Surely she nothing. She shrugged the information away from her as though a fly had landed on her collar. ‘Doesn’t sound like my kind of magic,’ she said. Whereupon I thought, here we go, Tolkien. But in fact she hadn’t even made it that far up the ladder of literacy.
‘What is?’ I asked, with my heart in my mouth.
She thought about it. ‘I’ve always liked Tommy Cooper,’ she said.
A dozen years later her answer to the same question would have been a boy wizard.
But worse was to come. Before the evening was over she had failed the Tolstoy test.
And yet the conversation leading up to it had been propitious. She was a cellist, she told me. A serious musician whose repertoire included Bach, Boccherini, Vivaldi and Dvořák. I quivered a little. Dvořák. She asked if I played. No. I just listened. Particularly to Dvořák. She had never been a professional cellist. Not quite up to that. But she had played with an amateur orchestra in Bournemouth, and then in Washington to which her second husband, a junior diplomat named Eisenhower, had whisked her when Vanessa was still a teenager. It was in Washington that she’d done a bit of modelling, too, once famously posing nude wrapped around her cello for a poster for the Georgetown Camerata Chamber Orchestra. ‘Well, not really nude,’ she told me, presumably bethinking herself of our age difference, ‘but it looked that way. And it brought my marriage to an end.’
‘Your husband didn’t like you posing nude with your cello?’ I asked. Funny what husbands don’t like.
‘It wasn’t so much that. He was jealous of the photographer who happened to be the violinist with whom I was rehearsing Brahms’s Double Concerto at the time.’
‘At the time he took the photograph?’
‘No, at the time my husband walked in and found us.’
‘Found you . . .’
‘No, not that. Found us rehearsing. The sight of it maddened him so much he threw me out of the house.’
‘Christ! And the violinist?’
‘He threatened to kill him.’
‘This is Tolstoy,’ I said excitedly. ‘Pure Tolstoy.’
She looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Is he another of your Cranford crowd?’
Was it possible? Was it possible to be a good enough cellist to play Brahms’s Double Concerto and not have heard of Tolstoy? Was it possible to have got beyond the age of ten, never mind the music, and not have heard of Tolstoy?
Unless she was teasing me. She had ironic eyes. She could have been having fun at my expense. But she didn’t seem engaged enough for that. Teasing is flirting, and she wasn’t flirting.
I mentioned The Kreutzer Sonata, Anna Karenina, War and Peace. Anna Karenina appeared to ring a bell and she must have deduced the others were books because she said she hadn’t read them. ‘I’m not a reader,’ she said. ‘Vanessa reads enough for both of us.’
I didn’t say reading doesn’t work like that. I didn’t say you can no more read for another person than you can drink water for him stroke her.
I couldn’t work her out. Didn’t one artistic endeavour necessarily bleed into another? If you play Bach’s Cello Suites you read Tolstoy. It was only much later that I realised you didn’t have to be cultured to be a musician – or a writer, come to that. Art? Some of the most vulgar philistines I knew made art, and of those the most vulgar still wrote books. Refinement was mainly to be found among those who consumed or championed them, like poor Merton. But you don’t know that when you’re twenty-four and still trying to spit out your first novel.
Poppy was lying about her reading, anyway. She read avidly. Pure shit, but she read it avidly.
Ditching Tolstoy, I asked her about her life before and after the junior diplomat who dumped her in Washington. There wasn’t much to tell. Her first husband had been a naval officer who’d drunk himself into an early grave. She’d loved him, on the occasions she saw him. Vanessa the same. But the two women had been alone together a great deal, so apart from missing their annual sailing holidays off the Isle of Wight they barely noticed the change when he’d gone. Vanessa hadn’t liked it in Washington and was glad to fly home. She went to Manchester University for a year, read philosophy, changed to languages, changed to art history, changed back to philosophy, and then left. She hadn’t liked it there either. But the absence of necessity was the real reason, Poppy explained. They’d been left money by Poppy’s first husband and she’d got a good settlement from her second; they wanted for nothing; other than to dress like each other and to float about looking lovely, they were without an aim. And the cello? Yes, she still practised. Vanessa too. At home, they played Vivaldi’s Double Concerto in G Minor together.
My eyes swam. ‘Nude?’
Where I found the courage or the folly to ask that I will never know. I no sooner said it than I backed away in my chair, putting my hands up to my face, half as though expecting to be struck, half as though preventing the demons that lived inside me from uttering another word.
Poppy put her glass down and for the first time looked me straight in the eyes. Then she beckoned me to her with a crooked finger.
I had flushed the colour of her lipstick.
‘Cheeky monkey!’ she said, kissing me on the cheek.
Cellist’s thighs.
I should have remembered.
Light years later, touching the living quiver of Poppy in the heat of the Monkey Mia night, that fact should have come back to me. Cellist’s thighs.
I am a cello.
And my work-in-progress alter ego, Little Gid, would he be a cello too?
Some things you keep for yourself.
16
All the World Loves a Wedding
‘Cheeky monkey’, I am now willing to accept, was what did it. Since it was meant to be a sexual compliment of sorts – wasn’t it? – I couldn’t but wonder what she’d seen in me. Not what she’d seen in me, but what she’d seen in me that was chimp-like. From which wondering it was the smallest step to remembering Mishnah Grunewald who had called me Beagle. And there, suddenly, was the novel I knew I needed to write. Courtesy of the woman – or at least one of the two women – I needed to impress.
How strangely inspiration works! Poppy Eisenhower was – or at least she presented herself at the time as being – the least bookish person on the planet, a woman ignorant of Mrs Gaskell and Tolstoy, and yet without her I would not have found my way out of the dark of uncreativity. The Dark Lady of my Sonnets, whose idea of magic realism was Tommy Cooper saying, ‘Just like that.’
It was Vanessa’s belief that because I kept everything for myself I was too selfish ever to be a truly great novelist.
This was a modified version of her earlier belief that I was too selfish ever to write a novel at all.
She was amazed when I finished my first book. ‘I’m walking on sunshine,’ I sang.
‘No, you’re not,’ she said.
And she was even more amazed when a publisher accepted it. But she was generous in defeat. ‘I am proud of you and delighted for you,’ she said. ‘I see it almost as one of my own.’
‘That’s kind,’ I said, not knowing what she was talking about. I had written it in secret, during the first two years of our marriage, either while she was sleeping or out having her nails done with her mother, or while I was standing at the till on a quiet day in Wilhelmina’s.
‘I mean one of my own in the sense that you could not have done it without me,’ she said.
I didn’t mention Poppy’s all-creating touch.
And she was right about the part she’d played. For all my exalted literary ambitions, it was wanting to stick it to Vanessa, to confound her view of me as a fantasist, that turned daydreaming into actuality. Just as one should never discount, when fathoming the origins of art, the influence of an uneducated mother-in-law, one should never underestimate, when measuring ambition, the influence of a jeering wife stroke husband. For jeering, too, is conversation, and conversation, for a writer such as I am, is the midwife of creation.
There’s a word for it. Maieutics. Sounds as though named after a goddess – Maieusis. I didn’t mention this to Vanessa, knowing that that was how she would henceforth want to be addressed: as the goddess Maieusis.
‘And also mine,’ she went on, ‘in the sense of its being the nearest I will get to mothering a child.’
Neither of us wanted a child. Not wanting a child was the only thing we agreed about. I sometimes thought it was the reason we got married, the wellspring of our union – not to engender life. So it seemed a contradiction, on her part, if not a betrayal, to be thinking of my book as offspring.
We fell out over what to call it. My working title, The Zookeeper, wasn’t her idea of what you call a child.
‘Nor mine,’ I said. ‘But it’s not a child.’
‘It is to me,’ she said. ‘Can’t you give it a child’s name?’
‘Like what?’
‘Vanessa.’
‘You’re not a child.’
‘I was.’
‘It’s not about you.’
She laughed one of her deep, guttural, scornful laughs. ‘Ah, darling,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘why are you in such denial? It’s about me on every line, admit it.’
‘Vee, you haven’t read it yet.’
‘Do I need to?’
‘If you’re going to go on thinking it’s about you, yes.’
She treated me to one of her archest expressions, eyes dancing, lips pleated. The prelude in some households, I didn’t doubt, to domestic violence. In our household such an expression was domestic violence. But you couldn’t be married to a woman like Vanessa and not pay a price for it.
‘So what is it about?’ she asked.
‘Animality, sensuality, cruelty, indifference.’
She laughed animalistically, sensually, cruelly, indifferently. ‘My point precisely,’ she said. ‘I know how you see me.’
‘Vee, it’s set in a zoo. I don’t see our life as a zoo.’
‘A zoo? You’ve never been inside a zoo in the time I’ve known you. You’ve never taken me to a zoo. You’ve never so much as mentioned a zoo. You don’t like animals. You won’t even let us have a cat. A zoo? You?’
I hadn’t told her about Mishnah Grunewald. Vanessa wasn’t a wife who liked hearing about her husband’s past. We were Adam and Eve. Before us, nothing.
‘I have a rich imagination,’ I reminded her.
‘And what happens in this richly imagined zoo?’
‘Zoological things.’
She paused. ‘It’s about your dick, isn’t it?’
‘It’s about everybody’s dick.’
‘Guido, not everybody has a dick. Half the world doesn’t have a dick.’
‘I know that. The novel is told from the point of view of someone who hasn’t got a dick.’
‘A eunuch?’
‘No.’
‘A gelding?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘A woman.’
She clasped her breasts and feigned a heart attack brought on by hysterical mirth.
‘A woman! Guido, what do you know about women? You have less knowledge of women than you have of zoos.’
I was tempted to tell her about Mishnah Grunewald, and all the other Mishnahs who gave the lie to our demi-Eden. What did I know about women? What didn’t I know about women? But this was a moment to stay calm. ‘I have listened to women, Vee. I have observed women. I have read about women. If Flaubert could write from the point of view of a woman, if James Joyce could write from the point of view of a woman, if Tolstoy –’
‘Yes, yes. I’ve got the drift. And what is she like, this woman you know nothing about?’
I shrugged. ‘Volatile, compassionate, beautiful, lovable.’
‘And she’s the zookeeper, I take it, this beautiful, volatile, lovable woman?’
‘Yes, as it happens she is.’
I’d like to have added ‘And she masturbates wild animals’.
‘And there’s a male character in this novel who loves her?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s you.’
‘It’s a novel, Vanessa, not a fucking autobiography.’
‘OK – so there is a male character in this novel who loves her. And it is you. Does he get her?’
‘Get her? ’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, you know what “get” means.’
‘What he gets is his comeuppance.’
‘Ah, so this is a story with a moral.’
‘No, it’s a story without anything. I’m a nihilist, I thought you knew that.’
‘You’re also a husband. You have a wife.’
‘I know that, Vee.’
‘Whom you wooed and won. And promised to be faithful to.’
Whom! Is it any surprise I loved her?
‘Yes, I did. But the men in my novel are not me. They are not winners. They are losers.’
‘And does the main one, the one who loves the lovable zookeeper, lose her along with everything else?’
I thought about it. ‘It’s ambiguous.’
She roared her laugh again. ‘There you are then,’ she said, slapping the palms of her hands like Archimedes proving a theorem, ‘it’s about me on every line.’
Quod erat demonstrandum.
I’d never seen her more volatile, compassionate, beautiful, or lovable.
The goddess Maieusis.
‘Change the names, Vanessa,’ I told her when she first showed me the opening page – which just happened to be the only page – of the novel she was writing.
Since I wouldn’t call my novel Vanessa, that was the title she gave hers. The heroine was called Vanessa. The villain was called Guy. They met in a shop called Wilhelmina’s. Vanessa had a mother called Poppy. That Guy was not feeling up Poppy was an accident only of timing and ignorance. I wasn’t at the time doing it, and Vanessa – the real Vanessa – was ignorant of the fact that I wanted to. Which at that stage, beyond occasional drunken fancy, or as a consequence of an angry impulse to hurt Vanessa, so was I.
‘If you think your changing the names fools anyone, you’re a fool yourself,’ was her answer.
But she misunderstood an essential fact about writing fiction. No matter how much you write about yourself, the minute you change your name you change you. And from that tiny germ of difference – as I never stopped telling Vanessa – a superior truth ensues.
‘Bullshit!’ was her considered response to that. ‘What’s a superior truth?’
‘A truer truth.’
She’d pay me back with that eventually, when I caught her in a lying lie.
Change the names, anyway, is the novelist’s credo. Change the names and you change what happened, and it’s only by changing what appeared to happen that you discover what did.
So here, with the names changed, is the invitation to the big event – two years very nearly to the day after mother and daughter stepped up into Wilhelmina’s which, for the sake of the truer truth, had now (if Gid was to be a goer) to be rechristened Marguerite’s.
The Author and Pauline Girodias
Invite the Reader
To the Wedding of Valerie and Gideon
Why Marguerite? Why Valerie and Pauline? Because to my ear they have the ring of characters from superior French porn.
Now, as I write, I recall the only two women who ever roused me – Valerie and Pauline. After Pauline had laid out the outfit it had been decided Valerie would wear for her wedding night, the black silk stockings, the black gloves, the spiked-heel black suede shoes, she undressed slowly before the mirror, perfumed herself and began to rouge her own breasts . . . That sort of thing.
As for Girodias, Maurice Girodias was of course the founder of Olympia Press, which published my favourite otherwise unpublishable erotic fiction. (A prim tautology: shouldn’t all fiction be erotic?) Not that Girodias was his real name either. He was in fact born Maurice Kahane. Girodias was his mother’s maiden name, a nom de non juif chosen by his f
ar-sighted, Nazi-sniffing father Jack in Paris in the 1930s. Maurice wrote warmly about his French mother, describing her as bubbly, charming and piquant, which is how I suppose I could have described my mother had I liked her more, or been possessed of a more charming personality myself.
The father, Kahane senior – born, I’m proud to say, just up the A34 from me in Manchester – was also a publisher of books of the spiked-heel, rouged-breast sort, as well as Henry Miller who was at that time banned in America. Heady days, these, for fiction, with novelists offending all and sundry, words having to be hidden from the authorities, and no one quite the person he said he was. Who was Francis Lengel, author of White Thighs? Alexander Trocchi, who else? Who was the innocuous-sounding Henry Jones, author of The Enormous Bed (‘Our mouths met, but, at the same time, her hand shot as if uncontrollably down to my trousers and discovered my freshly proved manhood again’)? The innocuous-sounding John Coleman, who other? What a thrill it must have been, how important a writer must have felt – and never mind the obscurity and the poverty – to know that governments trembled every time a woman’s hand shot down as if uncontrollably to a writer’s trousers. My tangling with the names of these pseudonymous heroes is a way of muscling in on the deception. Call it nostalgia. Writing will never be so much fun again.
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