Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [99]
‘I warned you hospitality would be rather sparse if you came back. Not a drop of Algerian left. I’m sorry for that. It was a great help when you’re seeing things through. I’ll just have to have a think now as to the best way of tackling life.’
‘Will you be all right, Trappy?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Nothing we can do?’
‘Not a thing – ah, here we are.’
Trapnel had found the box. He swallowed a couple of examples of whatever sustaining globules were kept inside it. Possibly they were no more than sleeping pills. There was now no point in our staying a moment longer. Both Bagshaw and I tried to say something more of a sympathetic sort. Trapnel shook his head.
‘Probably all for the best. Who can tell? Still, losing that manuscript takes some laughing off. I’ll have to think a lot about that.’
Bagshaw still hung about.
‘Are you absolutely cleaned out, Trappy?’
‘Me? Cleaned out? Good heavens, no. Thanks a lot all the same, but a cheque arrived this morning, quite a decent one, from a film paper I’d done a piece for.’
Whether or not that were true, it was a good exit line; Trapnel at his best. Bagshaw and I said goodnight. We passed again along the banks of the Canal, its waters still overspread with the pages of Profiles in String. The smell of the flat had again reminded me of Maclintick’s.
‘Will he really be all right?’
‘I don’t know about being all right exactly,’ said Bagshaw. ‘It’s hard to be all right when you’ve not only lost your girl, but she’s simultaneously destroyed your life work. I don’t know what I’d feel like in the same position. I’ve sometimes thought of writing another novel – a political one. Somehow there never seems time. I expect Trappy’ll pull through. Most of us do.’
‘I mean he won’t do himself in?’
‘Trappy?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, no. I’d be very surprised.’
‘People do.’
‘I know they do. There was a chap in Spain when I was there. An anarcho-syndicalist. He’d talk about Proudhon by the hour together. He shot himself in a hotel room. I don’t think Trappy will ever take that step. He’s too interested in his own myth. Not the type anyway. He’d have done it before now, if he were going to.’
‘He says something about suicide in the Camel.’’
‘The Camel’s not an exact description of Trappy’s own life. He is always complaining people take it as that. You must have heard him. There are incidents, but the novel’s not a blow-by-blow account of his early career.’
‘I’ve heard X say that readers can never believe a novelist invents anything. He was at least in Egypt?’
‘Do you mean to say he’s never told you what he was doing there?’
‘I’d always imagined his father was in the Consular, or something of the sort – possibly secret service connexions. X is always very keen on spying, says there’s a resemblance between what a spy does and what a novelist does, the point being you don’t suddenly steal an indispensable secret that gives complete mastery of the situation, but accumulate a lot of relatively humdrum facts, which when collated provide the picture.’
Bagshaw was not greatly interested in how novelists went to work, but was greatly astonished at this ignorance of Trapnel’s life when young.
‘A spy? Trapnel père wasn’t a spy. He was a jockey. Rode for the most part in Egypt. That’s why he knew the country. Did rather well in his profession, and saved up a bit. Married a girl from one of those English families who’ve lived for three or four generations in the Levant.’
‘But all this is good stuff. Why doesn’t X write about it?’
‘He did talk of an article for the mag. Then he thought he’d keep it for a book. Trappy has mixed feelings. Of course he got through whatever money there was, as soon as he laid hands on it. He’s not exactly ashamed. Rather proud in a way. All the same, it doesn’t quite fit in with his own picture of himself. Hints about the secret service seem more exciting. The other was just ordinary home life, therefore rather dull.’
By this time Bagshaw was all but sober. Our paths lay in different directions. We parted. I made my way home. A great deal seemed to have happened in a comparatively