The kindly ones by Anthony Powell Page B

others, concentrated whole-heartedly on amusing himself. This was within the limitations of the diffidence that enclosed him in dealings with women. There could be no doubt that Matilda herself had taken the decision that they should marry. Barnby used to say that women always take that decision. In any case, Matilda liked taking decisions. This taste of hers suited them both at the beginning of their married life, because Moreland was wholly without it, except where his own work was concerned.
    ‘The arts derive entirely from taking decisions,’ he used to say. ‘That is why they make such unspeakably burdensome demands on all who practise them. Having taken the decisions music requires, I want to be free of all others.’
    Moreland’s childhood – since I have spoken at some length of childhood – had been a very different affair from my own. In the first place, music, rather than military matters, had been regarded as the normal preoccupation of those round him in the house of his aunt who brought him up. I mean music was looked upon there not only as an art, but also as the familiar means of earning a livelihood. In my own home, the arts, to some very considerable extent respected, were not at all regarded in that essentially matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, down-to-earth manner. When my father was attached to a cavalry regiment at Brighton before we moved to Stonehurst, my parents might attend an occasional concert at the Pavilion; meet Mr Deacon there, afterwards visit his flat. They would even be aware that Mr Deacon was a ‘bad’ painter. At the same time, painting, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – like music, sculpture, writing and, of course, acting – would immutably remain for them an unusual, not wholly desirable, profession for an acquaintance. Indeed, a ‘good’ painter, certainly a well-known ‘modern’ painter (even though ‘modernism’ in the arts was by no means frowned upon by my father), would be considered even more of a freak than Mr Deacon himself, since being ‘well-known’ was, by its very nature, something of a social aberration. It was in Mr Deacon’s Brighton flat that he produced those huge pictures that might have been illustrations to Miss Orchard’s lessons about the gods of Olympus. Mr Deacon, in the words of his great hero, Walt Whitman, used to describe them as ‘the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans’. The Furies were probably never represented by his brush, because Mr Deacon shunned what Dicky Umfraville used always to call ‘the female form divine’.
    In the household of Moreland’s aunt, on the other hand, although there might be no money to spare – keeping solvent in itself rather a struggle – relatively celebrated persons flourished, so to speak, just round the corner. Moreland himself rather reluctantly agreed that some of the musicians who turned up there were ‘quite famous’, even if the writers and painters ‘showed an abysmal lack of talent’. ‘Modernism’ in the arts, if not much practised, was freely discussed. Life was seedy; it was also conducted on a plane in general more grown-up, certainly more easygoing, than existence at Stonehurst; for that matter at any of the other ever changing residences I had known as a child. For Moreland, the war had been no more than a mysterious, disturbing inconvenience in the background, the disagreeable cause to which indifferent or inadequate food was always attributed. It was not the sudden conversion into action of an idea already to a great extent familiar – even though the stupendous explosion of that idea, rendered into action, had never wholly ceased to ring in one’s ears. These were not the only dissimilarities of upbringing. From an early age, Moreland was looked upon by his aunt, and everyone else in their circle, as a boy destined to make a brilliant career in music. Even his childhood had been geared to that assumption. My own more modest ambition – not, as it