Books Do Furnish a Room (30 page)

He took off the tropical
jacket, slipped it on to a wire coat-hanger pendant from a hook in the door,
loosened his tie. After that he stretched. That seemed to give him an idea. He
began to look about the room, opening drawers, examining the shelf at the top
of the inside of the wardrobe, even searching under the bed. Doubtless he was
looking for ‘pills’ of one sort or another. Pamela might well have taken them
away with her. He talked while he hunted round.

‘I warned you hospitality would
be rather sparse if you came back. Not a drop of Algerian left. I’m sorry for
that. It was a great help when you’re seeing things through. I’ll just have to
have a think now as to the best way of tackling life.’

‘Will you be all right, Trappy?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Nothing we can do?’

‘Not a thing – ah, here we are.’

Trapnel had found the box. He
swallowed a couple of examples of whatever sustaining globules were kept inside it. Possibly they
were no more than sleeping pills. There was now no point in our staying a
moment longer. Both Bagshaw and I tried to say something more of a sympathetic
sort. Trapnel shook his head.

‘Probably all for the best. Who
can tell? Still, losing that manuscript takes some laughing off. I’ll have to
think a lot about that.’

Bagshaw still hung about.

‘Are you absolutely cleaned
out, Trappy?’

‘Me? Cleaned out? Good heavens,
no. Thanks a lot all the same, but a cheque arrived this morning, quite a
decent one, from a film paper I’d done a piece for.’

Whether or not that were true,
it was a good exit line; Trapnel at his best. Bagshaw and I said goodnight. We
passed again along the banks of the Canal, its waters still overspread with the
pages of
Profiles in String
. The smell of the flat had
again reminded me of Maclintick’s.

‘Will he really be all right?’

‘I don’t know about being all
right exactly,’ said Bagshaw. ‘It’s hard to be all right when you’ve not only
lost your girl, but she’s simultaneously destroyed your life work. I don’t know
what I’d feel like in the same position. I’ve sometimes thought of writing
another novel – a political one. Somehow there never seems time. I expect
Trappy’ll pull through. Most of us do.’

‘I mean he won’t do himself in?’

‘Trappy?’

‘Yes.’

‘God, no. I’d be very
surprised.’

‘People do.’

‘I know they do. There was a chap
in Spain when I was there. An anarcho-syndicalist. He’d talk about Proudhon by
the hour together. He shot himself in a hotel room. I don’t think Trappy will
ever take that step. He’s too interested in his own myth. Not the type anyway.
He’d have done it before now, if he were going to.’

‘He says something about
suicide in the
Camel
.’’

‘The
Camel
’s not an exact description of Trappy’s own life. He
is always complaining people take it as that. You must have heard him. There are incidents, but the novel’s not a blow-by-blow account of his early career.’

‘I’ve heard X say that readers
can never believe a novelist invents anything. He was at least in Egypt?’

‘Do you mean to say he’s never
told you what he was doing there?’

‘I’d always imagined his father
was in the Consular, or something of the sort – possibly secret service
connexions. X is always very keen on spying, says there’s a resemblance between
what a spy does and what a novelist does, the point being you don’t suddenly
steal an indispensable secret that gives complete mastery of the situation, but
accumulate a lot of relatively humdrum facts, which when collated provide the
picture.’

Bagshaw was not greatly
interested in how novelists went to work, but was greatly astonished at this
ignorance of Trapnel’s life when young.

‘A spy? Trapnel
père
wasn’t a spy. He was a jockey. Rode for the most part in Egypt. That’s why he
knew the country. Did rather well in his profession, and saved up a bit. Married a girl from one of those English families who’ve lived for three or
four generations in the Levant.’

‘But all this is good stuff.
Why doesn’t X write about it?’

‘He did talk of an article for
the mag. Then he thought he’d keep it for a book. Trappy has mixed feelings. Of
course he got through whatever money there was, as soon as he
laid hands on it. He’s not exactly ashamed. Rather proud in a way. All the
same, it doesn’t quite fit in with his own picture of himself. Hints about the
secret service seem more exciting. The other was just ordinary home life, therefore
rather dull.’

By this time Bagshaw was all
but sober. Our paths lay in different directions. We parted. I made my way
home. A great deal seemed to have happened in a comparatively short time. It
was still before midnight. A clock struck twelve while I put the key in the
door. As if from a neighbouring minaret, a cat muezzin began to call other cats
to prayer. The aberrations of love were incalculable. Burton, I remembered,
supposed the passion to extend even into the botanic world:

‘In vegetal creatures what
sovereignty Love hath by many pregnant proofs and familiar example may be
proved, especially of palm trees, which are both he and she, and express not a
sympathy but a love-passion, as by many observations have been confirmed.
Constantine
gives an instance out of
Florentius
his Georgicks, of a Palm-tree that loved most
fervently, and would not be comforted until such time her love applied himself
unto her; you might see the two trees bend, and of their own accords stretch
out their bows to embrace and kiss each other; they will give manifest signs of
mutual love.
Ammianus Marcellinus
reports that they marry one another, and fall in love if they grow in sight;
and when the wind brings up the smell to them, they are marvellously affected.
Philostratus
observes as much, and Galen, they will be sick for love, ready to die and pine
away …’

Now, considering these matters
that autumn afternoon under the colonnade, vegetal love seemed scarcely less
plausible than the human kind. The damp cobblestones in front gave the illusion
of quivering where the sunlight struck their irregular convexities. Rain still
fell. The Library presented itself as a preferable refuge from the wet I was
uncertain whether rules permitted casual entry. It was worth trying. At worst,
if told to go away, one could remain in the porch until time to move on. It
would be no worse than where I was. Abandoning the colonnade, I crossed the
road to a grey domed Edwardian building. Beyond
its threshold, a parabola of passage-way led into a high circular room, rising to
the roof and surrounded by a gallery. The place, often a welcome oasis in the
past, seemed smaller than remembered. A few boys were pottering about among the
bays of books, with an absent-minded air, or furiously writing at a table, as
if life itself depended on getting whatever it was finished in time. A
librarian presided at his desk.

Hoping to remain unobserved, I
loitered by the door. That was not to be. The librarian looked up and stared.
He took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, chose another pair from several
spectacle-cases in front of him, put them on his nose and stared again. After a
moment of this, he beckoned me. Recognizing that I was not to be allowed to
kill five or ten minutes in peace, I prepared for expulsion. No doubt there was
a regulation against visitors at this hour. The thing to do would be to delay
eviction as long as possible, so that a minimum of time had to be spent in the
porch. The librarian’s beckonings became more urgent. He was a man older than
normal for the job, more formally dressed. In fact, this was clearly an
assistant master substituting for a regular librarian. Professional librarians
were probably unprocurable owing to shortage of labour. I went across the room
to see what he wanted. Tactics could be decided by his own comportment. This
happy-go-lucky approach was cut short. Sitting at the desk was my former
housemaster Le Bas. He spoke crossly.

‘Do I know you?’

Boyhood returned in a flash,
the instinct to oppose Le Bas – as Bagshaw would say – dialectically. The
question was unanswerable. It is reasonable for someone to ask if you know him,
because such knowledge is in the hands of the questioned party. How can it be
asserted with assurance whether or not the questioner knows one? Powers of telepathy
would be required. It could certainly be urged that five years spent under the
same roof, so to speak under Le Bas’s guidance, gave him a decided opportunity
for knowing one; almost an unfair advantage, both in the superficial, also the
more searching sense of the phrase. That was the primitive, atavistic reaction.
More mature consideration brought to mind Le Bas’s notorious forgetfulness even
in those days. There was no reason to suppose his memory had improved.

‘I was in your house —’

Obviously it would be absurd to
call him ‘sir’, yet that still obtruded as the only suitable form of address.
What on earth else could he be called? Just ‘Le Bas’? Certainly he belonged to
a generation which continued throughout a lifetime to use that excellently
masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first
names smothered all subtleties of relationship, in any case, to call Le Bas by
a christian name was unthinkable. What would it be, in effect, if so daring an
apostrophe were contemplated? The initials had been L. L. Le B. – Lawrence
Langton Le Bas, that was it. No one had ever been known to call him Lawrence,
still less Langton. Among the other masters, some – his old enemy Cobberton,
for example – used once in a way to hail him as ‘Le B.’ There was, after all,
really no necessity to call him anything. Le Bas himself grew impatient at this
procrastination.

‘What’s your name?’

I told him. That made things
easier at once. Direct enquiry of that sort on the part of a former preceptor
was much to be preferred to Sillery’s reckless guessing. Confessed ignorance on
the point – as on most points – showed a saner attitude towards life. Le Bas
had learnt that, if nothing else. He was probably older than Sillery, a few
years the wrong side of eighty. Like Sillery, though in a different manner, he
too looked well; leathery, saurian; dry as a bone. Taking off the second pair
of spectacles, he again rubbed in the old accustomed fashion the deep, painfully inflamed sockets of the eyes. Then he resumed the earlier pair, or perhaps yet a third
reserve.

‘What’s your generation,
Jenkins?’

This was
like coming up for sentence at the Last Judgment. I tried to remember, to speak
more exactly, tried to decide how
best to put the answer clearly to Le Bas.

‘Fetdplace-Jones was captain of
the house when I arrived … my own lot… Stringham… Templer …’

Le Bas glared, as if in frank
disbelief. Whether that was because the names conveyed nothing, or my own
seemed not to belong amongst them, was only to be surmised. It looked as if he
were about to accuse me of being an impostor, to be turned away from the
Library forthwith. I lost my head, began to recite names at random as they came into my mind.

‘Simson … Fitzwith … Ghika …
Brandreth … Maiden … Bischoffsheim … Whitney … Parkinson … Summers-Miller …
Pyefinch … the Calthorpes … Widmerpool…’

At the last name Le Bas
suddenly came to life.

‘Widmerpool?’

‘Widmerpool was a year or so
senior to me.’

Le Bas seemed to forget that
all we were trying to do was approximately to place my own age-group in his
mind. He took one of several pens lying on the desk, examined it, chose another one, examined that, then wrote ‘Widmerpool’ on
the blotting paper in front of him, drawing a circle round the name. This was an unexpected reaction. It seemed to have nothing
whatever to do with myself. Le Bas now
sunk into a state of near oblivion. Could it be a form of
exorcism against pupils of his whom he had never much
liked? Then he offered an explanation.

‘Widmerpool’s down here today.
I met him in the street. We had a talk. He told me about a cause he’s interested
in. That’s why I made a note. I shall have to try and remember what he said. He’s an MP now.
What happened to the others?’

It was like answering enquiries
after a match – ’Fettiplace-Jones was out first ball, sir’ …’Parkinson kicked a
goal, sir’ … ‘Whitney got his colours, sir’. I tried to recollect some piece of
information to be deemed of interest to Le Bas about the sort of boys of whom
he could approve, but the only facts that came to mind were neither about
these, nor cheerful.

‘Stringham died in a Japanese
prisoner-of-war camp.’

‘Yes, yes – so I heard.’

That awareness was unexpected.

‘Templer was killed on a secret
operation.’

‘In the Balkans. Somebody told
me. Very sad.’

Once more the cognition was
unforeseen. Its acknowledgment was followed by Le Bas taking up the pen again.
Underneath Widmerpool’s name he wrote ‘Balkans’, drew another circle round the
word, which he attached to the first circle by a line. It looked more than ever
like some form of incantation.

‘Now I remember what it was
Widmerpool consulted me about. Some society he has organized to encourage good
relations with one of the Balkan countries. Now which one? Simson was drowned.
Torpedoed in a troopship.’

He mentioned Simson as another
relevant fact, not at all as if he did not wish to be outdone in consciousness
of widespread human dissolution in time of war.

‘What are you doing yourself,
Jenkins?’

‘I’m writing a book on Burton –
the
Anatomy of Melancholy
man.’

Le Bas took two or three
seconds to absorb that statement, the aspects, good and bad, implied by such an
activity. He had probably heard of Burton. He might easily know more about him
than did Sillery. Dons were not necessarily better informed than schoolmasters. When at last he spoke, it
was clear Le Bas did know about Burton. He was not wholly approving.