At Lady Molly's: A Novel

  The niece whose condition of unassailable rectitude had given such satisfaction to Alfred Tolland, and at the same time caused some unfriendly amusement to Molly Jeavons, was shown into the room. This crony of Mrs. Conyers, widow with several children and lady-in-waiting, was a handsome woman in her thirties. She was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser. You felt that her clothes were certainly removed when she retired for the night, but that no intermediate adjustment, however minor, was ever required, or would, indeed, be practicable. This was the eldest of the Tolland sisters, formed physically in much the same mould as Blanche and Priscilla; though I could see no resemblance between her and her brothers as I remembered them. She kissed Mrs. Conyers. The General greeted her warmly, though with a touch of irony in his manner. I was introduced. Lady Frederica looked at me carefully, rather as if she were engaged upon an army inspection: a glance not unfriendly, but extensively searching. I could see at once that she and Molly Jeavons would not be a couple easily to agree. Then she turned towards the General.

  ‘How are you feeling after your fall?’ she asked.

  ‘A bit stiff. A bit stiff. Took a fearful toss. Nearly broke my neck. And you, Frederica?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve been rather well,’ she said. ‘Christmas was spoiled by two of the children developing measles. But they have recovered now. All very exhausting while it lasted.’

  ‘I spent Christmas Day cleaning out the kennels,’ said the General. ‘Went to Early Service. Then I got into my oldest clothes and had a thorough go at them. Had luncheon late and a good sleep after. Read a book all the evening. One of the best Christmas Days I’ve ever had.’

  Frederica Tolland did not seem gready interested by this account of the General’s Christmas activities. She turned from him to Mrs. Conyers, as if she hoped for something more congenial.

  ‘What have you been doing, Bertha?’ she asked.

  ‘I went to the sales yesterday,’ said Mrs. Conyers, speaking as if that were a somewhat disagreeable duty that had been long on her mind.

  ‘Were you nearly trampled to death?’

  ‘I came away with a hat.’

  ‘I went earlier in the week,’ said Frederica. ‘Looking for a cheap black dress, as a matter of fact. So many royalties nearing their century, we’re bound to be in mourning again soon.’

  ‘Have they been working you hard?’ asked the General.

  I had the impression that he might be a little jealous of Frederica, who, for her part, was evidently determined that he should not be allowed to take himself too seriously. There was just a touch of sharpness in their interchanges.

  ‘Nothing really lethal since the British Industries Fair,’ she said. ‘I had to throw away my best pair of shoes after that. You are lucky not to have to turn out for that sort of thing. It will finish me off one of these days.’

  ‘You come and carry my axe at the next levée,’ said the General. ‘Thought I was going to drop with fatigue the last time I was on duty. Then that damned fellow Ponsonby trod on my gouty toe.’

  ‘We saw your Uncle Alfred the other night, Frederica,’ said Mrs. Conyers.

  She spoke either with a view to including me in the conversation or because habit had taught her that passages of this kind between her husband and Frederica Budd might become a shade acrimonious: perhaps merely to steer our talk back to the subject of Widmerpool.

  ‘He was looking well enough,’ she added.

  ‘Oh no, really?’ said Frederica, plainly surprised at this. ‘Where did you meet him? I thought he never went out except to things like regimental dinners. That is what he always says.’

  ‘At Molly Jeavons’s. I had not been there before.’

  ‘Of course. He goes there still, doesn’t he? What strange people he must meet at that house. What sort of a crowd did you find? I really must go and see Molly again myself some time. For some reason I never feel very anxious to go there. I think Rob was still alive when I last went to the Jeavonses’.’

  These remarks, although displaying no great affection, were moderate enough, considering the tone in which Molly Jeavons herself had spoken of Frederica.

  ‘That was where I found Nicholas again,’ said Mrs. Conyers.

  She proceeded to give some account of why they knew me. Frederica listened with attention, rather than interest, again recalling by her manner the checking of facts in the course of some official routine like going through the Customs or having one’s passport examined. Then she turned to me as if to obtain some final piece of necessary information.

  ‘Do you often go to the Jeavonses’?’ she asked.

  The enquiry seemed to prepare the way to cross-questioning one returned from the remote interior of some little-known country after making an intensive study of the savage life existing there.

  ‘That was the first time. I was taken by Chips Lovell, whom I work with.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said vaguely. ‘He is some sort of a relation of Molly’s, isn’t he?’

  She showed herself not at all positive about Lovell and his place in the world. This surprised me, as I had supposed she would know him, or at least know about him, pretty well. A moment later I wondered whether possibly she knew him, but pretended ignorance because she disapproved. Lovell was by no means universally liked. There were people who considered his behaviour far from impeccable. Frederica Budd might be one of these. A guarded attitude towards Lovell was only to be expected if Molly Jeavons was to be believed. At that moment the General spoke. He had been sitting in silence while we talked, quite happy silence, so it appeared, still pondering the matter of Widmerpool and his sister-in-law; or, more probably, his own rendering of Gounod and how it could be bettered. His sonorous, commanding voice, not loud, though pitched in a tone to carry across parade-ground or battle-field, echoed through the small room.

  ‘I like Jeavons,’ he said. ‘I only met him once, but I took to him. Lady Molly I hardly know. Her first husband, John Sleaford, was a pompous fellow. The present Sleaford—Geoffrey—I knew in South Africa. We see them from time to time. Bertha tells me Lady Molly was teasing your Uncle Alfred a lot the other night. People say she always does that. Is it true?’

  The General laughed a deep ho-ho-ho laugh again, like the demon king in pantomime. He evidently enjoyed the idea of people teasing Alfred Tolland.

  ‘I think she may rag Uncle Alfred a bit,’ said Frederica, without emotion. ‘If he doesn’t like it, he shouldn’t go there. I expect Erridge came up for discussion too, didn’t he?’

  I suspected this was said to forestall comment about Erridge on the part of the General himself. There was a distinct rivalry between them. Men of action have, in any case, a predisposition to be jealous of women, especially if the woman is young, good looking or placed in some relatively powerful position. Beauty, particularly, is a form of power of which, perhaps justly, men of action feel envious. Possibly there existed some more particular reason: the two of them conceivably representing rival factions in their connexion with the Court. I supposed from her tone and general demeanour that Frederica could hardly approve of her eldest brother’s way of life, but, unlike her uncle, was not prepared to acquiesce in all criticism of Erridge.

  ‘Do you know my brother, Erridge—Warminster, rather?’ she asked me, suddenly.

  She smiled like someone who wishes to encourage a child who possesses information more accurate, or more interesting, than that available to grown-ups; but one who might be too shy or too intractable to impart such knowledge.

  ‘I used to know him by sight.’

  ‘He has some rather odd ideas,’ she said. ‘But I expect you heard plenty about that at Molly Jeavons’s. They have hardly anything else to talk about there. He is a real blessing to them.’

  ‘Oh, I think they have got plenty to talk about,’ said Mrs. Conyers. ‘Too much, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t deny that Erridge has more than one bee in his bonnet,’ said the General, unexpectedly.
‘But I doubt if he is such a fool as some people seem to think him. He is just what they call nowadays introverted.’

  ‘Oh, Erry isn’t a fool,’ said Frederica. ‘He is rather too clever in a way—and an awful nuisance as an eldest brother. There may be something to be said for his ideas. It is the way he sets about them.’

  ‘Is it true that he has been a tramp?’ I asked.

  ‘Not actually been one, I think,’ said Frederica. ‘Making a study of them, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is he going to write a book about it?’ asked Mrs. Conyers. ‘There have been several books of that sort lately, haven’t there? Have you read anything else interesting, Nicholas? I always expect people like you to tell me what to put down on my library list.’

  ‘I’ve been reading something called Orlando,’’ said the General. ‘Virginia Woolf. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘I read it when it first came out.’

  ‘What do you think of it?’

  ‘Rather hard to say in a word.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He turned to Frederica.

  ‘Ever read Orlando?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘Bertha didn’t like it,’ he said.

  ‘Couldn’t get on with it,’ said Mrs. Conyers, emphatically. ‘I wish St. John Clarke would write a new one. He hasn’t published a book for years. I wonder whether he is dead. I used to love his novels, especially Fields of Amaranth.’

  ‘Odd stuff, Orlando,’ said the General, who was not easily shifted from his subject. ‘Starts about a young man in the fifteen-hundreds. Then, about eighteen-thirty, he turns into a woman. You say you’ve read it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you like it? Yes or no?’

  ‘Not greatly.’

  ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The woman can write, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that. I still didn’t like it.’

  The General thought again for some seconds.

  ‘Well, I shall read a bit more of it,’ he said, at last. ‘Don’t want to waste too much time on that sort of thing, of course. Now, psychoanalysis. Ever read anything about that? Sure you have. That was what I was on over Christmas.’

  ‘I’ve dipped into it from time to time. I can’t say I’m much of an expert.’

  ‘Been reading a lot about it lately,’ said the General. ‘Freud—Jung—haven’t much use for Adler. Something in it, you know. Tells you why you do things. All the same, I didn’t find it much help in understanding Orlando.’

  Once more he fell into a state of coma. It was astonishing to me that he should have been reading about psychoanalysis, although his mental equipment was certainly in no way inferior to that of many persons who talked of such things all day long. When he had used the word ‘introverted’ I had thought that no more than repetition of a current popular term. I saw now that the subject had thoroughly engaged his attention. However, he wished to discuss it no further at that moment. Neither of the two ladies seemed to share his interest.

  ‘Is it true that your sister, Mildred, is going to marry again?’ asked Frederica. ‘Someone told me so the other day. They could not remember the name of the man. It hasn’t been in the papers yet, has it?’

  She spoke casually. Mrs. Conyers was well prepared for the question, because she answered without hesitation, allowing no suggestion to appear of the doubts she had revealed to me only a short time earlier.

  ‘The engagement is supposed to be a secret,’ she said, ‘but, as everybody will hear about it quite soon, there is really no reason to deny the rumour.’

  ‘Then it is true?’

  ‘It certainly looks as if Mildred is going to marry again.’

  No one, however determined to make a good story, could have derived much additional information on the subject from the manner in which Mrs. Conyers spoke, except in so far that she could not be said to show any obvious delight at the prospect of her sister taking a third husband. That was the farthest implication offered. There was not a hint of disapproval or regret; on the contrary, complete acceptance of the situation was manifest, even mild satisfaction not openly disavowed. It was impossible to withhold admiration from this façade, so effortlessly presented.

  ‘And he—?’

  ‘Nicholas, here, was at school with him,’ said Mrs. Conyers, tranquilly.

  She spoke as if most people must, as a matter of course, be already aware of that circumstance; for it now seemed that, in spite of her husband’s doubts, she had finally accepted the fact that I was within a few years of Widmerpool’s age. The remark only stimulated Frederica’s curiosity.

  ‘Oh, do tell me what he is like,’ she said. ‘Mildred was just that amount older than me to make her rather a thrilling figure at the time when I first came “out”. She was at the Huntercombes’ once when I stayed there not long after the war. She was rather a dashing war widow and wore huge jade ear-rings, and smoked all the time and said the most hair-raising things. What is her new name to be, first of all?’

  ‘Widmerpool,’ I said, since the question was addressed to me.

  ‘Where do they come from?’ asked Mrs. Conyers, anxious to profit herself from Frederica’s interrogation.

  ‘Nottinghamshire, I believe.’

  This reply was at worst innocuous, and might be taken, in general, to imply a worthy family background. It was also—as I understood from Widmerpool himself—in no way a departure from the truth. Fearing that I might, if pressed, be compelled ultimately to admit some hard things about Widmerpool, I felt that the least I could do for an old acquaintance in these circumstances was to suggest, however indirectly, a soothing picture of generations of Widmerpools in a rural setting; an ancient, if dilapidated, manor house: Widmerpool tombs in the churchyard: tankards of ale at The Widmerpool Arms.

  ‘You haven’t said what his Christian name is,’ said Frederica, apparently accepting, anyway at this stage, the regional superscription.

  ‘Kenneth.’

  ‘Brothers or sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  I admired the thoroughness with which Frederica set to work on an enquiry of this kind, as much as I had admired Mrs. Conyers’s earlier refusal to give anything away.

  ‘And he is in the City?’

  ‘He is supposed to be rather good at making money,’ interpolated Mrs. Conyers.

  She had begun to smile indulgently at Frederica’s unconcealed curiosity. Now she employed a respectful yet at the same time deprecatory tone, as if this trait of Widmerpool’s—his supposed facility for ‘making money’—was, extraordinary as this might appear, a propensity not wholly unpleasant when you became accustomed to it. At the same time she abandoned her former position of apparent neutrality, openly joining in the search. Indeed, she put the next question herself.

  ‘His father is dead, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘Nottinghamshire, did you say?’

  ‘Or Derbyshire. I don’t remember for certain.’

  Widmerpool had once confided the fact that his grandfather, a business man from the Scotch Lowlands, had on marriage changed his name from ‘Geddes’; but such an additional piece of information would sound at that moment too esoteric and genealogical: otiose in its exactitude. In a different manner, to repeat Eleanor Walpole-Wilson’s remark made years before—‘Uncle George used to get his liquid manure from Mr. Widmerpool’s father’—might strike, though quite illogically, a disobliging, even objectionably facetious note. Eleanor’s ‘Uncle George’ was Lord Goring. It seemed best to omit all mention of liquid manure; simply to say that Widmerpool had known the Gorings and the Walpole-Wilsons.

  ‘Oh, the Walpole-Wilsons,’ said Frederica sharply, as if reminded of something she would rather forget. ‘Do you know the Walpole-Wilsons? My sister, Norah, shares a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Do you know them?’

  ‘I haven’t seen Eleanor for years. Nor her parents, for that matter.’

  The
General now came to life again, after his long period of rumination.

  ‘Walpole-Wilson was that fellow in the Diplomatic Service who made such a hash of things in South America,’ he said. ‘Got unstuck for it. I met him at a City dinner once, the Mercers—or was it the Fishmongers? Had an argument over Puccini.’

  ‘I don’t know the Gorings,’ said Frederica, ignoring the General. ‘You mean the ones called “Lord” Goring?’

  ‘Yes. He is a great fruit farmer, isn’t he? He talked about fruit on the only occasions when I met him.’

  ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘He is.’

  She had uttered the words ‘Lord Goring’ with emphasis on the title, seeming by her tone almost to suggest that all members of that particular family, male and female, might for some unaccountable reason call themselves “Lord”: at least implying that, even if she did not really suppose anything so absurd, she wished to indicate that I should have been wiser to have steered clear of the Gorings: in fact, that informed persons considered the Gorings themselves mistaken in burdening themselves with the rather ridiculous pretension of a peerage. When I came to know her better I realised that her words were intended to cast no particular slur on the Gorings; merely, since they were not personal friends of hers, to build up a safe defence in case they turned out, in her own eyes, undesirable.

  ‘I think Widmerpool père was mixed up with the fruit-farming side of Goring life.’

  ‘But look here,’ said General Conyers, suddenly emerging with terrific violence from the almost mediumistic trance in which he had sunk after the mention of Puccini. ‘The question is simply this. Can this fellow Widmerpool handle Mildred? It all turns on that. What do you think, Nicholas? You say you were at school with him. You usually know a fellow pretty well when you have been boys together. What’s your view? Give us an appreciation of the situation.’

  ‘But I don’t know Mrs. Haycock. I was only nine or ten when I first met her. Last night I barely spoke to her.’

  There was some laughter at that, and the necessity passed for an immediate pronouncement on the subject of Widmerpool’s potentialities.

  ‘You must meet my sister again,’ said Mrs. Conyers, involuntarily smiling to herself, I suppose at the thought of Widmerpool as Mildred’s husband.