A Buyers Market - Anthony Powell

As they skirted the wall, Sillery and his companion, by contrast remarkably spruce, had almost the appearance of a pair of desperadoes on their way to commit an act of violence, and, on reaching the place where the dark young man was standing, the Colonel certainly seemed to get rid of the women without much ceremony, treating them almost as a policeman might peremptorily “move on” from the corner of the street female loiterers of dubious complexion. The taller of the two girls was largely built, with china-blue eyes and yellow hair, holding herself in a somewhat conventionally languorous style: the other, dark, with small, pointed breasts and a neat, supple figure. The combined effect of their beauty was irresistible, causing a kind of involuntary pang, as if for a split-second I loved both of them passionately; though a further survey convinced me that nothing so disturbing had taken place. The girls composedly allowed themselves to be dislodged by Colonel Budd and Sillery: at the same time remaining on guard in a strategic position at a short distance, talking and laughing with each other, and with people in the immediate neighbourhood: evidently unwilling to abandon entirely their original stations vis-à-vis the young man.

The Colonel, imperceptibly inclining his neck in an abrupt gesture suggesting almost the sudden suppression of an unexpected eructation, presented Sillery, not without deference to this rather mysterious figure, regarding whom I had begun to feel a decided curiosity. The young man, smiling graciously, though rather shyly, held out a hand. Sillery, grinning broadly in return, made a deep bow that seemed, by its mixture of farce and formality, to accord perfectly with the cut of his evening clothes, in their implication of pantomime or charade. However, fearing that absorption in this scene, as reflected in the looking-glass, might have made me seem inattentive to Mr. Deacon’s exposition of difficulties experienced in contending with his household, I made further inquiries regarding Barnby’s status as a painter. Mr. Deacon did not warm to this subject. I found when I knew him better that this luke-warm attitude was not to be attributed entirely to jealousy he might feel towards Barnby’s success, but rather because, finding his own views on the subject so opposed to contemporary opinion as to be in practice untenable, he preferred to close his eyes to the existence of modern painting, just as formerly he had closed his eyes to politics and war. Accordingly, I asked about the nature of Barnby’s objections to Gypsy Jones.

“When Gypsy and I were first acquainted,” said Mr. Deacon, lowering his voice, “I was given to understand — well, hasn’t Swinburne got some lines about ‘wandering watery sighs where the sea sobs round Lesbian promontories’? In fact restriction to such a coastline was almost a condition of our association.”

“Did Barnby object?”

“I think he undoubtedly felt resentment,” said Mr. Deacon. “But, as a very dear friend of mine once remarked when I was a young man — for I was a young man once, whatever you may think to the contrary—‘Gothic manners don’t mix with Greek morals.’ Gypsy would never learn that.”

Mr. Deacon stopped speaking. He seemed to be deliberating within himself whether or not to ask some question, in the wording of which he found perhaps a certain embarrassment. After a few seconds he said: “As a matter of fact I am rather worried about Gypsy. I suppose you don’t happen to know the address of any medicos — I don’t mean the usual general practitioner with the restricted views of his profession — no, I didn’t for a moment suppose that you did. And of course one does not wish to get mixed up. I feel just the same as yourself. But you were inquiring about Barnby. I really must arrange for you to meet. I think you would like each other.”

When such scraps of gossip are committed to paper, the words bear a heavier weight than when the same information is imparted huskily between draughts of champagne, in the noise of a crowded room; besides which, my thoughts hovering still on the two girls who had been displaced by Sillery and Colonel Budd, I had not been giving very full attention to what Mr. Deacon had been saying. However, if I had at that moment considered Gypsy Jones’s difficulties with any seriousness, I should probably have decided, rightly or wrongly, that she was well able to look after herself. Even in the quietest forms of life the untoward is rarely far from the surface, and in the intemperate circles to which she seemed to belong nothing was surprising. I felt at the time absolutely no inclination to pursue the matter further. Mr. Deacon himself became temporarily lost in thought.

Our attention was at that moment violently reorientated by the return to the room of Mrs. Andriadis, who now shouted — a less forcible word would have been inadequate to describe her manner of announcing the news — that “darling Max” was going to sing: a statement creating a small upheaval in our immediate surroundings, owing to the proximity of the piano, upon which a bottle of champagne was now placed. A mild-looking young man in spectacles was thrust through the crowd, who seating himself on the music-stool, protested: “Must I really tickle the dominoes?” A number of voices at once encouraged him to embark upon his musical activity, and, after winding round the seat once or twice, apparently more as a ritual than for practical reasons, he struck a few chords.

“Really,” said Mr. Deacon, as if entitled to feel honest disgust at this development, “Mrs. Andriadis does not seem to care in the least whom she makes friends with.”

“Who is he?”

“Max Pilgrim — a public performer of some sort.”

The young man now began to sing in a tremulous, quavering voice, like that of an immensely ancient lady, though at the same time the words filled the room with a considerable volume of sound:

“I’m Tess of Le Touquet,

My morals are flukey,

Tossed on the foam,

I couldn’t be busier;

Permanent waves

Splash me into the caves;

Everyone loves me as much as Delysia.

When it’s wet on the Links, I know where to have a beau

Down in the club-house — next door to the lavabo.”

There was muffled laughter and some fragmentary applause, though a hum of conversation continued to be heard round about us.

“I don’t care for this at all,” said Mr. Deacon. “To begin with, I do not entirely understand the meaning of the words — if they have any meaning — and, in the second place, the singer once behaved to me in what I consider an objectionable manner. I can’t think how Mrs. Andriadis can have him in the house. It can’t do her reputation any good.”

The appearance of Max Pilgrim at the piano had thoroughly put out Mr. Deacon. In an attempt to relieve the gloom that had fallen on him I inquired about Mrs. Andriadis’s past.

“Barnby knows more about her than I do,” he said, rather resentfully. “She is said to have been mistress of a Royal Personage for a time. Personally I am not greatly stimulated by such revelations.”

“Is she still kept?”

“My dear boy, you have the crudest way of putting things,” said Mr. Deacon, smiling at this, and showing signs of cheering up a little. “No — so far as I am aware — our hostess is no longer ‘kept,’ as you are pleased to term the former state of life to which she was called by Providence. A client of mine told me that her present husband — there have been several — possessed comprehensive business interests in Manchester, or that region. My friend’s description suggested at least a sufficient competence on the latest husband’s part for the condition of dependence you mention to be, financially speaking, no longer necessary for his lady — even, perhaps, undesirable. Apart from this, I know little of Mr. Andriadis, though I imagine him to be a man of almost infinite tolerance. You are, I expect, familiar, with Barnby’s story of the necklace?”

“What necklace?”

“Milly,” said Mr. Deacon, pronouncing Mrs. Andriadis’s name with affected delicacy, “Milly saw a diamond-and-emerald necklace in Cartier’s. It cost, shall we say, two million francs. She approached the Royal Personage, who happened to be staying at the Crillon at that moment, and asked for the money to buy herself the necklace as a birthday present. The Royal Personage handed her the banknotes — which he was no doubt accustomed to keep in his pocket — and Milly curtsied her way out. She went round the corner to the apartment of a well-known French industrialist — I cannot remember which, but you would know the name — who was also interested in her welfare, and requested him to drive there and then to Cartier’s and buy the necklace on the spot. This the industrialist was obliging enough to do. Milly, was, therefore, two million francs to the good, and could, at the same time, give pleasure to both her protectors by wearing the necklace in the company of either. Simple — like all great ideas.”

Mr Deacon paused. He seemed all at once to regret this sudden, and uncharacteristic, outburst of sophistication on so mundane a subject. The anecdote had certainly been told in a manner entirely foreign to his accustomed tone in dealing with worldly matters; discussed by him in general, at least publicly — as I found at a later date, as if all practical transactions were wrapped in mystery impenetrable for one of his simple outlook. Such an approach had been, indeed, habitual with him at all times, and, even so far back as the days when my parents used to speak of him, I could recall banter about Mr. Deacon’s repeatedly expressed ignorance of the world. This attitude did not, of course, repudiate on his part a certain insistence on his own knowingness in minor, and more “human,” affairs, such as the running of his shop, described so precisely by him a short time earlier at the coffee-stall. The story of the necklace was, I thought, in some way vaguely familiar to me. It had possibly figured in the repertoire of Peter Templer at school, the heroine of Templer’s anecdote, so I believed, represented as a well-known actress rather than Mrs. Andriadis herself.

“Not that I know anything of such gallivanting,” said Mr. Deacon, as if by now ashamed of his momentary abandonment of the unassailable position vouchsafed to him by reliance, in all circumstances, on an artist’s traditional innocence of heart. “Personally I should be delighted for kings, priests, armament manufacturers, poules de luxe, and hoc genus omne to be swept into the dust-bin — and I might add all the nonsense we find about us tonight.”

As he stopped speaking, the words of the song, which had been proceeding through a number of verses, now became once more audible:

“Even the fairies

Say how sweet my hair is;

They mess my mascara and pinch the peroxide.

I know a coward

Would be overpowered,

When they all offer to be orthodox. I’d

Like to be kind but say: ‘Some other day, dears;

Pansies for thoughts remains still the best way, dears.’”

This verse gave great offence to Mr. Deacon. Indeed, its effect was almost electric in the suddenness of the ferment it caused within him. He brushed away a lock of grey hair fallen over his forehead, and clenched his fist until the knuckles were white. He was evidently very angry. “Insufferable!” he said. “And from such a person.”

He had gone quite pale with irritation. The Negro, too, perhaps himself a vocalist, or performer upon some instrument, had also been watching Max Pilgrim with a look of mounting, though silent, hatred that had contracted the whole of his face into a scowl of self-righteous rage. This look seemed by then to have dramatised his bearing into the character of Othello. But the pianist, taking occasional nips at his champagne, showed no sign of observing any of the odium aroused by him in these or other quarters. Mr. Deacon sighed. There was a moment when I thought he might, there and then, have decided to leave the house. His chest heaved. However, he evidently made up his mind to dismiss unpleasant reflections.

“Your young friend appears to hold the place of honour here,” he said, in a more restrained voice. “Is he rich? Who are his parents — if I am not being inquisitive?”

“They are divorced. His father married a Frenchwoman and lives in Kenya. His mother was a South African, also remarried — to a sailor called Foxe.”

“Buster Foxe?”

“Yes.”

“Rather a chic sailor,” said Mr. Deacon. “If I mistake not, I used to hear about him in Paris. And she started life as wife of some belted earl or other.”

He was again showing recklessness in giving voice to these spasmodic outbursts of worldly knowledge. The champagne perhaps caused this intermittent pulling aside of the curtain that concealed some, apparently considerable, volume of practical information about unlikely people: a little storehouse, the existence of which he was normally unwilling to admit, yet preserved safely at the back of his mind in case of need.

“What was the name?” he went on. “She is a very handsome woman — or was.”

“Warrington.”

“The Beautiful Lady Warrington!” said Mr. Deacon. “I remember seeing a photograph of her in The Queen. There was some nonsense there, too, about a fancy-dress ball she had given. When will people learn better? And Warrington himself was much older than she, and died soon after their marriage. He probably drank.”

“So far as I know, he was a respectable brigadier-general. It is Charles Stringham’s father who likes the bottle.”

“They are all the same,” said Mr. Deacon, decisively.

Whether this condemnation was aimed at all husbands of Stringham’s mother, or, more probably, intended, in principle, to embrace members of the entire social stratum from which these husbands had, up to date, been drawn, was not made clear. Once more he fell into silence, as if thinking things over. Max Pilgrim continued to hammer and strum and take gulps of champagne, while against an ever-increasing buzz of conversation, he chanted his song continuously, as if it were a narrative poem or saga recording the heroic, legendary deeds of some primitive race:

“I do hope Tallulah

Now feels a shade cooler,

But why does she pout, as she wanders so far off

From Monsieur Citroën,

Who says something knowin’

To Lady Cunard and Sir Basil Zaharoff?

Has someone guessed who was having a beano

At Milly’s last party behind the Casino?”

This verse turned out to be the climax. Max Pilgrim, removing his spectacles, rose and bowed. Since the beginning of the song, many people, among them Mrs. Andriadis herself, had drifted away, and the room was now half empty, though a small group of enthusiasts still hovered round the piano. This residuum now clapped and applauded heartily. Pilgrim was almost immediately led away by two ladies, neither of them young. What remained of the crowd began to shift and rearrange its component parts, so that in the movement following the song’s termination Mr. Deacon was swept away from his corner. I watched him betake himself by easy stages to the door, no doubt with the object of further exploration. While I was looking, someone grasped my arm, and I found that Sillery was standing beside me.