Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market

Sir Gavin straightened the photograph of Prince Theodoric’s father, wearing hussar uniform, that stood on the piano in a plain silver frame, surmounted by a royal crown.

“His helmet now shall make a hive for bees …” he remarked, as he sank heavily into an arm-chair.

A SENSE OF MATURITY, or at least of endured experience, is conveyed, for some reason, in the smell of autumn; so it seemed to me, passing one day, by chance, through Kensington Gardens. The eighteen months or less since that Sunday afternoon on the steps of the Albert Memorial, with the echoing of Eleanor’s whistle, and Barbara’s fleeting grasp of my arm, had become already measureless as an eternity. Now, like scraps of gilt peeled untidily from the mosaic surface of the neo-Gothic canopy, the leaves, stained dull gold, were blowing about in the wind, while, squatting motionless beside the elephant, the Arab still kept watch on summer’s mirage, as, once more, the green foliage faded gradually away before his displeased gaze. Those grave features implied that for him, too, that year, for all its monotony, had also called attention, in different aspects, to the processes of life and death that are always on the move. For my own part, I felt myself peculiarly conscious of these unalterable activities. For example, Stringham, as he had himself foreshadowed, was married to Peggy Stepney in the second week of October; the same day, as it happened, that saw the last of Mr. Deacon.

“Don’t miss Buster’s present,” Stringham just had time to remark, as the conveyor-belt of wedding guests evolved sluggishly across the carpet of the Bridgnorths’ drawing room in Cavendish Square.

There was opportunity to do no more than take the hand, for a moment, of bride and bridegroom; but Buster’s present could hardly have remained invisible: a grand-father clock, gutted, and fitted up with shelves to form a “cocktail cabinet,” fully equipped with glasses, two shakers, and space for bottles. A good deal of money had evidently been spent on this ingenious contrivance. There was even a secret drawer. I could not make up my mind whether the joke was not, in reality, against Stringham. The donor himself, perhaps physically incapacitated by anguish of jealousy, had been unable to attend the church; and, since at least one gossip column had referred to “popular Commander Foxe’s temporary retirement to a nursing home,” there seemed no reason to disbelieve in the actuality of Buster’s seizure.

Stringham’s mother, no less beautiful, so it seemed to me, than when, as a schoolboy, I had first set eyes on her — having at last made up her mind, as her son had put it, “whether to laugh or cry”—had wept throughout the whole of the service into the corner of a small, flame-coloured handkerchief. By the time of the reception, however, she had made a complete recovery. His sister, Flavia, I saw for the first time. She had married as her second husband an American called Wisebite, and her daughter, Pamela Flitton, a child of six or seven, by the earlier marriage, was one of the bridesmaids. Well dressed, and good looking, Mrs. Wisebite’s ties with Stringham were not known to me. She was a few years older than her brother, who rarely mentioned her. Miss Weedon, rather pale in the face, and more beaky than I remembered, sat in one of the back pews. I recalled the hungry looks she used to dart at Stringham on occasions when I had seen them together years before.

Neither of Peggy Stepney’s parents looked specially cheerful, and rumours were current to the effect that objections had been raised to the marriage by both families. It appeared to have been Stringham himself who had insisted upon its taking place. Such opposition as may have existed had been, no doubt, finally overcome by conviction on the Bridgnorths’ part that it was high time for their elder daughter to get married, since she could not subsist for ever on the strength of photographs, however charming, in the illustrated papers; and they could well have decided, in the circumstances, that she might easily pick on a husband less presentable than Stringham. Lord Bridgnorth, a stout, red-faced man, wearing a light grey stock and rather tight morning clothes, was notable for having owned a horse that won the Derby at a hundred to seven. His wife — daughter of a Scotch duke, to one of the remote branches of whose house Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson’s mother had belonged — was a powerful figure in the hospital world, where she operated, so I had been informed, in bitter competition with organisations supported by Mrs. Foxe: a rivalry which their new relationship was hardly likely to decrease. The Walpole-Wilsons themselves were not present, but Lady Huntercombe, arrayed more than ever like Mrs. Siddons, was sitting with her daughters on the bride’s side of the church, and later disparaged the music.

Weddings are notoriously depressing affairs. It looked as if this one, especially, had been preceded by more than common display of grievance on the part of persons regarding themselves as, in one way or another, fairly closely concerned, and therefore possessing the right to raise difficulties and proffer advice. Only Lady Anne Stepney appeared to be, for once, enjoying herself unreservedly. She was her sister’s chief bridesmaid, and, as a kind of public assertion of rebellion against convention of all kind, rather in Mr. Deacon’s manner, she was wearing her wreath back to front; a disorder of head-dress that gravely prejudiced the general appearance of the cortege as it passed up the aisle. Little Pamela Flitton, who was holding the bride’s train, felt sick at this same moment, and rejoined her nurse at the back of the church.

I returned to my rooms that evening in rather low spirits; and, just as I was retiring to bed, Barnby rang up with the news — quite unexpected, though I had heard of his indisposition — that Mr. Deacon had died as the result of an accident. Barnby’s account of how this had come about attested the curious fitness that sometimes attends the manner in which people finally leave this world; for, although Mr. Deacon’s end was not exactly dramatic within the ordinary meaning of the term, its circumstances, as he himself would have wished, could not possibly be regarded as commonplace. In many ways the embodiment of bourgeois thought, he could have claimed with some justice that his long struggle against the shackles of convention, sometimes inwardly dear to him, had, in the last resort, come to his aid in releasing him from what he would have considered the shame of a bourgeois death.

Although the demise was not a violent one in the most usual sense of the word, it unquestionably partook at the same time of that spirit of carelessness and informality always so vigorously advocated by Mr. Deacon as a precept for pursuing what Sillery liked to call “The Good Life.” Sillery’s ideas upon that subject were, of course, rather different, on the whole, from Mr. Deacon’s, in spite of the fact that both of them, even according to their own lights, were adventurers. But, although each looked upon himself as a figure almost Promethean in spirit of independence — godlike, and following ideals of his own, far from the well-worn tracks of fellow men — their chosen roads were also acknowledged by each to be set far apart.

Mr. Deacon and Sillery must, in fact, have been just about the same age. Possibly they had known each other in their troubled youth (for even Sillery had had to carve out a career for himself in his early years), and some intersection of those unrestricted paths to which each adhered no doubt explained at least a proportion of Sillery’s disapproval of Mr. Deacon’s habits. Any such strictures on Sillery’s part were at least equally attributable to prudence: that sense of self-preservation, and desire to “keep on the safe side,” of which Sillery, among the many other qualities to which he could lay claim, possessed more than a fair share.