by A. N. Wilson
‘That was a brilliant idea, Derek. I’ve got a good story here about a soccer manager.’
She was an eerily good mimic. Sinclo, who had come to assume that Mary ‘knew everything’, thought it quite likely not merely that she knew that he found working with Peg tiresome, but also that she’d heard somehow or another about the one-night stand. He attributed psychic, even magical, powers to her. Although she was clad in a fringed Wild West white leather top, half unzipped, and a matching white leather skirt, both Versace, with pink cowboy boots by Judy Rothschild, there was always something of another time and place. She could easily have been one of those maidens who appeared out of a mist to bear King Arthur to his barge, or emerged from the waters of a lake brandishing a sword, or she could have been Vivien the Enchantress, holding the wizard Merlin in her thrall.
This impression of timelessness was partly the result of her extraordinary resemblance to those round-faced, beaky-nosed girls so beloved of Burne-Jones; partly because her hair, which had been that colour for as long as anyone could remember, was quite ageless, being neither white in the way old people’s hair is white nor blonde in the way that most cheap dyes are blonde.
‘Diana’s’ – she named the most expensive restaurant in London, where she lunched almost every day, as if it were an idea that had just sprung to mind. ‘Could you bear? Could you?’
It was dismaying, when they were settled at the table, and she was smoking a cigarette over her tiny Caesar salad, to discover that she was not offering him a job on Gloss. Instead, she wanted to talk about ‘Dr Arbuthnot’s Diary’ on the Legion.
‘Peg’s an interviewer, not a diarist,’ she told him. ‘Now you … you could be a diarist.’
Nothing about Mary Much was accidental. He felt their knees momentarily meet beneath the table.
‘But it needs to be tougher. That thing about the Kitty Henderson drug cure – it was much too kind, much too bland.’
That was the moment to say that he was a cousin of Kitty’s. Afterwards, he realized she had known this all along, and needed to draw forth his tacit disloyalty towards her.
‘Charles Henderson’s a creep,’ she said sharply.
The previous year, Sinclo’s cousin, Kitty Chell, had married Charles Henderson. It had been a stormy relationship fuelled by shared tastes in wild friends, alcohol and cocaine. Kitty had lately taken a cure at a clinic in Arizona and Charles Henderson had been stupid enough to tell ‘Dr Arbuthnot’s Diary’ – while Peg was editing – that he and Kitty hoped to have a baby.
‘Trying for a family’ – she said it in a mincing voice. ‘Such a common phrase. Such a boring thing to want to do, but they are both bores – know ‘em?’
‘I do – as a matter of fact, I … er …’
‘Martina wants to have a go at them.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘You know Martina.’
‘I don’t, really.’
Mary Much leaned so far forward towards him over the table that he wondered whether they were going to kiss. He put down his forkful of calves’ liver, slithered as thin as paper.
‘Paranoia,’ she whispered. ‘Lennie and Martie – ickle bit paranoid. They really think they’re …’
She made a moue with her lips.
‘You’re not saying they’re bankrupt …’
‘Shh.’
She touched her lip with a long white finger. Then, businesslike, she said, ‘No, of course they’ll be okay, it’s a recession. Neither Lennie nor Martie realize that the rest of the world is affected, they think it’s just them. That’s why …’
Her voice sank to a whisper and he had to put his forehead almost against hers to hear.
‘It’s quite all right now, I’ve saved you, it was a brilliant piece, brilliant, but that’s why they were so angry with you for your piece on Bongo-Bongo.’
It was a while before he registered that Zinariya was being discussed.
‘You know that Lennie comes from Bongo-Bongo – very keen on De Blik Men, even more on De Blik Ladies, Lennie …’
Oh, really?’
She nodded enthusiastically, her face animated, her finger momentarily making thrusting copulatory gestures before she picked up her cigarette again from the side of her plate.
‘Thinks that old bender monk is buggering things up for him in Bongo – you know who I mean, you wrote about him – brilliant, brilliant – but you know he’s Kitty’s uncle, the bender.’
‘Father Chell? Yes, I did know …’
‘Frightful old hypocrite, the bender. Calls himself a communist …’
‘Does he? Father Chell?’
‘… but swans off to stately homes every other week. Married Kitty Chell to that drip Charles Henderson. One minute telling Lennie how to spend his money, the next going to marry silly little coke-fiends in some … Funny that about Lennie and Martie, have you noticed?’
All this was whispered at rapid speed.
‘As I say,’ said Sinclo, who was as flattered to be taken into Mary Much’s confidence as he was disturbed by her malice about his cousins, ‘I don’t really know the proprietor … Lennie.’
‘Grand dinners if you call entertaining the Prime Minister grand.’
‘I would, wouldn’t you?’
‘But they don’t know people like the Hendersons. Never get asked to Badminton or Chatsworth or Blenheim. The lords and ladies come to their big parties. Love the smell of money, lords and ladies do – but Martie and Lennie aren’t really accepted. That’s why …’
The whisper sank to near inaudibility. Her hair, which was wonderfully soft and silky, tickled his forehead, and the scent of Coco Mademoiselle intoxicated his nostrils. The sound coming from her was so faint that it was almost necessary to read her glossy red lips.
‘… they so much want Lennie to get his peerage.’
‘Is that likely?’ asked Sinclo, much too loud.
‘It’s not in the bag yet,’ she whispered. ‘That’s why it’s so important that the Prime Minister and he see eye to eye about Bongo – all de other Blik countries are raising such a silly stink about the Bongos hosting the Olympic Games.’
‘Commonwealth Games.’
‘God, you’re clever. Anyway, if the Prime Minister emerges as a hero over Bongo-Bongo, he might reward Lennie with a peerage. So we must keep on attacking Bender Chell.’
‘As a matter of fact, I don’t think Father Chell is—’
‘And Kitty Chell, silly little heroin addict, spoilt brat … and her randy old dad.’
‘Is Lord Longmore especially randy?’
‘Wasn’t there an affair with an actress?’
‘Yes, but twenty years ago …’ said Sinclo, trapped into revealing much too much knowledge about the family. Of course she must know he was related to them all.
‘That was Aubrey’s little weakness, I’m afraid.’
‘Actresses?’
She spluttered with mirth.
‘One day,’ she whispered, ‘I’ll tell you about Aubrey’s ickle accident. What really happened.’ Her face contorted itself into a mockery of pain. ‘Ouch! No – Aubrey’s other little weakness apart from rough trade is lords and ladies. Very sweet in a way, and it was the old way of doing a diary. But we must have something much more hard-hitting. That’s why that stuff about Kitty giving up drugs and trying for a baby was so, frankly, nauseating. We only want posh totty stories if they’re getting into trouble …’
She cackled. Sinclo remembered the phrase ‘motiveless malignity’ from some English lesson at school.
‘Son and heir drives sports car into the ornamental temple, Lady Esmerelda snorts the top of her head off, the Duke of Posh shags his way through Shepherd Market, that’s Worledge’s view of the aristocracy. The old Legion readers looked up to Posh, just as they looked up to Royals. Now the tumbrils are rolling – not for political reasons you understand, just spectator sport. No one wants to be told that as well as being richer than them and better looking than them and better bo
rn than them, the upper classes are also nicer. They have to be braying, selfish buffoons.’
Sinclo laughed. He wondered to what class her parents had belonged. She was so entirely sui generis that she had outsoared the ordinary borders of social classification.
‘There are plenty of braying, selfish buffoons about,’ he conceded.
‘Look,’ she said with sudden earnestness. ‘Aubrey’s past it. He hasn’t got …’ She sniggered into a napkin.
‘What it takes?’
‘He hasn’t got the balls for the job any more.’ And completely silently she mouthed, ‘And that’s true. LITERALLY.’
Two fingers made scissor gestures.
Sinclo stared open-eyed. He had just enough self-possession not to remark openly that Aubrey Bird was, surely, one of the ‘best friends’ of this woman who was now destroying his career.
‘It’s yours if you want it.’
In that moment of seriousness, she could have been speaking, not of Dr Arbuthnot’s Diary, but of her heart.
Sinclo closed his eyes. He thought of his ambition to be a foreign correspondent. He imagined himself at a café table in, say, Cairo, with all the newspapers, French, Arabic, English, spread out in front of him as he drank mint tea.
‘That …’ he was lost for words, ‘that would be wonderful, Mary,’ he said.
‘I think you’ll find that the priest, the old perv, got thrown out of Bongo-Bongo for being a bender. Write it up. Worledge would like it. I’ll get Martina on the case. We’ll get rid of Aubrey.’
Aubrey Bird had been Dr Arbuthnot for thirty years. He was, a journalistic institution. Getting rid of him, however feeble he might be, was like getting rid of the ravens from the Tower of London. Besides, mindless tittle-tattle about minor aristocrats, and racehorse owners and their chums was Aubrey’s métier. Sinclo had no interest in it whatever.
‘How?’ asked Sinclo.
She snip-snipped again with her two fingers, and when her giggles died down she said, ‘God, you’re gonna be hot.’
THIRTY-FIVE
‘I just can’t believe you wrote this.’
The Daily Legion was folded open on the upended barrel which served as a table at Bin Ends. A long pale finger pointed accusingly at the leader page. The headline was HANS BUSCH – YOUR POTTY OR ARE WE?! The ‘stand first’ was ‘With tongue firmly in cheek, top Legion writer L. P. Watson asks whether controversial modern artist Hans Busch’s latest work The Thinker – a Perspex toilet – is really worth the £1.3 million paid this week by an anonymous collector.’
The sheepish author slumped on his wobbly chair. He was neither especially proud, nor especially ashamed of the article.
‘Darling,’ he sighed, ‘I don’t know what you are making such a fuss about.’
‘Don’t call me darling.’
‘But you are my darling …’
‘It is so patronizing – we are trying to have a serious conversation.’
‘The article is meant to be funny – obviously it fails, unless it’s your sense of humour that has mysteriously failed.’
There was silence, time enough for him to wonder for the first time in his life whether this intense and beautiful person in fact had ever, in the eight years, on and off, they had known one another, shown the smallest sign of possessing a sense of humour.
‘Lionel, have you forgotten what I am supposed to be?’
L. P. Watson paused and looked at the impassioned, pale face of Rachel Pearl. He was used to being screamed at by his wife because of what he wrote in the Legion; his mistress had normally registered her disapprovals and disagreements by silence.
‘And the pay-offline … it is just, so predictable. Frankly, Lionel, it’s not worthy – even of you.’
‘Ouch.’
It was eleven thirty in the morning. The features conference had just ended, when Rachel had sent him an urgent e-mail message to say that they must talk. He, as it happened, had much more serious news to impart. His wife had told him that she wanted a divorce. This devastating news made his why-oh-why on the subject of Hans Busch’s Perspex lavatory seem a bit trivial; and Rachel’s anger about his article seemed, in the circumstances, schoolgirlish.
‘It was not Oscar Wilde, it was Ruskin who said that Whistler, not Turner, was throwing a paint pot in the face of the British public.’
‘Does it matter?’ he sighed.
‘Surely accuracy matters.’ She prodded the paper furiously. ‘You said it was Oscar Wilde …’
‘Yes, yes.’
She read it back to him:
‘It was Oscar Wilde long ago who accused Turner of throwing a pot of paint in the face of the British public. Hans Busch is throwing a pot of something else – the pot which those of us who are older remember keeping under our beds.
‘It would have had at least a certain style if it ended there, but it’s so heavy – “This isn’t art, though it might be something which rhymes with art” – Lionel, how could you write that?’
‘Worledge wrote it, I expect.’
‘You’re saying you didn’t even write this – that you let Worledge tamper with your copy?’
‘Sometimes – who cares what appears in our silly little paper?’
‘So long as I’m arts editor, I care what gets written about art. You thought you were just writing a jokey philistine article about conceptual art, yawn, yawn – but don’t you see just where Worledge was coming from when he commissioned that piece? He intended it as an attack on me …’
Oh, that’s a bit self-important.’
She picked up cigarettes and bag and rose from the table without speaking. He did not move to stop her, and swigged heavily from his glass of Shiraz.
‘Bye, Lionel.’
Lionel knew that in some mysterious way it was the failure of his relationship with Rachel which had led to the breakdown of his marriage to Julia. There was, of course, no logic in this belief, but it made sense to him, nevertheless. When he and Rachel were in love, when their lovemaking was satisfactory and they were enjoying one another’s company, he felt an agonizing awkwardness, a huge condescending pity for his wife whenever he returned to Clapham. This would lead him to be especially solicitous, to ask Julia in detail about her day, to offer to do the washing-up. He would urge her to let him buy her dinner in their local restaurant, or to entertain friends who especially bored him, just to show his conscience how sorry he was for being such a shit. When he and Rachel were failing to get along, by contrast, he was in an unshakeable gloom and allowed himself to be distant, cold and irascible with his wife and children.
It had become obvious to both him and Rachel that their affair had hit the buffers. He felt an old-fashioned gallantry about it; he did not want to hear himself sacking her – he wanted to put her in the position of sacking him.
This she resolutely refused to do. She also inwardly wanted to chuck, and start living an independent existence. For the previous eight years, she had believed him when he said he was unhappy with his wife, did not have sexual relations with her any more; she had believed him when he said he was lonely and sad, and that he needed her companionship. If she did not believe this, she would have had to see herself, since the age of twenty, as something little better than L.P.’s prostitute, and she could not bear that thought. So she stayed with him, not merely out of pity for his condition, as she saw it, but out of need to salvage her own dignity.
She had had a number of conversations with him, over the years, about conceptual art. She knew that he was incorrigibly, deliberately philistine about it. That was not what was at issue. Writing this particular article at this particular juncture must be seen as an insult to her. How could L.P. not see this? Either he had not been listening to her, for the last two or three weeks, when she had told him at such length about Worledge’s bullying her to rubbish Hans Busch, and her refusal to do so; or he had listened, and he was still prepared to write this ignorant, condescending article which – in the context of Legion office politics �
�� was tantamount to patting her on the head and saying, ‘The arts editor of the paper is a sad little pseud, a recent graduate who hasn’t learnt that all art is a pretension, that being serious about writing, or the visual or the musical is something we left behind at college with the nerds whose highest ambition was to do a traineeship course with the BBC.’
Looking at her sad, pale, angry face, Lionel knew that this might be a moment when they could split up; he could lose wife and girlfriend in one morning, make a clean sweep. In that moment, there would have been something tempting in that prospect. Coming to work that day, in a daze of confusion and grief, Lionel had felt that he would do anything to stop Julia divorcing him. He wondered whether it would be possible to undo the last twenty years, to become once again the man he had been aged twenty-five or thirty. Why could he not just go back – give up being L.P., wag and cynic, and return to being Lionel Watson, traveller, poet and gentle man of letters?
From where she stood, Rachel saw a balding man with brown teeth who was drinking in order to make himself intoxicated at half past eleven in the morning. She felt furious with him for his attitude of lofty distance.
He looked up at her and said, ‘Julia wants a divorce. She told me this morning.’
Immediately, Rachel’s anger evaporated.
‘Oh, Lionel, I’m sorry. Oh, my poor, poor boy.’
She sat down again at once opposite him and held both his hands in her own. For the first time that day, Watson’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Oh, Christ – it’s all a bit of a bloody mess.’
‘And here I was going on about’ – her hand swept over the open newspaper – ‘this trivia.’
