The Kindly Ones - Anthony Powell [95]
He made no further comment. We found a bus, which transported us in due course to the neighbourhood of the Jeavons house in South Kensington. The bell was not answered for a long time. We waited outside the faintly Dutch edifice with its over ornamented dark red brick facade.
‘I expect Mother has preceded us,’ said Widmerpool.
He was better now, though still not wholly recovered from the sight of Gypsy Jones. The door was opened at last by Jeavons himself. His appearance took me by surprise. Instead of the usual ancient grey suit, he was wearing a blue one-piece overall and a beret. Some people – as General Conyers had remarked – considered Jeavons a bore. Such critics had a case, undeniably, when he was sunk in one of his impenetrable silences, or, worse still, was trying, in a momentary burst of energy, to make some money by selling one of those commodities generically described by Chips Lovell as ‘an automatic boot-jack or infallible cure for the common cold’. To find Jeavons in the latter state was rare, the former, fairly frequent. Even apart from his war wound, Jeavons was not at all fitted for commercial employments. He had hardly done a stroke of work since marrying Molly. His wife did not mind that. Indeed, she may have preferred Jeavons to be dependent on her. Whatever some of her relations may have thought at the time of her marriage, it had turned out a success – allowing for the occasional ‘night out’ on Jeavons’s part, like the one when he had taken me to Dicky Umfraville’s night-club.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘How’s your war going? It’s touch and go whether we’re winning ours. Stanley’s here, and a lady who has come to see about lodging Stanley’s missus in the country. Then Molly met a fellow at Sanderson’s who was trying to find a home for his cat, and she’s gone and asked him to stay. The man, I mean, not the cat.’
‘The lady who has come about moving your – is it sister-in-law? – is my mother,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I spoke to you on the telephone about it. I am Kenneth Widmerpool, you know. We have met in the past.’
‘So you did,’ said Jeavons, ‘and so we have. It went out of my head like most other things. I thought Nick had just come to call and brought a friend. You can talk to Molly about it all when she comes downstairs, but I think your Mum has pretty well fixed everything up as it is.’
Jeavons’s voice, hoarse and faint, sounded as usual as if he had a cold in his head or had been up too late the night before. He seemed restive, disorientated, but in good form.
‘Who is Stanley?’ I asked.
‘Who’s Stanley?’ said Jeavons. ‘My brother, of course. Who did you think he was?’
‘Never knew you had a brother, Ted.’
‘Course I’ve got a brother.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Accountant.’
‘In London?’
‘Nottingham. Given it up now, of course. Back to the army. Staff-Captain at the War House. Fancy your never having heard of Stanley. No reason why you should, I suppose. Still, it strikes me as funny. Rather a great man, Stanley, in his way. Gets things done.’
Among so much that was depressing, the news that Jeavons had a brother was for some reason cheering. It was certainly information to fascinate Isobel, when I next saw her, even to stagger Chips Lovell, who, regarding himself as an authority on his wife’s relations, had certainly never heard of this outgrowth. Jeavons was known only to possess two or three vague connexions, sometimes to be found staying in the house, though never precisely placed in their kinship, in any case always hopelessly submerged in number by his wife’s cousins, nephews and nieces. He had had, it was true, an old aunt, or great-aunt, to whom Molly was said to have been ‘very good’, who had lingered on in the house for months suffering from some illness, finally dying in one of the upstairs rooms. A Jeavons brother was quite another matter, a phenomenon of wartime circumstances. Jeavons, his dark, insistently curly hair now faintly speckled with grey, had himself taken on a subtly different personality since the onset of war. After all, war was the element which had, in a sense, made his career. Obviously he reacted strongly to its impacts. Until now his appearance had always suggested a temporary officer of the