I went to look at my sunflowers, growing steadily, sure that the sun would be there for them, fulfilling themselves in the proper way at the proper time. Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who’s kidding whom?
So what am I going to do? I asked Robin on the wall. Robins are very faithful creatures who mate with the same mate year by year. I love the brave red shield on their breast and the determined way they follow the spade in search of worms. There am I doing all the digging and there’s little Robin making off with the worm. Homo sapiens. Blind Nature.
I don’t feel wise. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
The facts of my case are not unusual:
1 I have fallen in love with a woman who is married.
2 She has fallen in love with me.
3 I am committed to someone else.
4 How shall I know whether Louise is what I must do or must avoid?
The church could tell me, my friends have tried to help me, I could take the stoic course and run from temptation or I could put up sail and tack into this gathering wind.
For the first time in my life, I want to do the right thing more than I want to get my own way. I suppose I owe that to Bathsheba …
I remember her visiting my house soon after she had returned from a six-week trip to South Africa. Before she had gone, I had given her an ultimatum: Him or me. Her eyes, which very often filled with tears of self-pity, had reproached me for yet another lover’s half-nelson. I forced her to it and of course she made the decision for him. All right. Six weeks. I felt like the girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who is given a cellar full of straw to weave into gold by the following morning. All I had ever got from Bathsheba were bales of straw but when she was with me I believed that they were promises carved in precious stone. So I had to face up to the waste and the mess and I worked hard to sweep the chaff away. Then she came in, unrepentant, her memory gone as ever, wondering why I hadn’t returned her trunk calls or written poste restante.
‘I meant what I said.’
She sat in silence for about fifteen minutes while I glued the legs back on a kitchen chair. Then she asked me if I was seeing anybody else. I said I was, briefly, vaguely, hopefully.
She nodded and turned to go. When she got to the door she said, ‘I intended to tell you before we left but I forgot.’
I looked at her, sudden and sharp. I hated that ‘we’.
‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Uriah got NSU from a woman he slept with in New York. He slept with her to punish me of course. But he didn’t tell me and the doctor thinks I have it too. I’ve been taking the antibiotics so it’s probably all right. That is, you’re probably all right. You ought to check though.’
I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face.
‘You shit.’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘You told me you weren’t having sex with him anymore.’
‘I thought it was unfair. I didn’t want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left.’
‘I suppose that’s why you’ve never bothered to tell him that he doesn’t know how to make you come.’
She didn’t answer. She was crying now. It was like blood in the water to me. I circled her.
‘How long is it you’ve been married? The perfect public marriage. Ten years, twelve? And you don’t ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he’ll find it distasteful. Let’s hear it for sexual confidence.’
‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing me away. ‘I have to go home.’
‘It must be seven o’clock. That’s your home-time, isn’t it? That’s why you used to leave the practice early so that you could get a quick fuck for an hour and a half and then smooth yourself down to say, “Hello, darling,” and cook dinner.’
‘You let me come,’ she said.
‘Yes, I did, when you were bleeding, when you were sick, again and again I made you come.’
‘I didn’t mean that. I meant we did it together. You wanted me there.’
‘I wanted you everywhere and the pathetic thing is I still do.’
She looked at me. ‘Drive me home, will you?’
Art and Lies
FROM A DISTANCE only the light is visible; a speeding gleaming horizontal angel, trumpet out on a hard bend. The note bells the beauty of the stretching train that pulls the light in a long gold thread. It catches in the wheels, it flashes on the doors that open and close, that open and close, in commuter rhythm.
On the overcoats, briefcases, brooches, the light snags in rough-cut stones that stay unpolished. The man is busy. He hasn’t time to see the light that burns his clothes and illuminates his face. The light pouring down his shoulders in biblical excess. His book is a plate of glass.
Art and Lies is a fragmented set of narratives. Three stories, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, but not the composer, not the painter, and somewhat the poet. Nobody finds love or comes near to doing so. Love is unreadable, untranslatable. Love as bafflement. Love as regret.
I don’t know why the last line is, ‘It was not too late.’ I don’t feel this book has hope in it.
I think I was lost when I was writing it and this was not a ball of string in the minotaur’s labyrinth. I think I was the minotaur.
They are on the same train, Handel, Picasso, Sappho, fleeing a city where anything anyone would want to keep has fled already.
There is a question at the heart of this book:
How shall I live?
I think I was asking myself and getting no answers. But sometimes you have to get lost – both as a writer and as a reader. Sometimes only the question can be asked and the answer is somewhere in the distance – maybe a long way in the distance.
What I know is that life is distance learning. The next thing is out of reach. We reach it. The next thing is out of reach. We reach it.
IT HAPPENED, LATE one afternoon, when David arose from his couch and was walking upon the roof of his house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing, and the woman was very beautiful. And David sent and inquired about this woman. And one said, ‘Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?’ So David sent messengers and took her; and she came to him and he lay with her. Then she returned to her house. And the woman conceived and she sent and told David, ‘I am with child.’
So David sent word to Joab saying, ‘Send me Uriah the Hittite.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Go down to your house and wash your feet.’ And Uriah went out of the king’s house and there followed him a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king’s house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.
David said, ‘Have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house?’
Uriah said to David, ‘The ark, and Israel, and Judah dwell in booths and my lord Joab and the servants of my lord are camping in the open field; shall I then go to my house to eat and to drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.’ Then David said to Uriah, ‘Remain here today also and tomorrow I will let you depart.’ So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David invited him and he ate in his presence and drank so that he made him drunk; and in the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his lord but he did not go down to his house. In the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah, ‘Set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him that he may be struck down and die.’ And as Joab was besieging the city he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men, and some of the servants of David fell. Uriah the Hittite was slain also.
When the wife of Uriah heard that Uriah her husband was dead she made lamentation for her hu
sband. And when the mourning was over David sent and brought her to his house and she became his wife and bore him a son. But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.
And the Lord sent Nathan to David. He came to him and said to him, ‘There were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds but the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb which he had bought. And he brought it up and it grew up with him and with his children; it used to eat of his morsel and drink of his cup and lie in his bosom and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveller to the rich man and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or herd to prepare for the wayfarer, but he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him.’
Then David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man and he said to Nathan, ‘As the Lord lives the man who has done this deserves to die and he shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing and because he had no pity.’
Nathan said to David, ‘You are the man.’
(2 Samuel, 11 and 12:1–7)
‘Because he had no pity.’ The punishable sin is not lust, not even adultery, the sin is not to do with sex at all. It is a failure of feeling. Not an excess of passion but a lack of compassion.
I am a Sexualist. In flagrante delicto. The end-stop of the universe. Say my name and you say sex. Say my name and you say white sand under a white sky white trammel of my thighs.
Let me net you. Roll up roll up for the naked lady, tuppence a peep. Tup me? Oh no, I do the tupping in this show. I’m the horned god, the thrusting phallus, the spar and mainsail of this giddy vessel. All aboard for the Fantasy Cruise from Mitylene to Merrie England by way of Rome and passing through La Belle France. How long will it take? Not much more than two and a half thousand years of dirty fun and all at my own expense.
Am I making any sense? No? Here’s a clue: Very Famous Men have written about me, including Alexander Pope (Englishman 1688–1744 Occupation: Poet) and Charles Baudelaire (Frenchman 1821–67 Occupation: Poet). What more can a girl ask?
I have a lot of questions, not least, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS? When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow. I look like a nicotine junkie. I can no longer read my own writing. It isn’t surprising that so many of you have chosen to read between the lines when the lines themselves have become more mutilated than a Saturday night whore.
I’ve had to do that too; go down on the cocks of Very Famous Men, and that has put me in a position to tell you a trade secret: Their dose tastes just the same as anyone else’s. I’m no gourmet but I know a bucket of semolina when I’ve got my head in it. You can lead a whorse to water but you can’t make her drink. My advice? Don’t swallow it. Spit the little hopefuls down the sink and let them wriggle up the drain. No, I’m not hard-hearted but I have better things to do with my stomach lining. And I have another question: When did he last go down on you?
So many men have got off on me. Large men, small men, bald men, fat men. Men with a hose like a fire-fighter, men with nothing but a confectioner’s nozzle. Here they come, poking through the history books, telling you all about me.
I was born on an island. Can you see the marble beach and the glass sea? Both are lies. The white sand damp-veined is warm underfoot. The sea that softly reflects the hull will splinter it soon. What appears is not what is. I love the deception of sand and sea.
‘A Deceiver.’ ‘A notorious seducer of women.’ ‘A Venom.’ ‘A God.’ ‘The Tenth Muse.’ It is the job of a poet to name things, blasphemy when the things rise up to name the poet. The praise is no better than the blame. My own words have been lost amongst theirs.
Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709–84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood? Rest assured I shall have to let go of one if I am to keep hold of the other. In the end the choice has not been mine to make. Others have made it for me.
In the old days I was a great poet but a bad girl. See Plato (Greek 427–347 BC Occupation: Philosopher), then, Ovid came along in the first century AD and tried to clean up my reputation with a proper tragic romance. Me, who could have had any woman in history, fell for a baggy-trousered bus conductor with the kind of below-the-waist equipment funsters put on seaside postcards for a joke. Fuck him? I couldn’t even find him. He said I must have bad eyesight, I said it must be because of all those poems I was writing, late at night with only a tallow candle to keep me company. He said I should give it up, it was ruining our sex life.
The World and Other Places
IN THIS NIGHT-SOAKED bed with you it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be harder.
In this night-covered world with you I hope to find what I’m looking for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south. And in the morning we will get dressed together and go.
There’s a line in Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’, where she says, ‘We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others.’
This soul-searching is what writing does/is. Drilling down through the layered accumulations of convention, cliché, fear, neglect, prejudice, hatred, tradition, good and bad, buried dreams and forgotten desires. Is the soul there at all? Yours? Mine? And is there any better way of knowing our own soul than through the souls of others?
I believe that fiction, long or short, can work on many levels all at once. The story, of course. The characters. Their lives.
A time that isn’t our own – if the text is from the past, or if it is set in the past. Feelings evoked we might not otherwise feel. We expect fiction to deliver other places, other people.
But when we go deeper?
It hasn’t been too fashionable to talk about the soul. We live in a material world. Religion is discredited as superstition or, worse, fundamentalism. Spirituality, even when detached from religion, looks a bit hippy, woolly, vague; a comfort-zone for those who can’t quite manage life as a biological and chemical accident with miraculous consequences.
Already my language gives me away: miraculous consequences.
If you believe that life has an inside as well as an outside, then how can we recognise and protect that inner life? Develop it?
That has to be the job of art. Nothing works better as a tool for going deeper.
I am a writer because I want to go deeper.
I am on a quest. Is everything a quest story? Probably.
I look at the short fictions and I find the same preoccupations as in my longer work.
There’s a story in The World and Other Places called ‘The Three Friends’. It’s a little fairy story type thing – do you search for riches? Power? Sex?
Or that which cannot be found?
Does that seem like a hopeless quest? A journey for masochists only?
Maybe. But every time I get an answer it leads me to another question. That’s all I know. The infinity of space.
The world … yes. But what about the other places?
There’s a line in The Powerbook, ‘When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.’
That’s the journey. That’s the unfolding. That’s what the stories are.
THE BOAT IN the water …
I want to push further; to find the hidden cove, the little bay of delight that fear prevents. Sometimes I want to ride out the storm for no better reason than I need the storm. And if I die, I die. That’s the gamble, the game. I cannot protect myself although I can take precautions. Society can protect me least of all. It does it by limiting my freedom. Freedom or protection? What kind of choice is that?
In the boat on the water, these things are clear.
The Powerbook
LOVING YOU IS like lifting a heavy stone. It would be easier not to do it and I’m not sure why I am doing
it. It takes all my strength and all my determination and I said I wouldn’t love someone again like this.
Is there any sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance?
The Powerbook was a millennium novel, published in the wi-fi optimism of a new century.
Writers are all multiple personalities – that’s why we’re hard to live with – and the internet seemed to offer that playing shape-shifting of character, time, place, that is the core of fiction-making.
So I imagined a story where two people would play with each other online – inventing masks and costumes for themselves – it’s a theatrical book. Unfolding their personal stories through a series of make-believe stories. And meeting in real life, to discover the entanglement of their actual and virtual worlds.
Yes. It’s a love story.
THE STORIES WE sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing could be more familiar than love. Nothing else eludes us so completely.
In one strange scene a feral self-taught chemist finds his daughter moving among the dim-lit laboratory jars. She finds one labelled with a heart and a dagger. She picks it up, curious, afraid. Suddenly her father’s whiskery face is right behind her.
‘NEVER TOUCH THAT JAR! Never! If that gets loose, we’re finished.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Love! There’s love in that jar …’
And so I discovered that love is a hazardous liquid.
There’s no particular century to that scene. It’s gothic but it could be now. I like moving about in time. Only in the outside world are we constrained by time. Our inner lives move freely between past, present and future, and we don’t remember chronologically; memories apart in time sit side by side emotionally. As we get older our lives begin to form a pattern, not a straight line.
Love Page 5
