Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

‘Have you been to Stourwater before?’ I asked Betty Templer.

She stared at me with big, frightened eyes.

‘No.’

‘It’s rather a wonderful house, isn’t it?’

‘How — how do you mean?’

That question brought me up short. To like Stourwater, to disapprove, were both tenable opinions, but, as residence, the castle could hardly be regarded as anything except unusual. If Betty Templer had noticed none of its uncommon characteristics, pictures and furniture were not a subject to embark upon.

‘Do you know this part of the world at all?’

‘No,’ she said, after some hesitation.

‘Peter told me you lived at Sunningdale.’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you been there long?’

‘Since we married.’

‘Good for getting up and down to London.’

‘I don’t go to London much.’

‘I suppose Peter gets back for dinner.’

‘Sometimes.’

She looked as if she might begin to cry. It was an imbecile remark on my part, the worst possible subject to bring up, talking to the wife of a man like Templer.

‘I expect it is all rather nice there, anyway,’ I said.

I knew that I was losing my head, that she would soon reduce me to as desperate a state, conversationally speaking, as herself.

‘Yes,’ she admitted.

‘It was extraordinary Peter’s bringing us over in the car this evening. I hadn’t seen him for ages. We used to know each other so well at school.’

‘He knows such a lot of people,’ she said.

Her eyes filled with tears. There could be no doubt of it. I wondered what was going to happen next, fearing the worst. However, she made a tremendous effort.

‘Do you live in London?’ she asked.

‘Yes, we—’

‘I used to live in London when I was married to my first husband.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘He was in — in jute.’

‘Was he?’

For the moment I saw no way of utilising this opening.

‘Are you a stockbroker?’ she asked.

‘No … I … ’

I suddenly felt unable to explain what I did, what I was. The difficulties seemed, for some reason, insuperable. Fortunately no explanation was necessary. She required of me no alternative profession.

‘Most of Peter’s friends are stockbrokers,’ she said, speaking rather more calmly, as if that thought brought some small balm to her soul, adding, a moment later, ‘Some of them live at Sunningdale.’

The situation was relieved at that moment by Matilda’s causing conversation to become general by returning to the subject of Sir Magnus and his photography.

‘You were talking about photographing people, Donners,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you begin on us after dinner? What could be nicer to photograph than the present company?’

‘What a good idea,’ said Anne Umfraville. ‘Do let’s do that, Magnus. It would be fun.’

She was greatly improved, far less truculent, than in the days when I had first met her. If Dicky Umfraville could not be said exactly to have knocked the nonsense out of her, marriage to him had certainly effected a change. At least the nonsense was, so to speak, rearranged in a manner less irksome to those with whom she came in contact. She no longer contradicted, as a matter of principle, every word spoken to her; her demeanour was friendly, rather than the reverse. Soon after our arrival at Stourwater, she had reminded Isobel that they were distant cousins; her musical blunder with Moreland was due to ignorance, not desire to exacerbate him; she was well disposed even to Matilda, who, as a former ‘girl’ of Sir Magnus’s, might well have incurred her antagonism. I thought she had obviously taken a fancy to Templer, and he to her. That might explain her excellent humour. It might also explain, at least in part, his wife’s ‘state’.

‘Oh, are we going to be photographed?’ Betty Templer whispered at that moment in an agonised voice.

I concluded she had been reduced to her unhappy condition largely by Templer’s goings-on. Her own prettiness, silliness, adoration of himself must have brought Templer to the point of deciding to remove her from the husband who ‘bored her by talking of money all the time’. At a period when Templer was no doubt still smarting from his own abandonment by Mona, Betty had re-established his confidence by accepting him so absolutely. In marrying her, Templer had shown himself determined to make no such mistake a second time, to choose a wife unquestionably devoted to him, one possessing, besides, not too much life of her own. Mona, by the time she came Templer’s way, had had too many adventures. In Betty, he had certainly found adoration (throughout dinner, she continually cast tortured glances in his direction), but the price had been a high one. In short, Templer had picked a girl probably not quite ‘all there’ even at the beginning of their married life; then, by his rackety conduct, he had sent her never very stable faculties off their balance. Betty Templer was simply not equipped to cope with her husband, to stand up to Templer’s armour-plated egotism as a ‘ladies’ man’. The qualities that had bowled her over before marriage — that bowled her over, so far as that went, still — had also driven her to the borders of sanity. Never very bright in the head, she had been shattered by the unequal battle. The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life. No doubt affairs with other women played their part as well. In the circumstances, it was inconceivable that Templer did not have affairs with other women. That, at least, was my own reading of the situation. Anyway, whatever the cause, there could be no doubt Betty Templer’s spirit was broken that she was near the end of her tether. Templer must have been aware of that himself. In fact, his perpetual awareness of it explained my own consciousness of some horror in the background when he had stepped from his car that evening. He was always kind, I noticed, when he spoke to Betty, would probably have done anything in his power — short of altering his own way of life, which perhaps no one can truly do — to alleviate this painful situation. It was a gruesome predicament. I thought how ironic that Templer, my first friend to speak with assurance of ‘women’ and their ways, should have been caught up in this dire matrimonial trap. These impressions shot across the mind, disquieting, evanescent, like forked lightning. Sir Magnus, who had been silent for a minute or two, now leaned forward over the dinner-table, as if to carry us all with him at some all important board meeting — at a Cabinet itself — in the pursuance of an onerous project he had in mind.

‘By all means let us take some photographs after dinner,’ he said. ‘What a good idea.’

Highlights showed on his greenish eyes. No doubt he saw escape from dishing up ‘Munich’ for the thousandth time, not only with Anne Umfraville, but also with a handful of guests whose views he could not reasonably be expected to take seriously. Like so many men who have made a successful career through the will, it was hard to guess how much, or how little, Sir Magnus took in of what was going on immediately round him. Did he know that his own sexual habits were a source of constant speculation and jocularity; that Moreland was tortured by the thought of Matilda’s former status in the house; that Betty Templer made the party a very uncomfortable one; or was he indifferent to these things, and many others as well? It was impossible to say. Perhaps Sir Magnus, through his antennae, was even more keenly apprised of surrounding circumstances than the rest of us; perhaps, on the other hand, he was able to dismiss them completely from his consciousness as absolutely unessential elements in his own tranquil progress through life.