Anthony Powell - Temporary Kings

‘I’m sure you’ll like working with Louis.’

‘Who could doubt that?’ said Polly Duport.

She spoke lightly, of course. Pamela was behaving as if so pleased about the whole arrangement, that she was even a little anxious that it might not all go as well as deserved.

‘You mean because all women love Louis?’

‘All the world, surely?’

That was a neat reply. Pamela recognized it as such. She smiled, rather sadly, even though the idea seemed to please her. There was an instant’s pause. Moreland said this was the point when the atmosphere became very highly charged. One of the elements causing him to notice that was Stripling suddenly ceasing to reel off names and dates of vintage cars, which, until this tenseness made itself felt, he had, up to the last possible moment, continued to recite to Glober. Pamela spoke again, this time reflectively.

‘Quite a lot of people have loved Louis.’

‘They couldn’t help it,’ said Polly Duport.

Pamela laughed softy.

‘I expect you know,’ she said. ‘Louis’s stuffed a charming little cushion with hair snipped from the pussies of ladies he’s had?’

Stevens said afterwards that he ‘recognized that enquiry as signal for trouble starting’. Both he and Moreland, in whatever other respects their stories differed, stood shoulder to shoulder as regards those precise words of Pamela’s. Where they disagreed was as to the manner in which Polly Duport took them. Stevens thought her outraged. Moreland’s view was of her merely raising an eyebrow, so to speak, at the crudeness of phrasing. She was not in the least disconcerted by the eccentricity of the practice. Moreland was absolutely firm on that.

‘Miss Duport showed not the slightest sign of wilting.’

He agreed with Stevens that she made no comment. No one else made any comment either. They just stood, ‘as if hypnotized’, Moreland said. Pamela laughed quietly to herself, giving the impression that thought of Glober’s whim amused her. She turned towards him.

‘You have, haven’t you, Louis?’

‘Have what, honey?’

Glober was absolutely relaxed. Stevens, again fancying other people as scandalized as himself, supposed him taken aback a moment before. If so, Glober was now completely recovered.

‘Stuffed a cushion?’

‘Sure.’

‘As well as the ladies themselves?’

‘Correct.’

Glober remained unrattled. Pamela laughed this time shrilly. She was working herself up to a climax, possibly a sexual one. Stevens said her behaviour reminded him of a scene made at a black-market night-club during the war, when she had started a sudden row, calling out to the people at the next table that he was impotent. Stevens never minded telling that sort of story about himself. It was one of his good points. In any case, even if at one time or another he had failed to satisfy Pamela, the charge was hard to substantiate, in her case not a specially damaging one. As Barnby used to say in that connexion, ‘There’s a boomerang aspect.’ Glober remained equally undisturbed. His conversational tone matched Pamela’s.

‘I thought Miss Duport would just like to know what’s expected. Perhaps you’ve been at work with the nail-scissors already, Louis? Anyway, it’s a cheaper hobby than his.’

She pointed at Widmerpool. At this stage of the proceedings, Mrs Erdleigh seems to have taken charge. One imagines that, in her own incorporeal manner, she floated from the exterior of the group to its moral centre, wherever that might be. She appears to have laid a hand on Pamela’s arm, a movement to suggest restraint. This was the interlude Moreland most enjoyed describing, what he called ‘the Sorceress in the ascendant, Lady Widmerpool afflicted’. He said that Pamela, at contact of Mrs Erdleigh’s fingers, shot out a look of intense malevolence, hesitating for a second in whatever she was about to say.

‘My dear, beware. You are near the abyss. You stand at its utmost edge. Do not forget the warning I gave when you showed me your palm on that dread night.’

Stevens took the line later that neither second-sight nor magical powers were required to foretell the way things were moving. He may have been right. At the same time, however obscurely phrased, Mrs Erdleigh’s presentiments were near the mark.

‘The vessels of Saturn must not be shed to their dregs.’

Stevens, incapable himself of reproducing cabalistic dialectic, was no less impressed than Moreland, in whose repetition such specialized language lost none of its singularity. The unwonted nature of Mrs Erdleigh’s invocations did not so much in themselves bewilder Stevens as in their practical effect on Pamela.

‘The extraordinary thing was Pam more or less understood the stuff. That was how it looked. At least she stopped in her tracks for a second or two. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Stevens was certainly taken aback, but the spell, as it turned out, was short lasting. Briefly quelled, Pamela recovered herself.

‘Then you know?’

‘Time yet remains to evade the ghastly cataract.’

‘But you know?’

‘Knowledge is the treasure of our unsealed fountains.’

Pamela gave what Stevens, in his flamboyant manner, called a ‘terrible laugh’. Moreland admitted he, too, had found that laugh uncomfortable.

‘Then I’ll unseal them — and him.’

Mrs Erdleigh made some sort of motion with her hand, one of her mystic passes, conceivably no more than an emotional gesture, at which Pamela drew herself away, Moreland said, ‘like a serpent’. Mrs Erdleigh issued her final warning.

‘Court at your peril those spirits that dabble lasciviously with primeval matter, horrid substances, sperm of the world, producing monsters and fantastic things, as it is written, so that the toad, this leprous earth, eats up the eagle.’

Then Pamela began to scream with laughter again, shriller even than before.

‘You know, you know, you know. You’re a wonderful old girl. You don’t have to be told Léon-Joseph croaked in bed with me. You know already. You know it’s true, what nobody else quite believes.’

To what extent that plain statement was at once comprehended by those standing round remains uncertain. Probably the words did not wholly sink in until later. At moment of utterance they could have sounded all part of this extraordinary interchange, at once metaphorical and coarsely earthy. Some doubt existed, it was agreed, as to the exact phrases Pamela used. Whatever they were, positiveness of assertion was in no way diminished. She turned to Widmerpool again.

‘You tell them about it. After all, you were there.’

She pointed at him, now speaking to the others.

‘He thought I didn’t spot he was watching through the curtain.’

Up to this stage of things, it appears, no one except Mrs Erdleigh had attempted to tackle Pamela. Mrs Erdleigh, so far as it went, having done that with success, spoken her warning, withdrew into the shadows. Widmerpool had remained all the time silent. Even now he did not at once answer this imputation on himself. He heard it to the end without speaking. Glober, uncharacteristically at a loss for the inspired wisecrack to ease the situation, was equally mute. After that, from the moment Pamela voiced these revelations, there is difficulty in pinpointing order of events, reliable continuity almost impossible to establish. Accounts given by Moreland and Stevens were at odds with each other. What appears to have taken place is that Pamela, dissatisfied at her words being received with comparative calm, at best so stunning that her bearers lacked reaction, chose another line of attack. It is no less possible she was building up, in any case, to that. Stevens, more at home this time with plain statements, rather than Mrs Erdleigh’s oracular sayings, gave a convincing imitation of Pamela’s hissing denunciation.