Temporary Kings (5 page)

Were the hypothesis
of the female guardian a correct one (situation reminiscent of Miss Weedon
curing Stringham of drink), she would in the normal course of things certainly
intercept any money Trapnel might earn, or, more credibly, derive from ‘public
assistance’. Even in his less calamitous days, there had been interludes in the
past of signing on at ‘the Labour’ – the Labour Exchange – though what trade or
vocation Trapnel claimed at such emergencies was never revealed. When, so
transcendentally, the hundred pounds in cash materialized into his hands in the
manner of a highly proficient conjuror, Trapnel (like Stringham) must have
evaded his keeper, reverted to type in the traditional manner, decided, now the
money had come his way in this utterly unforeseen manner, to squander it
gloriously in The Hero of Acre.

Malcolm Crowding’s
account of Trapnel’s apotheosis in The Hero was likely to be the most reliable.
He had been there in person. Besides, his own works proclaimed him a writer of
little or no imagination. He could never have invented such a story. By that
time he had ceased to publish verse, and was lecturing on English literature at
a newly-founded provincial university, in fact spending the night in London in
connexion with the editing of a textbook. He approached the subject of Trapnel,
like his own academic work, in a spirit of the severest literary puritanism. On
impulse, a wish to call up old times, he had dropped in that night to The Hero.

‘I expect he hoped to
pick up a boy-friend,’ said Evadne Clapham. ‘The Hero was full of queers when I
was taken there last. It was much against my will in any case. They were all
standing round wide-eyed watching that old wretch Heather Hopkins giving an
imitation of John Foster Dulles in his galoshes.’

Whatever Malcolm
Crowding’s original intention, Trapnel’s arrival in The Hero offered something
worth while; in fact supplied a story to become, ever after, Crowding’s most
notable set-piece.

‘It was Lazarus
coming back from the Dead. Better than that, because Lazarus didn’t buy
everyone a drink – at least there’s no mention of that in Holy Writ.’

Somebody present – probably
Evadne Clapham again, bent on disorganizing the side-effects of Crowding’s
story – suggested that free drinks were to be inferred on the earlier
resurrectionary occasion from Tennyson:

‘When Lazarus left
his charnel-cave …
The streets were filled with joyful sound.’

Crowding refused to allow
his narrative to be obstructed by inconclusive pedantry of that sort. He merely
increased the vibrant note of his rather shrill voice. Evadne Clapham, or
whoever else it was interrupting, ceased to argue. Crowding, feeling the
Tennysonian phrase appropriate enough for Trapnel’s sojourn in outer darkness,
developed new metaphor in the direction of Shelley.

‘The charnel cave was
put behind him. It was Trapnel Unbound.’

There were present in
The Hero old stagers who had endured in that spot since Trapnel’s own great
days, when, tall, bearded, loquacious, didactic, draped in his dyed greatcoat,
toying with the death’s head swordstick, he had laid down the law on
literature, commanded the price of a drink (though never as now), dominated the
length of the saloon bar. His arrival was a thunderbolt. Even the most
complacent of The Hero’s soaks were jolted by it from their evening’s drinking.
Crowding never tired of telling the story.

‘X started in at once
– Wodehouse and Wittgenstein, Malraux and the Marx Brothers – it was just like
the old days, though never before had The Hero known a night like that for free
drinks.’

Unlike the mourners
of Lazarus – to accept Crowding’s apprehension of the incident, rather than
Evadne Clapham’s – the mourners of Trapnel, as, on the strength of his
resurrection, they were soon to become, were stood round after round. The Hero,
one of those old-fashioned pubs in grained pitchpine with engraved
looking-glass (what Mr Deacon used to call a ‘gin palace’), was anatomized into
half-a-dozen or more separate compartments, subtly differentiating, in the
traditional British manner, social subdivisions of its clientèle, according to
temperament or means: saloon bar: public bar: private bar: ladies’ bar: wine
bar: off-licence: possibly others too. Customers occupied in these peripheries
were all included in the Trapnel largesse, no less than those in the saloon
bar, where he had manifested himself. Swept in, too, were several birds of
passage, transients buying half-a-bottle in the off-licence. The fountains ran
with wine, more precisely with bitter and scotch. News of this boundless
munificence got round immediately, not only emptying The French-polishers’ Arms
opposite – according to Crowding, lately a serious rival to The Hero in
draining off a sediment of discontented intellectuals – but also considerably
reducing numbers in The Marquess of Sleaford round the corner, where
intellectuals were virtually unknown. Not only were these two latter pubs
practically cleared of customers, but what Crowding called a ‘thirsty concourse’
poured into The Hero from The Wheelbarrow (at the time of Bagshaw’s first
marriage, his last port of call on the way home, owing to staying open until
eleven), auxiliary drinkers from other taverns being all hospitably received by
Trapnel, if they could only get near enough to him. Crowding, telling the
story, would here shake his head.

‘X looked dreadfully
ill. As near the image of Death as the knob of that stick he used to carry
round, before he threw it into the Grand Union Canal. His face was even whiter.’

Trapnel had been at
the height of his old form, talking at the top of his voice, laughing,
shouting, contradicting, laying down the law about books and writers, films and
film stars, giving prolonged imitations of Boris Karloff; in general
reconstructing in its most intrinsic aspects his own persona of years gone by.
Not only Crowding, but many others, agreed The Hero had never known such a
night. That could not go on for ever. An end had to come. Finally, inexorably,
closing time was announced. This moment always represented the peak of Crowding’s
narrative.

‘X walked through the
doors of The Hero like a king. There was real dignity in his stride. It was a
royal progress. Courtiers followed in his wake. You can imagine – free drinks –
there was quite a crowd by that time, some of them singing, as it might be,
chants in a patron’s praise. X stopped outside, and they all stood round. He
waited for a moment by the kerb. Everyone kept back somehow, as if they didn’t
dare be too familiar. X gazed up the street, then down it, in that proud way of
his. He must have been looking for a taxi. He hadn’t said yet where he wanted
to go. I noticed for the first time that his beard was turning grey. Suddenly
he gave a start, remembering something. He wrung his hands, rushed back, tried
to get into the pub again through the outer doors, which they were barring up.
They wouldn’t let him back. He gave a loud cry.

‘“I’ve forgotten my
stick. I’ve lost my stick. My death’s head stick.”

‘Of course they
wouldn’t let him in again after closing time. Somebody told him he hadn’t
brought a stick with him. Whoever it was couldn’t have known about the sword-stick.
X didn’t take that in for a second or two. When he did, he began to laugh. He
laughed and laughed, like one of his own impersonations of a horror film – and
it was pretty horrible too. He went on laughing for some minutes, walking
slowly back to the edge of the pavement. People close said his look was quite
frightening.

‘“No,” he said. “Of course
I haven’t got a stick any longer, have I? I sacrificed it. Nor a bloody novel.
I haven’t got that either.”

‘Then he heeled over
into the gutter. Everybody thought he was drunk.’

At this point in the
narrative Crowding would pause, his face apt to twitch so violently that the
more sensitive of his listeners had to turn away. He would then slow up the
tempo of the narrative for its termination.

‘Drunk? They were
sadly in error. I watched Trapnel the whole time we were in the saloon bar
together. He consumed exactly one bloody double Three Star in the course of the
whole bloody time he was in The Hero.’

After adding this
comment as a kind of tailpiece to his chronicle, Crowding always stopped, and
glared round like a man expecting contradiction of the most vigorous kind.
Contradiction never came. Even Evadne Clapham was silent. Whether that was owed
to the force of Crowding’s recital, or because most of the audience usually
knew Trapnel had never been a great drinker, was uncertain. The surmise that
alcohol in itself played no great part in his final collapse was no doubt
correct, though he may have allowed himself that night an unwise admixture of
drink and ‘pills’; simply too many pills. Either could have resulted from
finding himself unexpectedly in funds. An inner fatigue, utter moral
exhaustion, had to be taken into consideration too. He was removed from the
street in due course, to a hospital, dying an hour or two later. By the time
the ambulance arrived, the near-criminal potential of the traditional Trapnel
entourage had extracted from his pockets all remnants, if such there were, of
the hundred pounds. He died quite penniless. At that particular juncture, he
appeared to be living alone. That probably explained getting his hands on the
money. Crowding never mentioned this last fact, but he would change his tone,
from pub crony to academic critic, as he drew to an end.

‘I respected the man
more than his work. He became a legend in his own lifetime. He often said so
himself, and with truth. Sometimes my students ask me to tell them about him – and
did you once see Trapnel plain? I reply “I did”, and often stopped and spoke
with him. At the same time I am put in a quandary. These young people find the
intellectual climate of
Camel Ride to the Tomb
unsatisfying. I
cannot in all fairness blame them. Where, they say, is the social conscience? I
have to reply, they look in vain.’

At the time of his
death, Trapnel’s
oeuvre
, so far as I knew, consisted of the
Camel
; the selection of short stories published as
Bin Ends
;
a fair amount of additional stories, never yet collected, some dating back to
his early days as a writer before the war (when he had kept himself alive by
all sorts of odd employments); a miscellany of occasional pieces, criticism
(some of it quite good), articles, parodies, stuff written for papers like
Fission
,
and never brought together; finally the
conte
(unpublished in
Trapnel’s lifetime on account of some legal battle over ‘rights’)
Dogs Have
No Uncles
. A work in Trapnel’s liveliest manner, almost long
enough to be called a novel, its posthumous appearance with Salvidge’s
Introduction had done something to prevent Trapnel’s reputation from slumping
too severely after his death. All this did not constitute a large aggregate of
work, but, together with what was available in other material, should make a
respectable critical biography. In any case, Trapnel’s was still an unexplored
period. Gwinnett added another item.

‘Did you know he kept
a
Commonplace Book
during his last years?’

‘Where is it?’

‘I have it myself.’

Gwinnett seemed for a
moment uncertain as to what he was prepared to say on the subject. Then, after
this hesitation, described how the librarian of his university, knowing about
Gwinnett’s interest in Trapnel, had drawn attention to an English bookseller’s
catalogue, which listed, among other manuscripts offered for sale, certain
papers of Trapnel’s come on the market. The price was not high, the College
authorities uninterested. Gwinnett acquired these odds and ends himself. None
of them turned out of startling interest, even the
Commonplace Book
,
though there was enough there to make its purchase worth while to a potential
biographer. That was Gwinnett’s own account.

‘I’ll show you the
book. Some of the notes – they’re all abbreviated, almost a code – are surely
about the castrating girl. You say she’s married to – is the name Widmerpool?’

‘Yes, she’s still
married to him.’

That was strange
enough. In the course of a dozen years or more of the Widmerpools’ married life
many stories had gone round, the least of them lurid enough to imply the union
could scarcely persist a week longer, yet it had persisted. They remained
together; anyway to the extent of living under the same roof. That phrase did
not, in fact, define the situation realistically. Each was usually under the
different roof of one or other of Widmerpool’s two places of residence. There
was the flat in Westminster (one of a large block near the River), and his
mother’s former cottage in the Stourwater neighbourhood, which (Widmerpool
mentioned when we met) had been ‘enlarged and improved’.

Stourwater Castle was
now a girls’ school; rather a fashionable one. The Quiggin twins, Amanda and
Belinda, were being educated there.

The existence of
these two separate Widmerpool establishments was sometimes offered as
explanation of a capacity to remain undivorced, which certainly required
elucidation. Pamela would disappear now and then with other men, behaviour apparently
accepted by Widmerpool himself, so that it became, as it were, accepted by
everyone else, a matter of comparatively little interest. People recently
returned from abroad would report that Pamela Widmerpool had been seen in Spain
with an ambitious journalist; among the islands of the Ægean with a fashionable
don; that one of the generals at a NATO headquarters had fallen out with
another senior officer, when she was staying with him; that her visit to an
embassy in Asia had resulted in a reshuffle of diplomatic personnel; that the
TUC had been put in a flutter one year at their conference by her presence with
a delegate at a local hotel. A Pamela Widmerpool anecdote might stop the gap in
a languishing dinner-table conversation, but, unless highly spiced, was by now
unlikely to hold the attention of the company for long.