‘The Sorceress seemed to know Lady Widmerpool already. At least she gave her extraordinary smile — one I would rather not have played on myself.’
Pamela had smiled in return. She took no other notice of Mrs Erdleigh, nor the rest of them. The person to whom she addressed herself was Polly Duport. Pamela did not come close, but it was plain to whom she was speaking.
‘I hear you’re going to be the star in Louis’s new film.’
Pamela said that very gently, barely audibly. Her tone almost suggested she was shy of mentioning the matter at all, though beyond words delighted at hearing such a rumour. All she wanted was to have the good news confirmed. Both Moreland and Stevens agreed there was not the smallest hint of unfriendliness in Pamela’s voice. At the same time, Stevens, knowing Pamela to the extent of having lived with her for at least a few weeks, had no doubt something ominous was brewing. Moreland, it seemed, had not bothered to categorize Pamela at all; so far as he was concerned, another ‘lady of fashion’, full of every sort of nonsense about music, to be avoided at all costs. He admitted to having been struck by her looks, when he came to examine her.
Polly Duport, whether she knew much or little about Pamela, can have had few illusions as to friendliness. She could hardly have failed to hear of Glober’s comparatively recent intention to cast Pamela for the lead she herself — anyway for the moment — was intended by him to play. Beyond that knowledge, of a purely business sort, the extent of her awareness of Pamela’s character, even nature of relationship with Glober, could well be over-estimated. The segregated life of the Theatre, separated by its nature from so much going on round about, might easily have prevented her from hearing more than essential; so to speak, her own cue in taking Pamela’s place. Polly Duport herself may not have been, over and above that, at all interested. She would know that Pamela, not a professional actress, had been in the running as ‘star’ of Glober’s film, had probably experienced some sort of love affair with him. That was not necessarily significant. There was no reason for her to guess Glober had planned to marry Pamela.
Polly Duport, replying to Pamela’s question, seems to have let fall a scrap of stylized stage banter adapted to such an enquiry, one of those conventional sets of phrase, existing in every professional world, in this case designed for use in counteracting another player, complimentary, spiteful, a mixture of both; clichés probably often in demand throughout the give-and-take of life in the Theatre. Moreland could not remember the actual comeback employed. He suggested several known to himself from his own backstage undertakings. Whatever form Polly Duport’s answer presented was amicably accepted by Pamela, but she did not abandon the subject.
‘I’m sure you’ll like working with Louis.’
‘Who could doubt that?’ said Polly Duport.
She spoke lightly, of course. Pamela was behaving as if so pleased about the whole arrangement, that she was even a little anxious that it might not all go as well as deserved.
‘You mean because all women love Louis?’
‘All the world, surely?’
That was a neat reply. Pamela recognized it as such. She smiled, rather sadly, even though the idea seemed to please her. There was an instant’s pause. Moreland said this was the point when the atmosphere became very highly charged. One of the elements causing him to notice that was Stripling suddenly ceasing to reel off names and dates of vintage cars, which, until this tenseness made itself felt, he had, up to the last possible moment, continued to recite to Glober. Pamela spoke again, this time reflectively.
‘Quite a lot of people have loved Louis.’
‘They couldn’t help it,’ said Polly Duport.
Pamela laughed softy.
‘I expect you know,’ she said. ‘Louis’s stuffed a charming little cushion with hair snipped from the pussies of ladies he’s had?’
Stevens said afterwards that he ‘recognized that enquiry as signal for trouble starting’. Both he and Moreland, in whatever other respects their stories differed, stood shoulder to shoulder as regards those precise words of Pamela’s. Where they disagreed was as to the manner in which Polly Duport took them. Stevens thought her outraged. Moreland’s view was of her merely raising an eyebrow, so to speak, at the crudeness of phrasing. She was not in the least disconcerted by the eccentricity of the practice. Moreland was absolutely firm on that.
‘Miss Duport showed not the slightest sign of wilting.’
He agreed with Stevens that she made no comment. No one else made any comment either. They just stood, ‘as if hypnotized’, Moreland said. Pamela laughed quietly to herself, giving the impression that thought of Glober’s whim amused her. She turned towards him.
‘You have, haven’t you, Louis?’
‘Have what, honey?’
Glober was absolutely relaxed. Stevens, again fancying other people as scandalized as himself, supposed him taken aback a moment before. If so, Glober was now completely recovered.
‘Stuffed a cushion?’
‘Sure.’
‘As well as the ladies themselves?’
‘Correct.’
Glober remained unrattled. Pamela laughed this time shrilly. She was working herself up to a climax, possibly a sexual one. Stevens said her behaviour reminded him of a scene made at a black-market night-club during the war, when she had started a sudden row, calling out to the people at the next table that he was impotent. Stevens never minded telling that sort of story about himself. It was one of his good points. In any case, even if at one time or another he had failed to satisfy Pamela, the charge was hard to substantiate, in her case not a specially damaging one. As Barnby used to say in that connexion, ‘There’s a boomerang aspect.’ Glober remained equally undisturbed. His conversational tone matched Pamela’s.
‘I thought Miss Duport would just like to know what’s expected. Perhaps you’ve been at work with the nail-scissors already, Louis? Anyway, it’s a cheaper hobby than his.’
She pointed at Widmerpool. At this stage of the proceedings, Mrs Erdleigh seems to have taken charge. One imagines that, in her own incorporeal manner, she floated from the exterior of the group to its moral centre, wherever that might be. She appears to have laid a hand on Pamela’s arm, a movement to suggest restraint. This was the interlude Moreland most enjoyed describing, what he called ‘the Sorceress in the ascendant, Lady Widmerpool afflicted’. He said that Pamela, at contact of Mrs Erdleigh’s fingers, shot out a look of intense malevolence, hesitating for a second in whatever she was about to say.
‘My dear, beware. You are near the abyss. You stand at its utmost edge. Do not forget the warning I gave when you showed me your palm on that dread night.’
Stevens took the line later that neither second-sight nor magical powers were required to foretell the way things were moving. He may have been right. At the same time, however obscurely phrased, Mrs Erdleigh’s presentiments were near the mark.
‘The vessels of Saturn must not be shed to their dregs.’
Stevens, incapable himself of reproducing cabalistic dialectic, was no less impressed than Moreland, in whose repetition such specialized language lost none of its singularity. The unwonted nature of Mrs Erdleigh’s invocations did not so much in themselves bewilder Stevens as in their practical effect on Pamela.