Books Do Furnish a Room (12 page)

‘It’s Erry’s shade haunting the
place,’ said Norah. ‘His obsession with ill-health. All the same, we all supposed
him a
malade imaginaire
. Now the joke’s with him.’

‘I was thinking the other day
that hypochondria’s a stepbrother to masochism,’ said Hugo.

This sort of conversation
grated on Frederica.

‘Do you know how Erry occupied
his last week?’ she asked. ‘Writing letters about the memorial window.’

‘The old original memorial
window?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Erry was always utterly
against it,’ said Norah. ‘At least refused ever to make a move. It was George
who used to say the window had been planned at the time and ought to be put up,
no matter what.’

‘Erry appears to have started
corresponding about stained-glass windows almost immediately after George’s
funeral. Blanche found the letters, didn’t you?’

Blanche smiled vaguely. Norah
threw her cigarette into the fireplace in a manner to express despair at all
human behaviour, her own family’s in particular.

‘Apart from going into complete
reverse as to his own values, fancy imagining you could get a stained-glass
window put up to your grandfather when you can’t find a bloody builder to
repair the roof of your bloody bombed-out flat. That was Erry all over.’

‘Perhaps he meant it as a kind
of tribute to George.’

‘I don’t object to George
wanting to stick the window up. That was George’s line. It’s Erry. It was just
like darling George to be nice about that sort of thing – just as he went when
he did, and didn’t hang about a few months after Erry to make double death
duties. George was always the best behaved of the family.’

Frederica did not comment on
that opinion. It looked as if a row, no uncommon occurrence when Frederica and
Norah were under the same roof, might be about to break out. Hugo, familiar
with his sisters’ wars and alliances, changed the subject.

‘There’s always something
rather consoling about death,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean Erry, because of course
one’s very sorry about the old boy and all that. What you must admit is there’s
a curious pleasure in hearing about someone’s death as a rule, even if you’ve
quite liked them.’

‘Not George’s,’ said Susan. ‘I
cried for days.’

‘So did I,’ said Norah. ‘Weeks.’

She was never to be outdone by
Susan.

‘That’s quite different again,’
said Hugo. ‘I quite agree I was cut up by George too. Felt awful about him in
an odd way – I mean not the obvious way, but treating it objectively. It seemed
such bloody bad luck. What I’m talking about is that sense of relief about
hearing a given death has taken place. One can’t explain it to oneself.’

‘I think you’re all absolutely
awful,’ said Roddy Cutts.

‘I don’t like hearing about
death or people dying in the least. It upsets me even if I don’t know them – some
film star you’ve hardly seen or foreign statesman or scientist you’ve only read
about in the paper. It thoroughly depresses me. I agree with Dicky about that.
Let’s change the subject.’

I asked whether he had settled
with Widmerpool the rights and wrongs of hire-purchase.

‘I don’t much care for the man.
In the margins where we might be reasonably in agreement, he always takes what
strikes me as an unnecessarily aggressive line.’

‘What’s Cheap Money?’

‘The idea is to avoid a
superfluity of the circulating medium concentrated on an insufficiency of what
you swop it for. When Widmerpool and his like have put the poor old
rentier
on the spot they may find he wasn’t performing too useless a role.’

‘But Widmerpool’s surely a
rentier
himself?’

‘He’s a bill-broker, and the
bill-brokers are the only companies getting any sympathy from the Government
these days. He’s in the happy position of being wooed by both sides, the Labour
Party – that is to say his own party – and the City, who hope to get
concessions.’

‘I find politics far more
lowering a subject than death,’ said Norah. ‘Especially if they have to include
discussing that man. I can’t think how Pam can stand him for five minutes. I’m
not surprised she’s ill all the time.’

‘I was told that one moment she
was going to marry John Mountfichet,’ said Susan. ‘He was prepared to leave his
wife for her. Then he was killed. She made this marriage on the rebound.
Decided to marry the first man who asked her.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ said
Jeavons. ‘That sort of story always gets put round. Who was Mountfichet’s wife
– the Huntercombes’ girl Venetia, wasn’t she? I bet they suited each other a treat in their own way. Married couples usually do.’

‘What’s that got to do with
whether he was going off with Pamela Flitton?’ asked Norah. ‘Or whether she
married Widmerpool on the rebound?’

‘People get divorced just
because they don’t know they suit each other,’ said Jeavons.

He did not enlarge further on
this rebuttal of the theory that people married ‘on the rebound’, or that the
first choice was founded on an instinctive Tightness of judgment. Instead, he
turned to the question of how he himself was to get back to London. Wandering
about the room chainsmoking, he looked more than ever like a plain-clothes man.

‘Wish the train didn’t arrive
back so late. They must be getting familiar with my face on that line. Probably
think I’m working the three-card trick. Anything I can do to help sort things
out while I’m here? Cleaning up that mess in the jar’s whetted my appetite for
work. I’d have offered to be a bearer, if I’d thought I could hold up the
coffin for more than a minute and a half, but that lump of gunmetal in my guts
has been giving trouble again. Never seems to settle down. Sure the army vets
left a fuse there, probably a whole shellcap. Can’t digest a thing. Becomes a
bore after a time. Never know what you may do when you’re in that state. Didn’t
want to be halfway up the aisle, and drop my end of the coffin. Still, that
couldn’t have disrupted things, or made more row, than that girl did going out.
Wish Molly was alive. Nothing Molly didn’t know about funerals.’

Frederica, who had just come
in, looked not altogether approving of all this. She was never in any case
really sure that she liked Jeavons, certainly not when in moods like his
present one. That had been Jeavons’s standing with her even before she married
Umfraville, for whom Jeavons himself had no great affection. Umfraville, on the
other hand, liked Jeavons. He used to give rather subtle imitations of him.

‘What you could do, Uncle Ted,
is to make a list of the wreaths,’ said Frederica. ‘Would you really do that?
It would be a great help.’

‘Keep me quiet, I suppose,’
said Jeavons.

He often showed an unexpected
awareness that he was getting on the nerves of people round him.

‘I’ll duly render a return of
wreaths,’ he said. ‘Show the state (a) as to people who ought to have sent them
and haven’t, (b) those who’ve properly observed regulations as to the drill on
such occasions.’

Never finding it easy to set
his mind to things, the process, if Jeavons decided to do so, was immensely
thorough. When he married, he had, for example, taken upon himself to memorize
the names of all his wife’s relations, an enormous horde of persons. Jeavons
familiarized himself with these ramifications of kindred as he would have
studied the component parts of a piece of machinery or mechanical weapon. He ‘made
a drill of it’, as he himself expressed his method, in the army sense of the
phrase, inventing a routine of some sort that enabled him to retain the name of
each individual in his mind, together with one small fact, probably quite
immaterial, about each one of them. As a consequence, his knowledge in that
field was encyclopaedic. No one was better placed to list the wreaths. Hugo
stretched himself out on the sofa.

‘Mortality breeds odd jobs,’ he
said.

‘And the men to do them,’ said
Jeavons.

Later, as he worked away, he
could be heard singing in his mellow, unexpectedly attractive voice, some music-hall
refrain from his younger days:

‘When Father went down to
Southend,
To spend a happy day,
He didn’t see much of the water,
But he put some beer away.
When he landed home,
Mother went out of her mind,
When he told her he’d lost the seaweed,
And left the cockles behind.’

A footnote to the events of
Erridge’s funeral was supplied by Dicky Umfraville after our return to London.
It was to be believed or not, according to taste. Umfraville produced the
imputation, if that were what it was to be called, when we were alone together.
Pamela Widmerpool’s name had cropped up again. Umfraville, assuming the manner
he employed when about to give an imitation, moved closer. Latterly, Umfraville’s
character-acting had become largely an impersonation of himself, Dr Jekyll,
even without the use of the transforming drug, slipping into the skin of the
larger-than-life burlesque figure of Mr Hyde. In these metamorphoses,
Umfraville’s normal conversation would suddenly take grotesque shape, the
bright bloodshot eyes, neat moustache, perfectly brushed hair – the formalized
army officer of caricature – suddenly twisted into some alarming or grotesque
shape as vehicle for improvisation.

‘Remember my confessing in my
outspoken way I’d been pretty close to Flavia Stringham in the old days of the
Happy Valley?’

‘You put it more bluntly than
that, Dicky – you said you’d taken her virginity.’

‘What a cad I am – well, one
sometimes wonders.’

‘Whether you’re a cad, Dicky,
or whether you were the first?’

‘Our little romance was
scarcely over before she married Cosmo Flitton. Now the only reason a woman
like Flavia could want to marry Cosmo was because she needed a husband in a
hurry, and at any price. Unfortunately my own circumstances forbade me aspiring
to her hand.’

‘Dicky, this is pure fantasy.’

Umfraville looked sad. Even at
his most boisterous, there was a touch of melancholy about him. He was a pure
Burton type, when one came to think of it. Melancholy as expressed by giving
imitations would have made another interesting sub-section in the
Anatomy
.

‘All right, old boy, all right.
Keep your whip up. Cosmo dropped a hint once in his cups.’

‘Not a positive one?’

‘There was nothing positive
about Cosmo Flitton – barring, of course, his Wassermann Test. Mind you, it could
be argued Flavia found an equally God-awful heel in Harrison F. Wisebite, but
Harrison came on to the scene too late to have fathered the beautiful Pamela.’

‘I’m not prepared to accept
this, Dicky. You’ve just thought it up.’

Umfraville’s habit of taking
liberties with dates, if a story could thereby be improved, was notorious.

‘You can never tell,’ he
repeated. ‘My God, Cosmo was a swine. A real swine. Harrison I liked in his
way. He mixed a refreshing cocktail of his own invention called Death Comes for
the Archbishop.’

In the course of preliminary conclaves with Bagshaw on the subject of
Fission
’s first number, mention was again made of an
additional personage, a woman, who was backing the magazine. Bagshaw, adept at
setting forth the niceties of political views, if these happened to attach to
the doctrinaire Left, was less good at delineating individuals, putting over no
more than that she was a widow who had always wanted some hand in running a
paper. As it turned out, excuse existed for this lack of precision in grasping
her name, in due course revealed in quite unforeseen circumstances. Bagshaw
thought she would cause little or no trouble editorially. That was less true of
Widmerpool, who certainly harboured doubts as to Bagshaw’s competence as editor.
Quiggin and Craggs were another matter. They were old acquaintances who
differed on all sorts of points, but they were familiar with Bagshaw’s habits.
Widmerpool had no experience of these. He might take exception to some of them.
Bagshaw himself was much too devious to express all this in plain terms, nor
would it have been discreet to do so openly. His disquiet showed itself in
repeated attempts to pinpoint Widmerpool himself politically.

‘From time to time I detect
signs of fellow-travelling. Then I think I’m on the wrong tack entirely, he’s
positively Right Wing Labour. Again, you find him stringing along with the far,
but anti-Communist, Left. You can’t help admiring the way he conceals his hand.
My guess is he’s playing ball with the Comrades on the quiet for whatever he
can get out of it, but trying to avoid the appearance of doing so. He doesn’t
want to prejudice his chances of a good job in the Government when the moment
comes.’

‘Was that the game Hamlet was
playing when he said:

The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No fellow-traveller returns, puzzles the will?’

‘There was something fishy
about Hamlet’s politics, I agree,’ said Bagshaw. ‘But the only
fellow-travellers we can be certain about were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.’

Meanwhile I worked away at
Burton, and various other jobs. The three months spent in the country after
demobilization had endorsed the severance with old army associates, the foreign
military attachés with whom I had been employed ‘in liaison’. One returned to a
different world. Once in a way the commemorative gesture might be made by one
or other of them of inviting a former colleague, now relegated to civilian
life; once in a way an unrevised list of names might bring one incongruously to
the surface again. On the whole, attendance at such gatherings became very
infrequent.

When we were asked to drinks by
Colonel and Madame Flores, the invitation derived from neither of these two
sources. It was sent simply because the hostess wanted to take another look at
a former lover who dated back to days long before she had become the wife of a
Latin American army officer; or – the latter far more probable, when one came
to think of it – was curious, as ladies who have had an inclination for a man
so often are, regarding the appearance and demeanour of his wife; with whom, as
it happened, the necessity had never arisen to emphasize that particular
conjunction of the past.