Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [36]
‘It’s Erry’s shade haunting the place,’ said Norah. ‘His obsession with ill-health. All the same, we all supposed him a malade imaginaire. Now the joke’s with him.’
‘I was thinking the other day that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,’ said Hugo.
This sort of conversation grated on Frederica.
‘Do you know how Erry occupied his last week?’ she asked. ‘Writing letters about the memorial window.’
‘The old original memorial window?’
‘Yes.’
‘But Erry was always utterly against it,’ said Norah. ‘At least refused ever to make a move. It was George who used to say the window had been planned at the time and ought to be put up, no matter what.’
‘Erry appears to have started corresponding about stained-glass windows almost immediately after George’s funeral. Blanche found the letters, didn’t you?’
Blanche smiled vaguely. Norah threw her cigarette into the fireplace in a manner to express despair at all human behaviour, her own family’s in particular.
‘Apart from going into complete reverse as to his own values, fancy imagining you could get a stained-glass window put up to your grandfather when you can’t find a bloody builder to repair the roof of your bloody bombed-out flat. That was Erry all over.’
‘Perhaps he meant it as a kind of tribute to George.’
‘I don’t object to George wanting to stick the window up. That was George’s line. It’s Erry. It was just like darling George to be nice about that sort of thing – just as he went when he did, and didn’t hang about a few months after Erry to make double death duties. George was always the best behaved of the family.’
Frederica did not comment on that opinion. It looked as if a row, no uncommon occurrence when Frederica and Norah were under the same roof, might be about to break out. Hugo, familiar with his sisters’ wars and alliances, changed the subject.
‘There’s always something rather consoling about death,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean Erry, because of course one’s very sorry about the old boy and all that. What you must admit is there’s a curious pleasure in hearing about someone’s death as a rule, even if you’ve quite liked them.’
‘Not George’s,’ said Susan. ‘I cried for days.’
‘So did I,’ said Norah. ‘Weeks.’
She was never to be outdone by Susan.
‘That’s quite different again,’ said Hugo. ‘I quite agree I was cut up by George too. Felt awful about him in an odd way – I mean not the obvious way, but treating it objectively. It seemed such bloody bad luck. What I’m talking about is that sense of relief about hearing a given death has taken place. One can’t explain it to oneself.’
‘I think you’re all absolutely awful,’ said Roddy Cutts.
‘I don’t like hearing about death or people dying in the least. It upsets me even if I don’t know them – some film star you’ve hardly seen or foreign statesman or scientist you’ve only read about in the paper. It thoroughly depresses me. I agree with Dicky about that. Let’s change the subject.’
I asked whether he had settled with Widmerpool the rights and wrongs of hire-purchase.
‘I don’t much care for the man. In the margins where we might be reasonably in agreement, he always takes what strikes me as an unnecessarily aggressive line.’
‘What’s Cheap Money?’
‘The idea is to avoid a superfluity of the circulating medium concentrated on an insufficiency of what you swop it for. When Widmerpool and his like have put the poor old rentier on the spot they may find he wasn’t performing too useless a role.’
‘But Widmerpool’s surely a rentier himself?’
‘He’s a bill-broker, and the bill-brokers are the only companies getting any sympathy from the Government these days. He’s in the happy position of being wooed by both sides, the Labour Party