Fascination (16 page)

Corless is the caretaker/porter of ‘Swinburne House’, the block of flats in which I reside. I prefer to think of him as a
concierge
and maintain a bourgeois Parisian’s chill reserve in my dealings with him. I don’t care for him or his rebarbative wife. When I came in the other day with my tins of mandarin oranges (forty in all) he nodded at me, with an insincere smile on his face (no offer to help, naturally) scarcely breaking off his conversation with some tradesman. I ignored him. At the lift, out of his view, I distinctly heard him say, ‘Nice enough old bloke, Mr Hill, but he’s not exactly Manchester United, is he?’ The tradesman concurred. This categorization has been bothering me since I heard it uttered. I must ask Maria if she can throw some light on it.

Maria left me a note, which I here transcribe: ‘I see, My dear Boss, that you have been and broken a plate – you are a bad, bad, naughty man!!! Your maid of all work, Maria O’Rourke.’ She calls me ‘boss’, which I don’t like, but in the nearly ten years she’s been working for me I have been unable to persuade her to call me plain Mr Hill. ‘You are my boss,’ she says, ‘whereupon I am the boss of the boss.’ She says that because she works for a writer she must learn to exploit the full richness of the English language. ‘Nevertheless’ is her favourite word; she also loves (and cruelly misuses) ‘whence’ and ‘hence’.

What is the point of rising early? I congratulate myself if I’m out of bed before midday. After my bath (a bath is not a bath if it lasts less than an hour) I lunch on a sandwich and a glass of pale ale. I write
in the afternoon in my study. Maria comes, cleans the flat, runs errands if I require anything and prepares an evening meal for both of us. She will read to me from whatever trash magazine she happens to have in her huge handbag. We dine together in the kitchen at around seven. I then conduct a symphony (Beethoven or Brahms at the moment). Maria tends to leave after the first movement. Before I go to bed I smoke a cigarette and drink my own invented cocktail – a ‘rumry’. Rum, sherry, warm milk and a spoonful of honey. I sleep like a baby.

The movie scenario I’m writing is entitled
Sex and Violence
. Its motivation is simple: every single scene is either sexy or violent. I had the idea in my bath one morning and I knew instantly I couldn’t fail. However, the thing is harder to manage than I had imagined. Does it not seem strange, I wonder rhetorically, that a man such as myself, who was born in the nineteenth century when Queen Victoria was on the throne should, seventy-five years later, be exercising his imagination on such a project? No, I reply, it’s not strange because everything in life is strange. It was strange being born in Tokyo; my late mother and father were strange people, spreading marmalade on toast is strange. Writing
Sex and Violence
is no stranger than entrusting a letter to a letterbox.

Maria’s urge for constant reassurance is a little enervating. Boss, she says, do you like me? Of course I like you. Do you think I’m pretty? I think you’re very pretty, Maria. Would you say, nevertheless, I was your pretty, dark-eyed Irish colleen? I would indeed. And so she goes about her cleaning singing pop songs all day. In fact she is an ordinary-looking woman in her late thirties with her short dark hair worn in a fringe. She dresses in an unexceptional, nondescript style – blouse, skirt, dark coat. She lives with her aged parents, and there is a brother who emigrated to Australia. Other human beings, however well you may think you know them, are utterly opaque, utterly mysterious.

Bills, bills, bills. Bills descend on me like seagulls round a fishing boat, squawking, importuning, pecking. I mine a little meagre ore from the bedrock of my capital and once again bless my dear mother’s small legacy. But if the cost of living doesn’t level off soon I won’t be able to afford a maid. I told this to Maria one day when I was irritated with her and she said she would work for her bestest boss for nothing, if necessary. I said she should get married, find a decent ‘boyo’ she could look after. How could she get married when she worked for me, she said, tears welling, hurt written all over her face. I had to spend an hour complimenting her beauty and talent.

Christmas 1969. My fantasy of celebrating Christmas is to stay in bed asleep for five days. What would Jesus Christ make of this commercial bacchanalia established in his name? Corless came to the door with his present: a nauseating brass matchbox holder with ‘Swinburne House’ stamped on its base. He lingered creepily, hoping for a tip, but I offered him a cup of tea knowing he would refuse. We pay enough of a maintenance charge as it is. I threw the matchbox holder in the bin. Maria found it and roundly berated me for my lack of charity. I said she could take it home to Kilburn, give it to her mother and father.

New year. I saw 1970 in through a mist of rumry and cigarette smoke. Maria called and said she wouldn’t be coming as she had to go for a ‘test’. To spite her I spent two hours cleaning the telephone – it was filthy. I then soaked all my change in hot water and Dettol and cut my hair.

As I’m slowly sinking in a quagmire of debt, I’ve started to fill in the football pools. Corless cuts me these days since my refusal to pay out his Christmas perquisite. The man’s not fit to lace my boots. Robert Donat, I remembered, was at one stage very interested in making a film based on my novel
The Parsley Tree
. I met him a few times before the war (the second one). I thought I might write to
him and ask him if he knew of any young producers who might be interested in
Sex and Violence
. Turns out he died in 1958.

The few weeks after Alice Durrell said she would marry me were my happiest, I would say. I was back from the war, unscathed (the first war, that is) and I looked ridiculously handsome in my naval uniform. Bell & Winter had paid me £100 for my first novel,
The Trembling Needle
. I look back on that period as if they were part of the history of another person – with absolutely nothing to do with the man I am today. But that happiness must have paid me a dividend that I can draw on now – unless the subsequent bitterness over the break-up with Alice cancelled it out… It seems wrong somehow that the glow dies, that remembered happiness doesn’t do the same trick as experienced happiness. I had too much then, overflowing with the stuff. It would be a fine thing if you could store your happiness in a happiness bank, and make the odd withdrawal when life becomes hard – like a bee and its honey, or a squirrel with its store of nuts. Now Maria’s in hospital the life I lead is of a tedium never known on land or sea.

I hadn’t left the flat for eight days and had kept the curtains drawn all day. I thought I needed a bit of weather and walked out into the park. It was so cold I had to go back for my hat, my coat with the fur collar and my white scarf. I walked down to the Serpentine and a man accosted me. ‘Are you Yves Hill?’ I said I was and he said we had been colleagues at the BBC during the war. ‘I knew it was you because of the hat and the fur-collared coat,’ he said. ‘You were always very… exotic, dashing.’ He told me his name but I couldn’t remember him. He was very polite but then everyone at the BBC in those days was paralysingly polite – in fact that was one reason I had to leave. I couldn’t exist in that regime of permanent good manners and solicitude. I began to think people were mocking me with their ‘good mornings’ and ‘how are yous’ and ‘looking very wells’. In fact now I think I was suffering from a form of persecution mania. Then my dear mother died and that gave me the where-withal
to set myself up in the flat in Swinburne House. ‘Where withal’ – a new word for Maria. The BBC man asked me what I was up to so I told him I was writing a movie scenario. ‘Lucky man,’ he said. ‘What wouldn’t I give to lead your life.’ It showed me again – not that I needed showing: perception of another is a fiction constructed by the perceiver.

A letter from Maria telling me about her operation and apologizing for still being in hospital: ‘As you know my dearest dear boss my only dream is to be back in Swinners washing your telephone for the third time in a week!!! No but seriously you are the grandest sweetest man in the world. Don’t miss your meals as I do worry about you not being able to cope nevertheless you must concentrate on your writing as that is what makes you tick as they say. Whence I only want to be back in Swinners as you can imagine I’m so ruddy fed up being sick. I just want to look after my sweet boss for alway’s and alway’s.’

A young woman came today from some provincial university to interview me. She is writing a book about the ‘interwar’ English novel. She almost said – I could see her forming the words as she set out her tape recorder – that she couldn’t believe how lucky she was having tracked me down because (‘I thought you were dead’)… because, ah, because many writers guarded their privacy and she could quite understand that. I saw her looking round the living room trying to make an inventory, wondering why there should be five large cartons of Carr’s Water Biscuits in the corner, stacked tins of pilchards in tomato sauce, several hundred toilet rolls. ‘I tend to buy in bulk,’ I explained to her, ‘whenever I see a bargain, or whenever anything is significantly discounted.’ I offered her a glass of rum, sherry or pale ale. She asked instead for a cup of tea. I don’t drink tea, I said, and I would counsel you not to. Why, she asked. Have you ever looked at the inside of a teapot, I replied. Think what’s happening to your innards. She switched on her machine and we talked of writers I had known. She was good enough to mention some of my novels,
which she appeared to have read, singling out for modest praise
The Astonished Soul
,
Oblong
and
A Voice, Crying
. I told her about Robert Donat and
The Parsley Tree
but she claimed not to know any film producers. Her hair could have done with a wash, I noticed as she left. She was wearing jeans and a sheepskin-style coat with fur trim that gave off a distinct and unpleasant smell, as if it had not been properly cured. ‘It was a real pleasure to meet you, Mr Hill,’ she said. ‘I shall go back and reread your books.’ After she’d gone it struck me that this young woman was probably my only reader; even more – that perhaps I had just met the very last reader of Yves Hill. My ultimate reader. It was not a consoling thought.

A complex and difficult tube and bus journey to Tooting Bec to find the hospital Maria was in. I felt like an anthropologist mingling with undiscovered tribes as I voyaged south through London. Some pretty girls, though, caught my wandering eye. Then it took me half an hour to find the ward – corridors stretching for miles, signs everywhere that seemed only to lead you deeper into the labyrinth. Maria looked pale and pinched, a maroon nylon turban-thing on her head drawing off what little colour was left in her face. I had brought the usual propitiatory fruit and a copy of
Sex and Violence
for her to read. She was tearfully grateful. She wanted to know if I had moved any furniture, changed anything in the flat, insisted I itemize my meals, expressed concern about my absence of routine. ‘I shall sort you out, boss, just you see, when I get back.’ I assured her no crockery or glasses had been broken. To make conversation I told her about the interviewer with the stinking coat and she was most put out. ‘How dare she?’ she said. ‘How dare she come into our spotless flat bringing smells?’ I bussed home through the gathering dusk not wanting to descend into the commuter underworld again. I dined off pilchards and mashed potato, then mandarin oranges drenched in condensed milk, all washed down with a double rumry.
Quel régal!
Conducted the entire Mahler’s Fifth, blubbing all the way through the adagietto. The ineffable sadness of that music.

I waited in all day for something I’d ordered from
Exchange & Mart
– possibly the most wonderful publication in the world – and was not disappointed when it arrived. What I’d ordered was a chair, a simple wooden chair, that can be easily transformed by the application of a few levers and bolts into either a work-table (for joinery or that sort of thing) or a step-ladder. I can spend a day leafing through
Exchange & Mart
and not notice time passing: the bargains, the enticing gadgets are extraordinary. I’ve ordered a dozen nylon astro-turf doormats that I intend to lay from the front door to the kitchen – the route where there is most traffic of feet. Then a perplexing phone call in the evening from a man with an Irish brogue telling me that Maria had to have another operation and that they were hoping for the best. ‘And to whom am I talking?’ I inquired. ‘Are you Mr O’Rourke?’ No, he replied, he was Maria’s fiancé, Desmond.