Anthony Powell - A Buyers Market
“It was at Stourwater,” said Lady Walpole-Wilson. “As a matter of fact we have been asked over there on Sunday. Prince Theodoric is staying there with Sir Magnus Donners.”
I knew the castle by name, and was even aware in a vague kind of way that it had often changed hands during the previous fifty or hundred years; but I had never seen the place, nor had any idea that Sir Magnus Donners lived there.
“And I so much wanted that afternoon to see those two hound puppies Nokes is walking,” said Eleanor. “Now it turns out we are being forced to go to this ghastly luncheon-party.”
“Got to be civil to one’s neighbours, my dear,” said Sir Gavin. “Besides, Theodoric has particularly asked to see me.”
“I don’t know what you call ‘neighbours’,” said Eleanor. “Stourwater is twenty-five miles, at least.”
“Nonsense,” said Sir Gavin. “I doubt if it is twenty-three.”
His attitude towards Eleanor varied between almost doting affection and an approach most easily suggested by the phrase “making the best of a bad job.” There were times when she vexed him. Arguing with her father brought out the resemblance between the two of them, though features that, in Sir Gavin, seemed conventionalised to the point, almost, of stylisation took on a peculiar twist in his daughter. As she sat there at the table, I could recognise no similarity whatever to Barbara — of whom at times I still found myself thinking — except for their shared colouring.
“I explained to Donners that we should be quite a large party,” said Sir Gavin, “but he would not hear of anyone being left behind. In any case, there is plenty of room there, and the castle itself is well worth seeing.”
“I don’t think I shall come after all, Gavin,” said Miss Walpole-Wilson. “No one will want to see me there — least of all Prince Theodoric. Although I dare say he is too young to remember the misunderstanding that arose, when I stayed with you, regarding that remark about ‘travesty of democratic government’—and you know I never care for people with too much money.”
“Oh, come, Janet,” said Sir Gavin. “Of course they will all want to see you — the Prince especially. He is a very go-ahead fellow, everyone who has met him agrees. As a matter of fact, you know as well as I do, the old King laughed heartily when I explained the circumstance of your remark. He made a rather broad joke about it. I’ve told you a thousand times. Besides, Donners is not a bad fellow at all.”
“I can’t get on with those people — ever.”
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘those people’,” said Sir Gavin, a trifle irritably. “Donners is no different from anyone else, except that he may be a bit richer. He didn’t start life barefoot — not that I for one should have the least objection if he had, more power to his elbow — but his father was an eminently solid figure. He was knighted, I believe, for what that’s worth. Donners went to some quite decent school. I think the family are of Scandinavian, or North German, extraction. No doubt very worthy people.”
“Oh, I do hope he isn’t German,” said Lady Walpole-Wilson. “I never thought of that.”
“Personally, I have a great admiration for the Germans — I do not, of course, mean the Junkers,” said her sister-in-law. “They have been hardly treated. No one of liberal opinions could think otherwise. And I certainly do not object to Sir Magnus on snobbish grounds. You know me too well for that, Gavin. I have no doubt, as you say, that he has many good points. All the same, I think I had better stay at home. I can make a start on my article about the Bosnian Moslems for the news-sheet of the Minority Problems League.”
“If Aunt Janet doesn’t go, I don’t see why I should,” said Eleanor. “I don’t in the least want to meet Prince Theodoric.”
“I do,” said Rosie Manasch. “I thought he looked too fetching at Goodwood.”
In the laugh that followed this certainly tactful expression of preference, earlier warnings of potential family difference died away. Sir Gavin began to describe, not for the first time, the occasion when, as a young secretary in some Oriental country, he had stained his face with coffee-grounds and, like Haroun-al-Raschid, “mingled” in the bazaar: with, so it appeared, useful results. The story carried dinner safely to the dessert, a stage when Pardoe brought conversation back once more to Sunday’s expedition by asking whether Sir Magnus Donners had purchased Stourwater from the family with whom Barbara was staying in Scotland, for whose house he was himself bound on leaving Hinton.
“He bought it from a relation of mine,” said Rosie Manasch. “Uncle Leopold always says he sold it — with due respect to you, Eleanor — because the hunting round here wasn’t good enough. I think it was really because it cost too much to keep up.”
“It is all very perfect now,” said Sir Gavin. “Rather too perfect for my taste. In any case, I am no medievalist.”
He looked round the table challengingly after saying this, rather as Uncle Giles was inclined to glare about him after making some more or less tendentious statement, whether because he suspected that one or other of us, in spite of this disavowal, would charge him with covert medievalism, or in momentary hesitation that, in taking so high a line on the subject of an era at once protracted and diversified, he ran risk of exposure to the impeachment of “missing something” thereby, was uncertain.
“There is the Holbein, too,” said Lady Walpole-Wilson. “You really must come, Janet, I know you like pictures.”
“The castle belongs, like Bodiam, to the later Middle Ages,” said Sir Gavin, assuming all at once the sing-song tones of a guide or lecturer. “And, like Bodiam, Stourwater possesses little or no historical interest, as such, while remaining, so far as its exterior is concerned, architecturally one of the most complete, and comparatively unaltered, fortified buildings of its period. For some reason—”
“—for some reason the defences were not dismantled—‘sleighted,’ I think you call it — at the time of the Civil Wars,” cut in Lady Walpole-Wilson, as if answering the responses in church, or completing the quotation of a well-known poem to show apreciation of its aptness. “Though subsequent owners undertook certain improvements in connection with the structural fabric of the interior, with a view to increasing Stourwater’s convenience as a private residence in more peaceful times.”
“I have already read a great deal of what you have been saying in Stourwater and Its Story, a copy of which was kindly placed by my bed,” said Miss Walpole-Wilson. “I doubt if all the information given there is very accurate.”
For some reason a curious sense of excitement rose within me at prospect of this visit. I could not explain to myself this feeling, almost of suspense, that seemed to hang over the expedition. I was curious to see the castle, certainly, hut that hardly explained an anxiety that Eleanor’s hound puppies, or Miss Walpole-Wilson’s humours, might prevent my going there. That night I lay awake thinking about Stourwater as if it had been the sole motive for my coming to Hinton: fearing all the time that some hitch would occur. However, the day came and we set out, Miss Walpole-Wilson, in spite of her earlier displeasure, finally agreeing to accompany the party, accommodated in two cars, one of them driven by Sir Gavin himself. There was perhaps a tacit suggestion that he would have liked Rosie Manasch to travel with him, but, although as a rule not unwilling to accept his company, and approval, she chose, on this occasion, the car driven by the chauffeur.
When we came to Stourwater that Sunday morning, the first sight was impressive. Set among oaks and beeches in a green hollow of the land, the castle was approached by a causeway crossing the remains of a moat, a broad expanse of water through which, with great deliberation, a pair of black swans, their passage sending ripples through the pond weed, glided between rushes swaying gently in the warm September air. Here was the Middle Age, from the pages of Tennyson, or Scott, at its most elegant: all sordid and painful elements subtly removed. Some such thought must have struck Sir Gavin too, for I heard him murmuring at the wheel:
“‘And sometimes thro’ the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two…”
There was, in fact, no one about at all; neither knights nor hinds, this absence of human life increasing a sense of unreality, as if we were travelling in a dream. The cars passed under the portcullis, and across a cobbled quadrangle. Beyond this open space, reached by another archway, was a courtyard of even larger dimensions, in the centre of which a sunken lawn had been laid out, with a fountain at the centre, and carved stone flower-pots, shaped like urns, at each of the four corners. The whole effect was not, perhaps, altogether in keeping with the rest of the place. Through a vaulted gateway on one side could be seen the high yew hedges of the garden. Steps led up to the main entrance of the castle’s domestic wing, at which the cars drew up.
Mounted effigies in Gothic armour guarded either side of the door by which we entered the Great Hall; and these dramatic figures of man and horse struck a new and somewhat disturbing note; though one at which the sunken garden had already hinted. Such implications of an over-elaborate solicitude were followed up everywhere the eye rested, producing a result altogether different from the cool, detached vision manifested a minute or two earlier by grey walls and towers rising out of the green, static landscape. Something was decidedly amiss. The final consequence of the pains lavished on these halls and galleries was not precisely that of a Hollywood film set, the objects assembled being, in the first place, too genuine, too valuable; there was even a certain sense of fitness, of historical association more or less correctly assessed. The display was discomforting, not contemptible. The impression was of sensations that might precede one of those episodes in a fairy story, when, at a given moment, the appropriate spell is pronounced to cause domes and minarets, fountains and pleasure-gardens, to disappear into thin air; leaving the hero — in this case, Sir Magnus Donners — shivering in rags beneath the blasted oak of a grim forest, or scorched by rays of a blazing sun among the rocks and boulders of some desolate mountainside. In fact, Sir Gavin’s strictures on Stourwater as “too perfect” were inadequate as a delineation to the extent of being almost beside the point.
I had supposed that, in common with most visits paid on these terms in the country, the Walpole-Wilson group might be left most of the time huddled in a cluster of their own, while the Donners house-party, drawn together as never before by the arrival of strangers, would discourse animatedly together at some distance off, the one faction scarcely mixing at all with the other. This not uncommon predicament could no doubt in a general way have been exemplified soon after we had been received by Sir Magnus — looking more healthily clerical than ever — in the Long Gallery (at the far end of which hung the Holbein, one of the portraits of Erasmus), had not various unforeseen circumstances contributed to modify what might be regarded as a more normal course of events. For example, among a number of faces in the room possessing a somewhat familiar appearance, I suddenly noticed Stringham and Bill Truscott, both of whom were conversing with an unusually pretty girl.
We were presented, one by one, to Prince Theodoric, who wore a grey flannel suit, unreservedly continental in cut, and appeared far more at his ease than at Mrs. Andriadis’s party: smiling in a most engaging manner when he shook hands. He spoke that scrupulously correct English, characteristic of certain foreign royalties, that confers on the language a smoothness and flexibility quite alien to the manner in which English people themselves talk. There was a word from him for everyone. Sir Gavin seized his hand as if he were meeting a long lost son, while Prince Theodoric himself seemed, on his side, equally pleased at their reunion. Lady Walpole-Wilson, probably because she remembered Prince Theodoric only as a boy, showed in her eye apparent surprise at finding him so grown-up. Only Eleanor’s, and her aunt’s firmly-clasped lips and stiff curtsey suggested entire disapproval.
Further introductions took place. The Huntercombes were there — Lord Huntercombe was Lord Lieutenant of the county — and there were a crowd of persons whose identities, as a whole, I failed to assimilate; though here and there was recognisable an occasional notability like Sir Horrocks Rusby, whose name I remembered Widmerpool mentioning on some occasions, who had not so long before achieved a good deal of prominence in the newspapers as counsel in the Derwentwater divorce case. I also noticed Mrs. Wentworth — whom Sir Horrocks had probably cross-questioned in the witness-box — still looking rather sulky, as she stood in one of the groups about us. When the formalities of these opening moves of the game had been completed, and we had been given cocktails, Stringham strolled across the room. His face was deeply burned by the sun. I wondered whether this was the result of the Deauville trip, of which Mrs. Andriadis had spoken, or if, on the contrary, division between them had been final. He had not wholly lost his appearance of fatigue.
“You must inspect my future wife,” he said at once.
This announcement of imminent marriage was a complete surprise. Barnby had said, during the course of the evening we had spent together: “When people think they are never further from marriage, they are often, in reality, never nearer to it,” but that kind of precept takes time to learn. I had certainly accepted the implication that nothing was more distant than marriage from Stringham’s intentions when he had so violently abandoned Mrs. Andriadis’s house; although now I even wondered whether he could have decided to repair matters by making Mrs, Andriadis herself his wife. To be able to consider this a possibility showed, I suppose, in its grasp of potentialities, an advance on my own part of which I should have been incapable earlier in the year. However, without further developing the news, he led me, to the girl from whose side he had come, who was still talking to Truscott.
“Peggy,” he said, “this is an old friend of mine.”
Apart from former signs given by Stringham’s behaviour, external evidence had been supplied, indirectly by Anne Stepney, and directly by Rosie Manasch, to the effect that anything like an engagement was “off.” Peggy Stepney, whom I now recognised from pictures I had seen of her, was not unlike her sister, with hair of the same faintly-reddish shade, though here, instead of a suggestion of disorder, the elder sister looked as if she might just have stepped gracefully from the cover of a fashion magazine; “too perfect,” indeed, as Sir Gavin might have said. She was, of course, a “beauty,” and possessed a kind of cold symmetry, very taking, and at the same time a little alarming. However, this exterior was not accompanied by a parallel coolness of manner; on the contrary, she could in the circumstances scarcely have been more agreeable. While we talked, we were joined by Mrs. Wentworth, at whose arrival I was conscious of a slight stiffening in Stringham’s bearing, an almost imperceptible acerbity, due possibly — though by no means certainly, I thought — to the part played by Mrs. Wentworth in his sister’s divorce. In comparing the looks of the two young women, it was immediately clear that Peggy Stepney was more obviously the beauty; though there was something about Mrs. Wentworth that made the discord she had aroused in so many quarters easily understandable.
