Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [45]
‘I’m sure you’ll like Trapnel,’ he said. ‘I feel none of the reservations about presenting him sometimes experienced during the war. I don’t mean brother officers in the RAF – who could be extraordinarily obtuse in recognizing the good points of a man who happens to be a bit out of the general run – but Trapnel managed to get on the wrong side of several supposedly intelligent people.’
‘Where does he fit into your political panorama?’
Bagshaw laughed.
‘That’s a good question. He has no place there. Doesn’t know what politics are about. I’d define him as a Leftish Social-Democrat, if I had to. Born a Roman Catholic, but doesn’t practise – a lapsed Catholic, rather as I’m a lapsed Marxist. As a matter of fact I came across him in the first instance through a small ILP group in India, but Trapnel didn’t know whether it was arse-holes or Tuesday, so far as all that was concerned. As I say, he’s rather odd-man-out.’
Even without Bagshaw’s note of caution, I had come prepared for Trapnel to turn out a bore. Pleasure in a book carries little or no guarantee where the author is concerned, and Camel Ride to the Tomb, whatever its qualities as a novel, had all the marks of having been written by a man who found difficulty in getting on with the rest of the world. That might well be in his favour; on the other hand, it might equally be a source of anyway local and temporary discomfort, even while one hoped for the best.
‘Trapnel’s incredibly keen to write well,’ said Bagshaw. ‘In fact determined. Won’t compromise an inch. I admire that, so far as it goes, but writers of that sort can add to an editor’s work. Our public may have to be educated up to some of the stuff we’re going to offer – I’m thinking of the political articles Kenneth Widmerpool is planning – so Trapnel’s good, light, lively pieces, if we can get them out of him, arc likely to assist the other end of the mag.’
Trapnel’s arrival at that point did not immediately set at rest Bagshaw’s rather ominous typification of him. Indeed, Bagshaw himself seemed to lose his nerve slightly when Trapnel entered the bar, though only for a second, and quickly recovered.
‘Ah, Trappy, here you are. Take a seat. What’s it to be? How are things?’
He introduced us. Trapnel, in a voice both deep and harsh, requested half a pint of bitter, somehow an unexpectedly temperate choice in the light of his appearance and gruffness of manner. He looked about thirty, tall, dark, with a beard. Beards, rarer in those days than they became later, at that period hinted of submarine duty, rather than the arts, social protest or a subsequent fashion simply for much more hair. At the same time, even if the beard, assessed with the clothes and stick he carried, marked him out as an exhibitionist in a reasonably high category, the singularity was more on account of elements within himself than from outward appearance.
Although the spring weather was still decidedly chilly, he was dressed in a pale ochre-coloured tropical suit, almost transparent in texture, on top of which he wore an overcoat, black and belted like Quiggin’s Partisan number, but of cloth, for some reason familiarly official in cut. This heavy garment, rather too short for Trapnel’s height of well over six feet, was at the same time too full, in view of his spare, almost emaciated body. Its weight emphasized the flimsiness of the tussore trousers below. The greatcoat turned out, much later, to have belonged to Bagshaw during his RAF service, disposed of on terms unspecified, possibly donated, to Trapnel, who had caused it to be dyed black. The pride Trapnel obviously took in the coat was certainly not untainted by an implied, though unjustified, aspiration to ex-officer status.
The walking stick struck a completely