The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  This Raymond Thomas Lawrence (name changed by deed of poll, of course) turned out to be a summer gadfly, a harmless idiot who was in and out of our lives for some time until he was finally put away. There were worse problems than Raymond II, as we called him—Raymond III’s on duty, I can remember our secretary Dot Round calling out, or Raymond IV, whenever she spotted one of his many successors peering lugubriously in at one or other of the Residence’s windows, looking for—what? Not much: there were worse problems than these sad, would-be replicas.

  What were any of them looking for, though, these crumbs of dust clinging to the shoes of history—the strange, lonely people we’d see down on the road, looking up, or being chased off the property by the dogs: or the groups of people we began to notice early on, standing by the garage and staring up at the house in twos and threes and sometimes more, and just looking, looking, as if there really was something to see in the woodwork of the Residence and the damp grey slate of its roof, something they might take away with them in order to redeem their shabby, fallen lives?

  It’s the same with our visitors, our tour parties: I watch them feeling the fabric, touching the walls, and their long, long contemplation of the Master’s portrait. What is it, what do they want, what are they trying to find or find out? What is it they think they’re taking away with them when they steal the ashtrays, the books, the wax fruit and the toilet rolls?

  The Visitor Book yields me little as I go through it looking for clues to the thief of the ashtray. Naturally, I seek a pattern, a name that occurs again and again, a recurrent address to follow up: or, absent that (and, indeed, there was nothing), perhaps a recurrent form of handwriting, a suggestion of the forgery of different names by a single, persistent visitor—and, yes, under that heading there does in fact seem to be something. But is it really there? I peer at the signatures and the comments beside them. The latter, of course, are nearly always appallingly banal and commonplace. Very moving. I had a real sense of being close to something here. Or (particularly gormless), I’m stunned. And, time and again, the ubiquitous and lamentable awesome: what can it mean, what can it be supposed to mean now its real meaning has been dislodged?

  Some of the comments, regrettably, are worse than this. Bored shitless not worth money. Get a new fucking fridge. Or (shades of Daisy Ashford), Open the shitter to visiters. And, even below that level—alas, but, it seems, inevitably, even in a higher venture like ours—shameful entries always and unoriginally obsessed with sex, race and excrement. Ray wrote shit. Nobel Prize for Fucking. Or (mystifyingly), Donald Duck is a Jew. Naturally, Raymond being Raymond, he liked this last kind of entries best, but I can assure you that, as soon as he left us, I inked them out, every shameful one of them.

  The Visitor Book is an enormous thing, by the way, not unlike some ancient elephant folios I once saw in the British Museum library, and it was being kept long before the Residence was opened up to the polloi and, for private visitors, even longer than that. Overwhelming the lamentable rubbish I’ve just quoted, there are, on its earliest pages, the entries I treasure most, the acknowledgements of Raymond’s growing status in his late middle years, when the hope of his eventual triumph had started to become a possibility and, then, something slightly more. As far as the Prize was concerned, for ten full years he had been considered papabile, nominated annually (I made sure of that, through the local branch of PEN and elsewhere) and with increasing rumours of shortlistings that were never quite more than that, since, of course, the Nobel committee doesn’t actually announce shortlists. But the rumours were part of a rising tide, a growing clamour that, as it began to engulf me, was by far and away the most exciting thing I’d ever experienced in my life.

  The acknowledgements from local writers were one thing, overdue though meaning nothing to Raymond, who kept few friends among his fellow artists in our tiny literary fishpond and, to tell the truth, seemed to set out to make as many lifelong enemies as he could. Acknowledgements from overseas were something else, though, and here they are in front of me, in the book’s earlier pages—from Tom Keneally, who on his visit (I remember) regaled us long into the night with his yarns and his Gough Whitlam impersonations, from Raymond’s favourite novelist, Walker Percy, from Robert Creeley, who sat at Raymond’s dining table as he went through the verse of the eager young poetasters gathered at his feet, from the great Seamus Heaney—he who some said had been robbed of the Prize the year Raymond was awarded it. And so many more notables, all of them making their pilgrimage to Cannon Rise and leaving their traces in this very Visitor Book. ‘Oh! The view!’ ‘My first taste of roast lamb and kumura’ (sic). ‘I have to leave all this?—horresco referens’. And so on.

  Bliss it was, you might say, in that dawn to be alive. And, then, finally, when it came at last, the moment itself, the quickening realisation that the impossible was about to become possible, then probable, that the phone call in the middle of the night was actually the phone call we’d waited for night after night, year after year, the call of calls: and Raymond, standing with the receiver to his ear, his face unreadable, no emotion showing at all as he looked out across the lights of the city and listened to the voice of the secretary of the Swedish Academy.

  Finally, the receiver cradled, the pause after he turned to me, and his words—he couldn’t resist them:

  Well, George, we knocked the bastard off—

  You can imagine what happened next, the tumult and the shouting, the tremendous sense of living in the moment, as if time itself had been annihilated or suspended, the sense of being at the very centre of history at last. For us, the entire world had stopped to applaud! Suddenly, Raymond’s face seemed to be everywhere we looked, smiling back at us in triumph, the phone seemed never to stop ringing, the mailbox all but burst with cards and letters. We travelled to Sweden with him for the ceremony, the four of us presently on the Trust—I was his private secretary by this stage, so accompanied him, naturally, and Marjorie, I recall, re-mortgaged her house to pay for her ticket. Julian, I know, sold his car, and how Semple got himself there I don’t know, but there he was in the end along with the rest of us.

  Hurried, hectic, wrenching it was: but, looking back, I can’t imagine how Raymond would have managed if we hadn’t made the effort to get there. He was a seasoned traveller, of course, but the constant media attention and the repeated interviews wore him out. They keep asking the same fucking questions and I keep giving the same fucking answers!—I can remember him saying this to me, and that his performances became increasingly just that, performances, his public accounts full of wilder and wilder inventions.

  At one stage he made his claim to have actually taken part in the Algerian wars of independence, and didn’t that attract the attention of the media world! So cantankerous did he become with all the questioning the day of the ceremony was a nightmare—he threatened, finally, to go home uncrowned, something Marjorie cajoled him out of the way you talk a spoilt child to bed. The dress requirements were the main issue: in the end he agreed to a haircut and beard-trim or a tie, but not both. The tie won out, so that he remains embalmed in the imagery of the moment looking like a wild colonial Santa Claus, his head a mass of curling locks and bristles and everything short of actual twigs and birds’ nests.

  We waited for his acceptance speech just as anxiously as we’d waited for the triumph of the tie. What would he say?—we’d gathered together before the trip and drafted a few ideas for him, which he read out loudly and satirically as we handed them to him one by one. Yes, that’s right, he said. Mankind will prevail. Our fate hunts each of us down. Life itself is whole enough to tell us what we need—what the hell’s that supposed to mean? In the end he wrote the speech himself and we had no idea what he intended to come out with, and, knowing he was capable of doing absolutely anything, feared the worst. And what he produced was simply wonderful, what one member of the committee said was the best Nobel acceptance speech he could remember: so simple, so moving, so direct. These days it’d all be on
YouTube, of course, and we could relive and relive again the magic of that moment: now much of it is gone, alas, the way everything belonging to that time seems lost to us now, in that dark backward and abysm, that vast Then before today’s transient, unpleasing, light-headed Now.

  Such an innocent age, when first we felt our way into what engulfs us in the present day! I can remember the time we bought a golfball typewriter for Dot Round, Raymond’s typist, to replace the old Imperial she’d typed the Master’s work on for so long, and how we gathered around to marvel at the wonder that had come among us—the tiny lettered ball, punching the paper as she battered the keyboard as if it had a mind of its own. What now? we all wondered, what next?—unaware as we were of being caught (as Raymond was to explain in his Nobel lecture) in the middle of an epistemic change, a once-in-three-centuries rupture in the very way the world thinks and believes, and not realising that our amazing new electric typewriter would soon become as outmoded as the ducking stool.

  These words are not mine, by the way, since, as I say, it was Raymond, even from within the event, who first explained what it was that was happening around us—now, there’s a touch of genius for you. Goodbye print, is what he told us. Hullo cyberspace. We had no idea what he meant at the time, of course. We had no idea how much of what is good and great in our heritage we would have to defend—he no less than us, of course, he no less than us.

  The Lord giveth, however, and the Lord taketh away. It was in Stockholm that I first thought he had something wrong with him, Raymond, I mean, when I watched him moving from the lectern after making his acceptance speech at the banquet—he was over to one side, a little, and seemed to be putting his right foot down in a different way as he walked. I mentioned it to Semple, and immediately wished I hadn’t. By the time we’d got ourselves back home it was no longer a suspicion but a fact: the old man had received his comeuppance at last, he was being punished for his past sins, both public (details all pretty well known) and also, according to Robert, private. There was nothing I could do to stop the whispered public embroidering of the story of Raymond’s triumph to the effect that he had been struck down in his pomp, as if the prize itself had brought the illness with it as in some medieval allegory.

  The rumours became monstrous—Raymond was dying of meningitis, Raymond was dying of AIDS, he was dying of syphilis contracted during his misspent Wanderjahr in North Africa years before: he had weeks to live. In the end it was a relief, almost, when he told us what his doctor had just told him. Parkinson’s. Seems I’ll be going around interviewing people, he said, which was classy, we all thought, given the circumstances: very stylish indeed. But at least we knew he would be with us for a good while more, though in quite what state, at that stage, we simply didn’t know.

  I had it out with Semple after that, I really did. Now are you satisfied? I demanded. He really is sick, he really is being punished? You told me, is what he replied. You started it off! Anyway, he said, everyone knows he’s a prick, he’s got up everyone’s nose who’s ever met him! He might well be difficult, I told him. I’ve never pretended my father was perfect. Uncle, he said. Ray’s your uncle. Father too, I reminded him. Adoptive father—now, what about this other stuff that’s going around? What other stuff, he said, and I thought he looked furtive when I went on the front foot to him like that. You know very well what other stuff, I told him. Oh, that, he said. Well, it’s true, isn’t it? You remember the things he used to get up to, don’t pretend it didn’t happen to you. It happened to everyone, all of us. I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, I told him. And if there’s any more of this we’ll sue—

  I still find it hard to forgive him, to forgive Robert—to forgive all those who simply had to drag down a man like that in his finest hour. He’d been a public figure for some years, and inevitably there were stories that had been doing the rounds in that time. Some of these had something to them: after all, Raymond had been in and out of enough bedroom windows actually to have been spotted at some of them. And, yes, he was a difficult man, I’m sure that’s becoming clear to you by now, he was a very difficult man indeed. He was an artist, and he was difficult because he was an artist: and an artist because difficult. The two things were one.

  That’s what I try to remind the others on the occasions that something comes up from a past they seem to remember in far greater detail than ever I can—I, who, unlike them, actually shared his house and life, who was actually present at the times they talk about. I’ve had to reprimand each of them more than once: Julian least, perhaps, since he had least to do with the Master as a young man, coming somewhat later to the scene as he did: although, of course, he’s as susceptible to suggestion as the next man.

  Remember what Raymond brought us! I reminded them all, and still remind them. Remember when we were waiting, remember when it happened—remember Stockholm! Remember when we were together, is what I meant, when we had a sense of purpose in our lives, a sense of meaning and magic. Because, dear Lord, there’s no doubting he brought us some wonderful times, an excitement we’d never have known ourselves without him. What would we be without him? I often ask, and I don’t just mean the four of us on the Trust. He was a gift to us all, a gift to everyone.

  For myself, I know I made too much of him when he was younger, despite our difficulties—because of our difficulties, in truth, because of them. Nothing is simple, nothing straightforward. I used to love him more when those things happened that I found so hard, sometimes so wrong, but that was when he meant more and more to me. The two went together, the pain and the love. They were the one thing.

  By the time I was a young man I thought of him not as a mere human being but almost as an incandescence—and it still doesn’t seem a completely extraordinary thing to confess that to you. He could do no wrong—even when he did. He was Raymond, he was the Master. He transformed everything he touched, everyone he touched. I knew to let him do it, because he was who he was. Some people make their own rules, and others are there to obey them. That’s just how it is. One simply submits to the greater force. One submits to a force of nature.

  And all of this now, it seems, a long lifetime ago. Somehow, he has gone, and the excitement and unpredictability he always brought have gone with him: here I am, somehow, left policing the theft of an ashtray. A glance up from my desk here in the Chicken Coop and I see the roof of the Residence beyond and below my office window, its distinctive tiles flecked with yellow-green moss, its guttering slumped along the bargeboard and hanging from its ties like a row of grubby hammocks. This is the sort of thing I think of now, and the question of how to pay Val, the sole remaining full-time gardening lady, and the others I am obliged to think of as well—the Butts, most obviously, both of them pensioners now and thus to some degree self-sufficient, both of them (I have to admit) kept on for sentiment’s sake as much as anything else. Each requires a notional salary of sorts, not to mention the Chicken Coop building to go on living in: more expense, more expense and more decisions.

  In the Blue Room this evening I put away these thoughts as I watch the sunlight leave it, its glow fading from the walls and from the Medal and from the Citation below it. The sherry glass is crystal, Waterford, of course, and one of the many treasures from Raymond’s parents’ estate at Hamilton Downs, while the sherry is Amontillado: the music, that Vivaldi castrato piece I’ve mentioned earlier as the nonpariel on the other side of a Geminiani Concerto Grosso disc.

  Finally, opened across my thigh, and worn from the habit of use, Raymond’s third novel Flatland, with its imperishable opening sentences: July. No green left. The pines, the pistachio trees, the palmettos and the cork-oaks black against the rust of the earth—I don’t need to read the words since I have so much of the Master’s work by heart: but I adore the simple fact of the book, the feel of the work and the use in it, the embodied thought in my hand as I raise it and let the words on the page meet yet again the words in my head. Such economy, and yet such pungency of expression: almost nothing betwe
en the reader and the world that is realised upon the page. I want the words to disappear, he used to say, and here he has all but made them do that, in a passage of extraordinary delicacy and originality and authenticity.

  His book is here tonight not so much to be read as simply to be, to reassure, to give to the moment as the extraordinary voice of the boy builds and soars and takes me with it to that other world the old man told me about and promised me and so very nearly took me to, and which so surely exists and is where he dwells now. Here it comes, here it comes at last, as the sun winks, and the evening falls, and the glass tips, and the words reassure, and the music climbs to heaven in the pretty mouth of the butchered, ruined boy.

  Extraordinary, extraordinary—the insoluble puzzle at the heart of beauty, the Master used to say, the killing in the middle of it. That is what he showed me: that, I think, was his especial, demanding gift, the knowledge in those traditional words the Italians used to say:

  Evviva il coltellino!

  Long live the little knife!

  III

  Actually, if you want to know the truth, Patrick, what I usually did first thing in the morning was, I’d wipe the old man’s arse for him. That’s what I usually did. You told me, just the facts, you’d sort them out yourself, well, there you go, there’s the first fact for you to sort out! Make something out of that—go on! Every morning I’d check him, and that’s what I’d have to do because sometimes the poor old bastard’d cacked himself in the night, not every night but most nights he did. I’d clean up the bedding and I’d clean him up, too, and I’d do everything else you’d expect me to do. If they get Parkinson’s they get bunged up, see, so I’d give him a couple of the old senna pods at night, about 7:00, and exactly twelve hours later it’s ba-boom, stand back, know what I mean? Full or empty he’d go off right on time, you could use him to set the Atomic Clock. So I always had to be there. Close sport, that’s what we call it in the weight room, it means looking out for someone when they’re lifting, in case of a fail? Anyway, sometimes I’d get a bit generous with the senna pod and then it’d be like I say, a lot of work for me when I turned up, I’d put him on the throne for the big moment at 7:00 a.m. Bombing Dresden, he used to call it. You’d hear him through the wall, bombs away—