After that night Trapnel disappeared. His work for Fission continued. The stooges came into play, delivering reviews or other pieces, collecting books and cheques, bringing suggestions for further items. Trapnel himself was no longer available. According to Bagshaw, he even ceased to pursue the question of further payment to assist the completion of Profiles in String. Use of surrogates did not prevent complicated negotiations taking place in relation to Fission contributions. For example, Trapnel suggested withdrawing what he had written about Sweetskin, and replacing the review with a parody. Bagshaw liked the idea. It was better for his own relations with Quiggin that Kydd’s novel should not be torn to shreds; better, if it came to that, from my own standpoint too. Alaric Kydd himself might not be altogether pleased to be treated in this fashion, but, a prosecution now pending, he had other things to think about. In any case Sweetskin would enjoy more space than in a notice of normal length. Trapnel’s lightness of touch in showing up Kydd’s weak points as a novelist indicated that the hysterical feelings displayed at The Hero had calmed down; at least infatuation with Pamela had left his talent unimpaired. Possibly this hopeless passion had already been apportioned to the extensive storehouse of forgotten Trapnel fantasies.
Sweetskin was not the only book to cause Quiggin & Craggs worry. Bagshaw reported a serious row blowing up about Sad Majors. Here the complexities of politics, rather than those of sex, impinged on purely commercial considerations. Bagshaw was very much at home in this atmosphere. He talked a lot about the Odo Stevens manuscript, which he had been allowed to read, and described as ‘full of meat’. However, although written in a lively manner, some of the material dealing with the Communist guerillas with whom Stevens had been in contact was at least as outspoken in its field as Kydd on the subject of sex.
‘It appears a British officer operating with a rival Resistance group got rather mysteriously liquidated. Accidents will happen even with the best-regulated secret police. Of course a lot of Royalists were shot, and quite a fair number of people who weren’t exactly Royalists, not to mention a crowd of heretical Communists too, the whole party ending, as we all know, in wholesale arrests and deportations. This is, of course, rather awkward for a firm of progressive tone. JG thinks it can be hoovered over satisfactorily. He wants to do the book, because it will sell, but Howard’s against. He saw at once there’d be a lot of trouble, if the material appeared in its present form.’
‘What will happen?’
‘Gypsy won’t hear of it.’
‘What’s Gypsy got to do with it?’
‘It’s her affair, isn’t it, if what Stevens has said is damaging to the Party? She’s bloody well consulted, apart from anything else, because Howard’s afraid of her — actually physically afraid. He knows about one or two things Gypsy’s arranged in her day. So do I. I don’t blame him.’
‘Have they turned the book down?’
‘They’re arguing it out.’
The weather was still unthawed when, a month or two later, I dined with Roddy Cutts at the House of Commons. Spring should have been on the way by then, but there was no sign. Our respective wives were both to give birth any day now. Roddy had suggested having a night out together to relieve the strain. A night out with Roddy carried no implications of outrageous dissipation. We talked most of the time about family affairs. He had seen Hugo Tolland the day before, who had been staying at Thrubworth, bringing back an account of how Siegfried, the German POW, was every day growing in local stature.
‘Siegfried gives regular conjuring displays now in the village hall. There’s talk of his getting engaged to one of Skerrett’s granddaughters. He’ll be nursing the constituency before we know where we are. Well, I suppose it’s about time to be getting along. I’ll just see how the debate’s going before we make for home.’
Roddy Cutts’s large handsome face always became drawn with anxiety when, at the close of any party at which he had been host, he glanced at the bill. This time the look indicated the worst; that he was ruined; parliamentary career at an end; he would have to sell up; probably emigrate. An extravagant charge would certainly have been out of place. Whatever the shock, Roddy made no comment. He dejectedly searched through pocket after pocket in apparently vain attempts to find a sum adequate to meet so severe a demand on a man’s resources. The second round through, one of the waistcoat pockets yielded a five-pound note. He smoothed out its paper on the table.
‘Give my love to Isobel, and hopes that all will be well.’
‘And mine to Susie.’
The change arrived. Roddy sorted it lethargically, at the same time giving the impression that the levy might have been less disastrous than at first feared. His manner of picking up coins and examining them used to irritate our brother-in-law George Tolland. We rose from the table, exchanging the claustrophobic pressures of the hall, where the meal had been eaten, for a no less viscous density of parliamentary smoking-rooms and lobbies, suffocating, like all such precincts, with the omnipresent and congealed essence of public contentions and private egotisms; breath of life to their frequenters. Roddy’s personality always took on a new dimension within these walls.
‘If you’ll wait for a minute in the central lobby, I’ll just hear how National Assistance Payments are going.’
Callot-like figures pervaded labyrinthine corridors. Cavernous alcoves were littered with paraphernalia of scaffolding and ropes, Piranesian frameworks hinting of torture and execution, but devised only to repair bomb damage to structure and interior ornament. Roddy reappeared.
‘Come along.’
We crossed the top of the flight of steps leading down into St Stephen’s Hall, the stairs seeming to offer a kind of emergency exit from contemporary affairs into a mysterious submerged world of mediaeval shadows, tempting to explore if one were alone, in spite of icy draughts blowing up from these spectral depths. Suddenly, from the opposite direction to which we were walking, Widmerpool appeared. He was pacing forward slowly, deliberately, solemnly, swinging his arms in a regular motion from the body, as if carefully balancing himself while he trod a restricted bee-line from one point to another. At first he was too deep in thought to notice our advance towards him. Roddy shouted a greeting.
‘Widmerpool, just the man I’m looking for.’
He could never resist accosting anyone he knew, and buttonholing them. Now he began a long dissertation about ‘pairing’. Surprised out of his own meditations, Widmerpool seemed at first only aware that he was being addressed by a fellow MP. A second later he grasped the linked identities of Roddy and myself, our relationship, the fact that were brothers-in-law evidently striking him at once as a matter of significance to himself. He brushed aside whatever Roddy was talking about — conversation in any case designed to keep alive a contact with a member of the other side, rather than reach a conclusion — beginning to speak of another subject that seemed already on his mind, possibly the question he had been so deeply pondering.