Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [77]
‘How does Fiona occupy herself in London?’
‘Odd jobs.’
‘Has she gone back to her journalism?’
‘Not exactly that. She has been doing bits of research. I myself was able to put some of that in her way. She’s quite efficient.’
‘Her parents always alleged she could work hard if she liked.’
One saw that in a certain sense Fiona had worked hard placating Murtlock. Delavacquerie looked a little embarrassed again.
‘It seems that Fiona revealed some of her plans about leaving the cult to Gwinnett, when he was himself in touch with them. Gwinnett suggested that – if she managed to kick free from Murtlock – Fiona should help him in some of the seventeenth-century donkey-work with the Jacobean dramatists. I hadn’t quite realized — ’
Delavacquerie did not finish the sentence. I suppose he meant he had not grasped the extent to which Gwinnett, too, had been concerned in Fiona’s ritual activities. Evidently she herself had softpedalled the Devil’s Fingers incident, as such. He ended off a little lamely.
‘Living at my place is as convenient as any other for that sort of work.’
I expressed agreement. Delavacquerie thought for a moment.
‘I may add that having Fiona in the flat has inevitably buggered up my other arrangements.’
‘Polly Duport?’
He laughed rather unhappily, but gave no details.
6
WHEN, IN THE EARLY SPRING of the following year, an invitation arrived for the wedding of our nephew, Sebastian Cutts, to a girl called Clare Akworth, I decided at once to attend. Isobel would almost certainly have gone in any case. Considerations touched on earlier – pressures of work, pressures of indolence – could have kept me away. Negative attitudes were counteracted by an unexpected aspect of the ceremony. The reception was to take place at Stourwater. Several factors combined to explain that choice of setting. Not only had the bride been educated at the girls’ school which had occupied the Castle now for more than thirty years, but her grandfather was one of the school’s governing body. The church service was to be held in a village not far away, where Clare Akworth’s mother, a widow, had settled, when her husband died in his late thirties. Mrs Akworth’s cottage had, I believe, been chosen in the first instance with an eye to the daughter’s schooling, for which her father-in-law was thought to have assumed responsibility. Anyway, the Stourwater premises had been made available during a holiday period, offering a prospect that Moreland might have regarded as almost alarmingly nostalgic in possibilities.
That was not all, where conjuring up the past was concerned. In this same field of reminiscences, the bride’s grandfather – no doubt the main influence in putting Stourwater thus on view – also sustained a personal role, even if an infinitely trivial one. In short, I could not pretend freedom from all curiosity as to what Sir Bertram Akworth now looked like. This interest had nothing to do with his being a governor of a well reputed school for girls, nor with the long catalogue of company directorships and committee memberships (ranging from Independent Television to the Diocesan Synod), which followed his name in Who’s Who. On the contrary, Sir Bertram Akworth was memorable in my mind solely on account of the fact that, as a schoolboy, he had sent a note of an amatory nature to a younger boy (my near contemporary, later friend, Peter Templer), been reported by Widmerpool to the authorities for this unlicensed act; in consequence, sacked.
The incident had aroused a certain amount of rather heartless laughter at the time by the incongruity of a suggestion (Stringham’s, I think) that an element of jealousy on Widmerpool’s part was not to be ruled out. Templer’s Akworth (Widmerpool’s Akworth, if you prefer), a boy several years older than myself, was known to me only by sight. I doubt if we ever spoke together. Like Widmerpool himself, unremarkable at work or games, Akworth had a sallow emaciated face, and kept himself to himself on the whole, his most prominent outward characteristic being an unusually raucous voice. These minor traits assumed a sinister significance in my eyes, when, not without horror, I heard of his expulsion. The dispatch of the note, in due course, took on a less diabolical aspect, as sophistication increased, and, during the period when Stringham, Templer, and I used all to mess together, Stringham would sometimes (never in front of Templer) joke about the incident, which shed for me its earlier aura of fiendish depravity.