The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [99]
‘This is Major —’
‘Jenkins.’
‘Major Jenkins was incredibly kind to me in St Paul’s.’
Madame Flores took my hand. In spite of the sunlessness of the day, she was wearing spectacles with dark lenses. When I turned to the younger one, her charming figure immediately renewed those thoughts of Jean Duport the atmosphere of the Cathedral had somehow generated. This girl had the same leggy, coltish look, untaught, yet hinting at the same time of captivating sophistications and artifices. She was much tidier than Jean had been when I first set eyes on her, tennis racquet against her hip.
‘But why was it necessary to be so kind to Carlos?’ asked her mother.
She spoke English as well as her husband, the accent even less perceptible.
‘Major Jenkins allowed me to sit in his own special seats.’
‘How very grand of him to have special seats.’
‘Otherwise there would have been nowhere but the steps of the altar.’
‘A most unsuitable place for you, Carlos.’
‘We are going to take Major Jenkins as far as Whitehall.’
The tone of Colonel Flores with his wife was that of a man in complete control. She seemed to accept this. All the same, she began to laugh a lot.
‘Nick,’ she said. ‘You look so different in uniform.’
‘You know each other already?’ asked Flores.
‘Of course we do,’ said Jean.
‘But we haven’t met for a long time.’
‘This is perfectly splendid,’ said Colonel Flores. ‘Come along. Let’s jump into the car.’
It was not only the dark lenses and changed hair-do. Jean had altered her whole style. Even the first impression, that she had contracted the faint suggestion of a foreign accent, was not wholly imaginary. The accent was there, though whether result of years in foreign parts, or adopted as a small affectation on return to her own country as a wife of a foreigner, was uncertain. Oddly enough, the fact of having noticed at once that Polly Duport looked so like her mother when younger, made the presence of Jean herself less, rather than more, to be expected. It was as if the mother was someone different; the daughter, the remembered Jean. About seventeen or eighteen, Polly Duport was certainly a very pretty girl; prettier, so far as that went, than her mother at the same age. Jean’s attraction in those days had been something other than mere prettiness. Polly had a certain look of her father, said to be very devoted to her. She seemed quite at ease, obviously brought up in a rather old-fashioned tradition, Spanish or exported English, that made her seem older than her age. Relations with her step-father appeared cordial. The whole story began to come back. Duport himself had spoken of the South American army officer his wife had married after her affair with Brent.
‘He looks like Rudolph Valentino on an off day,’ Duport had said.
Colonel Flores did not fall short of that description; if anything, he rose above it. He seemed not at all surprised that his wife and I knew each other. I wondered what sort of a picture, if any, Jean had given him of her life before their marriage. Probably reminiscence played no part whatever in their relationship. It does with few people. For that matter, one did not know what the former life of Flores himself had been. We exchanged conversational banalities. Formal and smiling, Jean too was perfectly at ease. More so than myself. I suddenly remembered about Peter. She had always been fond of her brother, without anything at all obsessive about that affection. His death must have upset her.
‘Poor Peter, yes. I suppose you heard over here before we did. He didn’t write often. We were rather out of touch in a way. Babs was sent the official thing, being rather in with that sort of world, and as …’
She meant that, in the circumstances, her elder sister had been informed of Templer’s death, rather than his wife.
‘Used you to see anything of him?’ she asked.
‘Once or twice at the beginning of the war. Not after he went into that secret show.’
‘I don’t even know where it was.’
‘Nor me – for certain.