Temporary Kings

by Anthony Powell

  ‘I think you said you were going to be in Venice another day or two?’

  I told him when the Conference broke up.

  ‘In that case we shall not be able to meet again – and I shall not require the package, of which I spoke, posted in England. I find I am falling seriously behind in my work. Got to buckle down, not waste any more time with visitors, if the job is to be properly done. Of course I was glad to see you after so many years, hear your news. Painting is like everything else, it must be taken seriously. No good otherwise. That does not mean I was not pleased we fell in with each other. Let me know if you come to Venice again on a similar peregrination with your intellectual friends.’

  ‘Did you clear up Widmerpool’s problem?’

  ‘Widmerpool?’

  ‘The man who came in while we were looking at your pictures.’

  ‘Widmerpool? Ah, yes, Lord Widmerpool. For the moment I could not place the name. Yes, yes. I did my best for him. Only a small matter. I don’t know why he seemed so concerned about it. He simply wanted to ascertain the whereabouts of a friend we have in common. By the way, keep it to yourself, will you, that you met Lord Widmerpool at my studio. He asked me to say that. I have no idea why. He rather gave me to understand that he had offered some excuse, other than that he was coming to see me, to avoid some social engagement – I can sympathize with that – and did not want so flimsy a motive to be revealed. Well, I mustn’t waste the whole morning coffee-housing on this vile instrument. Has your Conference settled anything by its coming together? No? I thought not. Goodbye to you, goodbye.’

  He rang off. When I saw Gwinnett later in the morning, before one of the sessions, I asked if he had caught up with Pamela. He replied so vaguely that it remained uncertain whether he had managed to find her; or found her, and been sent about his business. He said he was not packing up with the Conference, having decided to stay on for the Film Festival. Then he spoke as an afterthought.

  ‘There’s something I’d be glad for you to do for me when you get back to England – tell Trapnel’s friend, Mr Bagshaw, whom you mentioned, I’ll be calling him up. Just so he doesn’t think I’m some crazy American dissertation-writer, and give me the brush-off.’

  ‘He won’t do that. Where are you staying in London?’

  Gwinnett named an hotel in Bloomsbury, a former haunt of Trapnel’s.

  ‘That will be fairly spartan.’

  ‘I’ll get the atmosphere there. Later I might try some of the more rundown locations too.’

  ‘You’re going to do it in style.’

  ‘Sure.’

  I saw Gwinnett only once again, the day the Conference closed. He appeared carrying a small parcel, which looked like a paper-wrapped book. This he handed to me.

  ‘It’s Trapnel’s Commonplace Book. You’ll like to see it, though there isn’t all that there.’

  ‘Won’t you need it? When will I be able to return it to you, and where?’

  ‘You keep it for the next few weeks. I’d rather it wasn’t in my own hands for the time being. I’ll get in touch when I want it back.’

  That was all he would say, except also implying a preference not to be called up, otherwise contacted, at the hotel. Apart from the loan of the Commonplace Book, a generous one, our parting was as stiff as our meeting had been. Thinking over the unsolicited lending of the Commonplace Book I could only surmise he felt the Trapnel notes, after what she had said, safer right away from Pamela. Did he not trust himself, or was it that he thought her capable of anything? Dr Brightman, not remaining for the Film Festival, was also delaying immediate return to England.

  ‘It seemed a pity to be in this part of Italy, and not idle away a few days with the Ostrogoths and Lombards. The Venetian air overcomes one with dilettantism. That nice little Ada Leintwardine says she will join me for a night or two, when the Film Festival is over, at whatever place I have reached by then. Such an adventure to have met Lady Widmerpool. My colleagues will be green with envy.’

  At that period, when one travelled to and from Venice direct by air (the route avoided by Widmerpool), a bus picked up, or set down, airport passengers in the Piazzale Roma. By night this happened at an uncomfortable hour. You waited in a caffè, the bus arriving about one o’clock in the morning. Ennui and dejection were to be associated with the small hours spent in that place. Even in daytime the Piazzale Roma, flanked by two garages of megalomaniac dimension, overspread with parked charabancs and trucks, crowded throughout the twenty-four hours with touts and loiterers, is a gloomy, dusty, untidy, rather sinister spot. These backblocks, raw underside of the incredible inviolate aqueous city, were no doubt regarded by Tokenhouse as the ‘real Venice’ – though one lot of human beings and their habitations cannot be less or more ‘real’ than another – purlieus that, in Casanova’s day, would have teemed with swindlers, thieves, whores, pimps, police spies, flavours probably not wholly absent today.

  Waiting for the airport bus, I watched gangs of young men circling the huge square again and again. They seemed to wander about there all night. As one of these clusters of itinerant corner-boys prowled past the caffè, a straggler from the group turned aside for a moment to utter the hissing accolade owed to any female passer-by not absolutely monstrous of feature.

  ‘Bella! Bellissima!’

  A confrere ahead of him looked round too, and the wolf-whistler, forgetting his own impassioned salutation of a moment before, entered into argument with his friend, quite evidently about another subject. They all trudged on, chattering together. Through the shadows, recurrently dispersed by flashing headlights of cars passing and repassing, a slim trousered figure receded through murky byways, slinking between shifting loafers and parked vehicles. It certainly looked like Pamela Widmerpool. She was alone, roving slowly, abstractedly, through the Venetian midnight.

  4

  Bagshaw was at once attentive to the idea of an American biographer of X. Trapnel seeking an interview with himself. In fact he pressed for a meeting to hear a fuller account of Gwinnett’s needs. Television had made him more prolix than ever on the line. One was also increasingly aware that he was no longer Books-do-furnish-a-room Bagshaw of ancient days, but Lindsay Bagshaw, the Television ‘personality’, no towering magnate of that order, but, if only a minor scion, fully conscious of inspired status. He suggested a visit to his own house, something never before put forward. In the past, a pub would always have been proposed. Bagshaw himself was a little sheepish about the change. Complacent, he was also a trifle cowed. He attempted explanation.

  ‘I like to get back as early as possible after work. May prefers that. There’s always a lot to do at home.’

  The idea of Bagshaw deferring, in this manner, to domesticity, owning, even renting, a house was an altogether unfamiliar one. In early life, married or single, his quarters had been kept secret. They were in a sense his only secret, everyone always knowing about his love affairs, political standpoint, prospects of changing his job, ups and downs of health. Where he lived was another matter. That was not revealed. One pictured him domiciled less vagrantly than Trapnel, all the same never in connexion with anything so portentous as a house. There was no reason why Bagshaw should not possess a house, nor in general be taken less seriously than other people. No doubt, for his own purposes, he had done a good deal to encourage a view of himself as a grotesque figure, moving through a world of farce. Come to rest in relatively prosperous circumstances, he had now modified the role for which he had formerly typecast himself. Dynamic styles of life required one ‘image’; static, another. How deep these changes went could not be judged. Bagshaw remained devious.

  ‘We’re a bit north of Primrose Hill. I got the lease on quite favourable terms during the property slump some years after the war, when I left Fission. I shall look forward to hearing all about Professor Gwinnett, when I see you.’

  Bagshaw’s house, larger than surmised, was of fairly dilapidated exterior. Waiting on the doorstep, I wondered whether the upper storeys
were let off. Children’s voices were to be heard above, one of them making rather a fuss. Children had never played a part in the Bagshaw field of operation. They seemed out of place there. I rang a couple of times, then knocked. The door was opened by a girl of about sixteen or seventeen. Rather vacant in expression, reasonably good-looking, she was not on sight identifiable as member of the family or hired retainer. The point could not be settled, because she turned away without speaking, and set off up some stairs. At first I supposed her a foreign ‘au pair’, speaking no English, possibly seeking an interpreter, but, as she disappeared, she could be heard complaining.

  ‘All right, I’m coming. Don’t make such a bloody row.’

  The protest was a little hysterical as uttered. There was an impression, possibly due to a naturally tuberous figure, that she might be pregnant. That could easily have been a mistaken conclusion. I waited. Several doors could be explored, if no one appeared. I was about to experiment with one of these, when an elderly man, wearing a woollen dressing-gown, came slowly down the stairs up which the girl had departed. It was evident that he did not expect to find me in the hall. His arrival there would pose action of some sort, but, suddenly aware of my presence, he muttered some sort of apology, retreating up the stairs again. Even if Bagshaw’s way of life had in certain respects altered, become more solid, a fundamental pattern of unconventionality remained. The problem of what to do next was solved by the appearance, from a door leading apparently to the basement, of Bagshaw himself.

  ‘Ah, Nicholas. When did you arrive? How did you get in? Avril opened the door, I suppose. Where is she now? Gone off to quieten the kids, I expect. You haven’t been here long, have you?’

  ‘No, but a white-haired gentleman came down the stairs just now, apparently seeking help.’

  Bagshaw dismissed that.

  ‘Only my father. May didn’t appear, did she? The gas-cooker’s blown. Come in here, shall we?’

  He had changed a good deal since last seen. At that period we did not have a television set, so I had never watched a Bagshaw programme. He looked not only much older, also much more untidy, which once would have seemed hard to achieve. The room we entered was even untidier than Bagshaw himself. The mess there was epic. It seemed half-study, half-nursery, in one corner a bookcase full of works on political theory, in another a large dolls’ house, lacking its façade. The tables and floor were covered with typescripts, income-tax forms, newspapers, weeklies, mini-cars, children’s bricks. Bagshaw made a space on the sofa, at the far end from that where the stuffing was bursting out.

  ‘Now – a drink?’

  ‘Who is Avril?’

  ‘One of my stepdaughters.’

  ‘I didn’t know — ’

  ‘Three of them. Avril’s not a bad girl. Not very bright. A bit sub, to tell the truth. She’s in rather a jam at the moment. Can’t be helped.’

  Bagshaw made a despairing, consciously theatrical gesture, no doubt developed from his professional life.

  ‘Are the other stepchildren upstairs?’

  He looked surprised. Certainly the ages seemed wrong, if anything were to be inferred from the noises being made.

  ‘No, no. The ones upstairs are my own. The stepchildren are more or less grown-up. Getting into tangles with boyfriends all the time. You see I’m quite a family man now.’

  Bagshaw said that in a whimsical, rather faraway voice, probably another echo of his programme. His whole demeanour had become more histrionic, at least histrionic in a different manner from formerly. He sat down without pouring himself out a drink, something not entirely without precedent, though unlikely to be linked now with curative abstinences of the past.

  ‘Aren’t you having anything?’

  ‘I hardly drink at all these days. Find I feel better. Get through more work. Here’s May. How’s your migraine, dear? Have a drink, it may make you feel better. No? Too busy?’

  Mrs Bagshaw, in her forties, with traces of the same blonde good-looks as her daughter, had the air of being dreadfully harassed. She was also rather lame. Evidently used to people coming to see her husband about matters connected with his work, perfectly polite, she obviously hoped to get out of the room as soon as possible, after giving some sort of a progress report about the cooking-stove crisis. This problem solved, or postponed, she excused herself and retired again. Bagshaw, who had listened gravely, replied with apparent good sense to his wife’s statements and questions, clearly accepted this new incarnation of himself. In any case, it was no longer new to him. When Mrs Bagshaw had gone, he settled down again to his professionally avuncular manner.

  ‘Where will this American friend of yours stay in London, Nicholas?’

  ‘In one of those bleak hotels X used to frequent. He hopes to get the atmosphere first-hand. He really is very keen on doing the book well.’

  ‘Which one?’

  Bagshaw groaned at the name, and shook his head. To judge from the exterior of the place, that reaction was justified.

  ‘I spent a night there myself once years ago – rather a sordid story I won’t bore you with – in fact recommended the place to Trappy in the first instance. The bathroom accommodation doesn’t exactly measure up to the highest mod. con. standards. You know how strongly Americans feel about these things.’

  ‘Gwinnett wants the Trapnel ethos, not the best place in London to take a bath.’

  ‘I see.’

  That fact impressed Bagshaw. He thought about it for a moment.

  ‘Look here, this idea occurred to me as soon as you mentioned your American. Why doesn’t Professor Gwinnett – I mean only when he’s completed his stint of Trapnel ports of call, not before – come and PG with us? The spare room’s free at the moment. Our Japanese statistician went back to Osaka. I think we made him comfortable during his stay. At least he never complained. That may have been Zen, of course, overcoming of illusory dualisms. I got quite interested in Zen while he was with us.’

  The idea of lodging with Bagshaw, a guest paying or non-paying, would once have seemed almost as extraordinary as the fact of his possessing a house. Even in the reformed state of his ménage there were disrecommendations. If anyone were to be ‘lodger’, Bagshaw himself had always appeared prototype of the kind, one of Nature’s lodgers; coaxing the landlady, when behind with the rent, seducing her daughter, storing (in his revolutionary days) subversive pamphlets under the bed. He was imaginable in all such stylized circumstances; even meeting his death as a lodger – the Passing of the Third Floor Back, with Bagshaw as the body. Although that picture had to be revised, the thought of paying to live with Bagshaw was still to be accepted with some demur. That was what I felt as Bagshaw himself digressed on the subject.

  ‘The Icelander, an economist, was rather a turgid fellow, the Eng. Lit. New Zealander, a charming boy. We’re looking for a replacement just like your friend – and what could be better from his point of view, if he’s writing a book about poor old Trappy? I’ll tell you what, Nicholas, I’ll send a line to Professor Gwinnett to await arrival, so that he can arrange to see me whenever it suits his purpose. We’ll have a talk. If all goes well, I’ll suggest he comes and beds down here. I’ll put it this way, that he doesn’t dream of doing any such thing until he’s made an exhaustive study, in depth, of Trapnel haunts, thoroughly absorbed the Trapnel Weltanschauung. That should not take long. The essentials are not difficult to grasp.’

  Gwinnett was, after all, well able to look after himself. He needed no surveillance, would resent anything of the sort. Besides, from Gwinnett’s point of view, there was something to be said for hearing about Trapnel, while living side by side with Bagshaw. If he decided that to stay with the Bagshaws was convenient to his purpose, he would do so; if not, either refuse, or after brief trial withdraw. That was the situation. In any case, Gwinnett was not concerned with living a life of ease, but – something very different – living the life of Trapnel. To lodge with the Bagshaws would in no way run counter to that ambition, in spite of Trapn
el himself never having undergone the experience. He must have done similar things. At that moment a girl, recognizable as sister of Avril, probably a year or so older, came into the room. She took no notice of us, but knelt down, and began hunting about in the bookcase. She, too, was fairly good-looking.

  ‘What do you want, Felicity?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘This is Mr Jenkins.’

  ‘Hullo,’ she said, without turning round.

  ‘Where’s Stella?’ asked Bagshaw.

  ‘God knows.’

  She found her book, and went away, slamming the door after her. Bagshaw grimaced at the noise.

  ‘That one’s rather a worry too. Young people are nowadays. It’s either Regan or Goneril. Look here, have you seen this? Only one paper reported the item.’

  He searched about among the assortment of journals lying on the floor, indicating a short paragraph on the foreign news page, when he found the special one he wanted. Its subject was a recent state trial in one of the countries of Eastern Europe, action somewhat unexpected in an atmosphere, in general, of relaxed international tension. Representatives of an outgoing Government had been expelled from the Party, and a former police minister, with one or two others, imprisoned by the new administration taking over. No great prominence was being given by the London press to these proceedings, which appeared to be of a fairly stereotyped order in the People’s Republic concerned. That morning a modest headline in my own paper had drawn attention to allegations that some of the accused had been in the pay of the British Secret Service. The three or four persons named as having set out to corrupt members of the fallen Government (together with certain officials and ‘intellectuals’) were all British Communists of some public standing, or at least prominent fellow-travellers, malting little or no concealment of their political affiliations; in short, as little likely to be connected with the British Secret Service, as the accused of being in touch with that organization. An additional name, unintelligibly translated, had been put within inverted commas in Bagshaw’s newspaper paragraph.