Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [13]
Malcolm Crowding’s account of Trapnel’s apotheosis in The Hero was likely to be the most reliable. He had been there in person. Besides, his own works proclaimed him a writer of little or no imagination. He could never have invented such a story. By that time he had ceased to publish verse, and was lecturing on English literature at a newly-founded provincial university, in fact spending the night in London in connexion with the editing of a textbook. He approached the subject of Trapnel, like his own academic work, in a spirit of the severest literary puritanism. On impulse, a wish to call up old times, he had dropped in that night to The Hero.
‘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