At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [62]
‘We will pick you up when we come past the cottage, which we do, anyway,’ said Susan. ‘I warn you I am frightfully punctual.’
Quiggin did not look too pleased at this, but, having enjoyed his evening, he was by that time in a mood to allow such an arrangement to pass. Erridge, already suppressing one or two yawns, seemed anxious now that we should go, and give him an opportunity to make for bed. Mona, too, had been silent for a long ume, as if lost in thought. She looked tired. It was time to say good-night.
‘See you in the morning,’ said Isobel.
‘I will be waiting at the gate.’
Erridge came to the door and let us out. We passed once more through the dim glades of the melancholy park, now dramatised by moonlight. It was a warm night, damp, though without rain, and no wind stirred the trees. There was a smell of hay and wet timber in the air. The noise of owls came faintly as they called to each other under the stars.
‘Alf is a champion lad,’ said Quiggin. ‘His sisters are grand girls too. You didn’t take long to press your company on them, I must say.’
‘I’ve got to get back to London somehow.’
‘I didn’t think the girls were up to much,’ said Mona. ‘They behaved as if they owned the place. I hate those tweed suits.’
‘You know, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkyn in The Idiot,’ said Quiggin. ‘A Myshkyn with political grasp. You wouldn’t believe the money spent on good causes that he has got through, one way and another.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘He has helped a lot of individual cases that have been recommended to hirn from time to time. Howard Craggs got quite a bit out of him a year or two back, which I bet he never repaid. Then Alf has founded several societies and financed them. Refugees, too.’
‘Mind he doesn’t meet Guggenbühl.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ said Quiggin, laughing sourly.
‘He ought to marry a nice girl who would teach him to look after his money instead of handing it out to all these wasters,’ said Mona.
One of her bad moods seemed on the way.
‘All very good causes,’ said Quiggin, who seemed to enjoy contemplating this subject. ‘But sums that would make you gasp.’
‘Bloody fool,’ said Mona.
4
IN the Jeavonses’ house everything was disposed about the rooms as if the owners had moved in only a week or two before, and were still picknicking in considerable disorder among their unsorted belongings. Whether the better pieces were Sleaford spoils, or derived from Molly’s side of the family, Lovell was uncertain. Certainly Molly herself had not bought them; still less, Jeavons. Lovell said the only object the two of them were known to have acquired throughout their married life together was a cabinet made of some light, highly polished wood, designed—though never, I think, used—to enclose the wherewithal for mixing cocktails. In practice, bottles, glasses and ice were always brought into the drawing-room on a tray, the cabinet serving only as a plinth upon which to rest the cage enclosing two budgerigars. You could never tell who would carry in this drink tray; or, for that matter, who would open the front door. Regular servants were employed only spasmodically, their duties on the whole undertaken by such temporary figures as Erridge’s Smith, or superannuated nurses and governesses of the Ardglass family, whose former dependants were legion. Even personal friends of Molly’s, down on their luck for one reason or another, would from time to time lend a hand on the domestic side, while a succession of charwomen, gloomy or jocular, haunted the passages by day.
No one was ever, so to speak, turned away from the Jeavons table. The place was a hinterland where none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply and persons of every sort were to be encountered. Perhaps that description makes the company sound too diverting. Certainly Lovell was less complimentary. ‘Of course you hardly ever meet intelligent people there,’ he used to say, for some reason cherishing in his mind that category of person, without too closely defining means of recognition.