Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [12]
‘Trapnel’s crack-up is easy for an American to understand. If you don’t mind my saying so, to find a writer of even your age on his feet, and working, is not all that common with us.’
‘Some of the violent consuming nervous American energy was characteristic of Trapnel too.’
‘He’d no American blood?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘I’d like to think he had.’
‘His father was a jockey in Egypt. If Trapnel had written about that we’d have a completer picture.’
‘Completion was one of the things Trapnel aimed at, you said – the idea of the Complete Man. Did he achieve some of that? I think so.’
‘Vigny says the poet is not a sport of nature, his destiny is the human predicament.’
‘And the concept was challenged by this girl – as it were invalidated.’
Gwinnett thought about that for a moment, almost as if he were hoping to rebut his own conjecture. Then he laughed, and changed his tone.
‘It was the god Hercules deserting Antony.’
‘As a matter of fact the god Hercules returned in Trapnel’s case. There was music in the air again, though only briefly.’
Gwinnett had heard more misleading accounts. The best in existence was probably Malcolm Crowding’s. It was at least first-hand. No doubt Crowding’s story had been a little ornamented with the passage of time, no worse than that. The basic facts were that Trapnel had found himself in possession of a hundred pounds. No one argued about that, a fact in itself sufficiently extraordinary. What was additionally astonishing, almost a miracle, was the sum being in notes. A cheque might have brought quite different consequences. Where opinion chiefly differed was in the provenance of the money. It was usually designated, rather pedestrianly, as payment for forgotten ‘rights’, which had finally borne fruit in some medium functioning in long delayed action, possibly from a foreign country. Alternatively, more picturesquely, the hundred pounds was said to be a legacy left to Trapnel’s father, the celebrated jockey, as one of the items in the eccentric will of a grateful backer of the winning horse, ridden by Trapnel père, at a long forgotten Egyptian race-meeting. By slow but workmanlike processes of the law, the bequest had in due course been deflected to Trapnel himself as heir and successor, the sum delivered to him. If the latter origin were true, the whimsical testator must either have had a long memory, or omitted to overhaul his will for a great many years. In either ease, almost equally surprising, Trapnel was traced, the money handed over in cash. The only colourable explanation was that Trapnel, improbable as that might seem, having found his way personally to the intermediary – lawyer, accountant, publisher, agent – by his old skill induced whoever was in charge to accept a receipt for notes. If so, that final mustering of Trapnel’s long dormant forces proved dramatically, in a sense appropriately, fatal.
Were the hypothesis of the female guardian a correct one (situation reminiscent of Miss Weedon curing Stringham of drink), she would in the normal course of things certainly intercept any money Trapnel might earn, or, more credibly, derive from ‘public assistance’. Even in his less calamitous days, there had been interludes in the past of signing on at ‘the Labour’ – the Labour Exchange – though what trade or vocation Trapnel claimed at such emergencies was never revealed. When, so transcendentally, the hundred pounds in cash materialized into his hands in the manner of a highly proficient conjuror, Trapnel (like Stringham) must have evaded his keeper, reverted to type in the traditional manner, decided, now the money had come his way in this utterly unforeseen manner, to squander it gloriously in The Hero of Acre.