My Other Life Page 17

  I made notes for the next chapter, to prepare for tomorrow. The village. Smoke. Trampled earth. Frightened children. Barking dogs. A conversation. "We cannot help you." "Ice is life." The hidden strangers. The act of writing produced ideas and events. It was late afternoon and I was growing excited at the thought that I had moved on. I guessed that I was half done with the book. I wanted so much to be done before the summer, but ten chapters more, ten weeks, would take me into March, and if so, I might be through by my birthday in April. Looking over what I had written, I became hopeful. The book was strange, true, comic, and unexpected—that was what mattered most. I wanted people to believe it and like it, and to find something of themselves expressed in it.

  With these thoughts—my pen twitching words onto the bright paper in the pool of light on my desk, and darkness all around—night had fallen. The door to my room opened. It was Will.

  "Anton's downstairs making tea," he said.

  He looked exhausted. His face was smudged, his hair spiky, his hand-me-down school blazer had shrunk on him, but instead of making him look bigger it only made him skinnier, with a thin neck and knobby shoulders.

  "Hi, Dad."

  He kissed me. His hair smelled of cigarette smoke. When I mentioned this, he said, "The bus conductor made me sit on the upper deck."

  He slumped into the armchair opposite my desk. He said, "What page are you on?"

  I looked down. "Two hundred and eighty-seven."

  "Are you almost done?"

  "Half done, I think. I don't know for sure."

  "I did an essay for Wilkins today. Two sides. Macbeth."

  "The henpecked hero."

  Will nodded. "It's true. I should have said that."

  "You look tired, Will."

  "We had rugby. And the English essay. And in chemistry we did an experiment with sulfuric acid and Jason burned a hole in his blazer. Matron went bonkers when she saw it. In the morning there was a rehearsal for the school play. Lunch was stew. It was gristle and fat. I didn't eat it. Jam sponge for afters. Beale told me I needed a haircut. And some of the boys hid my satchel and when I found it they made fun of me. The sole of my shoe is coming off. Simon Wesley told me he hates me."

  School.

  I said, "Why don't you watch television?"

  "I have tons of homework. Latin prep, chemistry, and history."

  "What would you like for dinner?"

  "Dunno, do I? Maybe spaghetti. The vegetarian kind."

  "I'll make the sauce," I said. "We'll have salad. I think there's ice cream for dessert."

  Will yawned like a cat. "I'll have a bath first. The school showers weren't working, so we ran straight from rugby to chemistry. We were all dirty. Matron said we smelled like goats."

  That explained the mud streaks on his face and the dirt under his fingernails. My sons knew I loved them, but they had no idea how much I admired them.

  Anton called out to Will to say the toast and tea were ready, and while they sat at the table, saying little, I made the spaghetti sauce—chopped the onion and garlic and green pepper, and sauteed them with some mushrooms, then scalded and peeled the tomatoes, and tossed it all into a pot with a bunch of fresh basil and a stock cube and a pinch of crushed red pepper and a dollop of tomato paste. While the sauce reddened and simmered, the boys went upstairs to their room to do their homework, and I went out. I bought the Evening Standard and took it to the Fishmonger's Arms to read it over a pint of Guinness. There was a mention of John Updike staying at the Connaught, in London to launch his new book; and I thought how Londoners knew nothing of London hotel rooms.

  Later, waiting for Alison to come home, I watched a television game show with Anton, who had finished his homework, and when the host of the show quipped, "You're like the Irishman who thought an innuendo was a suppository," Anton laughed out loud, and I thought: I am happy. There was nothing on earth so joyous as this—the darkness, the silly game show, the thought that I had written something today, the knowledge that I was home, the anticipation that Alison would be home soon, the spaghetti sauce simmering, a pint of Guinness inside me, and most of all the explosive sound of my child's laughter, generous and full-throated. I felt blessed.

  Alison was home at seven, a bit later than usual. She too was tired, but she helped Will with his Latin while I boiled the water for the spaghetti and made salad. We ate together. The boys cleared the table. Alison did the dishes—because I had cooked—and after the boys went upstairs I read Alison the chapter I had just finished.

  "It's good," she said.

  "Say something more."

  "Isn't that enough?"

  "Just a little more."

  "I like the image about the leaves like dollar bills. And it's menacing at the end. I would want to read on. How's that?"

  "OK."

  We watched the Nine O'clock News and the beginning of a program about fruit bats. Then Alison yawned and said, "I'm tired."

  So we went to bed. Then the house was in darkness. I was happy. What had happened to make me so contented? I could not say why I was reassured. Perhaps my novel had gone better than I expected—I had finished a chapter. But more likely it was that we were together, a complete family, a whole healthy organism, fully alive.

  This ordinariness was what I liked and needed. It had been a perfect day.

  3

  London lies in a bowl-shaped valley sloping into the Thames—downhill from Clapham to the river and uphill again from the Embankment to the West End. London pedestrians and cyclists could feel the earth's contours beneath all these bricks. I sensed this on my last half mile up the steepness of St. James's Street on my way to the Lambourne Club, and I was imagining not that I was meeting Musprat, but that I was a member, going there each evening in the London darkness and finding it a refuge, reading Punch and The Times in an armchair in the reading room, sitting in front of the big fireplace in the lounge, standing with old men in rumpled suits.

  The Lambourne Club was a bright place with tall windows and high ceilings, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and brass polish and the hot ashes in the fire baskets. It seemed to me the essence of London—a carpet-quiet place, slightly too warm, a blend of old folks' home and private school, the safest place in the world, if you were an older white male.

  Joining the club was a lazy ambition, I knew that, and it didn't suit my impatient temperament—and what did I have in common with the members? But these difficulties interested and provoked me.

  I mentioned to Musprat on the stairs when I saw some men in pinstripe suits that I felt out of place in the Lambourne, because I was an American.

  "This club is full of Americans," Musprat said. "Solicitors and bankers mostly. The club wants their money. Them, for example."

  He indicated the men in the pinstripe suits. Was that the sort of person I wanted to turn into? American Anglophiles, predictable in their Burberrys and kidding themselves rigid and going heehaw in the club lounge with schooners of sherry?

  My main objections were the strict dress code and the absence of women. How could anyone relax while wearing a suit and tie? How could any man find pleasure in a place that was so sternly masculine?

  "Doesn't it bother you that there are no women here?"

  We were at the bar, among the old men who looked like morticians and the toothy young men shouting at each other and the overdressed Americans.

  Musprat looked around. He shrugged and made a sound in his nose. He said, "How many women are there in your local—what's it called?"

  "The Fish," I said. "Fishmonger's Arms. Not many."

  "Exactly," he said. "Irish, isn't it? All bog-trotters."

  We had gone there for a pint once when he had come over to borrow a book, and he had looked around and said, "I hate places like this."

  "I suppose the Lambourne's a bit like school in that way," he said, and glanced around. "Everything in London is a bit like school."

  I was heartened to hear him say it, because I had already worked that out myse
lf.

  Making a face, he said, "The food here at the Lambourne is school food. But that's not as bad as some places. Wilton's restaurant? Posh old buffers eat there. It costs a fortune because of the food."

  "Nouvelle cuisine?"

  He had a particularly aggressive laugh—the harsh, triumphant laughter of a deeply insecure person. "Nursery food," he shrieked, showing his stained teeth.

  We went into the Lambourne dining room. The idea in this club was that rather than eat alone, the members ate at a common table, a long refectory table in the center of the room. In this way a shipping magnate might find himself seated next to a journalist, a diplomat next to a novelist, but the chances were that inevitably you would find yourself next to a barrister or a solicitor—so Musprat said—because there were so many of them in the Lambourne. Once it had been mainly writers, the likes of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, Saki and Shaw, and its reputation had been literary and raffish. But now it was old gray men in old gray suits.

  Musprat winced at the menu and held it loosely, distastefully, in his chewed fingers. The menu was a small single sheet of paper inserted in a leather holder.

  "See what I mean?" he said. "School food."

  "They didn't have smoked buckling at my school. What was it, anyway?"

  "Fish," Musprat said, and smiled sourly at me in a one-upping way, and it struck me again that the English often made an effort to be such bad company—so contrary—and they often made a virtue of being peevish. Musprat surely did. You could see them up and down the long table, frowning at their food—their school food—and cutting it and pressing lumps against the tines, loading their forks as though they were baiting a hook.

  We ordered our food, and I began to hate being here.

  Not only did Musprat seem older than me, he also seemed fixed and certain in his life. I had no idea what was going to happen to me. Musprat said that he knew what his whole life would be like. Already he had been married and divorced. It was an unhappy and bitter marriage but an amicable divorce and now he was quite friendly with his ex-wife, so he said. He disliked children.

  Like many insecure people he was deeply and cynically opinionated, perhaps in an effort to give the impression that he was sure of himself. But his talk made me uneasy—the more certain he sounded, the more I feared for him. He said he knew exactly what he wanted—the narrow and predictable life that the English seemed to assume was the ideal. It would be the English life without change or upheaval or, apparently, passion. He could be tetchy and a scold—he was truthful and blunt in the way of an unhappy person who takes a little satisfaction in the hurt he inflicts on others. Because of all this, I sometimes reflected with sadness that he and I had no other friends.

  He used soon to be obsolete and fogeyish words like "pantechnicon" for moving van, and "beaker" for mug. In the country, he said, he wore gaiters. Gaiters? He called radio "the wireless." To annoy him one day I said, "Do you call airplanes 'flying machines'?" and he replied, "No, I call them aeroplanes, which is what they are."

  We talked about his radio plays at dinner. He was writing one at the moment, about a gypsy who—piece by piece—moved an entire caravan, or mobile home, into his one-room apartment in Islington.

  "I want to go on writing plays for the wireless," Musprat said.

  And as though to assure the failure of the effort at the outset, he often wrote the plays in blank verse, and sometimes they rhymed.

  "What about poetry?"

  "Poetry writing is shoveling shit. Radio plays reach a huge audience," he said. "I'm going to do that for the rest of my life. And I want to go on being in this club. I don't want to travel, I don't want to turn into a book reviewer. And I never want to go to America again. It's hideous there."

  "Sometimes I miss Boston," I said. It was a timid confession. I actually missed it every day—its space and its familiar streets and smells. I missed the laughter, I missed the feel of American money which was like the feel of flesh. Reality for me was the past, and it was elsewhere. This—London—was like a role I had been assigned to play, and I was as yet still unsure of my lines.

  Musprat said, "I was in Boston for that color mag story two years ago. Boston isn't a city. Not a real city. It's about ten small towns clustered around that poxy harbor. And you find"—Musprat was cutting a very small muscle of meat, his mouth set rather severely as he sawed the gray sinew—"that in fact Boston does not exist except as a rather spurious urban concept. I hated the food, the traffic's appalling, and you can't drive ten feet without propelling your car straight into a pothole. The police carry these bloody great revolvers and they're always sort of reaching for them."

  It was as though he were describing Boston in a warning way for the benefit of someone who had never set foot in the place.

  "I lived in Boston for twenty-two years," I said, hoping to shut him up. He knew so little of the city it was futile to argue the merits of it. But I had to be gentle. He was at his most vulnerable when he was generalizing like this, and his feelings were easily wounded, even though he could be brutal with others.

  "I preferred New York City," he said.

  "New York is never dark and never quiet," I said. "I can't sleep in that city."

  "London's worse in some ways," he said. "The air's foul from everyone breathing, shop assistants are rude, and the food's filthy." He was still eating, chewing quickly with his stained and protruding teeth, like a rodent. "I suppose that's why I like London."

  He was not a Londoner, though I would never have known. He had a neutral accent and a pompous and slightly cranky way of talking, always seeming to scold or correct.

  "Money's not important here. Class matters. And class has nothing to do with money."

  I kept noticing that in the English—their love of being right or of setting you straight, the schoolteacher sternness, because they had once been cringing students. In Musprat's case it was a bit worse, because he was from the provinces, somewhere in the Midlands, possibly Lichfield—he often made references to Dr. Johnson. He needed to prove himself, and yet he loathed himself for having to.

  He had a keen awareness of class and with it a hatred of the class system. This caused him conflict and sometimes pain.

  "People are always imitating their char lady. The lie-dee wot does for me comes on a weekly bie-sis, innit?'"

  And when I laughed—his mimicry was a success—he was torn, having succeeded at the very thing he hated.

  "Money's such a big thing in America. But no one has money here."

  He was signing the chit on the pad the waiter had brought. The waiter looked Malay, but when I asked the old man next me he said they were all Filipinos.

  The old man had a white mustache that was stained with nicotine, and he spoke in a roaring voice.

  "Absolutely indestructible! Work for a pittance. Live on rice and fish heads." He shifted his gaze around the table, as though seeking more listeners. "Their only fault is that they believe in an afterlife. Very superstitious. You wouldn't want to put your life in their hands, because they don't mind dying, you see. You want an atheist as your batman. But they get on willy-nilly. This isn't America—you don't need to take an examination to be admitted to Britain."

  The old man opposite, straining to hear, said, "Quite. My nephew is taking his examinations. I have no idea what it's all about. When I was in school my father simply rang his old tutor and said I was ready, I went up to Trinity."

  "Maybe your nephew is in one of these comprehensive schools," the man next to me said.

  "Yes. I believe he is. Are they very expensive?"

  As these old men continued to talk, the Filipino waiter went around the room and no one took any notice of him. It seemed to me that he could go anywhere and see anything. He was invisible.

  As I watched the silent waiter, Musprat said, "You see? That's why I like this club. Those old men."

  We were on our way to the coffee room. There were more old men among the aquatints of Indian ruins.

 
"...She is a very handsome woman. She absolutely has her pick of men. They send her roses. Her husband knows about it, of course. Turns a blind eye. Very keen cricketer, you know."

  Another said, "It was well known that the prince was having a little fling with her. Her husband was in the picture then. But, you know, people are always rather proud when their wives or daughters have a thing with a member of the royal family. In fact, people look up to them. It is rather an accomplishment."

  "No such luck for me," Musprat said, and he began talking to the old man as though he were one of them.

  I had two thoughts. That this was like every overseas club I had ever been in—male, old-fangled, English, fussy, and foolish—only cleaner. My second thought was more in the nature of a fear, that this life of the club and London and this talk were a sort of permanent condition—you joined and this was how your life went on, changelessly, passing from the dining room to the bar to the library, with a stop at the Gents, among these men, predictably, without surprises, until you died.

  Musprat looked irritable and slightly drunk. He took a deep breath, looked briefly youthful, smiled at me, then began to cough. And coughing, he became old once more.

  "I really am glad you suggested this," I said. Was I saying this because of my guilty feeling, which was the opposite of what I said? "I remember the first time I came here, about a year ago. The winter night when the snow—"

  "Jesus, are you actually reminiscing?"

  He was angry, disgusted, embarrassed. He drank some wine and made an ugly chewing face as he swallowed.

  "Let's bag the snooker table before someone else does," he said.

  From the way he behaved, in this abrupt and sneering way, usually bristling, I guessed that he had been bullied at school. He was small and pale. He wore thick glasses. He chewed his fingers. He wrote poems.

  In the snooker room a long bar of light hung over the table, brightening the green felt and putting the rest of the room in shadow.

  Musprat chalked our names on the slate that hung above the scoreboard of beads on wires that was like an abacus. He had lovely handwriting, regular and upright. School had made him, and then unmade him.