‘Congratulations on your new parliamentary job.’
‘Thanks, thanks. What are you doing down here?’
I told him, adding that I had been talking with Le Bas.
‘I ran into him too. I took the opportunity of giving him some account of my Balkan visit. Whatever one may think of Le Bas’s capabilities as a teacher, he is supposedly in charge of the young, and should therefore be put in possession of the correct facts.’
‘How did your trip go?’
‘We hear a lot about what is called an “Iron Curtain”. Where is this “Iron Curtain”, I ask myself? I found no sign. That was what I told Le Bas. You might think him a person to hold reactionary views, but I found that was not at all the case, now that the idea of world revolution has been dropped. By the way, how are you employed since Fission has closed down.
I mentioned various concerns that involved me. Widmerpool showed no embarrassment in mentioning the magazine. He even asked if it were true that Bagshaw had secured a job in television. However, when I enquired why, on such a damp and increasingly cold evening, he should be sitting on the wall, apparently just watching the world go by, he shifted uneasily, stiffening at the question.
‘Pam and I came down for the day.’
He laughed.
‘She’s got a young friend here whom she met somewhere during his holidays, and he invited her to tea. She’s having tea in his room now. I’m waiting for her.’
‘A boy, you mean?’
‘Yes — I suppose you’d call him a boy still.’
‘I meant still at the school?’
‘He was leaving, but stayed on for some reason — to captain some team, I think. Son or nephew of one of the Calthorpes. Do you remember them? Pam thought it would be an amusing jaunt. She insisted I mustn’t spoil the party by coming too. Rather a good joke.’
All the same, he did not look as if he found it specially funny. Blue-grey mist was thickening round us. I had a train to catch. The Widmerpools had come by car. They had no fixed plan about getting back to London. Pamela hated being tied down by too positive arrangements. She was going to pick her husband up hereabouts when the tea-party was over. I thought of what Trapnel had said of her couplings.
‘I must be off.’
‘I don’t believe I ever sent you details about that society I was telling Le Bas about. My secretary will forward them. I received Quiggin & Craggs’s Autumn List recently — their last. There were some interesting titles. Clapham has asked me to continue my association with publishing by joining his board.’
I too had received the list; later heard Quiggin’s comments on it. Sillery’s Garnered at Sunset, unexciting as the selection might be, had been noticed respectfully. Shernmaker, for example, was unexpectedly approving. Sales were not too bad, even if the advance was never recouped. Sillery might be said to have successfully imposed his will in this last fling. So did Ada Leintwardine. I Stopped at a Chemist upset several of the more old-fashioned reviewers who had survived the war, but they admitted a novel-writing career lay ahead of her. Even Evadne Clapham was impressed. In fact, Golden Grime was the last of Evadne Clapham’s books in her former style. Her subsequent manner followed Ada’s. Engine Melody — truncated title of The Pistons of Our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers — believed to be not too well translated, was by no means ignored, Nathaniel Sheldon’s mention including the phrase ‘muted beauty’. Vernon Gainsborough’s Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?, with seven other books on similar subjects, was favourably noticed in a Times Literary Supplement ‘front’.
‘It’s a real apologia pro vita sua,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Conversion from Trotskyism expressed in such unqualified terms must have warmed Gypsy’s heart after her reverses.’
The last reference was to Sad Majors. Odo Stevens had dealt effectively with efforts, such as they were, to suppress his book. He had enjoyed exceptional opportunities for knowing about such things. That may have put him at an advantage. As usual, he also had good luck. So far from being inconvenient, the whole matter worked out in his best interests. Having already grasped that he might have done better financially by going to some publisher other than Quiggin & Craggs, he at once recognized that the loss of the two typescripts would give a potent reason for requiring release from his contract. He did not mention the third typescript, which had been all the time in the hands of Rosie Manasch. Rosie had apparently suggested that her former Fleet Street contacts might be useful in exploiting serial possibilities. She was right. Sad Majors was serialized on excellent terms. It was published in book form in the spring.
L. O. Salvidge, rather an achievement in the light of current publishing delays, got out a further volume of essays to follow up Paper Wine. The new one, Secretions, was much reviewed beside Shernmaker’s Miscellaneous Equities. It was a notable score for Salvidge to have produced two books in less than a year. After the unsuccessful prosecution, Kydd’s Sweetskin at first failed to recover from the withdrawal at the time of the injunction, but, given a new wrapper design, Kydd himself alleged that it picked up relatively well. That season also appeared David Pennistone’s Descartes, Gassendi, and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus, the work of which he used to speak so despairingly when we were in the army together. I busied myself with Burton, even so only just managing to see Borage and Hellebore: a Study in print by the following December.
The scattered pages of Profiles in String, with the death’s-head swordstick, floated eternally downstream into the night. It was the beginning of Trapnel’s drift too, irretrievable as they. He went underground for a long time after that night. When at last he emerged, it was to haunt an increasingly gruesome and desolate world. There were odds and ends of film work, stray pieces of journalism, an occasional short story. In the last, possibly some traces reappeared of what had gone into Profiles in String, though in a much diminished form. Something of it may even have emerged on the screen. Another novel never got written. Trapnel himself always insisted that a novel is what its writer is. The definition only opens up a lot more questions. Perhaps he had taken a knock from which he never recovered; perhaps he had used up already what was in him, in the way writers do. In these sunless marshlands of existence, a dwindling reserve of pep-pills, a certain innate inventiveness, capacity for survival, above all the mystique of panache — in short, the Trapnel method — just about made it possible to hang on. That was the best you could say.
I once asked Dicky Umfraville — whose own experiences on the Turf made his knowledge of racing personalities extensive — whether he had ever heard of a jockey called Trapnel, whose professional career had been made largely in Egypt.