Kill Your Darlings

by Terence Blacker

  ‘Girlfriend, Doug?’

  ‘She’s a girl. She’s a friend. Work it out for yourself.’

  She was a girlfriend. I could tell that from the way she spent the night. Sometimes, their voices would die down to be replaced first by a sort of mumbling, then by a creaking of timber, punctuated occasionally by a rhythmic knocking of the bed-head against the wall.

  Soon any pretence that Zoe was a casual guest, just passing through, was abandoned. Some mornings she would appear in the kitchen, barefoot in her jeans, still smelling of bed. With a muttered greeting, she would make two mugs of tea which she would take upstairs to my son, her lover. Occasionally they would watch television together in the sitting-room. I became used to her presence. It was almost like having a daughter, or at least it would have been had it not been for the fact that Zoe and her weight problem, her clear skin and dark eyes reminded me uncomfortably of the late Mary Kydd.

  One night, lying alone in my marital bed, I was woken by a cry. Like any parent – even one for whom the care of an infant is distant memory – I was immediately wide awake and alert. At first, I thought that I was mistaken in thinking that the disturbance had come from inside the house and that some sort of altercation must be taking place on a nearby street outside, but there was no mistaking the next sound, a gasp followed by a groan. I got out of bed and, for a few seconds, stood in the corridor, listening. The groaning grew louder, more urgent, punctuated by yelps, the occasional slap of flesh. I returned to my room and closed the door but Zoe was proving to be a surprisingly noisy lover.

  I lay there, disapproving yet uncomfortably aroused. As a liberal parent, I knew I should be pleased by any new sign of my son’s burgeoning adulthood but this loud, truculent love-making, only feet away from where I was trying to sleep, seemed oddly derisive and triumphant. I was unable to go back to sleep.

  Alone in the marital bed? Yes, it was true. I had returned to the bedroom but, at this time of change and turmoil, when the days were accompanied by the comfort of an endlessly ringing telephone and the nights echoed to the cris de joie of little Zoe, Marigold was rarely at home. The influence of feng shui design, it seemed, was reaching beyond the purlieus of Greater London to conference centres in Birmingham, hotels in Scotland, stately homes in Yorkshire, upmarket housing developments in the West Country. Suddenly they all required the on-site attentions of Marigold Keays Associates.

  Each time she called in to collect clothes and mail, my wife seemed to be more of a visitor, acknowledging me with a tight, formal smile which discouraged conversation. From the way she took to visiting Doug in his room during her brief sojourns at the family home, I assumed that many of the calls he made from his mobile phone were to her. We seemed to have reached an arrangement which was both paradoxical and unfair: I lived with my son, estranged from him yet obliged to support his lazy, expensive habits; Marigold wandered the country, yet was closer to him than she had been for decade.

  Even the house and garden, which had once seemed almost a part of her, or at least an outer expression of her character and sensibility, now appeared to be of only passing interest to her. I took to moving objects around, placing the Inca fertility symbol where the Chou hill-jar had once been, in an attempt to goad her aesthetic sense into life. A flicker of irritation as she entered the room was her only response.

  ‘I’ve been freshening up Buddha’s bowl,’ I told her one day, catching her in the bedroom during one of her fleeting visits.

  She glanced at the godhead. ‘How amusing of you,’ she said.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to amuse. You always said it was important that he had fresh rice.’

  ‘To bring blessing and harmony to the marital room,’ she said in a distracted voice. ‘That no longer seems such a high priority. Do you have to follow me about like this?’

  I left the room. It was true that, as soon as I sensed her entering the house (a slight chill in the atmosphere, a surge of negative ch’i), I would emerging from my loft and attempt to engage her in conversation about whichever castle or housing development she was working on, or to bring her up to date, in a tone of jokey modesty, with the latest developments in the triumphant progress of terpsichore 4:2. She would respond with cool, distracted politeness, avoiding my eyes. Eventually, she would say, ‘Anyway, I had better get on’ or ‘I want see Doug now’ and I would retreat to my work station, defeated once more.

  For a while, I had assumed that the logical explanation for this froideur and these lengthy absences was that her emotions were still engaged elsewhere. Yet her gypsy wanderings across the country seemed inconsistent with a woman in love. When I made casual reference to the affair which was no longer a secret between us, she reacted oddly, with a sort of scoffing wince, a laugh that contained neither humour nor warmth. As an old hand in such matters, I judged that her arrangement had reached the moment of critical mass at which it either became more public and significant or was terminated in the same cool, well-organized fashion with which it had started. He had returned to his wife, or found someone else. They had ‘moved on’.

  Perhaps it was my success, my new-found strength, which had alienated her. For years, she had luxuriated in the illusion that, just as her material resources had supported our little family, so her confidence had kept afloat the leaky vessel of my self-regard. The advances in her career, she believed, had given me courage through the dark hours of non-production, of ‘work in progress’ that somehow never progressed. The monthly contribution she made to my living expenses had established a sort of hierarchy between us: I was the suffering, indigent artist, hopeless in all practical matters; she was the entrepreneur whose gift for making money had allowed me to pursue my demons untroubled by fears of what the next post would bring.

  Money – her success with it, my lack of it – had provided a bond, and now that bond was broken. I was free, drifting away from my moorings. It was odd: I had always imagined that, at this moment of financial independence, I would become more attractive to her, but I had been wrong.

  I realized that I did not want to lose my wife. I wanted to talk to her about Doug, to share awkward, relieved, parental jokes about his new girlfriend. I missed her neat self-sufficiency, the way that she brought an effortless elegance to her life and surroundings, her generosity of time and spirit towards the dreariest of neighbours, her standing orders at the bank to various carefully considered charities, her quiet, unshowy sense of the correct way to behave, her laugh, her old-fashioned expletives. Goodness. Blimey. Sugar. Good grief. In my mind I would hear her voice and I would smile. I even missed her scoldings. I wanted to take her to bed. I imagined moments when, at some early hour in the morning, we might be roused by the sounds of Zoe in full cry. We would turn to one another, groaning with parental exasperation, and, unable to get to sleep, find ourselves responding with a gentle, middle-aged variation on the same theme. We would fall asleep in each other’s arms.

  As if to escape more completely from me, she had become different from the Marigold with whom I had lived for all these years. She dressed more casually, moved through the house in a manner that was uncharacteristically deliberate. For the first time, I could imagine how she would be as an old woman. Oddest of all, and it was difficult not to discern some kind of slight here, her taste in reading had shifted from the popular history and vapid inspirational volumes she used to enjoy to mainstream contemporary fiction: Jane Gardam, Robertson Davies, Penelope Lively.

  One day, when she was packing a case in the bedroom (recently, she had seemed to leave for each new project with more cases than she ever returned with; maybe she was shipping herself out of the house in stages), I noticed a copy of Martin’s woeful American policier sitting up perkily and proprietorially in her handbag on the bed.

  ‘Since when have you been into Martin?’ I asked as casually as I could manage.

  My wife followed the direction of my eyes. ‘He’s great, isn’t he. I can see why you’re always going on about him. Surprisingly good at women
, I thought.’

  I hesitated, hoping, in my innocence, that this was a good-hearted tease, but she returned to her packing as if nothing particularly unusual had been said.

  ‘Good? At women? Martin?’ Unable to hold back any longer, I found that I was speaking more loudly than I had intended. ‘The policewoman narrator of this overblown jeu d’esprit, this painfully elongated short story, this pretentious little sub-Elmore Leonard semi-thriller, is no more feminine than the banal crew of tossers, losers and faux-lowlifes to be found in all his other novels.’ I picked up the novel and, as I riffled contemptuously through its pages, various irritating Martinian yelps and phrases (‘suicide is all over town’, ‘downward disparity’, ‘state-of-the-art cynicism’, ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry’) caught my eye. ‘In fact –’ I lowered my voice, aiming for a note of teacherly authority – ‘By opting for an American setting, he has sacrificed the one faintly intriguing aspect of his work – its edgy, Transatlantic linguistic tension. The plot’s wafer-thin and contrived, even before he abandons any attempt to tell a coherent story at around page 120, when he falls back exhaustedly on a feeble but lengthy Welsh joke. In a Chicago police story! Talk about hoisting the white flag!’

  My wife sat back on her haunches and looked me with faint amusement. ‘You know, I had completely forgotten that you were so jealous of him.’

  ‘My critique was entirely objective,’ I said, regretting that I had allowed her to goad me into a response that was more heartfelt than the occasion demanded.

  ‘You hate him because he’s done all the things that you should have done, written the books that you should have written.’

  I allowed a few moments for the full idiocy of this charge to become clear to her. When I spoke again, it was in cool and measured tones. ‘As it happens, I had a lot of time for him up to the time of his Eighties novel. No one could regret the catastrophic decline in his talent over the last few years more than I do.’

  ‘Poor Gregory. He’s sent you round the twist.’

  ‘In fact, as a fellow author, I feel profound sympathy for the man. When terpsichore appears, he’ll be finished. Cultural journalist? Of course. Humorist? Maybe. Serious novelist? Sorry, Mart, you’re not even close.’

  ‘Well, he just seems like a damned good read to me.’ My wife stood up and, unusually, looked me straight in the eye. ‘By the way, why can you never bear to mention the title of any his novels? The “London novel”, the “Eighties novel”. Why don’t just say it – London Fields, Money? Go on – it won’t hurt.’

  I swore at her (I very rarely swear at her) and left the room.

  Later, it occurred to me that this conversation had nothing to do with the small man at all. My wife was provoking me, pushing me into leaving her. I tried to tell myself that, when I was once more the king of the literary pages and the TV arts programmes, she would see me for who I was – Gregory, her husband, the father of her son, one third of our precious little family unit, but I feared that, by then, I would have lost her. Anyway, she had probably never even read Martin.

  * * *

  The Writer Speaks of … Ego

  ‘As for conceit, what man will do any good who is not conceited? Nobody holds a good opinion of a man who has a low opinion of himself.’

  Anthony Trollope

  ‘The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.’

  William Faulkner

  ‘Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s personality.’

  George Orwell

  ‘I think writers are inclined to be intensely egocentric. Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.’

  John Cheever

  ‘A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn’t stink a little bit of the writer’s pride in having given up his pride.’

  J. D. Salinger

  ‘To be any good you have to think you’re the best of your generation … Without that ridiculous competitive pride I don’t think you’ve got a chance, really.’

  Martin Amis

  * * *

  36

  A month after I had started working, the first three chapters and a full synopsis for Lolitaville were delivered to Brian’s new agent (sensibly, Barry Storm had been ditched with some of the less desirable baggage from Brian’s past) who passed it on to the publisher. She responded with a certain wariness. While she was impressed by the ‘brio’ and ‘narrative energy’ of the material, she had expected something rather less racy and more considered. Sorted, after all, had offered a serious contribution to the debate on criminality. What was the moral position of the new work? Its tone seemed oddly lenient, indeed almost approving, in its view of child abuse. Was this to be – I imagined her shudder of distaste – some sort of popular thriller? Or had she misunderstood Brian’s intentions?

  Hearing the news, I cursed myself for my lack of professionalism. In my haste, I had forgotten that we were dealing with book publishers. They had their tawdry reputations, their laughable respectability, to consider. Some light, cosmetic revisions would have to be made.

  A lunch was arranged between agent and publisher. The agent, well-briefed by the book’s true author, offered his apologies. Clearly Brian’s sub-textual intent had been obscured by his enthusiasm for narrative. He had always intended that the full and final version would emphasize a powerful ethical message behind the apparent amorality of the story itself. Its very lack of self-censoring irony would imbue it with the startlingly minimalist contemporaneity of the new Danish film directors who were now all the rage. A mock editorial introduction, of the type favoured by Nabokov in Pale Fire, had now been added. The title, Brian had also conceded, might have been ill-advised in that there was a small danger that it might appeal to the very people it sought to expose. He now proposed to call it, with a subtle Shakespearean touch, Nymph, In Thy Orisons.

  The publisher was convinced. Sensing a heady and profitable conflation of literary seriousness and old-fashioned prurience, she hurried back to her office and, later that day, put in an offer not far short of a quarter of a million pounds.

  It would be disingenuous to pretend that I was surprised to find that, yet again, I was responsible for an enviably successful literary project. Yet not for one moment did I consider taking the public credit that was due to me.

  terpsichore 4:2 was making its mark. Several of those who had read it had expressed a heartening, if off-the-record, conviction that it was a strong contender for virtually any literary prize for which we cared to enter it. My return from the wilderness and brief flirtation with notoriety following the death of Peter Gibson, had provoked a flurry of interest among features editors. No fewer than fifty copies of my new author portrait (a sultry black-and-white studio-shot taken by an up-and-coming fashion photographer) had been distributed to the press.

  In short, no matter how successful and profitable Nymph, In Thy Orisons may have turned out to be, my involvement in a lightly disguised paedo-thriller risked taking the sparkle off my now glittering reputation. The question of the novel’s subject matter could probably, with careful news management, be surmounted (I was a writer, for Christ’s sake) but the collaborative element of the enterprise was more worrying. Had Roth worked with a low-life media criminal? Did Updike ever share joint billing with a non-writer? No. Even Martin had always ploughed his narrow little furrow in solitude. The idea that I should be seen publicly in harness with the notorious wrong ’un Pussy McWilliam would doubtless cause a sensation in the press but, when the fuss d
ied down, it risked dulling the burnish on my public image as an artist and moral arbiter.

  So when we dined in at a vulgar West End restaurant for minor celebrities, shortly after the full scale of the financial triumph of Nymph had become clear, I was able to give my collaborator the answer for which he had been hoping. ‘Forget any author credit,’ I said. ‘Have it. This one’s on me.’

  McWilliam narrowed his eyes in a manner that, somewhat gracelessly, expressed suspicion rather than gratitude.

  ‘You helped me when I was in a jam,’ I explained. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

  ‘So what sort of cut do you think would be reasonable?’

  ‘Cut?’ I laughed.

  ‘Yeah, Greg. Don’t fuck about. You know what I’m saying.’

  I shrugged, unconcerned.

  ‘Personally, I think a one-off payment would be tidier,’ he said. ‘I can pay it off-shore, if you like. We’ll take the tax element into account, naturally. Seems only fair.’

  ‘Brian.’ I spoke quietly. ‘My novel is about to be published here and in New York. Foreign language rights are on offer to publishers all around the world. Hollywood’s hot to trot. I simply don’t need the aggravation of off-shore funds.’

  ‘It’ll have to be readies, then.’

  I smiled and said nothing.

  McWilliam looked at me sideways, like an amateur dramatic trying to convey an air of craftly suspicion. ‘You don’t want money?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘So what do you want then? What the fuck are you up to, Greg?’

  ‘It’s enough to see you happy, Brian. Let’s just say that, when I give you the final manuscript, our account will be settled.’

  I picked up my glass to toast him again but McWilliam sat dangerously still. ‘Don’t be a cunt, Greg. Please, for my sake, just don’t be a fucking arsehole. Not with me.’