The Acceptance World - Anthony Powell [60]
He was followed this time to the bar by the man with whom he had been at cards. Foppa’s companion could now be seen more clearly. His suit was better cut and general appearance more distinguished than was usual in the club. He had stood by the table for a moment, stretching himself and lighting a cigarette, while he regarded our group. A moment later, taking a step towards Anne Stepney, he said in a soft, purring, rather humorous voice, with something almost hypnotic about its tone:
‘I heard your name when you were introduced. You must be Eddie Bridgnorth’s daughter.’
Looking at him more closely as he said this, I was surprised that he had remained almost unobserved until that moment. He was no ordinary person. That was clear. Of medium height, even rather small when not compared with Foppa, he was slim, with that indefinably ‘horsey’ look that seems even to affect the texture of the skin. His age was hard to guess: probably he was in his forties. He was very trim in his clothes. They were old, neat, well preserved clothes, a little like those worn by Uncle Giles. This man gave the impression of having handled large sums of money in his time, although he did not convey any presumption of affluence at that particular moment. He was clean-shaven, and wore a hard collar and Brigade of Guards tie. I could not imagine what someone of that sort was doing at Foppa’s. There was something about him of Buster Foxe, third husband of Stringham’s mother: the same cool, tough, socially elegant personality, though far more genial than Buster’s. He lacked, too, that carapace of professional egotism acquired in boyhood that envelops protectively even the most good-humoured naval officer. Perhaps the similarity to Buster was after all only the outer veneer acquired by all people of the same generation.
Anne Stepney replied rather stiffly to this enquiry, that ‘Eddie Bridgnorth’ was indeed her father. Having decided to throw in her lot so uncompromisingly with ‘artists’, she may have felt put out to find herself confronted in such a place by someone of this kind. Since he claimed acquaintance with Lord Bridgnorth, there was no knowing what information he might possess about herself; nor what he might report subsequently if he saw her father again. However, the man in the Guards tie seemed instinctively to understand what her feelings would be on learning that he knew her family.
‘I am Dicky Umfraville,’ he said. ‘I don’t expect you have ever heard of me, because I have been away from this country for so long. I used to see something of your father when he owned Yellow Jack. In fact I won a whole heap of money on that horse once. None of it left now, I regret to say.’
He smiled gently. By the confidence, and at the same time the modesty, of his manner he managed to impart an extraordinary sense of reassurance. Anne Stepney seemed hardly to know what to say in answer to this account of himself. I remembered hearing Sillery speak of Umfraville, when I was an undergraduate. Perhaps facetiously, he had told Stringham that Umfraville was a man to beware of. That had been apropos of Stringham’s father, and life in Kenya. Stringham himself had met Umfraville in Kenya, and spoke of him as a well-known gentleman-rider. I also remembered Stringham complaining that Le Bas had once mistaken him for Umfraville, who had been at Le Bas’s house at least fifteen years earlier. Now, in spite of the difference in age and appearance, I could see that Le Bas’s error had been due to something more than the habitual vagueness of schoolmasters. The similarity between Stringham and Umfraville was of a moral rather than physical sort. The same dissatisfaction with life and basic melancholy gave a resemblance, though Umfraville’s features and expression were more formalised and, in some manner, coarser—perhaps they could even be called more brutal—than Stringham’s.
There was something else about Umfraville that struck me, a characteristic I had noticed in other people of his age. He seemed still young, a person like oneself; and yet at the same time his appearance and manner proclaimed that he had had time to live at least a few years of his grown-up life before the outbreak of war in 1914. Once I had thought of those who had known the epoch of my own childhood as