At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [72]
The band had momentarily ceased its hubbub. Jeavons leant forward. I thought he had something further to say which he wished to run no danger of being overheard. Instead, he suddenly began to sing, quite loud and in an unexpectedly deep and attractive voice:
‘I could say such—wonderful things to you,
There would be such—wonderful things to do . .
Taking this, perhaps not unnaturally, as a kind of summons, two of the girls at a neighbouring table rose and prepared to join us, a tall, muscular blonde, not altogether unlike Mona, and a small, plump brunette, who reminded me of a girl I used to know called Rosie Manasch. (Peter Templer liked to say that you could recognise all the girls you had ever met in a chorus: like picking out your friends from a flock of sheep.) Jeavons immediately checked this threatened incursion before it could take serious form by explaining that we were waiting for the ‘rest of the party’. The girls withdrew. Jeavons condnued the song as if there had been no interruption:
‘If you were the only—girl in the world,
And I was the only boy …’
He had only just time to finish before the band broke out again in a deafening volume of sound, playing some tune of very different tempo from that sung by Jeavons.
‘People don’t think the same way any longer,’ he bawled across the table. ‘The war blew the whole bloody thing up, like tossing a Mills bomb into a dug-out. Everything’s changed about all that. Always feel rather sorry for your generation as a matter of fact, not but what we haven’t all lost our—what do you call ’em—you know—somebody used the word in our house the other night—saying much what I’m saying now? Struck me very forcibly. You know—when you’re soft enough to think things are going to be a damned sight better than they turn out to be. What’s the word?’
‘Illusions?’
‘Illusions! That’s the one. We’ve lost all our bloody illusions. Put ’em all in the League of Nations, or somewhere like that. Illusions, my God. I had a few of ’em when I started. You wouldn’t believe it. Of course, I’ve been lucky. Lucky isn’t the word, as a matter of fact. Still people always talk as if marriage was one long roll in the hay. You can take it from me, my boy. it isn’t. You’ll be surprised when you get tied up to a woman yourself. Suppose I shouldn’t say such things. Molly and I are very fond of each other in our own way. Between you and me, she’s not a great one for bed. A chap I knew in the Ordnance, who’d carried on quite a bit with the girls, told me those noisy ones seldom are. Don’t do much in that line myself nowadays, to tell the truth. Feel too cooked most of the time. Never sure the army vets got quite all those separate pieces of a toffee-apple out of my ribs. Tickles a bit sometimes. Sull, you have to step out once in a way. Go melancholy mad otherwise. Life’s a rum business, however you look at it, and—as I was saying—not having been born to all this high life, and so on, I can’t exactly complain.’
It was clear to me now that, if Molly had had her day, so too in a sense had Jeavons, even though Jeavons’s day had not been at all the same as his wife’s: few days, indeed, could have been more different. He was one of those men, themselves not particularly aggressive in their relations with the opposite sex, who are at the same time peculiarly attractive to some women; and, accordingly, liable to be appropriated at short notice. The episode of Mildred Blaides illustrated this state of affairs, which was borne out by the story of his marriage. It was unlikely that these were the only two women in the course of his life who had decided to take charge of him. I was hoping for further reminiscences (though expecting none more extraordinary than that already retailed) when Dicky Umfraville himself arrived at our table.
Wearing a dinner jacket, Umfraville was otherwise unchanged from the night we had met at Foppa’s. Trim, horsey, perfecdy at ease with himself, and everyone around him, he managed at the same time to suggest the proximity of an abyss of scandal and bankruptcy threatening at any moment to engulf himself, and anyone else unfortunate enough to be within his immediate vicinity when the crash came. The charm he exercised over people was perhaps largely due to this ability to juggle with two contrasting, apparently contradictory attributes; the one, an underlying implication of sinister, disturbing undercurrents: the other, a soothing power to reassure and entertain. These incompatible elements were always to be felt warring with each other whenever he was present. He was like an actor who suddenly appears on the stage to the accompaniment of a roll of thunder, yet utterly captivates his audience a second later, while their nerves are still on edge, by crooning a sentimental song.