The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [90]
‘I really don’t know.’
It turned out later that General Conyers had sat next to Miss Weedon at a concert some months before the outbreak of war. They had fallen into conversation. Finding they knew many people in common, they had arranged to meet at another concert the following week. That was how their friendship had begun. In short, General Conyers had ‘picked up’ Miss Weedon. There was no denying it. It was a true romance.
‘Adventures only happen to adventurers,’ Mr Deacon had said one evening when we were sitting drinking in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.
‘That depends on what one calls adventurers,’ said Moreland, who was in a hair-splitting mood. ‘What you mean, Edgar, is that people to whom adventures happen are never wholly unadventurous. That is not the same thing. It’s the latter class who have the real adventures – people like oneself.’
‘Don’t be pedantic, Moreland,’ Mr Deacon had answered.
Certainly General Conyers was not unadventurous. Was he an adventurer? I considered his advice about the army. Then the answer came to me. I must get in touch with Widmerpool. I wondered why I had not thought of that earlier. I telephoned to his office. They put me through to a secretary.
‘Captain Widmerpool is embodied,’ she said in an unfriendly voice.
I could tell from her tone, efficient, charmless, unimaginative, that she had been given special instructions by Widmerpool himself to use the term ’embodied’ in describing his military condition. I asked where he was to be found. It was a secret. At last, not without pressure on my own part, she gave me a telephone number. This turned out to be that of his Territorial battalion’s headquarters. I rang him up.
‘Come and see me by all means, my boy,’ he boomed down the wire in a new, enormously hearty voice, ‘but bring your own beer. There won’t be much I can do for you. I’m up to my arse in bumph and don’t expect I shall be able to spare you more than a minute or two for waffling.’
I was annoyed by the phrase ‘bring your own beer’, also by being addressed as ‘my boy’ by Widmerpool. They were terms he had never, so to speak, earned the right to use, certainly not to me. However, I recognised that a world war was going to produce worse situations than Widmerpool’s getting above himself and using a coarsely military boisterousness of tone to which his civilian personality could make no claim. I accepted his invitation; he named a time. The following day, after finishing my article for the paper and looking at some books I had to review, I set out for the Territorial headquarters, which was situated in a fairly inaccessible district of London. I reached there at last, feeling in the depths of gloom. Entry into the most arcane recesses of the Secret Service could not have been made more difficult. Finally an NCO admitted me to Widmerpool’s presence. He was sitting, surrounded by files, in a small, horribly stuffy office, which was at the same time freezingly cold. I was still unused to the sight of him in uniform. He looked anything but an army officer – a railway official, perhaps, of some obscure country.
‘Been left in charge of details consequent on the unit’s move to a training area,’ he said brusquely, as I entered the room. ‘Suppose I shouldn’t have told you that. Security – security – and then security. Everyone must learn that. Well, my lad, what can I do for you? You need not stand. Take a pew.’
I sat on a kitchen chair with a broken back, and outlined my situation.
‘The fact is,’ said Widmerpool, glaring through his spectacles and puffing out his cheeks, as if rehearsing a tremendous blowing up he was going to give some subordinate in the very near future, ‘you ought to have joined the Territorials before war broke out.’
‘I know.’
‘No good just entering your name on the Reserve.’
‘There were difficulties about age.’
‘Only after you’d left it too late.’
‘It was only a matter of months.’
‘Never mind. Think how long I’ve been a Territorial officer. You should have looked ahead.’
‘You said there wasn’t going to be a war after “Munich”.’
‘You thought there was, so you were even more foolish.