Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  Her school friends were sympathetic, but they over-consoled. ‘Oh you poooooor thing. That’s absolutely terrible. What makes her think she has the right to—’ There was an equation they tried to solve that wasn’t helpful, as if anything you gave equalled a loss. They wouldn’t view her mother’s illness as collaboration, they only saw a renouncing and life passing her by.

  Sometimes they spoke of her as though she were a victim of domestic abuse!

  She didn’t blame them. It was confusing. She had a blister on her lip that looked seedy. It told against her. She regretted that.

  Next time though, she thought, she might say she couldn’t get away.

  One of the friends, Sheila, who was leaving early to attend her AA meeting, asked her if she would like a lift home. ‘Give us a chance to catch up a bit.’

  ‘Oh yes. Thank you. Great.’

  At the lights at the junction with Gloucester Place, Sheila looked at her too kindly. ‘What’s up?’ she asked, pulling over into a disabled parking bay so that they might talk.

  Beth thought she might cry. ‘I’m absolutely fine. Just a lot of pressure sometimes.’

  When they got to her street and she was about to get out of the car Sheila faced her seriously. ‘You think you might be like addicted to care-giving? It’s made you lose your job, it’s made you lose your relationship, it’s made you lose your home.’

  ‘It’s not like that. Well, maybe a tiny bit but—’

  ‘This may be hard for you to hear but there are meetings that support people with over-helping and co-dependency. Maybe that would be worth investigating.’

  ‘Really? How interesting,’ Beth said. ‘You are kind. Thanks for the lift. Night!’

  Then the following Friday at noon when her mother was in her bath, and she was setting a vegetable soup to simmer, three short rings on the doorbell.

  It was her brother and Dr Clarkson and a nurse in a royal blue dress. An ambush.

  ‘Fuck!’ she said, apologising rapidly. Six eyes fixed on her a little too benignly.

  Everything’s all right now, the grown-ups are here, she almost seemed to hear them say.

  She ushered them into the kitchen, thinking, thinking. She sat them all down. Now they were no longer standing in a row, they seemed tentative and hardly powerful at all.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve come for a couple of weeks to visit Mum and give you a break. Will you forgive me?’ her brother said. ‘I didn’t ask because I worried you’d say no. I will leave now if I’ve done something wrong.’

  ‘No, no,’ she reassured him, ‘don’t be silly.’

  ‘I’m more than happy to stay in a hotel and pop in at times that suit you. Whatever seems best to you. I’m sure I’ve gone about everything in the wrong way. I know I can be clumsy and thick about stuff, I just wanted to see how Mum is and to see you and to see how you are and that’s why I’m here.’ He spoke calmly and with softness. ‘I know you’re doing amazing things and you’re super-capable and everything like that and that you don’t need me in any way, but I just didn’t want you to think …’

  ‘I myself, as you know, was wondering—’ Dr Clarkson began cautiously but she interrupted him.

  ‘Let’s all calm the fuck down and have a cup of tea,’ Beth suggested.

  She never swore.

  ‘Perfect,’ her brother said.

  ‘Beth?’ her mother was calling from upstairs. ‘Beth? Can I have a hand a second?’

  ‘Shall I?’ The nurse half rose. On seeing Beth’s eyes she immediately sat down.

  ‘You,’ Beth said, ‘you can make the tea.’

  ‘I’ll stir the soup, shall I?’ Robin offered as she left the room.

  She held her mother’s underarms while she climbed out of the bath, closing her eyes for her mother’s privacy, once she had a firm grip. Then she turned and grabbed a towel and held it out for her mother, folding it round her body from behind. She blotted her wisps of hair with a pink flannel and together they slipped her head into a white terry cloth turban.

  ‘Do you need the loo or —?’

  ‘No, I’m good.’

  While her mother rested for a moment, sitting down heavily on the lip of the bath, Beth said, ‘Got some amazing news.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Robin is downstairs.’

  ‘Robin! Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, how lovely.’

  ‘He just rang the doorbell out of the blue.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘I know!’

  ‘I thought it was the man with the Ensure.’

  ‘Why don’t I settle you in bed, in the pink cardigan, then I could send him up with the soup?’

  ‘I think I will come down,’ her mother said. ‘Of course. That seems right. He has come all this way.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Beth said. ‘What would you like to wear, do you think?’

  Very very slowly they came down. Beth out in front, going backwards down the stairs, arms braced to catch her mother if she fell. She had chosen a long green silk skirt and an ivory blouse with small embroidered ivory flowers. She added a bright scarf printed with phlox and hydrangea. It had been years since she had worn such festive things. Beth led her by the elbow into the kitchen. Everyone stood. Her mother blinked repeatedly as though the whole scene was some sort of mirage. There was a jug of fancy daffodils on the table, pale bone-coloured ones with faded orange centres. It was the first time she had been downstairs since the day she came back from the hospital.

  Her mother greeted Robin like a prince, of course she did. She had always been courtly with her son. Her brother fielded his mother with strength and grace and honour. It was like a scene from the Bible.

  Dr Clarkson made a brief speech, referring to Beth’s care of her mother as a ‘living, breathing work of art’. The nurse was watching her with captivated eyes.

  Why did they assume that she would mind?

  Did she mind?

  Dr Clarkson suggested the nurse and Robin carve up the next two days between them if it suited Beth and the patient.

  ‘Fine with me,’ Beth said. ‘If it’s fine with you, Mum.’

  Her mother nodded.

  ‘There’s a few things I’ll probably write down for you, bits and bobs if that’s OK.’

  ‘Perfect,’ Robin said.

  The relief on Dr Clarkson’s face showed how braced he must have been for upset and disaster. People were so funny. The way they assumed that rivalry and dismay were all there was. It was a pleasure to surprise them. She imagined Robin also was enjoying this – the way, as a family, they often defeated expectation.

  Everyone was on their best behaviour and that always helped.

  The nurse was on the basic side, prim and sullen-eyed. She wouldn’t last long – they could do better – but she could sit downstairs and give her brother back-up if required. She was a good idea, really. And Robin would return after his two weeks, she might suggest ten days to him for two weeks was an awfully long time for Lauren to be by herself with the girls, but up to him, obviously. Anything was fine.

  Her mother gradually came to life. Soon she was girlish and skittish and even sang some snatches of song. Pink lit her cheeks within the grey. She had started using slightly different turns of phrase lately, saying things like ‘Bless him’ when talking about a disgraced politician in the news, which was a little bit worrying. This liveliness felt like movement in the opposite way. Her print scarf fell down and her scars glowed but she did not seem to care. She is about ten minutes away from sheer exhaustion, Beth thought. The effort she was putting into the festivities might actually kill her, but – they could go back upstairs in a moment. There was so much joy in the room. Even the grim nurse, Beatrice her name was, had stopped frowning and confided to them that in her line she had to be vigilant about catching her soaps as people took advantage. They could all watch Doctors upstairs at three o’clock maybe, Beth thought. She would suggest it i
n a moment. The nurse needed a bit of cake to cheer her up, perhaps that was all. She could nip out and buy one. Keep the party atmosphere afloat.

  Her mother and her brother were sitting holding on to each other, hand in hand in hand in hand, her mother’s face almost neon with pleasure. Beth started laughing. It was a sort of celebratory hysteria that she felt. Christmassy or something, deep and brimming. Proper abandon. Her brother caught her eye and winked.

  ‘Home is the hero,’ she said and blew him a kiss across the table, extending her arm so fully that her fingers came close to his lips.

  There wasn’t an emotion at that moment which she didn’t have.

  A life looking after a loved one wasn’t less of a life than any other sort. It might be the best of it. Why did ordinary family feeling shock people so? Did Dr Clarkson secretly wonder who would do it for him? He never spoke of Mrs Clarkson, and all the little Clarksons only seemed to cause him grief. Her mother once remarked ‘Anthony Clarkson is half in love with you, Beth, I sometimes think.’

  ‘Mum!’ she had cried.

  Dr Clarkson looked pale and one of his hands gripped the table. His whole body seemed to be saying, Why on earth am I still here? It was a question worth asking. The nurse was shaking her head as though she just didn’t hold with merriment, or feelings or people or times, or anything really.

  Strange.

  It was their last April.

  PHILIP HORNE

  THE TROLL

  1

  HE HAD WAITED and waited, the young man, at first happily enough, only a little on edge. Then, increasingly conscious that he cut a sorry figure among the gold and pearls and fine satin, the Italian cotton and designer silk, he became positively relieved at being left alone in the dark corner behind his damask napkin, glittering glassware and low-burning candle. The beautiful waiters and waitresses had briefly hovered, then given him up, perhaps after registering the slight crack in the face of his smartphone. Somehow he had forgotten how, each time, his pleasure in this avowedly celebratory occasion was shadowed by a vague unease. In his haste and agitation he had brought neither book nor paper; he was reduced to gazing at the tablecloth or the diners around, for whom, after their dismissive investigatory glances or long scornful stares, he had finally faded from view.

  Until, at least, the smartphone rang out at top volume with the latest tone that Flora had surreptitiously decided to install for him. Heads swivelled disgustedly, and in his horror and rush to silence it he knocked the phone over the table-edge, tipping off a large wine glass in the process. He watched for an agonised second as they descended towards the shining floor of marble, granite, quartz – whatever it took to shatter them into a thousand pieces. The device was still howling away after the impact, behind a spider’s web of brokenness, and he reached down to seize it, driving a shard of wine glass like a wasp sting up under his fingernail. As the staff moved forward disapprovingly to restore order – though not yet, as he feared for a second, to eject him unceremoniously from the restaurant, an idea that he could see had flickered across their minds – he stanched the bleeding with the damask napkin and took the call. It was Gloria.

  It should not have come as such a relief, the knowledge that he would have another hour to wait alone, thanks to some complication of snow and missed connections and cattle on the line. As instructed, he ordered bread, olives, sparkling water and, rather self-consciously, a bottle of champagne. And he requested too a sticking plaster and, when the olives arrived, plump and spicy and pungently Roman, something that was an inspiration of his own, a pad of paper and a pen.

  The slim-hipped waitress moved off with a charming, interested smile, reassured no doubt by the champagne order, and he began to write.

  It should be one of those things that perks you up and compensates for the lonely life of the writer – a mark of recognition by a colleague and ally, an act of generosity by an old friend, a break from the treadmill, a chance to review the state of things, and of course the new work. N’exagérons pas, I’m doing well, I’ve pulled myself together after that bad patch – and even if this one is found to suck I really think the next will rise to, well, a new level of something or other. Is it just because I keep falling short that these feasts – which have become symbols of the act or fact of publication – now seem to stick in my throat; so that I’ve come to regard them with as much joy as a visit to the dentist?

  Little has exactly changed since all this began – since that time five years ago when she and I, and Norman, who mustn’t be forgotten, were Bright Young British Novelists (that is, under forty).

  We were in Rome in 2011 for the British Council, giving glittering readings and workshops, signing dozens of copies of our books, eating magnificent meals and drinking prosecco as if we were journalists. It was late April, but felt like a perfect English June. And we were in a palazzo that someone had vacated for a week, or a piano of a palazzo, with the full works – scagliola floors, frescos on the ceiling, a balcony overlooking our very own piazza, even a Guercino, with a bit of that lovely blue he does, quite sexy, Joseph Fighting Off Potiphar’s Wife, I think, though it may have been a copy, or ‘school of’.

  Poor old Norman was at one end – they’d created an extra bedroom when they converted it – and she and I were in cavernous chambers at the other, one at each corner. She had a four-poster that would have accommodated a family of seven – she called me in to see it with screams of delight. Not the manner to which any of us were accustomed back home. It went to one’s head, rather, the dolce vita – drinking so freely, being luxuriously warm, living in a palace, getting all that attention when one’s more used to being ignored in the newsagent’s.

  It’s a little grotesque, that I was there reading from my ‘sensitive’ first novel, Cleavings, about all these supersensitive people in a postgraduate house outside Durham and the tiny stirrings and vibrations in the air around them, their antennae tingling as they manoeuvred around each other – and that I didn’t notice at all what was, as it transpired, going on under my nose. My personal image for what lurked beneath the surface, unimagined by me, comes from San Clemente, which the three of us visited with our lovely minder. Below the basilica built in 1108, which had seemed ancient enough in itself, dominated by a lovely golden mosaic of the Triumph of the Cross, with Christ surrounded by doves, they discovered a church from the fourth century, hushed and primitive; and then, below that, a pagan temple with a sacrificial altar bearing a carved image of Mithras slashing the throat of a bull. At the bottom of it all runs a gurgling subterranean river, no doubt to carry away the blood. For me, that somehow stands for all I had missed about my co-Bright-Young-BNs.

  Firstly, that the author of The Salford Chronicles, Norman Higgs – although thoroughly married and indeed already progenitor of a couple of kids – had developed a major crush on Gloria, which she’d been rebuffing with some well-aimed jabs to his soft underbelly, that is, his ego (at the time I simply took these for fairly routine feminist objections to his stolid Northern sexism). She referred a few times, even in front of him, to his plentifully sprouting bodily hair, which curled out of the shirts he wore open-necked in the Roman sunshine. Poor Norman didn’t have a medallion, but she kept saying she would buy him one. And maybe he thought that meant she did fancy him, despite his girth. He didn’t hear her say that whereas he thought he was Ted Hughes he always made her think of Les Dawson.

  But secondly, and more seriously, I failed to register that Gloria, the author of The Brides of March, who was funny, and kind of attractive in a rather wild way, but not really my type – she loved the Brontës and Saturday Night Fever more than Henry James and Ma nuit chez Maud – had developed a thing for me. Perhaps I missed this because I had a very nice girlfriend at home, or rather had had one – we crashed into a major row before I came away and our future was worse than uncertain; so I wasn’t really in the mood for romance, despite the setting. But we’d been having fun. Gloria was a great reader – she knew how to amuse the audi
ence in a way that lifted their spirits after they had been depressed by Norman. The combination of torrid sex scenes (in several kinds), dark-edged farcical incidents and offhand slaughter in The Brides (all of whom were widows by July) went down well in Fellini’s Roma. She and I would have running jokes, and exchange little smiles, especially when Norman was being more solemn than usual, and she made a point of kissing – on both cheeks – in the morning and evening, and taking my arm at odd moments. But I didn’t see much in it, thinking this must be what we bohemians did, so what happened took me unawares.

  To cut to the chase, or even, I suppose, to the kill. On our last night we gave a final reading, followed by a final reception on the rooftop terrace at the Council with a buffet and much drinking and hilarity. Norman, Gloria and I were dropped at the door of our palazzo, slightly unsteady from the free-flowing wine, and I realised I might not be back this way for a while. (In fact, I haven’t been since.) I said I would take a stroll on my own through the streets of Rome before turning in. Gloria looked disappointed, whereas Norman, tipsy as he was, perked up.

  I was gone some time. I didn’t have a clever phone then, and only a scrumpled little free tourist map, and, having had one prosecco too many, wasn’t very good at orientation. Plus, the real point seemed to be to get a little lost, to lay oneself open to the place. I wandered through the streets of Rome in the warmth of the night with a luxurious sense of possession, past the Spanish Steps, where I thought of poor Keats; down, somehow, to the Trevi Fountain, where like everybody I thought of the voluptuous abundance of Anita Ekberg; over to the Pantheon, where I thought of the pagans, the Christians and the big blank eye which glares down on everyone from above; then across to the banks of the Tiber, where I looked at the Castel Sant’Angelo and thought about Tosca and her death-plunge. Then, feeling overcome with tiredness – it was 2.30 in the morning, and it all caught up with me – I headed back along the riverbank past the grand, rather overpowering Napoleonic Museum in the Palazzo Primoli to our own not unimpressive palazzo. I felt like a mild conqueror of the city, in my own small degree. I suppose, actually, you could say it was the high-water mark of my life. Unless somehow this new book reverses what I’ve come to think of as the long ebb.