At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [60]
‘Have you been over the house?’ asked Isobel, beside whom I was sitting on the sofa.
We had drunk the champagne, and the atmosphere had become more relaxed. Erridge heard the question, and spoke himself, before I could answer. Although he had had nothing to drink, he had not been able to withstand the increased warmth of relationship that the rest of us had drawn from the wine.
‘Why, no, you haven’t seen the house yet,’ he said. ‘Would you by any chance like to go round, Jenkins? There is really little or nothing of any interest to see, I must warn you, except a hat that is supposed to have belonged to the younger Pitt.’
‘I should like to go round very much.’
‘I expect you will prefer to stay where you are, J.G.,’ said Erridge, who may have decided to take this opportunity of making a tour of the house as a kind of counterblast to Quiggin’s demand for champagne. ‘And I don’t expect you will want to go round either, Mona, as you have seen it all several times. Jenkins and I will walk through the rooms very quickly.’
However, both Quiggin and Mona insisted that they would like to take part in the tour, in spite of its repetitive character, so far as they themselves were concerned; and the Tolland girls agreed, rather loudly, that there was nothing they enjoyed more than their eldest brother’s showmanship in this particular undertaking.
‘Those anti-fascist pamphlets will have to wait for another night,’ Quiggin muttered to Erridge.
He spoke, as if to salve his conscience, as he rose from his chair.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Erridge testily, as if he wished to be reminded of the pamphlets as little as Quiggin. ‘Anyway, I want to go through them carefully—not with a lot of people interrupting.’
He strode firmly in front of us. We followed down several passages, emerging at last at the head of a broad staircase. Erridge descended. Half-way down, where the wall of the landing faced the hall, hung the full-length portrait, by Lawrence, of an officer wearing the slung jacket of a hussar. Erridge stopped in front of the picture.
‘The 4th Lord Erridge and ist Earl of Warminster,’ he said. ‘He was a very quarrelsome man and fought a number of duels. The Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said of him: “By God, Erridge has shown himself a greater rake than Anglesey and more damn’d a fool than ever was Combermere. It is my firm belief that had he been present on the field of Waterloo we should never have carried the day.”‘
‘But that was only when the Duke was cross,’ said Isobel. ‘Because he also remarked: “Erridge spoke out last night when Brougham extolled the virtues of Queen Caroline. I never saw a man so put out of countenance as was Brougham by his words.” I always wonder what he said. Of course, one knows in a general way, but it would be nice to know the actual phrases.’
‘I think he probably used to score off Wellington,’ said Susan. ‘And that was why the Duke was so sharp with him. Erridge was probably the more cunning of the two.’
‘Oh, rot,’ said Isobel. ‘I bet he wasn’t. Dukes are much more cunning than earls.’
‘What makes you think so?’ said her brother.
Not greatly pleased by this opinion, he did not wait for an answer, but moved on down the stairs. Denigration of ancestors was more agreeable to him than banter regarding the order of peerage to which he belonged. Not for the first time that evening one was conscious of the bones of an old world pomposity displayed beneath the skin of advanced political thought. However, he soon recovered from this momentary discomposure.
‘Of course the Tollands were really nobody much at the beginning of the fourteenth century,’ he said. ‘That is when they first appear. Lesser gentry, I suppose you might call them. I think they probably made their money out of the Black Death.’
As such a foundation of the family fortunes seemed of interest, I enquired further. Erridge was taken back by the question.
‘Oh, I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘There was a big industrial and social upheaval then, as you probably know. The Tollands may have turned it to good account. I think they were a pretty awful lot.