I know I should be grateful, I know I am grateful—
Lynda kissed him with chaste enthusiasm while Richard watched, approving.
But I can’t stomach this—everyone being kind to me at once—not when all I actually did was fuck up and hurt my dog.
“How are you doing?” Mary steered him towards a seat.
“Not great.”
“I know, you’ve started doing that thing with your eyes. You hate it, don’t you—people being nice.” Her voice dropped slightly. “But people quite often want to be nice to you. They find it annoying when you won’t let them.”
He stared at her, caught. “Don’t make me feel more ashamed of myself than I already do. Please.”
She shook her head and brushed something from his lapel, pressing briefly across the wrong shoulder. An interesting, silvery pain trickled down his arm and he had to wince.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Nate. I didn’t mean it.”
“It’s all right.”
“But I must have hurt you.”
“Ssh. You’ll have them all round, commiserating. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mm.” He nodded, neck rigid, determined not to whimper. “Jesus, woman, there’s no need to be that worried, you’ll get me . . . Go and find me a drink. If you don’t mind.”
“OK, if you’d like.”
He made a point of squeezing at her hand as she left him.
No, of course I don’t like—I want you to stay, I want to sit here and fucking bask in your concern. It fits better than anyone else’s. Almost anyone else’s.
It was about to be a long evening, he could tell. He called after her as unobtrusively as he could. “Um—get me something large, Mary. In fact, two glasses of something very large.”
Eckless had worked his way through his admirers and now halted in front of Nathan with a ruminative tilt of the head.
“No. Sorry. You wouldn’t fit up here. You’ll have to lie down on the floor like a normal dog—you remember?—the way we used to do it.” The animal seemed to consider this for a moment before duly slumping across both of Nathan’s feet. “Good man, we’ll keep ourselves company—this’ll be fine.”
“Dip?” Lynda was at his side with one of her threatening side plates of vegetable batons. Nathan wondered, momentarily, how many tons of roots and shoots she’d gone through since they first met.
Or how many tons have gone through her.
“I said dip.” She met his eyes with a touch of her old, libidinous ferocity.
“Yes, I heard what you said, but I couldn’t be certain if that was a question, or just an admission on your part.”
She set her haunch against his shoulder—his bad shoulder.
This is obviously the day for making that particular mistake. I should have worn my sling again—it might at least have warned them off.
Still, he forgave her—he even couldn’t help liking her for trying the old nonsense now. It was enough to make him feel almost close to being something like a man. And was much better than sympathy.
“You know, Nate, no matter how often you hit yourself over the head, you’ll still be a prick.”
“Talking of which, is that your snatch in my ear, or are you just pleased to see me?” Not his best ever line.
She giggled, which spoiled the mood of the whole pretence, but was still quite endearing. “Ah, Nathan, Nathan . . .” She perched on the arm of his chair, nudging an ache in all the way from his bad side to his sound one. “Why didn’t we?”
“Why didn’t we what?” He eased away, but she followed.
“Screw.”
“Charmingly put, as ever. I would say it was because . . .” He picked up a piece of carrot and ate it in one—no horseradish—meeting her eye while he munched.
You are a good woman, sometimes. Fuck saving my life—a minor grope and a bit of banter, that’s what’s needed. Just sometimes, just today.
He swallowed his mouthful—the flavour wasn’t especially suspect. “Do you want a serious answer?”
“Yes, OK, but hurry up—Mary’s coming back with your drink and you won’t want to talk about fucking in front of her—will you, Dad ?”
He refused the bait. “No, I wouldn’t want that, actually—it would show a lack of respect. But, to be serious and truthful, I didn’t screw you . . .” He endured a small spasm of discomfort and leaned closer to continue, softly, in the way she would find amusing. “I didn’t put my cock up your cunt and ride you witless, because I never met you when someone else wasn’t on my mind. Otherwise . . . otherwise, I would have banged you till your ears rang.”
She’ll like that—one good turn deserves another.
But she stood up immediately. “Christ, Nathan—do I really seem as safe as all that?” She could be baffling sometimes.
“Uh, wha . . . ?” He was aware of Mary standing and observing his confusion. Watching him beautifully closely—all curiosity, no shame. She made him feel proud—and intensely uncomfortable, of course.
Lynda continued, “You’ve really depressed me now. You’d never have said something like that if you took me seriously—if you didn’t think I was past it. I don’t frighten you any more, do I?”
“Well, I w—”
“And I was trying to cheer you up, you fuck.”
She stalked off, leaving Nathan to accept his drinks. “Don’t ask—I don’t think that I could explain.”
Mary was stifling a grin. “But I could guess. You’re not good at women, are you?”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
She caught his eye and winced. “I’m sorry, Nate.”
“Don’t be sorry. I don’t need people to be sorry.” He was messing this up, he could see—making Mary look uneasy, sad.
Shit, this is her day—finishes the novel, hears it’s OK—Christ, leave her the fuck alone.
He constructed a careful frown of affection and concern, let it lift into something more calm, a plain affection. “I need people—as you’ve mentioned—to be nice to me. And you’re perfectly nice.”
“Even if nice is a dreadful word.”
“We know what we mean.”
She nodded and sat, to his surprise, at the side of his chair: legs curled under her neatly, wonderfully, and the back of her head quite close to his good hand. It seemed an appropriate thing, an all right thing he could do, to glance a touch against her hair and simply stroke once over the curve of her skull.
You always had a lovely shape of head. I never saw another baby with such a perfect shape of head. You were fucking gorgeous.
She leaned back against his fingers once, but didn’t turn round, or look up.
Nathan, trying to relax, let his eyes wander and found his attention running headlong into Joe’s. The Chairman of the Fellowship was leaning against the mantelpiece, looking on with an almost offensive degree of content.
You can watch me if you want to, I don’t mind. You can like the way we are together, that’s fine. You can ask yourself if I’ve told her yet—I don’t mind that either, OK? Even if it’s none of your business in any way.
And we’re fine as we are, me and Mary, and she’s going to be great—a real writer—a real human being, too. The way her father never was.
And I have everything planned. My last plan, Joe—the good plan that lets me tell her every fucking thing. Not long now.
Joe met his stare gently for a moment and then broke off to address the room. “Well, ladies and gentlemen.” The ambient chatter ignored him. “Ladies and gentlemen!” Everyone had heard him the first time, of course, but it wouldn’t do to be called to order so easily. A hush gradually fell, the sound of Lynda, hissing something vehemently to Richard, the last voice to fade.
Joe sighed, paternal. “Thank you, and if we could take our seats . . . that would be excellent. Thank you again.
“Now, as we all know—”
“I have an announcement.” Nathan hadn’t expected himself to interrupt, but here he was,
all the same—interrupting, heart pattering near his throat, as if he was back in the schoolroom and rashly volunteering an answer to something involving trigonometry. “Yes, I ...” The silence in the room was, all of a sudden, exemplary.
Joe, blazingly amiable, grinned at him with frightening interest. “This isn’t exactly the time and place, but would you like to take the floor?”
“Well, no, I wouldn’t.” Nathan waited while Louis shifted in his seat, impatient, arms already hugged round his jar full of promises to the future. “It won’t take long. And it’s not about me. It’s about the writer whose work we all first read at—I suppose—around the time we put our little thoughts about 1996 in Louis’s jar. It’s about Mary.” Nathan knew that she’d kneeled up beside him in concern, but was trying not to pay any attention.
You’ve been spared more than twenty years of embarrassing paternal tributes—just be glad you’re only getting your first one now.
“I thought this would be an appropriate time to tell the Fellowship that Mary has completed her first novel and—” A small din of applause broke out. “And you shouldn’t clap just because it’s finished—fuck, anyone can finish a novel. She’s finished a good novel.” The clapping started again, along with a scatter of well-intended laughter—the sort of indulgent, self-referential noise that groups make for others of their kind. Nathan had never heard it made for him.
But it’s for Mary, really—that’s the difference.
She prodded him in the elbow until he had to face her and then glared at him, “You . . .” but also seemed not unhappy and able to tell the room, “yes, thanks. All right. Thanks. We’ll see.”
He leaned towards her. “Couldn’t help myself. And it’s good practice.”
“For being humiliated?”
“For being congratulated.”
“Same difference.”
That coughed a laugh out of him. “Well, as I said—good practice.”
“I’m just going to wait until you’re well before I hit you.” But she kissed near the root of his jaw and didn’t look angry in any way.
She blushes too much, though, just like me.
“If that’s all you have to say . . .” Joe patiently began again, reminding everyone of what they already knew—that the jar Louis was embracing held their promises to their future and that their future had arrived. Nathan thought he did the job quite well, given the oddly unceremonious nature of the ceremony.
Then Louis stood—not quite so frail that he couldn’t still enjoy a flirtation with authority. “Well now, before I break the jar it is my responsibility, as your historian, to say a few words. And, like the alchemists of old, I would begin with the reminder that many have perished in the work. We are the living and we keep the words alive, we keep their purpose alive. We are the living, but this is the Day of the Dead: our words are for the dead, all of the dead: the dead who made us and the dead we loved; the dead moments, passed from time; the dead passions spent; and all of the dead possibilities, the things that never were. We make them live and speak, we have that privilege.
“In a variety of archaic stories—the kind of which you know I’m fond—one, final question would be asked of those who were following the ultimate way and seeking the ultimate prize—‘Whom does the Grail serve?’ Their answer would win them all they had ever desired or destroy their hopes completely. This is traditionally when I ask members of the Fellowship: ‘Whom does the word serve?’ If we take what we are offered and we use it, friends, ‘Whom does the word serve?’ ” Louis closed his eyes, as if he might be considering his own answer, while the room paused, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps not. Still blind, and arms very slightly unsteady, he lifted the jar above his head, and then dashed it down. It broke open on the carpet, making a dull, small sound.
Nathan considered the mess of shards at Louis’s feet, the dust and little fragments of clay and, of course, the cards: all seven of them scattered through the heap. Louis knelt slowly and stirred the wreckage here and there with his finger, touching an edge or a corner of this or that card, somebody’s message to a year they could only imagine. Then he smiled, reached and lifted out his own white rectangle, studiously covered with his own black printing. “Perhaps if we each came forward and picked our card, we could then move on to reading out our contributions, before concluding the formal part of the evening and, perhaps, becoming appropriately inebriated. I’m sure Joe wouldn’t mind if, as usual, a few of us spend the night here, rather than having to weave our ways home.”
Good man, yourself, Louis—a real tearaway, aren’t you, quite the bold old boy.
Louis began to ease himself upright, his duties complete. Nathan slipped his feet out from under Eckless and moved forward to take the old man’s arm. He regretted the gesture immediately as minor agonies ground down the length of his back.
“Perhaps I should be helping you.” Louis winked, his hold on Nathan’s forearm delicate but precise. “Mm?”
“Yes. Perhaps.” Nathan delivered his charge to the appropriate easy chair and then nipped in quickly to find his card and fold it away in his jacket pocket.
He sat and stared at the clay dust on his hands while others trooped up and did what they had to, Mary going last, and he spoke and spoke over again in his head the five words that he’d written and allowed to be sealed away—one sentence to prove himself the stupidest fucker in creation. One sentence was all it took.
Joe was making another announcement, his suggestions sounding distant, vaguely absurd, “. . . this moment to think about what we . . .” Nathan couldn’t seem to focus, “. . . draw lots, or go round the room, or just read aloud as we feel we . . .” He stroked Eckless. Meanwhile, claustrophobia oozed easily into his lung and made him instantly, hugely, defensively, comfortingly angry.
All right. That’s it. That’s it.
On his feet, it seemed, shockingly quickly, he then marched to the fireplace, took out his card and threw it hard into the fire. The flames crouched momentarily and then swung back into place. For a moment, the pale shape containing his self-deluding, unfulfilling prophecy seemed to rest in the blaze unscathed, but then it buckled, darkened and, mercifully, began to disappear.
“Nathan?” Joe was close behind him, sounding concerned, but understanding in his customary, saintly fucking way.
“Piss off.”
“Nathan, this isn’t—”
“I don’t care. I’m not reading what I wrote and I’m going outside now. OK?” He spun to face them all—why not be hung for a sheep, for a bull in a china shop? “Anyone have any problems with that?”
And he charged out through the chairs and bewildered faces and stamped across the moonlit grass, feeling nauseous with rage, and wishing them all to go and fuck themselves—apart from Mary—in front of whom he had made a cunt of himself, a total cunt, when everything had been going not too badly and still he jogged on, catching his feet on unseen projections, stumbling, jarring the sore points in his shoulder and his head, until the sea breeze began to steady him and he could slow and breathe and slow again and finally sit on a rock looking down to the glow of the surf where it feathered up and curled and dipped at the base of the cliffs.
Ach bollocks. Cunt. Fuck. Nathan, you fuckwit, shithead, fuck.
“Nathan?”
“Wha—?”
It was Mary, the dim shape of Mary, breathless and carrying his coat, calling his name as she closed on him, flopping down at his side with an involuntary shove that stung him to the base of his brain but was still lovely.
“What on earth are you . . . ? He sounded ludicrously high-pitched, silly. He coughed and tried again, “What are you doing?”
“Obviously, I followed you.” She draped the coat around his shoulders and made him notice that he had been cold. “What were you doing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I didn’t want to get involved with it all.”
“Well, I could see that.”
This seemed to put an end to their conversation for a t
ime and they leaned together in the dark, listening to the wide rush and turn of water far below them and the easing of Mary’s breath. After a while, Nathan shifted, opened his coat and let it rest around Mary, too.
“Thanks.”
“It’s covered in dog hairs and mud, if you remember.”
“Thanks anyway.” She laughed quietly. “You do like to stir things up. What an exit. Fuck.”
“Don’t say fuck. I fucking say it all the time—it’s a terribly bad habit. Doesn’t befit a lady.”
“Fuck off.”
“Then again, you’re not a lady, you’re a novelist.” He felt her tense slightly at the idea of that and then give in to it. “And one day soon, you’ll be photographed in your darling little flat in Bloomsbury, or Hampstead, or maybe Chelsea that goes with your country place in . . . um . . .”
“The Conwy valley.”
“Yes, that’ll do—eccentric, but why not? And you’ll be there with your cats and your original watercolours and your adoring husband.”
She tensed again for a breath, then settled back. “Adoring, you say.”
“Mm hm. It’s compulsory. Authoresses’ husbands always have to be adoring and very quiet. As do your incredibly talented, ah . . . talented children.”
Not that it isn’t insane to even mention them.
“I think I’ll just settle for Jonno and we’ll see about the rest.”
“OK.”
“I would have to do that, though, wouldn’t I, if anybody liked the book—all of that being published stuff?”
“It’s a burden that you may well have to bear.” Don’t sound scared, please. I don’t know what to do if you get scared. “We’ll get through it together. You’ll do fine. It’s horrible crap with an occasional sweetie to relieve the bitterness, but we’ll get through.” And anyone who does you wrong, I will simply beat to death.
“Nathan, can I ask you . . . ?”
“Anything.”
“What did you write?”
He hadn’t expected that, but it was dark and he was tired and she was close and so the chill flux of blood in his heart only punched once or twice and then dissipated. She could know, he could tell her. Anything. “I wrote Nathan Staples is still married.” He swallowed, went on. “And I was right. Just not very right.” She squeezed her arm at his waist and he clenched his jaw, kept himself coherent, under control. “Mm hm. Not to worry. You remind me now—what did you write?”
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