Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [97]
‘Do come back, Trappy.’
Then an extraordinary thing happened. Trapnel was still standing by the edge of the water holding the dripping sheet of foolscap. Now he crushed it in his hand, and threw the ball of paper back into the Canal. He lifted the sword-stick behind his head, and, putting all his force into the throw, cast it as far as this would carry, high into the air. The stick turned and descended, death’s-head first. A mystic arm should certainly have risen from the dark waters of the mere to receive it. That did not happen. Trapnel’s Excalibur struck the flood a long way from the bank, disappeared for a moment, surfaced, and began to float downstream.
‘Now he really has become unmoored,’ said Bagshaw.
Trapnel came slowly up the bank.
‘You’ll never get your stick back, Trappy. What ever made you do it? We’ll hurry on to the bridge right away. It might have got caught up on something. There’s not much hope.’
Trapnel climbed back on to the pavement.
‘You were quite wrong, Books.’
‘What about?’
‘It was a work of genius.’
‘What was?’
‘The manuscript in the water – it was Profiles in String.’
I now agreed with Bagshaw in supposing Trapnel to have gone completely off his head. He stood looking at us. His smile was one of the consciously dramatic ones.
‘She brought the MS along, and chucked it into the Canal. She knew I should be almost bound to pass this way, and it would be well on the cards I should notice it. We quite often used to stroll down here at night and talk about the muck floating down, french letters and such like. She must have climbed over the railings to get to the water. I’d like to have watched her doing that. I’d thought of a lot of things she might be up to – doctoring my pills, arranging for me to find her being had by the milkman, giving the bailiffs our address. I never thought of this. I never thought she’d destroy my book.’
He stood there, still smiling slightly, almost as if he were embarrassed by what had happened.
‘You really mean that’s your manuscript over there in the water?’
Trapnel nodded.
‘The whole of it?’
‘It wasn’t quite finished. The end was what we had the row about.’
‘You must have a copy?’
“Of course I haven’t a copy. Why should I? I told you, it wasn’t finished yet.’
Even Bagshaw was appalled. He began to speak, then stopped, something I had never seen happen before. There was certainly nothing to say. Trapnel just stood there.
‘Come and look for the stick, Trappy.’
Trapnel was not at all disposed to move. Now the act had taken place, he wanted to reflect on it. Perhaps he feared still worse damage when the flat was reached, though that was hard to conceive.
‘In a way I’m not surprised. Even though this particular dish never struck me as likely to appear on the menu, it all fits in with the cuisine. Christ, two years’ work, and I’ll never feel the same as when I was writing it. She may be correct in what she thinks about it, but I’ll never be able to write it again – either her way or my own.’
Bagshaw, in spite of his feelings about the manuscript, could not forget the stick. The girl did not interest him at all.
‘You’ll never find a swordstick like that again. It was a great mistake to throw it away.’
Trapnel was not listening. He stood there musing. Then all at once he revealed something that had always been a mystery. Being Trapnel, an egotist of the first rank, he supposed this disclosure as of interest only in his own case, but a far wider field of vision was at the same time opened up by what was unveiled. In a sense it was of most interest where Trapnel was concerned, because he seems to have reacted in a somewhat different fashion to the rest of Pamela’s lovers, but, applicable to all of them, what was divulged offered clarification of her relations with men. Drink, pills, the strain of living with her, the destruction of Profiles in String, combination of all those, brought about