Free A Question of Upbringing by Anthony Powell Page B

own profit. Stringham and I talked of school affairs. The luncheon party—the whole house—was in an obscure way depressing. I had looked forward to coming there, but was quite glad when it was time to go.
    ‘Write and tell me anything that may happen,’ said Stringham, at the door. ‘Especially anything funny that Peter may do.’
    I promised to report any of Templer’s outstanding adventures, and we arranged to meet in nine or ten months’ time.
    ‘I shall long to come back to England,’ Stringham said. ‘Not that I specially favour the idea of universities. Undergraduates all look so wizened, and suède shoes appear to be compulsory.’
    Berkeley Square, as I drove through it, was cold and bright and remote: like Buster’s manner. I wondered how it would be to return to school with only the company of Templer for the following year; because there was no one else with any claim to take Stringham’s place, so that Templer and I would be left alone together. Stringham’s removal was going to alter the orientation of everyday life. I found a place in a crowded compartment, next to the engine, beside an elderly man wearing a check suit, who, for the whole journey, quarrelled quietly with a clergyman on the subject of opening the window, kept on taking down a dispatch-case from the rack and rummaging through it for papers that never seemed to be there, and in a general manner reminded me of the goings-on of Uncle Giles.
     
    Uncle Giles’s affairs had, in fact, moved recently towards something like a climax. After nearly two years of silence—since the moment when he had disappeared into the fog, supposedly on his way to Reading—nothing had been heard of him; until one day a letter had arrived, headed with the address of an hotel in the Isle of Man, the contents of which implied, though did not state, that he intended to get married. In anticipation of this contingency, my uncle advocated a thorough overhaul of the conditions of the Trust; and expressed, not for the first time, the difficulties that lay in the path of a man without influence.
    This news caused my parents some anxiety; for, although Uncle Giles’s doings during the passage of time that had taken place were unknown in detail, his connection withReading had been established, with fair certainty, to be the result of an association with a lady who lived there: some said a manicurist: others the widow of a garage-proprietor. There was, indeed, no reason why she should not have sustained both rôles. The topic was approached in the family circle with even more gloom, and horrified curiosity, than Uncle Giles’s activities usually aroused: misgiving being not entirely groundless, since Uncle Giles was known to be almost as indiscriminate in dealings with the opposite sex as he was unreliable in business negotiation. His first serious misadventure, when stationed in Egypt as a young man, had, indeed, centred upon a love affair.
    It was one of Uncle Giles’s chief complaints that he had been ‘put’ into the army—for which he possessed neither Mrs. Foxe’s romantic admiration nor her hard-headed grasp of military realities—instead of entering some unspecified profession in which his gifts would have been properly valued. He had begun his soldiering in a line regiment: later, with a view to being slightly better paid, exchanging into the Army Service Corps. I used to imagine him wearing a pill-box cap on the side of his head, making assignations under a sub-tropical sun with a beautiful lady dressed in a bustle and sitting in an open carriage driven by a coloured coachman; though such attire, as a matter of fact, belonged to a somewhat earlier period; and, even if circumstances resembled this picture in other respects, the chances were, on the whole, that assignations would be made, and kept, ‘in mufti’.
    There had been, in fact, two separate rows, which somehow became entangled together: somebody’s wife, and somebody else’s money: to say