Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

Then she walked slowly towards the house, humming to herself, and swinging her racket at the grass borders. Peter shouted after her: “Has Sunny arrived yet?.”

“He turned up just after you left.”

She made this answer without turning her head. It conveyed no implication of disapproval; no enthusiasm either. I watched her disappear from sight.

“Leave your stuff here,” said Peter. “Someone is bound to collect it. Let’s have some tea. What bloody bad manners my sisters have.”

Wearing a soft hat squashed down in the shape of a pork-pie, he already showed signs of having freed himself from whatever remaining restraints school had imposed. He had spent a month or two in Amsterdam, where his father had business interests. Mr. Templer’s notion was that Peter should gain in this way some smattering of commercial life before going into the City; as all further idea of educating or improving his son had now been abandoned by him. Peter could give no very coherent account of Dutch life, except to say that the canals smelt bad, and that there were two night-clubs which were much better than the others in that city. Apart from such slightly increased emphasis on characteristics already in evidence, he was quite unchanged.

“Who is Sunny?”

“He is called Sunny Farebrother, a friend of my father’s. He was staying in the neighbourhood for a funeral and has come over to talk business.”

“Your father’s contemporary?”

“Oh, no,” said Peter. “Much younger. Thirty or thirty-five. He is supposed to have done well in the war. At least I believe he got rather a good D.S.O.”

The name “Sunny Farebrother” struck me as almost redundant in its suggestion of clear-cut, straightforward masculinity. It seemed hardly necessary for Peter to add that someone with a name like that had “done well” in the war, so unambiguous was the portrait conjured up by the syllables. I imagined a kind of super-Buster, in whom qualities of intrepidity and simplicity of heart had been added to those of dash and glitter.

“Why is he called Sunny?” I asked, expecting some confirmation of this imaginary personality with which I had invested Mr. Farebrother.

“Because his Christian name is Sunderland,” said Peter. “I expect we shall have to listen to a lot of pretty boring conversation between the two of them.”

We entered the house at a side door. The walls of the greater part of the ground floor were faced with panelling, coloured and grained like a cigar-box. At the end of a large hall two men were sitting on a sofa by a tea-table at which Jean was pouring out cups of tea. The elder of this couple, a wiry, grim little fellow, almost entirely bald, and smoking a pipe, was obviously Peter’s father. His identity was emphasised by the existence of a portrait of himself in the room — representing its subject in a blue suit and hard white collar. The canvas, from the hand of Isbister, the R.A. had been tackled in a style of decidedly painful realism, the aggressive nature of the pigment intensified by the fact that each feature had been made to appear a little larger than life.

“Hallo, Jenkins,” said Mr. Templer, raising his hand. “Have some tea. Pour him out some tea, Jean. Well, go on, Farebrother — but try and stick to the point this time.”

He turned again to the tall, dark man sitting beside him. This person, Sunny Farebrother presumably, had shaken hands warmly, and given a genial smile when I approached the table. At Mr. Templer’s interpellation, this smile faded from his face in a flash, being replaced by a look of almost devotional intensity; and, letting drop my hand with startling suddenness, he returned to what seemed to be a specification of the terms and bearings of a foreign loan — apparently Hungarian — which he and Mr. Templer had evidently been discussing before our arrival. Jean handed me the plate of buttered toast, and, addressing herself to Peter, spoke once more of the hard tennis court.

During tea I had an opportunity of examining Sunny Farebrother more closely. His regular features and ascetic, serious manner did remind me in some way of Buster, curiously enough: though scarcely for the reasons I had expected. In spite of neatness and general air of being well-dressed, Farebrother had none of Buster’s consciously reckless manner of facing the world; while, so far from dispensing anything that might be interpreted as an attitude of indirect hostility, his demeanour — even allowing for the demands of a proper respect for a man older than himself and at the same time his host — appeared to be almost unnecessarily ingratiating. I was not exactly disappointed with the reality of someone whose outward appearance I had, rather absurdly, settled already in my mind on such slender grounds; but I was surprised, continuing to feel that I should like to know more of Sunny Farebrother. The train of thought engendered by this association with Buster took me on, fairly logically, to Miss Weedon; and, for a second, it even occurred to me that some trait possessed in common by Buster and Miss Weedon linked both of them with Sunny Farebrother; the two latter being the most alike, ridiculous as it might sound, of the three. This was certainly not on account of any suggestion, open or inadequately concealed, that Farebrother’s temperament was feminine in any abnormal manner, either physically or emotionally; on the contrary; though Miss Weedon for her part might perhaps lay claim to some remotely masculine air. It was rather that both had in common some smoothness, an acceptance that their mission in life was to iron out the difficulties of others: a recognition that, for them, power was won by self-abasement.

Sunny Farebrother’s suit, though well cut, was worn and a trifle dilapidated in places. The elbows of the coat were shiny, and, indeed, his whole manner suggested that he might be in distinctly straitened circumstances. I imagined him a cavalryman — something about his long legs and narrow trousers suggested horses — unable to support the expenses of his regiment, unwillingly become a stockbroker, or agent for some firm in the City, in an attempt to make two ends meet; though I learnt later that he had never been a regular soldier. With folded hands and head bent, he was listening, attentively, humbly — almost as if his life depended on it — to the words that Mr. Templer was speaking.

Years later, when I came to know Sunny Farebrother pretty well, he always retained for me something of this first picture of him; a vision — like Jean’s — that suggested an almost saintly figure, ill-used by a coarse-grained world: some vague and uncertain parallel with Colonel Newcome came to mind, in the colonel’s latter days in the Greyfriars almshouses, and it was easy to imagine Mr. Farebrother answering his name in such a setting, the last rays of sunset falling across his, by then, whitened hair. Everything about him supported claims to such a role: from the frayed ends of the evening tie that he wore later at dinner, to the immensely battered leather hat-box that was carried through the Hall with the rest of his luggage while we sat at tea. He seemed to feel some explanation for the existence of this last object was required, saying that it contained the top-hat he had recently worn at his great-uncle’s funeral, adding that it was the headgear that normally hung on a hook in his office for use as part of the uniform of his calling in the City.

“It cost me a tidy sum in lost business to pay that last tribute,” he said. “But there aren’t many of that grand old fellow’s sort left these days. I felt I ought to do it.”

Mr. Templer, his hands deep in his trousers pockets, took scarcely any notice of such asides. He discoursed instead, in a rasping undertone, of redemption dates and capital requirements. Jean finished what she had to say to Peter regarding the hard tennis court, then scarcely spoke at all. Later she went off on her own.