Darke
Page 27
‘Goodnight, Gampy,’ he murmured.
We woke at seven, and stumbled downstairs for juice and cereal, flat white and seeds.
‘I have a good idea,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could stay a little more and we could go to that museum that I like. The one with things you pull.’
‘You mean levers. That’s the Natural History Museum.’
‘Yeah, that one! Can we, Gampy, can we?’
‘I’m not sure. Mummy will be missing you, and she expects you home this morning.’
‘She won’t mind, silly. She’d be glad. She likes museums. Daddy does too. She’ll say yes! I bet she will.’
‘I’m sure that’s right,’ I said.
It was Suzy who’d taken him to the Science Museum, a month or two after she started chemotherapy. She insisted that she have Rudy on her own, on the fairly observed grounds that I would be bad company, and that Rudy would fawn on me anyway.
‘At least this way I get him to myself,’ she said, which rather overestimated her strength.
Rudy had a whale of a time, rushing about madly, pulling anything with a handle on it, whooping and laughing, until he knocked himself out, began to cry and insisted that Suzy buy him a rock crystal that cost £295 from the museum shop. He settled for an ice cream instead.
Suzy came home exhausted. ‘I loathe show-and-tell museums. They dumb things down, and wind kids up, like some sort of fucking culture playground!’
‘Poor you,’ I said.
‘This’ll be the last time. I’m not up to it any more. I love him dearly, but I can’t keep up now. It’s going to have to be you soon enough . . .’
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘Shhh,’ she said, touching her finger gently to my lips. ‘You’ll be OK, you always are.’
I kissed her finger, sucked at the tip of it briefly. ‘I won’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how to bear it.’
She smiled, her old smile, and withdrew her finger. ‘You’ll think of something. You always do.’
Acknowledgements
I don’t know where James Darke came from. His voice simply popped into my head and he wouldn’t go away. His first phrase, on insinuating himself, was ‘fucking T.S. Eliot!’, which was for some time the opening line of the novel. I was inhabited by him for months – I didn’t yet know who he was – and inhibited by him as well: I lost confidence in my own voice and my native cheer was fading demonstrably in the face of his constant presence. The only way to get him out of my head, I eventually reckoned, was to write him down. It didn’t work, not entirely, for the more I wrote, the deeper he insinuated himself. During the height of this infestation, a friend told me, rather strictly, that I was becoming rather curmudgeonly, and that it wasn’t very congenial, or indeed very like the ‘me’ he was used to.
Of course James Darke would have laughed at this, for it is one of his firmest beliefs that the ‘I’ we all so simplistically think we are – my voice, my disposition, my likes or dislikes – is actually the uneasy and unacknowledged outcome of competing voices, introjected over a lifetime, many of which have lost their original sources and become constituent parts of ourselves. Indeed, James, passionate reader and teacher that he has been, is a bit of an echo chamber of other people’s voices – writers, largely – whose words have become his own. (He thinks this is undesirable, but I disagree.) Sometimes he acknowledges his sources, but most often the phrases and sentiments of the great writers slip into his thoughts and feelings unannounced, and unacknowledged.
I have not put such instances into quotation marks, nor indeed have I noted them in any way. This kind of casual appropriation – not plagiarism, but also not unlike it in a minor key – is central to his way of constructing himself, and his distinctive voice is an amalgam of other distinctive voices. Though he might claim that the osmosis is largely unconscious, I’m not sure we should believe him: after all, he refers to ‘composing myself in painstakingly extracted bits’, which suggests time spent in his library, or (even) on Google.
Attentive readers will note interwoven phrases from many writers. The ones I am aware of include: Edward Abbey, Arnold, Beckett, Blake, Conrad, Donne, Flaubert, Dr Johnson, Joyce, Kafka, Larkin, Lawrence, Milton, Pope, Pound, Sartre, Swift, Dylan Thomas, Twain, Updike, Wittgenstein and Yeats. There are probably others that I have either forgotten or of whom I am unaware, because, like James Darke, I am myself a bit of a compendium of borrowed felicities, or what he shrugs off (in another context) as ‘the odd casual insertion’.
But if James is sometimes lax in acknowledging the wisdom of others, I do not wish to be. For this book could not be as it is without the patient benignity and high critical intelligence of a number of its early readers. Of these, as ever, the most important is my wife Belinda. I had feared, rightly, that James Darke would not be a congenial presence in her life, and certainly on first introduction she didn’t like him one little bit. She had her reasons, and after a struggle I listened to them. The James of Part I of this book is – can you believe it? – considerably toned down from his first and darkest incarnations, in which his disgust with himself and his fellow humans was more pronounced. My friend and literary agent Peter Straus also felt this overdone, and under pressure from his formidable judgement a number of major changes took place in the later drafts of the novel. Peter’s colleague at Rogers, Coleridge & White, Rosie Price, lent an intelligent young sensibility to her reading of the penultimate draft, which profited greatly from her acuity.
In that period of intense revaluation of the early drafts, I was sustained and encouraged by the very enthusiastic readings I had from my friends (and former editors) Rosalind Porter (Granta) and Andreas Campomar (Constable and Robinson).
I’d also like to thank my son Bertie, daughter Anna and son-in-law Steve Broome and nephew Matthew Greenberg for their support and critical input. My sister Ruthie and my friend Jonathan Strange have been, as ever, eagle-eyed proofreaders. I am also most grateful for the medical information offered by my doctor friends Sandra Goldstein and James Scott.
When Canongate, to my immense pleasure, bought this book, I was lucky to have the enormous enthusiasm and critical acumen of Jamie Byng, Jenny Todd and Francis Bickmore to spur me on during the final revisions. I couldn’t have asked for better publishers.