Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market

“I don’t think you remember me,” she said, almost at once, in a curiously harsh voice that brought back, in fact, that same sense of past years returning that Stringham’s inquiry for matches had caused me at the coffee-stall. “I used to be called Jean Templer. You are a friend of Peter’s, and you came to stay with us years ago.”

It was true that I had not recognised her. I think we might even have exchanged words without my guessing her identity, so little had she been in my thoughts, so unexpected a place was this to find her. That was not because she had changed greatly. On the contrary, she still seemed slim, attenuated, perhaps not — like the two other girls with whom I had been talking, and round whom my thoughts, before the distraction of the tapestry, had been drifting — exactly a “beauty;” but all the same, mysterious and absorbing: certainly pretty enough, so far as that went, just as she had seemed when I had visited the Templers after leaving school. There was perhaps a touch of the trim secretary of musical comedy. I saw also, with a kind of relief, that she seemed to express none of the qualities I had liked in Barbara, There was a sense of restraint here, a reserve at present unpredictable. I tried to excuse my bad manners in having failed at once to remember her. She gave one of those quick, almost masculine laughs. I was not at all sure how I felt about her, though conscious suddenly that being in love with Barbara, painful as some of its moments had been, now seemed a rather amateurish affair; just as my feelings for Barbara had once appeared to me so much more mature than those previously possessed for Suzette; or, indeed, for Jean herself.

“You were so deep in the tapestry,” she said.

“I was wondering about the couple in the little house on the hill.”

“They have a special devil — or is he a satyr? — to themselves.”

“He seems to be collaborating, doesn’t he?”

“Just lending a hand, I think.”

“A guest, I suppose — or member of the staff?”

“Oh, a friend of the family,” she said. “All newly-married couples have someone of that sort about. Sometimes several. Didn’t you know? I see you can’t be married.”

“But how do you know they are newly married?”

“They’ve got such a smart little house,” she said. “They must be newly married. And rather well off, too, I should say.”

I was left a trifle breathless by this exchange, not only because it was quite unlike the kind of luncheon-table conversation I had expected to come my way in that particular place, but also on account of its contrast with Jean’s former deportment, when we had met at her home. At that moment I hardly considered the difference that age had made, no doubt in both of us. She was, I thought, about a couple of years younger than myself. Feeling unable to maintain this show of detachment towards human — and, in especial, matrimonial — affairs, I asked whether it was not true that she had married Bob Duport. She nodded; not exactly conveying, it seemed to me, that by some happy chance their union had introduced her to an unexpected terrestrial paradise.

“Do you know Bob?”

“I just met him years ago with Peter.”

“Have you seen Peter lately?”

“Not for about a year. He has been doing very well in the City, hasn’t he? He always tells me so.”

She laughed.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “He has been making quite a lot of money, I think. That is always something. But I wish he would settle down, get married, for instance.”

I was aware of an unexpected drift towards intimacy, although this sudden sense of knowing her all at once much better was not simultaneously accompanied by any clear portrayal in my own mind of the kind of person she might really be. Perhaps intimacy of any sort, love or friendship, impedes all exactness of definition. For example, Mr. Deacon’s character was plainer to me than Barnby’s, although by then I knew Barnby better than I knew Mr. Deacon. In short, the persons we see most clearly are not necessarily those we know best. In any case, to attempt to describe a woman in the broad terms employable for a man is perhaps irrational.

“I went to a party in your London house given by Mrs. Andriadis.”

“How very grand,” she said. “What was it like? We let the place almost as soon as we took it, because Bob had to go abroad. It’s rather a horrid house, really. I hate it, and everything in it.”

I did not know how to comment on this attitude towards her own home, which — as I had agreed upon that famous night with the young man with the orchid — certainly left, in spite of its expensive air, a good deal to be desired. I said that I wished she had been present at the party.

“Oh, us,” she said laughing again, as if any such eventuality were utterly unthinkable. “Besides, we were away. Bob was arguing about nickel or aluminium or something for months on end. As a matter of fact, I think we shall have to sue Mrs. Andriadis when he comes back. She has raised absolute hell in the house. Burnt the boiler out and broken a huge looking-glass.”

She reminded me immediately of her brother in this disavowal of being the kind of person asked to Mrs. Andriadis’s parties; for the setting in which we found ourselves seemed, on the face of it to be perfectly conceivable as an extension of Mrs. Andriadis’s sort of entertaining. Indeed, it appeared to me, in my inexperience, that almost exactly the same chilly undercurrent of conflict was here perceptible as that permeating the house in Hill Street a month or two before. Dialectical subtleties could no doubt be advanced — as Stringham had first suggested, and remarks at Sillery’s had seemed to substantiate — to demolish Sir Magnus’s pretensions, hierarchically speaking, to more than the possession of “a lot of money;” in spite of various testimonials paid to him, at Hinton and elsewhere, on the score of his greatness in other directions. However, even allowing that Sir Magnus might be agreed to occupy a position only within this comparatively modest category of social differentiation, such assets as were his were not commonly disregarded, even in the world of Mrs. Andriadis. Her sphere might be looked upon, perhaps, as a more trenchant and mobile one, though it was doubtful if even this estimate were beyond question.

In fact, I was uncertain whether or not I might have misunderstood Jean, and that she had intended to imply that her existence was at a higher, rather than lower, plane. Some similar thought may have struck her too, because, as if in explanation of a matter that needed straightening out, she said: “Baby brought me here. She wanted someone to play for her side, and Bob’s aluminium fitted in nicely for this week-end, as Theodoric knew Bob — had even met him.”

The concept of “playing for her side” opened up in the imagination fascinating possibilities in connection with Mrs. Wentworth’s position in the household. I remembered the phrase as one used by Stringham when enlisting my own support in connection with his project of “going down” from the university after a single term of residence — the time, in fact, when he had asked his mother to lunch to meet Sillery. However, the status of Mrs. Wentworth at the castle was obviously not a matter to be investigated there and then, while, in addition to any question of diffidence in inquiring about that particular affair, Jean’s initial display of vivacity became suddenly exhausted, and she sank back into one of those silences that I remembered so well from the time when we had first met. For the rest of the meal she was occupied in fragmentary conversation with the man on her right, or I was myself talking with Rosie Manasch; so that we hardly spoke to one another again while in the dining-room.