The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [92]
Widmerpool was still oppressed by some unsolved problem, which he found difficulty about putting into words. He cleared his throat, swallowed several times.
‘I wondered whether you would come along to the Jeavonses tonight,’ he said. ‘It might be easier.’
‘What might?’
Widmerpool went red below his temples, under the line made by his spectacles. He began to sweat in spite of the low temperature of the room.
‘You remember that rather unfortunate business when I was engaged to Mildred Haycock?’
‘Yes.’
‘I haven’t really seen anything of the Jeavonses since then.’
*You came to the party Molly gave for Isobel just before we were married.’
‘I know,’ said Widmerpool, ‘but there were quite a lot of people there then. It was an occasion. It’s rather different going there tonight to discuss something like my mother’s cottage. Lady Molly has never seen my mother.’
‘I am sure it will be all right. Molly loves making arrangements.’
‘All the same, I feel certain embarrassments.’
‘No need to with the Jeavonses.’
‘I thought that, since Molly Jeavons is an aunt of your wife’s, things might be easier if you were to accompany me. Will you do that?’
‘All right.’
‘You will come?’
‘Yes, if you wish.’
I had not visited the Jeavonses for some little time – not since Isobel had gone to stay with Frederica – so that I was quite glad to make this, as it were, an excuse for calling on them. Isobel would certainly enjoy news of the Jeavons household.
‘Very well, then,’ said Widmerpool, now returning at once to his former peremptory tone, ‘we’ll move off forthwith. It is five minutes to the bus. Come along. Party, quick march.’
He gave some final instructions in the adjoining room to a gloomy corporal sitting before a typewriter, surrounded, like Widmerpool himself, with huge stacks of documents. We went out into the street, where the afternoon light was beginning to fade. Widmerpool, his leather-bound stick caught tight beneath his armpit, marched along beside me, tramp-tramp-tramp, eventually falling into step, since I had not taken my pace from his.
‘I don’t know what Jeavons’s relative will be like,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel absolutely confident she will be the sort my mother will like.’
I felt more apprehension for the person who had to share a cottage with Mrs Widmerpool.
‘I saw Bob Duport just before war broke out.’
I said that partly to see what Widmerpool would answer, partly because I thought he had been unhelpful about the army, tiresome about the Jeavonses. I hoped the information would displease him. The surmise was correct. He stiffened, strutting now so fiercely that he could almost be said to have broken into the goosestep.
‘Did you? Where?’
‘He was staying in a hotel where an uncle of mine died. I had to see about the funeral and ran across Duport there.’
‘Oh.’
‘I hadn’t seen him for years.’
‘He is a bad mannered fellow, Duport. Ungrateful, too.’
‘What is he ungrateful about?’
‘I got him a job in Turkey. You may remember we were talking about Duport’s affairs at Stourwater, when I saw you and your wife there about a year or more ago-just after “Munich”.’
‘He’d recently come back from Turkey when we met.’
‘He had been working for me there.’
‘So he said.’
‘I had to deal rather summarily with Duport in the end,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He showed no grasp of the international situation. He is insolent, too. So he mentioned my name?’
‘He did.’
‘Not very favourably, I expect.’
‘Not very.’
‘I don’t know what will happen to Duport,’ said Widmerpool. ‘He must be in a difficult position financially, owing to his reckless conduct. However, anybody can earn three pounds a week these days as an air-raid warden. Even Jeavons does. So Duport will not starve.’
He sounded rather sorry that Duport was not threatened with that fate.
‘He thought Sir Magnus Donners might find him something.’
‘Not if I know it.’
‘Do you think Donners will be asked to join the Government, if there is a Cabinet reshuffle?’
‘The papers speak of him as likely for office,’ said Widmerpool, not without condescension. ‘In some ways Magnus would make an excellent minister in time of war. In others, I am not so sure. He has certain undesirable traits for a public man in modern days. As you probably know, people speak of