Again, a dispiriting sputter of applause. Semple’s hat begins to levitate: Cosmo’s big, soft, pink, teacherly hands start popping against each other again. ‘Time for our second visitor!’ he cries.
Semple is up, and stepping his way carefully to the front, leaning, touching, murmuring, as he makes his way familiarly through the class. Everything here is known to him: he is in his medium, the peculiar little snowglobe of university life.
I suddenly realise. He’s going to read poetry—no one has warned me: I make my way to a rear seat and shut my eyes. Ah, God.
Robert’s performance never varies. One moment he’s joshing amid the motley, the next he’s approaching the lectern and the business of riffling through his papers as if suddenly called upon by Hera herself. Always a long, studied pause, once he’s at the lectern, as his fingers flutter the pages this way and that and he mimes the crisis of decision: and then, always, the sacramental moment as he smuggles a headband from his hip pocket—the only time his hat ever leaves his body, this, baring thick, implausible, metallic hair: slowly, reverentially, he places the band about his own head, low at the temples, and pauses, before settling down to read—
Oh, how Raymond lacerated him for this vanity when he first heard tell of it! You pretentious little turd! he told him. Who d’you think you are, Napoleon at Notre Dame?—and so on, and sometimes worse than this, too: but to no effect, since Semple goes on crowning himself in public readings to this day and has even spawned younger imitators amongst his creative writing progeny who do much the same. For he, too, like so many others, attempts to teach that which, according to Raymond, cannot be taught: his coterie call themselves the Cuffers, after one of his earlier collections, titled—lamentably—Cuffing Myself. The public readings of our small, charming but shabby city are full of solemn boys and girls who announce their translation from this world to another with much the same flim-flam of self-coronation as he does.
I open my eyes: the Napoleonic moment is over. We are in the sanctum.
‘Lady Blue,’ the poet begins, in the piping, spectral voice he seems always to reserve for these moments. He coughs into his hand, a little, shrill, unmanned cough, suitable for higher things. He begins to read—
And the phone in my pocket starts up!
Dear God, dear God, how embarrassing—I hate the thing at the best of times and use it only for purposes of the Trust: and now here it is, singing out its desolate little grace note. An involuntary shout of laughter from the class and then I’m up and stepping unevenly between legs and feet and fumbling in my pocket—Semple left at the lectern palms to face and his headband forlorn and disempowered, popped up slightly from its usual grip on his brow.
At the door I turn back and mouth sorry to him: and step outside, into the corridor and then the bright, leafy, eye-squinting quadrangle, the phone pressed to the side of my head.
This voice in my ear, its strange mixture of sounds—I know it, I know this woman, but it takes a few seconds for my mind to catch up with itself.
‘—tried your office but, no,’ it’s saying into my head. ‘Then I found this number and I thought you wouldn’t mind—’
Geneva. Geneva Trott is on my phone.
‘—important new development I’m sure you’ll be interested in,’ her voice is telling me. ‘And of course the other Trust members as well—’
Geneva Trott is speaking to me—
Geneva Trott. Long the bane of our lives on the Trust, long the cross we’ve all had to bear, and the one person in the world who can unite the four of us in rage—all I have to do is bring up her name. For many years now she has been a senior lecturer in English at a distinguished university to the north, and, in all those years, the dogged, mulishly relentless devotee of the only writer she seems to know of or care about in the whole wide world—quite possibly the only writer she’s ever read: Raymond Thomas Lawrence. How many years is it since she first burst in on our little world with Raymond Lawrence: Years of Lightning (1983), a literary-critical biography published in a tired life-and-works series that was a graveyard for third-rate lit-crits and fifth-rate writers? A bolt from the blue, or into it: and riddled with the dozen dozen tiny errors (plus a few real howlers) that came from its attempt to get around our collective gate, so to say, without the common courtesy of a rattle or a knock.
Let me count the ways. For a start, she got Raymond’s birthdate wrong—only by a day, but a full twenty-four hours nonetheless, a slip that spoke volumes about the efficiency of long-distance guesswork, her primary scholarly modus operandum as far as we were able to judge. Then she dated several of his publications wrongly, and wrote his novels The Outer Circle Transport Service as The Outer Service Transport Circle and Nineteen Forty-Eight as Nineteen Eighty-Four. Thomas Hamilton, the protagonist of both those novels, became John Hamilton in a couple of places, and, once—rewardingly—John Thomas: throughout, other names, both those of characters and those of actual people, wrinkled and slid. I was referred to throughout as Peter Or—well, I was mentioned a couple of times in her rotten little book and that is how she had me in each, as if I were nothing more, as far as she was concerned, than that single prepositional conjunction Raymond first identified in me, as you’ll see in a page or two. I was livid, of course—I mean, the cheek of it. The cheek of the whole thing, come to that.
Her biggest howler of all, though, was to have Raymond brought up in a place in which, to our knowledge, he had never even set foot! A wrong turn here and another there as (I presume: if she can make things up, so can I) she drove about North Canterbury in her (again, I’m guessing) Trabant, her ordnance survey map on her lap and the dazzle of the sun in her eyes. And in the end she settled (it seemed) on a dreadful little property up a long driveway off the even longer desolation of Cornwallis Road, too nondescript itself even to have a name—nothing much else to be seen, so this (she presumably presumed in her lumpen, oafish way) must be it.
She seems to have got up the drive far enough to catch a look at the farmhouse and its surrounding buildings, because her description is vivid in the way a townie could never make up, with small details beyond her invention that she could have seen only at first-hand: and it is among these that she placed young Raymond in her richly subjunctive account of his early years—Young Raymond would have wandered the rugged, rolling hills, learning them till they became as familiar as the back of his hand—putting him out to milk cows never farmed in the area at that time, forcing him to shiver through chilly nights that whistled between parted weatherboards far different from the sturdy brick clad of Hamilton Downs, the two- (and in places three-) storey pile in which (until boarding school smiled at him its beckoning, Sodoma smile) he was actually raised.
Hamilton Downs was—still is—about twenty miles due north of the Tobacco Road nightmare she had him in, on 2500 acres of rolling pastureland. It ran Corriedales for the dry conditions, and when things got wetter in the 1970s it switched to Highlanders, which (Ernie, the farm manager, informs me) are what it runs to this day. Not a cow in sight, there or anywhere else. Raymond, being Raymond, claimed to have lost his innocence amongst the farm animals and would provide details unasked, not least in a notorious interview with a bewildered Swedish journalist at the time of the award ceremony, one of the few relicts of that time you can still find on YouTube (‘Raymond Lawrence + gumboots’).
This was after the publication of Raymond Lawrence: Years of Lightning, so Geneva was not able to fold it into her meticulously improvised long-distance Freudian psychoanalysis, which made so much of the various ties, walking sticks, telephone poles and tall trees in Raymond’s oeuvre, not to mention the occasional cupboard or cave—the scene in Flatland in which protagonist and antagonist shelter together under a ragged outcrop of a hill while she holds his walking stick seemed almost to drive her into a frenzy of hermeneutic retrieval.
On the other hand, it has to be admitted that she got some things right, disturbingly so, and there were details in her book she couldn�
�t possibly have known unaided and which made the hair on the back of my neck stand up when I read them. Where had she got them from—which member of the inner circle had let them slip, who in the Trust, which of the gardeners, which of the accountants, who else in the support team, larger as it was in those days? Which of you took the thirty pieces of silver, I asked them one by one: and it seemed, at the end of it, that the answer was: none of them.
That, I didn’t believe, and I acted accordingly. What other than a betrayal—a series of betrayals, dozens of betrayals—could explain Geneva’s extraordinary, dangerous moments of knowledge, never stated but always there, somehow, between certain of her lines? No need to say anything further at this point, or, indeed, anything at all: and, of course, those of you unfortunate enough to know Geneva’s sad little book, with its brave, jolly, life-affirming cover, may have some idea of what I’m talking about. We still seek some of the culprits.
And now here am I, standing beneath the gingko tree appalled and shocked and with her voice still in my ear. Tapes, she told me. Videotapes? I demanded. No, no, audiotapes, she said. Sound tapes. Tapes of an interview. Interview? I asked her. Who with?
Oops. Tape stopped. Where was I? Yeah, most of the time all I had to do was fish him out of the downstairs garden room when the sun was going and get him onto the elevator, you know, the wheelchair platform that comes up by the front door? He was in good shape then, he wasn’t shaking all that much earlier on because I was injecting him same time each day and ditto with the pills, and the massage helped, too—wasn’t paid to do that but he asked me, he says give us a rub, go on. Every now and then, though, I’d notice things on him—like, I remember he’d been biting the inside of his bottom lip when he was eating, he told me that and I looked and there was quite a big wet-sore in there. Didn’t used to do that, he tells me. He’d got a mouth full of blood.
Anyway, that first day at the Residence Either-Or takes me through the house, see, he makes me do the tour and first up he says I have to sign the visitor’s book! Why do I have to sign it, I ask him, and he says, well, you’re a visitor, aren’t you, or do you live here? And that seemed fair enough even though it was a bit sarky. So I signed up, you know, Wham-Bam Thom Ham Thank you Ma’am. Turns out there’s all sorts of people’ve signed, he wouldn’t let me read all of it but like for example there was this guy who’d done the tour the weekend before and he just signed himself The Bishop, you know, like he’s dropped in off a chess board? And then there was that painting there, too, on the wall I mean, you must’ve seen it, Patrick, you know, where you come in?—craziest painting I ever seen, just the back of his head? Why’d they paint it back to front like that? I couldn’t see the point, you know, just zits and hickeys and a bald spot?
So I’m just having a look-round and Mr Orr, he says to me, Don’t touch the ornaments, please, we find they’re getting stolen. Just looking, I tell him. Is that Mr Lawrence there?—because there’s all these photos and there it was, it was Mr Lawrence, I recognised him from the telly only he was much younger in the photograph, his hair was black and his beard was black and white in patches, he looked like a badger. That’s him, says Either-Or. Who’s that with him? I asked, there was this young man in some of the photos but he wouldn’t say who it was. Then he says, the Master loves humanity but he can’t stand people, and when I look at him, y’know, like, what? he says to me, it’s a quote, and he turns away like I’m the dumbest prick in the class—like I’m in old Tinny’s special class, that’s how he talks to me. This teacher at my school, took all the mongrel kids?—Mr Tinetti.
Well, next thing I had a look in the bog and I’d never seen a throne that size, you could bath a baby in there, you could just about get in there and have a bath yourself! It’s because of the age of the house, Either-Or says. Now here’s the second bedroom, he sometimes writes in here at this desk in the evenings. And we’re in the little bedroom it turns out I’d end up sleeping in for a while before we all shifted up to the Chicken Coop—I’d no idea back then it’d come to that but it did! I’d turned into, like, a male nurse at that stage. There was a big rolltop desk in the little bedroom and I’d stack my camp bed in behind it when I packed up for the day, that and the sleeping bag and so on, and I’ll tell you what, it was as uncomfortable as anywhere I slept in my life. But I had to be nearby because he’d started not making it through the night by that stage, the way I’ve been telling you. And I’d give him his lunch, too—big joke, that was like pushing a meat pie through a keyhole, he was that disinterested those days—you’d need a bloody microscope to find a meat pie round the Chicken Coop, by the way, did I tell you that, they were all vegos? First thing in my time off, I’d go out and find myself a good meat pie or a burger, whatever’d got something in it that’d looked over a wall, that’s what my old man used to say. I looked in the fridge for a feed when I first got there—up at the Coop, I mean—and what they’d got in there was that healthy it made me sick. And I thought, maybe that’s why Mr Lawrence isn’t interested in his lunch, maybe I should smuggle him in a T-bone? They were starving him, that was half his trouble, so I used to give him a Bounty Bar now and then and he liked that, he used to say shit hot a Bounty Bar and he’d rub his hands together—
Anyway, Mrs Butt—she’s the housekeeper, and her old man, he keeps the house and garden together. They’re some weird religion but I don’t know what it is, I reckon all religions are pretty much the same anyway—like casserole, for years I just thought there was just this stuff called casserole, then someone says to me you can get different kinds, like, for example, they don’t always have to have carrot? Anyway, the Butts, I used to call them Left Butt and Right Butt, y’know, you wouldn’t want to come between them? Guess you had to be there. Old Edna, she’s Right Butt because there can’t be anyone righter than her—old Eric’s Left Butt because he always gets left out, even when it’s raining? Anyway, Mrs Right Butt, she catches me looking in the fridge and she says to me, plenty of walnuts in the barrel—they’ve got this big walnut tree up the back, full-grown, beautiful thing, and they’d pile the walnuts in this barrel and that’s what they seemed to live off, fucking walnuts pardon my French. Walnut loaf, the first time I had a feed up there I thought it was meatloaf and I pigged in and boy was I disappointed, I had to have a couple of Bounty Bars afterwards. And I tell you what, they had this dog up there—Rommel it was called sometimes but then sometimes it was Daisy, I could never work out whether there were two dogs that looked the same or just the one with two names—and anyway, they fed this dog walnuts! I never seen such a miserable-looking dog, eating a bowl of walnuts, and I tell you what, it needed a bloody good wash and I used to do that, I’d give it a dunk from time to time when the old man was snoozing. I’ll tell you what happened to him, sometime, too. Rommel. Unless it was Daisy.
Mrs Butt, though. You said you wanted to know about the staff back then when I started and she was one of them. I couldn’t believe how many people Either-Or had round the place when I turned up, I mean just for one man, you know? It’s like it’s Raymond Lawrence Incorporated or something. Seven women who did the garden when I first got there—that’s what really got to me, they did it all for nothing back then when I started?—not just Val and the six others, but all of them as far as I can see. That’s an exaggeration, because there’s the Butts, they were paid from the start. When things first got difficult with Mr Lawrence old Eric Butt’d drive him round in the Dodge as well, this big old car he had in the garage—every bastard and his son went for a drive in it as far as I can see, just not me, I was the only one that was kept from inside the car out of all of them, and I still don’t get why! Not for months and then suddenly I’m allowed inside it, I’ll tell you about that sometime, too.
And there was Mrs Round, too, Mrs A. Round, but I never found out what her first name was because they only ever called her Dot. Dot Round, what a name—she’d been typing up his writing for a hundred years by the time I got there, Mr Lawrence’s, and she turned up every
afternoon and she typed his stuff up that he writes out in longhand. She reckoned she was the only one could read it. He’d sit down there in the sunroom with this funny little desk thing across his knees and he’d write, it was years since I’d seen someone doing that, you know, writing with a fountain pen? When I ask him for a look at it he says to me, what did you expect, a quill? It’s a Parker 51, he says, it’s over fifty years old, that pen. That must be worth a bit, I told him, but he never said anything when I said that. He just made sure he took it back off me! And then he went on writing with it—bright blue ink, I remember that—though Val told me he was just going through the motions more and more those days, they reckoned what he was writing wasn’t up to much, they just let him write.
And old Dot, she’d turn up each day and type it out for him at the dining table in the front room, page after page of this bullshit. She’d got this old electric typewriter, it used to go like a bloody machinegun—that’s what I called her, Machinegun Round, but she didn’t seem to like it much when I did that. Dot, she’d say to me, call me Dot. Didn’t do her much good in the end, but I’ll tell you about that some other time, too. I’ve got that much to tell you and most of it you won’t believe. Oh, yes, and Mr Semple, he told me they were all Catholics, see, I mean everyone at Raymond Lawrence Incorporated, and I said how d’you know that, and he says well, Thom, they’ve always got colds, that’s how you tell whether people are Catholics or Protestants, the Micks have always got a slightly runny nose. And, you know what, it took me a couple of weeks to realise he was pulling my tit?
Right, where are we now on the guided tour?—the Blue Room. Right. At least forty-five minutes it’s taken us to get to this end room and he’s still going strong, Either-Or, in this big actory voice. But then, that’s what he is anyway, a big act. I told him at the end, you should sell tickets, and he looks at me like I’m a fly on a fruitcake and he says to me, but we’re open for the public good, Mr Ham, that’s the point. He used to say it like he was Noddy talking to his dinner, Hullo Mr Ham, hullo Mr Salad. This is before he starts calling me Gradus. Anyway: The Blue Room, he says in this special voice, like I’m colour-blind, know what I mean, can’t see what the bloody colour is when I’m standing there staring at it? This was added on to the Residence as the Master’s fame was beginning to bring him the material rewards he cared for least. Here we find the most treasured—and off he goes again.
The Back of His Head Page 10
