by Amis, Martin
‘Catering Sales Coordinator. Oh wow.’
I was back in the forecourt enjoying yet another fiery treat when my phone started to groan and throb. I was directed to a certain suite in ‘the Tower’.
These reintroductions to Christopher’s new world (always ominous and much previsualised): they usually began with the opening of a door. Usually the door opened inward or opened outward but this door split in two and opened sideways. And as I stepped from the elevator it was immediately clear that Christopher had moved on to another plane of distress. He was in the corridor that led to his rooms, reeling around on tiptoe as he struggled to contain it, to elongate himself and stay on top of it. A milky liquid burst upward from his mouth.
I embraced him (which these days I kept on reflexive ly doing). ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘It’s just a little accident. Don’t worry.’
‘The thing – the thing insists on getting out of me,’ he said when he could.
‘It’s nothing, my dear. It’s nothing.’
The sharply targeted weapon of proton treatment would begin on Monday. Today was Saturday, and the doctors had continued with the blunt instrument of chemotherapy, whereby ‘you sit in a room with a set of other finalists’, as Christopher put it, ‘and kindly people bring a huge transparent bag of poison and plug it into your arm’. This is no metaphor: they transfuse quarts of ‘intracellular poisons’ – to inhibit ‘milosis’, or cell division. And the swarm of side effects includes, among much else, immunosuppression, anaemia, alopecia, impotence, fatigue, ‘cognitive impairment’, and (most dependably) the overpowering need to vomit.
Such had been the long afternoon of the Hitch. But now, in the hotel restaurant, he was giving a display of perfect equanimity (in the gaps between his uncomplaining visits to the bathroom), and paying affectionate and solicitous attentions to Blue and to their daughter Antonia (while rearranging the scraps of food he sometimes tried to swallow and keep down). Early on I lightly wondered,
‘Has anyone noticed? On planes, they’ve started calling passengers customers.’
Blue, at least, had certainly noticed it, and thought it comical; and for a while we found some diversion in a word-replacement game of the kind we often played…
‘ “The passenger is always right.” “Michelangelo Antonioni’s sensitive study of alienation, The Customer”. “He’s an ugly passenger.” “Only fools and customers drink at sea.” “When you are –” ’
‘This won’t work,’ said Christopher. ‘It’s not subversive enough.’
I said, ‘Mm. Insufficiently subversive. But why’re they doing it? Who benefits?’
He said, ‘Americans – that’s who. You take it as an insult, Mart, but for an American it’s a compliment. It’s an upgrade.’
‘How d’you work that one out? Jesus, I don’t understand this goddamned country.’
‘Well, here in the US, passengers might be freeloaders, you know, lying hippies and scrounging sleazebags. Whereas customers, with that discretionary income of theirs, are the lifeblood of the nation.’
‘…All right. But doesn’t it go against the grain of American euphemism? And uh, false gentility? Even in supermarkets they call us guests. Well here’s one thing nobody’ll ever say. The plane crashed into Mount Fuji, with the loss of sixteen crew and just over three hundred customers.’
‘The customers died instantly. No. That would be subversive. If it kills you, I’d say – I’d say that once you’re dead, you go back to being a passenger.’*3
The talk became general and familiar, and it went on being spirited. Looking back from seven years on, I see that there was some reason to be buoyant. The shadow was of course always there (the shadow on the negatives of Christopher’s scans); but this weekend would mark the dethronement of that hated quackery, chemo, and the elevation in its place of radiotherapy in the futuristic form of the Proton Synchrotron. So we would put our faith, for now, in science fiction.
‘That sad chemo,’ I said. ‘It feels antique. Like leeching.’
‘Or like ritual sacrifice. Or like prayer.’
‘Mm, like prayer.’ The two of us were having a nightcap and a final smoke on a bench at the back entrance of the hotel. My body clock said 6 a.m., but I’d had a less tiring day than the Hitch. ‘Months ago you were saying that it messed with your concentration.’ And at dinner I noticed how he very slightly glazed over now and then, no doubt in suspicious communion with his viscera, just before disappearing for five or six minutes and then keenly returning and resuming. ‘But you were great – you delighted the girls, and me too.’
He lifted a hand for silence and briskly threw up into the flower bed. He wiped his mouth and I said,
‘You know how chemo got started? World War I. There were a couple of things about mustard gas that the medical boffins thought might be useful…Sorry, Hitch – let’s get off anything medical.’
After a quiescence we drifted towards the summer of 1914…Now I fancied I knew a thing or two about that, and I kept pace with him as we went through it – Franz Ferdinand murdered in Sarajevo in late June, the equivocations of Belgrade, the hardening of Vienna’s position, Germany’s assurance to Austria (known as the blank cheque), the Austrian ultimatum, the Russian mobilisation, the artillery of August…
All this had me sufficiently tested and stretched, but now Christopher said, ‘Those were the precipitants. As for the origins…’ And at that point I reached for my notebook and ballpoint.*4
So: the savage regicide in Belgrade in 1903; the Austrian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908; the formation of the Serbian Black Hand (Ujedinjenje ili smrt! – ‘Union or Death!’) in 1911, and the Agadir Crisis four months later; the Italian attack on Libya in 1912; the gradual Ottoman retreat from Europe, and Germany’s gradual displacement of England as the guardian of the Turkish Straits (‘the Sublime Porte’ being a permanent Russian obsession); the wild overestimation of Russian strength, fuelling German hastiness and fatalism…
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘if you want to start nearer the beginning you’d have to go back to 1389.’
‘1389?’
‘1389, and the final humiliation of Serbian forces at the hands of the Turk. On the Field of Blackbirds in Kosovo.’
And I thought, If Hitch had time we could go all the way back to the beginning of everything – to Cain and Abel, to Adam and Eve.
‘Kosovo Field. A wound in the Serbian psyche that Slobodan Milošević chose to reopen in 1989 in Kosovo, Little Keith – six hundred years later, to the day.’
Yes, or we could go forward. Through the Second World War, the Cold War, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the end of Communism, September 11, the Iraq War, et cetera – all the way to where we were now (if we had time), sitting on a wooden bench at the back entrance of a Texan hotel in the third month of 2011.
During dinner Blue and I were briefly alone at the table and I said,
‘The synchrotron – it doesn’t hurt, right?’
‘Not at the time…The truth is, they’re nearly going to have to kill him to kill it.’ She looked at me steadily. ‘But he’s an ox.’
I said, ‘You’re right. You’re right. But he’s an ox.’
Day of rest
Even the most dedicated Texan must see that the Lone Star is not a good name for an ambitious modern hotel. In fact the Lone Star was at least a four-star, and intensively money-absorbent, so my breakfasts there didn’t last long: tea, juice, coffee, low-church anxiety precluding the twenty-dollar fruit platter, as well as the seventy-dollar eggs Benedict with smoked salmon and a celebratory glass of champagne…
Up in the Tower, Blue and Antonia, wearing white bathrobes and white slippers, moved swiftly past me – off to the spa for ‘treatments’ (non-invasive treatments – massage, pedicure). So I entered and made myself comfortable in the sitting room and waited for Christopher to sti
r. I noticed the extra bed, provided for Antonia, my god-daughter, whom I still thought of as a child, despite the recent memory of her driving us all out to an Indian restaurant in DC. She was sixteen but this is America.
Distant scouring and expectorating. As James Joyce put it: Hoik!…Phthook!
‘I’m here,’ I called out. ‘But don’t mind me.’
A pause, and then he called back, ‘I may be some time.’
At length he appeared, in underpants and shirt; his calves, his thighs, had a whittled-down look; he clenched and reclenched his brow, trying to focus. Then he bent over the trolley and the mobile oven sent up by room service: coffee; a cautious bowl of porridge; a strip of bacon, a poached egg with hash browns; more coffee, sealed with a cigarette.
It was half an hour before noon on Christopher’s day off.
‘I’m feeling almost human,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I might even have a Scotch…’
Apart from the fact that he mixed his Johnnie Walker Black Label with Coca-Cola, as opposed to chilled Perrier water (no ice), this would have been the old pattern, the status quo ante, how it was before. And the normal pattern was a minimum of two American-sized whiskies starting at noon or a little earlier. Now they were English-sized whiskies, pub doubles, ‘just a dirty glass’, as he used to say…
Even when his intake was preternatural, even when lunch might last all day and dinner all night (and the interval between post-lunch wine and pre-dinner cocktails would be marked, not quite as often as not, by a hurried cup of tea), he never went to sleep unless he had produced ‘at least a thousand words of printable copy’ – without fail.
One evening in London in what must have been the spring of 1984, having varied his usual whiskies with the negronis I passed his way, Christopher was taken by me and Julia (who was pregnant with our first son, and therefore very continent) to a dancing party that might have qualified as a ball. The waiters were offering shot glasses of vodka, and Christopher and I went obediently from tray to tray. During the buffet dinner we both had about nineteen glasses of wine – nor, when they came, did we neglect the liqueurs, the Calvadoses, the Benedictines…
The expectant couple got home at about two. Three hours later, as I tried to balance on the Medusa’s raft of the bed, I heard Christopher let himself in. At about nine, during a spell of weary wakefulness, I heard Christopher let himself out, while a taxi rattled in the street – his destination, I knew, was a TV studio (where he assertively applied himself in the demanding company of Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer, and made a point of taunting Norman about his obsession with sodomy and homosexuality).*5
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked me in the kitchen as he fixed himself a midday Johnnie Black.
‘Truly dreadful. It’s so bad I can’t even smoke.’
He smiled with affectionate sadism and said, ‘Mm. I don’t get hangovers. Can’t see the point of them.’
‘The point of them, I suppose, is to make you vow you’ll never drink again. Or at least to make you hold off for long enough to stay alive.’
‘Try hair of the dog, Little Keith. Have a negroni. It’s the best thing.’
‘…Christ. Look at you. Sea breezes. You know, Hitch, you’ve got a naval constitution. Rum, bum, and baccy, and you fucking thrive on it. This morning. Did you get any sleep between when you got back and when you went out again?’
‘No. I wrote a piece.’
‘You wrote a piece?’
It took me a full minute to assimilate this. Then I got myself a beer and said,
‘You know who you remind me of as a writer type? Anthony Burgess.’ Christopher knew about my lunch with Burgess in Monaco, which made me seriously ill for three whole days and nights (and at six o’clock Burgess ordered a gin and tonic – as if to start all over again). ‘And after that I bet I know what Burgess did. He went home and wrote a symphony and did all the housework and got back to his novel in progress. To you and him, it’s just fuel.’
Blue had truth on her side. He’s an ox.
Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?
We left the Lone Star and crossed the road and entered the mall. ‘Over 30 Restaurants to Choose From,’ said the sign. We chose Tex-Mex.
‘Do you do this, Hitch?’ I said. ‘I think all men do it when they’re turning sixty. I keep looking back on my uh – on how it went with women.’
‘Oh yeah. Beginning at the beginning. And all the missed chances…’
‘Missed chances are very bad. Still, I have to say I look back with broad satisfaction. Larkin must’ve looked back with horror. And what’s the reason? Poets can pull.’
‘Mm, remember Fleischer in Humboldt’s Gift? He bangs on the girls’ door and says, Let me in. I’m a poet and I have a big cock. Announcing his twin attractions.’
‘Fleischer was overegging it. If you’re a poet you don’t need a big cock. You can look like Nosferatu and still pull. Poets get girls…A girl told me that. Not a poet.’
‘Which girl?’
‘Phoebe Phelps.’
‘Ah. How is dear Phoebe? I’m sure no poets ever pulled her.’
‘Well, definitely not when she was an escort girl. Poets can’t afford escort girls. Or anything else. That’s part of their spell.’
‘Is it? I assumed poets got girls because they’re supposed to be sensitive.’
‘Not according to Phoebe. It’s simpler than that. I can’t quite remember. Something to do with female fairmindedness. Oddly enough. I can’t quite…’
‘Phoebe? Then she had hidden depths.’
‘She was secretly…She read poets in secret. Or she read one poet.’
Christopher had with him a proof of Larkin’s Letters to Monica (which he would review in the Atlantic in May; I had already reviewed Letters to Monica in the Guardian). My notebook records that Christopher decided on lentil soup and a BLT. It also records the following: Hitch much quieter today (prospect of the synchrotron?). Making a visible effort not to seem too preoccupied. Like with Saul – found I was talking more.
I tapped the cover of Letters to Monica. ‘How’re you finding it?’
He shrugged and said, ‘I was expecting yet another layer of trex and mire. But so far it’s not quite as dank as I’d feared.’
‘It’s pretty dank.’
Having ordered, they went out for a smoke. I said,
‘The incidental stuff. Like their summer holidays. Sark. Mallaig. Poolewe. Who goes for a holiday on a crag in the North Sea? “Did you get my card from Pocklington?” ’
‘I’ve been to Pocklington.’
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Pocklington…But you like all that Middle England stuff that gives me the horrors.*6 And by Middle England I mean anywhere that’s not in central London. Rustic towns, country houses, weekend cottages.’
‘What could be more agreeable? You go for a long walk in the rain and then you drink yourself senseless in front of the fire.’
‘…No, I’m touched by it – by the fact that you’re touched by bourgeois yokels and their habitat. In Hitch-22, the rabbits on the lawn and all that. There is a kind of hick beauty there. And Larkin was its poet.’
‘And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes…’
‘The guildhalls, the carved choirs…’
‘I just think it will happen, soon.’
Two things were and would remain undiscussed. First, I wasn’t going to tell Hitch about Phoebe and the Larkin complication (inactive for a while but quietly reignited by Letters to Monica); you think you keep no secrets from your closest friend, but no one tells anyone everything. Second, neither of us was likely to bring up the fact that Larkin died of oesophageal cancer at the age of sixty-three. And, for us, sixty-three was in plain sight – visible to the naked eye.
‘With Monica,’ I said when we were back at the table. ‘…Okay
, here’s a question for you. Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?’
‘Mine? Worst in what sense?’
‘You know, the least attractive and the most boring…Or put it this way. The least attractive, the most boring, the most embarrassing in company, the most garrulous, the most self-important, and the worst fuck. Because that’s Monica.’
He said, ‘You think? Maybe she was the best fuck. Look at the others.’
‘No. Keep reading. Later on he says, I can’t tell whether you’re feeling anything. You don’t seem to like anything more than anything else…That’s not what you’d write to your best fuck. So go on – make a mental composite. Now. Imagine you went out with her, not for a week, not for six months, but for thirty-five years. Oh yeah, and this is a chick who votes Conservative. Confident and proud, she writes, of “my conservatism”.’
‘Christ.’ For the first time he looked really shaken. ‘My conservatism.’
‘Such was Monica. I last saw her in the uh, the early eighties. He brought her to dinner at Dad’s. And I tell you, brother, I tell you, she was a real…’
‘And so were all the others. Well I say all. All three or four of them.’
‘He was a genteel poltroon – that’s what I’ve come to think. Fastidious, prissy. He lacked courage, in all departments except poetry. Especially in the sack.’
‘Is it…Do you need courage in the sack?’
‘Have you come to the billet-doux where he says all sex is a form of male bullying – male “cruelty”? Bending someone else to your will, he says.’
‘I don’t think so. I’m on page…forty. I’ve skimmed ahead a bit. All those highminded excuses about his low sex drive.’
‘Well it’ll give you a twinge, this paragraph. There’s no actual duress, but you can’t help going through some of the same motions. You know – put your legs there. Flip over, darling. Now spin round…Decades ago I was in bed with Lily, uh, after the act, and she said, “Right. I’ll show you what it’s like being a girl.” She’s really strong, Lily, and she had me do the splits and hooked my feet round the back of my neck. All the time rutting breathily up against me. And it was certainly very forceful. And enlightening. And incredibly funny. I think I actually shat myself laughing…It’s one of my most cherished memories.’