Making the Cat Laugh (27 page)

Of course, it was probably just a silly little administrative oversight, but I nevertheless yowled with agony when I realized I hadn’t been invited to this year’s Booker Prize. ‘Will you be going to the dinner?’ my nice literary holiday companions had asked, as we lay beside our swimming-pool in Italy, catching up on our Ian McEwans. ‘Me?’ I said carelessly. ‘To the Booker Prize? On Tuesday 16 October at the Guildhall at 6.15 (drinks in the Old Library)? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. Haven’t really given it much thought.’

I don’t suppose anyone was fooled by this rather obvious dissimulation. When I got home from holiday, I was so desperate to find out whether I had received an invitation that I screeched the car to a halt outside the house (leaving it blocking a bus-lane) and rushed inside to ransack every item of post that had arrived in my absence. The cats, who had not seen me for three weeks, looked distinctly pained as I paced up and down, distractedly shuffling envelopes and shouting four-letter words. But when at last I admitted defeat, and lay stunned on a heap of litter, they came and sat on my chest, and discreetly looked the other way.

Now, I know what you are asking. Why the fuss? It’s something
I can’t explain. But if it is anything to do with pride, why did I phone the Booker Trust three days before the dinner and beg to be admitted? Their kind suggestion was that I could most certainly come to the Guildhall, but that unfortunately I might have to eat my meal in a different room from everyone else (the ‘parlour’) and watch the proceedings on a monitor. Sounds all right, I thought, I can live with that. Just so long as they don’t single me out in any other way – like stamping ‘
ONE DRINK ONLY
’ on my forehead, or shouting ‘You! Out!’ if I attempted to strike up a conversation with Beryl Bainbridge in the toilets.

In the event, however, I didn’t spend much time in the ‘parlour’, because a nice lady came along just after I had completed my first course and said that I could join the main event. ‘Does it matter that I’ve eaten something?’ I asked anxiously. It was quite disconcerting, actually, to be picked out for this honour, and conducted at a brisk pace from the rather cheerless parlour (which reminded me of being in a classroom at eight o’clock in the evening) to the glitz and hubbub of the grown-ups’ dinner. Did I feel proud and exhilarated as we strode along? No; strangely, I was too desperate and anxious to feel either of these things. In fact, what kept coming into my head was an intensely paranoid recollection of an old Nazi trick I had seen in umpteen prisoner-of-war films. Perhaps the Booker people were only
telling
me I had been released from the parlour, so that – just as I broke into a run – they could shoot me in the back and use me as an example to others. ‘Nobody,’ they could say afterwards, ‘invites herself to the Booker Prize and gets away with it.’

About a month ago, Alan Coren wrote a column on this page about the loss of his novel. Perhaps I should just phone him,
but on the other hand I feel I am too distant a relative to intrude on the grief. The thing is, he said he had been writing this novel on the quiet, had fetched up 20,000 words of it, and then lost the whole damn lot when his computer in France was nicked. As it is well attested that a writer cannot possibly reconstruct the thing from memory, his novel-writing days were thus officially over, and it was no great tragedy. He was taking it surprisingly well.

Well, obviously one’s chin wobbled a bit. A tear fell into one’s Common Sense breakfast food. The man was so brave. The traditional lost manuscript (of which the lost hard disk is the modern equivalent) is a highly touching motif for anyone who has ever attempted a sustained piece of fiction. Our words are our children, you know. Remember the despair of Eilert Lovborg in
Hedda Gabler
when he realized he had thoughtlessly abandoned his infant manuscript in a whorehouse? How the words ‘child murder’ came up, and in his remorse he shuffled off into the dark Norwegian night with a revolver? I pictured the two gruff French burglars, both played by Arthur Mullard, breaking into Mr Coren’s gaff and shining big rubber torches about. ‘Vous êtes coming wiv us,’ they said in deep voices, alighting on the computer. ‘Non, non,’ piped the novel, its eyes round with panic, ‘Papa! Papa!’ ‘Har, har,’ they laughed, ‘Votre papa habeets en Cricklywood! Il est miles away.’ And then they threw a black sack over its head before … well, I can’t go on.

But the reason I write this is that at the same time as feeling Lovborgian empathy with Mr Coren’s loss, I also feel intensely envious. You mean, your novel has just
gone?
Just like that? How absolutely fantastic. Personally, I have reached the late laborious paranoid stage in my own creative outpouring when its unfinished state gnaws at me like a constant reproach, and its mewlings for attention drive me mad with guilt. Which is why, whenever someone innocently asks, ‘How’s the novel?’ I
actually feel like screaming, or pulling a gun. ‘Novel?’ I want to yell, waving the weapon in dangerous circles. ‘
Did you ask about my novel?
’ I fumble with the trigger, wildly push back my fringe, and take a swig from a bottle. ‘What do you know about it? Just what do you think you know about it? You know
nothing,’
– I start to sob, here – ‘Nothing, nothing …’ The outburst tails off. I drop the gun. I give myself up. It’s all over.

People are only being nice, when they ask. To the enquirer, ‘How’s the novel?’ is like saying ‘How’s your Mum?’ – friendly, concerned, non-judgemental. All that’s required by way of response is, ‘Fine thanks, how’s yours?’ But unfortunately this simple question, when filtered through the cornered-animal mentality of the weary last-lap novelist, is transformed into the sort of sneering insinuation that makes homicide justifiable. ‘It was peculiar,’ friends say to one another, when I pop out of the room. ‘All I said was ‘‘How’s the novel?’’ and look, she bit my hand.’ ‘Tsk, tsk,’ the others agree, shaking their heads and peeling back the fresh bandages on their own nicks and flayings. ‘How did you get those bruised ribs again, Terry?’ ‘Well, we were at dinner, and she’d put down her knife and fork, and I said brightly, ‘‘Have you finished?’’ That’s all. And she flew at me.’

They don’t realize how sensitive you can get. They don’t know what it’s like to live constantly with this Tiny Tim of an unfinished book, sitting trusting and wistful in the inglenook of your consciousness waiting for you to fix its calipers and make it well. It’s such a drag. My novel can do nothing independently; I can’t pay somebody else to look after it in the afternoons; and if ultimately it gets botched, it will be nobody’s fault but mine. So I keep thinking of Mr Coren’s novel, kidnapped by ruffians, and considering whether, all in all, this unkind fate would not be preferable. ‘How’s the novel?’ people would ask, automatically ducking sideways and shielding their faces with their arms. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you?’ I
could say dolefully (as if sad). ‘It’s gone.’ ‘What?’ ‘Yes, I left it outside a supermarket, and just my luck, someone lured it away with a packet of crisps.’

The historical Saint Valentine was clubbed to death, you know. And now, seventeen centuries later, by means of one of those great arching ironies to which history is so partial, the rest of us are being clubbed to death by St Valentine’s Day. We are bludgeoned with love, and I am not sure I like it. Formerly St Valentine’s was one of those optional festivals, like Septuagesima, which you could celebrate at your own discretion. It was also, I always thought, associated with the finer, more delicate aspects of love: tremulous, unspoken, violet-scented. But a heavy hand in a red velvet glove has taken care of such love-heart nonsense, and St Valentine’s has turned overnight into an excuse for relentless Channel 4 extravaganzas featuring wall-to-wall exhibitionism and rumpy-pumpy. A certain grossness, it must be said, has poked its way into the sweet satin folds of the romance, and ‘Be my Valentine’ is no longer a wistful request.

Isn’t February depressing enough, without this? Channel 4 sent me a little bottle of massage oil in celebration of the ‘Love Weekend’ and I have been thinking seriously about drinking it. But leaving aside all the arguments on behalf of lonely stay-at-homes (and romantics) dismayed and alienated by frank, endless sex-talk on the telly, isn’t it just spit-awful to find yet another date in the calendar turned irrevocably into an imperative national event, demanding special film seasons on the box? I mean, where will it end? It was actually a surprise, on Monday, to see the world return to normal, with the banks open, and people going off to work. ‘No holiday, then?’ I breathed in relief, thankful for the small mercy.

Personally, I am now dreading next week’s Pancake Day, for fear that the TV channels will be given over to a ‘Night of Batter’. I hardly dare open my Radio Times:

Channel 4, meanwhile, could fill a studio with talentless ugly nude people with frying-pans on their heads, extracting endless nervous hilarity from the word ‘toss’. It could all happen; I sincerely believe it. Something for everyone, that’s the principle of these theme nights; only unfortunately it usually comes out curiously awry, as everything for someone.

I said I would leave aside the special-pleading arguments about lonely stay-at-homes struck downhearted and dismal by the excesses of this past weekend, but the pancake analogy somehow invites them back to the forefront again. Because – well, it’s obvious. While for single people (and people not happily in love, which is a different category that includes nearly everyone) the whole dark, heaving Valentine event is so dispiriting it makes the depression of Christmas seem like a hayride to a clambake, Pancake Day requires no special personal circumstances for its enjoyment, and is therefore, actually, a better cause for celebration. Hm, I may be on to something. I mean, you don’t have to be ‘lurved’ as a prerequisite for Pancake Day, just handy with a whisk. I have never thought of it this way before, but the pancake is obviously a great leveller. Old and young, ugly and beautiful, we can all roll them up and squirt them with lemons – and if we choose not to, it’s not because there is anything wrong with us.

It is sad to think how St Valentine’s is going – but on the other hand, the hell with it. You’ve got Shrove Tuesday to look forward to. Moreover, there is still time to record a short sequence on video describing your first pancake, your ideal pancake, your lost pancake, or the final pancake that left you feeling a bit sick and sorry for yourself. And the funny thing is, that compared with many of the dreary sexual relationships displayed and analysed on the ‘Love Weekend’, your pancakes will probably appear to have colour, individuality, interest – and above all, depth.

When Raoul Fitzgerald Hernandez O’Flaherty, the hot-blooded Irish-Argentinian international polo ace, called me up on Friday from his helicopter, begging me to join him on a weekend trip to Palm Beach, I admit I was slightly taken aback. This is a bit irregular, I thought. I had planned a nice weekend rearranging my dried fruit collection and mending my string bag, and now here was Randy Raoul hovering spectacularly over my front garden, showering emerald trinkets into my bird-bath, and demanding by loud-hailer that I go and inspect some new ponies.