Anthony Powell - At Lady Molly's

‘I think Mildred Haycock was quite glad to find someone to marry,’ she said. ‘Especially a man with such a good future in front of him. Of course he is a bit young for her. All the same, it is easier for a woman like Mrs. Haycock — who has two children, both quite old now — to be married. Then, also, although she is not badly off, she is very extravagant. Everyone says so.’

‘She has been living in the South of France?’

‘Where she made herself rather notorious, I believe.’

‘Meanwhile, her fiancé is suffering from jaundice.’

‘Indeed,’ said Miss Weedon, smiling thinly again. ‘I expect she will find someone to console her. Commander Foxe, for example.’

‘Buster? How is he?’

‘He might begin to take her out again. He retired from the Navy some years ago. He has got rather fat. It worries him terribly. He does all kinds of things for it. Every sort of diet. Cures at Tring. It is really his sole interest now.’

‘And you thought Mrs. Haycock might take his mind off the weighing machine?’

Miss Weedon’s mouth stiffened. I saw I had gone too far. She probably regretted her own indiscretion about Buster’s past with Mrs. Haycock. I had not thought of Buster Foxe for years. Stringham had never cared for him. It sounded from Miss Weedon’s tone as if Buster had been reduced — like Jeavons — to a purely subordinate position. There was a certain parallel in their situations. I wondered if they had ever met.

‘And how is Mrs. Foxe herself?’

‘Very well, I understand. As social as ever.’

‘What does Charles do about money now?’

‘Money is rather a difficulty,’ said Miss Weedon, abandoning her air of cold malice, and now speaking as if we had returned to serious matters. ‘His father, with that French wife of his in Kenya, has not much to spare. Mrs. Foxe has the Warrington money, but it is only for her lifetime. She spends it like water.’

At that moment Jeavons himself approached us, putting an end to any explanation Miss Weedon was about to offer on the subject of Stringham’s financial resources.

‘What do you make of Maisky?’ asked Jeavons.

He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education.

‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.

‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.

He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the main import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.

‘Molly has taken a great fancy to him,’ he said, at last.

‘I know.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Jeavons. ‘These fancies come and go.’

Miss Weedon made no attempt to deny the truth of that observation. Nor did she elaborate her dislike of monkeys. She continued to smile her arctic smile. Jeavons slowly strolled off again, as if to think out the implications of what Miss Weedon had said. I was aware once more of my strong disagreement with those — amongst whom I suspected Miss Weedon might be numbered — who found Jeavons without interest. On the contrary, he seemed to me, in his own way, rather a remarkable person. An encounter with him away from his own home confirmed that there existed more sides to him than might be apparent in the Jeavons drawing-room.

This episode took place a month or two later, on an evening that had begun with having a drink with Feingold in the pub near the Studio. Feingold had plans to write a satirical novel about life in the film business. He wanted to tell me the plot in the hope that I might be able to suggest a suitable ending to the story. Returning to London later than usual as a result of Feingold’s unwillingness to treat the subject in hand briefly (he himself lived in the neighbourhood of the Studio), I decided to dine off a sandwich and a glass of beer at some bar. The pubs in the neighbourhood of my own flat had not much to offer, so, quite fortuitously, I entered an establishment off the south side of Oxford Street, where an illuminated sign indicated an underground buffet. It was the kind of place my old, deceased friend, Mr. Deacon, used to call a ‘gin palace’.

At the foot of the stairs was a large, low-ceilinged room filled with shiny black-topped tables and red wicker armchairs. The bar, built in the shape of an L, took up most of two sides of this saloon, of which the pillars and marbled wall decoration again recalled Mr. Deacon’s name by their resemblance to the background characteristic of his pictures: Pupils of Socrates , for example, or By the Will of Diocletian . No doubt this bar had been designed by someone who had also brooded long and fruitlessly on classical themes, determined to express in whatever medium available some boyhood memory of Quo Vadis? or The Last Days of Pompeii . The place was deserted except for the barman, and a person in a mackintosh who sat dejectedly before an empty pint tankard in the far corner of the room. In these oppressively Late Roman surroundings, after climbing on to a high stool at the counter, I ordered food.

I had nearly finished eating, when I became obscurely aware that the man in the corner had risen and was making preparations to leave. He walked across the room, but instead of mounting the stairs leading to the street, he came towards the bar where I was sitting. I heard him pause behind me. I thought that, unable at the last moment to tear himself away from the place, he was going to buy himself another drink. Instead, I suddenly felt his hand upon my shoulder.

‘Didn’t recognise you at first. I was just on my way out. Come and have one with me in the corner after you’ve finished your tuck-in.’

It was Jeavons. As a rule he retained even in his civilian clothes a faded military air, comparable with — though quite different from — that of Uncle Giles: both of them in strong contrast with the obsolete splendours of General Conyers. A safety pin used to couple together the points of Jeavons’s soft collar under the knot of what might be presumed to be the stripes of a regimental tie. That night, however, in a somewhat Tyrolese hat with the brim turned down all the way round, wearing a woollen scarf and a belted mackintosh, the ensemble gave him for some reason the appearance of a plain-clothes man. His face was paler than usual. Although perfectly steady on his feet, and speaking in his usual slow, deliberate drawl, I had the impression he had been drinking fairly heavily. We ordered some more beer, and carried it across the room to where he had been sitting.

‘This your local?’ he asked.

‘Never been here before in my life. I dropped in quite by chance.’

‘Same here.’

‘It’s a long way from your beat.’

‘I’ve been doing a pub crawl,’ he said. ‘Feel I have to have one — once in a way. Does you good.’

There could be no doubt, after that, that Jeavons was practising one of those interludes of dissipation to which Lovell had referred, during which he purged himself, as it were, of too much domesticity.

‘Think there is going to be a war?’ he asked, very unexpectedly.

‘Not specially. I suppose there might be — in a year or two.’

‘What do you think we ought to do about it?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Shall I tell you?’

‘Please do.’

‘Declare war on Germany right away,’ said Jeavons. ‘Knock this blighter Hitler out before he gives further trouble.’

‘Can we very well do that?’