Then I reached up on tiptoe and put my lips against his cheek and gave him the double extra hard kiss I had promised. If my kisses do help him live then he should live twice as long as he was going to because of that one. I would have made it even longer but I was holding my breath because of the smell.
* * *
In one hand, Violet Gold holds Bigger Than Big by Chris Noth, and in the other, Solomon’s Testament by Eli Gold. Eeny meeny miny mo, she thinks, catch a nig– but then she stops herself, even in her thoughts, remembering that that word was out of bounds now, and feeling the fear and confusion that she always feels around the shifting sands of linguistic acceptability, the dread that she is going to get it wrong.
She opens Bigger Than Big:
It is 12 May 2008. Tonight is the night of the premiere of the Sex and the City movie, in London. Hundreds of screaming fans line the red carpet outside the Odeon cinema in the city’s famous Leicester Square, waiting for a glimpse of their heroes: of the women who play Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. And of me. I play Big. The male lead in the movie. The sex object, people say, for the millions of women who have religiously watched the TV series for years. And yet I am not there. I have chosen to be with my son, instead. He is four months old.
She puts it down. She feels that flatness behind the eyes she sometimes feels when reading Eli’s book, that sense that these words are not meant for her, and that understanding them will be hard work, like reading in a language enough like English to pick up about a quarter of the meaning.
She holds up Solomon’s Testament again, without opening it. When she does this – when she just feels the 530-page heft of it, and looks at the first edition cover, with its strange abstraction of a face, an image once so modern, now so dated – the book loses its new fluidity and reverts to what it has been for her for many years: something stolid and fixed, an ornament, a keepsake, gathering dust on her shelf harking back to an ever-receding point in her life.
Violet remembers when Eli first came home with a copy of the book. He was so happy, as happy as she had ever seen him. He kept on reading it, which seemed odd to her, as he had written it, and so must have read it many times already. But she could see he got so much joy out of seeing his words in print and between covers. It had taken him a long time, and involved overcoming many obstacles, to force it into that form. Before embarking on the novel, Eli had written a number of short stories and submitted them to a magazine called Horizon: they had all been turned down. His pages would be returned generally with a cursory note, although once a man called Cyril Connolly had written a few paragraphs acknowledging that he had talent but explaining why his writing wasn’t quite right for them. Violet remembers his name because she remembers reading the letter over Eli’s shoulder, and saying that she thought it was nice that Mr Connolly had taken the trouble to write, considering that he wasn’t going to use any of the stories. She shudders at the memory of it: both at her cloying naivety and at the image lodged in her mind of how Eli had looked round at her, his normally lazy eyes electric with rage.
‘I’m so full of it,’ he said.
‘So full of what?’
‘Of everything he says. And it’s all so wrong. So fucking wrong. Now I have to live all day with all the reasons he’s so wrong. It’s like a letter in my head.’
‘Are you going to write it?’
‘What?’
‘The letter. To Mr Connolly.’
He squinted at her, like he couldn’t make her out.
‘No, Birdy. I just meant that my mind is full with a letter I could write. But, I could, I guess … what do you think?’
Violet, not entirely used to offering her husband advice, nodded. ‘If you think it might change his mind,’ she said.
Eli laughed. ‘It won’t do that.’
‘Won’t it?’
‘No. You can change people’s minds about politics, and you can change their mind about whether or not they want a slice of cake. But you can’t change their mind once they’ve made a statement of taste. You can argue with them all you like, but the best, the absolute best you can get to, once they’ve said they don’t like something, is a shake of a head and the words: I’m sorry, I’m simply don’t like it.’
‘So …’
‘So, you’re right. I should write a letter to Mr Connolly.’ The name came out super sour: Violet blushed, aware that he was sarcastically echoing her politeness. ‘It won’t achieve anything, but it will make me feel better, and it might stop me hearing all the arguments in my head all day.’
Violet felt guilty about this conversation, even though she never found out whether or not Eli actually posted the seven-page letter that he wrote in response to Cyril Connolly’s rejection. The fear that he might have – and that it might have made things worse for him – hung heavy with her for weeks.
She eventually realized, however, that in some fundamental way Eli did not take these rejections to heart; or, at least, did not store them in that part of his heart which had any bearing on his stone-cold sense of his own genius. When, on occasion, Mr Harlow, the boss of International Shipbrokers Ltd, had called Violet into his office and reprimanded her for typing errors, her first instinct was always that he was right, that she was a poor worker, and that her typing should really be much better by now. But even though they made him first angry and then depressed, the rejection letters did not make Eli question whether there might be something wrong with his work. He did not even consider it: his self-confidence acted like a silver shield to criticism, against which it deflected and dispersed like light. Criticism existed only outside of himself, evidence of the world’s stupidity, or, at best, of its unreadiness to accept his genius as yet.
It was typical of Eli, Violet thinks with hindsight, that he should have given up trying to get short stories into magazines like Horizon, and chosen instead to leapfrog that hinterland of a writer’s career and get on with a novel. His prove-them-wrong engine just continued expanding. The fury that fuelled seven pages of pointless prose to Cyril Connolly combined with all of Eli’s other furies to create the fire underneath Solomon’s Testament. He received numerous rejection letters for that, too, but by then it was like he had built from them a paper ark, on which he was sailing confidently against the current of their idiot opinion towards the harbour of his success. And when, eventually, in 1954, Weidenfeld & Nicolson published the book in a small print run of only two thousand copies, he gathered up every rejection letter he had ever had – including Cyril Connolly’s – and threw them down the toilet.
‘Why didn’t you put them in the fire?’ she said, putting her coat on to go down to the box at the end of the street and telephone a plumber. It was mid-winter. ‘At least then they might have helped to warm the room.’
He smiled at her and shrugged, and did not say Because that would have been too glorious for them and because the act of throwing my rejection letters down the toilet makes a statement about what they are, as the symbolism would have been marred by an admission of its meaning.
Sitting in her room at Redcliffe House, with the sky darkening outside her window and the smell of lunch still seeping through the floorboards, she remembers the first arrival of Eli’s book. It did not come in a parcel – although other copies would, many of them, cluttering up the place; her husband brought it home from the publishers. He kept reading it and laughing, as if it contained jokes he had never seen before. He sat in the one comfy chair they had in their bedsit, letting the fire go out, and laughed and laughed. This confused Violet still further, as the few glances that she had stolen at the manuscript had not revealed anything that she, a fan of Tommy Trinder, could conceive of as funny.
The very first time he came home with the book, he was, for a moment, like a little boy. It turned out that he had walked all the way from Soho to Walthamstow – and had run the last two miles, holding the book aloft like an Olympic torch. When he came through the door, the first thing he said was ‘Birdy!’ He called her: a
nd when she came, wiping her hands on her apron, he kept saying it. ‘Birdy! Birdy, Birdy, Birdy …’ And he held the book out for her; not to read, but just to see, like a prize he had won, and won, it sounded to her ears, for her.
In fact, as she would come to realize later, what Eli had brought home was a bomb, ticking and ready to smash through the windows of their life. The fuse was not yet lit, but it was when the first signifi-cant review came out – a rave in the Daily Telegraph by Donald Davie ending, ‘Solomon’s Testament drags the novel, kicking and screaming, into the future.’ Violet had not considered this. She had accepted for a long time that Eli was writing a book, and that that was something mysterious and not for her, but she had thought of it as a closed act – she had not imagined any life beyond it, except that perhaps, at some point, Eli might write another book. His writing, she assumed, would carry on in parallel to their lives – he would still work at the Post Office, and she at International Shipbrokers Ltd – and that he would no doubt carry on writing much as other men carried on flying pigeons or collecting stamps. She thought of it, in other words, as a hobby; and in so thinking, she felt she was not diminishing it – many of the men she had known before marriage who flew pigeons did so with the same passion and intensity that Eli wrote.
What she was not expecting was that with the book would come the world: the world, that is, of the newspaper and the radio and the television, the world as projected onto the imagination of the ordinary by the mechanisms of fame. This was the great surprise. Today, sometimes, she watches the TV or sees the garish colour photographs in the newspapers, and thinks that children growing up now must see through to that world as easily as she once saw through her family’s kitchen window to their back garden, and that getting there must feel as simple as walking through the door. But when she was young, there was no passage there at all. She went to the movies, and she listened to the radio, and the life that was represented there – both the fictional life, and the life of the stars, which seemed, when she read about it in the newspapers, no less fictional – seemed to come from some other side, like the dead to the living, or perhaps the living to the dead. It would have been as easy for her to enter into that life as to enter into the cinema screen or the radio valves. Indeed, such a wish – even as she might dream of Stewart Grainger or Eric Portman – never even occurred to her. The idea of being famous herself, which so stalks today’s young that it seems not even an aspiration but an entitlement, would have been for Violet so far away from possibility as to live beyond the realm of the imagination. Fame was another planet; another dimension.
With hindsight, however, she could see how it was not like that for Eli. After the Daily Telegraph review came out, a journalist came to see him – a hunched, little man with a bad cough, who just knocked on the door, without a by your leave – and Eli didn’t blink. He led him straight through to their tiny room, and when, a couple of minutes later, she walked in with cups of tea for the both of them, her husband was talking freely of his destiny: of always knowing he would be a writer, of being sure from the beginning of his muse, of realizing very early on that he wasn’t meant to work in the Post Office for the rest of his life. She knew it wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t put on for the journalist: he had always been like that. It just took it to happen for it to become clear. Eli slid into fame as though into a bespoke tailored suit.
For Violet, though, fame was like finding a secret room in a house that you had lived in for years, a room you never knew was there, and, through a combination of fear, and uncertainty about whether you were allowed to, never went into. The nearest she came to it was a reading Eli gave at Foyles two months after the publication of Solomon’s Testament. She had never been into Foyles but had passed it on Charing Cross Road, not bothering to go in, most of the titles on display in the window being by writers that she had only heard of via Eli’s furious bedside rants. When she arrived – it was a Wednesday night, and cold – she was taken aback by the sight of a series of posters which had been put up on the main window. These posters had an image of the book cover on them, and the words ‘A READING FROM THE NEW LITERARY SENSATION’ written below. Above was the date and time, and then Eli’s name, and then a photograph of her husband which she had never seen before. Such was the economy of expectation at Weidenfeld & Nicolson regarding Solomon’s Testament that the photograph of Eli on the back inner flap of the first printing was simply an old picture that he had provided: a photograph of the two of them, taken on Brighton beach the previous summer, from which Violet had been excised. In that picture, Eli had looked like he always did when having his photograph taken: smiling not entirely naturally, his arms folded, a little hunched against the sea wind, but with some real joy breaking through the self-consciousness. He was both at ease and ill at ease, as people are having heard someone shout the word cheese – in this case Gwendoline, the only one of her friends to own a camera, who Eli had rather surprisingly allowed on this daytrip. But in this other photograph, the one in the window at Foyles, he had acquired that thing which people who are regularly photographed have, that way of looking and being looked at that seems at once utterly natural and completely mythological. How did he know how to do that? she thought. And so quickly? Was it the cameraman telling him what to do, or had he just done it, instinctively?
When she came into the shop – it felt exciting, going into a shop after six o’clock, like Christmas, when they stayed open late – about two hundred chairs had been set up in front of a small wooden stage, to create a mini-theatre. It was not enough: the place was packed, and many people were standing around behind and by the side of the chairs. She was taken aback by the audience, who were all younger and better looking than she had expected. An assumption remained within Violet, that people interested in books must be either old, or old before their time: but this crowd seemed to be mainly in their twenties, and fashionable. A lot of the men had glasses, but not wiry old-man ones – thick black ones which they wore in a way that suggested a sort of arch thoughtfulness, rather than myopia. The women were pretty: most of them wore trousers and some denim jeans, which Violet had seen in the shops but did not own a pair of. She felt old in her pink striped silhouette dress, which she had picked out especially for tonight. She couldn’t make out whether she was, in fact, older than most in this audience: when she looked closely, some of them, both men and women, seemed more lined than her, and one or two might even have dyed their hair, but everyone gave out some overall message of youth, some indefinable mix of confidence and fashionability that Violet had thought did not extend beyond one’s early twenties.
A woman in a smart blue dress suit was taking what appeared to be tickets, which inspired in her the familiar stab of anxiety that she had got something wrong, having arrived without one (not realizing that tickets would be needed for a reading in a bookshop). She thought about turning round and leaving, to spare everyone the embarrassment, but then a bald man with glasses appeared and said:
‘Mrs Gold?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m the duty manager for tonight. Can I get you a seat?’ He pointed her towards a chair in a middle row, over the back of which a small piece of paper had been folded, bearing the legend RESERVED.
‘Thank you,’ said Violet. ‘My pleasure,’ he said, turning to go. Partly to delay the embarrassment of forcing the people already seated in the row to stand up and partly because she really wanted to know, Violet touched his arm at the elbow, saying:
‘Excuse me … sir.’
‘Yes, Mrs Gold?’ he answered, smiling, she assumed at her use of sir.
‘How did you know it was me?’
He reached into his inner jacket pocket and produced a torn piece of paper. He handed it over. It was a picture of her, waving, and grinning, and holding her coat against her body for warmth. It was the other half of the photograph of Eli on Brighton beach that had served, originally, as his book jacket photograph. She knew that Eli had had the photograph returned from the publishers,
although she hadn’t seen it around their bedsit for a while.
‘Mr Gold gave me this and told me to watch out for you. And make sure you got a good seat.’
She looked up at the duty manager. He, at least, looked as old as his years. She held out her hand, offering back the photograph.
‘No, no. Please. I don’t …’ He trailed off, avoiding the phrase need it any more. ‘Have a nice evening, Mrs Gold.’
She is moved enough by the memory to go and fetch the photograph from her shoebox, now perched on the bedside table – she had no wish to go through the palaver of fetching it from underneath the mattress again. It lies on top of all the bits and pieces of her life, just below her wedding photo. Barring some yellowing at the edges and a certain cloudiness about the image that she does not remember, it has not aged much: certainly, she thinks, glancing up from it to the mirror on the wall above, not as much as her.
She holds it to the mirror, just above her face, a bit like the referees in football matches do their red and yellow cards. Because the photograph is blocking one eye she can see it better, the enforced wink helping to break through the minor cataracts that blur her peripheral vision. And she thinks how wrong it all is. Not time, or the loss of herself, the disjunction between this woman in the photograph and who she is now – despite those things creating in her a visceral sense of wrong, she knows that they are deeply right, or, at least, deeply true – but how none of it means quite what it should. If this was a film, she would still possess both halves of this photograph, and the camera would close in on both fragments now, with her sad face hovering above the tear, a clear symbol of her fractured marriage. Or perhaps the photograph she would own would be the glamorous publicity one of Eli that had been on the Foyles poster, and that would have been torn away from some image of her, to suggest how fame rent him from her. It makes no sense that this photograph of her, ripped away from the image of Eli, actually stands as a keepsake of a moment of kindness towards her; of a small break in his solipsism which surprised her by making her realize that he did sometimes care for her when she was not there.
The Death of Eli Gold Page 34