‘I gave up golf. No time.’
Again he looked despairing. He had devoted so much energy to achieving his present position in the world that even golf had been discarded. There was something impressive in this admission. We sat for a time in silence. The fat man was now enjoying the first taste of some apple-pie liberally covered with cream and brown sugar. The yellow-faced couple were still occupied with the situation in Central Europe.
‘La position de Dollfuss envers le parti national-socialiste autrichien serait insoutenable s’il comptait sur une gouvernement soi-disant parlementaire: il faut bien l’avouer.’
‘Heurcusement le chancelier autrichien n’est pas accablé d’un tel handicap administratif.’
Widmerpool may have caught some of their words. In any case, he must have decided that the question of his own immediate problems had been sufficiently ventilated. He, too, began to speak of international politics; and with less pessimism than might have been expected.
‘As you probably know,’ he said, ‘my opinions have moved steadily to the left of late years. I quite see that there are aspects of Hitler’s programme to which objection may most legitimately be taken. For example, I myself possess a number of Jewish friends, some of them very able men—Jimmy Klein, for example—and I should therefore much prefer that item of the National Socialist policy to be dropped. I am, in fact, not at all sure that it will not be dropped when matters get straightened out a bit. After all, it is sometimes forgotten that the National Socialists are not only “national”, they are also “socialist”. So far as that goes, I am with them. They believe in planning. Everyone will agree that there was a great deal of the old Germany that it was right to sweep away—the Kaisers and Krupps, Hindenburgs and mediatised princes, stuff of that sort—we want to hear no more about them. Certainly not. People talk of rearming. I am glad to say the Labour Party is against it to a man—and the more enlightened Tories, too. There is far too much disregard, as it is, of the equilibrium to be maintained between the rate of production and consumption in the aggregate, without the additional interference of a crushing armaments programme. We do not want an obstacle like that in the way of the organised movement towards progressive planning in the economic world of today. People talk of non-aggression pacts between France, Belgium and ourselves. The plain consequence of any such scatter-brained military commitments would be merely to augment existing German fears of complete encirclement. No, no, none of that, please. What is much more likely to be productive is to settle things round a table. Business men of the right sort. Prominent trade unionists. Sir Magnus Donners could probably play his part. If Germany wants her former colonies, hand them back to her. What is the objection? They are no use to anyone else. Take a man like Goering. Now, it seems pretty plain to me from looking at photographs of him in the papers that he only likes swaggering about in uniforms and decorations. I expect he is a bit of a snob—most of us are at heart—well, ask him to Buckingham Palace. Show him round. What is there against giving him the Garter? After all, it is what such things are for, isn’t it? Coffee?’
‘Yes, black.’
‘You can have it downstairs. I never take coffee.’
‘Talking of uniforms, are you still a Territorial?’
‘I am still a Territorial,’ said Widmerpool, smiling with some satisfaction. ‘I hold the rank of captain. I can perfectly follow your train of thought. You suppose that because I am opposed to sabre-rattling in the direction of our Teutonic neighbours, that therefore I must be the sort of man incapable of holding his own in an officers’ mess. Let me assure you that such is not the case. Between you and me, I am by no means averse from issuing orders. An army—even an amateur army—is no bad school in which to learn to command—and you must know how to command in business, my dear Nicholas, as much as in any army. Besides that, one has in a battalion opportunity for giving expression to one’s own point of view—a point of view often new to the persons I find myself among. These young bank clerks, accountants and so on, excellent Territorial officers, are naturally quite unfamiliar with the less limited world inhabited by someone like myself. I make it my business to instruct them. However, I dare say I may have to give up my Territorials when I get married. I do not know about that yet.’
At last it was time for me to go on my way.
‘So you are off to have tea with some of my future inlaws, are you?’ said Widmerpool, at the door of the club. ‘Well, you mustn’t repeat to them some of the things we have talked about. I am sure the General would be greatly shocked.’
He sniggered once again, making one of his awkward gestures of farewell that looked as if he were shaking his fist. I went down the steps feeling strangely dejected. It was a sunny afternoon and there was time to kill before the Conyers visit. I tried to persuade myself that the gloom that had descended upon me was induced by Widmerpool’s prolonged political dissertations, but in my heart I knew that its true cause was all this talk of marriage. With the age of thirty in sight a sense of guilt in relation to that subject makes itself increasingly felt. It was all very well mentally to prepare ribald jokes about Widmerpool’s honeymoon for such friends who knew him, and certainly nothing could be more grotesque than his approach to the matter in hand. That was undeniable. Yet one day, I knew, life would catch up with me too; like Widmerpool, I should be making uneasy preparations to ‘settle down’. Should I, when the time came to ‘take the plunge’, as he had called it, feel inwardly less nervous about the future than he? Should I cut a better figure? This oppression of the heart was intensified by a peculiar awareness that the time was not far distant; even though I could think of no one whose shadow fell across such a speculation.
Dismissing my own preoccupations and trying to consider Widmerpool’s position objectively, I found it of interest. For example, he was about to become brother-in-law of General Conyers, now little short of an octogenarian. I did not know whom the remaining Blaides sisters had married—one, at least, had remained single—but their husbands must all have been years senior to Widmerpool, even though they might be younger than the General. I attempted to find some parallel, however far-fetched, to link Widmerpool with General Conyers; thereby hoping to construct one of those formal designs in human behaviour which for some reason afford an obscure satisfaction to the mind: making the more apparent inconsistencies of life easier to bear. A list could be compiled. Both were accustomed to live by the will: both had decided for a time to carve out a career unburdened by a wife: both were, in very different ways, fairly successful men. There the comparison seemed to break down.
However, the family connexions of Mrs. Conyers had been thought by some to have played a part in bringing her husband to the altar; similar considerations might well be operating in the mind of Widmerpool where her sister was concerned. That would not be running contrary to his character. Alternatively, any such estimate of his motives—or the General’s—might be completely at fault. In either case, love rather than convenience might dominate action. Indeed, such evidence as I possessed of Widmerpool’s former behaviour towards women indicated a decided lack of restraint, even when passion was unsatisfied.
Then there was Mrs. Haycock herself. Why on earth—so her circumstances presented themselves to me—should she wish to marry Widmerpool? Such an inability to assess physical attraction or community of interest is, of course, common enough. Where the opposite sex is concerned, especially in relation to marriage, the workings of the imagination, or knowledge of the individuals themselves, are overwhelmed by the subjective approach. Only by admitting complete ignorance from the start can some explanation sometimes slowly be built up. I wondered, for example, whether she saw in Widmerpool the solid humdrum qualities formerly apparent in her Australian husband: although no evidence whatever justified the assumption that her Australian husband had been either solid or humdrum. For all I knew, he might have been a good-for-nothing of the first water. Once again, it was possible that Mrs. Haycock herself was in love. The fact th
at Widmerpool seemed a grotesque figure to some who knew him provided no reason why he should not inspire love in others. I record these speculations not for their subtlety, certainly not for their generosity of feeling, but to emphasise the difficulty in understanding, even remotely, why people behave as they do.
The question of love was still apt to be associated in my own mind with thoughts of Jean; additionally so since Widmerpool had spoken of her brother, Peter Templer, and her husband, Bob Duport: even making enquiries about Jean herself. Evidently she had impressed him in some way. Could I safely assure myself that I was no longer in love with her? I had recently decided, at last with some sense of security, that life could proceed on that assumption. All the same, it was not uniformly easy to state this decision to myself with a feeling of absolute confidence; even though I found myself dwelling less than formerly on the question of whether we could have ‘made a success of it.’ For a moment the thought of her reunited to Duport had brought to the heart a touch of the red-hot pincers: a reminder of her voice saying ‘that was rather a wet kiss.’
Some people dramatise their love affairs—as I was doing at that moment—by emphasis on sentiment and sensuality; others prefer the centre of the stage to be occupied by those aspects of action and power that must also play so prominent a part in love. Adepts of the latter school try to exclude, or at least considerably to reduce, the former emotions. Barnby would rarely admit himself ‘in love’ with the women he pursued: Baby Wentworth was believed never to speak another civil word to a man after taking him as a lover. The exhibitionism of publicity is necessary to one, just as to another is a physical beauty that must be universally acknowledged. Peter Templer liked to be seen about with ‘obvious beauties’: Bijou Ardglass, to be photographed in the papers with her lover of the moment. Most individual approaches to love, however unexpected, possess a logic of their own; for only by attempting to find some rationalisation of love in the mind can its burdens easily be borne. Sentiment and power, each in their way, supply something to feed the mind, if not the heart. They are therefore elements operated often to excess by persons in temperament unable to love at all, yet at the same time unwilling to be left out of the fun, or to bear the social stigma of living emotionally uninteresting lives.
I thought of some of these things as I made my way, later that afternoon, towards Sloane Square, the neighbourhood where General and Mrs. Conyers still inhabited the flat which I had visited as a small boy. I felt, to tell the truth, rather out of practice for paying a call of this sort. I was usually away from London on Sunday, certainly unaccustomed to spend the afternoon at tea with an elderly general and his wife. Even tea at the Ufford with Uncle Giles would take place only a couple of times within a period of about three years. However, this seemed one of several hints of change that had become noticeable lately, suggesting those times when the ice-floes of life’s river are breaking up—as in that scene in Resurrection—to float down-stream, before the torrent freezes again in due course into new and deceptively durable shape.
Although I used to see the General or Mrs. Conyers once in a way when I was younger, usually with my parents at the Grand Military (the General himself had formerly done some steeplechasing) or at some point-to-point at Hawthorn Hill, the last of these meetings between us had taken place years before. The Conyers’s flat, when I arrived there, appeared considerably smaller than I remembered. Otherwise the place was unchanged. There on the bookcase was the photograph of the General with his halberd. The ’cello I could not immediately locate. The reason for this became apparent a moment or two after I had been greeted by Mrs. Conyers, when a low melancholy wailing began all at once to echo from somewhere not far off, persistent, though muffled by several doors: notes of a hidden orchestra, mysterious, even a shade unearthly, as if somewhere in the vicinity gnomes were thumbing strange instruments in a cave. Then the music swelled in volume like a street band coming level with the window, so that one felt instinctively for a coin to throw down.
‘Aylmer will be with us in a minute,’ said Mrs. Conyers. ‘He always practises until five o’clock when we are in London. As you were coming this afternoon he agreed to finish a little earlier. He is never satisfied with his execution.’
‘The piece seems familiar.’
‘Ave Maria.’
‘But, of course.’
‘When it isn’t Gounod, it is Marcello’s sonatas.
The thought of the General at his ‘cello conjured up one of those Dutch genre pictures, sentimental yet at the same time impressive, not only on account of their adroit recession and delicate colour tones, but also from the deep social conviction of the painter. For some reason I could not help imagining him scraping away in the uniform of the Bodyguard, helmet resting on a carved oak chest and halberd leaning against the wall. Mrs. Conyers dismissed her husband’s cadences, no doubt only too familiar.
‘What a strange household that is of Lady Molly’s,’ she said, ‘I don’t mind telling you that I find him rather difficult. He seems to have nothing whatever to talk about. He once told me of a wonderfully cheap place to buy white cotton shirts for men. Of course, Aylmer was glad to know of the shop, only you don’t want to go on discussing it for ever. So tedious for his wife, it must be, but she doesn’t seem to mind it. All the Ardglass family are very odd. I believe you come across all kinds of people at the Jeavonses—some of them decidedly what my father used to call “rum”. Of course that was where my sister first met Mr. Widmerpool. How funny you should know him already.’
She spoke with some show of indifference, but there could be no doubt that her unconcern was simulated and that she longed to discuss the engagement exhaustively: probably hoping to hear special revelations about Widmerpool before her husband joined us.
‘I know him quite well. In fact, I have just been lunching with him.’
Mrs. Conyers was enchanted at this news.
‘Then you can really tell us what he is like,’ she said. ‘We have heard some—of course I don’t believe them—not exactly flattering accounts of him. Naturally you don’t want to listen to everything you hear, but Mildred is my youngest sister, and she does do some rather reckless things sometimes. Do describe him to me.’
At that moment tea was brought in by the maid, and, before Mrs. Conyers could further insist upon a reply, the General himself appeared. He was still limping slightly from his fall. He grasped my arm near the elbow for a second in a grip of steel, as if making a sudden arrest. Generals, as a collective rank, incline physically to be above, or below, average stature. Aylmer Conyers, notably tall, possessed in addition to his height, much natural distinction. In fact, his personality filled the room, although without active aggression. At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing. If he decided to kill you, he would kill you; if he thought it sufficient to knock you down, he would knock you down: if a mere reprimand was all required, he would confine himself to a reprimand. In addition to this, he patently maintained a good-humoured, well-mannered awareness of the inherent failings of human nature: the ultimate futility of all human effort. He wore an unusually thick, dark hairy suit, the coat cut long, the trousers narrow, a high stiff collar, of which the stud was revealed by the tie, and beautifully polished boots of patent leather with grey cloth tops. He looked like an infinitely accomplished actor got up to play the part that was, in fact, his own. At the same time he managed to avoid that almost too perfect elegance of outward appearance to be found in some men of his sort, especially courtiers. The hairiness of the suit did that. It suggested that a touch of rough force had been retained as a reminder of his strenuous past, like ancient, rusty armour hanging among luxurious tapestries.
‘Never get that last bit right,’ he said. ‘. . . Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae . . . always a shade flat on that high note in hora . . .’
He slowly shook his head, at the same time lowering himself into an arm-chair, while he straightened out his left leg with both
hands as if modelling a piece of delicate sculpture. Evidently it was still rather painfully stiff. After achieving the best angle for comfort, he began to conduct through the air the strokes of an imaginary baton, at the same time allowing himself to hum under his breath:
‘Turn, tumtitty, tum-te-tum
Te-tum te-titty tum-tum-te-titty, tum-te-titty
Amen, A-a-a-a-ame-e-e-en . . .’
Mrs. Conyers, throughout these movements and sounds, all of which she completely ignored, could scarcely wait for the maid carrying the tea-tray to leave the room.
‘Too late to learn at my age, much too late,’ said the General. ‘But I go on trying. Never mind, I’m not getting on too badly with those arrangements of Saint-Saëns.’
‘Aylmer, you remember I told you Nicholas knows Mr. Widmerpool?’
‘What, this Nicholas?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know the fellow who is going to marry Mildred?’
‘Yes.’
If Mrs. Conyers had already told her husband of my acquaintance with Widmerpool, the General had entirely forgotten about that piece of information, for it now came to him as something absolutely new, and, for some reason, excruciatingly funny, causing him to fall into an absolute paroxysm of deep, throaty guffaws, like the inextinguishable laughter of the Homeric gods on high Olympus, to whose characteristic faults and merits General Conyers’s own nature probably approximated closely enough. A twinge of pain in his leg brought this laughter to an end in a fit of coughing.
‘What sort of a fellow is he?’ he asked, speaking now more seriously. ‘We haven’t heard too satisfactory an account of him, have we, Bertha? Is he a good fellow? He’ll have his hands full with Mildred, you may be sure of that. Much younger than her, isn’t he?’
‘I was at school with him. He must be about——’
‘Nonsense,’ said the General. ‘You can’t have been at school with him. You must be thinking of someone else of that name—a younger brother, I expect.’
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 7
