Anthony Powell - At Lady Molly's

All the same, the story, even if untrue, impressed me as of interest in its bearing on a sense of strain suffered, perhaps continuously, by Jeavons himself. At worst, the supposed introduction of a ‘tart’ into his house was a myth somehow come into existence, which represented in highly coloured terms a long since vanquished husband’s vain efforts publicly to demonstrate his own independence from a wife’s too evident domination. The legend itself was a kind of tribute to Molly’s strength: a strength of which her first husband too, for all I knew, might in his time have been made equally aware; although Lord Sleaford, at least outwardly, was better equipped to control a wife of Molly’s sort.

‘I don’t think she was unhappy when she was married to Uncle John,’ Lovell used to say. ‘Of course, he was rather a dull dog. Still, lots of women have to put up with dull dogs — not to say dirty dogs — without the advantage of lots of money and a stately home. Besides, Ted is a dull dog, too. I suppose Aunt Molly prefers husbands like that.’

My own feeling was that Jeavons could not be described as ‘dull’: even though he had appeared so, in that very phrase, to Widmerpool equally with Lovell. On the contrary, Jeavons seemed to me a person oddly interesting.

‘Molly never really got on with her contemporaries,’ Lovell said. ‘The kind of people one associates with Lady Diana — and all that. She knew some of them, of course, very well, but she couldn’t be called one of that, or any other, set. I dare say Uncle John was afraid of his wife being thought “fast”. She was very shy, too, I believe, in those days. Quite different from what she is like now.’

A picture of Molly Jeavons was beginning to emerge: separateness from her ‘young married’ contemporaries: perhaps a certain recoil from their flamboyance: in any case, nothing in common with the fleeting interest in the arts of that new fashionable world. She might have the acquisitive instinct to capture from her first marriage (if that was indeed their provenance) such spoils as the Wilson and the Greuze, while remaining wholly untouched by the intellectual emancipation, however skin-deep, of her generation: the Russian Ballet: the painters of the Paris School: novels and poetry of the period: not even such a mournful haunt of the third-rate as the Celtic Twilight had played a part in her life. She had occupied a position many women must have envied, jogging along there for a dozen years without apparent dissatisfaction or a breath of scandal; then contentedly taking on an existence of such a very different kind, hardly noticing the change. All that was interesting. The fact was, perhaps, that her easy going, unambitious manner of life had passed unremarked in a vast house like Dogdene, organised in the last resort by the industrious Sleaford, who, according to Lovell, possessed rather a taste for interfering in domestic matters. While married to him, Molly remained a big, charming, noisy young woman, who had never entirely ceased to be a schoolgirl. When the Dogdene frame was removed, like the loosening of a corset of steel, the unconventional, the eccentric, even the sluttish side of her nature became suddenly revealed to the world.

So far as ‘getting on’ with her second husband was concerned, the strongest protest she ever seemed to make was: ‘Oh, Teddy, dear, do you ever catch hold of the right end of the stick?’, spoken kindly, and usually not without provocation; for Jeavons could be slow in grasping the point of a story. Some husbands might certainly take even that rebuke amiss, but Jeavons never seemed to question Molly’s absolute sway over himself, the house and all those who came there. I heard her say these words on subsequent visits after Lovell had introduced me there. Neither Widmerpool nor Mrs. Haycock had turned up again since that first night, and I made some enquiry about them.

‘Oh, you know Mr. Widmerpool?’ said Molly, at once beginning to laugh. ‘How extraordinary that you should know him. But perhaps you said so before. He has got jaundice. What a thing to happen when you are going to get married.’

‘How disagreeable for him. But I am not altogether surprised. He always makes a great fuss about his health. I think he has had jaundice before.’

‘You know him well then?’

‘Fairly well — though I don’t often see him.’

‘He is rather amusing, isn’t he?’ said Molly. ‘Quite a wit in his way. But he must look awful now that he is bright yellow.’

I agreed that the disease would give Widmerpool an unattractive appearance. It seemed to me extraordinary that she should have thought him ‘amusing’. I sometimes found his company enjoyable, because we had experienced much in common; but I could never remember him making an entertaining remark. I wondered what he could have said to cause that judgment: learning in due course that she was quite reckless in the characteristics she attributed to individuals. A chance remark would have the effect of swaying her entirely in favour of one person, or of arousing the bitterest opposition to another. She was very critical of many of the people who came to see her, and hoarded an accumulation of largely unfounded inferences about their character. These inaccuracies seemed to cancel each other out in some manner, so that in the last resort Molly was no worse informed, indeed in point of acuteness often better placed, than what might be regarded as ‘the average’.

‘Do you think he is in love with Mildred?’ she asked sharply.

‘I really don’t know. I suppose so. If he wants to marry her.’

I was not at all prepared for the question.

‘Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all,’ she said. ‘I feel rather sorry for him in some ways. Mildred is not an easy person. I’ve known her such a long time. She isn’t a bit easy. But now you simply must come up to my bedroom and see the monkey. I bought him today from a man in Soho, where I went to get some pimentos.’

A good deal of the life of the Jeavons’ household was, in fact, lived in Molly’s bedroom, either because a sick animal was established there (with the budgerigars, four principal dogs and at least as many cats inhabited the house), or simply because Molly herself had risen late, or retired early to rest, in either case holding a kind of reception from her bed, a Victorian fourposter that took up most of the room. On a chest of drawers beside the bed stood a photograph of Jeavons in uniform: breeches: puttees: at the back of his head a floppy service cap of the kind stigmatised by Mrs. Haycock in her youth as a ‘gorblimey’. He held a knotted bamboo swagger cane under one arm, and, wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the M.C. (awarded after the action in which he had been so seriously wounded), he looked the complete subaltern of war-time musical comedy.

‘Come along, all of you,’ said Molly. ‘You must all see the monkey. You too, Tuffy. You simply must see him.’

I had already recognised the tall, dark, beaky-nosed woman to whom she spoke as Miss Weedon, former secretary of my old friend Charles Stringham’s mother, Mrs. Foxe. Miss Weedon, now in her late forties, had been his sister Flavia’s governess. After Flavia grew up, she had stayed on to help with Mrs. Foxe’s social engagements and charities. I had been waiting an opportunity to have a word with her. I reintroduced myself as we climbed the stairs with the other people who wished — or were being compelled — to visit the monkey. Miss Weedon, wholly unchanged, still sombrely dressed, gave me a keen look.

‘But of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Charles brought you to luncheon in the London house before he went to Kenya to stay with his father. They had forgotten to get a ticket for Charles in a theatre party that had been made up — the Russian Ballet, I think. I was put to all kind of trouble to produce the extra ticket. However, I got it for him in the end.’