However, as the eye separated individuals from the mass, marks of a certain exoticism were here revealed, notably absent from the scene at Belgrave Square: such deviations from a more conventional standard alleviating, so far as they went, earlier implications of stiffness; although these intermittent patches of singularity — if they were to be regarded as singular — were, on the whole, not necessarily predisposed to put an uninvited newcomer any more at his ease; except perhaps in the sense that one act of informality in such surroundings might, roughly speaking, be held tacitly to excuse another.
For example, an elderly gentleman with a neat white moustache and eye-glass, evidently come from some official assemblage — perhaps the reception at the Spanish Embassy — because he wore miniatures, and the cross of some order in white enamel and gold under the points of his collar, was conversing with a Negro, almost tawny in pigmentation, rigged out in an elaborately waisted and square-shouldered tail-coat with exaggeratedly pointed lapels. It was really this couple that had made me think of Uncle Giles, who, in spite of advocacy of the urgent dissolution of the British Empire on grounds of its despotic treatment of backward races, did not greatly care for coloured people, whatever their origin; and, unless some quite exceptional circumstance sanctioned the admixture, he would certainly not have approved of guests of African descent being invited to a party to which he himself had been bidden. In this particular case, however, he would undoubtedly have directed the earlier momentum of his disparagement against the man with the eye-glass, since my uncle could not abide the wearing of medals. “Won ’em in Piccadilly, I shouldn’t wonder,” he was always accustomed to comment, when his eye fell on these outward and visible awards, whoever the recipient, and whatever the occasion.
Not far from the two persons just described existed further material no less vulnerable to my uncle’s censure, for a heavily-built man, with a greying beard and the air of a person of consequence, was unsuccessfully striving, to the accompaniment of much laughter on both sides, to wrest a magnum of champagne from the hands of an ancient dame, black-browed, and wearing a tiara, or jewelled head-dress of some sort, who was struggling manfully to retain possession of the bottle. Here, therefore, were assembled in a single group — as it were of baroque sculpture come all at once to life — three classes of object all equally abhorrent to Uncle Giles; that is to say, champagne, beards, and tiaras: each in its different way representing sides of life for which he could find no good to say; beards implying to him Bohemianism’s avoidance of those practical responsibilities with which he always felt himself burdened: tiaras and champagne unavoidably conjuring up images of guilty opulence of a kind naturally inimical to “radical” principles.
Although these relatively exotic embellishments to the scene occurred within a framework on the whole commonplace enough, the shifting groups of the party created, as a spectacle, illusion of moving within the actual confines of a picture or tapestry, into the depths of which the personality of each new arrival had to be automatically amalgamated; even in the case of apparently unassimilable material such as Mr. Deacon or Gyspy Jones, both of whom, as I have said, were immediately absorbed, at least to the eye, almost as soon as they had crossed the threshold of Mrs. Andriadis.
“Who is this extraordinary old puss you have in tow?” Stringham had asked, while he and I had walked a little ahead of the other three, after we had left the coffee-stall.
“A friend of my parents.”
“Mine know the oddest people too — especially my father. And Miss Jones? Also a friend — or a cousin?”
He only laughed when I attempted to describe the circumstances that had led to my finding myself with Mr. Deacon, who certainly seemed to require some explanation at the stage of life, and of behaviour, that he had now reached. Stringham pretended to think — or was at least unwilling to disbelieve — that Gypsy Jones was my own chosen companion, rather than Mr. Deacon’s. However, he had shown no sign of regarding either of them as noticeably more strange than anyone else, encountered on a summer night, who might seem eligible to be asked to a party given by a friend. It was, indeed, clear to me that strangeness was what Stringham now expected, indeed, demanded from life: a need already become hard to satisfy. The detachment he had always seemed to possess was now more marked than ever before. At the same time he had become in some manner different from the person I had known at school, so that, in spite of the air almost of relief that he had shown at falling in with us, I began to feel uncertain whether, in fact, Anne Stepney had not used the term “pompous” in the usual, and not some specialised, sense. Peter Templer, too, I remembered had employed the same word years before at school when he had inquired about Stringham’s family. “Well, I imagine it was all rather pompous even at lunch, wasn’t it?” he had asked. At that time I associated pomposity with Le Bas, or even with Widmerpool, both of whom habitually indulged in mannerisms unthinkable in Stringham. Yet there could be no doubt that he now possessed a personal remoteness, a kind of preoccupation with his own affairs, that gave at least some prima facie excuse for using the epithet. All the rather elaborate friendliness, and apparent gratitude for the meeting — almost as if it might offer means of escape from some burdensome commitment — was unquestionably part of a barrier set up against the rest of the world. Trying to disregard the gap, of which I felt so well aware, as it yawned between us, I asked about his family.
“My father sits in Kenya, quarrelling with his French wife.”
“And your mother?”
“Similarly occupied with Buster over here.”
“At Glimber?”
“Glimber — as arranged by Buster — is let to an Armenian. They now live in a house of more reasonable proportions at Sunningdale. You must come there one day — if only to see dawn breaking over the rock garden. I once arrived there in the small hours and had that unforgettable experience.”
“Is Buster still in the Navy?”
“Not he.”
“A gentleman of leisure?”
“But much humbled. No longer expects one to remember every individual stroke he made during the polo season.”
“So you both rub along all right?”
“Like a house on fire,” said Stringham. “All the same, you know parents — especially step-parents — are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years. As a matter of fact, Buster may come to the party if he can get away.”