Читать книгу Duet - Carol Shields - Страница 7

The first frost this morning, a landmark. At breakfast Martin talks about snow tires and mentions a sale at Canadian Tire. After school these days Richard plays football with his friends in the shadowy yard, and when they thud to the grass, the ground rings with sound. Watching them, I am reassured.

It is almost dark now when we sit down to dinner. Meredith has found some candles in the cupboard, bent out of shape with the summer heat but still useable, so that now our dinners are washed with candlelight. I make pot roast which they love and mashed potatoes which make me think of Susanna Moodie. In the evening the children have their homework. Martin goes over papers at his desk or reads a book, sitting in the yellow chair, his feet resting on the coffeetable, and he hums. Richard and Meredith bicker lazily. Husband, children, they are not so much witnessed as perceived, flat leaves which grow absently from a stalk in my head, each fitting into the next, all their curving edges perfect. So far, so far. It seems they require someone, me, to watch them; otherwise they would float apart and disintegrate.

I watch them. They are as happy as can be expected. What is the matter with me, I wonder. Why am I always the one who watches?

One day this week I checked into the Civic Hospital for a minor operation, a delicate, feminine, unspeakable, minimal nothing, the sort of irksome repair work which I suppose I must expect now that I am forty.

A minor piece of surgery, but nevertheless requiring a general anaesthetic. Preparation, sleep, recovery, a whole day required, a day fully erased from my life. Martin drove me to the hospital at nine and came to take me home again in the evening. The snipping and sewing were entirely satisfactory, and except for an hour’s discomfort, there were no after effects. None. I am in service again. A lost day, but there was one cheering interlude.

Shortly before the administering of the general anaesthetic, I was given a little white pill to make me drowsy. In a languorous trance I was then wheeled on a stretcher to a darkened room and lined up with about twelve other people, male and female, all in the same condition. White-faced nurses tiptoed between our parked rows, whispering. Far below us in another world, cars honked and squeaked.

Lying there semidrugged, I sensed a new identity: I was exactly like a biscuit set out to bake, just waiting my turn in the oven. I moved my head lazily to one side and found myself face to face, not six inches away from a man, another biscuit. His eyes met mine, and I watched him fascinated, a slow-motion film, as he laboured to open his mouth and pronounce with a slur, ‘Funny feeling, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As though we were a tray of biscuits.’

‘That’s right,’ he said crookedly.

Surprised, I asked, ‘What are you here for?’

‘The old water works,’ he said yawning. ‘But nothing major.’

Kidneys, bladder, urine; a diagram flashed in my brain. ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. Always polite. I cannot, even here, escape courtesy.

‘What about you?’ he mouthed, almost inaudible now.

‘One of those female things,’ I whispered. ‘Also not major.’

‘You married?’

‘Yes. Are you?’ I asked, realizing too late that he had asked because of the nature of my complaint, not because we were comparing our status as we might had we met at a party.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m married. But not happily.’

‘Pardon?’ Courtesy again, the scented phrase. Our mother had always insisted we say pardon and, as Charleen says, we are children all our lives, obedient to echoes.

‘Not happily,’ he said again. ‘Married yes,’ he made an effort to enunciate, ‘but not happily married.’

A surreal testimony. It must be the anesthetic, I thought, pulling an admission like that from a sheeted stranger. The effect of the pill or perhaps the rarity of the circumstances, the two of us lying here nose to nose, almost naked under our thin sheets, horizontal in midmorning, chemical-smelling limbo, our conversation somehow crisped into truth.

‘Too bad,’ I said with just a shade of sympathy.

‘You happily married?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I murmured, a little ashamed at the affirmative ring in my voice. ‘I’m one of the lucky ones. Not that I deserve it.’

‘What do you mean, not that you deserve it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, you said it,’ he said crossly.

‘I just meant that I’m not all that terrific a wife. You know, not self-sacrificial.’ I groped for an example. ‘For instance, when Martin asked me to type something for him last week. Just something short.’

‘Yeah?’ His mouth made a circle on the white sheet.

‘I said, what’s the matter with Nell? That’s his secretary.’

‘He’s got a secretary, eh?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted, again stung with guilt. This was beginning to sound like a man who didn’t have a secretary. ‘She’s skinny though,’ I explained. ‘A real stick. And he shares her with two other professors.’

‘I see. I see.’ His voice dropped off, and I thought for a minute that he’d fallen asleep.

Pressing on anyway I repeated loudly, ‘So I said, what’s the matter with Nell?’

‘And what did he say to that?’ the voice came.

‘Martin? Well, he just said, “Never mind, Judith.” But then I felt so mean that I went ahead and did it anyway.’

‘The typing you mean?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘So you’re not such a rotten wife,’ he accused me.

‘In a way,’ I said. ‘I did it, but it doesn’t count if you’re not willing.’ Where had I got that? Girl Guides maybe.

‘I never ask my wife to type for me.’

‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘Typing I don’t need.’

‘Maybe you ask for something else,’ I suggested, aware that our conversation was slipping over into a new frontier.

‘Just to let me alone, to let me goddamned alone. Every night she has to ask me what I did all day. At the plant. She wants to know, she says. I tell her, look, I lived through it once, do I have to live through it twice?’

‘I see what you mean,’ I said, hardly able to remember what we were talking about.

‘You do?’ Far away in his nest of sheets he registered surprise.

‘Yes. I know exactly what you mean. As my mother used to say, “I don’t want to chew my cabbage twice.”’

‘You mean you don’t ask your husband what he did all day?’

‘Well,’ I said growing weary, ‘no. I don’t think I ever do. Poor Martin.’

‘Christ,’ he said as two nurses began rolling him to the doorway.

‘Christ. I wish I was married to you.’

‘Thank you,’ I called faintly. ‘Thank you, thank you.’

Absurdly flattered, I too was wheeled away. Joy closed my eyes, and all I remember seeing after that was a blur of brilliant blue.

‘You haven’t read it yet, have you?’ Meredith accuses me.

‘Read what yet?’ I am ironing in the kitchen, late on a Thursday afternoon. Pillowcases, Martin’s shirts. I am travelling across the yokes, thinking these shirts I bought on sale are no good. Just a touch-up they’re supposed to need, but the point of my iron is required on every seam.

‘You haven’t read Furlong’s book?’ Meredith says sharply.

‘The new one you mean?’

‘Graven Images.’

‘Well,’ I say apologetically, letting that little word ‘well’ unwind slowly, making a wavy line out of it the way our mother used to do, ‘well, you know how busy I’ve been.’

‘You read Pearson’s book.’

‘That was different.’

Abruptly she lapses into confidence. ‘It’s the best one he’s written. You’ve just got to read it. That one scene where Verna dies. You’ll love it. She’s the sister. Unmarried. But beautiful, spiritual, even though she never had a chance to go to school. She’s blind, but she has these fantastic visions. Honestly, when you stop to think that here you have a man, a man who is actually writing from inside, you know, from inside a woman’s head. It’s unbelievable. That kind of intuition.’

‘I’m planning to read it,’ I assure her earnestly, for I want to make her happy. ‘But there’s the Susanna thing, and when I’m not working on that, there’s the ironing. One thing after another.’

‘You know that’s not the reason you haven’t read it,’ she says, her eyes going icy.

I put down the iron, setting it securely on its heel. ‘All right, Meredith. You tell me why.’

‘You think he’s a dumb corny romantic. Flabby. Feminine.’

‘Paunchy,’ I help her out.

‘You see,’ her voice rises.

‘Predictable. That’s it, if you really want to know, Meredith.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that.’

‘Easy.’ I tell her. ‘This is his tenth novel, you know, and I’ve read them all. Every one. So I’ve a pretty good idea what’s in this one. The formula, you might say, is familiar.’

‘What’s it about then?’ her voice pleads, and I don’t dare look at her.

I shake a blouse vigorously out of the basket. ‘First there’s the waving wheat. He opens, Chapter One, to waving wheat. Admit it, Meredith, Saskatchewan in powder form. Mix with honest rain water for native genre.’

‘He grew up there.’

‘I know, Meredith, I know. But he doesn’t live there now, does he? He lives here in the east. For twenty years he’s lived in the east. And he isn’t a farmer. He’s a writer. And when he’s not being a writer, he’s being a professor. Don’t forget about that.’

‘Roots matter to some people,’ she says in a tone which accuses me of forgetting my own. Nurtured on the jointed avenues of Scarborough, did that count?

‘All right,’ I say. ‘Then you move into his storm chapter. Rain, snow, hail, locusts maybe. It doesn’t matter as long as it’s devastating. Echoes of Moses. A punishing storm. To remind them they’re reaching too high or sinning too low. A holocaust and, I grant you this, very well done. Furlong is exceptional on storms.’

‘This book really is different. There’s another plot altogether.’

I rip into a shirt of Richard’s. ‘Then the characters. Three I can be sure of. The Presbyterian Grandmother. And sometimes Grandfather too, staring out from his little chimney corner, all-knowing, all-seeing, but, alas, unheeded. Right, Meredith?’

Stop, I tell myself. You’re enjoying this. You’re a cruel, cynical woman piercing the pink valentine heart of your own daughter, shut up, shut up.

She mumbles something I don’t catch.

‘Then,’ I say, ‘we’re into the wife. She endures. There’s nothing more to say about her except that she endures. But her husband, rampant with lust, keep your eye on him.’

‘You haven’t even read it.’

‘Watch the husband, Meredith. Lust will undo him. Furlong will get him for sure with a horde of locusts. Or a limb frozen in the storm and requiring a tense kitchen-table amputation.’

‘Influenza,’ Meredith murmurs. ‘But the rest really is different.’

‘And we close with more waving wheat. Vibrations from the hearthside saying, if only you’d listened.’

‘It’s not supposed to be real life. It’s not biography,’ she says, giving that last word a nasty snap. ‘It’s sort of a symbol of the country. You have to look at it as a kind of extended image. Like in Shakespeare.’

‘I’m going to read it,’ I tell her as I fold the ironing board, contrite now. ‘I might even settle down with it tonight.’

We’ve had the book since August. Furlong brought me one, right off the press one steaming afternoon. Inscribed ‘To Martin and Judith Who Care.’ Beautiful thought, but I cringed reading it, hoping Martin wouldn’t notice. Furlong seems unable to resist going the quarter-inch too far.

Furlong’s picture on the back of the book is distressingly authorly. One can see evidence of a tally taken, a check list fulfilled. Beard and moustache, of course. White turtleneck exposed at the collar of an overcoat. Tweed and cablestitch juxtaposed, a generation-straddling costume testifying to eclectic respectability.

A pipe angles from the corner of his mouth! It’s bowl is missing, the outlines lost in the dark shadow of the overcoat, so that for a moment I thought it was a cigarillo or maybe just a fountain pen he was sucking on. But no, on close examination I could see the shine of the bowl. Everything in place.

The picture is two-colour, white and a sort of olive tone, bleeding off the edges, Time-Life style. Behind him a microcosm of Canada – a fretwork of bare branches and a blur of olive snow, man against nature.

His eyes are mere slits. Snow glare? The whole expression is nicely in place, a costly membrane, bemused but kindly, academic but gutsy. The photographer has clearly demanded detachment.

The jacket blurb admits he teaches creative writing in a university, but couched within this apology is the information that he has also swept floors, reported news, herded sheep, a man for all seasons, our friend Furlong.

Those slit eyes stick with me as I put away the ironing; shirts on hangers, handkerchiefs in drawers, pillowcases in the cupboard. They burn twin candles in my brain, and their nonchalance fails to convince me; I feel the muscular twitch of effort, the attempt to hold, to brave it out.

Poor Furlong, christened, legend has it, by the first reviewer of his first book who judged him a furlong ahead of all other current novelists. Before that he was known as Red, but I know the guilty secret of his real name: it is Rudyard. His mother let it slip one night at a department sherry party, then covered herself with a flustered apology. We grappled, she and I, in a polite but clumsy exchange, confused and feverish, but I am not a biographer for nothing; I filed it away; I remember the name Rudyard. Rudyard. Rudyard. I think of it quite often, and in a way I love him, Rudyard Eberhardt. More than I could ever love Furlong.

Meredith slips past me on the stairs. She is on her way to her room and she doesn’t speak; she doesn’t even look at me. What have I done now?

‘Martin.’

‘Yes.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Just going over some notes.’

‘Lecture notes?’

‘Yes.’

It is midnight, the children are sleeping, and we are in bed. Martin is leaning into the circle of light given off by our tiny and feeble bedside lamp, milkglass, a nobbly imitation with a scorched shade.

‘Do you know I’ve never heard you give a lecture?’

‘You hate Milton.’ He says this gently, absently.

‘I know. I know. But I’d like to hear you anyway.’

‘You’d be bored stiff.’

‘Probably. But I’d like to see what your style is like.’

‘Style?’

‘You know. Your lecturing style.’

‘What do you think it’s like?’ He doesn’t raise his eyes from his pile of papers.

But I reply thoughtfully. ‘Orderly, I’m sure you’re orderly. Not too theatrical, but here and there a flourish. An understated flourish though.’

‘Hummm.’

‘And I suppose you quote a few lines now and then. Sort of scatter them around.’

‘Milton is notoriously unquotable, you know.’ He looks up. I am in my yellow tulip nightgown, a birthday present from my sister Charleen.

I ask, ‘What do you mean he’s unquotable. The greatest master of the English language unquotable?’

‘Can you think of anything he ever said?’

‘No. I can’t. Not a thing. Not at this hour anyway.’

‘There you are.’

‘Wasn’t there something like tripping the light fantastic?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘It’s hard to see why they bother teaching him then. If you can’t even remember anything he wrote.’

‘Memorable phrases aren’t everything.’

‘Maybe Milton should just be phased out.’

‘Could be.’ I have lost him again.

‘Actually, Martin, I did hear you lecture once.’

‘You did? When was that?’

‘Remember last year. No, the year before last, the year after England. When I was taking Furlong’s course in creative writing.’

‘Oh yes.’ He is scribbling in the margin.

‘Well, on my way to the seminar room one day I was walking past a blank door on the third floor of the Arts Building.’

‘Yes?’

‘Through the door there was a sound coming. A familiar sound, all muffled through the wood. You know how thick those doors are. If it had been anyone else I wouldn’t even have heard it.’

‘And it was me.’

‘It was you. And it’s a funny thing, I couldn’t hear a word you were saying. It was all too muffled. Just the rise and fall of your voice. And I suppose some sort of recognizable tonal quality. But it was mainly the rise and fall, the rise and fall. It was your voice, Martin. There wasn’t a notice on the door saying it was you in there teaching Milton, but I was sure.’

‘You should have come in.’

‘I was on my way to Furlong’s class. And besides I wouldn’t have. I don’t know why, but I never would have come in.’

‘I’d better just check these notes over once more.’

‘Actually, Martin, it was eerie. Your voice coming through the wood like that, rising and falling, rising and falling.’

‘My God, Judith, you make me sound like some kind of drone.’

‘It’s something like handwriting.’ I propped myself up on one elbow. ‘Did you know that it’s almost impossible to fake your handwriting? You can slant it backhand or straight up and down and put in endless curlicues, but the giveaway is the proportion of the tall letters to the size of the small ones. It’s individual like fingerprints. Like your voice. The rhythm is personal, rising and falling. It was you.’

‘Christ, Judith, let me get this done so I can get some sleep.’

‘The funny thing is, Martin, that even when I was absolutely certain, I had the oddest sensation that I didn’t know you at all. As though you were a stranger, someone I’d never met before.’

‘Really?’ He reaches for my breasts under the yellow nylon.

‘You were a stranger. Of course, I realized it was just the novelty of the viewpoint. Coming across you unexpectedly. In a different role, really. It was just seeing you from another perspective.’

‘Why don’t we just make love?’

But I am still in a contemplative frame of mind. ‘Did you ever think of what that expression means? Making love?’

‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’

‘Milton, eh?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Well, that’s quotable.’

‘Fairly.’

‘Martin. Before you turn out the light, there’s a question I’ve been wanting to ask you for weeks.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t want you to think I’m prying or anything.

‘Who would ever suspect you of a thing like that?’ His tone is only slightly mocking.

‘But I notice things and sometimes I wonder.’

His hand rests on the lamp switch. Judith, just shoot.’

‘I was wondering, I was just wondering if you were really happy teaching Milton year after year?’

The light goes out, and we fall into our familiar private geometry, the friendly grazing of skin, the circling, circling. The walls tilt in; the darkness presses, but far away I am remembering two things. First, that Martin hasn’t answered my question. And second – the question I have asked him – it wasn’t the question I had meant to ask at all.

I spend one wet fall afternoon at the library researching Susanna Moodie, making notes, filling in the gaps.

This place is a scholarly retreat, high up overlooking the river, and the reading room is large and handsome. Even on a dark day it is fairly bright. There are rows of evenly spaced oak tables, and here and there groupings of leather armchairs where no one ever sits. The people around me are bent over enormous books, books so heavy that a library assistant delivers them on wheeled trolleys. They turn the pages slowly, and sometimes I see their heads bobbing in silent confirmation to the print. Unlike me, they have the appearance of serious scholars; distanced from their crisp stacks of notes, they are purposeful, industrious, admirable.

What I am doing is common, snoopy, vulgar; reading the junky old novelettes and serialized articles of Susanna Moodie; catlike I wait for her to lose her grip. And though she is careful, artfully careful, I am finding gold. The bridal bed she mentions in her story ‘The Miss Greens,’ a hint of sexuality, hurray. Her democratic posture slipping in a book review in the Victoria Magazine, get it down, get it down. Her fear of ugliness. And today I find something altogether unsavoury – the way in which she dwells on the mutilated body of a young pioneer mother who is killed by a panther. She skirts the dreadful sight, but she is really circling in, moving around and around it, horrified, but hoping for one more view. Yes, Susanna, it must be true, you are crazy, crazy.

Susanna Strickland Moodie 1803-1885. Gentle English upbringing, gracious country house, large and literary family, privately tutored at home, an early scribbler of stories. Later to emerge in a small way in London reform circles, a meeting with a Lieutenant Moodie in a friend’s drawing-room, marriage, pregnancy, birth, emigration, all in rapid order. Then more children, poverty, struggle, writing, writing by lamplight, a rag dipped into lard for a wick, writing to pay off debts and buy flour. Then burying her husband and going senile, little wonder, at eighty, and death in Toronto.

It is a real life, a matter of record, sewn together like a leather glove with all the years joining, no worse than some and better than many. A private life, completed, deserving decent burial, deserving the sweet black eclipse, but I am setting out to exhume her, searching, prying into the small seams, counting stitches, adding, subtracting, keeping score, invading an area of existence where I’ve no real rights. I ask the squares of light that fall on the oak table, doesn’t this woman deserve the seal of oblivion? It is, after all, what I would want.

But I keep poking away.

No wonder Richard seals his letter with Scotch tape. No wonder Meredith locks her diary, burns her mail, carries the telephone into her room when she talks. No wonder Martin is driven to subterfuge, not telling me that his latest paper has been turned down by the Renaissance Society. And concealing, for who knows what sinister purposes, his brilliant hanks of wool.

And John Spalding in Birmingham.

Poor John Spalding, how I added him up. Lecturer in English, possessor of a shrewish wife and precocious child, querulous and slightly affected, drinking too much at staff parties and forcing arguments about World Federalism, writing essays for obscure quarterlies; John Spalding, failed novelist, poor John Spalding.

How was he to know when he rented his flat to strangers that he would get me, Judith Gill, incorrigibly curious, for a tenant. Curious is kind; I am an invader, I am an enemy.

And he is a right chump, just handing it over like that, giving me several hundred square feet of new territory to explore. Drawers and cupboards to open. His books left candidly on the shelves where I could analyze the subtlety of his underlining or jeer at his marginal notations.

All that year I filtered him through the wallpaper, the kitchen utensils, the old snapshots, the shaving equipment, distilling him from the ratty blankets and the unpardonable home carpentry, the Marks-and-Spencer lamp shades and the paper bag in the bathroom cupboard where for mysterious reasons he saved burnt-out lightbulbs. Why, why?

The task of the biographer is to enlarge on available data.

The total image would never exist were it not for the careful daily accumulation of details. I had long since memorized the working axioms, the fleshy certitudes. Thus I peered into cupboards thinking. ‘Tell me what a man eats and I will tell you who he is.’ While examining the bookshelves, recalled that, ‘A man’s sensitivity is indexed in his library.’ While looking into the household accounts – ‘A man’s bank balance betrays his character.’ Into his medicine cabinet – ‘A man’s weakness is outlined by the medicines which enslave him.’

And his sex life, his and Isabel’s, strewn about the flat like a mouldering marriage map; ancient douche bag under a pile of sheets in the airing cupboard; The Potent Male in paperback between the bedsprings; a disintegrating diaphram, dusty with powder in a zippered case; rubber safes sealed in plastic and hastily stuffed behind a crusted vaseline jar; half-squeezed tubes of vaginal jelly, sprays, circular discs emptied of birth control pills – didn’t that woman ever throw anything away – stains on the mattress, brown-edged, stiff to the touch, ancient, untended.

Almost against the drift of my will I became an assimilator of details and, out of all the miscellaneous and unsorted debris in the Birmingham flat, John Spalding, wiry (or so I believe him to be), university lecturer, neurotic specialist in Thomas Hardy, a man who suffered insomnia and constipation, who fantasized on a love life beyond Isabel’s loathsome douche bag, who was behind on his telephone bill – out of all this, John Spalding achieved, in my mind at least, something like solid dimensions.

Martin was busy that year. Daily he shut himself inside the walnut horizons of Trinity Library, having deluded himself into thinking he was happier in England than he had ever been before. The children were occupied in their daily battle with English schooling, and I was alone in the flat most of the time, restless between biographies, wandering from room to room, pondering on John and Isabel for want of something better to do.

Gradually they grew inside my head, a shifting composite leafing out like cauliflower, growing more and more elaborate, branching off like the filaments of a child’s daydream. I could almost touch them through the walls. Almost.

Then I discovered, on the top shelf of John’s bookcase, a row of loose-leaf notebooks.

His manuscripts.

I had noticed them before in their brown-and-buff covers, but the blank private spines had made me disinclined, until this particular day, to reach for them.

But taking them down at last, I knew before I had opened the first one that I was onto the real thing; the total disclosure which is what a biographer prays for, the swift fall of facts which requires no more laborious jigsaws. That first notebook weighed heavy in my hands; I knew it must all be there.

I had already known – someone must have told me – that John Spalding had written a number of novels, and that all of them had been rejected by publishers. And here they were, seven of them.

Since I had no way of recognizing their chronology, I simply started off, in orderly fashion, with the notebook on the far left. In a week I had read the whole shelf, the work, I guessed, of several years. I swallowed them, digested them whole in the ivory-tinted afternoons to the tune of the ticking clock and the spit of the gas fire.

Before long a pattern emerged from all that print, the rickety frame upon which he hung his rambling stream-of-consciousness plots. Like ugly cousins they resembled each other. Their insights bled geometrically, one to the other.

The machinery consisted of a shy sensitive young man pitted against the incomprehensible world of irritable women, cruel children, sour beer, and leaking roofs. Suddenly this man is given the gift of perfect beauty, and the form of this gift varies slightly from novel to novel. In one case it appears in the shape of a poetry-reciting nymphet; in another case it occurs as a French orphan with large unforgettable eyes. And large unforgettable breasts. A friendship with a black man, struck up one day on a bus, which leads into a damp cave of brothels and spiritualism. Thus stimulated, the frail world of the sensitive young man swirls with sudden meaning, warming his heart, skin, brain, blood, bowels, each in turn. And then a blackout, a plunge as the music fades. The blood cools, and the hand of despair stretches forth. On the journey between wretchedness and joy and back to wretchedness, the young man is tormented by poverty and by the level of his uninformed taste. He is taunted by his mysterious resistance to the materialistic world or his adherence to fatal truths. Thousands and thousands of pages, yards and yards of ascent and descent, all totally and climactically boring.

Although, in fairness, the first book – at least the one on the far left which I judged to be first – had a plot of fairly breathless originality. I pondered a while over the significance of that. Had he lived this plot himself or simply dreamed it up? The rest of the books were so helplessly conventional that it was difficult for me to credit him with creativity at any level. Still, it seemed reasonable, since the least of us are visited occasionally by genius, that this book might have been his one good idea.

Later I was to ask myself what made me pry into another person’s private manuscripts, and I liked to think that having discovered the bright break of originality in the first book, I read to the end in the hope of finding more. But it was more likely my unhealthy lust for the lives of other people. I was fascinated watching him play the role of tormented hero, and his wife Isabel too, floating in and out, bloody with temper, recognizable even as she changed from Janet, Ida, Anna, Bella, Anabel, Ada, Irene.

But more was to come. Besides the loose-leaf notebooks there was a slim scribbler which turned out to be a sort of writer’s diary. I should have stopped with the novels, for opening and reading such a personal document made me cringe at his candour, my face going hot and cold as his ego stumbled beyond mere boyish postures, falling into what seemed like near madness. The passages were random and undated.

This constant rejection is finally taking its toll. I honestly believe I am the next Shakespeare, but without some sign of recognition, how can I carry on?

Constipation. It seems I am meant to suffer. An hour today in the bathroom – the most painful so far. It is easy to blame I. Fried bread every morning. I am sick with grease. I am losing my grip.

Have not heard from publishers yet and it is now three months. No news is good news, I tell I. She smirks. Bitch, bitch, bitch.

My hopes are up at last. Surely they must be considering it – they’ve taken long enough over it. We are ready to go to London or even New York the minute we hear. Must speak to Prof. B. about leave of absence. Should be no trouble as university can only profit by having novelist on staff.

Have been thinking about movie rights. Must speak to lawyer. Too expensive though. Could corner someone in the law faculty.

I am frightened at what comes out of my head. This long stream of negation. Life with I. and A. has become unreal. I exist somewhere else but where?

Manuscript returned today. Polite. But not very long note. Still, they must think I have some talent as they say they would like to see other manuscripts. I expected more after six months. My first book was my best. A prophet in his own country…

Stale, stale, stale. The year in Nicosia will do me good. Freshen the perceptions. Thank God for Anita, who doesn’t know how I suffer. Had another nosebleed last night.

I read the notebook to the end although the terrible open quality of its confessions brought me close to weeping. Silly, silly, silly little man. Paranoiac, inept, ridiculous. But he reached me through those disjointed bleeding notes as he hadn’t in all his seven novels.

That shabby flat. I looked around at the border of brown lino and the imitation Indian rug. Fluffy green chunks of it pulled away daily in the vacuum cleaner. Why did he save light bulbs? Did he believe, somewhere in his halo of fantasy, that they might miraculously pull themselves together, suffer a spontaneous healing so that the filaments, reunited, their strength recovered, were once again able to throw out light?

I put the notebook back on the shelf with the sad, unwanted novels. I never told anyone about them, not even Martin, and I never again so much as touched their tense covers. John Spalding and his terrible sorrowing stayed with me all winter, a painful bruising, crippling as the weather, pulling me down. I never really shook it off until I was back aboard the BOAC, strapped in with a dazzling lunch tray on my lap and the wide winking ocean beneath me.