Anthony Powell - At Lady Molly's

‘May we join you for a moment?’ he said. ‘You know, Mildred, I don’t believe we have met since that terrible night at Cannes in — what was it? — about 1923, when Milly Andriadis gave that great party, and we walked round the port together and watched the sunrise.’

We made room for them. Hopkins and Pilgrim were on their best behaviour. Templer’s girl seemed for the moment almost to have forgotten him in the excitement of sitting with such celebrities. I found myself next to Templer and we had a moment to talk.

‘How are you, Nick,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for centuries.’

‘No worse — and you?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Templer. ‘Family worries of various kinds, though there is a lot to be said for no longer being married. The usual trouble is raging with Bob and that sister of mine. No sooner does Bob get a good job than he goes off with some girl. All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law. I believe Jean has left him again, and gone to stay in Rome with Baby Wentworth — or whatever Baby Wentworth is now called after marrying that Italian.’

It was quite a good test, and I came out of it with flying colours; that is to say, without any immediate desire to buy an air ticket to Rome.

‘You did know my sister, Jean, didn’t you?’ he said. “I mean I haven’t been telling you a long story about someone you’ve never met?’

‘Of course I knew her. And your other sister, too. I met her ages ago.’

‘Baby Wentworth is a cousin of mine,’ said Mrs. Haycock, suddenly breaking off an argument with Hopkins regarding the private life of the barman at the Carlton Hotel at Cannes. ‘What a pretty girl she is. When my father died, he hadn’t managed to produce a son, so Baby’s father succeeded. Her brother, Jack Vowchurch, is rather hell, I believe. I’ve never met him. They were quite distant cousins, and we never saw anything of them. Then one day at Andbes someone pointed out Baby to me. Didn’t Sir Magnus Donners have rather a fancy for her? She was with him then.’

‘Wasn’t your father the chap who rode his horse upstairs after dinner?’ asked Jeavons, wholly unexpectedly.

‘Yes, of course he was,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘His favourite hunter. That was before I was born. I think he was supposed to be celebrating something. “Peace with Honour”, would it have been? That kind of thing. I believe that was the story. We had a hunting-box at Melton Mowbray that season. They had to demolish the side wall of the house to retrieve the animal. It cost the hell of a lot of money, I know.’

Once again, when she spoke of her father, I was reminded of Mrs. Conyers, even though the phraseology of the narrative was so different from any her sister would have employed.

‘And then there was some other story,’ insisted Jeavons. ‘Setting fire to a fellow’s newspaper in a train. Something like that.’

This interest in Lord Vowchurch on the part of Jeavons I found astonishing.

‘There are absolutely hundreds, darling,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘Do you know about when he squirted mauve ink over an archbishop at a wedding?’

‘I met such a sweet archbishop at the Theatrical Garden Party last year,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t an archbishop, but just a bishop. He wore a hat just like one of Heather’s.’

‘I might get a clerical hat,’ said Hopkins. ‘That’s not a bad idea. There is a place off Oxford Street where they sell black boaters. I’ve always wanted one.’

I asked if she had been seeing much of Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

‘Oh, those two girls,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d met you before somewhere. No, I haven’t been seeing them. I found out Eleanor had said a very unkind thing about me. I thought she was a friend, but I see I made a mistake.’

‘Look here,’ said Jeavons, who had cast off inertia and was now in his most lively mood. ‘Do you remember how that song used to go:

“He ran a pin

In Gwendolyn,

In Lower Grosvenor Place …”

I can’t remember the exact words.’

By this time I was becoming tired of Umfraville’s night club. Like Widmerpool, I wished to go home. Jeavons’s companionship demanded an almost infinite capacity for adaptation to changed moods and circumstances. In many ways sympathetic, he lacked any of that familiar pattern of behaviour to be found, say, in Quiggin, so that in the last resort his company was exhausting rather than stimulating. Umfraville went off to attend to the club’s administration. Discussion began once mere as to whether the party should move elsewhere.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘If you all want to go to the Slip-in, why not leave me here with Ted. He and I will talk about old times for a bit. Then he can see me home.’

That was agreed. There was still a lot of talk. I left before the final plan was put into execution. Out in the passage, Umfraville was instructing the villainous, blue-nosed custodian as to who could, and who could not, wisely be admitted to the club.

‘Not going?’ he said. ‘It’s early yet.’

‘I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and write filmscripts.’

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘But, look here, just before you go, what’s happened to Mildred Haycock these days? I hadn’t seen her in an age. She seems to be holding up pretty well. I know Peter Templer, but who was the other chap who left the party early on?’

‘He is called Widmerpool. She is engaged to him.’

‘Is she, indeed? What does he do?’

‘A bill-broker.’

Umfraville nodded his head sagely.

‘Come again,’ he said. ‘Now that you know the way.’

I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.

A BACKGROUND of other events largely obscured the steps leading up to my engagement to Isobel Tolland. Of this crisis in my life, I remember chiefly a sense of tremendous inevitability, a feeling that fate was settling its own problems, and too much reflection would be out of place. Marriage, as I have said, is a form of action, of violence almost: an assertion of the will. Its orbit is not to be charted with precision, if misrepresentation and contrivance are to be avoided. Its facts can perhaps only be known by implication. It is a state from which all objectivity has been removed. I shall say something, however, of the incident which at this juncture chiefly distracted attention from my own affairs.

Although that evening when we had dined at Thrubworth had been by no means the sole occasion when Quiggin had announced that he wanted to ‘see China and judge for himself’, no one among his acquaintances supposed him at all likely to set sail at once for the Far East. The words were generally — and, as it turned out, correctly — assumed to be in the main rhetorical: merely buttressing opinions already propagated by him about the ominous situation in Asia. There was, for example, the matter of fare. High as his reputation stood as a critic, it was doubtful whether any publisher would be prepared to advance enough on a projected travel book, with a political bias, to transport Quiggin so far; while Erridge, sympathetic to the wish, had at the same time shown no impulse to foot the bill. Doubts had been maliciously expressed by Mark Members, just returned from his lecture tour in America, as to whether, when it came to the point, Quiggin would be impatient to enter an area in which the Japanese Army was at that time engaged in active operations. Members may have been unjust. He was certainly applying to Quiggin the heartless criticism of an old friend. All the same, I should have been surprised to hear that Quiggin had set out upon that journey.