There was a peculiar silence, as if he hovered above memory.
'I was fifty-nine, you see, and I knew that a portion of myself would depart with Joan. How vividly I saw loneliness from the near side of her death. Because although we all have our time on this glittering earth the mortality business is so wretchedly sad. You look away from it, you come to terms with it, you ignore or suppress or challenge or defy it because the thing itself is too miserable for words; and the sadness lives for ever, flows around and beneath our daily lives. Joan became worse after her bursts of energy, and Frances and I spent many hours together, going to the village, buying food, talking about books, the teachers at her school, her sprightly view of the world, and Joan was quite relieved I had a companion to spend the hours with when she was too tired. We were finding our separate ways to cope, she and I. There were so many hours. I could hardly work, although I fooled around in my study.
'To begin with she might sit against my legs on the rug when we watched television. I would pat her head or grip her hand remonstratively if she teased me. When we strolled along, she would link arms with mine, like a loving niece. And then what happened developed so gradually that there was no moment at which I could say I had transgressed. We cleaved to each other, in my case because I was escaping death, in her case because she had, I suspect, a peculiar desire to lose her virginity to someone safe. Even then poor Frances was adrift. To think that fragile wisp submitted to my stale old body . . . It fascinates me to remember what we did, where we did it, because it is so unthinkable I wonder sometimes whether it really happened. We were utterly split between the pains we took for Joan, the love and care we cocooned her with, and this Pentecostal copulation, so soaked in sin as to be almost cleansing. I have never done anything so wrong and yet never felt more impelled towards it. In late middle age I had become concupiscent, and the more we did this dreadful thing, in odd hours at odd places, the less it seemed to have anything to do with sex. For me, it was just the wolfing of another's aliveness, an almost mechanical passion, confined to the ravenous instant. We put ourselves so far out that guilt was unfeelable. Our secret was hardly spoken. What could we say to each other? If the rest of the world could see us we were damned. The great writer in bed with his girl-niece! It was too stupefying to contemplate. I felt washed along, driven by nature, and everything else carried on around our madness. Doctors came and went. Joan's sister visited. We made trips to the hospital. I fed the cats, shaved in the bath, read the local newspaper to my wife and felt no detachment or reserve. Everything that might be felt was simmering away. Only, deep inside I realised I was recovering.
'Joan fared better through the summer. A remission of sorts took the pressure of a deadline off our backs because I suppose I thought that, although the prognosis of her illness typically included a false remission, the remission itself was so positive, so miraculous that anything seemed possible again and for once we all felt light on our feet, heady even, as though inevitability had taken a holiday. It was around then that I started to work again. My concentration returned. I was propelled into the idea of a new novel and left the women together whenever I could and even wrote during the night. What had come to me, what had exploded in my head, was the idea that this situation, the demented contrast between love and rich leave-taking and the long togetherness of a married life, and the Dionysian cleaving with a teenager was the most complex thing that had ever happened to me, and that in its contradictions so many things were wrought that if I could just find the form and the arrangement, I would pour into this book something more powerful than I had ever generated before. An energising obsession. It took me over completely and for a fortnight I steamed out the pages, almost a novella, forty thousand words produced under white heat, which I then reworked, revised and rubbished and then began again. Some kind of fission was taking place. Or melt-down. I was burned up by the intensity of the subject, and yet unable to transcend its personal nature, as if everything that went on at that stage contained me in it and was impossible to objectify. It was so damnably about me. I could not create a character for myself; could not formulate a type that would work convincingly. The more I thought about it, the more difficult it became to frame my experience in terms that were morally intelligible. And yet the material kept flowing. I had put myself on heat.
'Joan was curious. And Frances, to whom I confided, was queerly flattered by my new productivity. When Joan asked questions I dissimulated. I had no intention of telling her what was going on in my study in case such activity appeared to be stealing energy from her. To balance things I redoubled my attentions and did what I could to play down the excitement.
'Frances began to sense my withdrawal. I think she saw I was tending towards self-sufficiency. And even though I went to her room at the appointed time when Joan was asleep, I was beginning to fear the limpet strength of her attachment. She yielded her body like a sacrificial offering to my good will. Everything in her was confused. And I knew her behaviour was a hopeless mix of filial need and sex, and that I was in the paradoxical trap of being her surrogate father and illicit lover, the guarantor of love for the privilege of abuse. And I wondered whether it was I who made her thus, or whether she had come to us out of a disturbed impulse to find in the nearly bereaved attentions of a famous uncle compensation for an unloving father. I asked myself these questions. I began to see that my behaviour was an adjustment. That hers was sickness. I had corrupted her and would inevitably betray her.
'Joan deteriorated. We reeled back into suspense, endured the tests, had our half-sympathetic, half-scientific nods from doctors. And as the prognosis darkened, she was struck with woe. Her courage deserted her. The end was drawing near and the poor woman was raging to be alive, to be well. She was distraught, ghastly with anger. She was so jealous, she said, of me and Frances with our health. She was furious that I could still write, that nothing could stop me; and in desperate remorse I threw myself into the task of a homage to our time together, to what she had given me. I wanted to inject her with every last fulfilment. I wanted her to see and accept the end and feel the round fullness of her life. I wanted her to commemorate, not despair; to give us the best of her remaining days. And slowly she softened and subsided into mild new restfulness, and somehow the pain eased, and I saw then that she had loved her lot in some way, the writer's wife, her long toil of support, and that my achievements were her doing, and my output was her gift to the world, and that she had made my life perfect and that I loved her in and through my work, that she was its muse and the garden of my happiness, and this, I believe, she took to herself and in the worsening hours seemed comforted by. And as she sank, my agony returned. I was incontinent with loss. I slipped around the house like a ghost. Could not sleep. Could not eat. Misery convulsed me. One night, unable to endure her shallow breath and wan face under the low light, I crept from the room and stood in the corridor, struggling with short breath and a ridge in my belly, as if this were the worst stage of the process, and slowly, as the darkness thinned, I saw the aperture of Frances's doorway, and out of insomniac boredom I tiptoed along to hear the sound of her easy sleep. And when I came to the door, I heard her call softly. She was wide awake and couldn't sleep and so in pyjamas and dressing-gown I went inside, into the warm air, and saw her risen up in bed, her white nightie vaporous, and before long I was lying with her under the sheets, clinging to her side with childlike shudders.
'We didn't do anything. We hardly moved. And yet something must have disturbed Joan. I heard her call for me once and as I eased myself out of the hug, drawing strength to go back, the door came open slightly, and there she was. She was over us in the dark. Could see everything. Took it in instantly. Her voice was so weak by then. She said, ''Oh, God!'' with a tone of frail surprise and resignation, as though she knew immediately that the wound was so deep that nothing anyone could say would heal it, and that she would not live to recover from the shock. And then she went, the light of the landing left in the door, and I lay li
ke a stone as Frances dissolved around me.
'By the time I got to her room, she had locked the door. I knocked and pleaded, said everything I could think of through that silent door. Took a ladder to her window outside, also bolted. Sat weeping in the kitchen half the night, Frances's convulsions of guilt driving me mad. I knew that my life would not be worth living if I did not tell Joan everything as honestly as I could, throw my weakness on her mercy, and show her Frances's terrible contrition so that at least my dear wife would be spared the torture of her own imaginings, and God, how I struggled through those ghastly hours to find the right words, to frame the sense of what had happened, to find for myself an explanation that would not be horrible to either woman. I was gibbering with the fear and guilt of it. I was lost. Truly lost.
'And in the morning I tried her door again and decided to waste no time and smash the bloody thing down. It took three runs along the landing. Three runs. And on the third run I had the premonition as I shouldered through the splintering frame that she had crossed another threshold. I reached the bed and found her asleep still. She lay perfectly composed on her back and showed no trace of unrest or pain.
'I took her hand in mine and knelt down beside her and when I kissed her palm I knew she was dead.'
They sat opposite each other for an age of silence. Hilldyard had nothing left in him and kept his hands on his lap.
Michael was unable to introduce the sound of his voice into the air.
'Frances went back to England and was in shock for a year. Told nobody. She has never had a boyfriend. And no matter what I say, I can't make her understand a halfpenny of what I was going through, because her understanding has frozen at the age of fifteen. She is too disturbed to show empathy and thus has no understanding of herself, which means I'm only what she needs of me or hates me for. And however I try to show love as her uncle, it is either not enough or a parody of what happened back then. I have made her unreachable, and she blames me for everything, while detesting herself. The years have gone by and always I hoped she would settle down, find a man, a job, ease into normality, which she never does, will never do, and instead her anger grows.
'Her anger crucified me. She would visit me in Tuscany, and every time she would insist that it was I who killed Joan. And yet every time she wanted my love back, which I could not find to give. Those visits destroyed me as a writer, as did the certainty that love had vanished from my life. I had ruined the memory of my marriage, could get nothing from it, because Joan died without reconciliation; and what I had done to Frances was not love, so much as theft. I'd blighted her future to cure my sorrow and loneliness. I found myself isolated, unforgivable, corrupted. I could not shake off the contradiction between my achievements as an artist and my actions as a man. My life had failed. It seemed impossible to believe in anything . . . literary.
'That book was an attempt to bring love back into existence. An act of wish-fulfilment. Frances depends on it. She takes it as my homage to her and identifies with Anna, as if Anna were the woman Frances might have become and Josh the man who would have loved her. I created Anna to prove I could express love if not in memory then in imagination, and to show in some self-deluding way that Joan made me unfaithful, when what really happened was much darker, a complete singularity, which I could never treat fictionally because I refuse to promote such unspeakables and because literature does not need them. All the beauty, all the moral care one puts into a novel cannot co-exist with that.
'There were times when I thought the book should be published. It was what I had done, for better or worse. So I gave the manuscript to Basil and immediately regretted it. To publish this lie was worse than silence. I demanded it back. He held on, and you know what happened then.
'Bad times, Michael. I don't know what kept me going. Until you came along, trundling in out of the blue. You arrived in Positano, and quickly I knew something about you, which you wouldn't know yourself, but mainly that I could trust you, and that you liked the best part of what I could offer, my work. You reconnected me with this place. I was inspired by all the old things. I wanted all of a sudden to use my powers to return to the world the fineness I had subtracted from it. You were my inspiration and my subject: a sensitive young man in retreat, whose qualities had neither been effaced nor properly channelled. You opened up the future for me.'
Michael glanced away, resisting communication, hiding shame.
He stared at Michael, as if to prove the transformation, and Michael in his seat felt the energy of his gaze, like solar warmth turned on him, and saw the aspect of a changed man. Hilldyard seemed, for a moment, years younger, at the height of his powers, virile with talent, as though staring at him from a previous era.
'She's blackmailing me for the film money.'
Michael felt himself blush.
'I keep telling her there isn't going to be a film. She says I've got to sell the rights and pay her off or she'll tell the papers.'
He allowed the silence to endure as his skin prickled.
'I'm not sure which paper. The TLS or the Sun? You see there isn't a literary tabloid.' He looked down, his imagination defeated by the idea.
The words exhaled from Michael's lips like last breath. 'Call her bluff.'
'Can you imagine what it would do to me if this got out?' Hilldyard puckered his lips. 'I mean, what happened is not material for the public domain. It's a part of my life that nobody can understand. It can't be interpreted on the facts. Frances knows this. She knows how destructive it would be to tell anyone. She knows that it would injure my reputation as a novelist, disgrace me as a man, and still achieve nothing for her, except a spasm of power.' He looked up. He was pale. 'Talk to her for me, please.'
Michael recoiled inwardly.
'She'll listen to you. You can say the film fell through. You can vouch for the fact that I'm sorry.'
He blinked against the effort of dissimulation.
'For God's sake, help me, Michael!'
Michael stood up, unable to bear the tension. He walked around in a circle and came to a stop. For a moment he was checked, thought he could not continue. His tongue was dry.
'I've something to tell you.'
'You're not going away!'
'Not that.'
'Thank God!'
He raised a flat hand, compelling attention. 'I've done a deal to produce the film. The Americans are here. Shane Hammond is here.'
Hilldyard was silent.
'The film is set up. All I need is the option signed by you. They want to see us at the Sirenuse tomorrow, but I'll handle that. I know how you feel. Unfortunately I must insist.'
Hilldyard's astonishment spread like a blush through the skin of his face. He regarded Michael with the shock of total surprise, as if all his powers of insight had failed to prepare him for this moment.
'Insist!'
'Fate decrees.'
He scowled contemptuously.
'I've no choice,' said Michael suddenly.
'How can you insist?'
'I think you underestimate the desperate nature of my position.'
'Nobody in the world can be this desperate!'
'In the real world they can.'
'My dear boy.' Hilldyard was stupefied. 'You're surely not proposing to threaten me?'
There was a peculiar silence as the two men stared at each other.
'Sign these,' Michael said quickly, pulling the papers from his jacket.
Hilldyard registered the unfamiliar tone of voice with narrowed eyes, as though he were hearing for the first time Michael's steeliness, a trait he had not witnessed before. He gazed in scorn at the outstretched arm, at the blasphemy of an option agreement proffered in these circumstances.
His eyes were round with hurt and barely controlled anger. 'You'd throw me away just like that?'
Michael was rigid. 'All I ask is your signature.'
'Well, you know, you might as well ask for my life.'
'Don't exaggerate, James.'
'Oh Michael!' He shook his head with exasperation. 'Don't underestimate.'
'It's only a book.'
He smacked his hands in front of his face. 'Nothing is only a book!'
'It hurts no one to see this adapted.'
'You can't offer me that document without knowing you are hurling our friendship away, because if it means anything, it means not doing this.'
'I have no choice.'
'Except to betray me?'
It had come to this, and he looked at it barely.
He saw the effect of his self-possession in the author's stare. He was inhuman all of a sudden and Hilldyard was reckoning this against his panic.
'And if I say no?'
'I'll go to the papers.'
'You're possessed,' he shouted.
'Frances wants justice! Give her reparation and save yourself!'
'You'd be killing me. Because if this got out, that would be my end. Are you really prepared to contemplate that?'
The two men stood a few feet apart, the wear and tear of tension creasing their brows. Hilldyard's astonishment seemed to tie itself in tighter knots. 'You couldn't do that without dying inside.'
'Come on. Sign it.'
'I took you in,' he pleaded.
'To be your acolyte! So that I could sacrifice myself to literature. Like Joan, like Frances. We're all the servants of your immortal genius, and all around you people are dying or going mad, or broke, while you dream of new novels and new claims on posterity.'
Sex & Genius Page 27
