by James Wood
I went to sit next to Jane on the carpet. “You don’t have any cause to be mean to him, you know,” said Jane, looking down between her knees. “You’re not blaming him, are you? Surely you’ve got over all that?”
“No, no. Max is forgiven—for that, at least,” I said.
“It didn’t sound like it just now. It sounded as if both of you are furious with one another.”
“I forgive Max. Look, I sympathize with him for being in love with you.”
“You have nothing to forgive,” said Jane. “As I said to you at Christmas, take a long hard look at Fiona. Max has a girlfriend. He has no interest in me.”
“Okay, but then he should forgive me,” I said. “For whatever I’ve done—which is what, exactly? What have I done to Max?”
“I think Max is angry with you for the same reason that I am—your behaviour at the funeral.”
“You know, my father had just died. Is that so hard to understand?”
But Jane was lost in her own thoughts.
“That you mentioned our marriage in your speech in church. That you mentioned us. In that awful speech. Oh, Tommy, that was terrible.”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But what about your side of the bargain? What about the promised period of probation? You’ve seen me exactly three times since the end of July. It’s October now!”
I felt my desperation made me seem foolish and emotional, and my reproaches made me seem weak and hectoring.
“Jane, I know you have this big concert coming. Roger told me about it.”
“Are you blaming my music again for getting between us?”
“No, I mean it. I’m not being sarcastic. Roger said that it’s the biggest concert yet. I’ll be there, you know, cheering you on. If you want me to come.” I felt tears in my eyes, and hung my head. “Janey, I’m very sorry for everything. I know how utterly useless I am, I know how awful I was to live with, but I can’t seem to pull myself out and up. I can’t seem to.” Inclining her body towards me, so that I felt the outline of her warmth, Jane said:
“Are you all right, Tommy? You know we all care about you.” The words fell like instantly evaporating rain.
“Oh good, it’s nice to know that you all care about me,” I said, with excessive bitterness.
“You’re being unpleasant again.”
“And you are being less than sensitive.”
“This isn’t the place for—this.”
We carried on like this for a minute or so more, but the evening was ruined. So much for my optimism, so much for the sunscreen! I left the flat early, just as Joshua Smithers began defending, to Roger, some minor work by Mendelssohn, and walked home, up Adelaide Road to noisy Swiss Cottage.
16
AS IF JANE AND MAX HAD NOT PUNISHED me sufficiently, the next day my bank card was taken by the machine in the wall, because my account is overdrawn. I couldn’t face asking Uncle Karl for money, and I have to pay back the money I borrowed from Philip Zealy, so that afternoon I bought the Evening Standard and responded to an advertisement for telesales operators. They wanted me there the next morning, in Hatfield.
Without knowing it, I had chosen a car magazine; their glass tower was near the station. There was a group of us waiting at reception, where we were met by a middle-aged man who called himself Rob. He was a big fellow, with short, load-bearing legs. He pulled his jacket tight, creating a masculine bustle as the jacket’s single flap stuck out in a prim salute over his backside. Rob explained that we were to phone people who had advertised the sale of a car in another magazine or newspaper, ask them if they had had any success, and, if not, persuade them to re-advertise in his magazine.
He led us upstairs to the selling room, a huge windowless pasture full of nodding humans—nodding, because all of them were on the phone, and all of them talking and moving up and down as they spoke. There was the universal proud blandness of all office noise, and as I heard that awful continuity I thanked my stars that I have for so many years avoided this form of drudgery—for so long I have been what Psalm 81 calls “delivered from the pots.” Well, we were shown to bare plastic desks, handed sheets of telephone numbers attached to names and models of cars, and told to “get on with it.” At each successful sale, or “take,” we should raise our hand. Every minute or so a hand went up in the room, at which fat Rob rose from his chair at the front and walked with short, Japanese steps to a blackboard, where he adjusted a running total—of advertisements sold that day, I presumed.
I made £27 in two hours, which wasn’t bad, but quite apart from the humiliation of the work, I suffered an attack of nerves while having to walk through the room to the lavatory, and this attack was far, far worse than even the job itself. Simply put, I found that my legs were beginning to seize up as I tried to make my way to the bathroom. The desks were all facing me, I had to walk against the visual tide, as it were, and I felt that all eyes were turned my way, even though reason told me that no one in the room had the slightest interest in my passage.
In a second, the horrors of adolescence returned. I vividly remember the moment, in my fourteenth year, at which I became self-conscious. I was late for school assembly, and had to walk into the hall while several hundred boys and girls watched me. I realized that for the first time I felt very awkward being watched, and my legs began to freeze, and I barely made it in one piece to my seat. Should I try to look as if I was not being watched, or try to look as if I knew I was being watched?
I can laugh about it now, but how terrible was that hurtle into self-consciousness; it was like a second birth. After that morning, whenever I went into assembly I became sure that everyone was looking at me; I imagined they could even hear me swallowing, and so I tried to control my flow of saliva. A terrible dryness and pressure would build in my throat, and then the only way to swallow without being heard was to give a little cough (the forerunner of the later “artificial” cough). For several months I seemed to have no personality at all, except the one I daily built. Writing this, I am reminded of that grand line from one of the Psalms: “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it.” But as soon as I write this down, I am also reminded, less happily, of what Jesus says to Nicodemus: “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Well, this agony was my second birth. I became anxious about speaking in public; when asked to read aloud from a schoolbook by one of my teachers, I bit into my pen and flooded my mouth with ink, and then ran from the classroom, as if to clean my mouth. My nose seemed to be getting larger than the rest of my face; or rather, my nose seemed to be becoming adult faster than my mouth or chin. In fact this was just the familiar way that adolescent faces, whose parts are enlarging at unequal speeds, sometimes resemble parodies of stretched heads by Picasso. But I was horrified, and for a while at nighttime, once I had said goodnight to my parents, I would strap up my nose with tape and elastic bands, to try to arrest its growth.
I became the victim of involuntary erections. Surely everyone could see the bulge in my trousers blooming like a flower in time-lapse photography. Now, as an adult, when I remember those erections, I think of one of my schoolteachers, Mr. Conners, showing our class photographic slides of ancient statues. When the fertility god appeared, with its penis crudely extended, Mr. Conners dealt with the subject forthrightly, took a breath, and said: “Note the engorged phallus.” He had clearly prepared the phrase; of course it failed, there were the usual laughs in the darkness. After I had mentioned it to her once, Mr. Conners’s phrase became a happy refrain between Jane and me. On those mornings when the usual male helplessness was stiffly facing her, Jane would sometimes look at my springing penis, and say, “Note the engorged phallus!”
Desperate, I wrote away to an American company that was advertising in one of my mother’s magazines. They sent me a self-hypnosis cassette, which promised “Self-Confidence.” My parents teased me for this extravagance, which cost all my pocket money. You were supposed to fall asleep to the sound of a man’s s
oothing words. At night (my nose taped up), I put on plush headphones, rested my head against the pillow, and drifted off on waves of Californian generosity. The man’s voice sounded bearded, somehow. Very gentle and bearded and muffled. He told me that I was a “valuable person,” that I should think well of myself, and could be brought into a new life if only I filled myself with self-esteem. It is hard to say if these words did me any good, because I was always asleep within two minutes. For all I know, the tape ended after two minutes, or suddenly turned into a vicious attack: “You are selfish, self-absorbed, utterly nugatory. You think that listening to this pathetic American tape will help. Think again, you little nonentity …” and so on!
A second birth, a second birth. The Greeks should have said: “Call no man happy who is born again.” And I’m not just talking about very shy and obviously damaged people, like Samuel Spedding, Muriel Spedding’s son who still lives in Sundershall, even though he is over fifty. Poor Sam Spedding, whom Max and I used to tease when we were boys. He was so shy that when you phoned him and asked, “Is that Sam Spedding?” he answered, in a very quiet voice, “It is, actually,” as if slightly amazed that he existed at all.
17
SO THE TELESALES JOB brought me very little, and I was still without a bank card. It was humiliating to have to search for lost pennies underneath my armchair cushion just to have enough to buy a sandwich. After four days of living on bread and jam I decided to phone Uncle Karl and arrange dinner at his house in Chelsea. We both knew the begging drill; we had done it before.
I have loved Chelsea ever since I first went there for Uncle Karl’s wedding party, at the age of thirteen. The tall, Victorian apartment buildings impart a childlike, fairy-tale feeling, like walking in a forest of wardrobes. From these buildings, with magical speed, richly dressed ladies emerge, as if all they do inside is put on and take off expensive clothes. Inside, Karl’s house is how I imagine all Chelsea houses to be: an enormous drawing room looking onto the rich street, a primitive and unused kitchen, a lovely bathroom on the second floor with curling, telephonic taps and hoses. Sofas in jungly chintzes (birds of paradise), thickly lined curtains heavy enough to wrap a corpse in, immovable furniture, beautiful old carpets worn in places down to little lyres of parallel strings, and on the dining-room table heavy silver cutlery, tarnished as if it has been drowned in ancestral lakes for a century.
Uncle Karl has done a very good job of impersonating an aristocrat. I’ve always felt close to him. First, we are both subject to delusions of grandeur. He knows very well that in my dreams I would come from a distinguished family, would be able to tell you what the Buntings were doing during the Reformation, or at least the Counter-Reformation; and knows well that, things being less than ideal, I am barely able to tell you what the Buntings were doing during the Industrial Revolution. (Schoolteaching, as far as I can make out.) Second, and consequently, we both love fine things—food, fabrics, furniture. And, third, we are twins in thought—he a secular Jew, I a secular Christian. He generally dealt with my parents’ Christianity by treating it as a form of madness, of an admittedly benign, English kind. As far as he is concerned, religion is something invented by the priests, the rabbis, the mullahs, an enormous international caravan spreading war and hatred and inquisition across the sands of the world. Briefly a lawyer before going into art dealing, he once said, in lawyerly fashion, that the New Testament, if indeed a final testament, had been “so badly drafted that it had given rise to two thousand years of vicious litigation,” a mot so bon that I have copied it into my BAG.
Father told me about Karl’s life when I was a teenager. He came to England in 1939, when he was eight. His parents put him on a train in Berlin, and he never saw them again. At Harwich, he was among a group of Jewish children who were “viewed” and “selected” by English parents, in a manner that now seems to me a strange inversion of the famous sixth-century story told to us as schoolchildren, of how Pope Gregory came upon a group of English slave-children for sale in Rome, and, struck by their fair hair and blue eyes, asked which land they came from, and then requested that Christ’s word be taken to this benighted country.
Karl was “selected” by a wealthy London family who, unimaginably, sent him away to a boys’ boarding school for a proper English education. Karl never talks about these early childhood experiences and I never ask, but my father told me that Karl stood every day with the other boys after breakfast, waiting for letters from their parents to be handed to them. For six months there were letters from Germany, and then there were none, though Karl could not stop hoping and quietly wept in the lavatories after these morning sessions. The picture stayed in my mind, and returns to me often when I see Uncle Karl: I imagine the little boy, darker than his fair-haired English schoolmates, dressed in grey short trousers … and then the headmaster, breakfast-warmed, stinking of pipe tobacco, reading out the English surnames from the envelopes: “Carter, Warburton, Hallchurch, Sim, Drury-Lowe, Wheeler, Scrase-Dickinson,” each of them solidly shouting out “Yes sir!” and going up to receive a letter and wandering off down a corridor still heavy with food smells.
Not surprisingly, Karl ran away from school, was picked up and returned, ran away again, and eventually the charity in charge of the refugee children reassigned him to a poorer but much happier family in rural Yorkshire. There were three brothers and one sister, and they welcomed him and played with him in their large garden. The father was a taciturn farmer—so they all ate comparatively well during the war—but the mother, whom Karl always called “Mamie,” was a warm and loquacious woman, kind but firm, given to non sequiturs and illogical statements. Karl did speak of these years in Yorkshire, he seemed to date his English life from this change, and he had a favourite example of Mamie’s way of talking. Near the end of the war, he told me, when he was thirteen or fourteen, Mamie overheard one of her sons calling the Germans “Nazi bastards.” The children, including Karl, liked to imitate dogfights between the RAF and the Luftwaffe, running around in the garden, their arms outstretched, their mouths savagely tut-tutting imaginary bullets from wing-mounted guns, and in the course of one of these games, in which the Germans always lost, one of the boys shouted, “Kill the Nazi bastards!”
Mamie immediately stopped the game and asked her son to repeat what he had said. Haltingly he did so, adding in defence: “That’s what everyone’s calling them now.”
“Well,” said Mamie, “that may be, but not in this house. As long as this is a free country, nobody’s using that kind of language here about the Germans.”
Karl loves telling this story, as an example of English “decency”; I have heard it three or four times. He starts laughing before he has finished it, so that strangers often mishear it.
Karl did well at school, quickly becoming fluent in English (though never losing a slight formality of speech), and in 1949, exempted from National Service because of his background, he went to university at Durham, where a year later he met my father, who had arrived as a young lecturer in theology, and who had his own war stories to tell. The two men became very close friends. My father, I believe, somewhat adopted Karl. Peter was thirty, wanted a child—something my mother once told me suggests that my parents tried for a long time to produce me—and there suddenly was Karl, eleven years younger than Peter Bunting, vulnerable, trailing his past. Apparently Karl was often at my parents’ house in those years before my birth, a pretty old house near the cathedral with four stone steps which are depressed in the middle like saddles and a red front door hemmed by a bruised brass strip.
Karl, by the way, does not look especially worldly, except that his clothes are quietly expensive, with subtle crossstitching and discreet herringbone patterns and silk threads—the sort of wasteful and lavish attention to texture, barely visible to the distant eye, that puts me in mind of life as seen under an electron microscope. But his body is unsybaritic: he is very thin and bony, broad-shouldered, so that his clothes, despite their fineness, hang from him rather. His
skin is sallow, and becomes even darker just under his handsome eyes, where there are creases and little ridges. As a child I was fascinated by these dark drains underneath Uncle Karl’s eyes; it seemed to my fanciful imagination that the skin there was stained with a kind of rust, a rust which might creep up on any of us if we neglected to wipe away our tears with a proper thick handkerchief.
At our dinner in Chelsea, Karl was wearing a rich, prickly tweed jacket, like a hair shirt worn inside out, and a fine tie patterned with blue digital dots. He stood in the doorway with his usual calm, ironic air. And standing right behind him in the hall was—Jane. It was an immense shock, but I struggled not to show it.
“Jane,” I said, “again! How nice. We mustn’t make a habit of this.” Karl had been naughty, if typically generous; inviting Jane without telling me was clearly part of his campaign to reunite us. Karl laughed as soon as he saw me.
“Oh, God, that beard will have to go, Tom. You look almost Hasidic, you know.” Every so often I neglect to shave; Jane knows this and corrected Karl.
“It’s not a beard, Karl, it’s an absence of shaving. It just means that Tom has run out of blades.” She gave my beard an affectionate stroke. Her hand was warm and delicate. She wore a short green suede skirt, which I had not seen before, and which looked very good. This time I was strengthened by her earlier flippancy at Roger’s and felt myself the match for it. This time I was not going to display my weakness, I was not going to let her know how much I needed her. I “set” my face to the appropriate mask.
We had a pleasant dinner, actually, but it was shadowed by my knowledge that once it was over I would need to ask Karl for money. At the table, we talked about my mother. Karl was concerned about her and said that he would try to visit her over Christmas. I complained, a little gracelessly, that she was continually phoning me.
