Temporary Kings (4 page)

‘That’s an intriguing
story it depicts. The girl offering herself for sacrifice. The calm dignity
with which she faces death. Tiepolo painted an
Iphigenia
too, more than once,
though I’ve only seen the one at the Villa Valmarana. There’s at least one
other that looks even finer in reproduction. It’s the inferential side of the
myth that fascinates me.’

Gwinnett sounded
oddly excited. His manner had altogether altered. The thought of
Iphigenia
must
have strangely moved him. Then he abruptly changed the subject. For some reason
speaking of the Veronese had released something within himself, made it
possible to introduce another, quite different motif, one, as it turned out,
that had been on his mind ever since we met. This matter, once given
expression, a little explained earlier lack of ease. At least it suggested that
Gwinnett, when broaching topics that meant a lot to him, was not so much vain
or unaccommodating, as nervous, paralysed, unsure of himself. That was the next
impression, equally untrustworthy as a judgment.

‘You knew the English
writer X. Trapnel, Mr Jenkins?’

‘Certainly.’

‘Pretty well, I
believe?’

‘Yes, I was quite an
authority on Trapnel at one moment.’

Gwinnett sighed.

‘I’d give anything to
have known Trapnel.’

‘There were ups and
downs in being a friend.’

‘You thought him a
good writer?’

‘A very good writer.’

‘I did too. That’s
why I’d have loved to meet him. I could have done that when I was a student. I
was over in London. I get mad at myself when I think of that. He was still
alive. I hadn’t read his books then. I wouldn’t have known where to go and see
him anyway.’

‘All you had to do
was to have a drink at one of his pubs.’

‘I couldn’t just
speak to him. He wouldn’t have liked that.’

‘If somebody had told
you one or two of his haunts – The Hero of Acre or The Mortimer – you could
hardly have avoided hearing Trapnel holding forth on books and writers. Then
you might have stood him a drink. The job would have been done.’

‘Trapnel’s the
subject of my dissertation – his life and works.’

‘So Trapnel’s going
to have a biographer?’

‘Myself.’

‘Fine.’

‘You think it right?’

‘Quite right.’

Gwinnett nodded his
head.

‘I ought to say I’d
already planned to get in touch with you, Mr Jenkins – among others who’d known
Trapnel – when I reached England after this Conference. I’d never have expected
to find you here.’

After the statement
of Gwinnett’s Trapnel project relations might have been on the way to becoming
easier. That did not happen; at least easing was by no means immediate. For a
minute or two he seemed even to regret the headlong nature of the confession.
Then he recovered some of the earlier more amenable manner.

‘You did not go on
seeing Trapnel right up to his death, I guess?’

‘Not for about four
or five years before that. It must be the best part of ten years now since I
talked to him – though he once sent me a note asking the date when some book
had been published, the actual month, I mean. He went completely underground
latterly.’

‘What book was that –
the one he wanted to know about?’

‘A collection of
essays by L. O. Salvidge called
Paper Wine
. There had
been some question of Trapnel reviewing it, but the notice never got written.’

‘Where was Trapnel
living when he wrote you?’

‘He only gave an
accommodation address. A newspaper shop in the Islington part of the world.

‘I want to see Mr
Salvidge too when I get to London.’

‘As you know, he
contributed an Introduction to a posthumous work of Trapnel’s called
Dogs
Have No Uncle
.’

‘It’s good. Not as
great as
Camel Ride to the Tomb
, but good. What a sense of doom that other
tide gives.’

In contrast with the
passing of a prolific writer like Ferrand-Sénéschal, Trapnel’s end, in spite of
aptness of circumstances, took place unnoticed by the press. That was not
surprising. He had produced no ‘serious’ work during his latter days.
Throughout his life he had been accustomed to ‘go underground’ intermittently,
when things took an unfavourable turn; the underground state becoming permanent
after the Pamela Widmerpool affair, her destruction of his manuscript, return
to her husband. That was when Trapnel disappeared for good. I knew no one who
continued to hobnob with him. He must have made business contacts from time to
time. His name would occasionally appear in print, or on the air, in connexion
with hack work of one kind or another. This was usually radio or television
collaboration with a partner, a professional, safely established, to whom
Trapnel had passed on a saleable idea he himself lacked energy or will to
hammer out to the end. In these exchanges he must have inclined to avoid former
friendly affiliations, reminders of ‘happier days’. It had to be admitted
Trapnel had known ‘happier days’, even if of a rather special order.

Bagshaw was a case in
point of Trapnel deliberately rejecting overtures from an old acquaintance. As
he had himself planned after the liquidation of
Fission
, when such
fiefs were comparatively easy to seize, Bagshaw had carved out for himself an
obscure, but apparently fairly prosperous, little realm in the unruly world of
television. Now he was known as ‘Lindsay Bagshaw’, the first name latent until
this coming into his own. I never saw much of him after the magazine ceased
publication, though we would run across each other occasionally. Once we met in
the lift at Broadcasting House, and he began to speak of Trapnel. Even by then
Bagshaw had become rather a changed man. Success, even moderate success, had
left a mark.

‘I’d have liked
Trappy to appear in one of my programmes. Quite impossible to run him to earth.
I caught sight of him one day from the top of a 137 bus. It wasn’t so much the
beard and the long black greatcoat, as that melancholy distinguished air Trappy
always had. I couldn’t jump off in full flight. It was one of those misty
evenings in Langham Place. The lights were shining from all the rows of windows
in this building. Trappy was standing by that church with the pointed spire. He
was looking up at those thousand windows of the BBC, all ablaze with light.
Something about him made me feel very sad. I couldn’t help thinking of the
Scholar Gypsy, and Christ-Church hall, and all that, even though I wasn’t at
the university myself, and it wasn’t snowing. I thought it would have been a
splendid shot in a film. I wondered if he’d agree to do a documentary about his
own failure in life – comparative, I mean. About a month later, I ran into one
of his understrappers in a pub. He was going to see Trappy later that evening.
I sent a note, but it wasn’t any good. No answer.’

There was also the
occasional Trapnel story or article to appear, nothing to be ashamed of, at the
same time nothing comparable with the old Trapnel standard. This submerged
period of Trapnel’s life could not have been enviable. He abandoned The Hero of
Acre, all the other pubs where he had been accustomed to harangue an assemblage
of chosen followers. The roving intelligentsia of the saloon bar – cultural
nomads of a race never likely to penetrate the international steppe – professional
topers, itinerant bores, near-criminals, knew him no more. They were thrown
back on their own resources, had to keep themselves instructed and amused in
other ways. Where Trapnel himself went, whom he saw, how he remained alive,
were all hard to imagine. Probably there remained women to find him still
passable enough even in decline; more or less devoted mistresses to maintain
survival of a sort As Trapnel himself might have insisted – one could hear his
dry harsh voice speaking the words – a washed-up condition is not necessarily
an unattractive one to a woman. That had also been one of Barnby’s themes: ‘Ladies
like a man to rescue. A job that offers a challenge. They can annex the
property at a cheap rate, and ruthlessly develop it.’

Trapnel may have been
annexed by a woman, not much development feasible, minimum financial security
about the best to be hoped. That in itself was after all something. Gwinnett
agreed the plausible assumption, after the collapse of Trapnel’s hopes, was
personal administration taken over by a relatively prudent wage-earning
mistress; even a good-hearted landlady, whose commonsense regulated money
matters, such as they were, warding off actual destitution. That is, Gwinnett
had nothing else to offer. His accord was not enthusiastic. Comparative
reluctance to accept that a woman might have kept Trapnel going, made me wonder
whether Gwinnett were not homosexual. He might be a homosexual as well as a
redeemed drunk; the former state, possibly repressed, seeking outlet in the
latter. Then he brought back the subject of women himself.

‘I’d like to ask you
about this girl – the castrating one.’

‘Pamela Widmerpool?’

‘I’ve been spun so
many yarns about her.’

The stories he had
been told were, on the whole, garbled in a manner to make the true
circumstances of Trapnel’s life all but unrecognizable. It was in any case a
field where accuracy was hard to come by. At the same time, if Gwinnett’s
information had percolated through misinformed sources, he himself showed
unexpected flashes of insight. Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary
to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail.
That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most,
of the true facts discarded. Besides, what could be called unreservedly true
when closely examined, especially about Trapnel? The stories told to Gwinnett
became notably blurred in their inferences about Pamela Widmerpool. Trapnel’s
relationship with her emerged as little more than a love affair that had gone
wrong, something that might have happened to anybody. Naturally, in one sense,
it
was
a love affair that had gone wrong, but subtlety was required
to express the unusual nature of that love affair, its start, progress,
termination. All these had been conveyed with such lack of finesse that no kind
of justice was done to the exceptional nature of those concerned: Pamela:
Widmerpool: Trapnel himself. For Gwinnett, too, there existed the seldom
remittent difficulty of translating the personalities and doings of English
material into American terms.

The impression these
reports had left with him was of a man’s luck – Trapnel’s luck – having
suddenly, meaninglessly, taken a turn for the worse. From being, in his way, a
notable writer, a promising career ahead of him, Trapnel had been suddenly,
inexorably, struck down by misfortune, although leading much the same sort of
life as he had always led, with girls not so wholly different from Pamela,
before he had linked himself to her. Sometimes Gwinnett hedged a little, but
that main interpretation was the one he was prepared, even if unwillingly, to
accept.

‘Trapnel’s crack-up is easy for an American to
understand. If you don’t mind my saying so, to find a writer of even your age
on his feet, and working, is not all that common with us.’

‘Some of the violent
consuming nervous American energy was characteristic of Trapnel too.’

‘He’d no American
blood?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘I’d like to think he
had.’

‘His father was a
jockey in Egypt. If Trapnel had written about that we’d have a completer
picture.’

‘Completion was one of
the things Trapnel aimed at, you said – the idea of the Complete Man. Did he
achieve some of that? I think so.’

‘Vigny says the poet
is not a sport of nature, his destiny is the human predicament.’

‘And the concept was
challenged by this girl – as it were invalidated.’

Gwinnett thought
about that for a moment, almost as if he were hoping to rebut his own
conjecture. Then he laughed, and changed his tone.

‘It was the god
Hercules deserting Antony.’

‘As a matter of fact
the god Hercules returned in Trapnel’s case. There was music in the air again,
though only briefly.’

Gwinnett had heard
more misleading accounts. The best in existence was probably Malcolm Crowding’s.
It was at least first-hand. No doubt Crowding’s story had been a little
ornamented with the passage of time, no worse than that. The basic facts were
that Trapnel had found himself in possession of a hundred pounds. No one argued
about that, a fact in itself sufficiently extraordinary. What was additionally
astonishing, almost a miracle, was the sum being in notes. A cheque might have
brought quite different consequences. Where opinion chiefly differed was in the
provenance of the money. It was usually designated, rather pedestrianly, as
payment for forgotten ‘rights’, which had finally borne fruit in some medium
functioning in long delayed action, possibly from a foreign country.
Alternatively, more picturesquely, the hundred pounds was said to be a legacy
left to Trapnel’s father, the celebrated jockey, as one of the items in the
eccentric will of a grateful backer of the winning horse, ridden by Trapnel
père
,
at a long forgotten Egyptian race-meeting. By slow but workmanlike processes of
the law, the bequest had in due course been deflected to Trapnel himself as
heir and successor, the sum delivered to him. If the latter origin were true,
the whimsical testator must either have had a long memory, or omitted to
overhaul his will for a great many years. In either ease, almost equally
surprising, Trapnel was traced, the money handed over in cash. The only
colourable explanation was that Trapnel, improbable as that might seem, having
found his way personally to the intermediary – lawyer, accountant, publisher,
agent – by his old skill induced whoever was in charge to accept a receipt for
notes. If so, that final mustering of Trapnel’s long dormant forces proved
dramatically, in a sense appropriately, fatal.