Temporary Kings

  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.

  ‘My wife loves travel,’ said Widmerpool. ‘She likes seeing how other people live.’

  No convincing answer had been offered to the question why she did not leave him for one of her many, if soon disillusioned lovers; nor why Widmerpool himself never chose his moment to divorce her. For some reason the status quo seemed to suit both. Trapnel, alleging the Widmerpool marriage to exclude sexual relationship (scarcely even tried out), had also spoken in a few tortured sentences of the frustration, agony, alienation, inspired in himself – though he loved her – by Pamela’s blend of frigidity with insatiable desire. People who went in for more precise ascriptions m such matters, especially far-fetched or eccentric ones, explained this matrimonial paradox by the theory that Widmerpool actually took pleasure in his wife’s infidelities, derived masochistic satisfaction, at the very least felt flattered, by the agitation she inspired. Pamela too, so these amateurs of psychology concluded, on her own side luxuriated no less in enjoyment of a recurrent thrill at being unfaithful. Another husband, less tolerant, could prove less satisfactory. Such hypotheses, if not widely accepted, remained comparatively unchallenged by more convincing speculation. At least they attempted to make sense of an otherwise inexplicable situation. They even offered a dim outline of a genuine, if macabre, bond of union; one very different from Trapnel’s enslavement. Even Dicky Umfraville’s comment had a certain force.

  ‘Anyway they’ve remained married. Took me five attempts, even if I placed the right bet in the end.’

  Loss of his seat in the Commons did not prevent Widmerpool from remaining a fairly prominent figure in public affairs, though there was some surprise when (a few weeks before the Conference opened in Venice) he was created a Life Peer. This advancement, proceeding through the medium of a Conservative Government, must undoubtedly have been conferred after consultation with Labour sources of authority, then in Opposition. Roddy Cutts, who held a minor post in the Tory administration, agreed that Widmerpool’s elevation to the Lords had aroused adverse comment on both sides of the House. At the same time, Cutts was sure the recommendation must have been cleared with the Leader of the Opposition, in spite of his reputed dislike for Widmerpool himself. Cutts was inclined to dismiss talk, such as Bagshaw’s, of Widmerpool’s fellow-travelling.

  ‘After all, if you’re on the Left, you have to take a Leftward line in public. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a Communist. Widmerpool may have had leanings in that direction once – certainly his own side thought so – but after all he’s not the only one. Personally I’m inclined to think all that’s over and done with. There was a story about his being mixed up with Maclean and Burgess. I can’t remember which. It was even said he lent a hand in tipping them off. Somebody did, but I’m sure it wasn’t Widmerpool. Besides, I don’t believe the man’s a bugger for a moment. Labour peers had to be created. It wasn’t at all easy to settle on suitable names. Not everyone wants to be kicked upstairs to the Lords. Widmerpool lost his seat. He’d made himself very useful on the financial side at one time or another, no matter what the talk about fellow-travelling. Yes, I mean contribution to Party funds. Why not? The money’s got to come from somewhere. Probably undisclosed inner workings of the Labour Party machine played a role too. Patronage? Might be. These things happen. No different to ourselves in that respect. A political party has to be operated. The PM would never have gone over Hugh’s head. When Widmerpool arrived in the House I found him abrasive about marginal issues. Latterly we’ve got on pretty well. We may be opponents, that’s no reason why one should doubt his sincerity. What is true – probably played a part in the peerage – is the active manner Widmerpool’s promoted East/West trade, naturally a sphere where some community of political thought, anyway outward acceptance of the other fellow’s point of view, is likely to oil the wheels. Whatever he did in that direction had, of course, the blessing of the Board of Trade. He must have made a packet too. Do you ever drink that wine from round the Black Sea? We don’t at all despise it at home. Tastes a bit sultry at times, but has the merit of being cheap. Kenneth Widmerpool’s got to do something to bring the pennies in with a wife like that. I daresay he wanted the peerage to induce her to stay.’

  This last supposition was unconvincing. It was possible to accept Bagshaw’s theory, up to a point, that Widmerpool dreamed of revenging himself on the world; in addition, that his marriage was one of the areas where that mood might seem to some extent justified. The notion that a Life Peerage would impress Pamela was improbable; typical of the unimaginative side of Roddy’s nature. That was one’s first thought. Then, reconsidering the evidence, the view emerged as one Widmerpool himself might easily hold. Pamela was unlikely to be interested, one way or the other, in whatever prestige might be supposed to attach to that transmutation. She had never shown
the smallest inclination to reach out towards more considerable aggrandizements for herself. They were reported, according to good authority, to have been on offer from lovers at different times. Her disregard for anything of the kind, provided its active expression remained within not too outrageous bounds, was one of his wife’s few characteristics potentially advantageous to Widmerpool’s public life. He could convincingly point to her behaviour as embodiment of contempt for ‘The Establishment’, an abstraction increasingly belaboured by him in speeches and articles. In fact, considering the Life Peerage in the light of Pamela’s past conduct, so far from its creation – as Cutts put forward – assuring an irreducibly solid foundation for a marriage often rocked by upheaval, the reverse appeared more likely, similar landmarks in her husband’s career having been emphasized in the past by proportionately augmented scandals. A Life Peerage, as an extreme example of Moreland’s conviction that matrimonial discord vibrates on an axis of envy, rather than jealousy, could even portend final severance.

  To explain all that, even a small part of it, to Gwinnett, ill hope of enlarging his view of the Widmerpools in relation to Trapnel, was not easy; certainly not within the time allotted for sitting under the Veroneses. Nothing about the Trapnel story was simple. Although Gwinnett was quick to grasp things, nothing about his own personality was simple either. He was an altogether unfamiliar type. He himself seemed almost painfully aware of our mutual difficulties of intercommunication. That made things no easier. There was an innate awkwardness about him. Now, for instance, he stood by the table, unable to make up his mind whether or not to accept Dr Brightman’s invitation to sit with us.

  ‘What will you drink?’

  Without answering, he caught a passing waiter and ordered a citronade. On such a night nothing was more natural than to prefer a cooling soft drink to something stronger, yet again one speculated for some reason about the possibility of an alcoholic past. Something about him suggested rigid control, concealment, an odd way of life. He had the air of punishing himself, possibly for his own supposed social inadequacies. When he sat down, all Dr Brightman’s briskness was required to dispel the threat he brought of damped conversation. He had been carrying a newspaper under his arm, which he laid on the table. It was French, the name folded out of sight.