At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [87]
‘Easy to explain,’ said Lovell. ‘Aunt Alice, the most conventional woman alive, is also one of those tremendously respectable people who long to know someone they regard as disreputable. To have Mildred Haycock as a friend has been the great adventure of Aunt Alice’s life.’
‘And she includes Mrs. Haycock’s husbands?’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Lovell. ‘You’ve got something when you ask that. I very much doubt whether Haycock ever reached Dogdene. However, as the Widmerpool engagement took place over here—and Mildred, in any case, coming to England so rarely—I suppose an invitation to both of them was hard to refuse. You see, Mildred almost certainly invited herself. She probably took the opportunity of asking if her young man could come too.’
This was a credible explanation.
‘It is just like the Sleafords,’ said Lovell, ‘that Aunt Alice should disapprove of Molly Jeavons, who is really so frightfully well behaved, in spite of the ramshackle way in which she lives, and take to her bosom someone like Mildred, who has slept with every old-timer between Cannes and St. Tropez.’
‘What will the Sleafords think about Widmerpool?’
‘He sounds just the sort of chap Uncle Geoffrey will like. Probably talk stocks and shares all day long, and go to bed every night at half-past ten sharp, after one glass of port. The port is quite good at Dogdene, I must admit. Only because no one has ever bothered to drink it. All the same, I am a bit surprised myself by their both getting an invitation. It is not so easy to penetrate Dogdene these days. I know. I’ve tried.’
I was, naturally, much occupied at this period with my own affairs, so that was all I heard about Widmerpool going to Dogdene before learning from Lovell—quite by chance one day at the Studio—that Mrs. Haycock’s engagement had been broken off. Lovell hardly knew Widmerpool. He would have had no particular concern with the engagement had not Dogdene provided the background for this event. He had no details. I learnt more of the story as a result of Molly Jeavons announcing: ‘I shall have a few people in next week, Nicholas, a sort of party for yourself and Isobel. Something quite small.’
When I had next been to the Jeavonses’ house after the visit to Umfraville’s night club, Jeavons himself had made no reference whatever to that excursion. Indeed, he hardly talked at all during the course of the evening, striding aimlessly about the room as if lost in thought. It was possible that his wound was giving him trouble. However, Molly spoke of the matter, pretending to be cross with me.
‘You are a very dissipated young man,’ she said. ‘What do you mean by keeping poor Teddy up till all hours in the way you did? I never heard such a thing. Do you know he had to spend a whole week in bed after going out with you?’
I tried to make some apology, although at the same time feeling not greatly to blame for the way Jeavons behaved when he went out on his own. As a matter of fact, I had not been at all well myself the following day, and was inclined to blame Jeavons for having caused me to sit up so late.
‘Just as well he found Mildred Blaides to look after him,’ said Molly. ‘I always thought they had known each other for ages, but it turned out they had only met once, a long time ago. You know she was a nurse at Dogdene during the war. Lucky she didn’t turn up when Teddy was there, or she would have scalded him to death with hot-water-bottles, or something of that sort. She was the worst nurse they ever had there—or in the whole of the V.A.D., for that matter.’
Molly spoke with more than a touch of acrimony, but at the same time it was impossible to guess how much she knew, or suspected, of Jeavons