Temporary Kings

2

The bragadin palace was approached on foot. Gwinnett and I walked together. Shared acquaintance with some of the circumstances of Trapnel’s life had not made Gwinnett’s behaviour less reserved. If anything, he was more farouche than before. Possibly he felt that to speak of the Commonplace Book had been indiscreet. Although he had emphasized that Trapnel’s ‘remains’ contained little of interest, many researchers in Gwinnett’s place might have kept the fact of its existence to themselves. In that respect he could not be called ‘cagey’, as Dr Brightman had characterized him at times. This lack of response was something less crude than ‘caginess’, almost suggesting terms like ‘alienation’ or ‘withdrawal.’ No doubt he was merely one of those persons, not so very uncommon, with whom every subsequent meeting after the first entails a fresh start from the beginning. The anxious air always remained. I should have liked to probe his views on the Ferrand-Sénéschal article, no more than skimmed, but something about Gwinnett’s manner made this not the moment.

‘Did you run across anyone you knew when you reconnoitred the Piazza last night?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘See anyone from the Conference?’

Gwinnett wriggled his neck.

‘No.’

He drawled out the negative, making it sound as if he thought the question in itself uncalled for, a trifle intrusive. I asked if he knew what the Palazzo would be like. Gwinnett was more responsive to that. He began to speak of Venetian architecture, of which he evidently knew something, going on to recommend the book written about Venice by William Dean Howells when American consul here. Then he abandoned porticos and pediments, and fell into a long silence, suggesting a mood to be left alone. We made our way through narrow calles towards an area beyond the Accademia. I wondered how best we could disembarrass ourselves of each other’s company without too blatantly seeming to do so. Suddenly Gwinnett came out of his dream with a sort of jerk, one of his characteristic nervous movements, which were not necessarily resentful. He spoke now as if referring to a matter he had been pondering for some little time, using that habitually low tone often hard to catch.

‘It seems Louis Glober is house-guest at the Palazzo.’

‘The publisher?’

‘Glober was that one time. He’s been a heap of other things too.’

‘When I met him years ago he was in publishing. That’s why I think of him as a publisher. I was in a firm that produced art books myself. He came to see us.’

‘Glober’s been more associated with pictures.’

‘Paintings, you mean, or films?’

‘Movies. I guess he owns some sort of a modern picture collection too.’

‘He was keen on paintings thirty years ago. He wanted my firm to do a series on the Cubists. That was when we met. It was quite a funny occasion. I wonder whether he remembers. Do you know him?’

Gwinnett shook his head.

‘I just saw a paragraph about him in the Continental Herald-Tribune. It said the well-known playboy-tycoon Louis Glober was here for the Film Festival, and was staying with Mr Jacky Bragadin.’

‘I thought Glober an amusing figure. Since then I’ve never done more than read about him in the paper in his playboy-tycoon capacity. I suppose he’s a typical Jacky Bragadin guest. Did the Herald-Tribune name any others?’

‘Just Glober. It seems he’s come on here from the German Grand Prix.’

‘Racing?’

‘Automobile racing. World Championship.’

‘He’s in that game too?’

‘Sure.’

To the eye of a fellow American I saw Glober must present a very different outline to that of my own remembrance. If not exactly the daily meat of the columnist, Louis Glober was a reasonably tasty snack, always available on the back shelf of the larder, where public personalities of a minor sort are stored in case of need. He was neither dished up too often to cause surfeit, nor left too long on ice to become stale. Contradictory features hampered his definition. The Herald-Tribune had termed him playboy-tycoon, this type-casting to cover publisher, film-producer, sportsman, ‘socialite’, a lot of other more or less news-valued labels, most with some basis in fact. The last photograph I had seen of Glober had been driving a vintage car. Gwinnett thought activities like sailing or motor racing had latterly taken the form of promotion, rather than too laboriously personal a role. That did not prevent Glober from still figuring as a noted rider, shot, golfer, yachtsman, or whatever else was required by the context. A taste for amusing himself had not inhibited making money, though again Glober was said to lose fortunes as easily as win them.

‘The point I remember about Glober was that he seemed rather intelligent.’

‘Ah-ha.’

The answer was non-committal, possibly disapproving, either because Gwinnett thought such a judgment, even if favourable, impertinent to pass on another human being, or because he was himself reluctant to allow the laurels of intelligence to decorate a brow of Glober’s type. As not seldom when Americans utter that sound, hard to transliterate, I was uncertain. We talked of some of the reputed exploits; the blazing Hollywood restaurant from which Glober had carried shoulder-high down a ladder a famous film star — Dietrich, Hepburn, Harlow — neither of us was certain of the heroine; the methusalem of champagne that burst celebrating the return from Europe of Texas Guinan; the fight (almost won) in some night-club with an ex-middle-weight champion of Australia. A reporter never seemed far away to chronicle these vignettes of Glober as a picturesque or glamorous figure, his own clear-cut sense of the dramatic occasion endearing him to press and public wherever he went. Even in England, where he was not much known, editors instinctively printed the intermittent Glober item, compressed into a couple of lines on the back page. I mentioned that.

‘Would they report him today?’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Glober must be about washed up.’

‘What is he? In his sixties? Just about.’

Gwinnett gave the impression of not greatly caring for the idea of Glober, at the same time granting some respect to a romantic so unusually successful at giving public expression to his romanticism; showing ability too, even if a fluctuating one, in making a success of financial ventures. My own memory of Glober was far from unsympathetic, even if he now sounded rather different — though not all that different — from the young American first set eyes on. The mere fact that he was staying with Jacky Bragadin for the Film Festival, that he had been car-racing in Germany, argued survival powers of a sort; resilience not always found in characters of his type.

‘Who’s he married to now?’

Glober’s wives had always been beauties. Once, very briefly, he had been husband of a world-famous film star. These unions lasted only a few years before being dissolved; soon renewed in similar fashion to the accompaniment of further widespread exudations of publicity in the appropriate quarters.

‘No one, so far as I know. His last wife died quite a long while ago. They’d been wed only a very short time. It was leukemia, I think. Glober was photographed kneeling at her grave. There was a blanket of lilies, and, on a card written large enough to read in a newspaper picture, a message: Farewell, Fleurdelys, farewell, fair one.’

‘Fleurdelys was her name?’

‘It looked almost as if Glober was lying in the grave.’

Gwinnett spoke with an odd sense of excitement. He stared at me hard. I did not know quite whether he were criticizing Glober, or applauding him, expressing irony or admiration. The thought of what Dr Brightman had said about the dead girl came back.

‘He was in a different mood when I met him.’

That had been towards the end of the nineteen-twenties. Glober had arrived in London as representative of a recently founded New York publishing house. Even before he landed, his name went round among the London publishers as a young American colleague with a head full of bright new ideas; by no means an unqualified recommendation to that particular community. Glober came to call on my own firm. He saw Daniel Tokenhouse. One of the bright ideas was the Cubist series. The suggestion was to produce generously illustrated, cheaply produced studies of these painters, blocks to be made in Holland or Germany by some newly devised process. Apart from the fact that the Cubists were still very generally regarded as wild men, if not worse, certainly unwise to encourage, transactions that included overseas production always entailed risks not every publisher was prepared to take. That was where Tokenhouse came in. Tokenhouse did not mind an element of risk. His predisposition for certain forms of rebellion against a humdrum approach to life was one of his unexpected sides. He also derived pleasure from the thought of how much the series would annoy other publishers, not to mention booksellers. Then, at quite an early stage, something went wrong in connexion with the issue of the series. I did not remember exactly what upset the project, but it never went forward. There had been rather a row, money and tempers lost. I was in too subordinate a position at the time to be concerned, or greatly interested, except so far as being well disposed to ‘modern art’. There were other things to think about, better ones, it then seemed, the business aspects forgotten among elements more memorable.

Tokenhouse was still occupied when Glober arrived for his appointment. Negotiations on the matter of St John Clarke’s Introduction to The Art of Horace Isbister had just begun. St John Clarke was still haggling about payment. He was too well known a novelist to be dismissed out of hand, so Glober could not be received. The manager, with whom I shared a not over-luxurious office, was wrangling with a binder in the firm’s waiting-room, a cubicle from its austerity in any case unsuitable for reception of another publisher, especially an American one. Tokenhouse rang through on the house-telephone with instructions to hold Glober in play for the further few minutes required to dislodge St John Clarke. The room where the manager and I passed our days, its walls grimly lined with file copies, was almost as comfortless as the waiting-room, but Glober was shown in. From the moment he entered, there was no need to provide distraction from the frugality of the surroundings. Glober himself took charge. In a matter of seconds we seemed already on the friendliest of terms. That was Glober’s speciality. I made some apology for this delay after an appointment had been made.

‘Don’t worry. It’s great to draw breath. There’s a lot of running round in London. I didn’t get to bed till late last night.’

He sat down in the collapsed armchair, and looked about him.

‘You’ve got a real Dickensian place here.’

‘Bleak House?’

Glober laughed his quiet attractive laugh.

‘The Old Curiosity Shop,’ he said. ‘In the illustration.’

I supposed him thirty, possibly a year or two more, to my own twenty-two or twenty-three, but his self-confidence, maturity of manner, separated us by several decades. Unusually tall, incontrovertibly good-looking, Glober’s features — in the later words of Xenia Lilienthal — were those of a ‘young Byzantine emperor’. One saw what she meant. It showed she had taken in that aspect of him, in spite of her bad cold. His quietly forceful manner suggested a right to command, inexhaustible funds of stored up energy, overwhelming sophistication, limitless financial resource. At that age I did not notice a hard core of melancholy lurking beneath these assets. Perhaps in those days that side of his nature was better concealed. The instinct he so essentially possessed was getting on the right terms with everybody, no matter how transiently encountered. This intuitive impulse caused him to move from illustrating Dickens to pictures in general, the fact that he himself wanted to buy an Augustus John drawing before he left England. The gallery handling John’s work had shown him nothing he fancied. Had I any ideas? I suggested direct approach to the painter himself, all the time feeling there was some quite easy answer, which Glober’s flow of questions had put from my head.

‘John’s out of the country. If I could meet some private person that had a drawing he was willing to trade.’

Then I remembered such an opportunity had been announced the previous week. The Lilienthals were trying to sell a John drawing for Mopsy Pontner. Moreland had mentioned the fact. Moreland had been searching for a secondhand copy of The Atheist’s Tragedy in the Lilienthals’ bookshop, and Xenia Lilienthal had told him that Mopsy Pontner — more correctly, Mopsy Pontner’s husband — had an Augustus John drawing to sell. The Lilienthals were accustomed to take books off Mr Deacon’s hands, when included in miscellaneous ‘lots’ acquired by him at auction to add to his stock of antiques. Mr Deacon was not above marketing the odd volume of curiosa — eroticism preferably confined to the male sex — but did not care to be bothered with the sale of more humdrum literary works. The Lilienthals’ shop was just around the corner. They were familiar with his quirks, like the Pontners, frequenters of The Mortimer, though not regularly.

Moreland (these were days before marriage to Matilda) always commended Mopsy Pontner’s looks, but was a friend of Pontner, who was musically inclined in a manner Moreland could approve, a qualification by no means common. Moreland tended to keep off his friends’ wives. Pontner, who knew several languages pretty well, earned a living by translating. He also bought paintings and drawings, when he could afford them, partly because he had a taste for pictures too, partly as a speculation. I ought to have thought of that when Glober raised the subject. This must have been a moment when money was required to tide over a financial crisis, take a holiday, or, as likely as either, invest in another work of art, which Pontner considered a better bet for a rise on the market. Pontner was older than his wife. The fact that Moreland found Mopsy attractive, liked talking about her, probably accounted for his passing on the information. At that time I had never met her, though knew she was reputed quite a beauty in her way. Suddenly remembering about this drawing, I told Glober it had been on offer a week or more before.

‘Do you think it’s still unsold?’

‘Shall I make enquiries?’

‘Go ahead. This is great. Mr Jenkins, we just had to meet.’

Glober was full of enthusiasm. He must have recognized one of his own characteristic situations taking shape before his eyes. His next reaction was that everyone must come to dinner with him to discuss the deal. By now he was certain the drawing remained unsold. Its existence revealed, it was now his by law of nature. Before the matter could be gone into further, Tokenhouse appeared in the doorway, having disembarrassed himself of St John Clarke, who could be heard coughing painfully, in a disgruntled manner, as he made his way down the stairs. Tokenhouse uttered his characteristically rather brusque apologies for the delay. Before they disappeared together Glober took my hand.

‘Call me up at the hotel between four and five this evening, Mr Jenkins. Even suppose the drawing is sold, I’d like to have you dine with me.’

Tokenhouse heard that a shade suspiciously. He was jealous of outside contacts, not least American ones. Glober stayed for about an hour. I did not see him when he left. In the course of the day I made several telephone calls, finding the Augustus John drawing still available, Pontners and Lilienthals delighted to scent a buyer. I informed Glober.

‘And they’ll all have dinner with me?’

‘Of course.’

Everyone was pleased with the idea. The party took place in Glober’s sitting-room on one of the upper floors of the hotel, an old-fashioned establishment (pulled down a couple of years later) in the Curzon Street neighbourhood. It was a favourite haunt at that period of the more enlightened sort of American publisher. The place was just Glober’s mark. When I arrived, he was inspecting the table laid for dinner.

‘Good to see you. I’ve asked quite a crowd.’

Mopsy Pontner, bringing the drawing with her, arrived alone. At the last moment her husband had been prevented from coming by another engagement, arisen at short notice, having professional bearing on one of his translations. Pontner rightly judged his wife fully competent to negotiate the business of the drawing on her own. There were a dozen or more guests by the time we sat down. The Lilienthals arrived late, and rather drunk, having had a long session at The Mortimer with a customer who could not make up his mind whether or not to buy a Conrad first-edition in their catalogue. Xenia Lilienthal, small, with ginger corkscrew curls and a beseeching expression, was suffering from a heavy cold in her nose. Lilienthal, his mind on business, kept fingering the hairs of his sparse black beard. Glober had roped in another American publisher and wife, met the previous day in London, both hitherto unknown to him. They were on their way to the south of France. He wanted them to deliver by hand a present to a friend they had in common, who was staying at Antibes. A young man with a lisp and honey-coloured hair, come to the hotel earlier in the evening to sell Glober a Georgian silver tankard, had been asked to stay for dinner. This young man told the Lilienthals he had once met them with Mr Deacon, to which they assented without much warmth. There was a lesbian called ‘Bill’ (apparently lacking a surname), seen much at parties, who admitted soon after arrival that she was uncertain as to how firm her invitation had been to this one. Old Mrs Maliphant was present, who had been on the stage in the ’seventies. She was alleged to have slept with Irving; some said Tree; possibly both. Glober had encountered her at the house of one of the several publishers to whom she had promised her Memoirs. Moreland, to some extent responsible for the whole assembly, arrived in poorish form, absent in manner, probably weighed down with a current love affair gone wrong. Other guests, now forgotten, may also have been entertained. If so, their presence did not affect what happened.

The years invest the muster-roll of Glober’s dinner-party with a certain specious picturesqueness, if anything increased by being a shade grotesque. At the time, at least on the surface of things, the evening turned out heavy going. That was Glober’s fault only so far as he had been over-reckless in mixing people, always risky, sometimes fatal. In this particular venture, he had, as an American, underrated the intractable strain in English social life, even at this undemanding London level, an easy thing to do for anyone not conversant with its heterogeneous elements, their likes and dislikes. Food and drink were both reasonably good. Conversation never got properly under way. Something was lacking.

Glober bought the Augustus John drawing on sight. He made no demur about the price, a fairly steep one in the light of the then market. It was a three-quarter length of a model called Conchita, a gipsy type Barnby, too, sometimes employed. Glober’s own demeanour, as when he had visited the office, was enormously genial, but even he did not appear to find the going easy with Mopsy Pontner, whom he had placed next to himself at table. He sat between her and the American publisher’s wife, a statuesque lady from Baltimore. Mopsy, with dark straggling hair and very red lips, perfectly civil, was uncommunicative in manner. She made Glober do all the talking. He probably did not mind that, but had earned the right to a little more notice than he seemed to be getting. He had also to work hard with the Baltimore lady, though not because she did not talk. The trouble was her anxiety about reservations on the Blue Train the following day. She continually returned to this preoccupation. When Xenia was not snuffling, she and Lilienthal exchanged secondhand-book chat across the table. The young silver salesman and ‘Bill’, recognizing no harmony in common, did not communicate with each other at all. Mrs Maliphant rambled on in a monologue about old Chelsea days, saying ‘Wilde’ when she meant ‘Whistler’, and ‘Sargent’ for ‘Shannon’. Moreland left early. I left early too; early that is in the light of the sort of party intended, and the fact that my flat in Shepherd Market was only a few yards away. Glober said an effusive goodbye.

‘Call me up when you’re next in New York, Mr Jenkins. I’d like to have you meet James Branch Cabell.’

That was the last I saw of Glober. His firm fell into liquidation the following year. Several go-ahead American publishing houses went bust about that time. The fact was regarded as an amelioration of whatever row had taken place about the Cubists, indicating our own firm was well out of the commitment.

Glober’s character was further particularized when, also about a year later, I came to know Mopsy Pontner better. It appeared that the evening at the hotel, anyway the latter part of it, had been less prosaic than might have been supposed at the time. Mopsy herself gave me an account of its consummation; no vague term in the context. She had, so she related, stayed on after the rest of the party had gone home. Glober, it seemed, had been more attractive to her, far more attractive, than outwardly revealed by her demeanour at dinner. In admitting that, she went so far as to declare that she had greatly approved of him at sight, as soon as she entered the room where we were to dine. Glober must have felt the same. The natural ease of his manner concealed such feelings, like Mopsy’s exterior reserve. Later that night mutual approval took physical expression.

‘Glober did me on the table.’

‘Among the coffee cups?’

‘We broke a couple of liqueur glasses.’

‘You obviously found him attractive.’

‘I believe I’d have run away with him that night, if he’d asked me. I was all right a day or two later, quite recovered. The affair stopped dead there. In any case he was sailing the next day. Some men are like that. Isn’t it funny? One rather odd thing about Glober, he insisted on taking a cutting from my bush — said he always did that after having anyone for the first time. He produced a pair of nail-scissors from a small red leather case. He told me he carried them round with him in case the need arose.’

‘We all of us have our whims.’

Mopsy laughed. So far as Glober was concerned, I do not put her conquest unduly high, though no doubt she was quite a beauty in her way. To exaggerate Glober’s achievement would be mistaken, lacking in a sense of proportion, even though Mopsy was capable of refusal, having turned Barnby down. Barnby made a good story about his failure to please on that occasion, which was one way of dealing with the matter. Such sudden adventures as this one of Glober’s can be misleading, unless considered in their context, time and place (as Moreland always insisted) both playing so vital a part. Nevertheless, this vignette, taken at an early stage of his career, suggests Glober’s vivacity, liberality, wide interests, capacity for attack; Mopsy’s footnote adding a small touch of the unusual, the exotic. These were no doubt the qualities that had carried him advantageously through the years of the Depression; New York to Hollywood, and back again; lots of other places too; until here he was at Jacky Bragadin’s Venetian palace. I enquired about Glober’s background. Gwinnett gave a rather satirical laugh.

‘Why do the British always ask that?’

‘One of our foibles.’

‘That’s not what Americans do.’

‘But we’re not Americans. You must humour our straying from the norm in that respect.’

Gwinnett laughed again.

‘Glober’s people were first generation Jewish emigrants. They were Russian. They took a German name to assimilate quicker, or so I’ve heard. Glober was from the Bronx.’

‘What we’d call the East End?’

‘His father made a sizeable pile in building. Glober himself didn’t begin on the breadline.’

‘You mean there was plenty of money before he started his publishing and film career?’

‘He made plenty more. Lost plenty too. Money is no problem to Glober.’

Gwinnett spoke with conviction. The comment that Glober was a man to whom money-making was no problem recalled Peter Templer having once spoken the same about Bob Duport. Duport, of course, had always been on a smaller scale financially than Glober, also without any claims to newspaper fame. I felt that side of Glober, the newspaper fame, was not without a certain fascination for Gwinnett, even if he hesitated to approve of Glober as an individual. An idea suddenly struck me.

‘Does he write?’

‘Does Glober write?’

‘Yes?’

‘Sure — did he refuse to sign his name to a contract you showed him in London on the grounds he couldn’t write? I’ll bet it wasn’t true, and he can.’

Gwinnett was unbending a little.

‘I meant books. It’s always a temptation (or a publisher to have a go at writing a book. After all, they think, if authors can do that, anybody can.’

‘Glober’s withstood the temptation so far.’

‘What I was leading up to is Glober having something of Trapnel about him — a Trapnel who brought off being a Complete Man. Of course if Glober can’t write, the comparison ceases to be valid, unless you accept as alternative Glober’s experience as entrepreneur in the arts. That might to some extent represent Trapnel’s literary sensibility.’

Gwinnett seemed unprepared for a comparison of that kind.

‘I just can’t imagine Trapnel without his writing,’ he said.

‘Certainly in his own eyes that would be a contradiction in terms. But all the beautiful girls, all the publishing and movie triumphs of one sort or another, all the publicity — yet the implied failure too. Experience of the other side of fortune. Losses, as well as gains, in money. Sadness in love, implicit in the changes of wives. In business, changes of interests. Nothing fails like success. Surely all that’s part of being complete in Trapnel’s eyes? Why shouldn’t Glober be Trapnel’s Complete Man at sixty?’

Gwinnett thought for a moment, but did not answer. The concept, even if it possessed a shred of interest, did not please him. He smiled a little grimly. There was no point in pressing the analogy. In any case, we had now reached the campo, along one side of which stood the palace to be visited; a Renaissance structure of moderate size, its exterior, as Gwinnett had explained on the way, severely restored in the eighteenth century. In the Venetian manner, the more splendid approach was by water, but it had been found more convenient to admit members of the Conference through the pillared entrance opening on to the square.

We passed between massively sententious caryatids towards a staircase carpeted in crimson. Dr Brightman drew level.

‘This Palazzo is not even mentioned in most guide-books,’ she said. ‘I’ve ascertained the whereabouts of the Tiepolo, and will lead you to it. Follow me, after we’ve made our bow.

At the top of the stairs, supported by a retinue of the Conference’s Executive Committee, and civic officials, Jacky Bragadin was receiving the guests. The municipality had helped to promote the Conference, in conjunction with the Biennale Exhibition, which fell that year, as well as the Film Festival. A small nervous man, in his fifties, Jacky Bragadin’s mixed blood had not wholly divested him of that Venetian physiognomy, noticeable as much in the contemporary city as in the canvases of its painters; somewhat as if most Venetians wore Commedia dell’Arte masks fashioned in the Orient, only a guess made at what Europeans look like. Into such features Jacky Bragadin had fused those of his American ancestry. He did not appear greatly at ease, fidgeting a good deal, a scarcely discernible American accent overlaying effects of English schooldays. The more consequential members of the Conference, after shaking hands, paused to have a word, or chat with the entourage, standing about on a landing ornamented with baroque busts of Roman emperors. The rest moved forward into a frescoed gallery beyond.

‘Come along,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘The ceiling is in an ante-room further on, not at all an obvious place. These Luca Giordanos will keep most of them quiet for the time being. We shall have a minute or two to inspect the Tiepolo in peace.’

Gwinnett, preferring to go over the Palazzo at his own speed, strolled away to examine the Roman emperors on their plinths. He may also have had an interest in Luca Giordano. I followed Dr Brightman through the doors leading into the gallery of frescoes. We passed on through further rooms, Dr Brightman expressing hurried comments.

‘These tapestries must be Florentine — look, The Drunkenness of Lot. The daughter on the left greatly resembles a pupil of mine, but we must not tarry, or the mob will be upon us again.’

She also disallowed for inspection a rococo ball-room, white walls, festooned with gold foliage and rams’ heads, making a background for Longhi caricatures, savants and punchinellos with huge spectacles and bulbous noses.

‘How much they resemble our fellow members of the Conference. The ante-room should be at the far end here.’

We entered a small almost square apartment, high ceilinged, with tall windows set in embrasures.

‘Here we are.’

She pointed upward. Miraculous volumes of colour billowed, gleamed, vibrated, above us. Dr Brightman clasped her hands.

‘Look — Candaules and Gyges.’

At our immediate entry the room had seemed empty. A second later, the presence of two other persons was revealed. The unconventional position both had chosen to assume, for a brief moment concealed, as it were camouflaged, their supine bodies, one male, the other female. In order the better to gaze straight ahead at the Tiepolo in a maximum of comfort, they were lying face upwards, feet towards each other, on two of the stone console seats, set on either side of the recess of a high pedimented window. The brightness of the sun flowing in had helped to make this couple invisible. At first sight, the pair seemed to have fainted away; alternatively, met not long before with sudden death in the vicinity, its abruptness requiring they should be laid out in that place as a kind of emergency mortuary, just to get the bodies out of the way pending final removal. Dr Brightman, noticing these recumbent figures too, gave a quick disapproving glance, but, without comment on their posture, began to speak aloud her exposition on the ceiling.

‘As Russell Gwinnett said, one is a little reminded of Iphigenia in the Villa Valmarana, or the Mars and Venus there. The usual consummate skill in handling aerial perspectives. The wife of Candaules — Gautier calls her Nyssia, but I suspect the name invented by him — is obviously the same model as Pharaoh’s daughter in Moses saved from the water at Edinburgh, also the lady in all the Antony and Cleopatra sequences, such as those at the Labia Palace, which I was once lucky enough to see.’

To make no mistake, I took another swift look at the couple lying on the ledges under the window. There was no mistake. They were sufficiently far away to convey quietly to Dr Brightman that we were in the presence of her ‘very bedworthy gentlewoman’, heroine, by implication, of ‘L’après-midi d’un monstre’. The horizontal figure on the left was certainly Pamela Widmerpool; the man on the right, lying like an effigy of exceptional length on a tomb, was not known to me. Dr Brightman as usual kept her head. Adjusting her spectacles, so as to make a more thorough survey of Pamela when the moment came, she continued to gaze for a few seconds upwards, her tone, at the same time, showing the keen interest she felt in this disclosure.

‘Lady Widmerpool? Indeed? I’ll curb my aesthetic enthusiasms in a moment in order to scan her surreptitiously.’

She concentrated for at least a minute on the Tiepolo, before making an inspection in her own time and manner. Leaving her to do that, I crossed the floor to where Pamela had brought her body into almost upright position in order to cast a disdainful glance on whoever had entered the room. As I advanced she gave one of her furious looks, then, without smiling, accepted that we knew each other.

‘Hullo, Pamela.’

‘Hullo.’

Much of the beauty of her younger days remained in her late thirties. She had allowed her hair to go grey, perhaps deliberately engineered the process, silver tinted, with faint highlights of strawberry pink that glistened when caught by sunlight. She looked harder, more angular in appearance, undiminished in capacity for putting less aggressive beauties in the shade. Apart from the instant warning of general hostility to all comers that her personality automatically projected, an unspoken declaration that no man or woman could remain unthreatened by her presence, she did not appear displeased at this encounter, merely indifferent. Even indifference was qualified by a certain sense of suppressed nervous excitement, suggesting tensions almost compliant to interruption of whatever she was doing. Usually her particular form of self-projection excluded conceding an inch in making contacts easier, outward expression, no doubt, of an inner sexual condition. She was like a royal personage, prepared to converse, but not bestowing the smallest scrap of assistance to the interlocutor, from whom all effort, every contribution of discursive vitality, must come. Now, on the other hand, she unbent a little.

‘Jacky didn’t mention you were staying. I suppose you arrived in that ghastly middle-of-the-night plane. Who’s the old girl? One of Jacky’s dykes?’

That was about the furthest I had ever heard Pamela go in the way of taking conversational initiative, for that matter, in showing interest in other people’s doings. I explained that neither Dr Brightman nor myself was the latest addition to the Bragadin house-party; for fun, subjoining a word about Dr Brightman’s academic celebrity. Pamela did not answer. She had the gift of making silence as vindictive as speech. Dr Brightman continued to examine the ceiling, while at the same time she moved discreetly in our direction. When she was near enough I introduced them. Dr Brightman’s manner was courteously firm, Pamela in no way uncivil, though she did not attempt to name the man with her. He, also risen from the flat of his back, had now manifestly put himself into an attitude preparatory for meeting strangers. Evidently he was familiar with Pamela’s distaste for social convention of any kind, in any case well able to look after himself. After giving her a statutory moment or two to make his identity known, he announced himself without her help. The intonation, deep and pleasant, was American.

‘Louis Glober.’

He held out a large white hand, much manicured. The voice came back over the years, the tone just the same, quiet in pitch, masterful, friendly, full of hope. Otherwise hardly a trace remained of the smooth dominating young man who had interviewed Tokenhouse about the Cubist series, given the dinner-party for the John drawing, ‘done’ Mopsy Pontner on the dinner-table in the private suite of that defunct Mayfair hotel. He was still tall, of course, no less full of assurance, though that assurance took rather a different form. It was in one sense less flowing — less like, say, Sunny Farebrother’s determination to charm — in another, tougher, more outwardly ruthless. What Glober had lost, physically speaking (a good deal, including, naturally enough, all essentially youthful adjuncts), was to a certain extent counterbalanced by transmutation into a different type of distinguished appearance. The young Byzantine emperor had become an old one; Herod the Tetrarch was perhaps nearer the mark than Byzantine emperor; anyway a ruler with a touch of exoticism in his behaviour and tastes. What was left of Glober’s hair, scarcely more than a suggestion he once had owned some, was still black — possibly from treatment artificial as Pamela’s — his handsome, sallow pouchy face become richly senatorial. Never particularly ‘American’ in aspect (not, at least, American as pictured by Europeans), now he might have come from Spain, Italy, any of the Slav countries. A certain glassiness about the eyes recalled Sir Magnus Donners, though Glober was, in general, quite another type of tycoon. Before I could reintroduce myself to him, Dr Brightman went into attack with Pamela.

‘Tell me, do tell me, Lady Widmerpool, where did you get those quite delectable sandals?’

Pamela accepted the tribute. They went into the question together. I explained to Glober how we had met before.

‘Do you remember — the Augustus John drawing?’

He thought for a moment, then began to laugh loudly. Putting a hand on my shoulder, he continued to laugh.

‘This warms me like news from home. Is it really thirty years? I just don’t believe you. The charming Mrs Pontner. It was a privilege to meet her. How is she?’

‘No more with us, I’m afraid.’

‘Passed on?’

‘Yes.’

Glober shook his head in regret.

‘Was that recently?’

‘During the war. I hadn’t seen her for ages, even by then. She’d married Lilienthal, the bookseller with the beard, who came to your party too. When Pontner died, Mopsy went to help in the bookshop. Then Xenia went off with an Indian doctor, and Mopsy married Lilienthal.’

‘Mrs Lilienthal was the little redhead with the bad cold?’

Glober certainly possessed astonishing powers of recall. I could hardly bring his guests to mind myself, the facts just offered having come from Moreland a comparatively short time before. Otherwise, I should never have remembered (nor indeed known about) most of what I had just related. Whenever we met, which was not often, Moreland loved to talk of that period of his life, days before marriage, ill health, living with Mrs Maclintick, had all, if not overwhelmed him, made existence very different. On that particular meeting, he had dredged up the story of Mopsy Pontner’s sad end; for sad it had been. Glober shook his head, and sighed.

‘Mrs Pontner, too. I recall her so well.

The forehead and the little ears

Have gone where Saturn keeps the years.’

‘You didn’t produce that extempore?’

‘Edwin Arlington Robinson.’

I was glad to hear a representative quotation from a poet named by Dr Brightman as contributing a small element to Gwinnett’s makeup, and wondered how often, when obituary sentiments were owed in connexion with just that sort of personal reminiscence, Glober had found the tag apposite. Frequently, his promptness suggested. The possibility in no manner abated its felicity. We talked for a minute or two about other aspects of that long past London visit of his. I told him Tokenhouse now lived in Venice, but Glober did not rise to that, reasonably enough. The strange thing was how much he remembered. This conversation did not please Pamela. Abandoning an apparently amicable chat about footgear with Dr Brightman, she now pointed to the ceiling.

‘You haven’t explained yet what’s happening up there.’

When she addressed Glober, the tone suggested proprietary rights. One of the paradoxes about Pamela was a sexuality, in one sense almost laughably ostentatious, the first thing you noticed about her; in another, something equally connected with sex that seemed reluctant, extorted, a possession she herself utterly refused to share with anyone.

‘What’s happening? That’s what I want to know.’

She stood, legs thrust apart, staring upward. White trousers, thin as gauze, stretched skintight across elegantly compact small haunches, challengingly exhibited, yet neatly formed; hard, pointed breasts, no less contentious and smally compassed, under a shirt patterned in crimson and peacock blue, stuck out like delicately shaped bosses of a shield. These colours might have been expressly designed — by dissonance as much as harmony — for juxtaposition against those pouring down in brilliant rays of light from the Tiepolo; subtle yet penetrating pinks and greys, light blue turning almost to lavender, rich saffrons and cinnamons melting into bronze and gold. Pamela’s own tints hinted that she herself, only a moment before, had floated down out of those cloudy vertical perspectives, perhaps compelled to do so by the artist himself, displeased that her crimson and peacock shades struck too extravagant a note, one that disturbed rather than enriched a composition, which, for all its splendour, remained somehow tenebrous too. If so, reminder of her own expulsion from the scene, as she contemplated it again, increasingly enraged her.

‘Can’t anybody say anything?’

Glober, half turning in her direction, and smiling tolerantly, parodied the speech of a tourist.

‘Oh, boy, it sure is a marvellous picture, that Tee-ay-po-lo.’

All of us, even Dr Brightman, fixed attention once more on the ceiling, as if with the sole object of producing an answer to Pamela’s urgent enquiry. There was plenty on view up there. Pamela’s desire to have more exact information, even if ungraciously expressed, was reasonable enough once you considered the picture. Dr Brightman took up her former exposition, now delivered to a larger audience.

‘The Council of Ten made trouble at the time. Objection was not, so many believe, to danger of corrupting morals in the private residence of a grandee, so much as to the fact that the subject itself was known to bear reference to the habits of one of the most Serene Republic’s chief magistrates, another patrician, with whom the Bragadin who owned this palace had quarrelled. The artist has illustrated the highspot of the story’s action.’

The scene above was enigmatic. A group of three main figures occupied respectively foreground, middle distance, background, all linked together by some intensely dramatic situation. These persons stood in a pillared room, spacious, though apparently no more than a bedchamber, which had unexpectedly managed to float out of whatever building it was normally part — some palace, one imagined — to remain suspended, a kind of celestial ‘Mulberry’ set for action in the upper reaches of the sky. The skill of the painter brought complete conviction to the phenomena round about. Only a sufficiently long ladder — expedient perhaps employed for banishing Pamela from on high — seemed required to reach the apartment’s so trenchantly pictured dimension; to join the trio playing out whatever game had to be gambled between them by dire cast of the Fates. That verdict was manifestly just a question of time. Meanwhile, an attendant team of intermediate beings — cupids, tritons, sphinxes, chimaeras, the passing harpy, loitering gorgon — negligently assisted stratospheric support of the whole giddy structure and its occupants, a floating recess perceptibly cubist in conception, the view from its levels far outdoing anything to be glimpsed from the funicular; moreover, if so nebulous a setting could be assigned mundane location, a distant pinnacle, or campanile, three-quarters hidden by cloud, seemed Venetian rather than Neapolitan in feeling.

‘Who’s the naked man with the stand?’ asked Pamela.

An unclothed hero, from his appurtenances a king, reclined on the divan or couch that was the focus of the picture. One single tenuous fold of gold-edged damask counterpane, elsewhere slipped away from his haughtily muscular body, undeniably emphasized (rather than concealed) the physical anticipation to which Pamela referred, of pleasure to be enjoyed in a few seconds time; for a lady, also naked, tall and fair haired, was moving across the room to join him where he lay. To guess what was in the mind of the King — if king he were — seemed at first sight easy enough, but closer examination revealed an unforeseen subtlety of expression. Proud, self-satisfied, thoughtful, more than a little amused, he seemed to be experiencing mixed emotions; feelings that went a long way beyond mere expectant sensuality. No doubt the King was ardent, not to say randy, in the mood for a romp; he was experiencing another relish too.

The lady — perhaps the Queen, perhaps a mistress — less intent on making love, anxious to augment pending pleasure by delicious delay, suddenly remembering her own neglect of some desirable adjunct, or necessary precaution, incident on what was about to take place, had paused. Her taut posture, arrested there in the middle of the bedchamber, immediately proposed to the mind these, and other possibilities; that she was utterly frigid, not at all looking forward to what lay ahead; that — like Pamela herself — she was frigid but wanted a lot of it all the same; that her excitement was no less than the King’s, but her own attention had been suddenly deflected from the matter in hand by a disturbing sound or movement, heard, perceived, sensed, in the shadows of the room. She had scented danger. This last minute retardation in coming to bed had, at the same time, something of all women about it; the King’s anticipatory complacence, something of all men.

The last possibility — that the lady had noticed an untoward happening in the background of the bedchamber — was the explanation. Her eyes were cast on the ground, while she seemed to contemplate looking back over her shoulder to scrutinize further whatever dismayed her. Had she glanced behind, she might, or might not, have been in time to mark down in the darkness the undoubted source of her uneasiness. A cloaked and helmeted personage was slipping swiftly, unostentatiously, away from the room towards a curtained doorway behind the pillars, presumably an emergency exit into the firmament beyond. At that end of the sky, an ominous storm was plainly blowing up, dark clouds already shot with coruscations of lightning and tongues of flame (as if an air-raid were in progress), their glare revealing, in the shadows of the bedchamber, an alcove, where this tall onlooker had undoubtedly lurked a moment beforehand. Whether or not the lady was categorically aware of an intruding presence threatening the privacy of sexual embrace, whether her suspicions had been only partially aroused, was undetermined. There was no doubt whatever some sort of apprehension had passed through her mind. That was all of which to be certain. The features of the cloaked man, now in retreat, were for the most part hidden by the jutting vizor of the plumed helmet he wore, so that his own emotions were invisible. The calmly classical treatment of the scene, breathtaking in opulence of shapes and colours, imposed at the same time a sense of awful tension, imminent tragedy not long to be delayed.

‘I wonder whether the model was the painter’s wife,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘She occurs so often in his pictures. I must look into that. If so, she was Guardi’s sister. Gyges looks rather like the soldier in The Agony in the Garden, who so much resembles General Rommel.’

‘I don’t remember the story. Didn’t Gyges possess a magic ring?’

‘That was my strong conviction too,’ said Glober.

Dr Brightman offered no apology for settling down to the comportment of a professional lecturer, one she fulfilled with distinction.

‘Candaules was king of Lydia — capital, Sardis, of the New Testament — Gyges his chief officer and personal friend. Candaules was always boasting to Gyges of the beauty of his wife. Finding him, as the King thought, insufficiently impressed, Candaules suggested that Gyges should conceal himself in their bedroom in such a manner that he had opportunity to see the Queen naked. Gyges made some demur at that, public nakedness being a state the Lydians considered particularly scandalous.’

‘The Lydians sound just full of small-town prejudices,’ said Glober.

‘On the contrary,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘The Greeks did not know what being rich meant until they came in contact with the Lydians, now thought to be ancestors of the Etruscans.’

I remembered the text, from the Book of Revelation, inscribed in gothic lettering on the walls of the chapel that had been the Company’s barrack-room, when I first joined. Now it seemed particularly apt.

‘Thou hast a few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments, and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.’

‘Exactly,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘Gyges tried to be one of the worthy at first, but Candaules insisted, so he gave in, and was hidden in the royal bedchamber. Unfortunately for her husband, the Queen noticed the reluctant voyeur stealing away — we see her doing so above — and was understandably incensed. She sent for Gyges the following day, and presented him with two alternatives: either he could kill Candaules, and marry her en secondes noces, or — no doubt a simple undertaking in their respective circumstances at the Lydian court — she would arrange for Gyges himself to be done away with. In the latter event, familiarity with her unclothed beauty would die with him; in the former, become a perfectly proper aspect of a respectably married man’s — or rather married king’s — matrimonial relationship. Gyges chose the former course of action. His friend and sovereign, Candaules, was liquidated by him, he married the Queen, and ruled Lydia with credit for forty years.’

There was pause after Dr Brightman’s terse recapitulation of the story. Everyone seemed to be thinking it over. Glober was the first to speak.

‘Then the owner of the magic ring was another guy — another Gyges rather? Not the same Gyges that saw the lady nude?’

Dr Brightman gave the smile reserved for promising pupils.

‘Versions vary in all such legends. According to Plato, Gyges descended into the earth, where he found a brazen horse, within which lay the body of a huge man wearing a brazen ring on his finger. Gyges took the ring, which had the property of rendering its wearer invisible. This attribute may well have facilitated the regicide. The Hollow Horse, you remember, is a widespread symbol of Death and Rebirth. You probably came across that in the works of Thomas Vaughan, the alchemist, Mr Jenkins, in the course of your Burton researches. The historical Gyges may well have excavated the remains of some Bronze Age chieftain, buried within a horse’s skin or effigy. Think of the capture of Troy. I don’t doubt they will find horses ritually buried round Sardis one of these days, where a pyramid tomb may still be seen, traditionally of Gyges — whose voyeurism brought him such good fortune.’

This was getting a long way from Tiepolo, but, seasoned in presentation of learning, Dr Brightman had dominated her audience. Even Pamela, who might have been expected to interrupt or walk away, had listened with attention. So far from becoming restless or rebellious, she too showed signs of being impressed, in her own way stimulated, by the many striking features of the Candaules/Gyges story.

Her cheeks had become less pale. Glober responded to the legend too, though in quite a different manner. He seemed almost cowed by its implications.

‘That’s a great tale,’ he said. ‘David and Uriah the other way round.’

‘An excellent definition,’ said Dr Brightman. ‘You mean Candaules, by so to speak encouraging a Peeping Tom, put himself, without foreseeing that, in the forefront of the battle. One thinks of Vashti and Ahasuerus too, where much less was required. Nowadays such a treat would be in no way comparable. You need to go no further than the Lido to contemplate naked bodies — all but naked at least — but in Lydia, Judah too for that matter, the bikini would not have been tolerated.’

‘There’s a difference between a bikini, and nothing at all, Dr Brightman,’ said Glober. ‘You’ve got to grant that much.’

Pamela was full of contempt for such a comment. Now she showed herself getting back to her more normal form.

‘What are you talking about? What the King wanted was to be watched screwing.’

If she supposed that observation likely to discompose Dr Brightman, Pamela made a big mistake, though she was herself by then likely to be beyond such primitive essays in shocking. She had always spoken out exactly as she felt on any given occasion; at least exactly as it suited her to give public expression to whatever she wished to pass as her own feelings. In this particular case, she seemed genuinely interested in the true aim of Candaules, the theory put forward, a matter of psychological accuracy, rather than lubricious humour. Dr Brightman did not hesitate to take up the challenge.

‘Others, as well as yourself, have supposed mere nakedness an insufficient motif, Lady Widmerpool. Gautier, in his conte written round the legend, characteristically adumbrates a melancholy artist-king, intoxicated by the beauty of his artist-model queen, whom he displays secretly to his friend Gyges, drawn as a French lieutenant of cavalry. Gide, on the other hand, takes quite a different view, somewhat reorganizing the story. Gide’s Gyges is a poor fisherman, who delivers to the King’s table a fish, in which the ring of invisibility is found. Candaules, a liberal, forward-looking, benevolent monarch — no less melancholy than Gautier’s prince, though not, like him, a mere Ivory Tower aesthete — decides as a matter of social conscience to bestow on his impoverished subject, the fisherman, some of the privilege a king enjoys. Among such treats is the sight of the Queen naked. To this end, Candaules lends Gyges the ring. Gyges, once invisible, is master of the situation. He spends a night with the wife of Candaules, who thinks her husband in unusually high spirits. Naturally, Gyges slays his benefactor in the end, taking over Queen and Kingdom.’

‘That taught His Majesty to brag about his luck,’ said Glober. ‘He went that much too far.’

Dr Brightman allowed such a point of view.

‘Gide’s political undertones insinuate that Candaules represents a too tolerant ruling class, over anxious to share personal advantages, some of which are perhaps better left unshared, anyway that sharing, in the case of Candaules, led to disaster. You must remember the play was written nearly half a century ago. I need hardly add that both Gautier and Gide treat the theme in essentially French terms, as if the particular events described could have taken place only in France.’

Pamela remained unsatisfied.

‘That wasn’t what I meant. I didn’t say having an affair. I said watching — looking on, or being looked at.’

She spoke the words emphatically, in a clearer tone than that she was accustomed to use. Her attention had undoubtedly been captured. Dr Brightman, not in the least denying that to ‘watch’ was quite another matter, nodded again to show she fully grasped the disparity.

‘You mean one facet of the legend links up with kingship in another guise? I agree. Sacrifice is almost implied. Public manifestation of himself as source of fertility might be required too, to forestall a successor from snatching that attribute of regality. You have made a good point, Lady Widmerpool. To speak less seriously, one cannot help recalling a local example here in Venice — or rather the island seclusion of Murano — of the practice to which you refer. I mean Casanova’s divertissement with the two nuns under the eye of Cardinal de Bernis.’

Pamela, perhaps from ignorance of the Memoirs, appeared out-manoeuvred for the moment, at least attempted no comeback. The subject could already have begun to pall on her, though for once she was looking thoughtful rather than impatient. Moreland, too, was fond of talking about Casanova’s threesome with the nuns.

‘I’ve never myself been more than one of a pair,’ Moreland said. ‘How inexperienced one is, even though the best things in life are free. For the more venturesome, the song is not How happy could I be with either, but How happy could I be with two girls.’

By now the rest of the Conference had begun to infiltrate the Longhi room, the vanguard of oncoming intellectuals substantiating Dr Brightman’s comparison with the sages, abbés, punchinellos, pictured on the white-and-gold walls. Gwinnett was among this advance party, which also included two other British representatives, Ada Leintwardine and Quentin Shuckerly. Both of these accommodated at an hotel on the Lido, I had done no more than exchange a few words with them. They were taking the Conference with great seriousness, from time to time addressing sessions, an obligation for which Gwinnett and myself had substituted contribution to the organ devoted to its ‘dialogues’. Ada, not least because she retained some of the girlish good-looks of her twenties, had been warmly received in her observations regarding the necessity of assimilating European culture to that of Asia and Africa, delivered in primitive but daring French. Shuckerly, too, won applause by the artlessness and modesty with which he emphasized the many previous occasions on which he had made his now quite famous speech about culture being the scene-shifter to ring up the Iron Curtain.

Shuckerly was a great crony of Ada’s. Tall, urbane, smiling, businesslike, with a complexion so richly tanned by the sun that his enemies (friends, too) hinted at artifice, he had by now begun almost to rival Mark Members himself as a notable figure at international congresses. In earlier days, both as intimate friend and committed poet, he had been closely associated with Malcolm Crowding. Bernard Shernmaker, always irked by even comparative success in others, had designated Shuckerly ‘the air-hostess of English Letters’ at some literary party. ‘Better than the ad-man of french ones,’ had been Shuckerly’s retort, a slanting gloss on Shernmaker’s recently published piece about Ferrand-Sénéschal. Ada and Shuckerly sat on the same committees, signed the same protests, seemed to share much the same temperament, except that Ada, so far as was known, required no analogous counterpoise to Shuckerly’s alleged taste (Shernmaker again the authority) for being intermittently beaten-up.

Shernmaker had been malicious about Ada, too, in days of her first appearance as a novelist, though latterly, having in general somewhat lost his critical nerve, allowing her from time to time temperate praise. Some explained this unfriendly tone by rejected advances, at the period when Ada was new to London, and certainly Shernmaker remained always insistent that, in spite of marriage, Ada’s emotional interests lay chiefly with her own sex. There may have been some truth in this assertion. If so, that had not prevented her from giving birth to twins soon after marriage to Quiggin, their identical, almost laughable, resemblance to their father scotching another of Shernmaker’s disobliging innuendos. Quiggin did not by now at all mind his wife being a better known figure than himself. The sales of her books may even have played some part in his own evolvement, after Clapham’s death, as chairman of the firm. In the delicate role — compared by Evadne Clapham to a troika — of publisher, husband, critic, Quiggin had judged his wife’s first book, I Stopped at a Chemist (a tolerable film as Sally Goes Shopping), too short commercially. In consequence of this advice, Ada had written two long novels about domestic life, which threatened literary doldrums. She had extracted herself with Bedsores and The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday, since these never looked back as a successful writer. Ada’s personality — what Members called her ‘petits soins’ — played a considerable part, too, in the Quiggins’ notorious literary dinner parties.

As they advanced into the Tiepolo room, Shuckerly made for Dr Brightman, Ada for Pamela. She seemed very surprised to find her old friend in the Bragadin palace. As Ada passed him, Glober shot out an appraising glance, reminiscent of those Peter Templer used to give ladies he did not know, Glober’s all-inclusive survey suggesting recognition of Ada’s valuable qualities, additional to her good looks. Always a shade on the plump side (even when she had worked for Sillery), she was no thinner, but carried herself well, retaining that air of bright, blonde, efficient, self-possessed secretary, who knows the whereabouts of everything required in a properly run office, much too sensible to allow more than just the right minimum of flirtatious behaviour to pervade business hours. No doubt Ada had learnt a lot from contact with Sillery. At the ninetieth birthday celebrations mentioned by Dr Brightman, the names of both the Quiggins had appeared as present, Quiggin himself reported as having delivered one of the many speeches.

Ada hurried up to Pamela, and embraced her warmly. It looked as if they had not met for some time. Pamela’s reception of this greeting was less obviously approving of reunion, though her accustomed coldness of manner was not to be constructed as pointer in one direction more than another. Ten years ago they had been on good terms. Since then they might well have quarrelled, moved apart, made friends again, never ceased to be friends. It was impossible to judge from outward signs. Pamela allowed herself to be kissed. She made no attempt to return the ardent flow of words from Ada that followed. No such display of sentiment was to be expected, even if Ada could claim, in the past, to have been Pamela’s sole female friend and confidante. No doubt mere acceptance of Ada’s continued devotion confirmed no rift had taken place.

‘Pam, what are you doing here? You’re the last person I’d expected to see. You can’t be a member of the Conference?’

Pamela made a face of disgust at the thought.

‘What are you doing then?’

‘I’m staying here.’

‘In the Palazzo — with Mr Bragadin?’

‘Of course.’

‘Both of you?’

Ada allowed too much unconcealed curiosity to echo in that question for Pamela’s taste. Her face hardened. She began to frown. As it turned out, that seemed more from contempt for Ada’s crude inquisitiveness, than from displeasure at what she wanted to know. Whatever Pamela’s feelings about her husband, she was not prepared to plunge into the heart-to-heart talk about him which Ada’s question posed. Ada’s tone sounded as if she too had heard Pamela’s name connected with the Ferrand-Sénéschal affair. It was more than a conventional enquiry to a wife about her husband. The conventional assumption would in any case have been that Pamela was not accompanied by Widmerpool. Ada was no doubt dying to learn how he was taking this new scandal involving his wife’s name; Pamela, perfectly grasping what her friend was after, not at all inclined, there and then, to make a present of the latest news. Instead, she gave Ada a look, hard, understanding, half-threatening, which declared for the present a policy of adjournment in relation to more exciting items.

‘He’s arriving today.’

‘In Venice?’

‘Yes.’

This manner of stating Widmerpool’s movements recalled the habit of referring always to ‘him’, rather than using a name. Ada’s question was at least answered.

‘That awful night-flight? I was a wreck when I arrived at four in the morning.’

Pamela laughed derisively.

‘He wasn’t man enough to take the night-flight this time. He’s on a plane as far as Milan, from there by train.’

Ada was persistent.

‘Is he feeling worried then?’

‘Why should he be?’

‘I don’t know. I just wondered. He always has such a lot on his plate, as he himself always says. I must congratulate him on becoming a lord — and you too, darling.’

‘Oh, that?’

‘Aren’t you pleased?’

Pamela did not bother to answer.

‘I’m longing for a talk.’

Pamela did not answer that either. She began to frown again. It did not look as if she herself were longing for a talk at all. Her bearing suggested quite the contrary. In spite of such discouragement, Ada rattled on. She was, after all, used to Pamela and her ways. An affection of simplicity was simply part of Ada’s tactic. She judged, probably rightly, that even if Pamela’s prevailing aspect did not at present show a good disposition towards old acquaintance, that could in due course be overcome.

‘How long are you both staying in Venice?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I’ve a story I must tell you.’

Ada lowered her voice. Gwinnett, finished with the Longhis, had proceeded on to examination of the Tiepolo. He was moving steadily in our direction. At any moment now opportunity would be offered for putting him in touch with Pamela. Obligation to effect an introduction, so that he could relate her to his work on Trapnel, was not to be ignored. On the other hand, was this the right moment? From Gwinnett’s point of view the risk was considerable. Head-on presentation might — almost certainly would — result in one of Pamela’s sudden capricious antagonisms, possibly aversion so keen that all further enquiry in her direction would be at an end. Nevertheless, in whatever manner Gwinnett were to approach her, that eventuality had to be faced. There was no way of guarding against their temperaments proving mutually antipathetic. This was as good a chance as likely to occur. In the case of flat refusal to cooperate, he would have to do the best he could. To bring them together in this neutral spot, even if Gwinnett did not, here and now, speak of Trapnel — an awkward subject to broach in the first few seconds after introduction — circumstances would at least allow him to absorb something of Pamela’s personality, useful material for his book he might never secure again, if opportunity were missed. Before I could make up my mind how best to act, Glober, left on his own by Ada’s monopoly of Pamela, Shuckerly’s of Dr Brightman, began to speak of the ceiling again.

‘The way the painter’s contrived to illuminate those locations of dark pigmentation is just great. Dwell on that multi-coloured luminosity of cloud effect. To think I spent twenty-four hours in Jacky’s Palazzo before stepping over to gaze.’

Continuous companionship, with the conversation that brought, was necessary to Glober all the time. His manner made one feel even momentary isolation of himself required ending instantly, if he were not to risk grave nervous strain. His words postponed need for decision about bringing together Gwinnett and Pamela. Gwinnett himself came up at that moment, and started off an enquiry of his own.

‘Do you know the legend depicted up there? It’s not familiar to me.’

Glober, recognizing another American, but taking charge probably more from instinct to speak authoritatively, than because a fellow-countryman had asked the question, stepped in with an answer.

‘We’ve just been told the story by Dr Brightman. It’s a great one.’

He preceded to recapitulate, briefly and proficiently. Gwinnett listened with attention. I did not know whether he recognized Glober, nor, if so, whether he wanted to meet him. His own vague manner almost suggested unawareness that Glober and I had been talking together; that nothing was further from his mind than that Glober should reply to his question. At the same time, one never quite knew with Gwinnett; what he was thinking, how he would behave. That his action in approaching us at that moment was deliberate, premeditated, could not be entirely ruled out.

‘Thanks a lot. That’s an interesting story.’

Gwinnett evidently meant what he said. Although I was aware of hazards incident on introducing to each other nationals of the same country (Americans not least), without carefully reconnoitring the ground, no alternative was offered. I spoke their names, coupled with that of the college where Gwinnett taught English. He smiled faintly when this was done, but with an impassivity that gave nothing away, least of all any hint that he was already conversant with Glober’s reputation. If interested in making this encounter, Gwinnett did not show it, holding his cards to his chest in a manner, to the popular European view, ‘un-American’. Anyway, it was in contrast with Glober’s exuberance, intact from younger days, tempered with that unnoisy manner which so well suited him. There was nothing in the least forced about Glober’s friendliness, none of that sense of inadequacy sometimes noticeable after a gushing approach has lacked basic vitality to sustain its first impact. Glober possessed that inner strength. When he caught Gwinnett’s two hands, the gesture managed to be warm, amusing, not at all reckless or overdone.

‘One of the rarest signatures too,’ he said.

Although he spoke in that quiet way, he might just as well have shouted, from the punch he put into this piece of banter, for, even if complimentary, banter was what it turned out to be. At the time, the bearing was obscure to me, unconnected with Dr Brightman’s reference to the surname’s link with a ‘Signer’ family; though I noted inwardly the odd coincidence of Gwinnett himself speaking ironically of Glober being ‘able to sign his name’. The conjunction of phrase, a mere chance, made Gwinnett’s reply seem the more enigmatic. Later, I wondered whether, in fact, he ever signed his own name without thinking of his ancestor. That was not impossible. At the moment he appeared a little put out, laughing in a deprecatory manner, as he tried to withdraw his fingers from Glober’s grip.

‘I take care my own signature’s a rare one too,’ he said. ‘Anyway on cheques.’

There was a touch of reproof in this rather knockabout rejoinder. Gwinnett was probably flattered too. How much flattered was hard to assess, the incident not immediately explicable, its implications only subsequently revealed. Gwinnett was in any case, so it seemed to me, too good an American to persist, after all that, in his earlier, more distant air; to make absolutely unambiguous a preference for different, less overpowering, modes of address between strangers. There was no question of ‘putting Glober in his place’, an inclination that might easily have emerged in England from a personality of Gwinnett’s type. At the same time, to the extent of showing the smallest spark of exuberance himself, he did not at all retreat from his own chosen position, just keeping a dead level of civility, to which exception could not possibly be taken.

In due course, Dr Brightman explained that, among endorsements of the Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnett’s signature happened to be much prized among collectors purposing to possess an example of each. In Gwinnett’s light dismissal, as an individual, of Glober’s commendatory teasing, in quite another form, something was reminiscent of Pamela’s neutralization of Ada’s affectionate embrace. Neutralization was the process Gwinnett’s manner often called to mind. Pamela’s exterior, to the uninformed observer, could have been interpreted as hostile. No hostility was present in Gwinnett’s reply, just unspoken announcement of another way of life. If that were hostility, it was to be detected by only the most delicate instrument. Glober himself showed not the smallest awareness of even that antithesis. Constitutionally habituated, simply as a man, to being liked by people, he could have become insensitive to antipathy, unless explicit; alternatively, so intensely conscious of any attitude towards himself short of total surrender, that he was conditioned utterly to conceal any such awareness.

The dissimilarities of these two Americans seemed to put them into almost every direct opposition in relation to one another: Gwinnett, much the younger, a disturbed background, chancy fortunes, a small but appreciable stake in American history: Glober, of mature age, easy manner, worldly success, recent — not necessarily easy — family origins. One thought of the gladiator with the sword and shield; the one with the net and trident. No doubt gladiators too had in common the typical characteristics of their trade, and something bound Gwinnett and Glober together, perhaps merely their ‘Americanness’. One struggled for a phrase to define this characteristic in common, if indeed it existed. An appropriate term warbled across the room from the lips of Quentin Shuckerly.

‘So I told Bernard he was just like the lame boy in the Pied Piper, getting left behind as a critic, whenever a fashionable tune was played. I clinched my argument by using a word he didn’t know — allotropic — a variation of properties that doesn’t change the substance. My dear, the poor man was completely crushed.’

That seemed the term for Glober and Gwinnett, at least how they looked to one across the abyss of uncertainty that precluded definition, with any subtlety, of American types and ways. Meanwhile, the question of whether or not to introduce Gwinnett to Pamela, without saying some preliminary word first, was becoming more urgent than ever. Thinking about allotropy was no help. Then all at once, in a flash, the problem was solved, the Gordian Knot cut, possibly in interplay of that allotropic element. Personal responsibility was all at once removed. Glober, taking Gwinnett by the arm, broke in between Pamela and Ada.

‘I want you to meet Professor Gwinnett, Pam. This is Lady Widmerpool, who’s stopping in the Palazzo.’

Why Glober did that I could not guess at the time, have never since quite decided. The step may have been due to a compulsive, all-embracing need to arrange, in a manner satisfactory to himself, everyone within orbit — creating an instant court, as Dr Brightman might have said — the spirit in Glober that brought together the Mopsy Pontner dinner party. He may, on the other hand, having favourably marked down Ada, grasped that the simplest way to talk with her for a minute or two would be to occupy Pamela with Gwinnett. Alternatively, the consigning of Gwinnett to Pamela might have appealed to him as a delicate revenge for Gwinnett’s latent superciliousness, at least refusal to fall in more amicably with Glober’s own more effusive mood. To introduce Gwinnett to Pamela was as likely as not to cause a clash. That clash might be what Glober wished, not necessarily in a mood of retaliation, but with the object of bringing the two of them together for the spectacle, the sheer fun, mildly sadistic, of watching what was likely to be a ‘scene’ — any scene — in which Pamela was involved. What he certainly did not know was that Gwinnett’s highest ambition at that moment was just what had taken place through Glober’s own instrumentality.

If Glober sought drama, he was disappointed. At least he was disappointed if he wanted fireworks in the form of violent opposition or bad temper. In another sense — for anyone who knew the stakes for which Gwinnett was playing — the reception he received was intensely dramatic, more so than any brush-off could have been, however defiant. The mere fact that Gwinnett himself, not Pamela, took the offensive was in itself impressive.

‘I’d hoped very much to meet you while I was in Venice, Lady Widmerpool. I didn’t know I’d have this luck.’

He spoke very simply. Pamela gave him one of her blank stares. She did not speak. At that stage of their meeting it looked as if Gwinnett were going to get, if nothing worse, a characteristic rejection. She allowed him to take her hand, withdrawing it quickly.

‘I’m writing a book on X. Trapnel,’ Gwinnett said.

He paused. This frontal attack, taking over an active role, thrusting Pamela even momentarily into the passive, suggested something of Gwinnett’s potential. He said the words quietly, quite a different quietness from Glober’s, though suggesting something of the same muted strength. They were spoken almost casually, a statement just given for information, no more, before going on to speak of other things. There was no question of blurting out in an uncontrolled manner the nature of his ‘project’, what he wanted for it from her. To use such a tone was to tackle the approach in an effective, possibly the only effective, manner. It exhibited a fine appreciation of the fact that to gain Pamela’s cooperation with regard to the biography was a matter of now or never. He must sink or swim. Gwinnett undoubtedly saw that. I admired him for attempting no compromise. There was again a parallel between Gwinnett’s tone with Pamela, and the way he had replied to Glober, the one conveying only the merest atom of overt friendliness, just as the other conveyed possibly the reverse, difference between the two almost imperceptible. While this had been taking place, Glober had transferred his attention to Ada. They were chattering away together as if friends for years.

‘I think you knew him,’ said Gwinnett. ‘Trapnel, I mean.’

Pamela, who had as usual registered no immediate outward reaction to his first statement, still remained silent. Gwinnett was silent too. In that, he showed his strength. After making the initial announcement of his position, he made no effort to develop the situation. They stood looking at each other. There was a long pause during which one felt anything might happen: Pamela walk away: burst out laughing: overwhelm Gwinnett with abuse: strike him in the face. After what seemed several minutes, but could only have been a second or two, Pamela spoke. Her voice was low.

‘Poor X,’ she said.

She sounded deeply moved, not far from tears. Gwinnett inclined his head a little. That movement was no more than a quiver, quick, awkward, at the same time reverential in its way, wholly without affectation. He too seemed to feel strong emotion. Something had been achieved between them.

‘Yes — Trapnel wasn’t always a lucky guy it seems.’

Now, it had become Trapnel’s turn to join the dynasty of Pamela’s dead lovers. Emotional warmth in her was directed only towards the dead, men who had played some part in her life, but were no more there to do so. That was how it looked. The first time we had ever talked together, she had described herself as ‘close’ to her uncle, Charles Stringham, almost suggesting a sexual relationship. Stringham’s circumstances made nothing more unlikely, in any physical form, although, in the last resort, close relationship of a sexual kind does not perhaps necessarily require such expression, something even undesired, except in infinitely sublimated shape. When, for example, Pamela had been racketing round during the war, with all sorts of lovers, from all sorts of nations, she had refused to give herself to Peter Templer (in his own words ‘mad about her’); after he was killed calling him the ‘nicest man I ever knew’.

Trapnel, whose rapid declension as a writer had been substantially accelerated by Pamela’s own efforts, notably destruction of his manuscript, was now to be rehabilitated, memorialized, placed in historical perspective, among those loves with whom, but for unhappy chance, all might have been well. It was Death she liked. Mrs Erdleigh had hinted as much on the night of the flying-bombs. Would Gwinnett be able to offer her Death? At least, in managing to catch and hold the frail line cast to him, he had not made a bad beginning. There was hope for his book. Glober, after instigating the Gwinnett/Pamela conversation, must now have decided to put an end to it, having said all he wanted to say to Ada. Seeing out of the corner of his eye that Gwinnett’s communion with Pamela produced no immediately lively incident, he may have judged it better to cut it short. Pamela herself anticipated anything he might be about to say.

‘Why didn’t you explain at first Professor Gwinnett was the man you need for the Trapnel film?’

Glober was not quite prepared for that question. It opened up a new subject. Pamela turned to Gwinnett again.

‘Louis wants to make a last film. I’ve told him it’s to be based on the Trapnel novel that got destroyed. X himself said there was a film there. I’ve been telling Louis the best parts of the book, which I remember absolutely. He’s not very quick about taking facts in, but he’s got round to this as a proposition.’

Glober smiled, but made no effort to elaborate the subject put forward.

‘Naturally I never read the last novel,’ said Gwinnett. ‘Did it have close bearing on Trapnel’s own life.’

‘Of course.’

Circumstances came to Glober’s aid at that moment, in the manner they do with persons of adventurous temperament put in momentary difficulty. He brought an abrupt end to the matter being discussed by jerking his head towards the far side of the room.

‘Here’s Baby — with your husband.’

Two persons, without much ceremony, were forcing a channel between the dense accumulation of intellectuals, pottering about or gazing upward. One of these new arrivals was Widmerpool, the other a smartly dressed woman of about the same age-group. Widmerpool was undoubtedly seeking his wife. Even at a distance, symptoms of that condition were easily recognizable. They were a little different, a little more agitated, than any of his other outward displays of personal disturbance. As he pushed his way through the crowd, he had the look of a man who had not slept for several nights. No doubt the journey, even by train, had been tiring, but hardly trying enough to cause such an expression of worried annoyance, irritation merging into fear.

Thinner than in his younger days, Widmerpool was less bald than Glober, even if such hair as remained was sparse and grizzled. Rather absurdly, I was a little taken aback by this elderly appearance, physical changes in persons known for a long time always causing a certain inner uneasiness — Umfraville’s sense of being let down by the rapidity with which friends and acquaintances decay, once the process has begun. Widmerpool’s air of discomfort was by no means decreased by the heavy texture, in spite of the hot weather, of the dark suit he wore. Built for him when more bulky, it hung about his body in loose folds, like clothes on a scarecrow. He seemed to have come straight from the City; having regard to recent elevation in rank, more probably the House of Lords.

The woman with him was Baby Wentworth — or whatever she was now called. When last heard of, she had been married to an Italian. I remembered her beauty, sly look, short curly hair, thirty years before, when, supposedly mistress of Sir Magnus Donners, she had also been pursued, at different levels, by both Prince Theodoric and Barnby. Now in her fifties, Baby had not at all lost her smart appearance — she too wore trousers — but, if she looked less than her age, her features also registered considerable ups and downs of fortune. She made towards Glober, abandoned again by Pamela who had resumed talk with Gwinnett. Widmerpool went straight for his wife, inserting himself without apology between her and Gwinnett, in order to reduce delay in speaking to a minimum.

‘Pam — I want a word in private at once.’

Gwinnett took a step back to allow Widmerpool easier passage. No doubt he guessed the relationship. Pamela, on the other hand, showed not the least recognition of the fact that her husband had just arrived. She took no notice of him whatsoever. Instead of offering any facility for speech, she quickly moved sideways and forward, again decreasing distance between Gwinnett and herself, blocking Widmerpool’s way, so that she could continue a conversation, which, so far as could be judged, was going relatively well.

‘Pam…’

Pamela threw him a glance. Her manner suggested that a man — a very unprepossessing man at that — was trying to pick her up in a public place; some uncouth sightseer, not even a member of the Conference, having gained access to the Palazzo because the door was open, was now going round accosting ladies encountered there. Widmerpool persisted.

‘You must come with me. It’s urgent.’

She answered now without turning her head.

‘Do go away. I heard you the first time. Can’t you take a hint? I’m being shown round the house by Louis Glober. You knew he was going to be staying with Jacky. At the moment I’m talking about a rather important matter to Professor Gwinnett.’

Widmerpool’s reaction to this treatment was complex. On the one hand, he was obviously not at all surprised by blank refusal to cooperate; on the other, he could not be said to have received that refusal with anything like indifference. He paused for a moment, apparently analysing means of forcing his wife to obey; then he must have decided against any such attempt. His expression suggested the existence of one or two tricks up his sleeve, to be played when they were alone together. He was about to move away, return from wherever he had come, but, catching sight of me, stopped and nodded. Recognition evidently suggested more to him than the fact that we had not met since the night of the Election party. He went straight to the point, his manner confirming existence of some problem on his mind desperate to solve.

‘Nicholas, how are you? Staying with Jacky Bragadin? No — then you are almost certainly a member of this Conference going round? That is what I expected. Just the man I want to talk to.’

‘Congratulations on the peerage.’

‘Ah, yes. Thank you very much. Not very contemporary, such a designation sounds today, but it has its advantages. I didn’t want to leave the Commons, no one less. 1955 may have been a moral victory — several of my constituents described my campaign as a greater personal triumph than the previous poll, when I was returned — but past efforts were forgotten in a fight that was not always a clean one. As I still have a lot of work in me, the Upper Chamber, so long as it hangs on, seemed as good a place to do that work as any other. As it happens, my normal activities are rather impeded at the moment by a number of irksome matters, indeed one domestic tragedy, since my mother passed away only a few days ago at her cottage in Kirkcudbrightshire, which she always spoke of as an ideal home for her declining years. She had reached a ripe age, so that the end was not unexpected. Unfortunately, it was quite impossible for me to make a journey as far as Scotland at this particular moment. I could not attempt it. At the same time, it was painful to leave a matter like my mother’s burial in the hands of a secretary, competent as my own secretary happens to be. Something a little over and above routine competence is required at such a moment. None the less, that was what had to be done. I couldn’t be in Kirkcudbrightshire and Venice at the same time, and, little as I like the place, I had to come to Venice.’

He stopped, overwhelmed by his troubles. I did not know why I was being told all this. Widmerpool’s jaws worked up and down. He gave the impression of hesitation in asking some question. I enquired if he were in Venice on business, since he did not care for the city in other respects.

‘Yes — no — not really. A slight rest. Pamela wanted a short rest. To be quiet, out of things, just for a little. You may be able to help me, as a matter of fact, in something I want to know. Your Conference has been going on for a day or two?’

‘Yes.’

‘You meet and mix with the other members — the foreign ones, I mean?’

‘Some of them.’

‘I was hoping to kill two birds with one stone. Pamela was given an open invitation to stay in this imposing residence. The owner — Bragadin — is one of the smart international set, I understand, what the papers call café society, I’m told. All that sort of thing is a mystery to me. Distasteful too, in the highest degree. At the same time, it was convenient for Pamela to take a rest, even if in a style I myself cannot approve. But to get back to the Conference, am I right in supposing all these people round about are its members? I am. There chances to be one of them I am particularly anxious to meet, if here. It is a most lucky opportunity the two things coincided.’

‘The Conference, and your visit?’

‘Yes, yes. That is what I mean. Have you run across Dr Belkin? He is familiar to me only by name, through certain cultural societies to which I belong. By an unhappy mischance, we have never set eyes on each other, though we have corresponded — on cultural matters, of course. He was, incidentally, a mutual friend of poor Ferrand-Sénéschal. How sad that too. I am, of course, not sure that Dr Belkin will have been able to put in an appearance. He could have become too much occupied in the cultural affairs of his own country, in which he plays a central part. They may not have been able to spare him at the last moment. He is a busy man. Belkin? Dr Belkin? Have you heard anything of him, or seen him?’

I was about to answer that the name was unknown to me, when Pamela, overhearing Widmerpool’s strained, eager tone, got her word in first. She turned from where she stood with Gwinnett, looked straight at her husband, and laughed outright. It was not a friendly laugh.

‘You won’t find your friend Belkin here.’

She spoke under her breath, almost in a hiss, still laughing. Widmerpool’s face altered. He swallowed uneasily. When he replied he was quite calm.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What I say.’

‘You only know about Belkin because you’ve heard me refer to him.’

‘That’s sufficient.’

‘What information have you got regarding him then?’

‘Just what you’ve told me. And a few small items I’ve picked up elsewhere.’

‘But I haven’t told you anything — I — that was what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘Why should you think he won’t be here? You don’t know him personally any more than I do. Nothing I’ve said gave you any reason to draw that conclusion. Only quite a recent development makes me want to meet him rather urgently.’

‘It wasn’t what you said. It was what Léon-Joseph said.’

Considering the circumstances, Widmerpool took that comment stoically, though he was showing signs of strain.

He seemed to want most to get to the bottom of Pamela’s insinuation.

‘He told you this before he …’

Widmerpool put the question composedly, as if what had happened to Ferrand-Sénéschal did not matter much, only out of respect he did not name it.

‘No,’ said Pamela, also speaking quietly. ‘He told me after he’d died, of course — Leon-Joseph appeared to me as a ghost last night, and gave the information. He was gliding down the Grand Canal, walking on the water like Jesus, except that he was carrying his head under his arm like Mary Queen of Scots. I recognized the head by those blubber lips and rimless spectacles. The blubber lips spoke the words: “A cause de ses sentiments stalinistes, Belkin est foutu.”’

Widmerpool appeared more disconcerted by the implications of Pamela’s words than resentful of their ironic intonation. She said no more for the moment, returning to Gwinnett, who had politely moved a little to one side, when she broke off to take part in this last interchange. He must by then know for certain she was engaged with her husband. Opportunity was now more available than earlier to estimate Pamela’s potentialities. This readiness of Gwinnett’s to withdraw into the background showed comprehension. Widmerpool again thought things over for a moment. Then he made a step in his wife’s direction. Once more Gwinnett moved away. Widmerpool was fairly angry now. Anger and fright seemed to make up his combined emotions.

‘If this is true — Léon-Joseph really told you something of the kind before he died — why on earth didn’t you pass it on?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Why should you?’

‘Yes?’

Widmerpool, almost shaking now, was just able to control himself.

‘You know its importance — if true … which I doubt… the whole point of making this contact… the consequences … you know perfectly well what I mean …’

It looked as if the consequences, whatever they were likely to be, remained too awesome to put into words. Pamela turned her head away, and upward. Resting lightly the tips of her fingers on her hips, she leant slowly back on her heels, revealing to advantage the slimness of her still immensely graceful neck. She tipped her head slightly to one side, apparently lost once more in fascination by the legend of Candaules and Gyges. Widmerpool could stand this treatment no longer. He burst out.

‘What are you looking at? Answer my question. This is a serious matter, I tell you.’

Pamela did not reply at once. When she did so, she spoke in the absent strain of someone who has just made an absorbing discovery.

‘There’s a picture up there of a man exhibiting his naked wife to a friend. Have you inspected it yet?’

Widmerpool did not reply this time. His face was yellow. The look he gave her suggested that, of all things living, she was the most abhorrent to him. Pamela continued her soft, almost cooing commentary, a voice in complete contrast with her earlier sullenness.

‘I know you can’t tell one picture from another, haven’t the slightest idea what those square, flat, brightly coloured surfaces are, which people put in frames, and hang on their walls, or why they hang them there. You probably think they conceal safes with money in them, or compromising documents, possibly dirty books and postcards. The favourite things you think it better to keep hidden away. All the same, the subject of this particular picture might catch your attention — for instance remind you of those photographs shut up in the secret drawer of that desk you sometimes forget to lock. I didn’t know about them till the other day. I didn’t even know you’d taken them. Wasn’t that innocent of me? How Leon-Joseph laughed, when I told him. You were careless to forget about turning the key.’

Widmerpool had gone a pasty yellowish colour when his wife quoted Ferrand-Sénéschal’s alleged conjecture about Dr Belkin’s reasons for absenting himself from the Conference. Now the blood came back into his face, turning it brick red. He was furious. Even so, he must have grasped that whatever had to be said must wait for privacy. He made a powerful effort at self-control, which could not be concealed. Then he spoke quite soberly.

‘You don’t know how things stand, why it was necessary for me to come here. When you do, you will see you are being rather silly. There have been unfortunate developments certainly, absurd ones. Even if Belkin does not turn up, there will be a way out, but, if he is here, that will be easier. We’ll have a talk later about the best way of handling matters. This may concern you as much as me, so please do not be frivolous about it.’

Pamela was uninterested.

‘I haven’t the least idea what matters need handling. Oh, yes — the picture on the ceiling? You mean that? You want more explanation? Well, the wife there, whose husband arranged for his chum to have a peep at her in that charming manner, handled things by getting the chum who’d enjoyed the eyeful to do the husband in.’

She looked about for Gwinnett again. He was on the other side of the room, in front of a highly coloured piece of Venetian eighteenth-century sculpture, torso of a Turk. Gwinnett was examining the elaborate folds of the marble turban. Pamela went to join him. There could be no doubt she was interested in Gwinnett. What had taken place between the Widmerpools had attracted no attention from surrounding members of the Conference, nor Bragadin guests. Gwinnett himself could hardly have failed to notice its earlier pungency, but may not have caught the drift. Pamela might well be on her way to give him an account of that. Perhaps his Trapnel studies had prepared him for something of the sort; perhaps he supposed this the manner English married couples normally behaved. Considering the things said, both Widmerpools could have appeared outwardly unruffled, the colour of Widmerpool’s face reasonably attributable to the heat of the day, and texture of his clothes. He still seemed uncertain whether or not his wife had spoken with authority on the subject of Belkin. He looked at her questioningly for a second. When he turned to me again, his thoughts were far away.

‘I wonder what’s the best course to take about Belkin. The first thing to do is to make sure whether or not he’s here. How can I find that out?’

‘Ask one of the Executive Committee. Dr Brightman, over there, would know whom to tackle. She’s talking to our host.’

Jacky Bragadin, not paying much attention to whatever Dr Brightman was saying to him, was casting anxious glances round the room. A few members of the Conference had begun to drift into the next gallery, by far the larger majority continuing to contemplate the Tiepolo. Jacky Bragadin seemed to fear the story of Candaules and Gyges had hypnotized them, caused an aesthetic catalepsy to descend. Their state threatened to turn his home into a sort of Sleeping Beauty’s Palace, rows of inert vertical figures of intellectuals, for ever straining sightless eyes upward towards the ceiling, impossible to eject from where they stood. He waved his hands.

‘This way,’ he cried. ‘This way.’

He may have been merely regretful that his guests should exhaust so much appreciation on this single aspect, even if a highly prized one, of his treasures, anxious that should not be done to detriment of other splendid items. Most likely of all, he wanted to get us out of the place, hoped our sightseeing would be undertaken with all possible dispatch, leaving him and his guests in peace; or whatever passed for peace in such a house-party. One wondered how he could ever have been foolhardy enough to have presented Pamela with an open invitation to stay any time she liked. The cause, in his case, would not have been love. Possibly he had never done so. She had forced herself on him. It was waste of time to speculate how the Widmerpools had managed to install themselves in the Palazzo. Jacky Bragadin, like most rich people, was well able to attend to his own interests. He must have had his reasons.

‘This way,’ he repeated. ‘This way.’

He tried to encourage the more obdurate loiterers with smiles and beckonings. They would not be persuaded. He gave it up for a moment Dr Brightman pinned him down again. Glober reappeared beside Widmerpool and myself.

‘Mr Jenkins, I want you and Signora Clarini to meet. Signora Clarini is stopping in the Palazzo too. Her husband’s name you’ll know, the celebrated Italian director.’

I explained Baby and I had already met, though contacts had been slight, ages before. In those days, soon after her own association with Sir Magnus Donners, the Italian husband had then been spoken of as satisfactory to herself, even if of dubious occupation. Now he was no longer dubious, he must also have become less satisfactory, because Baby seemed displeased at his name being dragged in. Glober, on hearing she and I had met, struck an amused pose, as always personal to himself, if to some extent drawn from that deep fund of American schematized humour, of which, in a more sparing and austere technique, Colonel Cobb had been something of a master. Glober was not at all displeased to find earlier knowledge of Baby would unequivocally demonstrate the sort of woman prepared to run after him; an undertaking on which she certainly seemed engaged.

‘Baby, I believe you’ve met every man in the Eastern Hemisphere, and quite a few in the Western too.’

Possibly a small touch of malice was voiced. Baby may have thought that She looked sulky. I remembered Barnby’s passion for her, his comment how Sir Magnus never minded his girls having other commitments. That was hardly a subject to bridge our once slender acquaintance. Her manner, not outstandingly friendly, minimally accepted former meetings had taken place.

‘Aren’t you fed up with this heat?’ she said. ‘Everybody’s dripping. Look at Louis. Isn’t he a disgusting sight?’

Glober murmured consciously good-natured protests. ‘Am I, Baby? But not everyone. Look at Lord Widmerpool, he’s fresh as a daisy. I believe he’s right to take that Milan route. I’ll do the same myself next time.’

Drawing attention in this manner to Widmerpool’s appearance was indication that Glober made no pretence of liking him. Baby did not even smile. Her demeanour wafted through the Tiepolo room a breath of the Nineteen-Twenties. Like one who hands on the torch of a past era of folk culture, she had somehow preserved intact, from ballroom and plage, golf course and hunting field, a social technique fashionable then, even considered alluring. This rather unblissful breeze blowing across the years recalled a little Widmerpool’s former fiancée, Mrs Haycock (Baby’s distant cousin), though Baby herself had always been far the better-looking. She stopped a long way short of displaying the stigmata a lifetime of late parties and casual love affairs had bestowed on Mrs Haycock. Nevertheless, she had developed some of the same masculine hardening of the features, voice rising to a bark, elements veering in the direction of sex-change, threatened by too constant adjustment of husbands and lovers; comparable with the feminine characteristics acquired from too pertinacious womanizing.

‘Are you hopping over to the Lido for a dip this evening, Louis? A bathe will do you good. Freshen you up. Then I’m going to visit Mrs Erdleigh, the famous clairvoyante, who’s in Venice. Why don’t you come there too? She’ll tell your fortune.’

Glober shook his head glumly at the thought of looking into the future. He showed no great keenness to bathe either.

‘I’ll have to think about the Lido. Get my priorities straight.’

Widmerpool was becoming impatient again.

‘Your Dr Brightman is talking for a very long time,’ he said. ‘Who is she?’

‘A very distinguished scholar.’

‘Oh.’

Jacky Bragadin was as eager to get away from Dr Brightman as Widmerpool to be put in contact with her. In Jacky Bragadin’s efforts to escape, the two of them arrived beside us. Dr Brightman swept everyone in.

‘I’ve been talking to our host about his Foundation. I thought something might be done for Russell Gwinnett. Where’s he gone?’

‘It must be on paper,’ said Jacky Bragadin. ‘Always on paper. The name sent to the Board. They look into such matters.’

He sounded desperate. Dr Brightman, pausing to explain that I wrote novels, ignored his misery. The information made Jacky Bragadin horribly uneasy, but at least resulted in a let-out from further discussion of his Foundation. I told Dr Brightman that Widmerpool wanted to meet one of the Executive Committee. At that she began to question Widmerpool too. Without great originality of subject matter, I spoke to Jacky Bragadin of the beauty of the ceiling.

‘Nice colour,’ he said, his heart not in the words.

‘We were discussing the story —’

Jacky Bragadin’s despair began rapidly to increase again at that. He laid his hand on my sleeve beseechingly.

‘You must see the other rooms … They all must …’

He peered, without much hope, at Baby, still trying to persuade Glober to bathe. Widmerpool and Dr Brightman went off together, presumably to try and find a member of the Executive Committee. Most of the other members of the Conference, including Ada and Shuckerly, had begun to filter into the next room, a small backwash of Tiepolo enthusiasts from time to time borne back on an incoming current to take another look. Among these last was Gwinnett. Pamela was no longer to be seen. Gwinnett seemed by then rather dazed.

‘How was it? You seemed to be making good going?’

‘Lady Widmerpool’s agreed to talk about Trapnel.’

‘She has?’

‘That’s as I understand it.’

‘Fine.’

‘If she sticks to that. She’s said some amazing things already.’

‘You brought off quite a quick bit of work.’

‘Do you think so?’

He appeared uncertain.

‘At least we’re going to meet again,’ he said.

‘What could be better than that?’

‘Where do you think she’s arranged to meet?’

‘I can’t guess.’

‘Try.’

‘Harry’s Bar?’

Gwinnett shook his head.

‘St Mark’s.’

‘In the Piazza?’

‘In the Basilica.’

‘Any particular place in the church?’

‘She just said she’d be there at a certain time.’

‘On, on …’ pleaded Jacky Bragadin. ‘On, on…’