At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [66]
‘People do grow up. At least some do.’
‘I am afraid Charles was not one of them,’ she said gravely. ‘He became a man, but he did not grow up. He is not grown up now.’
I hardly knew what to answer. It was one of those headfirst dives into generalisation that usually precedes between two persons a greater conversational intimacy. However, Miss Weedon made no attempt to expand her statement; nor, so to speak, to draw closer in her approach to the problem of Stringham. She merely continued to look at me with a kind of chilly amiability; as if, by making an immediate confession that I was a former friend of his, I had, so far as she was concerned, just managed to save my bacon. When a boy, I had regarded her as decidedly formidable. I still found her a trifle alarming. She gave an impression of complete singleness of purpose: the impression of a person who could make herself very disagreeable if thwarted.
‘Do you ever see Charles now?’ I asked.
She did not answer at once, as if waiting a second or two in order to make up her mind how best to deal with that question; perhaps trying to decide the relative merits of plain statement and diplomatic evasion. Finally she came down on the side of bluntness.
‘Yes, I do see him,’ she said. ‘Quite often. You probably know he drinks too much—really much too much. I am trying to help him about that.’
She stared at me very composedly. Once more I hardly knew how to reply. I had not expected our conversation to take this unreservedly serious turn; especially as we had by then reached the bedroom, and were only delayed in our introduction to the ape by the concourse of people who surrounded him, offering homage and applauding Molly’s particularisation of his many charms of character.
‘Charles had certainly had rather too much the last time I saw him,’ I said, trying to pass off the matter of Stringham’s drunkenness as if it were just a question of getting rather tight once in a way, which I knew to be far from the truth. ‘That was at a dinner he and I went to—two or three years ago at least.’
‘You have not seen him since then?’
‘No.’
‘It still goes on. But I think I shall be able to help him.’
I had no clear idea of how she would set about ‘helping’ Stringham, but the way she spoke made me conscious of her undoubted strength of will. In fact, her voice chilled my blood a little, she sounded so firm. However, at that moment we found ourselves confronted by the monkey—named by his owners ‘Maisky’, after the then Soviet Ambassador—and were introduced by Molly to shake hands with him. He was sitting thoughtfully among the cushions of a spacious basket, from time to time extending a small, dry paw in greeting to Molly’s guests as they came into his immediate presence. A saucer of nuts, stood beside him. There was something of Quiggin in his seriousness and self-absorbtion: also in the watchful manner in which he glanced from time to time at the nuts, sometimes choosing one specially tempting to crack.
‘Have you known Lady Molly long?’ asked Miss Weedon, after we had taken leave of Maisky, and were returning down the stairs.
‘Only a short time.’
‘I thought I had never seen you here before.’
‘I was brought by Chips Lovell.’
‘Oh, yes. One of her nephews. Rather a pushing young man. She was very good to him when he was a boy and his parents did not take much trouble about him. She is a very kind-hearted woman. Quite exceptionally kind-hearted. The house is always full of people she is doing good turns to. Children stay here while their parents are fixing up a divorce. Penniless young men get asked to meals. Former servants are always being given help of one sort or another. There is an old cousin of her husband’s ill in one of the upper bedrooms now. She has nowhere else to go, and will certainly never leave the house alive. I really cannot think how Lady Molly stands some of the people who come here. Many are quite dreadful.’
‘They certainly seem a mixed bag.’
‘They are worse than that, some of them.’
‘Really?’
‘At the same time, you may find yourself talking to someone like Charles