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.
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 Schooclass="underline" 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.