Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [108]
Henderson’s explanation had taken so long that the people next door, tired of waiting, now moved into the room where we were talking; Duport’s wheeled-chair pushed by his daughter. Her mother followed. Norman Chandler, who was directing the Strindberg production to which Henderson referred, was one of this party. Henderson was right about Jean. The metamorphosis, begun when the late Colonel Flores had been his country’s military attaché in London at the end of the war, was complete.
She was now altogether transformed into a foreign lady of distinction. The phrase ‘sad Goya duchess’ did not at all overstate the case. Chandler gave a dramatic cry of satisfaction at seeing someone with whom he could exchange reminiscences of Mr Deacon.
‘Nick, so you’ve come to see Edgar’s pictures? Who’d ever have thought it? Do you remember when I sold him that statuette called Truth unveiled by Time? Barney and Chuck ought to have that on show here too. I wonder where it is now?’
Duport stirred in the wheel-chair. He looked a rather ghastly sight. All the same he recognized me at once, and let out a hoarse laugh.
‘How the hell do you know he hasn’t come to see my pictures, Norman, not these naked Roman queers? He probably loves the sea.’
He turned in my direction.
‘I can’t remember your name, because I can’t remember anyone’s name these days, including my own most of the time, but we were in Brussels together, looking after different fragments of the Belgian military machine.’
‘We were indeed.’
I told Duport my name. Chandler hastened to make additional introductions.
‘So you and Bob know each other, Nick, and I’m sure you’ve met Polly. This is her mother, Madame Flores —’
Jean smiled graciously. She held out the hand of a former near-dictator’s lady – Carlos Flores cannot have been much short of dictator at the height of his power – a clasp, brief and light, not without a sense of power about it too. There could have been no doubt in the mind of an onlooker – Henderson, say, or Chuck – that Jean and I had met before. That was about the best you could say for past love. In fact Jean’s former husband, whom I had never much liked, was appreciably less distant than she.
‘I’ve gone down the drain since those Brussels days. It all started in the Middle East. Gyppy Tummy, then complications. Never got things properly right. Look at me now. Shunted round in a bathchair. Penny for the guy. That’s how I feel. One of the things I remember about you is that you knew that château-bottled shit Widmerpool.’
Polly Duport patted her father’s head in deprecation of such forcible metaphor. Duport’s appearance certainly bore out an assertion that he was not at all well. There seemed scarcely room in the chair for his long legs, the knees thrust up at an uncomfortable angle. Spectacles much altered his appearance. His daughter looked much younger than her forties. Firmly dedicated – somebody said like a nun – to her profession, she was dressed with great simplicity, as if to emphasize an absolute detachment from anything at all like the popular idea of an actress. This was in contrast with Jean, who had acquired a dramatic luxuriousness of turnout, not at all hers as a girl. Polly had always greatly resembled her mother, but, their styles now so different, perhaps only someone like myself, who had known Jean in her young days, would notice much similarity. Duport was not in the least disposed to abandon the theme of Widmerpool, whom he regarded as having at one moment all but ruined him financially.
‘Polly once saw Widmerpool knocked out by an American film star. I wish I’d been there to shake him by the hand.’
‘He wasn’t really knocked out, Papa. Only his specs broken. And Louis Glober wasn’t a film star, though he looked like one.’
‘It was something to break that bastard’s glasses. I’d have castrated him too, if I’d ever had the chance. Not