Fictional Lives

by Hugh Fleetwood

  In fact the only real dilemma he had to face was whether to marry, or, more particularly, whether to have children. A part of him held that he should—that, surely, was in the natural scheme of things—but another part, and ultimately the stronger part—told him that believing as he did that his work was the great thing that bound him to the earth, he should reserve himself entirely for that work, since only by doing so could he, personally, be happy. And being happy meant, for him, being good; and being good, being true to the earth; to life.

  He contented himself therefore—possibly because he too, in a corner of his brain, was afraid of death, and the separateness that the knowledge of death caused men to feel—by having the occasional affair, generally with brown-toned, brainy women who worked in publishing companies, or who taught—and by telling himself that should he ever decide to retire he could, if it weren’t too late, always revise his opinions, and change his mind. After all, there was no reason why he shouldn’t marry at fifty, or sixty; nor, if he married a younger woman, have children. And he was sure that if he did decide to he would find someone to accept him. Because it wasn’t as if he were physically repulsive, or lived as a hermit. On the contrary, what with lunches, and dinners, and the occasional party, with weekends spent in the country, and trips abroad twice a year, he led what many would have considered quite a social life; and therefore came into contact with a great many people. (He did this principally to gather material for his books, to harvest the grain to make the bread he hoped would nourish the world. Nevertheless it did keep him in practice, as far as social relations were concerned.)

  Not that he seriously thought, in those first twenty years of his career, that he ever would give up writing. And when, at the age of forty-six, he started to consider the possibility, it was already too late. For the retiral he contemplated was definitive.

  He had had, as all men did, periods of dejection throughout his life; periods when it seemed that everything he did was useless, that he wouldn’t, however well he worked, however clearly his note rang out, be able to change a thing in this sad universe. (He didn’t expect to change the course of history; but he did hope that his words might touch one or two people; one or two who would become three or four, then three or four who would become—well, a number.) But generally these moods didn’t last very long, and he was able to dismiss them—and their attendant feelings of boredom, and frustration—by seeing them for what they were: i.e. attacks of egoism, attacks of the illusion that he was set apart from, set above the natural order of things.

  But when he was in his mid-forties, imperceptibly at first, and then overwhelmingly, a sense of hopelessness settled over him that he couldn’t shake off, despite all his efforts to view it as mere egoism; as a mere longing, on the part of the youngest son, not only to be included in the family, but to dominate it.

  It had, this awful sense, just one cause. His books were not successful. That is to say, though they sold in quantities sufficient to make their publication commercially viable, and though they were nearly all well received by critics, they did not, as their author not only wished them to be, but believed they should, become widely read, indeed popular; and worse, all, without exception as far as he could tell, were read, whether by critics or such public as they had, only as stories, without any understanding or perception of what those stories signified. (Though how this was possible he wasn’t sure; for it seemed to him that unless the portraits he painted were viewed in the particular light he shone upon them they must be invisible; or anyway formless, colourless, and ugly.) Which led him first to the conclusion that if there were anyone at all in the world who did not believe in absolute truths he or she was not among those who bought books, and then—as his hopelessness really gripped him—to the conclusion that the fool in every man dominated the wiseman, that the fools of the world dominated the wisemen, and that there was no chance of changing this situation, ever.

  He tried to reason with himself; tried to tell himself that the man, whether author or not, who felt himself misunderstood was the most common of all mortals, and that, once again, his dejection was just a manifestation of his egoism, and fear. But he couldn’t convince himself. First because the fact that he shared his complaint with other men didn’t make it any less of a complaint; and second because it wasn’t a recognition of himself that he desired, but a recognition of his denial of himself. It was his own lack of egoism, his warnings against egoism, and his profound belief that only through a renunciation of the greedy frightened self could the world be helped, that he wished to be known.

  Having failed on this score, he then tried to combat his gloom by telling himself that it was the nature of his books that prevented them becoming popular. Those books that were, inevitably, about writers (whether actual ‘writers’, or fishermen, farmers, factory hands), who struggled with the materials available to them, and, in the absence of any set of rules telling them what to do, tried to create good stories of their lives. Perhaps they were too didactic, he told himself. Perhaps they were too elusive, and gave the sense of having been written in a hall of mirrors, so that it was impossible to tell what was real, and what was reflection. (What was fact, and what was fiction.) Or perhaps he had strung himself too tightly, so that the music that emerged from him was harsh, ugly, and difficult to listen to. Maybe if he relaxed a little a sweeter sound would emerge….

  There again, he failed. For he had always taken care not to be didactic—he had never imposed ‘a meaning’ upon his books; all that was implied, suggested or proclaimed by them was inherent in the story—just as he had always taken care not to be gratuitously elusive, or ambiguous. And as for stringing himself too tightly—he refuted that charge entirely. If anything, in his determination to deny himself, he hadn’t at times strung himself tight enough; so that his music had moments of sloppiness. But it was never harsh or difficult. He had a sufficiently good ear to be sure of that.

  No, he decided finally, the real reason for his lack of success was the one his editor had given him when, unable to contain himself any longer, he had told her of his feelings.

  ‘Your books, Walter,’ the woman had said, ‘are very good. And they could be successful. Very successful, in a limited way. But if you aren’t going to write the big, popular best-seller—which you’re clearly not, and clearly don’t want to—you must fix your name in the public’s eye. You must give the world a person, an image, to hang on to. You must, to put it crudely, do some publicity.’

  Which was the last straw; and the proof, if any were needed, that fools held sway in the land. Because all his life Walter had abhorred publicity; had thought fame, or the desire thereof, one of the most dangerous of all illusions; and had believed that the seeking of refuge in a public image was one of the clearest illustrations of the way that men sought death in life. He wanted his books to be known; not that atom in the universe that was called, for the sake of convenience, Walter Drake. He had always refused to give even the shortest interview; to talk to a representative of even the most obscure magazine. To do so would be unforgivably foolish.

  At the age of forty-eight, therefore, he decided to do two things. One was to write, with as much honesty as possible, an autobiography; in the bitter hope, or belief, that a world that had rejected his quick, living body—his novels—would accept a hard dead shell, and take it to be the body; and the still more bitter hope that by betraying his principles, and writing a book that did not deny the self—a necessarily sour thin book that would be a catalogue of disappointment, egoism and greed—he would demonstrate for all time the validity of those principles.

  The other thing he decided to do—the only thing he could do having so succumbed to his bitterness—was kill himself.

  *

  This then was Walter Drake’s version of himself. (Other people would have had different versions. One woman he knew had called him ‘the worn-out representative of a worn-out class’. Another had called him—having commented on his grey hair, his grey skin, his
grey voice, and the grey suits he always wore, ‘the most impeccably dull man in London’. And yet another, after he had had a brief relationship with her, had said that his total dedication to his work was nothing but the dedication of a man who is frightened to live—whatever that meant.) And, he thought, as he put down the manuscript, looked at the falling darkness outside, and realized the only remaining task to be done was wrap the thing up and take it to the post-office, it was indeed a sour thin version. Not only sour and thin but, even on its own terms, false. For though he had determined to be honest, there was one fact he had left out of the story. (The story, he repeated to himself, that was, precisely because of the egoism that inspired it, so much less true than his novels.) He had left it out because he wasn’t certain just how far it constituted a fact, and because it didn’t fit in with the general tone of wretchedness.

  This omitted fact, or whatever, of his life, this single, troublingly positive chord in the bleak music of his existence, was a skinny, red-haired Austrian Jewish woman of indeterminate age, whose name was Anna Stein. Or better, since Walter had never called her Anna, plain—Mrs Stein.

  He thought of her as he walked through the damp, leaf-strewn streets to the post-office….

  Feeling, once his career was underway, that he did now have a part in society, knowing that he needed peace and quiet, and realizing that he must have a fairly regular contact with humanity, he decided that he should live in a town, rather than in the country; and decided, when he saw the house in West London, with its surrounding, overgrown garden, that such a place would be ideal.

  Which, having been bought and moved into, it turned out to be—but for one small drawback. It was just too big for him to take care of by himself; or for him to take care of without having household chores waste too many of his working hours. He made, therefore, what he couldn’t help thinking of as a further compromise; and put an advertisement in the local newsagent’s for a cleaning woman.

  Mrs Stein was the second person who answered the advertisement, and as soon as he met her Walter knew that he had found what—who—he was looking for. First because with her bright dyed hair, her skeletal frame, her accent, and her general air of oddness, the woman fitted in with the house; which, with its steeply sloping roof, its low overhanging eaves, its little stained-glass windows, and its four rather precarious floors, was also somewhat odd; and second because he liked the way she told him that if she took the job she couldn’t keep regular hours. She would work five days a week, and would stay for as many hours per day as necessary; but she wouldn’t (she didn’t say why) specify what those hours would be; nor even what those days would be.

  She started the following week—on Walter’s thirty-fourth birthday—and within a month had convinced the novelist that—as with his career—he had made the right choice. Mrs Stein cleaned for him, she did his laundry, she cooked—depending on what time she came—the occasional meal for him, and she left him in peace. Left him in peace to such an extent that at times he felt obliged to interrupt his work and go to disturb her.

  Within a year he was telling himself he wouldn’t be able to live without her….

  It wasn’t only that she did everything for him—including paying his bills, going to the bank, doing his shopping, and dealing with most of his mail—and thus enabled him to concentrate exclusively on his work; she also gave him something he had never had before. Which was warmth.

  How she gave it to him he wasn’t sure; at the end of that first year she was no more communicative than she had been eleven months before. She called him always—with a note of accusal in her voice—Mr Drake. She only occasionally came to talk to him (though if she wanted something she would march straight into his study, without a thought that she might be halting the flow of his sacred prose, and without a word of apology), and she wasn’t always receptive when he wanted to talk to her. (She had the peculiarity of being both hard of hearing, and extremely sensitive to noise; so much so that at times, when he was speaking, she would stop him in mid-sentence, mutter ‘I can’t listen to you today, Mr Drake,’ and dismiss him from her presence.) Above all, she always rejected out of hand the idea that she should read one of his books. ‘I don’t need books, Mr Drake,’ she would say as she sewed, or cooked, or cleaned. ‘The world’s quite enough for me.’

  Yet in spite of all this—though he rather approved of her attitude to his work—give him warmth she did; and gave him, furthermore, the impression that while she didn’t want to read his books, while she never seemed curious about his family or private life (did she realize he didn’t have one?), and while, when she asked his opinion on something, she received it with an air of scepticism that bordered on contempt, she understood him better than the most perceptive reader of his work could ever have understood him.

  This impression was confirmed for him one summer afternoon, when Mrs Stein had been with him for eighteen months. He was sitting in his garden (which had become far more overgrown since he had bought the house, and was—and was to remain for another six years, until he felt obliged to have a gardener once a week—a virtual jungle), wondering whether to have a mug of tea, when the pale, flame-haired woman came out to find him; and told him that since the cost of living had gone up, and since—because she had checked his accounts?—she knew he could well afford it, she was giving herself a raise. ‘Of course,’ Walter said—not that he could have refused—and asked her if she would like some tea herself. He didn’t expect her to say yes, and was almost unreasonably delighted when she did. And when she was sitting in front of him, flapping, with her thin veined hand, at imaginary flies, and looking, for her, fairly benevolent, he decided that now was the time to find out a little more about her. About her age, for example—which he guessed was around forty-five, but could equally have been sixty—about her background, and about whether there was a Mr Stein. She was uncommunicative on the first issue—‘I’m old enough, Mr Drake,’ she muttered into her teacup—but on the second and third she was slightly more forthcoming. She had come to England just before the outbreak of the Second World War (as a child? As a teenager? As a young adult?) and had lost all her family—mother, father, two sisters and a brother—in ‘one of those places’. She had married (when? Where?) at the age of twenty-one; and her husband had also been an Austrian Jew. He had been a small-time importer exporter; but had invariably imported and exported goods that no one really wanted. She could have run his business much more successfully, but apart from the fact that the mismanagement of his affairs was necessary to him, she had had her own work. She had been a dance teacher. ‘I wanted to be a dancer myself when I was young,’ she said. ‘But things didn’t work out like that.’ She had taught for a number of years, until two things had happened, more or less simultaneously. One was that the only pupil she’d ever had who’d shown real promise (‘Her mother was Austrian, Mr Drake’) had, just as her career was about to take off, abandoned it for marriage; thereby disgusting her teacher so much that she had vowed to abandon her career; and the other was that Mr Stein had died; leaving his affairs in such a mess they had required two years of constant attention for anything to be salvaged from the ruins. When the estate had finally been settled the widow had supported herself by doing a number of jobs—which she’d always had to leave because of the noise—until she had decided that taking care of a single person’s house might be the right solution for her. Soon after she had decided she had seen the advertisement in the newsagent’s.

  ‘But do I,’ Walter asked, ‘pay you enough to live on, even with your raise?’

  No, of course not, Mrs Stein said. But she did one or two other things….

  ‘How old was Mr Stein when he died?’ Walter asked; hoping thereby to pin the widow down on the subject of her own age.

  ‘He was old enough,’ Mrs Stein said.

  ‘What,’ Walter asked, lowering his voice, and attempting with his manner to pour balm on a wound even as he poked it, ‘did Mr Stein die of?’

  ‘Hatred,�
� Mrs Stein said, as she broke a flower off an oleander bush, and sniffed at it.

  Walter thought that would be the woman’s only comment on her husband’s decease. But, surprisingly, it wasn’t. For having given the poisonous bloom another sniff, she looked at the grave youngish man she worked for, shook her head, and murmured, ‘He could never forgive the Fools.’

  That she had said Fools, and not mere fools, Walter was instantly certain; as he was certain that, though he had never spoken of his beliefs to Mrs Stein, what she meant by the word Fool was precisely what he meant by it.

  For a second, sitting in that overgrown garden, with the bees buzzing about him, and the planes flying overhead, Walter was tempted to stand up, go over to the angular woman in front of him, and embrace her. He found her, suddenly, beautiful. And even when that second had passed—for of course he couldn’t embrace her; not because he was afraid she would have rejected him (indeed he was strangely sure she wouldn’t have) but because to have done so might have changed the course of his life—he continued to gaze at her in gratitude and admiration, and continued to find her beautiful. Oh, he told himself, he had been right. She understood him. She understood him!

  Though he didn’t, for a while thereafter, stop having the occasional brief affair, Walter did, from that day on, make sure that Anna Stein never knew about it; and he did, too, whenever he embraced some other woman, feel that he was betraying his thin, harsh housekeeper….

  Why he believed that the woman wouldn’t have rejected his advances if he’d made them, was a question he was to ask himself as frequently in the following years as he had formerly wondered how she gave him warmth; and to ask himself with special urgency when, as happened every two or three months, he was tempted not only to put his arms around her, but to ask her to marry him. Yet though he was no more able to find an answer to this question than he had been to that other, and though he often tried to convince himself it was mere wishful thinking on his part, he could never rid himself of his belief. There was just something about the way Mrs Stein looked at him—scornfully, but humorously—something about the way she spoke to him—dismissively, but kindly—and above all something about the way she always called him Mr Drake—he had asked her to call him Walter several times, but she had invariably given a kind of shrug, as if he were asking the impossible of her—that made him feel that for all the difference, whatever it was, in their ages, for all the difference in their characters, and for all their lack of common interests, Mrs Stein both reciprocated his affection, and held him as essential to her life as he held her essential to his.