DIANA TRILLING
19
Together, there was now no hint of constraint between Fred and
Goronwy, nor any visible flutter of excitement on Pamela's side beyond
the stir which, I was already gathering, she always created around her.
And Margie? What about Margie? Deargentle Margie would seem to
be well-practiced in the art of sustaining her marriage, keeping its surface
unmarred, its depths unroiled.
We didn't again see the Reeses with the Warburgs but in the next
months we often came down to London from Oxford and now and
then met Fred and Pamela for lunch or a drink. On one such visit, the
Warburgs took us to lunch at the Athenaeum, Fred's club in London.
It
may no longer be so but at the time the Athenaeum didn't permit
women in its main dining room; women had to be entertained in the
adjacent Annex. Whether it was Fred or Pamela who chose it as our
place to meet for lunch, Pamela had of course to have approved it. Had
she chosen it just because it would allow her to make a fuss?
"Isn't this ridiculous?" she shrilled from the top of the flight of stairs
leading from the door of the Annex to the crowded room in which
members dined with their female guests and where Fred and Lionel and I
were waiting for her. "Do we women have to put up with this?"
In
1964 Pamela's feminist fervor was precocious; women's liberation had
just begun to make itself known in England. She meant to provoke
whoever heard her in the room at the foot of the stairs and several of
the people in the large dining area did in fact look up questioningly.
But no one gave any sign of disturbance. As for Fred, as always Fred
beamed. Another time when we came to London from Oxford and saw
the Warburgs, I heard Pamela tell a captive audience that she had once
sat next to Thomas Mann at table and that the famous German author
had spent most of the meal with his hand up her skirt.
In
the few weeks remaining before we moved from London to
Oxford, we saw the Reeses several times, either in their casual comfort–
able home or at the Old St. James's House, the hotel in London's West
End to which we had been recommended by friends in New York.
Sadly, I learn that it no longer exists. The Reeses were charmed by the
Old St. James's House. They especially responded to something disrep–
utable about it, or not so much disreputable as illicit. Neither of them
had heard of our hotel before we asked them to meet us there one late
afternoon for a drink.
The Old St. James's House was a group of four-storey brownstones
- or it may have been redstones - thrown together at the end of a small
dead-end street off St. James's Street and it didn't at all look like a ho-
