Anthony Powell - Hearing Secret Harmonies

‘How did you persuade them to put the play on?’

‘I infiltrated the idea through Polly Duport, who is rather a friend of mine. She thought she’d like to play Celia, though a bit old for the part of a young girl.’

This was Delavacquerie’s first mention of Polly Duport. There was some parallel with the way in which Moreland had first produced Matilda, when she had been playing in The Duchess of Malfi . I was quite unable to tell whether this casual method of introducing the name was deliberate, or Delavacquerie supposed I had always known about the association. Clinging to privacy was characteristic of both of them. Apparent secrecy might be partly explained by the shut-in nature of Polly Duport’s life of the Theatre, scarcely at all cutting across Delavacquerie’s two-fold existence, divided between poetry and public relations.

‘I believe you’ve met Polly?’

‘I haven’t seen her for ages. I used to know her parents — who are divorced of course.’

I did not add that, when we were young, I had been in love with Polly Duport’s mother. There seemed no moral obligation to reveal that, in the light of Delavacquerie having kept quiet for so long about her daughter; an example of the limitations, mentioned before, set round about the friendships of later life.

‘You knew both Polly’s parents? It is almost unprecedented to have met the two of them. I myself have never seen either, though Polly spends a lot of time looking after her father, who has been very ill. She’s marvellously good about him. He never sounds very agreeable. Her mother — as you probably know — was married to that South American political figure who was murdered by terrorists the other day.’

‘Poor Colonel Flores? Was he murdered?’

‘Wasn’t he a general? He was machine-gunned from behind an advertisement hoarding, so Polly told me. It wasn’t given much space in the English papers. I didn’t see it reported myself. He was retired by then. It was bad luck.’

I felt sorry about Colonel Flores, a master of charm, even if other qualities may have played a part in his rise to power. Delavacquerie returned to the subject of Gwinnett and the play.

‘He seemed to enjoy it a great deal. I had never seen Gwinnett like that before. He became quite talkative afterwards, when we all had supper together.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘A King falls in love with his son’s girlfriend — that’s Celia, played by Polly — while the son himself is away at the wars. When the son returns, his father says the girl is dead. The King has really hidden Celia, and is trying to seduce her. As he has no success, he decides to administer a love potion. Unfortunately the love potion is drunk by the Humorous Lieutenant. In consequence the Lieutenant falls in love with the King, instead of Celia doing so.’

‘Did the Lieutenant’s exaggerated sense of humour cause him to drink the love philtre?’

‘It was accidental. He had been knocked out in a fight, and someone, thinking a bowl of wine was lying handy, gave him the love philtre as a pick-me-up. The incident is quite funny, but really has nothing to do with the play — like so many things that happen to oneself. As a neurotic figure, the Lieutenant is perhaps not altogether unlike Gwinnett.’

‘Possibly Gwinnett too should drink a love philtre?’

‘Gwinnett is going to risk much stronger treatment than that. Do you remember that Lord Widmerpool, after making that speech at the Magnus Donners, asked Gwinnett to come and see him? Widmerpool has returned to the charge, as to a visit, and Gwinnett is going to go.’

‘That sounds a little grisly.’

‘Precisely why Gwinnett is going to do it He wishes to have the experience. Widmerpool’s situation has recently become more than ever extraordinary. From being, in a comparatively quiet way, an encourager of dissidents and dropouts, the recent addition to his community of Scorpio Murtlock, the young man we talked about some little time ago, has greatly developed its potential. Murtlock provides a charismatic element, and apparently Widmerpool thinks there are immense power possibilities in the cult. He’s got enough money to back it, anyway for the moment.’

‘But surely it’s Murtlock’s cult, not Widmerpool’s.’

‘We shall see. Gwinnett thinks that a struggle for power is taking place. That is one of the things that interests him. Gwinnett’s angle on all this is that the cult, with its rites and hierarchies, is all as near as you can get nowadays to the gothicism of which he is himself writing. He has seen something of the semi-mystic dropout groups of his own country, but feels this one offers a more Jacobean setting, through certain of its special characteristics.’

‘Does Gwinnett approve or disapprove? I expect he doesn’t show his hand?’

‘On the contrary, Gwinnett disapproves. He talked quite a lot about his disapproval. As I understand it, one of the tenets of the cult is that Harmony, Power, Death, are all more or less synonymous — not Desire and Death, like Shakespeare. Gwinnett disapproves of Death being, so to speak, removed from the romantic associations of Love — his own approach, with which his book deals — to be prostituted to the vulgar purposes of Power — pseudo-magical power at that. At the same time he wants to examine the processes as closely as possible.’

‘Some might think it insensitive of Gwinnett, in the circumstances, to visit Widmerpool, even in the interests of seventeenth-century scholarship.’

‘On that question Widmerpool himself has made his own standpoint unambiguously clear by going out of his way to invite Gwinnett to come and see him. You said that Gwinnett, when writing about Trapnel, saw himself as Trapnel. Now Gwinnett, writing about gothic Jacobean plays, sees himself as a character in one of them. I regret to say that I shall not be in England when Gwinnett pays his visit to Widmerpool, and therefore won’t hear how things went — that is, if Gwinnett chooses to tell me.’

‘You’re taking a holiday?’

‘Polly and I may be going to get married. We’ve known each other for a long time now. In the light of the way we both earn a living, neither of us liked the idea of being under the same roof. We might be changing that now. She’s coming to have a look at my Creole relations.’

Delavacquerie raised his eyebrows, as if that were going to be an unpredictable undertaking. I said some of the things you say when a friend of Delavacquerie’s age announces impending marriage. He laughed, and shook his head. All the same, he seemed very pleased with the prospect. So far as I knew anything of Polly Duport, she seemed a nice girl.

‘We shall see, we shall see. That is why we are visiting the Antilles.’

During the next month or so I did not go to London. Over and above the claims of ‘work’ — put forward earlier as taking an increasing stranglehold — attention was required for various local matters; the chief of these — and most tedious — the quarry question.

One of the neighbouring quarries (not that recalling the outlines of Mr Deacon’s picture) was attempting encroachment, as mentioned earlier, in the area of The Devil’s Fingers. The matter at issue had begun with the quarrying firm (using a farmer as ‘front’, at purchase of the land) acquiring about seventy agricultural acres along the line of the ridge on which the archaeological site stood. The firm was seeking permission from the Planning Authority to extend in the direction of the monument. Among other projects, if this were allowed, was creation of a ‘tip’, for quarry waste, above the stream near The Devil’s Fingers; the waters of the brook to be channelled beneath by means of a culvert. If local opposition to workings being allowed so near the remains of the Stone Age sepulchre could be shown to be sufficiently strong, a Government Enquiry was likely to be held, to settle a matter now come to a head, after dragging on for three if not four years.