Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  McWilliam stood up, walked to the head of the bed and released the silver handcuffs with a click. ‘I let them see the old two-hand bracelet,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll just let them slip out of my pocket when we’re alone, in the back of a cab or something. It’s like, whoops. Sometimes, just now and then, the girl ignores them. More often you see the old eyes widen slightly. The posher they are, the better they like it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I often wonder myself. Some sort of guilt thing maybe. A need to be punished by Daddy.’

  ‘Real life. You’re the outside world. Makes a change from books.’

  ‘Could be, Greg. Could be.’ He was staring at me. ‘Maybe it helps that I’m just me, on my own. I don’t have those family demons.’

  I thought of Marigold, her hand on my chest, her face turned away in an angry grimace of orgasm. I thought of Doug’s locked door. ‘Tell me where the idea for Sorted came from,’ I asked.

  McWilliam held up his arms in a sort of helpless shrug. ‘Straight up, Greg. You’re going to have to help me here. Fact is, I don’t do this writing thing. I’m a manager, a supervisor. I’ve got one person working on my journalism, someone else on book work. I just took on a very good lad to look after my Pussy Power with Brian McWilliam website. It’s a corporation and I’m the MD.’

  ‘Ah. That’s not really what our readers want to hear. We’re in the dream business.’

  ‘Tell you what, I’ll give the basic gen. You put in all the crap about the writing, yeah?’ He leant forward and switched on the tape machine. ‘Even when I was a nipper, back in Miss Beckwith’s class in Lambeth, I used to enjoy the old story-writing lark. Like all the other kids, I used to bunk off school, do a spot of thievin’, a bit of breakin’ and enterin’ – we had to earn our own pocket money in them days – but, you know, I’d always be there for those English lessons. I think I had talent, I do. But, course, when I left school, I had to pursue my career and that was it for the old words. Until I found myself with a bit of time on my hands. I lived in the Shepherd’s Bush area at the time. Wormwood Scrubs, to be precise…’

  So it went. I hardly had to ask him any questions. The fraudulence in which writers indulge while revealing their working methods came naturally to him. Writing was always there with him, see? Inside of him, like down in his gut – even when he wasn’t writing. On the out, when he decided to retire from his former way of life, he took to doing these performances, shows – but writing was always the dream. In fact, bottom line, straight from the shoulder, writing saved him. If it wasn’t for the old words, for getting it down on paper, he’d like as not be back in the Scrubs.

  I smiled as I switched off the machine. For the ten minutes or so of the interview, I had found myself warming to him. In a world of pretension, directness had much to recommend it. Even his lies had a sort of rough integrity to them. ‘D’you want to see a transcript before I file my copy?’

  ‘Transcript? Nah, I trust you, Greg.’ He stood up and wandered across the room and picked up his socks from the floor. ‘Coming to my gig this afternoon, then?’

  ‘There’s someone I hoped to catch who’s on in the big tent at the same time as you – he’s sort of a friend. Martin Amis.’

  ‘Oh yeah. Used to like his stuff. Money, wasn’t it? With that fat slob, Self?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll come to your talk if you think it would help the piece.’

  ‘Nah, it’s all bollocks. You stick with the real writers, Greg.’ Tying up his shoe laces, he said casually, ‘You’re in trouble, aren’t you?’

  ‘Trouble?’

  ‘Something’s going on. In your life. I can tell.’

  ‘You know writers. Being fucked up goes with the territory.’

  He stared at me, not for a moment buying the line I was giving him.

  ‘Let me know if I can help. Maybe you can come on board, help me with the old books. I think we’re quite similar you and me. I’ve got an instinct for these things.’ He reached into his top pocket and gave me a card. ‘Bear it in mind, Greg.’

  ‘Gregory.’

  He laughed. ‘Whatever.’

  * * *

  Top Five Peculiar Erotic Habits of the Great Writers

  1. Theodore Dreiser was so erotically charged that he was known to masturbate publicly in a room full of writers.

  2. Jean-Jacques Rousseau used to ‘expose myself to women from afar in the condition in which I would like to be in their company’.

  3. Marcel Proust liked to watch live rats being beaten and pierced with hatpins.

  4. Gustave Flaubert used to visit a brothel with friends, choose the ugliest girl and make love to her in front of the others without removing his cigar from his mouth.

  5. Gabriele D’Annunzio liked to sleep on a pillow stuffed with the locks of a hundred mistresses.

  * * *

  12

  Family man. Was it really that obvious? As I made my way through the streets of Gloucester back to the festival, did I emanate the proud, stubborn weariness of a veteran foot-soldier in the matrimonial army? Was there something in the slope of my shoulders that spoke of years of being tugged earthwards by the small arms of a child?

  I had felt uneasy and out of place all day. Now I remembered why. This weekend my wife would be with her lover. They would be luxuriating in the extra hours together in bed that my absence afforded, sad but proud that they had salvaged this at least from the wreckage of their domestic lives, this Saturday afternoon of sex and talk and laughter.

  I thought of Doug in his noisome, pullulating cave, of my wife and her busy, cold career, and experienced a familiar stab of guilt that the demands of literature had taken such a toll on the lives of those I loved. ‘The life stuff, the living, gets skimped,’ Martin says, as if, in a neat, throwaway phrase, the blood-soaked battlefield that we leave behind us can be explained and justified. I knew, with a certainty beyond comprehension, that I would lose my wife and son, was losing them right now, maybe had lost them already. And I knew, with equal certainty, that there was no going back. I had always been a family man and a family man I would remain until the end of my days.

  How did this happen? When had the closed, exclusive club that was Marigold and me become part of a great, untidy domestic unit? Long before Douglas arrived, certainly. It occurred to me now that, as soon as I had begun to love the woman who was to become my wife, I had also fallen in love with the idea of family which she represented, the unruly tribe of cousins, nephews and uncles who were so much part of her life.

  When we first met, at a party held by a mutual acquaintance, she was at art college, a would-be illustrator who had yet to discover her talent for interior design and I was passing time in an office before I discovered, shortly after turning twenty-six, that grown-up work was not for me. We had both blundered about in the shallows of emotional engagement and were ready for the big plunge.

  She stood out in that clamorous, edgy gathering of people caught uneasily between student hedonism and the first mortgage. There was, at first glance, something of the little girl lost about her – not only in her physical slightness but in the resolutely plain way she dressed and the way she stood on the edge of things, looking on and listening like someone who was trying, unsuccessfully, to enter into the spirit of things. I talked to her and was immediately attracted by the studious way she discussed her work, her innate modesty, her refusal to flirt. Only later did I realize that she had been as attracted to me as I had to her.

  I asked her out. We dined in a cheap French restaurant in Soho. On the way back to the car, I put an arm around her narrow shoulders, she leant against me and – what exactly happened? It’s hard to describe. A sort of electric charge, a jolt of attraction that was so unlike anything either of us had experienced that we both actually gasped, then laughed at the sheer force of what we felt. We kissed on that pavement in Greek Street; it was not a grinding, tonguey grope but a moment of sheer, awe-struck longing. I felt (forgive the cliché) complete. It was not the ti
me for games-playing, for dating etiquette. We went home, up the stairs to my flat and straight to bed, hardly talking, as if nothing in our relationship could move forward until we were properly a couple. It was a perfect night. She, who had slept with only two other men, was as shameless and knowing as a courtesan; I, a virgin until I was twenty-one, was a mighty Casanova. We awoke late the next morning face to face on a devastated bed. Eyes wide, her face close to mine, she said, ‘Blimey’ and her breath was as sweet as honey. I knew at that point that I wanted her to be my wife although it would be another three weeks before I had the courage to propose. We made love again.

  And her family was part of that perfection. I liked the idea that she was a Cameron, part of an ancient and moderately distinguished Lanarkshire family which she liked to describe, with mock exasperation, as ‘the clan’. I loved to hear stories of how they all gathered in the chilly Georgian family house outside Edinburgh at the slightest excuse – not just at Christmas and at significant funerals and weddings but at Easter and on anniversaries or obscure church festivals the significance of which had long been forgotten.

  It’s an odd fact that, apart from the sex, the incidents I remember best about my early weeks and months with Marigold occurred at Dean House where her parents Gordon and Dorothy Cameron lived. I suppose that all over the world there are seasonal gatherings at which, through rows and misunderstandings, in spite of divorce, death and unhappy children, the great unexpressed bond of blood kinship is renewed, but it was new to me. In fact, coming from a family that had never quite acquired the knack of intimacy, I found it a kind of miracle.

  Intimacy is perhaps too strong a word. The social atmosphere at Dean House where we spent every Christmas was as bracing as the temperature in the house (even when there was snow on the ground, Cameron liked to keep the antique oil central heating just slightly too low for comfort, as if discouraging his guests from making themselves too much at home). Marigold’s older sister and brother rarely seemed to meet between family occasions and behaved towards one another with a polite antipathy, as if each of them was waiting for the other to apologize for some ancient slight. As for Marigold, she would, as soon as she entered Dean House, become the pampered, wilful youngest daughter, lightening the atmosphere with her life and optimism, teasing her father indulgently. I never loved her more than when I saw her in the context of her odd, stultified family.

  Not that I got on badly with her parents. Old man Cameron must have been in his early sixties at the time I first met him, yet he had already taken on the persona of a gruff, cantankerous, put-upon paterfamilias, an act which he imbued with an element of self-mockery which fooled no one. His wife Dorothy had planned to be an actress before meeting Gordon, ten years her senior and already qualified as a barrister; they married when she was nineteen. Still a beautiful woman, she expressed a loving but restless impatience with her family, simultaneously bickering and playing up to her husband, muttering semi-humorous com-plaints about his selfishness to anyone who would listen. When, year after year, he repeated the same joke or anecdote from the courts, she would groan or cast her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Don’t encourage him,’ she would tell the family if they laughed.

  When I arrived at Dean House that first Christmas after I had met Marigold, I was confused by this ménage. There had been perhaps fifteen or sixteen people there, including non-family members who on these occasions gravitated for various reasons to the Cameron household. There was a resentful and monosyllabic old nanny who had looked after all three Cameron children, a couple of rather gauche male cousins and Hugo, an old golfing partner of Gordon’s whose wife had died. The group was so big and unfocused that one could wander from one group gathered in the hall where an ancient black and white television had been installed for the children, to the library where Gordon and Dorothy sat in state on either side of large log fire or to the kitchen where some pre-or post-meal business was taking place. Children, neat in tartan and buckled shoes, ran up and down the stairs. Inevitably, there were games – charades, hunt-the-thimble, something called ‘spoons’ which involved much scrabbling about under tables and furniture and which was later banned after a niece’s head was gashed open in the scrimmage.

  At one point, on my first Christmas Day at Dean House, one of Marigold’s nephews, Henry, a boy of around nine, whispered in her ear. She smiled and nodded. ‘The farmer wants a dog,’ the child (now a law student) called out.

  The family, with the exception of Mr and Mrs Cameron who looked on from their thrones on each side of the fire-place, formed a circle around Henry in the middle of the hall and I found myself holding hands with Marigold and one of the cousins. We moved around, singing.

  ‘The farmer wants a wife, the farmer wants a wife, ee-aye, ee-aye, the farmer wants a wife.’

  The movement stopped. Smiling yet solemn, Henry chose his younger sister Zoe who joined him in the centre of the circle.

  ‘The wife wants a child, the wife wants a child, ee-aye, ee-aye, the wife wants a child.’

  Zoe chose Marigold.

  ‘The child wants a dog, the child wants a dog, ee-aye, ee-aye, the child wants a dog.’

  Marigold chose her niece Lucy.

  ‘The dog wants a bone, the dog wants a bone, ee-aye, ee-aye, the dog wants a bone.’

  At first, Lucy chose her mother. Laughter. Marigold whispered in her ear, pointed at me. I was chosen. I was the bone.

  ‘On your hands and knees,’ cried my wife-to be. I crouched in the centre of the circle. It closed on me and suddenly hands, big hands and tiny hands, were plucking at my back, my legs, my head.

  ‘We all pick the bone, we all pick the bone, ee-aye, ee-aye, we all pick the bone.’

  Head down, eyes closed, protesting dutifully in mock horror, I endured the initiation ceremony, a bone picked with a curious mixture of warmth and roughness with a hint of threat. When, finally, I stood up, flushed and dishevelled, they all applauded. I was a Cameron.

  And so, oddly, I have remained. Married, a father, published, celebrity husband, through the ups, the downs and the strange wrong turnings of my life, Dean House has remained at the centre of it all. Another generation of children now run up and down the stairs.

  New members of the family – boyfriends, girlfriends, one husband thus far – have been absorbed into the group, fresh bones to be picked. The house has not grown warmer. Gordon and Dorothy sat in their chairs, bickering. Yet, for all the changes that were occurring in all our lives, the atmosphere on those occasions at that house remained the same.

  It was not that there was anything transcendently caring or unusual about the extended Cameron family; individually, we were as lost and bemused in our lives as anyone, but somehow, together, we were less ourselves – beneath the determined triviality of conversations, there was a seriousness. The family took over and briefly, over a period of two days or so, our individual concerns and worries and ambitions went into a sort of natural, unforced remission.

  Douglas loved Dean House. When he was small, he basked in the attention of the older children. Later, even after he turned in upon himself, soon after his eleventh birthday, he would revert to his happier, more childish self for the few days that we were there. Now, in his surly teens, he would somehow manage to talk in halting tones to his grandfather, telling this gruff, apparently unsympathetic old man more about his life in a few hours than he told us in the course of a year.

  ‘It’s all about children,’ Dorothy Cameron said to me as I sat beside her one Christmas afternoon. ‘In the end, they’re all that matters, aren’t they?’

  I elected to borrow my own child’s favourite word. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You’re a good father, Gregory,’ she said, glancing towards her daughter, my wife. ‘You mustn’t forget that.’

  At first, I thought she was mocking me. But she wasn’t.

  * * *

  The Writer Speaks of … Children

  I don’t know what Scrope Davies meant by telling you I liked children. I abom
inate the sight of them so much that I have always had the greatest respect for the character of Herod.

  Lord Byron

  Children dissipate the longing for immortality which is the compensation of the childless writer’s work. But it is not only a question of children or no children, there is a moment when the cult of home and happiness becomes harmful and domestic happiness one of those escapes from talent which we have deplored, for it replaces the necessary unhappiness without which writers perish.

  Cyril Connolly

  If I could not have children … I would be dead … My writing a hollow and failing substitute for real life, real feeling.

  Sylvia Plath

  Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.

  Philip Larkin

  As a father, I was angered by the way that he [V.S. Naipaul] actively disliked children, because any parent has an animal awareness of that hostility. It made me protective. I also saw that the man who disliked children and doesn’t have any of his own is probably himself childish, and sees other children as a threat.

  Paul Theroux

  Even if my marriage is falling apart and my children are unhappy and my spouse is unhappy, there is still a part of me that says, ‘God! This is fascinating!’

  Jane Smiley

  * * *

  13

  I was at the press bar when I first caught sight of Martin. He was at a corner table, chatting with self-conscious casualness to a group of his acolytes, including Tony Watson, an old pal who traditionally played the John the Baptist role on these occasions. Casually, I positioned myself at a nearby table and opened a novel in proof form, which I had brought with me in my shoulder-bag. Martin, I noticed, was looking demoralizingly well, if anything younger than when I had last seen him, his hair teased expensively so that what, in others, would seem like male pattern baldness was merely a distinguished thinning, a hint of patal sheen showing through as if to remind the world of the massive cerebral cortex it contained. His clothes might have been designed for the Esquire famous-novelist collection – loose, creased, elegantly dishevelled, autumnal beige and brown. Above all, I noticed his tan. It was neither the pinkish, embarrassed hue of an Englishman just back from his holidays nor the leathery countenance of some sub-Hemingway literary cowboy. Martin had been blessed with exactly the right amount of sun; he wore the burnished sheen of accomplishment, as if success itself had ripened him to achieve this perfect, bronzed, mature result.