Books Do Furnish a Room (14 page)

Widmerpool gave Rosie a slight
bow, his manner suggesting the connexion with
Fission
put her in a category of business colleagues to be treated circumspectly.

‘I’ve been having an
interesting talk with the military attaché of one of the new Governments in
Eastern Europe,’ he said. ‘He’s just arrived in London. As a matter of fact I
myself have rather a special relationship with his country, as a member – indeed
a founder member – of no less than two societies to cement British relations
with the new regime. You remember that ineffective princeling Theodoric, I
daresay.’

‘I thought him rather
attractive years ago,’ said Rosie. ‘It was at Sir Magnus Donners’ castle of all
places. Was the military attaché equally nice?’

‘A sturdy little fellow. Not
much to say for himself, but made a good impression. I told him of my close
connexions with his country. These representatives of single-party government
are inclined to form a very natural distrust for the West. I flatter myself I
got through to him successfully. I expect you’ve been talking about
Fission
. I hear you have been having sessions with our editor Bagshaw, Nicholas?’

‘He’s going to produce for me a
writer called X. Trapnel, of whom he has great hopes.’

‘
Camel Ride to the Tomb
?’
said Rosie. ‘I thought it so good.’

‘I shall have to read it,’ said
Widmerpool. ‘I shall indeed. I must be leaving now to attend to the affairs of
the nation.’

Somebody came up at that moment
to claim Rosie’s attention, so I never heard the story of what Pamela had said
to Peggy Klein.

The promised meeting with X.
Trapnel came about the following week. Like almost all persons whose life is
largely spun out in saloon bars, Bagshaw acknowledged strong ritualistic
responses to given pubs. Each drinking house possessed its special, almost
magical endowment to give meaning to whatever was said or done within its
individual premises. Indeed Bagshaw himself was so wholeheartedly committed to
the mystique of The Pub that no night of his life was complete without a final
pint of beer in one of them. Accordingly, withdrawal of Bagshaw’s company – whether
or not that were to be regarded as auspicious – could always be relied upon,
wherever he might be, however convivial the gathering, ten minutes before
closing time. If – an unlikely contingency – the ‘local’ were not already known
to him, Bagshaw, when invited to dinner, always took the trouble to ascertain
its exact situation for the enaction of this last rite. He must have carried in
his head the names and addresses of at least two hundred London pubs – heaven
knows how many provincial ones – each measured off in delicate gradations in
relation to the others, strictly assessed for every movement in Bagshaw’s
tactical game. The licensed premises he chose for the production of Trapnel
were in Great Portland Street, dingy, obscure, altogether lacking in outer ‘character’,
possibly a haunt familiar for years for stealthy BBC negotiations, after
Bagshaw himself had, in principle, abandoned the broadcasting world.

‘I’m sure you’ll like Trapnel,’
he said. ‘I feel none of the reservations about presenting him sometimes
experienced during the war. I don’t mean brother officers in the RAF – who
could be extraordinarily obtuse in recognizing the good points of a man who
happens to be a bit out of the general run – but Trapnel managed to get on the
wrong side of several supposedly intelligent people.’

‘Where does he fit into your
political panorama?’

Bagshaw laughed.

‘That’s a good question. He has
no place there. Doesn’t know what politics are about. I’d define him as a Leftish
Social-Democrat, if I had to. Born a Roman Catholic, but doesn’t practise – a
lapsed Catholic, rather as I’m a lapsed Marxist. As a matter of fact I came
across him in the first instance through a small ILP group in India, but
Trapnel didn’t know whether it was arse-holes or Tuesday, so far as all that
was concerned. As I say, he’s rather odd-man-out.’

Even without Bagshaw’s note of
caution, I had come prepared for Trapnel to turn out a bore. Pleasure in a book
carries little or no guarantee where the author is concerned, and
Camel Ride to the Tomb
, whatever its qualities as a
novel, had all the marks of having been written by a man who found difficulty
in getting on with the rest of the world. That might well be in his favour; on
the other hand, it might equally be a source of anyway local and temporary
discomfort, even while one hoped for the best.

‘Trapnel’s incredibly keen to
write well,’ said Bagshaw. ‘In fact determined. Won’t compromise an inch. I
admire that, so far as it goes, but writers of that sort can add to an editor’s
work. Our public may have to be educated up to some of
the stuff we’re going to offer – I’m thinking of the political articles Kenneth
Widmerpool is planning – so Trapnel’s good, light, lively pieces, if we can get
them out of him, arc likely to assist the other end of the mag.’

Trapnel’s arrival at that point
did not immediately set at rest Bagshaw’s rather ominous typification of him.
Indeed, Bagshaw himself seemed to lose his nerve slightly when Trapnel entered
the bar, though only for a second, and quickly recovered.

‘Ah, Trappy, here you are. Take
a seat. What’s it to be? How are things?’

He introduced us. Trapnel, in a
voice both deep and harsh, requested half a pint of bitter, somehow an
unexpectedly temperate choice in the light of his appearance and gruffness of
manner. He looked about thirty, tall, dark, with a beard. Beards, rarer in
those days than they became later, at that period hinted of submarine duty,
rather than the arts, social protest or a subsequent fashion simply for much
more hair. At the same time, even if the beard, assessed with the clothes and
stick he carried, marked him out as an exhibitionist in a reasonably high
category, the singularity was more on account of elements within himself than
from outward appearance.

Although the spring weather was
still decidedly chilly, he was dressed in a pale ochre-coloured tropical suit,
almost transparent in texture, on top of which he wore an overcoat, black and
belted like Quiggin’s Partisan number, but of cloth, for some reason familiarly
official in cut. This heavy garment, rather too short for Trapnel’s height of
well over six feet, was at the same time too full, in view of his spare, almost
emaciated body. Its weight emphasized the flimsiness of the tussore trousers
below. The greatcoat turned out, much later, to have belonged to Bagshaw during
his RAF service, disposed of on terms unspecified, possibly donated, to Trapnel,
who had caused it to be dyed black. The pride Trapnel obviously took in the
coat was certainly not untainted by an implied, though unjustified, aspiration
to ex-officer status.

The walking stick struck a
completely different note. Its wood unremarkable, but the knob, ivory, more
likely bone, crudely carved in the shape of a skull, was rather like old
Skerrett’s head at Erridge’s funeral. This stick clearly bulked large in Trapnel
equipment. It set the tone far more than the RAF greatcoat or tropical suit.
For the rest, he was hatless, wore a dark blue sports shirt frayed at the
collar, an emerald green tie patterned with naked women, was shod in grey suede
brothel-creepers. These last, then relatively new, were destined to survive a
long time, indeed until their rubber soles, worn to the thinness of paper, had
become all but detached from fibre-less uppers, sounding a kind of dismal
applause as they flapped rhythmically against the weary pavement trodden
beneath.

The general effect, chiefly
caused by the stick, was of the Eighteen-Nineties, the
décadence
; putting things at their least eclectic, a contemptuous rejection of currently
popular male modes in grey flannel demob suits with pork-pie hats,
bowler-crowned British Warms, hooded duffels, or even those varied outfits like
Quiggin’s, to be seen here and there, that suggested recent service in the
maquis
. All such were rejected. One could not help speculating whether an eyeglass
would not be produced – Trapnel was reported to have sported one for a brief
period, until broken in a pub brawl – insomuch that the figure he recalled,
familiar from some advertisement advocating a brand of chocolates or
cigarettes, similarly equipped with beard and cane, wore an eye-glass
on a broad ribbon, though additionally rigged out in
full evening dress, an order round his neck, opera cloak over his shoulder. In Trapnel’s case, the final effect had that touch of
surrealism which redeems from complete absurdity, though such redemption was a
near thing, only narrowly achieved.

Perhaps this description,
factually accurate – as so often when facts are accurately reported – is at the
same time morally unfair. ‘Facts’ – as Trapnel himself, talking about writing,
was later to point out – are after all only on the surface, inevitably
selective, prejudiced by subjective presentation. What is below, hidden, much
more likely to be important, is easily omitted. The effect Trapnel made might
indeed be a little absurd; it was not for that reason unimpressive. In spite of
much that was all but ludicrous, a kind of inner dignity still somehow clung to
him.

Nevertheless, the impression
made on myself was in principle an unfavourable one when he first entered the
pub. A personal superstructure on human beings that seems exaggerated and
disorganized threatens behaviour to match. That was the immediate response.
Almost at once this turned out an incorrect as well as priggish judgment. There
were no frills about Trapnel’s conversation. When he began to talk, beard,
clothes, stick, all took shape as necessary parts of him, barely esoteric, as
soon as you were brought into relatively close touch with the personality. That
personality, it was at once to be grasped, was quite tough. The fact that his
demeanour stopped just short of being aggressive was no doubt in the main a
form of self-protection, because a look of uncertainty, almost of fear,
intermittently showed in his eyes, which were dark brown to black. They gave
the clue to Trapnel having been through a hard time at some stage of his life,
even when one was still unaware how dangerously – anyway how uncomfortably – he
was inclined to live. His way of talking, not at all affected or artificial,
had a deliberate roughness, its rasp no doubt regulated for pub interchanges at
all levels, to avoid any suggestion of intellectual or social pretension.

‘Smart cane, Trappy,’ said
Bagshaw. ‘Who’s the type on the knob? Dr Goebbels? Yagoda? There’s a look of
both of them.’

‘I’d like to think it’s Boris
Karloff in a horror rôle,’ said Trapnel. ‘As you know, I’m a great Karloff fan.
I found it yesterday in a shop off the Portobello Road, and took charge on the
strength of the Quiggin & Craggs advance on the short stories. Not exactly
cheap, but I had to possess it. My last stick, Shakespeare’s head, was pinched.
It wasn’t in any case as good as this one – look.’

He twisted the knob, which
turned out to be the pommel of a sword-stick, the blade released by a spring at
the back of the skull. Bagshaw restrained him from drawing it further, seizing
Trapnel’s arm in feigned terror.

‘Don’t fix bayonets, I beseech
you, Trappy, or we’ll be asked to leave this joint. Keep your steel bright for
the Social Revolution.’

Trapnel laughed. He clicked the
sword back into the shaft of the stick.

‘You never know when you may
have trouble,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded using it on my last publisher.
Quiggin & Craggs are going to take over his stock of the
Camel
. They’ll do a reprint, if they can get the paper.’

I told him I had enjoyed the
book. That was well received. The novel’s title referred to an incident in
Trapnel’s childhood there described; one, so he insisted, that had prefigured
to him what life – anyway his own life – was to be. In the narrative this
episode had taken place in some warm foreign land, the name forgotten, but a
good deal of sand, the faint impression of a pyramid, offering a strong
presumption that the locale was Egyptian. The words that made such an impression on the young Trapnel – in many subsequent reminiscences always disposed to represent himself as an impressionable little boy – were intoned by an old man whose beard, turban, nightshirt, all the same shade of off-white,
manifested the outer habiliments of a prophet; just as the stony ground from
which he delivered his tidings to the Trapnel family party seemed the right
sort of platform from which to prophesy.

‘Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel
ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb …’

Trapnel, according to himself,
immediately recognized these words, monotonously repeated over and over again,
as a revelation.

‘I grasped at once that’s what
life was. How could the description be bettered? Juddering through the
wilderness, on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t properly control, along a
rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely,
yet truly, stated.’

If Trapnel were really so young
as represented by himself at the time of the incident, the story was not
entirely credible, though none the worse for that. None the worse, I mean,
insomuch as the words had undoubtedly haunted his mind at some stage, even if a
later one. The greybeard’s unremitting recommendation of his beast as means of
local archaeological transport had probably become embedded in the memory as
such phrases will, only later earmarked for advantageous literary use:
post hoc, propter hoc
, to invoke a tag hard worked by
Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson in post-retirement letters to
The
Times
.

The earlier Trapnel myth, as
propagated in the
Camel
, was
located in an area roughly speaking between Beirut and Port Said, with
occasional forays further afield from that axis. His family, for some
professional reason, seemed to have roamed that part of the world nomadically.
This fact – if it were a fact – to some extent attested the compatibility of a
pleasure trip taken in Egypt, a holiday resort, in the light of other details
given in the book, otherwise implying an unwarrantably prosperous interlude in
a background of many apparent ups and downs, not to say disasters. Egypt
cropped up more than once, perhaps – like the RAF officer’s greatcoat – adding
a potentially restorative tone. The occupation of Trapnel’s father was never
precisely defined; obscure, even faintly shady, commercial undertakings hinted.
His social life appeared marginally official in style, if not of a very exalted
order; possibly tenuous connexions with consular duties, not necessarily our
own. One speculated about the Secret Service. Once – much later than this first
meeting – a reference slipped out to relations in Smyrna. Trapnel’s physical
appearance did not exclude the possibility of a grandmother, even a mother, indigenous
to Asia Minor. He was, it appeared, an only child.