Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2

by Anthony Powell

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

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

  ‘This your local?’ he asked.

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

  ‘Same here.’

  ‘It’s a long way from your beat.’

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘Please do.’

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

  ‘Can we very well do that?’

  ‘Why not?’

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

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

  ‘Well?’

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

  ‘I suppose so.’

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

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

  ‘Some of it wasn’t so bad,’ he said.

  ‘No?’

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

  ‘Where were you?’

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

  ‘Pretty unpleasant?’

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

  ‘Did he win his bet?’

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

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

  ‘Going home?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

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

  ‘If you have any ideas.’

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

  ‘All right.’

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

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Ever heard of Dicky Umfraville?’

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

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

  ‘Is Dicky Umfraville still married to Anne Stepney?’

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

  ‘His fourth. She was quite young.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Wild horses won’t drag it from me.’

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

  ‘You are whetting my appetite.’

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

  ‘You did.’

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

  ‘Know him well?’

  ‘Quite well.’

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

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Know her too?’

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

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

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

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

  ‘Sorry.’

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

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

  ‘What did you do about it?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The nurse who gave you the glad eye.’

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

  ‘And this was——’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You didn’t say anything yourself?’

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

  ‘Of course.’

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

  ‘It does—enormously.’

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

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

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

  ‘I could say such—wonderful things to you,

  There would be such—wonderful things to do . . .’

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

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

  And I was the only boy . . .’

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

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

  ‘Illusions?’

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

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

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