Anthony Powell - Books Do Furnish a Room

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.’

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.