Anthony Powell - At Lady Mollys

‘Oh, rot,’ said Isobel. ‘I bet he wasn’t. Dukes are much more cunning than earls.’

‘What makes you think so?’ said her brother.

Not greatly pleased by this opinion, he did not wait for an answer, but moved on down the stairs. Denigration of ancestors was more agreeable to him than banter regarding the order of peerage to which he belonged. Not for the first time that evening one was conscious of the bones of an old world pomposity displayed beneath the skin of advanced political thought. However, he soon recovered from this momentary discomposure.

‘Of course the Tollands were really nobody much at the beginning of the fourteenth century,’ he said. ‘That is when they first appear. Lesser gentry, I suppose you might call them. I think they probably made their money out of the Black Death.’

As such a foundation of the family fortunes seemed of interest, I enquired further. Erridge was taken back by the question.

‘Oh, I don’t know for certain,’ he said. ‘There was a big industrial and social upheaval then, as you probably know. The Tollands may have turned it to good account. I think they were a pretty awful lot.’

He appeared a little disturbed by this perhaps over close attention on my own part to the detail of the history he provided. The girls giggled — Quiggin came to the rescue.

‘When did these kulaks begin their career of wholesale exploitation?’ he asked.

He sweetened the enquiry with some harsh laughter. Erridge laughed too, more at home with Quiggin in his political phraseology than in domestic raillery with his sisters.

‘ Kulaks is the word,’ he said. ‘I think they first went up in the world when one of them was knighted by Edward IV. Then another was Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, whatever that may have been, and lost his job under Bloody Mary. They’ve been an awfully undistinguished lot on the whole. They were Cavaliers in the Civil War and got a peerage under Queen Anne. John Toland, the deist, was no relation, so I’ve been told. I should rather like to have claimed him.’

We entered a long room hung with portraits. The younger Pitt’s hat stood within a glass case in one corner by the window. The furniture, as described by Lovell, was under dust-sheets.

‘I never use any of these rooms,’ said Erridge.

He pulled away the dust-sheets without ceremony; leaving in the centre of the room a heap of linen on the floor. The furniture was on the whole mediocre; although, as at the Jeavonses’, there was a good piece here and there. The pictures, too, apart from the Lawrence — the bravura of which gave it some charm — were wholly lacking in distinction. Erridge seemed aware of these deficiencies, referring more than once to the ‘rubbish’ his forbears had accumulated. Yet, at the same time, in his own peculiar way, he seemed deeply to enjoy this opportunity of displaying the house: a guilty enjoyment, though for that reason no less keen.

‘We really ought to have my Uncle Alfred here,’ said Erridge. ‘He regards himself as rather an authority on family history — and, I must say, is a very great bore on the subject. Nothing is worse than someone who takes that sort of thing up, and hasn’t had enough education to carry it through.’

I recalled Alfred Tolland’s own remarks about his nephew’s failure to erect a memorial window. Erridge, whose last words revealed a certain intellectual arrogance, until then dormant, probably found it convenient to diminish his own scrutiny of family matters where tedious negotiation was concerned. In any case, however much an oblique contemplation of his race might gratify him, there could be no doubt that he regarded any such weakness as morally wrong.

‘It makes a very nice museum to live in,’ said Quiggin.

We had completed the tour and returned to the room where we had dined. No trace seemed to remain of Quiggin’s earlier objections to the tour. His inconsistencies, more limited by circumstance than those of Erridge, were no less pronounced. Erridge himself, entirely at ease while displaying his possessions, now began once more to pace about the room nervously.

‘How are you and Isobel getting back, Susy?’ he asked.

He sounded apprehensive, as if he feared his sisters might have come with the idea of attempting to stay for several months: perhaps even hoping to take possession of the house entirely, and entertain at his expense on a huge scale.

‘Well, I’ve got Roddy’s car,’ said Susan, blushing again at mention of her future husband. ‘We thought if you could put us up for the night, we’d start early for London tomorrow morning.’

Erridge was not enthusiastic about this proposal. There was some discussion. However, he could not very well turn his sisters out of the house at that hour of the night, so that in the end he agreed; at the same time conveying a warning that the sheets might not be properly aired.

‘All right,’ said Isobel. ‘We’ll get rheumatic fever. We don’t mind. I can’t tell you how smart Roddy’s car is, by the way. If we get up reasonably early, we shall reach London in no time.’

‘It is rather a grand car,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t know whether anyone would like a lift in the morning.’

This seemed an opportunity not to be missed. I asked if I might accept the offer.

‘Yes, do come,’ said Isobel. ‘It will be too boring otherwise, driving all the way to London with Susy talking of nothing but arrangements for her wedding.’

‘We will pick you up when we come past the cottage, which we do, anyway,’ said Susan. ‘I warn you I am frightfully punctual.’

Quiggin did not look too pleased at this, but, having enjoyed his evening, he was by that time in a mood to allow such an arrangement to pass. Erridge, already suppressing one or two yawns, seemed anxious now that we should go, and give him an opportunity to make for bed. Mona, too, had been silent for a long ume, as if lost in thought. She looked tired. It was time to say good-night.

‘See you in the morning,’ said Isobel.

‘I will be waiting at the gate.’

Erridge came to the door and let us out. We passed once more through the dim glades of the melancholy park, now dramatised by moonlight. It was a warm night, damp, though without rain, and no wind stirred the trees. There was a smell of hay and wet timber in the air. The noise of owls came faintly as they called to each other under the stars.

‘Alf is a champion lad,’ said Quiggin. ‘His sisters are grand girls too. You didn’t take long to press your company on them, I must say.’

‘I’ve got to get back to London somehow.’

‘I didn’t think the girls were up to much,’ said Mona. ‘They behaved as if they owned the place. I hate those tweed suits.’

‘You know, Alf is rather like Prince Myshkyn in The Idiot ,’ said Quiggin. ‘A Myshkyn with political grasp. You wouldn’t believe the money spent on good causes that he has got through, one way and another.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘He has helped a lot of individual cases that have been recommended to hirn from time to time. Howard Craggs got quite a bit out of him a year or two back, which I bet he never repaid. Then Alf has founded several societies and financed them. Refugees, too.’

‘Mind he doesn’t meet Guggenbühl.’

‘I’ll see to that,’ said Quiggin, laughing sourly.

‘He ought to marry a nice girl who would teach him to look after his money instead of handing it out to all these wasters,’ said Mona.

One of her bad moods seemed on the way.

‘All very good causes,’ said Quiggin, who seemed to enjoy contemplating this subject. ‘But sums that would make you gasp.’

‘Bloody fool,’ said Mona.

IN the Jeavonses’ house everything was disposed about the rooms as if the owners had moved in only a week or two before, and were still picknicking in considerable disorder among their unsorted belongings. Whether the better pieces were Sleaford spoils, or derived from Molly’s side of the family, Lovell was uncertain. Certainly Molly herself had not bought them; still less, Jeavons. Lovell said the only object the two of them were known to have acquired throughout their married life together was a cabinet made of some light, highly polished wood, designed — though never, I think, used — to enclose the wherewithal for mixing cocktails. In practice, bottles, glasses and ice were always brought into the drawing-room on a tray, the cabinet serving only as a plinth upon which to rest the cage enclosing two budgerigars. You could never tell who would carry in this drink tray; or, for that matter, who would open the front door. Regular servants were employed only spasmodically, their duties on the whole undertaken by such temporary figures as Erridge’s Smith, or superannuated nurses and governesses of the Ardglass family, whose former dependants were legion. Even personal friends of Molly’s, down on their luck for one reason or another, would from time to time lend a hand on the domestic side, while a succession of charwomen, gloomy or jocular, haunted the passages by day.

No one was ever, so to speak, turned away from the Jeavons table. The place was a hinterland where none of the ordinary rules seemed to apply and persons of every sort were to be encountered. Perhaps that description makes the company sound too diverting. Certainly Lovell was less complimentary. ‘Of course you hardly ever meet intelligent people there,’ he used to say, for some reason cherishing in his mind that category of person, without too closely defining means of recognition. ‘And you rarely see anyone whom I would call really smart.’ Then he was accustomed to relent a little, and add: ‘All the same, you may find absolutely anybody at Aunt Molly’s.’

In making this practical — even brutal — analysis, I think Lovell merely meant that individuals deeply ambitious of receiving a lot of grand invitations would never dream of wasting time among the rag, tag and bobtail normally to be found at the Jeavonses’; but he probably intended at the same time to imply that such over-eager people might sometimes be surprised — possibly even made envious — by the kind of visitor from Molly’s past — or, for that matter, her unconformable present — who was the exception in the house rather than the rule. A powerful substratum of relations was usually to be found there, Ardglass and Sleaford connexions, as a rule: not, on the whole, the most eminent members of those families. Jeavons, certainly no snob in the popular and derogatory sense (although he had acquired for everyday purposes a modicum of lore peculiar to his wife’s world) would from time to time produce a relation of his own — for example, a nephew who worked in Wolverhampton — but, even had he so desired, he could never have attempted to compete in point of number with the ramifications of Molly’s family: the descendants of her grandfather’s ninety-seven first cousins. It was at the Jeavonses’ that I met the Tolland sisters again.

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.