It was then that I began to feel distantly, obscurely alarmed.
* * *
Exercise
Describe, in as much detail as possible, the incident in your life of which you are most embarrassed. Then recount the same events from the point of view of another protagonist.
* * *
17
I had heard the novel, or at least I felt as if I had heard it. On our way back to London, my pupil, apparently liberated in some strange way by the events of the previous night, gabbled and bubbled and laughed like a child on the last day of term. At first, this garrulousness – jokes, snatches of songs, zany biographies created for our fellow drivers as we drove past them on the M40 – amused me. Then he turned to the subject of his novel. He outlined the narrative, dilated upon its themes and characters, described scenes with such vividness and fluency that the text might have been there written on the road before us.
Banbury. Oxford. Thame. Hearing a bad novel recited can be a trial, but hearing a good one, written by a boy of twenty, can be worse. Hypnotized by his words, I found myself forgetting where I was, almost letting go of my natural tutorly scepticism and being drawn into the strange alternative reality Peter was creating. He had reached that point in a work when, suddenly, the long uphill trudge becomes a joyous downward romp towards completion. Nothing could stop him now; every disparate element of the novel had fused into perfect coherence. He could talk about it for hour upon hour if allowed, because it was there, an established thing, which conversation could no longer destroy.
Aylesbury. Princes Risborough. Slough. On and on he went. I thought at the time that it was lack of sleep and the delayed trauma of what had happened the previous night which made me unusually susceptible to Peter’s narrative. Now I know that my first instinct was correct: there was something undeniably powerful, original and strange to this work.
I felt sick. I found myself hoping that Peter was revealing a hidden talent as a performer, that the written version would turn out to be a faint and blurred shadow of what I was hearing. I willed him to be quiet but, when I glanced across at him, he misinterpreted my look and smiled back at me with an open, bashful affection which made me shudder. I longed to be back home in my loft, surrounded my own novels, working quietly on some interesting literary list or statistic (‘Great Writers Who Have Discovered They Are Homosexual in Middle Age’, perhaps) but I was unable to escape from Peter’s voice, his story.
He directed me though west London to the block of flats off Hammersmith Broadway where he lived. I parked in what at first glance I took to be some sort of scrapyard but turned out to be a car park for those who inhabited the flats. Weary, irritated by the prolonged, brilliant threnody of egotism to which I had been subjected, I left the car’s engine running.
‘Sorry, I seem to have run on a bit.’ Peter smiled confidingly.
‘No problem. It was all very interesting,’ I said, gripping the steering-wheel with both hands.
‘Shall we take the urine-soaked lift to my little hovel?’ he asked in the gently mocking voice he seemed to have acquired since last night.
‘I had better get back.’ I smiled briefly, coldly. ‘Real life awaits me.’
Peter laid a hand on my thigh. ‘You mean last night wasn’t real life?’
‘You know it wasn’t.’
‘It felt real enough to me.’
I glanced across and saw, for the first time, how different he was today. There was an openness, colour in the cheeks, an alertness to those startling blue eyes. Mysteriously, his teeth seemed less grey than they had been yesterday; his hair, no longer lank and dull, had a sort of glow to it. Memories of last night caught me unawares. I felt constricted and uneasy. Peter whispered my name, looked around him to see that the coast was clear and, with a sluttish knowingness, leant across and unzipped me. Before I could protest, he lowered his head. He took me in his mouth, his right hand holding me, his left reaching between my legs as if somehow he wanted to take all of me into his mouth and consume me just as he had quietly consumed my knowledge, my experience, my life as a writer, for the novel he had secretly been writing. In that moment of unnerving expertise, as I sat, helpless, eyes closed, in thrall to his ministrations, it occurred to me that overnight he had become the teacher, I the pupil. In spite of the longing I felt, I resented his precociousness, remembering details of his novel – how easy, authoritative, convincing and full of incident it seemed beside the stuttering, empty uncertainties of Insignificance, or Mind the Gap or even Adultery in Hampstead.
I opened my eyes and checked that no passers-by were approaching. It was not, heaven knows, that I had engaged in a semi-public act of sex, alert yet lustful, but there was something sharper and sweeter and more dangerous to what was happening and I didn’t like it at all. As if sensing the direction of my thoughts, Peter moved and nuzzled me against his cheek, like a child with a toy. ‘Come with me in the lift to paradise,’ he whispered.
‘No.’ With as much dignity as I could muster, I pushed him away from me. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ I zipped myself, did up my belt and looked pointedly at my watch. There was something smug and triumphalist in Peter which made me distrust his new flirtatiousness. I hated him right then – hated his assumption that, limping and sweaty with need, I would follow him to the pigsty where he lived, hated his power over me, hated his youth and his golden future. He had lured me onwards, tricked me with his fake unworldliness, until he was almost – almost – in control.
He sat up and stared ahead, sulky and affronted, his lips wet and swollen like those of a porn starlet resting between takes. ‘I’m sorry if I embarrassed you,’ he said.
‘We shouldn’t go too fast.’
‘You didn’t think that last night.’
‘I’m not supposed to get involved with my students. I could get fired.’
‘Fired.’ There was real contempt in his voice.
‘I’m not saying we can’t see each other. Just that … well, I’m sure you understand.’
‘No blow-jobs in the car park.’ His voice was thin and venomous. ‘No bunk-ups on the tenth floor because someone might see us. What will it be then – the next Gloucester Festival?’
‘I’m a married man. I have a teenage son. I’m –’ I sighed, suddenly irritated by this conversation. ‘I’m straight, Peter.’
He looked across at me and I, with a lurch of alarm, I noticed there were tears in his eyes. ‘Please come upstairs,’ he whispered. ‘You needn’t stay long.’
A knot of rage tightened in the pit of my stomach. I was not unused to this kind of scene but somehow enacting it with another man seemed absurd and humiliating. I cursed myself for the writerly vulnerability which had drawn me to my student’s bedroom the previous night, yet another false move in my life for which Martin had been indirectly responsible.
‘I’ll see you in class on Thursday,’ I said. ‘Maybe you could bring some of the novel to read.’
He swore, not at me but to himself, like a man who had suddenly forgotten something. He opened the passenger door and, half falling out of it, loped away towards the cavernous entrance to the tower block. I leant across, pulled the door shut, jammed the car into gear and drove off without giving him another look.
* * *
Top Five Early Starters Among Modern Writers
1. John Updike knew he wanted to be a writer as soon as he saw his mother at a typewriter.
2. George Orwell wrote his first poem at four and knew from the age of five that he would be a writer and had completed a verse play by the age of fourteen.
3. Norman Mailer wrote his first novel at seven.
4. Evelyn Waugh was also writing stories at seven.
5. Gore Vidal had published five novels by the age of twenty-five.
* * *
18
My son was stirring into life in a manner that made me uneasy. We had had become used to his reclusiveness; now that he was leaving his room, he became less recognizabl
e, more mysterious, than ever.
When he went out, he never explained where he was going but the evidence on his return – dark, dilated pupils, violent mood swings and long, gulped drinks of water at the kitchen sink – suggested that, while at large he had given himself some sort of narcotic treat. There was a new bearish confidence to him now, as he crashed about the house; he talked rarely and, when he did, he spoke in a loud, belligerent voice. No longer shifty, he sometimes stared me straight in the eye as if waiting for the moment when he could gain violent revenge for the excess of parental zeal that had led to my pushing him to the floor in the kitchen.
One morning he startled me by barging into my room as I tussled with a section of Literary Lists for which I had gathered material but had not at that moment conveyed into finished form. The way that he stared down at the blank page in front of me made my stomach lurch with rage.
‘Have you any idea how annoying that is?’ I asked.
‘Wha? Wha?’ It was the impatient squawk of a young crow demanding food from a parent.
I sighed. ‘Doug, I’m working. I know it doesn’t mean much to you, but it’s important to me. It may not look much –’ I waved wearily at the sheet in front of me ‘– but it involves thinking.’
My son stared out of the window.
‘You wouldn’t do it to Mum,’ I said.
‘Wha?’
‘Burst into her office without knocking.’
‘She’s got a secretary an’ all. It’s a bit different, ennit.’
I looked at my son – unshaven, barefoot, in a torn and faded T-shirt, long baggy shorts over his thin, yet oddly hairy legs. I sensed that he wanted to say more, perhaps dispense some casual act of adolescent cruelty, but that something was holding him back.
‘Just because I don’t make as much money as Mum, it doesn’t mean that what I do is meaningless.’
For a brief, telling moment, my son glanced down at the blank pad in front of me, then smiled, almost sympathetically.
‘Writing’s all about the blank page,’ I spoke quickly before he could say anything. ‘Sometimes it can be worth a hundred pages. Graham Greene said –’
‘Who’s he then?’
‘Never mind.’
For a moment he stood in silence. There was nothing that put Doug more quickly on the defensive than any suggestion that he and I might have something in common, that I could talk to him as a fellow adult. In the past, the mildest attempt to engage in a normal, neutral discussion of subject of interest to me would send him scurrying back to his room, as if mere conversation with me risked some form of subtle contamination.
‘It’s ridiculous,’ he said suddenly, and I knew that we had reached the reason for his visit. ‘I just have no money, ever, right? I go out, right, and I try to have a normal life, right, and I’m with these people and, I dunno, I just have to sit there, like holding on to this half-pint like I’m some sort of kid. It’s just totally ridiculous.’
Although I knew that the impulse behind this outburst (quite a peroration by Doug’s standards) was entirely mercenary, I none the less found it oddly moving. I saw my son, down the pub with his mates, trying on adulthood like an ill-fitting suit, grunting and laughing and going ‘owi, owi’ in a clumsy attempt to join the lager culture. Although most of his friends were middle-class cockneys like him, none of them seemed quite so full of dull despair as my son. They had part-time jobs; one of them even had a girlfriend, a sulky, wordless blonde girl with a chewing-gum habit. I sensed that none of them was quite so alienated from the two people who had brought him into the world as he was.
‘You’ve got pocket money. Twenty quid a week’s not bad, considering everything’s paid for you.’ Already, I felt wearied by this argument. Not only was I venturing into treacherous territory, hardly being a financial success story myself, but somehow the whole business of money seemed so marginal. I longed for Doug to be able to go out with his friends and buy his round, I loathed playing the part of the skinflint parent, yet I knew that merely handing over cash would add to the harm that, somehow, Marigold and I seemed to have inflicted on him. ‘If you worked, it would be easier to justify.’
‘What’s the difference between me reading a few magazines and you sitting at your desk?’ A closed angry look crossed Doug’s face and I knew I had lost him. ‘Why’s one such a waste of time while the other’s really hard work? If I decided that I was this writer geezer and spent all day picking my nose and doing nothing, would you be really proud of me and give me loads of pocket money?’
‘I happen to be a professional writer.’
‘Oh yeah, right.’ He seemed to be about to say something.
‘And I teach once a week. I do interviews. I don’t like it but I do it.’ I waved at the shelves along the wall of one side of the office where I kept carefully labelled box-files containing my various uncompleted projects. ‘There are very few days when I do absolutely nothing.’
Doug laughed nastily and nodded in the direction of the virgin page before me.
‘Owi, so all this sitting about and thinking makes you feel tired, right. That’s why you have to go out most evenings. And Mum’s the same. You leave me and fucking Donovan here on our fuckin’ tod, right?’
Not entirely happy as to the direction the conversation was going, I reached for a copy of D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature as if to look something up.
‘You know what? I feel tired, just like you do.’
‘There’s no need to shout, Doug.’
‘So I wanna go out, right. But I can’t, ’cos I got no fuckin’ dosh, have I.’
I laid down D’Israeli. ‘I’ll speak to your mother,’ I said.
‘Owi, you want me to get money?’ Doug was standing his ground. ‘I can, you know. There’s ways. You won’t like ’em but I can do it. No problem.’
I looked up at him and suddenly felt that my son was stronger than me. He had delivered the ultimate teenage threat. Pay up or see what happens.
‘I have to work,’ I said weakly.
‘Owi, suit yourself.’ He left chirpily, slamming the door to my office behind him.
After Doug’s pocket money was increased to £30 a week, an odd self-consciousness descended on the house. Where normally we would pull against each other, a family that was not quite a family, parents who did almost anything to avoid parenting, a child cocooned in his room and longing to fly free, now we seemed to become aware of our reliance upon one another, boats frozen in the same lake, together yet apart.
It must have been a quiet time in the world of feng shui design. Marigold would visit the office briefly during the morning, returning home to potter unconvincingly about the garden, sometimes directing towards Ned the gardener what were not so much instructions as gentle indications of what might possibly be done, subject to karma, astrological appropriateness and general vibrations. She took to making fussy vegetarian meals which she insisted Doug and I should share. Some evenings we would sit in the kitchen, making stilted conversation like a dysfunctional family whose rehabilitation into normal life was being recorded by a hidden camera.
Doug’s presence at these occasions, and other small concessions to civilization (‘Owi?’ he would say, encountering me during the day) seemed to be only partly the result of his pay-rise. There was a sort of kinship in his attitude to me these days. We were both lost, both spiritually alone. We both spent much of the day doing nothing in particular and worrying about it.
‘How’s the old blank page going, then?’ he asked me one evening as we picked at some highly-coloured Buddhist thing Marigold had prepared.
‘I’ve discovered a rather intriguing connection between the writing life and sewing-machines.’
Marigold looked from me to Doug as if this new level of communication was not entirely welcome. ‘Sewing-machines,’ she smiled thinly. ‘Riveting.’
‘Nice one, Mum.’
‘Oh.’ Marigold laughed, genuinely this time. ‘A pun.’
‘Act
ually it is rather interesting,’ I continued, taking encouragement from this unusual outbreak of good humour. ‘There was George Gissing who gave Nell Harrison, the young prostitute who became his wife, a machine. Samuel Butler became involved with Lucie Dumas, a whore from Islington, and again the sewing-machine was an essential part of their relationship. So much so that, after her death, Butler would keep a kettleholder she had made pinned up above his mantelpiece. Arnold Bennett was so impressed by this story that he asked his wife to sew next door to the room where he was writing, but unfortunately he was disturbed by the sound of the needle against the thimble.’
‘Fascinating,’ said my wife.
‘What’s with all these prostitutes?’ asked Doug.
Glancing at Marigold, who is uncomfortable with any discussion of a vaguely sexual nature in front of our son, I said, ‘Funnily enough, writers do have something of a faiblesse in that regard. I’ve recently been compiling a list of eminent literary figures who lost their virginity to a prostitute. Byron, Hugo, Flaubert, Joyce, Maugham. When he was in Africa, Graham Greene was said to have received consignments of condoms from London in batches of a thousand.’
‘Thank you, Gregory. I think we’ve heard enough now.’
‘Five hundred words a day, then off he would go. Apparently he liked doing it in churches.’
My wife sighed.
‘Behind the altar.’
She laid down her knife and fork.
‘With his god-daughter.’
‘Grow up, Gregory.’ At last she spoke but with more weariness than anger. ‘You’re showing off and it’s very silly.’
It was that word ‘silly’ which doused the conversation. Silliness was the enemy for Marigold: it covered everything from gossip to jokes to irreverence towards the role of toilets in feng shui. Above all, it covered all references to sex. Even my good-hearted attempts, when we were alone and talking to one another, to remind her that there had been a time in our lives when we had thought, talked and done little else but varying forms of silliness, failed to move her.
Kill Your Darlings Page 14