Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

“How am I to know that neither of you smoked too?” he said, sweeping aside the persistent denials that both of us immediately offered. “How can I possibly tell?”

He sounded at the same time angry and despairing. He said: “You must write a letter to your uncle, Jenkins, and ask him to give his word that neither of you smoked.”

“But I don’t know his address, sir. All I know is that he was on his way to Reading.”

“By car?”

“By train, I think, sir.”

“Nonsense, nonsense,” said Le Bas. “Not know your own uncle’s address? Get it from your parents if necessary. I shall make myself very objectionable to you both until I see that letter.”

He raised his hands from his sides a little way, and clenched his fists, as if he were about to leap high into the air like an athlete, or ballet dancer; and in this taut attitude he seemed to be considering how best to carry out his threat, while he breathed heavily inward as if to imbibe the full savour of sausages and tobacco smoke that still hung about the room. At that moment there was a sound of talking, and some laughter, in the passage. The door was suddenly flung open, and Templer burst into the room. He was brought up short by the sight of Le Bas: in whom Templer immediately called up a new train of thought.

“Ah, Templer, there you are. You went to London, didn’t you? What time did your train get in this evening?”

“It was late, sir,” said Templer, who seemed more than usually pleased with himself, though aware that there might be trouble ahead: he dropped his voice a little: “I couldn’t afford a cab, sir, so I walked.”

He had a thin face and light blue eyes that gave out a perpetual and quite mechanical sparkle: at first engaging: then irritating: and finally a normal and inevitable aspect of his features that one no longer noticed. His hair came down in a sharp angle on the forehead and his large pointed ears were like those attributed to satyrs, “a race amongst whom Templer would have found some interests in common,” as Stringham had said, when Templer’s ears had been dignified by someone with this classical comparison. His eyes flashed and twinkled now like the lamps of a lighthouse as he fixed them on Le Bas, while both settled down to a duel about the railway time-table. Although Templer fenced with skill, it seemed pretty clear that he would be forced, in due course, to admit that he had taken a train later than that prescribed by regulations. But Le Bas, who not uncommonly forgot entirely about the matter in hand, suddenly seemed to lose interest in Templer’s train and its time of arrival (just as he had for the moment abandoned the subject of Uncle Giles’s cigarette); and he hurried away, muttering something about Greek unseens. For the moment we were free of him. Templer sat down in the arm-chair.

“Did he come in when you were having a gasper?” he said. “The room reeks as if camels had been stabled in it.”

“You don’t suppose we should be such fools as to smoke in the house,” said Stringham. “It was Jenkins’s uncle. But my dear Peter, why do you always go about dressed as if you were going to dance up and down a row of naked ladies singing ‘Dapper Dan was a very handy man,’ or something equally lyrical? You get more like an advertisement for gents’ tailoring every day.”

“I think it is rather a good get-up for London,” said Templer, examining a handful of his suit. “Every item chosen with thought, I can assure you.”

Stringham said: “If you’re not careful you will suffer the awful fate of the man who always knows the right clothes to wear and the right shop to buy them at.”

Templer laughed. He had a kind of natural jauntiness that seemed to require to be helped out by more than ordinary attention to what he wore: a quality that might in the last resort save him from Stringham’s warning picture of the dangers of dressing too well. As a matter of fact, although he used to make fun of him to his face, Stringham was stimulated, perhaps a little impressed, by Templer; however often he might repeat that: “Peter Templer’s affectation that he has to find time to smoke at least one pipe a day bores me to death: nor did it cut any ice with me when he pointed out the empty half-bottle of whisky he had deposited behind the conservatory in Le Bas’s garden.” The previous summer, Stringham and Templer had managed to attend a race-meeting together one half-holiday afternoon without being caught. Such adventures I felt to be a bit above my head, though I enjoyed hearing about them. I was, as I have said, not yet sure that I really liked Templer. His chief subjects of conversation were clothes, girls, and the persecutions of Le Bas, who, always sensitive to the possibility of being ragged, tended to make himself unnecessarily disagreeable in any quarter that might reasonably be thought to arouse special apprehension. Besides this, Templer could not possibly be looked upon as a credit to the house. He was not much of a hand at the sort of games that are played at school (though his build made him good at tennis and golf), so that he was in a weak position, being fairly lazy at work, to withstand prolonged aggression from a housemaster. Consequently Templer was involved in a continuous series of minor rows. The question of the train was evidently to become the current point for Le Bas’s attack.

“Well, that all seems to have blown over for the moment,” Stringham said. “You ought to keep your uncles in better order, Jenkins.”

I explained that Uncle Giles was known for being impossible to keep in order, and that he always left trouble in his wake. Templer said: “I suppose Le Bas will go on pestering about that train. You know, I used to be a great pet of his. Now his only object seems to be to get me sacked.”

“He ought to be able to bring that off sooner or later with your help,” said Stringham. “After all he is not an absolute fool: though pretty near it.”

“I believe he was quite an oar in his youth,” said Templer. “At least he won the Diamond Sculls. Still, past successes at Henley don’t make him any more tolerable to deal with as a housemaster.”

“He started life as a poet,” Stringham said. “Did you know that? Years ago, after coming back from a holiday in Greece, he wrote some things that he thought were frightfully good. He showed them to someone or other who pointed out that, as a matter of fact, they were frightfully bad. Le Bas never got over it.”

“I can’t imagine anything more appalling than a poem by Le Bas,” said Templer, “though I’m surprised he doesn’t make his pupils learn them.”

“Who did he show them to?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Stringham. “Henry James, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or someone like that.”

“Who on earth told you?”

“An elderly character who came to lunch. I believe he is an ambassador somewhere; or was. He used to run round with the same gang as Le Bas. He said Le Bas used to be tremendously promising as a young man. He was good at everything.”

“I can’t imagine he was ever much good with the girls,” said Templer.

“Maybe not,” said Stringham. “Not everyone has your singleness of aim. As a matter of fact do you think Le Bas has any sex life?”

“I don’t know about Le Bas,” said Templer, who had evidently been waiting since his arrival back from London for the right moment to make some important announcement about himself, “but I have. The reason I took the later train was because I was with a girl.”

“You devil.”

“I was a devil, I can assure you.”

“I suppose we shall have to hear about it,” said Stringham. “Don’t spare my feelings. Did you hold hands at the cinema? Where did you meet?”