‘What are we going to do with him?’
‘Put him to bed,’ said Widmerpool, speaking as if any other action were inconceivable.
Widmerpool and I, therefore, set out to remove String ham’s clothes, get him into some pyjamas, and place him between the sheets. This was a more difficult job than might be supposed. His stiff shirt seemed riveted to him. However, we managed to get it off at last, though not without tearing it. In these final stages, Stringham himself returned to consciousness.
‘Look here,’ he said, suddenly sitting up on the bed, ‘what is happening? People seem to be treating me roughly. Am I being thrown out of somewhere? If so, where? And what have I done to deserve such treatment? I am perfectly prepared to listen to reason and admit that I was in the wrong, and pay for anything I have broken. That is provided, of course, that I was in the wrong. Nick, why are you letting this man hustle me? I seem for some reason to be in bed in the middle of the afternoon. Really, my habits get worse and worse. I am even now full of good resolutions for getting up at half-past seven every morning. But who is this man? I know his face.’
‘It’s Widmerpool. You remember Widmerpool?’
‘Remember Widmerpool…’ said Stringham. ‘Remember Widmerpool… Do I remember Widmerpool? … How could I ever forget Widmerpool? … How could anybody forget Widmerpool? …’
‘We thought you needed help, Stringham,’ said Widmerpool, in a very matter-of-fact voice. ‘So we put you to bed.’
‘You did, did you?’
Stringham lay back in the bed, looking fixedly before him. His manner was certainly odd, but his utterance was no longer confused.
‘You needed a bit of looking after,’ said Widmerpool.
‘That time is past,’ said Stringham.
He began to get out of bed.
‘No…’
Widmerpool took a step forward. He made as if to restrain Stringham from leaving the bed, holding both his stubby hands in front of him, as if warming them before a fire.
‘Look here,’ said Stringham, ‘I must be allowed to get in and out of my own bed. That is a fundamental human right. Other people’s beds may be another matter. In them, another party is concerned. But ingress and egress of one’s own bed is unassailable.’
‘Much better stay where you are,’ said Widmerpool, in a voice intended to be soothing.
‘Nick, are you a party to this?’
‘Why not call it a day?’
‘Take my advice,’ said Widmerpool. ‘We know what is best for you.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘For your own good.’
‘I haven’t got my own good at heart.’
‘We will get you anything you want.’
‘Curse your charity.’
Once more Stringham attempted to get out of the bed. He had pushed the clothes back, when Widmerpool threw himself on top of him, holding Stringham bodily there. While they struggled together, Stringham began to yell at the top of his voice.
‘So these are the famous Widmerpool good manners, are they?’ he shouted. ‘This is the celebrated Widmerpool courtesy, of which we have always heard so much. Here is the man who posed as another Lord Chesterfield. Let me go, you whited sepulchre, you serpent, you small-time Judas, coming to another man’s house in the guise of paying a social call, and then holding him down in his own bed.’
The scene was so grotesque that I began to laugh; not altogether happily, it was true, but at least as some form of nervous relief. The two of them wrestling together were pouring with sweat, especially Widmerpool, who was the stronger. He must have been quite powerful, for Stringham was fighting like a maniac. The bed creaked and rocked as if it would break beneath them. And then, quite suddenly, Stringham began laughing too. He laughed and laughed, until he could struggle no more. The combat ceased. Widmerpool stepped back. Stringham lay gasping on the pillows.
‘All right,’ he said, still shaking with laughter, ‘I’ll stay. To tell the truth, I am beginning to feel the need for a little rest myself.’
Widmerpool, whose tie had become twisted in the struggle, straightened his clothes. His dinner-jacket looked more extraordinary than ever. He was panting hard.
‘Is there anything you would like?’ he asked in a formal voice.
‘Yes,’ said Stringham, whose mood was now completely changed. ‘A couple of those little pills in the box on the left of the dressing-table. They will knock me out finally. I do dislike waking at four and thinking things over. Perhaps three of the pills would be wiser, on second thoughts. Half measures are never any good.’
He was getting sleepy again, and spoke in a flat, mechanical tone. All his excitement was over. We gave him the sleeping tablets. He took them, turned away from us, and rolled over on his side.
‘Good-night, all,’ he said.
‘Good-night, Charles.’
‘Good-night, Stringham,’ said Widmerpool, rather severely.
We perfunctorily tidied some of the mess in the immediate neighbourhood of the bed. Stringham’s clothes were piled on a chair. Then we made our way down into the street.
‘Great pity for a man to drink like that,’ said Widmerpool.
I did not answer, largely because I was thinking of other matters: chiefly of how strange a thing it was that I myself should have been engaged in a physical conflict designed to restrict Stringham’s movements: a conflict in which the moving spirit had been Widmerpool. That suggested a whole social upheaval: a positively cosmic change in life’s system. Widmerpool, once so derided by all of us, had become in some mysterious manner a person of authority. Now, in a sense, it was he who derided us; or at least his disapproval had become something far more powerful than the merely defensive weapon it had once seemed.
I remembered that we were not far from the place where formerly Widmerpool had run into Mr. Deacon and Gypsy Jones on the night of the Huntercombes’ dance. Then he had been on his way to a flat in Victoria. I asked if he still lived there with his mother.
‘Still there,’ he said. ‘Though we are always talking of moving. It has great advantages, you know. You must come and see us. You have been there in the past, haven’t you?’
‘I dined with you and your mother once.’
‘Of course. Miss Walpole-Wilson was at dinner, wasn’t she? I remember her saying afterwards that you did not seem a very serious young man.’
‘I saw her brother the other day at the Isbister Retrospective Exhibition.’
‘I do not greatly care for the company of Sir Gavin,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I dislike failure, especially failure in one holding an official position. It is letting all of us down. But—as I was saying—we shall be rather occupied with my new job for a time, so that I expect we shall not be doing much entertaining. When we have settled down, you must come and see us again.’
I was not sure if his ‘we’ was the first person plural of royalty and editors, or whether he spoke to include his mother; as if Mrs. Widmerpool were already a partner with him in his bill-broking. We said good-night, and I wished him luck in the Acceptance World. It was time to make for Jean’s. She was reaching London by a late train that evening, again lodged in the flat at the back of Rutland Gate.
On the way there I took from my pocket the postcard she had sent telling me when to arrive. I read it over, as I had already done so many times that day. There was no mistake. I should be there at the time she asked. The events of the evening seemed already fading into unreality at the prospect of seeing her once more.
The card she had sent was of French origin, in colour, showing a man and woman seated literally one on top of the other in an armchair upholstered with crimson plush. These two exchanged ardent glances. They were evidently on the best of terms, because the young man, fair, though at the same time rather Semitic of feature, was squeezing the girl’s arm just above the elbow. Wearing a suit of rich brown material, a tartan tie and a diamond ring on the third finger of his right hand, his face, as he displayed a row of dazzling teeth, re
minded me of Prince Theodoric’s profile—as the Prince might have been painted by Isbister. The girl smiled back approvingly as she balanced on his knee.
‘Doesn’t she look like Mona?’ Jean had written on the back. Dark, with corkscrew curls, the girl was undeniably pretty, dressed in a pink frock, its short sleeves frilled with white, the whole garment, including the frills, covered with a pattern of small black spots. The limits of the photograph caused her legs to fade suddenly from the picture, an unexpected subordination of design created either to conceal an impression of squatness, or possibly a purely visual effect—the result of foreshortening—rather than because these lower limbs failed in the eyes of the photographer to attain a required standard of elegance. For whichever reason, the remaining free space at the foot of the postcard was sufficient to allow the title of the caption below to be printed in long, flourishing capitals:
Sex Appeal
Ton regard et ta voix ont un je ne sais quoi …
D’étrange et de troublant qui me met en émoi.
Although in other respects a certain emptiness of background suggested a passage or hall, dim reflections of looking-glass set above a shelf painted white seemed to belong to a dressing-table: a piece of furniture hinting, consequently, of bedrooms. To the left, sprays of artificial flowers, red and yellow, drooped from the mouth of a large vase of which the base was invisible. This gigantic vessel assumed at first sight the proportions of a wine vat or sepulchral urn, even one of those legendary jars into which Morgiana, in the Arabian Nights, poured boiling oil severally on the Forty Thieves: a public rather than private ornament, it might be thought, decorating presumably the bedroom, if bedroom it was, of a hotel. Indeed, the style of furnishing was reminiscent of the Ufford.
Contemplating the blended tones of pink and brown framed within the postcard’s scalloped edge of gold, one could not help thinking how extraordinarily unlike ‘the real thing’ was this particular representation of a pair of lovers; indeed, how indifferently, at almost every level except the highest, the ecstasies and bitterness of love are at once conveyed in art. So much of the truth remains finally unnegotiable; in spite of the fact that most persons in love go through remarkably similar experiences. Here, in the picture, for example, implications were misleading, if not positively inaccurate. The matter was presented as all too easy, the twin flames of dual egotism reduced almost to nothing, so that there was no pain; and, for that matter, almost no pleasure. A sense of anxiety, without which the condition could scarcely be held to exist, was altogether absent.
Yet, after all, even the crude image of the postcard depicted with at least a degree of truth one side of love’s outward appearance. That had to be admitted. Some of love was like the picture. I had enacted such scenes with Jean: Templer with Mona: now Mona was enacting them with Quiggin: Barnby and Umfraville with Anne Stepney: Stringham with her sister Peggy: Peggy now in the arms of her cousin: Uncle Giles, very probably, with Mrs. Erdleigh: Mrs. Erdleigh with Jimmy Stripling: Jimmy Stripling, if it came to that, with Jean: and Duport, too.
The behaviour of the lovers in the plush armchair beside the sparse heads of those sad flowers was perfectly normal; nor could the wording of the couplet be blamed as specially far-fetched, or in some other manner indefensible. ‘D’étrange et de troublant’ were epithets, so far as they went, perfectly appropriate in their indication of those indefinable, mysterious emotions that love arouses. In themselves there was nothing incongruous in such descriptive labels. They might, indeed, be regarded as rather apt. I could hardly deny that I was at that moment experiencing something of the sort.
The mere act of a woman sitting on a man’s knee, rather than a chair, certainly suggested the Templer milieu. A memorial to Templer himself, in marble or bronze, were public demand ever to arise for so unlikely a cenotaph, might suitably take the form of a couple so grouped. For some reason—perhaps a confused memory of Le Baiser—the style of Rodin came to mind. Templer’s own point of view seemed to approximate to that earlier period of the plastic arts. Unrestrained emotion was the vogue then, treatment more in his line than some of the bleakly intellectual statuary of our own generation.
Even allowing a fairly limited concession to its character as a kind of folk perception—an eternal girl sitting on an eternal young man’s knee—the fact remained that an infinity of relevant material had been deliberately omitted from this vignette of love in action. These two supposedly good-looking persons were, in effect, going through the motions of love in such a manner as to convince others, perhaps less well equipped for the struggle than themselves, that they, too, the spectators, could be easily identified with some comparable tableau. They, too, could sit embracing on crimson chairs. Although hard to define with precision the exact point at which a breach of honesty had occurred, there could be no doubt that this performance included an element of the confidence-trick.
The night was a shade cooler now. Jean was wearing a white blouse, or sports shirt, open at the neck. Beneath it, her body trembled a little.
‘What was your dinner like?’ she asked.
‘Peter turned up.’
‘He said he would probably go there.’
I told her about Le Bas; and also about Stringham.
‘That is why I am a bit late.’
‘Did Peter mention that Bob is back in England?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that his prospects are not too bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘That may make difficulties.’
‘I know.’
‘Don’t let’s talk of them.’
‘No.’
‘Darling Nick.’
Outside, a clock struck the hour. Though ominous, things still had their enchantment. After all, as St. John Clarke was reported to have said at the Huntercombes’, ‘All blessings are mixed blessings.’ Perhaps, in spite of everything, the couple of the postcard could not be dismissed so easily. It was in their world that I seemed now to find myself.
Anthony Powell, The Acceptance World
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