Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

He laughed a lot, and this would have b.een the moment to leave him, and go on our way. We should probably have escaped without further trouble if Templer — feeling no doubt that Stringham had been occupying too much of the stage — had not begun to shoot out radiations towards Le Bas, long and short, like an ocular Morse code, saying at the same time in his naturally rather harsh voice: “I am afraid we very nearly jumped on you, sir.”

Le Bas at once looked less friendly. In any case it was an unwise remark to make and Templer managed to imply a kind of threat in the tone, probably the consequence in some degree of his perpetual war with Le Bas. As a result of this observation, Le Bas at once launched into a long, and wholly irrelevant, speech on the topic of his new scheme for the prevention of the theft of books from the slab in the hail: a favourite subject of his for wearing down resistance in members of his house. It was accordingly some time before we were at last able to escape from the field, and from Le Bas: who returned to his book of verse. Fortunately the pipe seemed to have extinguished itself during the latter period of Le Bas’s harangue; or perhaps its smell was absorbed by that of the gas-works, which, absent in the earlier afternoon, had now become apparent.

Behind the next hedge Templer took the pipe from his pocket and tapped it out against his heel.

“That was a near one,” he said. “I burnt my hand on that bloody pipe. Why on earth did you want to go on like that about poetry?”

“How Le Bas failed to notice the appalling stink from your pipe will always be a mystery,” Stringham said. “His olfactory sense must be deficient — probably adenoids. Why, therefore, did he make so much fuss about Jenkins’s uncle’s cigarette? It is an interesting question.”

“But Heraclitus, or whoever it was,” said Templer. “It was all so utterly unnecessary.”

“Heraclitus put him in a good temper,” said Stringham. “It was your threatening to jump on him that made the trouble.”

“It was your talking about Oscar Wilde.”

“Nonsense.”

“Anyway,” said Templer, “Le Bas has thoroughly spoiled my afternoon. Let’s go back.”

Stringham agreed, and we pursued a grassy path bordered with turnip fields. A short distance farther on, this track narrowed, and traversed a locality made up of allotments, dotted here and there with huts, or potting-sheds. Climbing a gate, we came out on to the road. There was a garage opposite with a shack beside it, in front of which stood some battered iron tables and chairs. A notice offered “Tea and Minerals.” It was a desolate spot. Stringham said: “We might just drop in here for a cooling drink.”

Templer and I at once protested against entering this uninviting booth, which had nothing whatever to recommend it outwardly. All shops were out-of-bounds on Sunday, and there was no apparent reason for running the risk of being caught in such a place; especially since Le Bas might easily decide to return to the house along this road. However, Stringham was so pressing that in the end we were persuaded to accompany him into the shack. The front room was empty. A girl in a grubby apron with untidy bobbed hair came in from the back, where a gramophone was playing:“Everything is buzz-buzz now,

Everything is buzz, somehow:

You ring up on your buzzer,

And bozz with one anozzer,

Or, in other words, pow-wow.”

The girl moved towards us with reluctance. Stringham ordered ginger-beer. Templer said: “This place is too awful. Anyway, I loathe sweet drinks.”

We sat down at one of the iron tables, covered with a cloth marked with jagged brown stains. The record stopped: the needle continuing to scratch round and round its centre, revolving slower and slower, until at last the mechanism unwound itself and ceased to, operate. Stringham asked the girl if there was a telephone. She made some enquiries from an unseen person, still farther off than the gramophone, and an older woman’s voice joined in discussion of the matter. Then the girl came back and told Stringham he could use the telephone in the office of the garage, if he liked to come with her to the back of the building. Stringham disappeared with the girl. Templer said: “What on earth is happening? He can’t be trying to get off with that female.”

We drank our ginger-beer.

“What the hell is he up to?” said Templer again, after some minutes had passed. “I hope we don’t run into Le Bas coming out of here.”

We finished our drinks and Templer tried, without success, to engage the girl in conversation, when she came to clear plates and glasses from another table. At last Stringham reappeared, rather hurriedly, his usually pale face slightly flushed. He drank off his ginger-beer at a gulp and said: “We might be getting along now. I will pay for this.”

Out on the road again, Templer said: “First we are rushed into this horrible place: then we are rushed out again. What is supposed to be on?”

Stringham said: “I’ve just had a word with the police.”

“What about?”

“On the subject of Braddock alias Thorne.”

“Who’s that?”

“The chap they wanted for fraud.”

“What about him?”

“Just to inform them of his whereabouts.”

“Is this a joke?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you tell them to look?”

“In a field beyond the railway line.”

“Why?”

“Set your mind to it.”

“Le Bas?”

“Neat, wasn’t it?”

“What did they say?”

“I rang up in the character of Le Bas himself,” Stringham said. “I told them that a man ‘described as looking rather like me’ had been piling up bills at various shops in the town where I had accounts: that I had positive information that the man in question had been only a few minutes earlier at the place I described.”

“Did the police swallow that?”

“They asked me to come to the station. I pretended to get angry at the delay, and — in a really magnificent Le Bas outburst — I said that I had an urgent appointment to address the confirmation candidates — although, as far as I can remember, it is the wrong time of year to be confirmed — that I was late already and must set off at once: and that, if the man were not arrested, I should hold the local police responsible.”

“I foresee the hell of a row,” said Templer. “Still, one must admit that it was a good idea. Meanwhile, the sooner we get back to the house and supply a few alibis, the better.”

We walked at a fairly smart pace down the road Widmerpool had traversed when I had seen him returning from his run at the end of the previous year: the tar now soft under foot from the heat of the summer sun. Inside, the house was quiet and comparatively cool. Templer, who had recently relaxed his rule of never reading for pleasure, took up Sanders of the River , while Stringham and I discussed the probable course that events would take if the police decided to act as a result of the telephone message. We sat about until the bell began to ring for evening chapel.

“Come on,” said Stringham. “Let’s see if there is any news.”

At the foot of the stairs, we met Widmerpool in the hall. He had just come in from outside, and he seemed unusually excited about something. As we passed — contrary in my experience to all precedent so far as his normal behaviour was concerned — he addressed himself to Stringham, in point of age the nearest to him, saying in his shrillest voice: “I say, do you know Le Bas has been arrested ?”

He stood there in the shadowy space by the slab in a setting of brown-paper parcels, dog-eared school books, and crumbs — a precinct of which the moral and physical cleansing provoked endless activity in the mind of Le Bas — and stood with his feet apart and eyes expanded, his panting, as Templer had justly described it, like that of an elderly lap-dog: his appearance suggesting rather some unusual creature actually bred in those depths by the slab, amphibious perhaps, though largely belonging to this land-world of blankets and carbolic: scents which attained their maximum density at this point, where they met and mingled with the Irish stew, which, coming from the territories of laundry baskets and coke, reached its most potent force on the first step of the stairs.