Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [85]
‘How’s my husband?’ she asked.
‘I’ve not seen him lately – not since the night you left.’
‘You saw him then?’
‘I’d been dining with another MP. We came back to the Victoria Street flat to discuss some things.’
‘Which MP?’
‘Roddy Cutts – my brother-in-law.’
‘That tall sandy-haired Tory?’
‘Yes.’
‘Were you there when Short delivered the message?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was it taken?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well or badly?’
‘There was no scene.’
A slight flush had come over her face when she asked these questions. There could be no doubt she derived some sort of sensual satisfaction from dwelling on what had happened. Trapnel, acute enough to recognize, and resent, this process of exciting herself by such means, looked uneasy. The manner in which she managed to maintain a wholly unchanged demeanour in these very changed surroundings was notable; yet after all why should she become different just because she had decided to spend a season with Trapnel? With him, with Odo Stevens, with Allied officers, for that matter with Widmerpool, she remained the same, as individuals mostly do within a more intimate orbit; at home; with a lover; under unaccustomed stress. To suppose otherwise is naïve. At the same time, some require action, others are paralysed by action. That dissimilarity recognized, people stay themselves. Pamela did not give an inch. She was not rattled. She did the rattling.
The same could not be said of Widmerpool. He was obstinate, not easily deflected from his purpose, but circumstances might rattle him badly. He was not, like Pamela, consistent in never adapting his behaviour to others. Her constant search for new lovers made the world see her as existing solely in the field of sex, but the Furies that had driven her into the arms of Widmerpool by their torments – no doubt his too – at the same time invested her with the magnetic power that mesmerized Trapnel, operated in a manner to transcend love or sex, as both are commonly regarded. Did she and Widmerpool in some manner supplement each other, she supplying a condition he lacked – one that Burton would have called Melancholy? Now she showed her powers at work.
‘I’m not satisfied with X’s book.’
That was the first aesthetic judgment I had ever heard her make. When she had earlier changed the subject from Trapnel’s writing, I thought she found, as some women do, concentration on a husband’s or lover’s work in some manner vexing. That she should return to his writing of her own volition was unexpected. It looked as if this were another manner of keeping Trapnel on his toes, because he reacted strongly to the comment.
‘I’m going to alter the bits you don’t like. You know, Nick, Pam’s got a marvellous instinct for a sequence that has gone a shade wrong technically. I can’t put it all right in five minutes, darling. These things take time and hard work. It’ll all be done in due course, when I’ve thrown off this bloody thing that’s playing such hell with work.’
‘This is Profiles in String?’
‘I can’t get the feel of the end chapters. Most of the bad criticism you read is lack of understanding of what it feels like to get the wheels working internally when you’re writing a novel. Not one reviewer in a thousand grasps that.’
Pamela showed no interest in subtleties of literary feeling.
‘I’d rather you burnt it than published it as it stands. In fact you’re not going to.’
Trapnel sighed. It was unlike him to accept criticism so humbly. On the face of it, there seemed no more reason to suppose Pamela knew how a novel should be written – from Trapnel’s point of view – than did the reviewers. In general, if he allowed himself to seek another opinion about how to deal with some matter in what he was writing – a short story, for example – he was accustomed to argue hard all the way in favour of whatever treatment he himself had in mind. Pamela showed contempt for the abject manner in