Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market

My first thought was that Mr. Deacon’s sister had returned to the house. After the cremation, she had announced herself as retiring for the rest of the day to her hotel in Bloomsbury, as she was suffering from a headache.

I supposed now that she had changed her mind, and decided to continue the task of sorting her brother’s belongings, regarding some of which she had already consulted Barnby, since there were books and papers among Mr. Deacon’s property that raised a number of questions of disposal, sometimes of a somewhat delicate kind. She had probably come back to the shop and again sought guidance on some matter. It was to be hoped that the point would not prove an embarrassing one. However, when I said my name, the person beyond the door turned out to be Gypsy.

“Come in for a moment,” she called.

I turned the handle and entered. She was standing behind the screen, in the shadows, at the back of the shop. My first impression was that she had stripped herself stark naked. There was, indeed, good reason for this misapprehension, for a second look showed that she was wearing a kind of bathing-dress, flesh-coloured, and of unusually sparing cut. I must have showed my surprise, because she burst into a paroxysm of laughter.

“I thought you would like to see my dress for the Merry Thought fancy-dress party,” she said. “I am going as Eve,”

She came closer.

“Where is Barnby?” she asked.

“He went out. Didn’t you hear him go? After he spoke on the telephone.”

“I’ve only just come in,” she said. “I wanted to try out my costume on both of you.”

She sounded disappointed at having missed such an opportunity to impress Barnby, though I thought the display would have annoyed rather than amused him; which was no doubt her intention.

“Won’t you be cold?”

“The place is going to be specially heated. Anyway, the weather is mild enough. Still, shut the door. There’s a bit of a draught.”

She sat down on the divan. That part of the shop was shut off from the rest by the screen in such a way as almost to form a cubicle. As Mr. Deacon had described, shawls or draperies of some sort were spread over the surface of this piece of furniture.

“What do you think of the fig leaf?” she asked. “I made it myself.”

I have already spoken of the common ground shared by conflicting emotions. As Barnby had remarked, the funeral had been “hard on the nerves,” and a consciousness of sudden relief from pressure was stimulating. Gypsy, somewhat altering the manner she had adopted on my first arrival in the shop, now managed to look almost prim. She had the air of waiting for something, of asking a question to which she already knew the answer. There was also something more than a little compelling about the atmosphere of the alcove: the operation perhaps of memories left over as a residue from former states of concupiscence, although so fanciful a condition could hardly be offered in extenuation. I asked myself whether this situation, or something not far from it, was not one often premeditated, and, although I still felt one half awake, not to be lightly passed by.

The lack of demur on her part seemed quite in accordance with the almost somnambulistic force that had brought me into that place, and also with the torpid, dream-like atmosphere of the afternoon. At least such protests as she put forward were of so formal and artificial an order that they increased, rather than diminished, the impression that a long-established rite was to be enacted, among Staffordshire figures and papier-mâché trays, with the compelling, detached formality of nightmare. Perhaps some demand, not to be denied in its overpowering force, had occasioned simultaneously both this summons and Mrs. Wentworth’s telephone call; each product of that slow process of building up of events, as already mentioned, coming at last to a head. I was conscious of Gypsy changing her individuality, though at the same time retaining her familiar form: this illusion almost conveying the extraordinary impression that there were really three of us — perhaps even four, because I was aware that alteration had taken place within myself too — of whom the pair of active participants had been, as it were, projected from out of our normally unrelated selves.

In spite of the apparently irresistible nature of the circumstances, when regarded through the larger perspective that seemed, on reflection, to prevail — that is to say of a general subordination to an intricate design of cause and effect — I could not help admitting, in due course, the awareness of a sense of inadequacy. There was no specific suggestion that anything had, as it might be said, “gone wrong”, it was merely that any wish to remain any longer present in those surroundings had suddenly and violently decreased, if not disappeared entirely. This feeling was, in its way, a shock. Gypsy, for her part, appeared far less impressed than myself by consciousness of anything, even relatively momentous, having occurred. In fact, after the brief interval of extreme animation, her subsequent indifference, which might almost have been called torpid, was, so it seemed to me, remarkable. This imperturbability was inclined to produce an impression that, so far from knowing each other a great deal better, we had progressed scarcely at all in that direction; perhaps, become more than ever, even irretrievably, alienated. Barbara’s recurrent injunction to avoid any question of “getting sentimental” seemed, here in the embodiment of Gypsy, now carried to lengths which might legitimately be looked upon as such a principle’s logical conclusion.

This likeness to Barbara was more clearly indicated, however, than by a merely mental comparison of theory, because, while Gypsy lay upon the divan, her hands before her, looking, perhaps rather self-consciously, a little like Goya’s Maja nude —or possibly it would be nearer the mark to cite that picture’s derivative, Manet’s Olympia , which I had, as it happened, heard her mention on some former occasion — she glanced down, with satisfaction, at her own extremities.

“How brown my leg is,” she said. “Fancy sunburn lasting that long.”

Were Barbara and Gypsy really the same girl, I asked myself. There was something to be said for the theory; for I had been abruptly reminded of Barbara’s remark, uttered under the trees of Belgrave Square earlier in the year: “How blue my hand is in the moonlight.” Self-admiration apart, there could be no doubt now that they had a great deal in common. It was a concept that made me feel that, in so far as I was personally involved in matters of sentiment, the season was, romantically speaking, autumn indeed, and that the leaves had undeniably fallen from the trees so far as former views on love were concerned: even though such views had been held by me only so short a time before. Here, at least, at the back of Mr. Deacon’s shop, some conclusion had been reached, though even that inference, too, might be found open to question. At the same time, I could not help being struck, not only by a kind of wonder that I now found myself, as it were, with Barbara in conditions once pictured as beyond words vain of achievement, but also at that same moment by a sense almost of solemnity at this latest illustration of the pattern that life forms. A new phase in conversation was now initiated by a question from Gypsy.

“What was the funeral like?” she asked, as if making a deliberate return to every-day conditions.

“Short.”

“I think I was right not to go.”

“You didn’t miss much.”

“It was a matter of conscience.”

She developed for a time this line of thought, and I agreed that, regarded in the light of her convictions, her absence might be looked upon as excusable, if any such severity of doctrine was indeed insurmountable. I agreed further that Mr. Deacon himself might have appreciated such scruples.