Anthony Powell: At Lady Molly's

‘The chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly,’ he said, ‘is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.’

‘A sister of Blanche Tolland?’

‘Yes. Do you know Blanche?’

‘Only by sight, and years ago. She is rather dotty, isn’t she?’

‘Quite dotty,’ said Lovell. ‘Lives in a complete world of her own. Fairly happy about it though, I think.’

‘Then there is one called Norah, isn’t there, who set up house with a rather strange girl I used to know called Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.’

‘That’s it. She is rather dotty too, but in a different way. That couple are said to be a ménage . Then there is Isobel. She is rather different. Priscilla is the youngest. She isn’t really “out” yet.’

I was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine at that period, to Lovell’s twenty-three or twenty-four, and through him had become aware for the first time that a younger generation was close on my heels. I told him I felt much too old and passé to take an interest in such small fry as young ladies who were not yet ‘out’.

‘Oh, I quite realise that,’ said Lovell indulgently. ‘There will certainly be elder persons there too for chaps like you who prefer serious conversation. You might like Isobel. I believe she is a bit of a highbrow when she isn’t going to night clubs.’

We drove precariously down Gloucester Road, the car emitting a series of frightening crepitations and an evil fume, while Lovell artlessly outlined his long-term plans for the seduction of Priscilla Tolland. We turned off somewhere by the Underground station. I liked the idea of going to this unknown place for an hour or so, surroundings where the cheerless Studio atmosphere might be purged away. Lovell stopped in front of a fairly large house of dark red brick, the architecture of which sounded a distant, not particularly encouraging, echo of the High Renaissance. After waiting on the doorstep for some time, the door was opened by a man of indeterminate age in shirt sleeves and carpet slippers. He might have passed for a butler. Pale and unhealthy looking, he had the air of having lived for months at a time underground in unventilated, overheated rooms. He brought with him odours of beer and cheese. Closer examination of this unkempt, moody fellow revealed him as older than he had appeared at first sight.

‘Good evening, Smith,’ said Lovell, rather grandly.

‘’Evening,’ said Smith, speaking without the smallest suggestion of warmth.

‘How are you, Smith?’

Smith looked Lovell up and down as if he considered the enquiry not merely silly, but downright insulting. He did not answer.

‘Is her Ladyship upstairs?’

‘Where do you think she’d be — in the basement?’

The tone of Smith’s voice made no concession whatever towards alleviating the asperity of this answer. Lovell showed no sign of surprise at being received so caustically, passing off the retort with a hearty laugh. Smith shambled off down the stairs, muttering to himself. He seemed thoroughly fed up, not only with Lovell, but also with his own job.

‘Smith is wonderful, isn’t he?’ said Lovell, as we mounted the staircase. ‘Aunt Molly sometimes borrows him from Erridge, when, for one reason or another, Thrubworth is closed down. I should warn you there is never an electric light bulb in the downstairs lavatory here and sometimes no bromo.’

I followed him to the first floor; and into a double drawing-room in which eight or nine persons were standing or sitting. A general though never precisely defined suggestion of chinoiserie, sustained by a profusion of Oriental bowls and jars, pervaded the decoration. Some of the furniture was obviously rather valuable: the rest, gimcrack to a degree. Pictures showed a similar variation of standard, a Richard Wilson and a Greuze (these I noted later) hanging among pastels of Moroccan native types. A dark, handsome woman, now getting a trifle plump by the emaciated standards of the period, came towards us.

‘Why, Chips,’ she said. ‘Here you are at last. We thought you would be earlier.’

‘Couldn’t get away, Aunt Molly,’ said Lovell. ‘This is Mr. Jenkins. He and I slave away writing films together.’

‘What will you drink?’ she asked. ‘Teddy, get them something to drink quickly. They must be in dire need.’

She smiled at me as if she were rather proud of that last phrase. Jeavons now appeared before us and began to make some rather hopeless gestures in the direction of several bottles and decanters standing on a table at the far end of the room. It was at once apparent that he was something left over from the war. I found it almost impossible to believe that he would so much resemble the mental picture conjured up by Lovell’s earlier description of him. Like one of those mammoths — or, in Jeavons’s case, somewhat less gigantic form of primeval life — caught in a glacier and physically preserved into an age when his very kind was known only from fossilised bones, or drawings on the walls of subterranean caves, he somehow managed to look just as he must have looked in 1917: hardly a day older. Perhaps a better simile to indicate the effect of remoteness he gave, standing there with a vacant expression and both hands in his pockets, would be that of some rare insect enclosed in amber. He wore a minute Charlie Chaplin moustache, his dark, shiny hair, in which there was a touch of red, rolling away from his forehead like the stone locks of a sculpted head of Caracalla.

At this point I became suddenly aware that at least one of the guests present was already well known to me. This was my family’s old friend, Mrs. Conyers. Although I had not seen her at all recently, we had met from time to time — usually at intervals of several years — since the distant day when I had been taken to her flat and shown the scimitar. The last occasion had been the wedding of her daughter, Charlotte, to the lieutenant-commander. Evidently Mrs. Conyers had been dining with the Jeavonses. However, it appeared that she did not know them well, and, perhaps not greatly at ease in their society, she was clearly much relieved at finding, in myself, someone she knew of old. I was not sure that I myself was equally pleased, for, although I liked Mrs. Conyers well enough, I thought it preferable to explore new ground like the Jeavons house unobserved by old friends of my parents. However, nothing could have been less admonitory than Mrs. Conyers’s manner towards myself; if admonition properly defines the attitude threatened, when one is young, by the presence of old family friends.

In appearance Mrs. Conyers retained, no doubt from her childhood, the harassed, uncertain expression of those who have for many years had to endure close association with persons addicted to practical joking. Like the rest of her sisters, she must have suffered in no small degree from her father’s love of horse-play. One of six daughters, she had been regarded as ‘on the shelf’ by her parents when the General proposed to her. She herself had probably abandoned thought of marriage, because she was by then devoting most of her time to attending an elderly, intractable relation, Sybil, Lady Amesbury, whose memoirs 1 mentioned earlier. One of her father’s exploits had been recorded in this book, the occasion when Lord Vowchurch, in his younger days, had loosed half a dozen monkeys wearing tail-coats and white ties at an ambassadorial ball: a casual relic of innumerable similar anecdotes that have passed into oblivion.

Although never exactly handsome, Mrs. Conyers was not without a look of sad distinction. In public she deferred to her husband, but she was known to possess a will of her own, displayed in that foxy, almost rodent-like cast of feature, which, resembling her sister’s in its keenness, was not disagreeable. It was said that she had entirely reorganised the General’s life after he had left the army; and much for the better. When I went across the room to speak with her, she raised her eyebrows slightly to indicate, if not precise disapproval, at least a secret signal that she felt herself not altogether at home. The message read that she required any support she could get.