A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [91]
“Gypsy,” he said, hesitating a moment over the name, and speaking so low as to be almost inaudible4
“What about her?”
The whole affair was hopelessly tangled in my head. I could remember that Barnby had said something about Widmerpool being involved with Gypsy Jones, but I have already spoken of the way of looking at life to which, in those days, I subscribed—the conception that sets individuals and ideas in hermetically sealed receptacles—and the world in which such things could happen at which Widmerpool seemed to hint appeared infinitely removed, I cannot now think why, from Stourwater and its surroundings. However, it was at last plain that Widmerpool had, in some manner, seriously compromised himself with Gypsy Jones. A flood of possible misadventures that could have played an unhappy part in causing his distress now invaded my imagination.
“A doctor was found,” said Widmerpool.
He spoke in a voice hollow with desperation, and this news did not allay the suspicion that whatever was amiss must be fairly serious; though for some reason the exact cause of his anxiety still remained uncertain in my mind.
“I believe everything is all right now,” he said. “But it cost a lot of money. More than I could afford. You know, I’ve never even committed a technical offence before—like using the untransferable half of somebody else’s return ticket, or driving a borrowed car insured only in the owner’s name.”
Giving expression to his dismay seemed to have done him good: at least to have calmed him.
“I felt I could mention matters to you as you were already familiar with the situation,” he said. “That fellow Barnby told me you knew. I don’t much care for him.”
Now, at last, I remembered the gist of what Mr. Deacon had told me, and, incredible as I should have supposed their course to be, the sequence of events began to become at least dimly visible: though much remained obscure. I have spoken before of the difficulties involved in judging other people’s behaviour by a consistent standard—for, after all, one must judge them, even at the price of being judged oneself—and, had I been told of some similar indiscretion on the part, say, of Peter Templer I should have been particularly disturbed. There is, or, at least, should be, a fitness in the follies each individual pursues and uniformity of pattern is, on the whole, rightly preserved in human behaviour. Such unwritten regulations seemed now to have been disregarded wholesale.
In point of fact Templer was, so far as I knew, capable of conducting his affairs without recourse to such extremities; and a crisis of this kind appeared to me so foreign to Widmerpool’s nature—indeed, to what might almost be called his station in life—that there was something distinctly shocking, almost personally worrying, in finding him entangled with a woman in such circumstances. I could not help wondering whether or not there had been, or would be, material compensation for these mental, and financial, sufferings. Having regarded him, before hearing of his feelings for Barbara, as existing almost in a vacuum so far as the emotion of love was concerned, an effort on my own part was required to accept the fact that he had been engaged upon so improbable, indeed, so sinister, a liaison. If I had been annoyed to find, a month or two earlier, that he considered himself to possess claims of at least, some tenuous sort on Barbara, I was also more than a trifle put out to discover that Widmerpool, so generally regarded by his contemporaries as a dull dog, had been, in fact, however much he might now regret it, in this way, at a moment’s notice, prepared to live comparatively dangerously.
“I will tell you more some other time. Naturally my mother