The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Others were less convinced. How much of the early fiction d’you think is real—how much d’you think is based on what he actually did? I asked Semple at one point. None of it, he replied. Bastard probably stayed pissing up in the hotel bar in Algiers writing down what he heard other people say about the fighting.

  As you can see, he too had breakdowns in his belief in the Master—we all did from time to time. On this occasion, I think I remember, the old man had just chucked Robert’s latest poems back in his face and then bought him a colouring book and crayons: that or something like it was what lay between them at that particular moment. It’s just stuffing, what you write, the old man had told him. Stuffing, stuffing, stuffing! Find something different! It’s meant to be behind what you write, not in front of it! That was when he’d thrown the poems. You can fucking talk, Robert had shot back at him, his face dark with anger. You can fucking talk.

  Hence his scepticism, Semple’s, I mean. A little later, though, I caught him out in a drunken boast to the effect that, in truth, he’d never read Flatland, or at least that he’d never read it quite to the end— something like that—and I shamed him (as much as he was capable of being shamed) into reading my copy of the novel.

  No one else writes like that, he said, as he handed it back to me when he was done. No one, no one in the world.

  You could see he was rattled. He meant no one could write as well as that, but also that no one could write an account like the one Raymond had written in that novel without having lived it, without having been there and done that, as he used to say. He did it all right, Robert told me. No doubt about that. The old bastard, he did it all right.

  I realised that if he was as shocked as this he couldn’t possibly have read Frighten Me either, the other early Algerian novel, and I bullied him into reading that as well: and he was equally shaken by what he saw there, too, once he had. No wonder people tried to ban them, he said. Jesus, I’d no idea. They’re so realistic, they’re so shocking, it all actually happens—

  Oh, the relief, though, when I finally caught up with the Master back then—when I’d read everything he’d already written and could open something of his that was new, something made while I was in his life, in his house and beginning to become a part of him.

  One of the most wonderful things about his later success, as far as I’m concerned, is that it pasted a new narrative over the excesses of this early writing, you might say, a narrative of which I thoroughly approve and in which I had no small part myself in the fixing: Raymond as the growing conscience of the nation and then, as he went on, of the world, of the civilised world: Raymond the humanitarian, speaking on behalf of the wretched of the earth, wrenching our mistakes, naked and quivering—Lord, how some here hated him for this—into the eyes of the teeming globe.

  There is general agreement among the critics that in his middle phase—from The Outer Circle Transport Service, say—his work began to acquire that depth and resonance, that maturity of vision, which was so much remarked on when he won the Prize and which so fully explained his winning of it. For his holding before our collective gaze the wretched of the earth—part of what the Citation states about his achievement. Other-people, he had begun to call them, the wretched and the damned: eventually the title of one of his last novels and certainly his most disturbing.

  Slowly, slowly, all this has become mine: the compassion, the humanity, the love of the victim and the fool, of the man who dares to be different—of the man who dares to be.

  I’ve told you what he was like at the ceremony at Stockholm: the attention he received when he returned home interested him even less, and, except for those occasions when he was feeling unusually generous, he tried to avoid it. The illness got in the way, it has to be said, though of course there are always those naysayers who claimed it made no difference whatever and that he was unbearable and unpredictable long before the first tremor in his arm.

  Admittedly, there was a disastrous civic reception at the town hall here quite soon after the award, in which he made what even I have to confess was a most inappropriate speech, a truly embarrassing speech. After this it was agreed that he should begin to pass things more and more to me—to the others who were to be in the Trust, yes, but, primarily (given that by that stage I was formally his secretary and personal assistant), to me. More and more it was Raymond’s name that was advertised but mine that was offered in its place, in the introductions to the various public meetings I insisted he continue to agree to: or he who would precede me onto the stage, or before the cameras, but I who would follow him and, after the brief, distracted few words he could be bothered to give at the best of times, I upon whom he would rely increasingly to give substance to these occasions—to flesh him out, so to speak.

  And thus, imperceptible to the public gaze, a gentle transition from uncle to nephew, as, increasingly, I began to steal the show with a growing public narration of Raymond’s life in the years after the award. At first these public lectures were illustrated by a steady accumulation of slides in a carousel: then, as time went on and with Julian’s help, by electronic means. Scenes from the ceremony at Stockholm—Raymond receiving the award in his reluctant tuxedo and tie, his hair awry like Beethoven’s, Raymond and the four of us with him, all in our youth (wry self-deprecation always worked well at this point of my presentation), Raymond with King Carl Gustaf, Raymond delivering his acceptance speech at the banquet, Raymond receiving his applause.

  From his return home and after, there are scenes from the reception at Government House: Raymond with the Governor-General, Raymond and the Trust members with the Governor-General, the five of us with the prime minister of the day, the five of us with the local mayor and his council, Raymond alone with the mayor and his council. Scenes from the town hall reception, from the garden of the Residence, from Raymond’s writing life—and, all the time, my voice, knitting together the anecdotes and the facts for his followers, with Raymond sometimes present, in the early years of all this, immobile yet sharp-eyed, but, later, inert or not present at all, and, after a certain point, almost always silent wherever he was. Sitting there in his fauteuil roulant.

  Until, eventually, once the dreadful matter of his death had been delicately sorted out, it was me alone at last and at stage centre, neveu et héritier. The role finally engulfed me, and I in turn embraced the role: it was as if it had been written for me and for me alone, as if I had been created for it and for nothing else. The triumph of the writer manqué, some people said—Marjorie, of all people, was one of them, in the only really serious argument I’ve ever had with her, shortly after Raymond went and our roles were being settled in court, as, unhappily, became necessary. You’re well in now, I remember her shouting at me outside the courtroom when it was all over and done. Raymond the fucking Second. You’ve become a significant literary figure at last—now all you have to do is write something! We were in the middle of the bitter row that followed the publication of his will and its clear delineation of our relative positions. You’re not even a fucking writer! she said to me. I just don’t get it, what did you pay him? You can forge his signature, did you forge the rest of the will as well?

  From time to time they raged and stamped, but less and less frequently over the years and never for very long—Marjorie easily distracted as her personal life lurched from crise to crise, Robert as much so by his ongoing obsession with juvenile pulchitrude. Julian, always affable, put up little resistance in the first place.

  Often, after this, they struggled to keep up with my plans, my feints and manoeuvres. So Raymond’s going into four different international libraries but no one’s actually going to be allowed to see anything he ever wrote once it’s there, have I got that right? Marjorie creaked at me, carefully, when I outlined the arrangements I’d slowly been putting together in the final years of the old man’s life. He’s going bit by bit, I told her. We’ve still got a lot here in the Residence to catalogue. Yes, but could you explain the thinking, she said. If
no one’s ever going to be allowed to actually see his manuscripts and so on, you know, actually read them and work on them, shouldn’t we just burn them here and now and be done with it? She didn’t understand, alas, she simply didn’t understand.

  More than this: one night after a Trust meeting I overheard Semple outside, in amongst the slamming car doors down by the garage as they prepared to leave in the usual way. He can’t let the old man go, he was saying to the others. Norman. He’s got all Ray’s droppings saved up in bottles under the Blue Room—he’s got Ray down there as well, he gets into the sarcophagus with him every night and shuts the lid! And then Marjorie’s laughter, and Julian saying now now, Robert. And all the while my blood running cold: Lord, if only they knew what it really was they were laughing at—

  On the other hand, I do have to admit I did have difficulty separating myself from the Master when the time came. He’d absorbed me so utterly into his life and with so little resistance on my part that, once the fuss about his extraordinary, devastating end had faded, it could hardly be different. I’ll even admit to you the existence of a little reliquary I keep in a drawer in his bedroom in the Residence. His upper denture (his lower teeth were his own) and (each in a little pharmaceutical sample-bag) a snip of his beard and another of his hair—the former white and tightly kinked, the latter slightly waved and grey, with a slight hint of russet left in it like the henna in the hair of a dead pharaoh. His spectacles of course, both the little half-glasses he wore around the place to peer over and the full-sized, wire-framed bifocals whose temple-bars Phyllis so deftly caught with that single flutter of paint in her greatest portrait.

  Some nail-clippings, too, from both fingers and toes, and the ring he always wore—curious, this, given he never married—on the second finger of his left hand. And then, simply, bits and pieces: a cigarette holder and lighter, a dried-up toothbrush from thirty years ago, an ancient packet of suppositories half used up, a sebsis from his kif-smoking days in North Africa, its bowl tortuously, tinily carved and yet its stem just a plant stalk pulled from somewhere. Other objects, too, less loved and treasured than, simply, there, his, unavoidably part of the record of his existence.

  Here, too, I keep the stick he sometimes used on us, alas: on Robert, on me: sometimes, even, on Marjorie—on anyone, it seemed, including the Kennedy kids next door when he caught them about his property. Fifteen inches long and tightly covered in stitched brown leather: it still terrifies me whenever I see it, reeking of the exotic as it does, like a distant row of camels, like an endless, billowing, many-peaked Bedouin tent. An unquestionable part of the old man’s North African story from the moment he began to spin it to me, early in my time in this house, part of his wondrous gallimaufry of bullshit, as he described it once when, yet again, he’d drunk too much. At other times it was quite separate and with a life of its own as a pure object, a thing that could cause terror and pain. There were days when it was about, I remember, and there were days when it was not: but always it was there, always it was present, always it was somewhere. It never ceased to exist, always reeking of the Barbary coast and the mysteries of l’Arabie.

  Yet, somehow, for all the fear in it—the terror—I could never bear to throw it away, or anything else of him: in fact some of these relics I carry about with me secretly, quite often, in order to fortify myself, to reassure myself that he is still with me in some way. How often have I sat in a meeting of the Trust with the half-glasses in my shirt pocket, or his ring sliding around on my little finger, or his gnarled old toothbrush inside my jacket! Raymond, Raymond, synecdochal Raymond, hidden about my person!

  Quite apart from anything else, though, and if the truth be told, almost the first thing he did to me was to cut off my writing arm, just like that. At some callow moment, and tremulously, the teenaged me gave him some dreadful juvenile thing I’d written: There’s to be no more of this, he said when he returned it—when he held it out to me, that is, and then pulled it away and hoisted it up and out of my reach. Look, look carefully, he said, watch, and turned, and opened the lid of the kitchen incinerator and thrust my work into its flames. You’re. Not. A. Writer, he said, carefully. You’re something else, not sure what, but take it from me, whatever it is it isn’t that. You’re something, but I haven’t decided what it is yet—

  Dear God, how I hated him for that—I still do, in part of me! You see that I can write, somewhat, a little, and (I like to fancy) sometimes more than a little: a tendency to overwrite sometimes, certainly, to be a little self-consciously ‘literary’, and too many long sentences over-reliant on parentheses and colons: this is what my friends tell me. All true. I try to improve, to be disciplined. In the most ambitious sense, though, in the fullest sense of the Artistic—off came my writing arm from the shoulder, in a single swipe and with no anaesthetic to dull the pain. I gave up the idea of high artistic achievement there and then: he was the writer, and no one else. He’d made that clear. No one need apply.

  Sometime later—I mean years later, when I was eighteen, perhaps, or nineteen—he suddenly told me he’d finally decided what it was that I would be. My bumboy, he told me. When I tell you, you drop your daks and touch your toes, that’s what you do from now on.

  This was when we’d had the last of our really violent disagreements—the end of my adolescence, really, the end of my innocent years—but it was also a time when the possibility of the Prize was first coming clearly into sight. He’d been nominated several years in a row by then—and I think he had a growing idea of what might happen to him soon, perhaps, and, consequently, of what it was he would need from me. I was bookish, I was obedient, I was efficient, I could add up a row of figures. I would do: as you will see.

  More than anything, though, I was his. When I was three, my father—Raymond’s older brother—much older, ten years older—died in an accident at the family farm near Springfield. My mother remarried almost straight away, to a man I’m sure had been in her life already. Raymond was always the forbidden uncle I overheard my mother and my father’s replacement discussing, in due course, through the wall: whenever I appeared at these moments they’d fall silent and turn from each other as if they’d been talking about something else.

  Little by little, I became fascinated by him, this forbidden uncle: what was the thing he’d done wrong? It’s not so much that as who he mixed with, my mother said to me once, cautiously, reluctantly, when I’d pestered her enough on the topic: and that was the point at which the naughty, smoky word bohemian entered my life. He was an outlaw!

  From somewhere in the house I found one of his books—the only one my mother had forgotten to throw out—and pored over its cod Hansel-and-Gretel cover, as I later learned it was supposed to be. Miss Furie’s Treasure Hunt, it was, that very first venture: he glowered from the back cover, a sharp-bearded man with a disturbing, iron gaze. He terrified me even then.

  So I sought him out. This deliciously forbidden, forbidding man had returned from overseas the year before and bought a property on the hills to the south-east of town—as if he was trying to get as far away from the farm as he could, I overheard my mother telling my stepfather through an inefficiently closed door. His address was in the phonebook, delightfully taboo: 23 Cannon Rise. His house, equally proscribed, was but a bike ride across town and a fifteen- or twenty-minute toil up a hill road. Once there, puffing, unfit, I stood before a low iron-red cliff at the foot of his property and then scrambled up it and onto his lawn.

  At the far end, up the slopes of the banked grass and beyond the raised flowerbeds, the house was exactly as it is today. I always have the sense, though, when I remember the moment, that the Blue Room was in the process of being added, out to the left: but that can’t possibly be true, as you will come to understand—although, equally, you might in fact come to see that it must be true, can only be true.

  Seen like that, the house gave me too little, and so the following weekend I returned to it, and again the weekend after that, and again after that, alwa
ys hoping for more. Each time, it sat there and looked back at me.

  Eventually, though, it yielded what I had come for, Raymond Thomas Lawrence himself, aged—what? Not quite forty, I imagine. The Raymond Lawrence who had returned from the UK the year before and was just starting to conceive of The Outer Circle Transport Service, as I was to discover soon: the novel that seemed out of place at the time but which looked, when all was done, like an attempt to break out of what no less an authority than Dr Geneva Trott herself has designated his somewhat overblown earlier style.

  And indeed, as I was to discover, it did have some funny moments here and there, if rather elephantine ones: written by this man who turned and stared at me that day half a good long lifetime ago, in shabby cardigan and trousers and rubber boots, as I remember him, and amongst autumn leaves and pale smoke, if (again) those details are true. I remember a fine drift of rain and the smell of the smoke in the rain, and from him a smoky pale-blue gaze, even though I know that in the photos and the paintings the eyes are another colour, somewhat darker: and a moment of engagement quite unlike anything I had experienced before in my life, a clinch so intense it was almost paralysing. It seized me, it held me: and, then, a moment after that, a turning away, as if to say, I’ve got you, or, I’ve caught you now, you’re mine.

  A stirring in the forest—

  It was so odd, so disturbing, that I never told anyone about it: even my mother, whom I trusted at the time, although that was beginning to change in the usual way. Somehow, the man had uncovered me just by looking at me, had seemed to bare my eleven-year-old self to itself in some primitive way: and then had turned indifferently back to his autumn leaves and his funeral pyre.