On Pamela's side, the alliance is more mysterious; convincing on that very account. "Why did she do it?" Flavia Wisebite, Stringham's sister, Pamela's mother, asks Nick at a wedding years after Pamela's death; Pamela contrives to commit suicide while in bed with Trapnel's biographer.   "How could she? Find the most horrible man on earth and then marry him? She always had to have her own way. It was quite enough that everyone said that Widmerpool was awful, hideous, monstrous. She just wanted to show that she didn't care in the least what anyone said. She was the same as a child. Absolutely wilful. Nobody could control her." When he meets Pamela as an ATS driver in the war, Nick has a sense that she is thoroughly vicious: "using the word not so much in the moral sense but as one might speak of a horse-more specifically a mare."

Widmerpool has been too continuously a leitmotif in Jenkins's own story to be considered the most horrible man on earth.   Like Pamela, who uses sex not for pleasure, nor for consolation, nor to connect and communicate with another, but to dominate, to impose her will, Widmerpool is throughout the sequence a forceful archetype as much as a character. Characters suffer. They learn. They attempt to reconcile the world without to the world within.  Archetypes, whether heroes or anti-heroes, are not proponents of the examined life.  They are forces: of their own destruction, of other people's destiny. "That boy will be the death of me," says Stringham of some comic blunder of Widmerpool at school.  Twenty years on, he proves to be. Widmerpool exemplifies to Jenkins, the slow starter in life, the perils and attractions of taking charge of your life, of subordinating everything you do and feel to an heroic exercise of will. Powell invests too much in Widmerpool's horror-comic potential to let him remain purely a gargoyle. Widmerpool has intellectual ability, formidable energy, application. He can forget himself sufficiently for a few moments to analyse the behaviour of others, if and only if doing so helps him get on. He is therefore effective in business during his Donners-Brebner years. In the army, he ends up as a Colonel with an OBE for his work in the Cabinet Office. He becomes a Labour MP and is one of the first to be made a Life Peer under the Tories in 1958.  

By the end of the sequence, set in time some ten years later, two of the four school contemporaries are dead. Nick is a happily married man of letters in his sixties, whose wife, Isobel, has given him two children (who do not appear in the novel except as dedicatees of individual books) and also an immense cast of in-laws. These do appear.  The wonderful Erridge — touch of the Longfords, both Edward and Frank; touch of George Orwell — has gone, but a niece, Fiona, daughter of Tory MP Roddy Cutts and Isobel's sister, Susan, is pivotal for the end of Dance. She is a member of Widmerpool's nemesis Scorpio Murtlock's ruralist, hippy, alternative society cult. Quite a few of my own friends of that time used to travel around the countryside in horse-drawn caravans and a cloud of marijuana. They could perfectly well have camped in a field near the Chantry. Perhaps they did. I am not for a moment suggesting that these saintly figures engaged in satanic rites. But such are not unknown in the country.  Quite recently, more than 40 years on, the Lord-Lieutenant of the county adjoining ours has had to tackle a worrying outbreak of witchcraft. It was a pretext, in his view, for incest and child abuse. Our perceptions may be defined by decades. As Powell was classically aware, human compulsions are not.