‘So you were at school together,’ he said slowly.
He regarded Templer and myself as if the fact we had been at school together was an important piece of evidence in assessing our capabilities, both as individuals and as a team. He paused. There was an awkward silence.
‘Well, I suppose you sometimes think of those days with regret,’ Sir Magnus continued at last. ‘I know I do. Only in later life does one learn what a jewel is youth.’
He smiled apologetically at having been compelled to use such a high-flown phrase. Matilda, laughing, took his arm. ‘Dear Donners,’ she said, ‘what a thing to tell us. You don’t suppose we believe you for a moment. Of course you much prefer living in your lovely castle to being back at school.’
Sir Magnus smiled. However, he was not to be jockeyed so easily from his serious mood.
‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I would at least give what I have to live again my time at the Sorbonne. One is not a student twice in a lifetime.’
‘One is never a student at all in England,’ said Moreland, in a tone that showed he was still in no mood to be tractable, ‘except possibly a medical student or an art student. I suppose you might say I was myself a student, in one sense, when I was at the Royal College of Music. I never felt in the least like one. Besides, with that sort of student, you enter an area of specialisation, which hardly counts for what I mean. Undergraduates in this country are quite different from students. Not that I was ever even an undergraduate myself, but my observation shows me that undergraduates have nothing in common with what is understood abroad by the word student – young men for ever rioting, undertaking political assassination, overturning governments.’
Sir Magnus smiled a little uncertainly, as if only too familiar with these dissertations of Moreland’s on fugitive subjects; as if aware, too, that it was no good hoping to introduce any other matter unless such aimless ramblings had been brought by Moreland himself to a close. Moreland stopped speaking and laughed, seeing what was in Sir Magnus’s mind. Sir Magnus began a sentence, but, before he could get the words out, the woman sitting in the corner of the room threw down her newspaper and jumped to her feet. She came hurriedly towards us. She was quite pretty, very untidy, with reddish hair and elaborately blued eyelids. Far from being Templer’s wife – unless, by some extraordinary freak, they had married and the news had never come my way – this was Lady Anne Stepney, sister of Peggy Stepney (now divorced and remarried) who had been Stringham’s former wife. Anne Stepney was also a divorcée – in fact, she was Anne Umfraville, having married that raffish figure, Dicky Umfraville, at least twenty years older than herself, as his third or fourth wife. That marriage, too, had broken up. There had been a time, just before meeting Dicky Umfraville, when Anne had been closely associated with Barnby. Now her manner suggested that she regarded Sir Magnus as her own property.
‘I really do agree with you about students,’ she said, speaking in a torrent of words addressed to Moreland. ‘Why is it we don’t have any in England? It would liven things up so. I wish the students would do something to prevent all the awful things that have been happening in Czechoslovakia. I do apologise for my rudeness in not coming to talk to you before now. I was so utterly engrossed in what I was reading, I really had to finish the article. It’s by J. G. Quiggin. He says we ought to have fought. I can’t think about anything but Czechoslovakia. Why can’t one of the Germans do in Hitler? Those German students, who are so proud of the duelling scars on their faces, take it like lambs when it comes to being bossed about by a man like that.’
‘The Times says that the Lord Mayor’s Fund for the relief of the Czechs has evoked a wide response,’ said Sir Magnus mildly.
Lady Anne made an angry movement.
‘But you must all be longing for a drink,’ she said, as if in despair. ‘I didn’t know you were going to sit in here, Magnus. I told them to put the drink tray in the Chinese Room. Shall I ring and have it transferred here?’
It was clear that she regarded herself as holding an established position at Stourwater. Sir Magnus continued to look embarrassed, but whether on account of this outburst, the distressing situation in Central Europe, or the problem of where to consume our drinks, was not apparent. He was probably far from anxious to embark, there and then, on the rights and wrongs of Munich, the practical issues of which were certainly at that time occupying the foremost place in his mind. Roddy Cutts had indicated that when we had talked of Sir Magnus again, after Fettiplace-Jones and his wife had gone home.
‘Donners is in close touch with some of the seedy businessmen one or two of the Cabinet think worth cultivating,’ said Roddy, who appeared to have kept his own artillery masked while speaking with Fettiplace-Jones, ‘but he is alleged to be absolutely out of sympathy with the Chamberlain policy. He is playing a waiting game, perhaps a wise one from his point of view.’
The explosive undertones introduced by Anne Umfraville were deadened at that moment by the entry of another woman, whose arrival immediately altered the atmosphere of the room, without greatly relieving its tensions. She, too, was pretty, with the looks sometimes described as ‘porcelain’, fragile and delicate, slim and blonde. She gave the impression of being not so much an actress, as the sort of girl an actress often tries to portray on the stage in some play making few demands on the mind: the ‘nice’ girl in a farce or detective story. A typical Templer girl, I thought, feeling sure she must be Peter’s wife, then remembering she was the woman with him at Dicky Umfraville’s night-club.
‘A Mrs Taylor or Porter,’ he had said, ‘I can’t remember which. Rather a peach, isn’t she?’
Presumably Templer had removed her from Mr Taylor or Porter. As she came through the door, Templer’s own expression altered slightly. It was as if his features contracted for a brief instant with a sudden spasm of toothache, an agony over almost as soon as felt. The woman moved slowly, shyly, towards us. Sir Magnus stopped looking at Anne Umfraville, following this new arrival with his eyes, as if she were walking a tight-rope and he feared she might at any moment make a false step, fall into the net below, ruin the act, possibly break her neck. Templer watched her too. She came to a standstill.
‘This is Betty,’ Templer said.
He spoke as if long past despair. Sir Magnus nodded in resigned, though ever hopeful, agreement that this was indeed Betty. Betty stood for a moment gazing round the room in a dazed, almost terrified, manner, suggesting sudden emergence into the light of day after long hours spent behind drawn curtains. I suddenly thought of the tour of Stourwater’s ‘dungeons’ (strenuously asserted by Miss Janet Walpole-Wilson, on my previous visit, to be mere granaries), when Sir Magnus had remarked with sensuous ogreishness, ‘I sometimes think that is where we should put the girls who don’t behave.’ Could it be that Betty Templer, with her husband’s connivance – an explanation of Templer’s uneasy air – had been imprisoned in the course of some partly high-spirited, partly sadistic, rompings to gratify their host’s strange whims? Of course, I did not seriously suppose such a thing, but for a split second the grotesque notion presented itself. However, setting fantasy aside, I saw at once that something was ‘wrong’ with Betty Templer, not realising, until I came to shake hands with her, how badly ‘wrong’ things were. It was like trying to shake hands with Ophelia while she was strewing flowers. Betty Templer was ‘dotty’. She was as ‘dotty’ as my sister-in-law, Blanche Tolland – far ‘dottier’, because people met Blanche, talked with her at parties, had dealings with her about her charities, without ever guessing about her ‘dottiness’. Indeed, in the world of ‘good works’ she was a rather well known, certainly a respected, figure. Blanche’s strangeness, when examined, mainly took the shape of lacking any desire to engage herself in life, to have friends, to marry, to bear children, to go out into the world. Within, so to speak, her chosen alcove, she appeared perfectly happy, at least not actively unhappy. The same could certainly not be said for Betty Templer. Betty Templer, on the contrary, was painfully d
isorientated, at her wits’ end, not happy at all. It was dreadful. I saw that the situation required reassessment. After my failure at shaking hands with her, I made some remark about the weather. She looked at me without speaking, as if horrified at my words.
‘Perhaps it would be better to go to the Chinese Room,’ said Sir Magnus, ‘if the drinks are really there.’
He spoke in that curiously despondent, even threatening, manner sometimes adopted by very rich people towards their guests, especially where food and drink are concerned, a tone suggesting considerable danger that drinks would not be found in the Chinese Room or, indeed, anywhere else at Stourwater Castle; that we should be lucky if we were given anything to drink at all – or to eat, too, if it came to that – during the evening that lay ahead of us.
‘Will you lead the way, Anne?’ he said, with determined cheerfulness. ‘I shall have to speak to you later about trying to keep us from our drinks. Deliberate naughtiness on your part, I fear. Have you heard the New Hungarian String Quartet, Hugh? I haven’t been myself. I was at Faust the other night, and a little disappointed at some of the singing.’
We followed through the door, crossing the hall again, while I wondered what on earth had happened to Templer’s wife to give her this air of having been struck by lightning. Contact between us was broken for the moment, because, while drinks were being dispensed in the Chinese Room, I found myself talking to Anne Umfraville. By the fireplace there, as if left by some visiting photographer, was a camera on a tripod, beside which stood two adjustable lamps.
‘What’s all this, Donners?’ asked Matilda. ‘Have you taken up photography?’
‘It is my new hobby,’ said Sir Magnus, speaking apologetically, as if this time, at least, he agreed with other people in thinking his own habits a shade undesirable. ‘I find it impossible to persuade professionals to take pictures of my collections in the way I want them taken. That was why I decided to do it myself. The results, although I say it, are as good, if not better. I have been photographing some of the Nymphenburg. That is why the apparatus is in here.’
‘Do you ever photograph people?’ asked Moreland.
‘I had not thought of that,’ said Sir Magnus, smiling rather wolfishly. ‘I suppose I might rise to people.’
‘Happy snaps,’ said Matilda.
‘Or unhappy ones,’ said Moreland, ‘just for a change.’
Dinner was announced. We found ourselves among those scenes in blue, yellow and crimson, the tapestries illustrating the Seven Deadly Sins, which surrounded the dining-room, remembered so well from my earlier visit. Then, I had sat next to Jean Duport. We had talked about the imagery of the incidents depicted in the tapestries. Suitably enough our place had been just below the sequences of Luxuria.
‘Of course they are newly married . . .’ she had said.
That all seemed a long time ago. I glanced round the room. If the rest of Stourwater had proved disappointing – certainly less overpowering in ornate magnificence – these fantastic tapestries, on the other hand, had gained in magnitude. More gorgeous, more extravagant than ever, they engulfed my imagination again in their enchanting colours, grotesque episodes, symbolic moods, making me forget once more the persons on either side of me, just as I had been unaware of Jean when she had spoken on that day, telling me we had met before. Thinking of that, I indulged in a brief moment of sentimentality permissible before social duties intervened. Then, I collected myself. I was between Matilda and Betty Templer – we were sitting at a table greatly reduced in size from that in use on the day when Prince Theodoric had been entertained at Stourwater – and, abandoning the tapestries, I became aware that Templer was chatting in his easy way to Matilda, while I myself had made no effort to engage his wife in conversation. Beyond Betty Templer, Moreland was already administering a tremendous scolding to Anne Umfraville, who, as soon as they sat down, had ventured to express some musical opinion which outraged him, an easy enough thing to do. Sir Magnus, on the other side, had begun to recount to Isobel the history of the castle.
‘Have you been to Stourwater before?’ I asked Betty Templer.
She stared at me with big, frightened eyes.
‘No.’
‘It’s rather a wonderful house, isn’t it?’
‘How – how do you mean?’
That question brought me up short. To like Stourwater, to disapprove, were both tenable opinions, but, as residence, the castle could hardly be regarded as anything except unusual. If Betty Templer had noticed none of its uncommon characteristics, pictures and furniture were not a subject to embark upon.
‘Do you know this part of the world at all?’
‘No,’ she said, after some hesitation.
‘Peter told me you lived at Sunningdale.’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been there long?’
‘Since we married.’
‘Good for getting up and down to London.’
‘I don’t go to London much.’
‘I suppose Peter gets back for dinner.’
‘Sometimes.’
She looked as if she might begin to cry. It was an imbecile remark on my part, the worst possible subject to bring up, talking to the wife of a man like Templer.
‘I expect it is all rather nice there, anyway,’ I said.
I knew that I was losing my head, that she would soon reduce me to as desperate a state, conversationally speaking, as herself.
‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘It was extraordinary Peter’s bringing us over in the car this evening. I hadn’t seen him for ages. We used to know each other so well at school.’
‘He knows such a lot of people,’ she said.
Her eyes filled with tears. There could be no doubt of it. I wondered what was going to happen next, fearing the worst. However, she made a tremendous effort.
‘Do you live in London?’ she asked.
‘Yes, we——’
‘I used to live in London when I was married to my first husband.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘He was in – in jute.’
‘Was he?’
For the moment I saw no way of utilising this opening.
‘Are you a stockbroker?’ she asked.
‘No . . . I . . .’
I suddenly felt unable to explain what I did, what I was. The difficulties seemed, for some reason, insuperable. Fortunately no explanation was necessary. She required of me no alternative profession.
‘Most of Peter’s friends are stockbrokers,’ she said, speaking rather more calmly, as if that thought brought some small balm to her soul, adding, a moment later, ‘Some of them live at Sunningdale.’
The situation was relieved at that moment by Matilda’s causing conversation to become general by returning to the subject of Sir Magnus and his photography.
‘You were talking about photographing people, Donners,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you begin on us after dinner? What could be nicer to photograph than the present company?’
‘What a good idea,’ said Anne Umfraville. ‘Do let’s do that, Magnus. It would be fun.’
She was greatly improved, far less truculent, than in the days when I had first met her. If Dicky Umfraville could not be said exactly to have knocked the nonsense out of her, marriage to him had certainly effected a change. At least the nonsense was, so to speak, rearranged in a manner less irksome to those with whom she came in contact. She no longer contradicted, as a matter of principle, every word spoken to her; her demeanour was friendly, rather than the reverse. Soon after our arrival at Stourwater, she had reminded Isobel that they were distant cousins; her musical blunder with Moreland was due to ignorance, not desire to exacerbate him; she was well disposed even to Matilda, who, as a former ‘girl’ of Sir Magnus’s, might well have incurred her antagonism. I thought she had obviously taken a fancy to Templer, and he to her. That might explain her excellent humour. It might also explain, at least in part, his wife’s ‘state’.
‘Oh, are we go
ing to be photographed?’ Betty Templer whispered at that moment in an agonised voice.
I concluded she had been reduced to her unhappy condition largely by Templer’s goings-on. Her own prettiness, silliness, adoration of himself must have brought Templer to the point of deciding to remove her from the husband who ‘bored her by talking of money all the time’. At a period when Templer was no doubt still smarting from his own abandonment by Mona, Betty had re-established his confidence by accepting him so absolutely. In marrying her, Templer had shown himself determined to make no such mistake a second time, to choose a wife unquestionably devoted to him, one possessing, besides, not too much life of her own. Mona, by the time she came Templer’s way, had had too many adventures. In Betty, he had certainly found adoration (throughout dinner, she continually cast tortured glances in his direction), but the price had been a high one. In short, Templer had picked a girl probably not quite ‘all there’ even at the beginning of their married life; then, by his rackety conduct, he had sent her never very stable faculties off their balance. Betty Templer was simply not equipped to cope with her husband, to stand up to Templer’s armour-plated egotism as a ‘ladies’ man’. The qualities that had bowled her over before marriage – that bowled her over, so far as that went, still – had also driven her to the borders of sanity. Never very bright in the head, she had been shattered by the unequal battle. The exercise of powerful ‘charm’ is, in any case, more appreciated in public than in private life, exacting, as it does, almost as heavy demands on the receiver as the transmitter, demands often too onerous to be weighed satisfactorily against the many other, all too delicate, requirements of married life. No doubt affairs with other women played their part as well. In the circumstances, it was inconceivable that Templer did not have affairs with other women. That, at least, was my own reading of the situation. Anyway, whatever the cause, there could be no doubt Betty Templer’s spirit was broken, that she was near the end of her tether. Templer must have been aware of that himself. In fact, his perpetual awareness of it explained my own consciousness of some horror in the background when he had stepped from his car that evening. He was always kind, I noticed, when he spoke to Betty, would probably have done anything in his power – short of altering his own way of life, which perhaps no one can truly do – to alleviate this painful situation. It was a gruesome predicament. I thought how ironic that Templer, my first friend to speak with assurance of ‘women’ and their ways, should have been caught up in this dire matrimonial trap. These impressions shot across the mind, disquieting, evanescent, like forked lightning. Sir Magnus, who had been silent for a minute or two, now leaned forward over the dinner-table, as if to carry us all with him at some all important board meeting – at a Cabinet itself – in the pursuance of an onerous project he had in mind.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 2 Page 56