‘I expect he hoped to pick up a boy-friend,’ said Evadne Clapham. ‘The Hero was full of queers when I was taken there last. It was much against my will in any case. They were all standing round wide-eyed watching that old wretch Heather Hopkins giving an imitation of John Foster Dulles in his galoshes.’
Whatever Malcolm Crowding’s original intention, Trapnel’s arrival in The Hero offered something worth while; in fact supplied a story to become, ever after, Crowding’s most notable set-piece.
‘It was Lazarus coming back from the Dead. Better than that, because Lazarus didn’t buy everyone a drink — at least there’s no mention of that in Holy Writ.’
Somebody present — probably Evadne Clapham again, bent on disorganizing the side-effects of Crowding’s story — suggested that free drinks were to be inferred on the earlier resurrectionary occasion from Tennyson:
‘When Lazarus left his charnel-cave …
The streets were filled with joyful sound.’
Crowding refused to allow his narrative to be obstructed by inconclusive pedantry of that sort. He merely increased the vibrant note of his rather shrill voice. Evadne Clapham, or whoever else it was interrupting, ceased to argue. Crowding, feeling the Tennysonian phrase appropriate enough for Trapnel’s sojourn in outer darkness, developed new metaphor in the direction of Shelley.
‘The charnel cave was put behind him. It was Trapnel Unbound.’
There were present in The Hero old stagers who had endured in that spot since Trapnel’s own great days, when, tall, bearded, loquacious, didactic, draped in his dyed greatcoat, toying with the death’s head swordstick, he had laid down the law on literature, commanded the price of a drink (though never as now), dominated the length of the saloon bar. His arrival was a thunderbolt. Even the most complacent of The Hero’s soaks were jolted by it from their evening’s drinking. Crowding never tired of telling the story.
‘X started in at once — Wodehouse and Wittgenstein, Malraux and the Marx Brothers — it was just like the old days, though never before had The Hero known a night like that for free drinks.’
Unlike the mourners of Lazarus — to accept Crowding’s apprehension of the incident, rather than Evadne Clapham’s — the mourners of Trapnel, as, on the strength of his resurrection, they were soon to become, were stood round after round. The Hero, one of those old-fashioned pubs in grained pitchpine with engraved looking-glass (what Mr Deacon used to call a ‘gin palace’), was anatomized into half-a-dozen or more separate compartments, subtly differentiating, in the traditional British manner, social subdivisions of its clientèle, according to temperament or means: saloon bar: public bar: private bar: ladies’ bar: wine bar: off-licence: possibly others too. Customers occupied in these peripheries were all included in the Trapnel largesse, no less than those in the saloon bar, where he had manifested himself. Swept in, too, were several birds of passage, transients buying half-a-bottle in the off-licence. The fountains ran with wine, more precisely with bitter and scotch. News of this boundless munificence got round immediately, not only emptying The French-polishers’ Arms opposite — according to Crowding, lately a serious rival to The Hero in draining off a sediment of discontented intellectuals — but also considerably reducing numbers in The Marquess of Sleaford round the corner, where intellectuals were virtually unknown. Not only were these two latter pubs practically cleared of customers, but what Crowding called a ‘thirsty concourse’ poured into The Hero from The Wheelbarrow (at the time of Bagshaw’s first marriage, his last port of call on the way home, owing to staying open until eleven), auxiliary drinkers from other taverns being all hospitably received by Trapnel, if they could only get near enough to him. Crowding, telling the story, would here shake his head.
‘X looked dreadfully ill. As near the image of Death as the knob of that stick he used to carry round, before he threw it into the Grand Union Canal. His face was even whiter.’
Trapnel had been at the height of his old form, talking at the top of his voice, laughing, shouting, contradicting, laying down the law about books and writers, films and film stars, giving prolonged imitations of Boris Karloff; in general reconstructing in its most intrinsic aspects his own persona of years gone by. Not only Crowding, but many others, agreed The Hero had never known such a night. That could not go on for ever. An end had to come. Finally, inexorably, closing time was announced. This moment always represented the peak of Crowding’s narrative.
‘X walked through the doors of The Hero like a king. There was real dignity in his stride. It was a royal progress. Courtiers followed in his wake. You can imagine — free drinks — there was quite a crowd by that time, some of them singing, as it might be, chants in a patron’s praise. X stopped outside, and they all stood round. He waited for a moment by the kerb. Everyone kept back somehow, as if they didn’t dare be too familiar. X gazed up the street, then down it, in that proud way of his. He must have been looking for a taxi. He hadn’t said yet where he wanted to go. I noticed for the first time that his beard was turning grey. Suddenly he gave a start, remembering something. He wrung his hands, rushed back, tried to get into the pub again through the outer doors, which they were barring up. They wouldn’t let him back. He gave a loud cry.
‘“I’ve forgotten my stick. I’ve lost my stick. My death’s head stick.”
‘Of course they wouldn’t let him in again after closing time. Somebody told him he hadn’t brought a stick with him. Whoever it was couldn’t have known about the sword-stick. X didn’t take that in for a second or two. When he did, he began to laugh. He laughed and laughed, like one of his own impersonations of a horror film — and it was pretty horrible too. He went on laughing for some minutes, walking slowly back to the edge of the pavement. People close said his look was quite frightening.
‘“No,” he said. “Of course I haven’t got a stick any longer, have I? I sacrificed it. Nor a bloody novel. I haven’t got that either.”
‘Then he heeled over into the gutter. Everybody thought he was drunk.’
At this point in the narrative Crowding would pause, his face apt to twitch so violently that the more sensitive of his listeners had to turn away. He would then slow up the tempo of the narrative for its termination.
‘Drunk? They were sadly in error. I watched Trapnel the whole time we were in the saloon bar together. He consumed exactly one bloody double Three Star in the course of the whole bloody time he was in The Hero.’
After adding this comment as a kind of tailpiece to his chronicle, Crowding always stopped, and glared round like a man expecting contradiction of the most vigorous kind. Contradiction never came. Even Evadne Clapham was silent. Whether that was owed to the force of Crowding’s recital, or because most of the audience usually knew Trapnel had never been a great drinker, was uncertain. The surmise that alcohol in itself played no great part in his final collapse was no doubt correct, though he may have allowed himself that night an unwise admixture of drink and ‘pills’; simply too many pills. Either could have resulted from finding himself unexpectedly in funds. An inner fatigue, utter moral exhaustion, had to be taken into consideration too. He was removed from the street in due course, to a hospital, dying an hour or two later. By the time the ambulance arrived, the near-criminal potential of the traditional Trapnel entourage had extracted from his pockets all remnants, if such there were, of the hundred pounds. He died quite penniless. At that particular juncture, he appeared to be living alone. That probably explained getting his hands on the money. Crowding never mentioned this last fact, but he would change his tone, from pub crony to academic critic, as he drew to an end.