by John Purcell
With a mug of tea before Helen and a warm coffee in my hands we are soon chatting amiably enough. Helen shows some surprise when I let her know I’ve been reading her for years. She asks me my age and in the same breath says it is none of her business.
‘Twenty-four,’ I say, realising too late that perhaps Pret A Manger hadn’t been a great idea. Helen doesn’t look very comfortable. The rain is driving tourists in and the noise is building.
‘When I was your age I had a real terror of the old. But the elderly were different then.’
‘How so?’
‘They were the product of a culture that no longer existed. I was in my twenties in the sixties and the elderly in my life then had been born in the nineteenth century. Their formative years were largely spent in the pre-war era. The period someone like E.M. Forster writes about. I was surrounded by people who remembered that life. They’d lived it. And made judgements based on that experience. From Queen Victoria and the horse and carriage and on through two world wars, the general strike and all that. Lucy Honeychurch might have been my elderly neighbour. Forster himself died in 1970! What changes to see in one lifetime. They were an entirely alien generation. Refugees of a kind. Stateless. Where had their world gone? I was the product of a completely new world: TV, motorways, rock’n’roll music, Sputnik and the welfare state. I couldn’t even talk to the elderly. I suppose that generation might have been less frightening if my own grandparents had been alive. But all four had died young.’
As Helen speaks and warms to her subject, a light comes into her eyes, her whole face grows animated. She’s taller than I expected, and her frame larger, though she hasn’t an unwanted ounce of flesh on her. Her hand gestures remind me of my time in Italy. They echo her speech.
It becomes clear as we chat that Helen is genuinely surprised by my interest in her. Because I am a young woman. But on reading her early novels, I tell her, I am not struck by the differences between her female protagonists and myself, as much as I’m struck by the similarities. Their concerns – education, career, family and love – are mine. And the obstacles thrown in their path are the same as those thrown in mine – self-doubt, money, the patriarchy.
‘Which just goes to show that the optimism of the sixties and seventies was premature. Not enough has changed. My books should, if progress is being made, be as alien to you as the lives of Forster’s heroines were to me. Though a century apart, the novels of Forster and Austen have more in common than Forster and even, say, someone like Hemingway, who was his near contemporary. The first half of the twentieth century saw rapid change in nearly every facet of life. The second saw changes, but not so quickly, or profound. They were changes of outward appearances, largely.’
But there have been changes. Women in Western countries do have greater freedoms. And then there’s the internet. I ask her what effect the internet has had on her writing.
‘I don’t leave the house. I used to make trips to the library. There was always something I had to look into. The library was my second home. Especially when beginning a novel. Now I just google everything. The worst effect is an obsession with being absolutely correct in every detail. It slows me down, but also deadens my writing. Malcolm is always running red pencil through these passages in my writing. He bans me from the internet when I’m revising my work. He doesn’t appreciate how difficult this is for me. He is largely unplugged. Writes with a pencil. Which is probably the only thing he had in common with the late Jackie Collins.’
The ‘Malcolm’ she refers to often in her conversation is her husband, the writer and critic Malcolm Taylor. His 2014 book of essays on the modern London novel, The Knowledge, is seen as the new benchmark of modern literary criticism. Over the last twenty years, Malcolm and Helen have wielded great influence over English literature and over the new generation of writers. But Helen says recent talk of them being a power couple couldn’t be further from the truth.
‘Authors are the least powerful group in the book industry. A few may get to throw their weight around, because they’ve sold millions of copies, but they’re a rare breed. And they never throw their weight around in a way that benefits other authors. Most authors, at least the ones I’ve met, have no power and do as they’re told. Very few only write; most supplement their writing with other work. It’s a perilous existence with little financial reward.’
And yet, recent news would suggest otherwise. For Helen has been seduced away from her long-time publisher, Sandersons, by Morris and Robbins for an undisclosed sum, rumoured to run to seven figures.
She laughs when I repeat the sum. ‘If only! What publisher would take such a risk on a writer with one foot in the grave? I’ve had a reasonably successful career. But my editor says with each new novel my readership drops because they’re all dying off!’
Not all, I assure her. More and more young women are drawn to her writing.
‘I’ve been very fortunate. Many of my novels are still in print, and from time to time they include me in a set of modern classics. Not bad. But neither Malcolm nor I have ever sold in the US. So we’ve never hit the big time like our friend David.’ [David Cornwell, the author John le Carré.]
However, Helen and Malcolm recently moved from the three-bedroom flat they shared for the last fifty years in Brixton, and where, famously, they shared an office and wrote at desks facing each other, to a terrace in West London, so there might be some truth to the rumour after all.
I asked Helen whether she was proud of the work she had been able to produce over a long writing life.
‘Yes, very. I’m not going to be meek and mild at this late stage. I never set out with a plan. If a young person chose to read through my novels I’d hope they’d prove useful. They’re not going to help them put together a piece of IKEA furniture. But I’ve spent so long wandering in the moral minefield of modern life, I know many a safe passage through. And that can be helpful, I think. Why make mistakes you can avoid? What good is fiction if it doesn’t allow you to practise at living life?’
Not wanting to end our conversation, even though Helen is showing some small signs of impatience with our surroundings, I ask what she is currently working on.
‘The book for Morris and Robbins. To be frank, I’ve lost my way a bit. I’m in the dark with my arms stretched out taking tentative steps. Somewhere in the darkness is a story. I hope.’
* Postscript: Subsequent to this interview, German publishing titan, Seelenlos, bought Helen Owen’s new publisher, Morris and Robbins.
*
My confidence in being able to turn Helen to more commercial fiction had plummeted with the lift.
Now I was sitting on a lounge in the lobby of the building, staring at my phone.
I called Julia.
‘They gave Helen Owen a million fucking pounds?!’
There was silence on the other end.
‘Hello? Julia? Just tell me. It makes one hell of a difference.’
‘Yes. But it wasn’t a million. It was two million.’
‘Jesus! Why?’
‘That’s what I hope you’ll find out.’
‘Who knows you’re assigning her to me? Julia? Julia?!’
The phone call was over.
Chapter 8
Leather Notebook
Malcolm had been sitting at his desk in his office for hours. It was almost four in the afternoon and he was listening to the grumbling of his belly. Helen was out for the day and he had not eaten lunch. He had been sustained by the cup of tea he had made at eleven.
On the desk was a large leatherbound notebook, opened to a page partly covered with his own clear printed script in pencil. The first writing he had attempted in the new house.
The notebook was very fine. Aspinal of London. The leather was nice to hold in the hand, to run his fingers across. Though it was many years ago now, he remembered that the box it arrived in included a printed card that read: Happy birthday, Dad. Love, Daniel and Geraldine.
At the time, he had been s
urprised by his son giving him a notebook of this kind. He must have known that Malcolm always wrote on loose sheets of foolscap paper. For notes, he always carried a spiral-bound pocket notepad and a pencil stub. These weren’t recent innovations, these were lifelong habits forged in his teenage years when he first started to write seriously.
Accompanying the grumbling of his stomach were Malcolm’s doubts. In order to make use of Daniel’s present, he was consciously abandoning the method of sixty-something years of writing. The notebook wouldn’t stay open when laid on its spine and had to be held open with his left hand. The leather binding and three hundred or so pages lifted his wrist an inch off the desk, which caused him to alter the habitual slouch and made him sit further back in his desk chair. The paper in this notebook, though of a much better quality, was coarse in comparison to his cheap foolscap. The pencil scraped across the page. And finally, the paper wasn’t lined.
But he wanted to use it. It was from Daniel.
Besides, the house wouldn’t let him go back to his old ways. The foolscap paper had remained conspicuously empty of pencilled words.
The leather notebook would break the hoodoo. It was Daniel’s notebook he was to fill. He would write for Daniel. Not for Helen, as he had always done until now.
Helen had led him to rediscover the notebook. That day when she had tried to encourage him to empty the boxes of books in his office, Malcolm had, after she’d left, roused himself and, feeling equal parts resentful and repentant, had thrown more of his books onto the shelves: his battered Penguins bought cheap second-hand, tattered Everyman’s Library editions, anonymous coverless pocket hardcovers, his Virago Modern Classics, the many hundreds of books, all in poor shape, all read before he got his hands on them. Books with a past.
On discovering the expensive leather notebook in one of the boxes, he had stepped back to look at his work but was saddened to discover his much-read books looked shabby on the pristine white shelves. Almost as shabby as the reading chair he lowered himself into. Helen had tried to throw the chair out before they moved. But he had clung to it tenaciously. Rubbed raw in some places and stained and ripped, the chair was a part of him that could not be discarded. He could not remember the chair’s precise origin and he did not recall it ever being new; he supposed it had come to him second-hand. It had been in the corner of their shared office for at least thirty years, maybe more. It had been the one thing in the flat that was entirely his own.
Helen was right though. In his new office it looked out of place and, like the books, distressingly dilapidated. She had suggested getting it reupholstered but the idea had distressed him, so she had covered it with a rug.
Malcolm felt she should have waited until he was seated in the chair before she covered it with the rug. He felt as the chair and the books did, completely out of place in this new house. He too was rubbed around the edges and stained. This house was too beautiful, too clean, too expansive. And white. So white. He was a stain here. A living stain. He was almost eighty years old. He’d lived in the one place for fifty years. Fifty years. The move had been a colossal error of judgement.
The foolscap remained in the desk drawer. That Malcolm was dead to him.
Where the notebook had looked entirely out of place in their Brixton flat, it was now the only thing in Malcolm’s possession that truly suited this new house.
This white purgatory.
The grumbling of his belly continued. He lifted the pencil and wrote on. This first day of writing had been productive; he’d filled page after page, but something was different. It wasn’t the notebook or Daniel. It wasn’t the strange light of being longlisted.
It was this: it was more than fifty years since he had written alone.
In the flat, even when Helen was out, she was there opposite him. Her papers, teacup, books and silly little knick-knacks held her place. Now she had her own office across the landing. She was gone. Everything was different.
Because of this, Malcolm had avoided writing for months, the longest he had gone without since he first started writing. He couldn’t write alone, that would be admitting something. That would make it real.
He flicked through the pages he had just written and then closed the notebook.
It was real now.
Chapter 9
Intermission
Who wants to be woken up at 2 am by the buzz of an intercom? The street was so perfectly silent, I could hear the buzzer going off in the fourth-floor flat above. I pressed it a third time. I’m sure half the residents in the building heard it before their neighbour did.
‘Oh, fuck, it’s you.’
I blew him a kiss, down the camera lens. It fogged over. The street door clicked open and I pushed through it and climbed the four flights to his door. It was open. I closed it behind me, crossed the tiny flat and found tattoo boy back in bed. Stripping naked I climbed in beside him. The flat was freezing. He rolled away from me and I spooned him. He was so warm. He groaned as I put my cold hands on him.
‘Sleep,’ he growled.
Not a chance. He knew it, too. When my hands found their way down to his cock, it was rock hard.
*
‘Don’t you sleep?’ asked tattoo boy, after his alarm woke him at six. I was sitting at his kitchenette bench eating his cereal. I’d wrapped my naked self in his duffle coat.
‘Nope. Too much going on.’
He didn’t say anything, just stared at me with sleepy eyes.
‘Hey, tattoo boy, why is it so fucking cold in this place?’
‘Josh.’
‘Really? Josh? Doesn’t suit you. I like tattoo boy.’
His drowsy smile seemed to say he didn’t care what I called him.
‘It’s fucking freezing!’
‘Can’t afford heating.’
I put the cereal down and grabbed my handbag. I dug around for a bit and found what I was looking for. Taking off the rubber band I pulled out a few hundred pounds and scrunched them up. I threw them at him.
‘I’ll be back for more of that cock of yours, so next time I expect some fucking heat. All right?’
‘I’m your little whore, am I?’
‘If you want. I don’t care how you think about it or me.’
Josh didn’t answer this but he straightened out the notes, smoothed them against the mattress and put them under the pillow.
‘I live on champagne, too. So make sure there are always a few cold bottles of Bollinger in the fridge.’
He looked at me warily then shook off the covers and, naked, went off to the bathroom. I heard him pee and then shower. In five or so minutes he came out looking as he had when he left. There was no getting away from it. He was a perfect specimen.
‘I didn’t expect to see you again,’ he mumbled, as he started to dress.
‘I didn’t expect to want to see you again.’
‘You do this sort of thing often?’
‘All the time.’
‘I bet no one has ever left you out on the street.’
‘Not yet.’
As I watched, he put on a pair of utterly filthy jeans, two unwashed T-shirts and a stained Nike hoodie, then proceeded to pull on thick woollen socks and dust-covered work boots.
‘Will you be here when I get back?’
‘No.’
I took off his duffle coat and handed it to him. He smiled broadly as I stood naked before him. He took his time to get the jacket on. All the while his eyes were on mine.
‘You’re the devil.’
I nodded. ‘What time do you need to be at work?’
‘Seven.’
‘You can be late.’
*
I didn’t leave the flat. There was no point. I’d be back that night for more. For an hour after he left I lay on his bed utterly fucked. When I finally moved I shuddered. All of my body felt electric. And it wasn’t the fuck. That had been quick. He probably made it to work on time. It was how we fucked. Rabid beasts. He is so strong. He pounded me. Held me down
and gave it to me. And the noise we made. I was screaming. And he roared as he came.
Then he did up his pants and left. Not a word. Not a kiss. Ruined me. Ruined. So I stayed.
This wasn’t the whole truth. I mean, he knew how to fuck. And his scent was delicious. And those abs. But would I have stayed if I hadn’t had somewhere else I had to be, somewhere I didn’t want to go?
I wrapped the blanket around me and wandered around his flat. I looked in drawers. Flicked through an unread copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I masturbated. Ate another bowl of cereal. I opened his laptop. Then closed it. I showered.
I climbed back into bed and waited for him to return.
I was asleep when he returned. I awoke to the sound of the shower. I lay sleepily while he washed the day off him. He came to me naked and kissed me. Slipping under the covers, he held me, lay on me. He kissed me for so long I wasn’t sure when his cock had slipped into me. I hadn’t been kissed like that for years. These were teenage kisses, so urgent and full, then tender and lingering. And the gentle thrusts of his hips driving his cock deep. He was killing me. He knew what he was doing. When he kissed his way down between my legs I was completely undone. He toyed with me, too. Took me to the edge and retreated. When I escaped his game I came so hard that I almost suffocated him holding his head to me like a madwoman. Afterwards, he stood at the end of the bed and watched the final throes overtake me. But he wasn’t done. And he was too strong for me to resist. He flung me over on my stomach and lifted me to my knees.
*
He wasn’t doing anything special. This wasn’t imaginative sex. I wasn’t being tested. Or shocked. He wasn’t someone’s husband or boyfriend. It had none of the thrill of the unfamiliar or the deviant. I didn’t wake up beside him in that state of aroused disgust I’d become familiar with. But here I was sitting at the end of a bar like an overprotective, jealous girlfriend watching him work. Truth be known, I couldn’t let him out of my sight. So I’d followed him to his second job. It was nice to pretend to like someone. To experience the sex you get when you first fall for someone without falling for them. He reminded me of boys from the village I’d climbed over the walls of my boarding school to smoke with and kiss.