The whole business was made all the more extraordinary for me because it was so much alien to my usual ways: I’m not, I can assure you, in the habit of visiting the paranormal—until all this business began, I didn’t even believe it might exist! Thus, for me, that moment of apparition in the Blue Room was an extraordinary experience, the shock of it still in me even now, a couple of days later, in my body and, more, in my mind. For, as far as I was concerned, it really was the old man, at that moment, appearing in front of me in the darkness at last.
And, then, a click as the light went on—and there was Julian, staring at me popeyed, just as I (I’m sure) was staring back at him. Peter, he said, and I said his name, or maybe it was the other way about: and then we simply laughed and laughed and laughed. We were both so relieved—we’d given each other such a shock! And after all it was just Julian, and after all it was just Peter!
What was interesting, though, was the way each of us had been quite sure the other was the Master, come back to haunt. How, why? I asked: the two paua shells, he said. It felt like the past coming back, I could smell it, I could almost smell the Mediterranean—you know, as if the old boy had taken us back there?
So, there you are: I wasn’t imagining things!—in the moment, I, too, had thought of Kerr, that strangest of Raymond’s many strange novels, with its solitary raft journey across the Mediterranean. And it was a strange conversation, too, I have to admit, as we sat together in the Blue Room we’d painted together years before. I remembered again that moment I’ve mentioned, when we stood there, the four of us, paintbrushes in hand, our work done and ourselves worn out but transfixed none the less by that sense I’ve tried to convey to you already of being returned to the start of things, when our collective story was about to begin—all brought about, it seemed, through the perfect achievement of a particular colour, a particular hue and tone.
So? Raymond said after we told him, I remember, when he’d turned up to inspect our newly painted Blue Room. Why the surprise? And it was true: there should have been none in it for us, because, after all, he’d gone on and on for years about the colour blue. The colour of transition, he told us. Not just any old blue, but (he pointed to our still-drying walls) that blue, that one there. Sky blue! The colour in which the abstract is able to become real, the colour that allows the static to start moving—the colour that lets things turn into words and words into things! That is what he said, and that is how he said it, in that occasionally operatic manner of his. I remember what he said next, too. Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve set the cat among the pigeons. Anything can happen in this room now you’ve got the colour right—
Quite something to remember at a time like this!—and we were like two young boys, Julian and I, I suppose, sitting there a few midnights ago in the perfectly preserved time capsule that is the Blue Room. We could feel him all around us, the old man: even the smell of him, since we celebrated the trick he seemed to have played on us by getting out his Ouzo—his Ouzo, literally his, that very last bottle he’d owned and with little more than the neck drunk out of it. We unscrewed the top, the two of us, and had a drink to him in his very own aqua vita, to acknowledge what he had done to us. Very unusual for him, for Julian, and even more so for me.
The old man had fooled us both, all right, properly put the wind up the pair of us the way he’d used to do in the good old days. The past rattled around and about in the sound of the wind outside and the familiar slight tremble of the French doors that was always incurably present on nights like this, the death-watch-beetle sound of time itself passing by. At such moments then always became present, in the creak of the floorboards, the dark at the windows, the cones of soft light from the corner lamps: Raymond himself could have walked into the room in his slippers and dressing gown and sat down with us for a shot, no water and nothing else, either, just the Ouzo. Sissies! he’d bawl at us if we put anything into it. And his perennial toast: here’s follicles on your bollockles—
So it seemed almost inevitable that, after a reflective silence as we sat there in the darkened Blue Room, Julian should reach deep into the past, after we had calmed down a little, and speak the unspoken words. Does she know about it—Geneva? Is that how you can tell the tapes are for real?
I sat there for a moment: after so many years it had been extraordinary, shocking, to hear Geneva bringing back something of what happened, to hear her give voice to the past, in effect, and it was just as disturbing to hear it aloud in Julian’s words.
Geneva? I asked. Another long wait, as I thought about it. Yes, I said. She seems to know something. Another pause. Jeepers, he said. How much? Just the fact that there’s something to know, I told him. Remember, we agreed never to discuss it, we agreed to keep it between the two of us. Yes, he said. We did. But someone’s obviously got to her. No, I mean we agreed never even to discuss it ourselves, I told him. Remember?
Julian’s name fascinated Raymond, when he turned up not long before the award of the Prize to catalogue his papers for the local university’s research library. At some point he let slip that he published poetry in his spare time, on an enormous old American printing press in the studio behind his house. Like many other local poetasters, Robert fell around his neck as soon as he heard this, and in due course Julian brought out his fifth volume, Cuffing Myself. A limited edition of fifty or some crap like that, as Raymond disgustedly put it.
He accosted Julian, I remember, at the launch. Chapbook? he demanded, feigning ignorance. His smile, as he approached this evidently harmless and decent man, chilled the heart. Is that a book written by a chap? And so on: it got worse, much, much worse, and was not at all pleasant to watch. Some reeled away, shocked at Raymond’s mounting brutality.
The thing was, though, that Julian seemed not to notice. Patiently, he explained to Raymond what a chapbook is, and Robert’s appalling title as well. He’s got no idea what it really means, Raymond said in the car on the way home: I can’t believe it. He actually thinks it’s about Robert’s shirt. At length, too, Julian explained his mission to publish, eventually, as much local writing as possible. Raymond was appalled: he actually wants to encourage all these fucking lady writers, he said. All this shit people write about their hip operations—art as therapy, tomorrow will be another day, all that weak shit. How’re we going to stop him, what are we going to do about it?
It took so long, so long for Raymond to realise the truth of Julian’s name, and of his existence beyond it: that, like the fictional Julia, he is another ingenue, but this time one that lives and breathes and walks around, somehow, without the need to be written: a medium-sized man with hair the colour of hair, someone who resisted conscription (Raymond’s despairing phrase). I don’t get it, I don’t get him, he said after another party and another meeting with Julian. I don’t know why he’s here. At this party? I asked. No, Raymond said. On the planet. What’s he got to do with literature, what’s he got to do with writing? He doesn’t write, he’s not sick enough in the head, he just wants to help people, what’s wrong with the man? How am I going to get to him, how am I going to break him down, how can I subject him?
Ah, yes: that was the thing, you see. Julian resisted arrest, as Raymond’s Marjorie-Julia-Marjorie and the rest of us so signally failed to do. In a sense, Julian was the anti-Julia—the antidote, as the old man once said, to the poison of art. By that stage he had more or less accepted Julian’s role as a sort of literary functionary, someone who got things done: published other people’s unpublishable books, recorded the visits of the famous, arranged readings and made sure the microphone always worked at them, spoke up regularly for this or that promising youngster on air till the monthly arts programme he ran on local radio was—of course—defunded.
In the middle of all this, Raymond tried to capture him in one of his stories—he was writing The Long Run collection at the time, I think, or maybe it was later—and that was when he came up with hair-coloured hair. I can’t do it, he said. He just won’t sit still and be
a subject. He’s unwritable. It’s never happened to me before—I’ve just spent half the fucking afternoon trying to find a word for his hair, and there isn’t one!
Marjorie, on the other hand, seemed to slip into his language without resistance. Did he really take her to Ibiza underaged and debauch her there, as she claims—as Raymond claims, too?
This is what she has happening, in turn, to the Julia in her novel, in such a layering of art and life that it is impossible now to know what is real and what invented. Reading Unravel Me I felt it was actually her, Marjorie herself, Marjorie in truth, walking the pages in her bonne vie as a fictional character: full, rounded, complex, complete, and believable as none of us can possibly be in the living world, full of purpose and the glow of inner life: caught in a narrative curve that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. She is real at last, carrying the novel throughout, its heart, its soul, the young woman of today making her way in a man’s world, finally standing triumphant as the embodiment of a fine and palpable womanhood. Life itself, growing on the page, the epitome of the grand humanist tradition. The fullest possible validation of the imaginative act, as one critic described this Julia who was Marjorie who was Julia who was Marjorie. The author as she possibly might have been: but as she could actually never be.
Fallen below this, lapsed back into the quotidian, she goes on being just Robert Semple’s condescended Marge: perpetually dabbing at her nose, forever lugging her many bags and grips about with her, always improvising in the classroom, always in the toils of this unsatisfactory relationship or that. It is as if her novel is the life and she’s been forgotten from her fiction: the protagonist’s best friend’s sister, perhaps, whose name you can never quite remember once you’ve finished the book, someone you think you might actually have known once, distantly seen now sitting in the bus shelter, much of her face covered by her hat as the bus goes flying by. Rusticated from the world of Art, always a little late to things, condemned forever to shop.
Look, Marjorie said to me once, and showed me a photograph. We were in her house, a little way up the most fashionable hillside in town—a little higher than the Residence, on the next spur to the east. Her parents most certainly did not approve of her daughter’s association with Raymond, and, although an only child, Marjorie was astonished when, in due course and after all, she inherited the house from her widowed mother. This, ten years ago and more, but to her as if yesterday, as if this morning, even: as if now, and of this minute.
I know, I know, she told me once. I’m worse than Ruskin—I should paint everything white and wander around calling their names out, the way he did when his Dumb and Mad died. I know I was meant to sell up and be sensible and buy a townhouse, she said, but I can’t touch anything. Their clothes are still in the cupboards, I just can’t bring myself to do anything about them. Talk about daughters-of-the-late-carnal.
And this is where she showed me that photograph: her boyfriend, I realised straight away, a businessman called Fahti—yes, yes, I know—who has been in and out of her life for a decade at least. The image in the photograph shows him wearing a dark cap and standing very straight as he looks off to the left with a walking pole held in his hand as if he is about to do great things, like Roald Amundsen.
Fahti, I told her.
No, you silly prick!—and she pushed the photo closer. It took me several seconds more. Then: Raymond! I said. For goodness’ sake! Can’t get away from him, she said. I stared at the image: I’d forgotten how striking he was in his prime. Is that really him? I asked her. I can’t really even remember him like this. So handsome! Well, how d’you think he got me? she said. Striking, yes, particularly when you’re aged ten. She took the photo from me. Why d’you think I took Fahti so seriously? she asked me. Well, I’ve never met Fahti, I told her. I’ve no idea what he looks like. Oh, the usual thing, she told me. Small, dark and handsome. Pointed beard, rimless specs. All the other stuff as well.
The other stuff. Fahti is but one of a stream of unsuccessful lovers who have replicated one another in Marjorie’s life, all of whom replicate this Original in the photograph. Like him, like them, he issued her with instructions, gave her ultimatums and threats, went in and out of her life as he pleased, had other women, returned without explanation and offhandedly resumed his commerce with her. That it turned out he was married through all this hardly needs to be mentioned. Of course he was married.
I asked Marjorie during one of his absences whether he’d ever beaten her. Oh, you know me, she replied. Doesn’t work without it. Doesn’t work with it, either. Choose one. Well—he’s gone now, I comforted her. They’re always gone, she said. Every time. They’re gone before they arrive. I spend half my salary on counsellors and we talk and talk and talk and then we agree what the problem is—Ray’s the problem, I love him I hate him I love him I hate him—and then we agree, next time I’m going to make more sensible choices and have a really adult relationship. Then out I go and find someone I think’s not like Raymond at all—and guess what happens next?
At one stage she was in a relationship with a tall, frightening Dutchman because she thought that that was what not-Raymond meant: taller (or fatter, or thinner, as others turned out to be one by one, or with different-coloured hair or none at all). She used to say that her time with Raymond, as she called it, was the longest she’d ever been with a man: I’m always with him, she said, that’s the trouble, he’s never gone away. Everyone else is Raymond-lite, she said, looking around herself for her box of tissues. They come in one door pretending to be him and they go out the other and abandon me—
On one of these occasions I reminded her that Raymond really was my father, legally so, and that it was curious to hear her talk of him as her own. The difference is a piece of paper, she said back to me, dabbing at her nose. They ask me, what about your biological father? These counsellors. Then they don’t believe me when I tell them my biological father was a long drink of warm gin and I had no relationship with him at all—why do they think it was I fell into Ray’s clutches so soon? I wasn’t ten, but I wasn’t much more. You were fourteen, I reminded her. Yes, she said: but fourteen?—aren’t you shocked by that? I am. I can’t believe it was me. But he had me the minute he met me, he turned up to do a reading at my school—I was like those women in the Cavafy poem, d’you know the one? They can’t wait for the barbarians to come? I seduced him as much as he seduced me. Yes, with the donkey watching, I reminded her. You told us all about it. No, she said, long before the donkey!
I’ve heard these things several times, of course: she used to say she was drawn to me as a confidante by my lack of compassion, my ruthlessness, by my (her phrase) neuter quality. Sometimes, at these moments, when she talks about her early days with Raymond, I tell her she’s fantasising: and she always stares past me when I do. I can’t tell, I remember her saying on one of these occasions. It’s all fantasy, isn’t it? One shrink told me I was fantasising about what I wanted my father to do to me. He was a Freudian, he said it’s all transference and projection—relationships, he said that’s all they are, that’s how they start, he said, and they end when the transference and the projection have served their purpose, whatever that might be. I cried and cried when he told me that.
She wiped her nose with a tissue and flicked a naughty glance at me. He had you at ten, she said.
She’d made this sort of claim before. I met him at eleven, I reminded her. And he did not have me. Yes he did! she said. Every time he hit you with that bat-thing of his he was having you! It’s about pain and power and humiliation, doesn’t that sound like sex to you?
At this point I stopped her short. He hardly touched me, I said. Anyway, he was trying to make a man of me. She stared back at me, boldly, I remember. He broke your back, she said. That’s what he did. He did not, I told her—I wanted to get this straight there and then, to get it straight and put it away for good and all. That was the hormones, I told her. They did the trick but that’s the price, spinal scoliosis in later years
. She was still staring at me. Hormones my bottom, she said, coolly. He beat you to death. Then he tried to bury it, he tried to cover it up.
Oh, I stared at her when she said that, I stared and stared at her. At what level of fantasy was she speaking when she was saying something like that? What did she know?
There’s a terrible scene in Flatland where the protag-onist, Hamilton, takes a young Amazigh deep into the Algerian desert, beyond the Aurès—a youth, really, barely that—and eventually, lingeringly, kills him. It’s appalling for all the obvious reasons, and for the details of the business itself, which seems to go on and on: but it is appalling most of all (I can barely let myself write this) because of the love in it, and the way that love suffuses and elevates the writing, and draws the reader into what is being described, however much we try to resist its pull. The scene is unreadable, and so extraordinarily, obscenely beautiful that it has to be read, it must be read. It pulls you down into itself, it makes you into itself and of itself.
When I first read it as a youth—half a boy still, really, more than half a boy—I was numbed by its obscenity. I wanted to stop and I couldn’t, I wanted it to end and it wouldn’t. And so I was sucked under, appalled and by degrees, till I’d become a part of what I read—an agent, a protagonist, in effect Thomas Hamilton himself: I was a torturer and a murderer, I’d done these things myself and felt the love and the desire in both of them. Oh, God, to admit that! He’d reached into me as his reader, Raymond, and made me realise how much I was complicit in every single thing I’d made him describe for me in such painful, lingering detail. I’ve never quite forgiven him for it. Remember, I was the Amazigh’s very age at the time: well, more or less, whatever it was. I mean I was him as well, the boy as well, the youth. You have to understand that, you have to understand that to know what I’m trying to tell you. He was me. I was him.
The Back of His Head Page 17