A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [75]
“He talked a lot about her at the party.”
“What did he say?”
“He was deploring that she found herself in rather an awkward spot.”
“You know about that, do you?”
“Mr. Deacon seemed very concerned.”
“You make me laugh when you call Edgar ‘Mr. Deacon’,” said Barnby. “It certainly makes a new man of him. As a matter of fact, I rather think Jones has solved her problem. You know, she is older than you’d think—too old to get into that sort of difficulty. What do you say to going across the road for a drink?”
On the way out of the studio I asked if one of the unframed portraits standing against the easel could be a likeness of Mrs. Wentworth. Barnby, after scarcely perceptible hesitation, agreed that the picture represented that lady.
“She is rather paintable,” he explained.
“Yes?”
“But tricky at times.”
The subject of Mrs. Wentworth seemed to dispirit him a little, and he remained silent until we were sitting in front of our drinks in the empty saloon bar of the pub on the corner.
“Do you have any dealings with Donners?” he asked at last.
“A friend of mine called Charles Stringham had some sort of a job with him.”
“I’ve heard Baby speak of Stringham. Wasn’t there something about a divorce?”
“His sister’s.”
“That was it,” said Barnby. “But the point is—what is happening about Baby and Donners?”
“How do you mean?”
“They are seen about a lot together. Baby has been appearing with some rather nice diamond clips, and odds and ends of that sort, which seem to be recent acquisitions.”
Barnby screwed up his face in thought.
“Of course,” he said. “I realise that a poor man competing with a rich one for a woman should be in a relatively strong position if he plays his cards well. Even so, Donners possesses to a superlative degree the advantages of his handicaps—so that one cannot help feeling a bit agitated at times. Especially with Theodoric cutting in, though I don’t think he carries many guns.”
“What about Mrs. Wentworth’s husband?”
“Divorced,” said Barnby. “She may even want to marry Donners. The point is, in this—as, I believe, in business matters too—he is rather a man of mystery. From time to time he has a girl hanging about, but he never seems to settle down with anyone. The girls themselves are evasive. They admit to no more than accepting presents and giving nothing in return. That’s innocent enough, after all.”
Although he spoke of the matter as if not to be taken too seriously, I suspected that he was, at least for the moment, fairly deeply concerned in the matter of Baby Wentworth; and when conversation turned to the supposed whims of Sir Magnus, Barnby seemed to take a self-tormenting pleasure in the nature of the hypotheses he put forward. It appeared that the position was additionally complicated by the fact that he had sold a picture to Sir Magnus a month or two before, and that there was even some question of his undertaking a mural in the entrance of the Donners-Brebner building.
“Makes the situation rather delicate,” said Barnby.
He was, so I discovered, a figure of the third generation (perhaps the descent, if ascertainable, would have proved even longer) in the world in which he moved: a fact that seemed to give his judgment, based on easy terms of long standing with the problems involved, a scope rather unusual among those who practise the arts, even when they themselves perform with proficiency. His father—though he had died comparatively young, and left no money to speak of—had been, in his day, a fairly successful sculptor of an academic sort; his grandfather, not unknown in the ’sixties and ’seventies, a book illustrator in the Tenniel tradition.
There were those, as I found later, among Barnby’s acquaintances who would suggest that his too extensive field of appreciation had to some degree inhibited