Joseph Anton: A Memoir (83 page)

After the miscarriage Elizabeth turned away from him and devoted herself exclusively to little Milan. A nanny was found, Susan, the daughter of a Special Branch officer, but she resisted employing her. “I just want someone for an hour or two a day,” she said. “Just a bit of child-minding help.”

Their lives became very separate. She didn’t even want to travel in the same car as him, preferring to be in her own car with the baby. He hardly saw her during the day and in the big empty house he felt his life becoming empty too. Sometimes they had an omelet together at around 10
P.M.
and then she was “too tired to stay awake,” while he was too wakeful to sleep. She didn’t want to go anywhere with him, do anything with him, spend the evening with him, and she
grew resentful if he suggested going out without her. So the imprisonment-by-baby continued. “I want two more children,” she said flatly. There wasn’t much more conversation than that.

Their friends began to notice the growing distance between them. “She never looks at you anymore,” Caroline Michel said, worried. “She never touches you. What’s the matter?” But he didn’t want to say what the matter was.

Milan began to walk. He was ten and a half months old.

Random House took the paperback of
The Satanic Verses
into their warehouse, and at once the British press did its best to stir things up.
The Guardian
ran a provocative front-page story suggesting that Random House’s decision would “revive” the trouble, and at once it did revive. The
Evening Standard
threatened to run a piece saying that Random House had gone ahead without taking police advice. Dick Stark called them to say that that was incorrect, so instead the paper threatened a story saying that Random House had published
in spite of
police advice. Dick Stark checked with the men in the Christmas tree fortress and they said there was “minimal” risk, which reassured Gail Rebuck. Andrew, Gillon and he had kept the Consortium paperback edition in print for five years now, so this change of warehousing arrangements should not have been news. Paperback publication had been “normalized” across Europe and in Canada and even in the United States, where Henry Holt’s Owl imprint had taken over distribution without any trouble. But a few hostile news stories might make the British experience very different. Random House and the Special Branch worked hard to reassure the
Standard
and in the end its story did not run. And in
The Telegraph
there was a balanced, measured, wholly sensible piece. The risk diminished. However, Random House brought bomb scanners into their mailroom and warned their staff. All the senior executives were still worried about the press stirring up a big Islamist reaction. But to their great credit they were readying themselves to reprint and to issue the Vintage edition. “I’m sure the worst thing we can do is flinch or delay,” said Simon Master. “If we have a good weekend, we’ll print.” In Russia the publishers of
The Satanic Verses
were being threatened by local Muslims. That was alarming. But as things turned out, nothing happened in England, and at long last paperback publication of
The Satanic Verses
was taken over by Vintage Books, and normal service was resumed. The Consortium was dissolved.

There were some more small, good things. Gloria B. Anderson of the
New York Times
syndication department came back four years after her bosses had prevented her from following through on her offer to give him a syndicated column to say that this time everyone was very keen that he should write for the paper. There was nothing to be gained by bearing a grudge. This was
The New York Times
, and it would give him a monthly platform all around the world. And it would probably pay for Whispering Frank and Beryl the cleaning lady and maybe a nanny too.

His niece Mishka, a pale, stick-thin little girl of six, had been revealing astonishing musical gifts in a largely tone-deaf family. Now the Purcell School and the Menuhin School were fighting over her. Sameen chose the Purcell because Mishka was not just a musical virtuoso, she was years ahead of her age group academically as well, and the Purcell was better at providing their students with a good general education. The Menuhin was a one-track-minded musical hothouse. Mishka’s extraordinary precocity came at a price. She was too bright for her own age group and too young for her academic equals, so it was and would be a lonely childhood. But she had knocked them flat at the Purcell and Menuhin and already at her tender age it was clear that this, a life in music, was what she wanted. One day in the family car when her parents were arguing out the pros and cons of the two schools, little Mishka piped up from the backseat, “Shouldn’t that be my decision?”

The Purcell School told Sameen that Mishka was exceptionally gifted, and that they would be privileged to have her. She could start in September, because they were not insured to teach students younger than that, and she would be the youngest person ever to be given a full scholarship at the school. High excitement! A bright new star was rising
in the family and they would have to protect and guide her until she was old enough to shine by herself.

He was awarded the Budapest Grand Prize for Literature and went to receive it. In Budapest the mayor, Gábor Demszky, who had been a leading publisher of samizdat texts during the Soviet era, opened up the glass-fronted cabinet in his office to reveal the precious books, formerly illegal, which were now the emblems of his greatest pride. They had been printed on a portable printing press from Huddersfield that they moved secretly from apartment to apartment at night to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands; a machine so important that they never mentioned it in conversation, using a woman’s name instead. “Huddersfield was an important part of the fight against Communism,” Demszky said. Then they got onto the mayoral motorboat and zoomed up and down the Danube at speed. The grand prize itself was a surprise: a small engraved metal box that, when opened, was filled with crisp new U.S. dollars. Very useful.

Zafar went to do an Italian course in Florence, and was very happy. There were several new girls in his life, an opera singer with whom he broke up “because she suddenly began to remind me of my mum,” and a tall, somewhat older blonde. Evie was now his best friend and he had grown so close to her family the Daltons that his mother and father were sometimes almost jealous of them. But Zafar was having a ball, planning excursions to Siena, Pisa, and Fiesole. He had not had the easiest of childhoods and it was a fine thing to see him growing up into this great fellow, so full of confidence, stretching his wings.

Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser came to dinner at Bishop’s Avenue. Robert McCrum, a little slower than he used to be, with a sweet, vague smile on his face, and his wife, Sarah Lyall, were the other guests, and when Harold discovered that Robert worked for the
Observer
, with which he had some unmemorable political quarrel, and that Sarah worked for the hated, because American,
New York Times
, he launched into one of his loudest, longest, least attractive bouts of Pintering.

The day after Milan’s first birthday they flew to America to spend three months—
Three months!
It would be their longest stretch of freedom—in the house on Little Noyac Path. It was a year since they had been at John Avedon’s house and heard about Diana’s death and then there had been the global phenomenon of her death and the miracle of the flowers and so on and now he was back in Bridgehampton with his imaginary Ormus and Vina and the ground was opening up beneath Vina’s feet and she was swallowed by the earth and turned into a global phenomenon, too. He was approaching the end of his novel, finishing the chapter “Beneath Her Feet” and writing the chapter “Vina Divina” and of course Diana’s dying had affected Vina’s and it felt right that he wrote this passage in the place where he’d been when he heard the news. He wrote a song for Ormus, the song Ormus wrote for her, his Orphic hymn to lost love,
what I worshipped stole my love away, it was the ground beneath her feet
, and pressed on toward the Lennonesque end of his unending book

In the months that followed the book was completed, revised, polished, printed, and given to others to read. On the day he finished working on it, in the little study up its own staircase that had become his summer aerie, he made himself a promise.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
was one of his three really long books, along with
The Satanic Verses
and
Midnight’s Children
. “No more 250,000-word monsters,” he told himself. “Shorter books, more often.” For more than a decade he kept that promise, writing two short and two medium-length novels between 2000 and 2009. Then he got to work on his memoir, and realized that he had fallen off the wagon.

It was the Summer of Monica and it was not clear that President Clinton would survive the attempt to impeach him. Dreadful black-comic jokes were circulating.

The stains on the dress couldn’t provide an incontestable ID because everyone from Arkansas has the same DNA
.

“Happiness writes white,” Henry de Montherlant wrote. “It doesn’t show up on the page.” Happiness that summer was a low white house surrounded by green fields amid hills and woods, and
walking with Elizabeth and his sons on the beach in the late afternoon as the sun fell low in the sky and a haze obscured the horizon. It was going to the copy shop near Bridgehampton Commons and waiting while copies of his novel were made. “You can come back later,” the woman in the store told him, but he waited. It was a first wedding anniversary dinner with Elizabeth in Sag Harbor at the American Hotel. It was a trip to Yankee Stadium with Don DeLillo to watch the Yanks play the Angels, even if they did lose the game. And it was a letter from his new editor, Michael Naumann at Henry Holt, that spoke of
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
in language so exalted that he couldn’t quote it to anyone. Just six days after this letter arrived, however, Michael Naumann resigned from Holt and went off to be the new German minister of culture.
Oh well
, he thought. It was still a wonderful letter.