A Dance to the Music of Time: 2nd Movement

by Anthony Powell

  ‘Hold up, Trappy. You’re tight.’

  That was a fatal remark. Not only did open expression of that opinion make Trapnel very indignant, it also had the effect of physically increasing, anyway for the moment, the lack of control that was overcoming him. Trapnel always hated any suggestion that limits existed to his own powers of alcoholic assimilation. Bagshaw must already have known that. The fact that his comment was true made it no more excusable, except for being equally applicable to Bagshaw himself.

  ‘Tight? I’m always being asked by people how it is I’m never drunk, however much I put back. They can’t make it out. I can finish a bottle of brandy at a sitting, get up sober as when I started. Drink just doesn’t have any effect on me. You don’t suppose the few halves of bitter we’ve had tonight made me drunk, Books, do you? It’s you who are a little tipsy, my boy. You’ve rather a weak head.’

  He waved his stick. If the contrast had to be made, this described their capacities in reverse. Bagshaw took it well, having made the initial error by his comment.

  ‘Drunk or sober, we can none of us stand here all night. Shall we head for your place, Trappy?’

  This suggestion had a steadying, immediately subduing effect on Trapnel. He seemed to remember suddenly all he had been trying to forget. The outward appearance of drunkenness left him at once. He might have swallowed an instant sedative. The state of utter dejection returned. He spoke to Bagshaw quietly, almost humbly.

  ‘Does Nicholas know what’s happened?’

  ‘Roughly.’

  ‘I’d like to be a bit clearer about what’s up.’

  ‘There’s been some trouble with Pam. It was all over my new book. We never seem to agree about writing, especially my writing. It’s almost as if she hates it, doesn’t want me to do it, and yet she thinks about my work all the time, knows just where the weak places are. We have a lot of rows about it. We had one this morning. I left the house in a rage. I told her she was mad on Naturalism. That’s why the subject was on my mind. Books and I began talking about it. I’m for it too. I told her I was. I’ve told everyone, and written it. What I can’t stand is people giving it their own exclusive meaning. That’s what Pam does. She just uses it to pick on the way I write. She brings up all my own arguments against me. Then when I half agree, she takes an absolutely opposite line. It’s like Pavlov’s dogs. I think sometimes I’ll go up the wall.’

  ‘Why discuss your work with her?’ said Bagshawe inconsistently. ‘Tell her to get on with the washing-up.’

  ‘It’s not the first row we’ve had by a long chalk. Christ, I don’t want her to leave me. I know it’s pretty awful living the way we do, but I can’t face the thought of her leaving. You know I’m not sure there isn’t going to be a film in Profiles in String. It was the last thing I thought about when I started, but now I believe there might be. It would go over big, if it went over at all.’

  At one moment it looked as if Trapnel were going to break down, at the next, that he was about to indulge in one of his fantasies about making money, which overwhelmed him from time to time. These sudden changes of gear were going to require careful handling, if he were to be conveyed back to the flat. It was much more likely that he would want to go to a drinking club of some sort. He usually knew the address of one that would admit him. Bagshaw, grasping the fact that Trapnel needed soothing, now took charge quite effectively. He must have had long experience in persuading fellow-drunks to do what he, rather than they themselves, wanted. He was ruthless about getting his own way when he thought that necessary, showing total disregard for other people’s wishes or convenience. That was now all to the good.

  ‘We know what you feel, Trappy. Come on. We’ll go back and see how things are. She’s probably longing to see you.’

  ‘You don’t know her.’

  ‘I admit that, but I’ve seen her. They’re all the same.’

  ‘There’s not a drop to drink.’

  ‘Never mind. Nick and I will just see you home.’

  ‘Will you really? I couldn’t face it otherwise.’

  Trapnel was like a child who suddenly decides to be fretful no longer. Now he was even full of gratitude. We reached Edgware Road with him still in this mood. There was a small stretch of the main highway to negotiate before turning off by the Canal. The evening was warm, stuffy, full of strange smells. For once Trapnel seemed suitably dressed in his tropical suit. We turned down the south side of the Canal, walking on the pavement away from the houses. Railings shut off a grass bank that sloped down to the tow-path. Trapnel had now moved into a pastoral dream.

  ‘I love this waterway. I’d like to have a private barge, and float down it waving to the tarts.’

  ‘Do you get a lot down here?’ asked Bagshaw, interested.

  ‘You see the odd one. They live round about, but tend to work other streets. What a mess the place is in.’

  Most of London was pretty grubby at this period, the Canal no exception. On the surface of the water concentric circles of oil, undulating in the colours of the spectrum, were illuminated by moonlight. Through these luminous prisms floated anonymous off-scourings of every kind, tin cans, petrol drums, soggy cardboard boxes. Watery litter increased as the bridge was approached. Bagshaw pointed to a peculiarly obnoxious deposit bobbing up and down by the bank.

  ‘Looks as if someone’s dumped their unit’s paper salvage. I used to have to deal with that at one stage of the war. Obsolete forms waiting to be pulped and made into other forms. An internal reincarnation. Fitted the scene in India.’

  Trapnel stopped, and leant against the railings.

  ‘Let’s pause for a moment. Contemplate life. It’s a shade untidy here, but romantic too. Do you know what all that mess of paper looks like? A manuscript. Probably someone’s first novel. Authors always talk of burning their first novel. I believe this one’s drowned his.’

  ‘Or hers.’

  ‘Some beautiful girl who wrote about her seduction, and couldn’t get it published.’

  ‘When lovely woman stoops to authorship?’

  ‘I think I’ll go and have a look. Might give me some ideas.’

  ‘Trappy, don’t be silly.’

  Trapnel, laughing rather dementedly, began to climb the railings. Bagshaw attempted to stop this. Before he could be persuaded otherwise, Trapnel had lifted himself up, and was halfway across. The railings presented no very serious obstacle even to a man in a somewhat deranged state, who carried a stick in one hand. He dropped to the other side without difficulty. The bank sloped fairly steeply to the lower level of the tow-path and the water. Trapnel reached the footway. He paused for a moment, looking up and down the length of the Canal. Then he went to the water’s edge, and began to poke with the swordstick at the sheets of paper floating about all over the surface.

  ‘Come back, Trappy. You’re not the dustman.’

  Trapnel took no notice of Bagshaw. He continued to strain forward with the stick, until it looked ominously as if he would fall in. The pieces of paper, scattered broadcast, were all just out of reach.

  ‘We shall have to get over,’ said Bagshaw. ‘He’ll be in at any moment.’

  Then Trapnel caught one of the sheets with the end of the stick. He guided it to the bank. For a second it escaped, but was recaptured. He bent down to pick it up, shook off the water and straightened out the page. The soaked paper seemed to fascinate him. He looked at it for a long time. Bagshaw, relieved that the railings would not now have to be climbed, for a minute or two did not intervene. At last he became tired of waiting.

  ‘Is it a work of genius? Do decide one way or the other. We can’t bear more delay to know whether it ought to be published or not.’

  Trapnel gave a kind of shudder. He swayed. Either drink had once more overcome him with the suddenness with which it had struck outside the pub, or he was acting out a scene of feigned horror at what he read. Whichever it were, he really did look again as if about to fall into the Canal. Abruptly he stopped playing the part, or
recovered his nerve. I suppose these antics, like the literary ramblings in the pub, also designed to delay discovery that Pamela had abandoned him; alternatively, to put off some frightful confrontation with her.

  ‘Do come back, Trappy.’

  Then an extraordinary thing happened. Trapnel was still standing by the edge of the water holding the dripping sheet of foolscap. Now he crushed it in his hand, and threw the ball of paper back into the Canal. He lifted the sword-stick behind his head, and, putting all his force into the throw, cast it as far as this would carry, high into the air. The stick turned and descended, death’s-head first. A mystic arm should certainly have risen from the dark waters of the mere to receive it. That did not happen. Trapnel’s Excalibur struck the flood a long way from the bank, disappeared for a moment, surfaced, and began to float downstream.

  ‘Now he really has become unmoored,’ said Bagshaw.

  Trapnel came slowly up the bank.

  ‘You’ll never get your stick back, Trappy. What ever made you do it? We’ll hurry on to the bridge right away. It might have got caught up on something. There’s not much hope.’

  Trapnel climbed back on to the pavement.

  ‘You were quite wrong, Books.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘It was a work of genius.’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘The manuscript in the water—it was Profiles in String.’

  I now agreed with Bagshaw in supposing Trapnel to have gone completely off his head. He stood looking at us. His smile was one of the consciously dramatic ones.

  ‘She brought the MS along, and chucked it into the Canal. She knew I should be almost bound to pass this way, and it would be well on the cards I should notice it. We quite often used to stroll down here at night and talk about the muck floating down, french letters and such like. She must have climbed over the railings to get to the water. I’d like to have watched her doing that. I’d thought of a lot of things she might be up to—doctoring my pills, arranging for me to find her being had by the milkman, giving the bailiffs our address. I never thought of this. I never thought she’d destroy my book.’

  He stood there, still smiling slightly, almost as if he were embarrassed by what had happened.

  ‘You really mean that’s your manuscript over there in the water?’

  Trapnel nodded.

  ‘The whole of it?’

  ‘It wasn’t quite finished. The end was what we had the row about.’

  ‘You must have a copy?’

  ‘Of course I haven’t a copy. Why should I? I told you, it wasn’t finished yet.’

  Even Bagshaw was appalled. He began to speak, then stopped, something I had never seen happen before. There was certainly nothing to say. Trapnel just stood there.

  ‘Come and look for the stick, Trappy.’

  Trapnel was not at all disposed to move. Now the act had taken place, he wanted to reflect on it. Perhaps he feared still worse damage when the flat was reached, though that was hard to conceive.

  ‘In a way I’m not surprised. Even though this particular dish never struck me as likely to appear on the menu, it all fits in with the cuisine. Christ, two years’ work, and I’ll never feel the same as when I was writing it. She may be correct in what she thinks about it, but I’ll never be able to write it again—either her way or my own.’

  Bagshaw, in spite of his feelings about the manuscript, could not forget the stick. The girl did not interest him at all.

  ‘You’ll never find a swordstick like that again. It was a great mistake to throw it away.’

  Trapnel was not listening. He stood there musing. Then all at once he revealed something that had always been a mystery. Being Trapnel, an egotist of the first rank, he supposed this disclosure as of interest only in his own case, but a far wider field of vision was at the same time opened up by what was unveiled. In a sense it was of most interest where Trapnel was concerned, because he seems to have reacted in a somewhat different fashion to the rest of Pamela’s lovers, but, applicable to all of them, what was divulged offered clarification of her relations with men. Drink, pills, the strain of living with her, the destruction of Profiles in String, combination of all those, brought about a confession hardly conceivable from Trapnel in other circumstances. He now spoke in a low, confidential tone.

  ‘You may have wondered why a girl like that ever came to live with me?’

  ‘Not so much as why she ever married that husband of hers,’ said Bagshaw. ‘I can understand all the rest.’

  ‘I doubt if you can. Not every man can stand what’s entailed.’

  ‘I don’t contradict that.’

  ‘You don’t know what I mean.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Trapnel did not answer for a moment. It was as if he were thinking how to phrase whatever he intended to say. Then he spoke with great intensity.

  ‘It’s when you have her. She wants it all the time, yet doesn’t want it. She goes rigid like a corpse. Every grind’s a nightmare. It’s all the time, and always the same.’

  Trapnel said this with absolute simplicity. Irony, melodrama, narcissism, fantasy, all his accustomed tendency to play a rôle had been this time completely eliminated. The curtain was at least partially drawn aside. A little light had been let in, Stevens had not told all the truth.

  ‘I could take it, because—well, I suppose because I loved her. Why not admit it? I’m not sure I don’t still.’

  Bagshaw could not stand that. Excessive displays of amative sensibility always disturbed him.

  ‘Even Sacher-Masoch drew the line somewhere, Trappy—true we don’t know where. What did her husband think about this, I’d like to know.’

  ‘She told me he only tried a couple of times. Gave it up as a bad job.’

  ‘So that’s how things are?’

  ‘For certain reasons it suited him to be married to her.’

  ‘And her to him?’

  ‘She stopped that, if ever true, when she came to live with me.’

  Even after what had taken place, Trapnel spoke defensively.

  ‘It gave him a kind of prestige,’ he said.

  ‘Not much prestige the way she was carrying on.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It’s not what she does, it’s what she is.’

  ‘You mean he’s positively flattered?’

  ‘That’s what she seemed to think. She may be right. That’s a form of masochism too. It’s not my sort. Not that I can explain my sort, if that’s what it is. It doesn’t feel unnatural to me. As I said, I love her—at least used to. I don’t think I do now. She’ll always go on like this. She’s a child, who doesn’t know any better.’

  ‘Oh, balls,’ said Bagshaw. ‘I’ve heard men say that sort of thing about women before. It’s rubbish, the scrapings of the barrel. You must rise above that, Trappy. Let’s get back to your place anyway.’

  I had never seen Bagshaw so agitated. This time Trapnel came quietly. When we reached the bridge, he insisted that he did not want to look for the stick.

  ‘It’s a sacrifice. One of those things you dedicate to the Gods. I remember reading about a sacred pool in an Indian temple, where good writing floated on the water, bad writing sank. Perhaps the Canal has the same property, and Pam was right to put my book there.’

  Those words meant that he was getting back his normal form. Panache was coming into play. I sympathized with Bagshaw’s sentiments as to the deliberate throwing away of a good swordstick, but Trapnel’s manner of dealing with the situation had not been without its lofty side. Nothing unexpected was found in the flat. Pamela had packed her clothes, and left with the suitcases. The Modigliani and her own photographs were gone too. No doubt she had strolled down to the Canal, disposed of Profiles in String, then returned with a taxi to remove her effects. Trapnel glanced for a second at the spaces left by the pictures.

  ‘She can’t have been gone more than a few hours. She must have done i
t after dark. If only I’d come back earlier in the day she’d still have been here.’

  He took off the tropical jacket, slipped it on to a wire coat-hanger pendant from a hook in the door, loosened his tie. After that he stretched. That seemed to give him an idea. He began to look about the room, opening drawers, examining the shelf at the top of the inside of the wardrobe, even searching under the bed. Doubtless he was looking for ‘pills’ of one sort or another. Pamela might well have taken them away with her. He talked while he hunted round.

  ‘I warned you hospitality would be rather sparse if you came back. Not a drop of Algerian left. I’m sorry for that. It was a great help when you’re seeing things through. I’ll just have to have a think now as to the best way of tackling life.’

  ‘Will you be all right, Trappy?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Nothing we can do?’

  ‘Not a thing—ah, here we are.’

  Trapnel had found the box. He swallowed a couple of examples of whatever sustaining globules were kept inside it. Possibly they were no more than sleeping pills. There was now no point in our staying a moment longer. Both Bagshaw and I tried to say something more of a sympathetic sort. Trapnel shook his head.