Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  I was already desperate for sleep, and was hoping as I tiptoed up the great staircase that Gloria and Norman were safely in their beds. I fumbled for the code and punched it in, eased the big door open, removed my shoes and stepped lightly to the bathroom without turning on the lights – enough illumination came in from the street. There was something magical about the great, gleaming, pointlessly spacious salone as I glided across it. I brushed my teeth and splashed my face and slipped into my warm, darkened room with relief – then simply threw off my clothes and climbed into the grand bed, which was, I recalled, though I couldn’t see it, ornamented in gilt like a royal barge. I lay there almost soberly, as my barge moved from the brink, savouring in the blackness – the shutters were shut – this last moment of an extraordinary passage of time.

  Suddenly I passed from cushiony self-satisfaction to rigid alarm. There was low breathing coming from the pillow next to mine. Had I got the wrong room? No, I wasn’t that drunk. I reached for my granny-phone and its dim light showed me – very close – the face of Gloria, asleep beside me, looking innocent, almost childlike in repose and, to be honest, quite attractive. She had obviously been the worse for wear – she’d matched me glass for glass, despite her small frame. Maybe she had just mistaken my room for hers.

  But then her eyes opened, and she smiled in a way that showed it was no mistake. ‘Come here,’ she whispered. She pulled back the covers to show a slim but sinuous body. I was hesitating, unsure what to do, when she slid closer to me and her warm skin came into contact with mine. I should perhaps have behaved like Philip Marlowe, but Gloria was no murderous Carmen Sternwood, I reflected, and I liked her, and she was a sort of guest, though an uninvited one, in my bed. I could have said I was gay – that might have been the one acceptable escape clause – but it didn’t occur to me, and I imagine wouldn’t have been convincing. In Lord Lucan’s circle – not that I model my conduct on theirs – there was a phrase, ‘boff de politesse’, to describe what a gentleman does for a lady when the alternative would be painfully embarrassing for both. This was more than that. On the other hand, I confess, it was rather less than a coup de foudre.

  Afterwards we lay there in silence for a long time. It wasn’t at all clear what this meant – to her, or actually to me. She lay on my chest – she wasn’t heavy, and strands of her long hair were coiled in all directions, covering me – and seemed very happy. I tried to think of this as the perfect Roman ending.

  Perhaps we’d have talked about it all and cleared the air, but a noise – a chair violently scraping on a fake-marble floor and someone muttering ‘Bugger!’ – broke in on us. We both laughed under our breath. Norman was on the move – presumably going to the fridge for a glass of water. But no, we heard him padding across the salone, and then closer and closer. It occurred to me with horror that he was drunkenly set upon waking me up and having a heart-to-heart – in which he would tell me what he really thought of me and my work at length, instead of making sour little barbed remarks – as he had been doing – and harrumphing in the background when I did my readings.

  The footsteps paused outside my door, but there was no knock. He was listening. We both held our breath. Then the low slap of flesh on stone could be heard again – went further, to Gloria’s door. Silence again – he was listening there. Then a low knock. Then a louder knock. ‘Gloria!’ he whispered – then louder, very Mancunian, ‘Gloria!’ There was the sound of a handle turning, and he evidently stepped into her room. Plaintively, ‘Gloria?’ Then, ‘Oh!’ At this, I’m afraid we both giggled. He evidently heard. Because he said ‘Oh!’ again – much more darkly.

  Now he padded back across the corridor and stood outside my door, breathing audibly. It felt in the dark and the quiet as if he was standing beside the bed, glowering down at us. He seemed angry, hurt, maybe about to become violent. We lay there in tense silence, suppressing giggles, but also just a little afraid. He must have stayed there for a minute. Then the heavy footsteps moved away.

  ‘Fee fi fo fum,’ said Gloria, when we heard his door finally click shut. ‘He’ll grind your bones to make his bread if you’re not careful.’ We laughed, in relief – and also because, for once, life had come up with a fitting finale, in the key of farce, for an episode already memorable in itself.

  We didn’t have that conversation in Rome to clear the air, which is why … But she’s here. To be continued?

  2

  ‘Hello, darling. Give me a kiss. There, that’s better. My God! That journey was a nightmare … not so much the delay, which is usual – good, I see you got a bottle of champagne as I told you, did you leave any? Oh good! No, it was the people! Snapchatting, Fifty Shades of Nondescript, Femail all round. Diehard Faragistes, philistines, rich and arrogant or poor and resentful …’ Gloria’s arrival caused a stir, as always, and Will half enjoyed the attention now – he got so little anywhere else – even though it was only reflected curiosity.

  ‘My little village is such a haven from all that,’ she went on. ‘Fake news hardly penetrates. Well, that’s not quite true, I suppose. They do like stories about suicide-bomber refugee pre-teens, and they still talk about Defra having deliberately infected herds with foot-and-mouth … I know, they’re not all soulmates. But I have a sort of coven, who are lovely. My “friends” and “followers”, you know …’ Will was distracted by a thirtysomething woman at a nearby table taking a surreptitious photo on her phone – of Gloria and therefore of him – and, it appeared, excitedly posting it at once. ‘… Anyway, yes, it is good to be back in London – and to see you. Oh, another bottle of champagne, please. No, really, this is on me. It’s so good of you to meet me, as always – this is my treat. That’s the deal, my dear.’

  In her cascading black asymmetrical garments and with her large dangling earrings, delicate silver nose-stud and mane of black hair, Gloria looked the part of a glamorous best-selling author – just as Will, in his low moments, imagined he looked the part of a failure. She was still talking.

  ‘I just loved the new one. Fine Print – it’s tremendous, my dear. I think you’re on to something new. Not just the title – so clever, and a step on from Cleavages and Unbucklings and Nobody Much and that other one with the title that’s too long – but the story. I mean, this time you’ve got one! It’s your version of the Faust story, isn’t it? But in the age of unlimited credit. So clever. You’ll sell the TV rights, I wouldn’t be surprised. Ah, thanks, yes, open it now – let’s raise a glass to its success – and to you! Is it today it’s published? Tomorrow? Excellent.’

  They drank to his book – and he insisted on drinking also to her new one, Passion Faced, a story of amour fou between a young widow and the director of a crematorium, which was already selling ferociously. They talked about their various projects, and things that had occurred since their last meeting.

  But the longer she talked the more he felt in a doomed way that she was just sparing him, and that there was something she had no choice but to mention. In fact, it felt like a mercy when it finally came out. This time, at least, it was only a question – as Will had half expected.

  ‘Has our hirsute friend broken cover yet? Sorry to mention him, but you know very well that every time you’ve come out with a novel he’s been there under the bridge clutching at your ankle, trying to stop you getting past.’

  This was the Troll, as they’d come to refer to him, a shadowy but unavoidable figure who, starting with Will’s second novel Bucklings, had posted reviews on all good websites, under the web alias of Otto Stroller, a ‘Top Reviewer’ – hence their nickname. He had fired his first salvo from the undergrowth some time back. Happily, on this occasion, Will could answer Gloria’s query in the negative. The troll hadn’t pounced; yet, anyway. She expressed relief, but seemed struck by the fact that this somehow didn’t seem to lift Will’s spirits.

  The return from Rome – five years ago now – had been awkward. Norman had been thunderously sullen all the way, hung-over but also brooding abysmally, an
d they’d sat uncomfortably in a row of three on the plane, reading each other’s books: well, Will and Norman read Gloria’s, Gloria read Will’s, and no one read Norman’s. Will had later forced himself through The Salford Chronicles – an epic survey of Salford history extending from the visit of Bonnie Prince Charlie, through William Huskisson’s death in the first ever railway accident, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to the Blitz, all seen through the eyes of the heroic Huggins family. It had a rough energy, but Will winced at the portrayals of patronising Southern intellectuals which punctuated the book. At least it had been written before Norman met Will, so Ambrose St John couldn’t be him.

  A few days after they got home Gloria had started sending Will emails clearly conveying that she assumed their relationship, as if that was the word for it, would carry on. He had been paralysed with the awkwardness – had left most of them unanswered, and sent brief occasional replies over which he agonised, of a cordial but evasive kind that he knew very well buttered no parsnips. She was up in the wilds of Yorkshire – the success of The Brides of March, and of its TV adaptation, allowed her to buy a small cottage, not to mention a cream Porsche which she texted him an image of – so a casual meeting was out of the question, since because of his teaching commitments, and routine of visits to his ailing mother, he seldom got away from London. After a month or two she stopped sending the emails.

  But when Bucklings, in which Will’s main characters had moved down to London and were struggling ineffectually in the worlds of publishing and literary journalism, appeared just under a year later, they saw each other again. She’d sent him a message asking to read it in manuscript – and had been very supportive – and insisted on buying him lunch in Mayfair, at a place where the food was, she pointed out, authentically Roman. And at that first lunch, she had drawn his attention to Stroller’s vitriolic tour de force, which she had come across in a conspicuous place on Amazon.

  It started by sketching the privileged ivory-tower milieu from which Will was said to have emerged, then accused him of being a complacent, vacuous pseudo-avant-gardist who thought he was Henry James but lacked the intellectual scope or moral substance, let alone the narrative interest, of James Herriot. It ended by meditating on how he could be persuaded to put an end to a career which was an embarrassing disaster and brought shame on the name of literature. This would save his readers from the sensation of taking an endless bus journey through some dreary London suburb where every stop seemed the same as every other – which Stroller suspected might have been responsible already for a suicide or two, and certainly some cases of severe depression.

  Who was Stroller? she had asked. Was there anyone from his university time who had it in for him? He was a bit stunned, but when he had scratched around in his past, the only real candidate was his contemporary and college-mate Mark Lord – who had got a 2.1 when Will got a First, and who felt that difference the more sharply because of the expectations of his academic parents. Will had stayed on at Cambridge for his PhD, while Mark to get funding had to go off to Lampeter – where he had stuck, full-time, among the sheep, with a Welsh wife and children. An academic friend who knew them both and had done some externalling in Lampeter had confided to Will that in his cups Mark confessed to his loathing of Will, an emotion he had apparently expatiated on for over an hour. But that had been a couple of years back.

  Gloria was sceptical anyway. Surely, she had said, there was a prime suspect, who had a motive that they were both very aware of – one who, moreover, even looked rather like a troll. She revealed that Norman was not only in the habit of sending her rather plaintive yearning texts, he occasionally drove over from Salford to pay a visit – though she did her best to avoid him, and when he cornered her he was self-pitying rather than threatening. He would hint that if she relented he would be prepared to leave his growing family for her. And he would mutter darkly about Will, she said, especially since Bucklings had been nominated for the Vere De Vere Prize (which, however, it would not go on to win).

  At her subsequent lunches with Will she had reported additional discoveries: for one thing, that Stroller had reviewed other works very favourably – including hers, and, actually, Norman’s own. If Norman was Stroller, that wouldn’t be unprecedented. Poe had reviewed himself more than once, hadn’t he? As they went on, the reviews took the form of a series of open letters to Will pleading with him to stop writing, to spare his readers the tortures of boredom and disappointment his works inflicted.

  But ‘Honestly, you mustn’t worry so much about it’, she had said, even though he had just told her he wasn’t worried. ‘I know a lot of people would find this disheartening. And I see that you can’t very well ignore it, because, after all, he is doing this in just the place where the most readers will be deciding whether or not to buy the book. But, you know, “Hobgoblin, nor foul fiend, Can daunt his spirit … There’s no discouragement Shall make him once relent His first avowed intent To be a pilgrim.” OK, so there’s someone who has it in for you. So what? Man up! Defy him …’

  Towards the end of that first lunch she had revealed that she was staying in a discreet little boutique hotel round the corner, and insisted that he come back with her for a third bottle of champagne. He had thought they were on a new, non-sexual basis. But when he didn’t immediately say yes, he saw a pain and vulnerability in her eyes, and it neutralised his reluctance, so that he couldn’t refuse. She wasn’t really giving him a choice, anyway. ‘It’s the least you can do,’ she had said. He wasn’t attached to anyone at the time, and he was fond of her – so he wavered, and he was lost.

  What followed was excruciating, so much so, to tell the truth, that he was unable to play his part, something that had never happened to him before. He had staggered out into the chill of the evening, feeling humiliated and ashamed – and as full of pity for Gloria as he was for himself. The look of sad bafflement on her face as he had kissed her goodbye would come back to him at unexpected moments and almost reduce him to tears.

  Each succeeding year, for Grey Man (which she called, laughing, Faceless Nonentity), about a young writer in the grip of depression, and then We Did Not Know What Was Happening To Us (which she called The Gormless), where Will’s main characters lost their jobs, homes and spouses and their ambitions were crushed, she had offered the same invitation. But through those previous lunches he had gently but firmly refused to come back with her to those burgundy silk sheets, pleading the appointments that he had consciously made to keep him from succumbing. And now, in any case, he was with Flora, who definitely wouldn’t understand the concept of the boff de politesse – they were getting married next year. This time Gloria seemed rather alarmingly lively – he even wondered if she were on some medication – but all the way to and through pudding their talk was pleasant enough, with no further mention of Stroller.

  Then, as they reached the liqueurs – she always insisted on Amaro, the name of which she said perfectly combined bitterness and love, because it was so close to amare – she suddenly recalled something. ‘Oh, sorry! I should have said this earlier. Good news, I think. One of my “followers” who knows I know you tweeted me this morning a link to an early review of your book in the LLR, but I didn’t have time to look. Maybe the tide is turning for you!’ She pulled out her iPad and deftly brought it up. It was called, ominously, ‘Small in Every Way’ – and as Will craned over the table to see, his heart sank. Under the title was that name – Otto Stroller.

  This time, somehow, the Troll who had been a nuisance under the bridge had got inside the castle – the LLR, for God’s sake, about the only serious mainstream literary review left – and graduated to the rank of full-blown ogreish gatekeeper, raising the drawbridge and hurling down boulders on the would-be interloper Will. As he read on, there was no respite. This was Stroller’s most effective blow yet, by some way. It was malign, and hyperbolic, but he had pitched it as a manifesto for big ambitious novels against small intricate ones, and it made hideously compulsive readi
ng, which some would certainly find funny – 3,500 words of satirical caricature of his whole world-view and manner and idea of himself; not fair, but not easy to shrug off. Parts of it made even Will laugh. He was filled with sudden despair. Would he never escape? Would his publisher even keep him on after this? Sales had been getting low on Grey Man and We Did Not Know What Was Happening To Us, and how could Fine Print do better now? The Troll called it Terms and Conditions, saying this was a perfect name for it, since the T&Cs were the kind of thing people never bothered to read. Will should have seen that coming, he thought; indeed, maybe his unconscious was in league with the Troll, setting up his mockeries. The worst of it was, because of the timing all the other reviewers would read this before they filed their own copy – and contempt, he had learned, was among the most infectious of emotions.

  ‘Look, Will, my dear, don’t cry, for goodness’ sake.’ He wasn’t crying, actually, but when she said this he was shocked to realise he was on the verge of it, as he registered how upset he had allowed himself to appear. ‘Let’s keep this in proportion, darling,’ she went on. ‘How could Norman have got himself into the LLR, I wonder? That’s terrible. But people will know it’s just malicious – no one will take it seriously. Look, let’s save the afternoon: just come back to the hotel with me. I know about Dora, and she sounds marvellous – but we don’t need to let that stop us. I won’t breathe a word. We can just shut out the world for the afternoon. One more time. I’ll take you under my wing.’