by Various
I wouldn’t say that she says this loudly, but she’s definitely no longer speaking in what you’d call a low voice.
Jayne says, ‘I’ll just lie here all night, wondering what those noises are.’
I don’t know what to say. For some reason, I feel very exhausted.
Jayne says, ‘Honey, it’s not safe.’
I hear her. She’s arguing that, even if we could fall asleep, it would be unsafe to do so in circumstances where we’ve heard thuds and coughs of an unknown character and origin. I say, ‘You’re right.’
I don’t move, however. I stay right where I am, in bed.
It’s important to examine this moment with some care and, above all, to avoid simplistic psychological conclusions. In that moment, which I clearly recall, the following occurred: I was overcome by a dreamlike inertness. I was not experiencing fear as such. I have been afraid and I know what it is to be afraid. This wasn’t that. This was what I’d call an oneiric paralysis.
Thus I could intuit that my wife was looking at me, yet my own eyes, open but unaccountably immobilised, were directed straight ahead, toward some point in the darkness: I lacked the wherewithal to turn my head and return her look. Her bedside lamp lit up, presumably by her hand. I sensed her climbing out of the bed. She appeared at the foot of the bed. There she was visible to me. She fixed her hair into a bun and put on a dressing gown I didn’t know existed. She was as beautiful as ever, that much I could take in. She said, ‘I’ll go down myself.’
Here I became most strongly conscious of my incapacitation – because I found myself unable to intervene. But for this incapacity, I would surely have pointed out that she was taking a crazy risk. I would have reminded her that Arizona is teeming with guns and gunmen. I would have proposed an alternative to venturing alone downstairs. In short, I would have stopped her.
To be clear, my inability to speak up wasn’t because I’d lost my voice as such. The content of my thoughts amounted to a blank. I was the subject of a mental whiteout.
My beloved left the sleeping zone. I heard her footfall as she went down the stairs.
My symptoms improved a little. I found myself able to move my feet over the border of the bed – though no further. I could not escape a sedentary posture. I perforce awaited the sound of whatever next happened.
Which was: a soft utterance. Certainly it was a human voice, or a human-like voice. Then came a pause; then a repetition of the first utterance, equally soft; and then what sounded like a responsive utterance. I heard a movement being made, a movement I associated with an act of clumsiness. Then came a series of sounds made by bodily movements, it seemed, then another, slightly longer speech episode involving one voice or more than one voice, I couldn’t tell for sure. What was being said and being done, and by whom, and in which zone: all of these matters were beyond me. I was on the bed’s edge, that is to say, still bedridden. This state of affairs persisted for a period of time that even in retrospect remains incalculable: soft utterances belonging, it seemed, although I could not be sure, to more than one speaker; pauses; the sounds of movements human or animal; and my own stasis. At any rate, there eventually came a moment when the light in the living zone was switched on; and very soon after that, I heard the distinctive exhalation of the refrigerator door being opened, and the splashing, or plashing, of liquid being poured into a glass. Here, my motive powers returned as mysteriously as they had abandoned me. I got to my feet and went down.
Jayne is seated at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. She has taken to drinking milk regularly, for the calcium: one of her greatest fears is that she’ll lose bone density and end up stooped, like her mother.
‘Good idea,’ I say, and I pour myself a glass of milk, too, even though my bone density isn’t something I lose sleep over. I sit down across the table from her.
Jayne is on her smartphone, scrolling. I wait for her to send a text or make a phone call, because she normally doesn’t pick up her gadget without a purpose in mind. She keeps scrolling, though, almost as if she’s just passing time.
I’ve never seen her in any kind of dressing gown before. This one has an old-fashioned pattern of brown-and-green tartan. She looks good in it. ‘I like your dressing gown,’ I say.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I thought it might come in handy.’
I survey the surroundings. I see nothing amiss or unusual. Nor can I smell anything out of the ordinary.
Jayne finishes her milk. ‘I think I’ll go back to bed now,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s late.’ I go up with her.
In the morning, we follow our routine. I make scrambled eggs and coffee for two; we consume the eggs and coffee; and we retire to our respective work zones: I to the garden office, where I do the consultancy stuff that occupies me for about five hours, six days a week; Jayne to the studio, which is her name for the zone of the house dedicated to her printmaking activities. We are both very busy on this particular day and work longer and more intensely than normal, and at midday we separately grab a bite to eat. In the late afternoon, I check in on her.
‘How’s it going?’ I say.
‘Good,’ she says, all vagueness and preoccupation. She is standing at her worktable, her palms black with ink. She wears the green apron I know so well.
I peek over her shoulder. ‘Very nice,’ I say.
Jayne does not respond, which is to be expected.
‘For tonight, I was thinking steak,’ I say.
‘Yay,’ Jayne says. She loves steak, if I make it.
So I step out and get the meat and cook it. I open a bottle of red wine. I serve the meat with grilled asparagus and sautéed potatoes.
‘You don’t like the steak?’ I say. Jayne has only eaten a mouthful of it. Otherwise she has finished her food – including two helpings of potatoes.
She says, ‘I’m not that hungry.’
‘Not hungry?’ I say.
‘Maybe I’ll have some later.’
I say to her, ‘What happened last night? When you went downstairs.’
Jayne says, ‘You were right. It was nothing.’
I say, ‘I heard voices. I heard you talking to someone.’
‘You did?’ she says.
‘You’re saying those voices I heard were nothing?’
‘You tell me,’ Jayne says.
‘You were there,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t. You tell me.’
‘Where were you?’ she says. ‘In bed?’ Now she is eating her steak.
I say, ‘You’re hungry now?’ I say, ‘Who were you talking to?’
Jayne says, ‘Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?’
It must be said: I’m furious. ‘Can I get you anything else?’ I say. ‘A glass of milk?’
I didn’t press Jayne further. If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s an interrogator. I decided to bide my time. Jayne, who is a great one for marital candor and discussion, would open up to me sooner or later. Meanwhile, I held off telling her about my side of things; in particular, the bizarre condition to which I fell victim on that night – a catastrophic neural stoppage. My story went hand in hand with her story. I couldn’t tell her mine unless she told me hers.
Three months have passed. Neither of us has brought up the subject.
The nocturnal noises have not reoccurred, it should be said. There have been noises of the usual variety, of course, but none that have caused a disturbance. I may have played a role in this.
It has always been the case that, when Jayne and I finally call it a day, she goes upstairs while I linger in order to lock up, switch off the lights, perform a visual sweep, and generally satisfy myself that everything is shipshape and we can safely bed down. Lately, however, I have taken to staying downstairs after my patrol, if I can call it that. I sit in my armchair. All the lights have been turned off except for the lamp by the chair, so that I am, in effect, spotlighted, and clearly visible to any visitor. I remain seated for a period of time that varies between half an hour and a whole hour. I don’t do an
ything. I remain alert. I offer myself for inspection.
‘Are you coming up?’ Jayne called down when I first began to do this.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I’m just seeing to a few things.’
‘OK, well, come up soon,’ Jayne said. ‘I miss you.’
A short while later, she was at the top of the stairs. ‘Love, I’m going to go to sleep soon,’ she said.
‘You do that, my darling,’ I said. ‘Get yourself some shuteye. You’ve worked hard.’
‘Is that new?’ she said.
‘It’s my dressing gown,’ I said.
The dressing gown had been delivered that morning. It bothered me, when I began these vigils, that I lacked appropriate attire. To watchfully occupy a chair was a pursuit that belonged neither to the day nor to the night; neither to the world of action nor to the world of rest. Specifically, I wanted to remove my clothing at day’s end and yet not sit downstairs dressed only in pajamas. The solution was a dressing gown.
Shopping for a dressing gown isn’t straightforward. Not only is there the danger of ordering a bathrobe by mistake, but there’s also the danger of buying something that will make you ridiculous. After a considerable effort of online browsing, I got one made of dark-blue silk. I chose well. I enjoy slipping it on and fastening the sash and – because this, too, has become part of the ritual – wetting and combing my hair so that, unforeseeably, I am more spruce than I’ve been in years. I’m very much a jeans and lumberjack shirt kind of guy.
‘It looks nice on you,’ Jayne said. As was now the norm, she too was wearing her dressing gown. She added, laughing, ‘In a Hugh Hefner kind of way.’
Was this an entirely friendly qualification? I couldn’t tell; an unfamiliar opacity clouded Jayne in that moment. And when she got me monogrammed black slippers for my birthday – ‘To complete the Hef look’ – the same cloud suddenly returned. Still, I wear the slippers happily. And whenever I finally turn in, Jayne is always awake or half-awake, and always rolls over on her side to hold me, and always asks, ‘Is everything OK?’ It is, I tell her.
When I’m in my chair, I automatically compare any weird noises to those that disturbed us that night – the thuds, the coughs. The comparison has not yet yielded an echo. I also replay in my mind what I heard when Jayne went downstairs, which sounded to me like a conversation between Jayne and another person, even though it may have been nothing and certainly came to nothing; and I find myself again looking forward to the day when Jayne will finally reminisce about the incident, and will at last disclose what happened to her during those interminable moments when I found myself in a veritable psychic captivity, a state which I’ll finally have the opportunity to describe to her – although, because Jayne is given to worry, maybe it would be best if I protected her from learning about a biobehavioral ailment of such troubling neurophysiological dimensions. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve kept something from her. I’ve never told her that, when she and I first met, I had reached a point in my life when it would comfort me to look around a room and figure out exactly how I might hang myself. Jayne is my rescuer from all of that.
It’s quite possible that she has forgotten all about the night of the noises. Certainly, the alternative scenario is highly improbable: that hers is a calculated muteness; that she is keeping the facts from me on purpose. It would be most unlike Jayne to do such a thing. She can’t abide tactical silences. Moreover, this particular silence would serve no purpose that I can see; therefore it cannot be purposeful.
Meanwhile, I’ve become quite the expert in what might be called bionomic audio. For example, I’ve learned that the chatter of skunks can resemble the chirping of birds. This sort of knowledge doesn’t just offer itself on a plate. It requires a physical deed. Several times I’ve stepped out of the abode, armed only with a flashlight, to investigate a noise. One night, while reconnoitring a scuttling in the bushes – it could have been a lot of things: the raccoon may be spotted in Flagstaff, and the grey fox, and the feral cat, and certainly the squirrel – I found myself in the middle of the woods without even a flashlight. It’s true that a ‘woods’ is a sizeable wooded area and that we’re actually concerned with a copse here, but to me it seemed as if I was in the middle of a woods in the middle of the night, even if was only about ten o’clock.
It was very dark. Our block has no streetlights, and the nuisance of light trespass doesn’t affect us in the slightest. We have only one next-door neighbor, and her property, hidden by brush and oak trees, has been scrupulously disilluminated in compliance with the dark-skies ordinances for which Flagstaff is so famous. I recently looked into installing motion-sensing security lights around the house, only to immediately fall down into a deep, scary pit of outdoor lighting codes. In any case, Jayne was opposed to the idea. ‘You’ll just light up a bunch of rodents,’ she said. She also said, ‘I refuse to live like a poltroon’, which made me smile. I love and admire her fiery verbal streak.
A ‘poltroon’, I read, is an ‘utter coward’, which I knew. I didn’t know that the word probably descends from the Old Italian poltrire, to laze around in bed, from poltro, bed. Interesting, I guess.
Where was I? In dark woods. But once my vision has adapted to the absence of light, of man’s light, I am in bright woods. It is a paradox: dark skies, precisely because they’re untainted by the pollution known as sky glow, are extraordinarily luminous. A strong lunar light penetrates the high black foliage and falls in a crazy silver scatter onto the underwood; and it’s quite possible that starlight also plays a part in the woods’ weird monochromatic brilliance, which has a powerfully camouflaging effect in that every usually distinct thing, each plant and rock and patch of open ground, appears in a common uniform of sheen and shadow. This must account for the strange feeling of personal invisibility that comes over me. I lean against a tree – and am tree-like. I find myself calmly standing sentry there, part-clad in my mail of moonlight, and doing so in a state of such optical and auditory supervigilance that I perceive, with no trace of a startle reflex, the movements not only of the forest creatures as they hop and scamper and flit, but even, through the blackened chaparral, the distant footsteps of someone walking on San Francisco. When my phone vibrates, it’s as if I’ve pocketed a tremor of the earth.
‘Love?’ Jayne says. ‘Love, where are you?’
I inform her.
She says, ‘The woods? You mean the yard? Are you OK? You’ve been gone for half an hour.’
I turn toward the abode. An upstairs window offers an enchanting rectangle of warm yellow light. Otherwise our abode partakes of the dark and of the woods.
I assure Jayne that all’s well. A bit of me would like to say more – would like to let her know about my adventure in the silver forest.
‘Come inside, love,’ Jayne says. She sounds worried, as well she might. She is a woman all alone in a house in the woods.
‘I’ll be right there,’ I say. ‘Sit tight. I’m on my way.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would have been impossible without help and encouragement from many people. I can’t name them all, but my warm thanks go to: Susie Boyt, Jonathan Coe, Caroline Dawnay, Giles Foden, Tessa Hadley, Joe O’Neill; to Charlotte Knight and Frances Macmillan at Vintage, as well as David Purvis and Nick Skidmore; to Nick Hornby, David Lodge and John Sutherland; to Paul Auster, John Banville, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, J. M. Coetzee, Mark Haddon, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain; to Matthew Beaumont, Gert Buelens, Jonathan Crewe, Quentin Curtis, Susan Halpert, Oliver Herford, Richard Holmes, Simon Johnson, Adrian Poole, Peter Swaab, René Weis, Michael Wood and Marino Zorzi and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi; and to Sarah Burton and Sarah Baxter at the Society of Authors. As always, Judith Hawley and Olivia Horne have been a vital support throughout. Acknowledgement is due to Bay James for kind permission to reproduce the image of the notebook page (in the sixth notebook) from which Giles Foden has drawn ‘The Road to Gabon’; likewise to the Houghton Library, where the notebooks are hous
ed (as bMS Am 1094); and to Penguin Books, for permission to reprint Colm Tóibín’s story ‘Silence’, which first appeared in his collection of stories The Empty Family.
APPENDIX
SUBJECTS FROM JAMES’S NOTEBOOKS
What follow are the subjects the writers have taken as the basis or inspiration for their stories, not always complete, as they have often seized on part of the ‘germ’ and grown their story from that. Some of the subjects, as readers who are led to look at James’s notebooks will find, carry on down roads untravelled – untravelled both by James himself, who didn’t write them, and certainly by these new adventurers.
Where James uses phrases in French I have glossed them at the foot of the page.
PAUL THEROUX
Father X
Jan. 28th 1900. Note at leisure the subject of the parson & bought sermon situation suggested to me by something mentioned by A[rthur] C[hristopher] B[enson].fn1 My notion of the unfrocked, disgraced cleric, living in hole &c, & writing, for an agent, sermons that the latter sells, type-written, & for which there is a demand.
COLM TÓIBÍN
Silence
34 D[e].V[ere].G[ardens].fn2 Jan. 23d 1894.
I failed the other day, through interruption, to make a note, as I intended, of the anecdote told me some time since by Lady Gregory,fn3 who gave it me as a ‘plot’ and saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself. However, it is worth mentioning. (I mean that I see in it all there is – but what there is is in the rather barren (today,) and dreary, frumpy direction of the pardon, the not-pardon, of the erring wife. When the stout middle-aged wife has an unmentionable ‘past,’ one feels how tiresome & charmless, how suggestive of mature petticoats & other frowsy properties, the whole general situation has become.) At any rate, Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue. She left her home, I think, with another man – and left her two young daughters. The episode was brief and disastrous – the other man left her in turn, and the husband took her back. He covered up, hushed up her absence – perhaps moved into another part of the country, where the story was unknown; and she resumed her place at his foyerfn4 and in the care and supervision of her children. But the husband’s action had been taken on an inexorable condition – that of her remaining only while the daughters were young and in want of a mother’s apparent as well as real presence. ‘I wish to avoid scandal – injury to their little lives; I don’t wish them to ask questions about you that I can’t answer or that I can answer only with lies. But you remain only till they are of such and such ages, to such and such a date. Then you go.’ She accepts the bargain, and does everything she can, by her devotion to her children, to repair her fault. Does she hope to induce her husband to relax his rigour – or does she really accept the prospect that stares her in the face? The story doesn’t say: what it does say is that the husband maintains his conditions and the attitude of the wife, maintained also for years, avails in no degree to attenuate them. He has fixed a particular date, a particular year, and they have lived de part & d’autre,fn5 with her eyes upon this dreadful day. The two girls alone have been in ignorance of it, as well as of everything else. But at last the day comes – they have grown up; her work is done and she must go. I suppose there isn’t much question of their ‘going out’; or else that it is just this function of taking them into the world, at 17, at 18, that he judges her most unfit for. She leaves them, in short, on the stroke of the clock, and leaves them in a bewilderment and distress against which the father, surely, shld. have deemed it his duty to provide – which he must, from afar off, have seen as inevitable. The way he meets it, in Lady G.’s anecdote, at any rate, is by giving the daughters the real explanation – revealing to them the facts of the case. These facts appal them, have the most terrible effect upon them. They are sensitive, pure, proud, religious (Catholics;) they feel stained, sickened, horrified with life, and they both go into a convent – take the veil. That was Lady G.’s anecdote. I confess that as I roughly write it out, this way, there seems to me to be more in it – in fact its possibilities open out. It becomes, indeed, very much what one sees in it or puts in it; presenting itself even as the possible theme of a rather strong short novel – 80 000 to a 100 000 words. Jotting roughly what it appears to recéler,fn6 or suggest, I see the spectacle of the effect on the different natures of the 2 girls. I see a kind of drama of the woman’s hopes and fears. I see the question of the marriage of one of the girls or of both – and the attitude, là-dedans,fn7 the part played, by the young men whom it is a question of their marrying. I see one of the girls ‘take after’ her mother on the spot. The other, different, throws herself into religion. The 1st one, say, has always known the truth. The revelation has nothing new to teach her. Something doubtless resides in such a subject, and it grows, I am bound to say, as one thinks of it. The character, the strange, deep, prolonged and preserved rigour of the husband – and above all his responsibility: that of his action, his effect upon his daughters. His stupidity, his woodenness, his pedantry of consistency, his want of conception, of imagination of how they will feel, will take the thing. The absence of imagination his main characteristic. Then the young man – the lover of one of them, and his part in the drama, his knowledge in advance, his dread of it. He is the lover of the girl who goes into religion. The other one – reckless, cynical, with the soul of a cocotte,fn8 has another tie: a secret relation with some bad fellow to whom, say, she gives herself. And the mother – and her lover? What becomes of her? The lover, say, has waited for her? – or the husband relents after he has seen the ravage made by his inhuman action and is re-united to her on the ruins of their common domestic happiness. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x