by Adam Thorpe
And when he grew too old even to attempt to depart, long after his children had left home, long after his wife had succumbed to the early senility that left her trembling in a chair in the front sitting room, he took to walking very slowly and steadily along the furthest perimeter of the grounds in an attempt to establish the precise configuration of his wheel. It had grown almost unwieldy in its extent. He could feel it strike Mongolia, St Petersburg, the wave-tops of the Atlantic ocean far beyond St Kilda – and even, on a clear day, the heights of Iceland with their furry gauze of smoke and mist.
Its extent worried him, at times, until he burnt his notes on the upper lawn in a conflagration that, he was sure, had been felt as a warm blush on the earth-facing flank of Pluto, the coldest and farthest of the planets, and thus the nearest to his heart.
IS THIS THE WAY YOU SAID?
The profoundest way of feeling something is to suffer it.
Gustave Flaubert
Jonathan had spent ten years writing this novel and had sent it blind to an editor called Eddie – Eddie Thwing (Marion thought this was a great joke and that if you put it in a novel it would be like calling your heroine Fiona Crumpet). Eddie was quite young and glamorous, apparently, but then anyone in the publishing business was, to Jonathan and Marion, quite young and glamorous. In the three months between sending the novel and the extremely favourable reply, something very bad happened to Eddie Thwing. Neither Jonathan nor Marion knew about this, but most people in the publishing world did. It happened on a holiday in Greece and it was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. Eddie lost his kid, Ed, in a tragic accident the details of which no one was quite certain about, except that it involved the sea. Ed was not yet three. Eddie’s wife, Holly, was recovering from the loss down in Sussex, where her parents owned an isolated and very old farmhouse. Eddie was back at work, looking a bit strange but holding his own. His reply to Jonathan Lewis, although brief, was every writer’s dream. It said the book – entitled New Demons – was gripping, dark and dangerous. It concluded with a desire to meet the author at his earliest possible convenience (although, being a glamorous editor, Eddie hadn’t put it like that; he’d written, ‘Let’s meet. Very soon. Give me a ring.’).
‘He sounds nice,’ said Marion.
‘Yup. Nice and relaxed. Not frightening.’
‘Well done, you.’
‘I had this feeling. Something was driving me on.’
‘It’s called faith.’
‘And you’ve put up with me.’
‘God knows how,’ said Marion. ‘I guess it’s being blinded by love.’
They were drinking champagne. This felt very extravagant. Jonathan was fifty-three and had been a peripatetic drama teacher in various knotty schools for the last thirty years, while Marion was a self-employed weaver. They had very little money and fewer illusions, but they did live in Brighton, moving there when property was still tatty and affordable back in the early 1980s. If their tiny house was a couple of floors higher, they’d see the sea.
The world had not gone the way they had expected it to go. Jonathan had started his novel on his forty-second birthday – February 27, 1994 – and finished it on his fifty-second. In the week he had started it, President Clinton won a $6 billion order from Saudi Arabia for passenger aircraft, the Vatican attacked Benetton for using a dead Croat’s bloodstained clothes on their publicity posters, and Pilkington Glass announced it was planning to float half its Australian business. Jonathan knew nothing about any of this, although it was of great importance on one level. This level was not Jonathan’s. Neither (back then) was it Eddie’s, who was just starting out as a junior editor in J. C. Laurence and Company – a small, academic publisher based in a house of many crooked floors in Soho. Almost immediately, it seemed, he had left Laurence for Jansen House, a new, aggressive group in South Kensington run somewhere at the back of it all by the Americans. Within two years he was in charge of reviving an obscure Teenage Fantasy imprint called Act uP, renamed Luxor and headed, under his control, for a more sophisticated literary readership. Fantasy with Brains was the house motto, and the strategy was wildly successful in a very competitive market.
SO WHO’S DUMBING DOWN?
[Photo of Proust in bed, reading the latest Luxor]
Fantasy with Brains.
When it was revealed that Prince Charles was a Luxor fan, taking a pile up to Balmoral, success was royally sealed. This much Jonathan Lewis knew, only because his friend Dave, an improvident bookseller with connections, had told him. Otherwise the world of education and the world of big-time publishing were not even in the same ball-park, if that was the right expression. It was certainly the one that occurred to him as he delivered the novel’s six hundred pages by hand to Jansen House. He was used to shabby, Victorian, prison-like buildings lined with glazed brown tiles to the neck-high window-level and smelling of wet jumpers and bleach and onion crisps. Here he was in a converted boiler-factory where clouded glass met clouded glass and the scent of proper coffee made the world beyond the hammered-steel curve of Reception feel both brainy and sexual. Posters of an erect wooden penis advertising a ‘steamily brilliant, spine-chillingly cool’ novel by one Sophie-Anne Witlock made him think of the graffiti he had found this morning on the classroom blackboard. He had never had his own classroom, of course. His fate was to teach drama in spaces cluttered with desks and chairs and cupboards, only rarely being able to use the gym (if gym there was), because gym was for serious stuff like Sports.
He had started out bouncing like a rubber ball with enthusiasm, believing – like all his TIE colleagues back in the seventies – that theatre-in-education would change the world. He was a kind of Jesuit in loose, Japanese-style togs. He went to mime school in Paris, took courses in London from visiting Kabuki masters and Polish disciples of Grotowski and even learnt how to whirl like a dervish. He was an itinerant performer on the alternative theatre scene for a time. As part of his social programme of deep change, he took teachers’ training at Goldsmiths at the age of thirty-one and then grew older and tireder pretty fast. It no longer seemed so exciting to use a chair as a car, or a rag as the billowing sea, or your body as the world. Certainly not to the kids – less and less his cup of tea, remedial rather than redeemable, most of them overweight and overtired, their ‘self-expression’ consisting of being on the job or out on the piss or just staring blankly, chewing. His classes were mostly confrontations steered artfully and wearyingly towards compromise. Then a fragile girl he had taught to whirl like a dervish ended up doing it obsessively at home and finished in a mental home for a year. (That was a bad time, when Marion had a miscarriage; then they moved to Brighton and Josie was born a year later.) None of what he did was going to make these kids into celebrities, that was the trouble: that was their main aim, to be rich and starry. That’s what ‘drama’ and ‘theatre’ meant to most of them, and faffing about with chairs and rags and masks cut out of magazines felt like a deviant activity. Now, standing in Jansen House on a damp October morning, with the dolled-up receptionists taking calls and greeting visitors as if they were in the headquarters of the World Bank or some five-star hotel, not a ship of literature, Jonathan felt a thrill in his belly that was, he realised, precisely what his pupils must feel when dreaming of being famous and on the box.
His package had disappeared behind the counter. Ten years of work, his best years (in many ways) sheathed in a Jiffy bag addressed to Eddie Thwing, Luxor Books (he wasn’t sure whether to put Edward Thwing, but Dave had said an emphatic no-no, stuff like that put them off before they’d even opened it and anyway it was unpronounceable). Now he couldn’t leave, like a dad delivering his child on the first ever day of school. The roof of the ex-boiler factory soared to blue-tinted skylights over the lobby area, although the rest had been divided into floors. There were some Star Trek easy chairs around a scatter of the day’s papers on a low teak table, and he loitered near them without sitting down, feeling shy and uncomfortable but reluctant to hit the s
treets again right away. The people who came in and out were taller and smarter than he was used to, like a species of confident bird, with the exception of a few short, disgruntled types – in shapeless jackets or parkas and with untidy hair – he assumed were authors. A fat man in a shiny black coat, looking like a walking aubergine, was royally greeted by a posse of suits. The author is king, thought Jonathan, but these ministers hold all the reins. Everyone looked as if they knew the place, had known it for years, and he imagined himself as one of them, his name in lights or whatever was the publishing equivalent.
New Demons, a dark and astonishing tale of time travel, possession and searing love, has burst like a neo-Gothic Harley Davidson into the sleepy hollow of literate Fantasy.
Or words to that effect. He was improvising off the posters. Everything was extraordinary, amazing, wonderful. He hadn’t heard of most of the authors, but the few bearing familiar names seemed to him like gods, merely because their words were printed and in the shops. A few were Luxor, with very cool images that went against the grain of the usual pizza-coloured Fantasy type: they were like hyped-up ECM album covers. His secret was that he read very little Fantasy literature. His literary guru was Mervyn Peake, who hardly qualified as a Fantasy writer at all. Apart from various obscure Russians, he avoided the field. That, he felt, was his strength. The strength of an outsider. There was a lemon-yellow Citroen 2CV in the lobby, as if some eccentric woman author had parked it there, and a little stall of shiny apples you could help yourself from. He took five.
Marion wanted to know how it had gone, from behind her vast loom in the sitting room. (Jonathan worked in the box room, when Josie wasn’t back from Politics and Philosophy at Durham.)
‘I gave it in, that’s all.’
‘You didn’t see anybody?’
‘Well, he didn’t come out and thank me personally for the privilege of offering it to him.’
‘No need to be like that. How am I supposed to know how it works? I could never understand why you didn’t try plays.’
‘Plays? You really think I’m going to be part of that scene?’
‘What scene?’
‘The theatre scene. Bunch of incestuous hacks and gays and self-serving stuck-up Oxbridge pseuds. Or all three.’
‘Mike and Dennis are gay. Mike went to Oxford. They’re our best friends. You sound more and more like your dad.’
‘Look, we’ve been through this so many times, Marion. I’ve written this bloody novel as an act of faith. I don’t care if it’s published or not. I had to write it, that’s all.’
‘Of course you care if it’s published.’
He did care, he cared very much. Time had reared up in front of him like a deadening wall and turned everything futile when he was about forty-eight. His body, maximally exercised once for mime work, was showing signs of strain in the joints. The specialist doctor told him that mime, like ballet, made the joints too loose. The clic caused arthritis, eventually. The kids he taught were getting worse and worse. Culture was sloshing about in Lottery money but it all felt somehow impoverished after the glory days of the sixties and seventies – merely a wing of the commercial palace whose other wing was War.
New Demons said all this, but in a parallel world that was, Jonathan recognised, full of his own little traumas. It had been an act of therapy, far cheaper than visiting a shrink, or even banging on about it all in the Fox and Hounds, his old sporadic haunt (now a transvestite bar). Marion was Penelope during this long odyssey, in which Jonathan had been more difficult to live with than he would otherwise have been. Or maybe not. Marion recognised, waiting for him to finish – to come symbolically home – that without the novel he might have been completely impossible.
Even with the trainee Post Office workers (an hour of ‘communicational expression’ every week at the college), he’d had somewhere to escape to during their total lack of participation, their bewilderment, their mask of abuse. The novel was a quest, both literally and metaphorically, but it was also a refuge. Tapped out on a 1950s Adler, it had been painstakingly transferred to disc on Dave’s advice.
‘On the other hand,’ Dave said, ‘if it’s really good then that authentic, back-of-the-cupboard look will give it prestige. But it’d have to be really good. Otherwise it’s slickness time.’
Then there was the waiting. Dave had said that very few people got taken on from unsolicited manuscripts, that most people made it through contacts, being someone’s kid or lover or sex-slave or just squeezing the right hooter at the right parties. Jonathan reckoned this was jealousy on Dave’s part, as Dave’s poems had been rejected by everyone but Decoys, which was in fact Dave’s own magazine, run off on an old roneo machine that had belonged to Brighton Town Council. His poems were long torrents of abuse, with confusing Dada-style typography. And Dave’s second-hand bookshop, Fastidium, was so quiet that the most exciting event of his day was the bus stopping opposite. Jonathan had no idea how Dave Reynolds kept going, especially as he couldn’t resist buying up books by the carton-load, adding to the tottering walls that made the two rooms into a labyrinth, something out of Lewis Carroll – or Mervyn Peake.
‘Books aren’t meat,’ Dave would say. ‘They don’t have sell-by dates on them.’
‘They do in Waterstone’s,’ said Jonathan.
‘Waterstone’s don’t sell books,’ Dave pointed out. ‘They sell units of stock.’
It was Dave who first told Jonathan about Eddie Thwing.
‘Is Thwing his real name?’
‘Absolutely, guv. There was a Sir Robert Thwing who led a proto-Marxist revolt back in 1230, stealing corn from the fat foreign monks and giving it away to the poor.’
‘How do you know so much?’
‘I read what I don’t sell.’
‘But you don’t sell anything.’
‘Exactly. Ah, there’s the bus. The most exciting thing that’s happened this morning.’
‘I’ve come in.’
‘You don’t bloody count. Eddie Thwing does count. He comes in here when he’s down for the Festival, thinking he’s going to find a signed first edition of – well, Ulysses or something. I deliberately give him the impression that I wouldn’t know it if the first folio or the torn-out page from that Robin Hood ballad turned up. He never goes away a disappointed man without spending a tenner on paperbacks, ha ha.’
‘So you reckon I should give him a try, do you? Seriously?’
‘Nothing to lose. If you’re a genius, he’ll spot it.’
‘But I’m not a genius. I’m a clapped-out drama teacher who’s wasted his spare time on this stonker of a piece of drivel and I’m stupidly proud of it.’
‘I’m always amazed at how well you understand yourself, mate.’
‘It’s called self-expression, Dave. Running your tongue over the site of the trauma.’
Dave nodded knowingly.
‘No harm in trying, is there? I’m still trying. How’s the lovely Marion?’
‘You won’t believe this, Dave, but she’s got a big order from this vegetarian shoe shop in Duke Street.’
‘A what?’
‘Vegetarian shoe shop. Shoes made only from vegetable material.’
‘Not dhal, I hope. Imagine if it rained or you walked through a puddle and your trainers were made of dhal.’
Jonathan and Dave looked at each other and cracked up, spilling a pile of old green Pelicans spotted with dirt. The funny thing was, Jonathan and almost everyone else in Brighton believed that Fastidium didn’t go with Dave’s shop, because they didn’t realise that it meant Disgust.
Eddie went on holiday that summer to Andros, the Hampstead of the Greek islands. That’s to say, it was relatively unspoilt by dint of the fact that rich Greek-Americans, fat with ships and trade, would build their plush villas on land they made sure was untainted by development and then spend half the year there. There was also an excellent modern art museum facing the sea, full of Matisse. Eddie did not usually holiday with his family, he was too
busy, but Holly had insisted. Holly came from a wealthy dynasty of lawyers, one of whom had married an American writer called Felicity Keen who was very popular for about five years in the 1930s, penning a series of satiric detective tales set mostly in the world of the silver screen. That was Holly’s grandmother, and it was Holly’s lifelong task to restore Felicity Keen, or ‘Buggles’ to the family, to her rightful throne. Three of the tales were published in one volume by Virago in 1985. Holly had spent the interim in battling to find financial backing for a projected film of one of the tales, set on a set and weaving a real-life poison murder into the celluloid equivalent. Eddie had met her at a publisher’s party six years ago and they got serious within minutes. That is, he fell for her instantly and they both knew that this was it from the very first second. Eddie was married and so was Holly, but neither had had time for kids and their relative spouses were deep in affairs themselves. Holly vaguely worked on the edge of the book industry as an authorial assistant, and had recently spent many months collating an exhaustive index for a history of poaching. They had clocked each other over the drinks and babble for about an hour; now they were together by the quietest window of the club’s function room. The club was called Tidings, with one wall given over to a slowed-up projection of a seventies porn film – an installation by Marcus Kent, apparently.
‘You wouldn’t believe how many fields the subject touches,’ Holly was now saying to Eddie. This was the second thing she’d ever said to him. The first was in response to his question, ‘What do you do?’
