The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [14]
As time passed, people leaving, others arriving, I began increasingly to suspect that Members was not going to show up. That would not be out of character, because cutting appointments was a recognised element in his method of conducting life. This habit—to be in general associated with a strong, sometimes frustrated desire to impose the will—is usually attributed on each specific occasion to the fact that ‘something better turned up’. Such defaulters are almost as a matter of course reproached with trying to make a more profitable use of their time. Perhaps, in reality, self-interest in its crudest form plays less part in these deviations than might be supposed. The manoeuvre may often be undertaken for its own sake. The person awaited deliberately withholds himself from the person awaiting. Mere absence is in this manner turned into a form of action, even potentially violent in its consequences.
Possibly Members, from an inner compulsion, had suddenly decided to establish ascendancy by such an assertion of the will. On the other hand, the action would in the circumstances represent such an infinitesimal score against life in general that his absence, if deliberate, was probably attributable to some minor move in domestic politics vis-à-vis St. John Clarke. I was thinking over these possibilities, rather gloomily wondering whether or not I would withdraw or stay a few minutes longer, when an immensely familiar head and shoulders became visible for a second through a kind of window, or embrasure, looking out from the palm court on to the lower levels of the passage and rooms beyond. It was Peter Templer. A moment later he strolled up the steps.
For a few seconds Templer gazed thoughtfully round the room, as if contemplating the deterioration of a landscape, known from youth, once famed for its natural beauty, now ruined beyond recall. He was about to turn away, when he caught sight of me and came towards the table. It must have been at least three years since we had met. His sleekly brushed hair and long, rather elegant stride were just the same. His face was perhaps a shade fuller, and his eyes at once began to give out that familiar blue mechanical sparkle that I remembered so well from our schooldays. With a red carnation in the buttonhole of his dark suit, his shirt cuffs cut tightly round the wrist so that somehow his links asserted themselves unduly, Templer’s air was distinctly prosperous. But he also looked as if by then he knew what worry was, something certainly unknown to him in the past.
‘I suppose you are waiting for someone, Nick,’ he said, drawing up a chair. ‘Some ripe little piece?’
‘You’re very wide of the mark.’
‘Then a dowager is going to buy your dinner—after which she will make you an offer?’
‘No such luck.’
‘What then?’
‘I’m waiting for a man.’
‘I say, old boy, sorry to have been so inquisitive. Things have come to that, have they?’
‘You couldn’t know.’
‘I should have guessed.’
‘Have a drink, anyway.’
I remembered reading, some years before, an obituary notice in the Morning Post, referring to his father’s death. This paragraph, signed ‘A.S.F.’, was, in fact, a brief personal memoir rather than a bald account of the late Mr. Templer’s career. Although the deceased’s chairmanship of various companies was mentioned—his financial interests had been chiefly in cement—more emphasis was laid on his delight in sport, especially boxing, his many undisclosed benefactions to charity, the kind heart within him,always cloaked by a deceptively brusque manner. The initials, together with a certain banality of phrasing, suggested the hand of Sunny Farebrother, Mr. Templer’s younger City associate I had met at their house. That visit had been the sole occasion when I had seen Templer