My Other Life (21 page)

I undressed in the dark and crept into bed with Alison. She slid against me and sighed, the bedclothes a nest of warmth. In order to ease myself into sleep I went through the chapters of my unfinished novel, murmuring the number of each chapter and the secret tide I had assigned it. There were eleven so far, but I was asleep by the time I got to eight.

London nights were silent and clammy cold in the submarine darkness, and when I woke from a dream of strangulation it was as though I were suspended in this dark, vitreous silence. I had the sense of us all in the house swimming through these London nights, of night here as a sea swell, and of us sinuously moving through it as though drifting deep in the face of a wave. I loved sleep, and it was only morning that gave me a sense of disorder, something to do with the morning darkness of winter—we woke and dressed in the dark—and the clank of milk bottles, of crates shifting on the milk float, the only sound in the street, but a deranged one.

"You came home so late last night," Alison said. "What time was it?"

"Eleven or so," I said, wondering why I was lying. She would not have minded my telling her it had been after midnight.

Yet she was silent. She seemed preoccupied. I sensed her disapproval.

"It wasn't much," I said, being defensive. "Pretty boring. I got some money at Gaston's, then Ian and I went to a book launch." Alison said nothing. I said, "That boring American woman who writes about Nash terraces."

She had not heard. She said, "The boys were up until all hours doing homework. Why do they give them so much prep? I'm going to complain."

"Don't say anything, Mum," Anton said.

Will said, "You'll get us into trouble."

"Jeremy's mum complained and Townsend announced it in class and everyone laughed at him."

They were seated awkwardly at the table wolfing their cereal. In their school uniforms, their hair sticking up, their blazers rumpled, they looked harassed, if not anguished. They ate quickly, nervously, without any pleasure, just stoking their faces, and then they jumped up and said they had to go or they would be late.

"I'll walk you to the bus stop," I said.

Alison said, "I'll be gone by the time you get back, so I'll say goodbye now." She kissed me while the boys tightened the buckles on their satchels.

Mornings were clamorous, and I needed silence, needed the house to myself. I wanted to see them all on their way. I could not sit down until the house was empty.

At the bus stop, Will said, "Are you a socialist?"

"I don't vote—Americans can't vote in Britain," I said. "I'm just a spectator."

"Mum's a Labour supporter," Anton said. "I am too."

"That's what he told Mr. Fitch," Will said.

"That's none of your business," Anton said.

"You can be a socialist, but if you're dogmatic," I began.

Will asked, "What does 'dogmatic' mean?"

Anton was listening too, as though he had been too proud to ask.

"Something like inflexible."

"Mr. Beale is inflexible."

Mr. Beale was the hated headmaster.

All this time they were looking up the road for the bus. I hovered and yet held back, wanting to protect them and wanting to be strong. And they had the same ambivalence, liking my company and resenting the thought that they might need it. They were thin and pale, with a hint of anxiety in their soft brown eyes.

It was a cold, overcast morning of mist, with a harsh sound of traffic, and the dampness gave a greasy look to the black road and the broken pavement. Then the bus loomed and slowed, and they leaped aboard, catching hold of the rail, and when the bus resumed and went past me I saw them standing, small figures jammed in the aisle among all the heavy coats.

The house was empty when I returned. I went to my study and opened my notebook and read:
Shafts of sunlight filled with brilliant flakes falling through the green leaves to the jungle floor
—which was where I had left off yesterday to write my book review and go to Gaston's.

Shafts of sunlight filled with brilliant flakes.

I looked through the window of my study. Outside, London in midwinter was dark, and the brick and stone of the old house-backs I saw looked crusted with neglect. The trees were brittle and black too, and the damp night air had left a look of slime on the slate roofs. Some windows were lighted—you could see the pale bulbs—but the overall impression was of stillness and darkness, of daylight sleepily emerging and seeping out of the low sky. In this narrow corner of the city winter seemed a kind of fatal affliction, the way a gangrenous leg turns black.

The darkness was a comfort. I was learning to live here. The stillness, and even the tomblike quality in the shapes of houses, the sense I had of being buried alive here, penetrated me; it kept me indoors and calmed me and helped me think. A blue sky would have turned my head and tempted me away, but the gray morning and the backs of these old houses and their brown bricks kept my reverie intact. I was not dealing with London. There was no distraction here. I was writing about the jungle.

I had sketched the way ahead—I knew what was coming in the next three or four chapters. After that, I had only the vaguest sense of what I was in for. Mocking myself, I said out loud, "Now what?"

Just as I picked up my pen, the mailman's feet sounded on the stone front steps, and I held my breath, and then letters began plopping through the letter slot. Only one required a reply, an overdue bill, and I paid it immediately, then found a stamp for it. Another, from a reader—a woman who said she liked my books—I crumpled and threw away. I lifted my pen again, but when nothing came—no word, no thought—I retrieved the woman's letter from the wastebasket and smoothed it. It was from Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada. I pulled out my big atlas and found the place—near Edmonton—and I was so touched by a message from this distance, I replied to her on a postcard, thanking her for her letter.

It was then ten-thirty. I tried again, attempting to move on.
The shafts of sunlight
... I struggled to continue the thought, to make a paragraph, but I could not advance it.

The woman's letter from Stony Plain, Alberta, had mentioned a particular story I had written years before. I found that collection in the bookshelf and read the story. It was good. It held me. Could I still write as fluently as that? Putting the book away, I glanced up and saw a guidebook to Canada. Stony Plain was not listed, but there was an entry for Edmonton. The capital. Oldest city in the province. On the Saskatchewan River. And this:
Ukrainians played a large role in the settlement of Edmonton and are still the dominant ethnic group.

I shut the guidebook and dragged my notebook over and tried again, struggling to begin. It was now eleven-twenty. I reread everything that I had written in that chapter so far, and as I read I noticed that my fingernails needed cutting. I attended to this, paring them carefully over the wastebasket, and as I was doing so the telephone rang. It was Ian Musprat. Did I want to meet for lunch?

Snipping my nails, I said, "I'm writing."

I believed the lie would commit me to action.

Musprat said, "I've been thrashing around all morning. I can't do a thing. It's hopeless. How about playing snooker at the Lambourne later on?"

"I'm busy tonight." Another lie. I must write something, I thought. "What about tomorrow?"

"Fine. I'll see you at the Lambourne at seven. If we eat early the table will be free. I'll let you get on with your writing. I don't know how you do it."

But after I hung up I did not write. I finished clipping my fingernails and then I filed them. It was almost noon.

At last, very methodically, I began to recopy what I had written on the previous page in the notebook, writing it on a fresh page, as though to give myself momentum. I improved it, but when I got to the end nothing more came. It was ten minutes to one. I tugged. I squinted. I saw something.

I wrote,
Just then they looked up and saw a brown face staring at them through the leaves, and after they saw the first one they saw more—three, seven, a dozen human faces, suspended like masks.

A breakthrough at last. I had more to write, but stopped—I would save it for later. It was one o'clock, time for lunch.

Fish fingers—I loved the improbable name, like "shoe trees"—three of them in a sandwich, a cup of coffee, two chocolate cookies, and while I ate this I listened to
The World at One,
a news program, and I read
The Times,
and I sat. The radio, the food, the newspaper—it all left me calm, and when the program ended I hurried upstairs and almost without thinking I wrote the sentence I had saved:
They looked again and the faces were gone.

This was all I needed, because in that thought—the sight of the faces in the jungle—I saw the whole situation, my own characters, the Indians spying on them, the hint of an ambush, the jungle, the narrow paths, the hidden village. And so I spent the rest of the afternoon bringing my characters nearer and nearer—and intermittently they saw the faces—until when their path ran out they arrived at the village and were mobbed. End of chapter.

I had written 35 words in the morning, and in the afternoon something like 1,500. But what gave me the greatest pleasure was a sentence containing the image
limp green leaves like old dollar bills.

I made notes for the next chapter, to prepare for tomorrow.
The village. Smoke. Trampled earth. Frightened children. Barking dogs. A conversation. "We cannot help you." "Ice is life." The hidden strangers.
The act of writing produced ideas and events. It was late afternoon and I was growing excited at the thought that I had moved on. I guessed that I was half done with the book. I wanted so much to be done before the summer, but ten chapters more, ten weeks, would take me into March, and if so, I might be through by my birthday in April. Looking over what I had written, I became hopeful. The book was strange, true, comic, and unexpected—that was what mattered most. I wanted people to believe it and like it, and to find something of themselves expressed in it.

With these thoughts—my pen twitching words onto the bright paper in the pool of light on my desk, and darkness all around—night had fallen. The door to my room opened. It was Will.

"Anton's downstairs making tea," he said.

He looked exhausted. His face was smudged, his hair spiky, his hand-me-down school blazer had shrunk on him, but instead of making him look bigger it only made him skinnier, with a thin neck and knobby shoulders.

"Hi, Dad."

He kissed me. His hair smelled of cigarette smoke. When I mentioned this, he said, "The bus conductor made me sit on the upper deck."

He slumped into the armchair opposite my desk. He said, "What page are you on?"

I looked down. "Two hundred and eighty-seven."

"Are you almost done?"

"Half done, I think. I don't know for sure."

"I did an essay for Wilkins today. Two sides.
Macbeth.
"

"The henpecked hero."

Will nodded. "It's true. I should have said that."

"You look tired, Will."

"We had rugby. And the English essay. And in chemistry we did an experiment with sulfuric acid and Jason burned a hole in his blazer. Matron went bonkers when she saw it. In the morning there was a rehearsal for the school play. Lunch was stew. It was gristle and fat. I didn't eat it. Jam sponge for afters. Beale told me I needed a haircut. And some of the boys hid my satchel and when I found it they made fun of me. The sole of my shoe is coming off. Simon Wesley told me he hates me."

School.

I said, "Why don't you watch television?"

"I have tons of homework. Latin prep, chemistry, and history."

"What would you like for dinner?"

"Dunno, do I? Maybe spaghetti. The vegetarian kind."

"I'll make the sauce," I said. "We'll have salad. I think there's ice cream for dessert."

Will yawned like a cat. "I'll have a bath first. The school showers weren't working, so we ran straight from rugby to chemistry. We were all dirty. Matron said we smelled like goats."

That explained the mud streaks on his face and the dirt under his fingernails. My sons knew I loved them, but they had no idea how much I admired them.

Anton called out to Will to say the toast and tea were ready, and while they sat at the table, saying little, I made the spaghetti sauce—chopped the onion and garlic and green pepper, and sauteed them with some mushrooms, then scalded and peeled the tomatoes, and tossed it all into a pot with a bunch of fresh basil and a stock cube and a pinch of crushed red pepper and a dollop of tomato paste. While the sauce reddened and simmered, the boys went upstairs to their room to do their homework, and I went out. I bought the
Evening Standard
and took it to the Fishmonger's Arms to read it over a pint of Guinness. There was a mention of John Updike staying at the Connaught, in London to launch his new book; and I thought how Londoners knew nothing of London hotel rooms.

Later, waiting for Alison to come home, I watched a television game show with Anton, who had finished his homework, and when the host of the show quipped, "You're like the Irishman who thought an innuendo was a suppository," Anton laughed out loud, and I thought: I am happy. There was nothing on earth so joyous as this—the darkness, the silly game show, the thought that I had written something today, the knowledge that I was home, the anticipation that Alison would be home soon, the spaghetti sauce simmering, a pint of Guinness inside me, and most of all the explosive sound of my child's laughter, generous and full-throated. I felt blessed.

Alison was home at seven, a bit later than usual. She too was tired, but she helped Will with his Latin while I boiled the water for the spaghetti and made salad. We ate together. The boys cleared the table. Alison did the dishes—because I had cooked—and after the boys went upstairs I read Alison the chapter I had just finished.

"It's good," she said.

"Say something more."