The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [9]
‘You hadn’t heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘About Betty?’
‘Not ill, I hope.’
It occurred to me she might have been killed in a raid. That could happen to acquaintances and remain unknown to one for months.
‘She went off her rocker,’ he said.
‘You mean …’
‘Just what I say. She’s in the bin.’
He spoke roughly. The deliberate brutality of the statement was so complete, so designed to let no one, least of all myself, off any of its implications, that it could only be accepted as concealing an abyss of painful feeling. At least, correctly or not, such downright language had to be given the benefit of the doubt in that respect.
‘Rather a peach, isn’t she?’
That was what he had said of her, when I had first seen them together at Umfraville’s night-club, a stage in their relationship when Templer could not remember whether his future wife’s surname was Taylor or Porter. Now, he made no effort to help out the situation. There was nothing whatever to be said in return. I produced a few conventional phrases, none in the least adequate, at the same time feeling rather aggrieved that Templer himself should choose, first, to carry curtness of manner to the point of seeming positively unfriendly; then change to a tone that only long intimacy in the past could justify. Perhaps – thinking over Betty’s demeanour staying with Sir Magnus Dormers – this ultimate disaster was not altogether surprising. Having such cares on his mind could to some extent explain Templer’s earlier unaccommodating manner.
‘Just one of those things,’ he said.
He spoke this time as if a little to excuse himself for what might look like an earlier show of heartlessness.
‘To tell the truth, I’m feeling a shade fed up about marriage, women, my job, in fact the whole bag of tricks,’ he said. ‘Then this awful business of one’s age. You keep on getting back to that. If it isn’t one objection, it’s another. “You’re not young enough, old boy.” I’m always being told that nowadays. On top of it all, a bomb hit my flat the other night. I was on Fire Duty at the Ministry. Everybody said what a marvellous piece of luck. Not sure.’
‘Did it wreck the place completely?’
Templer shook his head, indicating not so much lack of damage at the flat, as that he could not bring himself to recapitulate further a subject so utterly tedious and unrewarding.
‘You haven’t any good idea where I might go temporarily? I’m living from hand to mouth at the moment with anyone who will put me up.’
I suggested the Jeavons house in South Kensington. Ted Jeavons, having somehow managed to find a builder to patch up the roof and back wall – an achievement no one but himself would have brought off at that moment – was still in residence. Only the rear part of the structure had been damaged by the bomb, the front remaining almost untouched. Jeavons ran the house more or less as it had been run when Molly was alive, with a shifting population of visitors, some of whom lived there more or less permanently, paying rent. Lots of households of much that kind existed in wartime London, a matter of luck if, homeless like Templer, you knew where to apply. He wrote down the address, at the same time showing characteristic lack of interest in information about Jeavons.
‘I might propose myself,’ he said. ‘If a bomb’s already hit the place, with any luck it won’t happen again, though I don’t know that there’s any real reason to suppose that.’
He paused, then suddenly began to talk about himself in a manner that was oddly apologetic, quite unlike his accustomed style as remembered, or the tone he had been using up till now. Until then, I had felt all contact lost between us, that the picture I retained of him when we had