Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

I felt more apprehension for the person who had to share a cottage with Mrs Widmerpool.

‘I saw Bob Duport just before war broke out.’

I said that partly to see what Widmerpool would answer, partly because I thought he had been unhelpful about the army, tiresome about the Jeavonses. I hoped the information would displease him. The surmise was correct. He stiffened, strutting now so fiercely that he could almost be said to have broken into the goosestep.

‘Did you? Where?’

‘He was staying in a hotel where an uncle of mine died. I had to see about the funeral and ran across Duport there.’

‘Oh.’

‘I hadn’t seen him for years.’

‘He is a bad mannered fellow, Duport. Ungrateful, too.’

‘What is he ungrateful about?’

‘I got him a job in Turkey. You may remember we were talking about Duport’s affairs at Stourwater, when I saw you and your wife there about a year or more ago-just after “Munich”.’

‘He’d recently come back from Turkey when we met.’

‘He had been working for me there.’

‘So he said.’

‘I had to deal rather summarily with Duport in the end,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He showed no grasp of the international situation. He is insolent, too. So he mentioned my name?’

‘He did.’

‘Not very favourably, I expect.’

‘Not very.’

‘I don’t know what will happen to Duport,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He must be in a difficult position financially, owing to his reckless conduct. However, anybody can earn three pounds a week these days as an air-raid warden. Even Jeavons does. So Duport will not starve.’

He sounded rather sorry that Duport was not threatened with that fate.

‘He thought Sir Magnus Donners might find him something.’

‘Not if I know it.’

‘Do you think Donners will be asked to join the Government, if there is a Cabinet reshuffle?’

‘The papers speak of him as likely for office,’ said Widmerpool, not without condescension. ‘In some ways Magnus would make an excellent minister in time of war. In others, I am not so sure. He has certain undesirable traits for a public man in modern days. As you probably know, people speak of — well, mistresses. I am no prude. Let a man lead his own life, say I — but, if he is a public man, let him be careful. More than these allegedly bad morals, I object in Magnus to something you would never guess if you met him casually. I mean a kind of hidden frivolity. Now, what a lamentable scene that was when I looked in on Stourwater when you were there. Suppose some journalist had got hold of it.’

Widmerpool was about to enlarge on the Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins as played in the Stourwater dining-room, when his attention — and my own — was caught by a small crowd of people loitering in the half-light at the corner of a side street. Some sort of a meeting was in progress. From the traditional soapbox, a haggard middle-aged man in spectacles and a cloth cap was addressing fifteen or twenty persons, including several children. The group was apathetic enough, except for the children, who were playing a game that involved swinging their gas-mask cases at each other by the string, then running quickly away. Two women in trousers were hawking a newspaper or pamphlet. Widmerpool and I paused. The orator, his face gnarled and blotched by a lifetime of haranguing crowds out of doors in all weathers, seemed to be coming to the end of his discourse. He used that peculiarly unctuous, coaxing, almost beseeching manner of address adopted by some political speakers, reminding me a little of my brother-in-law, Roddy Cutts, whose voice would sometimes take on that same pleading note when he made a public appeal for a cause in which he was interested.

‘… why didn’t the so-called British Government of the day clinch the Anglo-Soviet alliance when they had the chance … get something done … Comrade Stalin’s invitation to a round-table conference at Bucharest … consistent moral policy … effective forces of socialism … necessary new alignments … USSR prestige first and foremost …’

The speech came to an end, the listeners demonstrating neither approval nor the reverse. The haggard man stepped down from the soapbox, wiped his spectacles, loosened the peak of his cap from his forehead, lit a cigarette. The children’s gas-mask game reached a pitch of frenzied intensity, so that in their scamperings one of the women selling newspapers almost had the packet knocked from her hand. Widmerpool turned to me. He was about to comment, when our attention was engaged by a new speaker. This was the second newspaper-selling woman, who, having now handed over her papers to the man with the cloth cap, herself jumped on to the soapbox. In a harsh clear voice she opened a tremendous tirade, quite different in approach from the quieter, more reasoned appeal of the spectacled man.

‘… blooming bloody hypocrisy … anybody wants this war except a few crackpots … see a chance of seizing world power and grinding the last miserable halfpence from the frozen fingers of stricken mankind … lot of Fascist, terroristic, anti-semitic, war-mongering, exploiting White Guards and traitors to the masses …’

It was Gypsy Jones. I had not set eyes on her since the days when we used to meet in Mr Deacon’s antique shop. She had lost a front tooth, otherwise did not look greatly changed from what she had been in the Mr Deacon period: older, harder, angrier, further than ever from her last bath, but essentially the same. Her hair was still cut short like a boy’s, her fists clenched, her legs set wide apart. Over her trousers she wore a man’s overcoat, far from new, the aggressive inelegance of the ensemble expressing to perfection her own revolutionary, destructive state of mind. In the old days she had worked for Howard Craggs at the Vox Populi Press, was said to be his mistress. Craggs had moved a long way since the Vox Populi Press. Lately, he had been appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Information. I recalled the night when Gypsy Jones had been dressed as Eve in order to accompany Craggs, as Adam, to the Merry Thought fancy-dress party: the encounter we had had at the back of Mr Deacon’s shop. There had been a certain grubby charm about her. I felt no regrets. Love had played no part. There was nothing painful to recall. Then Widmerpool had fallen for her, had pursued her, had paid for her ‘operation’. Such things seemed like another incarnation.

‘… not appealing to a lot of half-baked Bloomsbury intellectuals and Hampstead ideologues … bourgeois scabs and parlour-socialist nancy boys … scum of weak-kneed Trotskyite flunkeys … betraying the workers and anyone else it suits their filthy bloody blackleg book to betray … I’m talking about politics — socialism — reality — adaptability …’

I felt my arm caught tightly. It was Widmerpool. I turned towards him. He had gone quite pale. His thick lips were trembling a little. The sight of Gypsy Jones, rousing vague memories in myself, had caused him to react far more violently. To Widmerpool, she was not the mere handmaid of memory, she was a spectre of horror, the ghastly reminder of failure, misery, degradation. He dragged at my arm.

‘For God’s sake, come away,’ he said.

We continued our course down the street, over which dusk was falling, Widmerpool walking at a much sharper pace, but without any of his former bravura, the stick now gripped in his hand as if to ward off actual physical attack.

‘You realised who it was?’ he said, as we hurried along.

‘Of course.’

‘How soon did you see her?’

‘Only after she had begun to speak.’

‘Me, too. What an escape. It was a near thing.’

‘What was?’

‘She might have noticed me.’