Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

“An appalling thing to happen,” said Widmerpool. “I left soon after the incident. Was it ever cleared up how the mistake arose?”

“Stringham rang up the police and told them that Le Bas was the man they wanted to arrest,”

“What do you mean?”

“The criminal they were after looked rather like Le Bas. We had seen a picture of him outside the police-station.”

“But why —”

“As a hoax.”

“Stringham?”

“On the telephone — he said he was Le Bas himself.”

“I never heard anything like it,” said Widmerpool. “What an extraordinary thing to have done.”

He sounded so furious that I felt that some sort of apology was called for — in retrospect the episode certainly seemed less patently a matter for laughter, now that one was older and had left school — and I said: “Well, Le Bas was rather an ass.”

“I certainly did not approve of Le Bas, or of his methods of running a house,” said Widmerpool: and I remembered that Le Bas had particularly disliked him. “But to do a thing like that to his own housemaster … And the risk he ran. He might have been expelled. Were you concerned in this too, Jenkins?”

Widmerpool spoke so sternly that for a moment I thought he intended to sit down, there and then, and, in a belated effort to have justice done, report the whole matter in writing to Le Bas or the headmaster. I explained that personally I had had no share in the hoax, beyond having been out walking with Stringham at the time. Widmerpool said, with what I thought to be extraordinary fierceness: “Of course Stringham was thoroughly undisciplined. It came from having too much money.”

“I never noticed much money lying about.”

“Stringham may not have been given an abnormal amount himself,” said Widmerpool, irritably, “but his family are immensely wealthy. Glimber is a huge place. My mother and I went over it once on visiting day.”

“But he is not coming in to Glimber.”

I felt glad that I had been supplied by Templer with this piece of information.

“Of course he isn’t,’’ said Widmerpool, as if my reply had been little short of insulting. “But there are all his mother’s South African gold holdings. That divorce of hers was a very unfortunate affair for someone so well known.”

I should have liked to hear more of this last matter, but, Stringham being a friend of mine, I felt that it would be beneath my dignity to discuss his family affairs with someone who, like Widmerpool, knew of them only through hearsay. Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity, was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.

“And that thin, rather good-looking boy,” Widmerpool continued, “who used to be about a lot with you and Stringham?”

“Peter Templer.”

“Was he in the Le Bas affair too?”

“He was out for a walk with us on the same afternoon.”

“He did not have too good a reputation, did he?”

“Not too good.”

“That was my impression,” said Widmerpool. “That he was not a good influence in the house.”

“You and he were mixed up in the Akworth row, weren’t you?” I asked, not from malice, or with a view to keeping him in order on the subject of my friends, so much as for the reason that I was inquisitive to know more of that affair: and, considering the way that Widmerpool had been talking, I felt no particular delicacy about making the enquiry.

Widmerpool went brick-red. He said: “I would rather not speak of that, if you don’t mind.”

“Don’t let’s then.”

“I suppose Templer got sacked in the end?” Widmerpool went on: no doubt conscious that he might have sounded over-emphatic, and evidently trying to bring some jocularity into his tone.

“More or less asked to leave.”

“How badly used he really to behave?”

He moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.

“He had a woman before he left.”

If Widmerpool had been upset by the news that Stringham had played the Braddock alias Thorne trick on Le Bas, and more personally embarrassed by reference to the Akworth scandal, this piece of information, regarding Templer’s crowning exploit, threw him almost entirely off his balance. He made a strange sound, half-way between a low laugh and a clearing of the throat, simultaneously swallowing hard. He also went, if possible, redder than ever. Took off his spectacles and began to polish them, as he usually did when his nerves were on edge. I did not feel entirely at ease with the subject myself. To help out the situation, I added: “I have just been staying with the Templers as a matter of fact.”

Widmerpool clearly welcomed this shift of interest in our conversation, enquiring almost eagerly about the Templers’ house, and the manner in which they lived. We talked about the Templers for a time, and I found to my surprise that Widmerpool knew Sunny Farebrother by name, though they had never met. He said: “A very sharp fellow, they tell me.”

“I liked him.”

“Naturally you did,” said Widmerpool. “He can make himself very agreeable.”

I found Widmerpool’s remarks in this vein so tiresome that I was almost inclined to try and shock him further by describing in detail the various incidents that had taken place while I was staying at the Templers’. In the end I decided that those happenings needed too much explanation before they could be appreciated, anyway by Widmerpool, that there was nothing to be gained by trying to impress him, or attempting to modify his point of view. I told him that Peter was going straight into business, without spending any time at the university. Rather unexpectedly, Widmerpool approved this decision, almost in Sunny Farebrother’s own phrase.

“Much better get down to work right away,” he said. “There was not much money when my father died, so 1 talked things over with my mother — she has a wonderful grasp of business matters — and we decided we would do the same thing, and cut out Oxford or Cambridge.”

By using the first person plural, he made the words sound as if there had been some question of his mother going up to the university with him. He said: “This effort to polish up my French is merely in the nature of a holiday.”

“A holiday from what?”

“I am articled to a firm of solicitors.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I do not necessarily propose to remain a solicitor all my life,” said Widmerpool. “I look to wider horizons.”

“What sort?”

“Business, Politics.”

This all seemed to me such rubbish that I changed the subject, asking where he lived. He replied, rather stiffly, that his mother had a flat in Victoria. It was convenient, he said; but without explaining the advantages. I enquired what life was like in London.

“That depends what you do,” said Widmerpool, guardedly.

“So I suppose.”

“What profession are you going to follow?”

“I don’t know.”

It seemed almost impossible to make any remark without in one manner or another disturbing Widmerpool’s equanimity. He was almost as shocked at hearing that I had no ready-made plans for a career as he had been scandalised a few minutes earlier at the information regarding the precocious dissipation of Templer’s life.

“But surely you have some bent?” he said. “An ambition to do well at something?”

This ideal conception — that one should have an aim in life — had, indeed, only too often occurred to me as an unsolved problem; but I was still far from deciding what form my endeavours should ultimately take. Being at that moment unprepared for an a priori discussion as to what the future should hold, I made several rather lame remarks to the effect that I wanted one day “to write:” an assertion that had not even the merit of being true, as it was an idea that had scarcely crossed my mind until that moment.