Conversations With Mr. Prain (17 page)

“And then you discovered I was a writer.”

“Yes. You were writing a poem. It was a godsend. I couldn’t believe my luck. Perhaps it isn’t necessary, but it gave me a different idea. Mind you, if you had shown no talent, I would not make this offer. Even after judging your ability, I was still uncertain of your seriousness, as I have just said. I am not an impulsive man, you see. When I make a decision, it is only after much reflection.”

“But you have decided?”

“Yes.”

“So what exactly are the
precise
terms of the offer?”

We both sipped our drinks. At this stage, I could have downed what remained of mine in one. I noted that he was recovering his equilibrium, becoming the businessman again. “The deal I can offer you is that you can come here to Walton Hall during the week, live here without any expenses, and write to your heart’s content, as long as during that time you make yourself available to Monique as the model for a sculpture. Anything you need for basic living expenses and materials will be paid for, including all the recycled paper in England that you want. In addition, Monique will pay you separately as an artist’s model. It will come from me, of course, but it’s better that it goes through her. The costs of your rail tickets from London to
Banbury will also be paid for. You like the house don’t you? It would be a nice place to work? I know that for authors the right environment can be very important.”

I smiled and looked down. “Of course.”

“Much of it would be covered up in the autumn, but you could have a suite of rooms on the first floor, near Monique’s. You could use a laptop and printer I have here. Monique would show you.”

My mind whirred. I immediately found practical reasons why this arrangement would prove difficult, and immediately answered them by thinking of means by which obstacles could be overcome. Could I do all my work for the stall for the main weekend trade from Walton Hall? No. I would have to come back to London on Friday afternoon in order to pick up books from people who had answered my “book clearance” weekly advertisements. My flatmates would have to take down names and numbers, but they did that anyway, since I was so often out. I would have to make sure I always had the communal van late on Fridays or else Monday morning. I could still do my internet orders. I’d hire help. The stall would pay my weekly rent at the Camden flat and utilities, personal expenses and so on. But what would people think? Would they laugh if I said I had a patron? Would people think I had a sugar daddy? Principles!

“But it would also be a secret?” I asked.

“Yes. I don’t want a … reputation.”

I’d have to lie then, I thought. How could I do that, to people like my flatmates, for example? Jesus.

But—time to write, I thought, living at this house! I could walk in the woods and countryside. I would have such space. I would be almost alone. I craved it, but I stopped myself from reacting positively, or reacting at all.

“Please don’t decide immediately,” he said. “Now you know everything, you might feel it isn’t quite your cup of tea?”

No strings. No strings. I felt I had to say something, but felt anything I said would somehow give me away. I felt confused, as if all kinds of spare parts I had stored inside myself were clattering about and it was too noisy to rationalise the situation. Edward Prain was looking at me intently, wanting me to make some sign about my response.

What had Monique been trying to tell me, upstairs in the study, with the look she had given? It was surely this: Beware, he wants you, and in the strangest way.

“Nothing would be written down,” he said. “It would be an oral agreement. Nothing would be written on paper.”

Then I smiled, realising that he did not trust me that much. I realised he thought I just might be the sort of woman who would go to the press. He was a man of power and influence, whose name and picture might appear in the business and finance pages of the leading newspapers. What if some woman came along and announced that she had been propositioned, that he had made all sorts of lewd suggestions, or worse? He was actually afraid of that. He didn’t want a “reputation.” There had to be no strings, or else I could go to Fleet Street and have him for breakfast. All the same, I could lie about him. He had given me
enough ammunition. Or I could tell the truth, and the tabloids could weave a tasty headline: “Perky Publisher Pays for Marble Pin-Up” or something. Would he sue? Without a written agreement, I would have a harder case to prove. It would be his word—as respectable Mr. Prain—and loyal Monique’s, against mine, and I was just an expatriate stallkeeper at Camden Lock Market, former artist’s model. I would not stand a chance.

“Monique does not know how long the sculpture would take her to complete: perhaps six months, perhaps a year. She’ll be finishing other projects as well. So you would have to negotiate with her when you would wish to terminate the agreement. As I said, she wants to return to France when the job’s done.”

I still could not react. Things seemed too complicated. His explanations were supposed to clarify the situation, and instead I felt more in a muddle than ever, immobilised.

What was the right reaction? Did he expect me to haggle for a better deal, one with a bonus: an absolute promise to publish my work, no matter what? No, he would never do that. He was offering so much already. And he would not play games with his business.

Then he made a gesture. He picked up the various folders lying next to each other on the table, and put them back in the black box. He closed the lid. By doing so, he closed the subject of my work with an awful finality.

I shuddered, shivered. All at once it felt as if autumn had blown into the room without warning. I noticed then that the sunlight had gone, and it was growing darker.

“You’re shivering,” he noted, concerned. Then I saw that in one small movement he hesitated from reaching forward. He almost let his hand move towards me in some sort of reassuring way. He said, “The summer isn’t what it was. When evening draws near it can turn chilly.”

“Never mind,” I said.

He got up, saying, “Let me borrow something for you to wear from Monique. She wouldn’t mind a bit.”

“It’s all right.” I tried to control another shiver. Goose bumps had formed all over my arms. I’m already turning into stone, I thought. “I should probably be getting home now.”

“Monique could drive you to the station. I know she wanted to pop into town to the supermarket.”

It’s odd how a word like “supermarket” can suddenly seem inappropriate. You have to wonder what is taking place, when that happens. I am so cold, I thought. This is ridiculous. I rubbed my arms, and then stood up, looking down at the box on the table as if from a great height.

So I would prepare to leave. Movement would warm me up.

“I hope this is not too … strange. I don’t like to disappoint you about your writing,” he said, surprisingly.

I tried to shrug off any hint of disappointment. What had happened to me? Something had been knocked out of place. I was not quite myself. Perhaps I was in a sort of shock. I needed to go slowly, and make sure at each pace that I was doing precisely what I wanted to do, or else I
would lose, and he would win. Yes: that was it, a case of winning or losing now. But I did not understand the nature of the game. It was not chess, it was something else. To win, I had to know what I wanted; to know what I wanted I had to be clear, and accept whatever it was. Edward Prain had managed, somehow, to aim a blow at a critical part of my make-up, the weakest link.

The best thing I can do, I thought, is to get myself ready and go home. I do not need to respond to the offer. I can mull things over during the next week or so. Today has been quite enough. There is nothing more to be said or done.

“Here, take this,” he said, quickly slipping off his jacket and placing it over my shoulders as if I was the frail heroine of a 1930s movie. As he did so, I felt him. I felt this touch of his hands very lightly on my upper arms, and his warmth, his smell, preserved in the embrace of the jacket. I noticed his gaze touch my body, as if he could bring his hands down and, with one sweep, rip off my flowery curtain of clothes.

Then, as also in a film, where the camera, focused on the foreground, gradually adjusts its focus to the distance, I saw in the doorway a person. It made me jump.

Mr. Prain turned around.

“What do you want?” I heard him say.

“Need your approval for a list of purchases, sir.” It was the gardener. His voice held an insinuation that he had seen, and there was something very funny going on here. He looked at me as a betrayer.

Mr. Prain did not ask the gardener to sit down. They stood speaking about the list in the doorway. I believe a piece of paper was signed against a wall. With the exit of the gardener, I prepared myself for departure. Leave, now.

Edward Prain turned back to me. “I’ll get a cardigan from Monique.”

“Thanks.”

“You’ll think about my offer.”

“Yes.”

“You can phone me.” He took a card out of his shirt pocket and passed it to me, with slight anxiety. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you.”

He left me, as I stood there still shivering in his jacket, holding his name in my fingers.

When I was a child it bothered me that people in adventures, whether in books or in films, never went to the toilet. Often you would find that they could eat, or even sleep, but they never had a need for any problematic bodily functions. I still notice this, in an action thriller or chiller, how people can go for 48 hours, chased by all kinds of evil things, without ever needing to pee.

With Edward Prain’s departure in search of a cardigan, I realised I had such a need. The only bathroom I could remember was off his bedroom, and I knew that I had to go up two flights of stairs, along a hallway, down a sub-corridor and up some other steps to get to it.

I went into the entrance foyer and marched up the grand staircase to the first floor. But then I found myself pausing, looking down into the empty entrance hall, as if I had walked up through low cloud to the top of a hill where everything was suddenly clear and sunny.

He thought I was lazy!

The swirl of disappointment and shock dissipated, and I felt the clarity of outrage. He had thrown me with his
critique of my novel. And then to follow it with the offer! He really knew how to win a game.

He indicated I was a naive, sloppy person with some literary talent.

So was he right about my work? I had just felt he had to be, down there, sitting in the drawing room, but now, as I was ascending, and pausing, I wondered. Some of the people who had read my novel had been a little unsure about it, because it didn’t have much action, but they generally thought it was written very well. Others—like my musician flatmates—had loved it. I had sent it to a well-known poet I happen to know and respect, whose name I will withhold, who wrote back with superlative praise, asking me only to tighten up and condense, to work more on honing my style. And I, if the truth be known, believed in my work. I loved my characters and their desperate search for a solution that would save their relationship, as I had sought a solution when things ended with Max. It’s a terrible thing when the glue that kept you together does not seem to work anymore, and you vainly seek some magic formula to restore it. I had wept with them, argued with them, despaired with them. My characters were with me, part of me, yet separate friends I knew intimately. I could hear them talking. How could I box them away and never let them speak again?

I looked once more at Edward Prain’s neat little card and wanted to crush it. Instead I put it in the pocket of my dress, and found myself composing a poem. As I went on upwards to my destination it came to me, surprisingly,
in rhymed iambic pentameter, as if I were a Shakespearean heroine soliloquising about the mendacity of a villain.

The poem was not quite like that as I went up and along the route to the top of Edward Prain’s house. It was rougher, and while there were elements that worked perfectly, instantly, there were other parts that remained a hole, with me skipping the beat over them until the next part flowed. I almost darted off from the task at hand to find my bag, left behind in the study, where I had paper and a turquoise felt pen, but I decided to answer the bodily need before the poetic, thinking I would have plenty of time to play with the poem on the train home.

I followed the route and successfully entered my destination, carefully avoiding looking at the four-poster
bed as I passed it. As I closed the door, I closed the poem, and surveyed this new space.

The bathroom was spacious and light, with black and white floor tiles and white walls. Warmed now, I hung up the jacket on a peg on the door and admired the beauty of the room. There was a Delft decorated porcelain lavatory with a polished wooden seat, and matching blue tiles on the sideboard next to the wash basin. It all looked too museumy to be used, but there was no choice. As I sat there I noted the brass taps, and the large, self-standing bath tub, all so clean and shiny. An old oak chest probably held towels. On a small shelf were a few toiletries, a badger shaving brush and hand razor. Everything was immaculate.

In the pokey bathroom in my Camden flat, before filling up the tub, I had to scrub off the tidemarks left by previous bathers and push aside a plastic shower curtain, patterned green with mould. There, rough, patchy lino covered damp boards. The shelves were a metropolis of different shampoos, creams and bottles that no one knew quite what to do with. A broken toilet lid leaned against the wall. Toothbrushes lay around the basin, with three different topless pastes. Threadbare towels hung limply from the rack and door handle. Underwear drooped from lines near the cracked ceiling. Cobwebs nestled in the small window that no one could open.