Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [33]
‘You could look at it that way.’
‘In a sense Gwinnett represents Widmerpool’s revenge on Pamela too?’
‘That also occurred to me. The Revenger’s Tragedy. All the same, the point is surely not going to be easy to put, as man-to-man, when you confront Widmerpool?’
‘Nevertheless, I shall bear it in mind.’
‘I never thought Gwinnett would get the book finished. He gave up academic life when all the trouble happened. I last heard of him teaching water-skiing.’
‘A promising profession for a man keen on Death?’
‘I don’t think Gwinnett does away with his girls. He is not a murderer. He just loves where Death is. The subject enraptures him. Emily Brightman says there was an earlier incident of his breaking into a mortuary, where a dead love of his lay.’
Delavacquerie thought for a moment.
‘I can understand the obsession, like most others. People love where Beauty is, where Money is, where Power is – why not where Death is? An American poet said Death is the Mother of Beauty. No, I was being perhaps unduly secretive at lunch. I’ll tell you. I have a special line on Lord Widmerpool. My son is at the university of which he is the chancellor.’
I knew Delavacquerie’s wife had died ten or fifteen years before. I had never met her. They had come across each other in England, the marriage, so far as I knew, a happy one. Delavacquerie sometimes spoke of his wife. The son he had never before mentioned.
‘In the ordinary way, of course, Etienne would scarcely know who was the chancellor of the university. Lord Widmerpool, as we were saying at lunch, has for some little time been laying stress on his own closeness to the younger generation, and its upheavals. You may have seen his letters – always signed nowadays “Ken Widmerpool”, rather than just “Widmerpool”, as a peer of the realm – a matey approach habitually brought into play so far as students of the university are concerned. He has made his house a centre for what might be called the more difficult cases.’
‘Was your son involved in the Quiggin twins’ paint-throwing?’
Delavacquerie laughed at the suggestion.
‘On the contrary, Etienne is a hard-working boy, who wants to get a good economics degree, but naturally he does the things his own contemporaries do up to a point – knows all about them, I mean, even if he isn’t the paint-throwing type. He has talked a lot about Lord Widmerpool. Quite a personality cult has been established there. Lord Widmerpool has made himself a powerful figure in the student world – which, I need hardly remind you, is by no means entirely made up of students.’
‘You think your knowledge of Widmerpool’s latest stance is such as to persuade him to create no difficulties about Gwinnett’s book?’
‘It is my own self-esteem that prompts me to attempt this. That is what I am like. I want to come back to the Magnus Donners Prize committee, and inform them that Lord Widmerpool is perfectly agreeable to Death’s-head Swordsman receiving the award – that is, if you and the rest of the panel wish the book to be chosen.’
This statement of his own feelings in the matter was very typical of Delavacquerie; to admit ambitions of a kind not necessarily to be expected from a poet, anyway the poet of popular imagination. By the time we had this conversation the habit had grown up of our lunching together in London at fairly regular intervals (quite apart from the Magnus Donners meetings), so that I was already familiar with a side of him that was competitive in a manner he rather liked to emphasize. Then he came out with something for which I was not at all prepared.
‘Isn’t a girl called Fiona Cutts some sort of a relation of yours?’
‘A niece.’
‘She used to be a friend of Etienne’s.’
‘Lately?’
‘A year or two ago. For a short time she and Etienne saw quite a lot of each other – I mean enough for me to have met her too. A nice girl. I think in the end she found Etienne too humdrum, though they got on well for a while.’
‘Did they meet with the odd crowd Fiona is now going round with?’
‘No, not at all. At some musical get-together, I think. The