My Other Life (20 page)

Musprat was smoking. He puffed out his cheeks and blew smoke.

"Hoping he'll give us an alpha," he said crossly. "Are you going to that Hodder's party?"

I said that I didn't know anything about it.

"It's for that boring American woman who writes picture books about Nash terraces. Every twit in London will be there."

"So are you going?"

"It's a drink," Musprat said, meaning yes. He looked pale and rumpled, leaning clumsily against a torpedo-sized fire extinguisher.

"Are you feeling all right?"

"Of course," he said. He was offended by the question. "You're always asking me that."

There had been only one other time. I had run into him one morning in the Strand. I had said he looked ill, as though he had just thrown up. He said he had, he had been drinking the night before, but that he was sick every morning. He said, "
Don't you throw up every morning?
"

"Come in, Ian!" the literary editor shouted through the closed door.

"Just like my tutor," Musprat muttered, and shuffled in. He was out in minutes, sighing and rifling the book locker. And then it was my turn, and the editor, Graham Heavage, immediately lapsed into his irritating habit.

"
Bonjour, M'sieur Theroux, fa va? II souffle un vent glacial aujourd'hui. Avez-vous des engelures?
"

That was his irritating habit. He often spoke to me in French—because of my name, because he spoke French well and could patronize me that way. I regarded it as an unfriendly gesture. I spoke French badly. So I always replied to him in English. This didn't bother him, but neither did it encourage him to speak to me in English. He had the sort of reddish eyes you see in most geese and in some eastern Europeans.

"I'm fine. No chilblains."

Wasn't that what
engelure
meant?

Heavage was a highly intelligent but fretful man of fifty or so who had never been friendly with me. He was another tie wearer. He was said to be an authority on Aleister Crowley—hard to reconcile this fastidious editor with the lecherous Satanist, but the English sometimes had surprising interests.

Goose eyes twitching, he went through my copy quickly and frowned in approval, making swift printer's marks in ballpoint as he read, and then he said, "I can't remember when anyone has used the word 'crappy' in these pages before."

"Do you want to change it to 'egregious'?"

"No. Crappy will do," he said. But he didn't smile. It was hard to tell whether he was mocking me. Still, he was scrutinizing the review—not reading it, but considering it. "And you're a trifle severe with Mr. Updike."

"I hate allegories."

"I would have said pastiche, but never mind."

Musprat was right, it was a tutorial. No praise, only nitpicking and rather wintry irony.

Shoving the pages into a wire tray on his desk, Heavage said, "We'll run this next week. On your way out, have a trawl through the book locker. See if there's anything you want to do."

I decided to be blunt. "I'd like to do one big book instead of four small ones for a change."

"I'll keep that in mind," Heavage said. "As you say in America, I'll think it over mentally."

I wanted to hit him. I was sure that he had never had any experience of physical violence, so my slapping his face would be a great shock. In this silence he had leveled his reddish eyes at me, as though he had guessed at my hostility.

"Not many big books in January," he said, flexing his fingers. "Very quiet at the moment, though there will be the usual logjam in the spring. Find yourself a clutch of novels, there's a good chap."

He was saying no to my doing a lead review. So it was another week as a hack. Then he smiled and broke into French, which was my signal that the meeting was at an end.

I found Musprat on his knees, rooting around the book locker.

"Look at this," he said. It was a picture book,
Tennyson at Freshwater: The Record of a Friendship.
"I bags it."

"I didn't know you were interested in Tennyson."

"I'm not," Musprat said. "But look at the price. Ten quid. I'll just mention it in my roundup and Gaston will give me a fiver for it."

***

It was a beautiful drawing room in a Nash terrace on the Outer Circle, east side, of Regent's Park, and everyone there seemed to be out of place—reviewers, writers, editors, publicists, all drinking wine and watching for the trays of hors d'oeuvres which were carried by waiters and waitresses who were better dressed than most of the guests. I had the impression of people who had just come in off the streets, drifted out of the park, where they had been lurking—they looked damp and grateful and somewhat anxious. I mentioned this to Musprat.

"They're drunk, that's all," he said, and lunged at a woman with a tray of drinks.

While I was searching for someone I knew, a woman materialized next to me. She was almost my height, and white-faced, with an elegant neck—and a pearl and velvet collar around it—and full red lips.

"I know who you are," she said. "But I thought you were much older."

People sometimes said that because of all of my opinionated reviews, but it was only a posture I had adopted. There were comic possibilities in being full of opinions and crotchets. I wanted to be the joker who never smiled, and I was surprised when I was taken seriously.

"You're very busy, aren't you? I see your shorter pieces everywhere."

"But mainly on the back pages."

"I loathe self-deprecation," she said. "Don't be insincere. I thought your
Railway Bazaar
was brilliant. It was quite the best book I've read in ages. I gave copies of it to all my friends for Christmas."

When people spoke in this way I always assumed they were making it up. I smiled at the woman and asked no further questions. I thought it might embarrass her if I had. In any case, she was still talking.

"Your best review was from a man I saw walking along the tracks at Paddington station. He had a copy of it in his hand. A man passing by said, 'Is that book any good?' and the first man said, 'Fucking marvelous, Fred.'"

"I like that."

"I thought you might," she said. "And what are you working on at the moment?"

"A novel."

She smiled. I loved the fullness of her lips against her thin face.

"About a man," I said.

Her eyes were dark and deeply set.

"He leaves home and becomes a sort of castaway."

Still she said nothing. There was a pinkish bloom on her cheeks.

"He dies in the end."

How was it possible for someone to hear all this and still say nothing? Her silence made me nervous.

But I loved this woman's looks, her lips, her lovely Madonna's face, her skin so close against her skull, her high forehead and her black, gleaming hair tightly drawn back. Her paleness, her pinkness had no blemish, and I found her slightly protruding teeth another aspect of her beauty. She was wearing a dark dress trimmed in velvet and lace, and although she was thin—with a slender neck and fragile-looking arms and wrists—she had a full, deep bosom that her good posture and height elevated and presented. I was accustomed to regarding lovely women as not very intelligent, but she seemed both beautiful and brainy—her silences alone seemed intelligently timed—and this combination I found madly attractive.

My tongue was gummy as I said, "It's called
The Last Man,
" and looked down and saw that she was wearing stiletto heels, wicked shoes on thin, white feet.

"That title has an excellent pedigree.
The Last Man
—that was Mary Shelley's original title for
Frankenstein,
" she said. "And I'm sure you know that Orwell's first title for
1984
was
The Last Man in Europe.
"

From my expression I was sure she realized that I did not know this at all.

"You could ask Sonia," the woman said. "Sonia Orwell. She's over there by the window. Do you want to meet her?"

I said no, not at the moment, because I could not imagine that George Orwell's widow would want to meet me—I anticipated more silences.

"I really do admire your writing," the woman said. "In fact, I think you might have that rare combination of qualities that makes a writer of genius."

"What qualities?" I asked, and fumbled with my arms.

"Total megalomania and a nose for what the public like to read. It's unbeatable. Dickens had it. So did Shaw. Henry James didn't have it, but Maugham did."

"I've just been reading Hugh Walpole. He was a friend of Henry James. James was always sending him hugs.
Portrait of a Man with Red Hair.
"

The woman had stiffened each time I had uttered a sentence.

"A macabre novel," I said. "Set in Cornwall."

The woman said, "You're much better than Hugh Walpole."

It was the first time in my life anyone had ever said that I was better than a dead writer. I had never imagined that I was better than anyone who had written in the past. It had never occurred to me that I might be compared to another writer, dead or alive. The point about writing was that you were yourself—comparisons were meaningless. Nevertheless, I took this woman's assertion as praise.

She went on praising me—and I felt flustered, embarrassed, and confused, like a puppy being squirted by a hose. I also found myself delighting in glancing down at her cleavage. Did women know how this warm, smile-like slot excited a man's interest?

Distracted, I asked, "And who are you?"

But she was looking across the room.

"Will you excuse me?" she said, and gave me a lovely smile, and she was away, sooner than I wished.

Had I said something wrong?

Then Musprat was at my elbow, with a cigarette and a smeared glass and flecks of vol-au-vent pastry on his tie and fingers. His eyes were bloodshot, his suit wrinkled, the knot on his tie yanked small. He was slightly hunched over and looked more fragile and elderly than ever.

"Who was that?" I asked him.

She was standing by the fireplace talking animatedly to a man in a chalk-striped suit.

"Lady Max," Musprat said. "She's married to a tick called Alabaster. He's something in the City. They have a house in the Boltons."

"She seems nice." I was thinking of her praise.

"That's the one thing she's not."

"She's attractive," I said.

"Sort of a bruised peach," Musprat said.

"I like the way she's dressed."

"She's always wearing those fuck-me shoes," Musprat said.

"Don't you think she's pretty?"

"I hate that word," he said in a disgusted way. "I don't want to hear it. At this point in the evening everyone looks leathery to me."

I lingered at the party hoping to speak to the woman, Lady Max, again. She did not return to my end of the room. She was surrounded and I was too shy to approach her.

I loitered, growing sober, and with this heightening sobriety felt strangely superior—not in any complicated way and not intellectually, but simply stronger and in control. The other, drunker guests brought out a kind of priggishness in me. At a certain point—when the first drunken person emerged and began to stagger and sputter—I usually stopped drinking and began to watch, and grew sober and colder, and was all the more fascinated by what I saw.

Drunk people, loud people, obvious and angry people, people stammering and stumbling, spilling drinks and scarfing small burned sausages and cheese cubes on toothpicks. They had surrendered all power and direction, they were yelling and gasping. They strengthened me.

I did not want to be that way. I stood, growing calmer, observing them. They seemed, as Musprat often seemed to me, self-destructive and weak. I didn't see how people like that could write anything. That was my yardstick. I measured people by their ability to write. How could these people write well if they could not see straight?

Lady Max flashed past and I made after her. I wanted to hear more, but lost her in the crowd.

It was important in London to leave a party or start home before the public houses closed, for just after eleven o'clock the streets were thronged with drunks—all men, their faces wolfish and pale, yelling at passing cars or else staggering and scrapping. Some of them loitered, looking ravenous, eating chips with greasy fingers out of pouches of old newspapers. All over London these men, turned out of the pubs, were pissing in doorways.

That night I was delayed on the Underground, and by the time I reached Victoria the eruption had occurred—drunks everywhere. The station was overbright, which made it seem dirtier than it would have in dim light, and it was old—the wind blowing up the tracks and through the barriers, rustling the newspapers and the plastic cups and moving them through the way the tide moves flotsam. The newsstand was shut, but the
Evening Standard
poster was still stuck to the wall, looking sorry in its teasing way:
TV COMEDY STAR IN SUICIDE BID—PICTURE.

That feeling I had had at the party came back to me on the train, as I saw the drunks eating chips and dripping hamburgers, or else slumped in their seats, or swaying feebly with the swaying carriage, looking weak and tired. It was not merely that I was sober; I was also a stranger, an American, an alien, just quietly looking. I saw theirs as a peculiarly English despair—specifically London fatigue, London futility. It was their fate, not mine, and I wanted to write about it, because no one else had noticed it. I was not any of them.

Three stops, thinking these thoughts, and then I walked through the disorder of my own station, littered and grimy, its posters torn and its black iron gleaming with the sweat of condensed fog. I liked hearing my footsteps in the stillness, and the shadows and the mist falling through the light of the street lamps, as empty double-decker buses moved importantly down the empty high road.

Alison had gone to bed. Before I joined her I crept upstairs in the dark and stood in the boys' room, listening to the rise and fall of their breathing, just the slightest whisper of it, Will's adenoidal snorting and Anton's just audible flutter. They were both still, like buoyant things floating high and peacefully on a sea of sleep. Without waking them, I kissed each boy's cheek—their faces were warm in the cold room, and their breath had made feathers of frost on the windowpane.