The Book Against God

by James Wood

  “You bribe me, you bribe me … Oh, it’s beautiful! Tommy you’re so extravagant, and I have far too many lovely things, most of them from you.”

  I murmured to Jane, in the interest of truthfulness, that it was largely her money.

  “You’re not supposed to say that, you silly thing.”

  A good liar needs strength: strong nerves, strong ethics (precisely so as to be able to keep the lie separate in his soul from the truth), and above all a very strong memory. I have the nerves, the ethics, but unfortunately I am forgetful and disorganized. I promised to do something about the Hilliers’ invitation, and then forgot about it, and suddenly it was the day of the party, and Jane saw the time and name written on our kitchen calendar (written by her, of course).

  “What did you do about that in the end?” she asked me.

  “Ah. Nothing … as yet. But—but”—I held my hand up to calm her down—“we can still cancel.”

  “Of course we can’t. It would be awfully rude. You did nothing at all?”

  “Yes, I suppose it would seem rude,” I muttered to myself.

  “Tom, I asked you to do this. Two weeks ago. I asked you. I have to do everything in this house.”

  “I have a plan,” I said.

  “Oh dear,” said Jane—not, I think, without some fondness.

  “Look, tonight we won’t even try to attend the party, and if the phone goes we won’t answer. But tomorrow night let’s go to Clapham and appear at Catrine and Danny’s at exactly the time that they want us there tonight.”

  “That’s utterly silly.”

  “No it isn’t. It merely looks as if we got the date wrong by a single day. An easy error. Now, in the best possible world, Danny and Catrine will be out and we can leave a note; but if they are in they will forgive us for our honest mistake, offer us a drink that politeness dictates we refuse, and then we are on our way into the night. I know, we can have dinner round the corner in Wandsworth, in that new restaurant that was just in the Standard.”

  “We can’t do that. I asked you to lie on behalf of me, not to lie with me at your side. I couldn’t do it. And I asked you to lie before the event—not after it! No no no, I refuse to go along with this, this silliness. Oh dear, this teaches me a lesson.”

  “What lesson?”

  “You know what I mean,” she said ominously. Then she lightened, and I thought we might be through the worst of it. “And who’s paying for supper, Croesus?”

  I struggled to get Jane to accept this plan. She would not. We went to the party, and she got gloomy again, and was cross with me all evening for not having the courage to have declined the invitation when I first received it. Of course, we had a perfectly pleasant time at the Hilliers’, a fact which Jane refused to accept.

  3

  TEN YEARS AGO AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, when I was a student there, Professor Syme called me “the Great Pretender.” What did he mean by that? I think I was a pretty good philosophy student at London—rather idle, very plausible for sure, picking at odd tufts of learning. Asked to read Plato, I would spend instead a few days with Plotinus. That’s my way of doing things. It was not deception so much as a disdain for the bridle. I liked to be free. I like to be free! Syme predicted that I would win top marks or fail badly in my finals exams. I won top marks, and then had the pleasure of frustrating expectations by not staying on to do a doctorate.

  But once out of university I was afflicted by a real eagerness to study. I sat at home, reading and reading. Well, not at home, actually, but at Uncle Karl’s house in Chelsea. And Karl is not my real uncle, either, but was my father’s best friend, a refugee from Germany who came as a mere boy to England in 1939, and met Father in the early 1950s, when Karl became a student at Durham University. Father took the young Karl under his wing. Later, Karl made money, a lot of it, in the 1960s and ’70s, as an art dealer. He has a house in a street behind Sloane Square. After university, I lived with Karl for three happy and decidedly childlike years, in an enormous bedroom whose walls were covered with outrageous contemporary paintings. It was an easy existence, during which I sat and read a great deal, spoiled only by the odd necessary job when money ran out and by the unannounced entrance of uniformed deliverymen, who came to take one ugly painting off the wall and replace it with another. But there was a quality of desperation in the way I consumed books at Uncle Karl’s, beginning each in the hope that this was the one which would tell me how to live, how to think; as soon as I realized that it would not, my reading of it began to slow, precisely as if my heartbeat were slowing from its initial race. More often than not, I put it aside.

  Eventually, partly at the urging of my parents, I decided to go back to university and begin a Ph.D. dissertation. I worked quite hard at first; but then I lost interest and hope, and in the last two years the BAG has become more important to me. The problem is that I started reading books that were utterly beyond the scope of my academic work—the early Church Fathers, the Psalms (again and again), certain Buddhist and Islamic texts. And then I couldn’t stop reading these “irrelevant” books.

  It was while I was most blocked on the Ph.D. that I met Jane, five years ago now, and began to develop some of my bad habits—the irresponsibility, the lying when it was not necessary, not replying to bills, and so on. I was twenty-six, she was six years older. I won’t deny that I’m irresponsible—though not actually as irresponsible as I probably seem. For instance, while we were married Jane and I always argued a great deal about my failure to pay bills on time, and yet they were always paid in the end. In my teens I read somewhere that Erik Satie never opened any bills. Now, I am cowardly, so I was unable to go as far as Satie. But I thought that a little of the Satie style would be a good thing. Again, I can’t entirely divorce this quality of my temperament from my secularism. If one believes that one has only seventy years or so on this earth and no afterlife, one cannot spend one’s time observing all the proprieties and rules. My God, if I were scrupulous about paying bills, balancing my cheque book, cleaning the lavatory, answering letters and telephone messages, changing my clothes, bathing, and the rest, I would spend my entire life rolling the rock of diligence up a hill of someone else’s making.

  No, life is always a struggle for freedom. Whenever I sign a cheque for some idiot company or other, I feel a little like a man in an electric chair or in a hospital bed, streaming with wires and connections and linkages. All these smothering tentacles: the gas company, the electric people, the landlord, the tax man, the credit-card officials, all of these needy babies pressing down on me and demanding that I turn my life into one long liegedom. So I leave bills unopened, and it gives me a small thrill to come upon them on the kitchen table, and to know that although inside the envelopes lie all these hysterical flashing demands, from the outside they are as calm as chess players. Then, having done nothing, I watch the second wave, the repeat requests, arrive a couple of weeks later, and enjoy placing the second wave on top of the first wave of bills on the table. Once I have resisted this, I am primed for the third wave, exactly ten days later. These requests are not from the original companies but from collection agencies—the bailiffs—and come in special envelopes. This is the moment at which I sign my cheque like a good little bourgeois, and enclose it with a pugilistic note, a bit of a challenge: “P.S.: Since I have finally paid up, you can call off your thugs.”

  Obviously, this is less of a problem than it was, because I have fewer bills to pay in the Finchley Road bedsit. But it was always coming between me and Jane when we were together. The Ph.D. is clearly to blame. It forced me into an unnatural and weak position with my wife. Her husband had no income, no power, and no status. All he did was sit at home trying to finish the unfinishable. The more I look at it, the more I see the Ph.D. as the reason for everything bad in my life.

  Often, I think, Jane enjoyed my spirit of rebellion—though she has never been a secularist like me—and used to laugh with me at some of the scrapes we got into. That’s what has made underst
anding her so difficult: for the first two years of our marriage she seemed to cherish my irresponsibility. She herself is exceedingly law-abiding. So I think she enjoyed living with me, with this younger man who was obviously a creative and blithely lawless presence. I think she almost encouraged me not to pay bills and so on. I have a memory of her standing at the doorway and laughing wildly while I answered one of those telemarketing calls on the phone. “Am I speaking to Mr. Bunting?” She knew what I would always say in response to that question: “I’m afraid you’re not. I am house-sitting for Mr. Bunting, and he’s in Hong Kong for a month. Perhaps you’ll call back when he returns?”

  It’s true that Jane began to get angrier with me about my financial irresponsibility. Last year, about six months before my father had his first heart attack, we argued about my credit-card payments. Someone from Visa had started phoning me. Day after day the phone went, and it was always the same man. So on the fourth or fifth day I performed a trick I had used before, and which Jane had previously enjoyed. As soon as I heard him speak, I said, “Hello?” He replied: “Yes, hello, is that Mr. Bunting?” And again, with more puzzlement, I said, “Hello?” as if I couldn’t hear anyone on the line. And again, he said, “Hel-lo, Mr. Bunting.” Then, for verisimilitude, I kept the receiver near my mouth and shouted to Jane, “Jane, what is wrong with this bloody phone, I can’t hear a thing. Someone has phoned and I can’t make out a word he is saying! This is the third time today. We have to get it fixed.” And then I put the phone down. Jane, of course, came to me and asked what was wrong with the phone. I told her that I had simply been using my old trick to get someone who was “after me” off my back. But Jane reminded me that we were married, and that if someone was after me then that person was also after her, and that if we ever had a child that person would also be after our child. That was what being a family was. Her sarcasm was rising like floodwater. To calm her, I explained that it was nothing more serious than the Visa people chasing a late payment.

  “But you told me that you had paid the bill,” said Jane.

  “Did I? I find that extremely unlikely.”

  “You looked into my eyes last week and told me that you had paid the bill and posted it in … I think you said in Gower Street.”

  “Ah, no no, it wasn’t the Visa bill I was referring to. No.”

  “What was it?”

  “Another bill.”

  “The lie you are telling me to cover up the first lie is more repellent to me than the original one. Just so you know.” Jane seemed almost to be shivering with disgust.

  Now, there are liars who will tell you that they were pleased to be forced to confession, that as soon as they began to tell the truth it bubbled up wantonly from their mouths. I am not one of those liars. Caught, I tell another lie to hide the first. I surrender a lie with great unwillingness and feel instantly nostalgic, once it has gone, for the old comfort it offered me. But I also know the value of a tactical surrender.

  “Okay, I hadn’t paid the Visa bill.”

  “And you lied to me when you said that you had.”

  “No, I don’t think I did lie. I’m sure I imagined when I spoke to you that I had indeed paid and posted the bill.”

  “Oh, Tommy.” Jane looked at me with amazement. “Tell the truth! Don’t you understand that I care much more about your lying to me than about your lying to the credit-card company?”

  What surprised me was not Jane’s anger but her distress. And, frankly, although practically I understand the distinction between lying to one’s wife and lying to a corporation, philosophically the difference seems slight. Surely both lies were so tiny, so opportunistic, that they hardly merited examination, let alone rebuke? The problem is that Jane has no sense of proportion. It’s a curious aspect of lying—looking at the phenomenon philosophically—that for most people the size of a lie has no relation to its perceived potency. People like Jane cannot distinguish between small lies and large lies; for them, the act of lying is always itself an enormity, and comes in only one size. God did the same in Eden. After all, Adam’s sin was actually very small, but God inflated its consequences ridiculously. Jane treats every lie as if it were asparagus, which, whether I eat one spear or ten, makes my urine smell with exactly the same pungency.

  4

  IT WAS MY FRIEND ROGER TRELAWNAY who introduced me to Jane. Roger runs an early music choir. He is eager and gentle, a happy schoolboy. He speaks very fast; his upper front teeth are slightly twisted. They look as if they are trying to escape from his mouth under the pressure of such fast speech and have got caught up in themselves in the process. I can’t always understand Roger, because he treats the music world as if it were school, handing out nicknames and judgments to players and conductors. “This one is conducted by Hitler!” he says eagerly, as he puts on a record for me to listen to. He has a set of wholly musical assumptions, most of which are nonsensical to me: “It’s all in D major, which is really boring.” Or: “B minor is the key of suicide.” So I tend to listen to about half of what Roger says. But I heard him talk about Jane Sheridan, one of his “music friends,” and finally he dragged me to hear her give a little concert in Bloomsbury. I was unwilling to go because I almost always dislike Roger’s music friends. “You won’t be disappointed, Tom,” he said. “She’s a marvellous pianist, and also quite dishy, way beyond my league.”

  I thought that Jane was not very attractive as she came onto the stage; she was heavily involved in one of those large, parachute-like concert dresses made of puffy blue raw silk, the kind that only female musicians wear. As she passed the piano, she patted its black hood, which was raised as if to catch the sun, bowed, sat on the red, buttoned-leather seat, scratched her cheek, and began a quiet piece, which I didn’t know. Her neck and back were thin, her hair was gripped in a severe ponytail. The short sleeves of her bunched and hilly dress throttled her thin upper arms, whose white skin caught the light as she lifted her hands—lifted them gently, in paddling movements, as if trying to calm the piano. Her face was lovely; I could see that, and I was beginning to find rather an erotic contrast between the angular arms and wrists, probably as thin as they had been when she was a teenager, and the more rounded, certainly adult deposit on which she sat. As she concentrated, the tip of her tongue emerged like a middle lip. She sat as if at a loom, calmly weaving and shuttling. By the end of the concert, I wanted to meet her. I was tremendously attracted by the sight of this woman so completely at work, so much the mistress of her instrument.

  Roger and I approached her as she stood by the piano after the concert, talking to a plump man in a light-brown leather coat, with white creases in it like the striations of fat in a piece of meat, whom Jane later identified as the organist of St. James’s, Picadilly, “where Stokowski was once the organist.” (I made myself look as if I knew who the hell Stokowski was.)

  “Well, what did you think?” she asked Roger, in a flash of that difficult pride I would come to know so well.

  “Super,” said Roger. “Beethoven a bit fast.”

  “Yep, I need fingers like a millipede’s legs to do bits of 109 anyway,” she said with great briskness. “God, those trills!” I was surprised by this firm easiness, because I would’ve been irritated had Roger criticized me in that way.

  There was a silence. Roger, who can be socially incompetent, had not introduced me.

  “I thought the concert was brilliant, beautiful,” I offered. The last adjective made me awkward. I think of myself as moderately attractive, neither handsome nor ugly. Epicurus speaks of katastema, the stable condition of the flesh, and argues that the achievement of this constitutes the highest joy. My looks, neither striking nor quite dismissable, had enabled such stability, since they protected me from extremes of emotion: I had tended neither to be rejected by women nor to be jumped on by them. And in parallel, my emotions towards women had tended away from extremity. But about Jane I felt extreme, quite quickly. Jane’s eyes had a quality which immediately made me anxious. She turne
d amazing, dark eyes on me. Such thick long lashes! I had seen her only in profile, and was shocked.

  “I’m Thomas Bunting, by the way.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard all about you,” she said.

  I think I was immediately attracted to Jane. To begin with, she has those remarkable eyes, densely dark. So intense are they that if I look only at them, she seems to be always angry with me. The rest of her face is almost tyrannized into blandness by them: for a long time I found that I could not recall any aspect of her face other than those black concentrations. She has a habit of pushing her chin out, as if catching something with her teeth. Her hair is very dark, fiercely commanded into a ponytail which hangs quiveringly, like the needle of a delicate instrument designed to monitor her moods. I got to know this shaking sleek ponytail very well indeed, because Jane has many moods, and there is no way to predict when or why she will laugh (at which point her ponytail, laughter’s tassel, swings and rocks) or become angry (the ponytail, now pride’s brush, stiff and unmoving, as she tilts her head to the left and closes her eyes in fury). Her noise is quite long—something suggestive of erotic prolongation in a long nose, I think—and her neck is long, too. At its base is a teaspoon declivity. There are freckles on her collarbones: eager touchmarks, sexual dapple. Her accent is very proper.

  Roger proposed a drink somewhere.

  “Not in this—party dress,” Jane said firmly. “I feel ten years old in this thing, and as if the clown were about to turn up and keep us happy. Give me a moment.”

  She disappeared to change. The only sounds were the distant London traffic, and the wet collapse of a cleaner’s mop on the floor of the now empty hall. Five minutes later, Jane appeared from a heavy side door twice her height, and came towards us. I was astounded by the transformation. The ugly concert dress had compiled a superfluous commentary of silk around her, and obscured the truth. But in tight-fitting black jeans and a white blouse with oversize buttons she was closely revealed—slim, tall, elegant. She had exchanged her ponytail for a brilliant crimson hairband that glowed as if painted there. I noticed a tiny hesitation of the left foot. Not quite a limp. At the piano she had been utterly graceful. Away from it, she was a little physically awkward, with this tiny hesitation in her step. In my infatuation, I thought this was beautiful, as if the piano were calling her back to her proper place.