Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

‘Who can it be?’ said my mother, no less disturbed.

My father studied the message. He went suddenly red with annoyance.

‘Wait a moment,’ he said to the boy, in a voice of command.

My mother followed him into the hall. I hung about in the background.

‘For goodness’ sake say what’s happened,’ begged my mother, in an agony of fearing the worst.

My father read aloud the words, his voice shaking with irritation:

‘ Can you house me Sunday night talk business arrive tea-time Giles .’

He held the telegram away from him as if fear of some awful taint threatened him by its contact. There was a long pause. Disturbing situations were certainly arising.

‘Really too bad of him,’ said my mother at last.

‘Damn Giles.’

‘Inconsiderate, too, to leave it so late.’

‘He can’t come.’

‘We must think it over.’

‘There is no time. I won’t have him.’

‘Where is he?’

‘It’s sent from Aldershot.’

‘Quite close then.’

‘What the devil is Giles doing in Aldershot?’

My parents looked at each other without speaking. Things could not be worse. Uncle Giles was not much more than a dozen miles away.

‘We heard there was some trouble, didn’t we?’

‘Of course there is trouble,’ said my father. ‘Was there ever a moment when Giles was not in trouble? Don’t be silly.’

There was another long pause.

‘The telegram was reply-paid,’ said my mother at last, not able to bear the thought that the boy might be bored or inconvenienced by this delay in drafting an answer. ‘The boy is still waiting.’

‘Damn the boy.’

My father was in despair. As I have said, all tragedies for him were major tragedies, and here was one following close on the heels of another.

‘With the Converses coming too.’

‘Can’t we put Giles off?’

‘He may really need help.’

‘Of course he needs help. He always needs help.’

‘Difficult to say he can’t come.’

‘Just like Giles to choose this day of all days.’

‘Besides, I never think Giles and Aylmer Conyers get on very well together.’

‘Get on well together,’ said my father. ‘They can’t stand each other.’

The thought of this deep mutual antipathy existing between his brother and General Conyers cheered my father a little. He even laughed.

‘I suppose Giles will have to come,’ he admitted.

‘No way out.’

‘The Conyerses will leave before he arrives.’

‘They won’t stay late if they are motoring home.’

‘Shall I tell Giles he can come?’

‘We must, I think.’

‘It may be just as well to know what he is up to. I hope it is not a serious mess this time. I wouldn’t trust that fellow an inch who got him the bucket-shop job.’

Uncle Giles did not at all mind annoying his relations. That was all part of his policy of making war on society. In fact, up to a point, the more he annoyed his relations, the better he was pleased. At the same time, his interests were to some extent bound up with remaining on reasonably good terms with my father. Since he had quarrelled irretrievably with his other brother, my father — also on poorish terms with Uncle Martin, whom we never saw — represented one of the few stable elements in the vicissitudes of Uncle Giles’s life. He and my father irritated, without actually disliking, each other. Uncle Giles, the older; my father, the more firmly established; the honours were fairly even, when it came to conflict. For example, my father disapproved, probably rightly, of the form taken by his brother’s ‘outside broking’, although I do not know how much the firm for which Uncle Giles worked deserved the imputation of sharp practice. Certainly my father questioned its bona fides and was never tired of declaring that he would advise no friend of his to do business there. At the same time, his own interest in the stock market prevented him from refraining entirely from all financial discussion with Uncle Giles, with whom he was in any case indissolubly linked, financially speaking, by the terms of a will. Their argument would often become acrimonious, but I suspect my father sometimes took “Uncle Giles’s advice about investments, especially if a ‘bit of a gamble’ was in the air.

‘Shall I say Expect you teatime today ?’

‘How is Giles going to get here?’

‘I won’t fetch him. It can’t be done. The Conyerses may not leave in time.’

My mother looked uncertain.

‘Do you think I should?’

‘You can’t. Not with other guests coming.’

‘Giles will find his way.’

‘We can be sure of that.’

My mother was right in supposing Uncle Giles perfectly capable of finding his way to any place recommended by his own interests. She was also right in thinking that Albert, after confiding his marriage plans to herself, would immediately reveal them in the kitchen. Edith described the scene later. She was having a cup of tea before church when Albert made the official announcement of his engagement. Billson had at once burst into tears. Bracey was having a ‘funny day’ — though a mild one — brought on either by regret at the necessity of resuming his duties, or, more probably, as a consequence of nervous strain after a spell in the house of his Luton sister-in-law. Accordingly, he showed no interest in the prospect of being left, as it were, in possession of the field so far as Billson was concerned. After issuing his pronouncement, Albert turned his attention to the mousse, the cooking of which always caused him great anxiety. Billson moved silently from kitchen to dining-room, and back again, laying the table miserably, red-eyed, white-faced, looking as much like a ghost as any she had described. She had taken badly Albert’s surrender to the ‘girl from Bristol’. The house had an uneasy air. I retired to my own places of resort in the garden.

The Conyers party was scheduled to arrive about one o’clock, but the notorious uncertainty of motor-cars had given rise to much head-shaking on the probability of their lateness. However, I was loitering about the outskirts of the house, not long after the telegraph-boy had disappeared on his bicycle over the horizon, when a car began painfully to climb the lower slopes of the hill. It could only contain General and Mrs Conyers. This was an unexpected excitement. I watched their slow ascent, which was jerky, like the upward movement of a funicular, but, contrary to my father’s gloomy forecast, the steep incline was negotiated without undue difficulty. I was even able to open the Stonehurst gate to admit the vehicle. There could be no doubt now of the identity of driver and passenger. By that period, of course, motorists no longer wore the peaked cap and goggles of their pioneering days, but, all the same, the General’s long check ulster and deerstalker seemed assumed to some extent ritualistically.

‘It is always cold motoring,’ my mother used to say.

The car drew up by the front door. The General, leaping from it with boundless energy, came to meet me, leaving his wife to extract herself as best she could from a pile of wraps and rugs, sufficient in number to perform a version of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Tall, distinguished, with grey moustache and flashing eyes, he held out his hand.

‘How do you do, Nicholas?’

He spoke gravely, in a tone no different from that to be used with a contemporary. There was about him a kind of fierceness, combined with a deep sense of understanding.

‘We are a little earlier than I expected,’ he said. ‘I hope your father and mother will not mind. I drove rather fast, as your mother said you lived at the back of beyond, and I am always uncertain of my own map-reading. I see now what she meant. How are they educating you up here? Do you go to school?’