Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [36]
‘No more with us, I’m afraid.’
‘Passed on?’
‘Yes.’
Glober shook his head in regret.
‘Was that recently?’
‘During the war. I hadn’t seen her for ages, even by then. She’d married Lilienthal, the bookseller with the beard, who came to your party too. When Pontner died, Mopsy went to help in the bookshop. Then Xenia went off with an Indian doctor, and Mopsy married Lilienthal.’
‘Mrs Lilienthal was the little redhead with the bad cold?’
Glober certainly possessed astonishing powers of recall. I could hardly bring his guests to mind myself, the facts just offered having come from Moreland a comparatively short time before. Otherwise, I should never have remembered (nor indeed known about) most of what I had just related. Whenever we met, which was not often, Moreland loved to talk of that period of his life, days before marriage, ill health, living with Mrs Maclintick, had all, if not overwhelmed him, made existence very different. On that particular meeting, he had dredged up the story of Mopsy Pontner’s sad end; for sad it had been. Glober shook his head, and sighed.
‘Mrs Pontner, too. I recall her so well.
The forehead and the little ears
Have gone where Saturn keeps the years.’
‘You didn’t produce that extempore?’
‘Edwin Arlington Robinson.’
I was glad to hear a representative quotation from a poet named by Dr Brightman as contributing a small element to Gwinnett’s makeup, and wondered how often, when obituary sentiments were owed in connexion with just that sort of personal reminiscence, Glober had found the tag apposite. Frequently, his promptness suggested. The possibility in no manner abated its felicity. We talked for a minute or two about other aspects of that long past London visit of his. I told him Tokenhouse now lived in Venice, but Glober did not rise to that, reasonably enough. The strange thing was how much he remembered. This conversation did not please Pamela. Abandoning an apparently amicable chat about footgear with Dr Brightman, she now pointed to the ceiling.
‘You haven’t explained yet what’s happening up there.’
When she addressed Glober, the tone suggested proprietary rights. One of the paradoxes about Pamela was a sexuality, in one sense almost laughably ostentatious, the first thing you noticed about her; in another, something equally connected with sex that seemed reluctant, extorted, a possession she herself utterly refused to share with anyone.
‘What’s happening? That’s what I want to know.’
She stood, legs thrust apart, staring upward. White trousers, thin as gauze, stretched skintight across elegantly compact small haunches, challengingly exhibited, yet neatly formed; hard, pointed breasts, no less contentious and smally compassed, under a shirt patterned in crimson and peacock blue, stuck out like delicately shaped bosses of a shield. These colours might have been expressly designed – by dissonance as much as harmony – for juxtaposition against those pouring down in brilliant rays of light from the Tiepolo; subtle yet penetrating pinks and greys, light blue turning almost to lavender, rich saffrons and cinnamons melting into bronze and gold. Pamela’s own tints hinted that she herself, only a moment before, had floated down out of those cloudy vertical perspectives, perhaps compelled to do so by the artist himself, displeased that her crimson and peacock shades struck too extravagant a note, one that disturbed rather than enriched a composition, which, for all its splendour, remained somehow tenebrous too. If so, reminder of her own expulsion from the scene, as she contemplated it again, increasingly enraged her.
‘Can’t anybody say anything?’
Glober, half turning in her direction, and smiling tolerantly, parodied the speech of a tourist.
‘Oh, boy, it sure is a marvellous picture, that Tee-ay-po-lo.’
All of us, even Dr Brightman, fixed attention once more on the ceiling, as if with the sole object of producing an answer to Pamela’s urgent enquiry. There was plenty on view up there. Pamela’s desire to