Books Do Furnish a Room

  ‘I warned you it wasn’t much good.’

  This would mean embarrassment for Quiggin, if Trapnel had been unremittingly scathing. Coming on top of the ‘touch’, unfavourable comment from such a source would make Kydd more resentful than ever. However, that was primarily Quiggin’s worry. So far as I was concerned the juggernaut of critical opinion must be allowed to take its irrefragable course. If too fervent worshippers, like Kydd, were crushed to powder beneath the pitiless wheels of its car, nothing could be done. Only their own adoration of the idol made them so vulnerable. Trapnel was specially contemptuous of Kydd’s attempts at eroticism. To be fair, Sweetskin was in due course the object of prosecution, so presumably someone found the book erotic, but Trapnel became almost frenzied in his expostulations to the contrary. It was then suddenly revealed that Trapnel was in the middle of a row with Quiggin & Craggs.

  ‘I thought you got on so well with Ada?’

  Ada Leintwardine dealt with Trapnel in ordinary contacts with the firm. She did not control disposal of money – there Quiggin was called in – but questions of production, publicity, all such matters passed through her hands. Book production, as it happened, owing to shortage of paper and governmental restrictions of one kind or another, was at the lowest ebb in its history at this period. A subject upon which Trapnel held strong views, this potential area of difference might have led to trouble. Ada always smoothed things over. After the honeymoon following the transfer of Camel Ride to the Tomb, Trapnel and Craggs scarcely bothered to conceal the lack of sympathy they felt for one another. It looked as if Quiggin had now been swept into embroilment by Trapnel’s tendency to get on bad terms with all publishers and editors.

  In this connexion, Ada was an example of Trapnel’s exemption from the need to captivate every woman with whom he came in contact. He would not necessarily have captivated Ada had he tried. Nothing was less likely. The point was that he did not try. He always emphasized his amicable relations with her, how much he preferred these to be on a purely business basis. This proved no more than that Ada was not Trapnel’s sort of woman, Trapnel not Ada’s sort of man, but, for someone who liked running other people’s lives so much as Ada, to get on with Trapnel, who liked running his own, was certainly a recommendation for tact in doing business.

  ‘Ada’s all right. She’s a grand girl. It isn’t Ada who gets me down. She’s always on my side. It’s Craggs who’s impossible. I feel pretty sure of that. He makes trouble in the background.’

  ‘What sort of trouble?’

  ‘Influencing JG.’

  ‘Bin Ends went quite well?’

  ‘All right. They’ve been looking at the first few chapters of Profiles in String – provisional title. I want some money while I’m writing it. I can’t live on air.’

  ‘Surely they’ll advance something on what you’ve shown them?’

  ‘They’ve given me a bit already, but I’ve got to exist while I write the bloody book.’

  ‘You mean they won’t unbelt any more?’

  ‘I may have to approach another publisher.’

  ‘You’re under contract?’

  ‘They like the new book all right, what there is. Like it very much. If they won’t see reason, I may have to put the matter in the hands of my solicitors.’

  Trapnel tapped the skull against the table. Talk about his solicitors always meant a highly nervous state. Even at the time of the monumental entanglement of the conte, it was doubtful whether legal processes had ever been carried further than consultation with old Tim Clipthorpe, one of the seasoned habitués of The Hero, his face covered with crimson blotches, who had been struck off the roll in the year the Titanic went down, as he was always telling any adjacent toper who would listen. In any case, Trapnel gave the impression that, as publishing rows go, this was not a specially serious one. Even if it were, he could hardly have brought a fellow-writer, not a particularly close friend, to shiver in the boreal chills of The Hero’s saloon bar merely to confirm the parsimony of publishers; still less to listen to a critical onslaught against the amateurish pornography and slipshod prose of Alaric Kydd. Even Trapnel’s egotism was hardly capable of that. He was, in fact, obviously playing for time, talking at random while he tried to screw himself up to making some more or less startling confession. Again he tapped the swordstick against the table.

  ‘Don’t let’s talk about all this rot anyway. One of the things I wanted to tell you was that Tessa’s walked out on me.’

  That was much more the sort of thing to be expected. Even so, Tessa seemed a rather slender pretext for bringing about a portentous meeting such as this one. An attractive girl, she had shown early signs of finding the Trapnel way of life too much for her. Her departure was not a staggering surprise. Sympathy seemed best expressed by enquiry, though the answer was not in much doubt.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Yesterday – just left a note saying she was through.’

  ‘Things had been getting difficult?’

  ‘There was rather a scene last week. I thought it had all blown over. Apparently not. As a matter of fact I’m not sorry. I was fond of Tessa, but things have to have an end – at least most do.’

  ‘Dowson said something of the sort in verse.’

  Trapnel brushed aside further condolences, admittedly rather feeble ones, on the subject of the vicissitudes of love. He was, to say the least, bearing Tessa’s abdication with fortitude. I was surprised at quite such a show of indifference, thinking some of it perhaps assumed. Trapnel, although resilient, was not at all heartless in such matters.

  ‘Now Tessa’s gone I’m faced with a decision.’

  ‘Giving up women altogether?’

  Trapnel laughed with rather conscious bitterness.

  ‘I mean Tessa kept me from making an absolute fool of myself. Now I’m left without that support.’

  He did not have the appearance of having indulged in a recent drinking bout, nor too many pep-pills, but was in such an unusual state that I began to wonder whether, after all, Ada was at the bottom of all this; that I had been summoned to give advice on the uncommon situation of an author falling in love with his publisher. The suspicion became almost a certainty when Trapnel leant forward and spoke dramatically, almost in a whisper.

  ‘Nick, I’m absolutely mad about somebody.’

  ‘A replacement for Tessa?’

  ‘No – nothing like that. Nothing like Tessa at all. This is love. The genuine thing. I’ve never known what it was before. Not really. Now I do.’

  This was going a little far. He spoke with complete gravity, though he and I were not at all on the terms when revelations of that kind are volunteered. Trapnel’s emotional life, if proffered at all, was as a rule dished up with a light dressing of irony or melancholy. He was never brutal; on the other hand, he was never severely stricken. From the outside he appeared a reasonably adoring lover, if not an unduly serious one. The attitude maintained that night in The Hero was different from anything previously handed out. I had made up my mind to leave very soon now, almost at once. If Trapnel wanted to make a statement, he must get on with the job, do it expeditiously. The night was too cold to hang about any longer, while he braced himself to set forth in detail this amatory crisis, whatever it might be.

  ‘Why isn’t this one like Tessa?’

  Instead of answering the question, Trapnel opened Sweetskin again. He removed from its pages the review slip which notes date of publication, together with the request (never in the history of criticism vouchsafed) that the publisher should be sent a copy of the notice when it appeared in print. This small square of paper had been inserted earlier by Trapnel to mark a passage of notable ineptitude to be read aloud as illustration of Kydd’s inability to write with grace, distinction or knowledge of the ways of women. He had recited the paragraph a few minutes before. Now he took one of several pens from the outside breast pocket of the tropical jacket, quickly wrote something on the back of the slip of paper, and passed it ac
ross to me. On examination, this enigmatic missive disclosed two words inscribed in Trapnel’s small decorative script, of which he was rather proud. I read them without at first understanding why my attention should be drawn to this name.

  Pamela Widmerpool

  The whole procedure had been so odd, I was so cold and bored, the final flourish so unexpected – although in one sense Trapnel at his most Trapnelesque – that I did not immediately grasp the meaning of this revealment, if revealment it were.

  ‘What about her?’

  Trapnel did not speak at once. He looked as if he could not believe he had heard the words correctly. I asked again. He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘That’s whom I’m in love with.’

  No comment seemed anywhere near adequate. This was beyond all limits. Burton well expressed man’s subjection to passion. To recall his words gave some support now. ‘The scorching beams under the Æquinoctial, or extremity of cold within the circle of the Arctick, where the very Seas are frozen, cold or torrid zone cannot avoid, or expel this beat, fury and rage of mortal men.’ No doubt that was just how Trapnel felt. His face showed that he saw this climax as the moment of truth, one of those high-spots in the old silent films that he liked to recall, some terrific consummation emphasized by several seconds of monotonous music rising louder and louder, until, almost deafening, the notes suddenly jar out of tune in a frightful discord: the train is derailed: the canoe swept over the rapids: the knife plunged into the naked flesh. All is over. The action is cut: calm music again, perhaps no music at all.

  ‘Of course I know I’m mad. I don’t stand a chance. That’s one of the reasons why the situation’s nothing like Tessa – or any other girl I’ve ever been mixed up with. I admit it’s not sane. I admit that from the start.’

  If things had gone so far that Trapnel could not even pronounce the name of the woman he loved, had to write it down on a review slip, the situation must indeed be acute. I laughed. There seemed nothing else to do. That reaction was taken badly by Trapnel. He had some right to be offended after putting on such an act. That could not be helped. He looked half-furious, half-upset. As he was inclined to talk about his girls only after they had left, there was no measure for judging the norm of his feelings when they were first sighted. Possibly he was always as worked up as at that moment, merely that I had never been the confidant. That seemed unlikely. Even if he showed the same initial excitement, the incongruity of making Pamela his aim was something apart.

  ‘You didn’t much take to her at the Fission party.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I thought her the most awful girl I’d ever met.’

  ‘What brought about the change?’

  ‘I was in Ada’s room looking through my press-cuttings. Mrs Widmerpool suddenly came in. She’s an old friend of Ada’s. I hadn’t known that. She didn’t bother to be announced from the downstairs office, just came straight up to Ada’s room. She wanted to telephone right away. I was standing there talking to Ada about the cuttings. Mrs Widmerpool didn’t take any notice of me. I might just as well not have been there, far less chatted with her at a party. Ada told her my name again, but she absolutely cut me. She went to the telephone, at once began cursing the girl at the switchboard for her slowness. When she got the number, it was to bawl out some man who’d sent her a jar of pickled peaches as a present. She said they were absolutely foul. She’d thrown them down the lavatory. She fairly gave him hell.’

  ‘That stole your heart away?’

  ‘Something did. Nick, I’m not joking. I’m mad about her. I’d do anything to see her again.’

  ‘Did you converse after the telephoning?’

  ‘That’s what I’m coming to. We did talk. Ada asked her if she’d read the Camel. My God, she had – and liked it. She was – I don’t know – almost as if she were shy all at once. Utterly different from what she’d been at the party, or even a moment before in the room. She behaved as if she quite liked me, but felt it would be wrong to show it. That was the moment when the thing hit me. I didn’t know what to do. I felt quite ill with excitement. I mean both randy, and sentimentally in love with her too. I was wondering whether I’d ask both her and Ada to have a drink with me before lunch – perhaps borrow ten bob from Ada and pay her back later in the afternoon, because I was absolutely cleaned out at the moment of speaking – then Mrs Widmerpool suddenly remembered she was lunching with some lucky devil, and had told him to be at the restaurant at twelve-thirty, it being then a good bit after one o’clock- She went away, but quite unhurried. She knew he’d wait. What can I do? I’m crazy about her.’

  Trapnel paused. The story still remained beyond comment. However, it was apparently not at an end. Something else too was on Trapnel’s mind. Now he looked a shade embarrassed, a rare condition for him.

  ‘You remember I talked to her husband at that party? We got on rather well. I can never think of him as her husband, but all the same he is, and something happened which I wish had never taken place.’

  ‘If you mean you borrowed a quid off him, I know – he told me.*

  ‘He did? In that case I feel better about it. The taxi absorbed my last sixpence. I had to get back to West Kilburn that night by hook or crook. I won’t go into the reason why, but it was the case. I’d walked there once from Piccadilly, and preferred not to do it again. That was why I did a thing I don’t often do, and got a loan from a complete stranger. The fact was it struck me as I was leaving the party that Mr Widmerpool had been so kind in listening to me – expressed such humane views on housing and such things – that he wouldn’t mind helping me over a temporary difficulty. I was embarrassed at having to do so. I think Mr Widmerpool was a bit embarrassed too. He didn’t know what I meant at first.’

  Trapnel laughed rather apologetically. It was possible to recognize a conflict of feelings. As a writer, he could perfectly appreciate the funny side of taking a pound off Widmerpool; the whole operation looked like a little exercise in the art, introducing himself, making a good impression, bringing off the ‘touch’. He had probably waited to leave the party until he saw Widmerpool going down the stairs, instinct guiding him as to the dole that would not be considered too excessive to withhold. At the same time, as a borrower, Trapnel had to keep up a serious attitude towards borrowing. He could not admit the whole affair had been a prepared scheme from the start. Finally, as a lover, he had put himself in a rather absurd relation to the husband of the object of his affections. To confess that showed how far Trapnel’s defences were down. He returned to the subject of Pamela.

  ‘Ada says they don’t get on too well together. She told me that when I dropped in again on the office the following day. A man who looks like that couldn’t appreciate such a marvellous creature.’

  ‘Did you tell Ada how you felt?’

  ‘Not on your life. There’s a lot of argument going on about the new novel, as I mentioned, quite apart from notices still coming in for Bin Ends. It was perfectly natural for me to look in again. As a matter of fact Ada began to speak of Mrs Widmerpool herself as soon as I arrived. I just sat and listened.’

  ‘Ada’s pretty smart at guessing.’

  ‘She doesn’t guess how I feel. I know she doesn’t. She couldn’t have said some of the things she did, if she had. I was very careful not to give anything away – you won’t either, Nick, will you? I don’t want anyone else to know. But how on earth am I to see her again.’

  ‘Go and pay Widmerpool back his quid, I suppose.’

  This frivolous, possibly even heartless comment was made as a mild call to order, a suggestion so unlikely to be followed that it would emphasize the absurdity of Trapnel’s situation. That was not at all the way he took it. On the contrary, the proposal immediately struck him not only as seriously put forward, but a scheme of daring originality. No doubt the proposal was indeed original in the sense that repayment of a loan had never occurred to Trapnel as a measure to be considered.

  ‘Christ, what a marvellous idea. You mean I’
d call at their place and hand back the pound?’

  He pondered this extravagant – literally extravagant – possibility.

  ‘But what would Mr Widmerpool say if he happened to be there when I turned up? He’d think it a bit odd.’

  ‘Even if he did, he’d be unlikely to refuse a pound. A very pleasant surprise.’

  Even then it never occurred to me that Trapnel would take this unheard-of step.

  ‘God, what a brilliant idea.’

  We both laughed at such a flight of fancy. Trapnel’s condition of tension slightly relaxed. Sanity seemed now at least within sight. All the same, he continued to play with the idea of seeing Pamela again.

  ‘I’ll get on the job right away.’

  There seemed more than a possibility that the pound, so improbably required for potential return to Widmerpool, might be requested then and there, whether or not it ever found its way back into Widmerpool’s pocket. The fact no such demand was made may have been as much due to Trapnel’s disinclination to borrow in an obviously unornamental manner, as his rule that application to another writer was reluctant. His attack on such occasions was apt to be swift, imperative, self-assured, never less than correct in avoiding a precursory period of uneasy anticipation, often unequivocally brilliant in being utterly unexpected until the last second; at the same time never intrusive, even in the eyes of those perfectly conversant with Trapnel’s habits. In the nature of things he met with rebuff as well as acquiescence – the parallel of seduction inevitably suggests itself – but there had been many successes. On this occasion probably Quiggin & Craggs, worsted in the current wrangle about advances, would pay up; anyway a pound. Paradoxical as that might seem, getting the money would be the least of Trapnel’s problems, if, in the spirit in which he had first accosted Widmerpool, he wanted to add a grotesque end to the story by settling the debt.

  ‘I can’t thank you enough.’

  He fell into deep thought, adopting now a different, rather dramatically conscious style. Having derived all that was needed from our meeting, his mind was devoted to future plans. I told him circumstances prevented my staying longer at The Hero. Trapnel nodded absently. I left him, his glass of beer still three-quarters full, rested precariously on the copy of Sweetskin. On the way home the whole affair struck me as reminiscent of Rowland Gwatkin, my former Company Commander, revealing at Castlemallock Anti-Gas School his love for a barmaid. Gwatkin’s military ambition was narrow enough compared with Trapnel’s soaring aspirations about being a ‘complete man’ and more besides. At the amatory level there was no comparison. Nevertheless, something existed in common, some lack of fulfilment, as Pennistone would say, ‘in a higher unity’. Besides, if Trapnel’s medical category – not to mention a thousand ineligibilities of character – had not precluded him from recommendation for a commission, no doubt he too would have shared Gwatkin’s warlike dreams; a dazzling flying career added to the other personal targets.