Temporary Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

shining from all the rows of windows
in this building. Trappy was standing by that church with the pointed spire. He
was looking up at those thousand windows of the BBC, all ablaze with light.
Something about him made me feel very sad. I couldn’t help thinking of the
Scholar Gypsy, and Christ-Church hall, and all that, even though I wasn’t at
the university myself, and it wasn’t snowing. I thought it would have been a
splendid shot in a film. I wondered if he’d agree to do a documentary about his
own failure in life – comparative, I mean. About a month later, I ran into one
of his understrappers in a pub. He was going to see Trappy later that evening.
I sent a note, but it wasn’t any good. No answer.’
    There was also the
occasional Trapnel story or article to appear, nothing to be ashamed of, at the
same time nothing comparable with the old Trapnel standard. This submerged
period of Trapnel’s life could not have been enviable. He abandoned The Hero of
Acre, all the other pubs where he had been accustomed to harangue an assemblage
of chosen followers. The roving intelligentsia of the saloon bar – cultural
nomads of a race never likely to penetrate the international steppe – professional
topers, itinerant bores, near-criminals, knew him no more. They were thrown
back on their own resources, had to keep themselves instructed and amused in
other ways. Where Trapnel himself went, whom he saw, how he remained alive,
were all hard to imagine. Probably there remained women to find him still
passable enough even in decline; more or less devoted mistresses to maintain
survival of a sort As Trapnel himself might have insisted – one could hear his
dry harsh voice speaking the words – a washed-up condition is not necessarily
an unattractive one to a woman. That had also been one of Barnby’s themes: ‘Ladies
like a man to rescue. A job that offers a challenge. They can annex the
property at a cheap rate, and ruthlessly develop it.’
    Trapnel may have been
annexed by a woman, not much development feasible, minimum financial security
about the best to be hoped. That in itself was after all something. Gwinnett
agreed the plausible assumption, after the collapse of Trapnel’s hopes, was
personal administration taken over by a relatively prudent wage-earning
mistress; even a good-hearted landlady, whose commonsense regulated money
matters, such as they were, warding off actual destitution. That is, Gwinnett
had nothing else to offer. His accord was not enthusiastic. Comparative
reluctance to accept that a woman might have kept Trapnel going, made me wonder
whether Gwinnett were not homosexual. He might be a homosexual as well as a
redeemed drunk; the former state, possibly repressed, seeking outlet in the
latter. Then he brought back the subject of women himself.
    ‘I’d like to ask you
about this girl – the castrating one.’
    ‘Pamela Widmerpool?’
    ‘I’ve been spun so
many yarns about her.’
    The stories he had
been told were, on the whole, garbled in a manner to make the true
circumstances of Trapnel’s life all but unrecognizable. It was in any case a
field where accuracy was hard to come by. At the same time, if Gwinnett’s
information had percolated through misinformed sources, he himself showed
unexpected flashes of insight. Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary
to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail.
That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most,
of the true facts discarded. Besides, what could be called unreservedly true
when closely examined, especially about Trapnel? The stories told to Gwinnett
became notably blurred in their inferences about Pamela Widmerpool. Trapnel’s
relationship with her emerged as little more than a love affair that had gone
wrong, something that might have happened to anybody. Naturally, in one sense,
it
was
a love affair that had gone