Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [82]
‘He didn’t say much. Just offered some apologies. Of course, it was obviously Pamela Widmerpool’s fault, not his. He didn’t attempt to excuse himself on that account.’
The night’s disturbances appear to have died down in a fairly banal family quarrel, nothing to do with Pamela or Gwinnett. In fact, the following day, Bagshaw – so far as I know, May Bagshaw too – was prepared for all to be forgiven and forgotten. On this point Bagshaw’s father and stepdaughters do not seem to have been consulted. Gwinnett himself was firm that he must leave. He moved to an hotel (another of Trapnel’s haunts) the same afternoon. Bagshaw said he was uncertain what he felt after Gwinnett had gone.
‘I was sorry to lose him. At the same time I saw, from his own point of view, it would be difficult to stay on. The whole thing might happen again, if that woman knew he was still living with us. Of course, I thought they were having an affair, that she had come to the house to sleep with him. If so, I couldn’t see why either of them needed to make all that to-do. Couldn’t he have done whatever her other lovers do? That was how it looked at the moment.’
By the time Bagshaw told the story himself, a good deal had happened to give opportunity for improving its framework, accentuating highspots of the narrative. One could not be quite sure he had not seen things differently during the embroilment. For example, he spoke of words, possibly apocryphal, murmured by Pamela, as she withdrew (however that had happened) from the house. Bagshaw put this scarcely coherent sentence forward as key to what took place later, explanation, too, of the night’s doings, or lack of them; for that matter, general relationship with Gwinnett.
Bagshaw could not swear to the exact phrase. It had something to do with ‘dead woman’ or ‘death wish’. He also asserted that Gwinnett, while staying in the house, had spoken more than once of Pamela’s conjunction with Ferrand-Sénéschal, bearing out Dr Brightman’s theory that Gwinnett himself was more than a little taken up with mortality. Bagshaw gave other instances. At the time, naturally, emphasis immediately afterwards was laid on the question why Pamela had been wandering about without any clothes. Reflecting on similar instances in my own experience, there was the time (actually not witnessed) when the parlourmaid, Billson, had walked naked into the drawing-room at Stonehurst; more tangibly, when the front door of her flat had been opened to myself by Jean Duport in the same condition. Unlike Candaules’s queen, these two had deliberately chosen to appear in that state, not, as the Queen – anyway vis-à-vis Gyges – involuntarily nude. Perhaps the Tiepolo picture had done something to disturb the balance of Pamela’s mind, in the light of her reported behaviour at the Bragadin dinner party. The situation – just what had really caused the doings at the Bagshaws’ – remained, at the end of that year, still obscure. Most people who took any interest in the matter simply assumed Pamela and Gwinnett had been ‘having an affair’, some row taken place, notable only for Pamela’s incalculable manner of handling things.
About January or February, Gwinnett himself sent a line saying he would like to meet. He wished the Commonplace Book returned to him, unless I particularly needed to keep it longer. We arranged to lunch together on a day I was coming to London. Gwinnett had not remained unaffected by the months spent in England. Whether the change was due to odd experiences undergone, or simply because he felt a sense of release in making a start on his book, was impossible to say. The transformation itself was not easy to define. Not exactly loosened up, he gave at the same time an impression of being on better terms with himself. Here in London he looked more