Anthony Powell - The Kindly Ones

‘More or less.’

Before I could enlarge on my own activities, Molly Jeavons came into the room, making all the disturbance that naturally noisy people always bring in their train. Dark, large, still good-looking at fifty, there was something of the barmaid about her, something of the Charles II beauty, although Molly, they said, had never been exactly a ‘beauty’ when younger, more from lack of temperament to play the part, than want of physical equipment. These two sides she represented, merging in middle age, suited her tomboyish, all enveloping manner. This manner seemed designed by her to dispense with aristocratic frills unsuitable to the style in which the Jeavonses lived, but — caught by Time, as all idiosyncrasies of talk and behaviour can be — the final result was somewhat to emphasise the background she was at pains to understate. She was wearing various rather ill-assorted woollen garments. After greeting Widmerpool and saying something about his mother’s cottage, she turned to me.

‘We’ve been having the most awful time, Nick,’ she said, ‘trying to fix up the rows of animals that always infest the house. Sanderson, the vet, a great friend of mine, has been an angel. I talked to the sweetest man there who was trying to find a home for his cat. His wife had just left him and he’d just been turned out of the furnished flat he was living in because the owner wanted it back. He had nowhere to go and was absolutely at the end of his tether. He seemed so nice, I couldn’t leave until we’d arranged the cat’s future. The long and the short of it is he’s going to stay for a night or two here. He had his bag with him and was going to some awful hotel, because he has very little money. He seems to know a lot of people we all know. You probably know him yourself, Nick.’

‘What is he called?’

‘I simply can’t remember,’ she said. ‘I’ve had such a lot of things to do today that I am feeling quite dizzy and the name has completely gone out of my head. He’ll be down in a moment. He is just unpacking his things — and now I must hear how the arrangements about the cottage are getting on.’

She joined the conversation taking place between Jeavons’s brother, Widmerpool and Widmerpool’s mother. Jeavons, who had been listening abstractedly to these negotiations, came and sat beside me.

‘What’s happening to all the Tollands, Nick?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t heard anything of them, except that your wife, Isobel, is going to have a baby and is staying in the country with Frederica.’

‘George has gone back to his regiment.’

‘Ex-Guardsman, isn’t he?’ said Jeavons. ‘He’ll be for a holding battalion.’

‘Then Hugo has become a Gunner.’

‘In the ranks?’

‘Yes.’

Hugo, regarded in general by his family as a fairly unsatisfactory figure, in spite of recent achievements in selling antique furniture, had taken the wind out of everyone’s sails by his enlistment.

‘One will be called up anyway,’ Hugo had said. ‘Why not have a start of everyone? Get in on the ground floor.’

Such a view from Hugo was unexpected.

‘He looks a bit strange in uniform.’

‘Must be like that song Billy Bennett used to sing,’ said Jeavons:

‘I’m a trooper, I’m a trooper,

They call me Gladys Cooper.

Ages since I’ve been to a music-hall. Aren’t what they used to be anyway. Still, it does Hugo credit.’

‘Robert has some idea of joining the navy.’

‘Plenty of water in the trenches, without going out of your way to look for it,’ said Jeavons shuddering. ‘Besides, I feel bilious most of the time, even when I’m not rolling about in a boat.’

‘Chips Lovell, like me, is thinking things over. Roddy Cutts, being an MP, arranged something — a Yeomanry regiment, I think.’

While we were talking someone came into the room. I had not taken very seriously Molly Jeavons’s surmise that I should probably know the man she had picked up at the vet’s. She always imagined Isobel and I must know everyone roughly the same age as ourselves. Perhaps she liked to feel that, if necessary, she could draw on our reserves for her own purposes. I thought it most improbable that I should have met this casual acquaintance, certainly never guessed he would turn out to be Moreland. However, Moreland it was. He looked far from well, dazed and unhappy.

‘Good God,’ he said, catching sight of me.

Molly Jeavons detached herself from the talk about Mrs Widmerpool’s lodger.

‘So you do know him, Nick.’

‘Of course we know each other.’

‘I felt sure you would.’

‘Why are you here?’ said Moreland. ‘Did you arrange this?’

‘Will you be all right in that room?’ Molly asked. ‘For goodness sake don’t touch the blackout, or the whole thing will come down. It’s just fixed temporarily to last the night. Teddy will do something about it in the morning.’

‘I really can’t thank you enough,’ said Moreland. ‘Farinelli … one thing and another … then letting me come here….’

He had probably been drinking earlier in the day, was still overwrought, though not exactly drunk, not far from tears. Molly Jeavons brushed his thanks aside.

‘One thing I can’t do,’ she said, ‘is to give either you or Nick dinner here tonight. Nor any of these other people either, except Stanley. We simply haven’t got enough food in the house to offer you anything.’

‘We’ll dine together,’ I said. ‘Is there anywhere in the neighbourhood?’

‘A place halfway up Gloucester Road on the right. It’s called the Scarlet Pimpernel. The food is not as bad as it sounds. They’ll send out for drinks.’

‘Do you feel equal to the Scarlet Pimpernel, Hugh?’

Moreland, almost past speech, nodded.

‘Give him your key, Teddy,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘We can find him another in the morning.’

Jeavons fumbled in one of the pockets of his overall and handed a key to Moreland.

‘I’ll probably be pottering about when you come in,’ he said, ‘can’t get to sleep if I turn in early. Come back with him, Nick. We might be able to find a glass of beer for you.’

I went across the room to take leave of Widmerpool and his mother. When I came up to her, Mrs Widmerpool turned her battery of teeth upon me, smiling fiercely, like the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, her shining, ruddy countenance advancing closer as she continued to hold my hand in hers.

‘I expect you are still occupied with your literary pursuits,’ she said, taking up our conversation at precisely the point at which it had been abandoned.

‘Some journalism—’

‘This is not a happy time for book-lovers.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘Still, you are fortunate.’

‘Why?’

‘With your bookish days, not, like Kenneth, in arms.’

‘He seems a Happy Warrior.’

‘It is not in his nature to remain in civil life at time of war,’ she said.

‘I will say good night, then.’

‘Good luck to you,’ she said, ‘wherever you may find yourself in these troublous times.’

She gave me another smile of great malignance, returning immediately to her discussions about rent. Widmerpool half raised his hand in a gesture of farewell. Moreland and I left the house together.

‘What the hell were you doing in that place?’ he asked, as we walked up the street.

‘Molly Jeavons is an aunt of Isobel’s. It is a perfectly normal place for me to be. Far stranger that you yourself should turn up there.’

‘You’re right about that,’ Moreland said. ‘I can’t quite make out how I did. Things have been moving rather quickly with me the last few months. Who was that terrifying woman you said good-bye to?’

‘Mother of the man in spectacles called Widmerpool. You met him with me at a nursing home years ago.’