18
PARTISAN REVIEW
ness.
It
would always be a question whether what he was searching out
was one's good will or its opposite, one's suspiciousness and doubt of
him. His smile was frequent and brilliant but ultimately lacking in mirth.
I do not mean that it was a mechanical smile, a mere twitch of the lips.
It
was full and pleasing, dangerously so. But it was gone as fast as it had
appeared, like a curtain which rises for an instant to reveal a scene ofjoy,
only in the next instant to fall abruptly, robbing us of our happy illu–
SIOn.
I remember little of our talk this first night of our meeting with the
Reeses, not much else than Lionel's and my antiphonal account of the
curious occurrence in our taxi as we had been driving to the Warburgs'
earlier that evening. Our cab had been halted by a traffic light and an–
other cab had drawn up alongside of us.
It
appeared to be driven by a
friend of our driver; the two men greeted each other familiarly and our
driver called out: "the Warburgs." To this mention of our destination
the other driver nodded appreciatively. What Lionel and I couldn't un–
derstand was how our driver knew whom we were visiting. Giving him
the address to which we wished to be taken, Lionel had mentioned only
a street and number, not a name; and even if he overheard us speaking of
the Warburgs, why did our driver want to share this information with
his friend?
Pamela supplied the answer. We had undoubtedly been driven by the
same cabbie who, with her encouragement, had submitted a novel to
her.
It
was a promising subject for a work of fiction, was it not? Pamela
inquired brightly of us. Life as seen through the eyes of a London cab
driver? But the manuscript had now been submitted and she would have
to write him a note of rejection . She would give the disappointed au–
thor the name of a rival publishing house to which he could send his
book, she concluded naughtily.
Throughout her explanation Warburg regarded his wife with unwa–
vering admiration and when, some months later, Goronwy would tell
me of his old affair with Pamela, I would retrieve, as from a computer,
this expression on Warburg's face, this declaration of his unfaltering love.
Why, I asked myself then and still ask, why an affair with Pamela of all
people, and why had Goronwy made this intimate disclosure to me?
'~She
had the softest skin of any woman I have ever known," he assured
me in response to my unasked question and added, unnecessarily: "All
over." Boo! I replied silently. The discovery of his wife's infidelity,
Goronwy told me, had all but destroyed the Warburgs' marriage and
Fred's life. Broken-hearted, he had packed to leave but Pamela had
managed to hold him back. The affair had ended and she and Fred had
once more become their old devoted selves.
