Tales from a Master's Notebook

by Various

  Will was struck by something she had said, and put his head in his hands. She put her hand on his shoulder and waited. Something was troubling him. He remained silent for a full minute.

  Then, ‘I’m sorry, Gloria,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think I can keep on doing this. It’s very kind of you, but I think I’ve just got to go. Let’s leave it there. This is hard to take.’

  But he didn’t move. He sat there for a moment, biting his lower lip. ‘And in fact, there’s something I should have told you earlier – something a bit upsetting, in more than one way. I heard something from my agent – it’s not been made public yet – and … Well, the Troll can’t have been Norman as we thought. Because Norman is dead. He was at some book festival in Australia six weeks ago, and had a row with the organisers after his reading, so they didn’t keep in touch after he left. Apparently he was driving from one place to another and stopped to go for a long run in the outback. Remember how he was always getting lost in Rome? Eventually someone noticed the car abandoned in the car park. They just found him a couple of days ago, what was left of him – in a hollow. Horrible.’

  Gloria’s face contorted. ‘That is horrible. Good God, poor Norman. And his family. The children … That’s ghastly.’ She stared into space, and took a gulp of Amaro. ‘But surely he must have written the review before leaving the festival?’

  ‘No,’ Will said quietly, ‘the proof copies only went out three weeks ago. Remember? It couldn’t have been him.’

  She looked uneasy. ‘What about your other friend, what’s his name? – Mark, then? It must have been him, after all.’

  ‘Well, I don’t think so. You see, I ran into him at the British Library a couple of months back, and we went for lunch, in spite of everything. He told me that he’d come to think that Wales was the best place he could have ended up – he’s a big fish there now, and he’s got funding for a long period of research leave to write a book that sounds as if it will be really good. That’s why he was in London. I told him about my troubles – you know, writing block, my sort of breakdown, all the hostile reviews, money worries, the short-term contracts – and he said he’d had completely the wrong idea about me. He actually apologised for having thought we were rivals. And I must say I believed him. We cleared the air, and got on really well. So he’s ruled out too.’

  A strange look came over Gloria’s face. ‘So who do you think the Troll is?’

  ‘I simply couldn’t say,’ Will replied, gently.

  3

  That peculiar expression on Gloria’s face came back to Will two months later as he climbed over the stile on his way to her village, which he had never visited before. She had seemed stricken. That rather airless dark corner of the Mayfair restaurant felt impossibly remote to him as he made his way through the breeze-tossed late-morning sunshine of the Dales in spring. She had confusedly checked the time, called for the bill and paid, bundled together her things and departed, all without any further conversational niceties – as if she couldn’t wait to get out of there.

  He was early, having made a point of allowing time to walk the five miles of countryside from the nearest station. A taxi would have been too abrupt; this meandering rustic path gave him time to think. As he reached the crest of the last hill, he was granted a view down over the village in its wooded valley, seemingly unchanged since – well, at least the 1950s. It was beautiful, and he couldn’t hold back tears. Sitting down on a tussock in the luminously green grass, he shut his eyes for a moment.

  Now he was going to meet Gloria’s friends for the first time, he realised, a thought which gave him a moment’s pause. What might she have said to them about him? Probably nothing, despite what he now couldn’t but assume about the authorship of those reviews. The world didn’t revolve around him, as he kept being reminded – and he could just tell people he was an old friend.

  The tolling of church bells carried up to him there on the wind, and he looked at his phone to see the time; having been early, he had dawdled and was now on the point of being late. So he jumped to his feet and strode down the field towards the point where the path entered a dark, tangled copse – full, though, of birds, singing for their lives.

  The bells had stopped while he was still in the middle of the wood, but the ancient grey-stone church – ivied, squat-towered, hunched in a ring of sheltering woods that in midwinter would have been sinister but now were illuminated by bright sunshine – still hadn’t closed its doors. The last few people were drifting in, and Will slipped inside with them. The door, which faced south, was then left open, so that sunlight poured in and was reflected off the old, worn slabs – as well as coming in through the high windows, many of which were plain glass. Somehow the faith had been kept going for centuries in this tiny settlement, amid snow, floods, war, poverty. The peacefulness of it consoled him.

  He couldn’t at first find a place, but a rather impatient female usher led him down the length of the narrow nave, past rows of faces on either side, to a pew awkwardly near the front. It was a comfort that the church was clearly so full of love for Gloria. He was only just settled when a hush fell, and the coffin was carried in by four sturdy women, one of whom was crying audibly. He looked down, struck by the reality of the ending of this life that had touched his. Surely, he thought, with a chill – and he realised it was something that had been at the back of his mind since he heard the news – Gloria’s death couldn’t be anything to do with him?

  As he looked up again, he had the illusion – it must be an illusion – that everyone was looking at him – or had just turned away, in order to avoid meeting his look. Whether or not this was the case, he suddenly felt very self-conscious. Almost everyone there was a woman, it seemed, except for a few accompanying males, and it felt almost as if he had broken some taboo. This was Gloria’s ‘coven’, then.

  The tributes, by two women of roughly Gloria’s age, her best friend and her agent, praised Gloria’s bravery, her imaginative genius, her generosity, her mischievous sense of humour. Her loss in such cruel circumstances would be devastating – but her books, which had changed their lives and those of millions, would live on. The critics, and her rivals, had never been fair, resenting her high sales and attaching the grotesque label of ‘women’s fiction’ to work that would always have the power to transform and enrich. She had never, one speaker said, had much luck with men, had thought too well of them and been repeatedly deceived – choosing cold, self-centred charmers who had abused her kindness. Only her father, and her gay best friend from college, had not let her down. A sigh of sympathy, and indignation, ran through the congregation. ‘Well, they’ll be sorry now,’ the friend declared.

  A couple of people glanced in Will’s direction. A shiver swept over him. His agent had simply told him Gloria was killed in a car accident, and given him the time of the funeral. He had come because he felt he must, and because he wanted properly to grieve for her – but now the woman vicar began to speak, and as he listened he realised from the way she skirted round the subject that almost everyone present believed that Gloria had intentionally driven her cream Porsche off the road and into that fatal gorge.

  He sat on in the church as the others filed out into the sunshine. It was achingly sad, the thought that her death might have been something meant, not just a hideous accident. He looked over to the door. Silhouetted against the sun was a middle-aged woman with short hair and glasses, standing there and looking intently in his direction. He could not make out her face, but her posture was – well, baleful. It now crossed his mind: what might Gloria have said to them about him in her wounded state? He foresaw that there might be difficulties at the reception.

  When he came outside, no one was looking at him, at least, and he just stood there, at a loss. There was one woman, however, of about his age, definitely unbaleful, with a kindly face, who had evidently been weeping during the service. She was on her own, having arrived late, and now smiled dimly across at him. She came over through the graves, saying, �
��Hello, I’m Jill, I’m one of Gloria’s oldest friends. I don’t think we’ve met …’ Relieved, Will smiled back at her and shook her hand. ‘Hello,’ he said, and told her his name.

  She didn’t say anything. In fact, she looked as if he had kicked her in the stomach. Her face crumpled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, and turned and ran, desperately, clumsily, out of the churchyard. From behind the stone wall came sounds of gasping, retching, sobbing. A couple of other women went out to help her.

  It was like a hideous dream. Will just looked at his feet. He sensed that all round people were staring at him, whispering his name, outraged by his presence. Some were crying, overcome by the mixture of grief and violation. But he could not move.

  At last, one of the women who had been helping Jill re-entered the churchyard and marched up to him. It was evidently something that required enormous courage on her part, but she felt she had to represent the collective spirit. He recognised her stance: she was the baleful one. ‘You should never have come here,’ she hissed at him, heroically. ‘We all know what you did, all Gloria’s friends – it was unforgivable. She forgave you – but don’t think that we can. She was such a sweet person. Please just go now, and never come back. You think you can get away with this? Let me tell you, we all want justice for Gloria – and you’ll be sorry.’

  The words struck him like an unexpected rugby tackle: Will felt faint, and he heard a buzzing in his ears. But he had to get away, so, unsteadily, he made his way to the church gate, amid a murmur of disapproval. At the gate he paused, holding a stanchion for support.

  One of the men present, a stocky, mild-mannered-looking man in his thirties, came over, his face unreadable. Will thought for a moment he was going to offer to intercede, to hear what Will had to say for himself. But then a fist walloped him on the side of the head. He fell to his knees with the force of the blow.

  He stumbled away, his ears ringing, back into the dark wood, up the hill, under skies that were now full of grim clouds portending rain. He half walked, half ran for a couple of miles, putting as much distance as he could between himself and the church. In the downpour, he missed his path; then, slipping and sliding in the mud, he found his phone was gone – it must have fallen out of his pocket when he was knocked down. So, wet, lost, ashamed, confused, grieving, he wandered for miles that day and into the night, sometimes weeping for Gloria, sometimes for himself, sometimes for Norman; sometimes laughing bitterly at everything. He should have gone back for the phone, but which way even was back? It was after dark when he reached the station, and well after midnight when the train finally pulled into London.

  By that time, another web review of Fine Print had appeared. It was there in his inbox, sent by a solicitous friend, when he checked, as he somehow couldn’t help doing, before sleep, or what should have been sleep. It lacked the playfulness and finesse of the earlier assaults, but was quite jagged enough to reopen old wounds. The first of many bearing the byline, ‘Ottoline Stroller’, it ended,

  This soi-disant author seems to think he has talent, and for a while the world was fooled into thinking so too. Fortunately, Fine Print dispels any uncertainty: it shows conclusively that he is simply not worth the candle – he’s coldly self-obsessed, blindly sexist, institutionally racist, and his uninteresting ‘experiments’ are cases for the Journal of Negative Results. This ‘Print’ is not only not ‘Fine’, I’m wasting my time and yours in even discussing it. He is, in fact, not a zero but a minus, mean-spirited and abusive – and not just of our patience. I usually give books I don’t like to charity. In this case that would be irresponsible, so I have fed his oeuvre instead to my wood-burning stove, where, as I type these closing words, it at last achieves some value by giving off a little smoky warmth.

  As Will climbed into bed, Flora turned over, tutting gently, and returned to her deep slumbers. He lay there beside her, eyes wide open, strange strands of memory in his head, shivering, watching an icy future yawn before him. He had gone wrong somewhere; would never get across the bridge as many others seemed to do, would wait and wait, beside the abyss, unseen in the darkness – or rather, unseeing, he would be forever unforgivingly scrutinised by burning, hostile, anonymous eyes, dead eyes, from which there could be no getting away.

  JOSEPH O’NEILL

  THE POLTROON HUSBAND

  FIVE YEARS AGO we sold the Phoenix house and bought land in Flagstaff and built a house there – our ‘final abode’, I called it. Jayne objected to this designation, but I defended myself with what I termed an ‘argument from reality’ – which was also objected to by Jayne, who said I was using ‘an argument from being really annoying’.

  ‘Are you saying this isn’t going to be our final abode?’ I said. ‘And don’t talk to me about hospices or nuthouses. You know what I mean. This is the last place you and I will call home. This is our final abode.’

  I looked up ‘abode’. It refers to a habitual residence, of course; but it derives from an Old English verb meaning ‘to wait’. The expression ‘abide with me’ can be traced back to the same source. An abode is a place of waiting. Waiting for what? Not to be a downer, but I think we all know the answer. When I shared my research with Jayne, she said, ‘I see that your darkness is somewhat useful to you, but it’s a bit intellectually weak.’ This delighted me, of course.

  The final abode is on a wooded, intermittently waterlogged double lot on South San Francisco Street, near the university. The neighborhood was quite ramshackle when we moved in, and to this day it hosts a significant population of indigent men. They come to Flagstaff with good reason, in my opinion: the climate is lovely in this desert oasis seven thousand feet above the sea, and there are good social services, and the townsfolk are good-hearted, I would claim, although it must be noted that the city only recently decriminalised begging. I took part in the protests against the law. Jayne, whose politics on this issue are the same as mine, was disinclined to man the barricades, so to speak. We, the protesters, chanted slogans and held up placards and marched along Beaver Street, where some of us got into good trouble, to use the catchphrase of my hero, John Lewis: we sat down in the middle of the road and symbolically panhandled. I was among those sitting down but not among those randomly arrested and dragged away by the cops, much to Jayne’s relief.

  Our house, very cleverly laid out by a local architect, consists of five shipping containers raised several feet from the ground. Half of one container functions as a garden office and the other half functions as a covered footbridge over the stream that runs through our land: previously you had to negotiate a pair of old planks. The covered bridge was my idea. It makes me stupidly proud when visitors pause to enjoy the view through the bridge’s window: the small brown watercourse, the translucent thicket. It is extraordinary how many of the design problems we encountered led to solutions whose positive dimensions exceeded the negative dimensions of the original problem. And how fortunate we were to find this magical overgrown downtown woodland in the first place. Road traffic is imperceptible from the house; and when the maples and river birches are in leaf, we cannot be seen by anyone walking by. It is a wonderfully private, precious urban place.

  One night, Jayne grabs my wrist. We are in bed.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she says.

  ‘Hear what?’

  Jayne is still holding my wrist, though not as tightly as before.

  ‘Shush,’ she says.

  We listen. I am about to declare the all-clear when there’s a noise – a kind of thud, as if a person had collided with the sofa.

  Jayne and I look at each other. ‘What was that?’ she says. She is whispering.

  We listen some more. Another noise: not as loud, but also thud-like.

  ‘It could be a skunk,’ I say. We have a lot of skunks around here. Skunks are born intruders.

  ‘Is it downstairs?’

  It’s hard for me to give an answer. Although the house has two stories and numerous dedicated ‘zones’, to use the architect’s word,
only the bathrooms are rooms, that is, spaces enclosed by four walls and a door. Otherwise the house comprises a single acoustical unit. This can be confusing. Often a noise made in one zone will sound as if it emanates from another.

  Now there is a sudden louder noise that must be described as a cough. Something or someone is either coughing or making a coughing sound. It’s definitely coming from inside the house. I think.

  ‘I’d better take a look,’ I say. A little to my surprise, Jayne doesn’t disagree. I turn off my bedside light. ‘Let’s listen again,’ I say.

  For several minutes, Jayne and I sit up in bed in the darkness and the quiet. We don’t hear anything. Actually, that’s incorrect: we don’t hear anything untoward. If you listen hard enough, you always hear something. The susurration of the ceiling fan. The faint roar of the comforter.

  ‘I think it’s fine,’ I finally say.

  ‘What’s fine?’

  ‘It was nothing,’ I say. ‘We’re always hearing noises.’ That’s basically true. Often, at night, a racket of clawed feet on the roof produces the false impression that animals have penetrated the abode.

  ‘Let’s call 911,’ Jayne says.

  I don’t have to tell her that our phones are downstairs, in the kitchen, plugged into chargers. I say, ‘Sweetie, there’s no need to worry. Nothing has happened.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we check?’ she says.

  What she’s really suggesting is that I’m the one who should check – that the checker should be me. I should get out of bed and go down the stairs and find out what is making the noises. My feeling is that this isn’t called for. Those noises happened a long time ago, is how I feel about it. I feel like they are historical facts.

  Jayne says, ‘I won’t be able to sleep.’