I suspect it’s always hardest to describe those people you like the most. You want others to feel the same way about them as you do, and that’s undoubtedly asking too much. You find a woman very attractive and so you begin to describe her: the mass of red hair, the brown eyes, the long, lean body (all of these the new arrival possessed). But perhaps the reader isn’t partial to red hair or brown eyes or long, lean bodies, so for him or her you’re describing someone who by definition isn’t that attractive at all.
So maybe you use more generalised words, like saying she had fine features, an elegant body, a warm presence, since surely nobody could dislike fineness, elegance and warmth; but the problem is it sounds as if you’re describing an idea of a woman rather than the woman herself.
So maybe you get a bit poetic, say her eyes were like stars or limpid pools, or whatever. I’m not entirely sure how star-like eyes actually look, but they sound unobjectionable. Limpid I have no idea about at all, but I know it’s an acceptable way for eyes to look. But some people don’t like poetry, and star-like, limpid eyes sound like clichés anyway.
So maybe you can do it by giving the person’s features moral qualities. You say she had proud breasts, a noble chin, wise eyes. Again, nobody can object to pride, nobility and wisdom, can they? And maybe the simple word beautiful comes into this category. Perhaps I should just say she was very beautiful and leave it at that, let the reader fill in the outline, colour in his or her own ideas of what constitutes beauty, of what a beautiful woman looks like. But that seems pretty feeble.
Possibly the telling detail is the way to go. The first thing I noticed, after the flapping red greatcoat and the red hair and so on, were the glasses. She wore a pair of formidably ugly hornrims, the kind that beg to be removed so that someone could say, ‘Gosh, now that I see you without your glasses, why, you’re quite, quite beautiful.’ But the removal of the glasses would have been superfluous. She was obviously quite beautiful even with them, at least to me. The glasses emphasised her seriousness, made her appear substantial. I, who spent so much of my time feeling unserious and insubstantial, found this very appealing indeed. There was nothing bland about her, nothing half-hearted. She looked strong in every sense: a strong presence, a strong personality.
Ruth Harris and I stared at her, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who was intimidated by being stared at. ‘I haven’t missed the start, have I?’ she asked loudly of nobody in particular and then she saw me, obviously recognised me from the author photograph, and said, ‘Oh my, this is really mingling with the stars, isn’t it?’
I smiled at her as beguilingly as I knew how. She was someone I’d have been very pleased to beguile. I decided that even if nobody else arrived I would still be happy to go ahead with the reading. This woman’s presence would make it all worthwhile. I looked at my watch. We were already well past the scheduled starting time, but Ruth Harris said we should wait a few more minutes. Then the rest of the audience arrived; two more people: Gregory Collins and Nicola.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Nicola said briskly, as though her presence was the most natural thing in the world. ‘I got lost. Then I met up with this nice man. I asked for directions. He was coming here too and he was lost as well but, anyway, we’re here now.’
Gregory and I looked at each other and tried to think of something to say.
‘I’m Gregory Collins,’ I managed at last, as I shook his hand.
‘I’m Bob,’ said Gregory shamelessly. ‘Bob Burns.’
What kind of name was that?
‘Nice to meet you, Bob,’ I said.
‘Not Robbie Burns?’ Ruth Harris said with a trilling little laugh.
‘No. Robbie Burns was an eighteenth-century Scottish poet who died in seventeen ninety-six. So obviously not,’ said Gregory, and nobody could tell whether they were supposed to laugh at that.
I could only guess at Gregory and Nicola’s separate motives for coming to the event. Gregory, I thought, might have come hoping to share in some reflected, not to say refracted, glory. Perhaps he had wanted to see how popular he was and who his fans were. Tough luck, Gregory. But perhaps he was also there to keep an eye on me, to see that I didn’t misrepresent him. That seemed a little untrusting.
Nicola’s game was harder to understand. She knew that at the very least her presence was bound to make me feel uncomfortable, and no doubt that suited her; but she’d come a long way if that was all she wanted. It occurred to me she might be there to denounce me publicly and, if so, I wondered whether she’d do it during or after the reading. I didn’t give her the chance to do it before. The moment she and Gregory arrived we all trooped into the back room and I began to read.
I’d decided it was best to start with some of the more salacious parts of the book. I had calculated that even if these passages caused offence, at least they’d be hard to ignore. I’d made this calculation when I assumed I’d be reading to a room full of strangers, but given the actual composition of my audience, who was I likely to offend, and who was likely to ignore me? Then I intended to read a long, philosophical passage about language and silence, derivative no doubt, but nevertheless signalling the high seriousness of the author.
Why did I care about signalling Gregory Collins’ high seriousness? Why did I want him to look good? Why didn’t I, for instance, read some of the book’s worst, dreariest, most badly written sections? The simple answer is that I just wasn’t that sort of person. Although I harboured some resentment and petty jealousy of Gregory, I had no reason to want the world to think he was an absolute prat. I wasn’t a motiveless malignity. More importantly, it was me on the stage not him; I didn’t want anyone to think the flesh and blood character they saw before them was an absolute prat.
The reading went as well as it could have, given the circumstances. It was certainly not a difficult audience, although they weren’t very warm or responsive either. Ruth Harris stood at the back of the room, fidgety and fluttery, and yet with an enormous beam on her face. In her mind, if nowhere else, she was presiding over another resounding literary triumph, one that I feared might result in her trying to seduce the visiting author. Gregory Collins was enjoying himself almost as much. He was hanging on my every word, sometimes mouthing them along with me. It occurred to me that this was probably the first time he’d ever heard his novel read aloud, and if he’d never struck me as a man who liked the sound of his own voice, he certainly liked the sound of his own words.
Nicola was not enjoying herself nearly as much as these other two, but she looked as though she was deriving some sort of pleasure from the evening, perhaps a perverse one. I didn’t for a moment think it was anything as straightforward as watching her boyfriend, or possibly ex-boyfriend, give a good performance. I still suspected it had more to do with some act of revenge she had in mind for later.
In the face of these obviously vested interests I found myself directing the reading increasingly towards the single bona fide member of the public, the woman in the hornrims. At first she wrapped her big coat around her, turned up the collar, closed her eyes, and listened with rapt attention to the smut I was reading out. Then, when I got on to the philosophical part, she unfurled herself, got out a writing pad and started taking notes. That seemed very strange, but then I clicked, oh right, she must be from the local paper, sent to review the event, not a bona fide member of the public after all, but at least Gregory was getting some media attention. I couldn’t begrudge him that.
I read for a little over forty minutes. It seemed a long session, but when it was over I was satisfied with my performance. I could have wished for a better and bigger audience but I thought I’d done a good job on behalf of Gregory and myself. Then it was time for questions from the floor. I didn’t see there could be many of these.
Ruth Harris pitched in immediately. ‘What I’d like to know is how far the novel is autobiographical.’
‘Well,’ I said, smiling suavely, ‘the truth is, I’ve never actually been embedded in a block of wax.’
She wasn’t amused. ‘No, of course not,’ she snapped. ‘I meant the sexual material: the bisexual orgies, the Turkish bath scene, the group sex with the older women.’
These had seemed to me the book’s least convincing episodes. I knew very little about Gregory Collins’ private life but I was as sure as I could be that he hadn’t experienced any of these things first hand. Ruth Harris’s mention of sex with older women now seemed to take on a special relevance that I thought it best to quash.
I said, ‘You know, there’s always a distance between an author’s experience and his art; and I think it’s good if the exact distance remains mysterious.’
I glanced towards Gregory and saw him nodding in agreement. He liked my answer. Ruth Harris didn’t. She asked several more questions designed to plumb the extent of the author’s apparent polymorphous perversity. I did my very best to disappoint her.
Then Gregory himself pitched in with a few questions; well, they weren’t really questions at all, more self-congratulatory ruminations. ‘I’d like to say what a bloody excellent book I think you’ve written,’ he said. ‘It’s timely and contemporary without being disposable or faddish. And I reckon you’ve been right clever in setting up an opposition between the clean cold world of the spirit, a world both of knowing and unknowing, on the one hand, versus a world of sensory overload and sexual phantasmagoria on the other.’
He delivered several more ‘questions’ along these lines, and fortunately they didn’t require much response from me. I was briefly tempted to disagree with him for the sheer hell of it, to insist that he’d completely misunderstood the book, but I knew that would be going too far. I simply thanked him for his kind words, as though my natural modesty prevented me from agreeing with his assessment of my genius. I noticed that the woman in the hornrims even made notes of what Gregory was saying, which seemed a bit excessive. I was hoping she’d ask me a question so I could turn my charm yet more fiercely in her direction; another way of irritating Nicola. And I kept expecting Nicola herself to say something, to ask some snotty, lacerating question designed to have me floundering, but she remained silent and self-possessed, her disapproval obvious to me, but to no one else. Perhaps she wasn’t there for revenge after all.
I suppose she mightn’t have said a word if Ruth Harris hadn’t attempted to round things off by saying, ‘You’ve been a lovely audience, and before we let Mr Collins go I’d like to ask you, as a bit of market research, why you’re all here tonight.’
She turned to Gregory, who said, ‘I’m here because I think Gregory Collins is the most important young writer working in England today.’
Then she asked, ‘And what about you ladies?’
Nicola spoke first. I steeled myself. A knowing little grimace lodged itself on her face and she said, ‘I’m here because I used to sleep with the author.’
Did that past tense mean that she was never going to sleep with me again? It seemed quite possible, and I was disappointed at how little that disappointed me. It was an answer that seemed to please Ruth Harris, however, suggesting that I, Gregory Collins, was a bit of a rake. She then turned to the other woman, and asked her the same question, and the woman replied, ‘I’m here because I hope to be sleeping with the author in the very near future.’
I had no idea whether she meant it, but it was a good line and it might have brought the house down if there’d been a house. As it was, Ruth Harris scowled at her murderously and brought the event to a close. She was now regarding me sourly and, thank God, was no longer offering me dinner.
A part of me thought that Nicola and I should go off with Gregory, and I’d tell her that this was the real author. This might help her see the funny side, at least make her realise that Gregory was no monster and that I hadn’t done anything so very terrible. I had no particular desire for reconciliation, but I was vain enough not to want her to continue to think badly of me. The drawback was that this would mean abandoning the woman who’d expressed a desire to sleep with me in the very near future. I could hardly make these explanations while she was present, and I very much wanted her to be present.
But as it turned out, neither Gregory nor Nicola stuck around a moment longer than necessary; and neither of them wanted to be with me. In fact, they left together, and that confused me even more. Had he picked her up on the way to the bookshop? Were they now going off for drinks and flirtation? It hardly seemed likely given what I knew about both of them, but even if they were just walking to the station together, I wondered what on earth they were saying to each other.
Nicola still had no idea who this stranger was. Would she tell him that I was a fraud? Would he then tell her he knew all about it, that he’d set it up, that he was the person I was pretending to be? Would she be as angry with him as she had been with me? And then what? I couldn’t imagine and, besides, I had other things on my mind, chiefly the woman in the hornrims. Were we about to go off for drinks and flirtation? Well, yes and no. She introduced herself as Alicia Crowe, a name that struck me as utterly unfitting, and said she’d like to talk to me professionally. I assumed she wanted to interview me for the piece I thought she was writing for the local paper, so a few minutes later she and I were indeed sitting in a pub together, having managed to leave a vexed and disappointed Ruth Harris behind, and I was asking the one thing I wanted to know.
‘Did you mean what you said?’
She replied, ‘Wouldn’t it be really shallow to want to sleep with someone just because you liked a book they’d written?’
‘Well—’
‘I mean it would be almost as shallow as wanting to sleep with them just because they had nice hair or good cheekbones, wouldn’t it? Why does anybody ever sleep with anybody? Is it just habit? Or animal instinct? Or to satisfy their own vanity?’
At first I assumed this was a rhetorical question, but she continued to stare at me through the hornrimmed glasses, and it was clear she wanted an answer. I thought for a second of what a handsome couple she and I could make, even more appealing than Nicola and me, but perhaps this was what she meant by vanity.
‘I suppose people sleep together because they want excitement, fun, warmth, closeness, comfort, love,’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘they want those things, but is sleeping with someone likely to provide them?’
‘If you’re lucky.’
She nodded thoughtfully, as if I’d given an eccentrically challenging answer.
‘You’re full of surprises,’ she said. ‘I didn’t think the author of The Wax Man would be very interested in warmth and closeness.’
‘Trust the teller not the tale,’ I said.
She knew I was being glib, and perhaps that surprised her too. The Wax Man may have had many failings as a novel, but glibness wasn’t one of them.
‘I suppose saying that I hoped to be sleeping with the author was a cheap shot. I was using sex to grab your attention. I wasn’t really offering to have sex with you. I actually wanted to talk to you about a job.’
I had no idea what she meant. Did she think I was in a position to give her work? Was she offering to be my secretary, my amanuensis? Or did she think I could help her get out of local journalism and into Fleet Street?
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Aren’t you happy in your current job?’
‘I’m not asking for a job,’ she said. ‘I’m offering you one. Possibly.’
I brightened up. The prospect of getting out of the rare book trade was very appealing, but then I had to remind myself that she didn’t know I was in the rare book trade, that it was Gregory Collins she’d be offering a job to, not me.
‘What kind of job?’
‘A writer-in-residence.’
OK, maybe she wasn’t a journalist after all, maybe she was a college lecturer.
‘Yes? Where would I reside?’
She looked at her watch and said, ‘Finish your drink. It’s still early. There’s someone I want you to meet.’
‘I’d much rather stay here with you, drinki
ng and talking.’
‘There’ll be time for that later.’
‘Will there?’
‘Yes. We could have dinner after you’ve seen my boss.’
I calculated that by the time we’d seen her boss, then been to a restaurant, it would be getting late and I might very possibly miss the last train home, just like Gregory Collins had missed his last train back to the north. In the same way, I might have to stay over and she would feel responsible and obliged to offer me a bed for the night, and that would open up all sorts of possibilities. Ah, this was the literary life as dreamed of by the unliterary.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I said. ‘You’re a journalist or a lecturer or something, right?’
‘I’m a doctor,’ she said. ‘A psychiatrist.’
‘Oh,’ I said, baffled. ‘So who is it you want me to meet?’
‘His name’s Dr Eric Kincaid. You may have heard of him. He’s a genius.’
Naturally I’d never heard of Dr Eric Kincaid, but Alicia, or Dr Crowe as I was now entitled to think of her, spoke of him with such awe that I tried to convince myself I had. On the other hand, if she was to be believed, he had heard of me, of Gregory Collins. She said he’d read The Wax Man and was keen to meet me. That seemed unlikely but who was I to question it? I wasn’t clear what would happen when I met him. Was he going to interview me for this nebulous writer-in-residence job, or was I being taken there for his entertainment, because I was an interesting case study? Either way, I should have run a mile, but, of course, I didn’t. We got a taxi and there I was, travelling with this strange, serious, undoubtedly sexy woman in these unusual circumstances, and it didn’t feel bad at all. It felt like another part of the adventure, and one I thought I was still in control of. Regardless of how it ended, it was infinitely more fun than my normal life.
It did occur to me, however, that once these two psychiatrists got together and started talking to me, they might well be smart enough to see right through my act. That threatened to be humiliating, but so what? What did it really matter? I didn’t know these people and they didn’t know me. I would have welcomed the chance to get to know Alicia Crowe better, but it seemed likely that I’d never be able to hold my head up and see her again after this evening anyway. I had to make the most of her company while I could, and that’s why I went along with her plan.
Bedlam Burning Page 5