Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [37]
‘I find politics far more lowering a subject than death,’ said Norah. ‘Especially if they have to include discussing that man. I can’t think how Pam can stand him for five minutes. I’m not surprised she’s ill all the time.’
‘I was told that one moment she was going to marry John Mountfichet,’ said Susan. ‘He was prepared to leave his wife for her. Then he was killed. She made this marriage on the rebound. Decided to marry the first man who asked her.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ said Jeavons. ‘That sort of story always gets put round. Who was Mountfichet’s wife – the Huntercombes’ girl Venetia, wasn’t she? I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way. Married couples usually do.’
‘What’s that got to do with whether he was going off with Pamela Flitton?’ asked Norah. ‘Or whether she married Widmerpool on the rebound?’
‘People get divorced just because they don’t know they suit each other,’ said Jeavons.
He did not enlarge further on this rebuttal of the theory that people married ‘on the rebound’, or that the first choice was founded on an instinctive Tightness of judgment. Instead, he turned to the question of how he himself was to get back to London. Wandering about the room chainsmoking, he looked more than ever like a plain-clothes man.
‘Wish the train didn’t arrive back so late. They must be getting familiar with my face on that line. Probably think I’m working the three-card trick. Anything I can do to help sort things out while I’m here? Cleaning up that mess in the jar’s whetted my appetite for work. I’d have offered to be a bearer, if I’d thought I could hold up the coffin for more than a minute and a half, but that lump of gunmetal in my guts has been giving trouble again. Never seems to settle down. Sure the army vets left a fuse there, probably a whole shellcap. Can’t digest a thing. Becomes a bore after a time. Never know what you may do when you’re in that state. Didn’t want to be halfway up the aisle, and drop my end of the coffin. Still, that couldn’t have disrupted things, or made more row, than that girl did going out. Wish Molly was alive. Nothing Molly didn’t know about funerals.’
Frederica, who had just come in, looked not altogether approving of all this. She was never in any case really sure that she liked Jeavons, certainly not when in moods like his present one. That had been Jeavons’s standing with her even before she married Umfraville, for whom Jeavons himself had no great affection. Umfraville, on the other hand, liked Jeavons. He used to give rather subtle imitations of him.
‘What you could do, Uncle Ted, is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that? It would be a great help.’
‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’ said Jeavons.
He often showed an unexpected awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.
‘I’ll duly render a return of wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on such occasions.’
Never finding it easy to set his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo stretched himself out on the sofa.
‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he said.
‘And the men to do them,’ said Jeavons.
Later, as he worked away, he could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall refrain from his younger days: