A Million Windows (17 page)

They met occasionally in a hotel lounge near the building where she worked in an inner suburb, and they wrote, each of them, long letters as though trying to outdo one another in writing. Sometimes their letters included speculations about the future but they were more often concerned to interpret the past. After a certain time, she decided that they had written enough, although he felt as though much, much more demanded to be written. The few occasions when they were alone together seemed to bring her joy but they brought him nothing of the kind, which is all that he cares to report in writing about those occasions. On the last such occasion, he and she spent an afternoon in a large
house of mud-brick in hilly, forested countryside north-east of the capital city. Before that day, each had talked sometimes of leaving his or her family: she her husband and daughter; he his wife and two sons. The house of mud-brick would be empty for a year while the owners were in Europe, and he and she might have spent their first year together on a forested hillside not far from the terminus of a suburban railway line. During the afternoon in the mud-brick house, each came to acknowledge that they would not meet again although they might well write to one another for many more years, which, in fact, they did.

He still recalls many of the details that occurred to him while he read for the first time a piece of fiction of hers written while she was his student and awarded by him the highest possible grade. He learned from her comments during the classroom discussion that the fiction, as he had supposed, was drawn from the author's experience, which was a guarded form of words often used in the writing class to warn readers against supposing the text in question to be mere autobiography. The chief character of the piece of fiction is a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who spent her early years in a bleak district in the north-east of England before leaving home to live and work in London. She arrives in London at a time during the late 1960s when the city is sometimes called Swinging London.

The only piece of his own published fiction that might be understood as connected with her has for its fictional setting a house on a forested hillside where a group of writers of fiction is attending a series of writers' workshops in which they read and
comment on one another's fiction. The writers taking part bind themselves by the strictest of rules. No one speaks to another during their days together in the house. During workshop sessions, all comments, even those made by the supervisor, are written in silence and later distributed as photocopies. No one looks into the face of another or signals to another or groans or sighs or laughs in the hearing of another. Anyone breaking any of these or other such rules is expelled at once from the house. In the early paragraphs of the piece of fiction, the first-person narrator seems several times to refer to the recent expulsion from the house of a female person for whom the rules were seemingly too much to bear.

Even one or another discerning reader might have supposed by now that we live permanently up here in our out-of-the-way eyrie. While it would be possible for a certain sort of writer to make his home here, and a few are rumoured to have tried from time to time, everyone that I know in this corridor and those few from lower corridors whom I speak to sometimes in the grounds – each of them has another sort of home elsewhere; has a wife, perhaps, or children or grandchildren and cares and concerns very different from those that trouble him while he sits at his desk behind his upper window.

Do we never write about those concerns, those children, or those wives? I suspect that most of us do so write, although we hardly ever discuss that writing or offer it for publication.
We have not only desks in our rooms but filing cabinets: solid, steel, old-fashioned filing cabinets with locks and keys. If I surmise rightly, then many a filing cabinet will be unlocked one day in accordance with the Last Will of the man who sat for much of his life at the desk nearby – many a filing cabinet will be unlocked and many a page will be found there of a sort of writing rather different from that which covers most of the pages of this work of fiction. What did the writing-students say often of their pieces, according to the narrator of the previous section? ‘This fiction is drawn from the author's experience.'

But why are we so reticent? Has not many a well-known writer seemed to make a sort of fiction out of his hating his father or divorcing his wife or watching his child endure a fatal illness? I believe us to be not so much reticent as properly respectful of, or even in awe of, what most of us hereabouts call true fiction. Even though none of us would claim to understand the matter, we sense that true fiction, the sort of fiction that we go on trying to write during year after year in this building, could never include the mere jottings of a person seeming to recall some or another painful experience of not long before. We sense that true fiction is more likely to include what was overlooked or ignored or barely seen or felt at the time of its occurrence but comes continually to mind ten or twenty years afterwards not on account of its having long ago provoked passion or pain but because of its appearing to be part of a pattern of meaning that extends over much of a lifetime.

Perhaps that is why we return continually to this towering
monstrosity, as it surely appears to some who see it from a distance and never know what goes on in its many wings and behind its many windows. Perhaps that is why each of us looks up often while he steers his car across the mostly level countryside hereabouts, waiting to see the glowing of late sunlight in the windows of his true home. Perhaps each of us, whenever he returns yet again to his upper room and passes the row of locked filing cabinets on his way to his desk – perhaps each of us hears in mind at such a time not the cautious phrases of some or another posthumous biography but the manifold rhythms of one after another subordinate clause in quite another sort of book. Perhaps each of us is driven most urgently not by his wanting to be the subject of some or another biography and not even by his wanting to be the author of some or another memorable volume but by his wanting to grasp the paradox that has exercised him during much of his lifetime: by his wanting to understand how the so-called actual and the so-called possible – what he did and what he only dreamed of doing – come finally to be indistinguishable in the sort of text that we call true fiction.

Every one of us in this remote series of rooms would have fallen in love with more than a few fictional female personages. Leaving aside the question what is meant by the expression
to fall in love
, I can surely add that each of us finds himself equally liable to fall in love with the sort of personage who appears to him while he reads some or another fictional text or the sort of
personage who appears to him from out of the space between fictional texts and whom he then seeks to have as a personage in a text of his own making. One of us, so I happened to learn recently while we two alone were drinking late – one of us had, nearly thirty years ago, the experience of falling in love with an entity, so to call her, who was both an actual female person, one of the sumless inhabitants of the spaces between fictional texts, and also a seeming likeness, if not the embodiment, of a personage who had first appeared to him nearly ten years before while he was reading a work of non-fiction first published nearly ten years before his birth, which personage was also a fictional personage in a work of fiction that he was writing at the time when he fell in love, so to speak, with the entity, so to call her.

I offer no apology to any sort of reader for any difficulties that he or she may have had with the previous sentence. Some of us in this topmost storey have been, or are still, entangled in such matters as cannot be reported in simple sentences. We are, during all our waking hours, rememberers of what we have read or have written, lamenters of what we have failed to read or write, projectors of what we hope still to read or to write, and breathing men, able, despite our many other concerns, to pace these corridors or to stroll through the grounds around this building or to travel whither we choose in the mostly level countryside beyond the grounds and no less likely than any other sort of man to fall in love with someone seen from a distance or met up with.

The man who is the chief character of this and several
surrounding paragraphs read for the first time, early in his fifth decade, a book of non-fiction, so to call it, reporting, among many other matters, the death of a young woman, hardly more than a girl, who had leaped into a well on a remote farming estate comprising mostly level grassy countryside in the south-west of the Kingdom of Hungary more than thirty years before his birth. As is often the way with us frequenters of this upper corridor, the man, some ten years after he had first read the book mentioned, had set out to write a work of fiction in order not only to explain to himself why the image of a certain young woman, hardly more than a girl, was constantly in his mind but also to learn, if it were possible, what he seemed required to learn whenever the image seemed, as it often seemed, to importune him. He knew about the young woman, hardly more than a girl, who was mentioned in the first sentence of this paragraph and was mentioned in only three paragraphs of the book of non-fiction mentioned there, only that she had leaped into the well after having run during the night from the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer; that she had been unusually good-looking, although when her corpse had been dragged from the well and had been laid on the frozen soil nearby, her face had been disfigured by scratches caused, perhaps, by the buckets of the cowherds who had discovered her when they were watering their cattle at dawn; and that she had leaped barefoot into the well, having left her boots behind in her haste to leave the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer.

When he set out to write the work of fiction mentioned above, the man with the image constantly in his mind knew no
more about the young woman mentioned above than what is reported about her in the previous sentence. He did not know, for example, what was the colour of her hair or what was her name. Of what might be called her history he knew only that she had left her boots in the bedroom of the farm-overseer, her employer. The man knew, however, a great deal about the image-person, so to call her. He knew that she was dark-haired; he knew her name; and he had learned, in somewhat the way that a person learns such matters in dreams, much about her history, as it might be called.

I ought, perhaps, to have repeated in each of the previous two sentences not that the chief character of these paragraphs
knew
certain matters but that he
seemed to know
them or that he
claimed to know
them. I wrote what I wrote after having recalled certain discussions between the chief character and myself, his narrator for the time being. We in this isolated corridor hold many views considered eccentric in other parts of the building, but even we find extreme and untenable some of the claims of the chief character. He claims to believe, for example, that the image-person, as I called her above, did not come into being as a result of his having read a certain three paragraphs in a certain book of non-fiction but that she pre-existed that event and that his taking-in with his eyes the text of the three paragraphs was merely the event that enabled him and her to meet up with one another. He even claims to believe that an image-person may be sometimes capable of influencing textual events, by which he seems to mean that his dark-haired image-person might not only
have caused a certain three paragraphs of text to be written but might somehow have influenced him, nearly fifty years later, to become a reader of those paragraphs.

We, the colleagues, so to call us, of this speculator, so to call him, have for long agreed that the reading and the writing of texts, even of so-called non-fiction texts, are mysterious processes indeed. Some of us talk without awkwardness of an invisible world inhabited by the beings who appear to us while we read. We acknowledge that the invisible beings seem largely independent of us and even that they are able to affect our thinking and our behaviour, but the speculator, my chief character, would have us believe rather more than this.