Temporary Kings by Anthony Powell Read Free Book Online Page A

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 Ægean 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 of an otherwise inexplicable
situation. They even offered a dim outline of a genuine, if macabre, bond of
union; one very different from Trapnel’s enslavement. Even Dicky