“I’ll mention it tomorrow night. While they’re striking up the overture.” Not that ‘Auntie Mame’ was a musical.
“Tell her it’s cold at the bottom of the river.”
“And dark,” I said.
“And wet.”
“And all the little fishes go goop-goop-goop! All right—I’ll see what I can do.”
Late though it was when we got in I stayed up, inspired, and wrote a further three pages of the book. Which left me with only the short final chapter to attend to. After that I couldn’t sleep for a long time. I went through the novel mentally, almost incident by incident, one favourite passage following another. I kept thinking of how surprised Oliver and Elizabeth were both going to be, and of the pleasure my book was going to give them.
17
I finished ‘Where Two Roads Meet’ on the nineteenth of March—not, as I’d hoped, before breakfast but very soon afterwards. It was one of the happiest and most satisfying moments of my life when I placed the typescript in Oliver’s hands; there was an element of ceremony about it and recognition of a work completed.
“Well, writer?”
“Well, painter?”
“Does this call for a spot of celebration?”
“What—at ten o’clock in the morning?”
“Why not at ten o’clock in the morning? Will there ever be a better ten o’clock than this?” He caressed my cheek with his knuckles. “Last night I put some Dom Perignon in the fridge.”
I floated through the day in a haze of excitement. Oliver was going to do no painting—meant to sit comfortably in his studio, with a Thermos flask beside him, and to read solidly, without interruption. A twenty-minute break for food—that was all.
I couldn’t bear to stay at home; I couldn’t bear to have lunch with him, his task unfinished, his opinion unexpressed. I went to Kew Gardens, and wished my mother and aunt could have been there too, on one of those outings which, mainly due to the rigours of the winter (mainly—not, unluckily, altogether) had never taken place.
In two days’ time, though … spring! What better moment to try to resuscitate the idea?
But no regret could spoil the heady magic of that day. Every ten minutes I wondered where Oliver might have got to now and sometimes I imagined I was reading with him, looking down over his shoulder. Even when I ended up at a cinema, I was still as conscious of Oliver as I was of the film.
I returned to the flat at seven. And he had finished my book barely half an hour before. He had moved into the sitting room and had the typescript on his lap.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Says he—feigning blithe indifference!”
“Don’t keep me in suspense.”
“All right.” He went to the drinks cupboard in order to pour me a sherry. “Then let me say before anything … congratulations on your having completed your first novel! Two hundred and eighty-one pages—on its own, no mean achievement!” He handed me my glass. “And even more of an achievement, clearly, when it’s a novel so very full of good things.”
I felt a cold trickle of sweat run down the side of my body. I put my sherry on the mantelpiece.
“But you didn’t like it, did you?”
He proceeded with the thought he’d had in mind. “That very long chapter, for instance, when Ella realizes Jean-Paul is attempting to kill her. I found the tension brilliantly sustained.”
“Jean-Philippe,” I said.
“Jean-Philippe.”
“And that’s really what strikes you first? At that point my main worry, in fact, was that it might be turning into melodrama.”
“And what’s wrong with melodrama? Nothing—when it’s skilfully written.”
“Well, all right, then … but talk to me about Blanche! I want to hear about Blanche.”
He laughed. “Oh, quel monstre!”
“Yes, but despite that—and of course she was often referred to as monstrous—didn’t you sometimes feel a sneaking sort of affection?”
He said, “Well, I can see you did. You obviously had a lot of fun writing Blanche. I loved it when she went to Timmy’s speech day.”
“And, in her honour, the headmaster arranged a showing of her first movie? Did you appreciate the parody?”
“Was it based on something real?”
“Oh, yes. ‘Peg of Old Drury’. And Cedric Hardwicke really did play Garrick. But the film was English, not American.”
“Ah … I didn’t know.”
There was a pause.
Oliver picked up the typescript again.
He started to leaf through it.
I said: “You didn’t like it. Did you?”
He picked his words with care. “I think the parts are better than the whole. I also think there’s no doubt whatever that you’re going to make a fine writer—already are a fine writer. But you’ll need to find material which suits you. Not always so easy as it sounds!”
“And this sort doesn’t?”
“It’s too divorced from life. And remember Marnie’s advice: write about the things you know—not the things you’ve seen in the cinema or read about in other books.”
“But you said you liked the chapter where Ella discovers Jean-Philippe is planning to murder her.”
“Yes, I know. I ought to be consistent. Tell you what, my love. Let’s regard ‘Where Two Roads Meet’ as an invaluable and very necessary exercise—you shouldn’t regret even one second of all the months you spent on it! And let me now help you find a storyline which would make far better use of your talents. I’d enjoy that, wouldn’t you? We could stop going out so much, and spend our evenings working out a wonderful synopsis.”
I didn’t answer. Fully a minute went by as I paced about the room. When I sat down he smiled.
“We’ll dream up something so exciting you’ll be able to think of nothing else for days and days! But this time with real character development … and with each event initiating the next, in such a way that your story will reveal a tightness—an inevitability—which even George Eliot or Jane Austen might have envied.”
I also gave a smile, though mine was probably more strained. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have read it all at one sitting. Could that have made a difference?”
He shook his head, silently.
I suggested cutting it.
Again he shook his head. “I think you’d do a whole lot better to start afresh—and on something which bears the stamp of truth right from the start.” He reached out his hand, in a helpless gesture of empathy. “Oh, my poor love. You don’t look very happy.”
“No, I’m all right. A bit disappointed, naturally. Who wouldn’t be?”
“And I’m disappointed, too. But doesn’t that show what idiots we are? There’s so much in this book to rejoice at! Why, only a year from now—”
“But is there nothing else you can say about Blanche?” I didn’t want to hear about only a year from now.
“She was fun.”
“But that’s it? Fun?”
“My darling, let’s face it. Blanche is overwritten. She’s amusing in small doses but you’ve let her run away with you. As I say, you probably had a whale of a time creating her, but then you became a mite self-indulgent.”
And what else? He said that both my hero and my heroine were insipid; and that, with Timothy especially, one had no idea what kind of person he really was, what drove him on, what made him tick. And another way of stressing that same point: there appeared to be no connection between Timothy the child and Timothy the man, and not one of his boyhood experiences need ever have taken place, so far as Oliver could see, for all the influence they’d had upon his adult character.
Oh, he was thorough—my august and noble patron; once he’d started he plainly sought to be inclusive! And I could have sworn the exercise was giving him enjoyment. Superficially it may have seemed he was occasionally trying to comfort me—a picking out of odd passages, satiric or perceptive, which honestly gave a foretaste, as he kept on saying in one form
or another until I genuinely felt I might shout at him if he did so once again—a foretaste of the fine and important book I clearly had it within me to produce; but then, at the slightest prod, he would immediately rush off again on his pleasurable crusade of destruction. I had read recently that well-nigh any conversation, no matter how apparently innocent, was basically aggressive; an attempt to gain the upper hand. And I could well believe it. I didn’t know what long-repressed resentments Oliver might be in the throes of releasing that night, but I could only hope he found it therapeutic. He certainly deserved to—with all the energy he was expending!
But I derived my consolation: it was actually I who had the upper hand. Not in my endless self-indulgent flow of words (who was he to speak of self-indulgence?) but in my silences, my weary nods, my pretence of acquiescence. Okay, I was thinking all the while, all the while I was enabling him to carry on with the great purge—okay, let him say this, let him say that, let him pick holes, let him demolish. But wasn’t it, in truth, a little pathetic: this compulsion he had to dominate, to play Pygmalion, to mete out money and knowledge and approval with always the same barely concealed air of condescension? A father-figure, head of the household, undisputed boss! No wonder, I thought, he pined so feebly to create a family. It was of course a need that all essentially weak men had: to appear strong. Yes; poor Oliver. It was certainly a bit pathetic.
And so the joke was—the ultimate irony of a sad, sad situation—that when we went to bed at a ridiculously early hour and he believed that he was reassuring me, it was far more the other way about.
Poor Oliver.
The next morning, however, I no longer felt so tolerant.
From the moment I awoke, shortly after five, unable to return to sleep, I felt bleak, in some fashion bereaved—but definitely not tolerant.
I asked myself what right he had, first to encourage me, then to use me as something on which to take out his frustrations, all his pitiful frustrations. Did he suppose that, just because from time to time he so luxuriatingly owned up to how complex and cussed he was, this automatically exonerated him? The divine right of kings: such is the way I am; how can I help it if I am deeper and more finely wrought than others?
Oh, damn him! Damn him! Damn him!
But at least I wasn’t a masochist—I needn’t just sit there and endure it. Thank God, I had my bolt-hole. Thank God it wouldn’t be a sign of any weakness if I now rushed back to that.
Therefore, straight after breakfast, I made a most grateful escape to my own flat.
It had been several days since my last visit: I usually went to air the place, and sweep and dust and even polish. But this morning, rather strangely, I had been there for scarcely fifteen minutes when there came a ring at the doorbell; and outside stood a lad with a telegram.
18
URGENT STOP PHONE TONIGHT STOP MOTHER
My instant thought, naturally: Aunt Clara. Rendered stupid by shock I sank down in a chair and gazed further at the message. She was either dead or as good as dead or … worse than dead. I said, Dear God I don’t believe in you. But make Aunt Clara well and I swear I’ll try to.
Yet gradually my mind started to clear. Of course I didn’t have to wait until this evening. I could telephone right now. I hurried to the phone box.
But the phone box was occupied and, impatient for action, I ran to where I knew there was another. On my way to it, however, it occurred to me my mother wouldn’t be at home; she’d be spending the day at the hospital; hence her instruction to ring in the evening. Though the second phone box was empty I ran past it. I’d seen a bus for Charing Cross and managed to catch it at the lights. A taxi would have been quicker but the bus was there and a taxi wasn’t.
The journey to Folkestone was the slowest I had ever known. I arrived at half-past-twelve and went straight to the house rather than the hospital. Just in case. The distance was too short to regard the time as wasted.
Faintly to my surprise, when I rang the bell I heard movement. To my further surprise, the door was opened by Aunt Clara. For several seconds we simply stood there, like two ill-informed meerkats.
“By all that’s wonderful!” she said at last. “I thought you were the postman.”
There was obviously not a lot the matter with her. I felt tremendous relief, clearly—but also a sense of anticlimax, almost annoyance. She had managed to give me a very bad couple of hours.
“But why were you looking so astonished?” she asked. “You could hardly have thought I was the postman.”
It was the relief that proved the stronger. “Oh, you’d be surprised. The postmen are getting sexier each day. Where’s Mum?”
We had by this time gone into the house.
“Why, at the restaurant—where else? But she forgot to tell me you were coming home. How on earth did you manage to get away in the morning? Has the shop burnt down? I do hope so.”
I followed her dazedly into the kitchen. Abruptly she turned and said, “You’re not ill, are you?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“And you haven’t had the sack?”
I shook my head. We laughed a little. I said: “And you two are keeping okay?”
My aunt grew serious. “Well, I am, thank you; but honestly I’m not so sure about your mother. She came home last night looking extremely peaked. And she didn’t seem any happier this morning. But when I ventured to suggest she spend the day at home she fairly snapped my head off. If you ask me, I think that job’s getting a bit too much for her.”
Cancer, I thought. The anxiety returned, practically as strong but, this time, directed towards my mother. She must have found a lump; in addition to everything else—early widowhood, straitened circumstances, boredom, worry over Clara—now this! Why was there no fairness to this life of ours?
“Anyway, John, it’s as well you are here this weekend. It will cheer her up.”
“Yes.” I’d been going to another concert with Elizabeth that evening but I could always telephone.
“Sit down and tell me what sort of sandwiches you’d like,” invited Aunt Clara. “I’m having cheese. I could offer you cheese. In the cupboard there’s some nice cheese.”
“Oh, decisions, decisions,” I cried. But my heart wasn’t in it. “Listen, if you don’t mind, I won’t stop; not for the minute. You see, I’d like to speak to Mum as quickly as I can.”
“Such urgency!” she said.
She was half laughing, but still looked puzzled.
“You do know, John dear, that if you’re ever in any kind of a scrape…?”
“You’ll be the first to hear about it.”
“No, I don’t necessarily ask that. But naturally you realize how very fond of you your old aunt is? Anyway,” she added, with sudden brusqueness, “I’ll see you later!” I kissed her on the cheek—answered, “Ditto!”—and left.
The Copper Kettle was, for me, less than a ten-minute walk away. Its regular clientele was elderly and mostly female and its decor was the sort you would expect: a long row of copper saucepans, of graduated sizes, hanging from nails in the mock beam above ye olde fireplace … but with the eponymous kettle sitting in state upon the hearth. Every table always had at its centre a jar of wild flowers.
It was one o’clock and in all likelihood—this being a Friday—the customers would be eating delicate portions of steamed fish in parsley sauce, with apple crumble and custard, or ice cream, to follow.
The place was full. When I opened the door my mother was sitting at her cash desk. For the moment, she was alone, and looking in my direction.
Yet she didn’t see me—not until I was standing right before her. Then she focused and gave a start.
“Hello, Mum!”
But it wasn’t easy to appear cheerful. Her expression had brought back the awful scene there’d been in January, when inadvertently I’d mentioned my driving lessons and had then been unable to keep my grand new car a secret. After which—very unhopefully—I had been obliged to invent an Oliver who was a wi
dower of sixty-five: an improbable benefactor who regarded me in the light of one of his own sons, of whom there were four.
However, since then, that mutual admiration society, whose final meeting had been in December, had utterly disbanded; since then, things hadn’t been the same between my mother and myself.
“We can’t talk here!” Those were her first words.
“Where can we, then?”
“This evening. After work. I told you.”
“But nobody can hear us here. Can’t you tell me what the trouble is? I’ve been so worried since I had your wire.”
“Have you? Yes, I’m not surprised.”
“Are you ill?”
“Ill? Yes … ill. I feel quite ill.”
“Then you shouldn’t be working. I’ll speak to Mrs Watson. I’ll ring for a taxi and take you home.”
“No! I don’t want you to! In any case—can’t you see how busy we are? You could hardly have chosen a less convenient moment!”
“I don’t care how busy you are. If you’re not fit to work—”
“What are you doing here, anyway? I didn’t want you to come—”
“The telegram said urgent. I decided the best thing would be to take the day off and catch the first train down.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?”
“Decide to take the day off. You didn’t need to. You see … I know!” Even in this extremity there was a note of triumph in her voice and—at least equally disconcerting—a gleam of it in her eyes. “Why do you think I sent that telegram? Because I couldn’t reach you at the shop, that’s why!”
“Oh … Oh, yes. I see.”
“I’m not quite the fool you thought me.”
“I never thought you a fool.”
“Excuse me. I must attend to this customer.”
When she had finished I said, “You know, it still involved my taking the day off.”
“We really can’t talk here. It’s impossible.”
“I’ve been writing a book, you see. I told you about this book. I’ve been working on it every day—more or less keeping office hours. Now it’s nearly finished … and I think it’s going to make me money!” I was speaking rapidly, and with urgency, trying to cram it all in before she could tell me to stop, or before there should come another business interruption. “I realized you wouldn’t like me giving up the job and that’s why I didn’t tell you. But I wanted to give you a surprise by getting the book done quickly and having it accepted. You’ve always known it was my aim to be a writer.”
The Man on the Bridge Page 12
