Darke

by Rick Gekoski

  In those early years we negotiated a truce, creating what we called the demilitarised zone: parts of the flat – the kitchen, sitting room and (particularly) loo were designated a no-woman’s land of tidiness and right order, patrolled by me – others (her study and latterly her bedroom) could be as promiscuously messy as she wished. I winced when I went into her spaces, which I did as infrequently as possible.

  The fiction was that we had agreed on this mode of peaceful coexistence, but actually I imposed it on Suzy gently, subtly and by degrees. In a marriage someone has to set the boundaries and – this sounds worse than it actually was – the rules. Suzy was largely unaware of it, but that is what I did, and we were happier for it. She never got any neater, but confined herself to barracks. She even became a tolerable cook, though rather inclined to muck about with perfectly good recipes, in the interest of some creative personal input. She had recurrent love affairs with various spices and sauces – galangal, harissa, pesto, garam masala, the list went on and on – which she dispensed with a profligate and undiscriminating generosity. She enjoyed her experiments with flavour more than I did. Worse was her capacity, which had to be experienced to be credited, to use every single pot, pan and utensil in the kitchen in the preparation of even the simplest of meals.

  But while I allowed, indeed encouraged, her to learn to cook, she was under no conditions allowed to do the washing up. At first I thought her incapacity to tell a clean dish or utensil from a dirty one was purposive – if you’re so fuckin’ fussy, why don’t you do it yourself? – but she was quite happy to eat off her self-washed filthy plates, so I accepted that she either didn’t notice or didn’t care, and insisted on doing the washing up myself. She was delighted to accede to yet another example of my fussy ways.

  Nor was she allowed to put things away, or the items would never be found again. I took firm control of all our necessary papers, and filed them accordingly. In the kitchen I had an equally admirable system: clear, consistent and reliable, so long as Suzy never put anything, anything, away. I did the shopping, put the food and goods in the right places, cleared up after meals, checked that everything was in its right place. She didn’t mind, indeed hardly noticed, because she never learned – even after repeated instruction – where things were. She didn’t care.

  She saved her attention for ‘things that matter’, and her writing had nothing slapdash about it. Suzy wrote as if she were sometimes a painter, at others a meteorologist. Reading a draft of her work, I tended to skip these passages. If I want clouds and trees, I can go for a bloody walk. I want novels bright with observed life, with ideas and narrative drive, compelling characters, both passionate and ironic. And such a fiction has no need of thunderstorms, or noses with sinuous varicosities, or gradations of cerise. None of the business that English novelists are addicted to. Get to the human content: all this compulsion to describe things merely indicates a lack of faith in the form, makes it some sort of activity that transforms things unto words, in order to make you see an imperfect version of the thing in itself. Boring.

  Her new novel also had a fault – if one counted it as such, perhaps it was merely a characteristic? – that drove me crazy. Suzy’s characters, when they were in a state of heightened feeling, angry, argumentative, or emotionally moved, were inclined to speak in paragraphs. In one instance, a whole page was given up to some speech or other, while the character’s interlocutor presumably had a short nap.

  ‘He does go on, doesn’t he?’ I said.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘It isn’t accurate. People don’t talk like that. Listen to them anywhere. They interrupt each other, make short declarative statements, assert this, react to that. They don’t speechify.’ This was perhaps stronger than I intended. Or perhaps, after exercising a wide-ranging critical restraint with the various drafts of the novel, I was getting frustrated. Or hostile, perhaps. Suzy reacted as if I were.

  ‘It’s not a documentary, for fuck’s sake! It’s literature. And I’m not Harold bloody Pinter. It doesn’t have to be terse. It can be expansive. Characters in a novel – exactly because they are not real people – are more articulate, more able to organise and to adumbrate their thoughts. Smarter, clearer, than real people. That is part of why we like characters in a novel more than we like people on the Clapham omnibus.’

  ‘If you are not careful,’ I said, carefully, ‘you will end up writing like fucking Philip Roth.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Paragraphs, nah, not just. I read a bit of one the other week – I have no idea why I keep trying – that had characters talking pages’ worth. First one, then the other. They all sounded just like Philip Roth. Big surprise! It was absurd.’

  ‘Which novel are you talking about?’

  ‘I can never remember, hard to tell them apart. Something about the Sabbath? I couldn’t finish it, horrible protagonist, I couldn’t bear him.’

  She looked shocked. ‘Mickey Sabbath? I adore him, he’s so exciting.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean? Exciting? You mean like titillating? You fancy him?’

  ‘Don’t be provocative. He’s better than fanciable, he’s well written.’

  ‘Rubbish! And Roth’ll never win the Nobel. Can you imagine a bunch of po-faced Swedes wading through all that sex and verbiage? Too many Jews, too much talk – ’

  ‘Pinter is one of them!’

  ‘That’s why he doesn’t write about Jews. If he did, he couldn’t be terse. Only Gentiles are Pinteresque.’

  In spite of all her attentiveness, NOB (as Suzy called it, pleased by both the class and sexual connotations) was essentially an easy novel, so she’d made it as difficult as she could, both for herself and for her reader. The prose was over-managed, the plot seemed to suggest that she was trying to find the hardest way to tell what was essentially a simple story: a girl goes up to Oxford from the shires, has the usual intellectual and social rites de passage, and emerges neither stronger nor wiser, though feeling herself to be both. A coming-of-age book, spirited, hopeful, naive.

  I read each revision with an increasing sense that I ought to say as little as possible by way of criticism. Suzy could tolerate a discussion of a stylistic point, or one of plot development, was open to questioning about the clarity of her observations – all this and more, but I was silently clear that this was not a good novel. Had I foolishly said so, it would have confirmed what she knew and she wouldn’t have thanked me for it.

  NOB sold better than The Gristmill, though it was widely regarded as something of a disappointment. But Suzy’s name was already out there, and a considerable number of readers – the book sold over 5,000 copies in hardback, which was respectable for an up-and-coming young novelist in those days – had anticipated something more achieved than her first novel. They were disappointed, but they didn’t much mind because they got a lot of sex, protracted and raunchy. At the time, English women did not write explicitly about sex, and the fact that Suzy was both young and pretty – the author photo on the rear cover was vamped up, at the publisher’s insistence – guaranteed that the book would be widely noticed. Suzy did interviews for the Sunday supplements, appeared on Radio 4 and at the Hay Festival, which she adored and where she got a good audience, with a great many men in it.

  Sir Henry never mentioned the novel to Suzy: this one was worse and more shaming than her previous bald parody of bald him. I imagine he read it in the privacy of his study. He would have found it titillating, and managed, by a sleight of whatever passed for his imagination, to abstract the blow jobs and quickie shags from their incestuous context, and regarded the heroine simply as a damn sexy girl, of indeterminate provenance.

  I was more deeply implicated in the goings on – though how specifically it was impossible to say, even after repeated study of the relevant men, and passages. I knew Suzy had had previous lovers, though details had never been forthcoming, thank God, but here they were. The men were no doubt composite figures, but in the various goings and comings I cou
ld recognise significant moments in our own sexual history. I was furious.

  ‘You promised,’ I shouted, ‘you said I would not be in it!’

  ‘I have no idea what you are talking about. You’re not in it. I’m not either. The characters are all made up: they are words on a page. It’s a fucking work of fucking fiction!’

  ‘But people are tittering when they see me . . .’

  ‘You’re just jealous of my old boyfriends. How pathetic!’

  ‘I thought they were just words on a page! All of a sudden they have dicks? How typographically pornographic of them. And I met Mandy in the Covered Market yesterday, and she positively blushed and simpered when she saw me. I could swear she was checking me out . . .’

  ‘Your problem. Get over it.’

  I did, it didn’t matter, none of it. I had my PhD to finish, having abandoned Oxford and begun commuting to Cambridge, where I had rooms in Clare, though I rarely used them, to apprentice myself to an invigoratingly fanatical acolyte of Dr Leavis’s.

  For Suzy it was time to write a big book, a worthy enactment of the high seriousness that she brought to her craft, as she modestly called it. It is one thing to be promising at twenty-four: at thirty it is a sign of arrested development, or no development at all.

  D.H. Lawrence had reassured her that NOB would be an insignificant step in her progress as a writer. After all, hadn’t he followed up The White Peacock with the (even worse) The Trespasser? Both sunk in autobiography, both with as much sex as you could get away with in 1911 and 1912. And then? Sons and Lovers! The third novel, the one that testifies to whether a writer really has anything in him (or her) other than adolescent reconfigurations of adolescence. Time to cross that pons asinorum.

  It is rarely useful to have studied Latin. I’d spent too many of my childish years conjugating away, pleased at my capacity to master the material and please my masters, but without the slightest sense that this dead language might ever come alive. When it occasionally did, I was delighted. Pons asinorum is an ass’s or, perhaps better, donkey’s bridge. When I added this simple bit of translation to my rudimentary knowledge of Classics and mathematics, I remembered that the term was applied to Euclid’s fifth proposition in Book I of his Elements of Geometry: ‘the angles opposite the equal sides of an isosceles triangle are equal’. Since this is the first of Euclid’s propositions to require an effort of understanding, it became known as the bridge to the others.

  But I was surprised to find, after a little judicious research, that there was another medieval term to describe the theorem: Elefuga, a sort of portmanteau word combining the Greek for ‘misery’ with the Latin for ‘flight’. I did not tell Suzy about this bit of arcana, for she was discovering its truth for herself. Every morning she would retreat to the study, coffee in hand, sit at her desk, pen and notebook to the side – and sit, and sit. Sometimes she cried as well, though she was careful to do so quietly and to remove the traces.

  ‘Misery’ is both too strong a term to describe this state of mind, and too weak. Starving people, victims of disasters, the bereft, the dying, the grief-stricken, are miserable. Suzy knew this, and was suitably ashamed at the intensity of her unhappiness. She was blocked, as she called it, a state that admitted amelioration in a way that genuine wretchedness does not. All she had to do, she admitted, was to write the fucking book.

  As she failed to do so, her desperation was real, and intense, and protracted, and seemed to admit of no cure. Someone can feed a starving person, or give succour to the dying. But for Suzy, sunk in gloom, there was no comfort. Nobody else could solve her problem.

  But if misery was unabating, there was always flight. After six months, she abandoned her scratchy and inadequate attempts at a first draft. The hell with it, she wasn’t good or tough or confident enough, and the idea of writing a novel set in India (!) was proving both intractable and uncongenial. She busied herself with other and lesser projects, helped me with my research, got a job in a second-hand bookshop, and resolved never to write another word of fiction, a resolution that merely confirmed her inability to do so, as if a paraplegic had resolved to give up mountaineering.

  But a cripple may dream of mountains and yearn for the freedom of the snowy wastes, to climb, to breathe thin air, to endure. And Suzy, in her bookshop for those next couple of years – she liked the shelving of books, the occasional treasure that they purchased, the enthusiasm of their customers, the search for rare or merely out-of-print books – even there she was unhappy, and dreamt of the dangerous slopes of her abandoned literary ambitions. She wasn’t aiming high enough. She wasn’t aiming at all. She was avoiding.

  Her depression did not deepen, neither did it go away. She got through the days, pretended to me and to herself that she was satisfied with her choices, and privately mourned the self that she could not become: the writer, the proper writer.

  Various friends recommended psychotherapy, and I, though I knew nothing of it, would have supported any action that might lessen her gloom. But how does one find such a person, the right one? There are institutes, and lists of accredited therapists. Friends suggest the well-regarded Mr X or the ever-so-insightful Mrs Y. But it is a protracted and intimate and costly process, and you cannot do much in the way of product testing.

  At the supermarket you can pick up the grapefruits, feel them, look them over, smell them, pick the best of the bunch. You exercise more discrimination in that choice than you do in choosing therapists, who rather object if you sniff them. Suzy had only two requirements. She would prefer to work with a woman (‘they are less untrustworthy’) and she would under no conditions consult a Freudian: ‘if I feel the need of a penis,’ she maintained firmly, ‘I want it inside me, not outside.’

  She sampled a couple of sessions with one or two candidates, but left their rooms feeling demoralised and unconvinced. And then she was introduced to Dr Julia Frommer, who had trained with Alice Miller. After a couple of exploratory sessions, in which Suzy probed and fingered as much as was seemly, the two agreed to work together and see how things progressed.

  She loved the idea of such a project, came home after her sessions and made a transcript of what had been said, adding her own comments and interpretations. She kept these in the top drawer of her desk, rather hoping, I suspected, that I might have a peek.

  I did. Or rather, I didn’t. Perhaps it is the same thing? I’m now required to write in detail – to remember? – scenes at which I wasn’t present. I can pretend that I had a genuine source in her desk drawer – novelists are required to do this all the time – and perhaps I did. I can’t honestly remember. The only way for me honestly to remember is to make it up, and in so doing make it true.

  The satisfaction of writing in this journal is that I compose myself in it. I am unworried by recounting, with apparent exactitude, events, feelings, sentences even, that happened many decades ago. How do I know that these renderings are accurate? They’re not.

  Or they are. Most of what happened in the long distant past is irretrievably lost, which is why it feels much more creative and agreeable – and real – to write about it. In the present you are mired in clarity, however mitigated; the past is so misty that you can be true not to what happened – who knows? – but what might have happened, should have. Aristotle says something similar, only not so crisply.

  If I were to show Suzy this account of her sessions, she wouldn’t be so prolix as to disagree. I hope she’d have been proud of me, of the spirit of what I’d done. That, after all, is partly why I am writing. For her.

  The initial signs were promising. Suzy had no desire to rabbit on about how unhappy she was, nor did Dr Frommer care to know the details. It became their joint goal to remember and to reanimate the forgotten and repressed child that Suzy had been, who was certain – according to this mode of thought – to have been unhappy, unloved and lacking a voice of her own. Unhappy children make unhappy adults. Happy ones, happy ones. It was a simple enough formula: all you had to do was to reco
ver the ‘inner child’, the little Suzy who had been so thoroughly repressed both then and now, and make her feel validated and freshly alive.

  ‘It’s like the Everly Brothers, isn’t it?’ she said, from the comfy depths of her armchair.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Was it possible that Dr Frommer had never heard of Phil and Don? And if so, what the hell was she doing with such a stodgy therapist, sunk in Bach and Thomas Mann, no fun at all? And – this was a bad sign – Dr F had no taste for puns, a thickening of the ear, no relish for wordplay. She had not responded when Suzy had described her second Indian governess as ‘a breath of fresh Ayah’. She probably didn’t get it. Suzy felt a new wave of gloom.

  ‘The Everly Brothers! “Wake Up Little Susie”!’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  Ever the good student, and anxious to please, Suzy worked at her new project assiduously, discussed every moment of it with me (though enjoined not to by Dr F). She dreamt copiously, fantasised and free associated, indulged herself in acts of active imagination, and otherwise began, bit by bit, to foreground that impoverished and angry little girl whom she had so long shunted into the hinterland of her unconscious, and who – Dr Frommer maintained – had been struggling to be heard ever since. Unregarded, little Suzy felt stifled and angry and unloved. Allowed to re-emerge, listened to and psychically cuddled – all that unhappiness was not her fault after all, why should she cling onto it any more? – the adult Suzy would begin to feel the benefits.

  The procedure was not, Dr Frommer insisted, in any way analogous to Freudian purgation: little Suzy was neither a malignancy to be removed, nor a pustule to be squeezed. Perhaps, Dr Frommer suggested, it was something like having a baby? ‘It is, after all, bringing a child into the world. And she is your child!’