The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [93]
‘Valery asks why one has been summoned to this carnival,’ Moreland once said, ‘but it’s more like blind man’s buff. One reels through the carnival in question, blundering into persons one can’t see, and, without much success, trying to keep hold of a few of them.’
There could be no doubt that General Conyers had taken on a formidable woman; equally no doubt that he was a formidable man. If he could handle Billson naked, he could probably handle Miss Weedon clothed – or naked, too, if it came to that. I felt admiration for his energy, his determination to cling to life. There was nothing defeatist about him. However, my parents, as I had expected, were not at all pleased by the news. They had, of course, never heard of Miss Weedon. The engagement was, indeed, quite a shock to them. In fact, the whole affair made my father very cross. Now that Uncle Giles was no more, he may have felt himself permitted a greater freedom of expression in openly criticising General Conyers. He did so in just the terms the General had himself envisaged.
‘No fool like an old fool,’ my father said. ‘I shouldn’t have believed it of him, Bertha hardly cold in her grave.’
‘I hope he hasn’t made a silly mistake,’ said my mother. ‘I like old Aylmer, with all his funny ways of behaving.’
‘Very awkward for his daughter too. Why, some of his grandchildren must be almost grown up.’
‘Oh, no,’ said my mother, who loved accuracy in such matters, ‘not grown up.’
‘Where did he meet this woman?’
‘I really don’t know.’
It turned out later that General Conyers had sat next to Miss Weedon at a concert some months before the outbreak of war. They had fallen into conversation. Finding they knew many people in common, they had arranged to meet at another concert the following week. That was how their friendship had begun. In short, General Conyers had ‘picked up’ Miss Weedon. There was no denying it. It was a true romance.
‘Adventures only happen to adventurers,’ Mr Deacon had said one evening when we were sitting drinking in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.
‘That depends on what one calls adventurers,’ said Moreland, who was in a hair-splitting mood. ‘What you mean, Edgar, is that people to whom adventures happen are never wholly unadventurous. That is not the same thing. It’s the latter class who have the real adventures – people like oneself.’
‘Don’t be pedantic, Moreland,’ Mr Deacon had answered.
Certainly General Conyers was not unadventurous. Was he an adventurer? I considered his advice about the army. Then the answer came to me. I must get in touch with Widmerpool. I wondered why I had not thought of that earlier. I telephoned to his office. They put me through to a secretary.
‘Captain Widmerpool is embodied,’ she said in an unfriendly voice.
I could tell from her tone, efficient, charmless, unimaginative, that she had been given special instructions by Widmerpool himself to use the term ’embodied’ in describing his military condition. I asked where he was to be found. It was a secret. At last, not without pressure on my own part, she gave me a telephone number. This turned out to be that of his Territorial battalion’s headquarters. I rang him up.
‘Come and see me by all means, my boy,’ he boomed down the wire in a new, enormously hearty voice, ‘but bring your own beer. There won’t be much I can do for you. I’m up to my arse in bumph and don’t expect I shall be able to