At Lady Molly's

4

IN the Jeavonses’ house everything was disposed about the rooms as if the owners had moved in only a week or two before, and were still picknicking in considerable disorder among their unsorted belongings. Whether the better pieces were Sleaford spoils, or derived from Molly’s side of the family, Lovell was uncertain. Certainly Molly herself had not bought them; still less, Jeavons. Lovell said the only object the two of them were known to have acquired throughout their married life together was a cabinet made of some light, highly polished wood, designed — though never, I think, used — to enclose the wherewithal for mixing cocktails. In practice, bottles, glasses and ice were always brought into the drawing-room on a tray, the cabinet serving only as a plinth upon which to rest the cage enclosing two budgerigars. You could never tell who would carry in this drink tray; or, for that matter, who would open the front door. Regular servants were employed only spasmodically, their duties on the whole undertaken by such temporary figures as Erridge’s Smith, or superannuated nurses and governesses of the Ardglass family, whose former dependants were legion. Even personal friends of Molly’s, down on their luck for one reason or another, would from time to time lend a hand on the domestic side, while a succession of charwomen, gloomy or jocular, haunted the passages by day.

No one was ever, so to speak, turned away from the Jeavons table. The place was a hinterland where none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply and persons of every sort were to be encountered. Perhaps that description makes the company sound too diverting. Certainly Lovell was less complimentary. ‘Of course you hardly ever meet intelligent people there,’ he used to say, for some reason cherishing in his mind that category of person, without too closely defining means of recognition. ‘And you rarely see anyone whom I would call really smart.’ Then he was accustomed to relent a little, and add: ‘All the same, you may find absolutely anybody at Aunt Molly’s.’

In making this practical — even brutal — analysis, I think Lovell merely meant that individuals deeply ambitious of receiving a lot of grand invitations would never dream of wasting time among the rag, tag and bobtail normally to be found at the Jeavonses’; but he probably intended at the same time to imply that such over-eager people might sometimes be surprised — possibly even made envious — by the kind of visitor from Molly’s past — or, for that matter, her unconformable present — who was the exception in the house rather than the rule. A powerful substratum of relations was usually to be found there, Ardglass and Sleaford connexions, as a rule: not, on the whole, the most eminent members of those families. Jeavons, certainly no snob in the popular and derogatory sense (although he had acquired for everyday purposes a modicum of lore peculiar to his wife’s world) would from time to time produce a relation of his own — for example, a nephew who worked in Wolverhampton — but, even had he so desired, he could never have attempted to compete in point of number with the ramifications of Molly’s family: the descendants of her grandfather’s ninety-seven first cousins. It was at the Jeavonses’ that I met the Tolland sisters again.

Lovell, probably unreliable, I thought, upon such a point, said that Jeavons used occasionally to kick over the traces of married life.

‘He goes off by himself and gets tight and picks up a woman,’ Lovell said. ‘Just once in a way, you know. One evening he brought an obvious tart to the house to have a drink.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Someone told me. One of the Tollands, I think.’

I questioned the truth of the story, not so much because I wholly disbelieved it, as on account of the implications of such behaviour, suggesting additionally mysterious avenues of Jeavons’s life, which for some reason I felt unwilling, almost too squeamish, to face. However, Lovell himself agreed that whichever Tolland sister had produced the story was probably no very capable judge of the degrees of fallen womanhood, and might easily have used the term without professional connotation: admitting, too, had any such incident taken place, that the girl was unlikely to have been remarked as someone very unusual in such a social no man’s land as the Jeavons drawing-room. He conceded finally that Molly would be more than equal to dealing with an intrusion of just that sort, even had she decided — something very unlikely — that the trespassing guest had unexpectedly passed beyond some invisible, though as it were platonically defined, limit as to who might, and who might not, be suitably received under the Jeavons’ roof.

All the same, the story, even if untrue, impressed me as of interest in its bearing on a sense of strain suffered, perhaps continuously, by Jeavons himself. At worst, the supposed introduction of a ‘tart’ into his house was a myth somehow come into existence, which represented in highly coloured terms a long since vanquished husband’s vain efforts publicly to demonstrate his own independence from a wife’s too evident domination. The legend itself was a kind of tribute to Molly’s strength: a strength of which her first husband too, for all I knew, might in his time have been made equally aware; although Lord Sleaford, at least outwardly, was better equipped to control a wife of Molly’s sort.

‘I don’t think she was unhappy when she was married to Uncle John,’ Lovell used to say. ‘Of course, he was rather a dull dog. Still, lots of women have to put up with dull dogs — not to say dirty dogs — without the advantage of lots of money and a stately home. Besides, Ted is a dull dog, too. I suppose Aunt Molly prefers husbands like that.’

My own feeling was that Jeavons could not be described as ‘dull’: even though he had appeared so, in that very phrase, to Widmerpool equally with Lovell. On the contrary, Jeavons seemed to me a person oddly interesting.

‘Molly never really got on with her contemporaries,’ Lovell said. ‘The kind of people one associates with Lady Diana — and all that. She knew some of them, of course, very well, but she couldn’t be called one of that, or any other, set. I dare say Uncle John was afraid of his wife being thought “fast”. She was very shy, too, I believe, in those days. Quite different from what she is like now.’

A picture of Molly Jeavons was beginning to emerge: separateness from her ‘young married’ contemporaries: perhaps a certain recoil from their flamboyance: in any case, nothing in common with the fleeting interest in the arts of that new fashionable world. She might have the acquisitive instinct to capture from her first marriage (if that was indeed their provenance) such spoils as the Wilson and the Greuze, while remaining wholly untouched by the intellectual emancipation, however skin-deep, of her generation: the Russian Ballet: the painters of the Paris School: novels and poetry of the period: not even such a mournful haunt of the third-rate as the Celtic Twilight had played a part in her life. She had occupied a position many women must have envied, jogging along there for a dozen years without apparent dissatisfaction or a breath of scandal; then contentedly taking on an existence of such a very different kind, hardly noticing the change. All that was interesting. The fact was, perhaps, that her easy going, unambitious manner of life had passed unremarked in a vast house like Dogdene, organised in the last resort by the industrious Sleaford, who, according to Lovell, possessed rather a taste for interfering in domestic matters. While married to him, Molly remained a big, charming, noisy young woman, who had never entirely ceased to be a schoolgirl. When the Dogdene frame was removed, like the loosening of a corset of steel, the unconventional, the eccentric, even the sluttish side of her nature became suddenly revealed to the world.

So far as ‘getting on’ with her second husband was concerned, the strongest protest she ever seemed to make was: ‘Oh, Teddy, dear, do you ever catch hold of the right end of the stick?’, spoken kindly, and usually not without provocation; for Jeavons could be slow in grasping the point of a story. Some husbands might certainly take even that rebuke amiss, but Jeavons never seemed to question Molly’s absolute sway over himself, the house and all those who came there. I heard her say these words on subsequent visits after Lovell had introduced me there. Neither Widmerpool nor Mrs. Haycock had turned up again since that first night, and I made some enquiry about them.

‘Oh, you know Mr. Widmerpool?’ said Molly, at once beginning to laugh. ‘How extraordinary that you should know him. But perhaps you said so before. He has got jaundice. What a thing to happen when you are going to get married.’

‘How disagreeable for him. But I am not altogether surprised. He always makes a great fuss about his health. I think he has had jaundice before.’

‘You know him well then?’

‘Fairly well — though I don’t often see him.’

‘He is rather amusing, isn’t he?’ said Molly. ‘Quite a wit in his way. But he must look awful now that he is bright yellow.’

I agreed that the disease would give Widmerpool an unattractive appearance. It seemed to me extraordinary that she should have thought him ‘amusing’. I sometimes found his company enjoyable, because we had experienced much in common; but I could never remember him making an entertaining remark. I wondered what he could have said to cause that judgment: learning in due course that she was quite reckless in the characteristics she attributed to individuals. A chance remark would have the effect of swaying her entirely in favour of one person, or of arousing the bitterest opposition to another. She was very critical of many of the people who came to see her, and hoarded an accumulation of largely unfounded inferences about their character. These inaccuracies seemed to cancel each other out in some manner, so that in the last resort Molly was no worse informed, indeed in point of acuteness often better placed, than what might be regarded as ‘the average’.

‘Do you think he is in love with Mildred?’ she asked sharply.

‘I really don’t know. I suppose so. If he wants to marry her.’

I was not at all prepared for the question.

‘Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all,’ she said. ‘I feel rather sorry for him in some ways. Mildred is not an easy person. I’ve known her such a long time. She isn’t a bit easy. But now you simply must come up to my bedroom and see the monkey. I bought him today from a man in Soho, where I went to get some pimentos.’

A good deal of the life of the Jeavons’ household was, in fact, lived in Molly’s bedroom, either because a sick animal was established there (with the budgerigars, four principal dogs and at least as many cats inhabited the house), or simply because Molly herself had risen late, or retired early to rest, in either case holding a kind of reception from her bed, a Victorian fourposter that took up most of the room. On a chest of drawers beside the bed stood a photograph of Jeavons in uniform: breeches: puttees: at the back of his head a floppy service cap of the kind stigmatised by Mrs. Haycock in her youth as a ‘gorblimey’. He held a knotted bamboo swagger cane under one arm, and, wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the M.C. (awarded after the action in which he had been so seriously wounded), he looked the complete subaltern of war-time musical comedy.

‘Come along, all of you,’ said Molly. ‘You must all see the monkey. You too, Tuffy. You simply must see him.’

I had already recognised the tall, dark, beaky-nosed woman to whom she spoke as Miss Weedon, former secretary of my old friend Charles Stringham’s mother, Mrs. Foxe. Miss Weedon, now in her late forties, had been his sister Flavia’s governess. After Flavia grew up, she had stayed on to help with Mrs. Foxe’s social engagements and charities. I had been waiting an opportunity to have a word with her. I reintroduced myself as we climbed the stairs with the other people who wished — or were being compelled — to visit the monkey. Miss Weedon, wholly unchanged, still sombrely dressed, gave me a keen look.

‘But of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Charles brought you to luncheon in the London house before he went to Kenya to stay with his father. They had forgotten to get a ticket for Charles in a theatre party that had been made up — the Russian Ballet, I think. I was put to all kind of trouble to produce the extra ticket. However, I got it for him in the end.’

I, too, remembered the incident; and also the look of adoration Miss Weedon had given Stringham when she entered the room. I well recalled that passionate glance, although even then — that night at the Jeavonses’—I had not yet guessed the depths of her devotion. I wondered what she did with herself now. Stringham, when last we had seen something of each other, had told me: ‘Tuffy has come into a little money,’ and that she was no longer his mother’s secretary. I found in due course that Miss Weedon was a close friend of Molly’s; in fact that she re-enacted at the Jeavonses’ many of her former duties when in the employment of Mrs. Foxe, although, of course, in a household organised on very different terms. It was impossible to know from her manner how unexpected, or the reverse, she found the fact that we had met again at this place. In her profound, though mysterious, dimness, she was typical of the background of Jeavons gatherings.

‘I always regret that Charles ever made that journey to Kenya.’ she said.

She spoke severely, as if I had myself been in part to blame for allowing such a thing ever to have taken place; even though at the same time she freely forgave me for such former thoughtlessness.

‘Why?’

‘He was never the same afterwards.’

I had to admit to myself there was some truth in that. Stringham had never been the same after Kenya. It had been a water-shed in his life.

‘Perhaps it was just because he became a man,’ she said. ‘Of course, his upbringing was impossible — always, from the beginning. But he changed so much after that trip to Africa. He was a boy when he went — and such a charming boy — and he really came back a man.’

‘People do grow up. At least some do.’

‘I am afraid Charles was not one of them,’ she said gravely. ‘He became a man, but he did not grow up. He is not grown up now.’

I hardly knew what to answer. It was one of those headfirst dives into generalisation that usually precedes between two persons a greater conversational intimacy. However, Miss Weedon made no attempt to expand her statement; nor, so to speak, to draw closer in her approach to the problem of Stringham. She merely continued to look at me with a kind of chilly amiability; as if, by making an immediate confession that I was a former friend of his, I had, so far as she was concerned, just managed to save my bacon. When a boy, I had regarded her as decidedly formidable. I still found her a trifle alarming. She gave an impression of complete singleness of purpose: the impression of a person who could make herself very disagreeable if thwarted.

‘Do you ever see Charles now?’ I asked.

She did not answer at once, as if waiting a second or two in order to make up her mind how best to deal with that question; perhaps trying to decide the relative merits of plain statement and diplomatic evasion. Finally she came down on the side of bluntness.

‘Yes, I do see him,’ she said. ‘Quite often. You probably know he drinks too much — really much too much. I am trying to help him about that.’

She stared at me very composedly. Once more I hardly knew how to reply. I had not expected our conversation to take this unreservedly serious turn; especially as we had by then reached the bedroom, and were only delayed in our introduction to the ape by the concourse of people who surrounded him, offering homage and applauding Molly’s particularisation of his many charms of character.

‘Charles had certainly had rather too much the last time I saw him,’ I said, trying to pass off the matter of Stringham’s drunkenness as if it were just a question of getting rather tight once in a way, which I knew to be far from the truth. ‘That was at a dinner he and I went to — two or three years ago at least.’

‘You have not seen him since then?’

‘No.’

‘It still goes on. But I think I shall be able to help him.’

I had no clear idea of how she would set about ‘helping’ Stringham, but the way she spoke made me conscious of her undoubted strength of will. In fact, her voice chilled my blood a little, she sounded so firm. However, at that moment we found ourselves confronted by the monkey — named by his owners ‘Maisky’, after the then Soviet Ambassador — and were introduced by Molly to shake hands with him. He was sitting thoughtfully among the cushions of a spacious basket, from time to time extending a small, dry paw in greeting to Molly’s guests as they came into his immediate presence. A saucer of nuts, stood beside him. There was something of Quiggin in his seriousness and self-absorbtion: also in the watchful manner in which he glanced from time to time at the nuts, sometimes choosing one specially tempting to crack.

‘Have you known Lady Molly long?’ asked Miss Weedon, after we had taken leave of Maisky, and were returning down the stairs.

‘Only a short time.’

‘I thought I had never seen you here before.’

‘I was brought by Chips Lovell.’

‘Oh, yes. One of her nephews. Rather a pushing young man. She was very good to him when he was a boy and his parents did not take much trouble about him. She is a very kind-hearted woman. Quite exceptionally kind-hearted. The house is always full of people she is doing good turns to. Children stay here while their parents are fixing up a divorce. Penniless young men get asked to meals. Former servants are always being given help of one sort or another. There is an old cousin of her husband’s ill in one of the upper bedrooms now. She has nowhere else to go, and will certainly never leave the house alive. I really cannot think how Lady Molly stands some of the people who come here. Many are quite dreadful.’

‘They certainly seem a mixed bag.’

‘They are worse than that, some of them.’

‘Really?’

‘At the same time, you may find yourself talking to someone like Charles’s former father-in-law, Lord Bridgnorth — whom Charles detests and thinks the most conceited, pompous man in the world — who eats out of Lady Molly’s hand. He even takes her advice about his horses. Lady Plynlimmon was here at tea the other day. She really seemed quite interested in what Mr. Jeavons was saying about Germany, although usually she won’t speak to anyone who is not in the Cabinet. Not long ago Lord Amesbury looked in on his way to a court ball, wearing knee breeches and the Garter. Lady Molly was giving the vet a meal she had cooked herself, because everyone else was out for one reason or another and she had made him come in from miles away in the suburbs to see a cat that had fever. I happened to drop in, and found all three of them eating scrambled eggs together.’

By that time we had once more reached the drawing-room. Miss Weedon ceased to enlarge upon these occasional — indeed, very occasional — glories of the Jeavons’ salon; which were, as it happened, in marked contrast to the company gathered together that evening. I asked if she knew Mrs. Haycock.

‘Certainly I do,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘Do you remember a boy called Widmerpool who was at school with Charles and yourself? I think you were all in the same house together, were you not? Charles used to give imitations of him. I am sure you must remember. Well, Mrs. Haycock is going to marry Mr. Widmerpool.’

She nodded her head sharply, to emphasise what she had said. I was amazed that she should be familiar with Stringham’s mimicry of Widmerpool. I could have found it within the bounds of possibility that she had heard of Widmerpool, but that Stringham should have shared with her such jokes as his brilliant, though essentially esoteric, Widmerpool imitations, I should never have guessed. This new light on Stringham’s relationship with Miss Weedon suggested quite a different sort of intimacy to any I had previously surmised. I told her that I already knew of Widmerpool’s engagement. That had been my reason for enquiry. Miss Weedon smiled her thin freezing smile.

‘I think Mildred Haycock was quite glad to find someone to marry,’ she said. ‘Especially a man with such a good future in front of him. Of course he is a bit young for her. All the same, it is easier for a woman like Mrs. Haycock — who has two children, both quite old now — to be married. Then, also, although she is not badly off, she is very extravagant. Everyone says so.’

‘She has been living in the South of France?’

‘Where she made herself rather notorious, I believe.’

‘Meanwhile, her fiancé is suffering from jaundice.’

‘Indeed,’ said Miss Weedon, smiling thinly again. ‘I expect she will find someone to console her. Commander Foxe, for example.’

‘Buster? How is he?’

‘He might begin to take her out again. He retired from the Navy some years ago. He has got rather fat. It worries him terribly. He does all kinds of things for it. Every sort of diet. Cures at Tring. It is really his sole interest now.’

‘And you thought Mrs. Haycock might take his mind off the weighing machine?’

Miss Weedon’s mouth stiffened. I saw I had gone too far. She probably regretted her own indiscretion about Buster’s past with Mrs. Haycock. I had not thought of Buster Foxe for years. Stringham had never cared for him. It sounded from Miss Weedon’s tone as if Buster had been reduced — like Jeavons — to a purely subordinate position. There was a certain parallel in their situations. I wondered if they had ever met.

‘And how is Mrs. Foxe herself?’

‘Very well, I understand. As social as ever.’

‘What does Charles do about money now?’

‘Money is rather a difficulty,’ said Miss Weedon, abandoning her air of cold malice, and now speaking as if we had returned to serious matters. ‘His father, with that French wife of his in Kenya, has not much to spare. Mrs. Foxe has the Warrington money, but it is only for her lifetime. She spends it like water.’

At that moment Jeavons himself approached us, putting an end to any explanation Miss Weedon was about to offer on the subject of Stringham’s financial resources.

‘What do you make of Maisky?’ asked Jeavons.

He spoke in a preoccupied, confidential tone, as if Miss Weedon’s reply might make all the difference by its orientation to plans on foot for Maisky’s education.

‘I don’t care for monkeys,’ said Miss Weedon.

‘Oh, don’t you?’ said Jeavons.

He stood pondering this flat, forthright declaration of anti-simianism on Miss Weedon’s part. The notion that some people might not like monkeys was evidently entirely new to him; surprising, perhaps a trifle displeasing, but at the same time one of those general ideas of which one can easily grasp the main import without being necessarily in agreement. It was a theory that startled by its stark simplicity.

‘Molly has taken a great fancy to him,’ he said, at last.

‘I know.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Jeavons. ‘These fancies come and go.’

Miss Weedon made no attempt to deny the truth of that observation. Nor did she elaborate her dislike of monkeys. She continued to smile her arctic smile. Jeavons slowly strolled off again, as if to think out the implications of what Miss Weedon had said. I was aware once more of my strong disagreement with those — amongst whom I suspected Miss Weedon might be numbered — who found Jeavons without interest. On the contrary, he seemed to me, in his own way, rather a remarkable person. An encounter with him away from his own home confirmed that there existed more sides to him than might be apparent in the Jeavons drawing-room.

This episode took place a month or two later, on an evening that had begun with having a drink with Feingold in the pub near the Studio. Feingold had plans to write a satirical novel about life in the film business. He wanted to tell me the plot in the hope that I might be able to suggest a suitable ending to the story. Returning to London later than usual as a result of Feingold’s unwillingness to treat the subject in hand briefly (he himself lived in the neighbourhood of the Studio), I decided to dine off a sandwich and a glass of beer at some bar. The pubs in the neighbourhood of my own flat had not much to offer, so, quite fortuitously, I entered an establishment off the south side of Oxford Street, where an illuminated sign indicated an underground buffet. It was the kind of place my old, deceased friend, Mr. Deacon, used to call a ‘gin palace’.

At the foot of the stairs was a large, low-ceilinged room filled with shiny black-topped tables and red wicker armchairs. The bar, built in the shape of an L, took up most of two sides of this saloon, of which the pillars and marbled wall decoration again recalled Mr. Deacon’s name by their resemblance to the background characteristic of his pictures: Pupils of Socrates, for example, or By the Will of Diocletian. No doubt this bar had been designed by someone who had also brooded long and fruitlessly on classical themes, determined to express in whatever medium available some boyhood memory of Quo Vadis? or The Last Days of Pompeii. The place was deserted except for the barman, and a person in a mackintosh who sat dejectedly before an empty pint tankard in the far corner of the room. In these oppressively Late Roman surroundings, after climbing on to a high stool at the counter, I ordered food.

I had nearly finished eating, when I became obscurely aware that the man in the corner had risen and was making preparations to leave. He walked across the room, but instead of mounting the stairs leading to the street, he came towards the bar where I was sitting. I heard him pause behind me. I thought that, unable at the last moment to tear himself away from the place, he was going to buy himself another drink. Instead, I suddenly felt his hand upon my shoulder.

‘Didn’t recognise you at first. I was just on my way out. Come and have one with me in the corner after you’ve finished your tuck-in.’

It was Jeavons. As a rule he retained even in his civilian clothes a faded military air, comparable with — though quite different from — that of Uncle Giles: both of them in strong contrast with the obsolete splendours of General Conyers. A safety pin used to couple together the points of Jeavons’s soft collar under the knot of what might be presumed to be the stripes of a regimental tie. That night, however, in a somewhat Tyrolese hat with the brim turned down all the way round, wearing a woollen scarf and a belted mackintosh, the ensemble gave him for some reason the appearance of a plain-clothes man. His face was paler than usual. Although perfectly steady on his feet, and speaking in his usual slow, deliberate drawl, I had the impression he had been drinking fairly heavily. We ordered some more beer, and carried it across the room to where he had been sitting.

‘This your local?’ he asked.

‘Never been here before in my life. I dropped in quite by chance.’

‘Same here.’

‘It’s a long way from your beat.’

‘I’ve been doing a pub crawl,’ he said. ‘Feel I have to have one — once in a way. Does you good.’

There could be no doubt, after that, that Jeavons was practising one of those interludes of dissipation to which Lovell had referred, during which he purged himself, as it were, of too much domesticity.

‘Think there is going to be a war?’ he asked, very unexpectedly.

‘Not specially. I suppose there might be — in a year or two.’

‘What do you think we ought to do about it?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘Shall I tell you?’

‘Please do.’

‘Declare war on Germany right away,’ said Jeavons. ‘Knock this blighter Hitler out before he gives further trouble.’

‘Can we very well do that?’

‘Why not?’

‘No government would dream of taking it on. The country wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘Of course they wouldn’t,’ said Jeavons.

‘Well?’

‘Well, we’ll just have to wait,’ said Jeavons.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Wait and see,’ said Jeavons. ‘That was what Mr. Asquith used to say. Didn’t do us much good in 1914. I expect you were too young to have been in the last show?’

I thought that enquiry rather unnecessary, not by then aware that, as one grows older, the physical appearance of those younger than oneself offers only a vague indication of their precise age. To me, ‘the Armistice’ was a distant memory of my preparatory school: to Jeavons, the order to ‘cease fire’ had happened only the other day. The possibility that I might have been ‘in the war’ seemed perfectly conceivable to him.

‘Some of it wasn’t so bad,’ he said.

‘No?’

‘Most of it perfect hell, of course. Absolute bloody hell on earth. Bloody awful. Gives me the willies even to think of it sometimes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Joined up at Thirsk. Started off in the Green Howards. Got a commission after a bit in one of the newly-formed battalions of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. I’d exchanged from the Duke’s into the Machine-Gun Corps when I caught it in the tummy at Le Bassée.’

‘Pretty unpleasant?’

‘Not too good. Couldn’t digest anything for ages. Can’t always now, to tell the truth. Some of those dinners Molly gives. Still, digestion is a funny thing. I once knew a chap who took a bet he could eat a cut-off-the-joint-and-two-veg at a dozen different pubs between twelve o’clock and three on the same day.’

‘Did he win his bet?’

‘The first time,’ said Jeavons, screwing up his face painfully at the thought of his friend’s ordeal, ‘someone else at the table lit a cigarette, and he was sick — I think he had got to about eight or nine by then. We all agreed he ought to have another chance. A day or two later he brought it off. Funny what people can do.’

Conversation could be carried no further because at this point ‘closing time’ was announced. Jeavons, rather to my surprise, made no effort to prolong our stay until the last possible moment. On the contrary, the barman had scarcely announced ‘Time, gendemen, please,’ when Jeavons made for the stairs. I followed him. He seemed to have a course for himself clearly mapped out. When we reached the street, he turned once more to me.

‘Going home?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Wouldn’t like to prolong this night of giddy pleasure with me for a bit?’

‘If you have any ideas.’

‘There is a place I thought of visiting tonight. A club of some sort — or a ‘bottie party’ as they seem to call it these days — that has just opened. Care to come?’

‘All right.’

‘A fellow came to see Molly some weeks ago, and gave us a card to get in any time we wanted. You know, you buy a bottle and all that. Makes you a member. Chap used to know Molly years ago. Gone the pace a bit. Now he is rather hard up and managing this hide-out.’

‘I see.’

‘Ever heard of Dicky Umfraville?’

‘Yes. In fact I met him once years ago.’

‘That’s all right then. Umfraville is running the place. Molly would never dream of going near it, of course. Thought I might go and have a look-see myself.’

‘Is Dicky Umfraville still married to Anne Stepney?’

‘Don’t think he is married to anyone at the moment,’ said Jeavons. ‘That would make his third or fourth, wouldn’t it?’

‘His fourth. She was quite young.’

‘Come to think of it, Molly did say he’d had another divorce fairly recently,’ said Jeavons. ‘Anyway, he is more than usually on the rocks at the moment. He used to stay at Dogdene when Molly’s first husband was alive. Gilded youth in those days. Not much left now. First-class rider, of course, Umfraville. Second in the National one year.’

While we talked, Jeavons had been making his way in a south-easterly direction. We continued in silence for some time, threading a path through a tangle of mean streets, past the plate-glass windows of restaurants opaque with steam.

‘I think we must be close now,’ said Jeavons, at last. ‘I know more or less where the place is, and Dicky has drawn a sort of map at the back of the card.’

By that time we were in the neighbourhood of the Trouville Restaurant, a haunt of Uncle Giles, where one night, years before, I had joined him for a meal. The entrance to the club was concealed in an alleyway, by no means easy to find. We discovered the door at last. The name of the place was inscribed upon it on a minute brass plate, as if any kind of display was to be avoided. At the end of a narrow, dimly-lit passage a villainous-looking fellow with watery eyes and a nose covered with blue veins sat behind a rickety table. On the mention of Umfraville’s name and production of the card, this Dickensian personage agreed that we might enter the precincts, after he had with his own hand laboriously inscribed our names in a book.

‘The Captain’s not in the club yet,’ he said, as he shut this volume, giving at the same time a dreadful leer like that of a very bad actor attempting to horrify a pantomime audience. ‘But I don’t expect he’ll be long now.’

‘Tell him to report to the Orderly Room when he comes,’ said Jeavons, causing the blue-nosed guardian of the door to reveal a few rotting teeth in appreciation of this military pleasantry.

The interior of the club was unimpressive. An orchestra of three, piano, drum and saxophone, were making a deafening noise in the corner of the room. A few ‘hostesses’ sat about in couples, gossiping angrily in undertones, or silently reclining in listless attitudes against the back of a chair. We seemed to be the first arrivals, not surprisingly, for it was still early in the evening for a place of this kind to show any sign of life. After a certain amount of palaver, a waiter brought us something to drink. Nothing about the club suggested that Umfraville’s fortune would be made by managing it.

‘Anyway, as I was saying,’ remarked Jeavons, who had, in fact, scarcely spoken for some considerable time, except for his negotiations with the doorkeeper and waiter. ‘As I was saying, you did have the odd spot of fun once in a while. Mostly on leave, of course. That stands to reason. Now I’ll tell you a funny story, if you’ll promise to keep it under your hat.’

‘Wild horses won’t drag it from me.’

‘I suppose it’s a story a real gent wouldn’t tell,’ said Jeavons. ‘But then I’m not a real gent.’

‘You are whetting my appetite.’

‘I don’t know why I should fix on you to hear the story,’ said Jeavons, speaking as if he had given much thought to the question of who should be his confidant in this particular matter, and at the same time taking a packet of Gold Flake from his trouser pocket and beginning to tear open the wrapping. ‘But I’ve got an idea it might amuse you. Did I see you talking to a fellow called Widmerpool at our house some little while ago — I believe it was the first night you ever came there?’

‘You did.’

I was interested to find that new arrivals at the Jeavonses’ were so accurately registered in the mind of the host.

‘Know him well?’

‘Quite well.’

‘Then I expect you know he is going to marry someone called Mildred Haycock, who was also there that night.’

‘I do.’

‘Know her too?’

‘Not really. I met her once when I was a small boy.’

‘Exactly. You were a small boy and she was already grown up. In other words, she is quite a bit older than Widmerpool.’

‘I know. She was a nurse at Dogdene when your wife was there, wasn’t she—?’

‘Wait a moment — wait a moment;’ said Jeavons. ‘Not so fast. Don’t rush ahead. That’s all part of the story.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Well, as I was saying, you did occasionally have a spot of fun in those days. Especially on leave. That’s the point. No good going too fast. Had to dodge the A.P.M., of course. Still, that’s by the way. Now I happened to get ninety-six hours’ leave at short notice when I hadn’t time to make any arrangements. Found the easiest thing was to spend the time in London. Didn’t know a soul there. Not a bloody cat. Well, after I’d had a bit of a lie-up in bed, I thought I’d go to a show. The M.O. had told me to look in on Daly’s, if I got the chance. It was a jolly good piece of advice. The Maid of the Mountains. Top-hole show. José Collins. She married into the aristocracy like myself, but that’s nothing to do with the story. I bought myself a stall, thinking I might catch a packet in the next ‘strafe’ and never sit in a theatre again. Hadn’t been there long before a large party came in and occupied the row in front of me. There were a couple of guardsmen in their grey greatcoats and some ladies in evening dress. Among this lot was a nurse — a V.A.D. — who, as I thought — and it subsequentiy proved correct — began to give me the glad eye.’

Jeavons paused to gulp his drink. He shook his head and sighed. There was a long silence. I feared this might be the termination of the story: a mere chronicle of nostalgic memory: a face seen on that one occasion, yet always remembered: a romantic dream that had remained with him all his life. I spurred him gently.

‘What did you do about it?’

‘About what?’

‘The nurse who gave you the glad eye.’

‘Oh yes, that. In the interval we managed to have a word together in the bar or somewhere. Next thing I knew, I was spending my leave with her.’

‘And this was—’

‘Mrs. Haycock — or, as she then was, the Honourable Mildred Blaides.’

Jeavons’s expression was so oracular, his tone so solemn, when he pronounced the name with the formal prefix attached, that I laughed. However, he himself remained totally serious in his demeanour. He sat there looking straight at me, as if the profound moral beauty of his own story delighted him rather than any purely anecdotal quality, romantic or banal, according to how you took it.

‘And you never saw her again from that time until the other night?’

‘Never set eyes on her. Of course, I’ve often heard Molly speak of Mildred Blaides and her goings-on, but I never knew it was the same girl. She and Molly used to meet sometimes. It so happened, for one reason or another, I was never there.’

‘Did she say anything about it the other night?’

‘Not a word. Didn’t recognise me. After all, I suppose I’ve got to take my place in what must be a pretty long list by now.’

‘You didn’t say anything yourself?’

‘Didn’t want to seem to presume on a war-time commission, so I kept mum. Besides, it’s just as well Molly shouldn’t know. If you gas about that sort of thing too much, the story is bound to get round. Silly of me to tell you, I expect. You’ll keep your trap shut, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘Just thought it might interest you — especially as you know Widmerpool.’

‘It does — enormously.’

‘That’s the sort of thing that happens in a war. Happens to some chaps in peace-time too, I suppose. Not chaps like me. Haven’t the temperament. Things have changed a lot now anyway. I don’t mean people don’t sleep with each other any longer. Of course they do. More than ever, if what everyone says nowadays is true. But the whole point of view is different somehow. I expect you were too young to have seen The Bing Boys?’

‘No, I wasn’t too young. I saw the show as a schoolboy.’

The band had momentarily ceased its hubbub. Jeavons leant forward. I thought he had something further to say which he wished to run no danger of being overheard. Instead, he suddenly began to sing, quite loud and in an unexpectedly deep and attractive voice:

‘I could say such — wonderful things to you,

There would be such — wonderful things to do.

Taking this, perhaps not unnaturally, as a kind of summons, two of the girls at a neighbouring table rose and prepared to join us, a tall, muscular blonde, not altogether unlike Mona, and a small, plump brunette, who reminded me of a girl I used to know called Rosie Manasch. (Peter Templer liked to say that you could recognise all the girls you had ever met in a chorus: like picking out your friends from a flock of sheep.) Jeavons immediately checked this threatened incursion before it could take serious form by explaining that we were waiting for the ‘rest of the party’. The girls withdrew. Jeavons condnued the song as if there had been no interruption:

‘If you were the only — girl in the world,

And I was the only boy …’

He had only just time to finish before the band broke out again in a deafening volume of sound, playing some tune of very different tempo from that sung by Jeavons.

‘People don’t think the same way any longer,’ he bawled across the table. ‘The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always feel rather sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our — what do you call ’em — you know — somebody used the word in our house the other night — saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know — when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?’

‘Illusions?’

‘Illusions! That’s the one. We’ve lost all our bloody illusions. Put ’em all in the League of Nations, or somewhere like that. Illusions, my God. I had a few of ’em when I started. You wouldn’t believe it. Of course, I’ve been lucky. Lucky isn’t the word, as a matter of fact. Still people always talk as if marriage was one long roll in the hay. You can take it from me, my boy. it isn’t. You’ll be surprised when you get tied up to a woman yourself. Suppose I shouldn’t say such things. Molly and I are very fond of each other in our own way. Between you and me, she’s not a great one for bed. A chap I knew in the Ordnance, who’d carried on quite a bit with the girls, told me those noisy ones seldom are. Don’t do much in that line myself nowadays, to tell the truth. Feel too cooked most of the time. Never sure the army vets got quite all those separate pieces of a toffee-apple out of my ribs. Tickles a bit sometimes. Sull, you have to step out once in a way. Go melancholy mad otherwise. Life’s a rum business, however you look at it, and — as I was saying — not having been born to all this high life, and so on, I can’t exactly complain.’

It was clear to me now that, if Molly had had her day, so too in a sense had Jeavons, even though Jeavons’s day had not been at all the same as his wife’s: few days, indeed, could have been more different. He was one of those men, themselves not particularly aggressive in their relations with the opposite sex, who are at the same time peculiarly attractive to some women; and, accordingly, liable to be appropriated at short notice. The episode of Mildred Blaides illustrated this state of affairs, which was borne out by the story of his marriage. It was unlikely that these were the only two women in the course of his life who had decided to take charge of him. I was hoping for further reminiscences (though expecting none more extraordinary than that already retailed) when Dicky Umfraville himself arrived at our table.

Wearing a dinner jacket, Umfraville was otherwise unchanged from the night we had met at Foppa’s. Trim, horsey, perfecdy at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be within his immediate vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle with two contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents: the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always to be felt warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on the stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song.

‘Why,’ he said, ‘this is a surprise. I never thought we should persuade you to come along here, Ted. Why didn’t you bring Molly with you? Are they treating you all right? I see they’ve brought you a bottle. Apply to me if there is any trouble. Would you like to meet any of the girls? They are not a bad crowd. I can’t imagine that you want anything of the sort.’

Jeavons did not answer. He barely acknowledged Umfraville’s greeting. Once more he was lost in thought. He had undoubtedly had a fair amount to drink. Umfraville was not at all put out by this reception. He pulled a chair up to the table and glanced across at me.

‘We’ve met before somewhere,’ he said.

‘At Foppa’s two or three years ago. You had just come back from Kenya. Hadn’t you been racing with Foppa?’

‘My God,’ said Umfraville, ‘I should think I do remember. Foppa and I had been to Caversham together. We are both interested in trotting races, which many people aren’t in this country. You came in with a very charming young woman, while Foppa and I were playing piquet. Then your friend Barnby appeared with Lady Anne Stepney — and before you could say Jack Robinson, the next thing I knew was that the Lady Anne had become my fourth wife.’

I laughed, wondering what he was going to say next. I knew that his marriage to Anne Stepney had lasted only a very short time.

‘I expect you heard that Anne and I didn’t manage to hit it off,’ he went on. ‘Charming child, but the fact was I was too old for her. She didn’t like grown-up life — and who shall blame her?’

He sighed.

‘I don’t like it much myself,’ he said.

‘Where is she now?’

I hardly knew whether the question was admissible. However, Umfraville had apparently achieved complete objectivity regarding his own life: certainly his matrimonial life.

‘Living in Paris,’ he said. ‘Doing some painting, you know. She was always tremendously keen on her painting. I fell rather short on that score too. Can’t tell a Sargent from a “Snaffles”. She shares a flat with a girl who also walked out on her husband the other day. Come on, Ted, you mustn’t go to sleep. I agree this place is pretty boring, but I can’t have it turned into a doss-house. Not for the first week or so, anyway.’

Jeavons came too with a jerk. He began to beat time thoughtfully on the table.

‘How are you doing here?’ he asked.

He spoke severely, as if he had come to audit the accounts. Umfraville shrugged’his shoulders.

‘Depends how people rally round,’ he said. ‘I don’t picture myself staying at this job long. Just enough to cover my most urgent needs — or rather my creditors’ most urgent needs. These joints have a brief vogue, if they’re lucky. We haven’t been open long enough yet to see how things are going. I lock upon your arrival, Ted, as a very good omen. Well, I suppose I must see everything about the place is going all right. Ought to have turned up earlier and done that already. I’ll look in again. By the way, Max Pilgrim and Heather Hopkins are coming in later to do a turn.’

He nodded to us, and moved away. People were now arriving in the club by twos and threes. The tables round us began to fill up. The girls lost some of their apathy. These newcomers offered little or no clue to the style of the place. They belonged to that anonymous, indistinct race of nightclub frequenters, as undifferentiated and lacking in individuality as the congregation at a funeral. None of them was in evening dress.

‘Rum bird, Umfraville,’ said Jeavons, thickly. ‘Don’t like him much. Knows everybody. Wasn’t a bit surprised when it turned out you’d met him before. Molly used to see quite a lot of him in the old days when he was a johnny about town.’

‘He married a girl much younger than himself as his fourth wife. They parted company, I hear.’

‘I know. The Bridgnorths’ second daughter,’ said Jeavons. ‘She has been to the house. Badly brought up. Been taken down a peg or two, I hope. Bad luck on Eddie Bridgnorth to have a girl like that. Done nothing to deserve it.’

Earlier in the evening, Jeavons had expressed only the vaguest knowledge of Umfraville’s last marriage. Now, he seemed familiar with all its essential aspects. His awareness seemed quite unpredictable from one moment to another. The compassionate tone in which he had named Lord Bridgnorth clearly voiced regret for a member of a caste rather than an individual, revealing for a split second a side of Jeavons on the whole concealed, though far more developed than might be supposed on brief acquaintance; the side, that is to say, which had by then entirely assimilated his wife’s social standpoint. Indeed, the words might have been uttered by Alfred Tolland, so conventional, yet at the same time so unaffected, was the reflection that Eddie Bridgnorth had done nothing to deserve a rackety daughter.

‘I think I’ll make a further inspection of these quarters,’ said Jeavons, rising. ‘Just as well to know your way about.’

He made at first towards the band, but a waiter redirected bim, and he disappeared through a small door. He was away a long time, during which two fresh elements were added to the composition of the room.

The first of these new components, a man and a woman, turned out to be Max Pilgrim and Heather Hopkins. They entered with the animation of professionals, almost as if their act had already begun, at once greeted by Umfraville who led them to a table near the band. I had never met Pilgrim, although I had more than once watched his performances at restaurants or cabarets, since that night, years before, when he had quarrelled so bitterly with poor Mr. Deacon at Mrs. Andriadis’s party. Tall and stooping, smiling through large spectacles, there was something mild and parsonic about his manner, as if he were apologising for having to draw peoples’ attention to their sins in so blatant a manner. He wore tails. Hopkins had cleaned herself up greatly since her application for the loan of an egg from Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Her black coat and skirt, cut like a dinner jacket, had silk lapels above a stiff shirt, butterfly collar and black bow tie. Her silk stockings were black, too, and she wore a bracelet round her left ankle.

This couple had scarccly appeared when another, far less expected party came in, and were shown to a table evidently reserved for them. Mrs. Haycock led the way, followed by my old friend, Peter Templer; then Widmerpool, walking beside an unusually good-looking girl whose face I did not know. They were in evening dress. From the rather stiff way in which Templer carried himself, I guessed that he felt a shade self-conscious about the company he was keeping. By that time I was used to the idea that he no longer regarded Widmerpool with derision. After all, they did business together, and Widmerpool had helped Bob Duport to get a job. All the same, there remained something incongruous about finding Templer and Widmerpool embarked upon a partie carrée at a night club. Night clubs were so much to be regarded as Templer’s natural element, and so little Widmerpool’s, that there seemed even a kind of injustice that Widmerpool should in this manner be forced to operate in a field so inappropriate to himself; and, on top of that, for Templer to be covertly ashamed of his company.

In addition to his air of being — almost literally — a fish out of water, Widmerpool looked far from well. Still yellow from his jaundice, he had grown thinner. His dinner jacket hung on him in folds. His hair was ruffled. His back was bent like that of an elderly man. Perhaps it was this flagging aspect of Widmerpool’s that made Templer seem more elegant than ever. He, too, was thinner than when I had last seen him. His habitual tendency was to look just a little too well dressed, and that evening he gave the appearance of having walked straight out of his tailor’s wearing an entirely new outfit. This glossy exterior, in juxtaposition with Widmerpool, could hardly have been more sharply emphasised. The unknown pretty girl was wearing an unadventurous frock, but Mrs. Haycock was dressed to kill. Enclosed within a bright emerald-green dress with huge leg-of-mutton sleeves, she was talking with great vivacity to Templer, whose arm from time to time she took and squeezed. She looked younger than when I had last seen her.

Before any sign of recognition could take place between the members of this party and myself, the band withdrew from their position at the end of the room, and settled down at one of the tables. A moment later Pilgrim and Hopkins mounted the dais, Hopkins appropriating the pianist’s stool, while Pilgrim lounged against the drum. He glanced at his nails, like a nervous don about to lecture a rowdy audience of undergraduates. Hopkins struck a few bars on the piano with brutal violence. By that time Jeavons had returned.

‘Found it all right,’ he said.

‘Have you seen who has arrived?’

‘Saw them on my way back. You know Mrs. H. doesn’t look a bit different from what she looked like in 1917.’

This comment on Mrs. Haycock seemed to me an extraordinary proposition: either crudely untrue, or most uncomplimentary to her earlier appearance. In due course one learns, where individuals and emotions are concerned, that Time’s slide-rule can make unlikely adjustments. Angular and flamboyant, Mrs. Haycock was certainly not without powers of attraction, but I doubted whether Jeavons saw in those severe terms. It was impossible to say. That side of her may, indeed, have constituted her charm for him both at that moment and in 1917. On the other hand, both then and in Umfraville’s night club, she may have been equally no more than a romantic dream, a figure transcending any mere question of personal appearance. At that moment Pilgrim advanced a little way in front of the drum, and, in a shrill, hesitant voice, like that of an elderly governess, began to sing:

‘Di, Di, in her collar and tie,

Quizzes the girls with a monocled eye,

Sipping her hock in a black satin stock,

Or shooting her cuffs over pernod or bock …’

‘I’ve a damn good mind to ask her for a dance,’ said Jeavons. ‘Who are they with? Do you know them?’

‘The man is called Peter Templer. I’ve known him for years.’

‘And the other girl?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who is Templer?’

‘A stockbroker. He was divorced not so long ago from a very pretty model, who then married a writer called Quiggin. Templer is like your friend in the Ordnance, a great one with the girls.’

‘Looks it,’ said Jeavons.

When Pilgrim and Hopkins had left their table, Umfraville had moved to the party of which Templer seemed to be host. He was talking to Mrs. Haycock. Templer began to gaze round the room. He caught sight of me and waved. I signalled back to him. Meanwhile, Pilgrim was continuing his song, while Hopkins thumped away vigorously, with a great deal of facility, at the piano.

‘Like a torpedo, in brogues or tuxedo,

She’s tearing around at Cap Cod, or the Lido;

From Bournemouth to Biarritz, the fashion parades

Welcome debonaire Di in her chic tailor-mades …’

‘You see this sort of song, for instance,’ said Jeavons. ‘Who the hell wants to listen to something like that? God knows what it is all about, for one thing. Songs were quite different when I was younger.’

The song came to an end and there was a little clapping.

Templer came across the dance floor to our table. I introduced him, explaining that Jeavons had brought me; and also that Jeavons knew Widmerpool and Mrs. Haycock. I told him that at once, to forestall comments that might easily be embarrassing in the mood to which Jeavons had abandoned himself.

‘So you already know that Widmerpool is getting married?’ said Templer. ‘I was hoping to break the news to you. I am disappointed.’

For someone in general so sure of himself, he was a shade self-conscious at being caught entertaining Widmerpool in a haunt of this kind: hardly a routine place to take a business acquaintance. He had probably hoped that the news of Widmerpool’s engagement, by its broad humour, would distract attention from his own immediate circumstances.

‘The old boy behaved rather well about my brother-in-law, Bob,’ he said, rather hurriedly. ‘And then Dicky kept on pestering me to come to this dive of his. Do you know Dicky?’

‘Just met him once before.’

‘And then the girl I’m with loves to be taken to places she thinks “amusing”. It seemed a chance of killing several birds with the same stone.’

‘Who is your girl?’

‘She is called Betty. I can never remember her married name. Taylor, is it? Porter? Something like that. We met at a dreadful bridge party the other day. Her husband is only interested in making money, she says. I can’t imagine what she finds amiss in that. Rather a peach, isn’t she?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Why don’t you both come over and join us?’

Templer addressed the question to me, but he turned in the direction of Jeavons as if to persuade him.

‘As you know our friend Widmerpool already,’ said Templer. ‘I need not explain what he is like. I know he’ll be glad to see both of you, even though he is a bit under the weather tonight.’

Rather to my surprise, Jeavons at once agreed to join the Templer party. I was not nearly so certain as Templer that Widmerpool would be glad to see us. Jeavons bored him; while Templer and I were such old friends that he might suspect some sort of alliance against himself. He was easily disturbed by such apprehensions.

‘What is wrong with Widmerpool?’

‘Feeling low generally,’ said Templer. ‘Mildred had to drag him out tonight. But never mind that. It is extraordinary those two should be engaged. Women may show some discrimination about whom they sleep with, but they’ll marry anybody.’

Templer was already, so it appeared, on Christian name terms with Mrs. Haycock. We moved across, bearing our bottle with us. Widmerpool, as I could have foretold, did not look too well pleased to have us at the same table, but his state of health disposed him to show this no more than by offering a rather sour greeting. Mrs. Haycock, on the other hand, was delighted by this increase in numbers. Flushed in the face, she looked as hard as nails. She could hardly be called handsome, but there was a dash about her that Widmerpool could justly feel lacking in his own life as a bachelor. It was surprising to me not merely that he should be alarmed at the prospect of becoming her husband, but that he should ever have had the courage to propose; although, at the same time, plenty of reasons for his doing so presented themselves. Probably he was prepared — for he did most things rationally — to accept, even to welcome, attributes in a wife other men might have approached with caution. At the same time, the notion that he was entirely actuated by ‘rational’ motives was also no doubt far from the truth. He was possibly not ‘in love’, but at the same time impelled by feelings, if less definable than ‘love’, no less powerful. It was perhaps his imagination which had been captured; which is, after all, something akin to love. Who can say? Mrs. Haycock turned a dazzling smile upon us.

‘I’m Molly’s husband,’ said Jeavons gruffly.

‘But, of course.’

She held out her hand, cordially, but without any suggestion that she knew him apart from her recent visit to the Jeavons house. It was certain, I had no doubt on that point, that she remembered nothing of having met him on the earlier occasion. I was curious to see how he would conduct himself. Mrs. Haycock faced me.

‘I know you are an old friend of Kenneth’s,’ she said. ‘As you can see, the poor boy is still as yellow as a guinea, isn’t he? It was over-eating that did it.’

‘But he is always so careful about his food.’

‘Of course, he fusses all the time,’ she said. ‘Or used to. That is just it. I won’t stand any nonsense of that sort. I like my food. Naturally, if you are banting, that is another matter. What I can’t stand is people who pick at carrots and patent foods and never have a drink.’

This description sounded a fairly exact definition of the meals Widmerpool enjoyed.

‘I have been making him take me to some decent restaurants — such as there are in this country — and showed him how good food can be. I suppose some of it must have disagreed with him. He is back having his own way now, dining off a sardine and a glass of Malvern water.’

Widmerpool himself smiled feebly at all this, as if making no attempt to deny the truth of the picture presented by her of his medical condition. All the time she was speaking, I could think of nothing but the story Jeavons had told me of his former adventure with her. Conversation became general, only Widmerpool continuing to sit in bleak silence. Templer’s girl had large, liquid eyes, and a drawl reminiscent of Mona’s. She was evidently very taken with Templer, gazing at him all the time, as if she could not believe her luck. I asked her what she thought of the Pilgrim-Hopkins turn.

‘Oh, they were good, weren’t they?’ she said. ‘Didn’t you think so, Peter?’

‘A frightfully old-fashioned couple,’ said Templer. ‘The only reason they are here is because their act was a flop at the Café de Madrid. Still, I’m glad you liked them, darling. It shows what a sweet nature you have. But I don’t want you to wear clothes like Miss Hopkins. You won’t do that, will you?’

She found this dissent from her own opinion delicious, darting excited, apprehensive glances at him from under her eyelashes. I saw that it was no good attempting, even conversationally, to compete. Mrs. Haycock would make easier going. I asked whether she and Widmerpool had decided where they were going to live after they were married.

‘That’s rather a big question,’ she said. ‘Kenneth’s business keeps him most of the time in London. I like the idea of making our headquarters in Paris. We could have a small flat over there quite cheaply — in some dingy neighbourhood, if necessary. But I’ve lived too long in France to want to live anywhere else now. Anyway, for most of the year. Then there are the boys. That’s another problem.’

I thought for a second that she must refer to a personal obligation she owed to some male group living probably on the Riviera, to be generically thus classified. Seeing that she had not made herself clear, she added:

‘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.’

It was quite a good test, and I came out of it with flying colours; that is to say, without any immediate desire to buy an air ticket to Rome.

‘You did know my sister, Jean, didn’t you?’ he said. “I mean I haven’t been telling you a long story about someone you’ve never met?’

‘Of course I knew her. And your other sister, too. I met her ages ago.’

‘Baby Wentworth is a cousin of mine,’ said Mrs. Haycock, suddenly breaking off an argument with Hopkins regarding the private life of the barman at the Carlton Hotel at Cannes. ‘What a pretty girl she is. When my father died, he hadn’t managed to produce a son, so Baby’s father succeeded. Her brother, Jack Vowchurch, is rather hell, I believe. I’ve never met him. They were quite distant cousins, and we never saw anything of them. Then one day at Andbes someone pointed out Baby to me. Didn’t Sir Magnus Donners have rather a fancy for her? She was with him then.’

‘Wasn’t your father the chap who rode his horse upstairs after dinner?’ asked Jeavons, wholly unexpectedly.

‘Yes, of course he was,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘His favourite hunter. That was before I was born. I think he was supposed to be celebrating something. “Peace with Honour”, would it have been? That kind of thing. I believe that was the story. We had a hunting-box at Melton Mowbray that season. They had to demolish the side wall of the house to retrieve the animal. It cost the hell of a lot of money, I know.’

Once again, when she spoke of her father, I was reminded of Mrs. Conyers, even though the phraseology of the narrative was so different from any her sister would have employed.

‘And then there was some other story,’ insisted Jeavons. ‘Setting fire to a fellow’s newspaper in a train. Something like that.’

This interest in Lord Vowchurch on the part of Jeavons I found astonishing.

‘There are absolutely hundreds, darling,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘Do you know about when he squirted mauve ink over an archbishop at a wedding?’

‘I met such a sweet archbishop at the Theatrical Garden Party last year,’ said Pilgrim. ‘Perhaps he wasn’t an archbishop, but just a bishop. He wore a hat just like one of Heather’s.’

‘I might get a clerical hat,’ said Hopkins. ‘That’s not a bad idea. There is a place off Oxford Street where they sell black boaters. I’ve always wanted one.’

I asked if she had been seeing much of Norah Tolland and Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

‘Oh, those two girls,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d met you before somewhere. No, I haven’t been seeing them. I found out Eleanor had said a very unkind thing about me. I thought she was a friend, but I see I made a mistake.’

‘Look here,’ said Jeavons, who had cast off inertia and was now in his most lively mood. ‘Do you remember how that song used to go:

“He ran a pin

In Gwendolyn,

In Lower Grosvenor Place …”

I can’t remember the exact words.’

By this time I was becoming tired of Umfraville’s night club. Like Widmerpool, I wished to go home. Jeavons’s companionship demanded an almost infinite capacity for adaptation to changed moods and circumstances. In many ways sympathetic, he lacked any of that familiar pattern of behaviour to be found, say, in Quiggin, so that in the last resort his company was exhausting rather than stimulating. Umfraville went off to attend to the club’s administration. Discussion began once mere as to whether the party should move elsewhere.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ said Mrs. Haycock. ‘If you all want to go to the Slip-in, why not leave me here with Ted. He and I will talk about old times for a bit. Then he can see me home.’

That was agreed. There was still a lot of talk. I left before the final plan was put into execution. Out in the passage, Umfraville was instructing the villainous, blue-nosed custodian as to who could, and who could not, wisely be admitted to the club.

‘Not going?’ he said. ‘It’s early yet.’

‘I’ve got to get up early tomorrow and write filmscripts.’

‘Good God,’ he said. ‘But, look here, just before you go, what’s happened to Mildred Haycock these days? I hadn’t seen her in an age. She seems to be holding up pretty well. I know Peter Templer, but who was the other chap who left the party early on?’

‘He is called Widmerpool. She is engaged to him.’

‘Is she, indeed? What does he do?’

‘A bill-broker.’

Umfraville nodded his head sagely.

‘Come again,’ he said. ‘Now that you know the way.’

I passed through empty streets, thinking that I, too, should be married soon, a change that presented itself in terms of action rather than reflection, the mood in which even the most prudent often marry: a crisis of delight and anxiety, excitement and oppression.