The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [99]
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘How’s your war going? It’s touch and go whether we’re winning ours. Stanley’s here, and a lady who has come to see about lodging Stanley’s missus in the country. Then Molly met a fellow at Sanderson’s who was trying to find a home for his cat, and she’s gone and asked him to stay. The man, I mean, not the cat.’
‘The lady who has come about moving your – is it sister-in-law? – is my mother,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I spoke to you on the telephone about it. I am Kenneth Widmerpool, you know. We have met in the past.’
‘So you did,’ said Jeavons, ‘and so we have. It went out of my head like most other things. I thought Nick had just come to call and brought a friend. You can talk to Molly about it all when she comes downstairs, but I think your Mum has pretty well fixed everything up as it is.’
Jeavons’s voice, hoarse and faint, sounded as usual as if he had a cold in his head or had been up too late the night before. He seemed restive, disorientated, but in good form.
‘Who is Stanley?’ I asked.
‘Who’s Stanley?’ said Jeavons. ‘My brother, of course. Who did you think he was?’
‘Never knew you had a brother, Ted.’
‘Course I’ve got a brother.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Accountant.’
‘In London?’
‘Nottingham. Given it up now, of course. Back to the army. Staff-Captain at the War House. Fancy your never having heard of Stanley. No reason why you should, I suppose. Still, it strikes me as funny. Rather a great man, Stanley, in his way. Gets things done.’
Among so much that was depressing, the news that Jeavons had a brother was for some reason cheering. It was certainly information to fascinate Isobel, when I next saw her, even to stagger Chips Lovell, who, regarding himself as an authority on his wife’s relations, had certainly never heard of this outgrowth. Jeavons was known only to possess two or three vague connexions, sometimes to be found staying in the house, though never precisely placed in their kinship, in any case always hopelessly submerged in number by his wife’s cousins, nephews and nieces. He had had, it was true, an old aunt, or great-aunt, to whom Molly was said to have been ‘very good’, who had lingered on in the house for months suffering from some illness, finally dying in one of the upstairs rooms. A Jeavons brother was quite another matter, a phenomenon of wartime circumstances. Jeavons, his dark, insistently curly hair now faintly speckled with grey, had himself taken on a subtly different personality since the onset of war. After all, war was the element which had, in a sense, made his career. Obviously he reacted strongly to its impacts. Until now his appearance had always suggested a temporary officer of the ’14-’18 conflict, who had miraculously survived, without in the least ageing, into a much later epoch. The blue overall changed all that. Jeavons had also allowed his Charlie Chaplin moustache to grow outwards towards the corners of his mouth. With his own curious adaptability and sense of survival, he had effortlessly discarded what was in any case no more than a kind of disguise, now facing the world in the more contemporary role, equally artificial, of the man who had come to clean the windows or mend the boiler. We moved up the stairs.
‘Met one of Isobel’s uncles at the warden-post the other night,’ said Jeavons. ‘Alfred Tolland, the one Molly always teases.’
‘How was he?’
‘We had a talk about how difficult it is for people with daughters to bring ’em out properly in wartime,’ Jeavons said.
He spoke without levity. Although he remained always utterly himself, Jeavons, after twenty years of marriage to Molly, had taken on much of his wife’s way of looking at things. It would be more true to say the way the world into which she had been born looked at things, for Molly herself would probably have given little thought to how daughters were to be ‘brought out’ in wartime, even