In this circle, Widmerpool had made himself an accepted, if not specially popular, figure. There was no question here of his being looked upon by the rest of the community as the oddity he had been regarded at school. In the weeks that followed I came to know him pretty well. We talked French to each other at meals, and kept up some show of using French during expeditions: alone together—usually late in the evening, when the others had gone to their rooms, to devote themselves to study, or to rest—we used to speak English; although Widmerpool rarely did so without making some reference to the reluctance with which he diverged from the rule of the house. He used to work hard at the language all the rest of the time. In spite of inherent difficulty in making words sound like French, he had acquired a large vocabulary, and could carry on a conversation adequately, provided he could think of something to say; for I found that he had no interest in anything that could not be labelled as in some way important or improving, an approach to conversation that naturally limited its scope. His determination to learn French set an example from which I fell lamentably short. In his rigid application to the purpose for which he came to France, he was undoubtedly the most satisfactory of Madame Leroy’s boarders, even including the industrious Monsieur Örn, who never could get his genders right.
Like Monsieur Dubuisson, Widmerpool showed no enthusiasm for Paul-Marie’s jokes.
‘That boy has a corrupt mind,’ he said, not many days after I had been in the house. ‘Extraordinary for a child of that age. I cannot imagine what would happen to him at an English school.’
‘He’s like Stringham as a small French boy.’
I said this without thinking at all deeply about the accuracy of the comparison. I did not, in fact, find in Paul-Marie any startling resemblance to Stringham, though some faint affinity must have existed between them, in so much that more than once I had thought of Stringham, when Paul-Marie had been engaged in one of his torrential outbursts of conversation. However, Widmerpool showed sudden interest in the identification of their two characters.
‘You were rather a friend of Stringham’s, weren’t you?’ he asked. ‘Of course I was a bit senior to know him. I liked the look of him on the whole. I should say he was an amusing fellow.’
For Widmerpool to imply that it was merely a matter of age that had prevented him from being on easy terms with Stringham struck me, at that time, as showing quite unjustifiable complacency regarding his own place in life. I still looked upon him as an ineffective person, rather a freak, who had no claim to consider himself as the equal of someone like Stringham who, obviously prepared to live dangerously, was not to be inhibited by the narrow bounds to which Widmerpool seemed by nature committed. It was partly for this reason that I said: ‘Do you remember the time when you saw Le Bas arrested?’
‘An appalling thing to happen,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I left soon after the incident. Was it ever cleared up how the mistake arose?’
‘Stringham rang up the police and told them that Le Bas was the man they wanted to arrest.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The criminal they were after looked rather like Le Bas. We had seen a picture of him outside the police-station.’
‘But why——’
‘As a hoax.’
‘Stringham?’
‘On the telephone—he said he was Le Bas himself.’
‘I never heard anything like it,’ said Widmerpool. ‘What an extraordinary thing to have done.’
He sounded so furious that I felt that some sort of apology was called for—in retrospect the episode certainly seemed less patently a matter for laughter, now that one was older and had left school—and I said: ‘Well, Le Bas was rather an ass.’
‘I certainly did not approve of Le Bas, or of his methods of running a house,’ said Widmerpool: and I remembered that Le Bas had particularly disliked him. ‘But to do a thing like that to his own housemaster . . . And the risk he ran. He might have been expelled. Were you concerned in this too, Jenkins?’
Widmerpool spoke so sternly that for a moment I thought he intended to sit down, there and then, and, in a belated effort to have justice done, report the whole matter in writing to Le Bas or the headmaster. I explained that personally I had had no share in the hoax, beyond having been out walking with Stringham at the time. Widmerpool said, with what I thought to be extraordinary fierceness: ‘Of course Stringham was thoroughly undisciplined. It came from having too much money.’
‘I never noticed much money lying about.’
‘Stringham may not have been given an abnormal amount himself,’ said Widmerpool, irritably, ‘but his family are immensely wealthy. Glimber is a huge place. My mother and I went over it once on visiting day.’
‘But he is not coming in to Glimber.’
I felt glad that I had been supplied by Templer with this piece of information.
‘Of course he isn’t,’ said Widmerpool, as if my reply had been little short of insulting. ‘But there are all his mother’s South African gold holdings. That divorce of hers was a very unfortunate affair for someone so well known.’
I should have liked to hear more of this last matter, but, Stringham being a friend of mine, I felt that it would be beneath my dignity to discuss his family affairs with someone who, like Widmerpool, knew of them only through hearsay. Later in life, I learnt that many things one may require have to be weighed against one’s dignity, which can be an insuperable barrier against advancement in almost any direction. However, in those days, choice between dignity and unsatisfied curiosity was less clear to me as a cruel decision that had to be made.
‘And that thin, rather good-looking boy,’ Widmerpool continued, ‘who used to be about a lot with you and Stringham?’
‘Peter Templer.’
‘Was he in the Le Bas affair too?’
‘He was out for a walk with us on the same afternoon.’
‘He did not have too good a reputation, did he?’
‘Not too good.’
‘That was my impression,’ said Widmerpool. ‘That he was not a good influence in the house.’
‘You and he were mixed up in the Akworth row, weren’t you?’ I asked, not from malice, or with a view to keeping him in order on the subject of my friends, so much as for the reason that I was inquisitive to know more of that affair: and, considering the way that Widmerpool had been talking, I felt no particular delicacy about making the enquiry.
Widmerpool went brick-red. He said: ‘I would rather not speak of that, if you don’t mind.’
‘Don’t let’s, then.’
‘I suppose Templer got sacked in the end?’ Widmerpool went on: no doubt conscious that he might have sounded over-emphatic, and evidently trying to bring some jocularity into his tone.
‘More or less asked to leave.’
‘How badly used he really to behave?’
He moistened his lips, though scarcely perceptibly. I thought his mixture of secretiveness and curiosity quite intolerable.
‘He had a woman before he left.’
If Widmerpool had been upset by the news that Stringham had played the Braddock alias Thorne trick on Le Bas, and more personally embarrassed by reference to the Akworth scandal, this piece of information, regarding Templer’s crowning exploit, threw him almost entirely off his balance. He made a strange sound, half-way between a low laugh and a clearing of the throat, simultaneously swallowing hard. He also went, if possible, redder than ever. Took off his spectacles and began to polish them, as he usually did when his nerves were on edge. I did not feel entirely at ease with the subject myself. To help out the situation, I added: ‘I have just been staying with the Templers as a matter of fact.’
Widmerpool clearly welcomed this shift of interest in our conversation, enquiring almost eagerly about the Templers’ house, and the manner in which they lived. We talked about the Templers for a time, and I found to my surprise that Widmerpool knew Sunny Farebrother by name, though they had never met. He said: ‘A very sharp fellow, they t
ell me.’
‘I liked him.’
‘Naturally you did,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He can make himself very agreeable.’
I found Widmerpool’s remarks in this vein so tiresome that I was almost inclined to try and shock him further by describing in detail the various incidents that had taken place while I was staying at the Templers’. In the end I decided that those happenings needed too much explanation before they could be appreciated, anyway by Widmerpool, that there was nothing to be gained by trying to impress him, or attempting to modify his point of view. I told him that Peter was going straight into business, without spending any time at the university. Rather unexpectedly, Widmerpool approved this decision, almost in Sunny Farebrother’s own phrase.
‘Much better get down to work right away,’ he said. ‘There was not much money when my father died, so I talked things over with my mother—she has a wonderful grasp of business matters—and we decided we would do the same thing, and cut out Oxford or Cambridge.’
By using the first person plural, he made the words sound as if there had been some question of his mother going up to the university with him. He said: ‘This effort to polish up my French is merely in the nature of a holiday.’
‘A holiday from what?’
‘I am articled to a firm of solicitors.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I do not necessarily propose to remain a solicitor all my life,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I look to wider horizons.’
‘What sort?’
‘Business. Politics.’
This all seemed to me such rubbish that I changed the subject, asking where he lived. He replied, rather stiffly, that his mother had a flat in Victoria. It was convenient, he said; but without explaining the advantages. I enquired what life was like in London.
‘That depends what you do,’ said Widmerpool, guardedly.
‘So I suppose.’
‘What profession are you going to follow?’
‘I don’t know.’
It seemed almost impossible to make any remark without in one manner or another disturbing Widmerpool’s equanimity. He was almost as shocked at hearing that I had no ready-made plans for a career as he had been scandalised a few minutes earlier at the information regarding the precocious dissipation of Templer’s life.
‘But surely you have some bent?’ he said. ‘An ambition to do well at something?’
This ideal conception—that one should have an aim in life—had, indeed, only too often occurred to me as an unsolved problem; but I was still far from deciding what form my endeavours should ultimately take. Being at that moment unprepared for an a priori discussion as to what the future should hold, I made several rather lame remarks to the effect that I wanted one day ‘to write’: an assertion that had not even the merit of being true, as it was an idea that had scarcely crossed my mind until that moment.
‘To write?’ said Widmerpool. ‘But that is hardly a profession. Unless you mean you want to be a journalist—like Lundquist.’
‘I suppose I might do that.’
‘It is precarious,’ said Widmerpool. ‘And—although we laugh, of course, at Örn for saying so, right out—there is certainly not much social position attached: unless, for example, you become editor of The Times, or something of that sort. I should think it over very carefully before you commit yourself.’
‘I am not absolutely determined to become a journalist.’
‘You are wise. What are your other interests?’
Feeling that the conversation had taken a turn that delivered me over to a kind of cross-examination, I admitted that I liked reading.
‘You can’t earn your living by reading,’ said Widmerpool, severely.
‘I never said you could.’
‘It doesn’t do to read too much,’ Widmerpool said. ‘You get to look at life with a false perspective. By all means have some familiarity with the standard authors. I should never raise any objection to that. But it is no good clogging your mind with a lot of trash from modern novels.’
‘That was what Le Bas used to say.’
‘And he was quite right. I disagreed in many ways with Le Bas. In that one, I see eye to eye with him.’
There was not much for me to say in reply. I had a novel—If Winter Comes, which I had now nearly finished—under my arm, and it was impossible to deny that I had been reading this book. Widmerpool must have noticed this, because he continued in a more kindly tone: ‘You must meet my mother. She is one of those rare middle-aged women who have retained their youthful interest in matters of the mind. If you like books—and you tell me you do—you would thoroughly enjoy a chat with her about them.’
‘That would be nice.’
‘I shall arrange it,’ said Widmerpool. ‘Et maintenant, il faut se coucher, parce-que je compte de me reveiller de bonne heure le matin.’
In the course of subsequent conversations between us he talked a good deal about his mother. On the subject of his father he was more reticent. Sometimes I had even the impression that Widmerpool père had earned a living in some manner of which his son—an only child—preferred not to speak: though, one evening, in a burst of confidence, he mentioned that his paternal grandfather had been a Scotch business man called Geddes, who had taken the name of Widmerpool after marrying a wife of that name, who was—so Widmerpool indicated in his characteristic manner—of rather higher standing than himself. There seemed to have been some kind of financial crisis when Widmerpool’s father had died, either on account of debts, or because the family’s income had been thereby much reduced. Life with his mother appeared to be very quiet and to consist of working all day and studying law after dinner most nights; though Widmerpool took care to explain to me that he deliberately took part in a certain amount of what he called ‘social life’. He said, with one of his rare smiles: ‘Brains and hard work are of very little avail, Jenkins, unless you know the right people.’
I told him that I had an uncle who was fond of saying the same thing; and I asked what form his relaxations generally took.
‘I go to dances,’ said Widmerpool; adding, rather grandly: ‘in the Season, that is.’
‘Do you get a lot of invitations?’ I asked, divided between feeling rather impressed by this attitude towards the subject in hand and, at the same time, finding difficulty in believing that he could be overwhelmed by persons wishing to share his company.
Widmerpool was evasive on this point, and muttered something about invitations being ‘just a question of getting on a list’. As he seemed unwilling to amplify this statement, I did not press him further, having myself a somewhat indistinct comprehension of what he meant: and appreciating that the relative extent of his invitations, as for anyone, might be, perhaps, a delicate matter.
‘I don’t get much time for games now,’ he said. ‘Though once in a way I make a point of going down to Barnes, and driving a ball into a net.’
I was, for some reason, conscious of an odd sense of relief that he should no longer consider himself compelled to undergo those protracted and gruelling trials of endurance against himself for which he still remained chiefly notable in my mind. Driving a golf ball into a net presented an innocuous, immensely less tortured, picture to the mind than that offered by those penitential exertions with which I had formed the habit of associating his hours of recreation. This mitigated strain became even more apparent to me later on, when we used to play tennis, though his old enthusiasm was still quite strong enough.
Tennis at La Grenadière—or rather in the grounds of a ruined nineteenth-century mansion in Renaissance style situated about a mile and a half away on the outskirts of the town—was certainly of a kind to give small opportunity for a parade of that feverish keenness which had made the sight of Widmerpool playing games at school so uncomfortable to watch: although, so far as possible, he always insisted upon a high standard of athletic formality being observed whenever we played. The tennis-court was, however, the stage for him to reveal to me quite another side of h
is character: an unsuspected strength of personality and power of negotiation. This was in connexion with the rupture of relations between Monsieur Örn and Monsieur Lundquist, both of whom, as it turned out, took their game with seriousness at least equal to Widmerpool’s; in spite of the comparatively unprofessional circumstances in which these contests were held.
The several hard tennis courts in this garden, which had been taken over as a park by the municipality, had never been properly kept up since becoming public property; so that in the course of time the soil had receded from the metal bars that formed the lines of demarcation, leaving solid boundaries that protruded so far above the ground that it was easy to catch one’s foot in them when running about the court. If the ball hit one of these projecting strips of metal, it might become wedged beneath, or fly off at an unexpected angle; accordingly counting as a ‘let’. Both of these types of ‘let’ took place with fair frequency, somewhat slowing up the cadence of the game, and making it hard to play with the concentration with which Widmerpool liked to approach all forms of sport. In addition to this local impediment to rapid play, neither Berthe nor Suzette were very proficient at the game; and they—with Paul-Marie and Jean-Népomucène, also beginners—always had to be worked into the fours.