by James Wood
I felt imprisoned by my father in those days. Ah, he was so sure that I would “see the light.” But not if I put huge drapes up against the windows! That was where the lying began, you see. My instinct was to hide myself, to hide my thoughts about God. A lie was necessary to protect the truth, that was obvious, as clothes hid the truth of the body. If my parents asked me whether I prayed to God, I would say that I did, and I felt that in lying about this I renewed my private truth. I began to think of truth as mine alone, and I could almost visualize it in my bedroom, protected by a locked door. My lies were saving the truth. At first, I only lied defensively, to give myself cover, and only about my lack of religious faith. But really, once you started, there were so many truths to protect that there were hardly enough lies to cover them. I liked smoking cigarettes with Max, and obviously it was necessary that I should tell my parents that I did not; moreover, it was necessary to tell them that in fact I loathed tobacco, that a single puff revolted me. It was the same with wine and gin, which Max and I were stealing from his parents.
Around this time, a friend of my parents, Canon Palliser, asked me, when we were alone, what I was studying for my O-level exams. Into the list of these subjects, I inserted Greek, which I had never studied. This was new. A lie wholly gratuitous. I felt a rush of sheer joy. The purest lie, because before there was even a truth to protect, I was, as it were, anticipating truth’s protection, truth’s needs. It was a kind of chivalry towards truth! You took the lie to the enemy, preemptively, so that you were not forced to lie.
That curious ecstasy I felt when I lied was the ecstasy of freedom. I became unknowable, unaccountable at the moment I lied. The difficulty was that I was always tempted into further risk. For it’s not truth that is bottomless, but untruth. Around this time I woke up one night in my bedroom, needing to urinate. I could barely be bothered to rise and walk to the bathroom. A shame that there was not some kind of commode, I thought. Seeing a half-empty glass on my bedside table, I finished the water, and then, impulsively, urinated into the glass. It filled with my warm waste. The sensible thing would be to empty the glass at once in the lavatory, or hide it under the bed. Instead, I carefully placed it back on the table, knowing that in the morning Mother—and sometimes Father—would enter the room, draw back the curtains, and wish me good morning. In the mornings, my mother enjoyed a moment of tenderness with me. She would move indulgently about the room, picking up dirty laundry and water glasses and teacups, fondly complaining about the untidiness and telling me that she and “Daddy” had already had breakfast but that I should take my time. It was quite different with Father. When he came to wake me up, he would stand at the door, and ask: “Interested?” This was the cue for me to say, sleepily, “Yes,” at which point he announced the news headlines he had heard on his little transistor radio while shaving: “More strikes today. No trains.” He borrowed the habit from his army training just before the outbreak of war. The staff sergeant used to waken the soldiers with the latest news he had heard from London in the officers’ mess. Father loved to tell the story of the day the Pope died, and how the sergeant, having announced the information, turned to the only Catholic soldier in the room, still asleep under blankets, and said, in robustly sympathetic tones, “Sorry, O’Brien,” and marched out.
I knew that my father would never notice the glass, but that my mother would stand next to the table, and I placed it there in the hope that she might see it. What joy for me to look at her, and deny that it was what it resembled, to express complete ignorance of its origins, to lie to her face. But she did not notice the glass, nor on four subsequent mornings—I repeated the nightly filling—and I got bored, and ended my game.
15
TWO WEEKS HAVE PASSED SINCE my meeting with Roger. One good week followed by one awful one. In the good week, which started well with Roger’s invitation to his music evening, I made some progress on my Ph.D., and did excellent work on the BAG, and thought as little about Jane and my late father as possible. And then it all came crashing down. First of all, I saw Jane, of course, at Roger’s, and that threw me out for several days. I can’t blame Jane; this was my ambush. Indeed, hubris sent me to Roger’s place. I was hopeful, and started entertaining fantasies of reconciliation. I knew how optimistic I was when I found myself taking a bath in my Finchley Road bathroom, washing my hair and then rubbing a bit of old sunscreen into my skin to give it gloss. I have never been conventionally very clean, and currently I have little incentive. Jane used to order me to bathe and assured me that the rest of the civilized world would look upon me with horror if it knew how truly filthy I was. But she only responded like this near the beginning of our relationship, once I had told her that I was no fan of the bath or shower; in other words, I seemed unclean to her only when I told her, not in fact. For I did not—I do not—smell; I was never actually very dirty while we were married. Those very civilized creatures who wash so thoroughly every day—what on earth are they washing? Do their legs and stomachs sweat? I hardly ever sweat (except when I am lying) and I’ve found that a quick wash of the torso suffices for several days. There’s a case to be made that washing is not especially philosophical. My BAG has several entries about washing. Plotinus preferred massages to bathing. Saint Jerome argued that those who have been washed in the water of Christ do not need to bathe. In fact, the secret of staying clean while not washing lies only in one thing: the daily changing of underwear. The soldiers of Napoleon who put on clean underwear before a battle—in the expectation of death they wanted to be clean for their Maker—had it right, though naturally my adaptation is a secular one.
Anyway, my skin glowed impressively when I turned up at Roger’s in Camden. Jane was already there. I could see her in the kitchen; her back was turned to me. There were strangers wandering about. One of them was introduced to me as Joshua Smithers, a composer. He seemed very peculiar. His whole body was violent. His hair seemed to have been torn from his head—or perhaps from someone else’s—and stuck roughly back on; it pointed forward from his brow, aiming at the world. Like Roger, Joshua spoke very fast, and as he did so he jerked his arms. He blocked my path to the kitchen, and started telling me about how little he liked jazz. “Completely fraudulent.” Perhaps he thought I was a jazz musician. Then he solemnly informed me that “the greatest twentieth-century composer” was Percy Grainger, who wrote In an English Country Garden. I looked around him. Jane was talking to Max and his girlfriend, Fiona Raymond, still with her back to me. There was something offensive about this turned back. Surely she knew I was there. By way of escaping Joshua’s exclusive attentions, I asked him if he knew Jane. She turned at her name, and looked straight at me, and I am ashamed to say that I became a fool in her presence. Those dark eyes made me null. I was aware of my face reddening, and then I felt my whole body warming. I began to plan how, without raising her suspicion that I was lying, I might give her the impression that the Ph.D. was finished. Jane said my name, fondly, easily, and then looked at my chest, and said, “Tommy dear, you’ve spilt something on your shirt.” And with scandalous composure, she dipped a cloth under the kitchen tap, approached me, and pressed at the spot, which was just above my left nipple. I watched my dark chest hairs become visible through the wet white shirt. I smelt her familiar perfume, and felt a kind of rage. How dare she deal with me in this wifely, familiar way. Was it so easy for her, then? I wanted to grab her thin, precious, talented wrists, and break them into bits. But all I said was, “You see, I’m useless without you, I can’t go anywhere,” which sounded self-pitying. And she replied, “Oh, you’re doing fine. You smell nice, by the way.”
It took me half an hour to forgive Jane for her flippancy—for her plain ordinariness. The difference between my anxiety and her calmness was horrible to contemplate. It was insulting. And why had Max not greeted me when I first saw him? Fiona had come up to me and asked me how I was, but Max had wandered off to get a drink. Since Father’s funeral, Max had been newly distant.
I moped
in a corner of the room while Roger and Joshua put different pieces of music on the record player. Jane sat on the floor, very close to one of the loudspeakers, as usual; I refused to look at her. The music meant little to me, so I closed my eyes and thought about what it provoked in me. Roger took control, speaking fast through his twisted teeth. Despite Roger’s brilliant musical ear, and immense knowledge of early music, which he edits and writes about, we always had to dissuade him from relating everything back to his choir and its performance schedule. Joshua wanted to play some Berg. As he was fiddling with the record, Roger said:
“Hmm. Berg’s no good for us, I’m afraid, he’s anniversarially poor.”
There was a silence.
“The choir. No good for us.”
“What was that peculiar phrase?” Max asked.
“Anniversarially poor,” said Roger.
“Yes? And?”
“You don’t get it, do you? Not even Jane? Well, Berg—and Michael Praetorius, actually—both of them died at fifty. So you can only get two anniversary festivals from Berg per century. Whereas with Bach”—Roger was now spitting with animation—“you get four per century.”
“I don’t follow,” said Max. “Please reconfigure your sentence.” Everyone laughed. I was reminded of how Max and I used to “philosophize” as teenagers.
“Oh dear, you’re still not with me because you don’t run a choir. Look, with anniversary festivals, you are allowed to do concerts at a hundred years and at fifty years from birth or death—i.e., in units of fifty. So with Bach, who was born in 1685 and died in 1750, there was a celebration in 1950 to mark two hundred years since his death, and in 1985 there was one to mark three hundred years since his birth, and in 2000 we can have one to mark two hundred and fifty years since his death if we want—I do, actually—and in 2035 we will be able to mark three hundred and fifty years since his birth, and so on. But look at Berg. He’s born in 1885, dies in 1935. You can celebrate a hundred years since his birth—1985. But if you try to celebrate a hundred and fifty years since his birth, you are celebrating in 2035—which just happens to be also a hundred years since his death. That’s what I mean, you only get two a century from Berg and Praetorius—the fifty-year celebrations always overlap with the hundred-year celebrations of his birth or his death. So we lose out. Very inconsiderate of those two.”
“I’m exhausted,” said Max.
“But, Rog, you’ll be lucky to be alive in 2050, so what’s it to you?” asked Jane.
“I’m speaking conceptually, of course. I like playing around with these little puzzles in my head. Thought everyone did.”
“Also,” said Joshua, “how many times has your choir ever sung anything by Berg?”
“Well, but that’s not the point, is it, Josh?” said Roger.
It appears that Joshua writes music which no one present seemed ever to have heard; and each piece he mentioned sounded, to me at least, more outlandish than the last: folk songs set in a parallel universe, a piece for string quartet and ukelele. His current project was an opera set in an aquarium to a libretto written by his grandmother. “Granny’s very dear and dotty. She’s created four major characters: Stingray, the baddy; Cod, a sort of holy fool type, always getting into scrapes; Coral, the goody; and Poseidon, who acts as a kind of chorus. As a literary text I think it’s completely brilliant—you should read it, you know, Max, and write a column about it.” When Roger put on a Bach fugue, Joshua lay on his back on Roger’s old worn carpet, rolling with delight under the harpsichord, and crying out, “The bastard, the bastard! Listen to what he’s doing, he can do anything he likes!”
I cheered up at this, and joined the conversation, which was becoming political. Everyone fell into natural humility before Max, who was considered to be an expert on political matters. When he talked about the European Union, people were quiet. The old Max, pitmatic Max, was in love with philosophy and metaphysics and theology, and knew how to keep the tedium of political discussion in its proper place. But as he has become more successful, more of a “pundit,” to use his mother’s phrase, he has become more and more worldly, at least on paper. Of course, his worldliness is a stunt. It is entirely derived from books. Remember that Max grew up without television. Newspapers did not enter The Oratory. The Thurlows never travelled. They starved life down to its academic minimum; life was a footnote to the great text of mental existence. He was educated, like me, in an unworldly provincial town. I remember how, years ago, Mother made me and Father laugh when she told us that she had just seen Professor Colin Thurlow, Professor Belinda Thurlow, and little bespectacled Max standing on the main bridge in Durham, “all determinedly and rather intellectually eating Mr. Whippy ice creams without the slightest sign of pleasure on any of their faces.”
“Look, Roger,” Max was saying, “ten years ago Britain was the fabled … sick man of Europe … you know, as Turkey was thought of in the nineteenth century. And there was no good reason for this. Remember the old saying about how Britain is a lump of coal surrounded by gas and oil and fish. We are a … rich nation but we were living then like … paupers. Not any more.” Not you, at least, I thought to myself, as Max continued.
“And we have Thatcher to thank for that, whether you agree with all … her ideology.” Max is forever writing about Mrs. Thatcher’s great successes.
“Oh, come on, Max, she’s not FDR,” I said. “Where’s her New Deal?”
“She’s a revolutionary, and the British don’t like … revolutionaries,” said Max, indifferently, as if my objection barely merited a response.
“Oh yes?” I asked. “So what were Herzen and Kropotkin doing for so long in England?”
“That was, when I last consulted the matter, the … nineteenth century.” Again, the curious indifference.
“Well, you said that the British don’t like revolutionaries.”
“I think Mrs. Thatcher’s brought a new morale to this country. But I don’t especially … want to argue with you about it,” said Max.
“Who called it an argument?” I asked, smiling. “I’m just putting a little pressure on you.”
“Fine, but the … quality of the pressure is what counts.” Max said this while letting great clouds of smoke escape from his mouth. His languid emissions irritated me enormously.
“What the hell does that mean?” I said.
“It means that I don’t ‘put pressure’ on you when you want to talk about … the Epicureans or God or … whatever.” I think that his “whatever” meant Jane.
“Oh no?”
“And I’m not sure you know anything about this.”
“Boys, boys, stop it, this isn’t going anywhere,” said Fiona Raymond. “Roger wants to put another piece of music on.”
It was Max’s amiability which ensured that, when we were teenagers, our Pitmatic Philosophical Society met weekly and never suffered a cross word. We founded it (Max and I were its only members) in part to fight what we called “the God-talkers,” adults who were either explicitly or implicitly propagandizing for God. Sometimes, as in the case of Canon Palliser, the propaganda was open and transparent. Sometimes, as with my parents, the instruction was careful, subtle, evasive—but all the more potent for its snakelike slithering. After all, how did Mr. Duffy tell us to write our essays? He stood at the front of the class and bellowed at us: “Children, start your essays with a bit of a bang. Bacon began his essay on gardens, ‘The Lord God Almighty first planted a garden.’ Try to emulate him.”
But I thought: Who is “him?” Were we to emulate Bacon, or, really, Him? I became convinced that Mr. Duffy was secretly trying to put the idea of God in my mind. Max agreed with me. So we established our Society, which was dedicated to the frank discussion of atheism, amorality, and decadence. We met behind the oak tree on Pilgrim’s Path. We brought cigarettes, alcohol when we could get it, and a feeble cassette recorder, from whose toyish loudspeaker we coaxed an illusory depth, as Led Zeppelin (denounced by Colin Thurlow as “satanic”) and Pink
Floyd flimsily corrupted a cubic centimetre of air. Dear Max, pitmatic Max. Sitting in Roger’s flat that night, pitmatic Max seemed to have completely disappeared.
I approached Max and drew him aside. “What the hell was that all about?” I asked.
“Don’t overreact. I am … allowed to be sharp with you, you know.”
“I don’t deserve it,” I said. I thought to myself: With what I know about you and Jane, it is I who should be sharp with you.
“Tom … isn’t it time you stopped … feeling so sorry for yourself?”
“Not you, too. Not the two of you together. Against me. I should call my work the Book Against Tom.”
“I’m on your side—but no, no, why does it have to be a … question of sides? Those are your terms, and they are … ridiculous. It’s not about sides at all. Whatever anger Jane has towards you is not mine.”
“Ah, so you do have some anger towards me,” I said.
“No, I just want you to stop moping in your bedsit and doing nothing—painting yourself with … tar and rolling in a great big bag of … feathers.”
“You know nothing about this. And you, who for so long have been telling me to keep going with the Ph.D., to put in another six months, another year, to get it done at all costs.”
“Tom, pull yourself together, for goodness sake. Your father is dead. Didn’t you say to me several times that you felt Peter was always … breathing over your Ph.D.?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“So, feel released. Finish the Ph.D. Or if that’s over, if you can’t finish the thesis, then write the Book Against God, and write it with … a sense of freedom, with a sense of new life.” I couldn’t stand being given “advice” by Max, and when he added that since Peter was dead I should no longer think of the Book Against God as my own little secret, my own “private crime”—those were his words—I was deeply offended, and I walked away from him while he was still talking. “Be a baby, then,” I heard him say behind me.
