Fictional Lives

by Hugh Fleetwood

  There was something more she had to learn, she told herself as she walked slowly through the hot dusty streets towards her hotel. She had seen in Margaret Brandon the symptoms of a disease. Now she had to discover the nature of the disease itself. To discover it, and label it—and thus make sure that her present conviction that Joseph Brandon had indeed been rotten didn’t slowly fade away; leaving her only with the suspicion that her reaction to his widow had been nothing more than some mixture of jealousy and resentment, and a priggish feeling that it was unsuitable for a great and famous author to be married to a doll, and live in luxury better suited to a banker.

  Which wasn’t true, she thought, as she reached her hotel. There had been a flaw in Brandon, and she would find out what it had been; and she would set it down in her book for all the world to read. And then she would be safe forever.

  *

  She had had to wait for years to get this far; she only had to wait one more day to reach her destination.

  Before she did, however, she learned something else which affected her profoundly; something which Christopher revealed to her when he came into her office the following morning.

  ‘What,’ the publisher said, ‘did you make of Margaret?’

  Tina looked at the tall thin man—of whom she was, in spite of his sex, very fond—and wondered whether he was a friend of the widow, and whether she should be diplomatic. But never having been one for diplomacy, and in any case catching a note in Christopher’s voice which suggested that he didn’t make very much of her himself, she shrugged and said, ‘I thought she was one of the most appalling people I have ever met in my life.’

  Christopher laughed. ‘I guessed you might not approve.’ He paused, and glanced briefly at his hands. ‘Though it’s a shame you never met her when she was younger, before they were married. She was quite different then. I think you would have liked her then.’

  ‘Different how?’

  ‘Oh, fatter—well anyway plumper—more of a mess, more fun, more natural, more lively, and—’ he paused again, and smiled shyly, ‘I don’t know whether you’ll approve of me saying this, but if she’s beautiful today, in a rather scary way, she was pretty when she was young.’

  Tina now laughed. ‘Really,’ she said, ‘I have nothing against pretty women.’

  She laughed, and she appeared to take Christopher’s comments lightly. But within, this revelation made her tremble. Margaret Brandon had once been as she had imagined that she would be. So Brandon hadn’t married a monster; he had created a monster. Oh, it was terrible, she thought; and made her all the more determined to expose the man.

  ‘And the house?’ she said. ‘I thought that was pretty awful, too.’

  Again Christopher smiled shyly. ‘I’m afraid that was Joe’s doing as well. He bought it when he first started making a lot of money. He told me that when he’d been a boy he’d seen a photograph of Chester Street, and had thought that one day he would like to live there. He had a thing about eighteenth-century elegance. I could never see how it fitted in with the rest of his character.’ He nodded at Tina, and smiled for the last time. ‘I’m hoping that’s what you’re going to explain to us all.’

  ‘I will if I can,’ Tina said with passion. ‘Don’t worry about that.’

  ‘I never worry about you,’ her publisher murmured—and then held out a bulky package he’d been carrying. ‘I don’t know if these will help you at all. Margaret rang up yesterday after you’d left her and said she’d forgotten to give them to you. She found them after Joe’s death. They’re diaries or something, apparently. I sent a messenger round for them.’

  ‘Have you read them?’ Tina asked, more than ever trying to appear calm, and more than ever trembling within; trembling now with the sense—with the certainty—that here, in this brown paper package, she would find what she wanted to know.

  ‘Me?’ Christopher seemed shocked. ‘Good heavens, no. I don’t want to poach on your territory.’ He looked at his watch. ‘But I must leave you now. I have a meeting at ten-thirty.’ He laid the package on the desk. ‘Happy reading.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tina said, still making an effort to appear unconcerned.

  ‘Oh, and while I remember.’ Christopher paused at the door. ‘Pat said to ask you if you could come to dinner with us next Tuesday—today week.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Tina said again, only wishing at the moment that the man would go, so she could open that package. ‘I’d like that.’

  And she would have liked it, for she was as fond of Christopher’s wife as she was of him. But she didn’t go to dinner the following Tuesday. In fact she returned to Italy that very evening.

  *

  Inside the package were three large notebooks.

  On the corner of one was written 1953–1963; on the corner of the second 1963–1973; on the corner of the third 1973——.

  She started at the beginning.

  June 24, 1953.

  Yesterday I arrived in London for the first time and immediately if absurdly felt I had come home. I also decided, as I stepped off the plane, that I would in future keep a sort of diary. I say a sort because my novels, I guess, are my real diary. But here I shall keep a record of the undigested facts of my life; or the undigestible facts.

  So—here goes.

  There followed a brief passage of Brandon’s first impression of the city; which Tina skimmed through quickly. For even as she had read these opening words, her eye had been caught by something further down that first page.

  In the evening Dick, and a young editor called Christopher something (I didn’t catch his name), took me to dinner in an Italian restaurant. We were joined by two compatriots of mine: Charles McDonald, a pompous old fool who didn’t impress me one bit, in spite of his reputation; and a fellow Southerner, Tina Courtland, whose book I haven’t read yet but who impressed me greatly. She is a tall, solid girl of around twenty-five, I’d guess, with a handsome man’s face, crew-cut blonde hair, an earnest manner and a voice that tends to get weepy when she becomes intense—which is often. She is clearly unaffected by the success that first novel of hers has had, and even seems scornful of it. She was also unaffected and seemingly scornful of Dick’s attempts to be ‘gentlemanly’ with her. But I’m not a gentleman so we got on well—at least until the end of the dinner.

  They had got on well; and Tina clearly remembered that evening, and the young Alabaman she was never to meet again. His grey eyes that were too cool for his warm manner, had, when they caught hers, acknowledged a kind of kinship with her; and his tall solid body and handsome man’s face, that had made both Dick and Christopher seem very slight, and shadowy, had made her feel that she had found, in him, a twin.

  I guess by then we had both drunk too much, and I was also tired after my flight. Anyway, we started getting aggressive with each other, and also, as one tends to when drunk and tired, started making deep pronouncements about life and art etc. etc. First of all we just sort of sparred with each other—but then when Tina C. solemnly stated, in her weepiest voice, that ‘The history of the world is the history of crime, and the writer’s task as I see it is to denounce crime’, the fun really started. (Dick gave us both a look that implied we were country folk going on about country matters.) To begin with I laughed, then I knocked over my glass, and then I made my solemn statement. Which was (more or less): ‘You may be right about the history of the world being the history of crime, but if you are, the writer’s task as I see it is to celebrate crime. Without crime there would be no progress, there would be no justice, there would certainly be no art, there would, paradoxically, be no check on crime, and above all the human race would no longer exist.’ At which Dick murmured ‘Oh come now’, Christopher looked amused, and Tina began to scream. She accused me of being a fool, she accused me of hating life, she accused me of every goddam thing she could think of, and finally she accused me of being a man. And when I murmured in my pleasantest fashion that I guessed as a woman she dissociated herself from history—
and not only from history, but also from reality—because if she didn’t she must certainly be a party to crime, she burst into tears, told me, yes, dissociate herself from history and reality was exactly what she did, because they were man’s history and reality, gave me a look which proved she didn’t believe what she said, and then ran out of the restaurant so fast she knocked over a little old waiter who I’m sure still doesn’t know what hit him.

  Well, I guess I won’t be seeing her again, though I’m sorry, because I did like her, and would like to continue my argument with her. That is get her to admit that she’s wrong and I’m right. Which, fifteen hours and a good sleep later, I know I am. Denounce crime, my ass! Maybe I put it wrong when I said I reckon a writer should celebrate crime. Maybe what I should have said is that if her original premise is correct (which I think it is, though it depends on the angle you view things from; you could put it the other way round, and say the history of the world is the history of man’s struggle against crime), and if therefore we are all a party to crime (because of course, as she virtually acknowledged with that look she gave me, she doesn’t think for a moment that even if she is a woman she can dissociate herself from history and reality; though if she doesn’t acknowledge it openly she’ll end up retiring to the countryside with some girl-friend, raising chickens and growing vegetables instead of writing books), the writer’s task is to describe the state of history and reality as it is now—to be in fact historians of the present—and let readers draw their own conclusions.

  What I also should have said, I guess, is that if, once again, it is true that the history of the world is the history of crime, and we are all therefore parties to crime, it is the writer’s task, the writer’s duty—if he is to be an accurate historian—to know what he is writing about. To be, in other words, a criminal. To do willingly and consciously—not just, as is normal, unwillingly and unconsciously—what he believes to be wrong. If I can’t write about love, if I have never loved—and I can’t—I can’t, by the same token, write about murder if I have never murdered. And I defy anyone to name a great work of literature that doesn’t deal with either love or murder; generally both. By that I am not claiming that every great writer of the past has killed someone; but I am claiming that some (whether in war or by ‘accident’) have, that those who have not have missed the ultimate greatness they are capable of (the greatness that comes from knowing every corner of themselves, of the world, of life and death; the greatness of taking the whole world in and creating it anew; and the greatness to which I aspire, and which for me is the reason I want to live and write—ah to be the world, to be God—how else could I bear my existence!), and above all that I myself, while I have every intention of being ‘good’ (indulging in my love of life) have also every intention of being ‘wicked’. (Indulging in my love of death.) Even up to and including murdering someone. For—to use a rather banal image—the love of life and the love of death are the twin motors on the ship of existence, and while I am here I wish to travel as far as I possibly can on that ship in exploration of the earth. To explore it, as I say, in order to re-create (no goddam it—create) it.

  There, Tina Courtland! As we used to say—put that in your pipe and smoke it!’

  Tina laid the notebook down and now, more than just trembling within, felt that her whole body was shaking. Not because she was embarrassed or upset by her recollection of the way that evening, all those years ago, had ended (lots of evenings had ended in a similar fashion when she had been young, and her fight with Brandon had in no way affected the impression she had received of him earlier that night), nor because these words she had read seemed to be a voice, literally from beyond the grave, that was speaking personally to her. Nor even—taken by themselves—because of the rantings about murder. She had heard others saying similar things, and generally understood them to be the longings of people, as writers often were, who felt themselves to be mere observers of life, mere sitters on the bank, and who yearned for some more active involvement in the world; some chance of being down there in the stream, swimming with everyone else.

  No, what really made her shake was a combination of joy, and, unexpectedly, an almost hysterical fear. The joy was occasioned by her now even greater certainty that if she read on she would indeed reach her destination; would indeed discover the nature of Joseph Brandon’s disease; would indeed be able to cast him out. The fear was occasioned by a premonition that in reaching that destination she was going to have to travel much further than she had ever wanted to go; that her discovery would not be—as she had always, when she had vaguely thought about it, imagined it would be—of some essentially minor ailment (some chronic eczema, as it were, of Brandon’s soul) but of a disease so horrible, so contagious, that her very contact with it would put her in mortal danger; and that far from being able to cast out the carrier of this disease, she would find herself forced into isolation with him, without the possibility of feeling any joy whatsoever.

  Such a premonition could, she thought, have been dismissed as pure fancy on her part (she didn’t really think Brandon had gone round mugging old women, raping little girls, stabbing people for fun, did she?), if it weren’t for two pieces of evidence she already had. One was the undisputed, well-publicized fact that throughout his life, though he had been based in England since 1953, Brandon had travelled continually; and travelled, more often than not, to countries in the grip of war or revolution. South America, Africa, the Far East—he had spent time in all these places, and even if friends, colleagues, and newspaper reports hadn’t told Tina exactly when and where, she would have been able to tell from the novels; nearly all of which had wars and revolutions as their backgrounds, and nearly all of which, in one way or another, described the effect of the horrors of war and revolution on some uncommitted observer; or on someone who found himself in their midst by accident; or once—in the last, most successful, and in Tina’s mind best book—on someone who had gone to a theatre of war (the Lebanon, in this instance) ostensibly in order to write articles condemning the conflict, but in fact because possessed by a lust for horror….

  There were passages in two or three of the books where the uncommitted observer, at the instant of realizing he could remain uncommitted no longer, found himself obliged to perpetrate the very crimes he had come to believe he must fight against; and in that book set in the Lebanon, a passage where the blood-hungry journalist is obliged to gratify his lust; and is destroyed in part by his at last first-hand knowledge of the nature of horror, and in part by his awareness that, even though he now entirely understands it and abhors it, he is more than ever consumed by a love of horror….

  Critics had always praised Brandon’s perception, his ‘deep insight into human psychology.’ But what, Tina now thought, if that perception, that insight, had been achieved by the perpetration, by Brandon himself, of the crimes he pinned on his characters. She knew, after all, that in many instances he had befriended revolutionaries, and been in the front line of battles. He had always claimed, in the interviews she had read, that he had never once carried a gun, or gone into any of those battles armed. He had always gone strictly as an observer. But what if, what if….

  The second piece of evidence that made her think her premonition was justified, and that she would read things in those notebooks she didn’t after all want to read—a piece of evidence she had already realized was significant, but now, in the light of what Christopher had said, became doubly so—was, of course, Margaret Brandon herself.

  Because since everyone had insisted—and she had read a great many letters which substantiated these reports—that the couple had always gotten on extremely well, there was nothing to suggest that the writer had ever mistreated his wife. Nor was there much likelihood that they had been sexually incompatible; some of those letters had been quite explicit, and Margaret, yesterday, in her soft expressionless voice, had mentioned—in the same tone she had used to describe the provenance of some of their furniture—that she supposed one of the
most difficult things for her to accept in Joe’s sudden death was that she had been deprived not only of a husband, but also of a lover. So, if Brandon had not mistreated her, if she had been satisfied sexually, what had transformed Margaret from a plump, lively and pretty girl into the taut frozen object that she was today? Not finding herself married to a world-famous author, surely. Nor even finding herself with money—because she had also mentioned that her family had been reasonably well off. So, what then?

  Ah, Tina thought, what but knowledge could have wrought such a change. And not knowledge of something unimportant. Knowledge of something too dreadful to know. Knowledge of the character of the man she was married to, and presumably loved. Knowledge of the character, if not of the deeds, that would be revealed by these notebooks.

  She stared at them now, as they lay on the desk before her, and for a while was tempted to throw them in the waste-paper basket; or better, to go out, borrow a match from one of the secretaries in the building, and set fire to them.

  But after a few minutes, and after having done something she hadn’t done for eight years—which was smoke a cigarette; she went up to Christopher’s office to beg one from him, saying that she had remembered she couldn’t write without smoking—she had relaxed enough to realize that, even if she didn’t read all the notebooks, she must at least read enough to be sure that she wasn’t simply indulging in fantasies; that she did have reason to fear.

  It took her another hour though to summon up the courage actually to do it; actually to expose herself.

  She opened the second volume; and flicked through it until she saw a heading marked ‘Congo’.

  She read that for ten minutes; then she opened the third volume and read under the heading marked ‘Vietnam’.

  Fifty minutes later, still so white—she caught sight of herself in a mirror—she looked like a ghost, still unable to hear the traffic or the clacking of typewriters, and still so rigid with shock—a shock that was all the greater for being caused by something she had expected to happen—that she felt she was tearing her muscles with every step she took, she went once again to Christopher’s office. But this time, instead of asking him for a cigarette, she told him shortly that Maisie had just phoned and said she had had a fall, that she was very sorry but she must return to Italy immediately, and that she had gathered, she believed, quite enough material to be getting on with. She would start work on the book itself soon, she said, would keep him informed as to her progress, and would return to London at a later date if she found it necessary.