A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [83]
“How long have I got to go on sitting next to that equerry of Theodoric’s, Bill?” she asked. “I’ve been through his favourite dance tunes at dinner last night. I can’t stand them at lunch again to-day. I’m not as young as I was.”
“Talk to him about birds and beasts,” said Stringham. “I’ve already tried that with great success—the flora and fauna of England and Wales.”
Mrs. Wentworth seemed not greatly amused by this facetiousness. Her demeanour was less friendly than Peggy Stepney’s, and she did no more than glance in my direction when we were introduced. I was impressed by Barnby’s temerity in tackling so formidable an objective. Luncheon was announced at that moment, so that the four of us temporarily parted company.
The dining-room was hung with sixteenth-century tapestries. I supposed that they might be Gobelins from their general appearance, blue and crimson tints set against lemon yellow. They illustrated the Seven Deadly Sins. I found myself seated opposite Luxuria, a failing principally portrayed in terms of a winged and horned female figure, crowned with roses, holding between finger and thumb one of her plump, naked breasts, while she gazed into a looking-glass, supported on one side by Cupid and on the other by a goat of unreliable aspect. The four-footed beast of the Apocalypse, with his seven dragon-heads dragged her triumphal car, which was of great splendour. Hercules, bearing his club, stood by, somewhat gloomily watching this procession, his mind filled, no doubt, with disquieting recollections. In the background, the open doors of a pillared house revealed a four-poster bed, with hangings rising to an apex, under the canopy of which a couple lay clenched in a priapic grapple. Among trees, to the right of the composition, further couples and groups, three or four of them at least, were similarly occupied in smaller houses and Oriental tents; or, in one case, simply on the ground.
I had been placed next to Rosie Manasch, who was, at the moment of seating herself, engaged in talk with her neighbour on the far side; and—curious to investigate some of the by-products of indulgence depicted in this sequence of animated, and at times enigmatic, incidents—I found myself fully occupied in examining unobtrusively the scenes spread out on the tapestry. There had been, I was dimly aware, some rearrangement of places on my right-hand side, where a chair had remained empty for a moment or two. Now a girl sat down there, next to me, to whom I had not yet, so far as I knew, been introduced, with some muttered words from Truscott, who had instigated the change of position—possibly to relieve Mrs. Wentworth from further strain of making conversation with Prince Theodoric’s equerry.
“I don’t think you remember me,” she said, almost at once, in a curiously harsh voice that brought back, in fact, that same sense of past years returning that Stringham’s inquiry for matches had caused me at the coffee-stall. “I used to be called Jean Templer. You are a friend of Peter’s, and you came to stay with us years ago.”
It was true that I had not recognised her. I think we might even have exchanged words without my guessing her identity, so little had she been in my thoughts, so unexpected a place was this to find her. That was not because she had changed greatly. On the contrary, she still seemed slim,