Anthony Powell - At Lady Molly's

‘If Mildred is not careful,’ said Molly, ‘she will polish off Mr. Widmerpool before she has time to marry him. I hear he had to go home, he was feeling so ill.’

I thought the sooner the subject of that night was abandoned, the better. While we had been talking, Jeavons had listened in silence, as if he had never before heard of any of the persons under discussion, including himself. I admired his detachment. I wondered, too, whether at that very moment his head was seething with forgotten melodies, for ever stirring him to indiscretion by provoking memories of an enchanted past.

‘I can’t have all the Tollands at this party,’ Molly had said. ‘So I had better have none of them. Bound to be jealousy otherwise. Just like Erridge to go to China when one of his sisters gets engaged.’

Smith was again on duty with the Jeavonses on the day of the party. He looked haggard and more out of sorts than ever.

‘You’re late,’ he said, taking my hat. ‘It has all started upstairs. Quite a crowd of them arrived already. Hope her ladyship hasn’t invited every blessed soul she knows.’

The guests seemed, in fact, to have been chosen even more at random than usual. Certainly there had been no question either of asking people because they were already friends of Isobel or myself; still less, because Molly wanted either of us specifically to meet them. All that was most nondescript in the Jeavons entourage predominated, together with a few exceptional and reckless examples of individual oddity. I noticed that Alfred Tolland had not been included in the general prohibition against the Tolland family of my own generation. He was standing in the corner of the room, wedged behind a table, talking to — of all people — Mark Members, whom I had never before seen at the Jeavonses’, and might be supposed, in principle, beyond Molly’s normal perimeter, wide as that might stretch; or at least essentially alien to most of what it enclosed. To describe the two of them as standing looking at one another, rather than talking, would have been nearer the truth, as each apparently found equal difficulty in contributing anything to a mutual conversation. At the same time, the table cut them off from contact with other guests.

‘I know you are interested in books, Nicholas,’ said Molly. ‘So I asked a rather nice young man I met the other day. He also writes or something. You will like him. A Mr. Members.’

‘I know him of old.’

‘Go and talk to him then. I don’t think he is getting on very well with Alfred Tolland. It is a great compliment to Isobel that Alfred has come. As you know, he never goes out. At least that is what he says. I always tell him I believe he leads a double life of great wickedness. He tried to get out of coming tonight, but I told him he would never be asked to the house again if he did not turn up. Then he didn’t dare refuse. Isobel, dear, there is someone I want you to meet.’

Both Alfred Tolland and Mark Members showed relief at the arrival of a third party to break up their téte-à-téte . They had by then reached a conversational standstill. This was the first I had seen of Alfred Tolland since the announcement of my own engagement. I was aware that he could no longer be regarded merely as the embarrassed, conscience-stricken figure, vaguely familiar in the past. Now he fell automatically into place in the profusion of new relationships that follow an organic change of condition. He began at once to mutter incoherent congratulations. Members watched him with something like hatred in his beady eyes.

‘Expect you’ve heard that Erridge has gone East,’ said Alfred Tolland. ‘Just heard it myself. Not — a—bad — idea. They are in a mess there. Perhaps the best thing. Might do him a lot of good. Get experience. Good thing to get experience. Ever been East?’

‘Never.’

‘Got as far as Singapore once,’ he said.

It seemed incredible. However, there appeared to be no reason why he should invent such a thing. I said a word to Members, who stood there looking far from pleased.

‘I shall have to be going now,’ said Alfred Tolland, snatching this offer of release. ‘I expect I shall see you at the dinner next …’

‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t know what our circumstances will be.’

‘Of course, of course. You can’t say. I quite understand. Pity you weren’t at the last one. Nice to feel that we …’

Exact expression of what it was nice for both of us to feel either evaded him, or was too precarious a sentiment to express in words. He merely nodded his head several times. Then he made for the door. Members sighed. He was in a bad humour.

‘What on earth is this party?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Did that man say something about your being engaged?’

‘Yes. I am engaged.’

‘To whom?’

‘Isobel Tolland — over there.’

‘Congratulations,’ said Members, without any exaggerated effusiveness, as if he disapproved of any such step in principle. ‘Many congratulations. I was stuck with that appalling bore for about twenty minutes. It was impossible to get away. Is he absolutely right in the head? What a strange house this is. I met Lady Molly Jeavons quite a long time ago at the Manaschs’. She asked me to come and see her. I called once or twice, but no one answered the bell, though I rang half a dozen times — and knocked too. Then she suddenly telephoned this invitation to me yesterday. She never mendoned your name. I did not think it would be quite like this.’

‘It is often different. You never know what it is going to be.’

‘Have you met her husband?’ said Members, quite plaintively. ‘I talked to him for a while when I first arrived. He asked me if I ever played snooker. Then he introduced me to the man you found me with.’

By then Members had several jobs of a literary kind which, since he was still a bachelor, must bring him in a respectable income. His American trip was said to have been a success. He no longer wrote verse with Freudian undertones, and he had abandoned anything so extreme as Quiggin’s professional ‘communism’, in the wake of which he had for a while half-heartedly trailed. Now he tended to be associated with German literature. Kleist; Grillparzer: Stifter: those were names to be caught on the echoes of his conversadon. Latterly, he was believed to be more taken up with Kierkegaard, then a writer not widely read in this country. Members, no fool, was always a little ahead of the fashion. He was a lively talker when not oppressed, as at that moment, by a party he did not enjoy. His distinguished appearance and terse manner made him a popular spare man at intellectual dinners. ‘But one really does not want to eat amateur paella and drink Chelsea Médoc for ever,’ he used to say: a world into which he felt himself somewhat rudely thrust immediately after losing his job as secretary to St. John Clarke. For a time now Members had been reappearing, so it was said, in the rather more elegant of the circles frequented by the famous novelist before his conversion to Marxism. In the light of this effort to maintain and expand his social life, Members found the Jeavons house a disappointment. He had expected something more grandiose. I tried to explain the household, but was glad when he brushed this aside, because I wanted to ask if he knew further details about Erridge and Mona. Members turned almost with relief to this subject.

‘Of course I knew J.G. had got hold of Lord Warminster,’ he said impatiently. ‘Surely everyone has known that for a long time. We had dinner together before I went to America. J.G. told me about the magazine he hoped to persuade Warminster to start. I saw at once that nothing would come of it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Warminster is too much of a crank.’