Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Poaching.’ She had smiled. ‘Anything you want to know about medieval forest laws.’

  Her eyes glittered at him and his own glittered back, with vague writhing mounds of flesh reflected in them. It was extraordinary. They were both being more than flirtatious. The usual level of flirtation at this kind of shindy was unserious, a game, mere showing off, mapping the bounds in safety, a response to exhaustion and free lashes of drink. Authors peered about, bewildered, like moles dragged from their holes, and got embarrassingly drunk in a ciderish way before being sent back down again for another two or three years (or, in some cases, for ever) while the partying carried on overhead. The author at this one – it was, Eddie had to keep recalling, this author’s launch – was the equivalent of one of those rattly little hire cars, if you were playing that comparison game. He wasn’t (thank God) Eddie’s bod, but one of the young and spotty hopefuls in Jansen House’s pure-breed literary stable, Peter Mapes Ltd, run by the immaculate David Roach. Mapes’s sales were undetectable except for their youngish star from Newcastle, Benny Irish, whose Jam Sandwich (and equally filthy sequels) sold millions and kept the rest afloat. Eddie hadn’t read the launch novel, set in a dilapidated Sicilian casino and featuring the slow torture and murder of at least three well-hung Albanian fieldworkers (‘terrifying’, ‘blackly humorous’), but it was, by all accounts, a winner, as long as they could hide the author (a part-time English lecturer at De Montfort University, Leicester) from sight. The author was also by the quieter window, and Eddie was keen to get rid of him. Eddie had big shoulders (he was a former rugby man) and simply edged the man out, casually, knowing that no author ever imposed him or herself on these occasions unless drink made them excitable. The author went off to join his parents (Eddie could tell they were his parents by their air of obsequious anxiety and the fact that no one else was talking to them), and Eddie and Holly were alone together.

  ‘You’re not Canadian?’

  ‘Do I sound it?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Jesus. I’m not even American. I’m English but I was brought up in Washington until I was ten.’

  ‘Your father?’

  ‘Diplomat. Actually, he was a spy. Kind of. I’m not supposed to tell you this because he’s still alive but he was in the secret service.’

  ‘Spying on the Yanks?’

  ‘Of course not. He kept going off to places like Bolivia. He was in Bomber Command,’ she added, casually. ‘I mean, originally. Forty-one raids. He raced cars for the RAF.’

  ‘How glamorous,’ said Eddie. Perfect profile, he was thinking. She told him that her parents had a very old farmhouse in Sussex, that they were in their seventies but still rode horses. Eddie’s parents were a tax inspector and a hospital clerk respectively, but he didn’t tell her that. Anyway, they were both dead, or as good as (his mother was in a home, completely ga-ga). Holly also told him that she had nearly made the Olympic alpine ski team in 1984. Eddie was nodding slowly, in love for the first time in his life. Or that’s what it felt like. She had long silvery earrings and a fringe gelled into fine claws over her forehead, which he really liked. Holly didn’t generally tell strangers all about herself, but Eddie kept asking questions, bent over her with his big shoulders so that she had to retreat slightly onto the broad window-sill. It was as if he was hiding her from the rest of the room. She hadn’t even mentioned Felicity Keen, which was probably just as well as Eddie had never heard of her.

  ‘Don’t you hate these things?’ Holly said, looking past him at the crush of bodies and the slow-motion licking of a nipple beyond. She didn’t want to tell him that she knew all about him and what a bastard he could be, excused only by his uncompromising brilliance, but he’d have guessed it anyway. Everyone knew about Eddie Thwing, ‘the swinger with a lisp’. She was surprised to find he didn’t have a lisp, in fact. Within a few days she knew much more about him and he knew much more about her, the planning side of all this aided by the fact that Jansen House owned a flat in Earl’s Court for the use of visiting authors or bigwigs from the American parent company and that the author booked in for that week had been hospitalised following a car crash in Argentina. Within three months, both spouses knew about the affair but had put up little resistance, although Holly’s husband (Neil, a failed screenwriter with nothing to commend him but his work with violent female prisoners) threatened to kill himself. Eddie’s wife, Jill, had already left him the year before for another man, a drunken, wealthy landowner who shot ducks on his estate in Norfolk, but Eddie had refused to co-operate out of self-confessed spite. Now he was phoning Jill about the divorce.

  ‘I want to come back to you,’ said his wife, unexpectedly.

  ‘Bad luck.’

  Because Holly was rich, Eddie was very relaxed about the nitty-gritty of the divorce agreement and his wife caused little trouble, resigning herself to duck-shoots on the Alde and local charity work. Neil moved to Costa Rica. So it was that, six years on, Eddie and Holly were in the three-star Pension Keti on Andros with their little boy, Ed. Holly had refused the chance of a villa.

  ‘I want full board. I want just to totally lounge.’

  Eddie had brought along some work, but not much. Holly had given up the Felicity Keen film project after some fifteen years of trying, but was still in touch with her old contacts and would check over likely manuscripts for cinematic potential. Eddie had decided finally to tackle Proust on Andros and had therefore brought along only three manuscripts to read, one of which happened to be Jonathan Lewis’s New Demons. Holly was attracted by the title. Eddie could tell her nothing about it, since he hadn’t even rolled off the rubber band keeping the six hundred pages from turning into chaos.

  ‘It’s a bloke who’s worked ten years on it, but then they all say that. The lonely genius thing. What it usually means is that they’re too self-deluded to know they’re crap.’

  ‘The saving illusion,’ said Holly, who was five years older than Eddie.

  ‘Life is a noisy stay in a brief, garish hotel,’ Eddie quoted, as inaccurately as ever. The Pension Keti was, like all Greek hotels, noisy: the bare tiled floors and walls made every room an echo chamber, a little nightmarish. It was also surprisingly hot, given they could see the waves breaking on the beach by a lift of the head from the bed. It would be so easy to go mad here, thought Eddie, like in an Antonioni film, staring up at that bloody fan going round and round. He’d have preferred the Outer Hebrides, in some ways. The sand made the floor slippery and Ed kept falling over. Somebody next door was playing some truly gumby Greek pop which, behind the white noise of the waves on the sand and the revolving fan, shifted into something that could almost have been Blur as he was drifting off. Siesta time. Relax. He wished he had, after all, brought along some hashish, but he hadn’t dared.

  ‘Who said that?’ asked Holly, after a long time which might have been seconds.

  ‘Conrad.’

  ‘Are you sure he said “a brief hotel”?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Ed, don’t do that.’

  Ed was shaking the bed. It was after lunch and too hot to be on the beach. Ed was very fair, taking after his father. He had exactly three hours of life left, but no one knew that. Maybe even the fates didn’t know that. Or God. It was one of those things.

  ‘How’s the Proust?’ Holly asked.

  ‘Not started yet.’

  ‘Proust didn’t believe in love. He thought love was a selfish need to be loved.’

  ‘OK,’ said Eddie, who was drifting off deliciously.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe he was right. Ed, please!’

  Holly stroked Eddie’s arm, then Ed’s fair gossamer hair. Ed clambered back off again and was doing something under the bed. She hoped the floor was dusted under there, that there weren’t scorpions.

  ‘What do you call for 999 here?’

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’

  ‘Because you should know it.’
r />   ‘We’re in a hotel, sort of. They’ll deal with any emergency.’

  ‘I wish I could just lounge. I need a really good book,’ said Holly, staring at the white ceiling. ‘I always bring all the wrong books. That book on Greek gods is so fucking tedious. It’s supposed to be amazing, but it’s just tedious. I don’t get it. So many of these fucking books are just tedious and pretentious. I can’t get anywhere past page thirty-three. It’s always page thirty-three.’

  The sun was sneaking in through a broken slat in the shutters and striking her face via the mirror. If they opened the shutters there would be a sea-breeze, she could hear the breeze in the bushes. But then the sun would be hot and Ed would get burnt. She wished Ed was not called Ed, but Eddie had insisted. His father and grandfather were Edward. It was a Thwing thing. She had wanted Sam. Or Henry, even.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I don’t care about the Greek gods. Everyone’s so hung up on them. They’re a bunch of prats. I can’t believe there are duvets in the cupboard.’

  ‘It gets cold here,’ murmured Eddie.

  ‘How nice,’ said Holly. ‘I’d love to come when it’s cold here. I’m basically a cold-loving person. I mean, I don’t like cold per se but it means you can snuggle up.’

  ‘You forget,’ murmured Eddie, ‘the damp in the cold.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Holly.

  She sighed and closed her eyes.

  ‘I guess I’ll have to try one of your fucking manuscripts,’ she said.

  Ed said ‘fucky’ several times, from under the bed.

  ‘I’ve told you before,’ murmured Eddie, from his delicious half slumber, ‘not to swear in front of the kids. He’s only two.’

  ‘My father always did,’ Holly said.

  ‘He was in Bomber Command,’ said Eddie.

  ‘It’s only words,’ Holly added, after a long time that again might have been a split second.

  ‘Fucky fucky fucky,’ said Ed, banging something on the tiles.

  Jonathan and Marion were playing Scrabble. He had placed a K on the end of GIN and the word he then made, slowly, like someone descending a ladder – KNIGHT – ended on a Triple Word Score.

  ‘Gink is not a word,’ said Marion.

  ‘Colonel Blink, the short-sighted gink,’ said Jonathan, totting up.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘The Beezer. The best thing in it.’

  Marion picked up the dictionary. She found it after ginglymus.

  ‘Sorry, it’s slang.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘It says it here. US slang, in fact.’

  ‘I don’t believe in slang. The term’s a hierarchical imposition, a mode of oppression to keep the elite in power. All utterance is expression, you can’t ghetto-ise bits of it.’

  ‘Crap. It’s the rules. No slang.’

  ‘You’ve got to give it to me. It’s crazy. How many times do you use six letters in one go? This is genius, the best since I added a T to ERROR and landed on a Triple Word Score with TEAZLE.’

  ‘Terror and teazle aren’t slang.’

  ‘There’s nothing about slang in the rules.’

  ‘Everyone knows you can’t have slang or foreign words.’

  ‘Anyway, I don’t believe in rules.’

  ‘Grow up, Jonathan.’

  ‘Why?’

  She put her head in her hands and started crying.

  ‘OK, have your bloody gink.’

  ‘What have I done?’

  ‘Nothing. I dunno. It’s probably the menopause.’

  Jonathan looked at her for a moment as she blew her nose. Her hair was fulsome and frizzy and grey, streaked with henna. She had pouches under her bright blue eyes. There was a furry quality to the skin around her nostrils and on the flange of each cheek. He remembered her in that circle of African drummers at the unelectrified Ecology Festival at Glastonbury back in ’76, incredibly beautiful, with long coppery hair down to her waist and a bright yellow cheesecloth shirt and huge clay bangles from Peru. Her eyes closed and calmly beating the African drum between her feet, over and over, and he joining her with a little drum he used in drama classes (his itinerant theatre company, Red Solstice, were running a workshop up in the main tent), and letting the rhythms weave in and out of his body, the energies accumulating into a spirit bubble that held them in a kind of transparent calm that might have been ecstatic if it hadn’t been so overpoweringly stable, as if the whole universe was running to their intricate beating and the other drummers grinning above their flexing, ebony-gleaming chests and shoulders and the silk cloth at each of her wrists wriggling and shining and the drum nestled like a pool between her long red Indian-style skirt, and she just keeping her eyes so closed and calm.

  That was love at first bloody sight, mate.

  And now she was getting old, poised on the edge of being truly and properly grey and tired and old. Sometimes, over her loom, with her head-scarf on to keep her hair back and her mouth pursed in concentration, she looked like one of those toothless old crofter-crones in sepia photos of St Kilda. He was almost annoyed with her for letting herself go, until he looked in the mirror at himself and saw that it was time that had decided things, like a spiteful make-up artist, a giggling boy-god armed with a set of Leichner pencils and cotton-wool pads and tweezers for all the harmless hairs, the hairs you wanted to keep.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jonathan. ‘We’ll say you’ve won.’

  ‘Is it tomorrow you’re seeing the editor?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m quite nervous.’

  ‘Put the crystal in your pocket, it’ll help,’ she said, sniffing.

  ‘Yeah. I think so.’

  He really did love her. He breathed in deeply and breathed out again to dilute his pissed-off feeling about the Scrabble. She was everything to him. They had probably known each other on the Great Plains, in Sumeria, in nameless prehistoric caves. Some of that was in New Demons, but always subject to the story. The one great advantage Jonathan had over his writing peers (not that he fully realised this) was that for thirty years he had been dealing in suspense, the art of keeping the audience in thrall. Story. Story, you lot. How are we going to shape all this into story? Where’s it all going? How’s it going to end? Not with a knife or a gun or a shot of cyanide, OK? This is not a computer game, this is life. And he would give them very tight structures and methods within which to improvise, to play. He had evolved from free expression to something very disciplined, intricate, effective. Otherwise, as he said, it was like playing squash without walls. It was a pity, in a way, that so many of the kids had gone butthead. They were like permanently soft cement that could not be shaped: too much water. Too many knocks. Too much contamination.

  He put his glasses on, peering over the rims at the love of his life.

  ‘Let’s at least finish, my sweet. You’re winning,’ he added – although that was only because he hadn’t yet finished his turn.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ she said, ‘with your glasses. It makes you look about ninety. Don’t for God’s sake do that in front of this editor guy tomorrow.’

  Eddie, Holly and Ed left the hotel about six, with the edge well off the sun and the heat pleasant. It was a short walk to the headland, where the beach ended and the rocks began. The beach was empty, this end. It amazed Eddie, how few people there were on these sandy beaches. There was no airport on Andros, that was probably the reason. Ed ran up and down in front of them, his little legs blurring as he kept his steps short and scuffed up the sand in clouds until he hit the wet part nearer the sea. He was really concentrated on this running on the sand; it was the feel of it, the warmth and the softness and then the cool, harder, wet part nearer the sea that made slappy noises. Holly was carrying a beach bag with three towels, a snorkel, a mask and all six hundred and thirteen pages of New Demons in its Jiffy, as if it couldn’t be split into lighter sections. Amazingly, she had already got through almost a hundred pages. She had started in bed at three o’clock that afternoon, and hadn’t been able to put it dow
n despite Ed’s repeated fucky fucky fucky and refusal to nap.

  ‘Oh, this is good,’ was all she’d say. ‘This is good.’

  Eddie probed, but apart from her saying that it was such a change to read something not trying to be clever and pretentious, he got no further. He hadn’t even glanced at the first page before bringing it to Greece. At one point, waking up from his siesta, he had looked at it lying there on the bedside table her side and felt a touch – he was surprised by this – of jealousy. He would have a go at it when she was finished, not before. Maybe this was the big one. The punters were stupid enough these days to follow the herd; you could turn a small success into a massive roller-coaster if you pulled the right strings. Everyone was reading the same four or five books. The rest were nothing. One of the four or five books that everyone was reading could be New Demons. But then, he thought (rolling over and feeling horny against Holly’s warm thigh under the sheet) he thought that about twenty times a month.

  Then they had gone out.

  Just before he woke up, however, he’d had the weirdest dream. He and Holly and Ed were waiting for the Tube, only the Tube was designed like the Paris Métro. It was somewhere central – it could even have been South Ken. Holly and Ed got on the train but he missed it because the safety doors, the type the Métro has, closed too fast. He watched the train go off and said, ‘It’s OK, I’ll get the next one,’ only he couldn’t quite recall where they were supposed to be getting off. All he knew was that it was close, just a couple of stations on. He got on the next train and within minutes daylight was flooding in, as happens on the Met Line out to Amersham or Chalfont St Giles. He started to panic, but the train kept on going. He left it the first place it stopped at, which turned out to be Uxbridge. Uxbridge! The blue enamelled sign over the platform said Uxbridge and there were trees and the air was fresh. It was, in fact, Uxbridge in the forties or fifties. He was way out of London, and he wanted to cry. He was incredibly frustrated and angry and this woke him up and there was a tiny circle of wet on the pillow.