Anthony Powell: The Acceptance World

That we had ceased to meet fairly regularly was due no doubt to some extent to Templer’s chronic inability — as our housemaster Le Bas would have said — to ‘keep up’ a friendship. He moved entirely within the orbit of events of the moment, looking neither forward nor backward. If we happened to run across each other, we arranged to do something together; not otherwise. This mutual detachment had been brought about also by the circumstances of my own life. To be circumscribed by people constituting the same professional community as myself was no wish of mine; rather the contrary. However, an inexorable law governs all human existence in that respect, ordaining that sooner or later everyone must appear before the world as he is. Many are not prepared to face this sometimes distasteful principle. Indeed, the illusion that anyone can escape from the marks of his vocation is an aspect of romanticism common to every profession; those occupied with the world of action claiming their true interests to lie in the pleasure of imagination or reflection, while persons principally concerned with reflective or imaginative pursuits are for ever asserting their inalienable right to participation in an active sphere.

Perhaps Templer himself lay somewhere within the range of this definition. If so, he gave little indication of it. In fact, if taxed, there can be no doubt that he would have denied any such thing. The outward sign that seemed to place him within this category was his own unwillingness ever wholly to accept the people amongst whom he had chosen to live. A curious streak of melancholy seemed to link him with a less arid manner of life than that to which he seemed irrevocably committed. At least I supposed something of that sort could still be said of his life; for I knew little or nothing of his daily routine, in or out of the office, though suspecting that neither his activities, nor his friends, were of a kind likely to be very sympathetic to myself.

However, various strands, controlled without much method and then invisible to me, imparted a certain irregular pattern to Templer’s personal affairs. For example, he liked his friends to be rich and engrossed in whatever business occupied them. They had to be serious about money, though relatively dissipated in their private lives; to possess no social ambitions whatever, though at the same time to be disfigured by no grave social defects. The women had to be good-looking, the men tolerably proficient at golf and bridge, without making a fetish of those pastimes. Both sexes, when entertained by him, were expected to drink fairly heavily; although, here again, intoxication must not be carried to excess. In fact, broadly speaking, Templer disliked anything that could be labelled ‘bohemian’, as much as anything with claims to be ‘smart’. He did not fancy even that sort of ‘smartness’ to be found to a limited extent in the City, a form of life which had, after all, so much in common with his own tastes.

‘You know, I really rather hate the well-born,’ he used to say. ‘Not that I see many of them these days.’

Nothing might be thought easier than gratification of these modest requirements among a circle of intimates; and the difficulty Templer found in settling down to any one set of persons limited by these terms of reference, and at the same time satisfactory to himself, was really remarkable. This side of him suggested a kind of ‘spoiled intellectual’. There was also the curious sympathy he could extend to such matters as the story of the St. John Clarke introduction, which he now made me outline after I had explained my purpose in the Ritz. The facts could scarcely have been very interesting to him, but he followed their detail as if alteration of the bank rate or fluctuations of the copper market were ultimately concerned. Perhaps this capacity for careful attention to other people’s affairs was the basis of his own success in business.

‘Of course I know about Isbister, R.A.,’ he said. ‘He painted that shocking picture of my old man. I tried to pop it when he dropped off the hooks, but there were no takers. I know about St. John Clarke, too. Mona reads his books. Absolutely laps them up, in fact.’

‘Who is Mona?’

‘Oh, yes, you haven’t met her yet, have you? Mona is my wife.’

‘But, my dear Peter, I had no idea you were married.’

‘Strange, isn’t it? Our wedding anniversary, matter of fact. Broke as I am, I thought we could gnaw a cutlet at the Grill to celebrate. Why not join us? Your chap is obviously not going to turn up.’

He began to speak of his own affairs, talking in just the way he did when we used to have tea together at school. Complaining of having lost a lot of money in ‘the slump’, he explained that he still owned a house in the neighbourhood of Maidenhead.

‘More or less camping out there now,’ he said. ‘With a married couple looking after us. The woman does the cooking. The man can drive a car and service it pretty well, but he hasn’t the foggiest idea about looking after my clothes.’

I asked about his marriage.

‘We met first at a road-house near Staines. Mona was being entertained there by a somewhat uncouth individual called Snider, an advertising agent. Snider’s firm was using her as a photographer’s model. You’ll know her face when you see her. Laxatives — halitosis — even her closest friend wouldn’t tell her — and so on.’

I discovered in due course that Mona’s chief appearance on the posters had been to advertise toothpaste; but both she and her husband were inclined to emphasise other more picturesque possibilities.

‘She’d already had a fairly adventurous career by then,’ Templer said.

He began to enlarge on this last piece of information, like a man unable to forgo irritating the quiescent nerve of a potentially aching tooth. I had the impression that he was still very much in love with his wife, but that things were perhaps not going as well as he could wish. That would explain a jerkiness of manner that suggested worry. The story itself seemed commonplace enough, yet containing implications of Templer’s own recurrent desire to escape from whatever world enclosed him.

‘She says she’s partly Swiss,’ he said. ‘Her father was an engineer in Birmingham, always being fired for being tight. ‘However, both parents are dead. The only relation she’s got is an aunt with a house in Worthing — a boarding-house, I think.’

I saw at once that Mona, whatever else her characteristics, was a wife liberally absolving Templer from additional family ties. That fact, perhaps counting for little compared with deeper considerations, would at the same time seem a great advantage in his eyes. This desire to avoid new relations through marriage was connected with an innate unwillingness to identify himself too closely with any one social group. In that taste, oddly enough, he resembled Uncle Giles, each of them considering himself master of a more sweeping mobility of action by voluntary withdrawal from competition at any given social level of existence.

At the time of narration, I did not inwardly accept all Templer’s highly coloured statements about his wife, but I was impressed by the apparent depths of his feeling for Mona. Even when telling the story of how his marriage had come about, he had completely abandoned any claim to have employed those high-handed methods he was accustomed to advocate for controlling girls of her sort. I asked what time she was due at the Ritz.

‘When she comes out of the cinema,’ he said. ‘She was determined to see Madchen in Uniform. I couldn’t face it. After all, one meets quite enough lesbians in real life without going to the pictures to see them.’

‘But it isn’t a film about lesbians.’

‘Oh, isn’t it?’ said Templer. ‘Mona thought it was. She’ll be disappointed if you’re right. However, I’m sure you’re wrong. Jimmy Brent told me about it. He usually knows what’s what in matters of that kind. My sister Jean is with Mona. Did you ever meet her? I can’t remember. They may be a little late, but I’ve booked a table. We can have a drink or two while we wait.’