At Lady Mollys - Anthony Powell

Lovell, probably unreliable, I thought, upon such a point, said that Jeavons used occasionally to kick over the traces of married life.

‘He goes off by himself and gets tight and picks up a woman,’ Lovell said. ‘Just once in a way, you know. One evening he brought an obvious tart to the house to have a drink.’

‘Were you there?’

‘No. Someone told me. One of the Tollands, I think.’

I questioned the truth of the story, not so much because I wholly disbelieved it, as on account of the implications of such behaviour, suggesting additionally mysterious avenues of Jeavons’s life, which for some reason I felt unwilling, almost too squeamish, to face. However, Lovell himself agreed that whichever Tolland sister had produced the story was probably no very capable judge of the degrees of fallen womanhood, and might easily have used the term without professional connotation: admitting, too, had any such incident taken place, that the girl was unlikely to have been remarked as someone very unusual in such a social no man’s land as the Jeavons drawing-room. He conceded finally that Molly would be more than equal to dealing with an intrusion of just that sort, even had she decided — something very unlikely — that the trespassing guest had unexpectedly passed beyond some invisible, though as it were platonically defined, limit as to who might, and who might not, be suitably received under the Jeavons’ roof.

All the same, the story, even if untrue, impressed me as of interest in its bearing on a sense of strain suffered, perhaps continuously, by Jeavons himself. At worst, the supposed introduction of a ‘tart’ into his house was a myth somehow come into existence, which represented in highly coloured terms a long since vanquished husband’s vain efforts publicly to demonstrate his own independence from a wife’s too evident domination. The legend itself was a kind of tribute to Molly’s strength: a strength of which her first husband too, for all I knew, might in his time have been made equally aware; although Lord Sleaford, at least outwardly, was better equipped to control a wife of Molly’s sort.

‘I don’t think she was unhappy when she was married to Uncle John,’ Lovell used to say. ‘Of course, he was rather a dull dog. Still, lots of women have to put up with dull dogs — not to say dirty dogs — without the advantage of lots of money and a stately home. Besides, Ted is a dull dog, too. I suppose Aunt Molly prefers husbands like that.’

My own feeling was that Jeavons could not be described as ‘dull’: even though he had appeared so, in that very phrase, to Widmerpool equally with Lovell. On the contrary, Jeavons seemed to me a person oddly interesting.

‘Molly never really got on with her contemporaries,’ Lovell said. ‘The kind of people one associates with Lady Diana — and all that. She knew some of them, of course, very well, but she couldn’t be called one of that, or any other, set. I dare say Uncle John was afraid of his wife being thought “fast”. She was very shy, too, I believe, in those days. Quite different from what she is like now.’

A picture of Molly Jeavons was beginning to emerge: separateness from her ‘young married’ contemporaries: perhaps a certain recoil from their flamboyance: in any case, nothing in common with the fleeting interest in the arts of that new fashionable world. She might have the acquisitive instinct to capture from her first marriage (if that was indeed their provenance) such spoils as the Wilson and the Greuze, while remaining wholly untouched by the intellectual emancipation, however skin-deep, of her generation: the Russian Ballet: the painters of the Paris School: novels and poetry of the period: not even such a mournful haunt of the third-rate as the Celtic Twilight had played a part in her life. She had occupied a position many women must have envied, jogging along there for a dozen years without apparent dissatisfaction or a breath of scandal; then contentedly taking on an existence of such a very different kind, hardly noticing the change. All that was interesting. The fact was, perhaps, that her easy going, unambitious manner of life had passed unremarked in a vast house like Dogdene, organised in the last resort by the industrious Sleaford, who, according to Lovell, possessed rather a taste for interfering in domestic matters. While married to him, Molly remained a big, charming, noisy young woman, who had never entirely ceased to be a schoolgirl. When the Dogdene frame was removed, like the loosening of a corset of steel, the unconventional, the eccentric, even the sluttish side of her nature became suddenly revealed to the world.

So far as ‘getting on’ with her second husband was concerned, the strongest protest she ever seemed to make was: ‘Oh, Teddy, dear, do you ever catch hold of the right end of the stick?’, spoken kindly, and usually not without provocation; for Jeavons could be slow in grasping the point of a story. Some husbands might certainly take even that rebuke amiss, but Jeavons never seemed to question Molly’s absolute sway over himself, the house and all those who came there. I heard her say these words on subsequent visits after Lovell had introduced me there. Neither Widmerpool nor Mrs. Haycock had turned up again since that first night, and I made some enquiry about them.

‘Oh, you know Mr. Widmerpool?’ said Molly, at once beginning to laugh. ‘How extraordinary that you should know him. But perhaps you said so before. He has got jaundice. What a thing to happen when you are going to get married.’

‘How disagreeable for him. But I am not altogether surprised. He always makes a great fuss about his health. I think he has had jaundice before.’

‘You know him well then?’

‘Fairly well — though I don’t often see him.’

‘He is rather amusing, isn’t he?’ said Molly. ‘Quite a wit in his way. But he must look awful now that he is bright yellow.’

I agreed that the disease would give Widmerpool an unattractive appearance. It seemed to me extraordinary that she should have thought him ‘amusing’. I sometimes found his company enjoyable, because we had experienced much in common; but I could never remember him making an entertaining remark. I wondered what he could have said to cause that judgment: learning in due course that she was quite reckless in the characteristics she attributed to individuals. A chance remark would have the effect of swaying her entirely in favour of one person, or of arousing the bitterest opposition to another. She was very critical of many of the people who came to see her, and hoarded an accumulation of largely unfounded inferences about their character. These inaccuracies seemed to cancel each other out in some manner, so that in the last resort Molly was no worse informed, indeed in point of acuteness often better placed, than what might be regarded as ‘the average’.

‘Do you think he is in love with Mildred?’ she asked sharply.

‘I really don’t know. I suppose so. If he wants to marry her.’

I was not at all prepared for the question.

‘Oh, that doesn’t necessarily follow at all,’ she said. ‘I feel rather sorry for him in some ways. Mildred is not an easy person. I’ve known her such a long time. She isn’t a bit easy. But now you simply must come up to my bedroom and see the monkey. I bought him today from a man in Soho, where I went to get some pimentos.’

A good deal of the life of the Jeavons’ household was, in fact, lived in Molly’s bedroom, either because a sick animal was established there (with the budgerigars, four principal dogs and at least as many cats inhabited the house), or simply because Molly herself had risen late, or retired early to rest, in either case holding a kind of reception from her bed, a Victorian fourposter that took up most of the room. On a chest of drawers beside the bed stood a photograph of Jeavons in uniform: breeches: puttees: at the back of his head a floppy service cap of the kind stigmatised by Mrs. Haycock in her youth as a ‘gorblimey’. He held a knotted bamboo swagger cane under one arm, and, wearing on his tunic the ribbon of the M.C. (awarded after the action in which he had been so seriously wounded), he looked the complete subaltern of war-time musical comedy.

‘Come along, all of you,’ said Molly. ‘You must all see the monkey. You too, Tuffy. You simply must see him.’

I had already recognised the tall, dark, beaky-nosed woman to whom she spoke as Miss Weedon, former secretary of my old friend Charles Stringham’s mother, Mrs. Foxe. Miss Weedon, now in her late forties, had been his sister Flavia’s governess. After Flavia grew up, she had stayed on to help with Mrs. Foxe’s social engagements and charities. I had been waiting an opportunity to have a word with her. I reintroduced myself as we climbed the stairs with the other people who wished — or were being compelled — to visit the monkey. Miss Weedon, wholly unchanged, still sombrely dressed, gave me a keen look.

‘But of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Charles brought you to luncheon in the London house before he went to Kenya to stay with his father. They had forgotten to get a ticket for Charles in a theatre party that had been made up — the Russian Ballet, I think. I was put to all kind of trouble to produce the extra ticket. However, I got it for him in the end.’

I, too, remembered the incident; and also the look of adoration Miss Weedon had given Stringham when she entered the room. I well recalled that passionate glance, although even then — that night at the Jeavonses’—I had not yet guessed the depths of her devotion. I wondered what she did with herself now. Stringham, when last we had seen something of each other, had told me: ‘Tuffy has come into a little money,’ and that she was no longer his mother’s secretary. I found in due course that Miss Weedon was a close friend of Molly’s; in fact that she re-enacted at the Jeavonses’ many of her former duties when in the employment of Mrs. Foxe, although, of course, in a household organised on very different terms. It was impossible to know from her manner how unexpected, or the reverse, she found the fact that we had met again at this place. In her profound, though mysterious, dimness, she was typical of the background of Jeavons gatherings.

‘I always regret that Charles ever made that journey to Kenya.’ she said.

She spoke severely, as if I had myself been in part to blame for allowing such a thing ever to have taken place; even though at the same time she freely forgave me for such former thoughtlessness.

‘Why?’

‘He was never the same afterwards.’

I had to admit to myself there was some truth in that. Stringham had never been the same after Kenya. It had been a water-shed in his life.

‘Perhaps it was just because he became a man,’ she said. ‘Of course, his upbringing was impossible — always, from the beginning. But he changed so much after that trip to Africa. He was a boy when he went — and such a charming boy — and he really came back a man.’

‘People do grow up. At least some do.’

‘I am afraid Charles was not one of them,’ she said gravely. ‘He became a man, but he did not grow up. He is not grown up now.’

I hardly knew what to answer. It was one of those headfirst dives into generalisation that usually precedes between two persons a greater conversational intimacy. However, Miss Weedon made no attempt to expand her statement; nor, so to speak, to draw closer in her approach to the problem of Stringham. She merely continued to look at me with a kind of chilly amiability; as if, by making an immediate confession that I was a former friend of his, I had, so far as she was concerned, just managed to save my bacon. When a boy, I had regarded her as decidedly formidable. I still found her a trifle alarming. She gave an impression of complete singleness of purpose: the impression of a person who could make herself very disagreeable if thwarted.

‘Do you ever see Charles now?’ I asked.

She did not answer at once, as if waiting a second or two in order to make up her mind how best to deal with that question; perhaps trying to decide the relative merits of plain statement and diplomatic evasion. Finally she came down on the side of bluntness.

‘Yes, I do see him,’ she said. ‘Quite often. You probably know he drinks too much — really much too much. I am trying to help him about that.’

She stared at me very composedly. Once more I hardly knew how to reply. I had not expected our conversation to take this unreservedly serious turn; especially as we had by then reached the bedroom, and were only delayed in our introduction to the ape by the concourse of people who surrounded him, offering homage and applauding Molly’s particularisation of his many charms of character.

‘Charles had certainly had rather too much the last time I saw him,’ I said, trying to pass off the matter of Stringham’s drunkenness as if it were just a question of getting rather tight once in a way, which I knew to be far from the truth. ‘That was at a dinner he and I went to — two or three years ago at least.’

‘You have not seen him since then?’

‘No.’

‘It still goes on. But I think I shall be able to help him.’

I had no clear idea of how she would set about ‘helping’ Stringham, but the way she spoke made me conscious of her undoubted strength of will. In fact, her voice chilled my blood a little, she sounded so firm. However, at that moment we found ourselves confronted by the monkey — named by his owners ‘Maisky’, after the then Soviet Ambassador — and were introduced by Molly to shake hands with him. He was sitting thoughtfully among the cushions of a spacious basket, from time to time extending a small, dry paw in greeting to Molly’s guests as they came into his immediate presence. A saucer of nuts, stood beside him. There was something of Quiggin in his seriousness and self-absorbtion: also in the watchful manner in which he glanced from time to time at the nuts, sometimes choosing one specially tempting to crack.

‘Have you known Lady Molly long?’ asked Miss Weedon, after we had taken leave of Maisky, and were returning down the stairs.

‘Only a short time.’

‘I thought I had never seen you here before.’

‘I was brought by Chips Lovell.’

‘Oh, yes. One of her nephews. Rather a pushing young man. She was very good to him when he was a boy and his parents did not take much trouble about him. She is a very kind-hearted woman. Quite exceptionally kind-hearted. The house is always full of people she is doing good turns to. Children stay here while their parents are fixing up a divorce. Penniless young men get asked to meals. Former servants are always being given help of one sort or another. There is an old cousin of her husband’s ill in one of the upper bedrooms now. She has nowhere else to go, and will certainly never leave the house alive. I really cannot think how Lady Molly stands some of the people who come here. Many are quite dreadful.’

‘They certainly seem a mixed bag.’

‘They are worse than that, some of them.’

‘Really?’

‘At the same time, you may find yourself talking to someone like Charles’s former father-in-law, Lord Bridgnorth — whom Charles detests and thinks the most conceited, pompous man in the world — who eats out of Lady Molly’s hand. He even takes her advice about his horses. Lady Plynlimmon was here at tea the other day. She really seemed quite interested in what Mr. Jeavons was saying about Germany, although usually she won’t speak to anyone who is not in the Cabinet. Not long ago Lord Amesbury looked in on his way to a court ball, wearing knee breeches and the Garter. Lady Molly was giving the vet a meal she had cooked herself, because everyone else was out for one reason or another and she had made him come in from miles away in the suburbs to see a cat that had fever. I happened to drop in, and found all three of them eating scrambled eggs together.’