The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [25]
‘What was the flick like?’ Templer enquired.
‘Marvellous,’ said Mona. ‘The sweetest—no, really—but the sweetest little girl you ever saw.’
‘She was awfully good,’ said Jean.
‘But what happened?’
‘Well, this little girl—who was called Manuela—was sent to a very posh German school.’
‘Posh?’ said Templer. ‘Sweetie, what an awful word. Please never use it in my presence again.’
Rather to my surprise, Mona accepted this rebuke meekly: even blushing slightly.
‘Well, Manuela went to this school, and fell passionately in love with one of the mistresses.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said Templer. ‘Nick insisted the film wasn’t about lesbians. You see he just poses as a man of the world, and hasn’t really the smallest idea what is going on round him.’
‘It isn’t a bit what you mean,’ said Mona, now bursting with indignation. ‘It was a really beautiful story. Manuela tried to kill herself. I cried and cried and cried.’
‘It really was good,’ said Jean to me. ‘Have you seen it?’
‘Yes. I liked it.’
‘He’s lying,’ said Templer. ‘If he had seen the film, he would have known it was about lesbians. Look here, Nick, why not come home with us for the week-end? We can run you back to your flat and get a toothbrush. I should like you to see our house, uncomfortable as staying there will be.’
‘Yes, do come, darling,’ said Mona, drawing out the words with her absurd articulation. ‘You will find everything quite mad, I’m afraid.’
She had by then drunk rather a lot of champagne.
‘You must come,’ said Jean, speaking in her matter-of- fact tone, almost as if she were giving an order. ‘There are all sorts of things I want to talk about.’
‘Of course he’ll come,’ said Templer. ‘But we might have the smallest spot of armagnac first.’
Afterwards, that dinner in the Grill seemed to partake of the nature of a ritual feast, a rite from which the four of us emerged to take up new positions in the formal dance with which human life is concerned. At the time, its charm seemed to reside in a difference from the usual run of things. Certainly the chief attraction of the projected visit would be absence of all previous plan. But, in a sense, nothing in life is planned—or everything is—because in the dance every step is ultimately the corollary of the step before; the consequence of being the kind of person one chances to be.
While we were at dinner heavy snow was descending outside. This downfall had ceased by the time my things were collected, though a few flakes were still blowing about in the clear winter air when we set out at last for the Templers’ house. The wind had suddenly dropped. The night was very cold.
‘Had to sell the Buick,’ Templer said. ‘I’m afraid you won’t find much room at the back of this miserable vehicle.’
Mona, now comatose after the wine at dinner, rolled herself up in a rug and took the seat in front. Almost immediately she went to sleep. Jean and I sat at the back of the car. We passed through Hammersmith, and the neighbourhood of Chiswick: then out on to the Great West Road. For a time I made desultory conversation. At last she scarcely answered, and I gave it up. Templer, smoking a cigar in the front, also seemed disinclined to talk now that he was at the wheel. We drove along at a good rate.
On either side of the highway, grotesque buildings, which in daytime resembled the temples of some shoddy, utterly unsympathetic Atlantis, now assumed the appearance of an Arctic city’s frontier forts. Veiled in snow, these hideous monuments of a lost world bordered a broad river of black, foaming slush, across the surface of which the car skimmed and jolted with a harsh crackling sound, as if the liquid beneath were scalding hot.
Although not always simultaneous in taking effect, nor necessarily at all equal in voltage, the process of love is rarely unilateral. When the moment comes, a secret attachment is often returned with interest. Some know this by instinct; others learn in a hard school.