Anthony Powell: Temporary Kings

‘Can one see him?’

‘Yes, do go up. Might keep him quiet. Don’t bring a crowd with you. The room’s the little study on the second floor, to the left.’

I found Isobel, and we both went upstairs. Moreland was lying on a small sofa, Rosie and Audrey Maclintick standing over him. The sofa was not big enough to contain his body comfortably at full length. He was drinking a glass of water, something I had never before seen him do, except after a heavy evening the night before. As Chandler had said, he did not look at all well. He was refusing to compromise with his own situation further than agreement to be driven home, when Stevens returned. Audrey Maclintick was trying to persuade him to rest quietly, until the car was announced as at the front door. When he saw us, he began to laugh in his old way.

‘I told you nostalgia would get me. It did. Absolutely spun me over like a ninepin. It was Carolo put the finishing touch. I can’t take it as I used. They say you lose your head for nostalgia, as you get older. That’s also the time when waves of it come sweeping down without warning. You have to ration yourself, or a sudden dose knocks you out, as it did me.’

‘You stop talking so much, and take it easy,’ said Audrey Maclintick. ‘I’m going to get that precious doctor of yours round as soon as you’re in bed, no matter what the time is, and how much he’s had to drink, if he hasn’t passed out cold. Even he told you to be careful, the last time he looked you over. You’re going to stay in bed for a week or two now, if I have anything to do with it.’

Moreland did not listen. In spite of Rosie’s added protest that he would be wiser to remain quiet, he continued to insist he would be perfectly recovered the following day. He also kept on returning to what had been happening that evening.

‘There were a lot of people near me talking about vintage cars. There’s nostalgia, if you like.

For some we loved, the loveliest and the best,

That from his vintage rolling Time hath pressed.

That’s a striking image. I remember, years ago, a man who kept on quoting Omar at that party of Mrs Foxe’s, after my Symphony. I’ve only just grasped that the verse refers to a car. Life’s vintage car, in which we’re all travelling. Better than Trapnel’s Camel, more Hegelian too. Then you’re suddenly told to get out and walk — pressed to, as the poet truly says.’

There was nothing to be done until Stevens returned.

Staying with Moreland was only to encourage running on like this, tiring himself, so Isobel and I spoke a word or two, then said goodnight. It was not quite clear what sort of a fall he had suffered. He seemed to have lost his senses for a minute or so, afterwards felt no worse than a little dazed.

‘I was pretty normal when I got up from the floor. If one could ever truthfully say that about oneself.’

A large proportion of the guests had already left when we arrived downstairs again.

‘Poor Hugh,’ said Isobel. ‘He didn’t look at all well to me.’

‘Nor me.’

Outside, the night was dark. There was no moon. A breeze, fresh, almost country-scented, blew in from the Park’s tall clusters of trees. We were aiming to cut through from the terrace, where the Stevens house stood, making for a street beyond, which ran parallel, where a taxi could be picked up. A few doors away from the Stevens entrance, two or three persons, standing against the railings, were having some sort of argument. Having attended the party, they seemed now to be squabbling. Numbers and sex were not at first distinguishable in the gloom, but turned out as a woman, two men, in fact the Widmerpools and Short. Widmerpool was giving Short a dressing-down. He was very angry. Short was defending himself mildly, but with bureaucratic obstinacy. He could be heard maintaining that administrative breakdowns were from time to time unavoidable.

‘I’ve already told you, Kenneth, that I quite plainly instructed the car to be outside waiting. The driver must have mistaken the address. If so, he will be along in a minute or two.’

As we went by, Widmerpool recognized us.

‘Have you by any chance got a car? Our hired vehicle hasn’t turned up. Leonard has made some sort of muddle. I suppose you couldn’t give us a lift?’

‘We’re on our way to pick up a taxi.’

‘Oh.’

‘Why not do the same? They come down fairly frequently in the street behind here.’

‘Pam doesn’t want to walk that far. Oh, hell and blast. Why must this have happened?’

Widmerpool was not merely cross, put out by the car not being on time, but wrought up to an extent almost resembling drunkenness. Drink, which he hardly touched as a rule, was unlikely to have played any part in this highly strung state, unless, quite exceptionally, he had felt the Seraglio an occasion to swallow a few glasses, more to impress others with his own improved situation than because he enjoyed their effect. Apart from threat of prosecution, he could have been suffering more than usual domestic strain, Pamela’s design to leave him — if all alleged about Glober were true — now suddenly put into reverse gear. Even if Widmerpool did not know the reason, her change of plans, involvement with Gwinnett, might well have caused more than usually uncomfortable repercussions at home. The fact that she would not walk the few yards necessary to find a taxi showed her mood. Widmerpool stamped his feet. Short addressed us in a more temperate manner.

‘If you should see anything looking like a hired car waiting round the corner, please ask the chauffeur if he’s booked in the name of Sir Leonard Short, will you? He may have mistaken the address. If so, just send him along here.’

We said we would do that.

‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight.’

The only answer was Short’s.

‘I told you Lady Widmerpool was looking frightening,’ said Isobel.

‘Will they wait there all night?’

‘I think she’s planning something. That was how she looked to me.’

By that time we had reached the main road. A taxi cruised by. So far as we were both concerned, that closed the Seraglio evening.

As with stories of Trapnel’s last hours, others in connexion with Gwinnett’s decampment from the Bagshaws’, what followed, outside the Stevens house in Regent’s Park, appeared afterwards in various versions. One hears about life, all the time, from different people, with very different narrative gifts. Accordingly, not only are many episodes, in which you may even have played a part yourself, hard enough to assess; a lot more must be judged from haphazard accounts given by others. Even if reported in good faith, some choose one aspect on which to concentrate, some another. This truth, obvious enough, was particularly applicable to the events following the Seraglio party. Even so, essential facts were scarcely in question. My own informants were Moreland and Stevens.

There was no irreplaceable divergence between these two accounts, although, when it came to telling a story in which veracity had to be measured against picturesque detail, neither could be called pedantically veracious; Moreland, in this respect the more reliable, being, if the more imaginative, the one who also best appreciated the graphic power of fact. Moreland talked about the scene right up to the end. He never tired of it. There can be no doubt it cheered his last months, added, as he himself said, to the richness of his own experience. His powerful gift of creative imagery led him, over and over again, to reconstruct the incidents, whenever anyone came to visit him.

Stevens, in principle to be thought of as a type used to violent scenes, was in a sense more taken by surprise, worse shocked, than Moreland. Marriage may have enervated Stevens, accustomed him by then to sedate, well-behaved routines. The rational, utilitarian, unruffled point of view, tempered with toughness, that directed most of his life — had so directed it in the past — could mislead, as well as stimulate. Like many persons who had enjoyed a comparatively adventurous career, knocked about the world a good deal, he retained a strain of naivety, naivety penetrating just the areas of the mind which, in Moreland’s case, were quite free from any such inhibition. Indeed, Moreland used to complain himself that ‘naivety in short supply’ could be a disadvantage in practising the arts, where it is often necessary to see one thing only, that particular thing with supreme clarity. In fact, when it came to giving a convincing description of what took place that night, the details Stevens produced, except for a few useful appendices, were little more than confirmation of Moreland’s epic account. Stevens himself excused the scrappiness of his own narration.