At Lady Molly's by Anthony Powell Read Free Book Online

not.’
    Alfred Tolland showed no disposition to deny the ‘dottiness’ of his niece, Blanche.
    ‘Robert is a bit of a mystery. He is in some business, but I don’t know whether he will stay there. Isobel—well, she is a bit different too. I’m not sure she isn’t going to get engaged soon herself. Then there is Priscilla, who is on the point of coming out, and was to have been here tonight, but she doesn’t seem to have turned up yet.’
    I made an effort to take in this bird’s-eye view of the Tollands, who now seemed to surround me on all sides after this vivid exposition of their several characters. Instinctively, I felt the greatest interest in Isobel, who was ‘different’; and also an odd feeling of regret that she might be about to become engaged in the near future. While I was brooding on this, Jeavons joined us. He stood there, scanning everyone’s face closely, as if hoping for some explanation of the matter in hand; perhaps even of life itself, so intense was his concentration: some reasonable interpretation couched in terms simple enough for a plain man to understand without undue effort. He also gave the impression of an old dog waiting to have a ball thrown to retrieve, more because that was the custom in the past than because sport or exercise was urgently required. However, no one enlightened him as to the subject under discussion, so he merely filled up my glass, and then his own. His wife and Alfred Tolland had now embarked on some detailed aspect of Tolland life, too esoteric for an outsider to follow.
    ‘In the film business like Chips?’ Jeavons asked, in a low husky voice, as if he had a cold coming on, or had drunk too much whisky the night before.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Ever met any of the stars?’
    ‘Not so you’d notice. I’m on the scenario side. The studio only makes English pictures for the quota. They wouldn’t be likely to employ anyone very grand in the way of an actor or actress.’
    Jeavons seemed disappointed at this answer.
    ‘Still,’ he urged, ‘you must see some beauties sometimes, don’t you?’
    ‘I’ve sat next to Adolph Menjou,’ said his wife, suddenly abandoning the subject of the Tollands, and breaking in with her accustomed violence, though not, I think, with any idea of preventing him from pursuing the question of film actresses and their looks. ‘He had such nice manners. Of course Garbo is the one I should really like to meet. I suppose everyone would. Wouldn’t you like to meet Garbo, Alfred?’
    ‘Never heard of him,’ said Tolland.
    Inevitably there was some laughter at this.
    ‘It’s a she ,’ said Molly Jeavons. ‘It’s a she , Alfred.’
    ‘An actress, I suppose,’ said Tolland, ‘or you wouldn’t be using that tone of voice. I don’t think I particularly want to meet Miss Garbo—or perhaps it is Mrs. Garbo.’
    There was more laughter at that. I was not sure—I am not sure to this day—whether he was feigning ignorance of the famous film star, whose name at that moment, the zenith of her fame, was a synonym for mysterious, elusive, feminine beauty; or whether he had, in truth, never heard of her.
    ‘I once met Mrs. Patrick Campbell when I was a young man,’ he said, speaking as if the statement was an afterthought. ‘Heard her read aloud High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire . Wonderful experience. Felt different all the evening. Couldn’t sleep after it. Lay awake—well—till the morning, nearly.’
    Possibly Molly Jeavons felt that for a brief second the tables had been turned on her, because she now returned to the charge in the game of baiting him about his family, probably feeling in that activity on safer ground.
    ‘Tell us more about the stained-glass window, Alfred,’ she said.
    This request galvanised him once again to the point of anger. She seemed to have touched some specially sensitive nerve.
    ‘I’ve told you already, Molly,’ he said, ‘the window has never been put up as it should have been. Erridge