At Lady Mollys - Anthony Powell

‘My two sons, you know.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘They are always cropping up.’

‘Are they at school?’

‘Yes, of course they are,’ she said, as if that were a foolish question to ask. ‘That is, when they haven’t been expelled.’

She stared at me fixedly after saying this, still seeming to imply that I should already know about her sons, especially the fact that they were continually being expelled from school. Uncertain whether or not she intended to strike a jaunty or sombre note, I did not know whether to laugh or commiserate. In fact, so peculiar was her tone that I wondered now whether she were entirely sane. Although in most respects impossible to imagine anyone less like Mrs. Conyers, a change of expression, or tone of voice, would suddenly recall her sister. For example, when she spoke of her children, I was reminded of Mrs. Conyers invoking the General. There was, however, one marked difference between them. Mrs. Conyers bestowed about her a sense of absolute certainty that she belonged — could only belong to the class from which she came, the world in which she lived. Mrs. Haycock, on the other hand, had by then largely jettisoned any crude certainties of origin. She may even have decided deliberately to rid herself of too embarrassing an inheritance of traditional thought and behaviour. If so, she had been on the whole successful. Only from time to time, and faintly, she offered a clue to correct speculation about herself: just as Jeavons would once in a way display the unmistakable action of his marriage on his point of view. On the whole, Mrs. Haycock’s bluff manner suggested long association with people who were rich, but rich without much concern about other aspects of life.

‘Of course I know they are dreadfully badly behaved,’ she said. ‘But what am I to do?’

She had that intense, voluble manner of speaking, often characteristic of those who are perhaps a little mad: a flow of words so violent as to give an impression of lack of balance.

‘How old are they?’

‘Fourteen and fifteen.’

Widmerpool, who at that moment looked in no state to shoulder such responsibilities as a couple of adolescent stepsons habitually expelled from school, leant across the table to address Mrs. Haycock.

‘I think I’ll retire for a minute or two,’ he said, ‘and see what taking a couple of those pills will do.’

‘All right, my own, off you go.’

Widmerpool scrambled out from where he sat in the corner next to the wall, and made for the door.

‘Isn’t he priceless?’ said Mrs. Haycock, almost with pride. ‘Do you know his mother?’

‘I’ve met her.’

‘Do you know that she suggested that she should live with us after we were married?’

Again she spoke in that strange, flat voice, looking hard at me, so that I did not know how to reply; whether to express horror or indulge in laughter. However, she herself seemed to expect no answer to her question. Whatever her feelings about Widmerpool’s mother, they lay too deep for words. Instead of continuing to discuss her personal affairs, she pointed to Jeavons.

‘Your friend seems to be going to sleep,’ she said. ‘You know I have always heard so much about him, and, although I’ve known Molly for years, I only met him for the first time the other night.’

Her observation about Jeavons’s state was true. Templer and his girl had risen to dance, and Jeavons had fallen into a coma similar to those in which General Conyers would sometimes sink. Jeavons seemed to have lost all his earlier enthusiasm to dance with Mrs. Haycock, a change of heart due probably to the amount of beer he had drunk earlier in the evening, before we met. I roused him, and he moved to the other side of the table, into the seat next to Mrs. Haycock.

‘How is Molly?’ she asked him.

‘Molly is all right.’

He did not sound too bright. However, he must have understood that something was exacted of him, and made an effort.

‘Where are you staying?’ he asked.

‘Jules’s.’

‘In Jermyn Street?’

‘I always have a suite there when I come over.’

Jeavons suddenly straightened himself.

‘Come and dance,’ he said.

This surprised me. I had supposed him to be speaking without much serious intention, even when he had first said he wanted to dance with her. After he had all but gone to sleep at the table, I thought he had probably found sufficient entertainment in his own reflections. On the contrary, he had now thrown off his drowsiness. Mrs. Haycock rose without the smallest hesitauon, and they took the floor together. I was sure she had not recognised Jeavons; equally certain that she was aware, as women are, that some disturbing element was abroad, involving herself in some inexplicable manner. She danced well, steering him this way and that, while Jeavons jogged up and down like a marionette, clutching her to him as he attempted the syncopated steps of some long-forgotten measure. I remembered that he himself never danced when the carpet was rolled back and the gramophone played at the Jeavonses’ house. I was still watching them circle the floor when Widmerpool returned from his absence in the inner recesses of the club. He looked worse than ever. There could be no doubt that he ought to go home to bed. He sat down beside me and groaned.

‘I think I shall have to go home,’ he said.

‘Didn’t the pills work?’

‘Quite useless. I am feeling most unwell. Why on earth have you come here with that fellow Jeavons?’

‘I ran across him earlier in the evening, and he brought me along. I’ve met Umfraville before, who runs this place.’

I felt, I did not know why, that it was reasonable for him to make this enquiry in an irritable tone; that some apology was indeed required for my appearance there at all. It was clear that the sooner Widmerpool left, the better for his state of health. He looked ghastly. I was going to suggest that he should make some sign to recall Mrs. Haycock to the table, so that they might leave immediately, when he began to speak in a lower voice, as if he had something on his mind.

‘You know what we were talking about when we last met?’

‘Yes — your engagement, you mean?’

‘I–I haven’t had an opportunity yet.’

‘You haven’t?’

I felt unwilling to reopen all that matter now, especially in his present state.

‘But we’ve been asked to stay at Dogdene.’

‘Yes?’

In spite of his malaise, Widmerpool could not keep from his voice a note of justifiable satisfaction.

‘You know the house, of course.’

‘I’ve never stayed there.’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I mean you know about it. The Sleafords’ place.’

‘Yes, I know all that.’

‘Do you think it would be — would be the moment?’

‘It might be a very good one.’

‘Of course it would make a splendid background. After all, if any house in the country has had a romantic history, it is Dogdene,’ he said.

The reflection seemed to give him strength. I thought of Pepys, and the ‘great black maid’; and immediately Widmerpool’s resemblance to the existing portraits of the diarist became apparent. He had the same obdurate, put-upon, bad-tempered expression. Only a full-bottomed wig was required to complete the picture. True, Widmerpool shared none of Pepys’s sensibility where the arts were concerned; in the aesthetic field he was a void. But they had a common preoccupation with money and professional advancement; also a kind of dogged honesty. Was it possible to imagine Widmerpool playing a similar role with the maid? There I felt doubtful. Was that, indeed, his inherent problem? Could it be that his love affairs had always fallen short of physical attack? How would he deal with Mrs. Haycock should that be so? I wondered whether their relationship was really so incongruous as it appeared from the exterior. So often one thinks that individuals and situations cannot be so extraordinary as they seem from outside: only to find that the truth is a thousand times odder.

While Widmerpool sat in silence, and I pondered these matters, there came suddenly a shrill burst of sound from the dance floor. 1 saw Mrs. Haycock break away violently from Jeavons. She clasped her hands together and gave peal after peal of laughter. Jeavons, too, was smiling, in his quiet, rather embarrassed manner. Mrs. Haycock caught his hand, and led him through the other dancing couples, back to the table. She was in a great state of excitement.

‘Look here,’ she said. ‘We’ve just made the most marvellous discovery. Do you know that we both knew each other in the war — when I was a nurse?’

‘What, when you were at Dogdene?’ asked Widmerpool.

His mind, still full of the glories of that great house, remained unimpressed by this news. To him nothing could be more natural than the fact that Mrs. Haycock and Jeavons had met. She had been a V.A.D. at Dogdene: Jeavons had been a convalescent there. There was no reason why Widmerpool should even speculate upon the possibility that their Dogdene interludes had not overlapped. He was, in any case, not at all interested in the lives of others.

‘I never recognised him, which was quite mad of me, because he looks just the same.’

‘Oh, really?’ said Widmerpool.

He could not see what the fuss was about.

‘Isn’t it absolutely marvellous to meet an old friend like that?’

‘Why, yes, I suppose it is,’ said Widmerpool, without any great conviction.

‘It’s scrumptious.’

Widmerpool smiled feebly. This was plainly a situation he found hard to envisage. In any case, he was at that moment too oppressed by his own state of health to attempt appreciation of Mrs. Haycock’s former friendships.

‘Look here, Mildred,’ he said, ‘I am still feeling far from well. I really think I will go home. What about you? Shall I take you back?’

Mrs. Haycock was appalled.

‘Go back?’ she said. ‘Why, of course not. I’ve only just arrived. And, anyway, there are millions of things I want to talk about after making this marvellous discovery. It is too priceless for words. To think that I never knew all these years. It is really too extraordinary that we should never have met. I believe Molly did it on purpose.’

Widmerpool, to do him justice, did not seem at all surprised at this not very sympathetic attitude towards his own condition. There was something dignified, even a little touching, about the manner in which he absolutely accepted the fact that his state of health did not matter to Mrs. Haycock in the least. Perhaps by then already inured to indifference, he had made up his mind to expect no more from married life. More probably, this chance offered to slip away quietly by himself, going home without further trouble — even without delivering Mrs. Haycock to her hotel — was a relief to him. In any case, he seemed thankful, not only that no impediment had been put in his way of escape, but that Mrs. Haycock herself was in the best possible mood at the prospect of her own abandonment.

‘Then I can safely leave you with Peter Templer and Mrs. Taylor — or is it Mrs. Porter?’ he said. ‘You will also have Nicholas and Mr. Jeavons to look after you.’

‘My dear, of course, of course.’

Widmerpool rose a little unsteadily. Probably the people round thought, quite mistakenly, that he had had too much to drink.

‘I shall go then,’ he said. ‘I will ring you up tomorrow, Mildred. Make my apologies to Peter.’

‘Night, night,’ she said, not unkindly.

Widmerpool nodded to the rest of us, then turned, and picked his way through the dancers.

‘But this is too, too amusing,’ said Mrs. Haycock, taking Jeavons by the arm. ‘To think we should meet again like this after all these years.’

She poured out another drink for himself, and passed the bottle round the table, so delighted by the discovery of Jeavons that Widmerpool seemed now dismissed entirely from her mind. The sentiments of Jeavons himself at that moment were hard to estimate; even to know how drunk he was. He might have reminded Mrs. Haycock of their former encounter with some motive in his mind, or merely on impulse. The information could even have emerged quite fortuitously in the course of one of his long, rambling anecdotes. No one could predict where his next step would lead. Outwardly, he gave no impression of intoxication, except for those intermittent bouts of sleepiness, in which, for that matter, he probably often indulged himself at home when dead sober. Templer and his girl returned to the table.

‘This is really rather a grim place,’ said Templer. ‘What do you say to moving on somewhere else — the Slip-in, or somewhere like that?’

‘Oh, but darling Peter,’ said Mrs. Haycock, who had, so it appeared, met Templer for the first time that evening. ‘I’ve just begun to enjoy myself so much. Kenneth decided he wasn’t feeling well enough to stay, so he has gone home — with many apologies — and now I have just found one of my oldest, my very oldest, friends here.’

She pointed to Jeavons.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Templer.

He looked a bit surprised; but there was, after all, no reason why Jeavons should not be one of her oldest friends, even if, in Templer’s eyes, he was rather an oddity. If Tcmpler’s first predisposition had been embarrassment at being caught in a party with Widmerpool, his mood had later changed to one of amusement at the insoluble problem of why I myself was visiting a night club with Jeavons. Jeavons was not an easy man to explain. Templer had none of Chips Lovell’s appreciation of the subtleties of such matters. The Jeavons house, irretrievably tinged, in however unconventional a manner, with a kind of life against which he had rigidly set his face, would have bored Templer to death. Mrs. Haycock was, for some reason, another matter; he could tolerate her. Patently rackety, and habituated to association with what Uncle Giles called ‘all sorts’—different, for some reason, from Molly Jeavons’s ‘all sorts’—she presented no impediment to Templer. He sat down beside her and began to discuss other places that might be more amusing than Umfraville’s club. Umfraville himself now returned, bringing with him Max Pilgrim and Heather Hopkins.

‘May we join you for a moment?’ he said. ‘You know, Mildred, I don’t believe we have met since that terrible night at Cannes in — what was it? — about 1923, when Milly Andriadis gave that great party, and we walked round the port together and watched the sunrise.’

We made room for them. Hopkins and Pilgrim were on their best behaviour. Templer’s girl seemed for the moment almost to have forgotten him in the excitement of sitting with such celebrities. I found myself next to Templer and we had a moment to talk.

‘How are you, Nick,’ he said. ‘I haven’t seen you for centuries.’

‘No worse — and you?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Templer. ‘Family worries of various kinds, though there is a lot to be said for no longer being married. The usual trouble is raging with Bob and that sister of mine. No sooner does Bob get a good job than he goes off with some girl. All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law. I believe Jean has left him again, and gone to stay in Rome with Baby Wentworth — or whatever Baby Wentworth is now called after marrying that Italian.’