‘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 short time. It was still before midnight. A clock struck twelve while I put the key in the door. As if from a neighbouring minaret, a cat muezzin began to call other cats to prayer. The aberrations of love were incalculable. Burton, I remembered, supposed the passion to extend even into the botanic world:
‘In vegetal creatures what sovereignty Love hath by many pregnant proofs and familiar example may be proved, especially of palm trees, which are both he and she, and express not a sympathy but a love-passion, as by many observations have been confirmed. Constantine gives an instance out of Florentius his Georgicks, of a Palm-tree that loved most fervently, and would not be comforted until such time her love applied himself unto her; you might see the two trees bend, and of their own accords stretch out their bows to embrace and kiss each other; they will give manifest signs of mutual love. Ammianus Marcellinus reports that they marry one another, and fall in love if they grow in sight; and when the wind brings up the smell to them, they are marvellously affected. Philostratus observes as much, and Galen, they will be sick for love, ready to die and pine away …’
Now, considering these matters that autumn afternoon under the colonnade, vegetal love seemed scarcely less plausible than the human kind. The damp cobblestones in front gave the illusion of quivering where the sunlight struck their irregular convexities. Rain still fell. The Library presented itself as a preferable refuge from the wet I was uncertain whether rules permitted casual entry. It was worth trying. At worst, if told to go away, one could remain in the porch until time to move on. It would be no worse than where I was. Abandoning the colonnade, I crossed the road to a grey domed Edwardian building. Beyond its threshold, a parabola of passage-way led into a high circular room, rising to the roof and surrounded by a gallery. The place, often a welcome oasis in the past, seemed smaller than remembered. A few boys were pottering about among the bays of books, with an absent-minded air, or furiously writing at a table, as if life itself depended on getting whatever it was finished in time. A librarian presided at his desk.
Hoping to remain unobserved, I loitered by the door. That was not to be. The librarian looked up and stared. He took off his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, chose another pair from several spectacle-cases in front of him, put them on his nose and stared again. After a moment of this, he beckoned me. Recognizing that I was not to be allowed to kill five or ten minutes in peace, I prepared for expulsion. No doubt there was a regulation against visitors at this hour. The thing to do would be to delay eviction as long as possible, so that a minimum of time had to be spent in the porch. The librarian’s beckonings became more urgent. He was a man older than normal for the job, more formally dressed. In fact, this was clearly an assistant master substituting for a regular librarian. Professional librarians were probably unprocurable owing to shortage of labour. I went across the room to see what he wanted. Tactics could be decided by his own comportment. This happy-go-lucky approach was cut short. Sitting at the desk was my former housemaster Le Bas. He spoke crossly.
‘Do I know you?’
Boyhood returned in a flash, the instinct to oppose Le Bas — as Bagshaw would say — dialectically. The question was unanswerable. It is reasonable for someone to ask if you know him, because such knowledge is in the hands of the questioned party. How can it be asserted with assurance whether or not the questioner knows one? Powers of telepathy would be required. It could certainly be urged that five years spent under the same roof, so to speak under Le Bas’s guidance, gave him a decided opportunity for knowing one; almost an unfair advantage, both in the superficial, also the more searching sense of the phrase. That was the primitive, atavistic reaction. More mature consideration brought to mind Le Bas’s notorious forgetfulness even in those days. There was no reason to suppose his memory had improved.
‘I was in your house —’
Obviously it would be absurd to call him ‘sir’, yet that still obtruded as the only suitable form of address. What on earth else could he be called? Just ‘Le Bas’? Certainly he belonged to a generation which continued throughout a lifetime to use that excellently masculine invocation of surname, before an irresponsible bandying of first names smothered all subtleties of relationship, in any case, to call Le Bas by a christian name was unthinkable. What would it be, in effect, if so daring an apostrophe were contemplated? The initials had been L. L. Le B. — Lawrence Langton Le Bas, that was it. No one had ever been known to call him Lawrence, still less Langton. Among the other masters, some — his old enemy Cobberton, for example — used once in a way to hail him as ‘Le B.’ There was, after all, really no necessity to call him anything. Le Bas himself grew impatient at this procrastination.
‘What’s your name?’