Anthony Powell - Temporary Kings

Gwinnett was certainly showing himself capable of handling Pamela in his own manner. He seemed, at worst, to have accomplished a transformation of roles, in which she stalked him, rather than he her. That might produce equally hazardous consequences, not least because Pamela herself showed positive taste for the readjustment. The hunter’s pursuit was no doubt familiar to her from past experience, only exceptional, in this case, to the extent that Gwinnett was already in her power from need to acquire Trapnel material.

‘OK,’ he said.

The three of us set off together. Nothing much was said until we were quite close to the hotel. Then, on a little humped bridge crossing a narrow waterway, Pamela stopped. She went to the parapet of the bridge, leant over it, looking down towards the canal. Gwinnett and I stopped too. She stared at the water for some time without saying anything. Then she spoke in her low unaccentuated manner.

‘I’ve thought of nothing but X since I’ve been in Venice. I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal. You know Louis Glober wants to do it as a film, with that ending. It might have happened here. This place just below.’

Gwinnett seemed almost to have been waiting for her to make that speech.

‘Why did you do it?’

He asked that quite bluntly.

‘You think it was just to be bitchy.’

‘I never said so.’

‘But you think it.’

He did not answer. Pamela left the parapet of the bridge. She moved slowly towards him.

‘I threw the book away because it wasn’t worthy of X.’

‘Then why do you want Glober to make a picture of something not worthy?’

‘Because the best parts can be preserved in a film.’

I supposed by that she meant her own part, in whatever Trapnel had written, could be recorded that way; at least her version of it. Then Gwinnett played a trump. Considering contacts already made, he had shown characteristic self-control in withholding the information until now.

‘Trapnel preserved the outline himself in his Commonplace Book .’

‘What’s that?’

‘Something you don’t know about.’

‘Where is it?’

‘I’ve got it.’

‘He says there what he said in Profiles in String ?’

‘Some of it.’

‘I’ll destroy that too — if it isn’t worthy of him.’

Gwinnett did not answer.

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘I entirely believe you, Lady Widmerpool, but you don’t have the Commonplace Book .’

In another mood she would certainly have shown contemptuous amusement for Gwinnett’s prim formality of manner. Now she was working herself up into one of her rages.

‘You won’t take my word — that I threw the manuscript into the Canal because it wasn’t good enough?’

‘I take your word unreservedly, Lady Widmerpool.’

Gwinnett himself might have been quite angry by then. It was impossible to tell. As usual he spoke, like Pamela herself, in a low unemphatic tone.

‘X himself knew it was a necessary sacrifice. He said so after. He liked to talk about that sort of thing. It was one side of him.’

What she stated about Trapnel was not at all untrue, if strange she had appreciated that aspect of him. She was an ideal instance of Barnby’s pronouncement that, for a woman, being in love with a man does not necessarily imply behaving well to him. Some comment of Trapnel’s about the destruction of the manuscript must have come to her ears later.

‘That was why he threw away his swordstick too.’

This settled the fact of someone having given her an account of the incident. Not myself, unlikely to have been Bagshaw, the story had just travelled round.

‘You knew that?’

She was insistent.

‘I’d been told,’ Gwinnett admitted.

He was stonewalling obstinately.

‘You don’t know what sacrifice is.’

Gwinnett gave an odd smile at that.

‘What makes you think so?’

If Pamela were an uncomfortable person, so was he. The way he asked that question was dreadfully tortured. If she noticed that fact — as time went on one suspected she did not miss much — she gave no sign.

‘I’ll show you.’

She slipped from off her shoulder the bag Glober had given her, wound the chain quickly about it, forming a rough knot. Then, holding the shortened links of gold, whirled round the bundle in the air, like a sort of prayer-wheel, and tossed it over the side of the bridge. There was the gentlest of splashes. The crocodile-skin (returned to its natural element) bobbed about for a second or two on the surface of the water, the moonlight glinting on metal clasps, a moment later, weighed down by the weight of its chain, sinking into the dark currents of the little canal. Gwinnett still did not speak. Pamela returned from the parapet from which she had watched the bag disappear.

‘That shows you what X did with something he valued.’

She had evidently intended to play out for Gwinnett’s benefit a figurative representation of the offering up of both manuscript and swordstick. Gwinnett did not propose to allow that. He showed himself prepared for a tussle.

‘You said just a short while back you didn’t think all that of the purse.’

He stood there openly unimpressed. For the moment it looked as if Pamela were going to hit him in the face, register one of those backhand swings she had dealt Stevens in the past. She may have contemplated doing so, thought better of it. Instead, she took hold of his right arm with her left hand, and hammered on his chest with her fist. She must have hit him quite hard. He retreated a step or two from the force of the onset, laughing a little, still not speaking. Pamela ceasing to pound Gwinnett at last, stood back. She gave him a long searching look. Then she turned, and walked quickly away in the direction from which we had come. Gwinnett did nothing for a minute or two. Either a lot of breath had been knocked out of him, and he was recovering, or he remained lost in contemplation of the whole strange incident; probably both. Then at last he shook his head.

‘I’d best go see what she’s after.’

He too set off into the night. He did that at a more moderate speed than Pamela’s. I left them to make whatever mutual coordination between them, physical or intellectual, seemed best in the light of whatever each required from the other. Even in the interests of getting a biography written about Trapnel, it was not for a third party to intervene further. Gwinnett had certainly entered the true Trapnel world in a manner no aspiring biographer could discount. It was like a supernatural story, a myth. If he wanted to avoid becoming the victim of sorcery, being himself turned into a toad, or something of that kind — in moral terms his dissertation follow Profiles in String into the waters of the Styx — he would have to find the magic talisman, and do that pretty quickly. It might already be too late.

Dr Brightman was in the hall of the hotel. She too had just come in. The evening with Ada had been a great success.

‘What a nice girl she is. I hear you both met at the Biennale. Russell Gwinnett suggested we should go there together. I must speak to him about it.’

‘Russell Gwinnett’s just been beaten up by Lady Widmerpool.’

Dr Brightman showed keen interest in the story of what had been happening. At the end she gave her verdict.

‘Lady Widmerpool may be what Russell is looking for.’

‘At least she could hardly be called a mother-substitute.’

‘Mothers vary.’

‘You called him gothic?’

‘To avoid the word decadent, so dear to the American heart, especially when European failings are in question. It is rarely used with precision here either. Of course there were the Decadents , so designated by themselves, but think of the habits of Alexander the Great, or Julius Caesar, neither of whom can be regarded as exactly decadent personalities.’