The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [83]
I got out the draft. Finally a tremendous minute was launched on its way that very afternoon. Bureaucratically speaking, grass had not grown under our feet; but this was only a beginning. That weekend was my free one. I told Isobel what I had suggested to Kucherman.
‘If the worst comes to the worst we can invoke Matilda.’
Neither of us had seen Matilda since she had married Sir Magnus Donners.
‘It’s just a long shot.’
On Monday morning a summons came from Finn as soon as he arrived in his room. I went up there.
‘This Belgian affair.’
‘Yes, sir?’
Finn passed his hands over the smooth ivory surfaces of his skull.
‘The most extraordinary thing has happened.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘An order has come down from the Highest Level of All to say it is to be treated as top priority. The chaps are to come over the moment their accommodation is decided upon. Things like financial details can be worked out later. All other minor matters too. Tell Blackhead he can talk to the PM about it, if he isn’t satisfied.’
‘This is splendid, sir.’
Finn put on the face he usually assumed when about to go deaf, but did not do so.
‘Providential,’ he said. ‘Can’t understand it. It just shows how the Old Man’s got his finger on every pulse. I don’t know whether Kucherman did – well, a bit of intriguing. He’s a very able fellow, and in the circumstances it would have been almost justified. You will attend a conference on the subject under the DSD at eleven o’clock this morning, all branches concerned being represented.’
The Director of Staff Duties was the general responsible for planning matters. When I next saw Kucherman, we agreed things had gone through with remarkable smoothness. The name of Sir Magnus Donners was not mentioned when we discussed certain administrative details. Thinking over the incident after, it was easy to see how a taste for intrigue, as Finn called it, could develop in people.
FIVE
During the period between the Potsdam Conference and the dropping of the first atomic bomb, I read in the paper one morning that Widmerpool was engaged to Pamela Flitton. This piece of news was undramatically announced in the column dedicated to such items. It was not even top of the list. Pamela was described as daughter of Captain Cosmo Flitton and Mrs Flavia Wisebite; an address in Montana (suggesting a ranch) showed her father was still alive and living in America. Her mother, whose style indicated divorce from Harrison Wisebite (sunk, so far as I knew, without a trace), had come to rest in the country round Glimber, possibly a cottage on the estate. Widmerpool – ‘Colonel K. G. Widmerpool, OBE’ – was based on a block of flats in Victoria Street. Apart from stories already vaguely propagated by Farebrother and Duport, there was no clue to how this engagement had come about. Surprising as it was, the immediate implications seemed no more than that a piece of colossal folly on both their parts would soon be readjusted by another announcement saying the marriage was ‘off’. The world was in such a state of flux that such inanities were only to be expected in one quarter or another. Only later, considered in cold blood, did the arrangement appear credible; even then for less than obvious reasons.
‘Drove for the Section, did she?’ said Pennistone. ‘I never remember those girls’ faces. I haven’t heard anything of Widmerpool for some time. I suppose he’s now passed into a world beyond good and evil.’
I had not set eyes on Widmerpool myself since the day Farebrother had recoiled from saluting him in Whitehall.
Although, as an archetypal figure, one of those fabulous monsters that haunt the recesses of the individual imagination, he held an immutable place in my own private mythology, with the passing of Stringham and Templer, I no longer knew anyone to whom he might present quite the same absorbing spectacle, accordingly