A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [34]
One evening, when Mr. Templer had come suddenly out of one of his gloomy reveries, and nodded curtly to Babs to withdraw the women from the dining-room, Sunny Farebrother jumped up to open the door, and, in the regrouping of seats that took place when we sat down again, placed himself next to me. The Templers, father and son, had begun to discuss with Stripling the jamming of his car’s accelerator Farebrother shifted the port in my direction without pouring himself out a second glass. He said: “Did I understand that your father was at the Peace Conference?”
“For a time.”
“I wonder if he and I were ever in the same show.”
I described to the best of my ability how my father had been wounded in Mesopotamia; and, after a spell of duty in Cairo, had been sent to Paris at the end of the war: adding that I had no very certain idea of the nature of his work. Farebrother seemed disappointed that no details were available on this subject; but he continued to chat quietly of the Conference, and of the people he had run across when he had worked there himself.
“Wonderfully interesting people,” he said. “After a time one thought nothing of lunching with, for example, a former Finance Minister of Rumania, as a matter of fact we reached the stage of my calling him ‘Hilarion’ and he calling me ‘Sunny.’ I met Monsieur Venizelos with him on several occasions.”
I expressed the respect that I certainly felt for an appointment that brought opportunity to enjoy such encounters.
“It was a different world,” said Sunny Farebrother.
He spoke with more vehemence than usual; and I supposed that he intended to imply that hobnobbing with foreign statesmen was greatly preferable to touting for business from Peter’s father. I asked if the work was difficult.
“When they were kind enough to present me with an O.B.E. at the end of it,” said Farebrother, “I told them I should have to wear it on my backside because it was the only medal I had ever won by sitting in a chair.”
I did not know whether it was quite my place either to approve or to deprecate this unconventional hypothesis, daring in its disregard for authority (if “they” were superiors immediately responsible for the conferment of the award) and, at the same time, modest in its assessment of its expositor’s personal merits. Sunny Farebrother had the happy gift of suggesting by his manner that one had known him for a long time; and I began to wonder whether I had not, after all, been right in supposing that his nickname had been acquired from something more than having been named “Sunderland.” There was a suggestion of boyishness – the word “sunny” would certainly be applicable – about his frank manner; but in spite of this manifest desire to get along with everyone on their own terms, there was also something lonely and inaccessible about him. It seemed to me, equally, that I had not been so greatly mistaken in the high-flown estimate of his qualities that I had formed on first hearing his name, and of his distinguished record. However, before any pronouncement became necessary on the subject of the most appropriate region on which to distribute what I imagined to be his many decorations, his voice took on a more serious note, and he went on: “The Conference was, of course, a great change from the previous three and a half years, fighting backwards and forwards over the Somme and God knows where else – and fighting damned hard, too.”
Jimmy Stripling caught the word “Somme,” because his mouth twitched slightly, and he began chopping at a piece of pine-apple rind on his plate: though continuing to listen to his father-in-law’s diagnosis of the internal troubles of the Mercedes.
“Going up to the university?” Farebrother asked, “In October.”
“Take my advice,” he said. “Look about for a good business opening. D