by Jill Dawson
‘Didn’t need to. She’s a phoney. I can’t stand phoneys,’ Frances says. She tosses back her Scotch, bangs the empty glass down on the table. ‘I’ve read all your novels, of course. It wasn’t my idea – the interview. I’ve done a few for the Beeb before. It was Ginny. She discovered where you were living. Little thing was so excited. Near popped, she did.’
The English vowels are the same sounds Sam makes. But here the grating is intense.
‘I’m from Sussex,’ she says, reading my mind. ‘But I certainly know Texas and New York, the places you grew up. Daddy was an ambassador. We travelled. Rome, Venice, Paris. I know all the places you know awfully well.’
I know more about that woman than any person alive. And yet not bothering to meet her. In a few years she’s going to be saying the same thing about me. I remember dimly that the woman novelist we’re talking about had an affair with a friend of mine, back in the late forties, guy named Don. ‘Did you speak to Don Parkin about her?’ I ask.
‘Ah, him – he knew nothing,’ is the barked reply.
‘But how can anyone know everything?’ I venture, stuttering. ‘I happen to have— A friend of mine is in analysis. Every week, talks her heart out. Every week for five years. I’m sure that shrink – she happens to be a woman – thinks she knows everything about my friend. And, boy, is she wrong. Here’s one thing she doesn’t know: my friend’s husband is a terrifying son of a bitch and she’s feared for her life more than once, but that she doesn’t talk about—’
‘Maybe he doesn’t beat her up and your friend is lying to you,’ she interrupts, clearly unable to listen to another person for more than one minute.
I am a little startled by the interruption but I carry on.
‘My point is, does that shrink – who thinks she knows everything, and certainly knows some secrets – but does that analyst know her?’
‘Well, but see, that’s shrinks for you. I’m a biographer. Better than a shrink. More like a detective. Looking for clues . . .’
‘Is the life itself a crime, then? Your metaphor rather implies it.’
‘Ha! Touché!’ She clinks her empty glass with mine and her eyes glitter; she’s enjoying this.
I give it one more stuttering go at explaining.
‘You might – you might read the diaries, say, know all the facts of their lives, birthdates, where they went to school, all the details and dates. And still if you have no – no imagination, maybe if you haven’t plumbed your own depths, you know nothing. Then another person with insight, intuition – or the gift of imagining . . . that person might get closer. Knowing someone is not about knowing everything, every little detail, anyways a crazy impossibility, it’s about intuiting the things that matter, the secrets and—’
‘Baloney,’ she says.
And I’m thinking in fury: Me, for instance. That’s my gift. I’m like Mark Twain: I know that folks are like the moon – all of them have a dark side and it only takes me five minutes to winkle it out. What’s Frances’s dark side, then? Not much hidden, that’s too easy. She’s a parasite, a vampire: she only feels alive when she drinks the blood of others. And mine? Mine is so bottomless one book couldn’t contain it. (Which is why I’m writing others.)
I take my own drink in tiny burning sips, trying to hide the shaking in my hands and shoulders. I’m thinking that those who don’t have the skill of being able to make people come alive using only words and paper never appreciate how unique, how supernatural a gift it is. I’m pretending this is a playful discussion rather than a matter of life and death to me. Luckily, Frances is, as I suspected, so tuned out from the best clues a person gives that she is hammering away regardless.
‘Never like to be in once place long, hmm?’ Frances is saying. Her hair is like a stiff wire brush and rather fascinating in its severity.
Back on safer ground. I swallow hard and attempt a light tone: ‘A few years. Suck all the juice out of a place and move on.’
‘How are you finding Suffolk, then?’ She guffaws, a great screeching laugh that opens its wings and flits all around the room. I try not to retreat too visibly, but I’m sure I somehow do, edging back further in my chair. She’s loud. And she doesn’t care.
She’s noticed her empty glass at last and is now jerking it in the rudest way towards the young barmaid for another, making a cursory nod towards my glass too. I accept and, in a spirit of overcompensation, thank the girl profusely. She’s pretty, with a wide mouth and a low neckline, and she beams back at me. The second Scotch goes down in a ribbon of fire and I find myself wanting to laugh.
‘You may as well know I’m writing a book about you,’ Frances says, after a further huge glug of Scotch. ‘An unauthorised one, of course. And Ginny is doing an itty-bitty piece of research for me. I didn’t feel the need to tell you – I didn’t feel the need to meet you – because I know there’s not a cat in hell’s chance you’ll give me your blessing.’
Ah. Does being right about Smythson-Balby in my suspicions, or at least finding an explanation for why she keeps materialising, change my feelings about her, make me less or more anxious? I check myself but find no answer.
‘I guess I’m right? And you’re flattered that I’m writing it,’ the woman says.
‘Why would I be flattered?’
‘It will give you the status you need. Cement your reputation. As a subject of Frances Balby – no one will call you a blasted crime writer after that. You’ll have your place, you know, where you’d like to be. In the canon or whatever you people call it.’
Now here I do feel something. A fizz. And I’m ashamed of myself, because it’s pathetic and unworthy and because I’ve spent a lifetime saying I don’t care. I deliberately conjure up Ronnie – so many conversations with him about writing, never about being a writer. Ronnie is my talisman, a sunny golden shield against what she offers: the devil’s bargain, held out. It’s not even possible, it’s hopeless to desire it, yet she wants me here slavering because, after all, every writer craves it. This scrap: the place in the canon.
She finishes the second Scotch as quickly as the first and produces a notebook and fountain pen from the purse beside her, leaning under the table to do so, and spying mine.
‘That’s rather an extraordinary handbag. What do you keep in there?’
I consider telling her, and decide against it.
She waits for my answer then, seeing none is forthcoming, asks: ‘So now that I have my cards on the table, are you planning to skedaddle? Skip the interview, the BBC?’
‘No . . .’ I say.
‘Splendid. That I didn’t expect. You’re a push-over, then?’ She cackles.
I tap my cigarette into the ashtray. No, not a pushover. Not at all.
‘Good,’ she says, folding the notebook open at the first clean page. ‘I’ll just do a few prelims. Then off with our saucy Ginny to La La Land it is. Two more Scotch and sodas, please.’ And the mad black crow is once again there on the table, screeching, dancing and jubilantly shaking her wings.
There is a commissionaire at the entrance to the BBC building who greets us. Smythson-Balby is beside me, Frances a couple of steps behind, so I think this is probably a safe moment to peek at the snails in my purse. But, damn it – the clasp opens wide as I try to do this surreptitiously and the commissionaire catches sight of what’s in there. Our eyes meet.
A head of lettuce, and six of my favourite snails, along with many of the babies – which look at the moment just like pieces of grit.
The commissionaire takes his cap off and readjusts it on his bald head. Wrinkles his nose at the fishy smell emanating from the opened purse, the pieces of dark slimed lettuce inside the damp brown paper. I close the purse quickly. I’m conscious of my pulse quickening.
‘Well, I suppose you can take a lettuce into the studio,’ he mumbles, in some sort of London accent.
Smythson-Balby gives him – and me – a bemused look; Frances Balby is a little distance from us, preoccupied with lighting a
cigarette – trying to hide the fact that it’s her last, not wanting to feel obliged to offer it to either of us – and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t see. What do I care if she sees, at any rate? Only that it will end up in the interview somehow, be turned into something eccentric rather than a perfectly practical solution to taking care of them when away from home. No doubt it will enter the mythology about me. The Famous Grouse, with the snail obsession, that kind of thing.
I remember little about the interview. It feels like a series of ducks, left hooks and parries. At one point Frances says: ‘Is your prose deliberately, wilfully unlovely? There is rather a relentless quality –’ to which I mumble my reply: ‘A novel isn’t a series of brilliant one-liners.’
She punches back at me: ‘What would you say it is, then?’
I don’t have any idea, I want to say. Why are you asking me? If I knew, do you think I wouldn’t quit, find a better way to spend my time? It’s an unrequited love affair. A letter to a lover who sometimes loves you back. It’s a compulsion; it’s something I have to do; it’s not for you, actually, or anyone at all; I can’t quit; I couldn’t tell you who it’s for or why. Leave me alone, can’t you? They’ll never believe you.
‘I think perhaps writing successful fiction has a supernatural quality,’ I venture, ‘making people think – believe – something that may or may not be true.’
‘A dark art? Or one big con-trick, in fact?’ Frances replies.
The research I’ve been doing for the Plotting book suddenly comes to my rescue and I remember a quote from Ford Madox Ford. I clear my throat and murmur: ‘No. I believe it’s nothing less than “a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case”.’
This is more of a poke under Frances’s ribs than a proper hit.
A vivid dream, I should have said. A vivid, sustained, illogical dream. A grey blob. A candle flame. A tiny whorl of snail, the pattern its grey belly makes when you turn it over, the words that fail you when you try to describe the tenderness you feel for its vulnerable horns, flailing wildly; when you really look.
She laughs then, and presumably a thousand radio listeners laugh with her. ‘Ha! With plenty of murders and fist fights thrown in for good measure. Well, that’s all we have time for, I’m afraid. Splendid, thank you Miss Highsmith.’
And afterwards the usual clamour sets up: I’m such a damn fool, why can’t I filter what I say, why is it that others (Ford Madox Ford for one) are so sure about what it is they’re doing; how can it be that as recently as a week ago I heard a writer of crime fiction state, once again, ‘I think we are all equally capable of committing murder, given the right circumstances’? And I wanted to scream: Oh, yeah? You think you could do one, even if you needed to? You think it easy, do you, to pick up that great heavy thing and bring it down on the head of whoever is driving you nuts? If it’s so easy – go ahead, do it, why not? Have a go, why don’t you, instead of just talking about it. Or what? You believe your great-aunt Lucy, who never hurt a fly, is as likely as young George, the ruffian at the local dance-hall, to have exactly the same amount of hate juice inside, solidifying into the same violent lava? All those plots where characters have motives – ha! How laughable I find these motives. How rational, how thoughtful. For Christ’s sake, is this what most murders are about? Victims are just the people who are in the way, the girlfriend or wife or guy at the receiving end: there’s no design. Murders are about one thing: they come out of murderous feelings. The grey blob at the corner of the eye, the fears, the feeling of deep, choking, agonising fear, the simmering cauldron bubbling in the centre of the heart and stoked up daily. I take an axe to Mick’s head. An old line of mine. Plot, storyline, cause and effect. Look around you: is that what’s going on? Does that man plan to begin a lifetime’s addiction to strangling his lovers? Does that man plot to lose every girlfriend he’s ever had by an epidemic of violent rages? It’s not controlled, plotted, planned and deliberate: it’s all just an explosion of mess, of feeling. Feelings directing everything.
And what it comes back to is this: I always suspected myself one of the rare individuals (even rarer among my sex) with more of this lava than others. I knew I was that uncommon being, capable of murder. And Gerald has allowed me to prove myself right.
The journey back is silent. Dark, yellow-lit hedges and fields, picket fences sepia in headlights. The red eyes of a fox sliding in front of us. I’m relieved when we’re back on the bit of straight, the A1120, leaving London and Frances Balby behind.
‘Are you offended then? I suppose I should have told you,’ Smythson-Balby finally says. It’s clear she’s been trying to think of a way to broach the subject for the last fifty miles.
‘You have a fine nerve but, hey, I don’t happen to give a snap,’ I say. Sure, she damn well should have told me, but it’s done now. So Ronnie was right, and she’s pretty shady and a vampire. Biographers. Leeches every one of them. Isn’t it a kind of murder, a half-baked idea to steal a life, and make it your own, live off the reflected glory? But what good would it do to say so?
‘I – it was your novel. The Cry of the Owl. I love that novel – it’s brilliant! So spooky and sinister. And his ex-wife is so – monstrous. She’s really crazy, frightening, but she makes him feel that he might be going mad. I was telling Frances how much I loved it and she said she was writing about you and then, well, when I found out from Izzie that you were moving to Earl Soham, it just seemed so extraordinary.’
‘It’s fine. I guess you could have mentioned it, that’s all.’
We pass the butcher: John Hutton. A milk churn by the roadside lit up in car-lights. I don’t know why but I find the solid cream shape of it troubling: an odd combination of cosy and sinister. ‘Ambrosia Ltd’, the dairies round here all say. And they make me think of Texas, of Grandfather’s wagon delivering the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, or the milk-delivery wagon with the orange wheels and the pretty white horse. Or the taste of steel-cut oatmeal. Of grits: yellow as scrambled egg, homely as porridge.
‘I hate to part on this note,’ she says. ‘I really do feel – well, terrible, Miss Highsmith. I do agree, I should have mentioned the biography and the fact that I was doing some research for Frances. And, of course, I would quite understand if you didn’t – you know – want to talk to me again.’
Her voice sounds a little choked. She’s not about to cry, for Christ’s sake? The girl is young, I suddenly remember. Ambitious young journalist – what was that crap she was telling me about winning some prize?
‘That wife. In that novel. Nickie,’ I offer, throwing her a line. ‘A girl I knew who acted just like that. Jealous, crazy. She had a dislodged mind. Fire Island. You said you knew it there.’
Smythson-Balby neatly changes the subject, as she does whenever I mention my old haunts.
‘So I heard a little of your interview with Frances,’ she says. ‘They had the radio on in the green room. I laughed when you said you were sick of writing about psychopaths. That they were too easy to nail. Went really well, I thought.’
I don’t agree.
‘Your friend has a hell of a nerve. She thinks if she flatters me with all that bull about not being a crime writer or suspense writer but just a writer I’ll fall in line. I can see through her. Ronnie never categorises me like that. I write to Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal. Did you know that?’
She says she didn’t.
‘And they write back.’
I could use a drink. I tell Smythson-Balby this, meaning for her to call by a country bar, but to my surprise she jabs her hand towards the glove compartment.
‘There’s a bottle of Dewar’s in there. And a glass. It’s not clean but . . .’
I pour myself a wobbly glass and down it in one.
‘I’ve been fending off would-be biographers for a while. Why can’t they wait until I’m dead?’
She laughs at this. One of her intemperate girlish guffaws.
‘Pour me a shot,’ she says. The yellow scarf is releasing th
e moorings on her ponytail and her black eye-liner is smudged into shadows at the sides of her eyes. She’s infinitely prettier when not so well composed. I consider telling her this, but think better of it, and pour her the whisky instead. I’m wondering how to ask her again about Aldeburgh, without making her suspicious. I need to know what she saw.
She keeps one hand on the wheel while she knocks back the drink. Her driving is no steadier than it was; I guess I should be more concerned.
‘Well, as I told you before, Miss Highsmith – Pat – I really am a fan. I’d hate to – blot my copybook, as it were, with you over this.’
‘Forget it. But what about a trade: tell me where we’ve met before.’
Now her gaze, straight ahead, seems to glaze in some way. A shield. There’s definitely plenty she’s still not telling. I persist: ‘I get the feeling you’ve lived in many different places, like me. But, strangely, they’re the same places. At the same times. Would you say?’
She laughs. ‘We’ve never shared dates. I’ve been in New York, Greenwich Village, yes, and Berne, Switzerland – and Paris in ’sixty-two, I think. Is that the same as you? Yes, odd, if it’s true.’
She’s cool, very cool. But then she delivers a blow.
‘And I think we have a friend in common. Samantha Gosforth? Her husband was in the papers recently, a sudden death. Very sad. I knew them both. Actually, I was briefly an au-pair for them. I knew Hugh Gosforth too, Gerald’s brother. Their daughter, Araminta, was just a baby then.’
This time, I’m not going to throw up. I’m controlled. Is she doing this deliberately? Releasing her scraps of information in drips? First she saw me in Aldeburgh; second, she knows Gerald and Sam. And third, surely, some deep but resonating hint that she knows stuff. Plenty of stuff. How much, I’m not sure but it goes back a while, too. But if she really knows Sam, why didn’t she put together that Sam was the woman she saw with me that night at the coast? And – I struggle to remember – when I mentioned to Sam that a young journalist was sniffing round, did I give ‘Virginia Smythson-Balby’ as the name? And what had Sam replied?
