The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [59]
To this establishment – which was called the Bellevue – Uncle Giles inevitably gravitated. Even if he had never heard of Albert, Uncle Giles would probably have turned up there sooner or later. His life was spent in such places – the Ufford, his pied-à-terre in Bayswater, the prototype – a phenomenal number of which must have housed him at one time or another throughout different parts of the United Kingdom.
‘Battered caravanserais,’ Uncle Giles used to say. ‘That’s what a fellow I met on board ship used to call the pubs he stayed in. From Omar Khayyam, you know. Not a bad name for ’em. Well-read man in his way. Wrote for the papers. Bit of a bounder. Stingy, too. Won the ship’s sweep and nobody saw a halfpenny back in hospitality.’
The position of Albert at the Bellevue offered a family connexion not to be disregarded, one to support a reasonable demand for that special treatment always felt by Uncle Giles to be unjustly denied him by fate and the malign efforts of ‘people who want to push themselves to the front’. Besides, the Bellevue offered a precinct where he could grumble to his heart’s content about his own family to someone who knew them personally. That was a rare treat. In addition, when Uncle Giles next saw any members of his family, he could equally grumble about Albert, complaining that his cooking had deteriorated, his manners become ‘offhand’. Uncle Giles did not visit the Bellevue often. Probably Albert, who had his own vicissitudes of temperament to contend with, did not care – family connexion or no family connexion – to accommodate so cantankerous a client there too frequently. He may have made intermittent excuses that the hotel was full to capacity. Whatever the reason, these occasional sojourns at the Bellevue were spaced out, for the most part, between Uncle Giles’s recurrent changes of employment, which grew no less frequent with the years. He continued to enjoy irritating his relations.
‘I like the little man they’ve got in Germany now,’ he would remark, quite casually.
This view, apparently so perverse in the light of Uncle Giles’s often declared radical principles, was in a measure the logical consequence of them. Dating to some extent from the post-war period, when to support Germany against France was the mark of liberal opinion, it had somehow merged with his approval of all action inimical to established institutions. National Socialism represented revolution; to that extent the movement gained the support, at any rate temporary support, of Uncle Giles. Besides, he shared Hitler’s sense of personal persecution, conviction that the world was against him. This was in marked contrast to the feeling of my brother-in-law, Erridge, also a declared enemy of established institutions, who devoted much of his energies to assisting propaganda against current German policies. Erridge, however, in his drift away from orthodox Communism after his own experiences in Spain, had become an increasingly keen ‘pacifist’, so that he was, in practice, as unwilling to oppose Germany by force of arms as Uncle Giles himself.
‘We don’t want guns,’ Erridge used to say. ‘We want to make the League of Nations effective.’
The death of the Tollands