The Valley of Bones - Anthony Powell [59]
‘I see what you mean.’
Umfraville stared at me with bloodshot eyes. When we had first met at Foppa’s, I had wondered whether he was not a little mad. The way he spoke now, even though it made me laugh, created the same disquieting impression. He nodded his head, smiling to himself, still contemplating his own characteristics with absolute absorption. I suddenly saw that Umfraville had been quite right when he said he was like Odo Stevens. Here again was an almost perfect narcissism, joined in much the same manner to a great acuteness of observation and relish for life.
‘You’re going to have a professional cad for a brother-in-law, old boy,’ he said, ‘make no mistake about that. Just to show you I know what I’m talking about when I apply that label to myself, I’ll confide a secret. I was the one who took our little friend Flavia’s virginity in Kenya years ago. Still, if that were the worst thing that ever happened to poor Flavia, she wouldn’t have had much to complain about. Fancy being married to Cosmo Flitton and Harrison F. Wisebite in one lifetime.’
‘Isobel and I had already discussed whether you and Mrs Wisebite had ever been in bed together.’
‘You had? That shows you’re a discerning couple. She’s a bright girl, your wife. Well, the answer is in the affirmative. You knew Flavia’s brother Charles, didn’t you?’
‘I used to know him well. I haven’t seen him for years.’
‘Met Charles Stringham in Kenya too. Came out for a month or two when he was quite a boy. I liked him very much. Then he took to drink, like so many other good chaps. Flavia says he has recovered now, and is in the army. Charles used to talk a lot about that bastard, Buster Foxe, whom their mother married when she and Boffles Stringham parted company. Charles hated Buster’s guts.’
‘I haven’t seen Commander Foxe for ages.’
‘Neither have I, thank God, but I hear he’s in the neighbourhood. At your brother-in-law, Lord Warminster’s home, in fact. He’ll soon be my brother-in-law, too. Then there’ll be hell to pay.’
‘But what on earth is Buster, a sailor, doing at Thrubworth? I thought it was a Corps Headquarters.’
‘Thrubworth isn’t an army set-up any longer. It’s still requisitioned, but they turned the place into one of those frightfully secret inter-service organisations. Buster has dug himself in there.’
‘Are they still letting Erry and Blanche inhabit their end of the house.’
‘Don’t object, so far as I hear.’
No very considerable adjustment had been necessary when Thrubworth had been taken over by the Government at the beginning of the war. Erridge, in any case, had been living in only a small part of the mansion (seventeenth-century brick, fronted in the eighteenth century with stone), his sister, Blanche, housekeeping for him. Although the place was only twenty or thirty miles from Frederica’s village, there was little or no communication between Erridge and the rest of his family. Since the outbreak of war he had become, so Isobel told me, less occupied than formerly with the practical side of politics, increasingly devoting himself to books about the Anabaptists and revolutionary movements of the Middle Ages.
‘Buster’s a contemporary of mine,’ said Umfraville, ‘a son-of-a-bitch in the top class. I’ve never told you my life story, have I?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You’ll hear it often enough when we become brothers-in-law,’ he said, ‘so I’