Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

‘I don’t think we can very well ask Mrs Skerrett to clean things up.’

‘Quite out of the question,’ said Frederica.

There was unanimous agreement that it was no job for Mrs Skerrett in the circumstances.

‘Why not tell that Jerry to empty it,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘He’s doubtless done worse things in his time. His whole demeanour suggests the Extermination Squad.’

‘Oh, God, no,’ said Hugo. ‘Can you imagine explaining to Siegfried what has happened? He would either think it funny in that awful gross German way, or priggishly disapprove in an equally German manner. I don’t know which would be worse. One would die of embarrassment.’

‘No, you couldn’t possibly ask a German to do the cleaning up,’ said Norah. ‘That would be going a bit far — and a POW at that.’

‘I can’t see why not,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘Rather good for him, to my way of thinking. Besides, the Germans are always desperately keen on vomiting. In their cafés or restaurants they have special places in the Gents for doing so after drinking a lot of beer.’

‘It’s not him,’ said Norah. ‘It’s us.’

‘Norah’s quite right,’ said Frederica.

For Frederica to support a proposition of Norah’s was sufficiently rare to tip the scale.

‘Well, who’s going to do it?’ asked Blanche. ‘The jar’s too big for me to manage alone.’

In the end, Jeavons, Hugo and I, with shrewd advice from Roddy Cutts, bore the enormous vessel up the stairs to Erridge’s bathroom. It passed through the door with comparative ease, but, once inside, every kind of difficulty was encountered. Apart from size and weight, the opening at the top of the pot was not designed for the use to which it had been put; not, in short, adapted for cleansing processes. The job took quite a long time. More than once the vase was nearly broken. We returned to the sitting-room with a good deal of relief that the business was at an end.

‘It’s Erry’s shade haunting the place,’ said Norah. ‘His obsession with ill-health. All the same, we all supposed him a malade imaginaire . Now the joke’s with him.’

‘I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,’ said Hugo.

This sort of conversation grated on Frederica.

‘Do you know how Erry occupied his last week?’ she asked. ‘Writing letters about the memorial window.’

‘The old original memorial window?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Erry was always utterly against it,’ said Norah. ‘At least refused ever to make a move. It was George who used to say the window had been planned at the time and ought to be put up, no matter what.’

‘Erry appears to have started corresponding about stained-glass windows almost immediately after George’s funeral. Blanche found the letters, didn’t you?’

Blanche smiled vaguely. Norah threw her cigarette into the fireplace in a manner to express despair at all human behaviour, her own family’s in particular.

‘Apart from going into complete reverse as to his own values, fancy imagining you could get a stained-glass window put up to your grandfather when you can’t find a bloody builder to repair the roof of your bloody bombed-out flat. That was Erry all over.’

‘Perhaps he meant it as a kind of tribute to George.’

‘I don’t object to George wanting to stick the window up. That was George’s line. It’s Erry. It was just like darling George to be nice about that sort of thing — just as he went when he did, and didn’t hang about a few months after Erry to make double death duties. George was always the best behaved of the family.’

Frederica did not comment on that opinion. It looked as if a row, no uncommon occurrence when Frederica and Norah were under the same roof, might be about to break out. Hugo, familiar with his sisters’ wars and alliances, changed the subject.

‘There’s always something rather consoling about death,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean Erry, because of course one’s very sorry about the old boy and all that. What you must admit is there’s a curious pleasure in hearing about someone’s death as a rule, even if you’ve quite liked them.’

‘Not George’s,’ said Susan. ‘I cried for days.’

‘So did I,’ said Norah. ‘Weeks.’

She was never to be outdone by Susan.

‘That’s quite different again,’ said Hugo. ‘I quite agree I was cut up by George too. Felt awful about him in an odd way — I mean not the obvious way, but treating it objectively. It seemed such bloody bad luck. What I’m talking about is that sense of relief about hearing a given death has taken place. One can’t explain it to oneself.’

‘I think you’re all absolutely awful,’ said Roddy Cutts.

‘I don’t like hearing about death or people dying in the least. It upsets me even if I don’t know them — some film star you’ve hardly seen or foreign statesman or scientist you’ve only read about in the paper. It thoroughly depresses me. I agree with Dicky about that. Let’s change the subject.’

I asked whether he had settled with Widmerpool the rights and wrongs of hire-purchase.

‘I don’t much care for the man. In the margins where we might be reasonably in agreement, he always takes what strikes me as an unnecessarily aggressive line.’

‘What’s Cheap Money?’

‘The idea is to avoid a superfluity of the circulating medium concentrated on an insufficiency of what you swop it for. When Widmerpool and his like have put the poor old rentier on the spot they may find he wasn’t performing too useless a role.’

‘But Widmerpool’s surely a rentier himself?’

‘He’s a bill-broker, and the bill-brokers are the only companies getting any sympathy from the Government these days. He’s in the happy position of being wooed by both sides, the Labour Party — that is to say his own party — and the City, who hope to get concessions.’

‘I find politics far more lowering a subject than death,’ said Norah. ‘Especially if they have to include discussing that man. I can’t think how Pam can stand him for five minutes. I’m not surprised she’s ill all the time.’

‘I was told that one moment she was going to marry John Mountfichet,’ said Susan. ‘He was prepared to leave his wife for her. Then he was killed. She made this marriage on the rebound. Decided to marry the first man who asked her.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Jeavons. ‘That sort of story always gets put round. Who was Mountfichet’s wife — the Huntercombes’ girl Venetia, wasn’t she? I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way. Married couples usually do.’

‘What’s that got to do with whether he was going off with Pamela Flitton?’ asked Norah. ‘Or whether she married Widmerpool on the rebound?’

‘People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other,’ said Jeavons.

He did not enlarge further on this rebuttal of the theory that people married ‘on the rebound’, or that the first choice was founded on an instinctive Tightness of judgment. Instead, he turned to the question of how he himself was to get back to London. Wandering about the room chainsmoking, he looked more than ever like a plain-clothes man.

‘Wish the train didn’t arrive back so late. They must be getting familiar with my face on that line. Probably think I’m working the three-card trick. Anything I can do to help sort things out while I’m here? Cleaning up that mess in the jar’s whetted my appetite for work. I’d have offered to be a bearer, if I’d thought I could hold up the coffin for more than a minute and a half, but that lump of gunmetal in my guts has been giving trouble again. Never seems to settle down. Sure the army vets left a fuse there, probably a whole shellcap. Can’t digest a thing. Becomes a bore after a time. Never know what you may do when you’re in that state. Didn’t want to be halfway up the aisle, and drop my end of the coffin. Still, that couldn’t have disrupted things, or made more row, than that girl did going out. Wish Molly was alive. Nothing Molly didn’t know about funerals.’