The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [46]
‘You did not tell me I was to collect one of my oldest friends, Magnus,’ said Templer, addressing his host as if he were on the most familiar terms with him, in spite of any differences between them of age and eminence. ‘Nick and I were at school together.’
Sir Magnus did not answer. He only raised his eyebrows and smiled. Introductions began. While he was shaking hands with Isobel, I observed, from out of the corner of my eye, a woman – whom I assumed to be Templer’s wife – sitting in an armchair with its back towards us in the corner of the room. She was reading a newspaper, which she did not lower at our entry. Sir Magnus shook hands all round, behaving as if he had never before met the Morelands, giving, when he reached me, that curious pump-handle motion to his handshake, terminated by a sudden upward jerk (as if suddenly shutting off from the main a valuable current of good will, of which not a volt too much must be expended), a form of greeting common to many persons with a long habit of public life. Ten years left little mark on him. Possibly the neat grey hair receded a trifle more; the line on one side of the mouth might have been a shade deeper; the eyes – greenish, like Matilda’s – were clear and very cold. Sir Magnus’s mouth was his least comfortable feature. Tall, holding himself squarely, he still possessed the air, conveyed to me when I first set eyes on him, of an athletic bishop or clerical headmaster. This impression was dispelled when he spoke, because he had none of the urbane manner usual to such persons. Unlike Roddy Cutts or Fettiplace-Jones, he was entirely without the patter of the professional politician, even appearing to find difficulty in making ‘small talk’ of any kind whatsoever. When he spoke, it was as if he had forced himself by sheer effort of will into manufacturing a few stereotyped sentences to tide over the trackless wilderness of social life. Such colourless phrases as he achieved were produced with a difficulty, a hesitancy, simulated perhaps, but decidedly effective in their unconcealed ineptness. While he uttered these verbal formalities, the side of his mouth twitched slightly. Like most successful men, he had turned this apparent disadvantage into a powerful weapon of offence and defence, in the way that the sledge-hammer impact of his comment left, by its banality, every other speaker at a standstill, giving him as a rule complete mastery of the conversational field. A vast capacity for imposing boredom, a sense of immensely powerful stuffiness, emanated from him, sapping every drop of vitality from weaker spirits.
‘So you were at school together,’ he said slowly.
He regarded Templer and myself as if the fact we had been at school together was an important piece of evidence in assessing our capabilities, both as individuals and as a team.
He paused. There was an awkward silence.
‘Well, I suppose you sometimes think of those days with regret,’ Sir Magnus continued at last. ‘I know I do. Only in later life does one learn what a jewel is youth.’
He smiled apologetically at having been compelled to use such a high-flown phrase. Matilda, laughing, took his arm. ‘Dear Donners,’ she said, ‘what a thing to tell us. You don’t suppose we believe you for a moment. Of course you much prefer living in your lovely castle to being back at school.’
Sir Magnus smiled. However, he was not to be jockeyed so easily from his serious mood.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I would at least give what I have to live again my time at the Sorbonne. One is not a student twice in a lifetime.’
‘One is never a student at all in England,’ said Moreland, in a tone that showed he was still in no mood to be tractable, ‘except possibly a medical student or an art student. I suppose you might say I was myself a student, in one sense, when I was at the Royal College of Music. I never felt in the least like one. Besides, with that sort of student, you enter an area of specialisation, which hardly counts for what I mean. Undergraduates in this country are quite different from students. Not that I was ever even an undergraduate myself, but my observation shows me that undergraduates have nothing in common with what is understood abroad by the word Student