Books Do Furnish a Room

  She did not utter a word but, turning from them, walked quickly towards the door. Morally speaking, some sort of warning seemed required that all had not been well, yet any such announcement was hard to phrase. Before anything could be said – if, indeed, there were anything apposite to say – Hugo had gently encouraged the group to move on.

  ‘I think a revised seating arrangement might be advisable on the way back to the station,’ said Widmerpool.

  ‘I’m going in front,’ said Pamela.

  The rest were contained somehow at the back. Alfred Tolland looked like a man being put to the torture for conscience sake, but determined to bear the torment with fortitude. Pamela lay back beside the driver with closed eyes. The taxi moved away slowly towards the arch, hooted, disappeared from sight. No one waved or looked back. Hugo and I re-entered the house. I told him what had happened in the passage.

  ‘In one of the big Chinese pots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t mean literally?’

  ‘Quite literally.’

  ‘Couldn’t you stop her?’

  ‘Where was there better?’

  ‘You mean otherwise it would have been the floor?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Does that mean she’s going to have a baby?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’

  ‘It’s the only excuse.’

  ‘I think it was just rage.’

  ‘Nothing whatever was said?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘You just looked on?’

  ‘What was there to say? It wasn’t my business, if she didn’t want the others to sympathize with her.’

  Hugo laughed. He thought for a moment.

  ‘I believe if I were given to falling for women, I’d fall for her.’

  ‘Meanwhile, how is the immediate problem to be dealt with?’

  ‘We’ll consult Blanche.’

  The news of Pamela’s conduct was received at the beginning with incredulity, the first reaction, that Hugo and I were projecting a bad-taste joke. When the crude truth was grasped, Roddy Cutts was shocked, Frederica furious, Norah sent into fits of hysterical laughter. Jeavons only shook his head.

  ‘Knew she was a wrong ’un from the start,’ he said. ‘Look at the way she behaved to that poor devil Templer. You know I often think of that chap. I liked having him in the house, and listening to all those stories about girls. Kept your mind off the blitz. Turned out we’d met before in that night-club of Umfraville’s, though I couldn’t remember a word about it.’

  Complications worse than at first envisaged were contingent on what had happened. The Chinese vase had to be sluiced out. Blanche, although totally accepting responsibility for putting right this misadventure, like the burden of every other disagreeable responsibility where keeping house was concerned, voiced these problems first.

  ‘I don’t think we can very well ask Mrs Skerrett to clean things up.’

  ‘Quite out of the question,’ said Frederica.

  There was unanimous agreement that it was no job for Mrs Skerrett in the circumstances.

  ‘Why not tell that Jerry to empty it,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘He’s doubtless done worse things in his time. His whole demeanour suggests the Extermination Squad.’

  ‘Oh, God, no,’ said Hugo. ‘Can you imagine explaining to Siegfried what has happened? He would either think it funny in that awful gross German way, or priggishly disapprove in an equally German manner. I don’t know which would be worse. One would die of embarrassment.’

  ‘No, you couldn’t possibly ask a German to do the cleaning up,’ said Norah. ‘That would be going a bit far – and a POW at that.’

  ‘I can’t see why not,’ said Roddy Cutts. ‘Rather good for him, to my way of thinking. Besides, the Germans are always desperately keen on vomiting. In their cafés or restaurants they have special places in the Gents for doing so after drinking a lot of beer.’

  ‘It’s not him,’ said Norah. ‘It’s us.’

  ‘Norah’s quite right,’ said Frederica.

  For Frederica to support a proposition of Norah’s was sufficiently rare to tip the scale.

  ‘Well, who’s going to do it?’ asked Blanche. ‘The jar’s too big for me to manage alone.’

  In the end, Jeavons, Hugo and I, with shrewd advice from Roddy Cutts, bore the enormous vessel up the stairs to Erridge’s bathroom. It passed through the door with comparative ease, but, once inside, every kind of difficulty was encountered. Apart from size and weight, the opening at the top of the pot was not designed for the use to which it had been put; not, in short, adapted for cleansing processes. The job took quite a long time. More than once the vase was nearly broken. We returned to the sitting-room with a good deal of relief that the business was at an end.

  ‘It’s Erry’s shade haunting the place,’ said Norah. ‘His obsession with ill-health. All the same, we all supposed him a malade imaginaire. Now the joke’s with him.’

  ‘I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,’ said Hugo.

  This sort of conversation grated on Frederica.

  ‘Do you know how Erry occupied his last week?’ she asked. ‘Writing letters about the memorial window.’

  ‘The old original memorial window?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But Erry was always utterly against it,’ said Norah. ‘At least refused ever to make a move. It was George who used to say the window had been planned at the time and ought to be put up, no matter what.’

  ‘Erry appears to have started corresponding about stained-glass windows almost immediately after George’s funeral. Blanche found the letters, didn’t you?’

  Blanche smiled vaguely. Norah threw her cigarette into the fireplace in a manner to express despair at all human behaviour, her own family’s in particular.

  ‘Apart from going into complete reverse as to his own values, fancy imagining you could get a stained-glass window put up to your grandfather when you can’t find a bloody builder to repair the roof of your bloody bombed-out flat. That was Erry all over.’

  ‘Perhaps he meant it as a kind of tribute to George.’

  ‘I don’t object to George wanting to stick the window up. That was George’s line. It’s Erry. It was just like darling George to be nice about that sort of thing – just as he went when he did, and didn’t hang about a few months after Erry to make double death duties. George was always the best behaved of the family.’

  Frederica did not comment on that opinion. It looked as if a row, no uncommon occurrence when Frederica and Norah were under the same roof, might be about to break out. Hugo, familiar with his sisters’ wars and alliances, changed the subject.

  ‘There’s always something rather consoling about death,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean Erry, because of course one’s very sorry about the old boy and all that. What you must admit is there’s a curious pleasure in hearing about someone’s death as a rule, even if you’ve quite liked them.’

  ‘Not George’s,’ said Susan. ‘I cried for days.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Norah. ‘Weeks.’

  She was never to be outdone by Susan.

  ‘That’s quite different again,’ said Hugo. ‘I quite agree I was cut up by George too. Felt awful about him in an odd way – I mean not the obvious way, but treating it objectively. It seemed such bloody bad luck. What I’m talking about is that sense of relief about hearing a given death has taken place. One can’t explain it to oneself.’

  ‘I think you’re all absolutely awful,’ said Roddy Cutts.

  ‘I don’t like hearing about death or people dying in the least. It upsets me even if I don’t know them – some film star you’ve hardly seen or foreign statesman or scientist you’ve only read about in the paper. It thoroughly depresses me. I agree with Dicky about that. Let’s change the subject.’

  I asked whether he had settled with Widmerpool the rights and wrongs of hire-purchase.

  ‘I don’t much care f
or the man. In the margins where we might be reasonably in agreement, he always takes what strikes me as an unnecessarily aggressive line.’

  ‘What’s Cheap Money?’

  ‘The idea is to avoid a superfluity of the circulating medium concentrated on an insufficiency of what you swop it for. When Widmerpool and his like have put the poor old rentier on the spot they may find he wasn’t performing too useless a role.’

  ‘But Widmerpool’s surely a rentier himself?’

  ‘He’s a bill-broker, and the bill-brokers are the only companies getting any sympathy from the Government these days. He’s in the happy position of being wooed by both sides, the Labour Party – that is to say his own party – and the City, who hope to get concessions.’

  ‘I find politics far more lowering a subject than death,’ said Norah. ‘Especially if they have to include discussing that man. I can’t think how Pam can stand him for five minutes. I’m not surprised she’s ill all the time.’

  ‘I was told that one moment she was going to marry John Mountfichet,’ said Susan. ‘He was prepared to leave his wife for her. Then he was killed. She made this marriage on the rebound. Decided to marry the first man who asked her.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Jeavons. ‘That sort of story always gets put round. Who was Mountfichet’s wife – the Huntercombes’ girl Venetia, wasn’t she? I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way. Married couples usually do.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with whether he was going off with Pamela Flitton?’ asked Norah. ‘Or whether she married Widmerpool on the rebound?’

  ‘People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other,’ said Jeavons.

  He did not enlarge further on this rebuttal of the theory that people married ‘on the rebound’, or that the first choice was founded on an instinctive Tightness of judgment. Instead, he turned to the question of how he himself was to get back to London. Wandering about the room chainsmoking, he looked more than ever like a plain-clothes man.

  ‘Wish the train didn’t arrive back so late. They must be getting familiar with my face on that line. Probably think I’m working the three-card trick. Anything I can do to help sort things out while I’m here? Cleaning up that mess in the jar’s whetted my appetite for work. I’d have offered to be a bearer, if I’d thought I could hold up the coffin for more than a minute and a half, but that lump of gunmetal in my guts has been giving trouble again. Never seems to settle down. Sure the army vets left a fuse there, probably a whole shellcap. Can’t digest a thing. Becomes a bore after a time. Never know what you may do when you’re in that state. Didn’t want to be halfway up the aisle, and drop my end of the coffin. Still, that couldn’t have disrupted things, or made more row, than that girl did going out. Wish Molly was alive. Nothing Molly didn’t know about funerals.’

  Frederica, who had just come in, looked not altogether approving of all this. She was never in any case really sure that she liked Jeavons, certainly not when in moods like his present one. That had been Jeavons’s standing with her even before she married Umfraville, for whom Jeavons himself had no great affection. Umfraville, on the other hand, liked Jeavons. He used to give rather subtle imitations of him.

  ‘What you could do, Uncle Ted, is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that? It would be a great help.’

  ‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’ said Jeavons.

  He often showed an unexpected awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.

  ‘I’ll duly render a return of wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on such occasions.’

  Never finding it easy to set his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo stretched himself out on the sofa.

  ‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he said.

  ‘And the men to do them,’ said Jeavons.

  Later, as he worked away, he could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall refrain from his younger days:

  ‘When Father went down to Southend,

  To spend a happy day,

  He didn’t see much of the water,

  But he put some beer away.

  When he landed home,

  Mother went out of her mind,

  When he told her he’d lost the seaweed,

  And left the cockles behind.’

  A footnote to the events of Erridge’s funeral was supplied by Dicky Umfraville after our return to London. It was to be believed or not, according to taste. Umfraville produced the imputation, if that were what it was to be called, when we were alone together. Pamela Widmerpool’s name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Latterly, Umfraville’s character-acting had become largely an impersonation of himself, Dr Jekyll, even without the use of the transforming drug, slipping into the skin of the larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses, Umfraville’s normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape, the bright bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair – the formalized army officer of caricature – suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque shape as vehicle for improvisation.

  ‘Remember my confessing in my outspoken way I’d been pretty close to Flavia Stringham in the old days of the Happy Valley?’

  ‘You put it more bluntly than that, Dicky – you said you’d taken her virginity.’

  ‘What a cad I am – well, one sometimes wonders.’

  ‘Whether you’re a cad, Dicky, or whether you were the first?’

  ‘Our little romance was scarcely over before she married Cosmo Flitton. Now the only reason a woman like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a hurry, and at any price. Unfortunately my own circumstances forbade me aspiring to her hand.’

  ‘Dicky, this is pure fantasy.’

  Umfraville looked sad. Even at his most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him. He was a pure Burton type, when one came to think of it. Melancholy as expressed by giving imitations would have made another interesting sub-section in the Anatomy.

  ‘All right, old boy, all right. Keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups.’

  ‘Not a positive one?’

  ‘There was nothing positive about Cosmo Flitton – barring, of course, his Wassermann Test. Mind you, it could be argued Flavia found an equally God-awful heel in Harrison F. Wisebite, but Harrison came on to the scene too late to have fathered the beautiful Pamela.’

  ‘I’m not prepared to accept this, Dicky. You’ve just thought it up.’

  Umfraville’s habit of taking liberties with dates, if a story could thereby be improved, was notorious.

  ‘You can never tell,’ he repeated. ‘My God, Cosmo was a swine. A real swine. Harrison I liked in his way. He mixed a refreshing cocktail of his own invention called Death Comes for the Archbishop.’

  3

  In the course of preliminary conclaves with Bagshaw on the subject of Fission’s first number, mention was again made of an additional personage, a woman, who was backing the magazine. Bagshaw, adept at setting forth the niceties of political views, if these happened to attach to the doctrinaire Left, was less good at d
elineating individuals, putting over no more than that she was a widow who had always wanted some hand in running a paper. As it turned out, excuse existed for this lack of precision in grasping her name, in due course revealed in quite unforeseen circumstances. Bagshaw thought she would cause little or no trouble editorially. That was less true of Widmerpool, who certainly harboured doubts as to Bagshaw’s competence as editor. Quiggin and Craggs were another matter. They were old acquaintances who differed on all sorts of points, but they were familiar with Bagshaw’s habits. Widmerpool had no experience of these. He might take exception to some of them. Bagshaw himself was much too devious to express all this in plain terms, nor would it have been discreet to do so openly. His disquiet showed itself in repeated attempts to pinpoint Widmerpool himself politically.

  ‘From time to time I detect signs of fellow-travelling. Then I think I’m on the wrong tack entirely, he’s positively Right Wing Labour. Again, you find him stringing along with the far, but anti-Communist, Left. You can’t help admiring the way he conceals his hand. My guess is he’s playing ball with the Comrades on the quiet for whatever he can get out of it, but trying to avoid the appearance of doing so. He doesn’t want to prejudice his chances of a good job in the Government when the moment comes.’

  ‘Was that the game Hamlet was playing when he said:

  The undiscovered country from whose bourn

  No fellow-traveller returns, puzzles the will?’

  ‘There was something fishy about Hamlet’s politics, I agree,’ said Bagshaw. ‘But the only fellow-travellers we can be certain about were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.’

  Meanwhile I worked away at Burton, and various other jobs. The three months spent in the country after demobilization had endorsed the severance with old army associates, the foreign military attachés with whom I had been employed ‘in liaison’. One returned to a different world. Once in a way the commemorative gesture might be made by one or other of them of inviting a former colleague, now relegated to civilian life; once in a way an unrevised list of names might bring one incongruously to the surface again. On the whole, attendance at such gatherings became very infrequent.