Hearing Secret Harmonies - Anthony Powell [30]
Delavacquerie continued to withhold the proof copy.
‘Not yet, Emily.’
‘Gibson, you are intolerable. Don’t be absurd. Hand it over immediately.’
‘I’m prepared to be magnanimous about the fiver,’ said Members. ‘I could ill afford forfeiture of five pounds at the time, but we were all penniless writers together, and bygones shall be bygones. The point is whether the book is good.’
‘The merits of Gwinnett’s book are not so much the issue,’ said Delavacquerie. ‘The difficulty is quite another matter.’
‘I know what you’re going to put forward,’ said Emily Brightman. ‘Libel. Am I right? I can see a book of that sort might be libellous, but that is surely the publisher’s affair. We shall have given the Prize before the row starts.’
‘That is not exactly the problem. At least the publishers are not worried in a general way on that ground. They think the possibility of anything of the sort very remote. The libel, if any, would be in connexion with Trapnel’s love affair with Pamela Widmerpool. As you know, she destroyed the manuscript of his last novel. That business was largely responsible for Trapnel’s final débâcle.’
‘An interesting legal point,’ said Members. ‘Is it libellous to write that someone’s deceased wife was unfaithful to him? I always understood, in days when I myself worked in a publisher’s office, that you can’t libel the dead. That was one of the firmest foundations of the publishing profession. On the other hand, I suppose the surviving partner might consider himself libelled, as being put on record as a trompé’d husband. At the time I was speaking of, my ancient publishing days, there also existed the element Emily brought up, rather severely, at one of our meetings – good taste – but fortunately we don’t have to bother about that now – even if it does platonically exist, as Emily assures us. Don’t say it’s good taste that makes you waver, Gibson. I believe you’re frightened of Emily’s disapproval.’
Members and Delavacquerie, outwardly well disposed towards each other, anyway conversationally, were not much in sympathy at base. Delavacquerie, formal as always, may all the same have revealed on some occasion his own sense of mutual disharmony. If so, Members was now getting his own back. Delavacquerie, recognizing that, smiled.
‘You may be right, Mark. At the same time you will agree, I think, when I state the problem, that it is a rather special one. Meanwhile, let me release these proofs.’
He handed the bundle to Emily Brightman, who almost snatched it from his hands. She turned at once to the title page. I read the layout over her arm.
DEATH’S-HEAD SWORDSMAN
The Life and Works of X. TRAPNEL
by
RUSSELL GWINNETT
In due course the proofs came my way. Gwinnett’s academic appointment, named at the beginning of the book, was held at an American college to be judged of fairly obscure status, though lately in the news, owing to exceptionally severe student troubles on its campus. On the page where a dedication might have stood, an epigraph was set.
My study’s ornament, thou shell of death,
Once the bright face of my betrothed lady.
The Revenger’s Tragedy.
For those who knew anything of Gwinnett, or of Trapnel for that matter, the quotation was, to say the least, ambiguous. The longer the lines were considered, the more profuse in private meaning they seemed to become. Moreland, too, had been keen on the plays of Cyril Tourneur. He used often to quote a favourite image from one of them: ‘… and how quaintly he died, like a politician, in hugger-mugger, made no man acquainted with it…’
Tourneur, as Gwinnett himself, was obsessed with Death. The skull, carried by the actor, his ‘study’s ornament’, was no doubt, in one sense, intended to strike the opening note of Gwinnett’s book, his own ‘study’. The couplet drew attention also to the