Things are changing in my world. I’ve been aware of this for a while now. Oh, how my uncle would have hated the very thought of it, since (he said) it was the sort of thing that only ever happened in books. Who d’you think you are, Jane Austen’s Emma?—I can hear his voice now, in my mind. People don’t fucking change, there’s no narrative curve in life—what, d’you think we’re all sitting here on a narrative arc, whizzing along in space? Beginning middle and end? People don’t get self-knowledge, they just get worse—and so on. The usual misanthropic business: except that, for me, for some time now, the world really has begun to seem in different ways, taking me along with it.
That voice of his, for example. It’s in my mind, it’s imagined and not out there anymore. This house. It’s around me now, and the sea wind is blowing and whistling in the usual way and making its customary draughts around my ankles: the panes are all darkness and reflection. The usual mise-en-scène, in other words—but nothing else, no frisson, no lurch of fear: nor, as I say, has there been such for a while. The house no longer looms around and about me when I come in at night, there’s no longer that sense I’ve always had that I’m being enclosed, and entering a mystery—that I’m entering the forest. Instead, it feels little more than the Chicken Coop, say, on the rare occasions the Butts are out for the evening and I open its unmemorious door to the vegetal smell of the cooked.
In other words, the Residence seems to have lost its animal capacity to scare the daylights out of me as soon as I’m inside it. A couple of nights ago I turned off every switch in the house and sat alone here in the darkness: I went into the Blue Room and stood still, waiting for the fear to come, waiting to be deliciously engulfed once more. I called my father’s name, once, twice, and felt again the small terror of doing so, a little, but I knew he wasn’t really there: and that was new, knowing that, and the first time I felt he might really and truly have gone away at last. I stood by the northern wall, close to it, right above the place where the boy is buried, and I thought about that business, too. There’ve been times when I’ve almost seen him, lying down there in his rough, hurried grave: almost. This time, though, hardly anything. No: nothing, nothing at all.
On the way out, I try for that precious, sublime squawk in the hallway floor once more—and it’s just a sound, a woody little creak, just itself.
The painting, then?—here it is, above the stone fireplace, across the table from me now. What an extraordinary thing it still manages to be! As silly as a wet hen, Raymond used to call Phylllis behind her back in later years, when the fire had gone out between them and they suddenly found themselves foolish, fond old friends instead. Turning him around to paint his soul was evidence of that silliness—or, alternatively, of an adjacent genius: of some special thing in her, that she could get the effect I’ve described to you whereby a man begins to steal away from the viewer out of a storm of dots and splashes and improbable tones of grass and earth and sky, to melt away and yet always be just about to turn back to you in every moment, just about to tell you over his shoulder absolutely everything that he means. Organic man in person, there and not there, there because he’s not there, another trick-of-the-eye—how did she do it? so many visitors to the Residence have asked me as I’ve taken them around the place: it’s nothing and something at the same time, nothing and everything—
Ah, yes, true, true, and I can see all of this as I sit here looking at Phyllis’s painting yet again. All of this, and yet none of it. I can’t tell you what the difference is—and this isn’t the first moment I’ve been aware of the change, to tell the truth: I’ve been stealing back to the dining room for weeks now, and staring at the picture, and turning away, and coming back to it once more—but I know something has melted away from me, not just here but in the house, in my life, in everything. The magical portal has been closed—a dramatic phrase, I know, over-dramatic. Silly, even, even self-indulgent: but that is what it has felt like.
It feels (yes, yes—this is it) as if I have come to the end, at last, of a long entanglement that began when Raymond turned his back on me all those years ago with eggbeater in hand, and I am simply a civilian once more. No, no, before that: back to the time when I first glimpsed him, Satan over the rubbish fire, back to that moment, back to the very first of him. Yes, that’s what’s been happening to me, I’m sure of that now. Once again I am that ordinary boy of my mother bred, before the fact of my delicious, illicit uncle was first poured into my ears. Raymond, and all he stood for. My Mephistophelean uncle.
Later, at least an hour later, I’m woken in my dining chair by a slam down on the driveway. I stand and move to the front door, but Julian’s through it and upon me before I’m there, with Semple head-down behind him: the Stetson seems almost to bounce its way up the concrete steps unaided as he climbs.
Julian thumps the door shut. They stand there, the pair of them, breathing hard at me.
‘Fuck me dead.’ Semple, his back against the door.
Julian has a plastic bag with him: he tips it out on the dining table. Audiotapes clatter and slide onto my documents. Five of them—six.
‘Mission accomplished.’
‘You stole them?’
‘Borrowed them.’ He’s still breathing hard. ‘From Marjorie’s.’
‘She’s staying with Marjorie? You broke in?’
‘No. Robert has a key.’
I look across at Semple. A key?
He shrugs. ‘Years ago.’ He lifts a cloth supermarket bag to the table and eases out two of Julian’s ancient, mossy Panasonics: they clump onto the tabletop. ‘How long’ve we got?’
‘A few hours.’ Julian. ‘She’s taken her to the Hungry Wok.’
‘Geneva? Marjorie has? Does she know you’ve—?’
Julian shakes his head. ‘We didn’t let her in on the plot.’
‘She’s made one of her own.’ Semple. He’s staring at the tapes up close, one by one, as if that’s the way to get into them. ‘A plot. With Geneva.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Robert.’ Julian plugs one of the Panasonics into a wall socket. ‘He thinks it’s romantic.’
‘They’ll be at it till dawn. Practising Sapphic alternatives.’
‘That’s just ridiculous. Look, we’ve got two or three hours to listen to these and get ’em back—’
I catch Julian’s eye.
‘Can I talk to you offstage for a moment?’
He follows me into the kitchen and its smell of the domestic past: I close the door behind us.
‘They’re not as old as the one we used back at my place,’ he says. ‘The tape decks. We should—’
‘He shouldn’t be here.’
‘Who?’
‘Robert. What if he finds the thing we’re looking for? On the tapes? What if he—’
Julian, mouthbreathing up at me. ‘I never thought of that. When we were putting it all together. Him and me. I just thought he’d—’
‘Why’s he—?’
‘Well. He had the key. She gave it to him years ago, apparently. He insisted on coming, I could’ve done it alone. He seemed to think it was a commando raid or something—he kept going back into her house, I had to wait for him—’
‘Well, how can we get rid of him now? Without hurting his feelings?’
He gazes at the door. ‘I never thought—you know, when we were—planning it, him and me. I just assumed—’ He looks away. ‘All that talk. I didn’t feel so brave when I was there. In Marjorie’s house. Behind her back.’ He looks at me again. ‘This is falling apart.’
‘We need to listen to the tapes, we need to know what it is she’s got over us. Geneva—’
‘The secret. Right.’ He puts his hand on the doorknob. A pause. ‘Tell me again what we’re looking for?’
I find I’m staring down, at our feet splayed on the ancient, trodden green and red of the kitchen linoleum.
‘The boy. We’re trying to find whether the boy is mentioned.’
‘The boy under the Blue Room?�
�
A pause.
‘I thought we were looking for the other thing,’ he says.
‘What other thing?’
‘The violence. Or what we burnt—remember?’
‘Shh—we don’t want that to get out.’
He’s looking down, too, as if the answer is somewhere at our feet.
‘No,’ Julian says. ‘No, quite.’
‘I mean, Robert would—’
‘—oh, of course he would—’
‘If he heard it, I mean.’
‘You’re right.’ He opens the door. ‘Quite right.’
‘If that’s what it turns out to be—’
‘On the tape. Right.’
‘I mean, there seem to be all sorts of things that might—’
‘Shh—shh—’
Back in the dining room, though, Semple is gone: the Panasonics sit side by side on the tabletop.
‘Where is he—where’re the tapes?’
Robert’s voice, distant: ‘I’m having a slash—’
A clatter, from the toilet.
‘Shit.’ His voice, through half-open doors. ‘Shit shit shit—’
‘What’ve you done?’ Julian is in the hallway now.
I can hear Semple saying something from the other side of the door, and then the flat, wooden thump of the seat against the cistern.
Now Julian’s voice again: ‘Oh, you silly prick—’
I follow him into the hallway: he’s peering into the little lavatory. ‘What’s happened?’
Here’s Semple, on his hands and knees beyond Julian’s legs: he’s bent over and fishing around in the loo. ‘Bugger,’ he’s saying. ‘Bugger and shit—’
‘What were you doing with them in here, anyway?’
‘I had them in my hands, I was going to put one in the deck and then I thought I’d duck in for a quick slash first—’
It slowly settles itself into a sentence: Semple, unbelievably, has dropped the tapes in the toilet bowl—
‘How many?’
He’s peering in. ‘Five. No, six—’
‘You brought them all in? You’ve dropped them all down the loo?’
He’s standing now: his sleeves are wet. Two of the tapes sit in a puddle on his palm.
‘Well, where are the others—?’
Julian is down now, on his knees and fumbling a hand in the bowl. ‘They’re round the bend a bit.’ His voice squeezes up to us. ‘The other three, I can feel them.’ A slight grunt. ‘Here we go—’
‘You mean after all the trouble you’ve gone to—’
‘Oh, fuck up, Norman. Just forget it—d’you think I came in here just to drop the fucking things in?’
He presses between us roughly and away. I follow him into the dining room.
‘Peter’s right.’ Julian, calling from the toilet. ‘We have gone to a lot of trouble—’
‘Well, that’s bad luck, then, isn’t it?’ Semple dumps the two wet cassettes onto the dining table. ‘It’s done now.’
‘Any chance of drying them off, Julian?’
‘I don’t think so. I’ll get some toilet paper. There’s still at least two more tapes stuck down here.’
‘What is this secret, anyway,’ Semple asks. ‘This thing we’re looking for—?’
I look out, at the pretty glitter of the city lights. ‘There’s no secret,’ I tell him.
‘You said there’s always a secret. A writer always has to have a secret otherwise he can’t write, that’s what—’
Julian appears. ‘For goodness’ sake!’ he says. ‘Another toilet roll’s gone!’
‘Another toilet roll?’
And at this exact moment, like an actor who’s fumbled her cue, Marjorie sails in through the front door: wrong player, wrong scene, wrong lines—even, conceivably, the wrong play:
She stops short and stares at us.
‘Toilet roll?’ she demands. ‘Has someone pooed themselves?’
We stare at her. She can’t possibly be here—but, on the other hand, and undeniably, she is.
‘Where’s Geneva?’
‘I left her at my place. Ringing the police.’
‘The police?’
‘Well, why not? She wants her tapes back.’
‘Robert’s just dropped them down the loo.’
‘I should’ve known. What a stupid bloody idea—she’s got a dozen more of them, anyway—’
‘What did you have to ring the police for?’
‘Really? A dozen more? Tapes? Geneva has?’
‘Of course she has—she wasn’t born yesterday, she only brought half of them down with her—less, there’s about twenty all told, she says. She’s heard them all, she knows everything.’
Of course she does. And of course she hasn’t shown her hand, not all of it, anyway. We’ve got nowhere, we’ve got nothing—
‘What does she know?’
‘D’you know?’
‘What?’
‘Has she told you? What she knows?’
Now Marjorie’s phone, though, starting up in one of her bags: which, which?—the third, she fumbles it out of the third.
‘D’you think she knows now?’ I whisper to Julian.
‘Where?’ says Marjorie, with the phone flat on her ear.
‘D’you think they both know? Julian whispers back. ‘The women?’ Behind him, Semple slips out into the little hallway.
‘What?’ Marjorie.
‘They’ve both got power over us now,’ Julian whispers back.
‘Where?’ Marjorie, to the phone.
Two doors away, the toilet flushes.
‘Has he just had a pee?’ Julian turns away. ‘There’s still two tapes down there—’
Marjorie snaps her phone off. I’ve never seen her look so grim.
She stares at us. ‘Which one of you was it?’
We stare back, Julian and I, two men frozen in front of an angry woman.
‘Not me,’ I tell her. ‘I wasn’t—’
‘Which one of us what?’
‘Which one of you shat on my living room carpet?’
‘What?’
‘Geneva says someone’s shat on my living-room carpet—’
‘Not me.’
‘Robert, where’s Robert gone—?’
‘He’s in the loo again—’
I watch them rattle off into the hallway, Julian first. It’s becoming clearer, the thing that Robert’s up to.
Marjorie, shrieking at him in the lavatory.
Julian tumbles back into the room. ‘I wondered why he went back in,’ he tells me. ‘At Marjorie’s. I can’t believe it—he says he wanted it look to like kids had done it—breaking in—’
Marjorie, furiously in behind him. ‘She’s not a dreadful woman at all,’ she’s shouting back at Robert. ‘As it happens I rather like her.’ She stops and stares at me as if I’ve just come in. ‘No, not quite like,’ she tells me. ‘It’s too soon for that. I’m not sure what I feel.’ A curious little smile as she’s saying this: to herself, and almost fondly, as if she’s only just begun to understand something. She opens her mouth, to say more:
And here, exactly at this point, and suddenly, loudly, shockingly, a sharp rap-rap on the front door.
We all come to a stop.
‘Christ, what’s this now?’ Julian.
‘And harassing an old man into his grave—’ Robert, following in from the hall. He stops short. ‘What?’ he says.
‘Just remember,’ Marjorie says, firmly. ‘No one was as bad as Raymond. Let’s be quite clear about that. But I’ll tell you one thing he could do better than anyone else, he could organise a decent plot.’
Rap-rap, on the other side of the door.
‘That’s true,’ Julian says. ‘We’ve been hopeless.’ He looks across at me. ‘What do we do now? Who’s this going to be? Does anyone know?’
Rap-rap-rap—
A presence, on the other side: voices, a mutter, not clear. A stirring of shoes: boots, maybe.
Ag
ain, a sharp double rap.
I look at Julian. He looks at Marjorie. Marjorie looks at Semple.
Semple looks at me.
I look at Julian again, and then at Marjorie.
Now Marjorie looks at me.
Rap-rap-rap-rap—
The sound of fate.
‘Well, go on, open it. Someone open it.’
I start across the room.
‘It’s only Ray,’ one of them calls out, and we all pretend to laugh at that.
IX
The Blue Room, when it came, took me completely by surprise, I remember that—it shocked me, it jolted me to the core. I’d been overseas a month, astonishing myself by how well I performed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin—so much so that I tried a couple of other libraries elsewhere in the States before I slipped over to England and the Continent for a week. There, I found the Master well known in unexpected places—at Aarhus and Liège, for example, where he was thought exotic, and in France, where (for obvious reasons) feelings about him were rather more ambivalent.
So that stage in our shared life had well and truly begun, in those last years before Stockholm—and there was I, back home and barely out of the taxi from the airport and swinging my suitcase onto my bed when I saw something through the window, in the bright, breezy afternoon light of the summer garden. I’d expected Raymond to meet me at the gate, or at the door at least, and to be eager to find out more of what I’d done for him. Instead, a fresh puzzle, from this man of puzzles.
What’s happening outside? I called to Edna Butt, whom I’d passed in the front room, where she was busy with vases.
The Back of His Head Page 27