At Lady Mollys - Anthony Powell

I was fortunate enough already to have established myself to some small extent in Lady Warminster’s good graces by a book written a year or two before which she happened to have enjoyed, so that my own reception might have been a worse one. Even so, with a person of her sort that was not a matter upon which to presume. For a time we discussed affairs personal to Isobel and myself, and then, as soon as these could be politely, and quite kindly, dismissed, Lady Warminster gave a smile that showed plainly we should turn to more intriguing topics.

‘I think you are one of the few people, either in or out of the family, who have met Erridge lately,’ she said. ‘So that you must now tell me what you think about this trip of his to China.’

I assured her that I knew little or nothing of Erridge and his movements, but that the journey seemed a reasonable one for him to make in the light of his interests and way of life. I admitted that I had heard him discuss a visit to China.

‘I agree with you,’ she said. ‘Erridge is much too much by himself. He will not be alone on the voyage, I think, will he?’

That was not easy to answer. I did not wish, at this early stage in our relationship, to be detected telling, or, indeed, implying, a deliberate lie. I hoped equally to avoid revealing all that was known about Erridge and Mona, scanty as that might be. I said that I knew no details about the arrangements made by Erridge for his journey.

‘There are always plenty of people to talk to on boats,’ I suggested, with a sense of descending into banality of the most painful kind.

‘Of course,’ she said, as if that notion had never before been so well presented to her. ‘Do you like the sea?’

‘Not at all.’

‘Nor me,’ she said. ‘There is nothing I detest more than a sea voyage. But surely he is taking a secretary, or someone of that sort. I think he will. It will be so lonely otherwise. Especially as he is used to living by himself. You are never so lonely as when among a lot of people you do not know.’

It was impossible to tell whether the reference to ‘a secretary’ designated Mona, or some new figure in Erridge’s life; or was merelv a random shot to draw information.

‘I don’t think I know about a secretary.’

‘Perhaps I am mistaken. Someone may have said something cf the sort. What did you think of Thrubworth? Erridge does not take much interest in the house, I am afraid. Still less in the grounds.’

‘I commented on Thrubworth and its surroundings, again aware that banality had not been avoided. Lady War minster sighed. She moved her thin, pale hands, covered with a network of faint blue veins, lightly over the surface of a cushion.

‘You were staying in the neighbourhood, I think.’

‘Yes.’

‘Not, by any chance, with the writer, J. G. Quiggin?’

‘Yes — with J. G. Quiggin. I have known him a long time. Do you read his articles?’

‘I was so interested when I heard Erridge had him living in that cottage. I enjoy Mr. Quiggin’s reviews so much, even when I do not agree with them. They have not been appearing lately.’

‘No. I haven’t seen any of them lately.’

‘Is there a Mrs. Quiggin?’

‘Yes, she —’

‘But I do not know why I am asking you this, because Susan and Isobel told me how they met you and the Quiggins, both of them, at Thrubworth. She is a great beauty, is she not?’

‘I think she might certainly be called a great beauty.’

‘An actress?’

‘No, a model. But she thinks of going on the films.’

‘Does she? And what does Mr. Quiggin think about that?’

‘He seemed quite to like the idea.’

‘Did he?’ she said. ‘Did he? How strange.’

She paused for a moment.

‘I like his articles so much,’ she went on, after a few seconds. ‘He is such — such a broad-minded man. So few critics are broad-minded. You know I want to talk to you about the new book I am writing myself. Will you give me your advice about it?’

For the time being the subject of Erridge was abandoned. I was glad of that. Lady Warminster had either learnt enough, or decided that for the moment, whatever her available knowledge, she would pursue the matter no further. Instead she talked for a time about Frederica, explaining that she had been so named on account of a Tolland great- uncle, a secretary of legation in Prussia, who, sharing an interest in painting, had been on friendly terms with the Empress Frederick. That was how the name had come into the family; that explained why Alfred Tolland had wanted to hear Mrs. Conyers’s anecdote about the Empress, the night we had met at the Jeavonses’. Lady Warminster represented to a high degree that characteristic of her own generation that everything may be said, though nothing indecorous discussed openly. Layer upon layer of wrapping, box after box revealing in the Chinese manner yet another box, must conceal all doubtful secrets; only the discipline of infinite obliquity made it lawful to examine the seamy side of life. If these mysteries were observed everything might be contemplated: however unsavoury: however unspeakable. Afterwards, thinking over the interview when I had left the house, I knew something of what Alfred Tolland could feel after one of Molly Jeavons’s interrogations. Lady Warminster might be outwardly quieter than her sister: her capacity for teasing was no less highly developed. A long time later, when the subject of Erridge and Mona had become a matter of common talk at the Jeavonses’—gossip which she must have known from her sister, even though they met rather rarely — Lady Warminster continued to refer to the association under enigmatic pseudonyms.

This mannered obscurity of handling the delicate problems of family life had nothing in common with the method of Chips Lovell, who, as I have indicated, spent a good deal of his time at the Studio telling the other scriptwriters about his relations. It would be easy to imagine a community in which this habit might have given offence, since many people feel disquisitions of that kind in some manner to derogate their own importance, few being interested in how others live. Lovell’s material was presented with little or no editing, so it was for the listener to decide for himself whether the assumption in him of a working knowledge of the circles in which Lovell moved, or liked to think he moved, was complimentary or the reverse. Feingold, I think, considered the whole of these Lovell annals a fabrication from start to finish, a dream life legitimate in one exercising the calling of script-writer. He treated Lovell’s stories of duchesses and grand parties like brilliantly improvised accounts of a brush with gangsters or Red Indians, narrated as if such florid adventures had not been in the least imaginary. Hegarty, on the other hand, on the rare occasions when he listened to anything anyone else said, would immediately cap all Lovell’s anecdotes with stories of his own, sometimes sharp enough in their own way, but at the same time petrified into that strange, lifeless, formalised convention to illustrate human experience, particularly current among persons long associated with films. For my own part, I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not, so that I found this side of Lovell agreeable.

When someone repeatedly tells you stories about their relations, pictures begin at last to form in the mind, tinged always in colours used by the narrator; so that after listening day after day to Lovell’s recitals, I had become not only well versed in the role of each performer, but also involuntarily preoccupied with their individual behaviour. This concern for Lovell’s reladons had grown into something like a furtive interest in the comic strip of a daily paper, a habit not admitted to oneself. Lovell covered a good deal of ground. He was as ready to contemplate the doings of some distant cousins of his, whose only claim to fame seemed to be that they had emigrated to Vancouver and returned to live at Esher, as to recount the more splendid aspects of ancestral archives, for example, the epic of his mother’s elopement with his father at a moment when her parents supposed her all but engaged to his more eligible cousin.

In these sagas, Lovell’s ‘second Sleaford uncle’ (to give him his nephew’s initial label) played a surprisingly small part. That was altogether unexpected. Lovell liked talking about Dogdene, but not about his uncle. The fact was that Lord Sleaford lived a very secluded life there, undertaking in the neighbourhood a bare minimum of such duties as were expected of a landowner of his magnitude. He would give a small shooting party from time to time (‘shepherd’s pie for luncheon,’ Lovell said, ‘and not enough sprouts’), existing on the whole outside, or at best on the edge of any given world of recognisable social activity; especially that of a kind to be treated at any degree of sensationalism in print. In quite a different way, he sounded almost as much a recluse as Erridge.

Lovell himself was in a manner proud of this honourable, uncorrupted twilight in which Lord Sleaford had his being, infinitely removed from the gossip-column renown so dear to his own heart; but he also felt, perhaps reasonably enough, that the historical and architectural magnificence of Dogdene was all the time being wasted as a setting for great events.

‘I know there is a lot to be said for a peer being quiet and well behaved,’ he used to say. ‘But really Uncle Geoffrey goes too far. When you think of the house parties they used to have at Dogdene, it is a bit depressing. You know, when George IV came to stay, they painted the place white and gold from top to bottom, including the Chinese Chippendale commodes. Even Aunt Molly, who never showed the slightest desire to cut a dash, quite often used to entertain royalty there. Then there was the occasional literary lion too. I believe Henry James was at Dogdene once. St. John Clarke was there just before the war. It wasn’t the complete morgue it is now. The fact is, Uncle Geoffrey is a very dull man. Aunt Alice, though she does her best, isn’t much better. If Uncle John hadn’t died, I don’t believe either of them would have married anybody — Uncle Geoffrey wouldn’t have been able to afford a wife, anyway. As it is, they just potter about and read the newspapers and listen to the wireless — and that is the extent of it.’

The general impression of Lord Sleaford that emerged from these fragments of information was certainly that of a person rather unusually lacking in any quality of liveliness or distinction. Dispiriting years as a younger son had destroyed in him any enterprise or geniality he might once have possessed. That was Lovell’s theory. Like Alfred Tolland, he had consistently failed to make a career for himself, while at the same time lacking the philosophic detachment which gave Alfred Tolland a certain moral dignity: even a kind of saintliness. Inheritance of Dogdene had come too late to alter his routine, set, no doubt congenially, in an unimaginative mould. Such was the portrait painted by Lovell, in which Lord Sleaford lived in my imagination with a certain rugged reality of his own; although I sometimes wondered whether, in this individual case, the uncompromising monochrome of Lovell’s pigment might be tinged by the possibility that Lord Sleaford himself did not greatly care for his nephew: perhaps openly disapproved of him. That was a contingency to be borne in mind.

Lady Sleaford, as depicted by Lovell, possessed for me, on the other hand, none of her husband’s clarity of outline. She was given no highlights, except the crumb of praise that she ‘did her best’. Lovell had contrived to afford her no separate existence. She was simply the wife of Lord Sleaford. I pictured her as embodying all the unreality of a dowager on the stage: grey-haired: grotesquely dressed: speaking in a stiff, affected manner: possibly gazing through a lorgnette: a figure belonging to Edwardian drawing-room comedy. Armed with this vision of the Sleafords, I could not help wondering how Widmerpool had been asked to their house, according to Lovell, so rarely visited.

‘Easy to explain,’ said Lovell. ‘Aunt Alice, the most conventional woman alive, is also one of those tremendously respectable people who long to know someone they regard as disreputable. To have Mildred Haycock as a friend has been the great adventure of Aunt Alice’s life.’

‘And she includes Mrs. Haycock’s husbands?’

‘Not necessarily,’ said Lovell. ‘You’ve got something when you ask that. I very much doubt whether Haycock ever reached Dogdene. However, as the Widmerpool engagement took place over here — and Mildred, in any case, coming to England so rarely — I suppose an invitation to both of them was hard to refuse. You see, Mildred almost certainly invited herself. She probably took the opportunity of asking if her young man could come too.’

This was a credible explanation.

‘It is just like the Sleafords,’ said Lovell, ‘that Aunt Alice should disapprove of Molly Jeavons, who is really so frightfully well behaved, in spite of the ramshackle way in which she lives, and take to her bosom someone like Mildred, who has slept with every old-timer between Cannes and St. Tropez.’

‘What will the Sleafords think about Widmerpool?’

‘He sounds just the sort of chap Uncle Geoffrey will like. Probably talk stocks and shares all day long, and go to bed every night at half-past ten sharp, after one glass of port. The port is quite good at Dogdene, I must admit. Only because no one has ever bothered to drink it. All the same, I am a bit surprised myself by their both getting an invitation. It is not so easy to penetrate Dogdene these days. I know. I’ve tried.’

I was, naturally, much occupied at this period with my own affairs, so that was all I heard about Widmerpool going to Dogdene before learning from Lovell — quite by chance one day at the Studio — that Mrs. Haycock’s engagement had been broken off. Lovell hardly knew Widmerpool. He would have had no particular concern with the engagement had not Dogdene provided the background for this event. He had no details. I learnt more of the story as a result of Molly Jeavons announcing: ‘I shall have a few people in next week, Nicholas, a sort of party for yourself and Isobel. Something quite small.’

When I had next been to the Jeavonses’ house after the visit to Umfraville’s night club, Jeavons himself had made no reference whatever to that excursion. Indeed, he hardly talked at all during the course of the evening, striding aimlessly about the room as if lost in thought. It was possible that his wound was giving him trouble. However, Molly spoke of the matter, pretending to be cross with me.

‘You are a very dissipated young man,’ she said. ‘What do you mean by keeping poor Teddy up till all hours in the way you did? I never heard such a thing. Do you know he had to spend a whole week in bed after going out with you?’

I tried to make some apology, although at the same time feeling not greatly to blame for the way Jeavons behaved when he went out on his own. As a matter of fact, I had not been at all well myself the following day, and was inclined to blame Jeavons for having caused me to sit up so late.

‘Just as well he found Mildred Blaides to look after him,’ said Molly. ‘I always thought they had known each other for ages, but it turned out they had only met once, a long time ago. You know she was a nurse at Dogdene during the war. Lucky she didn’t turn up when Teddy was there, or she would have scalded him to death with hot-water-bottles, or something of that sort. She was the worst nurse they ever had there — or in the whole of the V.A.D., for that matter.’