Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

Duport spat out some kipper-bones on to his plate. He took several deep gulps of coffee.

‘Of course in a way Widmerpool turned out to be right,’ he said. ‘As usual, his crassness brought him luck. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t wonder if he didn’t cut off my credits as much from spite as obtuseness.’

‘Why should Widmerpool want to spite you?’

‘Just to show who’s master. I sent him one or two pretty curt telegrams. He didn’t like that. Probably decided to get his own back. Anyway, I’m up a gum tree now.’

I saw he had cause to grumble. At that moment, I could not spare much sympathy. In any case, I did not care for Duport, although I had to admit he had his points. He was, in his way, a man of action. Ahead, I thought, lay plenty of opportunity for action of one kind or another. Even now, a thousand things had to be done. Then and there, the only course to follow was to oversee Uncle Giles’s cremation, return home, try to make plans in the light of the new international situation.

‘ ’Spect they’ll requisition the place now all right,’ said Albert, when I saw him. ‘That’s if there’s anything to requisition in a day or two. Hitler’s not one to tell us when he’s coming. Just loose a lot of bombs, I reckon. The wife’s still poorly and taking on a treat about the blackout in the bedrooms.’

For a man who thoroughly disliked danger, Albert faced the prospect of total war pretty well. At best its circumstances would shatter the props of his daily life at a time when he was no longer young. All the same, the Germans, the Russians, the suffragettes were all one when it came to putting up the shutters. He might be afraid when a policeman walked up the Stonehurst drive; that trepidation was scarcely at all increased by the prospect of bombardment from the air. Indeed, his fear was really a sort of courage, fear and courage being close to each other, like love and hate.

‘Mr Duport and I sat up with Dr Trelawney for a while after he went to bed last night,’ I said.

Albert shook his head.

‘Don’t know how we’re going to get rid of him now,’ he said. ‘Flesh and blood won’t stand it much longer. If there’s requisitioning, he’ll be requisitioned like the rest of us, I suppose. It won’t do no good talking. Well, it’s been nice seeing you again, Mr Nick.’

I felt no more wish to adjudicate between Albert and Dr Trelawney than between Duport and Widmerpool. They must settle their own problems. I went on my way. The crematorium was a blaze of sunshine. I had a word with the clergyman. It looked as if I was going to be the only mourner. Then, just as the service was about to begin, Mrs Erdleigh turned up. She was shrouded in black veils that seemed almost widow’s weeds. She leant towards me and whispered some greeting, then retired to a seat at the back of the little chapel. The clergyman’s voice sounded as if he, too, had sat up drinking the night before, though his appearance put such a surmise out of court.

‘… For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them …’

Uncle Giles’s spirit hovered in the air. I could well imagine one of his dissertations on such a theme. The coffin slid through the trap-door with perfect precision: Uncle Giles’s remains committed to a nomad’s pyre. I turned to meet Mrs Erdleigh. She had already slipped away. Her evasiveness was perhaps due to delicacy, because, when Uncle Giles’s will (proved at the unexpectedly large figure of seven thousand, three hundred pounds) came to light, Mrs Erdleigh turned out to be the sole legatee. Uncle Giles could not be said to have heaped up riches, but he had seen to it that his relations did not gather them. It was one of those testamentary surprises, like St John Clarke’s leaving his money to Erridge. The bequest gave some offence within the family.

‘Giles was always an unreliable fellow,’ said my father, ‘but we mustn’t speak ill of him now.’

WHEN THE SWORD OF MITHRAS — to borrow Dr Trelawney’s phrase — flashed at last from its scabbard, people supposed London would immediately become the target of bombs. However, the slayer of Osiris did not at first demand his grievous tribute of blood, and a tense, infinitely uneasy over-all stagnation imposed itself upon an equally uncomfortable, equally febrile, over-all activity. Everyone was on the move. The last place to find a friend or relation was the spot where he or she had lived or worked in peacetime. Only a few, here and there, discovered themselves already suitably situated for war conditions. Frederica Budd, for example, Isobel’s eldest sister, as a widow with children to bring up, had not long before gone to live in the country within range of their schools. Her small house stood in a village within twenty or thirty miles of Thrubworth, upon which Frederica always liked to keep an eye. Here it was arranged that Isobel should stay, if possible, until she gave birth. Without much in common except their relationship as sisters, the temperaments of Isobel and Frederica — unlike those of Frederica and Norah — were at the same time not in active conflict. Isobel’s help in running the house was as convenient to Frederica as this arrangement was acceptable to ourselves.

Thrubworth had been requisitioned as a military headquarters. In principle detesting war in all its manifestations, Erridge was reported, in practice, to enjoy the taking over of his house by the government. This unexpected attitude on his part was not, as might be thought, because of any theoretical approval of state intervention where private property was concerned, so much as on account of the legitimate grievance — indeed, series of legitimate grievances — with which the army’s investment of his mansion provided him. Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life. Since leaving school he had been deprived of all the typical grudges within the grasp of most young men. Some of these grudges, it was true, he had later developed with fair success by artificial means, grudges being, in a measure, part and parcel of his political approach. At first the outbreak of war had threatened more than one of his closest interests by making them commonplace, compulsory, even vulgarly ‘patriotic’. The army at Thrubworth, with the boundless inconvenience troops bring in their train, restored Erridge’s inner well-being. There was no major upheaval in his own daily existence. He and Blanche, in any case, inhabited only a small corner of the house, so that domestically speaking things remained largely unchanged for him on his own ground. At the same time he was no longer tempted to abandon all his high-minded activities. Provided with a sitting target, he was able to devote himself to an unremitting campaign against militarism as represented in person by the commanding officer and staff of the formation quartered on his property. A succession of skirmishes raged round the use of the billiard-table, the grand piano, the hard tennis-court, against a background of protest, often justifiable enough, about unsightly tracks made by short cuts across lawns, objects in the house broken or defaced by carelessness and vandalism. However, these hostilities could at the same time be unremitting only so far as Erridge’s own health allowed, the outbreak of war having quite genuinely transformed him from a congenital sufferer from many vague ailments into a man whose physical state bordered on that of a chronic invalid.

‘Erry helped to lose the Spanish war for his own side,’ said Norah. ‘Thank goodness he is not going to be fit enough to lose this one for the rest of us.’