Anthony Powell - The Military Philosophers

A lot of people were still about the streets, making progress slow, so at the foot of Ludgate Hill I turned into New Bridge Street in the direction of the river. There was no need to hurry. A stroll along the Embankment might be what was required. Then my mind was suddenly recalled to duty. Colonel Flores was walking in front of me. Seeing a foreign military attaché, even a Neutral one, was at once to experience the conditioned reflex, by now second-nature, that is to say instant awareness that he must be looked after to the best of my ability, although not one of my own particular charges. I caught him up and saluted.

‘I think you’re going the wrong way for the official car park, Colonel, it’s —’

Flores seized my hand and smiled.

‘None of my arrangements have been official today,’ he said. ‘In fact none of them have been properly conducted at all. My car had another job to do after dropping me at the Cathedral, so I arranged to meet it, when all was over, in one of the turnings off the Embankment. I thought there would be no parking difficulties there, whatever happened elsewhere. Was not that a brilliant idea? You must admire my knowledge of London topography.’

‘I do, sir.’

‘Come with me. I’ll give you a lift to wherever you want to go.’

It was no use explaining that I only wanted to walk by the river for a while, to be left alone briefly, to think of other things for a time, before returning to our room to complete whatever remained to be done. There was a fair amount of that too.

‘You know London well, Colonel?*

‘Not really. It was all done with a map, this great plan for the car. Am I not a credit to our Staff College?’

‘It’s your first visit?’

‘I was here — what — fifteen years ago, it must be. With all my family, an absolute tribe of us. We stayed at the Ritz, I remember. Now we will cross the road and advance west along the line of the Thames.’

He led the way to a side turning.

‘The car should be somewhere near this spot. Ah, here they are. It had to go and pick up my wife and stepdaughter.’

An oldish Rolls, displaying a CD number plate, was drawn up by the pavement in one of the streets running north and south. It was a little way ahead. As we approached, two ladies stepped out and walked towards us. They both looked incredibly elegant. In fact their elegance appalled one. Nobody in England had been able to get hold of any smart clothes for a long time now — except for the occasional ‘unsolicited gift’ like Matilda’s — and the sight of these two gave the impression that they had walked off the stage, or from some display of exotic fashions, into the street. Colonel Flores shouted something in Spanish. We came up with them.

‘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.’

One suddenly remembered that she was the wife of a Neutral military attaché, with whom secret matters must even now not be discussed.

‘It’s all too sad. Why did he do it?’

This was not really a question. In any case, to speak of Pamela Flitton would be too complicated. Bob Duport was better unmentioned too. The car was not an ideal place for conversations of that sort, especially with her husband present.

‘You must come and see us,’ she said. ‘We’re really not properly moved in yet. I expect you know we’ve only just arrived. The appointment was quite a surprise — due to a change of Government.’

She mentioned an address in Knightsbridge, as it happened not far from the flat at the back of Rutland Gate, where once, quite naked, she had opened the door when we were lovers. Like so many things that have actually taken place, the incident was now wholly unbelievable. How could this chic South American lady have shared with me embraces, passionate and polymorphous as those depicted on the tapestry of Luxuria that we had discussed together when we had met at Stourwater? Had she really used those words, those very unexpected expressions, she was accustomed to cry out aloud at the moment of achievement? Once I had thought life unthinkable without her. How could that have been, when she was now only just short of a perfect stranger? An absurd incident suddenly came into my head to put things in proportion. Representatives of the Section had to attend an official party the Greeks were giving at the Ritz. In the hall, a page-boy had said to another: ‘General de Gaulle’s in that room over there’. The second boy had been withering. He had simply replied: ‘Give me news, not history.’ Jean, I remembered, had become history. Perhaps not so much history as legend, the story true only in a symbolical sense; because, although its outlines might have general application to ourselves, or even to other people, Jean and I were no longer the persons we then had been.