Childish Loves (21 page)

There was another folder of materials, which Gerschon hadn't labeled yet, but just at that moment he knocked at the door and I didn't get a chance to look at them till after Christmas. I asked him if there was a Xerox nearby, and he let me photocopy a few pages, including the letter I have just quoted in full. ‘Against the grain of my conscience,' he said. By rights they all belonged to Mrs Sullivan.

‘Why Byron?' I asked him, on the way to lunch. ‘And
only
Byron – he didn't write about anything else. You're probably the wrong person to talk to about this, but three novels looks a little like a fixation.'

‘I've been thinking about that. Maybe for someone like Peter, who lived the way Peter lived, there was something about Byron, and the way
be
lived, that he couldn't get out of his head.'

‘Did Peter ever talk to you about his writing?'

‘No,' he said.

‘Did he ever show you anything he had written?'

‘No.'

‘Did he ever show
anybody
anything he had written? I mean, someone he knew, who knew him, who wasn't a dear Sir or Madam.'

‘They hardly look like the pleadings of a great writer, do they,' Peter said. ‘Though maybe great men plead no better than anybody else.' Later, when the food arrived, he came back to this question. ‘Maybe Lee Feldman, is what I wondered. Maybe he showed something to Lee Feldman. All of that business took place a couple of years after he finished
Imposture
. But nobody that I know of at the Byron Society, which would have been a natural starting point for friendly reactions, ever heard about his writing till you published it.'

‘Why didn't he talk about it with you?'

‘Let me ask you the same question,' he said. Then: ‘I don't know. You look at these letters, and maybe you get a feeling for why. The same feeling you get reading them: embarrassment. I suppose writers have to sell themselves like anyone else; but not like that. As if he didn't trust anyone, or thought they were all idiots. But he only comes across as desperate himself, or completely out of touch, which amounts to the same thing. What are you smiling at?'

‘Just that I used to write such letters myself.'

*

For fifteen months I lived in the basement of that Hampstead house and went quietly crazy. The only room with any natural light was the bedroom, so I put a desk in there, which meant that my commute to work in the morning was all of four and a half feet. I used to take a walk first thing just to get myself out of the house. On one of these walks, on a turning off the High Street, I discovered a charity second-hand shop with a steady supply of suits and dress shirts for six-foot-six men. Over time I acquired a closet full of these suits. (Not that they fit me – the guy shedding them was six inches bigger in the chest.) I bought ties, too, and spent a few minutes each morning picking out combinations of jacket, shirt and tie before sitting down to write.

It wasn't only in the mornings that I looked out for Caroline, hurrying to catch her bus. My desk was pushed under the window that gave onto the front stairwell. In the mornings, she never saw me, but coming home she faced the other way and sometimes glanced down ‘just to see if I was really working,' as she said to me once, in her kitchen, while I was picking laundry off the radiators. Around six o'clock each day I became conscious of the fact that she might come home any minute and looked up occasionally into the last of the daylight to check. I wanted her to see me writing; the thought of her kept me going longer than I otherwise might have. Sometimes she waved, and once, after forgetting her key, she came down to use the back stairway, which gave me the chance of inviting her in to tea. I didn't mind being seen in jacket and tie at my desk, but sitting across from her at the kitchen table turned out to be different – a fact that struck me when I brought in the tea. I looked ridiculous; worse, I looked unhappy.
‘Very
smart' was all that Caroline said.

From time to time, in the throes of some urgent feeling that might have been optimism or desperation, I took an afternoon off from my other ‘work' to write letters – to agents and publishers and magazine editors. I had one of those books that list them. A soft-bound volume, thick as the yellow pages, with bright red lettering on the front and on the back stories of advances paid. After only three months, etc. So I wrote letters. Dear Sir or Madam, the whole business. I am a young American writer living in London. My first novel is about. I am writing to you because. In your last issue, I noticed a story, which I liked very much. It suggested to me that you might be the right … A few years ago you published a book. My own first novel. I have written a short story. Whether I could interest you in a poem or not. I don't know if you accept unsolicited submissions. A good friend of mine suggested I get in touch. Recommended you to me. Me to you. I am just at the stage where I am beginning to consider.

Every line of these letters was equally unnatural and dishonest, and I disliked myself for writing them and resented the need to. Though I never wrote anything as bad as Peter Sullivan. And there was no need to, because nothing ever came of them. Except rejections, which I kept in a shoebox under my bed, since even this contact with the literary world seemed better than nothing.

Maybe I would have given up if I hadn't come home one day from one of my walks and seen Caroline through the bedroom window, reading, licking her thumb and turning over the pages at my desk. I sat on the stairwell for two or three minutes watching her and then climbed up the stairs again to continue my walk. When I came back again, she was gone, and two weeks passed before she brought up the subject of my writing. I remember that for most of that time it struck me as some kind of dirty secret, which Caroline had stumbled upon but was too embarrassed to mention. It was a real relief to me when she did, and relief led to other things, but if Peter ever had any personal response to what seems to me the clearest and best expression of his character, I don't know.

A few days after my lunch with Gerschon, Caroline and I returned to her parents' house in London, which is the house she grew up in and where we had also fallen in love; and I didn't get back to Cambridge or Peter until the new year.

I heard of her marriage from my mother, who seemed to take in the news that particular form of delight which is sometimes called sympathy. We were having tea at the Pigots. Since Kitty was occupied, in conversation with Mrs Pigot, I had retired to my chair by the window to read. Elizabeth and John were on the floor in front of the empty fireplace, tempting the dog with bones. But I was listening to my mother. I heard her say, ‘That puts me in mind of something, I must tell Byron.'

Then she called over to me, ‘Byron, I have some news for you.'

I said, ‘Well, what is it?'

‘Take out your handkerchief first, for you will want it.'

‘Nonsense,' said Mrs Pigot, ‘he isn't a boy.'

‘You will see.' Then, more loudly: ‘Mary Chaworth is married.'

‘Is that all?' I said.

‘To Mr Musters. I received a letter this morning from her aunt, Mrs Norris. What are you reading? I thought you would be more affected.'

In fact, it surprised me to suffer so little at the news –
Miss Chaworth married
. But I was then busy with preparations for entering upon college life. Our sentiments are not exhaustless, and divided amongst so many objects, they appear weak and colourless, and we begin to suspect ourselves of indifference. At least, this is what my mother accused me of, as I gave her my arm and we walked the short distance home.

She said, ‘I preferred your childishness. These modest, patient airs become you very ill.'

All this to provoke me. She dreaded my going as much as I longed for it, and by a dozen little stratagems each day attempted to incite in me a violence of reaction to equal her own.

‘I like what you call airs,' I said. ‘You mean, I suppose, that you cannot reduce me to tears, as you used to.'

‘You take everything coolly. For my part, I have ceased to take offence at it, but I thought Miss Chaworth would bring the blood to your cheeks.'

The next day, Elizabeth had engaged me to tea, and as the weather was fine we sat in their garden afterwards with books on our laps and read or pretended to read. The clouds in the sky were broken up into little pieces of clouds – it had been dry all week, and the earth had a contracted late summery look, so that even the lawn had need of a feather-duster.

After a silence of no great duration, Elizabeth said, ‘I feel I must require you to write to me, and you must protest, in great earnestness, the impossibility of your neglecting me.'

‘You think I will not.'

‘I think you will find a great deal to amuse and distract you.'

At the bottom of the garden was a low stone wall, and on the other side of it, a field with sheep grazing. Beyond the sheep, a farmhouse made up of the same dry grey stone as the wall, and beyond the farmhouse the hills rose mildly to the heavens, and towards Annesley.

‘I will not pretend any reluctance to leave Southwell, but I have no great desire to go to Cambridge.'

‘This is because you may do as you please. So nothing pleases you.'

We continued to read, and the shade of the cherry tree, leaning across the bench, moved slowly across our faces. ‘Now, this
will
please you,' she said after a minute and holding her book at arm's length, out of the glare of the sun. ‘This more or less fits the case:

She is a handsome girl, with a pleasant voice, but when she recites there is something that enters her face and gives her a very unnatural and insistent air. But I replied, ‘No, do not say last. You do not mean to raise my hopes in this fashion.'

‘I believe your mother is right. You have become very unfeeling. I thought you more soft-hearted, but you are spoiled by London women. They have taught you to be tender and cold.'

I took the book from her and opened it to the frontispiece: Robert Burns. Then, as I had a pencil in hand, I wrote something beneath his name and returned the volume to Elizabeth, saying, ‘Perhaps that will satisfy you of my feelings,' and she looked at it closely and held it away again, and read back to me in the same loud voice:

‘A very pretty sentiment,' she said, after a suitable pause, ‘though I must confess, I did not believe till this moment you could feel so little for Miss Mary Chaworth as you have pretended to feel. But I believe you now.'

We parted soon afterwards, amicably enough; and a few days later, I sat on the London coach and looked out the window as it drove along King Street, having taken leave of my mother half an hour before – sitting on the steps, with her face in her hands. Consequently, I was much surprised to see her again through an opened door at Mrs Crawley's, the pastry-cook. She was waiting her turn and spoke to no one and I felt almost sorry for her.

***

After a month in London at Mrs Massingberd's, I went up to Cambridge. There was at first a slight difficulty about the rooms. The porter, having mistaken me for a commoner named Brown, sent me to the wrong stairwell, and I went up and down it a good quarter-hour, on a foot already sore from confinement, without finding my name above any of the doors. It was by this point nearly four o'clock in the afternoon – the sun rapidly descending over the college roof – damp rising between cold stones. For a minute I thought of going to an inn, but I found the porter again and was gratified by my display of temper, and he directed me at last to a very pleasant room off a stairwell wide enough for a coach and six. His name, the porter's I mean, is Cummings, and I think he shall remember me hereafter.

The next morning at chapel I met this Brown. He is short and freckled, with a reddish, chafed complexion. He had heard of Cummings' error and was rather pleased by it. He said to me, ‘It is odd that our acquaintance should be launched in this fashion.' But I don't mean to confine my acquaintance to the sons of lawyers from Chorley. No one of any distinction, in name or appearance, rose early enough for chapel. I said to myself, this is the Southwell spirit; you must cure yourself of it.

My first task is to fit up my rooms, which are large and bright but unfortunately situated. On one side there is my tutor, and on the other an old Fellow of the college; he came out to see me directing the joiner, who was building a cabinet and two seats against the angle of the bay. The cabinet is for books. He said to me, ‘You are tall enough, come here,' and led me into his room, where there was a small fire and a small rug in front of it. Then he invited me to a glass of ‘right sherries', which stood warming on the hearth-stone. ‘Do you know Henry Mortlock?' he asked. ‘Do you know Frederick Toms? Do you know Richard Willoughby?' He had been at Harrow thirty years before, but I told him all the old masters have gone.

‘No, I have got the names wrong,' he said, ‘otherwise you would know them.'

Later, he knocked on my door with a knife in his hand. The window to his room had been painted shut; he could not reach the top edge. So I stood upon one of his chairs, while he fretted at my side, and scraped away until the window fell open.

The tutor I met on my way out. He introduced himself first to my servant, who introduced him to me. His name is Jones. His hand was damp when I shook it, and he called me ‘milord'.

‘I don't suppose we shall see you at any of the lectures,' he said and walked with me as far as the college gate.

‘I wished really to go to Oxford,' I confided in him. ‘But there were no rooms at Christ Church.'