Temporary Kings (23 page)

‘I’m
off too.’

Pamela
herself rose at that.

‘I’ve
had enough of this place,’ she said.

That
remark had all the appearance of being Gwinnett’s cue, a chance not to be
missed to take her elsewhere, get out of her whatever he wanted. Florian’s
could reasonably be regarded as a distracting spot for serious discussion.
Gwinnett himself stood up, but without putting forward any alternative
proposal. There was a pause. As a matter of form, I offered to see Pamela back
to the Bragadin palace. If Gwinnett did not want to settle immediately on another
port of call, he could easily suggest the duty of taking her home should fall
to him. He said nothing. Pamela herself categorically refused escort.

‘Where’s
your hotel?’

I
named it.

‘Both
of you?’

‘Yes.’

She
turned to Gwinnett.

‘Are
you going back too?’

‘That
was my intention.’

Pamela
fully accepted the implication that he did not propose to take her on at that
moment. She showed no resentment.

‘I’ll
walk as far as your hotel, then decide what I want to do. I like wandering
about Venice at night.’

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.’

‘Are
you implying sexual ambivalence in Gwinnett?’

‘I
think not. His life might have been easier had that been so. Of course he
remains essentially American in believing all questions have answers, that
there is an ideal life against which everyday life can be measured – but
measured only in everyday terms, so that the ideal life would be another sort
of everyday life. It is somewhere at that point Russell’s difficulties lie.’

We
said goodnight. I slept badly. Tokenhouse rang up early again the following
morning. He brushed aside reference to the visit to his studio. He was, in his
own terms, back to normal, comparative gaieties of the Glober luncheon
obliterated entirely.

‘I
think you said you were going to be in Venice another day or two?’

I
told him when the Conference broke up.

‘In
that case we shall not be able to meet again – and I shall not require the
package, of which I spoke, posted in England. I find I am falling seriously
behind in my work. Got to buckle down, not waste any more time with visitors,
if the job is to be properly done. Of course I was glad to see you after so
many years, hear your news. Painting is like everything else, it must be taken
seriously. No good otherwise. That does not mean I was not pleased we fell in
with each other. Let me know if you come to Venice again on a similar
peregrination with your intellectual friends.’

‘Did
you clear up Widmerpool’s problem?’

‘Widmerpool?’

‘The
man who came in while we were looking at your pictures.’

‘Widmerpool?
Ah, yes, Lord Widmerpool. For the moment I could not place the name. Yes, yes.
I did my best for him. Only a small matter. I don’t know why he seemed so
concerned about it. He simply wanted to ascertain the whereabouts of a friend
we have in common. By the way, keep it to yourself, will you, that you met Lord
Widmerpool at my studio. He asked me to say that. I have no idea why. He rather
gave me to understand that he had offered some excuse, other than that he was
coming to see me, to avoid some social engagement – I can sympathize with that
– and did not want so flimsy a motive to be revealed. Well, I mustn’t waste the
whole morning coffee-housing on this vile instrument. Has your Conference settled
anything by its coming together? No? I thought not. Goodbye to you, goodbye.’

He
rang off. When I saw Gwinnett later in the morning, before one of the sessions,
I asked if he had caught up with Pamela. He replied so vaguely that it remained
uncertain whether he had managed to find her; or found her, and been sent about
his business. He said he was not packing up with the Conference, having decided
to stay on for the Film Festival. Then he spoke as an afterthought.

‘There’s
something I’d be glad for you to do for me when you get back to England – tell
Trapnel’s friend, Mr Bagshaw, whom you mentioned, I’ll be calling him up. Just
so he doesn’t think I’m some crazy American dissertation-writer, and give me
the brush-off.’

‘He
won’t do that. Where are you staying in London?’

Gwinnett
named an hotel in Bloomsbury, a former haunt of Trapnel’s.

‘That
will be fairly spartan.’

‘I’ll
get the atmosphere there. Later I might try some of the more rundown locations
too.’

‘You’re
going to do it in style.’

‘Sure.’

I
saw Gwinnett only once again, the day the Conference closed. He appeared
carrying a small parcel, which looked like a paper-wrapped book. This he handed
to me.

‘It’s
Trapnel’s
Commonplace Book
.
You’ll like to see it, though there isn’t all that there.’

‘Won’t
you need it? When will I be able to return it to you, and where?’

‘You
keep it for the next few weeks. I’d rather it wasn’t in my own hands for the
time being. I’ll get in touch when I want it back.’

That
was all he would say, except also implying a preference not to be called up,
otherwise contacted, at the hotel. Apart from the loan of the
Commonplace Book
, a generous one, our parting was as
stiff as our meeting had been. Thinking over the unsolicited lending of the
Commonplace Book
I could only surmise he felt the
Trapnel notes, after what she had said, safer right away from Pamela. Did he
not trust himself, or was it that he thought her capable of anything? Dr
Brightman, not remaining for the Film Festival, was also delaying immediate
return to England.

‘It
seemed a pity to be in this part of Italy, and not idle away a few days with
the Ostrogoths and Lombards. The Venetian air overcomes one with dilettantism.
That nice little Ada Leintwardine says she will join me for a night or two,
when the Film Festival is over, at whatever place I have reached by then. Such
an adventure to have met Lady Widmerpool. My colleagues will be green with
envy.’