Anthony Powell - Temporary Kings

‘You speak as if I was a temperamental impresario about to throw a scene. It’s no affair of mine when the curtain goes up. I’d much rather have another drink, which the delay gives me the right to do, whatever Audrey says.’

It was remarkable he should admit to being defiant about what she said. Moreland went off. There was no means of putting a veto on drink into operation. He moved as if his joints were rather stiff these days. Stevens laughed.

‘Isn’t Hugh splendid? Rosie thought he wasn’t well, but he seems perfectly all right to me. I say, who do you think have turned up tonight? The Widmerpools. I suppose he’s celebrating.’

‘What’s he got to celebrate about? I thought he was going to be sent to the Tower, hanged, drawn and quartered.’

‘Not now. It’s been found “not in the public interest” to proceed with the case. I was hearing about it earlier in the day. A journalist I know told me some quite interesting things. Widmerpool was damned lucky. You can take it from me he was in a tight corner. I suppose he thought this a good opportunity to show himself in public. You can’t exactly say with an untarnished reputation, but at least not serving twenty-five years for espionage.’

‘Did he apply to you for a ticket, as a once close friend of his wife’s?’

‘The Widmerpools, old cock, were brought by a friend of Rosie’s, Sir Leonard Short, a civil servant with musical leanings, who used to frequent her parents’ house. As luck will have it, Tompsitt’s here too, our ambassador in the place where Widmerpool was having his trouble. They’ll be able to dish it up together. All very respectable.’

‘Is the large grim lady Tompsitt’s wife?’

‘She’s rather rich. Schweizer Deutsch. Been married before. Ah, things are moving quicker now. I see Rosie is making signs. Do you and Isobel know where your seats are? I want to talk to Isobel. I haven’t seen her for ages.’

He obviously had no idea how much Isobel disliked him. We all passed into the marquee. The Widmerpools, with Short (knighted at the last Birthday Honours), were several rows in front. Short, although his prim buttoned-up exterior allowed few inner doubts to be observed, looked less happy than the occasion seemed to demand, if what Stevens reported about Widmerpool were true. Pressure had perhaps been put on him to arrange this public appearance signalizing exculpation. Less dramatically than that, Widmerpool could simply have wished to hear the opera performed because he hoped to be identified with this particular charity. Love of music was unlikely to have brought him, whatever other reason. He, too, was looking more aggrieved than triumphant. Short’s apparent uneasiness — Widmerpool’s too, for that matter — may have been due to discovering that Pamela was far from popular with her hostess. If it came to that, Short was not at all well disposed to Pamela himself. She sat beside him, a look of utter contempt on her face, at the same time, rare with her, smiling faintly. She had got herself up in her smartest manner. Only those who knew her reputation might have reflected that, in another, more perverse mood, she might easily have turned up to watch the Seraglio wearing an old pair of jeans.

Rosie, Stevens, the Tory Cabinet Minister, his wife, Matilda Donners (who seemed to have brought the last two), were all sitting rather to the side of the front row. Their group, which included Polly Duport and Glober, had probably dined together. Behind the Widmerpools sat the Tompsitts, whom I had noticed on arrival. I had not set eyes on Tompsitt since hearing him, at the close of some inter-service committee, deplore, with Widmerpool, the Poles’ lack of circumspection in making representations about Katyn to the International Red Cross. The air of disorder, marking out Tompsitt in his early days as a young diplomatist free from the conventionality ascribed to his kind, had settled down to a middle-aged unkemptness, implying chronic irritability, as much as a free spirit. The exceptionally peevish expression on his face at that moment could be attributed to Widmerpool himself, who, leaning back in a manner threatening to repeat his wife’s chair-breaking incident at the French Embassy, showed no sign of ceasing to talk, in deference to the opening notes of the Overture. Finally, Tompsitt’s wife raised her programme menacingly. Widmerpool, bowing to force, turned away from them. The curtain rose revealing the Pasha’s palace.

During the first interval, on the way out of the marquee, we came on Glober. He was holding Polly Duport lightly by the arm.

‘Why, hullo, Nick. Fancy meeting you here. What a hell of a good time we all had in Venice. I’m not going to forget your Major Tokenhouse in years. I had that picture of his packaged, and sent back to the States, where it’s to become one of the treasures of the Glober collection of twentieth-century primitives. Why didn’t you stop over for the Film Festival, and meet Polly here?’

In saying all this Glober managed also to convey an odd sense of added remoteness, not only in speaking of our Venetian meeting, also somehow in relation to himself. He was not in the least unfriendly, absolutely the reverse, still enormously cordial, at the same time in a manner that set him at a distance, put a cordon round him, entrenched his position. It was a little like the rays people seem to emit when they have promised a job, promotion, invitation, satisfaction of one sort or another, then withdrawn the offer. He continued to speak for a minute or two about the Tokenhouse picture, imprisoning all around him within the net of his own social technique, moving on to the Film Festival, then the St John Clarke novel. He was not quite prepared for Isobel’s knowledge (in certain areas rivalling Trapnel’s) of obscure or forgotten fiction.

‘How will you handle the scene where Phyllida and Prosper get lost in the mist on the glacier at Schwarenbach?’

While Glober dealt with that question, I reminded Polly Duport of our drive back from the St Paul’s service, with her mother and stepfather. Undeniably a beauty, less remarkably so off the stage, she had now, I thought, come to resemble Duport more than Jean. She had her father’s cool, wary scepticism, as well as Jean’s figure and grey eyes. In her thirties, already well known, she had in the film at Venice somehow achieved this additional prestige, a flowering which had instinctively caught Glober’s fancy, aroused his untiring interest in the immediate.

‘I remember an English officer joining us. So that was you? I suppose you were keeping an eye on my stepfather, making sure he behaved properly in church?’

The comment recalled her mother.

‘How is Colonel Flores?’

‘Very well indeed. He’s a general now, but more or less retired from the army, and in politics.’

‘And your mother?’

‘She’s all right. Fine, in fact. Carlos’s new job suits her. You see, he’s head of the Government.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘For a year now.’

‘Dictator?’

‘We don’t call it that.’

‘Your mother must enjoy being Dictatress — Dictatrix, more correctly.’

Polly Duport laughed. She was charming, in spite of resemblance to her father, much ‘nicer’, one felt, than her mother, but without, so far as I was myself concerned, any of her mother’s former bowling-over endowments. Glober must have felt the reverse. Her professionalism of the Theatre, a seriousness her mother could never have achieved, in the Theatre, or any other of the arts, possibly exerting some of that effect on him.

‘I think Mama would certainly rather do the job herself.’

‘And your father?’

‘Do you know him too? You are well up in our family. Papa’s in the crude still.’