The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [36]
‘He must have changed his style since my day. Then he was a more outdoor type, with classical Greek overtones.’
‘Trelawney was always changing his style – even his name, too, I believe, which is, of course, no more Trelawney than my own is. Nor does anyone know why he should be addressed as Doctor. What was more exciting, my aunt knew a girl who – to use her own phrase – fell into his clutches. She was said to be a promising pianist. That must have been before I went to the Royal College, because I remember being more impressed by the idea of a female pianist who was promising, than I should have been after emerging from that famous conservatoire.’
‘What happened to the girl?’
‘Rather dreadful. She cast herself from a Welsh mountain-top – Trelawney had a kind of temple at that time in a remote farmhouse in North Wales. There was quite a scandal. He was attacked in one of the Sunday papers. It passed off, as such attacks do.’
‘What had he done to the girl?’
‘Oh, the usual things, I suppose – no doubt less usual ones, too, since Trelawney is an unusual man. In any case, possibilities are so limited even for a thaumaturge. The point was her subsequent suicide. There was talk of nameless rites, drugs, disagreeable forms of discipline – the sort of thing that might rather appeal to Sir Magnus Donners.’
‘Did you ever meet Trelawney yourself?’
‘When I first knew Maclintick, who numbered among his acquaintances some of the most unlikely people, he offered to take me to see the Doctor, then living in Shepherd’s Bush. In principle, Maclintick disapproved of persons like that, but he and Trelawney used to talk German philosophy together. They had been educated at the same German university – Bonn, I think – and it was a type of conversation hard to obtain elsewhere.’
‘Did you go?’
‘Somehow, I never found myself in the mood. I felt it might be embarrassing.
Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
That was me in those days.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought much delicacy was required where Dr Trelawney was concerned.’
‘My own occult interests are so sketchy. I’ve just thumbed over Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Never participated in a Black Mass in my life, or as much as received an invitation to a witches’ Sabbath.’
‘But I thought Dr Trelawney was more for the Simple Life, with a touch of yoga thrown in. I did not realise he was committed to all this sorcery.’
‘After you knew him, he must have moved further to the Left – or would it be to the Right? Extremes of policy have such a tendency to merge.’
‘Trelawney must be getting on in age now – Cagliostro in his latter days, though he has avoided incarceration up to date.’
‘What will happen to people like him as the world plods on to standardisation? Will they cease to be born, or find jobs in other professions? I suppose there will always be a position for a man with first-class magical qualifications.’
That conversation, too, had taken place long before either of us was married. I recalled it, years later, reading in a weekly paper a letter from Dr Trelawney protesting that some reviewer (Mark Members, as a matter of fact), in noticing a recently published work on prophecy and sortilege in which the author approached the subject in the light of psychiatry and telepathy, had confused the sayings of Paracelsus and Nostradamus. This letter (provoking a lively reply from Members) was composed in Dr Trelawney’s most florid manner. I wondered if Moreland would see it. It was a long time since we had met. When we were first married, Moreland and Matilda, Isobel and I, used often to see one another. Now those dinners at Foppa’s or the Strasbourg took place no longer. They seemed to form an historic period, distinct and definable,