Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [117]
During the months that remained to Moreland, after the Seraglio party, we often used to talk about the story of Candaules and Gyges. He had never heard of the Jacky Bragadin Tiepolo. The hospital was on the south bank of the River.
‘One might really have considered the legend as a theme for opera,’ Moreland said. ‘I mean, if other things had been equal.’
He lay in bed with an enormous pile of books beside him, books all over the bed too. He would quote from these from time to time. He was very taken with the idea of the comparison Pamela herself had made.
‘Candaules can obviously be better paralleled than Gyges. Most men have a bit of Candaules in them. Your friend Widmerpool seems to have quite a lot, if he really liked exhibiting his wife. She was the Queen all right, if she’s to be believed as being put on show. Also, in knowing that, herself intending to kill the King. Not necessarily physical killing, but revenge. Who was Gyges?’
‘Hardly Ferrand-Sénéschal. In any case, through no fault of his own, he failed in that role. Others seemed to have enjoyed his Gyges-like privileges without dethroning the King. Candaules-Widmerpool continues to reign.’
‘No, it doesn’t really work,’ said Moreland. ‘All the same, it’s a splendid fable of Love and Friendship – what you’re liable to get from both – but the bearings are more general than particular, in spite of certain striking resemblances in this case. You really think she took the overdose, told him, then …’
‘What else could have happened?’
‘Literally dying for love.’
‘Death happened to be the price. The sole price.’
‘All other people’s sexual relations are hard to imagine. The more staid the people, the more inconceivable their sexual relations. For some, the orgy is the most natural. On that night after the Seraglio, I was very struck by the goings-on with which Lady Widmerpool taxed her husband. I’ve next to no voyeurist tastes myself. I lack the love of power that makes the true voyeur. When I was in Marseilles, years ago, working on Vieux Port, there was a brothel, where, allegedly unknown to the occupants, you could look through to a room used by other clients. I never felt the smallest urge to buy a ticket. It was Donners’s thing, you know.’
Moreland reflected a moment on what he had said. While still married to Matilda, he had, rather naturally, always avoided reference to that side of Sir Magnus’s life. This was the first time, to my own knowledge, he had ever brought up the subject.
‘Did I ever tell you how the Great Industrialist once confided to me that, when a young man – already doing pretty well financially – the doctors told him he had only a year to live? Of course that now seems the hell of a long time, in the light of one’s own medical adviser’s admonitions – not that I’m greatly concerned about keeping the old hulk afloat for another voyage or two, in the increasingly stormy seas of contemporary life, especially by drastic cutting down of the rum ration, and confining oneself to ship’s biscuit, the regime recommended. That’s by the way. The point is, I now find myself in a stronger position than in those days for vividly imagining what it felt like to be the man in the van Gogh pictures, so to speak Donners-on-the-brink-of-Eternity. Do you know what action Donners took? I’ll tell you in his own words.’
Moreland adopted the flat lugubrious voice, conventionally used by those who knew Sir Magnus, to imitate – never very effectively, because inimitable – his manner of talking.
‘I rented a little cottage in The Weald, gem of a place that brought a lump to the throat by its charm. There I settled down to read the best – only the best – of all literatures, English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian.’
Moreland paused.
‘I don’t know why Spanish was left out. Perhaps it was included, and I’ve forgotten. Between these injections of the best literature, Donners listened to recordings