Conversations With Mr. Prain

by Joan Taylor

  I wandered from the foyer into a large drawing room with tall windows facing the front, some of which were open. Lace curtains billowed inwards prettily in the late afternoon breeze, and sun streamed everywhere, catching gold. There was an enormous fireplace protected by a bronze fireguard, and an arrangement of furniture covered in lush brocade. Why could we not have sat in this opulent room before? We had barely glanced in here on the tour of the house.

  A bluebottle fly buzzed around, caught, too brainless to think of flying out of an open window. It kept hurling itself against the closed ones and taking off on a different trajectory, battered and blind. I ambled amongst the furniture, the cabinets full of china and crystal and silver.

  A grandfather clock showed the time perpetually as four. It was nearer six. Four: the time for tea. And this was a room very suited for teas, a family room, despite its richness. Then I saw her. Above the fireplace, its gilt frame perfectly matching a pair of gigantic gilded candlesticks, there was a portrait of a woman whom Mr. Prain had not identified when we had poked our heads in here earlier, but I knew now that she was his mother. She had the same eyes, nose, bearing. She was wearing a purple satin dress, and sitting, straight-backed, on a velvet chair. All of her was represented: neatly crossed ankles and purple shoes, hands folded in the lap, fine neck. For jewellery, she wore only pearls and rings. Her hair was waved and tightly-cropped. She appeared to be in her middle years, not much older than Mr. Prain was now, though the artist may have flattered her. Her expression was one of a woman in the prime of life, sure of her subtle influences, prestige, attractiveness. She was pampered and strong. Her dark eyes were sharp, quite different from the equine brown eyes of Monique. Like her younger son, she was shrewd.

  Then I pictured her elsewhere in the room. Newly wed and proud, she was standing beside the piano. Her husband was playing a waltz, badly. He was robust, athletic, military. He stood up, masculine and tall, and bent to kiss her carefully on the cheek.

  Then, ten years later, the couple were sitting on the brocade chairs and sipping tea. Here was the family scene. Their two sons were playing. One, the elder, who took after his father, was cantering noisily around the room on his hobby-horse, threatening the many pieces of porcelain, crying out for attention and getting it, from nanny nearby and from parents. The other, on the floor, at his mother’s feet, was younger, frailer. He completed a jigsaw puzzle and looked up for approval, but no one noticed.

  After this, the younger boy, now a teenager, was sitting alone, reading a book. The others were outside, riding. Methodically, he was working his way through a Henry James. He wore a cream-coloured pullover and brown trousers. He would be unobtrusive. Then they entered. The three of them were laughing, full of themselves, shaking out their hair from riding hats, pulling off gloves, telling stories to the younger son, the audience, who had risen to greet them. They stood there in jodhpurs, brimming with vitality, ordering drinks from the maid, careless in their enjoyment, their collusion in recreation.

  But time was moving on. The elder son’s wedding, to an Argentinian property heiress, came and went, with hundreds of guests and gifts and spending, followed by the move to Argentina. Why? Perhaps he could no longer endure the tininess of England, a land too soft and small to contain that muscular physique, that New World soul, that lust for physical adventure. The mother, distraught at her loss, was demonstrating without shame which was the favourite son. She sat alone in the room, with the fire burning, waiting for the younger son and her husband to return from their business in the city. Idly, she tapestried a cloth. She had drooped from her days of triumph as depicted in the portrait. She had descended into abstract dissatisfaction.

  The fall continued. A funeral. The younger son and mother were left alone together in the great house, which seemed larger for lack of voices. There was an alteration of the inheritance. Argument. “Sell the horses!” she remonstrated. The younger son, impassive, found revenge.

  There was deviousness. The mother introduced a likely daughter-in-law, one with whom she could devise schemes. Tacit acquiescence evolved into opposition. And then another scene like the first, some years on: a courtly drama enacted with all grace and grisliness.

  But statures changed. The younger son seemed taller and the mother stooped. He was visiting from his flat in Chelsea, an occasional guest at the house. She became an elderly lady, who could no longer see to embroider vegetal motifs on fine linen. They sat here sipping tea, inactive, unable to talk with one another.

  Then death. The younger son wandered through the room alone, surrounded by these ghosts, deciding never to live here with them, and yet bound to the house: the receptacle of a hundred lives, ancestors, friends and servants, who dwelt here, who loved and ate, worked and died, etching their marks on the atmosphere of vestibules, stairs and living rooms.

  So caught up was I in this invention of his life, I did not immediately notice when Edward Prain, having found me, returned. I was looking at spectres around the room, removed from the present. It always shocks me when I realise someone is looking at my face at such a time. Usually it happens on trains or buses. There I am, totally absorbed in the world of my imagination, and suddenly I register a stranger staring. It’s like in a dream when you realise you are naked in a public place. I wonder if my eyes are showing the emotions in my heart, or if perhaps I have moved my lips as dialogue spilt out of the mouths of my characters, or—most worrying—if I might have mimed a kiss. But what can you do? You cannot at the same time be wholly caught in a dream so vivid that everything about your circumstances is erased, and also be perfectly in control of your eyes, mouth and all the multiple muscles of your face. So I am sure that one day or another, on the bus or the tube, someone has stared at me with complete astonishment. At least I haven’t reached the stage of muttering.

  So I turned to see him gazing at me. With my black box under one arm and a tray with two full glasses of martini balanced on the other hand he looked somewhat like a waiter.

  It’s tempting to ask at such a moment, “What did you see?” It’s like being a medium to another world. It’s hard to believe it was only in my head.

  But the sight of my manuscripts withered away self-consciousness as swiftly as mention of my work had done after he had shown the photograph. It also meant that the empowering indignation I had felt with Monique shrivelled into nothing, and I was left vulnerable once more.

  He positioned my box on the arm of the sofa near the fireplace, and put down the tray on a long walnut table before it. Then, he picked up the glasses and handed one to me.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, with assurance, as if commanding.

  “Did Monique make the cream cakes?” I asked.

  He smiled at this most insignificant of queries. I too managed a smile. It seemed a good idea to endeavour to establish cordial relations before the beginning of an examination of my literary efforts. No more questions about his family.

  “Yes,” he replied. “She did.”

  “So is she really a housekeeper?”

  “Of a sort.” He lifted his glass. “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  We drank. I believe the martini was weaker. His manner had become businesslike. He took out a gold fountain pen from his breast pocket. He was avoiding looking me in the eye.

  “I am sorry I upset you,” he said. “That was precisely what I wished to avoid.”

  We both sat down, facing each other. He placed himself in the middle of the sofa, and I sat in an armchair, facing him. He put down his pen very carefully on the table, to align with the side of the box.

  “This offer you have in mind. Do you—.”

  He reached for the black box and opened it up. “First of all, your work.”

  My stomach tightened and, fearing that I would shudder, I put down my glass. This had been what I had wanted, and yet now I wanted to curl up and groan.

  No, don’t say anything, I thought. All at once, I realised he would disappoint me. He had strung me
along so that the conversation would not begin with me being knocked down on the floor. Perhaps he was being kind, in his distorted way. Perhaps he wanted to spare me too much pain early on. Since I had proven such a difficult customer, he was not so worried about letting the blow fall.

  He picked up the wad of papers in the box and placed them on the table: poetry in one pile, the novel and the short stories, each in their own folders. I watched this ritual numbly, as a blood sacrifice might watch the enactment of sacred cult.

  “As I said,” he said, “your writing is quite good.”

  “Quite good.”

  He reclined back on the soft sofa and crossed his hands behind his head. “Some of it is very good. Your novel …” he continued. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, pressed his fingers to his lips, and then released them. “Bearing in mind that the market is saturated with novels, and that the competition for entry into this field is fierce, I’m afraid that, despite its merits, your novel is not sufficiently distinctive to make the grade.”

  I pursed my lips and nodded appreciatively as my heart sank.

  “As you know, the market is not very open to first-time novelists. This is one of the 50/50 pieces, not a non-starter, but equally not a sure-fire winner. I kept wondering as I read it: why is this important? It didn’t grip me, or give me what my editors like to call a ‘buzz.’ It’s sloppy, with too much padding and wasted action that serves no purpose. There isn’t really a plot. It was certain that Marilyn would leave … what was his name?”

  “David.”

  “It was certain that Marilyn would leave David from page two onwards, and the entire story was a painstaking, rather melodramatic, process of two people managing to engineer the inevitable. Furthermore, it’s insubstantial. The leading duo are superb minor characters, but they are not strong enough to carry a novel, especially one of almost three hundred pages. Meanwhile, the dog, Terry, has more personality than some of the supporting characters here: Mrs. Fleming, for example. I never managed to conjure up any sort of picture of who she was. The novel could profit by some careful rewriting. I do not feel you have devoted yourself to the hard work of editing. It looks to me as if you have written it, corrected most of the spelling mistakes, and thereafter considered it done. How many drafts did you write?”

  I cleared my dry throat. He was in full publisher mode. I was grateful that his eyes were mainly on the typescripts, for the corners of my lips were jittery with disappointment. “I don’t know. I just tinker on the screen. I don’t print out that much because it wastes paper.”

  He laughed. It just burst out of him: a truly genuine laugh.

  “It wastes paper,” he said.

  I looked at him as he tried to stuff the laugh away. What was so funny about that? I couldn’t think of any witty riposte. I was too upset. He realised that I was not happy, but my words were simply too amusing to him.

  “Stella. Stella,” he said. “Paper. Think about it.”

  I tried to. “It’s expensive. I use both sides. I recycle.” Dead-pan.

  “Book-publication requires an enormous amount of paper. A best-seller is not kind to trees, or the environment. Think of all the books we remainder and dump. If you want to write well, print out your work so you can read it properly on a page and forget about how many times you repeat the process. Just keep on doing it until you get it right.”

  “Are you saying there’s a fundamental inconsistency between my politics and my writing?” I asked.

  “No. I am saying that your excuse for not doing the work you needed to do on your novel is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “It is not an excuse,” I said. “Greens would recommend that a publisher get advice from the experts about how every aspect of your industry could be made environmentally friendly, from office to printing house to distribution.” What was I saying? I seemed to have taken refuge in an activist persona while my real self was lying in a corner whimpering.

  “And the fact that changing book production in line with your recommendations may cost a fortune would not bother you?”

  “The fate of the planet is more important than anything,” I said, formulaically. “And if you put that first, everything else falls into place.”

  “So if a business like mine would have to fold because it could not afford the cost of being environmentally friendly, then so be it.”

  “I don’t think alternatives need be as costly as you think. There’s print-on-demand for a start.” Focusing now with more clarity on this tangent of the conversation, I found myself feeling offended. He was being extremely obnoxious.

  He nodded and conceded the point. “But it is ironic, isn’t it?” he said. “You want to make money from writing, so you can devote more time to that alone. To make money you have to sell your work, and use the polluting medium of paper production. This, however, is not foremost in your mind. And you don’t want to compromise your sense of free expression by considering who will buy your work, which would be pandering to the market. It’s all part of being Green.” He used the word “green” in a way that indicated he was making a double-entendre.

  “Paper production,” I said, “is a very polluting industry, but in principle it could be environmentally sound to grow trees simply for the purpose of making paper, as long as the logging, transport, and processing of the trees into pulp are all done with the minimum cost to nature. We’re too accustomed to bleached white paper. It should be tawny grey.” I remained unemotional with this little lecture. It was safe to me to stay on this territory, and I did not want him to think he had succeeded in scoring any points.

  “But at the moment there are no publishers who care about this particularly, are there?”

  “Small-scale publishers and printing works—”

  “But no big publishers have gone Green. Consumers haven’t demanded it. That doesn’t stop you wanting to be published with a big concern. However, every writer, through publication, becomes part of a process that despoils the environment. Isn’t it a little strange that someone like you would want to be involved with someone like … with publishers?”

  “Look, no one can be perfectly good to the environment in the present state of things. We just have to do what we can in our own way. No one can preserve the earth single-handed or live on a little island. I’m not a hundred percent pure and spotless.” I found myself inadvertently wringing my hands. I snappily released them and then didn’t know where to put them again. I folded them away tightly on my body and tried to look anywhere but at Mr. Prain or my typescripts. He had clearly become attached to the idea that he had observed a key inconsistency, in that I would compromise my ideals for the sake of my work. I felt that he was harping on about a very small point, procrastinating, all to avoid the discussion of my writing.

  “You should set up your own publishing company, Stella,” he said, now a trifle sarcastic. “Do it all according to your highest standards. Only print the work of writers that show an awareness of the principles you stand for. I heard one Green activist say that in a society that valued nature we would not buy books at all. We would read them in libraries or online.”

  “Someone might say that, but there’s no Green dogma. People have different ideas.” His words were irksome. I felt barricaded behind my crossed arms, for I was fragile and conscious of the need to protect myself. Stop going on at me, I wanted to say. Leave me alone.

  He then observed perhaps he had pushed things too far. Something of an apology wavered in his eyes.

  “And you and your aspirations,” he said, more kindly. “How could you exist in a Green world?”

  “In my ideal world writers would be valued for what they wrote, not for how much they sold, and there would be all kinds of writers’ stipends paid for out of public money, rather than billions of pounds going into the army and GM crops.”

  “A room of one’s own and £500.”

  “Incidentally, Virginia Woolf’s ideal translates into about £20,000, af
ter tax, in today’s money. And as I’m sure you know that’s a pipe dream for most writers, even if they’re published and sell not too badly.”

  “Writers’ stipends,” said Mr. Prain, interested. Then he leant back and sipped his drink, reflectively.

  There was a slight pause, during which I frowned hard and glanced towards the portrait of his mother, who peered sternly back. “It’s all your fault,” I said to her, without moving my lips. “He’s a complete prat because of you.”

  “So you don’t like my novel,” I said, turning back to him.

  “Well … I thought your novel was quite good, even if it is set in Camden, and God knows we’ve had enough books set in Camden. There were bits that reminded me of Proust. But it was sloppy. Say whatever you like, but don’t be naive. You have produced a product here that people like me are supposed to sell in the market-place. It’s up to us to decide whether it really will sell. I have to anticipate what booksellers and readers want. We spend a fortune on assessing the market, and working out plans of what we will produce. If it won’t sell, I don’t want to waste my time and money unless it is of extraordinary literary merit, which this is not. I don’t know what audience this book would appeal to. It’s all about life in the … well in the rock scene.” He said “rock scene” with uncomfortable emphasis, aware that it was jargon he did not use. “But it’s intermixed with a domestic crisis and, again, environmentalism, diatribes about pollution and the planet. And then there are the New Zealandisms, which jar, rather, given that your characters are English.”

  “New Zealandisms?”

  “Yes. You write as you talk, with something of a New Zealand accent, though you never acknowledge that as your voice. There are words that are just plain wrong to an English reader. For example, at one point you describe a woman putting on her clothes to go out into a storm when the couple are on holiday in Wales. She begins with ‘panty-hose’ and ends with ‘gum-boots,’ when we would say ‘tights’ and ‘wellingtons.’ And what on earth is a ‘bach’ by the sea?” He pronounced the word as in “Bach,” the composer, when “bach” is a shortened form of “bachelor,” referring to what was once configured as a “bachelor’s house,” a word used for something the English would call a “sea-side cottage.” “An editor would have an unenviable job weeding out such aberrations.”