The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [48]
‘A Mrs Taylor or Porter,’ he had said, ‘I can’t remember which. Rather a peach, isn’t she?’
Presumably Templer had removed her from Mr Taylor or Porter. As she came through the door, Templer’s own expression altered slightly. It was as if his features contracted for a brief instant with a sudden spasm of toothache, an agony over almost as soon as felt. The woman moved slowly, shyly, towards us. Sir Magnus stopped looking at Anne Umfraville, following this new arrival with his eyes, as if she were walking a tight-rope and he feared she might at any moment make a false step, fall into the net below, ruin the act, possibly break her neck. Templer watched her too. She came to a standstill.
‘This is Betty,’ Templer said.
He spoke as if long past despair. Sir Magnus nodded in resigned, though ever hopeful, agreement that this was indeed Betty. Betty stood for a moment gazing round the room in a dazed, almost terrified, manner, suggesting sudden emergence into the light of day after long hours spent behind drawn curtains. I suddenly thought of the tour of Stourwater’s ‘dungeons’ (strenuously asserted by Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson, on my previous visit, to be mere granaries), when Sir Magnus had remarked with sensuous ogreishness, ‘I sometimes think that is where we should put the girls who don’t behave.’ Could it be that Betty Templer, with her husband’s connivance – an explanation of Templer’s uneasy air – had been imprisoned in the course of some partly high-spirited, partly sadistic, rompings to gratify their host’s strange whims? Of course, I did not seriously suppose such a thing, but for a split second the grotesque notion presented itself. However, setting fantasy aside, I saw at once that something was ‘wrong’ with Betty Templer, not realising, until I came to shake hands with her, how badly ‘wrong’ things were. It was like trying to shake hands with Ophelia while she was strewing flowers. Betty Templer was ‘dotty’.
She was as ‘dotty’ as my sister-in-law, Blanche Tolland – far ‘dottier’, because people met Blanche, talked with her at parties, had dealings with her about her charities, without ever guessing about her ‘dottiness’. Indeed, in the world of ‘good works’ she was a rather well known, certainly a respected, figure. Blanche’s strangeness, when examined, mainly took the shape of lacking any desire to engage herself in life, to have friends, to marry, to bear children, to go out into the world. Within, so to speak, her chosen alcove, she appeared perfectly happy, at least not actively unhappy. The same could certainly not be said for Betty Templer. Betty Templer, on the contrary, was painfully disorientated, at her wits’ end, not happy at all. It was dreadful. I saw that the situation required reassessment. After my failure at shaking hands with her, I made some remark about the weather. She looked at me without speaking, as if horrified at my words.
‘Perhaps it would be better to go to the Chinese Room,’ said Sir Magnus, ‘if the drinks are really there.’
He spoke in that curiously despondent, even threatening, manner sometimes adopted by very rich people towards their guests, especially where food and drink are concerned, a tone suggesting considerable danger that drinks would not be found in the Chinese Room or, indeed, anywhere else at Stourwater Castle; that we should be lucky if we were given anything to drink at all – or to eat, too, if it came to that – during the evening that lay ahead of us.
‘Will you lead the way, Anne?’ he said, with determined cheerfulness. ‘I shall have to speak to you later about trying to keep us from our drinks. Deliberate naughtiness on your part, I fear. Have you heard the New Hungarian String Quartet, Hugh? I haven’t been myself. I was at Faust the other night, and a little disappointed at some of the singing.’
We followed through the door, crossing the hall again, while I wondered what on earth had happened to Templer’s wife to give her this air of having been struck by lightning. Contact between us was broken for the moment, because, while drinks were being dispensed in the Chinese Room, I found myself talking to Anne Umfraville. By the fireplace there, as if left by some visiting photographer, was a camera on a tripod, beside which stood two adjustable lamps.