“I remember doing that as a boy,” he said. “I used to stick chewing gum under the dining-room table and then take it out and revive it by dipping it in the sugar bowl.”
Jenny winced. Could germs survive in the medium of dried-up gum, or did they die a gummy death? She extracted her handkerchief from her bag and used it to prise the small nodules of gum off the wood. Oedipus Snark watched her, amused.
“You’re not one of these people who’re pathologically afraid of germs, are you?” he asked. “Like the late Howard Hughes. The germs eventually got him, of course.”
“No. It’s just that I don’t like the idea of little pieces of gum on my desk. It is a school desk, isn’t it? For a very small child?”
Oedipus Snark frowned. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Compact, I suppose. But that’s an advantage these days.” He paused. “Going back to germs, tell me, what do you do with the handles of public loos? Do you touch them?”
Jenny looked away. She was not sure whether she wanted to talk about that. As it happened, she made sure that she never touched such handles with her hands, and would resort to gymnastics, pulling the chain with her foot if necessary, rather than risk the very obvious bacterial contamination that awaited those unwise enough to put their hands on such things. But she was not going to tell Oedipus Snark that.
“What do you do?” she asked.
He sniffed. “I am not one of those obsessive-compulsive types,” he said. “And we all know that a few germs are necessary for the immune system to keep itself in trim. That’s why there’s so much asthma these days—people are not exposed to enough germs.”
She realised that he had not answered her question. She persisted. “So you don’t touch the handle?”
Oedipus Snark nonchalantly picked up a piece of paper from his desk and began to read it. “This is a letter from Lou Portington. Remember her? Rather large party. There’s one loo I wouldn’t touch, even with gloves on! Hah! See?”
Jenny settled herself at her minuscule desk and picked up her notebook.
Oedipus Snark continued: “She wants me to go to a dinner she’s holding for the French Ambassador. At her place. How kind of her.”
Jenny made a note in her notebook. “And the date?”
Oedipus Snark put down the letter. “Problema. La Portington has alighted on the twenty-second, which no doubt suits His Excellency but which is the evening I’ve agreed to speak at that substance abuse conference. I was due to open it, wasn’t I?”
Jenny consulted a diary. “Yes. You agreed to that eight months ago. They wrote the other day with the programme. You’re on at seven-thirty. The first plenary session.”
“Pity,” said Oedipus Snark.
“Yes.” Jenny made another note in her book. “Shall I write and give your regrets?”
“Please do. Say that I’m terribly sorry, but I just can’t manage it.”
Jenny nodded. “I’m sure that she’ll find plenty of people happy to have dinner with the French Ambassador.”
Oedipus Snark looked up sharply. “I meant that you should give my regrets to the substance abuse people. Usual thing. Sorry to cancel, etc., etc. Urgent Party business.”
She looked at him. Hateful, she thought. Hateful Snark. Dissembling, lying Oedipus.
12. Berthea Snark
THOSE WERE the very thoughts, as it happened, that Berthea Snark was entertaining about her son at that precise moment—an example of what is known as Proustian synchronicity, where the stream of consciousness of one person matches another’s and where, for a few moments, both flow in the same direction and at the same pace, like waters conjoined. This instance of synchronicity, though, was not all that surprising, for if Oedipus Snark crossed the mind of anybody at any particular time, there was a reasonable chance that his mother was also thinking of him at that same point, given that she thought about him thirty or forty times a day—possibly more. This was not just because she was his mother, but because for the past two years she had been writing her son’s un-authorised biography—a task that required frequent contemplation of the subject. Such is the lot of the biographer: to live with the subject, to inhabit his skin, to enter his mental universe, to such an extent that biographer and subject become one.
Where a mother writes her son’s biography, this notion of becoming one with the subject has, of course, an additional, striking resonance. She and Oedipus had indeed been one, when she had nurtured the Liberal Democrat politician in utero. Not that a pregnant woman thinks of the baby she is carrying as being political: a mother may wish for a Liberal Democrat baby, but may not think of the matter as determined. And there is always the possibility that the child will grow in a political direction not contemplated, or approved of, by the parent; how many parents have seen their children espouse views radically different from their own?
Berthea Snark did not disapprove of her son’s political party, which struck her as being largely benign, perhaps even a touch too well-meaning, but only a touch. Nor did she disapprove of the parties to which he was in opposition. She quite liked the Labour Party for some of its policies and the Conservatives for some of theirs. It all depends, she said. Why should everybody embrace the herd instinct, which required one to regard one set of politicians as being always in the right while demonising another set? But what she did disapprove of was her son’s hypocrisy. He might be a Liberal Democrat on the surface, but he was not, she believed, a liberal democrat inside. And that was a most serious matter. Authenticity, in Berthea’s view, was all.
As Oedipus Snark discussed with his assistant, Jenny, the breaking of his undertaking of eight months’ standing to open a conference, Berthea Snark was preparing herself a cup of coffee in her house in a small street not far from Corduroy Mansions. This street, a cobbled mews which meandered briefly before ending in a modest row of garages, had become fashionable only recently. Berthea and her husband, Hubert Snark, had not had to pay present-day inflated prices for their home; they had acquired it for a song thirty years ago, when Oedipus was six. The mews house had been his childhood home and the place in which he first dreamed of reaching that promised land only a short distance away—Westminster. For just as small American boys may, in their log cabins, dream of the White House, so may small British boys, in their mews houses, dream of the House of Commons.
Berthea’s husband had been a largely absent father. When Oedipus was at primary school at the French Lycée in Kensington, Hubert had begun an affair with Jane Sharplie, an Oxford philosophy don and a Fellow of Somerville College, and had drifted away from the marriage. Berthea had been aware of the affair from the beginning; she was, in fact, a colleague and friend of the other woman, and had reviewed one of her books—favourably—in Mind.
“I know what’s going on,” she announced to Jane. They were sitting in the Friends’ Room at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, having met to view a well-received exhibition of French painting.
“Then you are fortunate,” said Jane, sipping at her coffee. “There are few of my philosopher colleagues at Oxford who can say the same thing. I, for one, must admit quite frankly that I don’t know what’s going on. I am working on the question, but cannot truthfully say that I have yet found an answer.”
Berthea smiled. “As a philosopher,” she said, “it’s your privilege to misinterpret what I say. But when I said I knew what was going on, I did not mean that I had achieved any insight into the meaning of things; I simply meant that I know what’s going on between you and Hubert.”
Jane put down her coffee cup. “Oh that,” she said nonchalantly. “I thought that you meant …”
Berthea smiled again, more sweetly this time. “No,” she said, “I meant the other thing.”
There was a silence. A fussy-looking man seated at a neighbouring table glanced at the two women before returning to his copy of The Burlington Magazine.
“I don’t want you to think that I’m angry,” said Berthea. “Many women would be, but in my case … Well, frankly, Jan
e, you’re welcome to him.”
Jane looked at her friend. “I didn’t start it,” she said.
Berthea nodded. “Of course not. I’ve never taken the view that the tango requires two. Such an old-fashioned attitude to dancing.”
There was a further silence as this comment was digested.
“So there we are,” said Jane. She added, “Would you mind terribly if he moved to Oxford? He could always come back to Pimlico for … for the occasional weekend.”
“Not in the slightest,” replied Berthea. “But I wouldn’t want him to keep a room in town. We don’t have all that much space and I would like to use his study as a waiting room for my patients. I consult in the house, you know.”
Jane was quick to agree. She looked at Berthea appreciatively. “You’re being very mature about this,” she said.
Berthea’s coffee was getting cold. She lifted the cup to her lips and drained it. “But that’s why he’s leaving me,” she said. “Because I’m mature.”
They returned to the exhibition, still having a couple of rooms to visit. In the final gallery, where they found themselves faced with Vuillard and other Postimpressionists, Jane suddenly realised what Berthea’s remark might mean. If Hubert was leaving Berthea because she was mature, did that mean that he was coming to her because she—Jane—was immature? Or that Hubert himself was not sufficiently mature for Berthea? Either way, she was not sure that she emerged with a great deal of credit—at least in Berthea’s eyes.
They peered together at a Vuillard interior. For a brief moment they turned and glanced at one another, and smiled. What was a man, a mere man, to come between two women friends who went back a long time? Nothing, thought Berthea.
They moved on. Another interior, a Montparnasse bedroom.
“I take it you’ve discovered that he snores,” Berthea remarked.
13. Stevie Phones Eddie
MARCIA LEFT WILLIAM in a thoughtful state. Her visits usually gave him something to reflect upon—Marcia brimmed with ideas, not all of them useful—but on this occasion he felt that what she had said was well worth considering. He had prepared himself for a show-down with Eddie over moving out, and had decided that the best tactic to adopt was to insist—and he would have to insist—that Eddie pay rent out of the small fund his grandmother had left for his benefit, but which, crucially, was entirely controlled by William. This rent would be an economic one, thus forcing Eddie to choose between a cheap rent elsewhere or an expensive rent at home. Eddie did not like to spend money—if it was his own, the money of others being a different matter—and might just prefer the cheaper option. It was a long shot, perhaps, but worth trying.
The time was ripe. A few days earlier, William had overheard the alternative offer being made over the telephone when he had picked up the receiver in his bedroom at precisely the moment Eddie had lifted it in the kitchen.
“That you, Ed?”
He recognised the voice of Eddie’s friend Stevie.
“Yup.”
And it’s me too, thought William, because I live here. He was just about to put the receiver down and leave Eddie to get on with his telephone call when he heard himself mentioned. Nobody could resist that, especially when it was on his own phone in his own house.
Stevie’s nasal voice continued. “Your old man.”
“Yup. What about him?”
“Pretty fed up with him, aren’t you?”
William held his breath. And what about me? he thought.
“Yup.”
William clenched his teeth.
“Mine gets on my nerves too. Blah, blah, blah. On and on about getting a job and a mortgage and so on. Blah, blah, blah.”
“Yup. Blah, blah, blah. Old-speak.”
William, on the point of interjecting “Blah,” stopped himself in time. There was more to come.
“Got a place at last. Found it yesterday. Kennington. Not bad at all.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep. De Laune Street. Heard of it?”
Eddie had not. “Sounds posh. Not?”
“No, not. But it’s got three bedrooms. Five hundred and sixty quid a month each. I need one other person. Maggie says she’ll take one of the rooms, but only three weeks after the lease starts. That’s a bit awkward but I said OK, that’s cool. So there’s her and me. I thought you might like the other room. Get your old man out of your hair.”
William’s eyes widened.
“Well …”
Take it, thought William. I’ll pay.
“Nice place,” said Stevie. “You know that pub we went to last month with Mike? Remember? It’s round the corner.”
There was silence. William imagined Eddie doing the calculation. Currently he lived rent-free in a better area. He also received free food and heating, and paid no discernible taxes. If anything went wrong and a tradesman was required, then it was William who made the arrangements. And Eddie, as far as his father could remember, had never used the vacuum cleaner, nor washed up, nor even loaded the dishwasher, in spite of frequent hints and requests. Eventually William had tired of piles of unwashed crockery and accepted that he would have to do everything himself—in a tight-lipped way, of course, but keeping before him, like the prospect of release from servitude, that glorious moment when his son would announce that he had found a flat and was moving out. Durance vile, though, was proving to be drawn out.
Eddie spoke. “Can you give me time to think? There’s quite a lot going on round here that I have to sort out.”
“Next week, Ed,” said Stevie. “Next week, max. I have to tell the guy next week or he gives it to somebody else. Students, I think. He doesn’t really want students, but he says they’re offering to pay a bit more rent and he has to know.”
“Students are bad news,” said Eddie.
William slipped the handset back into its cradle. He had heard enough—too much, in fact. Eddie had said that there was a lot going on—but what exactly did he mean by that? And as for the comment about students … One has to laugh, he thought, and he did then; looking up at the ceiling, he laughed at his son’s sheer effrontery. One had to like the young man, one really did. Perhaps he should just let him stay, resign himself to the fact that some people were meant to stay at home, like those Victorian and Edwardian women who never married but lived at home to look after their parents. And then, when the parents were no more, they became companions to other women, richer ones, and lived in that beholden state for the rest of their days.
But there was a difference. Those daughters looked after their parents, whereas it was he who was looking after Eddie. That was a major difference. And then those women busied themselves with all sorts of activities—sewing, making things—whereas Eddie …
No, the decision was made. And now, sitting in his office, staring at the empty chair recently occupied by Marcia, he realised that the endless rehearsal of options could be just that—endless. Upon reflection, the rent scheme looked less and less likely to achieve its objective. Eddie would simply refuse to pay up, and even though William controlled the purse-strings of the grandmother fund, he doubted whether he would be able to stand up to a furious Eddie should he turn off the monetary tap. No, he would have to be more subtle, and Marcia’s idea of obtaining a dog under a dog-share scheme seemed the perfect answer. Eddie hated dogs. He was scared of them in an utterly irrational way. And there was a physical reaction too: dogs made his eyes water—not uncontrollably, but at least to the point of irritation. And if a dog licked him, his skin itched.
He picked up the telephone and dialled the number Marcia had left. Would this dog be licky? he wondered. He hoped so.
A voice answered at the other end: a slightly impatient voice, the voice of one who rather resents being telephoned by a caller who will almost certainly be less significant.
“Look,” said William, “I’m sorry to phone out of the blue, but I was given your number by Marcia. She did some catering for you recently and she said that—”
The
voice cut him short. “If you’re wanting to sell me something, I’m afraid—”
“No, I’m not. Not at all. It’s just about your dog.”
There was a surprised silence at the other end of the line. Then: “My dog? Freddie de la Hay. Do you know him?”
14. The Names of Dogs
WILLIAM HAD TREATED himself to a taxi—this was, after all, a special mission and he needed time to think. He would need to come back by taxi too, since he was unsure about taking a dog on the tube. William reflected on the fact that while dog-owners notice the dogs of others and what they are doing, non-dog-owners tend not to be aware of what dogs are up to and what rules, if any, they obey. Had he seen dogs on the tube? There was a guide dog who travelled regularly on the Victoria Line; William had once spoken to its owner, breaking the rule of silence that made strangers of multitudes, and had heard how this intelligent dog could distinguish the various lines by their smell. The Victoria Line, the owner claimed, smelled quite different from the Northern Line or the District and Circle Lines; but only a dog would know.
Guide dogs, of course, were different, and usually not subject to the same rules as lesser dogs, but when it came to recalling whether he had seen ordinary dogs travelling on the tube, he was not sure. But then he remembered: he had seen a dog on the Northern Line a while back, being carried by its owner, a middle-aged woman in a low-waisted green dress who had talked to the dog throughout the journey. William remembered this because he had been struck by the conversation between woman and canine. The woman had looked into the dog’s eyes as she addressed it, and it had looked back at her with every indication of understanding and agreement. He had thought: she yearns for conversation, here in this great city, and only the dog will oblige.
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