The Back of His Head

by Patrick Evans

  Instead, for him, I must have seemed no more than those lesser beings who gather at the foot of Parnassus. At worst, those broken-winged gulls I mentioned many pages ago, people like Marjorie and Robert but also creatures even less than that, far less, the desperate and the disturbed and the inconsolable, squawking and squabbling at the crumbs of fame. At best, no more than Julian or I—useful idiots of the art world, organisers of readings and conferences and even (sometimes) publication, experts at finding funding, handling correspondence and getting writers in and out of taxis and onto planes. Artholes, Raymond sometimes called us.

  And behind his shoulders all the time, as we his followers scurried about hewing his wood and drawing his water, the rustling of that wondrous, magical, now-forbidden forest. The feared and beloved weald of the European imagination, in which all our childhood minds are formed and from which all our stories come. Gone.

  Not so far so, though, that I couldn’t hear the rustle of its leaves from time to time. For one thing, I still knew whenever he began to write again. Those sounds, those familiar scents, the change in the mood about the place—they started up straight away, as soon as I’d been banished, as if getting rid of me had set him free in some way.

  Such signs were as unmistakable as ever in this time I describe. First, the familiar jaunt to my uncle’s spirits that always came with inspiration, the sudden warbling and whistling and flirting, the reckless teasing of Mesdames Round and Butt and even the redoubtable Mrs During as she bent to scrub his loo. Raymond’s in love again, I remember someone saying when the moment of one of the earlier novels arrived upon us like this—Bisque, it was, possibly, and maybe it was Basil Bush who said it to me. I remember my uncle bursting out of the garden room one day early in the creation of one or other of his novels back then: By God, ’tis good! he cried: and if you like it you may!

  And, now, as I say, all this was unmistakably with us once again. There was I, his bumboy newly hatched, struggling (I think I remember this right) to get a cache of his documents out of the old wooden garage down below the house and into a van and off to the local university research library for cataloguing. One of the librarians helped me and a miserable, limp-wristed pair we were, too, grunting and sweating each filing cabinet and laden cardboard box out and into the van and off and away. And there was Raymond, up above us in the garden room of No. 23, doors flung wide apart as he sat scribbling at his écritoire, and there he was again, bounding up the outdoor steps with fistfuls of manuscript, and hugging Dot Round with delight (as she told me later) above her typewriter in the room above, and there he was yet once more, singing at the top of his voice and urging the others to join in. Ah, yes, a nest of singing birds they certainly were at this early stage of things. Such elation!

  And then, after that but not soon, the next phase. Christ on the road to Emmaus, he used to call it, my uncle: meaning the sense that, suddenly, someone else was with us. Who is the turd who walks always beside you? he’d ask when he knew the house had begun to fill with these new presences. It’s almost as if there’s someone there, I remember no less than Mrs Butt saying once when the house had begun to fill with the sense of his creations, or possibly it was no less than Mrs During who said it to me. It’s almost as if you can feel the things he’s writing about.

  Whichever woman said it I knew what she meant, and I knew it was uncomfortable for her not least because the apprehension was so plausible—I mean the overwhelming sense that some kind of created presence-of-the-moment really was about the place, in this world with everything else—the dog, Mrs During, Mrs Round, the gardening ladies, the milkman each morning at the gate, the paper-boy in the afternoon: present, and up to its unknowable business. These presences were the other side of the process which had started, for me, when he held up that second-hand frock all those years earlier and asked me to be his momentary Julia. We’d stepped into the universe of his imagination: now, back it came, stepping into our safe, predictable little orrery universe, with its house and its garage and its garden and the people who lived in and around them.

  No apparitions, not yet: instead, just the creak of a floorboard, perhaps, or the closing of a door that, when checked, might still be open after all: even, sometimes, the sense of the murmur of a voice: something, someone, about the place. Smells, too, of apples or cigarette smoke—or, once, for a moment, petrol—all these when the house was otherwise empty: and, always, always, the smell of the sea. That Mediterranean smell as we came to think of it, the smell of his writing. By this stage the ecstasy and the agony were past and the rest of it was just work, the usual toil and pain. Raymond was himself again, become more nearly a human being once more or as much so as he might ever be: a little buffled, as he used to say—another of his nonce words—but busy, sometimes tormented in the old way, sometimes less so, and always very much preoccupied, pushing his work along, worrying at it, worrying it along.

  What was this work, though, what was he writing about this time? Mind your fucking business, he told me when I tried to find out. You’ll know in due course. Just wait your patience, he said to me another time, when I tried to ask the question circuitously. Like everyone else. And then: how’s the cataloguing going?

  That was how he kept me away from where I most wanted to be—where I yearned to be again, now he’d so utterly cut me from it. He always answered questions about art with answers about life: my life, that is, my new life as his trainee personal assistant (the term we settled on in due course). He always reminded me, in other words, of what I’d given up and of what I’d turned into. Where’ve you got to? I’d asked him, hopefully, idling at his door: Out of ink, he’d say, briskly, sometimes, holding up an empty inkbottle. That’s where I’ve got to. Off you go—Stephens Radiant Blue, go on, go on, you know where to get it.

  Then: ta, nothing more, whenever I scurried back from the store in the laundry with a fresh bottle for him, as eager to please as Daisy the dog. I’d stand in the doorway of the garden room, the pliers still in my hand with which I always tweaked off each new cap for him, ink on my fingers from filling the Parker 51, and hoping—hoping—that he might let something slip about what it was he was writing at the moment. He’d look up: that’s all, he’d say, knowing full well, I’m sure, what it was I’d been waiting for. Oh, love locked out, locked out!

  Thus it was that Nineteen Forty-Eight, when it appeared, was as much a surprise to me as it was to anyone else. A satire of the Orwell novel, of all things!—set somewhat closer to home, of course, in the actual Oceania from which his protagonists—a couple of youngsters not much older than the children of the Miss Furie novel—come and go via a dilapidated suburban kitchen remarkably like the one we show visitors to the Residence: a portal to the past, to the year of the title, a period he became increasingly obsessed with as he went on. It all began then, I remember him saying to me. That’s when we started to fuck it all up. As his readers will know, it doesn’t become all that much clearer in the novel.

  He spent more and more time in the Dodge when he was writing it, I remember, driving around or just sitting there—and, it must be said, he enjoyed the same prepositional relationship to Marjorie, too, at the time: she who, by this stage, had long been his lover well and truly. By this time she was more or less living at the house—much tut-tutting from Mesdames Round and During and from Mrs Butt as well. Marjorie had to be there, of course, if for no better reason than that Raymond’s favourite creation was back in this new novel, adding a further dimension to Orwell’s famous line do it to Julia. It was that kind of novel.

  So that was what all the fuss was about, this time around: I mean the sense of possession about the house that I’ve mentioned, the subtle paranoia with which the Master allowed his dwelling to be gripped. I have to confess to a slight disappointment at the end of the process—the novel was pleasant enough to read but scarcely warranted the upheaval its genesis seemed to cause, in my mind at any rate. Nice to see you setting your work here and not there, one of his sixtyish Br
endas said at the launch, no doubt fortified by the free wine. But, Madam, everything I write is set here, he replied. Your problem is, you’ve only just fucking noticed.

  Then, though, he started to write Kerr. It took a while to gestate and, painfully and a few years later, to emerge, by which time I was well into my third decade and on my way to setting up what came to be known as the Raymond Thomas Lawrence Memorial Trust. In his ear all the time, was Marjorie’s description of my behaviour in those days. Why can’t you leave him alone, can’t you see he’s pregnant again? And indeed I hadn’t: which goes to show, alas, just how far I’d drifted from the world of words at that stage, and how firmly Mammon now held me in his grip.

  I’m thinking of the future, I told her. I’m setting up a trust, I’m thinking of his legacy.

  As soon as she spoke, though, it started to come back to me again, all of it: that forest sound, the smell of it, and of the sea beyond. I began to think once more about writing, I began to think again about him. What was going on? Something big, something important this time: the jab at Orwell had been just a prelude, it seemed, a passing moment before he turned to what—evidently—he’d been meaning to write all his life. Of this, when I began to look about me again, I became more and more certain—at last, this was it. For one thing, there was his sudden remoteness, the way he seemed to have been swallowed up into himself. There was that, and then there was the return of fear in my life—

  I remember a moment, not long after Marjorie told me he was expecting again, when I suddenly realised he was gazing at me, across a room that had others in it, that he’d been staring at me and staring at me for some time while the others talked: and I looked back at him at that moment and my bowels turned to water. Lord, dear Lord, some part of me had been caught—I was in what he was writing—

  I knew what was happening. I was a condemned man.

  It was a curious time, I remember, in these heady days and weeks when chaos came again. There was a brouhaha involving Raymond and Marjorie in that period as well: she who, not long after our conversation above, buggered off at last, as she put it, having had a gutsful of playing musical beds with bloody Phyllis Button. As well as Marjorie and Phyllis in their customary push-and-pull there were other women coming and going about the place at this time as Raymond practised his droit de seigneur among the wives of the local literati—a grace note of any new project of his, along with those moments when I’d catch him poring over what looked to be one of Eric Butt’s Auto Trader magazines but which I knew was Mein Kampf, concealed behind it and always a sign that the humour was upon him and anything could be about to happen.

  So Marjorie left for the UK at this time to have another taste of Europe and a life unmediated by Raymond Thomas Lawrence. Could feel him here, she wrote on a postcard of Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein: tomorrow, Dachau. Robert was gone from us as well, to a six-month writing residency at a provincial polytechnical college in the far north, something that had astonished us all when it was announced. As for Julian, at this stage he’d come into our lives as I’ve mentioned but was yet to find his full role amongst the followers of the Master. In fact I met him at the other end of one of those filing cabinets full of the old man’s papers we were lugging off to the research library it turned out he worked at: would you like to meet my uncle? he remembers me asking him.

  In that time, in other words, that very uncle and I were much alone in the house together. Each late afternoon the gardening ladies and the household staff would leave the two of us to our extraordinary nights together at No. 23, as my uncle wrote and wrote and I found myelf more and more engulfed by the new world he was creating.

  It had happened before, as I’ve indicated, but not quite like this. That salty, Mediterranean smell, for a start, washing over me when I woke in the night. The first time it happened I sat up in my bed, propped on my elbows, and drew the smell of it into myself. I opened the bedroom window: but, no, it didn’t come from outside. It was somewhere inside the house. I drew it in, and when I did it disappeared as if it had become part of me. On other nights the smell came back, though: I’d breathe it in again and think of the vast cedar forests in Frighten Me and Flatland. I was in them once more, and through to their far side, and down to the sea.

  Sometimes I heard him, too. The first was when he was at the desk in his bedroom, which he used now and then: voices, behind its door, and, when I crept out into the little hallway, a soft light from under it. Phyllis Button, I thought, in there for the usual show-and-tell—but no, neither the familiar bassoon of her voice nor the timpani of her smoker’s cough. This was something smaller, lighter, less: a flute, perhaps. The old man was trying out voices, that was it, he was speaking in character like an actor—he used to do that, sometimes, when he didn’t have a human around to suck into his vortex. A child’s voice. That’s what it sounded like, I remember. A child.

  A night or two more spent hovering outside his door like this, before another thought came up, abruptly, unpleasantly, unasked for. He actually had someone in there with him, another Julia.

  Another muse, another favourite.

  Marjorie was gone, I’d been dismissed from him twice over—we’d been too old anyway, the pair of us, and we’d been replaced, that was the truth or part of it. Was it not? He’d got someone else—what was he doing to her in there? Who was she? I found myself remembering the worst of it, the knife at the throat, the finger in the spine: and then, overwhelmingly, from a completely different direction, jealousy, that moment from all those years ago coming back, when he’d introduced me to the adolescent Marjorie and the feast of her bronze sausage curls, the spritz of her freckles, her toothy, sad grin.

  It overwhelmed me, the nostalgia for all that was lost, to him, to her, to me. Until relatively recently I’d still been his, after all: Marjorie, too, till the moment she boarded the plane and left the country—he’d drunk himself senseless that night, I remember that. And now—inevitably, I knew that—now, it seemed he had someone else. Another darling—

  Except that, apparently, he didn’t. A new woman? Val asked when I brought the possibility up with her, out in the garden. I used woman and not girl for obvious reasons, and edged into the topic cautiously, from something quite different. Mr Lawrence? she asked. I don’t think so. Nora Butt would’ve told me, she never misses anything like that. Or Dot, she’s in the house almost every day. Then she looked across at me. Isn’t he a bit old for that sort of thing now? she asked.

  No new woman, then, and, presumably, no new girl-Julia, either—I asked Dot myself and even, awkwardly, Mrs Butt, and they knew nothing of it, either of them, not a thing at all. Surely he’s too busy writing to bother with company, Dot told me. I can’t keep up with what he’s producing, he’s on a tear. That phrase surprised me, especially from her, but it gave me a sense of how he was at the time. I keep hearing things, I said. Around the house. Oh, but it’s always been like that when he’s writing, she said. The place gets haunted!

  Yes, the plot seemed to be unfolding, all right: except that the more he wrote the more hidden he seemed to become, and the more hidden he became the more I found myself shirking my supposed duties and listening outside doors and into phone conversations, questioning Val and Dot again and even (sometimes) Edna Butt, and loitering past windows in order to peer into them: at nothing, always, but increasingly with the sense of being on the very edge of a discovery of the utmost importance. He did this to people, he turned people into stalkers.

  I can’t remember at what stage of all this I decided who this new presence might be, but I do remember that at some point I read Flatland once again, and once again was jolted hard by that extraordinary experience, at the shock of that brutal ending and the surprise of finding that reading it yet again hadn’t diminished its impact. Again, the wonder at what kind of a man could write that.

  It was soon after this—I know this is true—it was soon after this that I woke from a dream about the boy, the youth in that novel. I was being beaten w
ith the leather stick, on the back and on the neck, but the noise came from somewhere else. I was awake and it was coming from another part of the house. I was awake, and it was gone. I sat there in the bed, twelve years old again, thirteen, my legs tucked up under me, pyjamas clinging to sweat, heart thudding in ears and neck. I listened to myself slowly thumping my way back down to something more nearly normal, and that was the only sound I could hear as I sat there, that bump-bump-bump in my chest and in my ears. The crying had gone. Had it been there at all? Who was it? What was happening?

  Kerr, the novel that did most to edge him towards the prize, that was the general consensus. He’d never had universal admiration before, but this time, and at last, he got it. Even he was pleased, and how could he not be? Perfect, a couple of reviewers said, and as near to perfection as it gets, said another. A grand work, said someone else, and A great and true novel, somebody after that—God, true! Raymond gasped, when I told him this. Another reviewer was of the opinion that the act of reviewing diminishes this work. It is beyond criticism. This was the time the muttering about the Nobel began in earnest. Definitely a contender, it was said, definitely a contender.

  More euphoria, too, once Kerr arrived in the United States—to our astonishment since, as I’ve said, it writes that entire country out of history but for its debris, some of which goes into the making of Kerr’s raft. The latter business was all based on his own experience, he told us, when he was trying to get away from Algeria after the ceasefire and before the election, and hit on the mad conceit of escaping north alone and by sea. There was all this Yank garbage still bobbing around after the war, he told me. I used 75-gallon drop-tanks from Mustang fighters, I floated the raft on those.

  D-model aircraft of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, Julian told me, used late in the Mediterranean theatre: the parachute Raymond turned into a sail would’ve come from a similar source, apparently, and the food he survived on throughout his journey was sure to have been U.S. war surplus, all of it—Hershey bars, Spam, canned corned beef, tins of Nescafé which he lost overboard almost as soon as he set out. There was a pocket can-opener he picked up in a bazaar in Algiers before he left and which looked like a spoon: used in the middle of the ocean, Raymond told me, to dig out a purulent tooth.