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wrong, but subtlety was required
to express the unusual nature of that love affair, its start, progress,
termination. All these had been conveyed with such lack of finesse that no kind
of justice was done to the exceptional nature of those concerned: Pamela:
Widmerpool: Trapnel himself. For Gwinnett, too, there existed the seldom
remittent difficulty of translating the personalities and doings of English
material into American terms.
    The impression these
reports had left with him was of a man’s luck – Trapnel’s luck – having
suddenly, meaninglessly, taken a turn for the worse. From being, in his way, a
notable writer, a promising career ahead of him, Trapnel had been suddenly,
inexorably, struck down by misfortune, although leading much the same sort of
life as he had always led, with girls not so wholly different from Pamela,
before he had linked himself to her. Sometimes Gwinnett hedged a little, but
that main interpretation was the one he was prepared, even if unwillingly, to
accept.
    ‘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