Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [113]
‘No, it doesn’t really work,’ said Moreland. ‘All the same, it’s a splendid fable of Love and Friendship – what you’re liable to get from both – but the bearings are more general than particular, in spite of certain striking resemblances in this case. You really think she took the overdose, told him, then …’
‘What else could have happened?’
‘Literally dying for love.’
‘Death happened to be the price. The sole price.’
‘All other people’s sexual relations are hard to imagine. The more staid the people, the more inconceivable their sexual relations. For some, the orgy is the most natural. On that night after the Seraglio, I was very struck by the goings-on with which Lady Widmerpool taxed her husband. I’ve next to no voyeurist tastes myself. I lack the love of power that makes the true voyeur. When I was in Marseilles, years ago, working on Vieux Port, there was a brothel, where, allegedly unknown to the occupants, you could look through to a room used by other clients. I never felt the smallest urge to buy a ticket. It was Donners’s thing, you know.’
Moreland reflected a moment on what he had said. While still married to Matilda, he had, rather naturally, always avoided reference to that side of Sir Magnus’s life. This was the first time, to my own knowledge, he had ever brought up the subject.
‘Did I ever tell you how the Great Industrialist once confided to me that, when a young man – already doing pretty well financially – the doctors told him he had only a year to live? Of course that now seems the hell of a long time, in the light of one’s own medical adviser’s admonitions – not that I’m greatly concerned about keeping the old hulk afloat for another voyage or two, in the increasingly stormy seas of contemporary life, especially by drastic cutting down of the rum ration, and confining oneself to ship’s biscuit, the regime recommended. That’s by the way. The point is, I now find myself in a stronger position than in those days for vividly imagining what it felt like to be the man in the van Gogh pictures, so to speak Donners-on-the-brink-of-Eternity. Do you know what action Donners took? I’ll tell you in his own words.’
Moreland adopted the flat lugubrious voice, conventionally used by those who knew Sir Magnus, to imitate – never very effectively, because inimitable – his manner of talking.
‘I rented a little cottage in The Weald, gem of a place that brought a lump to the throat by its charm. There I settled down to read the best – only the best – of all literatures, English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian.’
Moreland paused.
‘I don’t know why Spanish was left out. Perhaps it was included, and I’ve forgotten. Between these injections of the best literature, Donners listened to recordings of the best – only the best – music.’
‘Interrupted by meals composed of the best food and the best wine?’
‘Donners, as you must remember to your cost, like most power maniacs, was not at all interested in food and drink. Although far more in his line, I presume the best sexual sensations were also omitted. That would be not so much because their physical expression might hasten ringing down the curtain, as on account of the apodictic intention. Is “apodictic” the right word? I once used it with effect in an article attacking Honegger. The villeggiatura was very specifically designed to rise above coarser manifestations of the senses.’
‘In the end did all this culture bring about a cure?’
‘It wasn’t the culture. The medicos made a mistake. They’d got the slides mixed, or the doctrine changed as to whatever Donners was suffering from being fatal. Something of the sort. Anyway they guessed wrong. Everything with Donners was right as rain. After spending a month or two at his dream cottage, he went back to making money, governing the country, achieving all-time records in utterance of conversational clichés, diverting himself in his own odd ways, all the many activities for which we used to know and love him. That went on until he was gathered in at whatever ripe old age he reached