Anthony Powell - The Acceptance World

‘Maybe. And I can paint them. But can you write about them?’

‘No real tradition of how women behave exists in English writing. In France there is at least a good rough and ready convention, perhaps not always correct — riddled with every form of romanticism — but at least a pattern to which a writer can work. A French novelist may conform with the convention, or depart from it. His readers know, more or less, which he is doing. Here, every female character has to be treated empirically.’

‘Well, after all, so does every woman,’ said Barnby, another of whose dialectical habits was suddenly to switch round and argue against himself. ‘One of the troubles, I think, is that there are too many novelists like St. John Clarke.’

‘But novelists of the first rank have not always been attracted to women physically.’

‘If of the first rank,’ said Barnby, ‘they may rise above it. If anything less, homosexual novelists are, I believe, largely responsible for some of the extraordinary ideas that get disseminated about women and their behaviour.’

Barnby’s sententious tone had already indicated to me that he was himself entangled in some new adventure. Those utterances, which Mr. Deacon used to call ‘Barnby’s generalisations about women’, were almost always a prelude to a story involving some woman individually. So it had turned out on that occasion.

‘When you first make a hit with someone,’ he had continued, ‘you think everything is going all right with the girl, just because it is all right with you. But when you are more used to things, you are always on your guard — prepared for trouble of one sort or another.’

‘Who is it this time?’

‘A young woman I met on a train.’

‘How promiscuous.’

‘She inspired a certain confidence.’

‘And things are going wrong?’

‘On the contrary, going rather well. That is what makes me suspicious.’

‘Have you painted her?’

Barnby rummaged among the brushes, tubes of paint, newspapers, envelopes and bottles that littered the table; coming at last to a large portfolio from which he took a pencil drawing. The picture was of a girl’s head. She looked about twenty. The features, suggested rather than outlined, made her seem uncertain of herself, perhaps on the defensive. Her hair was untidy. There was an air of self- conscious rebellion. Something about the portrait struck me as familiar.

‘What is her name?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘She won’t tell me.’

‘How very secretive.’

‘That’s what I think.’

‘How often has she been here?’

‘Two or three times.’

I examined the drawing again.

‘I’ve met her.’

‘Who is she?’

‘I’m trying to remember.’

‘Have a good think,’ said Barnby, sighing. ‘I like to clear these matters up.’

But for the moment I was unable to recall the girl’s name. I had the impression our acquaintance had been slight, and was of a year or two earlier. There had been something absurd, or laughable, in the background of the occasion when we had met.

‘It would be only polite to reveal her identity by now,’ Barnby said, returning the drawing to the portfolio and making a grimace.

‘How did it start?’

‘I was coming back from a week-end with the Manaschs’. She arrived in the compartment about an hour before we reached London. We began to talk about films. For some reason we got on to the French Revolution. She said she was on the side of the People.’

‘Dark eyes and reddish hair?’

‘The latter unbrushed.’

‘Christian name, Anne?’

‘There was certainly an “A” on her handkerchief. That was a clue I forgot to tell you.’

‘Generally untidy?’

‘Decidedly. As to baths, I shouldn’t think she overdid them.’

‘I think I can place her.’

Don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘Lady Anne Stepney.’

‘A friend of yours?’

‘I sat next to her once at dinner years ago. She made the same remark about the French Revolution.’

‘Did she, indeed,’ said Barnby, perhaps a shade piqued at this apparently correct guess. ‘Did you follow up those liberal convictions at the time?’

‘On the contrary. I doubt if she would even remember my name. Her sister married Charles Stringham, whom I’ve sometimes talked of. They are getting a divorce, so I saw in the paper.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Barnby. ‘I read about it too. Stringham was the Great Industrialist’s secretary at one moment, wasn’t he? I met him with Baby and liked him. He has that very decorative mother, Mrs. Foxe, whom really I wouldn’t—’

He became silent; then returned to the subject of the girl.

‘Her parents are called Bridgnorth?’

‘That’s it.’

‘One starts these things,’ Barnby said, ‘and then the question arises: how is one to continue them? Before you know where you are, you are thoroughly entangled. That is what we all have to remember.’

‘We do, indeed.’

Lying in bed in the Templers’ house, feeling more than a little unwilling to rise into a chilly world, I thought of these words of Barnby’s. There could be no doubt that I was now, as he had said, ‘thoroughly entangled’.

Everyone came down late to breakfast that morning. Mona was in a decidedly bad temper. Her irritation was perhaps due to an inner awareness that a love affair was in the air, the precise location of which she was unable to identify; for I was fairly certain that neither of the Templers guessed anything was ‘on’ between Jean and myself. They seemed, indeed, fully occupied by the discord of their own relationship. As it happened, I found no opportunity to be alone with Jean. She seemed almost deliberately to arrange that we should always be chaperoned by one of the other two. She would once more have appeared as calm, distant, unknown to me, as when first seen, had she not twice smiled submissively, almost shyly, when our eyes met.

Mona’s sulkiness cast a gloom over the house. Although obviously lazy and easy-going in her manner of life, she possessed also an energy and egotism that put considerable force behind this display of moodiness. Templer made more than one effort to cheer her up, from time to time becoming annoyed himself at his lack of success; when conciliation would suddenly turn to teasing. However, his continued attempts to fall in with his wife’s whims led in due course to an unexpected development in the composition of the party.

We were sitting in a large room of nebulous character, where most of the life of the household was carried on, reading the Sunday papers, talking, and playing the gramophone. The previous night’s encounter with Quiggin had enflamed Mona’s memories of her career as an artist’s model. She began to talk of the ‘times’ she had had in various studios, and to question me about Mark Members; perhaps regretting that she had allowed this link with her past to be severed so entirely. Professionally, she had never come across such figures as Augustus John, or Epstein, trafficking chiefly with a group of the lesser academic painters; though she had known a few young men, like Members and Barnby, who frequented more ‘advanced’ circles. She had never even sat for Isbister, so she told me. All the same, that period of her life was now sufficiently far away to be clouded with romance; at least when compared in her own mind with her married circumstances.

When I agreed that both Members and Quiggin were by then, in their different ways, quite well-known ‘young writers’, she became more than ever enthusiastic about them, insisting that she must meet Quiggin again. In fact conversation seemed to have been deliberately steered by her into these channels with that end in view. Templer, lying in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, listened indifferently to her talk while he idly turned the pages of the News of the World. His wife’s experiences among ‘artists’ probably cropped up fairly often as a subject: a regular, almost legitimate method of exciting a little domestic jealousy when life at home seemed flat. Her repeated questions at last caused me to explain the change of secretary made by St. John Clarke.