Temporary Kings - Anthony Powell [15]
‘I respected the man more than his work. He became a legend in his own lifetime. He often said so himself, and with truth. Sometimes my students ask me to tell them about him – and did you once see Trapnel plain? I reply “I did”, and often stopped and spoke with him. At the same time I am put in a quandary. These young people find the intellectual climate of Camel Ride to the Tomb unsatisfying. I cannot in all fairness blame them. Where, they say, is the social conscience? I have to reply, they look in vain.’
At the time of his death, Trapnel’s oeuvre, so far as I knew, consisted of the Camel; the selection of short stories published as Bin Ends; a fair amount of additional stories, never yet collected, some dating back to his early days as a writer before the war (when he had kept himself alive by all sorts of odd employments); a miscellany of occasional pieces, criticism (some of it quite good), articles, parodies, stuff written for papers like Fission, and never brought together; finally the conte (unpublished in Trapnel’s lifetime on account of some legal battle over ‘rights’) Dogs Have No Uncles. A work in Trapnel’s liveliest manner, almost long enough to be called a novel, its posthumous appearance with Salvidge’s Introduction had done something to prevent Trapnel’s reputation from slumping too severely after his death. All this did not constitute a large aggregate of work, but, together with what was available in other material, should make a respectable critical biography. In any case, Trapnel’s was still an unexplored period. Gwinnett added another item.
‘Did you know he kept a Commonplace Book during his last years?’
‘Where is it?’
‘I have it myself.’
Gwinnett seemed for a moment uncertain as to what he was prepared to say on the subject. Then, after this hesitation, described how the librarian of his university, knowing about Gwinnett’s interest in Trapnel, had drawn attention to an English bookseller’s catalogue, which listed, among other manuscripts offered for sale, certain papers of Trapnel’s come on the market. The price was not high, the College authorities uninterested. Gwinnett acquired these odds and ends himself. None of them turned out of startling interest, even the Commonplace Book, though there was enough there to make its purchase worth while to a potential biographer. That was Gwinnett’s own account.
‘I’ll show you the book. Some of the notes – they’re all abbreviated, almost a code – are surely about the castrating girl. You say she’s married to – is the name Widmerpool?’
‘Yes, she’s still married to him.’
That was strange enough. In the course of a dozen years or more of the Widmerpools’ married life many stories had gone round, the least of them lurid enough to imply the union could scarcely persist a week longer, yet it had persisted. They remained together; anyway to the extent of living under the same roof. That phrase did not, in fact, define the situation realistically. Each was usually under the different roof of one or other of Widmerpool’s two places of residence. There was the flat in Westminster (one of a large block near the River), and his mother’s former cottage in the Stourwater neighbourhood, which (Widmerpool mentioned when we met) had been ‘enlarged and improved’.
Stourwater Castle was now a girls’ school; rather a fashionable one. The Quiggin twins, Amanda and Belinda, were being educated there.
The existence of these two separate Widmerpool establishments was sometimes offered as explanation of a capacity to remain undivorced, which certainly required elucidation. Pamela would disappear now and then with other men, behaviour apparently accepted by Widmerpool himself, so that it became, as it were, accepted by everyone else, a matter of comparatively little interest. People recently returned from abroad would report that Pamela Widmerpool had been seen in Spain with an ambitious journalist; among the islands of the AEgean with a fashionable don; that one of the generals at a NATO headquarters had fallen out with another senior officer, when she was staying with him; that her visit to an embassy in Asia had resulted in a reshuffle of diplomatic personnel; that the TUC had been put in a flutter one year at their conference by her presence with a delegate at a local hotel. A Pamela Widmerpool anecdote might stop the gap in a languishing dinner-table conversation, but, unless highly spiced, was by now unlikely to hold the attention of the company for long.