The Book Against God

by James Wood

  I remember how nervous I was when Jane first took me to Wiltshire. She told me that her mother disliked or disapproved of most of her daughter’s friends, and always communicated her disapproval in the same subtly oblique form: by using the word “touching.” As soon as she told Jane that she had found one of her daughter’s friends “rather touching, darling,” Jane knew that it was all over. “I used to wait in terror for that word ‘touching,’ and Mummy knew of course exactly what she was doing.”

  For whatever reason, Julia Sheridan did not find me “touching”—though presumably she now does—and Humphrey seemed quite taken with me. He asked me about my work, and when he discovered that I spent all my time at home on my Ph.D., he broke into laughter, which made the ice cubes in his gin-and-tonic chatter, and warmly said, “How very dolly! Welcome to the club. The ticklish thing is getting some poor bugger to pay for us to do nothing at all.” I laughed with him, though I was hurt and felt naked in front of Jane, who had heard her father. I coughed in embarrassment—this cough representing, perhaps, a forerunner of the “artificial” cough.

  One of the Sheridans had inherited a Bechstein grand, which neither could play. Jane started thumping out notes when she was three or four, and her parents always supported her, with a sluggish upper-class amazement at their daughter’s brilliance. (There is a brother, Hugo, six years older, who is also intelligent, a lawyer like his father, but stolid and conventional, not very close to Jane.) In the English way, they made their support sound like benign disapproval, something wrested from them. Humphrey said to me: “Of course, Jane’s music is jolly deep water, pretty much beyond me and Julia, though Julia had a good voice when I met her. We put Jane on a musical fast track, sort of Ascot Gold Cup, just letting her vamoose through, after Miss Ison, her piano teacher, called us in and said Jane was special and should go to an actual music school. Ison was a ferocious old bruiser. We bloody well did what we were told to do, or she’d rap you on the knuckles.”

  They had watched Jane’s progress with secret pride of course, though success of any kind was looked upon with faint social amusement, and very successful strangers were talked about proprietorially, as if they were all part of the larger aristocratic family. At one of our visits, Jane put on a record; it was Daniel Barenboim playing Beethoven. Julia Sheridan wandered in, picked up the record sleeve, and said vaguely, “Oh yes, dear. Barenboim, we see his name in the papers. He’s doing frightfully well, isn’t he?” This way of looking at the world, as if it all belonged to them, was quite novel to me, and I wondered how far the sense of ownership might stretch. Was Beethoven considered to have “done frightfully well”? And if Beethoven had only done frightfully well, what of poor Jane (not to mention poor Thomas Bunting)?

  But the Sheridans, petrified by the old bruiser Miss Ison, did indeed send Jane to a music college, where she prospered under the tuition of a formidable Armenian, who for a while forced her to play standing up, at a distance from the keyboard, to make her touch lighter and to wean her off the loud pedal. During the term-time, while Jane was away, her parents lowered the piano top and returned their silverframed family photographs; and in the holidays, when Jane came home to the half-timbered house, the photographs were removed and put in a box, and the top was raised, and Jane played and played, while her parents strayed in and out of the drawing room and sometimes stood by her, staring encouragingly at the inexplicable sheets of music. Her mother, who was moody and somewhat “sensitive,” would come in when Jane was crashing out titanic Beethoven, and complainingly say, “It is awfully loud, darling.” Then, when the music, following its own form, suddenly became pianissimo for a few minutes, Julia would smile and say, “Thank you, darling, that’s much better,” as if Jane and Beethoven were willingly conspiring to ease Julia’s nerves.

  It was during that visit to Humphrey and Julia Sheridan that I first thought of marriage. In fact, though, I never asked Jane to marry me; she hinted at it one wonderful evening, about two weeks after the trip to Wiltshire, and I found myself happy to be the recipient rather than the actor. I remember it well. Jane was in a buoyant mood and suggested that we have supper somewhere pleasant. We went to L’Escargot (she was paying, of course). It was a warm summer night, mid-June, and crowds were shuffling along the pavements as if they were chained together at the ankles; I felt as if I was being multiply pickpocketed; but there was no sense of menace—quite the opposite, it was the usual clumsy English attempt to mimic Italian or Spanish streetlife. The English version involves crowds of people squatting on pavements outside roaring pubs.

  “They think they’re in Rome, so they’re having a great time,” I said, as we picked our way over the stationary drinkers. “They don’t have to go back to Neasden or Kilburn until eleven p.m.” I was still trying to impress Jane in those days, and I affected an occasionally snobbish tone, while subtly “improving” my accent as I spoke.

  “Let’s go to Rome, darling,” said Jane. And then, shyly: “On our honeymoon.”

  I ignored her—though her words had set off a great excitement inside me—and continued:

  “Up in the north, in Durham or Newcastle, the men and women don’t get together like this. The lads go around in packs, looking like they want to beat you up, and the lasses go around in packs, looking like committees of prostitutes on the move.”

  “Tommy, you’re very naughty! Do that northern accent for me again.” In those days, I found Jane’s pearly, upper-class diction quite erotic. Her chin was jutting forward.

  I drew a breath, and then bellowed, Newcastle-style:

  “How! You looking at my bird? Cos’ if you look at my bird one mair time I’ll knack ya face in!”

  Drinkers gazed up at me from the pavement. Jane seemed delighted. “Then what happens, Tommy? You can’t leave me in the lurch.”

  “Then what happens is that you cravenly apologize, you say that you weren’t looking at the bloke’s girlfriend at all, it was the furthest thing from your mind. But you lose anyway, because he says: ‘What’s wrong with me bird, then? Funny, last time I looked there was nowt wrong with her. Mind you, praps I missed summat. Praps there’s summat wrong with her? But I diwent see owt wrong with her.’ And so it goes, with everthreatening irony. The trick is to make sure that he doesn’t bring his mates into it. De-escalation is the name of the game.”

  “How do you de-escalate? You know I had such a protected, completely musical upbringing that I barely ever went into a pub. By the time I was free enough—”

  “Free?”

  “Yes, free from the endless musical imprisonment, the music school, the relentless practising, all that. By the time I was more relaxed I didn’t feel like going to pubs anyway. I was too old. I was twenty-one.”

  “An old woman.”

  I used to tease Jane about her six years’ superiority over me. She would sometimes joke that she was “a woman in a hurry,” and I would calm her down with wise sayings from the Epicureans.

  “You de-escalate, by the way, by offering to buy everyone drinks, or by introducing your own girlfriend to them. The latter technique is foolproof. Never fails.”

  “Girlfriends, girlfriends!” Jane squeezed my hand as we walked down the street. “I don’t want to hear about them. I’ll edit them out of your photograph like Lenin did.”

  “Stalin.” I kissed her. “As long as I can do the same with your boyfriends.”

  We had a fine dinner. I would have liked to have shared the bill, of course—that was the only shadow, really. I remember that at one point in that dinner Jane suggested that I tended to see the world as a matter of strategies, techniques, tricks.

  “You’re always going on about the ‘trick’ of things. The trick of this, the trick of that. Why do you need all these tricks?”

  “Because the world is a tricky place, I suppose, and one must match it, evil for evil.” I spoke quite glibly.

  “You don’t really believe that, do you?” I loved Jane for her inability to treat anything lightly.


  “Yes, certainly. I think that adult life, that adulthood, is all struggle. The reason we so love, so cherish our childhoods, is that they represent life before this struggle of adulthood. I have a theory, actually, which I’d like to write about some day, that Adam and Eve deliberately got themselves booted out of Eden because they had not experienced childhood. Perhaps they thought that beyond Eden’s gates was childhood itself. How wrong they were.”

  “You’re mad, darling. How would they want childhood if they had never known it? You go in for the strangest speculations. Is that what you do all day?” Jane would never have dragged herself into a project like my BAG. Far too sensible and direct.

  “Well,” she continued, “what are your tricks? Hang on a minute, I have to deal with this awful music.” This was not the first time I had witnessed Jane’s absolute inability to eat while music is playing. She drew on all her reserves of haughtiness and calmly waved the waiter over with her long, professional fingers. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m a musician, a concert pianist, and I am trained to listen to music. Now, I can either listen and not eat, or eat and not listen. But I can’t do both. I know it’s already quiet, but might there be a way for you to turn it down? I’d be so grateful.” And she gazed at the waiter with her dense eyes, and her ponytail swayed, and of course he complied.

  “Now, darling, tell me about your tricks.” I am not ashamed to admit that it has always been the greatest joy to hear that word “darling” from Jane’s lips. It was spoken fast with a rather short ‘a’ and an almost Indian lilt—“daling.” In my family, my mother called both me and my father “dear” and “dearest” and “love,” but never “darling.”

  “Which tricks are you interested in? Well, here’s one. If an argument seems to be getting out of hand, say at a dinner party, it almost always works to point to the chin of your interlocutor and say, ‘By the way, you have a little piece of food on your chin.’ For some reason it takes the wind out of people’s sails utterly. The palaver they get into with wiping their chins! ‘Have I got rid of it now?’ ‘No, you’ve just moved it to the right.’ ‘Have I got it now?’ ‘Not quite, it’s still hanging on.’ ‘Now?’ ‘Yes, now you have.’ And all the while there’s nothing on the poor person’s chin at all. Once you are finished with all that, it rarely seems worth continuing the argument, and you can get up and go to the loo. It’s all about knowing when to break the moment. Once the right interruption has been launched, the hostile encounter often collapses like a tent that’s been blown over. But you have to be the controller of the wind, that’s what’s crucial.”

  “The controller of the wind, I like that.” Jane’s eyes were very bright. We had ordered champagne, and it was making our blood fizz. “That’s your mode, isn’t it—being the controller? Controlling sticky situations?”

  “I play them like a piano,” I joked, with mock assurance.

  “Marriage wouldn’t be a trick, would it?” asked Jane, again shyly.

  “No, it wouldn’t.” We were silent for a minute. “Am I hearing what I think I am hearing?”

  “You might be.”

  “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  “Well, make it so, then.”

  We were married three months later. Max was my best man. Roger and his choir sang at least eight anthems—really, they gave a concert briefly interrupted by the triviality of our vows. It was held in Wiltshire. How well I recall shaving that morning in the little local hotel, with my parents coughing and stirring on the other side of the bathroom wall: my hands shook, even though there were three hours to go. Clear, breezy, lightly warm, barely blue English September day. High hedgerows. Everything prettier than in the north.

  I remember sitting with Max, waiting for Jane to enter the church; with my hand I was keeping my right leg stuck to the church floor in case it started shaking with nervousness. Trumpets and drums sounded at the back of the church: friends of Roger. The medieval sound of the instruments made Jane seem like a great queen and Max and I humble ambassadors representing a new republic. Jane advanced on her father’s arm, gently talking to him in that quietly theatrical way one sees on stage. Only I recognized the tiny hesitation of the left foot. What was she saying to her father, what was she saying? “I am afraid”? “I love him”? “I love you and Mummy”? “I have waited for ever to do this”? A fine grey veil obscured her face like a layer of expensive dust. But then she stopped next to me and raised that curtain and turned to me and smiled a calm, grateful smile. Into her hair chains of wild flowers had been sown.

  The local vicar married us—the Reverend Hugh Fillimore, dressed from head to toe in black. Black suit, black priest’s stock, salty black Oxfords on his feet. He smoked a black pipe and had glasses seemingly made out of the same substance as his pipe. He seemed to have been carbonized long ago in some awful prehistoric conflagration. Remarkably, his amiable, ambling, vacant address never once mentioned our marriage. Not once! It was all about “the importance of having heroes—intellectual, spiritual, moral. Now,” he burbled on, standing in the exquisite carved pulpit, “enough abstraction. You all probably want to know who my heroes really are. All right, I shall oblige. My intellectual hero is Martin Luther. I don’t think that needs further justification. My spiritual hero—well, there are so awfully many, but I will nominate Father Brown, in the marvellous old Chesterton stories. And my moral hero: Winston Churchill. Plenty wrong with Churchill, and actually the other day I was dipping into one of the recent revisionist biographies, but in the end he just can’t really be dented. Toenails of clay, I’d say, at the worst. Now, of course, Christ should be our greatest hero, but from time to time when our faith feels faint we do need worldly models, too! And that’s why I’ve dealt with the subject today.”

  We spent the night in a country hotel. We were too late for dinner, but room service sent up smoked salmon sandwiches and a big Stilton cheese, veiny with blue fogs. Jane ran the bath, took off her dress, looked tiny in her punitive panty hose. Behind her in the bathroom the big taps were orchestrating volumes of steam.

  “I am famished. God these sandwiches are good. Darling, you were a miracle,” she said.

  “No, no, it was you. I did nothing.”

  “Well, we both did it. And tomorrow Rome!”

  “Poor us. Let’s toast Uncle Karl.” Karl was paying for our honeymoon.

  “Uncle Karl.”

  “Uncle Karl.”

  I touched Jane’s anxious thin back, and then the calmer swell of the hips.

  “Would it be a bad omen if we skipped our canonical marital obligations tonight? I am utterly exhausted,” I said.

  Jane laughed. “Despite your unfamiliarity with baths, might I be able to persuade you to join me in the water?”

  “Oh, I should think so.”

  “And we can see what happens from there.”

  “You bet. We can take it from the top, as they say in music, no?”

  “That’s in pop music, Tommy. Though I must say I’d never thought of that phrase in a sexual light before.”

  Probably, now that Jane and I are separated, our friends have said to each other, “I always thought it was a bad omen that the vicar gave that bizarre address—you know, you remember, the one in which he never mentioned Thomas and Jane.” But at the time it seemed only amusing.

  10

  AS I SAID, all seemed well between us last September when Jane was in Sundershall, which made her behaviour on my return to London the more mysterious. She seemed uninterested in talking to me; even stranger, she stopped fighting those elements of my temperament that she had recently been resisting. She said nothing about my dirty dressing gown, my slovenly side of the bedroom, the Ph.D., the BAG. Over the next two months she seemed to shrink inside herself. She began to grow impatient with my drifting and apparently leisurely ways, and at breakfast would announce coldly, “I will be incommunicado until lunchtime,” sticking her chin out and up as she did so. I would hear her start practising while I was still en
joying my morning coffee and cigarette (I am my father’s son). It used to be that Jane, smelling my first cigarette of the day, occasionally cried out, “Fee fie fo fum, I smell the fug of an Englishman,” which I loved to hear, and came into the kitchen to kiss me. I would be sitting in the paisley dressing gown, a scarf round my neck for warmth, and reading some or other edifying book. And then she would slick her lips with lipstick and munch them together, and rush out of the flat to Trinity, tossing “I love you, darling” behind her. But in the last few months of our marriage I seemed only to anger her, and she marched off every morning to the piano. Sometimes I walked to the edge of our tiny sitting room and, standing behind her, watched the knitting wings of her thin back, and turned away.

  Jane and I didn’t separate until last Christmas, but I date the real end of our marriage from September—from the moment I left London to visit my afflicted father. Why was Jane so pleased to have me out of the flat and two hundred miles away in the north of England? It’s true that just before my mother called to tell me about Father’s heart attack, I revealed to Jane for the first time the existence of the BAG, and mentioned that I was becoming increasingly interested in it. I told her that I felt correspondingly fainthearted about the Ph.D. I didn’t tell her that I had been working on the BAG almost exclusively for the last nine months; I merely said that it was “absorbing all my thought.” I hoped for sympathy. What I got was a kind of fear. Jane looked truly terrified! She watched me as if I were threatening her.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked her. “You look very alarmed. I just said that this project has been absorbing my mind. It’s a mental distraction, that’s all. It hasn’t got in the way of the Ph.D., which I will certainly finish by the end of this year.