Anthony Powell - The Acceptance World

‘There is a link between us,’ said Mrs. Erdleigh, as she set out the little heaps. ‘At present I cannot see what it is — but there is a link.’

This supposed connexion evidently puzzled her. ‘You are musical?’

‘No.’

‘Then you write — I think you have written a book?’

‘Yes.’

‘You live between two worlds,’ she said. ‘Perhaps even more than two worlds. You cannot always surmount your feelings.’

I could think of no possible reply to this indictment. ‘You are thought cold, but you possess deep affections, sometimes for people worthless in themselves. Often you are at odds with those who might help you. You like women, and they like you, but you often find the company of men more amusing. You expect too much, and yet you are also too resigned. You must try to understand life.’

Somewhat awed by this searching, even severe analysis, I promised I would do better in future.

‘People can only be themselves,’ she said. ‘If they possessed the qualities you desire in them, they would be different people.”

‘That is what I should like them to be.’

‘Sometimes you are too serious, sometimes not serious enough.’

‘So I have been told.’

‘You must make a greater effort in life.’

‘I can see that.’

These strictures certainly seemed just enough; and yet any change of direction would be hard to achieve. Perhaps I was irrevocably transfixed, just as she described, half-way between dissipation and diffidence. While I considered the matter, she passed on to more circumstantial things. It turned out that a fair woman was not very pleased with me; and a dark one almost equally vexed. Like my uncle — perhaps some family failing common to both of us — I was encompassed by gossip.

‘They do not signify at all,’ said Mrs. Erdleigh, referring thus rather ruthlessly to the women of disparate colouring. ‘This is a much more important lady — medium hair, I should say — and I think you have run across her once or twice before, though not recently. But there seems to be another man interested, too. He might even be a husband. You don’t like him much. He is tallish, I should guess. Fair, possibly red hair. In business. Often goes abroad.’

I began to turn over in my mind every woman I had ever met.

‘There is a small matter in your business that is going to cause inconvenience,’ she went on. ‘It has to do with an elderly man — and two young ones connected with him.’

‘Are you sure it is not two elderly men and one young man?’

It had immediately struck me that she might be en rapport with my firm’s growing difficulties regarding St. John Clarke’s introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister. The elderly men would be St. John Clarke and Isbister themselves — or perhaps St. John Clarke and one of the partners — and the young man was, of course, St. John Clarke’s secretary, Mark Members.

‘I see the two young men quite plainly,’ she said. ‘Rather a troublesome couple, I should say.’

This was all credible enough, including the character sketch, though perhaps not very interesting. Such trivial comment, mixed with a few home truths of a personal nature, provide, I had already learnt, the commonplaces of fortune-telling. Such was all that remained in my mind of what Mrs. Erdleigh prophesied on that occasion. She may have foretold more. If so, her words were forgotten by me. Indeed, I was not greatly struck by the insight she had shown; although she impressed me as a woman of dominant, even oddly attractive personality, in spite of a certain absurdity of demeanour. She herself seemed well pleased with the performance.

At the end of her sitting it was time to go. I was dining that evening with Barnby, picking him up at his studio. I rose to say good-bye, thanking her for the trouble she had taken.

‘We shall meet again.’ ‘I hope so.’

‘In about a year from now.’

‘Perhaps before.’

‘No,’ she said, smiling with the complacence of one to whom the secrets of human existence had been long since occultly revealed. ‘Not before.’

I did not press the point. Uncle Giles accompanied me to the hall. He had by then returned to the subject of money, the mystique of which was at least as absorbing to him as the rites upon which we had been engaged.

‘… and then one could not foresee that San Pedro Warehouses Deferred would become entirely valueless,’ he was saying. ‘The expropriations were merely the result of a liberal dictator coming in — got to face these changes. There was one of those quite natural revulsions against foreign capital…’

He broke off. Supposing our meeting now at an end, I turned from him, and made preparations to plunge through the opaque doors into the ocean of streets, in the grey ebb and flow of which the Ufford floated idly upon the swell. Uncle Giles put his hand on my arm.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I should mention to your parents the matter of having your fortune told. I don’t want them to blame me for leading you into bad habits, superstitious ones, I mean. Besides, they might not altogether approve of Myra Erdleigh.’

His brown, wrinkled face puckered slightly. He still retained some vestige of good looks, faintly military in character. Perhaps this hint, increased with age, of past regimental distinction in some forgotten garrison town was what Mrs. Erdleigh admired in him. Neither my parents, nor any of the rest of/Uncle Giles’s relations, were likely to worry about his behaviour if the worst he ever did was to persuade other members of the family to have their fortunes told. However, recognising that silence upon the subject of Mrs. Erdleigh might be a reasonable request, I assured him that I would not speak of our meeting.

I was curious to know what their relationship might be. Possibly they were planning marriage. The ‘marriage card’ had clearly been of interest to my uncle. There was something vaguely ‘improper’ about Mrs. Erdleigh, almost deliberately so; but impropriety of an unremembered, Victorian kind: a villa in St. John’s Wood, perhaps, and eccentric doings behind locked doors and lace curtains on sultry summer afternoons. Uncle Giles was known to possess a capacity for making himself acceptable to ladies of all sorts, some of whom had even been rumoured to contribute at times a trifle towards his expenses; those many expenses to which he was subject, and never tired of detailing. Mrs. Erdleigh looked not so much ‘well off’ as eminently capable of pursuing her own interests effectively. Possibly Uncle Giles considered her a good investment. She, on her side, no doubt had her uses for him. Apart from material considerations, he was obviously fascinated by her occult powers, with which he seemed almost religiously preoccupied. Like all such associations, this one probably included a fierce struggle of wills. It would be interesting to see who won the day. On the whole, my money was on Mrs. Erdleigh. I thought about the pair of them for a day or two, and then they both passed from my mind.

As I made my way towards the neighbourhood of Fitzroy Square, experiencing as usual that feeling of release that always followed parting company with Uncle Giles, I returned to the subject of future business difficulties foretold in the cards. These, as I have said, had seemed to refer to St. John Clarke’s introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister, already a tiresome affair, quite likely to pass from bad to worse. The introduction had been awaited for at least a year now, and we seemed no nearer getting the manuscript. The delay caused inconvenience at the office, since blocks had been made for a series of forty-eight monochrome plates and four three-colour half-tones; to which St. John Clarke was to add four or five thousand words of biographical reminiscence.