England on the eve of war - once again - Dance to the Music of Time

So let me try to piece together where we are right now in Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time volume 6, The Kindly Ones, end of part 2, as it is taking me a while to reacquaint myself with the many characters and their complicated inter-relationships: we are now in the early days of WWII in London; narrator, Nick Jenkins, is married to Isobel - we know very little about her (and v. little about his family and his personal life except thru his observations of others); I think he is in some kind of public-relations or publishing business, but not sure - his work life not much discussed. He and his friend, the sullen and eccentric composer, Moreland, and Moreland's new wife, Matilda, are invited to a party chez Sir Magnus Donner, a snobbish aristocrat with no taste who lives in a ghastly and gloomy fake castle with a dungeon - J. had visited before, and was struck by Donner's sadistic comments about keeping naughty women in the dungeon - Donner has had a series of marriages and relationships, including one with Matilda, making this visit rather fraught. D sends a driver to bring them there - turns out to be - in a twist so typical of this series - J's old schoolmate Peter Templar, a wealthy ladies man - whom he hadn't seen in many years. Templar is related in a way I can't recollect to J's old crush, Ann, and gives J the update on Ann - now remarried to a Latin American officer. At the party, Templar's wife, very shy and mentally fragile, has a kind of breakdown - which reminds J of the servant Billson's breakdown that he recollected in the first part of the novel. Also at the party, the odd duck and totally obsequious character, also going back to school days, Kenneth Widmerpool, shows up - he's clearly involved in some nasty war profiteering deals with Sir Magnus; he's also in uniform - a reminder of the war that is brewing on the continent. (I thought that the previous volume already had J. and W. serving during war time but I may be wrong on that.) This all sounds pretty complicated, but it's not that hard to follow; Powell is a very good narrator and guide, and he's great on creating or re-creating these social scenes - dinner parties, dates and clubs, etc. - in which there are huge clashes of personality and ideology that serve as a microcosm of the social upheavals and fractures taking place in England during this time - a great novel of society, as told through the lives of a small set of characters, much like Parade's End but more accessible (and longer).