Temporary Kings (11 page)

‘Look –
Candaules and Gyges
.’

At
our immediate entry the room had seemed empty. A second later, the presence of
two other persons was revealed. The unconventional position both had chosen to
assume, for a brief moment concealed, as it were camouflaged, their supine
bodies, one male, the other female. In order the better to gaze straight ahead
at the Tiepolo in a maximum of comfort, they were lying face upwards, feet
towards each other, on two of the stone console seats, set on either side of
the recess of a high pedimented window. The brightness of the sun flowing in
had helped to make this couple invisible. At first sight, the pair seemed to
have fainted away; alternatively, met not long before with sudden death in the
vicinity, its abruptness requiring they should be laid out in that place as a
kind of emergency mortuary, just to get the bodies out of the way pending final
removal. Dr Brightman, noticing these recumbent figures too, gave a quick
disapproving glance, but, without comment on their posture, began to speak
aloud her exposition on the ceiling.

‘As
Russell Gwinnett said, one is a little reminded of Iphigenia in the Villa
Valmarana, or the Mars and Venus there. The usual consummate skill in handling
aerial perspectives. The wife of Candaules – Gautier calls her Nyssia, but I
suspect the name invented by him – is obviously the same model as Pharaoh’s
daughter in
Moses saved from the water
at Edinburgh, also the lady in all the Antony and Cleopatra sequences, such as
those at the Labia Palace, which I was once lucky enough to see.’

To
make no mistake, I took another swift look at the couple lying on the ledges
under the window. There was no mistake. They were sufficiently far away to convey
quietly to Dr Brightman that we were in the presence of her ‘very bedworthy gentlewoman’,
heroine, by implication, of ‘L’après-midi d’un monstre’. The horizontal figure
on the left was certainly Pamela Widmerpool; the man on the right, lying like
an effigy of exceptional length on a tomb, was not known to me. Dr Brightman as
usual kept her head. Adjusting her spectacles, so as to make a more thorough
survey of Pamela when the moment came, she continued to gaze for a few seconds
upwards, her tone, at the same time, showing the keen interest she felt in this
disclosure.

‘Lady
Widmerpool? Indeed? I’ll curb my aesthetic enthusiasms in a moment in order to
scan her surreptitiously.’

She
concentrated for at least a minute on the Tiepolo, before making an inspection
in her own time and manner. Leaving her to do that, I crossed the floor to
where Pamela had brought her body into almost upright position in order to cast
a disdainful glance on whoever had entered the room. As I advanced she gave one
of her furious looks, then, without smiling, accepted that we knew each other.

‘Hullo,
Pamela.’

‘Hullo.’

Much
of the beauty of her younger days remained in her late thirties. She had
allowed her hair to go grey, perhaps deliberately engineered the process,
silver tinted, with faint highlights of strawberry pink that glistened when
caught by sunlight. She looked harder, more angular in appearance, undiminished
in capacity for putting less aggressive beauties in the shade. Apart from the
instant warning of general hostility to all comers that her personality
automatically projected, an unspoken declaration that no man or woman could
remain unthreatened by her presence, she did not appear displeased at this
encounter, merely indifferent. Even indifference was qualified by a certain
sense of suppressed nervous excitement, suggesting tensions almost compliant to
interruption of whatever she was doing. Usually her particular form of
self-projection excluded conceding an inch in making contacts easier, outward
expression, no doubt, of an inner sexual condition. She was like a royal
personage, prepared to converse, but not bestowing the smallest scrap of
assistance to the interlocutor, from whom all effort, every contribution of
discursive vitality, must come. Now, on the other hand, she unbent a little.

‘Jacky
didn’t mention you were staying. I suppose you arrived in that ghastly
middle-of-the-night plane. Who’s the old girl? One of Jacky’s dykes?’

That
was about the furthest I had ever heard Pamela go in the way of taking conversational
initiative, for that matter, in showing interest in other people’s doings. I
explained that neither Dr Brightman nor myself was the latest addition to the
Bragadin house-party; for fun, subjoining a word about Dr Brightman’s academic
celebrity. Pamela did not answer. She had the gift of making silence as
vindictive as speech. Dr Brightman continued to examine the ceiling, while at
the same time she moved discreetly in our direction. When she was near enough I
introduced them. Dr Brightman’s manner was courteously firm, Pamela in no way
uncivil, though she did not attempt to name the man with her. He, also risen
from the flat of his back, had now manifestly put himself into an attitude
preparatory for meeting strangers. Evidently he was familiar with Pamela’s
distaste for social convention of any kind, in any case well able to look after
himself. After giving her a statutory moment or two to make his identity known,
he announced himself without her help. The intonation, deep and pleasant, was
American.

‘Louis
Glober.’

He
held out a large white hand, much manicured. The voice came back over the
years, the tone just the same, quiet in pitch, masterful, friendly, full of
hope. Otherwise hardly a trace remained of the smooth dominating young man who
had interviewed Tokenhouse about the Cubist series, given the dinner-party for
the John drawing, ‘done’ Mopsy Pontner on the dinner-table in the private suite
of that defunct Mayfair hotel. He was still tall, of course, no less full of
assurance, though that assurance took rather a different form. It was in one
sense less flowing – less like, say, Sunny Farebrother’s determination to charm
– in another, tougher, more outwardly ruthless. What Glober had lost,
physically speaking (a good deal, including, naturally enough, all essentially
youthful adjuncts), was to a certain extent counterbalanced by transmutation
into a different type of distinguished appearance. The young Byzantine emperor
had become an old one; Herod the Tetrarch was perhaps nearer the mark than Byzantine
emperor; anyway a ruler with a touch of exoticism in his behaviour and tastes.
What was left of Glober’s hair, scarcely more than a suggestion he once had
owned some, was still black – possibly from treatment artificial as Pamela’s – his
handsome, sallow pouchy face become richly senatorial. Never particularly ‘American’
in aspect (not, at least, American as pictured by Europeans), now he might have
come from Spain, Italy, any of the Slav countries. A certain glassiness about
the eyes recalled Sir Magnus Donners, though Glober was, in general, quite
another type of tycoon. Before I could reintroduce myself to him, Dr Brightman
went into attack with Pamela.

‘Tell
me, do tell me, Lady Widmerpool, where did you get those quite delectable
sandals?’

Pamela
accepted the tribute. They went into the question together. I explained to
Glober how we had met before.

‘Do
you remember – the Augustus John drawing?’

He
thought for a moment, then began to laugh loudly. Putting a hand on my
shoulder, he continued to laugh.

‘This
warms me like news from home. Is it really thirty years? I just don’t believe
you. The charming Mrs Pontner. It was a privilege to meet her. How is she?’

‘No
more with us, I’m afraid.’

‘Passed
on?’

‘Yes.’

Glober
shook his head in regret.

‘Was
that recently?’

‘During
the war. I hadn’t seen her for ages, even by then. She’d married Lilienthal,
the bookseller with the beard, who came to your party too. When Pontner died,
Mopsy went to help in the bookshop. Then Xenia went off with an Indian doctor,
and Mopsy married Lilienthal.’

‘Mrs
Lilienthal was the little redhead with the bad cold?’

Glober
certainly possessed astonishing powers of recall. I could hardly bring his
guests to mind myself, the facts just offered having come from Moreland a
comparatively short time before. Otherwise, I should never have remembered (nor
indeed known about) most of what I had just related. Whenever we met, which was
not often, Moreland loved to talk of that period of his life, days before
marriage, ill health, living with Mrs Maclintick, had all, if not overwhelmed
him, made existence very different. On that particular meeting, he had dredged
up the story of Mopsy Pontner’s sad end; for sad it had been. Glober shook his
head, and sighed.

‘Mrs
Pontner, too. I recall her so well.

The
forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years.’

‘You
didn’t produce that extempore?’

‘Edwin
Arlington Robinson.’

I
was glad to hear a representative quotation from a poet named by Dr Brightman
as contributing a small element to Gwinnett’s makeup, and wondered how often,
when obituary sentiments were owed in connexion with just that sort of personal
reminiscence, Glober had found the tag apposite. Frequently, his promptness
suggested. The possibility in no manner abated its felicity. We talked for a
minute or two about other aspects of that long past London visit of his. I told
him Tokenhouse now lived in Venice, but Glober did not rise to that, reasonably
enough. The strange thing was how much he remembered. This conversation did not
please Pamela. Abandoning an apparently amicable chat about footgear with Dr
Brightman, she now pointed to the ceiling.

‘You
haven’t explained yet what’s happening up there.’

When
she addressed Glober, the tone suggested proprietary rights. One of the
paradoxes about Pamela was a sexuality, in one sense almost laughably
ostentatious, the first thing you noticed about her; in another, something
equally connected with sex that seemed reluctant, extorted, a possession she
herself utterly refused to share with anyone.

‘What’s
happening? That’s what I want to know.’

She
stood, legs thrust apart, staring upward. White trousers, thin as gauze,
stretched skintight across elegantly compact small haunches, challengingly
exhibited, yet neatly formed; hard, pointed breasts, no less contentious and
smally compassed, under a shirt patterned in crimson and peacock blue, stuck
out like delicately shaped bosses of a shield. These colours might have been
expressly designed – by dissonance as much as harmony – for juxtaposition
against those pouring down in brilliant rays of light from the Tiepolo; subtle
yet penetrating pinks and greys, light blue turning almost to lavender, rich
saffrons and cinnamons melting into bronze and gold. Pamela’s own tints hinted
that she herself, only a moment before, had floated down out of those cloudy
vertical perspectives, perhaps compelled to do so by the artist himself,
displeased that her crimson and peacock shades struck too extravagant a note,
one that disturbed rather than enriched a composition, which, for all its
splendour, remained somehow tenebrous too. If so, reminder of her own expulsion
from the scene, as she contemplated it again, increasingly enraged her.

‘Can’t
anybody say anything?’

Glober,
half turning in her direction, and smiling tolerantly, parodied the speech of a
tourist.

‘Oh,
boy, it sure is a marvellous picture, that Tee-ay-po-lo.’

All
of us, even Dr Brightman, fixed attention once more on the ceiling, as if with
the sole object of producing an answer to Pamela’s urgent enquiry. There was
plenty on view up there. Pamela’s desire to have more exact information, even
if ungraciously expressed, was reasonable enough once you considered the
picture. Dr Brightman took up her former exposition, now delivered to a larger
audience.

‘The
Council of Ten made trouble at the time. Objection was not, so many believe, to
danger of corrupting morals in the private residence of a grandee, so much as
to the fact that the subject itself was known to bear reference to the habits of
one of the most Serene Republic’s chief magistrates, another patrician, with
whom the Bragadin who owned this palace had quarrelled. The artist has
illustrated the highspot of
the story’s action.’

The
scene above was enigmatic. A group of three main figures occupied respectively
foreground, middle distance, background, all linked together by some intensely
dramatic situation. These persons stood in a pillared room, spacious, though apparently
no more than a bedchamber, which had unexpectedly managed to float out of
whatever building it was normally part – some palace, one imagined – to remain
suspended, a kind of celestial ‘Mulberry’ set for action in the upper reaches
of the sky. The skill of the painter brought complete conviction to the
phenomena round about. Only a sufficiently long ladder – expedient perhaps
employed for banishing Pamela from on high – seemed required to reach the
apartment’s so trenchantly pictured dimension; to join the trio playing out
whatever game had to be gambled between them by dire cast of the Fates. That
verdict was manifestly just a question of time. Meanwhile, an attendant team of
intermediate beings – cupids, tritons, sphinxes, chimaeras, the passing harpy,
loitering gorgon – negligently assisted stratospheric support of the whole
giddy structure and its occupants, a floating recess perceptibly cubist in
conception, the view from its levels far outdoing anything to be glimpsed from
the funicular; moreover, if so nebulous a setting could be assigned mundane
location, a distant pinnacle, or campanile, three-quarters hidden by cloud,
seemed Venetian rather than Neapolitan in feeling.

‘Who’s
the naked man with the stand?’ asked Pamela.

An
unclothed hero, from his appurtenances a king, reclined on the divan or couch
that was the focus of the picture. One single tenuous fold of gold-edged damask
counterpane, elsewhere slipped away from his haughtily muscular body,
undeniably emphasized (rather than concealed) the physical anticipation to
which Pamela referred, of pleasure to be enjoyed in a few seconds time; for a
lady, also naked, tall and fair haired, was moving across the room to join him
where he lay. To guess what was in the mind of the King – if king he were – seemed
at first sight easy enough, but closer examination revealed an unforeseen subtlety
of expression. Proud, self-satisfied, thoughtful, more than a little amused, he
seemed to be experiencing mixed emotions; feelings that went a long way beyond
mere expectant sensuality. No doubt the King was ardent, not to say randy, in
the mood for a romp; he was experiencing another relish too.