When someone repeatedly tells you stories about their relations, pictures begin at last to form in the mind, tinged always in colours used by the narrator; so that after listening day after day to Lovell’s recitals, I had become not only well versed in the rôle of each performer, but also involuntarily preoccupied with their individual behaviour. This concern for Lovell’s relations had grown into something like a furtive interest in the comic strip of a daily paper, a habit not admitted to oneself. Lovell covered a good deal of ground. He was as ready to contemplate the doings of some distant cousins of his, whose only claim to fame seemed to be that they had emigrated to Vancouver and returned to live at Esher, as to recount the more splendid aspects of ancestral archives, for example, the epic of his mother’s elopement with his father at a moment when her parents supposed her all but engaged to his more eligible cousin.
In these sagas, Lovell’s ‘second Sleaford uncle’ (to give him his nephew’s initial label) played a surprisingly small part. That was altogether unexpected. Lovell liked talking about Dogdene, but not about his uncle. The fact was that Lord Sleaford lived a very secluded life there, undertaking in the neighbourhood a bare minimum of such duties as were expected of a landowner of his magnitude. He would give a small shooting party from time to time (‘shepherd’s pie for luncheon,’ Lovell said, ‘and not enough sprouts’), existing on the whole outside, or at best on the edge of any given world of recognisable social activity; especially that of a kind to be treated at any degree of sensationalism in print. In quite a different way, he sounded almost as much a recluse as Erridge.
Lovell himself was in a manner proud of this honourable, uncorrupted twilight in which Lord Sleaford had his being, infinitely removed from the gossip-column renown so dear to his own heart; but he also felt, perhaps reasonably enough, that the historical and architectural magnificence of Dogdene was all the time being wasted as a setting for great events.
‘I know there is a lot to be said for a peer being quiet and well behaved,’ he used to say. ‘But really Uncle Geoffrey goes too far. When you think of the house parties they used to have at Dogdene, it is a bit depressing. You know, when George IV came to stay, they painted the place white and gold from top to bottom, including the Chinese Chippendale commodes. Even Aunt Molly, who never showed the slightest desire to cut a dash, quite often used to entertain royalty there. Then there was the occasional literary lion too. I believe Henry James was at Dogdene once. St. John Clarke was there just before the war. It wasn’t the complete morgue it is now. The fact is, Uncle Geoffrey is a very dull man. Aunt Alice, though she does her best, isn’t much better. If Uncle John hadn’t died, I don’t believe either of them would have married anybody—Uncle Geoffrey wouldn’t have been able to afford a wife, anyway. As it is, they just potter about and read the newspapers and listen to the wireless—and that is the extent of it.’
The general impression of Lord Sleaford that emerged from these fragments of information was certainly that of a person rather unusually lacking in any quality of liveliness or distinction. Dispiriting years as a younger son had destroyed in him any enterprise or geniality he might once have possessed. That was Lovell’s theory. Like Alfred Tolland, he had consistently failed to make a career for himself, while at the same time lacking the philosophic detachment which gave Alfred Tolland a certain moral dignity: even a kind of saintliness. Inheritance of Dogdene had come too late to alter his routine, set, no doubt congenially, in an unimaginative mould. Such was the portrait painted by Lovell, in which Lord Sleaford lived in my imagination with a certain rugged reality of his own; although I sometimes wondered whether, in this individual case, the uncompromising monochrome of Lovell’s pigment might be tinged by the possibility that Lord Sleaford himself did not greatly care for his nephew: perhaps openly disapproved of him. That was a contingency to be borne in mind.
Lady Sleaford, as depicted by Lovell, possessed for me, on the other hand, none of her husband’s clarity of outline. She was given no highlights, except the crumb of praise that she ‘did her best’. Lovell had contrived to afford her no separate existence. She was simply the wife of Lord Sleaford. I pictured her as embodying all the unreality of a dowager on the stage: grey-haired: grotesquely dressed: speaking in a stiff, affected manner: possibly gazing through a lorgnette: a figure belonging to Edwardian drawing-room comedy. Armed with this vision of the Sleafords, I could not help wondering how Widmerpool had been asked to their house, according to Lovell, so rarely visited.
‘Easy to explain,’ said Lovell. ‘Aunt Alice, the most conventional woman alive, is also one of those tremendously respectable people who long to know someone they regard as disreputable. To have Mildred Haycock as a friend has been the great adventure of Aunt Alice’s life.’
‘And she includes Mrs. Haycock’s husbands?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Lovell. ‘You’ve got something when you ask that. I very much doubt whether Haycock ever reached Dogdene. However, as the Widmerpool engagement took place over here—and Mildred, in any case, coming to England so rarely—I suppose an invitation to both of them was hard to refuse. You see, Mildred almost certainly invited herself. She probably took the opportunity of asking if her young man could come too.’
This was a credible explanation.
‘It is just like the Sleafords,’ said Lovell, ‘that Aunt Alice should disapprove of Molly Jeavons, who is really so frightfully well behaved, in spite of the ramshackle way in which she lives, and take to her bosom someone like Mildred, who has slept with every old-timer between Cannes and St. Tropez.’
‘What will the Sleafords think about Widmerpool?’
‘He sounds just the sort of chap Uncle Geoffrey will like. Probably talk stocks and shares all day long, and go to bed every night at half-past ten sharp, after one glass of port. The port is quite good at Dogdene, I must admit. Only because no one has ever bothered to drink it. All the same, I am a bit surprised myself by their both getting an invitation. It is not so easy to penetrate Dogdene these days. I know. I’ve tried.’
I was, naturally, much occupied at this period with my own affairs, so that was all I heard about Widmerpool going to Dogdene before learning from Lovell—quite by chance one day at the Studio—that Mrs. Haycock’s engagement had been broken off. Lovell hardly knew Widmerpool. He would have had no particular concern with the engagement had not Dogdene provided the background for this event. He had no details. I learnt more of the story as a result of Molly Jeavons announcing: ‘I shall have a few people in next week, Nicholas, a sort of party for yourself and Isobel. Something quite small.’
When I had next been to the Jeavonses’ house after the visit to Umfraville’s night club, Jeavons himself had made no reference whatever to that excursion. Indeed, he hardly talked at all during the course of the evening, striding aimlessly about the room as if lost in thought. It was possible that his wound was giving him trouble. However, Molly spoke of the matter, pretending to be cross with me.
‘You are a very dissipated young man,’ she said. ‘What do you mean by keeping poor Teddy up till all hours in the way you did? I never heard such a thing. Do you know he had to spend a whole week in bed after going out with you?’
I tried to make some apology, although at the same time feeling not greatly to blame for the way Jeavons behaved when he went out on his own. As a matter of fact, I had not been at all well myself the following day, and was inclined to blame Jeavons for having caused me to sit up so late.
‘Just as well he found Mildred Blaides to look after him,’ said Molly. ‘I always thought they had known each other for ages, but it turned out they had only met once, a long time ago. You know she was a nurse at Dogdene during the war. Lucky she didn’t turn up when Teddy was there, or she would have scalded him to death with hot-water-bottles, or something of that sort. She was the worst nurse they ever had there—or in the whole of the V.A.D., for that matter.’
Molly spoke with more than a touch of acrimony, but at the same time i
t was impossible to guess how much she knew, or suspected, of Jeavons’s night out; impossible, if it came to that, to know with any certainty how that night had ended, even though the nostalgic mood of Jeavons’s and Mrs. Haycock’s impetuous nature might, in unison, give a strong hint.
‘If Mildred is not careful,’ said Molly, ‘she will polish off Mr. Widmerpool before she has time to marry him. I hear he had to go home, he was feeling so ill.’
I thought the sooner the subject of that night was abandoned, the better. While we had been talking, Jeavons had listened in silence, as if he had never before heard of any of the persons under discussion, including himself. I admired his detachment. I wondered, too, whether at that very moment his head was seething with forgotten melodies, for ever stirring him to indiscretion by provoking memories of an enchanted past.
‘I can’t have all the Tollands at this party,’ Molly had said. ‘So I had better have none of them. Bound to be jealousy otherwise. Just like Erridge to go to China when one of his sisters gets engaged.’
Smith was again on duty with the Jeavonses on the day of the party. He looked haggard and more out of sorts than ever.
‘You’re late,’ he said, taking my hat. ‘It has all started upstairs. Quite a crowd of them arrived already. Hope her ladyship hasn’t invited every blessed soul she knows.’
The guests seemed, in fact, to have been chosen even more at random than usual. Certainly there had been no question either of asking people because they were already friends of Isobel or myself; still less, because Molly wanted either of us specifically to meet them. All that was most nondescript in the Jeavons entourage predominated, together with a few exceptional and reckless examples of individual oddity. I noticed that Alfred Tolland had not been included in the general prohibition against the Tolland family of my own generation. He was standing in the corner of the room, wedged behind a table, talking to—of all people—Mark Members, whom I had never before seen at the Jeavonses’, and might be supposed, in principle, beyond Molly’s normal perimeter, wide as that might stretch; or at least essentially alien to most of what it enclosed. To describe the two of them as standing looking at one another, rather than talking, would have been nearer the truth, as each apparently found equal difficulty in contributing anything to a mutual conversation. At the same time, the table cut them off from contact with other guests.
‘I know you are interested in books, Nicholas,’ said Molly. ‘So I asked a rather nice young man I met the other day. He also writes or something. You will like him. A Mr. Members.’
‘I know him of old.’
‘Go and talk to him then. I don’t think he is getting on very well with Alfred Tolland. It is a great compliment to Isobel that Alfred has come. As you know, he never goes out. At least that is what he says. I always tell him I believe he leads a double life of great wickedness. He tried to get out of coming tonight, but I told him he would never be asked to the house again if he did not turn up. Then he didn’t dare refuse. Isobel, dear, there is someone I want you to meet.’
Both Alfred Tolland and Mark Members showed relief at the arrival of a third party to break up their tête-à-tête. They had by then reached a conversational standstill. This was the first I had seen of Alfred Tolland since the announcement of my own engagement. I was aware that he could no longer be regarded merely as the embarrassed, conscience-stricken figure, vaguely familiar in the past. Now he fell automatically into place in the profusion of new relationships that follow an organic change of condition. He began at once to mutter incoherent congratulations. Members watched him with something like hatred in his beady eyes.
‘Expect you’ve heard that Erridge has gone East,’ said Alfred Tolland. ‘Just heard it myself. Not—a—bad—idea. They are in a mess there. Perhaps the best thing. Might do him a lot of good. Get experience. Good thing to get experience. Ever been East?’
‘Never.’
‘Got as far as Singapore once,’ he said.
It seemed incredible. However, there appeared to be no reason why he should invent such a thing. I said a word to Members, who stood there looking far from pleased.
‘I shall have to be going now,’ said Alfred Tolland, snatching this offer of release. ‘I expect I shall see you at the dinner next . . .’
‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t know what our circumstances will be.’
‘Of course, of course. You can’t say. I quite understand. Pity you weren’t at the last one. Nice to feel that we . . .’
Exact expression of what it was nice for both of us to feel either evaded him, or was too precarious a sentiment to express in words. He merely nodded his head several times. Then he made for the door. Members sighed. He was in a bad humour.
‘What on earth is this party?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Did that man say something about your being engaged?’
‘Yes. I am engaged.’
‘To whom?’
‘Isobel Tolland—over there.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Members, without any exaggerated effusiveness, as if he disapproved of any such step in principle. ‘Many congratulations. I was stuck with that appalling bore for about twenty minutes. It was impossible to get away. Is he absolutely right in the head? What a strange house this is. I met Lady Molly Jeavons quite a long time ago at the Manaschs’. She asked me to come and see her. I called once or twice, but no one answered the bell, though I rang half a dozen times—and knocked too. Then she suddenly telephoned this invitation to me yesterday. She never mentioned your name. I did not think it would be quite like this.’
‘It is often different. You never know what it is going to be.’
‘Have you met her husband?’ said Members, quite plaintively. ‘I talked to him for a while when I first arrived. He asked me if I ever played snooker. Then he introduced me to the man you found me with.’
By then Members had several jobs of a literary kind which, since he was still a bachelor, must bring him in a respectable income. His American trip was said to have been a success. He no longer wrote verse with Freudian undertones, and he had abandoned anything so extreme as Quiggin’s professional ‘communism’, in the wake of which he had for a while half-heartedly trailed. Now he tended to be associated with German literature. Kleist; Grillparzer: Stifter: those were names to be caught on the echoes of his conversation. Latterly, he was believed to be more taken up with Kierkegaard, then a writer not widely read in this country. Members, no fool, was always a little ahead of the fashion. He was a lively talker when not oppressed, as at that moment, by a party he did not enjoy. His distinguished appearance and terse manner made him a popular spare man at intellectual dinners. ‘But one really does not want to eat amateur paella and drink Chelsea Médoc for ever,’ he used to say: a world into which he felt himself somewhat rudely thrust immediately after losing his job as secretary to St. John Clarke. For a time now Members had been reappearing, so it was said, in the rather more elegant of the circles frequented by the famous novelist before his conversion to Marxism. In the light of this effort to maintain and expand his social life, Members found the Jeavons house a disappointment. He had expected something more grandiose. I tried to explain the household, but was glad when he brushed this aside, because I wanted to ask if he knew further details about Erridge and Mona. Members turned almost with relief to this subject.
‘Of course I knew J.G. had got hold of Lord Warminster,’ he said impatiently. ‘Surely everyone has known that for a long time. We had dinner together before I went to America. J.G. told me about the magazine he hoped to persuade Warminster to start. I saw at once that nothing would come of it.’
‘Why not?’
‘Warminster is too much of a crank.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No, but I know of him.’
‘How did the Mona situation arise?’
All at once Members was on his guard.
‘But there is every prospect of Warminster becoming your brother-in-law, isn’t there?’
‘Most certainly there is.’
Members laughed, not in his most friendly manner, and remained silent.
‘Come on—out with it,’ I said.
We had by then known each other for a long time. It was not an occasion to stand on ceremony, as Members was well aware. He thought for a second or two, pondering whether it would be preferable to circulate a good piece of gossip, or to tease more effectively by withholding any information he might himself possess. In the end he decided that communication of the news would be more pleasurable.
‘You know what Mona is,’ he said.
He smiled maliciously; for although, so far as I knew, there had never ‘been much’ between them, he had known Mona years before her association with Quiggin; in fact I had first set eyes on Mona in the company of Members at Mr. Deacon’s birthday party.
‘She was altogether too much for Erridge, was she?’ I asked. ‘When she struck.’
‘Erridge?’
‘For Warminster, I mean—his family call him Erridge.’
‘Yes, Mona was too much for him. I don’t think things got very far. Some sort of an assignation. J.G. found out about it. The next thing was the two of them had gone off together.’
‘How has J.G. taken it?’
‘He was full of gêne at first. You know she had a stranglehold on him, I am sure. Now that he has cooled down, he is really rather flattered, as well as being furious.’
‘Were they married?’
‘No.’
‘Is that certain?’
‘Absolutely.’
I should have liked to hear more, but at that moment Jeavons came up to us. He took an unfamiliar object from his coat pocket, and held it towards me.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 21
