Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [114]
‘You might think that enough. Watching your wife being screwed. Naturally it wasn’t the first time. It was just the first time with a blubber-lipped Frenchman, who couldn’t do it, then popped off. Of course he had arranged it all with Léon-Joseph beforehand – except the popping off – and in some -ways it made things easier to have two of us to explain to the hotel people that Monsieur Ferrand-Sénéschal had just passed away while we were visiting him. Then there’s a tart called Pauline he has games with. He used to photograph her. I found the photographs. He didn’t guess I’d meet Pauline too.’
Even then Widmerpool seems to have made no active protest. What really upset him was Pamela’s next item.
‘He’s been telling everybody that he hasn’t the slightest idea why they thought he was spying. I can explain that too, all his little under-the-counter Communist games. How he’s got out of his trouble, in spite of their holding an interesting little note in his own handwriting. He’s given the show away as often, and as far, as he dares. Unfortunately, he gave it away to his old pals, the Stalinists. The lot who are in now want to discredit some of those old pals. That’s where Léon-Joseph comes in again. Poor old Ferrand-Sénéschal was playing just the same sort of game – as well as an occasional orgy, when he felt up to it. So what he did was to hand over all the information he possessed about Ferrand-Sénéschal, some of that quite spicy. That’s why he was let off this time with a caution.’
Stevens, his mind, as I have said, adjusted to secret traffickings, his nature to physical violence, reported Pamela’s words as cut short at Widmerpool seizing her by the throat. Moreland disagreed that anything so forcible had happened, at least immediately. Moreland thought Widmerpool had simply caught her arm, possibly struck her on the arm, attempting to silence his wife. The scene partook, in far more savage temper, of that enacted at the Huntercombes’ ball, when, after Barbara Goring had cut his dance, Widmerpool grasped her wrist. The upshot then had been Barbara pouring sugar over his head. Widmerpool’s onslaught this time might be additionally menacing, stakes of the game, so to speak, immensely higher; the physical protest was the same, final exasperation of nerves kept by a woman too long on edge. Another analogy with this earlier grapple was Pamela, no more daunted at the assault than Barbara by her clutched wrist, dragged herself away, screaming with laughter. The scene was not without its horrifying, morally upsetting, side. Moreland emphasized that; Stevens, too, in his own terms.
‘In fact, I thought I was going to be sick,’ Moreland said. ‘Nausea might have been caused by my recent crise. If I had vomited, that would scarcely have added at all to other gruesome aspects.’
In emerging from this hand-to-hand affray with Pamela, possibly beaten off by her own counter-attack, Widmerpool seems to have stepped back without warning, retreating heavily on to Glober, who may himself have moved forward with an idea of separating husband and wife. Stevens thought Stripling had made some ponderous, ineffectual attempt to intervene. That is to some extent controverted by subsequent evidence. The view of Stevens was that Stripling had tried to catch Widmerpool round the waist, with the idea of restraining him, an act misattributed by Widmerpool to Glober. Both Moreland and Stevens agreed that, in the early stages of the Widmerpools’ clinch, Glober took no special initiative. Perhaps, for once, he felt a certain