Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘Flavia.’

Carefully balancing his stick and champagne, Umfraville embraced her.

‘How horrid of you not to recognize me.’

Umfraville swept that aside.

‘Flavia, this is an altogether unexpected delight. Does your presence at our nephew’s wedding mean that you and I are now related — in consequence of the marriage of these young people? How much I hope that, Flavia.’

The grey-haired lady — Stringham’s sister — laughed a rather tinkly laugh.

‘Dicky, you haven’t changed at all.’

Flavia Wisebite — it was to be assumed she still bore the name of her American second husband, Harrison Wisebite (like Veronica Tolland’s first, alcoholic, long departed) — laughed again tremulously. Her own affiliations with Umfraville dated back to infinitely distant days; Kenya, the Happy Valley, surroundings where, according to Umfraville himself — he had emphasized with a certain complacency his own caddishness in revealing the information — he had been the first to seduce her. That possibility was more credible than Umfraville’s follow-up, that he (rather than the reprehensible Cosmo Flitton, married to Flavia not long after) could be true father of Flavia’s daughter, Pamela. Pamela Flitton, it might be thought, carried all the marks of being Cosmo Flitton’s daughter. Age had done little or nothing to impair Umfraville’s capacities for routine banter, if he happened to be in the right mood. He continued to press the possibility of a remote family tie emerging from the Cutts/Akworth union that would connect Flavia Wisebite with himself.

‘Bride or bridegroom? Come on, Flavia. I want to be able to introduce you as my little cousin.’

‘No good, Dicky. I’m not a blood relation. I’m Clare Akworth’s godmother. Her mother’s a dear friend of mine. We live in cottages almost next door to each other, practically in walking distance of Stourwater.’

Flavia Wisebite began to narrate her past history to Umfraville in her rapid trembling voice; how nervous diseases had prostrated her, she had been in and out of hospital, was now cured. In spite of that assurance she still seemed in a highly nervous state. Umfraville, less tough in certain respects than in his younger days, was beginning to look rather upset himself at all this. No doubt he felt sorry for Flavia, but had reached a time of life when, if he came to a wedding, he hoped not to be harassed by having poured into his ears the troubles of a former mistress. His face became quite drawn as he listened. I should have been willing to escape myself, scarcely knowing her, and feeling in no way responsible. Before withdrawal were possible, Umfraville manoeuvred me into the conversation. Flavia Wisebite at once recalled the sole occasion when we had met in the past.

‘It was when Dicky was first engaged to your sister-in-law, Frederica. You drove over from Aldershot to Frederica’s house during the war. I was there with poor Robert, just before he was killed. I’m a contemporary of Frederica’s, you know. We came out at the same time. I remember you talking about my brother, Charles.’

She began to speak disjointedly of Stringham. She was, I thought, perhaps a little mad now. As one gets older, one gets increasingly used to encountering this development in friends and acquaintances; causing periods of self-examination in a similar connexion. Seeing that Flavia and I had something in common to talk about together, Umfraville slipped away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him stumping across the room on his stick to have a further word with the bride. Flavia Wisebite rambled on.

‘Charles was never sent into the world to make old bones, of course I always knew that, but how sad that he should have died as he did, how sad. He was a hero, of course, but what difference does that make, when you’re dead?’

She seemed to require an answer to that question. It was hard to offer one free from sententiousness. I made no attempt to do so.

‘I suppose it makes a difference the way a few people remember you.’

That seemed to satisfy her.

‘Yes, yes. Like Robert.’

‘Yes. Robert too.’

She appeared to have been made quite happy by this justifiable, if unoriginal conclusion. Oddly enough, when at Frederica’s, Flavia Wisebite had spoken almost disparagingly of her brother’s determination, in face of poor health, to join the army. This canonization of Stringham after death had something of her daughter Pamela’s way of remembering dead lovers. Now, in a somewhat similar manner, Flavia began to talk of Umfraville with affection, though she had hardly noticed him at Frederica’s. Then, of course, she had been involved with Robert Tolland. Even so, the enthusiasm with which she went on about Kenya, how amusing Umfraville had been there, how much her father had liked him, was an illustration of the way human relationships fluctuate, without any action taking place; Umfraville, from being entirely disregarded, now occupying a prominent place in Flavia Wisebite’s personal myth. Without warning, she switched to Pamela.

‘Did you ever meet my daughter?’

‘Yes. I knew Pamela.’

I was about to say that I knew Pamela well, then saw that, in Pamela Flitton’s case, that might imply closer affiliations than had ever in fact existed. It was a needless adjustment of phrase. Her mother had certainly long ceased to worry, if she had ever done so, about her daughter’s affairs, with whom she had, or had not, slept. Perhaps, in her own state of health, Flavia had been scarcely aware of all that In any case something else in relation to Pamela was now on her mind.

‘She died too.’

‘Yes.’

‘She married that dreadful man — Widmerpool.’

For the first time it occurred to me as strange, abnormally strange, that Flavia Wisebite had never, so far as I knew, played anything like an active rôle in her capacity as Widmerpool’s mother-in-law. In fact I now saw that, without formulating the idea at all clearly in my mind, I had always supposed Flavia to have died. Whatever the reason — chiefly no doubt the interludes in hospitals and nursing-homes — she seemed to have sidestepped the scandals that had enveloped her daughter’s name; not least Pamela’s unhappy end. If that had been her mother’s deliberate intention, she had been remarkably successful in keeping out of the way.

‘Did you know Widmerpool?’

‘Yes. I know him. I’ve known him for years.’

‘I said did you know him. Nobody could know him now.’

‘How do you mean?’

I did not grasp immediately the implication that Widmerpool had become literally impossible to know.

‘You can’t have heard what’s happened to him. He’s gone out of his mind. He lives with a crowd of dreadful people, most of them quite young, who wear extraordinary clothes, and do the most horrible, horrible things. They are quite near here.’

It was true that Widmerpool’s mother’s cottage had been only a mile or two from Stourwater.

‘I did know he’d become rather odd. I’d forgotten he was in this neighbourhood.’

‘I see them out running quite often.’

In the light of the cult’s habits there was nothing particularly extraordinary in Flavia Wisebite catching sight of them at their exercises from time to time. During the period of working for Sir Magnus Donners, Widmerpool had often spoken of his good fortune in having his mother’s cottage — later enlarged by himself — so close to the Castle.

‘Sometimes they’re in blue garments, sometimes hardly any clothes at all. I’ve been told they do wear absolutely nothing, stark naked, when they go out in the middle of the night in summer. They do all sorts of revolting things. I wonder it’s allowed. But then everything is allowed now.’