It had been a long, long time since I had last been down here rooting about in the sweet undergrowth but for years of my life it had seemed I had spent much of my happiest waking hours there. While all else changes, that does not. I felt as if I were home again.
Briefly and unconvincingly, my wife tried to free her arms, muttering words of protest, but she was mine now, it was the young Marigold I was making love to. After a few seconds she moved herself to me, her thighs quivering. When I freed her hands so that I could gather her up and feast on her more deeply, she merely laid them on my head like a priest blessing a communicant. She had never been a noisy lover but now I heard a prayer of need coming from her, occasionally punctuated by an involuntary gasp. As she pressed my head downwards, the fingers of her right hand twitching as if she were making love to herself through me, I paused.
‘Turn over,’ I said.
I knew my woman. I worked at her for a few seconds before her back arched. She buried her face in the pillow, clawing, muffling her moans, her whole body shuddering for what seemed like minutes but must have been around thirty seconds. Then, suddenly, she relaxed and was limp and slack, and self-contained once more. The established etiquette on these occasions had dictated that I should now make love to her slack, unresponding body until I too had come to rest, but I tugged her shoulder. Sullenly she turned to face me, eyes closed, embarrassed now, indifferent. I lifted her legs, just as I had once lifted Peter Gibson’s, and, thinking of him, made love to her in a lordly, leisurely way, a man taking his pleasure from his wife. She winced. She sighed. At one point, she clicked her teeth in a put-upon housewifely way. Unperturbed, I finished casually and moved to my side of the bed.
After a few seconds, she briskly pulled the duvet over herself, flicking one side of it my direction. Even before she spoke, I knew I was in trouble.
‘So what was all that about?’ There was the merest hint of post-coital languor in her voice.
‘I’m working hard. I desired you. I wanted it.’
‘It. You wanted it. So you took it.’
Already I felt my husbandly strength ebbing away. ‘Don’t go political on me, Marigold.’ I said. ‘Not now.’
‘Good grief, it’s not political to prefer not to be mauled around in the middle of the night by a man who happens to be feeling pleased with himself and thinks he deserves some kind of treat. I’m not a box of chocolates, you know.’
I said nothing.
‘Why are you feeling so pleased with yourself, by the way?’
‘The novel’s going well.’
‘Congratulations.’
‘And it’s been a long time.’
‘Huh. You could say.’
‘I’m not talking about the writing.’
‘Ah.’ She pulled the duvet around her shoulders. ‘Speak for yourself,’ she said, almost to herself.
There was something in her voice which caught my attention, a sort of smugness. ‘Are you in love with him?’ My voice hung in the dark for a few seconds.
‘What’s it to you?’
‘You’re my wife. You matter to me.’
‘You don’t really want to know, so don’t ask.’
Didn’t I? Marigold moved in a world of sharply dressed high achievers who treasured personal happiness and self-expression above all else. I had always known that nothing could have been more natural than that she should choose to express herself in the most traditional and direct way. I could hardly blame her. Besides, given what she knew of me and my past, she could respond to my pea-shooter of reproach with a battery of howitzers and hand-grenades.
‘We need to talk about Doug,’ she said.
For once, I was not going to allow the hulking, guilt-laden presence of our son into the marital bed. ‘It’s not too late, M,’ I said, using the nickname of our early years together.
‘I think he’s getting himself into trouble.’
I reached out a hand and laid it on the valley of her waist.
‘Let’s not do this to each other.’ I tried to pull her towards me.
She moved away with an angry twitch of her hips, letting my hand fall.
She half-turned. ‘See?’ she said, almost laughing. ‘See how it feels.’
‘That was the past.’
‘You reap what you sow,’ she sighed. ‘I’m going to sleep now.’
She huddled under the duvet as if finally to shut me out. For the millionth time in our marriage, I found myself staring at her dark hair on the pillow, the angry jut of her small shoulder, listening to the rise and fall of her breath.
* * *
A COMPARISON OF THE EARLY MORTALITY OF GREAT POETS AND GREAT NOVELISTS
Shortest Living Great Poets (in reverse
Age-of-Death Order)
Thomas Chatterton 18
Rupert Brooke 23
John Keats 26
Christopher Marlowe 29
James Elroy Flecker 29
Percy Bysshe Shelley 30
Sylvia Plath 30
Wilfred Owen 32
François Villon 33
Hart Crane 34
Average: 28.4
Shortest Living Great Novelists (in reverse
Age-of-Death Order)
Stephen Crane 29
Katherine Mansfield 35
Thomas Wolfe 38
Jack London 40
Edgar Allan Poe 40
Franz Kafka 41
Jane Austen 41
Guy de Maupassant 43
Robert Louis Stevenson 44
F. Scott Fitzgerald 44
Average: 39.50
* * *
28
If, as Auden said, a writer’s autobiography is his capital, I have been dealt a duff hand. My parents, still living, a couple of perky pensioners in Leicester, provided my childhood with neither the acts of mindless abuse and neglect nor the background of domestic dysfunction that offers a rich seam of material for the writer in later life. They fucked me up, my Mum and Dad, simply by not fucking me up. I forged wearily onwards to a normal marriage, normal parenthood, normal suburban life. Once I attempted to invest the creative capital accruing from early infidelities into the comic novel Adultery in Hampstead, but even I could see that the creative dividends were negligible, that scenes and insights intended as a frothy light-hearted sideways glance at gender misunderstanding emerged merely as sour misogyny.
Now, at the very moment when a hint of the truly dramatic was entering my life, the narrative took a wrong turn once more. An inspector called.
The arrival of a policeman is rarely good news in any serious work. Half in and half out of daily life, he brings with him an oppressive, distracting sense of more exciting events happening elsewhere. When serious novelists, in a moment of desperation, allow the heavy tread of law enforcement to enter their work, it invariably loses what tension and interest it ever had. The moment that Martin, floundering about in mid-career, actually elected to narrate the American novella through ‘a police’ had me punching the air with joy and relief.
Yet here he was, my policeman, cluttering up a narrative that had been going so promisingly with his investigation, his suspects, his routine lines of enquiry, changing my life for ever. Beckwith.
When he appeared one morning on the doorstep of 23 Brandon Gardens, I was absorbed in the closing scenes of terpsichore 4:2. Feverishly anticipating the moment when the agony of parturition would be over, I had quite forgotten about McWilliam, Mr and Mrs Gibson, about Mary Kydd, even Peter himself.
Until Beckwith.
Living near the wild frontier, I have had dealings over the years with the local police as, with an air of exhausted defeat, they followed up that day’s act of theft, vandalism or street violence. A few were hard-eyed opportunists, indiscernible in manner and moral character from the villains they were allegedly pursuing, but most were the traditional dogged, sincere, pencil-licking plods.
Beckwith was different. With wispy light hair prematurely receding from his pale, fleshy features
, he had the look of a man who spends too much time in front of a computer screen. His voice – ‘Mr Gregory Keays? I wonder if you could spare a few moments on the matter of your late student, Peter Gibson’ – was flat and suburban but there was something about the way he looked about him as I showed him into the hall, not so much intelligence as a sort of contemporary brightness, which put me on my guard. I imagined him to be the sort of policeman who would see crime in terms of productivity and turnover, who was but a short semantic step from describing criminals as ‘customers’. Somewhere about his neat be-suited person, or in his guy-next-door black briefcase, there would be various small items of communication technology (phone, pager, electronic notebook) to remind him of the day’s agenda, of where and who he was.
I showed him into the sitting-room. He admired a small figurine Marigold had recently imported from Papua New Guinea before casually taking a seat in front of the window. As I served him coffee, he chatted in a dutiful, non-specific way. He had heard of my wife, of course, but – not much of a bookworm, to be honest – had not had the pleasure of reading my novels. Forever Young, was it? I mentioned that I was caught up in the final stages of a new work but Beckwith failed to pick up the hint. He seemed casually, unnervingly well-informed about my life.
After a couple of minutes, he sat forward in his armchair, put his hands together in a thoughtful, self-important manner, and said, ‘There has been a development which we wanted to share with you. Concerning Peter.’
‘Yes?’ My tone indicated only mild curiosity. Briefly, when the policeman had introduced himself, it had occurred to me that his visit concerned Mary Kydd, that perhaps, in his enthusiasm, Brian McWilliam had misinterpreted my request for help, but Beckwith’s manner was too informal for that. Besides, old Pussy was nothing if not a professional in these matters.
‘We ran certain tests on the body of Peter Gibson.’ Beckwith sat back so that it was difficult to see the expression on his face against the light outside. ‘It appears that he may not have been quite as solitary as we had previously thought.’
‘Solitary? Peter was always something of a loner but he had friends. Several of the pupils in his class –’
‘Between you and me, Mr Keays, we’re not talking socially here.’ Beckwith gave a sort of wince of apology at having interrupted me. ‘It was more a matter of … a lover.’
‘Yes?’ My dignified, man-of-the-world manner conveyed, I hoped, a touch of disapproval that such matters should be deemed worthy of police investigation.
‘According to our forensic department, there are indications that Peter had, in the hours before his death, some intimate contact with another person.’
‘He had sex, you mean.’
‘There were traces of another person’s DNA on his – well, on his penis. Our people say that he had not had full, completed sex but something definitely of that nature had occured. There was a matter of saliva.’
‘Ah.’
For a moment we sat in Marigold’s immaculate room like two actors on a stage who had forgotten their lines. I looked out of the window, seeing not the street outside but that last scene in Peter’s unlovely flat, my head bowed over his thin, white body, his poor, cold cock in my mouth. I felt proprietorial, angry that the innocent corpse of my student had been pored over by some dirty-minded geek in a white coat. I was defensive of myself, too. It had been a moment of purity, of silent, wordless tribute. Why the hell should I not say goodbye to my lover in that way? I was a writer, for Christ’s sake.
I returned my attention to Beckwith, suddenly aware that I was breathing more deeply than was entirely normal.
‘We may not tell his parents.’ The policeman’s dull, cybernetic tone of voice was unchanged. ‘I thought I would tell you because, as his teacher, you might be able to shed light on the matter.’
‘Does it change anything?’
‘It may just cast a different light on his death.’
‘He was ringing me all night,’ I said. ‘My wife can be a witness to that. And, if he died in the early hours of the morning, no one can have seen him that day.’
‘Precisely.’
‘You’re not suggesting murder.’
‘No. There were no marks of violence on his body, no dabs around the flat. Apart from yours, of course.’
My mind ran over the implications of what I was hearing. ‘So you just want to know if he had a girlfriend.’
‘It was the DNA of a male person, sir.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘Did he mention any sort of romantic involvement to you? Were there any rumours among the other students of clubs, gay bars, that sort of thing?’
I laughed sharply and more loudly than I had intended. ‘Gay bars? You have no idea what he was like, do you? He wrote. He hardly went out at all.’
‘Maybe he had some sort of guilty secret which caused him to top – to tip himself over the edge.’
I sighed and shook my head at the absurdity of this line of investigations. ‘It wasn’t sex. I can tell you that.’
‘Yes, well.’ Beckwith glanced at his watch. ‘It was just a thought. Maybe I’ll have to have a word with the parents, after all. If there were any of his fellow students in whom he might have confided, it would be useful to have their names at some point.’
I thought for a moment. Then I knew what I had to do.
‘I think I can help you,’ I said.
* * *
Exercise
Describe a yew tree in a graveyard from the point of view of a) the vicar; b) the parent of a child who is buried there; c) a rabbit.
* * *
29
It was late morning. A pale, chilly sun lit the discreet mews in Kensington where Marigold led her professional life. On the few occasions when I had visited her, I had understood why my wife spent so many hours at her office, why a small cloud of irritation seemed to descend on her when she returned home. Here was order, money; here the sheer, enraging disorder of the commoner type of urban crime had no place. In the past, I had suggested that we might actually move into this area but Marigold had resisted, pointing out the cost of property, arguing that Dougie needed parks in which to play. In my more insecure moments, I had sensed that somehow she suspected that I would bring the disorder with me, that a little scummy trail of badness would follow me from Shepherd’s Bush to Kensington.
As usual, there was an air of calm in the ground-floor reception; as usual, Marigold’s personal assistant Tania, a viciously neat woman in her mid-thirties, looked up as I entered as if a scrap of litter had blown in from the pavement, before adopting a starchy, House of Correction smile.
‘Is she in?’ I asked.
‘She’s doing her correspondence.’ Tania made the activity sound like a religious devotion. ‘She won’t be long.’
I took a seat, impatiently flicking through a copy of Interiors as, in a professional undertone, the receptionist rang through to announce the unusual, unscheduled, unwelcome visit of the boss’s wife. I imagined Marigold’s little frown of annoyance at this intrusion of the personal into her working day.
She kept me waiting more than five minutes, at the end of which any mild sense of nervousness of the ordeal before me had evaporated in the glow of my impatience. Now of all times, she had elected to play one of the little games with which the long-term married will be familiar.
‘Hi.’
Marigold’s office was on the first floor, directly above reception, allowing her to descend the stairs and lean over the banisters in a girlish, informal welcome. Her unrecognizably warm and friendly disposition vanished as soon as we were alone in her office. For some abstruse feng shui-related reason, there was no desk here, no paper nor even a telephone. The large, light spacious room had a group of low chairs near the window. In the wall beside where my wife sat, a minute intercom and a discreet computer screen were set into the wall. Oddly, the effect was of temporariness, of the sense that the boss was using the place while her real office was being r
efurbished.
‘Well?’ She waved in the direction of one of the chairs as if I were some kind of junior employee.
I sat down slowly. ‘Not that well, as it happens,’ I said. ‘Can we talk?’
‘What else were we going to do?’
I nodded in the direction of the intercom. ‘That’s not switched on, is it? This is very … personal.’
Impatiently, she turned and pressed a button on the wall. ‘I’ve got a lunch.’
‘We had a call from the police today. It was about Peter Gibson’s death.’
‘Now? Isn’t it a bit late in the day for that?’
‘They did some tests on Peter’s body. They found traces of a quasi-sexual contact which they found interesting.’
My wife was giving me her full attention now. ‘I should think so. It changes everything, doesn’t it?’
‘No.’
‘But if he had a lover there, she must have been party to what he did.’
‘He.’
‘I never knew he was that way inclined – but then I never do know about your pupils.’ Marigold smiled coolly, as if she were winding up a meeting. ‘It must be upsetting for you but I can’t quite see why we can’t discuss it tonight.’
‘It was me.’
My wife sat very still, as if waiting for the punch-line of a joke. ‘You,’ she said eventually.
‘The DNA was mine. I’ve told the police that I’ll take a test but there’s no need. I’ve told them all they need to know.’
‘You? You had sex with Peter Gibson on the day he died?’ She laughed dryly. ‘I’ve heard everything now.’
‘Not sex. I said it was quasi-sexual. When I found him, I –’ Hesitating, I glanced at my wife and was rewarded by her expression of appalled incredulity. ‘When I found the body, I said goodbye in a somewhat personal oral manner.’
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