So this is what breaking-up with them meant, something it never meant for his father or his father’s friends, who were all men: destroying a close friend. All the work of the seventies and eighties, which did so much to make men like Harvey lose their fear of intimacy and their commitmentphobia – those olive branches laid across what used to be called, so quaintly, the sex war – all that work had this dreadful unforeseen consequence, the laying waste of so many friendships. Harvey came to realize that fucking and friendship are actually incompatible at some level. Not in the When Harry Met Sally way, that you cannot be friends with a woman without wanting to fuck them. Just the opposite: because you can be friends – you can become really close friends – with the woman you fuck. You cannot, however, remain friends with them – certainly not the same sort of friend – once you are forced to tell them that you no longer want to fuck them.
Eventually they would leave him. The words that Harvey was always holding just the other side of the mirror had an imprint. They came through the screen. And so the women would go, sometimes to other men, sometimes not, but always away from Harvey and his unspoken constant goodbye. The break-up would still be awful, but Harvey could at least hold on through the hours of emotional hanging, drawing and quartering to the rope of his innocence: they were leaving; it was not his fault; Love had handed him a pass. They would go and Harvey would mourn, he would feel the absence of his friend, he would maybe write a long letter to his ex where some small shards of writing talent would show through the self-consciously tortured lyricism, he would lie in whichever double bed they had bought together unsleeping in its sudden width, and then, after a week or so, he would embark on a short sexual rampage.
His hit rate, even in the AIDS-soaked eighties, was not bad: he was not then unattractive physically – he still had some of his mother’s dark prettiness, and his tendency to fat remained at this point a tendency, like Militant, never quite taking over the entire body – and, more importantly, he found out then that his Gold status actually had some currency. It’s a peculiar thing, sexually, being linked to the famous: at what point, Harvey sometimes wondered, did the line of desire run out? In a band, groupies who want to sleep with the front man will accept the drummer – some may accept the roadie – but probably not the front man’s brother, unless he’s in his own at least moderately successful band. However, if the object of desire is a writer, and an older writer, and on his way to being named as the world’s greatest living writer – and if you can claim to be a novelist, too, as Harvey could, at least in this stage of his career, before the slow slide down into ghost-writing – then being Eli Gold’s son was indeed a short cut to the sheets of – well, a handful of women working in publishing in Thatcher’s Britain.
The young Harvey also had some success, weirdly, with exactly those women who round about this time cast Eli Gold as their object of hate. It was a strange but, from his point of view, not unuseful paradox that his father’s placement in the hall of sexist shame along with Norman Mailer and Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin and all the other misogynist behemoths, led various militant young feminists between 1982 and 1987 to think that having sex with Harvey was some sort of strike for their cause. Particularly if Harvey was prepared to express guilt or regret over his father’s deeply flawed representation of women: as indeed he was, and, it should be said, not just in order to, in the common parlance, get his end away. Already well schooled by his mother in sexual politics, Harvey in the mid-eighties was a ball of shame, all the information coming at him all the time from remembered lectures at the polytechnic and songs by the Au Pairs and every woman around him in their berets and DMs convincing him that everything he felt, especially everything sexual, was wrong: wrong not just in the sense of not correct, but evil. It was a relief, therefore, a great blanket to cover his wrong and evil head, to place much of his guilt and regret and uncertainty and shame and ignorance and despair of ever getting it right about gender at the feet of his father.
But Harvey could not keep casual sex up for long. One, or, if he was lucky, two women might pass through his hands, and then the third would snag. It could be her skin, or her hair, or her eyes, or, most likely, some abstract sense of promise made concrete by sex. And so it went, his twenties, the same pattern, the all-consuming love, the patter down into a relationship, the soul-melting break-up, the charge into casual sex, the starting again with the snag. Until Stella, who arrived in his early thirties, just at the point when it was beginning to dawn on Harvey that he couldn’t carry on living this way forever.
It would be helpful at this stage to be able to say that what drew Harvey out of the relationship cycle – what made him choose Stella to be his life-station – was her soul. And, certainly, there was much to get snagged on in Stella Marsten’s soul. She was, Harvey was to come to realize, one of – he estimated – three people, none of them family members, he had ever met in his life who was deep down good. This was a stranger and more complicated thing to encounter than he at first realized: true goodness is a forceful challenge to the standard self, and to be able to bask in it without resentment takes a fair amount of goodness of one’s own, more than Harvey assumed to be in his reserves. The Good are a minority (being modest, as they must be, perhaps the most silent minority) and prey to the same abuse as any other, the carping and cat-calling of the deeply flawed majority, who would prefer to link the state to easy adjectival negatives: boring, goody-goody, Pollyannaish, and – that most unsexy of conditions – nice. Before Stella, Harvey had often told himself and his friends and his various therapists that he was not interested in women who were good, precisely because of these associations.
But Stella was none of these things: she was not Ned Flanders nice. The propaganda that the deeply flawed majority wish to ply about The Good – that they are no fun, that goodness equates to no sense of humour – was not true of Stella. She managed somehow to demonstrate a facility for and understanding of a critical component of humour – cruelty – without compromising her essential goodness. She was many things not normally ascribed to her type: maverick, and complex, and stylish, and capable of vice, and flighty, and confident, and passionate, and still fucking good. It beat Harvey, at some level, how it was possible.
Perhaps the key was that at the core of her was not what people lazily assume to be the DNA of goodness – giving a lot of money to charity or spending all your time in a hospice – but empathy. This was what really took Harvey’s breath away, Stella’s endless empathy. She always seemed to know how other people were feeling, or, if she didn’t know, had a deep awareness of how they might be, and that awareness was what ruled her behaviour. This is what goodness actually is: being possessed of an unforced, unmediated engagement with the desires of others. It was the unforced and unmediated part, Harvey realized, that really mattered. Although sometimes feeling close to it, he was not a sociopath; he knew he was supposed to factor other people’s desires into the everyday progress of his own. But this knowledge was never reflex or natural: it was always learnt. For Stella it was existential. It was like breathing.
And Harvey was to feel the greatest benefit from it. If you become emotionally linked with someone who breathes empathy, then, quite quickly, they offer something which, after all is said and done, may be the only hope for love in the long term: true knowledge of who you are. The Hollywood notion of Love, the myth of it that has replaced God for us, is wrong. We do not search for someone to complete us. We search for someone to know us completely – to reflect us back to ourselves. We look for someone who will never get us wrong. Harvey was lost – at some level he would always be lost – because he had grown up with a father who was himself widely known but who had chosen not to know him. To be found, for Harvey, was to be known – like a child playing hide and seek, only not where you were, but who. Stella was his finder. In animation, the artist often works with a sketchy black and white outline of a character, and only when it’s finished does he or she superimpose on this image, using a p
lastic transparency, a replica outline of the same character, filled in with colour. This is what Harvey felt when his relationship with Stella began to bloom: she was his animator. She knew, to an exact degree, his real outline, his true colours, and she had laid them softly and gently over what used to be his shadowy self. She had matched him up with himself.
And yet it wasn’t all these things that made him choose Stella, or which held her for him. It was – depressingly, at some level; unoriginally, of course; but as hard and true as arithmetic – her beauty. For she was also beautiful. Her inner matched her outer, in the classical, the fairy-tale, model. When Harvey first set eyes on her, in a small independent bookshop in Canterbury, he was reminded of a passage of his father’s:
Her face had impact: I felt it not in my eyes, but in my stomach.
It was from one of Eli’s lesser known novels, Reluctance. Harvey was on the short reading tour which followed the publication of his only novel, Blah Blah Blah, a melancholy piece of ladlit which hardly attempted to disguise its roman à clef trails through the romantic badlands of his twenties. He knew the form of the evening, or thought he did: a flat, dull train ride out to a provincial bookshop, an awkward conversation with a taxi-driver about who exactly he was, a cup of tea, or, if they were pushing the boat out, a glass of Jacob’s Creek, with the tired store manager and his or her unimpressed staff barely restraining themselves, normally unsuccessfully, from asking questions about his father; a couple of nervous glances towards the front of shop, where, with a few minutes to go, someone would be rearranging four rows of chairs into three; and then, finally, show time, in front of the fourteen people who had turned up, in order to sit through his reading so that they could ask some questions about his father. It had all been proceeding as normal – he was in a back room, and, indeed, the manager of Ex Libris, a grey-haired stick of a man keen to tell Harvey that he was a bit of a celebrity himself, having once played bass in The Subway Sect, had just handed him a glass of sickeningly fruity Merlot – when the door opened, and in she came. Harvey turned, and the line from Reluctance flicked into his head like a pop-up. The store manager was saying her name and something about her working for the publisher’s lawyer, but Harvey wasn’t listening. She was red-haired, and grey-eyed, and her face, full of soft symmetries, seemed to hit him, only not in the stomach, but in the heart. Her beauty was like a punch in the heart, expelling love.
Harvey fell, as he always did, like a sky-diver, like those people you see buffeted by winds on helmet cameras, screaming and gurning in a mash of adrenaline and abandon. Except this time, when the free-fall of infatuation opened into the parachute of relationship, the eventual landing wasn’t, for once, a crash. There was still a bump, but he held on to the rope, the safety harness, of her beauty.
Later on, of course – with marriage, and a house, and a child, and time, and full exposure to her goodness – Stella’s beauty was not the only thing. They became, of course, best friends: the bestest, in fact. She was the first woman he had ever been with who was not angry. This was one difference between the friends who were his girlfriends and his friends who were just friends. Harvey didn’t row with his friends. He might disagree with them – he might even get pissed off with them – but he never got into a proper fight with them. His girlfriends, however, were friends who could switch at will from being friends to being girlfriends – which meant the licence, suddenly, to become possessed by fury at something he had said that he had imagined innocuous, or by his glance pausing for longer than two seconds on another woman, or by failing to understand the directions to a weekend cottage.
It was only when he began seeing Stella that he realized that these constant flares away from friendship were not incidental: rather, they were indicative of the truth that every woman he had ever been with was deep-down angry. Harvey was not sure why this was. The man reared by Joan, and fostered by the 1980s into a New One, assumed that these women were deep-down angry with him – deep-down angry with the knowledge that the all-consuming love he had presented them with early on had died, and that they were just now carrying on until the exit was found: angry, in other words, because they were friends. Another part of him – not exactly a new part, more an older one, always there, just unopened – thought that perhaps all women were deep-down angry, because of men.
Except for Stella. He had found the Holy Grail, it seemed (much more so for his generation than the Zipless Fuck): The Unangry Girlfriend. They never rowed. What this meant was that they became even closer, even more the model of lover-friends. Harvey, who had always pushed his relationships towards a notional condition of maximum intimacy, was astonished that there was a level of closeness beyond that achieved with anyone else, and here it was. They were married eighteen months after the reading at Ex Libris, a small civic ceremony in a hotel in Canterbury, which defied the presence of the looming cathedral down the street with its lightly-worn irreligiousness, poems – ‘An Arundel Tomb,’ ‘Aire and Angels,’ ‘Sonnet 116’ – replacing prayers. Three years later their son was born, and Harvey found himself astonished again, how despite everything he had read in Parents sections of broadsheet newspapers about how difficult marriage became once a child split the love three ways, that he and Stella bonded more rather than less over Jamie. Even when the blissful bath of babyhood ran dry, and they realized that all was not quite right with Jamie – that when they smiled at him, he failed to smile back; that although his hearing was unimpaired, he wouldn’t respond to his name; that he played obsessively only with one toy, a rainbow-coloured spinning top, to the exclusion of all others – his condition, rather than alienating them from themselves, drove them deeper into the bunker of each other, the three of them against the world.
And then, one day, seven years into their marriage – when Jamie was four and Stella thirty-seven – they went for Sunday lunch at a restaurant on the Thames. It was a beautiful afternoon: London rose from the river like it used to on the television, on the Thames TV trailer. Harvey and Stella sat at a table outside. Jamie was being relatively easy, entranced by the boats and the potential opening power of Tower Bridge. Harvey had ordered a spicy Bloody Mary: it was his concession to alcohol, something his taste buds, hardly changed since childhood, otherwise had little truck with. It was just as he liked, where the vodka wasn’t actually discernible on the tongue, but provided an insensible tang of adulthood within the sweet and sour gazpacho mix. It spoke to him of brunch, of Greenwich Village, of glossy, cosmopolitan presentations of the urban life. Stella looked fantastic. Despite being from Ashford, and knowing of no other genetic antecedents for her outside of Kent, Harvey often projected onto her features something Celtic, especially, as then, when framed by water – an image of her standing in front of a loch, red curls blowing across her merciful face. He knew this was sentimental, linked to the goose pimples that always rose on his flesh when he heard ‘Danny Boy’ or ‘I Wish I Was In Carrickfergus’, but it touched him in any case.
She was talking, and Harvey was laughing. She was saying: ‘… Bumblebee have offered us a Disneyland trip.’ Bumblebee was an autism charity. Jamie sometimes got invited to Bumblebee events, although when they participated Harvey felt he could always detect from the organizers a slight froideur that they’d got in basically under the wire – that Asperger’s was a pretty diluted form of the disorder and not, therefore, necessarily a qualifying pass for the consolatory goodies. The word Bumblebee was whispered, so as not to set Jamie off.
‘Disneyland?’
‘Yeah. Paris.’
Harvey took another sip of his Bloody Mary. The ice was beginning to melt, thinning the tomato juice halfway down the glass.
‘Would he like that?’
Stella looked at their son. He had his eyes fixed on the bridge. Harvey had told him that it was due to open in three hours and forty-seven minutes; a lie, but Jamie had asked incessantly on the car journey over. His face is so memorable, Harvey thought – with its nose larger than a kid of four should have, s
andwiched between his still-pillowy cheeks, blown out now, indicating concentration. Ironically memorable, as Jamie suffered from almost complete face-blindness, only just about able to recognize Harvey and Stella: all others moved in a blur to him, teachers and relatives and the small group of children who Harvey suspected of being forced by their well-meaning parents to be his friends. His mouth was not moving, as it sometimes did when faced with this kind of calculation, but Harvey knew he was still counting the three hours and forty-seven minutes down in seconds, even though they would be gone long before the spurious set time arrived.
‘I don’t know,’ said Stella.
‘He likes Winnie the Pooh,’ replied Harvey. She was nodding, raising her eyebrows in sarcastic agreement: Jamie’s liking of their The Magic of Pooh DVD meant putting it on normally a minimum of nine times a day.
‘Yes. But I think it might frighten him.’
‘Frighten him?’
‘Yes. You know Muna, Khalil’s mum …’
‘Yes,’ said Harvey, his nod self-consciously weary, knowing that Stella assumed he had no idea who anyone was at Jamie’s school. This was essentially true, but Harvey always disavowed it with this weary nod.
‘She said they went last Easter, and Khalil cried throughout. Terrified. Especially at the beavers.’
‘The …?’
‘Leave it.’
‘What?’
The Death of Eli Gold Page 12