The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [91]
‘Absolutely.’
‘After all, it is I who am getting married, not they.’
‘Of course.’
‘They can mind their own business, what?’
‘Certainly.’
‘That’s a thing no one likes to do.’
General Conyers laughed very heartily at this thought of the horrible destiny pursuing his critics, that they would have to mind their own business, most dreaded of predicaments.
‘So I should like you to stay and meet my future wife,’ he said.
I wondered what my parents were going to say to this. From their point of view it would be the final nail in the coffin of Aylmer Conyers. There was nothing of which they would more disapprove. At that moment the front-door bell rang.
‘Forgive me,’ said the General, ‘as I explained before, I have no longer any domestic staff.’
He went off to open the door. I heard a woman’s voice in the hall; soft laughter, as if at a too violent embrace. I thought how furious Uncle Giles would have been had he lived to hear that General Conyers was contemplating remarriage. Certainly the news was unexpected enough. I wondered who on earth was going to appear. A succession of possibilities, both ludicrous and conventional, presented themselves to the mind: ash-blondes of seventeen; red-wigged, middle-aged procuresses, on the lines of Mrs Erdleigh; silver-haired, still palely-beautiful widows of defunct soldiers, courtiers, noblemen. I even toyed for a moment with the fantasy that the slight asperity that had always existed between the General and my sister-in-law, Frederica, might really have concealed love, dismissing such a possibility almost as soon as it took shape. Even that last expectation scarcely came up to the reality. I could not have guessed it in a million years. A tall, dark, beaky-nosed lady of about fifty came into the room. I rose. She was distinctly well dressed, with a businesslike, rather than frivolous, air.
‘We have often met before,’ she said, holding out her hand.
It was Miss Weedon.
‘At Lady Molly’s,’ she said, ‘and long before that too.’
The General took my arm between his forefinger and thumb, as if about to break it neatly just above the elbow with one sharp movement of his wrist.
‘So you know each other already?’ he said, not absolutely sure he was pleased by that fact. ‘I might have guessed you would have met with Molly Jeavons. I’d forgotten she was an aunt of Isobel’s.’
‘But we knew each other in much more distant days as well,’ said Miss Weedon, speaking in a gayer tone than I had ever heard her use before.
She looked enormously delighted at what was happening to her.
‘I ran into Jeavons the other day in Sloane Street,’ said General Conyers. ‘Have you seen him lately, Nick?’
‘Not for a month or two. There has been such a lot to do about Isobel going to the country and so on. We haven’t been to Molly’s house for ages. How are they?’
‘Jeavons is an air-raid warden,’ said the General. ‘We had quite a talk. I like Jeavons. Don’t know him well. Hear some people complain he is a bore. I don’t think so. He put me on to a first-rate place to buy cheap shirts many years ago. Shopped there ever since.’
‘I believe Lady Molly is going back to Dogdene,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘They have evacuated a girls’ school to the house. She may help to run it – not teach, of course. How strange to return after being châtelaine of the place.’
‘Of course, she was once married to that pompous fellow, John Sleaford, wasn’t she?’ said the General. ‘One forgets things. Sleaford must be dead these twenty years. How King Edward abominated him.’
‘I don’t think the present marchioness will be too pleased to find her former sister-in-law in residence at Dogdene again,’ said Miss Weedon, with one of those icy, malicious smiles I well remembered. ‘Lady Molly has always been so funny about what she calls “the latest Dogdene