by David Szalay
In the mind ever burning;
Never sick, never old, never dead,
From itself never turning…
Yes, something like that. Except it does have to turn from itself when its object finally is sitting there with sad eyes in a silly polo neck that misguidedly flaunts his paunch…
Thoughts like that tended to make her question everything. Tended to undermine the very idea of things. That was indeed the whole problem perhaps.
More words, more poetry—Never such innocence again…
And still more—After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
4
Freddy at school was an out-and-out weirdo. An insolently effortless top-setter, a heavy smoker, a purveyor of particularly extreme pornography—those tattered scraps of flesh-toned images—he was, with his halo of frizzy hair and plump putto’s face, a frightening outsider to many of the others. To many of the teachers too. A hand up in the middle of the French lesson. Mr Ellis is the terrified herbivore at the front near the whiteboard. ‘Sir?’ ‘Yes, Munt?’ (With a weak smile.) ‘Does wanking make you weak, sir?’ Little explosions of laughter from all over the room. Ellis obviously mortified, lady-faced, fully unable to deal with the situation. Does wanking make you weak, sir? Ostensibly—and this was very much the tone in which it was asked—it was an innocent appeal for information from an older, more experienced man. That, however, would be to miss the merciless overtone, enormously present that morning in the language school—You, Mr Ellis, does wanking make you weak? Is it wanking that makes you so weak, sir? Are you so weak, sir, because of all the wanking you do?
James was there for that incident, quietly reading a newspaper at a sunny desk near the windows. He was in the top set in French, and only in French. His father lived in France and he spent four months of the year there.
Mr Ellis might have stammered something.
More probably he just froze for a few seconds, and then with unseeing eyes kept murmuring the prepared text of the lesson as if nothing had happened.
Freddy was neither popular nor unpopular. For one thing, he didn’t do sport, which in itself placed him so far out of the mainstream as to be practically invisible. (James did do sport. He was in the second XV, which had a certain slackerish cachet, and was one of the stars of the hockey first XI, and on the tennis team too.) As for Freddy, he had once fannied about with the other anaemic four-eyed specimens on their twig-like legs, milky white thighs signally failing to fill shorts—and there was absolutely nothing to be said, in terms of social status, for the fourth XI, the fifth XV. They were for malcos and flids. They were for spastics. The slackerish cachet, such as it was, ended with the second team.
Freddy’s liberation from sport was the piano. While this was not particularly helpful for his image either, it was infinitely preferable to stumbling around in the mud on that polder of playing fields west of Hammersmith with someone like Mr Ellis timidly peeping the whistle on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons. (The staff room had its own sports hierarchy, which, while it exerted itself more subtly in social terms, more or less exactly mirrored that of the pupils.) So, the piano. The long, polished Steinway in the main hall of the music school. Mr Harris, the head of music, said Freddy was a ‘wunderkind’, and finally he persuaded the other Mr Harris—this one was head of sport, a far more exalted figure, a figure of papal mystique—to let Freddy off sport totally and permanently, so long as he instead spent the time practising the piano. This indulgence—which was unprecedented—massively enhanced Freddy’s status as a louchely unusual outsider. Indeed, with no further involvement in sport, he no longer seemed to be fully or properly part of the school. He spent most of his time in the music school—it looked like a small rococo theatre in an isolated part of the grounds—playing the piano and smoking. Mr Harris let him smoke in the music school; it was his own little kingdom, where all sorts of strange practices obtained. For instance, Freddy was on first-name terms with him—‘Morning, Mike’—as he was with most of the other tweed jackets and bluestockings of the music staff. At the age of fourteen, he took Grade Eight, and started to work his way through the semi-professional qualifications that followed it. The life of a professional musician—even some sort of star—seemed there for the taking.
The September of his final year. Mid-morning in the music school. Miserable autumn weather. (There is a pail out in the middle of the parquet, slowly filling from a weeping fissure in the moulding overhead.) The multicoloured application forms for the Royal College of Music are there on the table, waiting to be filled in—and in Mike’s opinion the application is no more than a formality. Freddy is of a much higher standard than is necessary to win a place most years…
When Freddy interrupts to say that he has no intention of applying to the Royal College, Mike looks as if he has just been told his Yorkshire terrier, Lulu, has died in a lawnmowing accident.
‘Why?’ he says finally.
Freddy says that as a professional pianist—and he seems to have no doubt that that is what he would be if he persevered with the piano—he would simply be performing the work of other men. They were the artists. The musicians were mere performers. Monkeys…
Anticipating Mike’s next point with a lifted finger, he says that it just isn’t possible to write music now. Not serious music. Serious music was fucked. (He did use the word ‘fucked’.) No serious music of any value was being written. As a medium it was quite possibly finished. He did not intend to waste his time on it. (Thus, incidentally, he flushed Mike’s life’s work—numerous suites and sonatas, one of which, the ‘West London Sonata’, had had an outing at the Norwich Music Festival—down the toilet of history.) No, what Freddy intended to do, he told the now misty-eyed Mike, was write. He would be a novelist, and he would start by taking an English degree at Oxford.
When he had said his piece, he lit a Gauloise filterless. He waved out the match and placed it neatly on the unused application forms. He looked up at the ornate plafond.
Though he would never admit it, he has, in the years since, spent much time pondering that miserable morning in the music school.
He went to Oxford, but there was no degree. He was sent down in his second year for doing no—no—work.
Through an intricate mechanism of interlocking nepotisms, he eventually found himself working first as a stringer and then as a staffer on a Fleet Street newspaper. These were the John Major years. He managed to spin out a decade or so of journalism— he was supremely plausible when he wanted to be—all the time incubating his masterpiece; wallowing in the tired sleaze of the times, and always planning to start it soon. In truth he started it on numerous occasions. Secretly, cigarette in mouth, he would type a few pages of a Sunday morning, and then, with a sneer on his face, scrumple them up and throw them away. They were never good enough to justify that morning in the music school. They were never anywhere near good enough. The futile, putrid soap opera of Tory politics circa 1995 was what he was in fact writing about. Malicious diary stuff mostly. For a while in the mid-Nineties he was a well-known quidnunc schmoozing the Commons bars.
Towards the end of the decade things started to go wrong. He was drinking too much. Of course, he had always been drinking too much from a medical standpoint; now he was drinking too much even to hold down his job as a political hack and diarist, with its semi-nocturnal hours and intense professional interest in watering holes. Stories went unfiled. He missed important things. (Was not answering his phone, for instance, on the afternoon of 11 September, 2001—he was passed out on the sofa.) There was an AIDS scare. In the office for a while, the story was, erroneously as it turned out, that Freddy was HIV positive. Still, his hair and teeth were starting to fall out, and he couldn’t afford a proper dentist. (Someone said that ended his dreams of television-pundit stardom. Freddy said, ‘What about John fucking Sergeant?’) And his old school-friend James, for a year or so, looked likely t
o find himself quite high up the Sunday Times Rich List. That didn’t help Freddy’s mood in the late Nineties. He had always looked down on James slightly—an unusually subtle jock perhaps, but fundamentally a philistine—and he found it hard to stomach the fact that, in the eyes of the world, he might ultimately prove more successful than him. Much more successful. Freddy was freelancing now, living hand to mouth—or mouth to hand—off his ability to winkle information out of people in pubs. The first New Labour landslide hadn’t helped. The immense shuffling of seats it entailed—the sudden and violent swings of status—were mirrored in the world of journalism. And to the extent that he was in with anybody, Freddy was mostly in with Tories. He had of course tried, too late—his self-interest was by then painfully transparent—to start making friends with some Labour people, but his main sources were still Tories, and no one was very interested in what they said or thought any more. Loose ends from schooldays—he hadn’t even tried to start his magnum opus for several years. Nor, for several years, did he see James. He was just unable to stomach the success of Interspex. When he saw in the papers that it had failed, he was pleased.
In many ways they were unlikely friends. Though they were in the same French lessons, they were in different houses and did not speak to each other until they shared a taxi to Heathrow at the end of their first term. They both had parents living overseas. Freddy’s parents—he was the sort of person it was hard to imagine having parents—lived in Dar es Salaam, where his father was a diplomat. There was a fellowship among the expat students. They were like orphans on the last day of term. Sometimes they had to spend an extra night in the empty school. Even if they didn’t, they were usually the last to leave. They seemed more worldly than the others, which in itself made them to some extent outsiders at the school. If Freddy’s mode of outsiderdom was obvious, however, James’s was more subtle. A tall, manly teenager—the infrequent spots looked out of place on his face and neck—a sportsman and in terms of schoolwork middling at most, he was in many ways a model lad. Perhaps he lacked some of the jocular oomph of the mainstream lad, and though he sat at the lads’ table in the dining hall—the loudest table, a mass of egregiously fashionable haircuts (flat-tops) and shoes (Doc Martens)—though his place there was entirely secure, the others might have felt at times that there was something semi-detached about him. Sometimes he seemed, in a mysterious way, to be several years—i.e. significantly—older than they were. There was that sense of worldliness. There was a lurking seriousness. To the younger pupils, he seemed like a proper man among them, someone their parents might know. That was one thing. His friendship with Munt was another. (And it was a measure of James’s status that he was able to be friends with Munt at all without significantly impairing his own standing.) Most of James’s other friends thought Freddy was a fucking weirdo. A fucking sicko. Most of his other friends were the sort of people who soberly tried to ignite their own farts. They were locker-room types. They were pack animals par excellence. The self-selecting school elite. A loner like Freddy made no sense to them. And most of Freddy’s other friends… Well, Freddy had no other friends.
In 1984, he spent the ten-day Michaelmas half-term with James in Paris. They stayed out very late every night, loitering hopefully in Pigalle, and drinking Pernod (the advert in the cinema with the naked woman under water), and walking into the skanks of Maghrebi drug dealers in the vicinity of the Gare du Nord. The following summer the same station was their jumping-off point for a month’s inter-railing—the zenith of their early friendship.
When they left school two years later, in spite of widely divergent paths, they still saw each other sometimes. James has unpleasant memories, for instance, of the time he visited Freddy up at Oxford. He was not in his element there. The students, even Freddy, did not seem to speak the same language as him; he literally did not understand quite a lot of what they said. He himself was just starting out as an estate agent at Windlesham Fielding—something he instinctively hushed up—and had moved into a place in Islington with Miriam. The pizza franchise, the film—such things filled the last few years for him. In one way or another, he spent much of his time thinking about money. The squalor of the house in which Freddy lived with various other people shocked him—he had been prepared for something squalid and it still managed to shock him. It had been the plan for him to stay there on the sofa. When he saw the sofa—dank in the spliffsmoke—he opted for a hotel. Which didn’t make him any more popular. Freddy’s squeeze, Isolde, who was something in the student union, subjected him to an irritating interrogation—she kept insisting that he tell them what he thought of ‘Thatcher’—as he tried to feel at home sitting on the ashy floor with a can of Carlsberg in his hand. The extraordinary thing was, these people were his own age—twenty, twenty-one. The places where they went out at night were just depressing. Hitting London in the Audi on Sunday evening, looking forward to dinner with Miriam, he promised himself he would never visit that freezing, foggy shithole again. And he didn’t. Freddy was sent down a month later anyway.
The latest phase of their friendship—following the hibernal period around the turn of the millennium—started in 2003. The post-Interspex phase. Plush magazine. The magazine was Freddy’s idea. Not having spoken to him for years, he phoned James to suggest he might like to invest in a magazine he was planning to set up. It seemed at the time that any idiot could set up a ‘lifestyle’ magazine—sex and shopping—and make a fortune. James no longer had any money to invest, though he knew how to find some, and he liked the idea. It was a potent formula—his own entrepreneurial know-how and experience, Freddy’s journalistic flair, and other people’s money. Unfortunately several dozen similar magazines were launched at about the same time, and two years later the few outstanding assets were still being digested in the intestine of the legal system, dissolved in the enzymes of the law. In the end there were just two issues, January and February 2005. The March issue had in fact been written and laid out—it was little more than a load of naked ladies; under financial pressure, the whole project was quickly simplifying into straightforward soft porn. It was never printed on account of the printers insisting on payment in advance.
One of the wiped-out investors was Freddy’s landlord, Anselm. His £50,000 was the only money Freddy himself had managed to raise. It helped that Anselm was under the impression that Freddy was the last surviving heir of Tsar Nicholas II, and that he was involved in a legal struggle over a vast fortune held in Switzerland since the First World War. (Freddy’s Dostoyevskian appearance helped with this—his low brow and sunken eyes, and the way that on hungover days, when he wore a long winter coat, his skin had a mortal yellow tinge.) He insisted that the Russian trove in Zurich was legally his, and Anselm had lent him significant sums to pay ‘legal fees’ and other expenses—fact-finding missions to Switzerland during the skiing season, for instance—in the expectation of a share of the spoils. (Freddy had promised him, in writing, first ten and then twenty per cent.) Nor, while living in Anselm’s house for the past few years, had he ever paid him a penny of rent—the idea was that that too would come out of the Swiss money in time.
The investment in Plush would not. That was an investment, not a loan, and Anselm demonstrated his faith in the existence of the Tsarina’s diamonds by making the distinction. The loss made him dyspeptic and unhappy. He hated losing money. Still, when the end was nigh, Freddy did ask him for another £50,000, to put towards the printing costs of the pornographic March issue. Which was perhaps to push him too far. Sitting in front of the terminals on which for more than twenty years he had tried, with a startling lack of success, to play the stockmarket, Anselm turned on his swivel-seat and looked at Freddy strictly over the top of his spectacles. He said, ‘Fréderic. Do you think I’m a fool?’
Freddy laughed as if the idea was ludicrous.
In fact there was, in Freddy’s opinion, something medieval
about Anselm’s foolishness—it was scarcely believable, off the scale, like something out of Chaucer or Boccaccio. So naturally he had slept with his wife, Alison, a former airline stewardess with a sort of saucy appeal. He had been sleeping with her since the first week he lived there. Sometimes he told her that he was passionately in love with her, that he wanted to take her away from that miserable house, where the viscid leaves of the overgrown trees in the garden shut out the light and the hot water trickled from a tubercular Ascot. He told her that he wanted to take her to Zanzibar—Zanzibaaah—where he had spent his sun-kissed youth.
*
Why he did it, he still doesn’t know. It was madness. Its only possible end was disaster. Maybe, he thinks now, on the tube with his haversack, that was what he wanted—to push Anselm to the point of disaster; maybe he was just no longer able to take the foolishness, which had acquired a kind of ear-splitting dissonance. Maybe it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was just the hangover.
Whatever it was, two Saturdays ago he woke up and found Alison—she was watching TV and having her first G & T of the day—and told her to pack a suitcase. They were finally going to do it. They were going to leave, and start new lives. She downed her drink and hurried upstairs to pack. And even then, waiting for her in the hall, leaning tiredly on the paint-thickened, time-stained anaglypta, with the keys of Anselm’s Rolls-Royce in his hand, Freddy knew that this was likely to end in disaster. And he did not even particularly want to do it. That was the strange thing. He knew it was likely to end in disaster, and he didn’t even particularly want to do it, and he still did it. There was a self-destructive element, no question. There was a self-destructive ennui at work. He watched her tiptoe downstairs—Anselm was snoring up there somewhere under his Times—in what she may have thought was some sort of old-school elopement scenario. Except she was already married. She stumbled and fell down the last two steps—perhaps it wasn’t her first G & T of the day after all. He took her suitcase and they slipped quietly out onto Cheyne Walk. It was one of those old Seventies Rolls-Royces, its paintwork—chocolate with a cupreous gleam—sticky with substances that had fallen from the tree under which it was parked.
