Books Do Furnish a Room - Anthony Powell [45]
‘Smart cane, Trappy,’ said Bagshaw. ‘Who’s the type on the knob? Dr Goebbels? Yagoda? There’s a look of both of them.’
‘I’d like to think it’s Boris Karloff in a horror rôle,’ said Trapnel. ‘As you know, I’m a great Karloff fan. I found it yesterday in a shop off the Portobello Road, and took charge on the strength of the Quiggin & Craggs advance on the short stories. Not exactly cheap, but I had to possess it. My last stick, Shakespeare’s head, was pinched. It wasn’t in any case as good as this one – look.’
He twisted the knob, which turned out to be the pommel of a sword-stick, the blade released by a spring at the back of the skull. Bagshaw restrained him from drawing it further, seizing Trapnel’s arm in feigned terror.
‘Don’t fix bayonets, I beseech you, Trappy, or we’ll be asked to leave this joint. Keep your steel bright for the Social Revolution.’
Trapnel laughed. He clicked the sword back into the shaft of the stick.
‘You never know when you may have trouble,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded using it on my last publisher. Quiggin & Craggs are going to take over his stock of the Camel. They’ll do a reprint, if they can get the paper.’
I told him I had enjoyed the book. That was well received. The novel’s title referred to an incident in Trapnel’s childhood there described; one, so he insisted, that had prefigured to him what life – anyway his own life – was to be. In the narrative this episode had taken place in some warm foreign land, the name forgotten, but a good deal of sand, the faint impression of a pyramid, offering a strong presumption that the locale was Egyptian. The words that made such an impression on the young Trapnel – in many subsequent reminiscences always disposed to represent himself as an impressionable little boy – were intoned by an old man whose beard, turban, nightshirt, all the same shade of off-white, manifested the outer habiliments of a prophet; just as the stony ground from which he delivered his tidings to the Trapnel family party seemed the right sort of platform from which to prophesy.
‘Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb … Camel ride to the Tomb …’
Trapnel, according to himself, immediately recognized these words, monotonously repeated over and over again, as a revelation.
‘I grasped at once that’s what life was. How could the description be bettered? Juddering through the wilderness, on an uncomfortable conveyance you can’t properly control, along a rocky, unpremeditated, but indefeasible track, towards the destination crudely, yet truly, stated.’
If Trapnel were really so young as represented by himself at the time of the incident, the story was not entirely credible, though none the worse for that. None the worse, I mean, insomuch as the words had undoubtedly haunted his mind at some stage, even if a later one. The greybeard’s unremitting recommendation of his beast as means of local archaeological transport had probably become embedded in the memory as such phrases will, only later earmarked for advantageous literary use: post hoc, propter hoc, to invoke a tag hard worked by Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson in post-retirement letters to The Times.
The earlier Trapnel myth, as propagated in the Camel, was located in an area roughly speaking between Beirut and Port Said, with occasional forays further afield from that axis. His family, for some professional reason, seemed to have roamed that part of the world nomadically. This fact