At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [18]
‘Well, he is no beauty,’ said Mrs. Conyers.
She spoke with such deep relief at her discovery of the unpleasingness of Widmerpool’s features that she must have feared the worst of her sister’s choice on account of the reported difference of age. Probably she had pictured some golden-haired gigolo of altogether unacceptable personal appearance. The truth was a great consolation to her. Certainly, to look at them, they seemed on the score of age to be a couple very reasonably to be associated together. Mrs. Haycock was in the neighbourhood of forty, and looked no younger, but Widmerpool, although only a year or so over thirty, had always appeared comfortably middle-aged even as a boy.
‘I know him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He is called Kenneth Widmerpool. I was at school with him as a matter of fact. He is in the City.’
‘I know his name of course. And that he is in the City. But what is he like?’
Mrs. Conyers did not attempt to conceal her own impatience. The reason of her anxiety was now made plain. She had no confidence in her sister’s choice of husband. She wanted to know the worst as soon as possible. Her first, and most serious, fears were passed; she wished to move on to a later stage of enquiry. Widmerpool, although giving her reason to be thankful that the outlook was not more threatening, had evidently made no very captivating impression.
‘Is he nice?’
‘I’ve known him a long time ‘
By then we were both involved in general introductions taking place round the room, so that I was not forced to answer the question. Afterwards, when I got home, I pondered what I should most properly have said in reply. The fact was that Widmerpool could hardly be described as ‘nice’. Energetic: able: successful: all kinds of things that had never been expected of him in the past; but ‘nice’ he had never been, and showed little sign of becoming. Yet, for some reason, I was quite glad to see him again. His reappearance, especially in that place, helped to prove somehow rather consolingly, that life continued its mysterious, patterned way. Widmerpool was a recurring milestone on the road; perhaps it would be more apt to say that his course, as one jogged round the track, was run from time to time, however different the pace, in common with my own. As an aspect of my past he was an element to be treated with interest, if not affection, like some unattractive building or natural feature of the landscape which brought back the irrational nostalgia of childhood. A minute later I found myself talking to him.
‘No, I haven’t seen you for a long time,’ he said, breathing heavily as usual, ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you, as a matter of fact, to tell you I was getting married.’
‘Many congratulations.’
‘Time to settle down,’ he said.
This remark was fatuous, since he had never been anything but ‘settled down’, at least in my eyes. I could not imagine why he should specially wish to tell me about his marriage, although there could be no doubt from his manner that he was in a great state of excitement at the thought of being engaged. His nose and lips, beneath the huge headlamps of his now rimless spectacles, were twitching slightly. Lunging out towards Mrs. Haycock, who stood not far from him, he seized her arm and drew her in our direction.
‘This is Nicholas Jenkins, my dear. An old friend of mine. He was somewhat my junior at school.’
Mrs. Haycock, who had been talking to her sister, now turned and faced me, so that for the first time since she had entered the room I had an opportunity of observing closely the woman he hoped to make his wife. I could at once appreciate the strong impression she might have made on him the moment she showed herself prepared to accept him as an admirer. Tall, elegant, brassy, she was markedly of the same generation as Molly Jeavons, without personally at all resembling her. Mrs. Haycock’s moral separateness from Widmerpool, immediately noticeable, was not on account of any difference of age, as such, for—as I have said—Widmerpool had never looked young. It was a separateness imposed upon her by the war. Like Jeavons, that was the epoch to which she belonged by some natural right. Life on the Riviera had no doubt left its mark too: a society in which Widmerpool was unlikely hitherto to have participated. She retained some of her sunburn from the previous summer, and, although dressed quite normally