious to avoid the awful mishaps envisaged by my father.
‘No, no.’
‘But I will if you think I should.’
‘No, no. Let him stew in his own juice.’
The day of the Conyers’ luncheon came. I woke up that morning with a feeling