Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [75]
‘Yes, she’s all right. I suppose she gets a kick out of keeping that little ponce.’
‘You must admit his war record was good.’
‘What’s that to me?’
To stay longer at the table would be not only to prejudice Gwinnett’s opportunity for further pursuit of Trapnel investigations, but also, if Pamela had taken a fancy to him, risk being told in uncompromising terms to leave them à deux.
‘I’m off too.’
Pamela herself rose at that.
‘I’ve had enough of this place,’ she said.
That remark had all the appearance of being Gwinnett’s cue, a chance not to be missed to take her elsewhere, get out of her whatever he wanted. Florian’s could reasonably be regarded as a distracting spot for serious discussion. Gwinnett himself stood up, but without putting forward any alternative proposal. There was a pause. As a matter of form, I offered to see Pamela back to the Bragadin palace. If Gwinnett did not want to settle immediately on another port of call, he could easily suggest the duty of taking her home should fall to him. He said nothing. Pamela herself categorically refused escort.
‘Where’s your hotel?’
I named it.
‘Both of you?’
‘Yes.’
She turned to Gwinnett.
‘Are you going back too?’
‘That was my intention.’
Pamela fully accepted the implication that he did not propose to take her on at that moment. She showed no resentment.
‘I’ll walk as far as your hotel, then decide what I want to do. I like wandering about Venice at night.’
Gwinnett was certainly showing himself capable of handling Pamela in his own manner. He seemed, at worst, to have accomplished a transformation of roles, in which she stalked him, rather than he her. That might produce equally hazardous consequences, not least because Pamela herself showed positive taste for the readjustment. The hunter’s pursuit was no doubt familiar to her from past experience, only exceptional, in this case, to the extent that Gwinnett was already in her power from need to acquire Trapnel material.
‘OK,’ he said.
The three of us set off together. Nothing much was said until we were quite close to the hotel. Then, on a little humped bridge crossing a narrow waterway, Pamela stopped. She went to the parapet of the bridge, leant over it, looking down towards the canal. Gwinnett and I stopped too. She stared at the water for some time without saying anything. Then she spoke in her low unaccentuated manner.
‘I’ve thought of nothing but X since I’ve been in Venice. I see that manuscript of his floating away on every canal. You know Louis Glober wants to do it as a film, with that ending. It might have happened here. This place just below.’
Gwinnett seemed almost to have been waiting for her to make that speech.
‘Why did you do it?’
He asked that quite bluntly.
‘You think it was just to be bitchy.’
‘I never said so.’
‘But you think it.’
He did not answer. Pamela left the parapet of the bridge. She moved slowly towards him.
‘I threw the book away because it wasn’t worthy of X.’
‘Then why do you want Glober to make a picture of something not worthy?’
‘Because the best parts can be preserved in a film.’
I supposed by that she meant her own part, in whatever Trapnel had written, could be recorded that way; at least her version of it. Then Gwinnett played a trump. Considering contacts already made, he had shown characteristic self-control in withholding the information until now.
‘Trapnel preserved the outline himself in his Commonplace Book.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Something you don’t know about.’
‘Where is it?’
‘I’ve got it.’
‘He says there what he said in Profiles in String?’
‘Some of it.’
‘I’ll destroy that too – if it isn’t worthy of him.’
Gwinnett did not answer.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I entirely believe you, Lady Widmerpool, but you don’t have the Commonplace Book.’
In another mood she would certainly have shown contemptuous amusement for Gwinnett’s prim formality of manner. Now she was working herself up into one of her rages.
‘You won’t take my word – that I threw the manuscript into the Canal because it wasn’t good enough?