Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  I did not want to discuss these perceptions with Mr. Prain. I preferred to hide from him any feelings I had and did my utmost to preserve a Zen-like serenity of expression. Why should I satisfy his curiosity?

  After a last appraisal of Medusa, I turned abruptly to look at the photographs, without waiting to be invited to do this. It was true he had an Arbus, one of an old couple dancing: her with painted face that could not hide wrinkles, folds of skin; him grinning, drunk, with food stains on his jacket. There was also a landscape by Ansell Adams and a plant by Mapplethorpe as well as a good British collection. An empty hook indicated where the photograph of me would have hung. Tactfully, he had not brought it with him as we toured the house. Next to the space were two others by Denis Johns: one of a child bouncing a ball by the Thames, and another of a wood into which a woman was running. I found myself drawn into this last image. You could see the woman’s elbows, hands, hair, arms, heels, legs, skirt, blouse all in motion, kicked up, flying. In the front of the frame there were close-ups of foxgloves and grasses. In clear detail, but in the back, also focused, was this shape, running. It must have been done by superimposing two images, but I could see no evidence of a join. I thought of the oil painting in the study: the woman running through the darkening landscape. Perhaps I reacted.

  “What is it?” he asked me. He was watching me closely, as before, this insect.

  “Oh nothing,” I said, breezily moving on. “It’s a good collection.”

  “I’m not completely a man of the past,” he said.

  “But you don’t often use this room, do you?” I observed.

  “Not often, no. Lately, I play chess here.” So he did like games of strategy.

  “By yourself?”

  “I play with Monique.”

  I took a few steps to the board with the aluminium chess-men. A game was in progress. “What are you? Black or white?”

  “White,” he replied.

  That would figure, I thought; he is the one with the advantage. White seemed to be in the stronger position. He had captured one of Monique’s bishops, a castle, a knight and three pawns. She, on the other hand, had taken a bishop and a couple of pawns from him. Her king was surrounded by his men. She had already castled. Few of her men were on his side of the board and did not seem to be primed for attack. Perhaps Monique liked to let her employer win. Perhaps he was very good.

  “That reminds me,” he said, and picked up her queen, placing it in a position that covered two important diagonals. Was that what they had been whispering: “queen to c3?” He chuckled. “It’s no use. It’ll be check mate in three moves.”

  I stared vainly at the board, trying to see how this could be possible, but he could see I was no Grand Master. Then all at once I saw, under the chess board, on a rack, my box of typescripts. Here!

  I felt a sudden sharp pain in my stomach, and tried not to show that I had seen anything. I clenched my hands. There before me were all the outpourings of my feelings and fantasies: poems of love, fear, death, moments, eternities; stories, many based on real events, real people; memories mashed into fiction. And he had read them. I had willingly handed them over to him. Again I saw him holding the page smeared with those lines of poetry. I saw him reading: a poem about hope. What about the novel? It was three years’ labour, mainly in the middle of the night. No, I did not want to write a blockbuster. I just wanted it to be published and read. Perhaps I really did want to shout at the city gates and summon a few people out of lethargy. I so needed a public, or else I might as well parley with gnats and moths in the wilderness. No one to hear. I had not fully understood the way it worked, that it would be so difficult. And then there was the possibility that I was just another self-absorbed fluffy-brain who derived a sense of catharsis from scribbling out some great fib of her own making, a tall story that would have the reader gripped, gullible, eager to devour every literary cream cake I happened to present on a platter.

  He pulled his attention away from the chess board, and looked at me, jocose. He knew I had seen my black box. I felt myself blushing. Should I mention it? There was no point. He was the one who would say precisely when the box would be opened. I had agreed to let him come to it in his own time. I knew now that the gallery was the last room he would show me. Here he meant us again to sit down. In due course, he would discuss my work.

  “You liked the sculpture,” he determined.

  I looked at him, trying to fathom what on earth he was thinking. “Yes, I do. I think it’s very clever,” I affirmed. Perhaps now we could get on to my typescripts.

  “Do you want a drink?” he asked cheerily. “I don’t think it’s too early.” It was about five o’clock.

  He can tell he has unsettled me, I thought. So much for my ability to seem calm. He’s thinking I need a drink to relax. “OK.” Be compliant.

  “What would you like?”

  “I’d like a … martini,” I said. I never drink martinis. I see them advertised at the pictures as belonging to exotic or unusual locations. Perhaps this room—and the sculpture—was surreal to me. It was certainly outside my usual reality. My natural habitation was found amid the noisy, populous streets of Camden Town. My countryside was Regent’s Park. My environment was a large, shared flat above a shoe shop on Camden High Street: an untidy flat with balconies facing the afternoon sun, where I sat on warm evenings, ignoring car fumes. Flatmates and friends came and went: the irregular tides of the day’s occupants. Sometimes I would go out to a film, the theatre, an exhibition, with a friend, a lover. Such was my ecosystem: a scruffy flat, the sort in which one finds old earrings and coins lodged under an off-cut of carpet or beneath the armchair when the vacuuming eventually gets done; where musical instruments and amplifiers clog the hallway. In a vegetarian kitchen piled with used crockery, pots and pans and decorated with faded Greenpeace posters, I would pour myself an organic beer, and take it to my bedroom full of books I could not resist at the price. I would go to my balcony overlooking the road, the people, the traffic, and I would treat the balcony as if it faced the ocean. There, I would write, beside a gnarled piece of driftwood found at the seaside. There I would drink a beer. In the house of Mr. Prain, I wanted martini.

  Mr. Prain moved towards the eastern wall, where the Kandinsky hung, and pressed a button, which was the same colour as the wall, so that I had not noticed it before. He pressed the button and the hidden door of a hidden cupboard sprung open.

  “How many secret compartments are there?” I asked.

  “Oh just this one,” he said. “I dislike obvious bars.”

  Mr. Prain disliked things that were not good taste.

  Then why me? I was not one of his ilk. I was something completely different.

  I sneezed.

  “Bless you,” he said.

  I sneezed again. (At-issue, at-issue, we all fall down.)

  “A speck of dust,” I explained, sniffing, rummaging for my handkerchief in the pocket of my floral dress and not finding it.

  “Bless you again,” he said, making tinkling sounds as he mixed drinks, pronged ice cubes, replaced bottles.

  Bless me. Bless my soul. Blessings in disguise. Lord help me, I thought. I sniffed as inconspicuously as possible. Something is wrong.

  Mr. Prain handed me a glass of martini. The glass was shaped like a bell, like those they have in advertisements.

  An advertisement in a cinema. Take me and Mr. Prain, dressed in evening attire, and place us in an exclusive club in the Caribbean. Note: palm trees, azure sea, white beach, black waiters. We are an advertisement couple, totally beyond reality, totally perfect. My hair is not in springy curls, but the gleaming result of a salon’s straightening treatment, swirled in a sleek roll, like that of an Alfred Hitchcock blonde. The colour of the sea is magical. Music: a breathy flute, soft and sensual. Storyboard it. His eyes. My eyes, deeply kohled. Close-up of lips. Martini. A sliced lemon. A cherry. Martini, in a glass bell, poured in slow motion. Ice. Nail-varnished fingers on the glass. His bow ti
e, dinner jacket, pink rose. My bare back. Breeze ruffling table-cloths. Martini. A glimmer of a smile. A touch.

  “Cheers,” I said, lifting the glass and sampling a mouthful.

  Luis Buñuel said that the perfect martini was pure gin pierced by a ray of sunlight, or something like that. This one had about 1% vermouth to 99% gin, the ratio of inspiration to perspiration Edison deemed genius to be.

  Mr. Prain imbibed the taste like a connoisseur, lifting his eyes to me all the while. I swallowed my gulp of almost pure gin with as much grace as God would allow, and decided to take the rest slowly.

  “So—we’re going to talk about my writing now,” I rasped, “are we?”

  “You’re so earnest, Stella.”

  My heart sank. What did he mean by that?

  “I mean, you honestly believe I am going to say something very important. My opinion is just my opinion. You must realise that. I am not the Delphic oracle. That I am a publisher is pure chance. I have very precise ideas about what makes good writing, but I am not infallible. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my elder brother had inherited Coymans rather than I. What kind of fiction would he have published? Would it have made a difference?”

  “Why … why didn’t he inherit the business?” I asked, a little hoarsely, thinking this was because of the speck of dust still lodged in my throat. Perhaps I should turn interrogator, and probe, before judgement.

  “I don’t know,” he said, after a short pause for consideration. “I was probably being groomed for the part from the beginning. I would get books when Charles would get a tennis racquet. Or is it that one just wants to please one’s parents? One of us had to be the dutiful son. If my elder brother had no intention of filling that role, perhaps there was no choice.”

  “So Charles was the black sheep?”

  “And I was the white goat,” he said.

  “But didn’t you do the right thing, in your parents eyes?”

  “In some ways. In others, Charlie was the darling, at least my mother’s darling. My mother’s family were all horse-mad, polo-mad, sporty types. The stables over there,” he nodded his head towards the east, “used to be full, all through my childhood. My father was keen on—very disreputable to you I’m sure—fox hunting. It was his exercise. I must say, I didn’t care for it, or for polo. They would go off—”

  “They?”

  “Mother, Father, Charles. I would sit at home reading and listening to Brahms. Charles couldn’t bear to sit down at a desk and work. I knew from as far back as I can remember that I would inherit the business, not Charles. He had to be free. His character demanded an outdoor, active life, not armchairs, typescripts and sherry.”

  “How old were you when you went into your father’s firm?” I asked, realising I was stalling when he was probably now ready to talk about my work. I suddenly really wanted to know more about him, personally.

  “Oh … I had completed my MA at Cambridge, and spent a year in Toulouse … I suppose I must have been twenty-two. My father taught me the ropes, as it were. Then I had a year in New York organising our division there. Then my father died.” He sipped again. “Would you like to sit down?” He indicated two of the Bauhaus chairs by the game of chess, by my black box. We moved towards them slowly.

  “How old are you now?” I said.

  “Forty-three.”

  “Twenty-one years at Coymans,” I said.

  “Twenty-one years.” A whiff of regret?

  “Did you ever want to do anything else, even if your family decided that the mantle would fall on your shoulders?” We hovered at our chairs, not sitting.

  A banned question. “One doesn’t contemplate the impossible.”

  “I do. Every day.”

  A quick smile. A swift inhalation. A new start at the response. “I am a fortunate man to have a career ready-made and waiting for me, and one that suits my temperament. I’ve taken Coymans from being a cosy little outfit with a staff of twenty-seven to the firm it is today. It’s been challenging, stimulating, rewarding and I have no regrets.”

  “But supposing you had the choice back when—”

  “I would have chosen to be a publisher. At any rate, in some respects I did have a choice. I mean, I could have sold out years ago. At one stage it was either that or modernise. Coymans was a small fish against the conglomerates, and we had to take the risk and expand, go for a more commercial image, or else we were liable to be consumed by bigger fry. We’re still in danger, as I said. The threat of becoming just another imprint is perennial.”

  “But you’ve gobbled up small publishers yourself, haven’t you? There was Abracadabra and—”

  “They asked us. They couldn’t survive. Airy-fairy ideas about pleasing the literati are not going to ensure a sound economic basis for your business when there isn’t a bread-and-butter product as well. You need to understand the whims of the average reader.”

  “And then the average reader dictates what you publish.”

  He shook his head. “As I said earlier, not necessarily. But Coymans is still not large enough and secure enough to resist the whales: Harper Collins, Penguin, Random House, Hachette. They’ve made offers.”

  “So you could have sold out and retired.”

  “Quite. But instead I’ve played the game and built up Coymans to withstand attack, as much as possible. My grandfather did well enough from publishing, but my father didn’t put much into the firm and there were hardly any profits to speak of. I sometimes wonder if it was more of a hobby to him than a business, but he was a sentimental man, and he hoped I might do something to restore its credibility.”

  “I gather your family didn’t make its money, originally, from books.”

  “Good Lord, no.” He genuinely scoffed at the suggestion.

  “From what, then?”

  He smiled, sardonic. “Tea.”

  “Your ancestors were tea importers?”

  “My ancestors brought tea from India. They were Dutch, but settled in England with the entourage of William of Orange. All those portraits I showed you downstairs—they were Kooijmans.” He pronounced the name in what I presumed to be a Dutch accent. “They anglicised it to Coymans. They were all tea people, but then they became landed gentry, I suppose, and land and horses were ever since the foundations of the family. My grandmother was the only heiress to all and she married, out of love, George Gordon Prain, a marriage a touch beneath her. My grandfather liked books, and set up Coymans. He spent the next thirty-five years working tirelessly in publishing, and left all the concerns of hearth and home to my grandmother. When my father took over, I think he saw himself as a bridge between my grandfather and me.”

  “And what will happen after you? Don’t you feel you have to produce an heir?”

  He smiled. “You make me sound like the King of England.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry.” I had said what had entered my head.

  “No, I don’t mind answering. Quite frankly, the firm has a life of its own. Someone will take over, someone else who loves the business. I wouldn’t want a son just to march in my footsteps, poor fellow.”

  “But what about all this?” I looked around, indicating the house, contents, grounds, and whatever fortune I had yet to hear about.

  “If I don’t have a child, it’ll go to my niece and nephew. Death duty will take some of it anyway. Or perhaps I’ll give everything to the Arts and become a knight in the process. That would be rather interesting.”

  “You could still marry,” I said.

  He threw me a glance that seemed impenetrable and slightly hostile. Had he no faith in love? I felt uneasy, because in that glance I detected there was recrimination against me. You do find me attractive, I thought. It isn’t just because of the photograph. You have been drawn to the begrimed corners of Camden Market just to see me, and you loathe me subconsciously for an effect upon you that you cannot understand, or conquer. You want to keep control of your feelings, and of me, and so all this. Perhaps I should stop right
there and say no more. Perhaps I should leave, I wondered, soon, get your opinion on my work and dash. I took a sip of gin and decided to persevere. Just a few more probes before the assessment.

  “You’re very eligible though,” I said. “You said you meet a lot of attractive women. There must be hundreds of women ready …” Ready for what? To have him sire their offspring, to play companion without asking for love, to give him a good time and put up a show? “… who would consider you the perfect catch.”

  “You do say peculiar things.”

  “Well …”

  “I’ve been engaged twice,” he admitted, looking into his glass.

  “Who broke the engagements?”

  Again, a flash of resentment.

  “You don’t need to answer. You have the right to remain silent,” I assured.

  A cagey smile. “Once me. Once her. The second one broke my heart. The first one was ridiculous. It was a conjuring trick of my mother’s.”

  “Is your mother still alive?” I’ve got to stop this, I thought. Three more questions maximum and then sit down. I felt like I was turning into a television interviewer, a talk-show host. I could go on and on with affable queries into his life.

  “No. She died four, almost five, years ago. This space used to comprise part of her rooms, drawing room and bedroom mainly. She died over there.” He pointed to the north-west corner. His tone was not emotive. It was almost callous. “After she died I had the walls knocked down to make this gallery.” He turned away, casting about glances, sipping. His footsteps padded softly on the grey carpet as he wandered. He saw there the bed, there the wardrobe, there the dressing table, and then he turned to look at me. “She had a stroke. Nothing dramatic. Nothing my mother did was dramatic, not even her death. I hope you don’t think me cold, but I was never close to her.”

  A talk-show host would here have had a perfect response, or found a way to take the conversation back to a pleasant, light mode that would have been both entertaining and insightful. I was overcome with an image of a little boy waiting for his mother to notice him and say something kind. I wanted to ask that little boy questions, and follow him to his childhood bedroom, to see what he played with, and how he coped with his loneliness. No question formulated itself.