‘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.