A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell [98]
“I’ve arranged to see the hound puppies on Tuesday,” said Eleanor. “What a pity you will all be gone by then.”
However, she spoke as if she could survive the disbandment of our party. I pondered some of the events of the day, especially the situations to which, by some inexorable fate, Widmerpool’s character seemed to commit him. This last misfortune had been, if anything, worse than the matter of Barbara and the sugar. And yet, like the phoenix, he rose habitually, so I concluded, recalling his other worries, from the ashes of his own humiliation. I could not help admiring the calm manner in which Sir Magnus had accepted damage of the most irritating kind to his property: violation which, to rich or poor, must always represent, to a greater or lesser degree, assault upon themselves and their feelings. From this incident, I began to understand at least one small aspect of Sir Magnus’s prescriptive right to have become in life what Uncle Giles would have called “a person of influence.” The point about Jean that had impressed me most, I thought, was that she was obviously more intelligent than I had previously supposed. In fact she was almost to be regarded as an entirely new person. If the chance arose again, it was in that capacity that she must be approached.
Sir Gavin straightened the photograph of Prince Theodoric’s father, wearing hussar uniform, that stood on the piano in a plain silver frame, surmounted by a royal crown.
“His helmet now shall make a hive for bees …” he remarked, as he sank heavily into an arm-chair.
4
A SENSE OF MATURITY, or at least of endured experience, is conveyed, for some reason, in the smell of autumn; so it seemed to me, passing one day, by chance, through Kensington Gardens. The eighteen months or less since that Sunday afternoon on the steps of the Albert Memorial, with the echoing of Eleanor’s whistle, and Barbara’s fleeting grasp of my arm, had become already measureless as an eternity. Now, like scraps of gilt peeled untidily from the mosaic surface of the neo-Gothic canopy, the leaves, stained dull gold, were blowing about in the wind, while, squatting motionless beside the elephant, the Arab still kept watch on summer’s mirage, as, once more, the green foliage faded gradually away before his displeased gaze. Those grave features implied that for him, too, that year, for all its monotony, had also called attention, in different aspects, to the processes of life and death that are always on the move. For my own part, I felt myself peculiarly conscious of these unalterable activities. For example, Stringham, as he had himself foreshadowed, was married to Peggy Stepney in the second week of October; the same day, as it happened, that saw the last of Mr. Deacon.
“Don’t miss Buster’s present,” Stringham just had time to remark, as the conveyor-belt of wedding guests evolved sluggishly across the carpet of the Bridgnorths’ drawing room in Cavendish Square.
There was opportunity to do no more than take the hand, for a moment, of bride and bridegroom; but Buster’s present could hardly have remained invisible: a grand-father clock, gutted, and fitted up with shelves to form a “cocktail cabinet,” fully equipped with glasses, two shakers, and space for bottles. A good deal of money had evidently been spent on this ingenious contrivance. There was even a secret drawer. I could not make up my mind whether the joke was not, in reality, against Stringham. The donor himself, perhaps physically incapacitated by anguish of jealousy, had been unable to attend the church; and, since at least one gossip column had referred to “popular Commander Foxe’s temporary retirement to a nursing home,” there seemed no reason to disbelieve in the actuality of Buster’s seizure.
Stringham’s mother, no less beautiful, so it seemed to me, than when, as a schoolboy, I had first set eyes on her—having at last made up her