A Closed Book

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘No, I didn’t. Let’s stick to what we’re about, shall we? What do you think? Could this particular gargoyle be useful for the book? Top me up, will you.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Thanks. About the gargoyle?’

  ‘Well, Paul, I don’t know whether you’ll be pleased or not, but in my opinion it bears absolutely no resemblance to you.’

  ‘Pity. And, I suppose, phew. Go on.’

  ‘This next one’s from Magdalen as well. And, since you keep insisting, I suppose I would have to say there’s a faint likeness this time. If you half-close your eyes.’

  ‘Yes, all right. What exactly is it?’

  ‘It’s a – well, no, simpler if I just read you the caption. “Man-monster and alligator are locked in symbiotic conflict, each grasping the other’s tongue.”’

  ‘Intriguing. You wouldn’t be trying to tell me something, John, would you?’

  ‘Why? What do you mean?’

  ‘If you don’t get it, it’s not worth explaining. Go on.’

  ‘Come on, that’s not –’

  ‘I said, go on.’

  ‘That’s about all there is. Oh, no, here’s something at New College. Now this could be interesting. A set of seven gargoyles representing the Seven Virtues. Patience, Generosity, Charity –’

  ‘Forget it. Doesn’t New College also have gargoyles of the Seven Deadly Sins?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re spread out on the next page.’

  ‘Any of them remind you of you-know-who?’

  ‘Well … At a pinch, number five.’

  ‘Number five?’

  ‘Sorry. That’s the reference number. Number five is, let’s see, “Corrupt Love”.’

  *

  ‘I’m weary of this little game. Weary, period.’

  ‘Oh. All right. You don’t feel like taking a walk this evening, then?’

  ‘Yes I do. Yes, let’s. I need air. I’ve been trapped inside my head all day. You can’t know how claustrophobic it is never to be able to escape from the inside of your own head. Yes, let’s have our walk now. Early. While it’s still light.’

  A man may be riddled by invisible superstitions. It’s possible, for example, to imagine just such a man, one who, painfully conscious of how foolish he must appear to others when sidestepping each and every ladder propped up in the street, succeeds in persuading himself one fine day that walking under a ladder will bring good luck rather than bad and that not walking under a ladder will bring bad luck rather than good. From which moment on he will sashay along the street, nonchalantly walking under every ladder he encounters. And those passers-by who chance to notice him – and who no doubt say to themselves, Now there goes someone completely free of superstition – utterly fail to understand that he nevertheless is still in thrall, neurotically in thrall, to a wholly personal form of superstition, one which, for all that its effects remain invisible to them, is no less irrational and inhibitive than that of which it constitutes the negative image. I’ve become such a man. It’s almost as though the daily routine of my life with John – coming up for a month now! – were ruled by an invisible set of precepts and principles that I’m helpless to resist. It’s almost as though I’ve been led along the edge, the very rim, of an abyss, without realizing for an instant that what has accompanied me all the way is a precipitous plunge into the void.

  ‘Paul, what is that?’

  ‘What is what?’

  ‘On your forehead?’

  ‘It’s nothing.’

  ‘Nothing? It’s quite a bruise you have there. Here’s your toast, by the way.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Butter to the left. Butter and marmalade to the right.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘What happened to you? The bruise?’

  ‘Oh, that. It was the wardrobe door again.’

  ‘What about the wardrobe door?’

  ‘There’s something the matter with the latch and the door doesn’t always stay closed. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, it swings open by itself. I’ve got no way of knowing, so naturally I walk straight into it.’

  ‘And you walked into it this morning?’

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I see …’

  ‘It’s happened before and it’ll happen again. I’ve learned to live with it. A little more sugar, please. These days I seem to prefer my coffee sugary.’

  ‘There you are.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘How often has it happened?’

  ‘Oh, half-a-dozen times, I suppose.’

  ‘Half-a-dozen times? You’re mad.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said I think you’re mad not to have had something done about it.’

  ‘The blind must expect to be knocked about a bit.’

  ‘Not when it can so easily be avoided.’

  ‘Charles tried to fix it once and only made it worse.’

  ‘Well, I’ve no idea what Charles did, but I know I can fix it.’

  ‘Stop fussing, will you? It’s not serious. I’ll just have to be extra careful.’

  ‘For a week or two. Then you’ll forget again.’

  ‘Well, and so what? It’s my forehead.’

  ‘Look, Paul. I’m going to be driving over to Chipping Campden after lunch. You’ve got practically nothing in the fridge for the weekend. And, as I remember, there’s a locksmith in the High Street. So why don’t I pop upstairs, measure the wardrobe door, then buy one of those things – restrictors, I think you call them. Door restrictors. They’re like a pair of huge metal compasses. Like protractors. Remember? At school? Anyway, you screw them on to the door and it always swings shut. And stays shut.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Why not? They’re not expensive.’

  ‘You know perfectly well I’m not thinking of the expense.’

  ‘Well, what? It would take me twenty minutes to fix it. Top whack.’

  ‘I said no.’

  ‘This has nothing to do with your claustrophobia, has it?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘That wardrobe of yours? It’s very roomy. I was just wondering if you were afraid of getting stuck inside.’

  ‘John. As someone once said, read my lips. I don’t want the lock changed and that’s that.’

  ‘Just a thought.’

  ‘Let’s get to work, shall we.’

  ‘Read it back to me. I promise not to interrupt.’

  ‘All right. I’m starting. “I myself heard of the Princess of Wales’s death in a way likely to have been repeated up and down the country. On the Sunday morning in question, early, very early – I had only just emerged from my bath – a friend rang me up. His voice sounded bizarrely guttural.

  ‘“‘Well,’ he said, without any of the expected telephonic pleasantries and preliminaries, ‘and what do you think of the news?’

  ‘“‘News? What news?’

  ‘“‘You mean you haven’t heard?’ he exclaimed with feigned incredulity. (I say ‘feigned’, because, considering my ‘What news?’, he could hardly have been in doubt that I had not heard.)

  ‘“The news burst forth in a loud firework display of exclamation marks.

  ‘“‘Diana’s dead! Dodi Fayed’s dead! They were being pursued by paparazzi! Their limousine crashed in a tunnel in Paris! The paparazzi have been arrested!’

  ‘“Like the entire country, I was caught off guard. What was shocking was less the mere fact of Diana’s death than how utterly out of the blue it had come. Even so early, however, I was already conscious of a faintly jarring note. My acquaintance was genuinely distraught: as I was later to learn, he would spend the remainder of that same Sunday in front of his television set. During his initial phone call, nevertheless, I could detect in his voice what I can only call a terrible elation, the elation of someone who knows himself to be the bearer not simply of bad news b
ut of thrillingly bad news. He was aghast, but he was also audibly exhilarated. And, no matter that he himself would indignantly deny such an allegation, I am convinced that he would have been obscurely frustrated, even downright disappointed, had I replied to his opening question by murmuring, ‘Yes, it is dreadful, isn’t it?’

  ‘“Everyone knows what I mean: the hair-raising excitement that we feel when communicating, to someone who has not yet been apprised of it, devastatingly bad news about mutual friends, colleagues and, of course, household-name celebrities. It is a species of excitement which has nothing to do with schadenfreude, the perverse satisfaction we (some of us) take in the reversals suffered by our friends. It can perfectly well coexist with authentic grief. But if anything can be securely filed away under the rubric of ‘human nature’, it is surely that half-suppressed frisson experienced when we find ourselves in a position to impart information – information that, like paint, is still wet – relating to an acquaintance’s sacking, divorce, accident, arrest, suicide or terminal cancer.

  ‘“To my knowledge, there is not, although there ought to be, a word for such a frisson, especially now that it has definitively gravitated on to the stage of world affairs. For take the case, precisely, of Diana. Whatever else there was to be said about it, the international response to the circumstances of her fatal accident was a vindication of McLuhan’s theory of the contemporary world as a global village, one in which, by virtue of the ubiquitous electronic media, anything that happens somewhere will happen everywhere else as well at the same time. And just as a real village would be abuzz with the sudden, violent death of its most glamorous and stylish inhabitant, so the global village seemed to be engulfed by the – dare I call it ‘gleeful’? – frenzy which surrounded Diana’s.

  ‘“It is not as though any of us wished for that death. Even I, profoundly hostile as I am to the brainless culture of celebrity, found myself saddened that someone so young and beautiful – someone, moreover, who appeared truly not to wish to fritter her life away – had met with so horrible an end. But there is no getting away from it. Diana’s death, tragic, pointless, ironic or (grisly word) iconic, call it whatever you will, was also a phenomenon. It was tremendously interesting.

  ‘“Nor was it unique, being, rather, only one in a lengthy series of recent newsworthy disasters which have had the effect of shaking a sluggish world out of a torpor of eternal sameness. For many of us, Pete Townshend was no more than a name, an irrelevant one at that, until he was slain in a Soho street. The Reverend Ian Paisley no more than an obnoxiously foul-mouthed (sic!) demagogue until he, too, was gunned down in his turn. Tony Blair no more than a toothily vacuous nonentity until he was enhaloed by the venomous spectre of AIDS. As for O. J. Simpson, there was, worldwide, an explosion of outrage at his acquittal, but there was equally (who will deny it?) a wonderfully galvanizing undercurrent of relish in that outrage, a relish of which the world would have been deprived if he had been sent to prison. The subsequent fact that he committed suicide was hence doubly gratifying, for it not only eliminated what vestiges of resentment might have lingered on from the patent – indeed, flagrant – injustice of his trial, it also offered yet another sensational item of news in which the collective, ever anxious to escape the cyclical ruts and routines of its humdrum, single-channelled existence, could revel without either guilt or responsibility.

  “‘What does it mean, though, to become oneself, as I modestly and briefly became, the focus, the cynosure, of such attention? What does it mean to become oneself the sensation, oneself the ten days’ wonder? I have sometimes pondered on the perceptional abyss that separates the nervous flier – as he sits with fastened seat-belt and scrotum-tightening rigidity inside an aircraft – from some idly ambling pedestrian far below on the ground who, for no particular reason, happens to glance up at the sky and observes a minuscule, streamlined object gracefully traversing it. And I have wondered, too, whether death might not be a little like that. For the individual who is experiencing death, the individual to whom it is happening, it must feel like being inside a plane, inside a vast, hollowed-out metal cylinder. For the attendant observer, by contrast, it must feel like being outside a plane, watching it pass overhead, so far, so very far overhead, and so tiny, so very tiny, it becomes virtually impossible for him to imagine that there might be anyone inside it. There, perhaps, is the difference between death as perceived by a dying man and death as perceived by another who watches him die. And there, too, perhaps, is the difference between being, and merely revelling in, a sensational news item.”’

  *

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘How many words? I’d say a thousand. No, twelve hundred.’

  ‘One thousand and ninety-two.’

  ‘Not bad, not bad. For a morning’s work, that’s not bad at all. Repetition of “ten days’ wonder” and “I have wondered”, but we can fix that. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s good.’

  ‘You think it’s good?’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Why, then, do I seem to detect a ghostly question-mark loitering with intent, as a policeman would say, at the end of that sentence?’

  ‘No. I really do think it’s good. Very good.’

  ‘Come on, John.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What do you actually think?’

  ‘Oh well, if you insist. It just struck me as, well, as being more – I’m not quite sure how to put this – more … more journalistic, somehow, than the rest of the book so far.’

  ‘Your point being?’

  ‘I couldn’t help wondering if …’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t help wondering – I mean, while you were dictating – I couldn’t help wondering if you’d decided after all to recycle the article we talked about, remember? The article you wrote for the Sunday Times? The article about Diana? Adapted here and there, you know, to fit the new context, but basically the same. Am I right?’

  ‘No. What’s for lunch?’

  Why is it I’m glad, why is it I’m relieved, that John is out? What is it about him that makes me eternally ill-at-ease? Oh, God, for an old friend. Oh, for notnecessarily a close friend but an old one. Someone for whom I haven’t always been blind and disfigured.

  ‘Let me see – where – here it is. Now. Now this shouldn’t be too difficult. Let’s – oh damn, of course, they’ve changed over to these bloody – what are they called again? – what? what? what? what are they called? – oh shit, trying to find a word on the tip of your tongue, it’s like – it’s like a – it’s like waiting for a sneeze to break. What are the fuckers called? Ah, ah – wait – touch-tone! Touch-tone phones. Yes, touch-tone … Dialling used to be so easy and so – so specific to phoning. But, no, naturally, naturally, they can’t leave anything alone, they’ve got to fiddle with everything, even with the few things that miraculously do work. Oh well, let’s go. Andrew’s number, Andrew’s number, Andrew’s number. Oh no, I don’t believe it! Come on. Remember, remember! What a time to forget! Ohhhh, wait, wait, 631 something. Uh, 631 – 631 – 631.3341! 631.3341! All right now, don’t forget. 631.3341. Now, let’s see, here’s 1, and here’s – here’s 3 – so this must be 6. Okay, that’s good for 631. Now – 3341 – all right, all right now – 3 is here – and again – and 4 is on the other side – as so – right – right – and then 1 is directly above 4. Okay, right. Let’s have a dry run. 6 – 3 – 1 – ohhhhh, no, that’s 4 – no, no, it is 1, it is 1 – do it again. 6 – 3 – 1, right. Shit, what comes after 1? 6 – 3 – 1 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 1. So. 3 – 3 – 4 – 1. 3, 3, 4, 1. 3, 3, 4, 1. Okay. Now – go! 6 – 3 – 3 – damn, stop! All right, calm, calm, just keep calm – and – 6 – 3 – 1 – uh – 3 – and the second 3 – 4 – 1. Et voilà. Nothing to it.’

  *

  ‘The number you have dialled has not been recognized. Please check and try again.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The number
you have dialled has not been –’

  ‘All right, all right. Okay, let’s just check this again. 6, yes – 3, yes – 1, yes – 3, yes – 3 again, yes – 4 – 1. That seems all right. So. 6 – 3 – 1 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 1.’

  *

  ‘The number you have dialled has not been recognized. Please –’

  ‘Stupid cunt! Why hasn’t it been recognized? Don’t you even know your own numbers? 631.3341. So what the hell’s the matter with that?’

  ‘Uh oh. London. London, of course. It’s 0171! 0171.631.3341! Now. Oh God, now where the fuck’s the 7? Wait. 1 – 2 – 3 – new line – 4 – 5 – 6 – then 7. Two rows directly under 1. Right. 0 – 1 – 7 – 1 – 6 – 3 – 1 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 1. Here goes nothing. 0 – 1 – 7 – 1 – eh, eh – 6 – 3 – 1 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 1.’

  *

  ‘Ah, at last.’

  ‘Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The number you are calling knows you are waiting.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The number you are calling knows you are waiting.’

  ‘Yes, darling, I heard you the first time.’

  *

  ‘Wait, wait. I think – yes, I think I know what this is. It’s – it’s the – it’s the – the call-waiting thingamabob. Call-waiting facility. Yup. Another useless gadget. Why do they do it? And what would happen, I wonder, what would happen if I dialled my own number? What? Let’s see. I’d get the message first. “Please hold the line while we try to connect you. The number you are calling knows you are waiting.” Then – then, yes, as the person being phoned, I’d find myself cutting in. Then what? Would I be put through to myself? Hah?’

  ‘Wait, though, wait. Damn. I should have held the line and someone would eventually have answered it. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Hold the line? Start again. 6 – 3 – 1 – no, no, damn it – start again – 0 – 1 – 7 – 1 – 6 – 3 – 1 – 3 – 3 – 4 – 1.’