The Kindly Ones

4

WHEN THE SWORD OF MITHRAS — to borrow Dr Trelawney’s phrase — flashed at last from its scabbard, people supposed London would immediately become the target of bombs. However, the slayer of Osiris did not at first demand his grievous tribute of blood, and a tense, infinitely uneasy over-all stagnation imposed itself upon an equally uncomfortable, equally febrile, over-all activity. Everyone was on the move. The last place to find a friend or relation was the spot where he or she had lived or worked in peacetime. Only a few, here and there, discovered themselves already suitably situated for war conditions. Frederica Budd, for example, Isobel’s eldest sister, as a widow with children to bring up, had not long before gone to live in the country within range of their schools. Her small house stood in a village within twenty or thirty miles of Thrubworth, upon which Frederica always liked to keep an eye. Here it was arranged that Isobel should stay, if possible, until she gave birth. Without much in common except their relationship as sisters, the temperaments of Isobel and Frederica — unlike those of Frederica and Norah — were at the same time not in active conflict. Isobel’s help in running the house was as convenient to Frederica as this arrangement was acceptable to ourselves.

Thrubworth had been requisitioned as a military headquarters. In principle detesting war in all its manifestations, Erridge was reported, in practice, to enjoy the taking over of his house by the government. This unexpected attitude on his part was not, as might be thought, because of any theoretical approval of state intervention where private property was concerned, so much as on account of the legitimate grievance — indeed, series of legitimate grievances — with which the army’s investment of his mansion provided him. Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life. Since leaving school he had been deprived of all the typical grudges within the grasp of most young men. Some of these grudges, it was true, he had later developed with fair success by artificial means, grudges being, in a measure, part and parcel of his political approach. At first the outbreak of war had threatened more than one of his closest interests by making them commonplace, compulsory, even vulgarly ‘patriotic’. The army at Thrubworth, with the boundless inconvenience troops bring in their train, restored Erridge’s inner well-being. There was no major upheaval in his own daily existence. He and Blanche, in any case, inhabited only a small corner of the house, so that domestically speaking things remained largely unchanged for him on his own ground. At the same time he was no longer tempted to abandon all his high-minded activities. Provided with a sitting target, he was able to devote himself to an unremitting campaign against militarism as represented in person by the commanding officer and staff of the formation quartered on his property. A succession of skirmishes raged round the use of the billiard-table, the grand piano, the hard tennis-court, against a background of protest, often justifiable enough, about unsightly tracks made by short cuts across lawns, objects in the house broken or defaced by carelessness and vandalism. However, these hostilities could at the same time be unremitting only so far as Erridge’s own health allowed, the outbreak of war having quite genuinely transformed him from a congenital sufferer from many vague ailments into a man whose physical state bordered on that of a chronic invalid.

‘Erry helped to lose the Spanish war for his own side,’ said Norah. ‘Thank goodness he is not going to be fit enough to lose this one for the rest of us.’

Norah herself, together with her friend, Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, had already enrolled themselves as drivers in some women’s service. They could talk of nothing but the charm of their superior officer, a certain Gwen McReith. Eleanor’s father, Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson, after many years of retirement, had made a public reappearance by writing a ‘turnover’ article for The Times on German influence in the smaller South American countries. This piece had ended with the words: ‘The dogs bark: the caravan moves on.’ In fact everyone, one way and another, was becoming absorbed into the leviathan of war. Its inexorable pressures were in some ways more irksome for those outside the machine than those within. I myself, for example, felt lonely and depressed. Isobel was miles away in the country; most of the people I knew had disappeared from London, or were soon to do so. They were in uniform, or some new, unusual civil occupation. In this atmosphere writing was more than ever out of the question; even reading could be attempted only at short stretches. I refused one or two jobs offered, saying I was ‘on the Reserve’, should soon be ‘called up’. However, no calling-up took place; nor, so far as I could discover, was any likely to be enunciated in the near future. There was just the surrounding pressure of uneasy stagnation, uneasy activity.

I was not alone, of course, in this predicament. Indeed, my father, who might have been expected to be of some assistance, was, as it turned out, in worse case even than myself. He was by this time totally immersed in the problem of how to bring about his own re-employment, a preoccupation which, in spite of her very mixed feelings on the subject, equally engrossed my mother, who partly feared he might succeed, partly dreaded his despair if left on the shelf. It was hard, even impossible, for my father to concentrate for even a short time on any other subject. He would talk for hours at a time about possible jobs that he might be offered. His prospects were meagre in the extreme, for his health had certainly not improved since retirement. Now, his days were spent writing letters to contemporaries who had achieved senior rank, hanging about his club trying to buttonhole them in person.

‘I managed to have a word with Fat Boy Gort at the Rag yesterday,’ he would say, speaking as if in a dream. ‘Of course I knew he could do nothing for me himself in his exalted position, but he wasn’t at all discouraging. Gave me the name of a fellow in the Adjutant-General’s own secretariat who is entering my name on a special file with a few others of much the same category as myself. Something may come of it. Brownrigg’s doing his best too. As a member of the Army Council, he ought to bring something off.’

Then it struck me that General Conyers might be worth approaching in my own interests. By that time my parents had almost lost touch with the General, having themselves drifted into a form of life in which they hardly ever ‘saw’ anybody, certainly a way of life far removed from the General’s own restless curiosity about things, an energy that age was said to have done little to abate. At least that was the picture of him to be inferred from their occasional mention of his name. To tell the truth, they rather disapproved of rumours that percolated through to them that General Conyers would sometimes attend meetings of the Society for Psychical Research, or had given a lecture at one of the universities on the subject of Oriental secret societies. My parents preferred to think of General Conyers as living a life of complete retirement and inactivity since the death of his wife four or five years before. At that date he had sold their house in the country, at the same time disposing of such sporting poodles as remained in the kennels there. Now he lived all the year round in the small flat near Sloane Square, where he was still said to play Gounod on his ’cello in the afternoons.

‘Poor old Aylmer,’ my father would say, since he liked to think of other people existing in an unspectacular, even colourless manner. ‘You know he was rather a gay spark in his youth. Never looked at another woman after he married Bertha. It must be a lonely life.’

At first I hesitated to call on General Conyers, not only on account of this forlorn picture of him, but also because great age is, in itself, a little intimidating. I had not set eyes on him since my own wedding. Finally, I decided to telephone. The General sounded immensely vigorous on the line. Like so many of his generation, he always shouted into the mouthpiece with the full force of his lungs, as if no other method would make the instrument work.

‘Delighted to hear your voice, Nick. Come along. Of course, of course, of course.’

He was specific about the time I was to call on the following day. I found myself once more under his photograph in the uniform of the Body Guard I had so much admired as a child, when my mother had taken me to see Mrs Conyers not long after we had left Stonehurst. I think the General admired this picture too, because, while we were talking of people we knew in common, he suddenly pointed to this apotheosis of himself in plumed helmet bearing a halberd.

‘They made me give all that up,’ he said. ‘Reached the age limit. Persuaded them to keep me on for quite a while longer than allowed by regulations, as a matter of fact, but they kicked me out in the end. Lot of nonsense. It’s not the fellows of my age who feel the strain. We know how to hold ourselves easily on parade. It’s the fellow in his fifties who has to go to bed for a week after duty at a court or levee. Tries to stand to attention all the time and be too damned regimental. Won’t do at that age. Anyway, I’ve got plenty to occupy me. Too much, I don’t mind telling you. In any case, gallivanting round in scarlet and gold doesn’t arise these days.’

He shook his head emphatically, as if I might try to deny that. His face had become more than ever aquiline and ivory, the underlying structure of bone and muscle, accentuated by age, giving him an other-worldliness of expression, a look withdrawn and remote (not unlike that of Lady Warminster’s features in the months before she died), as if he now lived in a dream of half-forgotten campaigns, love affairs, heterodox experiences and opinions. At the same time there was a restless strength, a rhythm, about his movements that made one think of the Michelangelo figures in the Sistine Chapel. The Cumæan Sybil with a neat moustache added? All at once he leant forward, turning with one arm over the back of his chair, his head slightly bent, pointing to another picture hanging on the wall. I saw he was an unbearded Jehovah inspiring life into Adam through an extended finger.

‘Sold most of the stuff when Bertha died,’ he said. ‘No good to Charlotte, married to a sailor, never has a home. Thought I’d keep the Troost, though. Troost? Van Troost? Can’t remember which he is. Not sure that I was wise to have had it cleaned on the advice of that fellow Smethyck.’

The scene was a guard-room in the Low Countries.

‘Undisciplined looking lot,’ General Conyers went on. ‘No joke soldiering in those days. Must have been most difficult to get your orders out to large bodies of men. Still, that’s true today. Immense intricacies even about calling them up in the categories you want them.’

I told him that was the very subject about which I came to speak; in short, how best to convert registration with the Reserve into a commission in the armed forces. Before the war, this metamorphosis had been everywhere regarded as a process to be put automatically in motion by the march of events; now, for those in their thirties, the key seemed inoperative for entry into that charmed circle. The General shook his head at once.

‘If Richard Cœur de Lion came back to earth tomorrow,’ he said, ‘he would be able to tell you more, my dear Nick, than I can about the British Army of today. I am not much further advanced in military knowledge than those fellows Troost painted in the guard-room. Can’t your father help?’

‘He’s trying to solve his own problem of getting back.’

‘They’ll never have him.’

‘You think not?’

‘Certainly not. Never heard such a thing.’

‘Why not?’

‘Health isn’t good enough. Too old.’

‘He doesn’t believe that.’

‘Of course he’s too old. Much too old. Aren’t you getting a shade old yourself to embark on a military career? Wars have to be fought by young men nowadays, you know, my dear Nick, not old buffers like us.’

‘Still, I thought I might try.’

‘Does you credit. Can’t one of your own contemporaries give you a tip? Some of them must be soldiers.’

He stood for a moment to straighten out his rheumatic leg, carefully smoothing the thick dark check of the trouser as far down as the cloth top of his buttoned boot. I felt a little dashed to find suddenly that I was so old, by now good for little, my life virtually over. The General returned to his chair.

‘Didn’t you once tell me years ago that you knew Hugh Moreland, the composer?’ he asked. ‘Splendid thing of his I heard on the wireless not long ago. Now, what was it called? Tone Poem Vieux Port … something of the sort … wondered if I could get a record …’

He had evidently dismissed the army — the war itself — from his mind for a moment. Quite other thoughts were in his head.

‘How are all Isobel’s brothers and sisters?’ he asked.

I gave some account of them.

‘Erridge is a psychosomatic case, of course,’ said the General. ‘Not a doubt of it. Contradictory exterior demands of contending interior emotions. Great pity he doesn’t get married.’

He looked at his watch. I made a movement to leave. As a man of action, General Conyers had failed me. He put out his hand at once.

‘No, don’t go yet,’ he said. ‘Stay just a moment more, if you can. There is someone coming I would like you to meet. That was why I asked you at this time. Got a bit of news to tell you, as a matter of fact. You can pass it on to your parents during the next day or two.’

He paused, nodding his head knowingly. He was evidently very pleased about something. I wondered what could have happened. Perhaps he had been given at long last some decoration he specially coveted. It would be late in the day to award him decorations, but such official afterthoughts are not unknown. All the same, it would be unlike General Conyers to care greatly about such things, certainly to speak of them with this enthusiasm, though one can never tell what specialised goals people will set their hearts on attaining.

‘I am getting married again,’ he said crisply.

I had just enough control not to laugh aloud.

‘Some people might think it a mistake,’ said the General, speaking now very sternly, as if he well knew how to deal in the most crushing fashion with such persons. ‘I perfectly realise that. I have not the smallest doubt that a good many of my friends will say that I am making a mistake. My answer is that I do not care a damn. Not a damn. Don’t you agree, Nicholas?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘After all, it is I who am getting married, not they.’

‘Of course.’

‘They can mind their own business, what?’

‘Certainly.’

‘That’s a thing no one likes to do.’

General Conyers laughed very heartily at this thought of the horrible destiny pursuing his critics, that they would have to mind their own business, most dreaded of predicaments.

‘So I should like you to stay and meet my future wife,’ he said.

I wondered what my parents were going to say to this. From their point of view it would be the final nail in the coffin of Aylmer Conyers. There was nothing of which they would more disapprove. At that moment the front-door bell rang.

‘Forgive me,’ said the General, ‘as I explained before, I have no longer any domestic staff.’

He went off to open the door. I heard a woman’s voice in the hall; soft laughter, as if at a too violent embrace. I thought how furious Uncle Giles would have been had he lived to hear that General Conyers was contemplating remarriage. Certainly the news was unexpected enough. I wondered who on earth was going to appear. A succession of possibilities, both ludicrous and conventional, presented themselves to the mind: ash-blondes of seventeen; red-wigged, middle-aged procuresses, on the lines of Mrs Erdleigh; silver-haired, still palely-beautiful widows of defunct soldiers, courtiers, noblemen. I even toyed for a moment with the fantasy that the slight asperity that had always existed between the General and my sister-in-law, Frederica, might really have concealed love, dismissing such a possibility almost as soon as it took shape. Even that last expectation scarcely came up to the reality. I could not have guessed it in a million years. A tall, dark, beaky-nosed lady of about fifty came into the room. I rose. She was distinctly well dressed, with a businesslike, rather than frivolous, air.

‘We have often met before,’ she said, holding out her hand.

It was Miss Weedon.

‘At Lady Molly’s,’ she said, ‘and long before that too.’

The General took my arm between his forefinger and thumb, as if about to break it neatly just above the elbow with one sharp movement of his wrist.

‘So you know each other already?’ he said, not absolutely sure he was pleased by that fact. ‘I might have guessed you would have met with Molly Jeavons. I’d forgotten she was an aunt of Isobel’s.’

‘But we knew each other in much more distant days as well,’ said Miss Weedon, speaking in a gayer tone than I had ever heard her use before.

She looked enormously delighted at what was happening to her.

‘I ran into Jeavons the other day in Sloane Street,’ said General Conyers. ‘Have you seen him lately, Nick?’

‘Not for a month or two. There has been such a lot to do about Isobel going to the country and so on. We haven’t been to Molly’s house for ages. How are they?’

‘Jeavons is an air-raid warden,’ said the General. ‘We had quite a talk. I like Jeavons. Don’t know him well. Hear some people complain he is a bore. I don’t think so. He put me on to a first-rate place to buy cheap shirts many years ago. Shopped there ever since.’

‘I believe Lady Molly is going back to Dogdene,’ said Miss Weedon. ‘They have evacuated a girls’ school to the house. She may help to run it — not teach, of course. How strange to return after being châtelaine of the place.’

‘Of course, she was once married to that pompous fellow, John Sleaford, wasn’t she?’ said the General. ‘One forgets things. Sleaford must be dead these twenty years. How King Edward abominated him.’

‘I don’t think the present marchioness will be too pleased to find her former sister-in-law in residence at Dogdene again,’ said Miss Weedon, with one of those icy, malicious smiles I well remembered. ‘Lady Molly has always been so funny about what she calls “the latest Dogdene economy”.’

‘Poor Alice Sleaford,’ said the General. ‘You must not be unkind to her, Geraldine.’

I had never before heard Miss Weedon addressed as ‘Geraldine’. When secretary to Stringham’s mother, Mrs Foxe, she had always been ‘Tuffy’. That was what Molly Jeavons called her, too. I wanted to ask about Stringham, but, in the existing circumstances, hesitated to do so. As bride of General Conyers, Miss Weedon had suddenly become such a very different sort of person, almost girlish in her manner, far from the Medusa she had once been designated by Moreland. At the same time, she still retained some of her secretary’s formality in speaking of people. However, she herself must have decided that her present position would be weakened, rather than strengthened, by all avoidance of the subject of Stringham, which, certain to turn up sooner or later, was best put at once on a solid basis. She now raised it herself.

‘I expect you want to hear about Charles,’ she said, very cheerfully.

‘Of course. How is he?’

‘Quite all right now.’

‘Really?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Charles is the fellow you were helping to look after his mother’s house, is he?’ asked General Conyers, speaking with that small touch of impatience, permissible, even to be applauded, in the light of his own engagement. ‘You knew Charles Stringham, did you, Nicholas? At school with him, were you? I hear he drank too much, but has given it up. Good thing.’

‘Is he still at Glimber?’

‘Glimber has been taken over as an evacuated government office. Charles is in London now, looking for a job. He wants to get into the army. Of course his health isn’t very good, even though he has stopped drinking. It isn’t going to be easy. There have been money troubles too. His father died in Kenya and left such money as he had to his French wife. Mrs Foxe is not nearly so rich as she was. Commander Foxe is so terribly extravagant. He has gone back to the navy, of course.’

‘Good old Buster.’

Miss Weedon laughed. She deeply detested Buster Foxe.

‘Nicholas wants to get into the army too,’ said General Conyers, anxious to dismiss the subject of Stringham and his relations. ‘He is also having difficulties. Didn’t you say so, Nicholas? Now, tell me, don’t I remember a former servant of your parents manages a hotel somewhere? Some seaside place. Very good cook, wasn’t he? I remember his soufflés. Thought we might perhaps honeymoon at his hotel. Not going to make it a long affair. Just a week or ten days. Quite enough.’

‘They have probably requisitioned the place. I was down there a month or two ago for Uncle Giles’s funeral.’

‘Saw his death in the paper. Made rather a mess of his life, didn’t he? Don’t think I set eyes on him since a week or two before the earlier war broke out.’

‘Do you remember Dr Trelawney? He was staying in the hotel.’

‘That old scoundrel. Was he, indeed? How is he?’

‘He got locked in the bathroom.’

‘Did he, did he?’ said the General thoughtfully. ‘The Essence of the All is the Godhead of the True … may be something in it. Always meant to go and have a look at Trelawney on his own ground … all that stuff about the Astral Plane …’

He pondered; then, with an effort, brought himself back to earth, when I said that I must be going.

‘Sorry not to have been more use about your own problem, Nick. Have another talk with your father. Better still, get some young fellow to help you. No good trying too high up. Somebody quite junior, like a lieutenant-colonel. That’s the kind of fellow. Very nice to have seen you. You must come and visit us after we get back. Don’t know where we shall go yet.’

I left them together, discussing that question, Miss Weedon still looking immensely pleased about everything. As the flat door closed, I heard her laughter, now quite shrill, begin again. She had reason to be pleased. Stringham, so it appeared, had been cured by her of ‘drink’; now she had captured General Conyers. The one achievement was as remarkable as the other. They were perhaps not so disparate as might at first sight appear. There was a kind of dash about Stringham comparable with the General’s manner of facing the world; at the same time, the General’s advanced age, like Stringham’s taste for the bottle, gave Miss Weedon something ponderable upon which to exercise her talent for ‘looking after’ people, her taste, in short, for power. General Conyers had seemed as enchanted with Miss Weedon as she with him. I wondered what other men — in addition to Stringham — had been ‘in her life’, as Mrs Erdleigh would have said; what, for that matter, had been Miss Weedon’s true relationship with Stringham. One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

‘Valery asks why one has been summoned to this carnival,’ Moreland once said, ‘but it’s more like blind man’s buff. One reels through the carnival in question, blundering into persons one can’t see, and, without much success, trying to keep hold of a few of them.’

There could be no doubt that General Conyers had taken on a formidable woman; equally no doubt that he was a formidable man. If he could handle Billson naked, he could probably handle Miss Weedon clothed — or naked, too, if it came to that. I felt admiration for his energy, his determination to cling to life. There was nothing defeatist about him. However, my parents, as I had expected, were not at all pleased by the news. They had, of course, never heard of Miss Weedon. The engagement was, indeed, quite a shock to them. In fact, the whole affair made my father very cross. Now that Uncle Giles was no more, he may have felt himself permitted a greater freedom of expression in openly criticising General Conyers. He did so in just the terms the General had himself envisaged.

‘No fool like an old fool,’ my father said. ‘I shouldn’t have believed it of him, Bertha hardly cold in her grave.’

‘I hope he hasn’t made a silly mistake,’ said my mother. ‘I like old Aylmer, with all his funny ways of behaving.’

‘Very awkward for his daughter too. Why, some of his grandchildren must be almost grown up.’

‘Oh, no,’ said my mother, who loved accuracy in such matters, ‘not grown up.’

‘Where did he meet this woman?’

‘I really don’t know.’

It turned out later that General Conyers had sat next to Miss Weedon at a concert some months before the outbreak of war. They had fallen into conversation. Finding they knew many people in common, they had arranged to meet at another concert the following week. That was how their friendship had begun. In short, General Conyers had ‘picked up’ Miss Weedon. There was no denying it. It was a true romance.

‘Adventures only happen to adventurers,’ Mr Deacon had said one evening when we were sitting drinking in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.

‘That depends on what one calls adventurers,’ said Moreland, who was in a hair-splitting mood. ‘What you mean, Edgar, is that people to whom adventures happen are never wholly unadventurous. That is not the same thing. It’s the latter class who have the real adventures — people like oneself.’

‘Don’t be pedantic, Moreland,’ Mr Deacon had answered.

Certainly General Conyers was not unadventurous. Was he an adventurer? I considered his advice about the army. Then the answer came to me. I must get in touch with Widmerpool. I wondered why I had not thought of that earlier. I telephoned to his office. They put me through to a secretary.

‘Captain Widmerpool is embodied,’ she said in an unfriendly voice.

I could tell from her tone, efficient, charmless, unimaginative, that she had been given special instructions by Widmerpool himself to use the term ’embodied’ in describing his military condition. I asked where he was to be found. It was a secret. At last, not without pressure on my own part, she gave me a telephone number. This turned out to be that of his Territorial battalion’s headquarters. I rang him up.

‘Come and see me by all means, my boy,’ he boomed down the wire in a new, enormously hearty voice, ‘but bring your own beer. There won’t be much I can do for you. I’m up to my arse in bumph and don’t expect I shall be able to spare you more than a minute or two for waffling.’

I was annoyed by the phrase ‘bring your own beer’, also by being addressed as ‘my boy’ by Widmerpool. They were terms he had never, so to speak, earned the right to use, certainly not to me. However, I recognised that a world war was going to produce worse situations than Widmerpool’s getting above himself and using a coarsely military boisterousness of tone to which his civilian personality could make no claim. I accepted his invitation; he named a time. The following day, after finishing my article for the paper and looking at some books I had to review, I set out for the Territorial headquarters, which was situated in a fairly inaccessible district of London. I reached there at last, feeling in the depths of gloom. Entry into the most arcane recesses of the Secret Service could not have been made more difficult. Finally an NCO admitted me to Widmerpool’s presence. He was sitting, surrounded by files, in a small, horribly stuffy office, which was at the same time freezingly cold. I was still unused to the sight of him in uniform. He looked anything but an army officer — a railway official, perhaps, of some obscure country.

‘Been left in charge of details consequent on the unit’s move to a training area,’ he said brusquely, as I entered the room. ‘Suppose I shouldn’t have told you that. Security — security — and then security. Everyone must learn that. Well, my lad, what can I do for you? You need not stand. Take a pew.’

I sat on a kitchen chair with a broken back, and outlined my situation.

‘The fact is,’ said Widmerpool, glaring through his spectacles and puffing out his cheeks, as if rehearsing a tremendous blowing up he was going to give some subordinate in the very near future, ‘you ought to have joined the Territorials before war broke out.’

‘I know.’

‘No good just entering your name on the Reserve.’

‘There were difficulties about age.’

‘Only after you’d left it too late.’

‘It was only a matter of months.’

‘Never mind. Think how long I’ve been a Territorial officer. You should have looked ahead.’

‘You said there wasn’t going to be a war after “Munich”.’

‘You thought there was, so you were even more foolish.’

There was truth in that.

‘I only want to know the best thing to do,’ I said.

‘You misjudged things, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’

‘No vacancies now.’

‘How can I put that right?’

‘The eldest of our last intake of commissioned subalterns was twenty-one. The whole lot of them had done at least eighteen months in the ranks — at least.’

‘Even so, the army will have to expand in due course.’

‘Officers will be drawn from the younger fellows coming up.’

‘You think there is nothing for me to do at present?’

‘You could enlist in the ranks.’

‘But the object of joining the Reserve — being accepted for it — was to be dealt with immediately as a potential officer.’

‘Then I can’t help you.’

‘Well, thanks for seeing me.’

‘I will keep an eye out for you,’ said Widmerpool, rather less severely. ‘As a matter of fact, I may be in a position well placed for doing so before many moons have waned.’

‘Why?’

‘I am probably to be sent to the Staff College.’

‘Oh?’

‘Again, for security reasons, that should not be mentioned beyond these four walls.’

He began to gather up his multitudinous papers, stowing some away in a safe, transferring others to a brief-case.

‘I shall be coming back to this office again after dinner,’ he said. ‘Lucky if I get away before midnight. It’s all got to be cleared up somehow, if the war is to be won. I gave my word to the Brigade-Major. He’s a very sharp fellow called Farebrother. City acquaintance of mine.’

‘Sunny Farebrother?’

‘Have you met him?’

‘Years ago.’

Widmerpool gave a semi-circular movement of his arm, as if to convey the crushing responsibility his promise to the Brigade-Major comprehended. He locked the safe. Putting the key in his trouser-pocket after attaching it to a chain hanging from his braces, he spoke again, this time in an entirely changed tone.

‘Nicholas,’ he said, ‘I am going to ask you to do something.’

‘Yes?’

‘Let me explain very briefly. As you know, my mother lives in a cottage not very far from Stourwater. We call it a cottage, it is really a little house. She has made it very exquisite.’

‘I remember your telling me.’

‘Since she lives by herself, there has been pressure — rather severe pressure — applied to her by the authorities to have evacuees there.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Now I do not wish my lady mother to be plagued by evacuees.’

That seemed a reasonable enough sentiment. Nobody wanted evacuees, even if they accepted the fact that evacuees must be endured. Why should they? I could not see, however, in Mrs Widmerpool’s case, that I could help in preventing such a situation from arising. I realised at the same time that Widmerpool had suddenly effected in himself one of those drastic changes of policy in which, for example, from acting an all-powerful tyrant, he would suddenly become a humble suppliant. I understood very clearly that something was required of me, but could not guess what I was expected to do. Some persons, knowing that they were later going to ask a favour, would have made themselves more agreeable when a favour was being asked of them. That was not Widmerpool’s way. I almost admired him for making so little effort to conceal his lack of interest in my own affairs, while waiting his time to demand something of myself.

‘The point is this,’ he said, ‘up to date, my mother has had an old friend — Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson, sister of that ineffective diplomatist, Sir Gavin — staying with her, so the question of evacuees, until now, has not arisen. Now Miss Walpole-Wilson’s work with the Women’s Voluntary Service takes her elsewhere. The danger of evacuees is acute.’

I thought how Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson’s ordinary clothes must have merged imperceptibly into the uniform of her service. It was as if she had been preparing all her life for that particular dress.

‘But how can I help?’

‘Some relation of Lady Molly Jeavons — a relative of her husband’s, to be more precise — wants accommodation in the country. A place not too far from London. Miss Walpole-Wilson heard about this herself. She told us.’

‘Why not ring up the Jeavonses?’

‘I have done so. In fact, I am meeting my mother at Lady Molly’s tonight.’

Widmerpool was still oppressed by some unsolved problem, which he found difficulty about putting into words. He cleared his throat, swallowed several times.

‘I wondered whether you would come along to the Jeavonses tonight,’ he said. ‘It might be easier.’

‘What might?’

Widmerpool went red below his temples, under the line made by his spectacles. He began to sweat in spite of the low temperature of the room.

‘You remember that rather unfortunate business when I was engaged to Mildred Haycock?’

‘Yes.’

‘I haven’t really seen anything of the Jeavonses since then.’

*You came to the party Molly gave for Isobel just before we were married.’

‘I know,’ said Widmerpool, ‘but there were quite a lot of people there then. It was an occasion. It’s rather different going there tonight to discuss something like my mother’s cottage. Lady Molly has never seen my mother.’

‘I am sure it will be all right. Molly loves making arrangements.’

‘All the same, I feel certain embarrassments.’

‘No need to with the Jeavonses.’

‘I thought that, since Molly Jeavons is an aunt of your wife’s, things might be easier if you were to accompany me. Will you do that?’

‘All right.’

‘You will come?’

‘Yes, if you wish.’

I had not visited the Jeavonses for some little time — not since Isobel had gone to stay with Frederica — so that I was quite glad to make this, as it were, an excuse for calling on them. Isobel would certainly enjoy news of the Jeavons household.

‘Very well, then,’ said Widmerpool, now returning at once to his former peremptory tone, ‘we’ll move off forthwith. It is five minutes to the bus. Come along. Party, quick march.’

He gave some final instructions in the adjoining room to a gloomy corporal sitting before a typewriter, surrounded, like Widmerpool himself, with huge stacks of documents. We went out into the street, where the afternoon light was beginning to fade. Widmerpool, his leather-bound stick caught tight beneath his armpit, marched along beside me, tramp-tramp-tramp, eventually falling into step, since I had not taken my pace from his.

‘I don’t know what Jeavons’s relative will be like,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel absolutely confident she will be the sort my mother will like.’

I felt more apprehension for the person who had to share a cottage with Mrs Widmerpool.

‘I saw Bob Duport just before war broke out.’

I said that partly to see what Widmerpool would answer, partly because I thought he had been unhelpful about the army, tiresome about the Jeavonses. I hoped the information would displease him. The surmise was correct. He stiffened, strutting now so fiercely that he could almost be said to have broken into the goosestep.

‘Did you? Where?’

‘He was staying in a hotel where an uncle of mine died. I had to see about the funeral and ran across Duport there.’

‘Oh.’

‘I hadn’t seen him for years.’

‘He is a bad mannered fellow, Duport. Ungrateful, too.’

‘What is he ungrateful about?’

‘I got him a job in Turkey. You may remember we were talking about Duport’s affairs at Stourwater, when I saw you and your wife there about a year or more ago-just after “Munich”.’

‘He’d recently come back from Turkey when we met.’

‘He had been working for me there.’

‘So he said.’

‘I had to deal rather summarily with Duport in the end,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He showed no grasp of the international situation. He is insolent, too. So he mentioned my name?’

‘He did.’

‘Not very favourably, I expect.’

‘Not very.’

‘I don’t know what will happen to Duport,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He must be in a difficult position financially, owing to his reckless conduct. However, anybody can earn three pounds a week these days as an air-raid warden. Even Jeavons does. So Duport will not starve.’

He sounded rather sorry that Duport was not threatened with that fate.

‘He thought Sir Magnus Donners might find him something.’

‘Not if I know it.’

‘Do you think Donners will be asked to join the Government, if there is a Cabinet reshuffle?’

‘The papers speak of him as likely for office,’ said Widmerpool, not without condescension. ‘In some ways Magnus would make an excellent minister in time of war. In others, I am not so sure. He has certain undesirable traits for a public man in modern days. As you probably know, people speak of — well, mistresses. I am no prude. Let a man lead his own life, say I — but, if he is a public man, let him be careful. More than these allegedly bad morals, I object in Magnus to something you would never guess if you met him casually. I mean a kind of hidden frivolity. Now, what a lamentable scene that was when I looked in on Stourwater when you were there. Suppose some journalist had got hold of it.’

Widmerpool was about to enlarge on the Masque of the Seven Deadly Sins as played in the Stourwater dining-room, when his attention — and my own — was caught by a small crowd of people loitering in the half-light at the corner of a side street. Some sort of a meeting was in progress. From the traditional soapbox, a haggard middle-aged man in spectacles and a cloth cap was addressing fifteen or twenty persons, including several children. The group was apathetic enough, except for the children, who were playing a game that involved swinging their gas-mask cases at each other by the string, then running quickly away. Two women in trousers were hawking a newspaper or pamphlet. Widmerpool and I paused. The orator, his face gnarled and blotched by a lifetime of haranguing crowds out of doors in all weathers, seemed to be coming to the end of his discourse. He used that peculiarly unctuous, coaxing, almost beseeching manner of address adopted by some political speakers, reminding me a little of my brother-in-law, Roddy Cutts, whose voice would sometimes take on that same pleading note when he made a public appeal for a cause in which he was interested.

‘… why didn’t the so-called British Government of the day clinch the Anglo-Soviet alliance when they had the chance … get something done … Comrade Stalin’s invitation to a round-table conference at Bucharest … consistent moral policy … effective forces of socialism … necessary new alignments … USSR prestige first and foremost …’

The speech came to an end, the listeners demonstrating neither approval nor the reverse. The haggard man stepped down from the soapbox, wiped his spectacles, loosened the peak of his cap from his forehead, lit a cigarette. The children’s gas-mask game reached a pitch of frenzied intensity, so that in their scamperings one of the women selling newspapers almost had the packet knocked from her hand. Widmerpool turned to me. He was about to comment, when our attention was engaged by a new speaker. This was the second newspaper-selling woman, who, having now handed over her papers to the man with the cloth cap, herself jumped on to the soapbox. In a harsh clear voice she opened a tremendous tirade, quite different in approach from the quieter, more reasoned appeal of the spectacled man.

‘… blooming bloody hypocrisy … anybody wants this war except a few crackpots … see a chance of seizing world power and grinding the last miserable halfpence from the frozen fingers of stricken mankind … lot of Fascist, terroristic, anti-semitic, war-mongering, exploiting White Guards and traitors to the masses …’

It was Gypsy Jones. I had not set eyes on her since the days when we used to meet in Mr Deacon’s antique shop. She had lost a front tooth, otherwise did not look greatly changed from what she had been in the Mr Deacon period: older, harder, angrier, further than ever from her last bath, but essentially the same. Her hair was still cut short like a boy’s, her fists clenched, her legs set wide apart. Over her trousers she wore a man’s overcoat, far from new, the aggressive inelegance of the ensemble expressing to perfection her own revolutionary, destructive state of mind. In the old days she had worked for Howard Craggs at the Vox Populi Press, was said to be his mistress. Craggs had moved a long way since the Vox Populi Press. Lately, he had been appointed to a high post in the Ministry of Information. I recalled the night when Gypsy Jones had been dressed as Eve in order to accompany Craggs, as Adam, to the Merry Thought fancy-dress party: the encounter we had had at the back of Mr Deacon’s shop. There had been a certain grubby charm about her. I felt no regrets. Love had played no part. There was nothing painful to recall. Then Widmerpool had fallen for her, had pursued her, had paid for her ‘operation’. Such things seemed like another incarnation.

‘… not appealing to a lot of half-baked Bloomsbury intellectuals and Hampstead ideologues … bourgeois scabs and parlour-socialist nancy boys … scum of weak-kneed Trotskyite flunkeys … betraying the workers and anyone else it suits their filthy bloody blackleg book to betray … I’m talking about politics — socialism — reality — adaptability …’

I felt my arm caught tightly. It was Widmerpool. I turned towards him. He had gone quite pale. His thick lips were trembling a little. The sight of Gypsy Jones, rousing vague memories in myself, had caused him to react far more violently. To Widmerpool, she was not the mere handmaid of memory, she was a spectre of horror, the ghastly reminder of failure, misery, degradation. He dragged at my arm.

‘For God’s sake, come away,’ he said.

We continued our course down the street, over which dusk was falling, Widmerpool walking at a much sharper pace, but without any of his former bravura, the stick now gripped in his hand as if to ward off actual physical attack.

‘You realised who it was?’ he said, as we hurried along.

‘Of course.’

‘How soon did you see her?’

‘Only after she had begun to speak.’

‘Me, too. What an escape. It was a near thing.’

‘What was?’

‘She might have noticed me.’

‘Would that have mattered?’

Widmerpool stopped dead.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked abruptly.

‘Supposing she had seen us, even said something to us?’

‘I didn’t say us, I saidme.’

‘You then?’

‘Of course it would have mattered. It would have been disastrous.’

‘Why?’

‘How can you ask such a question? There are all kind of reasons why it should matter. You know something of my past with that woman. Can’t you understand how painful the sight of her is to me? Besides, you heard what she was shouting. She is a Communist. Did you not understand what the words meant? Your denseness is unbelievable. She is attacking the prosecution of the war. Haven’t you grasped that Russia is now Hitler’s ally? Suppose that woman had suddenly addressed herself to me. That would have been a fine thing. You don’t realise what it means to be in an official position. Let me explain. I am not only an army officer, I am a man with heavy responsibilities. I have been left in charge of a headquarters. I have access to all kind of secret documents. You would not guess the nature of some of them. What if she had been seen speaking to me? Have you ever heard of M.I.5? What if its agents had seen us conversing? There may well have been one of them among the crowd. Such meetings are quite rightly kept under supervision by the contra-espionage department.’

I could think of no answer. Although Widmerpool’s view of himself as a man handling weighty state secrets was beyond belief in its absurdity, I felt at the same time that I had myself shown lack of feeling in treating so lightly his former love for Gypsy Jones. Love is at once always absurd and never absurd; the more grotesque its form, the more love itself confers a certain dignity on the circumstances of those it torments. No doubt Widmerpool had been through a searing experience with Gypsy Jones, an experience even now by no means forgotten. That could be the only explanation of such an outburst. I had rarely seen him so full of indignation. He had paused for breath. Now, his reproaches began again.

‘You come and ask me for advice about getting into the army, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘and because I spare the time to talk of such things — make time, when my duty lies by rights elsewhere — you think I have nothing more serious to occupy me than your own trivial problems. That is not the case. The General Staff of the Wehrmacht would be only too happy to possess even a tithe of the information I locked away before we quitted the Orderly Room.’

‘I don’t doubt it. I realise you are busy. It was kind of you to see me.’

Widmerpool was a little placated. Perhaps he also feared that, if he went too far in his reproofs, I might excuse myself from accompanying him to the Jeavonses’. He tapped me with his stick.

‘Don’t worry further about your remarks,’ he said. ‘The sight of that woman upset me, especially behaving as she was. Did you hear her language? Besides, I have been overworking as usual. You feel the strain at unexpected moments.’

He made no further comment. We found a bus, which transported us in due course to the neighbourhood of the Jeavons house in South Kensington. The bell was not answered for a long time. We waited outside the faintly Dutch edifice with its over ornamented dark red brick facade.

‘I expect Mother has preceded us,’ said Widmerpool.

He was better now, though still not wholly recovered from the sight of Gypsy Jones. The door was opened at last by Jeavons himself. His appearance took me by surprise. Instead of the usual ancient grey suit, he was wearing a blue one-piece overall and a beret. Some people — as General Conyers had remarked — considered Jeavons a bore. Such critics had a case, undeniably, when he was sunk in one of his impenetrable silences, or, worse still, was trying, in a momentary burst of energy, to make some money by selling one of those commodities generically described by Chips Lovell as ‘an automatic boot-jack or infallible cure for the common cold’. To find Jeavons in the latter state was rare, the former, fairly frequent. Even apart from his war wound, Jeavons was not at all fitted for commercial employments. He had hardly done a stroke of work since marrying Molly. His wife did not mind that. Indeed, she may have preferred Jeavons to be dependent on her. Whatever some of her relations may have thought at the time of her marriage, it had turned out a success — allowing for the occasional ‘night out’ on Jeavons’s part, like the one when he had taken me to Dicky Umfraville’s night-club.

‘Come in,’ he said. ‘How’s your war going? It’s touch and go whether we’re winning ours. Stanley’s here, and a lady who has come to see about lodging Stanley’s missus in the country. Then Molly met a fellow at Sanderson’s who was trying to find a home for his cat, and she’s gone and asked him to stay. The man, I mean, not the cat.’

‘The lady who has come about moving your — is it sister-in-law? — is my mother,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I spoke to you on the telephone about it. I am Kenneth Widmerpool, you know. We have met in the past.’

‘So you did,’ said Jeavons, ‘and so we have. It went out of my head like most other things. I thought Nick had just come to call and brought a friend. You can talk to Molly about it all when she comes downstairs, but I think your Mum has pretty well fixed everything up as it is.’

Jeavons’s voice, hoarse and faint, sounded as usual as if he had a cold in his head or had been up too late the night before. He seemed restive, disorientated, but in good form.

‘Who is Stanley?’ I asked.

‘Who’s Stanley?’ said Jeavons. ‘My brother, of course. Who did you think he was?’

‘Never knew you had a brother, Ted.’

‘Course I’ve got a brother.’

‘What does he do?’

‘Accountant.’

‘In London?’

‘Nottingham. Given it up now, of course. Back to the army. Staff-Captain at the War House. Fancy your never having heard of Stanley. No reason why you should, I suppose. Still, it strikes me as funny. Rather a great man, Stanley, in his way. Gets things done.’

Among so much that was depressing, the news that Jeavons had a brother was for some reason cheering. It was certainly information to fascinate Isobel, when I next saw her, even to stagger Chips Lovell, who, regarding himself as an authority on his wife’s relations, had certainly never heard of this outgrowth. Jeavons was known only to possess two or three vague connexions, sometimes to be found staying in the house, though never precisely placed in their kinship, in any case always hopelessly submerged in number by his wife’s cousins, nephews and nieces. He had had, it was true, an old aunt, or great-aunt, to whom Molly was said to have been ‘very good’, who had lingered on in the house for months suffering from some illness, finally dying in one of the upstairs rooms. A Jeavons brother was quite another matter, a phenomenon of wartime circumstances. Jeavons, his dark, insistently curly hair now faintly speckled with grey, had himself taken on a subtly different personality since the onset of war. After all, war was the element which had, in a sense, made his career. Obviously he reacted strongly to its impacts. Until now his appearance had always suggested a temporary officer of the ’14-’18 conflict, who had miraculously survived, without in the least ageing, into a much later epoch. The blue overall changed all that. Jeavons had also allowed his Charlie Chaplin moustache to grow outwards towards the corners of his mouth. With his own curious adaptability and sense of survival, he had effortlessly discarded what was in any case no more than a kind of disguise, now facing the world in the more contemporary role, equally artificial, of the man who had come to clean the windows or mend the boiler. We moved up the stairs.

‘Met one of Isobel’s uncles at the warden-post the other night,’ said Jeavons. ‘Alfred Tolland, the one Molly always teases.’

‘How was he?’

‘We had a talk about how difficult it is for people with daughters to bring ’em out properly in wartime,’ Jeavons said.

He spoke without levity. Although he remained always utterly himself, Jeavons, after twenty years of marriage to Molly, had taken on much of his wife’s way of looking at things. It would be more true to say the way the world into which she had been born looked at things, for Molly herself would probably have given little thought to how daughters were to be ‘brought out’ in wartime, even had she any daughters of her own. All the same, she would recognise that, to some people, the matter constituted a problem. Jeavons, who had never made the smallest effort to adopt that world’s manner of talking, its way of dressing, its general behaviour, had at the same time, quite objectively, absorbed certain of its traditional opinions, whether his wife held them or not. Alfred Tolland, for example, had probably found in Jeavons an unusually sympathetic listener to his — no doubt antediluvian — views on how young ladies should conduct themselves or be conducted, certainly more sympathetic than he would ever have found in Molly herself. The fact that Jeavons had no daughters, had no children at all, would never have prevented him from holding strong views on the subject.

‘Take my advice, don’t give up your home-farm,’ Chips Lovell had once heard Jeavons say to Lord Amesbury, admittedly a fairly formidable figure to counsel when it came to discussing the economics of estate management. ‘Eddie Bridgnorth gave up his and never ceased to regret it.’

To have prefaced this recommendation with the avowal that he himself came from a walk of life where people did not own home-farms would have seemed to Jeavons otiose, wearisome, egoistical. Everything about him, he knew, proclaiming that fact, he would have regarded such personal emphasis as in the worst of taste, as well as being without interest. Marriage to Molly had given him opportunities to see how a lot of hitherto unfamiliar forms of life worked. He had developed certain opinions, was prepared to give evidence. Home-farms fell into that category. The notion that he might be trying to pass himself off as a fellow-owner of a home-farm would have seemed to Jeavons laughable. Whether or not Jeavons’s advice tipped the scale was never known, but Chips Lovell reported that Lord Amesbury did not sell, so that he may have been convinced by this objectivity of reasoning. Perhaps it was of such matters that Jeavons was thinking when he would stand for hours in the corner of the drawing-room at one of Molly’s parties for young people (when the rugs would be turned back and they would dance to the gramophone), smiling to himself, gently clinking the money in his pocket.

‘Do help with the drinks, Teddy, dear,’ his wife would say on such occasions. ‘Are you feeling all right or is it your inside again?’

Then Jeavons would move like a sleep-walker towards the bottles.

‘What’s it going to be?’ he would mutter, almost beneath his breath. ‘Rotten tunes they always play nowadays.’

However, although Widmerpool had shown signs of restiveness at our too long delay in the hall, Jeavons was far from one of those comatose, stagnant moods that evening. There could be no doubt that the war had livened him up. He felt at home within its icy grasp. The house was more untidy than ever, the hall, as usual, full of luggage. I noticed that the marquetry cabinet bequeathed by Lady Warminster had reached no farther than the foot of the stairs. Some of the heavier pictures had been taken from their hooks and rested against the wall. Packing cases and trunks were everywhere.

‘People keep on arriving for a night or two,’ said Jeavons. ‘Place might be a doss-house. Of course, Stanley is only here until he can fix himself up. Then Molly must bring this other fellow to stay. Seems a nice bloke. She had to go and see the vet. No avoiding that. Can’t fight a war with quite the number of dogs and cats we normally have in the house. Got to find homes for them.’

‘What happened to Maisky, your pet monkey?’

‘Rather a sad story,’ said Jeavons, but did not enlarge.

The conditions he described were less abnormal here than they would have been in most households. Indeed, war seemed to have accelerated, exaggerated, rather than changed, the Jeavons way of life. The place was always in a mess. Mess there was endemic. People were always coming for a night or two, sometimes for much longer periods. There were always suitcases in the hall, always debris, untidiness, confusion everywhere. That was the way Molly liked to live, possibly her method of recovering from the tedium of married life with John Sleaford. Jeavons, whether he liked it or not, was dragged along in her train. No doubt he liked it, too, otherwise he would have left her, for no one could have stood such an existence unless reasonably sympathetic to him at heart. The sight of Jeavons’s brother sitting on the sofa beside Mrs Widmerpool brought home to one the innate eccentricity of Jeavons. This man in uniform, with a captain’s pips and three ‘First War’ ribbons, was recognisable as a brother more from build than any great similarity of feature. He was far more anonymous than Jeavons: older, solider, greyer, quieter, in general more staid. When you saw Stanley Jeavons, you recognised the adventurer in Ted. I thought of Moreland’s emendation, the distinction he drew between adventurers and those not wholly unadventurous, to both of which categories adventures happened — to the latter, perhaps, more than the former. Jeavons, although tending to play a passive role, could not be said to have led an entirely unadventurous life; perhaps one could go further, say without qualification that Jeavons was an adventurer. There was no time to think longer of such things at that moment, because Jeavons was making some kind of introduction.

‘Stanley’s a brass-hat now,’ he said. ‘God, how we used to hate the staff in our war, Stan, didn’t we? Fancy your ending up one of that mob.’

As we came into the room, Mrs Widmerpool had at once bared her teeth in a smile to indicate that we had met before. I was about to speak to her, when she jumped to her feet and seized Widmerpool by the shoulders, unable to allow Jeavons the undivided honour of presenting him to his brother.

‘My soldier son,’ she said, nodding delightedly like a Japanese doll.

‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Mother,’ said Widmerpool.

He grinned back happily at her through his spectacles, his composure, lately so shattered by Gypsy Jones, now completely restored. Mrs Widmerpool returned to the sofa, continuing to nurse on her knee a cardboard box, which at first I thought might be some sort of present she had brought Widmerpool, but recognised a second later as her gas-mask, carried with her into the drawing-room. She looked, as her son had described her a year earlier, ‘younger than ever’. She was squarely built, her heavy, nearly classical nose set between cheeks shining and pink like an apple. She wore a thick tweed suit and a tweed hat with a peak. Stanley Jeavons, who seemed rather glad to be absolved from talking to her further for the time being, turned his attention to Widmerpool.

‘What’s your outfit?’ he asked.

They began to speak of army matters. I was left with Mrs Widmerpool.

‘You are one of Kenneth’s literary friends, I remember,’ she said, ‘are you not?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Kenneth used to be such a reader too,’ she said. ‘Now, alas, he has no time for books. Indeed, few of us have. But I suppose you continue in the same manner?’

‘More or less.’

Before I could enlarge on my own activities, Molly Jeavons came into the room, making all the disturbance that naturally noisy people always bring in their train. Dark, large, still good-looking at fifty, there was something of the barmaid about her, something of the Charles II beauty, although Molly, they said, had never been exactly a ‘beauty’ when younger, more from lack of temperament to play the part, than want of physical equipment. These two sides she represented, merging in middle age, suited her tomboyish, all enveloping manner. This manner seemed designed by her to dispense with aristocratic frills unsuitable to the style in which the Jeavonses lived, but — caught by Time, as all idiosyncrasies of talk and behaviour can be — the final result was somewhat to emphasise the background she was at pains to understate. She was wearing various rather ill-assorted woollen garments. After greeting Widmerpool and saying something about his mother’s cottage, she turned to me.

‘We’ve been having the most awful time, Nick,’ she said, ‘trying to fix up the rows of animals that always infest the house. Sanderson, the vet, a great friend of mine, has been an angel. I talked to the sweetest man there who was trying to find a home for his cat. His wife had just left him and he’d just been turned out of the furnished flat he was living in because the owner wanted it back. He had nowhere to go and was absolutely at the end of his tether. He seemed so nice, I couldn’t leave until we’d arranged the cat’s future. The long and the short of it is he’s going to stay for a night or two here. He had his bag with him and was going to some awful hotel, because he has very little money. He seems to know a lot of people we all know. You probably know him yourself, Nick.’

‘What is he called?’

‘I simply can’t remember,’ she said. ‘I’ve had such a lot of things to do today that I am feeling quite dizzy and the name has completely gone out of my head. He’ll be down in a moment. He is just unpacking his things — and now I must hear how the arrangements about the cottage are getting on.’

She joined the conversation taking place between Jeavons’s brother, Widmerpool and Widmerpool’s mother. Jeavons, who had been listening abstractedly to these negotiations, came and sat beside me.

‘What’s happening to all the Tollands, Nick?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t heard anything of them, except that your wife, Isobel, is going to have a baby and is staying in the country with Frederica.’

‘George has gone back to his regiment.’

‘Ex-Guardsman, isn’t he?’ said Jeavons. ‘He’ll be for a holding battalion.’

‘Then Hugo has become a Gunner.’

‘In the ranks?’

‘Yes.’

Hugo, regarded in general by his family as a fairly unsatisfactory figure, in spite of recent achievements in selling antique furniture, had taken the wind out of everyone’s sails by his enlistment.

‘One will be called up anyway,’ Hugo had said. ‘Why not have a start of everyone? Get in on the ground floor.’

Such a view from Hugo was unexpected.

‘He looks a bit strange in uniform.’

‘Must be like that song Billy Bennett used to sing,’ said Jeavons:

‘I’m a trooper, I’m a trooper,

They call me Gladys Cooper.

Ages since I’ve been to a music-hall. Aren’t what they used to be anyway. Still, it does Hugo credit.’

‘Robert has some idea of joining the navy.’

‘Plenty of water in the trenches, without going out of your way to look for it,’ said Jeavons shuddering. ‘Besides, I feel bilious most of the time, even when I’m not rolling about in a boat.’

‘Chips Lovell, like me, is thinking things over. Roddy Cutts, being an MP, arranged something — a Yeomanry regiment, I think.’

While we were talking someone came into the room. I had not taken very seriously Molly Jeavons’s surmise that I should probably know the man she had picked up at the vet’s. She always imagined Isobel and I must know everyone roughly the same age as ourselves. Perhaps she liked to feel that, if necessary, she could draw on our reserves for her own purposes. I thought it most improbable that I should have met this casual acquaintance, certainly never guessed he would turn out to be Moreland. However, Moreland it was. He looked far from well, dazed and unhappy.

‘Good God,’ he said, catching sight of me.

Molly Jeavons detached herself from the talk about Mrs Widmerpool’s lodger.

‘So you do know him, Nick.’

‘Of course we know each other.’

‘I felt sure you would.’

‘Why are you here?’ said Moreland. ‘Did you arrange this?’

‘Will you be all right in that room?’ Molly asked. ‘For goodness sake don’t touch the blackout, or the whole thing will come down. It’s just fixed temporarily to last the night. Teddy will do something about it in the morning.’

‘I really can’t thank you enough,’ said Moreland. ‘Farinelli … one thing and another … then letting me come here….’

He had probably been drinking earlier in the day, was still overwrought, though not exactly drunk, not far from tears. Molly Jeavons brushed his thanks aside.

‘One thing I can’t do,’ she said, ‘is to give either you or Nick dinner here tonight. Nor any of these other people either, except Stanley. We simply haven’t got enough food in the house to offer you anything.’

‘We’ll dine together,’ I said. ‘Is there anywhere in the neighbourhood?’

‘A place halfway up Gloucester Road on the right. It’s called the Scarlet Pimpernel. The food is not as bad as it sounds. They’ll send out for drinks.’

‘Do you feel equal to the Scarlet Pimpernel, Hugh?’

Moreland, almost past speech, nodded.

‘Give him your key, Teddy,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘We can find him another in the morning.’

Jeavons fumbled in one of the pockets of his overall and handed a key to Moreland.

‘I’ll probably be pottering about when you come in,’ he said, ‘can’t get to sleep if I turn in early. Come back with him, Nick. We might be able to find a glass of beer for you.’

I went across the room to take leave of Widmerpool and his mother. When I came up to her, Mrs Widmerpool turned her battery of teeth upon me, smiling fiercely, like the Wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, her shining, ruddy countenance advancing closer as she continued to hold my hand in hers.

‘I expect you are still occupied with your literary pursuits,’ she said, taking up our conversation at precisely the point at which it had been abandoned.

‘Some journalism—’

‘This is not a happy time for book-lovers.’

‘No, indeed.’

‘Still, you are fortunate.’

‘Why?’

‘With your bookish days, not, like Kenneth, in arms.’

‘He seems a Happy Warrior.’

‘It is not in his nature to remain in civil life at time of war,’ she said.

‘I will say good night, then.’

‘Good luck to you,’ she said, ‘wherever you may find yourself in these troublous times.’

She gave me another smile of great malignance, returning immediately to her discussions about rent. Widmerpool half raised his hand in a gesture of farewell. Moreland and I left the house together.

‘What the hell were you doing in that place?’ he asked, as we walked up the street.

‘Molly Jeavons is an aunt of Isobel’s. It is a perfectly normal place for me to be. Far stranger that you yourself should turn up there.’

‘You’re right about that,’ Moreland said. ‘I can’t quite make out how I did. Things have been moving rather quickly with me the last few months. Who was that terrifying woman you said good-bye to?’

‘Mother of the man in spectacles called Widmerpool. You met him with me at a nursing home years ago.’

‘No recollection,’ said Moreland, ‘though he seemed familiar. His mother began on Scriabin as soon as I arrived in the house. Told me the Poème de l’Extase was her favourite musical work. I say, I’m feeling like hell. Far from de l ’extase.’

‘What’s been happening? I didn’t even know you’d left the country.’

‘The country, as it were, left me,’ said Moreland. ‘At least Matilda did, which came to much the same thing.’

‘How did all this come about?’

‘I hardly know myself.’

‘Has she gone off with somebody?’

‘Gone back to Donners.’

The information was so grotesque that at first I could hardly take it seriously. Then I saw as a possibility that a row might have taken place and Matilda done this from pique. At certain seasons, Matilda, admittedly, had a fairly rough time living with Moreland. She might require a short spell of rich life to put her right, although (as Mrs Widmerpool could have said) wartime was hardly the moment to pursue rich life. Sir Magnus Donners, as a former lover, himself no longer young, would provide a comparatively innocuous vehicle for such a temporary interlude. The Moreland situation, regarded in these cold-blooded terms, might be undesirable certainly, at the same time not beyond hope.

‘I’ll tell the story when we get to the restaurant,’ said Moreland. ‘I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. Just had a few doubles.’

We found the Scarlet Pimpernel soon after this. The place was not full. We took a table in the corner at the back of the room. At this early stage of the war, it was still possible to order a bottle of wine without undue difficulty and expense. The food, as Molly Jeavons had said, turned out better than might have been expected from the mob-caps of the waitresses and general tone of the establishment. After some soup and a glass of wine Moreland began to recover himself.

‘One always imagines things happen in hot blood,’ he said. ‘An ill-considered remark starts a row. Hard words follow, misunderstandings. Matters that can be put right in the end. Unfortunately life doesn’t work out like that. First of all there is no row, secondly, nothing can be put right.’

‘Barnby says he is always on his guard when things are going well with a woman.’

‘Still, your wife,’ said Moreland, ‘it’s bloody uncomfortable if things are not going well between yourself and your wife. I speak from experience. All the same, there may be something in Barnby’s view. You remember the business about me and — well — your sister-in-law, Priscilla?’

‘You conveyed at the time that a situation existed — then ceased to exist, or was stifled in some way.’

I did not see why I should help Moreland out beyond a certain point. If he wanted to tell his story, he must supply the facts, not reveal one half and allow the other to be guessed.

He had always been too fond of doing that when extracting sympathy for his emotional tangles. No one had ever known what had happened about himself and Priscilla, only that some close relationship had existed between them, which had caused a great deal of disturbance in his married life. Some explanation was required. The situation could not be pieced together merely from a series of generalisations about matrimony.

‘Anything you like,’ said Moreland. ‘The point is that, during that rather tricky period, Matty could not have behaved better. She was absolutely marvellous — really marvellous. It was the one thing that made the whole awfulness of life possible when …’

He did not finish the sentence, but meant, I supposed, when the affair with Priscilla was at an end.

‘Why on earth, if Matty was going to leave me, didn’t she leave me then? I’ll tell you. She enjoyed the emotional strain of it all. Women are like that, the lame girl in Dostoevsky who said she didn’t want to be happy.’

‘How did it start?’

‘Matilda was in a show that opened in the provinces — Brighton or somewhere. She just wrote and said she was not returning home, would I send her things along, such as they were. She had already taken most of her clothes with her, so I presume she had already decided on leaving when she set out.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Two or three weeks.’

‘Is it generally known?’

‘Not yet, I think. Matilda is often away acting, so it is quite usual for her to be absent from home.’

‘And you had no warning that all was not well?’

‘I am the most modest man in the world when it is a question of trying to make a woman fall for me,’ said Moreland. ‘I never expect I shall bring it off. On the other hand, once she’s fallen, I can never really believe she will prefer someone else. These things are just the way vanity happens to take you.’

‘But where does Donners come in? She can’t have fallen for him.’

‘She has been going over to Stourwater fairly often., She made no secret of that. Why should she? There didn’t seem any reason to object. What could I do, anyway? You remember we all dined there that rather grim evening when everyone dressed up as the Seven Deadly Sins. I recall now, that was where I saw your friend Widmerpool before. Does he always haunt my worst moments? Anyway, Matilda’s visits to Stourwater were of that sort, nothing serious.’

‘Is Matilda living at Stourwater at this moment?’

‘No — staying in the flat of a girl she knows in London, another actress. The point is this: if I allow Matilda to divorce me, Donners will marry her.’

‘No.’

Moreland laughed.

‘Indeed, yes,’ he said. ‘I see I have surprised you.’

‘You certainly have.’

‘It now turns out that Donners asked her to marry him before — when she was mixed up with him years ago.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘What can I do?’

‘But will you let yourself be divorced?’

‘I’ve tried every way of getting her back,’ said Moreland. ‘She is quite firm. I don’t want to be just spiteful about it. If she is consumed with a desire to become Lady Donners, Lady Donners let her be.’

‘But to want to be Lady Donners is so unlike Matilda — especially as she turned down the offer in the past.’

‘You think it unlike her?’

‘Don’t you?’

‘Not entirely. She can be tough, you know. One of the worst things about life is not how nasty the nasty people are. You know that already. It is how nasty the nice people can be.’

‘Have you no idea what went wrong?’

‘None — except, as I say, the Priscilla business. I thought that was all forgotten. Perhaps it was, and life with me was just too humdrum. Now I’ll tell you something else that may surprise you. Nothing ever took place between Priscilla and myself. We never went to bed.’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Moreland slowly, ‘perhaps because there did not seem anywhere to go. That’s so often one of the problems. I’ve thought about the subject a lot. One might write a story about two lovers who have nowhere to go. They are at their wits’ end. Then they pretend they are newly married and apply to a different estate-agent every week to inspect unfurnished houses and flats. As often as not they are given the key and manage to have an hour alone together. Inventive, don’t you think? I was crazy about Priscilla. Then Maclintick committed suicide and everything was altered. I felt upset, couldn’t think about girls and all that. That was when Priscilla herself decided things had better stop. I suppose the whole business shook the boat so far as my own marriage was concerned. It seemed to recover. I thought we were getting on all right. I was wrong.’

I was reminded of Duport telling me about Jean, although no one could have been less like Jean than Matilda, less like Moreland than Duport.

‘The fact is,’ said Moreland, ‘Matilda lost interest in me. With women, that situation is like a vacuum. It must be filled. They begin to look round for someone else. She decided on Donners.’

‘She was still pretty interested in you at the party Mrs Foxe gave for your symphony.’

‘How do you know?’

‘She talked to me about it.’

‘While I was getting off with Priscilla?’

‘More or less.’

Moreland made a grimace.

‘Surely she’ll come back in the end?’ I said.

‘You see, I’m not absolutely certain I want Matilda back,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I feel I can’t live without her, other times, that I can’t bear the thought of having her in the house. In real life, things are much worse than as represented in books. In books, you love somebody and want them, win them or lose them. In real life, so often, you love them and don’t want them, or want them and don’t love them.’

‘You make it all sound difficult.’

‘I sometimes think all I myself require is a quiet life,’ said Moreland. ‘For some unaccountable reason it is always imagined that people like oneself want to be rackety. Of course I want some fun occasionally, but so does everyone else.’

‘What does Matilda want? A lot of money?’

‘Not in the obvious way, diamonds and things. Matilda has wanted for a long time to spread her wings. She knows at last that she will never be any good as an actress. She wants power. Plenty of power. When we were first married she arranged all my life for me. Arranged rather too much. I’m not sure she liked it when I made a small name for myself — if one may be said to have made a small name for oneself.’

‘She will have to play second fiddle to Sir Magnus, more even than to yourself.’

‘Not second fiddle as an artist — as an actress, in her case. Being an artist — to use old fashioned terminology, but what other can one use? — partakes of certain feminine characteristics, is therefore peculiarly provoking for women to live with. In some way, the more “masculine” an artist is, the worse her predicament. If he is really homosexual, or hopelessly incapable of dealing with everyday life, it is almost easier.’

‘I can think of plenty of examples to the contrary.’

‘Anyway, there will be compensations with Donners. Matilda will operate on a large scale. She will have her finger in all kind of pies.’

‘Still, what pies.’

‘Not very intellectual ones, certainly,’ said Moreland, ‘but then the minds of most women are unamusing, unoriginal, determinedly banal. Matilda is not one of the exceptions. Is it surprising one is always cuckolded by middlebrows?’

‘But you talk as if these matters were all concerned with the mind.’

Moreland laughed.

‘I once asked Barnby if he did not find most women extraordinarily unsensual,’ he said. ‘Do you know what he answered?’

‘What?’

‘He said, “I’ve never noticed.”’

I laughed too.

‘I suppose,’ said Moreland, ‘had you asked Lloyd George, “Don’t you think politics rather corrupt?”, he might have made the same reply. Minor factors disappear when you are absorbed by any subject. You know, one of the things about being deserted is that it leaves you in a semi-castrated condition. You’re incapable of fixing yourself up with an alternative girl. Deserting people, on the other hand, is positively stimulating. I don’t mind betting that Matty is surrounded by admirers at this moment. Do you remember when we heard that crippled woman singing in Gerrard Street years ago:

Whom do you lead on Rapture’s roadway, far,

Before you agonize them in farewell?

That’s what it comes to. But look who has just arrived.’

Three people were sitting down at a table near the door of the restaurant. They were Mark Members, J. G. Quiggin and Anne Umfraville.

‘I feel better after getting all that off my chest,’ said Moreland.

‘Shall we go back?’

‘Do you think Lady Molly will have forgotten who I am?’ said Moreland. ‘It’s terribly kind of her to put me up like this, but you know what bad memories warm hearted people have.’

I saw from that Moreland had perfectly grasped Molly Jeavons’s character. Nothing was more probable than that she would have to be reminded of the whole incident of inviting him to the house when she saw him at breakfast the following morning. Like so many persons who live disordered lives, Moreland had peculiar powers of falling on his feet, an instinctive awareness of where to look for help. That was perhaps the legacy of early poverty. He and Molly Jeavons — although she made no claims whatever to know about the arts — would understand each other. If he overstayed his welcome — with Moreland not inconceivable — she would throw him out without the smallest ill-feeling on either side.

‘We might have a word with the literary critics on the way out,’ said Moreland.

‘What happened to Anne Umfraville in the light of recent developments?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Moreland. ‘I thought she was interested in your friend Templer. I understand she was passing out of Donners’s life in any case. She must have made some new friends.’

We paid the bill, pausing on the way out at the table by the door.

‘Who told you of this restaurant?’ said Quiggin. ‘I thought it was only known to Anne and myself — you have met, of course?’

His air was somewhat proprietorial.

‘Anne has a flat not far from here,’ he said. ‘Mark and I have been working late there.’

‘What at?’

‘Proofs,’ said Quiggin.

He did not explain what kind of proofs. Neither Moreland nor I inquired.

‘How is Matty, Hugh?’ asked Members.

‘On tour.’

‘I do adore Matilda,’ said Anne Umfraville. ‘Have you been to Stourwater lately? I have rather quarrelled with Magnus. He can be so tiresome. So pompous, you know.’

‘I don’t live near there any longer,’ said Moreland, ‘so we haven’t met for a month or two. Sir Magnus himself is no longer occupying the castle, of course. It has been taken over by the government, but I can’t remember for what purpose. Just as a castle, I suppose.’

‘What a ludicrous way this war is being run,’ said Quiggin. ‘I was talking to Howard Craggs about its inanities last night. Have you got a decent shelter where you live?’

‘I’m just going back there,’ said Moreland, ‘never to emerge.’

‘Give my love to Matty when you next see her,’ said Members.

‘And mine,’ said Anne Umfraville.

We said good night.

‘I think people know about Matilda,’ said Moreland.

We passed through streets lit only by a cold autumnal moon.

‘Have you the key?’

Moreland found it at last. We went upstairs to the drawing-room. Jeavons was wandering about restlessly. He had abandoned his beret, now wore a mackintosh over pyjamas. His brother was in an armchair, smoking his pipe and going through a pile of papers beside him on the floor. He would check each document, then place it on a stack the other side of his chair.

‘We got rid of them at last,’ said Jeavons. ‘Molly’s gone to bed. They struck a pretty hard bargain with Stanley. Still, the place seems to suit. That’s what matters. I’d rather it was Lil than me. What was dinner like?’

‘Not bad.’

‘How was our blackout as you came up the street?’

‘Not a chink of light.’

‘Have some beer?’

‘I think I’ll go straight to bed, if you don’t mind,’ said Moreland. ‘I feel a bit done in.’

I had never heard Moreland refuse a drink before. He must have been utterly exhausted. He had cheered up during dinner. Now he looked like death again.

‘I’ll come up with you to make sure the blackout won’t fall down,’ said Jeavons. ‘Never do to be fined as a warden.’

‘Good night, Nick.’

‘Good night.’

They went upstairs. Stanley Jeavons threw down what was apparently the last of his papers. He took the pipe from his mouth and began to knock it out against his heel. He sighed deeply. ‘I think I’ll have a glass of beer too,’ he said. He helped himself and sat down again. ‘It’s extraordinary,’ he said, ‘how you get a hunch from a chap’s handwriting if he’s done three years for fraudulent conversion.’

‘In business?’

‘In business, too. I meant in what I’m doing now.’

‘What are you doing?’ ‘Reservists.’ ‘For the army?’

‘Sorting them out. Got a pile of their personal details here. Stacks more at the office. Brought a batch home to work on.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘Some of them get called up.’

‘I’m on some form of the Reserve myself.’

‘Which one?’

I told him.

‘You’ll probably come my way in due course — or one of my colleagues’.’

‘Could it be speeded up?’

‘What?’

‘Finding my name.’

‘Would you like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t see why not.’

‘You could?’

‘M’m.’

‘Fairly soon?’

‘How old are you?’

I told him that too.

‘Health A1?’

‘I think so.’

‘School OTC?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get a Certificate A there?’

‘Yes.’

‘What arm is your choice?’

‘Infantry.’

‘Any particular regiment?’

I made a suggestion.

‘You don’t want one of the London regiments?’

‘Not specially. Why?’

‘Everyone seems to want a London regiment,’ he said. ‘Probably be able to fix you up with an out-of-the-way regiment like that.’

‘It would be kind.’

‘And you’d like to get cracking?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll see what we can do.’

‘That’s very good of you.’

‘Might take a week or two.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Just let me write your name in my little book.’

Jeavons returned to the room.

‘That friend of yours is absolutely cooked,’ he said. ‘He’d have been happy to sleep on the floor. His blackout is all correct now, if he doesn’t interfere with it. Well, Stan, I don’t know how much Lil is going to enjoy living in a cottage with Mrs W.’

‘Lil will be all right,’ said Stanley Jeavons. ‘She can get on with all sorts.’

‘More than I can,’ said Jeavons.

Stanley Jeavons shook his head without smiling. He evidently found his brother’s life inexplicable, had no desire whatever to share its extravagances. Jeavons moved towards the table where the beer bottles stood. Suddenly he began to sing in that full, deep, unexpectedly attractive voice, so different from the croaking tones in which he ordinarily conversed:

‘There’s a long, long trail a-winding

Into the land of … my dreams,

Where the night … ingale is singing

And the white moon beams.

There’s a long, long night of waiting,

Until my dreams all … come true …’

He broke off as suddenly as he had begun. Stanley Jeavons began tapping out his pipe again, perhaps to put a stop to this refrain.

‘Used to sing that while we were blanco-ing,’ said Jeavons. ‘God, how fed up I got cleaning that bloody equipment.’

‘I shall have to go home, Ted.’

‘Don’t hurry away.’

‘I must.’

‘Have some more beer.’

‘No.’

‘Come and see us soon,’ said Jeavons, ‘before we all get blown up. I’m still not satisfied with the fold of that curtain. Got the blackout on the brain. You haven’t a safety-pin about you, have you, Stan?’

Outside the moon had gone behind a bank of cloud. I went home through the gloom, exhilarated, at the same time rather afraid. Ahead lay the region beyond the white-currant bushes, where the wild country began, where armies for ever campaigned, where the Rules and Discipline of War prevailed. Another stage of life was passed, just as finally, just as irrevocably, as on that day when childhood had come so abruptly to an end at Stonehurst.