Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

‘Joking apart,’ my mother used to say, ‘it was a dreadful moment.’

There can be no doubt whatever that the scene was disturbing, terrifying, saddening, a moment that summarised, in the unclothed figure of Billson, human lack of coordination and abandonment of self-control in the face of emotional misery. Was she determined, in the habit of neurotics, to try to make things as bad for others as for herself? In that, she largely succeeded. There seemed no solution for the people in the room, no way out of the problem so violently posed by Billson in the shape of her own nude person. My father always confessed afterwards that he himself had been utterly at a loss. He could throw no light whatever on the reason why such a thing should suddenly have happened in his drawing-room, see no way of cutting short this unspeakable crisis. In telling — and re-telling — the highlights of the story, he contributed only one notable phrase.

‘She was stark,’ he used to say, ‘ absolutely stark.’

This was a relatively small descriptive ornament to the really vast saga that accumulated round the incident; at the same time, it was for some reason not without a certain narrative force.

‘I’ve come to give notice, m’m,’ Billson said. ‘I don’t want to stay if Albert is leaving your service, and besides, m’m, I can’t stand the ghosts no longer.’

Stonehurst, as I have said, was a ‘furnished’ house, the furniture, together with pictures, carpets, curtains, all distinctly on the seedy side, all part of the former home of people not much interested in what the rooms they lived in looked like. However, India, one way and another, provided a recurrent theme that gave a certain cohesion to an otherwise undistinguished, even anarchic style of decoration. In the hall, the brass gong was suspended from the horn or tusk of some animal; in the dining-room hung water-colours of the Ganges at Benares, the Old Fort at Calcutta, the Taj Mahal; in the smoking-room, a small revolving bookcase contained only four books: Marie Corelli’s Sorrows of Satan, St John Clarke’s Never to the Philistines, an illustrated volume of light verse called Lays of Ind, a volume of coloured pictures of Sepoy uniforms; in the drawing-room, the piano was covered with a Kashmir shawl of some size and fine texture, upon which, in silver frames, photographs of the former owner of Stonehurst (wearing a pith helmet surmounted with a spike) and his family (flanked by Indian servants) had stood before being stowed away in a drawer.

In human life, the individual ultimately dominates every situation, however disordered, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. On this occasion, as usual, all was not lost. There was a place for action, a display of will. General Conyers took in the situation at a glance. He saw this to be no time to dilate further upon Turkish subjection to German intrigue. He rose — so the story went — quite slowly from his chair, made two steps across the room, picked up the Kashmir shawl from where it lay across the surface of the piano. Then, suddenly changing his tempo and turning quickly towards Billson, he wrapped the shawl protectively round her.

‘Where is her room?’ he quietly asked.

No one afterwards was ever very well able to describe how he transported her along the passage, partly leading, partly carrying, the shawl always decently draped round Billson like a robe. The point, I repeat, was that action had been taken, will-power brought into play. The spell cast by Billson’s nakedness was broken. Life was normal again. Other people crowded round, eventually took charge. Mrs Gullick and Mercy appeared from somewhere. The doctor was summoned. It was probably just as well that Albert was having a nap in his room over at the stables, where Bracey, too, surrounded by saddlery, was prolonging his ‘funny day’. By the time these two reappeared, the crisis was long at an end. Having taken the first, the essential step, General Conyers, like a military dictator, who, at the close of a successful coup d’état, freely transfers his power to the civil authority, now moved voluntarily into the background. His mission was over, the situation mastered. He could return to private life, no more than the guest who happened to have been fortunate enough to find the opportunity of doing his host and hostess a trifling good turn. That was the line the General took about himself when all was over. He would accept neither praise nor thanks.

‘She made no trouble at all,’ he said. ‘More or less walked beside me — just as if we were going to sit out the next one in the conservatory.’

In fact he dismissed as laughable the notion that any difficulty at all attached to the management of Billson in her ‘state’. To what extent this modest assessment of his own agency truly represented his experience at the time is hard to estimate. He may have merely preferred to speak of it in that careless manner from dandyism, an unwillingness to admit that anything is difficult. I have sometimes speculated as to how much the General’s so successful dislodgement of Billson was due to an accustomed habit of command over ‘personnel’, how much to a natural aptitude for handling ‘women’. He was, after all, known to possess some little dexterity in the latter sphere before marriage circumscribed him.

‘Aylmer Conyers couldn’t keep away from the women as a young man,’ Uncle Giles once remarked. ‘They say some fellow chaffed him about it at a big viceregal bun-fight at Delhi — Henry Wilson or another of those talkative beggars who later became generals — “Aylmer, my boy,” this fellow, whoever he was, said, “you’re digging your grave in bed with Mrs Roxborough-Brown and the rest of them,” he said. Conyers didn’t give a dam. Not a dam. Went on just the same.’

Whether or not General Conyers would have done well to have heeded that warning, there can be little doubt that some touch of magic in his hand provided Billson with a particle of what she sought, a small substitute for Albert’s love, making her docile when led to her room, calming her later into sleep. Certainly he had shown complete disregard for the risk of making a fool of himself in public. That is a merit women are perhaps quicker to appreciate than men. Not that Billson herself can be supposed to have sat in judgment on such subtleties at that uncomfortable moment; yet even Billson’s disturbed spirit must have been in some manner aware of a compelling force that bound her to submit without protest to its arbitration.

‘I’ll just smoke another cigarette, if I may,’ said the General, when everything had been accomplished, ‘then Bertha and I really must set off in our motor-car. I’ve got to think about getting down that hill.’

Edith and I returned from the ‘walk’ just at the moment when General and Mrs Conyers were leaving. Their car had paused at the gate. My parents had come to the end of the drive to see the guests safely down the hill, my father full of advice about gears and brakes. Naturally enough, there was still a certain air of disturbance about the whole party. Even the General looked flushed. When Edith and I appeared, nothing of course was said, there and then, about what had taken place, but I could tell from my mother’s face that something very out of the way had happened. The rather forced laughter, the apologies to be heard, confirmed that. The events of the day were by no means at an end, however. My father opened the gate. The Conyers car began to move slowly forward. As it entered the road over a hump in the ground, making rather a jerk, an unexpected impediment was suddenly put in the General’s way. This was caused by a group of persons, unusually dressed, who were approaching from the left. They were running towards us. It was Dr Trelawney, followed by a pack of his disciples. They must suddenly have appeared over the brow of the hill. Without pausing to get breath they were now advancing up the road at a sharp pace, Dr Trelawney as usual leading. General Conyers, accelerating through the Stonehurst gate — an awkward one to negotiate — wheeled left, taking the corner in a wide arc, possibly owing to imperfect control of the steering. He had to apply his brakes sharply to avoid collision.