Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [41]
‘Of course Carlos is delighted, though he pretends not to be. He is quite ambitious. He makes very good speeches. We are both pleased really. It shows the new Government is being sensible. To tell the truth we were sent here partly to get Carlos out of the country. Now all that is changed – but the move must be done in such a hurry.’
‘How foolish of them not to have wanted such a nice man about the place.’
She laughed at that.
‘I was hoping to take Polly round a little in London. However, she is going to stay in England for a time in any case. She has ambitions to go on the stage.’
‘I haven’t seen her at your party?’
‘She’s with her father at the moment – I think you’ve met my first husband, Bob Duport?’
‘Several times – during the war among others. He’d been ill in the Middle East, and we ran across each other in Brussels.’
‘Gyppy tummy and other things left poor Bob rather a wreck. He ought to marry somebody who’d look after him properly, keep him in order too, which I never managed to do. He’s rather a weak man in some ways.’
‘Yes, poor Bob. No good being weak.’
She laughed again at this endorsement of her own estimate of Duport’s character, but at the same time without giving anything away, or to the smallest degree abandoning the determined formality of her manner. That particular laugh, the way she had of showing she entirely grasped the point of what one had said, once carried with it powerful intoxications; now – a relief to ascertain even after so long – not a split second of emotional tremor.
‘What’s he doing now?’
‘Bob? Oil. Something new for him – produced by an old friend of his called Jimmy Brent. You may have met him with my brother Peter. How I miss Peter, although we never saw much of each other.’
‘I came across Jimmy Brent in the war too.’
‘Jimmy’s a little bit awful really. He’s got very fat, and is to marry a widow with two grown-up sons. Still, he’s fixed up Bob, which is the great thing.’
To make some comment that showed I knew she had slept with Brent – by his own account, been in love with him – was tempting, but restraint prevailed. Nevertheless, recollecting that sudden hug watching a film, her whisper, ‘You make me feel so randy,’ I saw no reason why she should go scot free, escape entirely unteased.
‘How well you speak English, Madame Flores.’
‘People are always asking if I was brought up in this country.’
She laughed again in that formerly intoxicating manner. A small dark woman, wearing an enormous spray of diamonds set in the shape of rose petals trembling on a stalk, came through the crowd.
‘Rosie, how lovely to see you again. Do you know each other? Of course you do. I see Carlos is making signs that I must attend to the Moroccan colonel.’
Jean left us together. Rosie Manasch took a handful of stuffed olives from a plate, and offered one.
‘I saw you once at a meeting about Polish military hospitals. You were much occupied at the other end of the room, and I had to move on to the Titian halfway through. Besides, I didn’t know whether you’d remember me.’
The Red Cross, Allied charities, wartime activities of that sort, explained why she was at this party. It was unlikely that she had known Jean before the war, when Rosie had been married to her first husband, Jock Udall, heir apparent to the newspaper proprietor of that name, arch-enemy of Sir Magnus Donners. Rosie Manasch’s parents, inveterate givers of musical parties and buyers of modern pictures, had been patrons of both Moreland and Barnby in the past. Mark Members had made a bid to involve them in literature too, but without much success, enjoying a certain amount of their hospitality, but never bringing off anything spectacular in the way of plunder. It had been rumoured in those days that Barnby had attempted to start up some sort of a love affair with Rosie. If so, the chances were that nothing came of it. Possessing that agreeable gift of making men feel pleased with themselves by the way she talked, she was in general held to own a less sensual temperament than her appearance suggested. Quite how she accomplished this investiture of male self-satisfaction was hard to analyse, perhaps simply because, unlike some women, she preferred men that way.