Books Do Furnish a Room (29 page)

‘Why discuss your work with
her?’ said Bagshawe inconsistently. ‘Tell her to get on with the washing-up.’

‘It’s not the first row we’ve
had by a long chalk. Christ, I don’t want her to leave me. I know it’s pretty
awful living the way we do, but I can’t face the thought of her leaving. You
know I’m not sure there isn’t going to be a film in
Profiles
in String
. It was the last thing I thought about when I
started, but now I believe there might be. It would go over big, if it went
over at all.’

At one moment it looked as if
Trapnel were going to break down, at the next, that he was about to indulge in one
of his fantasies about making money, which overwhelmed him from time to time.
These sudden changes of gear were going to require careful handling, if he were
to be conveyed back to the flat. It was much more likely that he would want to
go to a drinking club of some sort. He usually knew the address of one that
would admit him. Bagshaw, grasping the fact that Trapnel needed soothing, now
took charge quite effectively. He must have had long experience in persuading
fellow-drunks to do what he, rather than they themselves, wanted. He was
ruthless about getting his own way when he thought that necessary, showing
total disregard for other people’s wishes or convenience. That was now all to
the good.

‘We know what you feel, Trappy.
Come on. We’ll go back and see how things are. She’s probably longing to see
you.’

‘You don’t know her.’

‘I admit that, but I’ve seen
her. They’re all the same.’

‘There’s not a drop to drink.’

‘Never mind. Nick and I will
just see you home.’

‘Will you really? I couldn’t
face it otherwise.’

Trapnel was like a child who
suddenly decides to be fretful no longer. Now he was even full of gratitude. We
reached Edgware Road with him still in this mood. There was a small stretch of
the main highway to negotiate before turning off by the Canal. The evening was
warm, stuffy, full of strange smells. For once Trapnel seemed suitably dressed
in his tropical suit. We turned down the south side of the Canal, walking on
the pavement away from the houses. Railings shut off a grass bank that sloped
down to the tow-path. Trapnel had now moved into a pastoral dream.

‘I love this waterway. I’d like
to have a private barge, and float down it waving to the tarts.’

‘Do you get a lot down here?’
asked Bagshaw, interested.

‘You see the odd one. They live
round about, but tend to work other streets. What a mess the place is in.’

Most of London was pretty
grubby at this period, the Canal no
exception. On the surface of the water concentric circles of
oil, undulating in the colours of the spectrum, were illuminated by moonlight. Through these luminous prisms floated anonymous
off-scourings of every kind, tin cans, petrol drums, soggy cardboard boxes. Watery litter increased as
the bridge was approached. Bagshaw pointed to a peculiarly obnoxious deposit bobbing up and down by the
bank.

‘Looks as if someone’s dumped
their unit’s paper salvage. I used to have to deal with that at one stage of
the war. Obsolete forms waiting to be pulped and made into other forms. An
internal reincarnation. Fitted the scene in India.’

Trapnel stopped, and leant
against the railings.

‘Let’s pause for a moment.
Contemplate life. It’s a shade untidy here, but romantic too. Do you know what
all that mess of paper looks like? A manuscript. Probably someone’s first
novel. Authors always talk of burning their first novel, I believe this one’s
drowned his.’

‘Or hers.’

‘Some beautiful girl who wrote
about her seduction, and couldn’t get it published.’

‘When lovely woman stoops to
authorship?’

‘I think I’ll go and have a
look. Might give me some ideas.’

‘Trappy, don’t be silly.’

Trapnel, laughing rather
dementedly, began to climb the railings. Bagshaw attempted to stop this. Before
he could be persuaded otherwise, Trapnel had lifted himself up, and was halfway
across. The railings presented no very serious obstacle even to a man in a
somewhat deranged state, who carried a stick in one hand. He dropped to the
other side without difficulty. The bank sloped fairly steeply to the lower
level of the tow-path and the water. Trapnel reached the footway. He paused for
a moment, looking up and down the length of the Canal. Then he went to the
water’s edge, and began to poke with the swordstick at the sheets of paper
floating about all over the surface.

‘Come back, Trappy. You’re not
the dustman.’

Trapnel took no notice of
Bagshaw. He continued to strain forward with the stick, until it looked
ominously as if he would fall in. The pieces of paper, scattered broadcast,
were all just out of reach.

‘We shall have to get over,’
said Bagshaw. ‘He’ll be in at any moment.’

Then Trapnel caught one of the
sheets with the end of the stick. He guided it to the bank. For a second it
escaped, but was recaptured. He bent down to pick it up, shook off the water
and straightened out the page. The soaked paper seemed to fascinate him. He
looked at it for a long time. Bagshaw, relieved that the railings would not now
have to be climbed, for a minute or two did not intervene. At last he became
tired of waiting.

‘Is it a work of genius? Do
decide one way or the other. We can’t bear more delay to know whether it ought
to be published or not.’

Trapnel gave a kind of shudder.
He swayed. Either drink had once more overcome him with the suddenness with which
it had struck outside the pub, or he was acting out a scene
of feigned horror at what he read. Whichever it were,
he really did look again as if about to fall into the Canal.
Abruptly he stopped playing the part, or recovered his nerve. I suppose these antics, like the
literary ramblings in the pub, also designed to delay discovery that Pamela had
abandoned him; alternatively, to put off some frightful confrontation with her.

‘Do come back, Trappy.’

Then an extraordinary thing
happened. Trapnel was still standing by the edge of the water holding the
dripping sheet of foolscap. Now he crushed it in his hand, and threw the ball
of paper back into the Canal. He lifted the sword-stick behind his head, and,
putting all his force into the throw, cast it as far as this would carry, high
into the air. The stick turned and descended, death’s-head first. A mystic arm
should certainly have risen from the dark waters of the mere to receive it.
That did not happen. Trapnel’s Excalibur struck the flood a long way from the
bank, disappeared for a moment, surfaced, and began to float downstream.

‘Now he really has become
unmoored,’ said Bagshaw.

Trapnel came slowly up the
bank.

‘You’ll never get your stick
back, Trappy. What ever made you do it? We’ll hurry on to the bridge right away.
It might have got caught up on something. There’s not much hope.’

Trapnel climbed back on to the
pavement.

‘You were quite wrong, Books.’

‘What about?’

‘It was a work of genius.’

‘What was?’

‘The manuscript in the water – it
was
Profiles in String
.’

I now agreed with Bagshaw in
supposing Trapnel to have gone completely off his head. He stood looking at us.
His smile was one of the consciously dramatic ones.

‘She brought the MS along, and
chucked it into the Canal. She knew I should be almost bound to pass this way,
and it would be well on the cards I should notice it. We quite often used to
stroll down here at night and talk about the muck floating down, french letters
and such like. She must have climbed over the railings to get to the water. I’d
like to have watched her doing that. I’d thought of a lot of things she might
be up to – doctoring my pills, arranging for me to find her being had by the
milkman, giving the bailiffs our address. I never thought of this. I never
thought she’d destroy my book.’

He stood there, still smiling
slightly, almost as if he were embarrassed by what had happened.

‘You really mean that’s your
manuscript over there in the water?’

Trapnel nodded.

‘The whole of it?’

‘It wasn’t quite finished. The
end was what we had the row about.’

‘You must have a copy?’

“Of course I haven’t a copy.
Why should I? I told you, it wasn’t finished yet.’

Even Bagshaw was appalled. He
began to speak, then stopped, something I had never seen happen before. There
was certainly nothing to say. Trapnel just stood there.

‘Come and look for the stick,
Trappy.’

Trapnel was not at all disposed
to move. Now the act had taken place, he wanted to reflect on it. Perhaps he
feared still worse damage when the flat was reached, though that was hard to
conceive.

‘In a way I’m not surprised.
Even though this particular dish never struck me as likely to appear on the
menu, it all fits in with the cuisine. Christ, two years’ work, and I’ll never
feel the same as when I was writing it. She may be correct in what she thinks
about it, but I’ll never be able to write it again – either her way or my own.’

Bagshaw, in spite of his
feelings about the manuscript, could not forget the stick. The girl did not
interest him at all.

‘You’ll never find a swordstick
like that again. It was a great mistake to throw it away.’

Trapnel was not listening. He
stood there musing. Then all at once he revealed something that had always been
a mystery. Being Trapnel, an egotist of the first rank, he supposed this
disclosure as of interest only in his own case, but a
far wider field of vision was at the same time opened up by what was unveiled. In a sense it was of most interest where Trapnel was
concerned, because he seems to have reacted in
a somewhat different fashion to the rest of Pamela’s
lovers, but, applicable to all of them, what was divulged offered clarification of her relations with men. Drink, pills, the strain of
living with her, the destruction of
Profiles in String
, combination of all those,
brought about a confession hardly conceivable from Trapnel in other
circumstances. He now spoke in a low, confidential tone.

‘You may have wondered why a
girl like that ever came to live with me?’

‘Not so much as why she ever
married that husband of hers,’ said Bagshaw. ‘I can understand all the rest.’

‘I doubt if you can. Not every
man can stand what’s entailed.’

‘I don’t contradict that.’

‘You don’t know what I mean.’

‘What do you mean?’

Trapnel did not answer for a
moment. It was as if he were thinking how to phrase whatever he intended to
say. Then he spoke with great intensity.

‘It’s when you have her. She
wants it all the time, yet doesn’t want it. She goes rigid like a corpse. Every
grind’s a nightmare. It’s all the time, and always the same.’

Trapnel said this with absolute
simplicity. Irony, melodrama, narcissism, fantasy, all his accustomed tendency
to. play a role had been this time completely eliminated. The curtain was at
least partially drawn aside. A little light had been let
in, Stevens had not told all the truth.

‘I could take it, because – well,
I suppose because I loved her. Why not admit it? I’m not sure I don’t still.’

Bagshaw could not stand that.
Excessive displays of amative sensibility always disturbed him.

‘Even Sacher-Masoch drew the
line somewhere, Trappy – true
we don’t know where. What did her husband think about this, I’d like to know.’

‘She told me he only tried a
couple of times. Gave it up as a bad job.’

‘So that’s how things are?’

‘For certain reasons it suited
him to be married to her.’

‘And her to him?’

‘She stopped that, if ever
true, when she came to live with me.’

Even after what had taken
place, Trapnel spoke defensively.

‘It gave him a kind of
prestige,’ he said.

‘Not much prestige the way she
was carrying on.’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘I don’t.’

‘It’s not what she does, it’s
what she is.’

‘You mean he’s positively
flattered?’

‘That’s what she seemed to
think. She may be right. That’s a form of masochism too. It’s not my sort. Not
that I can explain my sort, if that’s what it is. It doesn’t feel unnatural to me.
As I said, I love her – at least used to. I don’t think I do now. She’ll always
go on like this. She’s a child, who doesn’t know any better.’

‘Oh, balls,’ said Bagshaw. ‘I’ve
heard men say that sort of thing about women before. It’s rubbish, the scrapings
of the barrel. You must rise above that, Trappy. Let’s get back to
your place anyway.’

I had never seen Bagshaw so
agitated. This time Trapnel came quietly. When we reached the bridge, he
insisted that he did not want to look for the stick.

‘It’s a sacrifice. One of those
things you dedicate to the Gods. I remember reading about a sacred pool in an Indian temple,
where good writing floated on the water, bad writing
sank. Perhaps the Canal has the same property, and Pam was right to put my book
there.’

Those words meant that he was getting back his normal form. Panache was coming into play. I sympathized with Bagshaw’s sentiments as to the
deliberate throwing away of a
good swordstick, but Trapnel’s manner of dealing with the situation had not been without its lofty side. Nothing unexpected was
found in the flat. Pamela had packed her clothes, and
left with the suitcases. The Modigliani and her own
photographs were gone too. No doubt she had strolled down to the Canal, disposed of
Profiles in String
, then returned with a taxi to remove her effects. Trapnel glanced for
a second at the spaces left by the pictures.

‘She can’t have been gone more
than a few hours. She must have done it after dark. If only I’d come back
earlier in the day she’d still have been here.’