The Military Philosophers - Anthony Powell [86]
This was a very different tone from that Widmerpool was in the habit of using about his mother in the old days. It seemed likely the engagement represented one of his conscious decisions to put life on a new footing. He embarked on these from time to time, with consequent rearrangements all round. It looked as if sending Mrs Widmerpool into exile was going to be one such. It was hard to feel wholly condemnatory. I enquired about the circumstances in which he had met Pamela, a matter about which I was curious.
‘In Cairo. An extraordinary chance. As you know, my work throughout the war has never given me a second for social life. Even tonight I am here only because Pamela herself wanted to come – she is arriving at any moment – and I shall leave as soon as I have introduced her. I requested the Ambassador as a personal favour that I might bring my fiancée. He was charming about it. To tell the truth, I have to dine with the Minister tonight. A lot to talk about. Questions of policy. Adjustment to new régimes. But I was telling you how Pamela and I met. In Cairo there was trouble about my returning plane. One had been shot down, resulting in my having to kick my heels in the place for twenty-four hours. You know how vexatious that sort of situation is to me. I was taken to a place called Groppi’s. Someone introduced us. Before I knew where I was, we were dining together and on our way to a night-club. I had not been to a place of that sort for years. Had, indeed, quite forgotten what they were like. The fact was we had a most enjoyable evening.’
He laughed quite hysterically.
‘Then, as luck would have it, Pam was posted back to England. I should have added that she was working as secretary in one of the secret organizations there. I was glad about her return, because I don’t think she moved in a very good set in Cairo. When she arrived in London, she sent me a postcard – and what a postcard.’
Widmerpool giggled violently, then recovered himself.
‘It arrived one morning in that basement where I work night and day,’ he said. ‘You can imagine how pleased I was. It seems extraordinary that we hardly knew each other then, and now I’ve got a great big photograph of her on my desk.’
He was almost gasping. The words vividly conjured up his subterranean life. Photographs on a desk were never without interest. People who placed them there belonged to a special category in their human relationships. There was, for example, that peculiarly tortured-looking midshipman in a leather-and-talc frame in the room of a Section with which ours was often in contact. Some lines of John Davidson suddenly came into my head:
And so they wait, while empires sprung
Of hatred thunder past above,
Deep in the earth for ever young
Tannhauser and the Queen of Love.*
On reflection, the situation was not a very close parallel, because it was most unlikely Pamela had ever visited Widmerpool’s underground office. On the other hand, she herself could easily be envisaged as one of the myriad incarnations of Venus, even if Widmerpool were not much of a Tannhauser. At least he seemed in a similar way to have stumbled on the secret entrance to the court of the Paphian goddess in the Hollow Hill where his own duties were diurnally enacted. That was some qualification.
‘You know she’s Charles Stringham’s niece?’
‘Naturally I am aware of that.’
The question had not pleased him.
‘No news of Stringham, I suppose?* ‘There has been, as a matter of fact.’ Widmerpool seemed half angry, half desirous of making some statement about this.
‘He was captured,’ he said. ‘He didn’t survive.