Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

Even if these highly coloured anecdotes were to be disbelieved, their very existence indicated a troublesome personality. Myth of such pervasive volume does not suddenly arise about a woman entirely without a reason. One thing was certain. She had left the ATS. This was said to be due to bad health, trouble with a lung.

‘I never yet met a pretty girl who didn’t tell you she had TB,’ said Dicky Umfraville. ‘Probably the least of the diseases she inherited from Cosmo.’

Umfraville had been unsuccessful in his efforts to find a niche in one of the secret organizations, and was now commanding a transit camp with the rank of major.

‘Giving men hell is what Miss Flitton likes,’ he said. ‘I know the sort. Met plenty of them.’

There was something to be said for accepting that diagnosis, because two discernible features seemed to emerge from a large, often widely diversified, canon of evidence chronicling Pamela Flitton’s goings-on: the first, her indifference to the age and status of the men she decided to fascinate; the second, the unvarying technique of silence, followed by violence, with which she persecuted her lovers, or those who hoped to be numbered in that category. She appeared, for example, scarcely at all interested in looks or money, rank or youth, as such; just as happy deranging the modest home life of a middle-aged air-raid warden, as compromising the commission of a rich and handsome Guards ensign recently left school. In fact, she seemed to prefer ‘older men’ on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely. In the Section her memory remained with Borrit.

‘Wonder what happened to that juicy looking AT,’ he said more than once. ‘The good-lookers never stay. Wouldn’t mind spending a weekend with her.’

‘Weekends’ took place once a fortnight, most people saving up their weekly one day off to make them up. Once in a way Isobel managed to come to London during the week and we went out for a mild jaunt. This was not often, and, when she rang up one day to say Ted Jeavons had got hold of a couple of bottles of gin and was asking a few people in to share them with him, the invitation presented itself as quite an excitement. After Molly’s death, Isobel and her sisters used to keep in closer touch with Jeavons than formerly, making something of a duty to see him at fairly regular intervals, on the grounds that, a widower, he needed more attention than before. I had not seen him myself since suggesting Templer should take a room at the Jeavons’ house, but heard Templer had done so. Whether he remained, I did not know. Jeavons, keeping up Molly’s tradition of always welcoming any member of the family, had shown surprising resilience in recovering from the unhappy night when he had lost his wife. Certainly he had been greatly upset at the time, but he possessed a kind of innate toughness of spirit that carried him through. Norah Tolland, who did not care for any suggestion of sentimentality that concerned persons of the opposite sex — though she tolerated the loves, hates and regrets of her own exclusively feminine world — insisted that Jeavons’s recovery was complete.

‘Ted’s perfectly capable of looking after himself,’ she said. ‘In some respects — allowing for the war — the place is better run than when Molly was alive. I get a bit sick of those long disjointed harangues he gives about ARP.’

His duties as an air-raid warden had now become Jeavons’s sole interest, the whole background of his life. Apart from his period in the army during the previous war, he must have worked longer and more continuously at air-raid precautions than at any other job. Jeavons, although to be regarded as not much good at jobs, had here found his vocation. No one knew quite how the money situation would resolve itself when Molly died, Jeavons no longer in his first youth, with this admitted lack of handiness at earning a living. It turned out that Molly, with a forethought her noisy manner concealed, had taken steps to compound for her jointure, a financial reconstruction that had included buying the South Kensington house, thereby insuring (air raids unforeseen in that respect) her husband having a roof over his head, if she predeceased him. Although she was older, that possibility seemed unlikely enough in the light of Jeavons’s much propagated ‘rotten inside’, the stomach wound so perpetually reviled by himself. However, the unlikely had come to pass. Chips Lovell, when alive, had never tired of deploring Sleaford stinginess where their widows were concerned, but at least Jeavons had reaped some residue. One felt he deserved that at his age, though what precisely that age was, no one knew. Fifty must be in the offing, if not already attained.

‘Norah’s bringing a girl-friend with her,’ he said. ‘Wonder what she’s got hold of this time. The last one had a snub nose and freckles with biggish feet.’

Norah Tolland was a driver in one of the several classifications of women’s services, a corps which regarded themselves as of rather more consequence than mere ATS, whose officers they were not required to salute. Norah had taken pleasure in explaining that to a very important ATS officer wearing red tabs who had hauled her up for a supposed omission of respect.

‘Sorry your friend Templer’s gone, Nick,’ said Jeavons. ‘We got on pretty well. Used to have long talks at odd moments of the night when we’d both come off duty in the small hours. He told me a thing or two. Stories about the ladies, my hat.’

Jeavons’s thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy. Jeavons continued to wear these overalls, though by now promoted to an administrative post at the local ARP headquarters. He poured out glasses of gin-and-orange, a drink for ever to recall world war.

‘Why did Templer leave?’

‘Been fed up for ages. Wanted a more active job. Quite worried him.’

‘He told me all that nearly a year ago.’

‘There was a woman in the case. Usually is. That’s why he wanted to do something more dangerous. London’s quite dangerous enough for me. Templer didn’t think so.’

‘It sounds unlike him.’

‘He went off to some training place,’ said Jeavons. ‘Never know how people will behave. Look at poor Charles Stringham, missing at Singapore. Remember when he lived on the top floor here with Miss Weedon trying to cure him of the booze. He and I used to have one on the sly once in a way. Mrs Conyers, I should call her, not Miss Weedon. Bad luck her husband dropping dead like that, but in your nineties you must be prepared for accidents.’

General Conyers, also an air-raid warden, had collapsed in the street one night, pursuing looters attempting to steal a refrigerator from a bombed house. He died, as he had lived, in active, dramatic, unusual circumstances; such, one felt, as he himself would have preferred.

‘Tuffy, as Charles used to call her, is in MI5 now,’ said Jeavons. ‘Don’t think she has to get into evening dress and jade ear-rings and vamp German agents. Just supervises the girls there. Always looked as if she knew a lot of secrets. Those black dresses and white collars. I expect they want reliable people, and she’s reliable all right. This girl of Templer’s made him feel he was getting old. He wanted to find out whether that was true or not. Of course, you might argue he oughtn’t to have been playing around at all. You’ve got to remember the circumstances. Wife’s in a mental home, as you probably know. Awful thing to happen. It’s hard to keep straight, if you’re on your own. I remember Smith, that butler of your brother-in-law Erry’s, using those very words. Erry used to lend us Smith from time to time, when he was away from Thrubworth. Of course, Smith’s wife had been dead for years, luckily for her. I warrant there’d been some high jinks on Smith’s part at one time or another. Terrible chap, Smith. Oughtn’t to say it, but I’m really glad he’s dead. No chance of his ever working here again.’