Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

Norah herself, together with her friend, Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, had already enrolled themselves as drivers in some women’s service. They could talk of nothing but the charm of their superior officer, a certain Gwen McReith. Eleanor’s father, Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson, after many years of retirement, had made a public reappearance by writing a ‘turnover’ article for The Times on German influence in the smaller South American countries. This piece had ended with the words: ‘The dogs bark: the caravan moves on.’ In fact everyone, one way and another, was becoming absorbed into the leviathan of war. Its inexorable pressures were in some ways more irksome for those outside the machine than those within. I myself, for example, felt lonely and depressed. Isobel was miles away in the country; most of the people I knew had disappeared from London, or were soon to do so. They were in uniform, or some new, unusual civil occupation. In this atmosphere writing was more than ever out of the question; even reading could be attempted only at short stretches. I refused one or two jobs offered, saying I was ‘on the Reserve’, should soon be ‘called up’. However, no calling-up took place; nor, so far as I could discover, was any likely to be enunciated in the near future. There was just the surrounding pressure of uneasy stagnation, uneasy activity.

I was not alone, of course, in this predicament. Indeed, my father, who might have been expected to be of some assistance, was, as it turned out, in worse case even than myself. He was by this time totally immersed in the problem of how to bring about his own re-employment, a preoccupation which, in spite of her very mixed feelings on the subject, equally engrossed my mother, who partly feared he might succeed, partly dreaded his despair if left on the shelf. It was hard, even impossible, for my father to concentrate for even a short time on any other subject. He would talk for hours at a time about possible jobs that he might be offered. His prospects were meagre in the extreme, for his health had certainly not improved since retirement. Now, his days were spent writing letters to contemporaries who had achieved senior rank, hanging about his club trying to buttonhole them in person.

‘I managed to have a word with Fat Boy Gort at the Rag yesterday,’ he would say, speaking as if in a dream. ‘Of course I knew he could do nothing for me himself in his exalted position, but he wasn’t at all discouraging. Gave me the name of a fellow in the Adjutant-General’s own secretariat who is entering my name on a special file with a few others of much the same category as myself. Something may come of it. Brownrigg’s doing his best too. As a member of the Army Council, he ought to bring something off.’

Then it struck me that General Conyers might be worth approaching in my own interests. By that time my parents had almost lost touch with the General, having themselves drifted into a form of life in which they hardly ever ‘saw’ anybody, certainly a way of life far removed from the General’s own restless curiosity about things, an energy that age was said to have done little to abate. At least that was the picture of him to be inferred from their occasional mention of his name. To tell the truth, they rather disapproved of rumours that percolated through to them that General Conyers would sometimes attend meetings of the Society for Psychical Research, or had given a lecture at one of the universities on the subject of Oriental secret societies. My parents preferred to think of General Conyers as living a life of complete retirement and inactivity since the death of his wife four or five years before. At that date he had sold their house in the country, at the same time disposing of such sporting poodles as remained in the kennels there. Now he lived all the year round in the small flat near Sloane Square, where he was still said to play Gounod on his ’cello in the afternoons.

‘Poor old Aylmer,’ my father would say, since he liked to think of other people existing in an unspectacular, even colourless manner. ‘You know he was rather a gay spark in his youth. Never looked at another woman after he married Bertha. It must be a lonely life.’

At first I hesitated to call on General Conyers, not only on account of this forlorn picture of him, but also because great age is, in itself, a little intimidating. I had not set eyes on him since my own wedding. Finally, I decided to telephone. The General sounded immensely vigorous on the line. Like so many of his generation, he always shouted into the mouthpiece with the full force of his lungs, as if no other method would make the instrument work.

‘Delighted to hear your voice, Nick. Come along. Of course, of course, of course.’

He was specific about the time I was to call on the following day. I found myself once more under his photograph in the uniform of the Body Guard I had so much admired as a child, when my mother had taken me to see Mrs Conyers not long after we had left Stonehurst. I think the General admired this picture too, because, while we were talking of people we knew in common, he suddenly pointed to this apotheosis of himself in plumed helmet bearing a halberd.

‘They made me give all that up,’ he said. ‘Reached the age limit. Persuaded them to keep me on for quite a while longer than allowed by regulations, as a matter of fact, but they kicked me out in the end. Lot of nonsense. It’s not the fellows of my age who feel the strain. We know how to hold ourselves easily on parade. It’s the fellow in his fifties who has to go to bed for a week after duty at a court or levee. Tries to stand to attention all the time and be too damned regimental. Won’t do at that age. Anyway, I’ve got plenty to occupy me. Too much, I don’t mind telling you. In any case, gallivanting round in scarlet and gold doesn’t arise these days.’

He shook his head emphatically, as if I might try to deny that. His face had become more than ever aquiline and ivory, the underlying structure of bone and muscle, accentuated by age, giving him an other-worldliness of expression, a look withdrawn and remote (not unlike that of Lady Warminster’s features in the months before she died), as if he now lived in a dream of half-forgotten campaigns, love affairs, heterodox experiences and opinions. At the same time there was a restless strength, a rhythm, about his movements that made one think of the Michelangelo figures in the Sistine Chapel. The Cumæan Sybil with a neat moustache added? All at once he leant forward, turning with one arm over the back of his chair, his head slightly bent, pointing to another picture hanging on the wall. I saw he was an unbearded Jehovah inspiring life into Adam through an extended finger.

‘Sold most of the stuff when Bertha died,’ he said. ‘No good to Charlotte, married to a sailor, never has a home. Thought I’d keep the Troost, though. Troost? Van Troost? Can’t remember which he is. Not sure that I was wise to have had it cleaned on the advice of that fellow Smethyck.’

The scene was a guard-room in the Low Countries.

‘Undisciplined looking lot,’ General Conyers went on. ‘No joke soldiering in those days. Must have been most difficult to get your orders out to large bodies of men. Still, that’s true today. Immense intricacies even about calling them up in the categories you want them.’

I told him that was the very subject about which I came to speak; in short, how best to convert registration with the Reserve into a commission in the armed forces. Before the war, this metamorphosis had been everywhere regarded as a process to be put automatically in motion by the march of events; now, for those in their thirties, the key seemed inoperative for entry into that charmed circle. The General shook his head at once.

‘If Richard Cœur de Lion came back to earth tomorrow,’ he said, ‘he would be able to tell you more, my dear Nick, than I can about the British Army of today. I am not much further advanced in military knowledge than those fellows Troost painted in the guard-room. Can’t your father help?’