The walled college campus was divided into sections as distinct as the rooms in a home. Each section represented a different era in European architecture. Front Square, accessed via the Arch on College Green, was an eighteenth-century neoclassical tableau. The Arts Block, fronting onto Nassau Street, and towards which Glynn was presently headed, was a cement box homage to the nineteen seventies, the façade of which broke out in large weeping sores when it rained, as it often did in Dublin, lending the building a bleak, bedraggled appearance. It failed in its purpose to be a monument to the consolations offered by the arts and humanities, to act as a bulwark against the Irish winter. Small wonder we conceived of Glynn as being elsewhere. We rarely, if ever, pictured him in his office in the Department of English, despite it being his place of employment. As backdrops went, the Arts Block didn’t live up to him.
Upon encountering the narrow passage between the 1937 Reading Room and the Colonnades (which wasn’t all that narrow – it merely seemed so in contrast to the gracious expanse of Front Square) those approaching from the other side faltered and deferred right of way to Glynn, who proceeded without so much as checking his pace, nor registering the guard of honour of stalled students lined up on either side of the passage through which some minutes earlier I myself had slipped, unnoticed.
Glynn crossed the smooth worn cobbles flanking New Square. The gradient of the ramp leading up to the Arts Block appeared to cause him undue difficulty. He lost impetus and ground to a halt halfway up, as if the ramp were a taxing paragraph he would return to later, once he had mustered his resources. He leaned against the railing and checked his watch. Only thirteen minutes late: Grand so. He lit a cigarette.
That a literary colossus should struggle with a ramp was what you might call a paradox. From an elevated position, it was evident that Glynn was beginning to thin at the crown. He ran a protective hand over his hair, somehow sensing that it had become the focus of negtive attention. He scanned the faces of the students milling about him, then squinted up in my direction, where I stood at a window on the third floor of the Arts Block, trained on him like a sniper. Could he see me? Hard to say.
Glynn stamped out his cigarette and finally gained the ramp. I lost sight of him until he reappeared at the far end of the English Department corridor, a full nineteen minutes late for our appointment.
‘You wanted to see me, Professor?’ It was a rhetorical question. I was reminding him, not asking him, because Glynn patently didn’t want to see me at all.
‘That’s right,’ he conceded. He’d asked me at the end of the last workshop to schedule a private appointment with him in his office later that week. I asked Aisling whether he’d issued the same request to the others. She told me he had not. Glynn unpinned the few notes thumb-tacked to his message board and unlocked the door, ushering me in ahead of him.
His office was the first disappointment. I had anticipated stepping into my favourite photograph of him, I suppose: bay window, mahogany table, tiny glinting sceptre. I had failed to deduce that a Georgian window could not exist in a modern building like the Arts Block.
‘Have a seat,’ said Glynn, indicating a tomato-red plastic chair, as he settled himself behind a metal desk.
It was uncomfortable, having him to myself like that. We had never been alone together. Wait, that’s a lie. There was a preponderance of red biros on his desk, which I thought at the time was part of some intriguing system he’d devised to inspire himself, because everything was a big secret then, everything was alchemical and occult and enthralling. Glynn was frowning at one of the notes he’d untacked from his message board. It wasn’t written on foolscap like the other notes, but instead on a pale blue sheet of watermarked writing paper, the kind of stationery used by old ladies and priests. He put his glasses on and sat riveted to the page. ‘Be with you in a second,’ he murmured.
He leaned over to root through a drawer in an agitated fashion, leaving the note face up on the desk. A few words – no more than three or four – were printed in the dead centre of the sheet in lettering compact to the point of illegibility. Jesus Christ, I realised, it was one of the famous poison-pen letters. Aisling had described them to me: the bond paper, the minute writing. They were arriving thick and fast by then. Glynn uncapped a fountain pen and grimaced as he flicked it. A spray of black ink shot across the desk. He checked his watch, then scratched a series of numbers along the base of the note – the date, probably, and time of receipt – before dropping both the note and the pen into the drawer and pushing it shut.
‘So,’ he said, placing his forearms on the table and interlacing his fingers: ‘How are you settling in?’
I sat there like an actor who had forgotten his lines. I couldn’t think of an answer. I reached out and rested my fingertips lightly on the cool surface of the metal desk, not far from the spray of black ink. Glynn had asked me that exact question before, years ago, in another life, I was certain of it. He wasn’t Glynn, and I wasn’t me, but we had faced each other then, as we faced each other now, caught in the same dynamic. Did he not remember?
The disorientation must have been written all over my face. Guinevere said you could read me like an open book. Glynn plucked at a button on the cuff of his shirt. ‘It is not easy, I know,’ he began, ‘which is why I thought we might meet at this juncture, for a …’
He trailed off in search of the right word. That was a first – words failing Glynn. I wished the others had been there to see it. It was how he had opened his fourth novel, Broken Man: ‘I am lost for words, Annabel.’ And then appended a hundred thousand of them. On this occasion, however, the inarticulacy seemed genuine. He pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and proceeded to polish the lenses of his glasses.
‘For a …’ he began again, and trailed off again, then put his glasses back on and cleared his throat. ‘A chat, I suppose you might call it. It’s just you haven’t really been producing much new work, have you Declan? I’m afraid you appear to be struggling.’
I scanned the assortment of relics scattered throughout his office and shrugged. A crystal trophy, a granite one, wood, silver, gold; all displayed on his bookcase, from which also hung a medal on a ribbon. Honorary doctorates and black and white photographs of Glynn shaking hands with various dignitaries were mounted along one wall. Over his shoulder, through the window, was another wing of the Arts Block, offices the mirror image of the room in which we sat, festive fairy lights glowing in one. Christmas was less than three weeks off. House Eight was not in view.
A heap of brown leaves, I had noticed that morning as I’d walked along the railings of Mountjoy Square on my way in to see Glynn, had fallen into the shape of a skull. They can’t have, I told myself, and went back for a second look. But there it was on the pavement: a skull. No two ways about it. A light-bulb shape, maybe three foot long, with cavernous eyes and leering twigs for teeth. What else could I do only gape at it, then go about my business as if nothing had happened? I didn’t want to be late for my appointment with Glynn.
He had sent us away from the last workshop with a task. ‘Right,’ he’d said as we were packing up to leave, ‘Next week, bring me in a sentence beginning with the words “All my life”.’ It was unlike him to issue cogent instructions.
Antonia immediately demanded that she be allowed start her sentence with ‘All his’ or ‘All her life’, but Glynn was determined to lead us up the garden path of the first-person narrator, and granted her no leeway. All she had to do was stick it into inverted commas and revert back to her beloved third person once the dialogue was complete, but I left her to figure that out for herself.
I had wanted desperately to get Glynn’s task right. I’d sat down at my rickety desk in my rickety room and had written the three words at the top of a clean page. ‘All my life.’ You could tell a mile off that Glynn had composed them. It didn’t even look like my handwriting any more. Something clenched in my chest, as if I was waiting for the crack of a starting pistol, and next thing I was paring th
e already pared pencil with a vigour that snapped the frail stem of wood in two.
I’d raised the broken halves to my nose and sniffed them. They had smelled of primary school. I’d stood up and sat down again in one fluid movement, then spread my hands out flat on the desk, surrendering custody of them. Glynn’s partial sentence sat framed by my thumbs and index fingers. ‘All my life.’ I could think of nothing. Then the skull.
‘I don’t seem to be able to write, Professor Glynn.’
He nodded sympathetically. Hadn’t written a whole lot himself, lately.
‘So I was thinking about dropping out of the class.’
Glynn tilted his head in a manner that indicated I should continue, but I had said my lot. All I had produced in the seven weeks of attending his workshops were seven bits of Chapter Ones. It appeared I didn’t have it in me. Guinevere Wren’s smile, of all things, had tipped the balance – the realisation, rather, that this smile was not reserved for me alone. It was simply the way she looked at people. At the last workshop, she had read aloud a scene depicting the deep-seated alienation that poisoned the relationship between Maxwell Hartman and his eldest son. The group’s reaction had been unanimous. We had praised the extract to the hilt. Her striking imagery, her lyrical language, the sincerity and complexity of the sentiment evoked – she had absolutely nailed it.
She’d received our encomia with a little frown – our approval appeared to perplex her. Her uncertainty only made us praise her more. We embarked on a sustained group effort to rid Guinevere of self-doubt, overturning every rock and stone in a bid to hit on something that might bolster her confidence. Even Glynn joined in. ‘The electricity of poetic detail,’ he murmured, without specifying which detail he had in mind. Any of them, all of them. Each one packed a voltage.
But nothing we said communicated our enthusiasm, and it began sounding as hollow to us as it patently did to Guinevere. We stepped up our efforts, but that ship was going down. Water was gushing in faster than we could bail it out. In the midst of our fervour – the five of us baying encouragement from the stands as if she were the horse we’d bet our life savings on – I experienced a moment of detachment. I looked at that lovely girl, her calm face silhouetted against the steely November sky, the praise showering down, staring at the stack of A4 pages in front of her as if it were the murder confession we were forcing her to sign, and I had never imagined that another human being could seem so remote. Remote from me, remote from herself.
Antonia, of all people, told me in the pub after that workshop that she had felt exactly the same. How can anyone feel exactly the same? I wanted to shout at her. It was the most inane thing I’d ever heard in my life, although I knew Antonia was only trying to be empathetic, or human, or something. She could not recall the specific trigger in Guinevere’s reading, just the sudden onslaught in its aftermath of a sense of isolation so profound it had made her want to weep. Uncanny, how Guinevere had managed to summon into the room precisely the condition of alienation she’d been seeking to describe. It had pulled up a seat alongside us at the workshop table, where it had remained, slumped and odious, for the duration of the class, demonstrating the terrible irony that if you write well about something bad, you’ll never have any readers. Where did that leave us? With very few options. Very few options indeed.
The shadow of the leg of Glynn’s desk was rapidly fading from the floor. It could have been my own reflection I was watching disappear, the impact this dwindling had on me. A black cloud was occluding the watery sun. Glynn’s office darkened with remarkable speed, as if a whale were swallowing us whole. I looked at the Professor with appeal and saw the same appeal in him.
‘Dropping out?’ he prompted me. ‘Why?’
I shrugged. ‘Because I feel so …’
The only adjective that sprang to mind was ‘wobbly’. How could I produce the likes of ‘wobbly’ in front of the likes of Glynn? Words were at least as clunky as Glynn’s collection of trophies, his bulky lumps of metal and stone which in no way communicated the literary achievements they’d been designed to represent. I didn’t finish my sentence, merely shrugged again. Really, the intensity of the moods that used to sweep over me then.
The stoical nod with which Glynn received this information, or lack of it, indicated that nothing I could say would surprise the man. He had seen it all before. Emotions that were new and raw to me had been endured by him years ago, in another life that was over now, and all he could do was nod with a recognition that was in itself a comfort. He stood up and went to his bookcase, his repository of infinite riches, his windbreak, and selected a thick red leather tome. The Collected Works of William Blake, his favourite British poet. The Devil’s Party, Glynn’s sixth novel, was loosely based on Blake’s life. Parallels between the two men were not difficult to discern.
I watched as Glynn took down two more volumes of Romantic poetry and retrieved a metal hip flask from its hiding place at the back of the bookcase. He produced two teacups from his drawer and poured a generous measure of whiskey into each. He handed one cup to me and raised the other. ‘So explosive, MI5 monitors the distillery,’ he joked, but neither of us laughed. We sat in silence in Glynn’s trophy room while the world outside darkened around us, and the whiskey warmed the world within us. Lights in the offices across the way came on one by one. Glynn poured himself another drop.
‘You remind me of myself,’ he finally commented. The compassion with which he offered this was almost paternal in quality. ‘I won’t lie to you,’ he added, ‘it’s a difficult path we’ve chosen.’ We. It didn’t matter that everything recently written about Glynn read like a death notice. He kept writing writers’ novels, that was the problem. Readers’ novels were what was wanted. His career had been deemed moribund by those in the know, but still, I’d have done anything to join him.
‘You wouldn’t be feeling any better now?’ he wondered when my cup was empty.
‘I would,’ I told him. It was the truth.
‘Good man, good man.’
He returned the two teacups to the drawer and slotted the hip flask back in behind Blake, Byron and Shelley. I stood up, and he saw me to the door. Tacked to his message board was another pale-blue note. Glynn smiled weakly as he unpinned it. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment.
He gripped my shoulder. ‘Look after yourself, Declan.’ I didn’t know what to say. He retreated to his den with the note. An image of a lily stem, of all things, flashed into my mind, a freshly cut lily stem with three closed buds that I had once contemplated in a glass vase. The buds would open because they didn’t understand that their life supply had been severed, that they were already dead. I gazed at Glynn’s stooped shoulders as his door swung shut and thought of that stem, think of it still, think of him still, think of us all still, flowering regardless.
PART II
Hilary Term
January
13
I don’t like Mondays
The morning of the sixth of January found me sitting bolt upright at my desk in the flat on Mountjoy Square. I hadn’t spoken in five days. A month had passed since the last workshop. My pens and paper were laid out in front of me, but I wasn’t writing: I was listening. Several odd things had occurred in rapid succession. First, the animal cries. A dog started yelping at its upper register, its agony piercing the thin blue sky. It was coming from the back lane. Somewhere below, not far from where I sat, a bloody scene was unfolding. That I could not see it only made it worse. I would have given anything to make it stop.
And then, abruptly, the yelping did stop. The silence which ensued was more ominous still. I sat rooted to the seat.
Next came the rhythmic thumping in the sky, as if the wings of a huge bird were beating the air. It came from all directions at once, growing louder and closer. It took a long time for the helicopter to appear. That’s when I clapped eyes on the gull. I hadn’t seen it alight. A massive creature, big as a fox, but brazen, territorial, almost pugilistic in its assertion of its
dominion, mounted on the spine of a roof. It had its eye on me, its glassy, lemony eye. It did not have to turn its head to regard me.
A shaft of low light illuminated the gull as purple storm clouds bore down on the winter sun. You could wait all year for such light and still not find it. I tried to take it in as best I was able. The gull was smooth, sculptural, declaratory, and showed no fear at all, just a – what could you call it? – a knowingness, as if it wasn’t a bird in that round earless skull, exactly. No, not the consciousness of a bird in there, exactly.
The first plump raindrops slashed across the windowpane. A flash of sheet lightning, followed by a rumble of thunder. Something was expanding within me. I put down my pen. The gull was ululating by then, a wild, maniacal sound. A torrential downpour drowned him out. Then the doorbell rang. The doorbell, in that weather. I could hardly believe it.
Two men in navy suits and beige trench coats were standing on the doorstep under a green golf umbrella. The sky lit up theatrically behind them. ‘Is Jesus in your life?’ one of them asked me in a dapper London accent. Their trousers gleamed wetly like bin liners. ‘You’re having me on,’ was the best I could manage.
I pushed past them down the steps, and the front door clattered shut behind me. ‘Ah Jesus,’ I cried – my keys were upstairs on my desk. The second man said something that I didn’t catch and pressed a magazine into my hands.
The rain was lashing so hard by then that it bounced back up from the pavement. Cars ploughed hesitantly through the rising floodwater, waves rippling in their wake. The orange hulk of a double-decker bus was making slow progress along the North Circular Road. I ventured in the slipstream towards it. It was as dark as dusk, though the church bells hadn’t yet rung the noon Angelus.
I could find no bus stop on that stretch of the North Circular, so I waved my Jesus magazine. The bus pulled in, and the doors retracted. ‘Get in, get in!’ the driver roared, like a man hauling bodies out of the sea. ‘Where’s your coat? Merciful hour.’
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