‘And he—?’
‘Nicholas, here, was at school with him,’ said Mrs. Conyers, tranquilly.
She spoke as if most people must, as a matter of course, be already aware of that circumstance; for it now seemed that, in spite of her husband’s doubts, she had finally accepted the fact that I was within a few years of Widmerpool’s age. The remark only stimulated Frederica’s curiosity.
‘Oh, do tell me what he is like,’ she said. ‘Mildred was just that amount older than me to make her rather a thrilling figure at the time when I first came “out”. She was at the Huntercombes’ once when I stayed there not long after the war. She was rather a dashing war widow and wore huge jade ear-rings, and smoked all the time and said the most hair-raising things. What is her new name to be, first of all?’
‘Widmerpool,’ I said, since the question was addressed to me.
‘Where do they come from?’ asked Mrs. Conyers, anxious to profit herself from Frederica’s interrogation.
‘Nottinghamshire, I believe.’
This reply was at worst innocuous, and might be taken, in general, to imply a worthy family background. It was also — as I understood from Widmerpool himself — in no way a departure from the truth. Fearing that I might, if pressed, be compelled ultimately to admit some hard things about Widmerpool, I felt that the least I could do for an old acquaintance in these circumstances was to suggest, however indirectly, a soothing picture of generations of Widmerpools in a rural setting; an ancient, if dilapidated, manor house: Widmerpool tombs in the churchyard: tankards of ale at The Widmerpool Arms.
‘You haven’t said what his Christian name is,’ said Frederica, apparently accepting, anyway at this stage, the regional superscription.
‘Kenneth.’
‘Brothers or sisters?’
‘No.’
I admired the thoroughness with which Frederica set to work on an enquiry of this kind, as much as I had admired Mrs. Conyers’s earlier refusal to give anything away.
‘And he is in the City?’
‘He is supposed to be rather good at making money,’ interpolated Mrs. Conyers.
She had begun to smile indulgently at Frederica’s unconcealed curiosity. Now she employed a respectful yet at the same time deprecatory tone, as if this trait of Widmerpool’s — his supposed facility for ‘making money’—was, extraordinary as this might appear, a propensity not wholly unpleasant when you became accustomed to it. At the same time she abandoned her former position of apparent neutrality, openly joining in the search. Indeed, she put the next question herself.
‘His father is dead, isn’t he?’ she said. ‘Nottinghamshire, did you say?’
‘Or Derbyshire. I don’t remember for certain.’
Widmerpool had once confided the fact that his grandfather, a business man from the Scotch Lowlands, had on marriage changed his name from ‘Geddes’; but such an additional piece of information would sound at that moment too esoteric and genealogicaclass="underline" otiose in its exactitude. In a different manner, to repeat Eleanor Walpole-Wilson’s remark made years before—‘Uncle George used to get his liquid manure from Mr. Widmerpool’s father’—might strike, though quite illogically, a disobliging, even objectionably facetious note. Eleanor’s ‘Uncle George’ was Lord Goring. It seemed best to omit all mention of liquid manure; simply to say that Widmerpool had known the Gorings and the Walpole-Wilsons.
‘Oh, the Walpole-Wilsons,’ said Frederica sharply, as if reminded of something she would rather forget. ‘Do you know the Walpole-Wilsons? My sister, Norah, shares a flat with Eleanor Walpole-Wilson. Do you know them?’
‘I haven’t seen Eleanor for years. Nor her parents, for that matter.’
The General now came to life again, after his long period of rumination.
‘Walpole-Wilson was that fellow in the Diplomatic Service who made such a hash of things in South America,’ he said. ‘Got unstuck for it. I met him at a City dinner once, the Mercers — or was it the Fishmongers? Had an argument over Puccini.’
‘I don’t know the Gorings,’ said Frederica, ignoring the General. ‘You mean the ones called “Lord” Goring?’
‘Yes. He is a great fruit farmer, isn’t he? He talked about fruit on the only occasions when I met him.’
‘I remember,’ she said. ‘He is.’
She had uttered the words ‘Lord Goring’ with emphasis on the title, seeming by her tone almost to suggest that all members of that particular family, male and female, might for some unaccountable reason call themselves “Lord”: at least implying that, even if she did not really suppose anything so absurd, she wished to indicate that I should have been wiser to have steered clear of the Gorings: in fact, that informed persons considered the Gorings themselves mistaken in burdening themselves with the rather ridiculous pretension of a peerage. When I came to know her better I realised that her words were intended to cast no particular slur on the Gorings; merely, since they were not personal friends of hers, to build up a safe defence in case they turned out, in her own eyes, undesirable.
‘I think Widmerpool père was mixed up with the fruit-farming side of Goring life.’
‘But look here,’ said General Conyers, suddenly emerging with terrific violence from the almost mediumistic trance in which he had sunk after the mention of Puccini. ‘The question is simply this. Can this fellow Widmerpool handle Mildred? It all turns on that. What do you think, Nicholas? You say you were at school with him. You usually know a fellow pretty well when you have been boys together. What’s your view? Give us an appreciation of the situation.’
‘But I don’t know Mrs. Haycock. I was only nine or ten when I first met her. Last night I barely spoke to her.’
There was some laughter at that, and the necessity passed for an immediate pronouncement on the subject of Widmerpool’s potentialities.
‘You must meet my sister again,’ said Mrs. Conyers, involuntarily smiling to herself, I suppose at the thought of Widmerpool as Mildred’s husband.
After that, conversation drifted. Mrs. Conyers began once more to talk of clothes and of how her daughter, Charlotte, had had a baby in Malta. The General relapsed once more into torpor, occasionally murmuring faint musical intonations that might still be ringing the changes on ‘… nunc et in hora …’ Frederica rose to go. I gave her time to get down the stairs, and then myself said goodbye. It was agreed that so long a period must not again elapse before I paid another visit. Mrs. Conyers was one of those persons who find it difficult to part company quickly, so that it was some minutes before I reached the hall of the block of flats. In front of the entrance Frederica Budd was still sitting in a small car, which was making the horrible flat sound that indicates an engine refusing to fire.
‘This wretched car won’t start,’ she shouted.
‘Can I help?’
At that moment the engine came to life.
‘Shall I give you a lift?’ she said.
‘Which way are you going?’
‘Chelsea.’
I, too, was on my way to Chelsea that evening. It was a period of my life when, in recollection, I seem often to have been standing in a cinema queue with a different girl. One such evening lay ahead of me.
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Jump in,’ she said.
Now that she had invited me into her car, and we were driving along together, her manner, momentarily relaxed while she had been pressing the self-starter, became once more impersonal and remote; as if ‘a lift’ was not considered an excuse for undue familiarity between us. When the car had refused to start she had seemed younger and less chilly: less part of the impeccable Conyers world. Now she returned to an absolutely friendly, but also utterly impregnable outpost of formality.