‘Nope.’
‘Not ever?’
‘Not ever no how. But the docs can lop some of them off.’
‘And then?’
‘New ones grow.’
Again he looked at me and again he said, with extra force: ‘Bollocks.’ This was, we agreed, as much as could usefully be said. Then he asked: ‘What you reading?’
(It was Fahrenheit 451, which he’d read already; Brave New World was better, said Stephen. I seem to remember discussing Brave New World a week or two later, on the slope above the football pitches (‘the grandstand of the incompetent’, he called it); this, I think, was the hour in which the nickname ‘Bleb’ was conceived, a nickname at which Charlie – missing the point – took some offence, believing that it constituted collusion in the cruelty of the likes of class thug Vincent Draper, to whom I was ‘Grape-Face’ or ‘Pig-Tits’.)
So: ‘What are you reading?’ asked Stephen, and I can still feel something of the refreshment of being regarded by that calm yet tightly focused gaze, as if the disfigurement, having been discussed, had become invisible. Already I was used to people giving the impression, when they looked at me, that they were striving to peer through the face, as if the eyes were peep-holes through which – if they looked carefully – a small and vulnerable creature could be discerned, scurrying around inside.
Here, it occurs to me, is as good a place as any to bring in Miss Anscombe. Fifty-ish, cylindrical of torso, with ankles as wide as pint glasses, Miss Anscombe arrived at the school a year after Stephen, as a replacement for Mr Gidley, who had been arrested driving on the wrong side of the road in the middle of the night, at about 10 mph, and very much the worse for wear. Stephen and I were soon entranced. Miss Anscombe’s lessons were purposeful and fast-moving, with high-quality slide shows and a leavening of deadpan sarcasm, but even better than the lessons were her field trips. The first was a day’s excursion to the Sussex Downs. While the rest of the class trooped up the hill in the wake of the other teacher, Miss Anscombe loitered with Stephen and myself at the rear of the column, pointing out the salient features of the terrain. I see the three of us, sitting on a hummock, facing a slope on which the grass has a pleated appearance (soil-slip): her hands mimicked the curve of the scarp, and she talked as if she could see the surface of the earth buckling and falling before her eyes, like a time-lapse film in which tens of thousands of years were compressed into seconds; she held a lump of flint in her palm, stroking the stone as if to make it purr. She made a greater effort than some of her colleagues to act as if all of her pupils were equals in her eyes, but she had immediately taken a special liking to Stephen. ‘He’s Oxbridge material,’ she had told his mother emphatically at the end of his first year at the school, and Stephen’s decision to read anthropology at university was largely attributable to the advocacy of Miss Anscombe. (Miss Anscombe was a snob, and there was a suggestion, in the way she announced this to Stephen’s mother, that she feared the boy might be dispatched to the factory floor if she didn’t campaign for his further education; his mother, Stephen recalls, was thrilled and slightly alarmed by Miss Anscombe’s verdict, as if her son had been singled out by a recruiting officer for the Jesuits). Handing back an essay on Saharan oases, she told him that anthropology was a subject to which he should give the deepest consideration (her exact words, delivered in the tone of a judge giving advice to a jury), because it had become apparent in the course of the year that what principally interested him was not geology or weather or vegetation but people and the way they lived. The oases essay was quite brilliant, as had been his essay on the Inuit; his essays were always remarkable when the topic touched on unfamiliar cultures. She loaned him a book by Margaret Mead. It was wonderful. Anthropology was indeed an enticing proposition, but had our history teacher taken him aside and told him with similar forcefulness that he sensed in Stephen a craving to get stuck into the study of medieval Europe, and consequently presented him with a copy of The Waning of the Middle Ages, Stephen could in all likelihood have been persuaded that medieval history would prove an immensely rewarding area of study, just as, had our English teacher sent him home with extravagant praise ringing in his ears and a copy of Seven Types of Ambiguity in his pocket, he could have decided that three years of his life might fruitfully be devoted to the reading of English literature. But the voice of Miss Anscombe was the first to be heard (and probably would have prevailed in a hypothetical three-way shoot-out anyway), and so Stephen gratefully borrowed books from her and did not confess that the supposed brilliance of his essay on Saharan oases, like the brilliance of his writing about the Inuit, was largely attributable to certain books he’d found in his local library, which had seemed to be safely obscure because nobody had ever borrowed them. On the other hand, although he knew it wasn’t true that the way people lived their lives was what principally interested him (nothing principally interested him), he did find the books he borrowed from Miss Anscombe challenging in a way that few other books had been, and he continued to get high marks from her, even for essays that made little use of unacknowledged sources. And so he became, for three years, an anthropologist.
(Before we lose sight of Miss Anscombe I should record she liked me, if not as much as she liked Stephen, and perhaps a little too much on account of what another teacher was pleased to call my ‘pluck’. It was the example of Miss Anscombe that led me to answer, when asked what I intended to do with my life, that I’d like to be a teacher, an ambition that was maintained until the age of fifteen or so, when it became apparent that any livelihood involving intensive face-to-face work wasn’t going to be the right one for me. Even when I was affecting to be satisfied with the prospect of doing paperwork for my brother while pursuing a course of autodidacticism (and this is in fact what happened – I was a clerk for Charlie until Stephen found copy-editing work for me, through his boyfriend of the time), Miss Anscombe endeavoured to persuade me that I too should go to university. My parents were of the same opinion, and I did go so far as to visit Celia one weekend. Most of her friends were very pleasant to me, but a shade too strenuously so. House-mates strolled into the kitchen and – finding me there – strolled straight back out again. It was unbearable: the lovely girls taking the sun on the grass below the library; the students passing, some with a glance for the boys, some with a glance for the girls, all with a glance to the right, where I cringed at Celia’s side.)
Stephen’s university years were not a thorough success. Required now to devote himself to a single subject, he was frequently bored. He was intimidated by students who, having been to public school, were wholly at ease from the very first day: Jeremy’s father would collect him in a Bentley at the end of term; another had actually been to Samoa; another called a tutor by his first name, as though they were cousins. Some of his contemporaries were so smart they could read their Lévi-Strauss in the original. Seminars were like revivalist meetings, with everyone spouting paraphrases of Orientalism. Stephen himself spouted paraphrases of Orientalism. He thought it was the most amazing book he’d ever read, and he agreed with every word of it. Unfortunately he found that, while he was reading them, he agreed with every word of almost every book he read, even those that took issue with books by which he’d previously been similarly convinced. After a year he’d come to think that, although he could read as quickly as anyone and memorise facts with ease, he didn’t have a thought in his head – not a real one, a thought he could call his own. His essays weren’t expressions of his thinking: they were collages from which the seams had been adroitly erased. He was a fraud, except in the area of his emotional life, where at last he was fully and genuinely himself. It was for the boyfriends, and so as not to disappoint his parents (to whom he could never admit the slightest self-doubt) that Stephen stayed the distance – and for the films. Discovering a passion for cinema, and finding that he absorbed film credits as readily as any other type of data, Stephen became the secretary of the film society at the end of his first year. Before long it h
ad become in effect a one-man enterprise, with Stephen planning each term’s screenings, doing most of the administrative work, and writing a programme note for every film. These notes began as little more than a list of credits but soon grew into mini-essays, and he took such pleasure in writing them that he began to wonder if he might have happened upon something for which he had a true talent, something that might even in some way become a means of earning a living. The re-evaluation was accelerated when one of his tutors, having read his programme notes for Tokyo Story, remarked that it was the best thing he’d written all term, which was a little dismaying, because Stephen had been putting a lot of effort into his course work – i.e. producing text-collages of ever greater complexity. But as exams approached he was obliged to reduce his extra-curricular activities, and his confidence suffered a setback when, after the final screening under his regime, he was approached by a second-year history student who introduced himself as ‘something of a film buff’ before pointing out a serious error in Stephen’s notes for Rome, Open City. He proceeded to air several criticisms of the piece that had been handed out prior to the showing of The Magnificent Ambersons. Before the term was over the pugnacious historian had taken over Stephen’s role at the film society, and though one or two people told Stephen that the programme notes were now as dull as train timetables, the image of himself as the Guardian’s future film reviewer had been destroyed. (The love of cinema has never waned, however. And it was at a cinema that he met Oliver, his spouse in all but name. A screening of Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film from Germany at the National Film Theatre was what brought them together. When the lights went up they were the only two customers left in their seats.)
During the immediate post-university years, while waiting for his life-path to make itself visible, he took a variety of temporary jobs. He fitted kitchens with a friend of his father’s, who soon had to let cack-handed Stephen go; he was briefly a bicycle courier (his ability to memorise the London A-Z was an advantage; his lack of courage in the face of London traffic was not); for a while he was a proof-reader; he was a sub-editor and film reviewer for a short-lived magazine; he was a courier again (collision with parked car; he’d been experimenting with contact lenses, at the suggestion of boyfriend who’d had to tell him that the whole geek-chic thing wasn’t working for him any longer); he worked in the bookshop of the ICA; and then he got a job in the Horniman Museum, which is where a new passion possessed him. Surrounded by musical instruments from every cranny of the planet, he found himself being lured down a dozen different paths at once. Every month brought a new excitement: zydeco, merengue, degung, qawwali. He’d turn up at our house with a carrier bag full of music: ‘You have just got to listen to this,’ he would say, putting on a disc with such urgency it was as if he thought the thing might crumble in his hands if not heard immediately.
(Here is perhaps the place to mention that Stephen’s promiscuous taste in music changed my brother’s life. Having dropped by to see the parents on an evening when Stephen happened to be with me, Charlie heard an intriguing voice emanating from my room. He knocked, walked in and asked Stephen (standing by the door, in his customary posture of immobile ecstasy): ‘Who on earth is that?’ And thus, with a recording of Bill Monroe, was spontaneously born Charlie’s love of the folk music of the United States. The relationship between Charlie and Stephen was transformed too. This relationship had improved in recent years, partly because they didn’t encounter each other very often, now that Charlie was no longer living at home, but partly – as Charlie saw it – because Stephen himself had improved greatly: he was less ostentatious in his cleverness now (Charlie’s view was that Celia had brought out the worst in him, but Stephen’s new self-restraint was more the result of what he perceived to be his failures as a student than of the absence of Celia as cheerleader); he was less prone to affectations of otherworldliness (Stephen had indeed from time to time overplayed the thought-distracted persona, just as Charlie sometimes played up the stolidity); and he less frequently emitted the whiff of a person who believed himself to be spiritually superior to the rank and file money-grubbers of the world. Prior to the evening of Bill Monroe they had for some time been civil with each other, and once or twice had managed to conduct conversations without the aid of an intermediary. They could not, however, have been described as friends, not until the revelation of Bill Monroe.)
Let us complete the CV of Stephen Siviter. He stayed at the Horniman until he knew the museum so well he could have drawn a plan of the whole place from memory, marking every single stuffed bird and monkey skeleton, every hurdy-gurdy, shamisen and nagaswaram. Once the Horniman was exhausted, it was time to move on. An interlude of false moves followed: he reviewed films for a website (his last piece: ‘Man Overbored’ – on Titanic), reviewed CDs for a world music magazine (it went bust within a year), and worked in a number of shops – a bookshop, a charity shop, another bookshop, an outlet for Italian furniture where his monthly cheque wouldn’t have bought him a half-share in any of the sofas he was selling. The sale of an unconscionably expensive dining table turned out to be a pivotal event. We needn’t go into the details: suffice it to say that a fleeting relationship with the buyer of the table led to a job in a private gallery – owned by a friend of the buyer of the table – that specialised in Japanese and Chinese antiques, and this job led to a lowly position at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where Stephen embarked upon another burst of intensive self-education, which brought about his appointment to a considerably less lowly position at the V & A, which in turn led to a better-paid and more stimulating job at the Wallace Collection, whence he progressed to his current post at the Burrell Collection, where the nine thousand artefacts (tapestries, alabasters, stained glass, furniture, silver, table glass, paintings (Degas, Cézanne, Renoir …), Islamic art, items from ancient China, Egypt, Greece, Rome …) should keep him interested for a few more years. He’s a happy man; the happiest man I know.
Janina would rather I didn’t spend all day in here, typing away. ‘What are you writing?’ she asks, as if this activity were as peculiar as building a canoe out of matchsticks. I’m writing my memoirs, I tell her – the highs, the lows, the women I have known. She gives me a short smile and blinks three or four times, as though waiting for a noise to cease so she can resume our conversation. ‘OK,’ she says, ‘but why stay up here? You can bring the laptop outside.’
‘But I like my room,’ I tell her.
‘I’m glad you like it, but—’
‘I know. It’s not good for me.’
‘It’s not,’ she agrees, then belatedly gets the point. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘I get the message. I’ll back off.’
An hour later, Ellen reports that Janina has been rigging up a screen on one side of the terrace, so it couldn’t be more private.
‘I’m on a roll,’ I tell her. ‘What shall I tell you?’
‘Whatever you like,’ she says. ‘Something about yourself.’
I do a search for Dr Finnegan. It takes five minutes to find him – there he is, giving a lecture at King’s College. He’s retired now, and age has withered him. I don’t recognise him, but it must be the same man; the CV fits.
Of Dr Finnegan I retain little more than the impression of a very tall man and a white coat, unbuttoned, over a scratchy-looking, peat-coloured waistcoat. I see also a beaky nose, and a ring that has a large green stone set into it. I’d only ever seen such rings on women’s hands before. To the side of his desk, on the wall, hung a picture of a man with bright orange muscles instead of skin. The floor was covered with shiny lino, like the corridor outside, but the chairs on which my mother and I were sitting had a bright blue rug underneath them. My mother, when recalling Dr Finnegan, would invariably mention first the grey-green eyes and the way his hair was swept backwards off his forehead and temples in a style that was almost but not quite unruly. She imagined that he regarded himself as distinguished-looking. He’d pause after her questions and do a quick frown, as though her words
needed to be translated into something cleverer before he could understand them, then he’d reply in the soothing murmur of a man talking a distraught woman into putting the gun down.
We were shown into the room and told that Dr Finnegan would be with us shortly. Ten minutes later he arrived, flinging back the door as if he were the busiest man in the world. He was followed by a dark-skinned nurse who took me by the hand and led me into an adjoining room, where I drank a glass of orange squash and read a comic. This I remember.
So: enter Dr Finnegan, the tails of his white coat flapping like the wings of the angel of the Annunciation. (‘Hail, thou that art not so highly favoured.’) ‘There are Lisch nodules,’ he explained, once the child was out of the way. An incomprehensible photograph was presented, ostensibly for clarification. ‘In themselves they are nothing to be alarmed about. However, in combination with the macules—’
‘Macules?’
‘The spots.’
‘Oh.’
‘The café-au-lait macules and the Lisch nodules, taken together, are not good.’
‘They’re not?’
‘No, I’m sorry to say. They’re not good. Together, they are indicative of neurofibromatosis. The lump on Daniel’s neck, Mrs Brennan, is a dermal neurofibroma.’
Hearing the name of her son’s condition, my mother cast in her mind what manner of salutation this was. How, she wondered, could this be?
‘Well,’ proceeded Dr Finnegan, easing back in his chair, surrendering space to the enormous question that had now arisen between them, ‘there are two possibilities. The first, of course, is that Daniel’s condition is hereditary. In other words, that he has inherited it from yourself or from your husband.’
‘But—’ my mother began, and Dr Finnegan smiled and nodded, inviting her to articulate the thought, banal though it would inevitably be. ‘But that’s not possible. We haven’t had these spots—’
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