‘I don’t want to help you, it’s too depressing,’ said Kath, heading out of the room. ‘I’ll be next door if you need me.’
‘Did he mention me at all?’ I called back.
‘Just once, after he came out of hospital. He said, “I don’t suppose I gave Chris any reason to love me.”’
‘He really said that?’
‘He knew he’d never get around to telling you. He felt he’d left it too late for that sort of thing.’ It was typical for our family to have set a time limit on a declaration of feelings.
There wasn’t much to sort out. A couple of distinguished-service medals that had belonged to my grandfather, some cheap tie-pins and tarnished cufflinks, tobacco tins of odds and ends, insurance policies, a spectacularly ugly musical box made by William, and a couple of blown-up wedding photographs. As I looked at them I found myself wondering: had my grandmother really been such a monster? Long after she had died I discovered why she always wore her black boots. One was built up to hide a short leg. Life could not have been easy for her, so perhaps the only way to survive was to be tough. Families often resented an interloper, so it was likely that Bill’s sister Doreen, who had been closer to Mrs Fowler, would have been wary of my mother, with her refusal to join in the small talk and her stuck-up manners. The alliances and enmities were all so subjective, but they still coloured how we felt about the past and affected who we were in a variety of subtle and unexpected ways.
There was one wedding photograph I had never seen in the house before. It showed my father standing next to a handsome, muscular young man dressed in the kind of smart grey suit that Bill was later to adopt. He was being handed his wedding ring, but there was something about the pose that was too private to be entirely comfortable.
‘Who is this?’ I asked, wandering into the lounge to show my mother the picture.
‘Oh, that was Jack, your father’s best man. He doted on you. We used to call him your Uncle Jack, although he wasn’t a relation. Those two used to be inseparable.’
‘I’m surprised I don’t remember him.’
‘He died when you were little. Bad lungs.’
‘He’s very good looking. Far more your type.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think so.’
‘You didn’t tip your hat at him, then?’ I joked.
‘No, Jack wasn’t interested in the ladies, not in that way. He was a confirmed bachelor. Your father was fond of him, and took it very badly when he passed away so early in life. They knew each other from work. Jack collected antique glass. He had a flat in Bayswater. Your father would always stand him a beer or two. They were thick as thieves.’
‘Did you go to his funeral?’ I asked, a faint question nagging at me.
‘No, and neither did Bill. His mother wouldn’t let him. She’d heard something, you see, and put her foot down. It wasn’t mentioned in those days, you just avoided certain people. You probably remember how she could be.’
A shadowed piece of my father moved into the half-light.
‘He burned my poetry book,’ I said.
‘Well, he had a thing about poetry, he didn’t think it was manly. That was his mother’s doing. They lived their lives along very strict lines. There were things that were appropriate for a man to like, and things that weren’t. I fought hard for him, but I knew I’d lose out either way. She tore her son into a terrible bundle of contradictions. She tried to make him stay away from Jack. You don’t know what it cost him to get married at all.’
She paused in the doorway, unsure if she should say anything more.
‘He didn’t understand you, Chris. But I think perhaps he was envious. On the night before he died, Bill and I sat in the garden – he felt too hot in the house – and we had the oddest conversation. He pointed above the trees to a distant star – he always had incredibly good eyesight, even at the end – and asked if I thought there was life on other planets. I told him I didn’t know. “What if we were living on the last star left in the sky?” he suddenly asked. “We’d be all alone. It wouldn’t matter any more what anyone else thought of us.” Well, I could hardly be expected to think of an answer. I wasn’t prepared for him suddenly showing signs of curiosity or regret. Then I remembered what he had been like when we were courting, the wild ideas, the plans for the future.’
I thought of my father standing in the darkness on Blackheath at the age of seventeen, firewatching as phosphorescent bombs left angel-trails across the night sky. The distant glowing fires that turned the air around him acrid, the warning shouts from indistinct figures, the rumours and stories of death and dying. It must have seemed like the end of life, just as his was starting. His mother had told him to remain at home, where it was safe. She had been frightened of losing her only son. No wonder he had been so afraid to take any chances after that. He had been barely more than a child himself when war had broken out, and had remained the same age ever after.
That was why he always stood at the window, I thought. He was imagining life among the stars, thinking of what might have been.
‘I suppose he thought he could get away from his past. It would have been an escape for both of us. Except that it could never happen.’
‘He couldn’t leave her.’
‘Of course not. He needed her to feel reassured about himself, and she played on it. I think at heart he was a good man, but he wasn’t a good husband. Lord knows he tried hard enough. I have to take my share of the blame as well. I should never have married him. Whenever he saw you and I conspiring together, it must have made him feel worse about his own mother. I suppose he thought I was doing the same thing to you.’ She sighed, rising to make a fresh pot of Brooke Bond. ‘I loved him in my own way. You can always find a way to love someone if you understand them. I’ll miss him. Well, there you are. What’s done is done.’
It was the last word she had to say on the subject.
35
Accidental Examples
MY OLD SCHOOL friend Simon was getting married, and wanted me to be his best man. After a whirlwind romance that lasted a mere twenty-two years, he and his intended, Kate, threw caution to the wind and rushed into betrothal, perhaps because their children had shamed them into tying the knot before somebody died.
It took a lot to get me down to Somerset. In the intervening years I had rarely been spotted outside the M25.
‘So,’ I said when I arrived at Simon’s front door, horrified to find mud and what appeared to be some kind of horse ordure on my newly purchased Prada boots, ‘I hear you finally became a custom car designer.’
‘And you became a writer. Didn’t you start with horror stories?’
‘Yeah, no matter what else I write, satires, drama, social comedies, that’s what they’re going to put on my tombstone.’
‘I can’t believe how many books you’ve written. And yet nobody I know has ever heard of you.’
‘Well, occasionally I get lucky, but mostly I’m mid-list.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I’m one of the legion of writers out there who get respectful reviews and a steady readership, but never tap into current chattering-class obsessions.’
‘Sounding a bit bitter there, mate.’
‘I’m very happy,’ I promised him.
‘From what I’ve heard, your stuff’s just too weird. We’re ordinary families down here. We like our Harry Potters and Jeffrey Archers.’
‘I thought you would.’
‘I was sent a newspaper cutting about you. Those crazy elderly detectives you write about, Swan & Vesta.’
‘Bryant & May. I write the Bryant & May mysteries.’
‘Yeah, those are the ones.’ He grinned. ‘Bryant & May? Quite a match, eh?’
‘Right, haven’t heard that one before.’
He leaned forward, lowering his voice, looking very serious. ‘Look, you might have to tone it down around here. The locals aren’t much struck on Londoners with weird ideas, especially ones who reckon they’re creativ
e.’
That sounded familiar. I smiled to myself. When my first published tale featured the end line Vengeance sits on the left hand of God, I realized I had written a horror story just like the ones I had read as a child, although there were no ghouls or ghosts in it. For years, fiction had remained something I did in my spare time, like building galleons out of balsa wood or repairing clocks, an alternative to watching television. Now it was my livelihood. When people meet me, the first thing they usually ask is ‘What have you written that I’ve read?’, a question which presupposes some level of psychic ability. For the record, the second question is always ‘Do you write under your own name?’ because an amazing number of people think authors’ names are made up.
‘You could probably shift a lot more books if you wrote like Jeffrey Archer.’
‘Probably.’
‘Still, I guess you’re just grateful to be published at all. I mean, who reads any more?’
Novels, I was told by one publisher who had rejected my work, were commodities sold like tins of biscuits, and the sweeter the taste, the more you could sell. But to me, the most important thing was that they had to contain fresh ingredients, not recycled ideas from other people. I realized now that my mother had been trying to tell me this for years; I had simply not been listening to her.1
Still, I had delayed. I had been afraid to try, and risk failure. I remembered my father angrily snapping off the volume dial on his transistor radio while listening to Movie-Go-Round because an actor had said that performing required an act of courage. Courage, said Bill, was still working on the roads at sixty-five, spreading tar even though you knew it was giving you lung cancer, as his own father had done. Courage wasn’t mincing about on a stage or fiddling with a pen.
But in a way that Bill could never understand, it was. For years I was sure that if I failed as a writer, there would be nothing else left for me. If I could not achieve the one thing in life I tried hardest to do, it would be tough living with the loss of my dreams. How many people set out to change their worlds, only to find themselves in a state of perpetual downward revision and disappointment?
Over the years my list of favourite books had changed. These days it contained peripheral novels, tomes that fell outside the critics’ canon of greatness. High on the list was Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar, because Billy’s story acted as a warning and a reminder to me of the path not to take.
It took me years to build up the courage, but I finally stepped on to the train of opportunity that Billy Liar had let pass, and attempted my own novel. The size of the task dawned on me when I entered my flat and saw that it had turned yellow – the lounge floor and all the windows were covered with scribbled Post-it notes, like the exposed ramblings of an unsettled mind.
The main thing was not to think about the task in terms of success or failure. Writing came naturally, but writing well did not. It was like speaking a foreign language: you could never afford to stop concentrating for a second.
I added parts of myself to the stories, trawling for scraps of half-buried memories, like shaking seasoning into a stew. The things I recalled eventually allowed my characters to become both predictable and unknowable. It was like attaching a hundred coloured strings to push-pins, and sticking the pins all over a huge map, then plotting the trajectories and intersections of all the bits of string. And after I did it once, I did it again and again, until it started to make a vague kind of sense.
‘Yeah, I’ve been meaning to write a novel,’ said the unimpressed cab driver who dropped me back at the station. ‘I just haven’t had the time to get around to it.’ He made it sound like mending the guttering or putting up a birdhouse, a tiresome chore anyone could handle if they owned a decent toolkit. I did not believe it was something you could simply choose to do. Most of the writers I knew did it because they had no choice at all in the matter. In that sense it was like supporting a hopeless football team or being a kleptomaniac.
The most articulate child I ever met was a pretty little girl called Athena, who grew up in her mother’s steam-filled restaurant in North London, and who helped out in the evenings by serving at the tables and talking to the customers about themselves, before falling asleep behind the counter where the dishcloths were stored.
The most doomed boy I ever met went to an incredibly posh school in Westminster, where he was surrounded by every possible aid to becoming ‘creative’, supplied by an angry, determined, media-obsessed father he dared not fail.
From this I realized that it didn’t matter if you grew up in a house with hardly any books, or if you behaved so differently from your parents that everyone thought you must be a stranded foreign-exchange student. You could still pop up like a pavement weed and prove impossible to stamp down, just as a young chef might appear in a household that survived on microwaved food, or an artist could rise from a home that only had The Green Lady on its walls.
An invisible, inconsequential family, marking time together in a small, hospitable neighbourhood, like a Reader’s Digest condensation, only with more swearing and unconscious cruelty. Nothing the Fowlers ever did made any difference at all to the universe, the world, England, London or even Westerdale Road, and yet they were the product of a particular time, and therefore became accidental examples of it. People complained that everyone’s lives were too open now, but for too long they had been closed so tightly that no one could draw breath.
Back at my parents’ bungalow, I studied the photograph of my father. Bill was thirty-five when he married, but looked careworn and much older. The strain of his paradoxical life showed in the creases on his face. My fingers traced the contours of his knobbly skull, wondering what he was thinking in the picture.
I’m sorry I didn’t know you, I thought. The fault was mine as much as yours. I got lost in my books. I should have bothered to find out who you really were.
Kath and I sat side by side, sipping strong dark tea from fat white mugs. The delicate red and gold cups, the bone-china cake-stand and side plates she had kept for best had been the only items to survive the cull, tucked away and taped shut in cardboard boxes, in the tacit understanding that they would probably never be used to entertain friends and neighbours. The civilized social life my mother had been promised in the magazines, all dainty doilies and conversations about literature, had failed to materialize. And yet she had found contentment, after a fashion.
A few days after Bill’s funeral, the neighbours tentatively knocked to see if the coast was clear, and brought her little things they thought she might like. It was as if they half expected Bill to come back, like a Hammer Films zombie, and throw them all out. Slowly, the front room was opened up to guests, just for a mug of tea and some biscuits, a shop-bought fruit cake, the shy delivery of a bunch of flowers, but it brought Kath back to life.
She remained my greatest critic. After finishing one of a series of books I had written, she closed the cover with a final pat and said, ‘Well, dear, I think you’ve mined out that particular seam.’ And yet one day, when we quietly sat in her bungalow, she said after a thoughtful silence, ‘You know, when you first got published, I felt that I did, too.’ Beyond that, she wouldn’t be drawn on the subject.
As I drove away from the house, my mother stood at the door, smiling and waving until she was lost from sight. The curse of youth, I thought, was the determination to ignore the past; the curse of age was a desire to remember it. I was interested in understanding what had gone before, but Kath preferred to switch on the television and drown out old memories. Why shouldn’t she? She had earned the right. On the day I cleared out my father’s clothes, I had finally come to understand why I should love him. It was a shame that the realization had taken so long.
At home that night I climbed on to the bed and reached to the top of my wardrobe, pulling down the last few remaining notebooks, which were now covered in layers of grey dust. At some point I had stopped writing in them, and now I wanted to remind myself when that was.
Even tho
ugh I had switched to writing short stories, filing film reviews had been a hard habit to break. They peppered the pages so much that it was possible to provide an exact date for each book.
I found I had stopped filling them in on the very day I had left Cyril Villa to go and live alone. It seemed that those early, hopeless attempts at writing had not been signs of individuality at all, but of dependence and frustration. The blank pages that followed were the real signs of freedom.
Even though my father’s death had placed a full stop on one page of my life, the rest of the book would continue onward, each sheet as bare and white and wide as the horizon, waiting to be filled with words that might one day glimmer like stars.
‘I don’t know who he is,’ Bill had said of me plaintively. ‘There’s nothing in him I recognize.’
I am my mother’s son. Just as you were yours. But I finally became myself. I wish you could have, too.
Time, I thought, for just one final list. Thinking back to all of the years of advice that my mother and the librarian of the East Greenwich Public Library had given me, for no other reason than to hope I would improve myself, I set down my own list of writing rules:
My Rules for Writing
Fiction means you can make things up.
Don’t be ashamed of embarrassing yourself.
Stories don’t have to be biographies.
Ask yourself what your hero really wants.
Be prepared to think the unthinkable.
When you imagine your story can’t go further, go further.
You don’t always need to explain why people do things.
Crisis moments are better when they’re completely still.
Some of the best stories occur because the hero is slow to correct a mistake.
Everyone has the same feelings; they just think differently.
Leave room for your characters to breathe.
You have to love something about your hero.
Paperboy Page 25
