Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074)

by Lain, Douglas

  Disappointed to discover the shortbread biscuits were gone, he dipped dry bourbons into his milk and then moved the whole operation to the study where they kept another radio. This slightly larger wooden box had a flip top glass station indicator that Christopher could operate with ease, but when he tuned in his favorite station he found the 1910 Fruitgum Company still singing their mindless pop hit, or singing it all over again.

  “The name of the game is Simple Simon Says, and I’d like for you to play it too,” Mark Gutkowski, the lead singer of Fruitgum, explained to Chris. Then, halfway through, the needle was lifted from the groove and another record placed on the radio station’s turntable. Françoise Hardy’s “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” filled the gap left by the interruption, and Christopher decided he had tuned in the wrong station.

  It was three in the morning and Christopher sat in his study listening to a young woman singing light pop in French. He opened the cardboard box and took each item out and placed it on the kitchen table. He put the Merrythought cat down first, then the broken Piglet doll, then the jar of mud, the orange poster, a copy of Bonjour Tristesse, a Munchies wrapper, and now this letter from a boy named Gerrard Hand. Sitting in the plush brown leather chair in his study and looking it over Christopher felt small; he felt like a child. He tried to find something else on the radio, but there was nothing for him. There was no Beethoven, no Bach. Nothing to be found either up or down the dial.

  Christopher no longer wanted to sleep. He refused to give in to sleep. Instead he returned to the kitchen and made himself a cup of black tea and ate another stale bourbon biscuit. He parked himself at the kitchen table and looked at each item again. He wondered if the Munchies wrapper really belonged with the other items, but couldn’t bring himself to finally throw it away.

  Since he wasn’t going to sleep Chris went over the books from the bookstore. And he decided he should stop carrying secondhand books. That was the economically sound decision. Customers who wanted secondhand books weren’t readers in any case, they were collectors, and as such were an entirely different breed from his usual patrons. All that concerned buyers of secondhand books was the price. It took too much energy out of him and ultimately wasn’t worth the effort to close the sale.

  He’d had to deal with the problem that morning. An old man had wanted Christopher to knock a full pound off the price of six books, and the man’s face had turned red when Christopher refused. He wouldn’t lower and the man made as if to walk out of the shop, but he’d turned back.

  Christopher had followed the man out, patted him on the back, and wished him well. He’d opened the door for the collector, and that was when he’d spotted the morning’s mail. The letter had been sitting on the mat right inside the entrance.

  It started out in English but drifted into French as it went along. It began as an invitation and ended up a paranoid accusation.

  Christopher had received scores of fan letters since he’d opened the bookshop. Six-year-olds wrote him to ask about his bear. Adults who’d read his father’s books when they were young wrote to ask the same questions. Everyone wanted pretty much the same thing, and Christopher couldn’t give any answers. He didn’t know how to find the Hundred Acre Wood, and he didn’t know where childhood went to over the years, or why it was so difficult to feel real joy. He threw almost all of these letters away because they weren’t for him at all, but were really addressed to a boy Christopher’s father had made up.

  His father had written Christopher to serve as a comic foil for animal characters that were defined by their faults. He played straight man to an empty-headed bear, a pessimistic donkey, a self-aggrandizing rabbit, but as a foil Christopher always shared commonalities with the characters he played against.

  Christopher Robin the character was a great success, but the real Christopher was not. It wasn’t so much that Chris had disappointed or failed to live up to expectations, but his existence undermined the world his father had built around himself, the artificial world of his reputation and his stories. As a reminder of A. A. Milne’s own lost youth and worse, a reminder of the unpredictable and unknowable outside world that the older Milne had worked so hard to avoid, Christopher was an embarrassment.

  “Despite everything,” the letter writer had dared to assert, “you miss your father. You won’t find him in Dartmouth, and there is nothing left of him on the farm.”

  Christopher returned to bed, lay down again, and when he shut his eyes his mind conjured up Heffalumps. His wife and son breathed deeply and peacefully, but he was kept from sleep by Technicolor images: pink and purple elephants, cartoons from the Hollywood version of his father’s books. Chris couldn’t keep the Heffalumps away; he couldn’t stop thinking or dreaming of Woozles.

  “If you want to escape him you’ll have to find him again. You’ll need to find something of what he made for you, what he made of you,” the letter writer had written in French.

  “The bear is waiting for you.”

  * * *

  Daniel especially loved the sailboats, loved to say the word sailboat whether or not there were any there at all, though there usually were a few. From the bookstore window Daniel and Christopher would count the sails.

  “Sailboat, sailboat, sailboat.”

  It was May 3, 1968, and Chris was scheduled to fly to Paris. He woke Daniel early, helped the boy dress in his hiking shorts, red-and-black flannel shirt, and boots. Daniel wore the same basic outfit every day, he needed these sorts of consistencies and routines, and for Christopher it was an easy thing to accommodate him, second nature.

  The bookstore could open late as business was unseasonably slow. They left Abby to sleep in, opened the front door, and stepped onto the boardwalk. Dartmouth was as pleasant a place to walk as Cotchford Farm ever was. They breathed in the moist air, inhaled the smell of ocean, and looked out at the green hills on the other side of the River Dart. Chris felt good listening to the water, smelling the green hills, and even though Daniel gave no indication of any change, Chris felt sure that he too was moved. Chris pointed to houses that had been built in the Middle Ages and tried to teach him the words wattle and daub. When Daniel spotted a sailboat, Chris reminded him that the port had once been a favorite for pirates and other notorious seamen.

  Every couple of yards Daniel stopped to fetch a stone and then, with great effort, send it flying over the boardwalk and into the river.

  “This is the story about the Woodentops,” Daniel said. The Woodentops were from the television.

  “Can you see Dartmouth Castle?” Chris asked. He pointed it out to Daniel; it sat across the river to the south.

  “There was Mama Woodentop and the baby, and Daddy Woodentop, and Willie.”

  Daniel’s symptomatic way of talking, his delayed echolalia, was not usually communicative, but it could be. Sometimes Daniel would offer up a quote from the Roundabout as a comment on what was going on around them, or he would use these involuntary utterances to call attention to himself. Chris usually continued on as though Daniel hadn’t spoken at all, but the meaning of what he was saying was obvious and it almost felt as though they were having a conversation.

  “I’m leaving Dartmouth today. You and your mum will run the shop for me while I’m in Paris. Do you remember? I told you about Paris? I’m going to fly there on a jet plane.”

  Daniel picked up another rock and dropped it over the side.

  “This is the story about the Woodentops,” Daniel said again. “There was Mommy Woodentop and the baby, and last of all the very biggest spotty dog you ever did see.” Daniel stopped at the water’s edge, leaned down to put his fingers in the water, lay down on the wooden slats, and dangled his arms over the side. Splashing around he looked like nothing other than a normal seven-year old, and Chris felt guilty for the warm feeling that surged in his chest. Why should he love the boy more when he looked normal?

  Chris lay down next to his son, dangled his own arms off the side in the same way, let his fingers skirt across the t
op of the water, and felt the flow.

  “I won’t be gone for too long, maybe a week. Your mother will take care of you.”

  “Every government has its Secret Service branch,” Daniel said again. “America, CIA; France, Deuxième Bureau; England, MI5.”

  “Don’t worry. Your mum has it all down and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “This is the story of the Woodentops,” Daniel said.

  “That’s right.”

  The river was bigger, more permanent than they were, and indifferent to them and their condition. Chris felt the cool water of the Dart, thought about how many had dipped their hands in the same water, about Chaucer’s shipman and the years of piracy, the years of civil war. He glanced across the water and stared at the other bank, at the brown dirt and tall grass on the other side.

  “Nothing can ever, could ever, change,” Chris said. Then he stood up, abruptly displeased with himself, with the situation.

  “This is the story of the Woodentops. The CIA, Deuxième Bureau, and MI5.”

  “I’ll be just a little while. You’ll be fine. You’ll be fine,” Chris said. “I’ll be back soon, son.”

  * * *

  Christopher stirred his Coca-Cola with the thin green straw the stewardess had given him. With his seat in an upright position and his tray down he was aware of how small the space he occupied actually was, and how impossible it was.

  He stirred the cola with the straw but this had no effect. The liquid content of his plastic cup was fixed, perfectly balanced, homeostatic. Sunlight streamed in through the Plexiglas pane in the porthole. The sunlight made his beverage glow orange and brown. Moving the straw through the liquid, he had a sense that the moment was open, that it was easy to push against it, but when he considered where he was, when he thought of the empty space, the air outside, the impossibility of flight, he realized that the ease he felt was illusory.

  He’d told Abby that there was a mystery he was trying to solve. The letter writer from Paris had known details from Chris’s life that nobody should or could have known. For instance, the letter had described what had happened when Christopher had been ordered to climb a water tower and retrieve the corpse of a gunner tangled in the metal access ladder. The body had grown stiff, the man’s twisted legs caught between the rungs and, of course, trying to move him ended up compromising the body’s physical integrity. His chest split open and Chris was confronted with the fluids any person’s body contains along with the sort of rotten liquid that could only obtain after death. Chris had been overwhelmed by the stench, and by the texture of the man’s cold limbs.

  Abby didn’t understand why Chris would be interested in French politics or just what the students at the Sorbonne were on about. Why would he mix himself up in all of that? But Chris told her that the letter writer had known how it felt to survive the war. The guilt involved and the godlessness that lurked behind survival. The war was a random and heartless event and while there had been reasons for it, good reasons, none of them could obscure the fact that every specific act of violence, every death, was without purpose or meaning.

  Christopher admitted the answer to the question of how some French student radical might have come across obscure biographical details was not what he wanted. That wasn’t why he was going. He’d struggled to find his place in the war and before that, when he’d gone to university, he’d also been out of place whereas his father had never had such difficulties.

  When Alan had been a child of eighteen his friend, the editor of The Elizabethan, suggested that he should like to edit the journal Granta out of Cambridge and Alan had agreed. He’d replied that he would, in fact, edit Granta. This is how he left Westminster and how he came to be a writer of some importance. He had simply made a decision.

  Christopher, on the other hand, was too aware of all the impossibilities. For instance, the porthole in the airplane gave just one view of a world that could never be seen all at once and Christopher had never found a way to decide.

  After receiving the French fan letter, after the exhortation to join in, Abby had been curious about what was happening in Paris. She’d searched out the story, such as it was, from copies of the International Herald Tribune and the Times, both of which were available at the Devon grocery. She’d told him about the swimming pool disruption, about how students at Nanterre and not in Paris were causing trouble. They were young men who had been told they had nowhere fixed to go to, there was very little room for them in the new French economy.

  “But they’ve acted,” Chris said. “They’ve made a decision.”

  17

  At the Sorbonne Christopher found a pleasant café with sidewalk tables and red-white-and-blue-striped umbrellas right across the street from the exasperated students who were organizing a situation. On May 2 Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been suspended from Nanterre in a disciplinary hearing for the actions of March 22 and on that same day the student union hall was burned down. Dean Grappin had appeared on television to announce that he was shutting down the campus; the students’ response was transpiring as Christopher waited for his drink. Cohn-Bendit, for example, arrived with his megaphone right at precisely the same time as Christopher’s mimosa, and Chris found it difficult to figure out how many francs he owed while trying to follow what Cohn-Bendit was saying. Chris’s French was pretty rusty, and Cohn-Bendit’s words were somewhat distorted.

  Chris drank his breakfast cocktail and watched. His stomach was empty and he thought of ordering some tea to offset the effect of the champagne, but when the waiter came around again he settled for a small cup of thick coffee. Chris glanced up at the Sorbonne tower, at the dome, and then down again at the students on the street. The baroque backdrop for the struggle, the Sorbonne with its columns and ornamental statues, the majesty of the institution they were opposing, this seemed to work to the students’ advantage. After all, rebellions and strikes had occurred many, many times since the first revolution. Why not again? Somehow the Sorbonne made its history visible, the past visible right on the surface of the marble façade, and this made change seem possible.

  The students all looked quite smart. The boys had short hair and wore sports jackets and ties while the girls had long hair and wore skirts and dresses. Chris wondered which of them was Gerrard Hand. He wondered what was keeping him.

  The table Christopher was sitting at was grooved. There were pictures of animals—of snakes and ducks and lizards and owls—engraved into the uneven surface of the marble, and someone had left a copy of a pamphlet entitled “On the Poverty of Student Life” on the chair next to his. Chris let his coffee grow cold as he worked out the French text. “To transform the world and to change the structure of life are one and the same thing for the proletariat. For the proletariat revolt is a festival or it is nothing.”

  Chris wasn’t sure if he was reading it correctly. He didn’t see a clear connection between the first and second sentences. He took the letter Gerrard had written from the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and separated out the altered newspaper advertisement he’d been sent from the letter itself.

  Disney and Slesinger had managed to make his father’s books into cartoon movies in America and one of the advertisements for these, an advertisement for the first film entitled Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, featured Pooh standing in front of a full-length mirror with his stubby arms over his eyes. Gerrard had rubbed out the original text below the drawing and replaced them with French.

  “All that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” In this context the bear could be seen to be covering his eyes because he did not want to see his reflection.

  Another student now had the bullhorn. She was shouting something about Nanterre, but to Chris it seemed that they were protesting everything. They had signs against racial discrimination, against the Vietnam War, against work, against the “education industry.” Somebody had written, in English, that the workers should put their “bodies on the gears and on the wheels, and make it stop.�
�� The students protested everything, wanted everything. One of the students held a sign that read, “It is forbidden to forbid.”

  Was the message meant to be strident or absurd? He remembered a line, a joke, from one of his father’s books: “Did you ever stop to think and forget to start again?” He was talking to nobody but himself. “This is not a pipe.” Chris spoke the words aloud into the air. It was something he’d seen on a painting by a Belgian named Magritte, a commercial artist who, after designing wallpaper, found his way into the museums by using slick realism to create surreal questions in paintings. Chris had seen the picture of a pipe in the Arts section of the Times. The painting of a pipe that was not a pipe was titled “The Treachery of Images.”

  The painting had not impressed Chris, but he saw that it was clever. The only reason he remembered it was because he’d happened to read the accompanying article that claimed, cleverly or not, that the man responsible, René Magritte, was a surrealist, and that surrealism was a reaction to the horrors of war, specifically a reaction to the horror of the Great War. It was the machine gun and, in the case of Magritte, the Rape of Belgium that caused the pipe to abandon its image and the image to abandon its pipe. The world could no longer be painted; the pipe was not a pipe. After the Great War there had been nothing left in Europe but this feeling of being disconnected, and this is what Magritte hoped to transfer onto his canvases, like burning tubas or giant green apples.

  “This is not a pipe.” Chris said it again.

  On the other side of Boulevard Saint-Michel the police arrived in their kepis. They marched into the square and Chris nearly spat. It was unreal. The police tossed tear gas grenades into the crowd. Rather than disperse the students the attack caused their numbers to swell. Where were these boys and girls coming from? And more to the point, why? Modern Europe was a candy-coated pill and all they had to do was swallow it. Why all this? It made no sense. There had been real problems maybe, the conflict in French Algeria had taken a toll on French confidence for instance, but these students would have been mere children when that conflict ended. Yes, the American adventure in Vietnam was surely terrible, but that didn’t seem reason enough. And yet it was happening, the police were bloodying the lot of them, and they weren’t budging.