Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [96]
‘Will you really? I couldn’t face it otherwise.’
Trapnel was like a child who suddenly decides to be fretful no longer. Now he was even full of gratitude. We reached Edgware Road with him still in this mood. There was a small stretch of the main highway to negotiate before turning off by the Canal. The evening was warm, stuffy, full of strange smells. For once Trapnel seemed suitably dressed in his tropical suit. We turned down the south side of the Canal, walking on the pavement away from the houses. Railings shut off a grass bank that sloped down to the tow-path. Trapnel had now moved into a pastoral dream.
‘I love this waterway. I’d like to have a private barge, and float down it waving to the tarts.’
‘Do you get a lot down here?’ asked Bagshaw, interested.
‘You see the odd one. They live round about, but tend to work other streets. What a mess the place is in.’
Most of London was pretty grubby at this period, the Canal no exception. On the surface of the water concentric circles of oil, undulating in the colours of the spectrum, were illuminated by moonlight. Through these luminous prisms floated anonymous off-scourings of every kind, tin cans, petrol drums, soggy cardboard boxes. Watery litter increased as the bridge was approached. Bagshaw pointed to a peculiarly obnoxious deposit bobbing up and down by the bank.
‘Looks as if someone’s dumped their unit’s paper salvage. I used to have to deal with that at one stage of the war. Obsolete forms waiting to be pulped and made into other forms. An internal reincarnation. Fitted the scene in India.’
Trapnel stopped, and leant against the railings.
‘Let’s pause for a moment. Contemplate life. It’s a shade untidy here, but romantic too. Do you know what all that mess of paper looks like? A manuscript. Probably someone’s first novel. Authors always talk of burning their first novel, I believe this one’s drowned his.’
‘Or hers.’
‘Some beautiful girl who wrote about her seduction, and couldn’t get it published.’
‘When lovely woman stoops to authorship?’
‘I think I’ll go and have a look. Might give me some ideas.’
‘Trappy, don’t be silly.’
Trapnel, laughing rather dementedly, began to climb the railings. Bagshaw attempted to stop this. Before he could be persuaded otherwise, Trapnel had lifted himself up, and was halfway across. The railings presented no very serious obstacle even to a man in a somewhat deranged state, who carried a stick in one hand. He dropped to the other side without difficulty. The bank sloped fairly steeply to the lower level of the tow-path and the water. Trapnel reached the footway. He paused for a moment, looking up and down the length of the Canal. Then he went to the water’s edge, and began to poke with the swordstick at the sheets of paper floating about all over the surface.
‘Come back, Trappy. You’re not the dustman.’
Trapnel took no notice of Bagshaw. He continued to strain forward with the stick, until it looked ominously as if he would fall in. The pieces of paper, scattered broadcast, were all just out of reach.
‘We shall have to get over,’ said Bagshaw. ‘He’ll be in at any moment.’
Then Trapnel caught one of the sheets with the end of the stick. He guided it to the bank. For a second it escaped, but was recaptured. He bent down to pick it up, shook off the water and straightened out the page. The soaked paper seemed to fascinate him. He looked at it for a long time. Bagshaw, relieved that the railings would not now have to be climbed, for a minute or two did not intervene. At last he became tired of waiting.
‘Is it a work of genius? Do decide one way or the other. We can’t bear more delay to know whether it ought to be published or not.’
Trapnel gave a kind of shudder. He swayed. Either drink had once more overcome him with the suddenness with which it had struck outside the pub, or he was acting out a scene of feigned horror at what he read. Whichever it were, he really did look again as if about to fall into the Canal. Abruptly he stopped playing the part, or recovered his nerve. I suppose these antics,