Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

Frederica, who had just come in, looked not altogether approving of all this. She was never in any case really sure that she liked Jeavons, certainly not when in moods like his present one. That had been Jeavons’s standing with her even before she married Umfraville, for whom Jeavons himself had no great affection. Umfraville, on the other hand, liked Jeavons. He used to give rather subtle imitations of him.

‘What you could do, Uncle Ted, is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that? It would be a great help.’

‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’ said Jeavons.

He often showed an unexpected awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.

‘I’ll duly render a return of wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on such occasions.’

Never finding it easy to set his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo stretched himself out on the sofa.

‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he said.

‘And the men to do them,’ said Jeavons.

Later, as he worked away, he could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall refrain from his younger days:

‘When Father went down to Southend,

To spend a happy day,

He didn’t see much of the water,

But he put some beer away.

When he landed home,

Mother went out of her mind,

When he told her he’d lost the seaweed,

And left the cockles behind.’

A footnote to the events of Erridge’s funeral was supplied by Dicky Umfraville after our return to London. It was to be believed or not, according to taste. Umfraville produced the imputation, if that were what it was to be called, when we were alone together. Pamela Widmerpool’s name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Latterly, Umfraville’s character-acting had become largely an impersonation of himself, Dr Jekyll, even without the use of the transforming drug, slipping into the skin of the larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses, Umfraville’s normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape, the bright bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair — the formalized army officer of caricature — suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque shape as vehicle for improvisation.

‘Remember my confessing in my outspoken way I’d been pretty close to Flavia Stringham in the old days of the Happy Valley?’

‘You put it more bluntly than that, Dicky — you said you’d taken her virginity.’

‘What a cad I am — well, one sometimes wonders.’

‘Whether you’re a cad, Dicky, or whether you were the first?’

‘Our little romance was scarcely over before she married Cosmo Flitton. Now the only reason a woman like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a hurry, and at any price. Unfortunately my own circumstances forbade me aspiring to her hand.’

‘Dicky, this is pure fantasy.’

Umfraville looked sad. Even at his most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him. He was a pure Burton type, when one came to think of it. Melancholy as expressed by giving imitations would have made another interesting sub-section in the Anatomy .

‘All right, old boy, all right. Keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups.’

‘Not a positive one?’

‘There was nothing positive about Cosmo Flitton — barring, of course, his Wassermann Test. Mind you, it could be argued Flavia found an equally God-awful heel in Harrison F. Wisebite, but Harrison came on to the scene too late to have fathered the beautiful Pamela.’

‘I’m not prepared to accept this, Dicky. You’ve just thought it up.’

Umfraville’s habit of taking liberties with dates, if a story could thereby be improved, was notorious.

‘You can never tell,’ he repeated. ‘My God, Cosmo was a swine. A real swine. Harrison I liked in his way. He mixed a refreshing cocktail of his own invention called Death Comes for the Archbishop.’

In the course of preliminary conclaves with Bagshaw on the subject of Fission ’s first number, mention was again made of an additional personage, a woman, who was backing the magazine. Bagshaw, adept at setting forth the niceties of political views, if these happened to attach to the doctrinaire Left, was less good at delineating individuals, putting over no more than that she was a widow who had always wanted some hand in running a paper. As it turned out, excuse existed for this lack of precision in grasping her name, in due course revealed in quite unforeseen circumstances. Bagshaw thought she would cause little or no trouble editorially. That was less true of Widmerpool, who certainly harboured doubts as to Bagshaw’s competence as editor. Quiggin and Craggs were another matter. They were old acquaintances who differed on all sorts of points, but they were familiar with Bagshaw’s habits. Widmerpool had no experience of these. He might take exception to some of them. Bagshaw himself was much too devious to express all this in plain terms, nor would it have been discreet to do so openly. His disquiet showed itself in repeated attempts to pinpoint Widmerpool himself politically.

‘From time to time I detect signs of fellow-travelling. Then I think I’m on the wrong tack entirely, he’s positively Right Wing Labour. Again, you find him stringing along with the far, but anti-Communist, Left. You can’t help admiring the way he conceals his hand. My guess is he’s playing ball with the Comrades on the quiet for whatever he can get out of it, but trying to avoid the appearance of doing so. He doesn’t want to prejudice his chances of a good job in the Government when the moment comes.’

‘Was that the game Hamlet was playing when he said:

The undiscovered country from whose bourn

No fellow-traveller returns, puzzles the will?’

‘There was something fishy about Hamlet’s politics, I agree,’ said Bagshaw. ‘But the only fellow-travellers we can be certain about were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.’

Meanwhile I worked away at Burton, and various other jobs. The three months spent in the country after demobilization had endorsed the severance with old army associates, the foreign military attachés with whom I had been employed ‘in liaison’. One returned to a different world. Once in a way the commemorative gesture might be made by one or other of them of inviting a former colleague, now relegated to civilian life; once in a way an unrevised list of names might bring one incongruously to the surface again. On the whole, attendance at such gatherings became very infrequent.

When we were asked to drinks by Colonel and Madame Flores, the invitation derived from neither of these two sources. It was sent simply because the hostess wanted to take another look at a former lover who dated back to days long before she had become the wife of a Latin American army officer; or — the latter far more probable, when one came to think of it — was curious, as ladies who have had an inclination for a man so often are, regarding the appearance and demeanour of his wife; with whom, as it happened, the necessity had never arisen to emphasize that particular conjunction of the past.