My Other Life Page 16

  People sometimes said that because of all of my opinionated reviews, but it was only a posture I had adopted. There were comic possibilities in being full of opinions and crotchets. I wanted to be the joker who never smiled, and I was surprised when I was taken seriously.

  "You're very busy, aren't you? I see your shorter pieces everywhere."

  "But mainly on the back pages."

  "I loathe self-deprecation," she said. "Don't be insincere. I thought your Railway Bazaar was brilliant. It was quite the best book I've read in ages. I gave copies of it to all my friends for Christmas."

  When people spoke in this way I always assumed they were making it up. I smiled at the woman and asked no further questions. I thought it might embarrass her if I had. In any case, she was still talking.

  "Your best review was from a man I saw walking along the tracks at Paddington station. He had a copy of it in his hand. A man passing by said, 'Is that book any good?' and the first man said, 'Fucking marvelous, Fred.'"

  "I like that."

  "I thought you might," she said. "And what are you working on at the moment?"

  "A novel."

  She smiled. I loved the fullness of her lips against her thin face.

  "About a man," I said.

  Her eyes were dark and deeply set.

  "He leaves home and becomes a sort of castaway."

  Still she said nothing. There was a pinkish bloom on her cheeks.

  "He dies in the end."

  How was it possible for someone to hear all this and still say nothing? Her silence made me nervous.

  But I loved this woman's looks, her lips, her lovely Madonna's face, her skin so close against her skull, her high forehead and her black, gleaming hair tightly drawn back. Her paleness, her pinkness had no blemish, and I found her slightly protruding teeth another aspect of her beauty. She was wearing a dark dress trimmed in velvet and lace, and although she was thin—with a slender neck and fragile-looking arms and wrists—she had a full, deep bosom that her good posture and height elevated and presented. I was accustomed to regarding lovely women as not very intelligent, but she seemed both beautiful and brainy—her silences alone seemed intelligently timed—and this combination I found madly attractive.

  My tongue was gummy as I said, "It's called The Last Man," and looked down and saw that she was wearing stiletto heels, wicked shoes on thin, white feet.

  "That title has an excellent pedigree. The Last Man —that was Mary Shelley's original title for Frankenstein," she said. "And I'm sure you know that Orwell's first title for 1984 was The Last Man in Europe."

  From my expression I was sure she realized that I did not know this at all.

  "You could ask Sonia," the woman said. "Sonia Orwell. She's over there by the window. Do you want to meet her?"

  I said no, not at the moment, because I could not imagine that George Orwell's widow would want to meet me—I anticipated more silences.

  "I really do admire your writing," the woman said. "In fact, I think you might have that rare combination of qualities that makes a writer of genius."

  "What qualities?" I asked, and fumbled with my arms.

  "Total megalomania and a nose for what the public like to read. It's unbeatable. Dickens had it. So did Shaw. Henry James didn't have it, but Maugham did."

  "I've just been reading Hugh Walpole. He was a friend of Henry James. James was always sending him hugs. Portrait of a Man with Red Hair."

  The woman had stiffened each time I had uttered a sentence.

  "A macabre novel," I said. "Set in Cornwall."

  The woman said, "You're much better than Hugh Walpole."

  It was the first time in my life anyone had ever said that I was better than a dead writer. I had never imagined that I was better than anyone who had written in the past. It had never occurred to me that I might be compared to another writer, dead or alive. The point about writing was that you were yourself—comparisons were meaningless. Nevertheless, I took this woman's assertion as praise.

  She went on praising me—and I felt flustered, embarrassed, and confused, like a puppy being squirted by a hose. I also found myself delighting in glancing down at her cleavage. Did women know how this warm, smile-like slot excited a man's interest?

  Distracted, I asked, "And who are you?"

  But she was looking across the room.

  "Will you excuse me?" she said, and gave me a lovely smile, and she was away, sooner than I wished.

  Had I said something wrong?

  Then Musprat was at my elbow, with a cigarette and a smeared glass and flecks of vol-au-vent pastry on his tie and fingers. His eyes were bloodshot, his suit wrinkled, the knot on his tie yanked small. He was slightly hunched over and looked more fragile and elderly than ever.

  "Who was that?" I asked him.

  She was standing by the fireplace talking animatedly to a man in a chalk-striped suit.

  "Lady Max," Musprat said. "She's married to a tick called Alabaster. He's something in the City. They have a house in the Boltons."

  "She seems nice." I was thinking of her praise.

  "That's the one thing she's not."

  "She's attractive," I said.

  "Sort of a bruised peach," Musprat said.

  "I like the way she's dressed."

  "She's always wearing those fuck-me shoes," Musprat said.

  "Don't you think she's pretty?"

  "I hate that word," he said in a disgusted way. "I don't want to hear it. At this point in the evening everyone looks leathery to me."

  I lingered at the party hoping to speak to the woman, Lady Max, again. She did not return to my end of the room. She was surrounded and I was too shy to approach her.

  I loitered, growing sober, and with this heightening sobriety felt strangely superior—not in any complicated way and not intellectually, but simply stronger and in control. The other, drunker guests brought out a kind of priggishness in me. At a certain point—when the first drunken person emerged and began to stagger and sputter—I usually stopped drinking and began to watch, and grew sober and colder, and was all the more fascinated by what I saw.

  Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power and direction, they were yelling and gasping. They strengthened me.

  I did not want to be that way. I stood, growing calmer, observing them. They seemed, as Musprat often seemed to me, self-destructive and weak. I didn't see how people like that could write anything. That was my yardstick. I measured people by their ability to write. How could these people write well if they could not see straight?

  Lady Max flashed past and I made after her. I wanted to hear more, but lost her in the crowd.

  2

  It was important in London to leave a party or start home before the public houses closed, for just after eleven o'clock the streets were thronged with drunks—all men, their faces wolfish and pale, yelling at passing cars or else staggering and scrapping. Some of them loitered, looking ravenous, eating chips with greasy fingers out of pouches of old newspapers. All over London these men, turned out of the pubs, were pissing in doorways.

  That night I was delayed on the Underground, and by the time I reached Victoria the eruption had occurred—drunks everywhere. The station was overbright, which made it seem dirtier than it would have in dim light, and it was old—the wind blowing up the tracks and through the barriers, rustling the newspapers and the plastic cups and moving them through the way the tide moves flotsam. The newsstand was shut, but the Evening Standard poster was still stuck to the wall, looking sorry in its teasing way: TV COMEDY STAR IN SUICIDE BID—PICTURE.

  That feeling I had had at the party came back to me on the train, as I saw the drunks eating chips and dripping hamburgers, or else slumped in their seats, or swaying feebly with the swaying carriage, looking weak and tired. It was not merely that I was sober; I was also a stranger, an Ame
rican, an alien, just quietly looking. I saw theirs as a peculiarly English despair—specifically London fatigue, London futility. It was their fate, not mine, and I wanted to write about it, because no one else had noticed it. I was not any of them.

  Three stops, thinking these thoughts, and then I walked through the disorder of my own station, littered and grimy, its posters torn and its black iron gleaming with the sweat of condensed fog. I liked hearing my footsteps in the stillness, and the shadows and the mist falling through the light of the street lamps, as empty double-decker buses moved importantly down the empty high road.

  Alison had gone to bed. Before I joined her I crept upstairs in the dark and stood in the boys' room, listening to the rise and fall of their breathing, just the slightest whisper of it, Will's adenoidal snorting and Anton's just audible flutter. They were both still, like buoyant things floating high and peacefully on a sea of sleep. Without waking them, I kissed each boy's cheek—their faces were warm in the cold room, and their breath had made feathers of frost on the windowpane.

  I undressed in the dark and crept into bed with Alison. She slid against me and sighed, the bedclothes a nest of warmth. In order to ease myself into sleep I went through the chapters of my unfinished novel, murmuring the number of each chapter and the secret tide I had assigned it. There were eleven so far, but I was asleep by the time I got to eight.

  London nights were silent and clammy cold in the submarine darkness, and when I woke from a dream of strangulation it was as though I were suspended in this dark, vitreous silence. I had the sense of us all in the house swimming through these London nights, of night here as a sea swell, and of us sinuously moving through it as though drifting deep in the face of a wave. I loved sleep, and it was only morning that gave me a sense of disorder, something to do with the morning darkness of winter—we woke and dressed in the dark—and the clank of milk bottles, of crates shifting on the milk float, the only sound in the street, but a deranged one.

  "You came home so late last night," Alison said. "What time was it?"

  "Eleven or so," I said, wondering why I was lying. She would not have minded my telling her it had been after midnight.

  Yet she was silent. She seemed preoccupied. I sensed her disapproval.

  "It wasn't much," I said, being defensive. "Pretty boring. I got some money at Gaston's, then Ian and I went to a book launch." Alison said nothing. I said, "That boring American woman who writes about Nash terraces."

  She had not heard. She said, "The boys were up until all hours doing homework. Why do they give them so much prep? I'm going to complain."

  "Don't say anything, Mum," Anton said.

  Will said, "You'll get us into trouble."

  "Jeremy's mum complained and Townsend announced it in class and everyone laughed at him."

  They were seated awkwardly at the table wolfing their cereal. In their school uniforms, their hair sticking up, their blazers rumpled, they looked harassed, if not anguished. They ate quickly, nervously, without any pleasure, just stoking their faces, and then they jumped up and said they had to go or they would be late.

  "I'll walk you to the bus stop," I said.

  Alison said, "I'll be gone by the time you get back, so I'll say goodbye now." She kissed me while the boys tightened the buckles on their satchels.

  Mornings were clamorous, and I needed silence, needed the house to myself. I wanted to see them all on their way. I could not sit down until the house was empty.

  At the bus stop, Will said, "Are you a socialist?"

  "I don't vote—Americans can't vote in Britain," I said. "I'm just a spectator."

  "Mum's a Labour supporter," Anton said. "I am too."

  "That's what he told Mr. Fitch," Will said.

  "That's none of your business," Anton said.

  "You can be a socialist, but if you're dogmatic," I began.

  Will asked, "What does 'dogmatic' mean?"

  Anton was listening too, as though he had been too proud to ask.

  "Something like inflexible."

  "Mr. Beale is inflexible."

  Mr. Beale was the hated headmaster.

  All this time they were looking up the road for the bus. I hovered and yet held back, wanting to protect them and wanting to be strong. And they had the same ambivalence, liking my company and resenting the thought that they might need it. They were thin and pale, with a hint of anxiety in their soft brown eyes.

  It was a cold, overcast morning of mist, with a harsh sound of traffic, and the dampness gave a greasy look to the black road and the broken pavement. Then the bus loomed and slowed, and they leaped aboard, catching hold of the rail, and when the bus resumed and went past me I saw them standing, small figures jammed in the aisle among all the heavy coats.

  The house was empty when I returned. I went to my study and opened my notebook and read: Shafts of sunlight filled with brilliant flakes falling through the green leaves to the jungle floor—which was where I had left off yesterday to write my book review and go to Gaston's.

  Shafts of sunlight filled with brilliant flakes.

  I looked through the window of my study. Outside, London in midwinter was dark, and the brick and stone of the old house-backs I saw looked crusted with neglect. The trees were brittle and black too, and the damp night air had left a look of slime on the slate roofs. Some windows were lighted—you could see the pale bulbs—but the overall impression was of stillness and darkness, of daylight sleepily emerging and seeping out of the low sky. In this narrow corner of the city winter seemed a kind of fatal affliction, the way a gangrenous leg turns black.

  The darkness was a comfort. I was learning to live here. The stillness, and even the tomblike quality in the shapes of houses, the sense I had of being buried alive here, penetrated me; it kept me indoors and calmed me and helped me think. A blue sky would have turned my head and tempted me away, but the gray morning and the backs of these old houses and their brown bricks kept my reverie intact. I was not dealing with London. There was no distraction here. I was writing about the jungle.

  I had sketched the way ahead—I knew what was coming in the next three or four chapters. After that, I had only the vaguest sense of what I was in for. Mocking myself, I said out loud, "Now what?"

  Just as I picked up my pen, the mailman's feet sounded on the stone front steps, and I held my breath, and then letters began plopping through the letter slot. Only one required a reply, an overdue bill, and I paid it immediately, then found a stamp for it. Another, from a reader—a woman who said she liked my books—I crumpled and threw away. I lifted my pen again, but when nothing came—no word, no thought—I retrieved the woman's letter from the wastebasket and smoothed it. It was from Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada. I pulled out my big atlas and found the place—near Edmonton—and I was so touched by a message from this distance, I replied to her on a postcard, thanking her for her letter.

  It was then ten-thirty. I tried again, attempting to move on. The shafts of sunlight ... I struggled to continue the thought, to make a paragraph, but I could not advance it.

  The woman's letter from Stony Plain, Alberta, had mentioned a particular story I had written years before. I found that collection in the bookshelf and read the story. It was good. It held me. Could I still write as fluently as that? Putting the book away, I glanced up and saw a guidebook to Canada. Stony Plain was not listed, but there was an entry for Edmonton. The capital. Oldest city in the province. On the Saskatchewan River. And this: Ukrainians played a large role in the settlement of Edmonton and are still the dominant ethnic group.

  I shut the guidebook and dragged my notebook over and tried again, struggling to begin. It was now eleven-twenty. I reread everything that I had written in that chapter so far, and as I read I noticed that my fingernails needed cutting. I attended to this, paring them carefully over the wastebasket, and as I was doing so the telephone rang. It was Ian Musprat. Did I want to meet for lunch?

  Snipping my nails, I said, "I'm writing."

&n
bsp; I believed the lie would commit me to action.

  Musprat said, "I've been thrashing around all morning. I can't do a thing. It's hopeless. How about playing snooker at the Lambourne later on?"

  "I'm busy tonight." Another lie. I must write something, I thought. "What about tomorrow?"

  "Fine. I'll see you at the Lambourne at seven. If we eat early the table will be free. I'll let you get on with your writing. I don't know how you do it."

  But after I hung up I did not write. I finished clipping my fingernails and then I filed them. It was almost noon.

  At last, very methodically, I began to recopy what I had written on the previous page in the notebook, writing it on a fresh page, as though to give myself momentum. I improved it, but when I got to the end nothing more came. It was ten minutes to one. I tugged. I squinted. I saw something.

  I wrote, Just then they looked up and saw a brown face staring at them through the leaves, and after they saw the first one they saw more—three, seven, a dozen human faces, suspended like masks.

  A breakthrough at last. I had more to write, but stopped—I would save it for later. It was one o'clock, time for lunch.

  Fish fingers—I loved the improbable name, like "shoe trees"—three of them in a sandwich, a cup of coffee, two chocolate cookies, and while I ate this I listened to The World at One, a news program, and I read The Times, and I sat. The radio, the food, the newspaper—it all left me calm, and when the program ended I hurried upstairs and almost without thinking I wrote the sentence I had saved: They looked again and the faces were gone.

  This was all I needed, because in that thought—the sight of the faces in the jungle—I saw the whole situation, my own characters, the Indians spying on them, the hint of an ambush, the jungle, the narrow paths, the hidden village. And so I spent the rest of the afternoon bringing my characters nearer and nearer—and intermittently they saw the faces—until when their path ran out they arrived at the village and were mobbed. End of chapter.

  I had written 35 words in the morning, and in the afternoon something like 1,500. But what gave me the greatest pleasure was a sentence containing the image limp green leaves like old dollar bills.