The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [9]
‘Just one of those things,’ he said.
He spoke this time as if a little to excuse himself for what might look like an earlier show of heartlessness.
‘To tell the truth, I’m feeling a shade fed up about marriage, women, my job, in fact the whole bag of tricks,’ he said. ‘Then this awful business of one’s age. You keep on getting back to that. If it isn’t one objection, it’s another. “You’re not young enough, old boy.” I’m always being told that nowadays. On top of it all, a bomb hit my flat the other night. I was on Fire Duty at the Ministry. Everybody said what a marvellous piece of luck. Not sure.’
‘Did it wreck the place completely?’
Templer shook his head, indicating not so much lack of damage at the flat, as that he could not bring himself to recapitulate further a subject so utterly tedious and unrewarding.
‘You haven’t any good idea where I might go temporarily? I’m living from hand to mouth at the moment with anyone who will put me up.’
I suggested the Jeavons house in South Kensington. Ted Jeavons, having somehow managed to find a builder to patch up the roof and back wall – an achievement no one but himself would have brought off at that moment – was still in residence. Only the rear part of the structure had been damaged by the bomb, the front remaining almost untouched. Jeavons ran the house more or less as it had been run when Molly was alive, with a shifting population of visitors, some of whom lived there more or less permanently, paying rent. Lots of households of much that kind existed in wartime London, a matter of luck if, homeless like Templer, you knew where to apply. He wrote down the address, at the same time showing characteristic lack of interest in information about Jeavons.
‘I might propose myself,’ he said. ‘If a bomb’s already hit the place, with any luck it won’t happen again, though I don’t know that there’s any real reason to suppose that.’
He paused, then suddenly began to talk about himself in a manner that was oddly apologetic, quite unlike his accustomed style as remembered, or the tone he had been using up till now. Until then, I had felt all contact lost between us, that the picture I retained of him when we had been friends years before had become largely imaginary. Now a closer proximity seemed renewed.
‘I’ve given up girls,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be interested to know.’
‘Charles Stringham said the same when I ran across him in the ranks. Is this for the war?’
Templer laughed.
‘I used to think I was rather a success with the ladies,’ he said. ‘Now one wife’s run away and the other is where I indicated, I’m not so sure. At least I can’t be regarded as a great hand at marriage. It’s lately been made clear to me I’m not so hot extra-matrimonially either. That’s why I was beefing about age.’
He made a dismissive gesture.
‘I’ll ring your friend Jeavons,’ he said.
He strolled away. There was always the slight impression of which Stringham used to complain – persisting even into the universal shabbiness of wartime – that Templer was too well dressed. I had never before known him so dejected.
While eating breakfast after Night Duty, I reflected that it would be as well to warn Jeavons that Templer might be getting in touch with him. Without some such notification, knowing them both, nothing was more likely than that they would get at cross purposes with each other. Then I put personal matters from my mind and began to think about the day