At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [65]
‘Do you think he is in love with Mildred?’ she asked sharply.
‘I really don’t know. I suppose so. If he wants to marry her.’
I was not at all prepared for the question.
‘Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all,’ she said. ‘I feel rather sorry for him in some ways. Mildred is not an easy person. I’ve known her such a long time. She isn’t a bit easy. But now you simply must come up to my bedroom and see the monkey. I bought him today from a man in Soho, where I went to get some pimentos.’
A good deal of the life of the Jeavons’ household was, in fact, lived in Molly’s bedroom, either because a sick animal was established there (with the budgerigars, four principal dogs and at least as many cats inhabited the house), or simply because Molly herself had risen late, or retired early to rest, in either case holding a kind of reception from her bed, a Victorian fourposter that took up most of the room. On a chest of drawers beside the bed stood a photograph of Jeavons in uniform: breeches: puttees: at the back of his head a floppy service cap of the kind stigmatised by Mrs. Haycock in her youth as a ‘gorblimey’. He held a knotted bamboo swagger cane under one arm, and, wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the M.C. (awarded after the action in which he had been so seriously wounded), he looked the complete subaltern of war-time musical comedy.
‘Come along, all of you,’ said Molly. ‘You must all see the monkey. You too, Tuffy. You simply must see him.’
I had already recognised the tall, dark, beaky-nosed woman to whom she spoke as Miss Weedon, former secretary of my old friend Charles Stringham’s mother, Mrs. Foxe. Miss Weedon, now in her late forties, had been his sister Flavia’s governess. After Flavia grew up, she had stayed on to help with Mrs. Foxe’s social engagements and charities. I had been waiting an opportunity to have a word with her. I reintroduced myself as we climbed the stairs with the other people who wished—or were being compelled—to visit the monkey. Miss Weedon, wholly unchanged, still sombrely dressed, gave me a keen look.
‘But of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Charles brought you to luncheon in the London house before he went to Kenya to stay with his father. They had forgotten to get a ticket for Charles in a theatre party that had been made up—the Russian Ballet, I think. I was put to all kind of trouble to produce the extra ticket. However, I got it for him in the end.’
I, too, remembered the incident; and also the look of adoration Miss Weedon had given Stringham when she entered the room. I well recalled that passionate glance, although even then—that night at the Jeavonses’—I had not yet guessed the depths of her devotion. I wondered what she did with herself now. Stringham, when last we had seen something of each other, had told me: ‘Tuffy has come into a little money,’ and that she was no longer his mother’s secretary. I found in due course that Miss Weedon was a close friend of Molly’s; in fact that she re-enacted at the Jeavonses’ many of her former duties when in the employment of Mrs. Foxe, although, of course, in a household organised on very different terms. It was impossible to know from her manner how unexpected, or the reverse, she found the fact that we had met again at this place. In her profound, though mysterious, dimness, she was typical of the background of Jeavons gatherings.
‘I always regret that Charles ever made that journey to Kenya.’ she said.
She spoke severely, as if I had myself been in part to blame for allowing such a thing ever to have taken place; even though at the same time she freely forgave me for such former thoughtlessness.
‘Why?’
‘He was never the same afterwards.’
I had to admit to myself there was some truth in that. Stringham had never been the same after Kenya. It had been a water-shed in his life.
‘Perhaps it was just because he became a man,’ she said. ‘Of course, his upbringing was impossible—always, from the beginning. But he changed so much after that trip to Africa. He was a boy when he went—and such a charming boy—and he really came back a man.