Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

‘Ours was, after all, a very bourgeois bohemianism,’ he used to say. ‘Attending the Chelsea Arts Ball in absolutely historically correct Renaissance costume was regarded as the height of dissipation by most of the artists we knew. Your own surroundings were far more bizarre.’

Perhaps he was right. What Moreland and I possessed unexpectedly in common, however, was on the whole more remarkable than these obvious contrasts. With only a month or two between our ages, some accumulation of shared experience was natural enough: the dog following Edward VII’s coffin, the Earls Court Exhibition, tents in Hyde Park for George V’s coronation — those all found a place. There were, however, in addition to these public spectacles, certain unaccountable products of the Zeitgeist belonging to both childhoods, contributing some particle to each personal myth, so abundant in their way that Moreland and I sometimes seemed to have known each other long before meeting for the first time one evening in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.

For example, in the face of energetic protest at the time, neither, on grounds that the theme was too horrific for the eyes of young persons, had been allowed to attend that primitive of cinematographic art, the film version of Dante’s Inferno. Later, less explicably, both had taken a passionate interest in the American Civil War and the Dreyfus Case, poring over pictures of those two very dissimilar historical events wherever their scenes and characters could be found illustrated. There were also aesthetic prejudices in common: animosity towards R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island, capricious distaste for framed reproductions of Raphael’s La Madonna della Sedia.

One of these altogether unwarrantable items in this eccentric scrapbook of faded mementoes that Moreland and I seemed to have pasted up together in the nursery (though Moreland always denied having had a nursery, certainly a nurse) was a precocious awareness of Dr Trelawney, for ‘the Doctor’ — as Moreland liked to call him — had never, in fact, suffered the fate, attributed to him by Mrs Gullick, of being shot in the Tower. Moreland’s Trelawney experiences had been acquired earlier than my own, though still young enough to experience the same uneasy thrill, alarming, yet enjoyable, at the thought of his menacing shadow.

‘I used to hear about Trelawney long before I saw him,’ Moreland said. ‘One of the down-at-heel poets we knew was a friend of his — indeed, the two of them were said to have enjoyed the favours of succubi together out on the Astral Plane. I first set eyes on him when we were living in rooms at Putney. The time is fixed in my mind because of a bit of trouble with the landlady. The fact was my aunt had bought tickets for a concert with money that ought to have gone in paying the rent. Trelawney was pointed out to me that afternoon in the Queen’s Hall. He has musical interests, you know — I may add, of the most banal kind. I remember the wonderfully fraudulent look on his face as he sat listening to Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration, dressed in a black cape, hair down to his shoulders, rather like photographs of Rasputin.’

‘He must have changed his style since my day. Then he was a more outdoor type, with classical Greek overtones.’

‘Trelawney was always changing his style — even his name, too, I believe, which is, of course, no more Trelawney than my own is. Nor does anyone know why he should be addressed as Doctor. What was more exciting, my aunt knew a girl who — to use her own phrase — fell into his clutches. She was said to be a promising pianist. That must have been before I went to the Royal College, because I remember being more impressed by the idea of a female pianist who was promising, than I should have been after emerging from that famous conservatoire.’

‘What happened to the girl?’

‘Rather dreadful. She cast herself from a Welsh mountain-top — Trelawney had a kind of temple at that time in a remote farmhouse in North Wales. There was quite a scandal. He was attacked in one of the Sunday papers. It passed off, as such attacks do.’

‘What had he done to the girl?’

‘Oh, the usual things, I suppose — no doubt less usual ones, too, since Trelawney is an unusual man. In any case, possibilities are so limited even for a thaumaturge. The point was her subsequent suicide. There was talk of nameless rites, drugs, disagreeable forms of discipline — the sort of thing that might rather appeal to Sir Magnus Donners.’

‘Did you ever meet Trelawney yourself?’

‘When I first knew Maclintick, who numbered among his acquaintances some of the most unlikely people, he offered to take me to see the Doctor, then living in Shepherd’s Bush. In principle, Maclintick disapproved of persons like that, but he and Trelawney used to talk German philosophy together. They had been educated at the same German university — Bonn, I think — and it was a type of conversation hard to obtain elsewhere.’

‘Did you go?’

‘Somehow, I never found myself in the mood. I felt it might be embarrassing.

Oisive jeunesse

A tout asservie

Par délicatesse

J’ai perdu ma vie.

That was me in those days.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought much delicacy was required where Dr Trelawney was concerned.’

‘My own occult interests are so sketchy. I’ve just thumbed over Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie. Never participated in a Black Mass in my life, or as much as received an invitation to a witches’ Sabbath.’

‘But I thought Dr Trelawney was more for the Simple Life, with a touch of yoga thrown in. I did not realise he was committed to all this sorcery.’

‘After you knew him, he must have moved further to the Left — or would it be to the Right? Extremes of policy have such a tendency to merge.’

‘Trelawney must be getting on in age now — Cagliostro in his latter days, though he has avoided incarceration up to date.’

‘What will happen to people like him as the world plods on to standardisation? Will they cease to be born, or find jobs in other professions? I suppose there will always be a position for a man with first-class magical qualifications.’

That conversation, too, had taken place long before either of us was married. I recalled it, years later, reading in a weekly paper a letter from Dr Trelawney protesting that some reviewer (Mark Members, as a matter of fact), in noticing a recently published work on prophecy and sortilege in which the author approached the subject in the light of psychiatry and telepathy, had confused the sayings of Paracelsus and Nostradamus. This letter (provoking a lively reply from Members) was composed in Dr Trelawney’s most florid manner. I wondered if Moreland would see it. It was a long time since we had met. When we were first married, Moreland and Matilda, Isobel and I, used often to see one another. Now those dinners at Foppa’s or the Strasbourg took place no longer. They seemed to form an historic period, distinct and definable, even though less remote in time, as the infinitely distant days when Moreland and I had loitered about Soho together.

To explain why you see less of a friend, though there has been no quarrel, no gradual feeling of coldness, is not always easy. In this case, the drawing apart seemed to date from the time when something had been ‘on’ between Moreland and Isobel’s sister, Priscilla. During that period, with Moreland’s own marriage in the balance, we had seen little or nothing of him, because the situation was inevitably an awkward one. Now, the Morelands seemed to have settled down again pretty well; Priscilla was married to Chips Lovell. However, married life must always be a little different after an upheaval of that kind. With the Morelands, certain changes were observable from the outside; within, no doubt even more radical adjustments had taken place. Now, as a matter of course, Matilda accepted such parts as she could obtain as an actress. She had made some success in the role of Zenocrate in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great. She was often away from home for weeks at a time. Moreland himself, moving inexorably into a world exclusively musical in its interests, spent increasing periods working in his room. That was at first the reason why we saw less of him than ever, even after the business with Priscilla had come to an end. By that time, as easily happens, the habit of regular meetings had already passed. We would sometimes talk on the telephone or run across each other casually. Then a further barrier was raised, when, to the surprise of his friends, Moreland announced that he had decided to leave London.