Temporary Kings

by Anthony Powell

  ‘How much of the book have you done?’

  ‘I might have roughed out the first quarter.’

  He spoke of some of his discoveries. From various sources, he had unearthed material about Trapnel’s early life in Egypt. Perhaps concentrating on Egypt had given Gwinnett the Near East look. He could list, among other things, racehorses Trapnel’s father had ridden, and their owners. There were striking facts about the schools Trapnel had attended, which were many and various. Gwinnett had worked hard.

  ‘Have you traced any of the girls?’

  ‘I have.’

  Tessa, who had immediately preceded Pamela as object of Trapnel’s love, was doing extremely well. She was secretary, evidently a high-powered one, to the chairman of a noted firm of merchant bankers. Tessa had been helpful to Gwinnett in a straightforward way, giving him a clear, unvarnished account of Trapnel’s daily life, its interior economy, seen from the point of view of an intelligent, capable mistress, who wanted her lover to become a success as a writer. Although retaining affectionate memories of Trapnel, she decided in due course, she said, that he lacked the necessary stamina. That was an interesting first-hand view. Gwinnett had appreciated its good points.

  ‘Then there was Pat.’

  Pat, now married to a don, Professor of Social Science, had been less willing to have her past dredged up. She had replied with a tactful letter saying she preferred not to see Gwinnett.

  Sally was dead. That was all he had been able to find out about her.

  ‘I’d have liked to know more – how and why she died.’

  Jacqueline had married a journalist, and was living abroad, where her husband was foreign correspondent to a daily paper. Linda could not be traced.

  ‘Did you know Pauline?’

  ‘I never met her. I’ve heard Trapnel speak of her. He thought her depraved. Those were his words. They remained on good terms after parting.

  ‘I ran Pauline to earth.’

  ‘What’s she doing?’

  ‘She’s become a call-girl.’

  ‘Trapnel said that was where Pauline would end.’

  ‘Well, not much short of that, I’d say.’

  Gwinnett seemed uncertain whether or not to qualify the description. He thought for a moment, then decided against amendment.

  ‘I went to see her. She told me some facts.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘What some of her clients like.’

  ‘Anything out of the usual run?’

  ‘Not much, I guess.’

  ‘I’d have thought Trapnel pretty normal.’

  ‘She said he was.’

  Gwinnett changed the subject. I thought he had abandoned it. I was wrong. He was choosing another conversational angle, one of his habits, at times effected in a manner a little disconcerting.

  ‘Did Lindsay Bagshaw say there’d been some trouble at his place?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him, but I heard something of the sort. I knew you’d left.’

  ‘You heard Lady Widmerpool kicked up a racket there?’

  ‘Her name was mentioned.’

  ‘As raising hell?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘If you run across Lady Widmerpool, do you mind not telling her my address?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You heard about Lord Widmerpool being denounced on the radio as a British agent? Lindsay Bagshaw talked his head off about it. I’m not that interested in politics, though I couldn’t but be interested in such a thing happening. Just because of all the Trapnel tie-up with her. What do you think?’

  ‘He might be in deep water. Hard to say, at this stage.’

  Gwinnett hesitated, seeming, as he sometimes did, uncertain of the exact ground he wanted to occupy.

  ‘Lady Widmerpool – Pamela – I wouldn’t be in her husband’s shoes, if she’s left to decide his fate.’

  ‘She’s got it in for him?’

  ‘That’s how it looks.’

  ‘You’re avoiding her for the time being?’

  That was a reasonable question in the circumstances. Gwinnett did not answer it. At the same time he accepted its inferences.

  ‘Just to duck back to Pauline for a spell – she had dealings with Lord Widmerpool.’

  ‘Professional ones, you mean?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘He picked her up somewhere? Answered an ad?’

  ‘When his wife was living with Trapnel, Widmerpool had her shadowed. As a former girl friend of Trapnel’s, whom he saw once in a while, Pauline’s name was given to Widmerpool.’

  ‘And he went to see her?’

  ‘They met somehow.’

  ‘Continued to meet?’

  ‘It seems arrangements were made satisfactory to both sides. Pauline later figured at several parties attended by Widmerpool – and the Frenchman, too, who died all that sudden, when Pamela was around.’

  ‘Pauline told you that?’

  Gwinnett nodded. He had a way with him when he sought information. At least information was what he acquired.

  ‘Was Pamela herself included in these Pauline jaunts?’

  ‘I don’t know for certain. I don’t believe so.’

  Thought of Pamela seemed to depress Gwinnett He fell into one of his glooms. Their relationship was an enigma. Perhaps he was in love with her, in spite of everything. We parted on good terms, the best. Gwinnett spoke as if we were likely to talk together again as a matter of course, do that quite soon. At the same time he parried any suggestion of coming to see us; even arranging another meeting in London. This determination that initiative should remain in his hands was a reminder of Trapnel methods. Possibly it was one of the ways in which Gwinnett was growing to resemble Trapnel.

  During the next month or so, Gwinnett’s problems receded in my mind as a matter of immediate interest, Widmerpool’s too. Fresh information about the second of those came from two rather unexpected sources. These followed each other in quick succession, although quite unconnected.

  For several years after the war, I had attended reunion dinners of one of the branches of the army in which I had served, usually deciding to do so at the last moment, even then never quite knowing what brought me there. Friends made in a military connexion were, on the whole, to be seen more conveniently, infinitely more agreeably, in settings of a less deliberate character, where former brother officers, now restored to civilian life in multitudinous shapes, had often passed into spheres with which it was hard to make conversational contact. Intermittent transaction in the past of forgotten military business provided only a frail link. All the same, when something momentous like a war has taken place, all existence turned upside down, personal life discarded, every relationship reorganized, there is a temptation, after all is over, to return to what remains of the machine, examine such paraphernalia as came one’s way, pick about among the bent and rusting composite parts, assess merits and defects. Reunion dinners, to the point of morbidity, gave the chance of indulging in such reminiscent scrutinies. Not far from a vice, like most vices they began sooner or later to pall. Even the first revealed the gap, instantaneously come into being on demobilization, between what was; what, only a moment before, had been. On each subsequent occasion that hiatus widened perceptibly, moving in the direction of an all but impassable abyss.

  There were, of course, windfalls. One evening, at such an assemblage, my former Divisional Commander, General Liddament (by then promoted to the Army Council) turned up as guest of honour, making a lively speech about the country’s military commitments ‘round the map’, ending with a recommendation that everyone present should read Trollope. That was an exceptional piece of luck. In the same way, an old colleague would sometimes appear; Hewetson, who had looked after the Belgians, now senior partner in a firm of solicitors: Slade, Pennistone’s second-string with the Poles, headmaster of a school in the Midlands: Dempster, retired from selling timber, settled in Norway, still telling his aunt’s anecdotes about Ibsen. Finn, Commanding Officer of the Section, w
as dead. At the end of the war he had gone back briefly to his cosmetic business in Paris, soon after left, to end his days in contemplation of his past life and his VC, near Perpignan. Pennistone (married to a French girl, said to have taken an energetic part in the Resistance) had stepped into Finn’s place in the firm. His letters reported good sales. He rarely came to England, spare time from the office taken up with writing a book on the philosophical ideas of Cyrano de Bergerac.

  Usually there was less on offer, fewer, still fewer, even known by sight. That was especially true when the thinned ranks of branches, originally designed to be reunited on this particular occasion, were augmented by other elements. These, if remotely related in duties, had once been regarded with a certain professional suspicion, but their attendance too dwindled through death and inanition, requiring, as we did, bolstered numbers to make the party worth while. In short, feeling increasingly isolated, I lost the habit of attending these dinners. Then, a son likely to become liable for military service, it seemed wise to re-establish bearings in a current army world, find out what was happening, pick up anything to be known. I put down my name again, without much hope of seeing anyone with whom closer bonds were likely to be evoked than shared memory of whether or not some weapon, piece of equipment, had ‘come off the security list’ for release to the Allies, or by swopping stories about the shortcomings, as an officer and a man, of the unpopular brigadier.

  That year the dinner was held on the premises of a club or association of vaguely patriotic intent, unfamiliar to myself both in membership and situation. The dining-room was decorated in a manner sober to the point of becoming sepulchral, drinks obtainable from a bar at one end. No one standing about there was an acquaintance. At the table assigned to my former Section, faces were equally unknown. Mutual introductions took place. My righthand neighbour, Lintot, fair, bald, running to fat, had looked after some of the Neutrals – a ‘dismal crowd’, he said – before Finn commanded, later posted to Censorship in the Middle East. He worked in a travel agency. We talked of the best places to take an autumn holiday abroad.

  Macgivering, on the other side, also belonged to a War Office epoch earlier than my own. His duties had been in the Section handling in-coming telegrams, where he remembered the stunted middle-aged lieutenant, for ever polishing his Sam Browne belt. We had both forgotten his name. Macgivering himself, tall, spare, haggard, with a slight stutter, had been invalided out of the army, consequent on injury from enemy action, while in bed at his flat one early night of the blitz. We split a bottle of indifferent Médoc, and discussed car insurance, as he had some sort of public relations connexion with the motor business.

  Only towards the end of dinner did I notice Sunny Farebrother sitting at the end of a table on the far side of the room. During the war he had operated in several areas of army life, including at least one of those branches now joined to the increasingly disparate elements of this dinner. He had found himself a place at right angles to the ‘high table’, where more important members or guests sat. He was talking hard. His neighbour looked like a relatively senior officer, whom Farebrother appeared to be indoctrinating with some ideas of his own. Farebrother looked in the best of form. He must be close on seventy, I thought. At the end of these dinners movement away from table places was customary, so that people could circulate. I decided to have a word with Farebrother at this interspersion. He was still in earnest conversation with the supposed general, when the time came. He could be pushing a share in which he was interested. I had not seen him at or near the bar on arrival. Probably he had deliberately turned up at the last moment to avoid threatened liability for buying a drink.

  While I waited for a suitable moment to move across to Farebrother’s table, a man with woolly grey hair and wire spectacles (the latter not yet a fashionable adjunct) came to speak with Lintot. Macgivering had already left, to make contact elsewhere in the room. I changed into his former seat, to allow the wire-spectacled man to talk in more comfort sitting next to Lintot. They appeared to know each other through civilian rather than army connexions. Lintot was astonished at the wire-spectacled man’s presence at this dinner. His wonderment greatly pleased the other.

  ‘Didn’t expect to find your accountant here, did you, Mr Lintot? We can both of us forget the Inland Revenue for once, can’t we? To tell the truth, I’m attending this dinner under rather false pretences. The fact is a friend of mine told me he was coming to London for this reunion. We wanted to talk together about certain matters, one thing and another, so as I’d gained a technical right to be deemed Intelligence personnel, I applied to the organizers of this ‘I’ dinner. They said I could come. I always enjoy these get-togethers. My old mob have one. There’s a POW one too. Why not roll up, I said to myself.’

  ‘Never knew you were in the army. Of course we’ve always had a lot of other things to talk about, so that wasn’t surprising.’

  Lintot appeared rather at a loss what to say next. He drew me into the conversation, mentioning we had been in the same Section, though not in the War Office at the same period.

  ‘This is – well, I’ve got to be formal, and call you Mr Cheesman, because I only know your initials – this is Mr Cheesman, whose accountancy firm acts for mine. For me personally too. We do our best against the taxman between us, don’t we? I didn’t expect to find him here. Never thought of Mr Cheesman as a military man somehow, though I never think of myself as one either, if it comes to that.’

  ‘Yes, but you see my point. If I’m eligible, no reason why I shouldn’t come to the dinner, is there?’

  Cheesman was insistent. He was not in the least put out by Lintot’s emphasis on the unmilitary impression he gave. What he was keen on, pedantically keen, consisted in establishing his, so to speak, legal right to be at the party. He spoke in a precise, measured tone, as if attendance at the dinner were a matter of logic, as much as free choice.

  ‘Of course, of course. Glad to see you here. You’re about the only man in the room I’ve met before.’

  Lintot was quite uninterested in Cheesman’s bona fides as ‘I’ personnel. Cheesman accepted that his point had been understood, even if unenthusiastically. Now, I remembered that manner, at once mild and aggressive. It brought back early days in the army – Bithel, Stringham, Widmerpool.

  ‘Didn’t you command the Mobile Laundry?’

  I appended the number of General Liddament’s Division to that question.

  ‘You were there just for a short time, the Laundry only attached. Then it was posted to the Far East.’

  Cheesman drew himself up slightly.

  ‘Certainly I commanded that sub-unit. May I ask your name?’

  I told him. It conveyed nothing. That was immaterial. Cheesman’s own identity was the important factor.

  ‘Surely you fetched up in Singapore?’

  Cheesman nodded.

  ‘In fact, you were a Jap POW?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Cheesman gave that answer perfectly composedly, but for a brief second, something much shorter than that, something scarcely measurable in time, there shot, like forked lightning, across his serious unornamental features that awful look, common to those who speak of that experience. I had seen it before. Cheesman’s face reverted – the word suggests too extended a duration of instantaneous, petrifying exposure of hidden feeling – to an habitual sedateness. I remembered his arrival at Div. HQ; showing him the Mobile Laundry quarters; making this new officer known to Sergeant-Major Ablett Bithel had just been slung out. I had left Cheesman talking to the Sergeant-Major (who had the sub-unit well in hand), while I myself went off for a word with Stringham. One of Cheesman’s peculiarities had been to wear a waistcoat under his service-dress tunic. He had been surprised at that garment provoking amused comment in mess.

  ‘A waistcoat’s always been part of any suit I wore. Why change just because I’m in the army? I’ve got to keep warm in the army, like anywhere else, haven’t I?’

  He did not give an inch, eithe
r, in adapting himself to military manners and speech, behaving to superiors as he would in a civilian firm, where he was paid to give the best advice he could in connexion with his own employment. He dressed nothing up in the forms and terms traditional to the military subordinate. Colonel Hogbourne-Johnson had been particularly irked by that side of Cheesman. He used to call him ‘our Mr Cheesman’, a phrase in which Cheesman himself would have found nothing derogatory. Thirty-nine when he joined the army at the beginning of the war, he wanted to ‘command men’. He must be nearly sixty now. Except when that frightful look shot across his face, the features were scarcely more altered than Sunny Farebrother’s.

  ‘How the hell did you survive your Jap POW camp?’ asked Lintot cheerfully.

  Cheesman brushed the question aside.

  ‘A bit of luck. The Nips were moving some of their prisoners in ’44. Don’t know where they were taking us. When we were at sea, the Nip transport was sunk by an American warship. No arrangements made for POWs, of course, when ship’s company took to the boats, but the Americans rescued most of us – and a lot of the Nips too.’

  ‘Don’t expect you were feeling too good by that time?’

  ‘Naturally I wasn’t fit for normal duties for a month or two. When I was on my feet again, I got a change of job. They were short of Intelligence wallahs where I was. I’d picked up a few words of Japanese. It was thought better to make use of me in ‘I’, rather than go back to Mobile Laundry duty, though I’d have liked to return to the job for which I’d been trained. That’s why I’m allowed here, without being strictly speaking applicable. Funny meeting you, Mr Jenkins. I don’t remember your face at all at that Div HQ. The officer I recall is the DAAG, Major Widmerpool. He made quite an impression on me. Very efficient, I should say. A really good officer. You can always tell the type. I expect he’s done well in civilian life too.’