The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [57]
He began to prepare a corner of the table, upon which the cushions of Sloth still remained. Templer had now entirely thrown off the distant, almost formal air he had shown earlier in the day. He was more like himself when I had known him years before. His first scene, Youthful Lust, as he saw it – an old-fashioned conception, very typical of Templer himself – was to take place in the private room of a restaurant, where a debutante had been lured by a lustful undergraduate: Isobel, in long white gloves (which Sir Magnus produced, as if by magic), with three ostrich feathers in her hair; Templer, in vaguely sporting attire shorts and a scarf playing some part. Then, Middle-aged Lust; Matilda for some reason wearing sun-spectacles, was a married woman repelling the advances of a lustful clergyman, Templer in this role wearing an evening collar back-to-front. Neither of these two tableaux was specially memorable. For the third scene, Elderly Lust, a lustful octogenarian entertained to dinner a ballet girl – another typically nineteenth-century Templer concept – an opera-hat being produced from somewhere, white blotting-paper from the writing-table in the morning-room providing a stiff shirt. Anne Umfraville had constructed some sort of a ballet skirt, but was wearing by then little else. In his presentation of senile lust, Templer excelled himself, a theatrical performance he could never have achieved in the past. His acting might almost be regarded as one of those cases where unhappiness and frustration seem to force something like art from persons normally concerned only with the material side of life. Anne Umfraville, as the ballet girl, fell not far short of him in excellence.
‘Give me that fly-whisk,’ said Templer.
At the height of the act, amid much laughter from the audience, I suddenly heard next to me a muffled howl. It was the noise a dog makes when accidentally trodden on. I turned to see what had happened. The sound came from Betty Templer. Tears were coursing down her cheeks. Up to that moment she had been sitting silent on one of the dining-room chairs, watching the show, apparently fairly happy now that her own turn was passed. I thought she was even finding these antics a little amusing. Now, as I looked at her, she jumped up and rushed from the room. The door slammed. Templer and Anne Umfraville, both by then more or less recumbent on the cushions littering the table, in a dramatic and convincing representation of impotent desire, now separated one from the other. Templer slid to his feet. Sir Magnus looked up from the camera.
‘Oh, dear,’ he said mildly, ‘I’m afraid Betty is not feeling well again. Perhaps she should not have sat up so late.’
For some reason my mind was carried back at that moment to Stonehurst and the Billson incident. This was all the same kind of thing. Betty wanted Templer’s love, just as Billson wanted Albert’s; Albert’s marriage had precipitated a breakdown in just the same way as Templer’s extravagances with Anne Umfraville. Here, unfortunately, was no General Conyers to take charge of the situation, to quieten Betty Templer. Certainly her husband showed no immediate sign of wanting to accept that job. However, before an extreme moral discomfort could further immerse all of us, a diversion took pace. The door of the dining-room, so recently slammed, opened again. A man stood on the threshold. He was in uniform. He appeared to be standing at attention, a sinister, threatening figure, calling the world to arms. It was Widmerpool.
‘Good evening,’ he said.
Sir Magnus, who had been fiddling with the camera, smiling quietly to himself, as if he had not entirely failed to extract a passing thrill of pleasure from Betty Templer’s crise, looked up. Then he advanced across the room, his hand outstretched.
‘Kenneth,’ he said, ‘I did not expect to see you at this late hour. I thought you must have decided to drive straight to London. We have been taking some photographs.’
By that date, when the