A Question of Upbringing - Anthony Powell [8]
“Diamonds?”
I was familiar with detective stories in which South African millionaires had made their money in diamonds.
“Gold,” said Uncle Giles, narrowing his eyes.
My uncle’s period in South Africa was one of the several stretches of his career not too closely examined by other members of his family – or, if examined, not discussed – and I hoped that he might be about to give some account of experiences I had always been warned not to enquire into. However, he said no more than: “I saw your friend’s mother once when she was married to Lord Warrington and a very good-looking woman she was.”
“Who was Lord Warrington?”
“Much older than she was. He died. Never a good life, Warrington’s. And so you always have tea with young Stringham?”
“And another boy called Templer.”
“Where was Templer?” asked Uncle Giles, rather suspiciously, as if he supposed that someone might have been spying on him unawares, or that he had been swindled out of something.
“In London, having his eyes seen to.”
“What is wrong with his eyes?”
“They ache when he works.”
My uncle thought over this statement, which conveyed in Templer’s own words his personal diagnosis of this ocular complaint. Uncle Giles was evidently struck by some similarity of experience, because he was silent for several seconds. I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements regarding other people. He began to tap with his knuckles on the window-pane, continuing this tattoo until I had given up attempting, so far as I knew it, to describe Stringham’s background.
“It is about the Trust,” said Uncle Giles, coming abruptly to the end of his drumming, and adopting a manner at once accusing and seasoned with humility.
The Trust, therefore, was at the bottom of this visitation. The Trust explained this arrival by night in winter. If I had thought harder, such an explanation might have occurred to me earlier; but at that age I cannot pretend that I felt greatly interested in the Trust, a subject so often ventilated in my hearing. Perhaps the enormous amount of time and ingenuity that had been devoted by other members of my family to examining the Trust from its innumerable aspects had even decreased for me its intrinsic attraction. In fact the topic bored me. Looking back, I can understand the fascination that the Trust possessed for my relations: especially for those, like Uncle Giles, who benefited from it to a greater or lesser degree. In those days the keenness of their interest seemed something akin to madness.
The money came from a great-aunt, who had tied it up in such a way as to raise what were, I believe, some quite interesting questions of legal definition. In addition to this, one of my father’s other brothers, Uncle Martin, also a beneficiary, a bachelor, killed at the second battle of the Marne, had greatly complicated matters, although there was not a great deal of money to divide, by leaving a will of his own devising, which still further secured the capital without making it absolutely clear who should enjoy the interest. My father and Uncle Giles had accordingly come to a “gentleman’s agreement” on the subject of their respective shares (which brought in about one hundred and eighty-five pounds annually, or possibly nearly two hundred in a good year); but Uncle Giles had never been satisfied that he was receiving the full amount to which he was by right entitled: so that when times were hard – which happened about every eighteen months – he used to apply pressure with a view to squeezing out a few pounds more than his agreed portion. The repetition of these tactics, forgotten for a time and then breaking out again like one of Uncle Giles’s duodenal ulcers, had the effect of making my father exceedingly angry; and, taken in conjunction with the rest of my uncle’s manner of life, they had resulted in an almost complete severance of relations between the two brothers.
“As you probably know,” said Uncle Giles, “I owe your father a small sum of money. Nothing much. Decent of him to have give