I lay my head in the small of her back, feeling her cold sweat against my cheek. There seemed to be tears in my eyes.
‘Marigold,’ I whispered. ‘My Marigold.’
* * *
Top Five Literary Brothel-Creepers
1. Victor Hugo was such a legendary user of brothels that the day of his state funeral was, according to the Goncourt diaries, ‘celebrated by wholesale copulation, a priapic orgy, with all the prostitutes on holiday from their brothels, coupling with all and sundry on the lawns of the Champs-Elysées’. As a mark of respect to their greatest client, Paris prostitutes wore black crepe underwear.
2. Gustave Flaubert confessed to Hugo in 1853, ‘It is perhaps a perverse taste, but I like prostitution … a glance into its depths makes one giddy and teaches one all manner of things. It fills you with such sadness! And makes you dream so of love!’
3. Samuel Butler picked up a 21-year-old French whore, Lucie Dumas, at the Angel pub in Islington. For the next twenty years, he and his friend, the biographer Henry Festing Jones, visited her once a week (Butler on Wednesday afternoons, Festing Jones on Thursday afternoons), paying her £1 a visit, on the understanding that she gave up all other clients.
4. Theodore Dreiser sometimes took three whores in a day and still could not resist pawing women and brushing against them in crowded places.
5. Joseph Heller boasted: ‘Brothels are in my work and in my life as well.’
* * *
20
I was back on course. The printed-out manuscript for Literary Lists to which I added pages every day was growing and taking on the life of a real, to-be-published work beside my desk. My wife was spending more time away from the house than was strictly normal or healthy but would occasionally permit me a few moments of cool, unengaged conversation. I suggested that it might be a good moment to attempt to re-establish relations with local friends, fellow parents, with whom, perhaps as a result of our isolation from one another, we had lost contact, but somehow we seemed to have lost the facility for the informal neighbourly dinner party. There had been a time when I had worried that my only social contact was with other writers or literary journalists, that I was cutting myself off from the stuff of real life, but now I saw that any material to be gained from the anxious, ambitious lawyers, BBC producers and marketing types of Brandon Gardens and environs was of little interest to the writer of serious fiction. Who, seriously, would want to read about these people as they grew old, worried about their children, gained ulcers, had career crises and became ever more self-parodically dull and middle-aged?
On my daily walks these days, I headed away from the rackety front line, preferring the comfortable certainties to be found to the west. I took refuge in its rows of dignified semi-detached houses discreetly shaded by plane trees, its terraces of small shops, its ballet schools and estate cars and tennis clubs and piano practice after school, its precious Neighbourhood Watch schemes. There was crime here, but it was ordered and professional, committed by outsiders, qualitatively different from the east’s crime wave, which was a scummy stream of misbehaviour washing down every street, lapping at the doors, removing anything not chained or locked away. There, some low-grade crim might break into a house to discover, for no particular reason, that he was not just a burglar, but also a rapist, maybe even a murderer. Out west, a certain etiquette applied. Radios might be removed overnight but only from BMWs and in a carefully defined area; bespoke break-ins would occur where a single top-of-the-range item would be neatly extracted in a manner which made the victims feel perversely proud at the implied compliment to their good taste.
I needed rules, suburban order. My walks were brief, briskly taken escapes from a harsh working schedule, my deadline for The Book of Literary lists recently having taken on a new urgency. I attended to my family. I courted my wife and once even attempted, albeit half-heartedly, to revive our sexual relationship. I screened my calls.
For the first few days after Gloucester, Peter Gibson had been persistent, ringing five or six times every day, sometimes through the night, and leaving short messages on my office line. Not for the first time in my life, I was glad that, at Marigold’s insistence, the number to the family line, as she called it, was ex-directory.
At first, he was circumspect and succinct. His work was progressing well. He needed to discuss further matters raised at Gloucester. Would it be possible for me to return his short story Mise en Abme? Then, after the first few days, he simply asked me to call him. His voice, never exactly manly, seemed thinner and more defeated than I remembered. Occasionally piano music could be heard in the background, some abstract, modern thing that sounded like a depressive child let loose on a Steinway.
My wife, attuned to the language of the unanswered telephone call, was suspicious and made jaunty, barbed comments implying that, as had happened in the past, I was having difficulty in extricating myself from an affair. I ensured that, once when she paid one of her rare visits to my office, I played back Peter’s message. A student, I explained. He was having a creative crisis.
‘He sounds terrible,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t you call him?’
‘Nah. He’s a writer. He’s got to learn it goes with the territory. I’ll call him soon.’
She looked at me in a manner which suggested that she was not entirely taken in, but said nothing.
One day, I received a letter from him – or, rather, a one-line message, written in his neat, cramped hand on the back of a filing card.
‘“The trick is to love somebody. If you love one person, you see everyone differently.” James Baldwin.’
I added the quote to my database, made a note that I should attempt to find the source, and threw the card away.
The fact is, and was, that I was not James Baldwin, nor André Gide, nor E. M. Forster, nor Edmund White, nor even John Cheever. I was Gregory Keays, a straight and straightforward novelist. I had not suffered any significant sea-change in my sexual orientation. Reassured by Pia, I had returned to my daily life untroubled by memories of Peter or what had happened between us. I did not find myself gazing wistfully at the muscular bottoms of cyclists as they sped by in their lycra shorts. My nights were not disturbed by restless dreams of smooth-skinned boys or rough, priapic lorry-drivers. The incident, or series of incidents, that had occurred between us that night were more psychological than physiological, originating in an odd coincidence of one man’s vulnerability and another’s need for comfort. That was it. No regrets, but also no post-event analyses and, above all, no fumbling repeats.
If Peter had discovered what Baldwin had described as ‘the trick of love’, he was alone. It was harsh, but I had concluded that the best way to convey that reality was not to engage in stuttered explanation but to re-establish our teacher-pupil relationship by dint of a sensible cooling-off period. My first two lessons post-Gloucester I cancelled, claiming that I was ill. When I returned on the third week, Peter was not there.
It was almost five weeks after I had last seen him, when I received a brief message from him, delivered in a melodramatic whisper.
‘I’m finished.’
In my innocence, I assumed he was referring to his novel.
* * *
The Canon of Self-Slaughter: The Top Twenty Most
Celebrated Literary Suicides
John Berryman 1914–72
Jumped (height)
Thomas Chatterton 1752–70
Poisoning
Hart Crane 1899–1932
Drowning
Romain Gary 1914–87
Poisoning
Nikolai Gogol 1809–52
Starvation
Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
Shooting
Randall Jarrell 1914–65
Jumped (car)
Arthur Koestler 1905–83
Poisoning
Jerzy Kosinski 1933–91
Asphyxiation
Primo Levi 1919–87
Jumped (height)
Malcol
m Lowry 1909–57
Poisoning
Vladimir Mayakovsky 1893–1930
Shooting
Yukio Mishima 1925–63
Disembowelling
Cesare Pavese 1908–50
Poisoning
Sylvia Plath 1932–63
Gassing
Delmore Schwartz 1913–66
Poisoning
Anne Sexton 1928–74
Asphyxiation
Simone Weil 1909–43
Starvation
Virginia Woolf 1882–1941
Drowning
Stefan Zweig 1881–1942
Poisoning
* * *
21
There was nothing I could have done. I remain convinced of that.
Throughout the night of 27 November, the telephone rang again and again in my office. I had fallen asleep, the muffled tintinnabulation from behind the closed door becoming no more than a distant alarm bell in my dreams, when Marigold awoke me.
‘You’ve got to do something, Gregory,’ she said, sounding oddly wakeful. ‘Something’s going on.’
‘I’ll take the phone off the hook.’
‘It could be serious.’
‘It’s work. They’re calling my work number.’
Marigold gave a quiet, disbelieving laugh, the wife who knew too much, and at that moment the telephone rang again.
Grumbling, I got out of bed, put on my dressing-gown and went upstairs.
The green light on the answering machine revealed that there had been fifty-three messages over the previous two hours. I pressed ‘Play’.
‘Gregory.’ Peter’s voice sounded faint and despairing. A long silence followed during which I could hear his breathing. Then, ‘Please, Gregory.’
The next one was more or less the same. On the third, he was crying.
Shit. I thought for a moment, then dialled his number. He picked up, apparently before it had rung.
‘Peter, it’s Gregory.’
He snuffled hopelessly into the receiver.
‘You must stop doing this.’ I spoke as coolly as I could, although I found myself shaking. ‘I shall come round to your flat tomorrow and we shall discuss your work and your novel and agents who might be able to place it for you. I am of course concerned for you but I must ask you not to disrupt my private life in this way.’
‘Pri – private?’ He seemed to be having difficulty speaking.
I tried another approach. ‘This is what writers go through when they have finished a novel. Martin uses the phrase “scoured out”. He says one is so scoured out when emerging from a novel that one can hardly tie one’s shoelace. What this is telling me is that you are the true article – a novelist.’
‘You are so –’ There was a curious wheezing noise which might have been laughter or a sob, ‘– so full of shit.’
‘I realize that we have issues.’ I hesitated, choosing my words carefully. Not for the first time it occurred to me that, as a responsible tutor, I should refer Peter Gibson to the Institute’s pastoral care office, but that I was holding back, aware that my position would be seriously compromised should he reveal the events which had taken place in Gloucester. I had been given unofficial warnings in the past about the dangers of establishing intimate relations with any of my charges. Although even my worst enemy would have difficulty believing that I had seduced a male student, the fact that I had apparently ignored his later cry for help would not look good were anything to happen to him. ‘I shall visit you tomorrow and together we’ll resolve these problems, all right?’
He muttered something, querulous and unintelligible, about my being late, which I took to be a reference to my less than perfect time-keeping.
‘I won’t be late.’
There was a snuffling noise which might have been laughter or a sob.
‘I promise,’ I said in a tone of gentle finality, and hung up.
I deleted the messages on the answering machine and was about to unplug the telephone before I thought better of it. Whatever Peter’s problem, our conversation seemed to have calmed him down. I was sure that my promise to visit him the following day would preclude the need for further nuisance calls. As a tutor and friend, I had demonstrably behaved in as sympathetic and helpful a manner as could be expected, calming him and reassuring him in the small hours of the morning.
I returned to my bed.
‘The student,’ I said to my wife. ‘He seems to be having some sort of creative crack-up. I’ll go over tomorrow.’ Even to myself, my voice sounded odd and brittle.
In a gesture so uncharacteristic that it made me start, Marigold laid a hand on my arm. ‘You’re trembling,’ she said.
‘Winter.’
After a few minutes, I heard the rise and fall of her breathing. I lay awake, thinking of Peter, remembering our night, until the sparrows stirred and started singing in the tree outside our window. At last, I slept.
I was woken by the sound of the telephone beside the bed. I glanced at the alarm clock beside the bed. It was past eight. My wife, I could hear, was having a bath.
‘Gregory Keays.’ I tried to sound alert.
‘Gregory, it’s Mike Summers. Sorry to bother you so early but there might be a problem with one of your students – a boy called Gibson?’
I slumped down on the bed, as Summers, the Institute’s Student Counsellor, explained that he had been called at home by Serafina. She had been worried about Peter who had telephoned her that night. Was I aware of any problems in that area?
I told him that I had spoken to Peter during the night, that he seemed to be caught up in some sort of work crisis. I would go over to his flat as soon as I had finished breakfast.
As I say, there was nothing more that I could have done.
* * *
Top Five Literary Veterans
1. Lord Tennyson lost his virginity at forty-one.
2. Leo Tolstoy learnt to ride a bicycle at sixty-seven.
3. Theodore Fontaine wrote ten novels between the ages of seventy-six and eighty-four.
4. Thomas Hardy boasted of having sex at eighty-four.
5. Anthony Trollope wrote eight and half books between the ages of sixty-three and his death at sixty-seven.
* * *
22
Under normal circumstances, life is kept at a distance by the act of writing. The more you create an imaginative world, the more frivolous and irrelevant reality seems. So, over the years, the business of everyday existence for professional novelists is increasingly at one remove: what had been a fine, barely discernible spider’s web during the writing of Forever Young became more opaque and gauze-like during my comedic domestic phase with Mind the Gap and Adultery in Hampstead. By the time I was tussling with A/The/Until, Tell Me the Truth About Love, About Love, Cenotaph and Insignificance, a sheet (a blanket) surrounded my inner consciousness. Today, nothing in the daily newspapers truly engages me: war, famine, crime, rape, the abduction of children are little more a than busy backdrop to the enthralling deals and spats and ever-changing realignments of the literary world.
Under normal circumstances, this holding back from experience acts like an anaesthetic, dulling the pain of marital unhappiness, easing the guilt of inadequate parenthood, deleting all but the faintest shade of self-loathing that followed acts of infidelity or a visit to the Agency. I regarded incidents and feelings coolly, across a frontier, as if my real, physical life were just another narrative, to be shaped and cut, ordered and dramatized, edited and resolved at some later stage.
But these, I discovered, were not normal circumstances.
At first, the events following Peter Gibson’s suicide passed like the unedited rushes of a film in which I had played relatively minor part: the arrival, first of the police, then the ambulance, after I had discovered the body; the discussions and sorrowful announcements at the Institute, a couple of oddly barbed interviews with a policeman named Beckwith, the carefully composed note of condolence to Mr and Mrs Gibson. Throu
ghout it all, I was treated by my wife and my son with uncharacteristic gentleness and sympathy, as if somehow they sensed that what I was experiencing was more than the understandable guilt of a tutor whose most promising student had just taken his own life.
Yet I found sleep difficult, normal conversation impossible. I would walk for miles every day, my mind full of words and memories: that long, unblinking gaze when I turned to him during the first lesson; the little irritated frown of concentration that crossed his face when another pupil discussed his work, talking about his novel in the car back from Gloucester; his voice, his clear blue eyes, the hollow in his back. Even now, I feel sick to think of him.
So, during those unhappy days, when I was more exposed to public gaze than any writer likes to be, except around the time of publication, I took refuge in work. At first, I returned to Insignificance, hoping (it may sound cynical but such is the writerly soul) that the emotional turmoil of the past few days would jump-start the novel back into life, but every time I sat down to write, my thoughts turned back to Peter. The Book of Literary Lists, and its reduction of the writing life to facts, figures and charts, depressed me still further.
Kill Your Darlings Page 16
