Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [66]
‘Alaric had my sympathy. The money was at one moment resting frugally and safely in his pocket – the next, scattered broadcast by Trapnel. Alaric wasn’t going to stand Trapnel a drink with it, it’s therefore logical he should object to Trapnel wasting it on a drink for him.’
Kydd’s never wholly appeased rancour implied abstraction of a somewhat larger sum than customary. A tenner was normal. Quiggin, whose judgment on such matters was to be respected, put it as high as twelve or fifteen – possibly even twenty. He may have been right. He had just signed a cheque for Kydd. There must have been a battle of wills. Trapnel did not on the whole prejudice his own market by gleaning the odd five bob or half-a-crown, though there may have been fallings by the wayside in this respect when things were bad; even descent to sixpences and pennies, if it came to that, for his unceasing and interminable telephone calls from the afternoon drinking clubs he liked to frequent. Such dives appealed to him chiefly as social centres, when The Hero and other pubs were closed, because Trapnel, as drinking goes, was not a great consumer, though he chose to speak of himself as if he were. An exceptionally excited or demoralized mood was likely to be the consequence of his ‘pills’, also apparently taken in moderation, rather than alcohol.
‘The habit of words bestows adroitness on men of letters in devising formulae of excuse in evading onerous obligations. More especially when it comes to parting with hard cash.’
St John Clarke had voiced that reflection – chronologically speaking, before the beginning of years – when Mark Members had managed to oust Quiggin from being the well-known novelist’s secretary; himself to be replaced in turn by Guggenbühl. Members had goodish stories about his former master, particularly on the theme of handling needy acquaintances from the past, who called in search of financial aid. Members insisted that the sheer artistry of St John Clarke’ pretexts claiming exemption from lending were so ornate in expression that they sometimes opened fresh avenues of attack for the quicker-witted of his persecutors.
‘Many a literary parasite met his Waterloo in that sitting-room,’ said Members. ‘There were crises when shelling out seemed unavoidable. St J. always held out right up to the time he was himself remaindered by the Great Publisher. I wonder what luck X. Trapnel would have had on that stricken field of borrowers.’
It was an interesting question. Trapnel was just about old enough to have applied for aid before St John Clarke’s passing. His panoramic memory for the plots of twentieth-century novels certainly retained all the better known of St John Clarke’s works; as of almost every other novelist, good, bad or indifferent, published in Great Britain since the beginning of the century. As to the United States, Trapnel was less reliable, though he could put up a respectable display of familiarity with American novelists too; anyway since the end of the first war. An apt quotation from Dust Thou Art (in the College rooms), Match Me Such Marvel (Bithel’s favourite) or the much more elusive Mimosa (brought to my notice by Trapnel himself), might well have done the trick, produced at the right moment by a young, articulate, undeniably handsome fan; the intoxicating sound to St John Clarke of his own prose repeated aloud bringing off the miracle of success, where so many tired old leathery hands at the game had failed. In the face of what might sound damaging, even contradictory evidence, Trapnel was no professional sponge in the manner of characters often depicted in nineteenth-century novels, borrowing compulsively and indiscriminately, while at the same time managing to live in comparative comfort. That was the picture Members painted of the St John Clarke petitioners, spectres from the novelist’s younger, more haphazard days, who felt an old acquaintance had been allowed too long to exist in