Anthony Powell - A Question of Upbringing

“In the street.”

“Do you mean you picked her up?”

“Yes.”

“Fair or dark?”

“Fair.”

“And how was the introduction effected?”

“She smiled at me.”

“A tart, in other words.”

“I suppose she was, in a kind of way,” said Templer, “but quite young.”

“You know, Peter, you are just exactly the sort of boy my parents warned me against.”

“I went back to her flat.”

“How did you acquit yourself?”

“It was rather a success; except that the scent she used was absolutely asphyxiating. I was a bit afraid Le Bas might notice it on my clothes.”

“Not after the cigarette smoked by Jenkins’s uncle. Was it a well appointed apartment?”

“I admit the accommodation was a bit on the squalid side,” said Templer. “You can’t have everything for a quid.”

“That wasn’t very munificent, was it?”

“All I had. That was why I had to walk from the station.”

“You seem to have been what Le Bas would call ‘a very unwise young man’.”

“I see no reason why Le Bas should be worried by the matter, if he didn’t notice the scent.”

“What an indescribably sordid incident,” said Stringham. “However, let’s hear full details.”

“Not if you don’t want to be told them.”

“We do.”

Templer was supplying further particulars when Le Bas appeared in the room again. He seemed increasingly agitated, and said: “Templer, I want you to come and show me in the time-table which train you took. I have telephoned to the station and have been told that the one you should have travelled on was not late — and Jenkins, don’t forget that I shall expect to see that letter from your uncle by the end of the week. You had better keep him up to it, Stringham, as it is just as much in your interests as his that the matter should be cleared up.”

He tore off up the passage with Templer following behind at a slower pace. Stringham said: “Peter is crazy. He really will get shot out sooner or later.”

Although incomplete, the story of Templer’s London adventure — to be recapitulated on countless future occasions — had sufficiently amplified the incident for its significance to be inescapably clear to Stringham and myself. This was a glimpse through that mysterious door, once shut, that now seemed to stand ajar. It was as if, sounds of far-off conflict, or the muffled din of music and shouting, dimly heard in the past, had now come closer than ever before. Stringham smiled to himself and whistled. I think he felt a little uneasy in the awareness that Templer was one up on him now. He did not discuss the matter further: I too had no comment to make before thinking things over. After a time Templer returned to the room. He said: “What an infernal nuisance that man Le Bas is. I think he is going to write to my father. I particularly do not want trouble at this moment.”

“He seems to have developed a mania for letters flying in all directions,” said Stringham. “However, I feel competent to deal with his puny onslaughts. Meanwhile, I should like to hear more of this unfortunate incident which you were in the course of describing with such a wealth of colour. Begin at the beginning, please.”

*

The episode that Stringham continued to call “Templer’s unfortunate incident,” not startlingly interesting in itself, somehow crystallised my impression of Templer’s character: rather in the same way that seeing Widmerpool coming home from his “run” had established a picture of him in my mind, not different from the earlier perception held there, but one set in a clearer focus. Templer’s adventure indicated the lengths to which he was prepared to go, and behaviour that had previously seemed to me needless — and even rather tiresome — bravado on his part harmonised with a changing and widening experience. I found that I suddenly liked him better. His personality seemed to have fallen into place. There could be no doubt that he himself felt a milestone to have been passed; and, probably for this reason, became in some ways a quieter, more agreeable, friend. In due course, though not before the end of the term had been reached, Le Bas agreed to some sort of a compromise about the train: Templer admitting that he had been wrong in not returning earlier, at the same time producing evidence to show that alterations in the timetable might reasonably be supposed to have misled him. This saved Le Bas’s face, and the matter was allowed to drop at the expense of some minor penalty. The question of Uncle Giles’s cigarette was, however, pursued with extraordinary relentlessness into the New Year. My uncle’s lapse seemed in some manner to have brought home to Le Bas the suspicion that Stringham and I might have developed a tendency, no less pernicious than Templer’s, to break rules; and he managed in a number of small ways to make himself, as he had promised, decidedly obnoxious to both of us. I wrote twice to Uncle Giles, though without much hope of hearing from him. Months later the second letter arrived back from his last address marked “Gone Away:” just as if — as Stringham had remarked — my uncle had been a fox. This envelope finally satisfied Le Bas; but in future he was never quite the same either to Stringham or myself, the deterioration of his relations with Stringham leading ultimately to the incident of “Braddock alias Thorne,” an occasion which illustrated, curiously enough, another aspect of Widmerpool, though in it he played an entirely subordinate part.

This rather absurd affair, which did no one great credit, took place the following summer. Stringham, Templer and I were still messing together; and by then both of them had become so much part of my existence at school that it seemed strange to me that I had ever had doubts about either as a companion: though Stringham remained the one with whom I had most in common. Even now it seems to me that I spent a large proportion of my life in their close company, although the time that we were all three together was less than eighteen months. Their behaviour exemplified two different sides of life, in spite of some outward similarity in their tastes. For Templer, there was no truth except in tangible things: though he was not ambitious. Stringham, as I now see him, was romantic, and would perhaps have liked to play a somewhat different role from that which varying moods, and love of eccentricity, entailed upon him. Personally, I was aware of no particular drift to my life at that time. The days passed, and only later could their inexorable comment be recorded; and, pointless in some respects as was the Braddock alias Thorne episode, it retains a place, though not a specially admirable one, in my recollections of Stringham especially.

The three of us had gone for a walk one Sunday afternoon and were wandering about, rather aimlessly, in the heat; Stringham and Templer having wished to proceed in opposite directions. Passing the police-station, which we had finally reached without yet deciding on a line of march, Stringham had paused to read the posters pasted up outside: where, among a collection of notices referring to lost dogs, stolen jewellery, and foot-and-mouth disease, was reproduced the likeness of a man wanted for fraud. He was called “Braddock alias Thorne,” and his portrait showed one of those blurred, nondescript countenances, familiar in advertisements depicting persons who testify that patent medicine has banished their uric acid, or that application of some more efficacious remedy has enabled them to dispense with the use of a truss. The writing under the picture said that Braddock alias Thorne (who seemed to have committed an unusually large number of petty offences) was a man of respectable appearance, probably dressed in a black suit. The description was hardly borne out by what could be resolved from the photograph, which showed a bald, middle-aged criminal in spectacles, who looked capable of any enormity. Stringham remarked that the picture resembled President Woodrow Wilson. Templer said: “It is much more like Le Bas.”