Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  I had lost touch with the community of family some time ago but Marigold, who was more attuned to the neighbourhood gossip, occasionally and cruelly kept me up to speed on the progress of our son’s former friends. Gareth had been accepted for Oxford. Simon was appearing in TV advertisements. Leonora was doing marvels in Africa during her gap year. It is sometimes said that, over those first eighteen years of life, a kind of perverse justice prevails – that the gilded, carefree childhood of the blessed ones degenerates into a messy and turbulent adolescence while for the asthmatic, thumb-sucking no-hopers of the early years, an unexpected brilliance and grace arrived with puberty – but, for those of us in the parental B-stream, the idea was a cruel illusion: the children who had softened the teacher’s eye during the first year at primary school were now marching, proud, lithe-limbed and clear-eyed, towards adulthood; those whose names were never quite remembered on parents’ evenings were crouched in their rooms, growing spotty, hating the world and masturbating.

  Some of the losers, of course, acquired a sort of notoriety. A boy in the class above Doug had taken an overdose in Goa; the class thickie had impregnated a fourteen-year-old; someone else from the school was in a youth detention centre after a series of break-ins. When these titbits reached us, we shook our heads, offered commiserations, our hearts singing with joy and relief: our son may have been sulky, miserable, reclusive and emotionally repressed, but he was not a criminal.

  So it was a desultory, uneasy conversation that Marigold and I had that evening as we sat, facing one another in Marigold’s new Aeron chairs, like mature models in an advertisement for an upmarket estate agents. Something had happened which had seemed to change the atmosphere between us. It might have been that the sudden surge in my creative output had given me more confidence; those few moments when my hand had rested comfortably on my wife’s rump may have evoked some sad memory of ancient need. Most likely of all, we had, while staring into Doug’s room, his presence fading as surely as the sour smell which drifted through the house and out of the window, suddenly caught sight of the fearful loneliness of middle age before us. Our son was going. Soon we would be on our own.

  We spoke of local matters. At this moment when the next generation was preparing to move away, several of their parents, as if enacting some grim Darwinian precept, were cracking up, keeling over, sometimes even dying. Some sort of brain seizure had struck down one mother who was found one evening, stretched out cold in the kitchen, last night’s washing-up half-completed. A traditional squash-court heart attack had taken out one of the more active fathers. Others had merely been winged by time’s sniper bullet with tumours, clots, shadows or turns.

  ‘Apparently John Potter’s not too well.’ My wife sipped at her wine. ‘They found something on a lung.’

  ‘John? Poor chap.’ It had been some time since I had last seen Potter, who was younger than me but whose years in a solicitor’s office had imbued him with an air of gentle decline. He used to seek me out at neighbourhood parties or parents’ evenings and talk about the novels (usually some good-hearted middlebrow tome by John Mortimer or Elizabeth Jane Howard) that he had been reading. ‘He once told me that he had always wanted to be a writer,’ I said. ‘It was his great fantasy.’

  ‘A writer, John? Are you sure?’

  ‘He swore me to secrecy. When the children left home, he said, he was going to take early retirement and write a legal thriller. Is it serious, the lung thing?’

  ‘They’re not operating.’ My wife sighed, then sipped at her wine. ‘We promise ourselves these little treats for when we have the time to reclaim our lives. Then suddenly it’s too late.’

  ‘I doubt he would have written it. Very few people have the energy to start writing after the age of fifty. The nerve goes.’

  ‘Well, I’m not waiting for my treat.’ She looked up and, for the briefest of moments, I saw in that small, alert, determined figure, the art student with whom I had fallen in love over a quarter of a century ago. I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but sensed it was not the moment.

  ‘When I’ve finished the novel, maybe we could take a holiday,’ I said. ‘Go somewhere unusual.’

  Marigold laughed briefly, sadly. ‘When I finish the novel. That will be written on your gravestone.’

  For a moment, our eyes locked. At that uncharacteristic moment of frankness, when thoughts of Doug and the dying solicitor were fading, when it was just her and me, a little couple in a big world, we might have stepped back from going too far – opened another bottle of wine, switched on the television – but our defences were down. Inept, abandoned parents, socially isolated, we turned back to each other and discovered that the person we once thought we had understood, had somehow slipped away. Love for another man had made my wife a stranger. What she had thought was a fling (a treat) had become something more complex and difficult. These days, when she returned home late at night, there was no longer the smell of smoke and alcohol and public places upon her, but – the sure sign of an affair entering a dangerously domestic phase – a faint, intimate whiff of soap. I imagined her in a bath after an evening of love, contemplating the home to which she was about to return as she washed him out of her.

  ‘I remember when you started writing.’ Marigold spoke quietly, as if responding to my thoughts. ‘You would make notes about everything, every evening, sitting in that very chair. School, the other parents, changes to the house, me, you, the things that Douglas said and did during the day. D’you remember?’

  I nodded.

  ‘It seemed the way it should be,’ she said. ‘Writing was life. It took it all – words and colours and smells and experience – and gave it all shape and relevance. It marked it in time. I admired the way you were holding the moment, scrutinizing and treasuring it – the way you were somehow managing to live twice over.’

  ‘I’m not sure you admired it that much. You said that Forever Young was “jolly”. You might just as well have called it “chucklesome” or “a rib-tickler”.’

  It was a familiar charge, to which Marigold normally replied that she had meant I could do more serious work (the remark hung over me for the next fifteen years), but this evening she had something else on her mind and would not be diverted.

  ‘Something happened.’ She closed her eyes, frowning, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. ‘I could feel it but there was nothing I could do. After all the fuss died down after the Granta thing, you went back to work on Adultery in Hampstead –’

  ‘Accidents of Trust.’

  ‘Whatever. And a sort of film came over your eyes. Suddenly everything that surrounded you seemed to become too idiotic and domestic to qualify as material for your novels. In fact, you appeared to want to keep us at a distance from your precious work, in case the triviality of our lives somehow contaminated it. We lost you. Day by day, you drifted further away from us. Nothing could reach you – not company, nor Dougie, nor, in the end, me, us. You went through the motions of being a husband and father but you were just playing the part, to keep us quiet.’

  Martin’s remark about the life stuff, the living, getting skimped in a writer’s life occurred to me but I thought it wiser not share it at this point. ‘Perhaps I drifted away because I was married to someone who was no longer interested in my work, who gets the name of my novels wrong, who calls them “whatever”.’

  My wife stared at me coldly. ‘Do you want to discuss your body of work?’

  I shrugged, and looked out of the window. ‘Whatever.’

  ‘I was just thinking about the way you sneered at poor John Potter and his desire to write a book. It occurred to me that maybe you were the one who had it wrong all these years. Those of us who have been blundering onwards – John, me, Doug, the rest – living our lives, making mistakes, hurting and being hurt – maybe we were the ones on the dangerous edge of things. Maybe the novelist, hiding away in his imaginary world, isn’t this heroic figure after all. He’s actually running away from life and eng
agement.’

  ‘The writer as coward.’ I disliked the direction the conversation had taken but right now seemed an unsuitable moment to leave the room. ‘It’s a thought, I suppose.’

  ‘Those who can do. Those who can’t, sit at home and write about it.’

  ‘John Updike says –’

  ‘Fuck John Updike. Fuck all of you sad writers, huddling in your little bunkers, blubbing about the agony of being an artist while the rest of us – all the people you sneer at from your study – are keeping the show going. I don’t care what John Updike says. What do you say? How do you feel about all those years spent writing novels which you never actually finished.’

  ‘Art is struggle.’ I said, startled by my wife’s uncharacteristic bluntness. ‘Not only for the artists but for the artist’s family. I’m sorry but that’s the way it is.’

  A familiar feeling of fraudulence assailed me. I was acting the part of a father: after all these years, it was a role I had yet to master. Lately, I had found myself assailed by memories from the early years of my marriage. The ante-natal class in a brightly lit hospital room where Marigold, so serious and intent, learnt how to breathe properly while I self-consciously followed along, an ironic fellow passenger. The birth when, as if sensing my ambivalence and feeling of apartness, the nurses shouldered me aside as my wife, torn apart by the child she was bearing, held my hand, then pushed it away, stared at me, red-faced and infuriated, then, muscles straining, turned away as if the very last face she needed to see at that moment was that of the man who had brought this agony on her. The visits from in-laws, the colic, the night hours spent pacing back and forth, a tiny bundle of distressed wakefulness tense against one shoulder, the never-ending flow of body fluids that were suddenly at the centre of our daily existence. As Dougie stood and walked and talked and became a person, we would go on family holidays, a perfect, sunny, idealized version of which remained in the photograph albums on my wife’s desk.

  Were we, in those moments, a real, happy family or even then were we all, even Dougie, playing the part? The holidays went on but with each one, there was more unease, awkwardness. The single child buggy on the back seat. The cheap, tasteless meals (plaice, chips and bright green peas) were consumed in silence, the small figure of Dougie less and less able to turn the engine of action, laughter, rows and jokes that propelled family life. As if our failure as parents had infected his childishness with an awful, adult self-consciousness, he became less able to mix with other children. We would watch him, trailing along after them, absorbed in his own world, ignored, and we would hate those other children, with their ease with one another, their laughing playfulness, their brothers and sisters, the cute things they said, joyously related by their perfect parents. The photographs told their own story: no more unforced sunny smiles were to be found from, say, 1990 onwards. There was a rehearsed holiday jauntiness to the expressions on the faces of Marigold and me. Dougie was looking away, pulling a face or, most frequently of all, was obscured by an adult shoulder or a deckchair, or another bigger, bolder, happier child.

  We worried. What had we done to give our only child this instinct for sorrow? We wondered silently what freak of genetics had filtered out our talent – Marigold’s looks and athleticism, my more verbal imagination, our shared (though different) social skills – from our son. Should we have read to him more, exposed him to classical music, visited art galleries and the Science Museum on a Saturday afternoon? If, every year, we had taken him to children’s concerts at the Festival Hall, or the more responsible kind of pantomime, would he have become more outgoing? Would the habit of screaming ‘He’s behind you!’ with hundreds of other children have subtly shaded over the years, into confident everyday articulacy? If it was the growing distance between his mother and father that chilled his tiny heart, then why were his contemporaries, many of whose parents were divorced, or living in a permanent state of open hostility, not affected? Perhaps in that one unhappy area, that of vulnerability to the disappointment of others, he had succeeded beyond his peers.

  Now, Marigold seemed to have resolved the question of responsibility. I was to blame. It was all the fault of writing. ‘I gather from Doug that you hit him the other day,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Hit? Hardly.’ Even to me, my laughter sounded forced, unconvincing. ‘It was a … minor scuffle.’

  We sat in silence for a few seconds. Further explanation seemed to be required. ‘There comes a moment when they have to take responsibility, when they can’t just go on taking.’ I paused, startled by this image of our children as a group, a herd, moving through suburbia, exacting some kind of retribution on their exhausted parents. ‘I just lost it. I felt so … insulted by his indifference. He’s in our house, filling his angry little face with our food from our fridge. That teenage sarcasm –’ I shook my head, remembering the contemptuous mockery in Doug’s voice. ‘It’s lethal.’

  The cat, Donovan, wandered into the sitting-room and sat at Marigold’s feet, gazing up at her, eyes half-closed.

  ‘He calls you Psycho.’ My wife smiled sadly. ‘Psycho Dad.’

  ‘And I was always so big on non-violence.’

  ‘He remembers that, too.’

  I ached with a sense of my own hypocrisy. When Dougie was small and was first discovering that he had a talent for being bullied, I had been full of stern, liberal admonitions. Don’t get drawn in, Dougie. Rise above it, don’t play them at their own game. Nothing gets solved by hurting people, Dougie. Hitting isn’t strong or clever, it’s weak. The really brave person just walks away from it. You’ll be the winner in the end, Dougie. And ten years later, I was slamming him to the floor in our own kitchen. Psycho Dad. I wanted to explain all this to my wife but I sat, abject, silent.

  ‘He feels he has lost you and he’s angry about it,’ Marigold said eventually, her eyes on the cat at her feet.

  ‘That’s absurd. I’m here every day. I see more of him than most fathers – more of him than you do.’

  ‘You’re not here. You haven’t been for years.’ She looked up at me. ‘You used to be so close, you two. I was so proud of you. My men.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘You were such a good father. Even my parents admitted that. You’d spend hours making some Lego castle or writing songs together or going to the park with a football. All those silly jokes you used to make about my cooking or pretending to be asleep at your desk when he walked in. Once you told him that some naughty children stop growing and become smaller and smaller. It was why you had to be very careful walking about the house – the smallest crumb might be a naughty child.’

  ‘No wonder he’s so fucked up.’

  ‘He loved you. He still does. It was why he tried to join in the football games in the park, why he used to bring those stories back from school. He knew he had me but he felt, he just knew, that you were slipping away from him. He couldn’t understand it. What had once been so natural and fun seemed to become a duty to you, yet another domestic chore. Even when you were playing with him, you weren’t there.’

  ‘Of course I was.’

  ‘No. You were putting in the hours before returning to the world that really mattered to you – the one made of words. Good grief, you’d been fun, Gregory – it’s hard to believe now, but people used to enjoy bringing their children round here. Those silly camping holidays in Cornwall – I used to look forward to them for months. So did Dougie. Then they too became an interruption, something to be endured.’

  ‘It goes with the territory,’ I said weakly.

  ‘So then our social life dried up. I gave up inviting my colleagues around because you made it so obvious you were bored by them that I became embarrassed. Other couples, parents, took to avoiding us as if our unhappiness were contagious. You used to get your writer friends over but that ended too. I suppose you decided that domestic life and parenthood was no longer quite the image you wanted.’

  ‘Nonsense. Parenthood’s hot at the moment.’

  �
��It wasn’t then. Not in the Eighties.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘You know, even Dougie’s little friends picked it up in the end. The grumpy dad in the background. He took to visiting them at their houses. Then, even that stopped.’

  After several minutes’ internal debate, Donovan hopped on to my wife’s lap, an act of almost unprecedented affection which seemed at that point like yet another small betrayal.

  ‘He blamed himself.’ Marigold’s voice was bleak and defeated. ‘He decided that it was his fault that he was losing you, that you were drifting away from us. He was on his own. I was busy with my career. Sometimes it must have seemed that the weight of the family rested on his skinny little shoulders. If only he could be like the other children – chatty and confident, popular at school, good at football or tennis – it would keep us together. But he couldn’t do it. The more he tried, the less he succeeded. He saw you withdrawing day by day and he sensed that it was your disappointment with him and with family life that was the cause. Then, when he was about twelve or thirteen and had just changed schools, he looked at us and saw failure, his failure – a cold non-family, three lonely people. And he gave up. He went into his room and just … gave up.’ She stroked Donovan, smoothing down his fur. ‘So when you talk about taking responsibility, you miss the point. It’s exactly what he is doing. He’s taking our unhappiness and anger and sense of disappointment and making them his.’

  ‘He told you all this?’

  ‘Of course not. But he tells me more than you think.’

  ‘It hasn’t been easy for any of us.’

  ‘The suffering artist.’ My wife invested the words with sudden, biting venom. ‘We were the ones who paid the price. We could do nothing while all the warmth and humour and life that you once had leaked away into your fiction.’ She paused, tellingly. ‘Or at least so one assumes.’

  ‘That was unnecessary.’

  ‘To tell the truth, it wouldn’t have made any difference if you had written one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. The effect on us would have been the same.’