Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [16]
Gwinnett seemed for a moment uncertain as to what he was prepared to say on the subject. Then, after this hesitation, described how the librarian of his university, knowing about Gwinnett’s interest in Trapnel, had drawn attention to an English bookseller’s catalogue, which listed, among other manuscripts offered for sale, certain papers of Trapnel’s come on the market. The price was not high, the College authorities uninterested. Gwinnett acquired these odds and ends himself. None of them turned out of startling interest, even the Commonplace Book, though there was enough there to make its purchase worth while to a potential biographer. That was Gwinnett’s own account.
‘I’ll show you the book. Some of the notes – they’re all abbreviated, almost a code – are surely about the castrating girl. You say she’s married to – is the name Widmerpool?’
‘Yes, she’s still married to him.’
That was strange enough. In the course of a dozen years or more of the Widmerpools’ married life many stories had gone round, the least of them lurid enough to imply the union could scarcely persist a week longer, yet it had persisted. They remained together; anyway to the extent of living under the same roof. That phrase did not, in fact, define the situation realistically. Each was usually under the different roof of one or other of Widmerpool’s two places of residence. There was the flat in Westminster (one of a large block near the River), and his mother’s former cottage in the Stourwater neighbourhood, which (Widmerpool mentioned when we met) had been ‘enlarged and improved’.
Stourwater Castle was now a girls’ school; rather a fashionable one. The Quiggin twins, Amanda and Belinda, were being educated there.
The existence of these two separate Widmerpool establishments was sometimes offered as explanation of a capacity to remain undivorced, which certainly required elucidation. Pamela would disappear now and then with other men, behaviour apparently accepted by Widmerpool himself, so that it became, as it were, accepted by everyone else, a matter of comparatively little interest. People recently returned from abroad would report that Pamela Widmerpool had been seen in Spain with an ambitious journalist; among the islands of the AEgean with a fashionable don; that one of the generals at a NATO headquarters had fallen out with another senior officer, when she was staying with him; that her visit to an embassy in Asia had resulted in a reshuffle of diplomatic personnel; that the TUC had been put in a flutter one year at their conference by her presence with a delegate at a local hotel. A Pamela Widmerpool anecdote might stop the gap in a languishing dinner-table conversation, but, unless highly spiced, was by now unlikely to hold the attention of the company for long.
‘My wife loves travel,’ said Widmerpool. ‘She likes seeing how other people live.’
No convincing answer had been offered to the question why she did not leave him for one of her many, if soon disillusioned lovers; nor why Widmerpool himself never chose his moment to divorce her. For some reason the status quo seemed to suit both. Trapnel, alleging the Widmerpool marriage to exclude sexual relationship (scarcely even tried out), had also spoken in a few tortured sentences of the frustration, agony, alienation, inspired in himself – though he loved her – by Pamela’s blend of frigidity with insatiable desire. People who went in for more precise ascriptions m such matters, especially far-fetched or eccentric ones, explained this matrimonial paradox by the theory that Widmerpool actually took pleasure in his wife’s infidelities, derived masochistic satisfaction, at the very least felt flattered, by the agitation she inspired. Pamela too, so these amateurs of psychology concluded, on her own side luxuriated no less in enjoyment of a recurrent thrill at being unfaithful. Another husband, less tolerant, could prove less satisfactory. Such hypotheses, if not widely accepted, remained comparatively unchallenged by more convincing speculation. At least they attempted to make sense