He seemed to be talking about some kind of family holiday. Martin, the family man, with the boys, the baby, the loving rigmarole of domestic life. I had to smile. So transparent, this fresh pitch for sympathy. I could just about take the version of him put about in the male glossies (the tennis, the pool, the darts) but the Dad thing had never come alive as a drama for him – not as domestic comedy, nor as mid-life tragedy. It remained dead on the page, even when he shamelessly flashed an anecdotal family photo album as he was doing now. Please, Martin, I murmured. Give us a break.
A woman in her twenties, of the type often found at festivals (has read all the right contemporary novels, is working on something right now but she can’t tell you about it) half-turned to me with undisguised irritation before turning back to listen, lips slightly parted, eyes shining. As she crossed her legs, revealing the elegant, intelligent limbs in an unfeasibly short skirt (this was a literary festival, for Christ’s sake), it occurred to me, with sickening clarity, that she was participating in this event with an enthusiasm that was more erotic than intellectual. There were other women, I now saw – young, attractive, apparently normal – who were looking at their hero with the same rapt, yearning, opened-out expression.
I shouldn’t have been surprised – at the launch of one of the classier novelists, you will find more beautiful women than at a fashion show – yet I was. This was a man who, although he had acquired a reputation as something of a rabbit in the past – having his way with an entire generation of dark-eyed, talented media beauties as if he were representing a vast army of his male peers (which in a way he was) – was now post-first marriage, post-dental rethink, post-mid-life collapse, post-virtually everything that was youthful and dynamic. He seemed to have come to terms with his age: he had talked about retiring from writing, causing a spasm of joy in the hearts of the rest of us; he had taken to referring, in an almost avuncular way, to the ‘young guys’ moving up to take his place. He was showing signs of acting his age, but the junior, female division of his army of fans still behaved as if he were still there, rooting and rutting among the female intelligentsia. Who knows? Maybe (this was a thought that made me swear out loud, causing another twitch of distracted irritation from the woman in front of me) he was.
He’s a good reader. That lazy, corrupted voice, that has had just too much of everything, ambled its way into a short story. Within a few paragraphs, it was clear that this was a most unMartinian piece – no tough-guy side-of-the-mouth narration, no sleeve-tucking, look-at-me-Mom narrative tricks, not even any swearing.
Something else strange: Martin had joined the memoir gang, the novelists who have lost their confidence in fiction and who now reach into the murk of their own tawdry pasts in order to give their work the fake prurient charge of a True Confessions shocker. Traditionally, wives, lovers, friends and children have been ruthlessly served up in fiction – ‘discretion is not, unfortunately, for novelists,’ as Roth says – but they have usually at least been transformed a bit, cooked by the process of fictionalization so that they are not entirely recognizable. Now they came at us, raw, with novelists managing to have it both ways, conveying the tang of reality while reserving for themselves the right to change a few facts, traduce the occasional character for the sake of their art.
Yet, in spite of myself, I was soon absorbed in the story, forgetting the other novelists, the audience, even the girl with the legs, allowing the rhythm of the words to draw me into its imaginative universe of holidays, kids squabbling in the back of the car, Dad wearily tolerant, sweet, wise words spoken by small mouths, turning dark in its final passage, the events casting a shadow forward to less sunny days. It was a small story but it had a touch of the universal to it.
Applause. That familiar, awkward, social smile from the author. He sat down to submit himself to the usual dreary questions from Tony Watson but, after that story, his heart wasn’t in explanation of writing methods. Nor was the audience listening; the power of the story we had just heard was still resonating in our brains. It was then that, with a lurch of the stomach, I realized what had happened.
Just when it seemed that he was caught, that his limitations were at last about to be revealed, he had jumped free once again, just as he had done so many times over the past quarter of a century. He had become a chronicler of the human heart.
Fuck. Fucking Martin had done it again.
* * *
Affirmation
Today I am a sailor crossing the mighty swell of an ocean. My guide? The stars.
* * *
14
There was little noise beyond a respectful, church-like buzz as the audience made its way out of the hall. They had liked him. They had been impressed. They had responded to the sheer humanity of the man. In a few minutes’ time, after the spell had worn off, they would become engaged in eager discussion with fellow admirers of the small man as to what this new direction in his career meant.
I was not immediately inclined to hurry back to the village pub to deconstruct with my student the cultural significance of Martin’s discovery that he had a heart. I wandered the streets of Gloucester, past knots of festival visitors, jostled by people emerging from pubs at closing time. I felt unusually disconsolate. Although writers like to believe that we are united in a brotherhood of creative toil, there are moments of vulnerability when the triumph of a contemporary can be hard to endure. Normally, the brief spasm of pain occurs privately, while reading a review or even, with a growing sense of admiring despair, the book itself, but tonight’s victory had been achieved in a public context, to laughter and applause, before the moist adoration of girls in unfeasibly short skirts. The humiliation of the rest of us felt almost personal.
Martin, the good father. I had seen it all now. In past interviews, he had identified with such icy precision the domestic failings of the creative artist that it had been easy to visualize him at home as a distracted, tetchy figure, a short-fused domestic bully (I’m a writer, for Christ’s sake, he would scream at wife or children), a snarling family tyrant who had clung obstinately to scruffy bachelor habits, smoking roll-ups in the nursery, leaving skid-marks on the bath-towels, destroying carefully planned dinner parties with his leery boredom, preferring to play snooker with Will or Julian or some Keith Talent type in a smoky dive in Notting Hill rather than kick a ball about in Dogshit Park with the kids. Yet here he was, having it all, doing it all, triumphant after another surprise flanking movement, battered by separation and decay, the doting dad.
So smooth, so tanned, so fucking happy. At some time after the pubs had closed, I found myself sitting on a park bench somewhere in the centre of the town, the ghostly shadows of a playground before me, like dinosaurs frozen in an urban landscape. I saw myself, a pasty, middle-aged man, running to fat, a slumped, exhausted figure, hands sunk deep in the pockets of his raincoat. Then I thought of Martin, on a beach in some swanky East Coast resort in America, amusing and being amused by his children and their friends, giving to them and, in the gentle, sneaky manner of writers, taking from them.
In this area at least, we were different. I have chosen not to pilfer the family album for fraudulent authenticity, cheap smiles and easy tears. The emotional striptease, revealing the novelist in all his touching bony nakedness, his pale, abnormally sensitive skin flayed by experience, will never be part of my work. It is a cheat, a short cut to the reader’s heart, which owes more to a magazine agony column than to the art of fiction. Frankly, I was surprised that Martin could stoop that low.
Then again, precisely what kind of material would have been available to me? The beach scenes of my memory were not sun-dappled and full of infant laughter and those odd, yet strangely perceptive things that kids say. They were damp, grey, regretful and oddly silent.
I thought of the holidays spent every year camping on the north coast of Cornwall since Douglas had been two, a time caught for me in the silver-framed photograph on Marigold’s dressing-table showing an English beach scene, low tide,
the sea a dark line on the horizon, a windblown family of three apparently oblivious to all but themselves. Marigold and I sat in front of a rock, me skinny with an absurd haircut, she an almost unrecognizably plump and motherly figure. I was smiling, she had her arms outstretched towards the small, spindly figure of our son, running towards her, straight-limbed, his silken hair streaming behind him, his eyes closed, his mouth open in what seemed to be a cry of joy and belonging.
At first we had all been in one tent, but the sea air seemed to carry an aphrodisiac quality for both Marigold and for me and restrained, secretive love-making had never been to our taste. When Dougie was seven, we bought him a small tent of his own. The treat of independence quickly wore off yet, with a determination to this day I find slightly shocking, he was sent to bed early every evening – it’s grown-up time now, Dougie – so that his parents could grapple angrily in the darkness like animals, wild and free, mating in the savannah.
It was at about that time that Dougie lost his taste for the company of his peers, drifting away from the groups of other children on the beach to his parents who would play with him in a dutiful, quality-time fashion. The other children seemed to sense that he was different from them in some mysterious but not terribly interesting way. On occasions, I noticed other larger families, real families, noisy groups with Gran and Grandpa and a pram and a picnic basket, people who had grasped the concept of family and holidays, darting glances at our self-contained little group of three, as if they knew that we were frauds, imposters in the land of normal mums and dads and kids.
Even before Dougie became Doug, that open smile caught in the photograph had faltered, faded and finally disappeared. On the long drive down to the west coast, he would be silent on the back seat, either staring out of the window or playing listlessly with the computer game of the moment. Sometimes, when I looked in the rear-view mirror, I would find myself staring into the clear, unhappy eyes of my son, as if it had finally dawned on him that he had drawn a duff card in life’s lottery, that his family was not as others were, that each of the three of us was as lost and lonely as the others.
There were voices behind me, a man and a woman, loud and cheerful and I looked up from my bench to see a couple, arms wrapped around each other, approaching. Seeing me, they stopped chatting and seemed to hurry on as if I had reminded them of something they would prefer right now not to know about. I stood up and walked slowly to where I had left my car.
It was about half past twelve by the time I reached the hotel but, in the half-lit bar, two men and woman were sitting like sculptures moulded to their stools. They glanced at me as I entered, stared at me for a moment before resuming their conversation in low, bored voices.
I needed to talk, too. The intimacy and emotional charge of Martin’s story, then remembering Cornwall and the chill, damp nights when my wife and I had fucked like strangers, as if we were fucking for our very lives, had made me feel restless. Unlocking my room, I sat on the double bed which occupied most of the room and, after a moment’s hesitation, picked up the telephone and dialled home. To my surprise, Marigold answered. As soon as I heard her voice, I knew that calling at this hour had been a mistake.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘I just rang to see how everything was.’
‘Now? Have you any idea what time it is?’
‘Sorry.’
There was a pause, and, as I imagined my wife arranging herself in bed, turning over, pulling the duvet over a naked shoulder, I felt a pang of nostalgic lust. ‘What’s the problem, Gregory?’
‘Problem?’ I sighed. There were times when the mere sound of my wife’s voice, with its distant echo of disappointment and impatience, deflated me. ‘No particular problem. I was just thinking of Cornwall.’
‘Cornwall?’
‘The tent. You and me. Those nights.’ I closed my eyes and there before me was my young wife, crouching over me, like some bird of prey on its victim. For her, I had ceased to be me on those occasions, so caught up was she in her own erotic project. I was not Gregory, not her husband, but just a man, the man, Man. Her need was so awesome that when she made love, riding me, grinding me downwards so that my back pressed against the hard earth, it was as if she were trying to expunge something, to destroy it for ever. Pah! Agh! She came with an urgency which must have been heard across the campsite. Or maybe, it occurred to me now, it was Puh! Ugh! – there was a sort of loathing, disgust even, in that moment of final abandon.
‘It made me sad,’ I said.
Marigold yawned. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
‘Are you alone?’
She laughed. ‘Yes. Unfortunately.’
‘There’s no need to be gratuitously unkind.’
‘Don’t ask, then. Gregory, I’m tired. Was there anything else?’
‘How’s Doug?’
‘Out.’
‘I’m worried about him. He seems so alienated. Lost.’
‘I’ve told you.’ Another yawn, or maybe a sigh. ‘You should talk to him.’
Lately, it had been easier to communicate with Marigold over the telephone than in person, when the sight of me seemed to irritate her inordinately – as disembodied voices down a wire, we became oddly more ourselves – but not tonight.
‘Have you been drinking, Gregory?’
‘No. I went to listen to Martin.’
‘Martin who?’
‘Doesn’t matter. I’m sorry I woke you.’
I hung up. Then I stood, heeled off my shoes and walked in my socks to the door, pocketing my keys as I went. I padded down the corridor and knocked on Peter Gibson’s door. Hearing from within a sort of distracted grunt, I entered.
He was writing. In the far corner of the room, he sat, crouched over a pad, illuminated by a single light, a lamp on the desk, wearing a baggy, faded T-shirt and boxer shorts. To judge by the heavy, foetid atmosphere in the room and the unmade bed, he had not been out all day.
After a few seconds, he turned and smiled blearily as if, far from there being anything unusual in this visit from his tutor in the dead of night, he had been expecting it.
‘Still at it?’ I stood uneasily in the middle of the room.
Peter ran a hand through his lank, dark hair. Even against the light, there was a glitter to his eyes, an animation which seemed new. ‘Yeah,’ he said finally. ‘How was it?’
‘It was all right. Did the interview. The guy’s a fraud but an amusing one.’ Remembering McWilliam and his wrecked bed, I glanced at dishevelled blankets on Peter’s bed. ‘You had a kip then.’
‘Yeah. Slept a bit this afternoon.’
‘Sensible. Very few decent novelists can work in the afternoon. That’s why they all have affairs. Fills up those empty hours before the evening shift.’
‘Right.’ He smiled.
I gazed at the figure bathed in light in the corner of the room, the long hair falling forward, the pale neck and painfully bony shoulder-blade. As if in a dream, I moved across the room. Standing behind Peter’s chair, I laid a hand on the bare flesh of Peter’s shoulder. ‘Then I saw Martin,’ I said as casually as I could manage.
‘Yeah? What was he like?’
‘Fucking brilliant.’
‘Bad luck.’
We both laughed. I strengthened my grip on his shoulder. Peter turned and, with a moan that banished in a trice what was left of ambiguity, threw an arm around my waist and buried his face in my stomach. I hesitated, shocked, and lifted my right hand to disengage, to push the boy away. But when it fell, it landed gently on the scruff of his neck. I tightened my grip on his hair, turned his head upwards and towards me and, with a deep groan that seemed to come from someone else altogether, I kissed him.
* * *
Twenty-Five Great Authors Who Lost a Parent in the First Ten Years of Their Lives
Charles Baudelaire
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
George Byron
Albert Camus
Elias Canetti
&n
bsp; Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Joseph Conrad
René Descartes
John Donne
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Joseph Heller
John Keats
Somerset Maugham
Friedrich Nietzche
Sylvia Plath
Edgar Allan Poe
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Jean-Paul Sartre
Henri Stendhal
August Strindberg
Jonathan Swift
William Thackeray
Leo Tolstoy
William Wordsworth
* * *
15
Whether erotic contentment stimulates or deters the creative impulse is, I discovered while researching the ‘Love and Work’ chapter for Literary Lists, a matter of some dispute among the great writers. On the one hand there is Browning, who wrote precisely one poem during the first three years of marriage to Elizabeth Barrett; on the other, George Eliot who was only able to write fiction when she found contentment with George Lewes. Balzac permitted himself sex but not ejaculation (‘I lost a book this morning,’ he wailed to his friend Latouche after a moment of carelessness) while Larkin, in a letter to J. B. Sutton, confessed that ‘this letting-in of a second person spells death to perception and the desire to express’, recommending the contemplation of ‘glittering loneliness’ for the writer. As Kipling has it, ‘Few lips would be moved to song if they would find a sufficiency of kissing.’
Kill Your Darlings Page 12
