Anthony Powell - Temporary Kings

‘Somebody once did that with a banana at school. His face must have a radar-like attraction for fruit. Glober still wants to marry Pamela in spite of all this?’

‘I think so. He’s quite tough. He says all his contemporaries have drunk themselves crazy, undergone major surgery, discharged both barrels with their big toe, dropped down dead on the set, and he’s not going to fall for any of that. All the same, he’s disturbed about Gwinnett. Pam asked Louis if Gwinnett was queer. That’s what worried him. Her interest. Is he?’

‘Homosexual?’

‘Of course.’

‘I don’t think so. I don’t think he’s very normal either.’

‘Will Gwinnett’s book about Trapnel be good? Ought we to publish it? We’ll talk about that later. Here’s my vaporetto. See you at the Men of Letters | Men of Science session. I must polish up my speech. Don’t breathe a word about anything I’ve said, will you?’

She boarded a vessel bound for the Lido. I waited for the next boat heading towards the Grand Canal. To present Sir Magnus Donners as Candaules at the Bragadin dinner party showed imagination on Pamela’s part. Bob Duport had offered much the same solution as to what Sir Magnus ‘liked’.

‘Donners never minded people getting off with his girls. I’ve heard he’s a voyeur.’

Barnby, without arriving at that logical conclusion, had expressed the same mild surprise at Sir Magnus’s lack of jealousy. The subject, reduced to the crude medium of the peep-hole, recalled the visit to Stourwater, when, without warning, its owner had suddenly appeared through a concealed door, decorated with the spines of dummy books, just as if he had been waiting at an observation post. The principle could clearly be extended from a mere social occasion to one with intimate overtones. The power element in both uses was obvious enough.

‘Peter may have developed special tastes too,’ Duport said. ‘Very intensive womanizing sometimes leads to that, and no one can say Peter hasn’t been intensive.’

In days when Peter Templer had been pursuing Pamela, he might easily have talked to her about Sir Magnus, even taken her to see him, but not at Stourwater, the castle by then converted to wartime uses. The fact that his former home was now a girl’s school, looked on as expensive, could hardly be unpleasing to the shade of Sir Magnus, if it walked there. The practices attributed to him, justly or not, had to be admitted as inescapably grotesque, humour never more patently the enemy of sex. Perhaps Gyges, too, had felt that; as king, living his next forty years in an atmosphere of meticulous sexual normality. I should have liked to discuss the whole matter with Moreland, but, although he was no longer married to Matilda, the habits of Sir Magnus and his mistresses remained a delicate one to broach. He was like that. Moreland was not well. In fact, things looked pretty bad. He would work for a time with energy, then fall into a lethargic condition. There had been financial strains too. One of his recordings becoming in a small way a popular hit, made that side easier lately. We rarely met. He and Audrey Maclintick — whom he had never married — lived, together with a black cat, Hardicanute, an obscure, secluded life.

At the hotel desk they handed out a letter from Isobel. I took it upstairs to read. Across the top of the page, an afterthought from personal things, that amorphous yet intense substance of which family life is made up, she had scribbled a casual postscript.

‘Have you seen about Ferrand-Sénéschal? Probably not as you never read the papers abroad. Fascinating rumours about Pamela Widmerpool.’

I lay on the bed and dozed. It would have been wiser to have drunk less at lunch. I felt Glober was to blame. Quite a long time later the telephone buzzed, waking me.

‘Hullo?’

‘Is that Mr Jenkins?’

It was a man’s voice, an American’s.

‘Speaking.’

‘It’s Russell Gwinnett.’

‘Why, hullo?’

There was a pause at the other end of the line. I was not sure we had not been cut off. Then Gwinnett cleared his throat.

‘Can we have a talk?’

‘Of course. When?’

He seemed undecided. While he was thinking, I looked to see the time. It was well after six.

‘Now, if you like. We could have a drink somewhere.’

‘I can’t manage right now.’

There was another long pause. He seemed to regret having called. At least he sounded as if he required help in making up his mind whether or not to ring off. It looked as if he would do that, unless I could suggest an alternative. I had no plans for the evening. Dinner with Gwinnett would solve that problem. In an odd way, prospect of his company gave a sense of adventure.

‘How about dining together?’

Gwinnett considered the proposal for some seconds. The idea seemed not greatly to appeal, but in the end he concurred. ‘OK.’

He made it sound a concession.

‘Where shall that be?’

‘Not in the hotel, I guess.’

‘I agree.’

Talk took place about restaurants. Gwinnett showed himself unexpectedly knowledgeable. In this, as in other matters, he was a dark horse. We fixed on one at last, arranging to meet at the table. He showed no immediate sign of getting off the line, but did not speak, nor appear, at that juncture, to have more to say.

‘Eight o’clock then?’

‘OK.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘OK.’

I hung up. He was not an easy man. All the same, I liked him. Later, at the restaurant, he turned up punctually. The fact that I liked him was just as well, otherwise dinner, anyway at the start, would have been tedious. I had supposed, rather complacently, that Gwinnett wanted to talk about his assignation with Pamela; report on it, ask an opinion, perhaps discuss future tactics. As the meal progressed, he showed no sign of approaching that subject. The appointment might well have foundered. Nothing was more probable. The more one thought about it, the less likely seemed any possibility of Pamela having turned up. Gwinnett had almost certainly waited, perhaps for an hour or two, in the porch of the Basilica, then trudged back to the hotel. That was the picture. In any case, now we were together, he had to be allowed to approach the matter On his own terms. To force an issue would be fatal. Without going into details about Tokenhouse, I mentioned meeting Glober at the Biennale, lunching in his company. Gwinnett showed no interest. He talked of Conference matters. He was preparing a report for his College. The College, so it appeared, had arranged his attendance with that in view, the Venetian visit combined with London, for Trapnel research. He asked if I had known Dr Brightman for long.

‘I met her for the first time here. I’d read some of her books.’

Gwinnett spoke highly of Dr Brightman, the good impression she had made on the Faculty, when exchange professor, her influence on his own way of looking at things. He said all that quite simply, in the manner Americans achieve, without self-consciousness or affectation, serious comment that, in English terms, would require — at least almost certainly receive — less direct unvarnished treatment. He let fall that his family had moved to New England after the Civil War. The impression was of an unusual, rather lonely young man, who had sustained a kind of intellectual nourishment from an older woman, with whom no sort of cross-currents of gender, not the slightest, were in question. I still wondered what was his trouble, the wound that had somehow maimed him. Dr Brightman must have been understanding about whatever that might be. Dinner was nearly at an end, when, quite suddenly, he turned to the subject of Pamela. This employment of two personalities in himself was possibly deliberate; voluntary or involuntary, characteristic of him.