Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [109]
‘I’ve already told you, Kenneth, that I quite plainly instructed the car to be outside waiting. The driver must have mistaken the address. If so, he will be along in a minute or two.’
As we went by, Widmerpool recognized us.
‘Have you by any chance got a car? Our hired vehicle hasn’t turned up. Leonard has made some sort of muddle. I suppose you couldn’t give us a lift?’
‘We’re on our way to pick up a taxi.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why not do the same? They come down fairly frequently in the street behind here.’
‘Pam doesn’t want to walk that far. Oh, hell and blast. Why must this have happened?’
Widmerpool was not merely cross, put out by the car not being on time, but wrought up to an extent almost resembling drunkenness. Drink, which he hardly touched as a rule, was unlikely to have played any part in this highly strung state, unless, quite exceptionally, he had felt the Seraglio an occasion to swallow a few glasses, more to impress others with his own improved situation than because he enjoyed their effect. Apart from threat of prosecution, he could have been suffering more than usual domestic strain, Pamela’s design to leave him – if all alleged about Glober were true – now suddenly put into reverse gear. Even if Widmerpool did not know the reason, her change of plans, involvement with Gwinnett, might well have caused more than usually uncomfortable repercussions at home. The fact that she would not walk the few yards necessary to find a taxi showed her mood. Widmerpool stamped his feet. Short addressed us in a more temperate manner.
‘If you should see anything looking like a hired car waiting round the corner, please ask the chauffeur if he’s booked in the name of Sir Leonard Short, will you? He may have mistaken the address. If so, just send him along here.’
We said we would do that.
‘Goodnight.’
‘Goodnight.’
The only answer was Short’s.
‘I told you Lady Widmerpool was looking frightening,’ said Isobel.
‘Will they wait there all night?’
‘I think she’s planning something. That was how she looked to me.’
By that time we had reached the main road. A taxi cruised by. So far as we were both concerned, that closed the Seraglio evening.
As with stories of Trapnel’s last hours, others in connexion with Gwinnett’s decampment from the Bagshaws’, what followed, outside the Stevens house in Regent’s Park, appeared afterwards in various versions. One hears about life, all the time, from different people, with very different narrative gifts. Accordingly, not only are many episodes, in which you may even have played a part yourself, hard enough to assess; a lot more must be judged from haphazard accounts given by others. Even if reported in good faith, some choose one aspect on which to concentrate, some another. This truth, obvious enough, was particularly applicable to the events following the Seraglio party. Even so, essential facts were scarcely in question. My own informants were Moreland and Stevens.
There was no irreplaceable divergence between these two accounts, although, when it came to telling a story in which veracity had to be measured against picturesque detail, neither could be called pedantically veracious; Moreland, in this respect the more reliable, being, if the more imaginative, the one who also best appreciated the graphic power of fact. Moreland talked about the scene right up to the end. He never tired of it. There can be no doubt it cheered his last months, added, as he himself said, to the richness of his own experience. His powerful gift of creative imagery led him, over and over again, to reconstruct the incidents, whenever anyone came to visit him.
Stevens, in principle to be thought of as a type used to violent scenes, was in a sense more taken by surprise, worse shocked, than Moreland. Marriage may have enervated Stevens, accustomed him by then to sedate, well-behaved routines. The rational, utilitarian, unruffled point of view, tempered with toughness, that directed most of his life – had