‘Hardly Ferrand-Sénéschal. In any case, through no fault of his own, he failed in that role. Others seemed to have enjoyed his Gyges-like privileges without dethroning the King. Candaules-Widmerpool continues to reign.’
‘No, it doesn’t really work,’ said Moreland. ‘All the same, it’s a splendid fable of Love and Friendship — what you’re liable to get from both — but the bearings are more general than particular, in spite of certain striking resemblances in this case. You really think she took the overdose, told him, then …’
‘What else could have happened?’
‘Literally dying for love.’
‘Death happened to be the price. The sole price.’
‘All other people’s sexual relations are hard to imagine. The more staid the people, the more inconceivable their sexual relations. For some, the orgy is the most natural. On that night after the Seraglio, I was very struck by the goings-on with which Lady Widmerpool taxed her husband. I’ve next to no voyeurist tastes myself. I lack the love of power that makes the true voyeur. When I was in Marseilles, years ago, working on Vieux Port, there was a brothel, where, allegedly unknown to the occupants, you could look through to a room used by other clients. I never felt the smallest urge to buy a ticket. It was Donners’s thing, you know.’
Moreland reflected a moment on what he had said. While still married to Matilda, he had, rather naturally, always avoided reference to that side of Sir Magnus’s life. This was the first time, to my own knowledge, he had ever brought up the subject.
‘Did I ever tell you how the Great Industrialist once confided to me that, when a young man — already doing pretty well financially — the doctors told him he had only a year to live? Of course that now seems the hell of a long time, in the light of one’s own medical adviser’s admonitions — not that I’m greatly concerned about keeping the old hulk afloat for another voyage or two, in the increasingly stormy seas of contemporary life, especially by drastic cutting down of the rum ration, and confining oneself to ship’s biscuit, the regime recommended. That’s by the way. The point is, I now find myself in a stronger position than in those days for vividly imagining what it felt like to be the man in the van Gogh pictures, so to speak Donners-on-the-brink-of-Eternity. Do you know what action Donners took? I’ll tell you in his own words.’
Moreland adopted the flat lugubrious voice, conventionally used by those who knew Sir Magnus, to imitate — never very effectively, because inimitable — his manner of talking.
‘I rented a little cottage in The Weald, gem of a place that brought a lump to the throat by its charm. There I settled down to read the best — only the best — of all literatures, English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian.’
Moreland paused.
‘I don’t know why Spanish was left out. Perhaps it was included, and I’ve forgotten. Between these injections of the best literature, Donners listened to recordings of the best — only the best — music.’
‘Interrupted by meals composed of the best food and the best wine?’
‘Donners, as you must remember to your cost, like most power maniacs, was not at all interested in food and drink. Although far more in his line, I presume the best sexual sensations were also omitted. That would be not so much because their physical expression might hasten ringing down the curtain, as on account of the apodictic intention. Is “apodictic” the right word? I once used it with effect in an article attacking Honegger. The villeggiatura was very specifically designed to rise above coarser manifestations of the senses.’
‘In the end did all this culture bring about a cure?’
‘It wasn’t the culture. The medicos made a mistake. They’d got the slides mixed, or the doctrine changed as to whatever Donners was suffering from being fatal. Something of the sort. Anyway they guessed wrong. Everything with Donners was right as rain. After spending a month or two at his dream cottage, he went back to making money, governing the country, achieving all-time records in utterance of conversational clichés, diverting himself in his own odd ways, all the many activities for which we used to know and love him. That went on until he was gathered in at whatever ripe old age he reached — not far short of eighty, so far as I remember.’
‘Also, if one may say so, without showing much outward sign of having concentrated on the best literature of half-a-dozen nations.’
‘Not the smallest. I was thinking that the other day while reading a translation of I Promessi Sposi. It sounds as if I were modelling myself on Donners, but I’ve got a lot of detective stories too. There was a special reason why I Promessi Sposi made me think of Donners, wonder whether it figured on his list, when he put on that final spurt to become cultured before rigor mortis set in. Like so many romantic novels, the story turns to some extent on the Villain upsetting the Hero by abducting the Heroine, unwilling victim threatened by the former’s lust. That particular theme always misses the main point in the tribulations of Heroes in real life, where the trouble is that the Heroine, once abducted, is likely to be only too anxious to suffer a fate worse than death.’
‘You mean Sir Magnus and his girls?’
For the moment I had not thought of Matilda.
‘I meant when he abducted Matty, and married her. Not exactly a precise parallel with Manzoni, I admit, but you’ll see what I mean.’
I did not know what to answer. This was the first time Moreland had ever spoken in such terms of Matilda leaving him for Sir Magnus Donners. He sighed, then laughed.
‘I suppose she liked being married to him. She remained in that state without apparent stress. She knew him, of course, from their first round together. In his odd way, he must have been attached to her too. All the same, I believe her when she said — consistently said — that she herself always refused to play his games, the way some — presumably most — of his girls did. I mean his taste, like your friend Lord Widmerpool’s, for watching other people make love.’
‘He was a friend of Donners too, but I don’t think Widmerpool got the habit there. What you say was certainly one of the things alleged. So it was true?’
‘Let’s approach the matter in the narrative technique of The Arabian Nights — the world where Donners really belonged — with a story. In fact, two stories. You must be familiar with both, favourite tales of my youth. To tell the truth, I’ve heard neither of them since the war. I’ve no doubt they survive in renovated shape.’
Moreland sighed again.
‘The first yarn is of a man making his way home late one night in London. He finds two ladies whose car has broken down. It is in the small hours, not a soul abroad. The earliest version ever told me represented the two ladies — one young and beautiful, the other older, but very distinguished — as having failed to crank their car with the starting-handle. Thought of this vintage jewel would make the mouths water of those vintage-hounds at the Seraglio, and shows the antiquity of the legend. No doubt the help required was later adapted to more up-to-date mechanics. In yet earlier days, the horses of their phaeton were probably restive, or the carriage immobilized for some other contemporary reason. Anyway, the man gets the engine humming. The ladies are grateful, so much so, they ask him back to their home for a drink. He accepts. After placing the glass to his lips, he remembers no more. He is found the following day, unconscious, in the gutter of some alley in a deserted neighbourhood. He has been castrated.’