Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market

At first sight Stringham looked just the same; indeed, the fact that on the former occasion, as now, he had been wearing a white tie somehow conveyed the illusion that he had been in a tail-coat for all the years since we had last met. He looked tired, perhaps rather irritable, though evidently pleased to fall in like this with someone known to him. I was conscious of that peculiar feeling of restraint in meeting someone, of whom I had once seen so much, now dropped altogether from everyday life: an extension — and refinement, perhaps — of the sensation no doubt mutually experienced between my parents and Mr. Deacon on that day in the Louvre: more acute, because I had been far more closely associated with Stringham than ever they with Mr. Deacon. The presence of Widmerpool at the stall added a touch of fantasy to Stringham’s appearance at that spot; for it was as if Widmerpool’s own antics had now called his mimic into being as inexorable accessory to any real existence to which Widmerpool himself might aspire. I introduced Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones.

“Why, hallo, Stringham,” said Widmerpool, putting down his coffee-cup with a clatter and puffing out his cheeks in a great demonstration of heartiness. “We haven’t met since we were at Le Bas’s.”

He thought, no doubt — if he thought of the matter at all — that Stringham and I were friends who continued to see each other often, inevitably unaware that this was, in fact, our first meeting for so long. Stringham, on his side, clearly supposed that all four of us — Widmerpool, Mr. Deacon, Gypsy Jones, and myself — had been spending an evening together; though it was obvious that he could determine no easy explanation for finding me in Widmerpool’s company, and judged our companionship immensely funny. He laughed a lot when I explained that Widmerpool and I had been to the Huntercombes’ dance.

“Well, well,” he said. “It’s a long time since I went to a dance. How my poor mother used to hate them when my sister was first issued to an ungrateful public. Was it agony?”

“May one inquire why you should suppose a splendid society ball to have been agony?” asked Mr. Deacon, rather archly.

There could be no doubt that, at first sight, he had taken a great fancy to Stringham. He spoke in his ironically humorous voice from deep down in his throat.

“In the first place,” said Stringham, “I rather dislike being crowded and uncomfortable — though, heaven knows, dances are not the only places where that happens. A most serious criticism I put forward is that one is expected, when attending them, to keep at least moderately sober.”

When he said this, it struck me that Stringham had already, perhaps, consumed a few drinks before meeting us.

“And otherwise behave with comparative rectitude?” said Mr. Deacon, charmed by this answer. “I believe I understand you perfectly.”

“Exactly,” said Stringham. “For that reason I am now on my way — as I expect you are too — to Milly Andriadis’s. I expect that will be crowded and uncomfortable too, but at least one can behave as one wishes there.”

“Is that woman still extorting her toll from life?” asked Mr. Deacon.

“Giving a party in Hill Street this very night. I assumed you were all going there.”

“This coffee tastes of glue,” said Gypsy Jones, in her small, rasping, though not entirely unattractive voice.

She was dissatisfied, no doubt, with the lack of attention paid to her; though possibly also stimulated by the way events were shaping.

“One heard a lot of Mrs. Andriadis in Paris,” said Mr. Deacon, taking no notice of this interruption. “In fact, I went to a party of hers once — at least I think she was joint hostess with one of the Murats. A deplorable influence she is, if one may say so.”

“One certainly may,” said Stringham. “She couldn’t be worse. As a matter of fact, my name is rather intimately linked with hers at the moment — though naturally we are unfaithful to each other in our fashion, when opportunity arises, which in my case, I have to confess, is not any too often.”

I really had no very clear idea what all this talk was about, and I had never heard of Mrs. Andriadis. I was also uncertain whether Stringham truly supposed that we might all be on our way to this party, or if he were talking completely at random. Mr. Deacon, however, seemed to grasp the situation perfectly, continuing to laugh out a series of deep chuckles.

“Where do you come from now?” I asked.

“I’ve a flat just round the corner,” said Stringham. “At first I couldn’t make up my mind whether I was in the vein for a party, and thought a short walk would help me decide. To tell the truth, I have only just risen from my couch. There had, for one reason and another, been a number of rather late nights last week, and, as I didn’t want to miss poor Milly’s party in case she felt hurt — she is too touchy for words — I went straight home to bed this afternoon so that I might be in tolerable form for the festivities — instead of the limp rag one feels most of the time. It seemed about the hour to stroll across. Why not come, all of you? Milly would be delighted.”

“Is it near?”

“Just past those Sassoon houses. Do come. That is, if none of you mind low parties.”

UNCE GILES’S standard of values was, in most matters, ill-adapted to employment by anyone except himself. At the same time, I can now perceive that by unhesitating contempt for all human conduct but his own — judged among his immediate relatives as far from irreproachable — he held up a mirror to emphasise latent imperfections of almost any situation that momentary enthusiasm might, in the first instance, have overlooked. His views, in fact, provided a kind of yardstick to the proportions of which no earthly yard could possibly measure up. This unquestioning condemnation of everyone, and everything, had no doubt supplied armour against some of the disappointments of life; although any philosophical satisfaction derived from reliance on these sentiments had certainly not at all diminished my uncle’s capacity for grumbling, in and out of season, at anomalies of social behaviour to be found, especially since the war, on all sides. To look at things through Uncle Giles’s eyes would never have occurred to me; but — simply as an exceptional expedient for attempting to preserve a sense of proportion, a state of mind, for that matter, neither always acceptable nor immediately advantageous — there may have been something to be said for borrowing, once in a way, something from Uncle Giles’s method of approach. This concept of regarding one’s own affairs through the medium of a friend or relative is not, of course, a specially profound one; but, in the case of my uncle, the field of vision surveyed was always likely to be so individual to himself that almost any scene contemplated from this point of vantage required, on the part of another observer, more than ordinarily drastic refocusing.

He would, for example, have dismissed the Huntercombes’ dance as one of those formal occasions that he himself, as it were by definition, found wholly unsympathetic. Uncle Giles disapproved on principle of anyone who could afford to live in Belgrave Square (for he echoed almost the identical words of Mr. Deacon regarding people “with more money than was good for them”), especially when they were, in addition, bearers of what he called “handles to their names”; though he would sometimes, in this same connection, refer with conversational familiarity, more in sorrow than anger, to a few members of his own generation, known to him in a greater or lesser degree in years gone by, who had been brought by inheritance to this unhappy condition. He had, for some reason, nothing like so strong an aversion for recently acquired wealth — from holders of which, it is true, he had from time to time even profited to a small degree — provided the money had been amassed by owners safely to be despised, at least in private, by himself or anyone else; and by methods commonly acknowledged to be indefensible. It was to any form of long-established affluence that he took the gravest exception, particularly if the ownership of land was combined with any suggestion of public service, even when such exertions were performed in some quite unspectacular, and apparently harmless, manner, like sitting on a borough council, of helping at a school-treat. “Interfering beggars,” he used to remark of those concerned.