The Back of His Head (39 page)

Don't have to tell you why, Patrick—he'd got the bloody stuff in the boot! Like I say, I'd no idea. That's all I can remember, it was all a bloody accident anyway. I'm over by the gingko tree putting a Bounty Bar wrapper in the waste bin over there, and I turn round and he's standing next to the Dodge and he's patting his pockets, and just then he catches my eye and he gives me that special smile, remember I told you about it? He gives me that special smile of his and he winks, and I just felt
great
, the way I always did when that happened. He'd give me all this shit and then there'd be this, and it'd make you feel so special, like there wasn't anything he wouldn't do for you because you were the most important thing in his life. Just looking at you and then the smile, that's all it was, and the look, the way he looked at you, like he knew you like he owned you—like he'd taken you over and he was going to look after you for the rest of your life. That's how it felt. Just the two of us looking at each other like that, it made me want to hug him, I don't know why but it did, it made me want to hold on to him and hold on to him.

So that was what was going on when it happened, one second things are like that and the next

At the Residence I find a surprising number of visitors, most of them climbing down from a tour bus while the rest walk up the drive from cars parked below on Cannon Rise. Spring air, and weather but one remove from perfection—sunshine, a sea breeze, and, very high, a slight haze that is beginning to wash out the deeper blue of the middle of the day. On the trees, the blush of new growth and a froth of blossom: in the air, the flap and chatter of birds.

It is the start of a new season for the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence, and, as always at this time of year, there is the sweet scent of a new beginning, of new life, of rebirth and hope and renewal. As the visitors come gabbling up the front steps I fancy the Master still with me, in the air about us, an invisible presence, keeping an eye on things. Is he, is he here?

I count the arrivals: twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four—and, now, another woman jogging after them, up the front steps to the door: twenty-five. Quite a number to get through the signing of the Visitor Book—quite a number needing to be asked not to stand on the elevator platform as we wait.
We'll all take the plunge together when everyone's signed the Book!
Others I ask to wait their patience with their questions about Phyllis's magisterial painting.
All will be revealed in a few minutes!
This time, only one of them wants to know why visitors must sign in:
security, security
, is always my response to this question.

I raise my voice to the group:
Now, we've had some security issues over the years, unfortunately. Over the years some important items have gone missing on tours of the Residence. In order to preserve the authenticity of your experience, the members of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust have always declined to use roped-off areas, and the only items secured to their place are the Painting here, the Citation, which we'll see quite soon in the Blue Room, and of course the Medal itself, next to the Citation. We'd appreciate it if you'd respect the freedom of movement we've chosen to give visitors to the Residence by making sure that you look, but don't touch
—

The Tour begins. They look, but don't touch.

First for them to look at, of course, is the Painting. The questions are the usual ones—why the back of his head?
Because that is where she was trying to reach in the painting, to his deepest, most hidden self
. Why so much paint flung about?
At this late stage of her career, the artist was attempting to reach through the medium to the man himself
. How come it seems so detailed when you really look at it?
Some would say that that is the power of art, to trick the eye and the mind into seeing something beyond mere representation. This is a theme which Raymond Lawrence himself returned to constantly in his writing, and which was especially mentioned by the Nobel Committee: the power of Art to deceive the eye
. What would a painting like this be worth?
The Trust has insured the Painting for a very substantial sum—that's why they insist that it's bolted to the wall!

Duteous, unspontaneous laughter.

Now, the Tour takes its first collective step—or steps: we need six trips to ferry them down to the garden room on the elevator, four at a time and five at the end.
In his later years the Master, as many of us called him, made increasing use of this elevator each day to take himself and his wheelchair down here to write and then, as evening came on and his day's work was finished, to take him back up to the Residence proper
.

Here, I point out Raymond's
fauteuil roulant
, abandoned in the corner of the garden room: and it is at that moment that I notice another out in the garden, beyond the sliding doors of the garden room, a wheelchair locked into place on the lawn, about forty feet away. It has a high back turned to the house and from this distance anything of the figure inside is too small to see clearly: just a tiny, pale stick of an arm, visible for a moment.

I return to the business at hand: now everyone is crowded into the garden room it's time to give them the video of the Master in those golden years immediately after the award. Of this I never tire, of course. The video player is getting on in years: the tape, too, which catches and slurs at various moments. But it is always the same familiar, irretrievable world that it retrieves for us nevertheless, that most distant of all lost pasts, the recent past, the one we still know and remember and most nakedly mourn, the past that leaves behind every trace of itself to remind us of the finality of our death. It was full summer, I remember, by the time Bruno Prock and his crew arrived from Austria to make the art programme documentary from which this is excerpted, and one can still see on the screen the blowsiness of the trees and the shrubs, can still hear in the background the mad tinnitus of the crickets. It is a summer that never ends.

At the stage caught by the tape Raymond remained plausible, his illness at its earlier stages: his performance for the Austrians varied from episodes of the usual nonsense (here, on the screen, eliciting the burst of laughter this moment always brings from visitors viewing the video, he has his dental plate in upside down, a stunt that was quite beyond the Austrian visitors' collective comprehension) to longer episodes in which, persuaded by Bruno's intensity and concentration, he gave more serious and detailed answers than I'd ever heard him give to anyone else before. Most of all, Bruno was interested in those disowned early novels.

Because violence returns dignity to the violent
, Raymond tells him towards the end of the documentary, in answer to the obvious question.
It returns dignity to those whose own dignity has been taken from them
. That part isn't included in this introductory video, naturally, but I remember it because it was something he'd never addressed before, never spoken about directly. And, then:
each successful work of art conceals a crime, an act of violence
.

Now, alas, comes the only moment in the video that I detest. A long shot of the Trust members on the lawn begins, and pauses—all of us younger, Marjorie surprisingly
gamin
and unsurprisingly skittish—pauses, and then pans left to take in the gardening ladies, hard at their work as they always were in those days, bent forward, their hoes moving almost in unison. Eric Butt, hoeing, too, and Daisy the dog, over-excited, her bobbing tail up in a curve—and, now, here he comes as he always does at this moment, his large, broad-shouldered frame visible for a few seconds, that ridiculous head, the loose-lipped, weak-mouthed grin, perpetual, democratic, unquestioning, invariably inane—

Gradus again. For years I tried not to think of him, I tried to exclude him from my mind and concentrate on the story of the Master. He doesn't belong in the life I'm talking about, he has no place in my story—he had no place in our lives back then, he didn't fit in from the start. He wasn't the beginning of anything and he wasn't the end of anything, he didn't explain anything or represent it. He simply
was
, he simply existed. I was horrified he'd been included in the first place, in this sequence that Julian selected from the Austrians' documentary. It's a historical record, Julian protested when I tried to get him to edit the buffoon out. But editing it was too difficult: so there he remains, my
bête noir
, providing the only moment in each viewing of this videotape at which I need to look away. In a second or two, I know, the camera itself will rub him out—I turn back, and
there:
he's gone. He never was. Never existed.
There
—

And, as Gradus leaves the screen, the old man comes back onto it, almost as fully present as in the flesh. The first glimpse of him always shocks me, however many times I've seen the video before: in white summer clothing and a broad-brimmed white hat he comes with a couple of the others through the shrubbery and towards the camera, holding his palms together in front of him like a monk. He is listening, now he is laughing, his head thrown back, and now he looks down at the camera with the smile held: he removes his hat and the lost wind plays with the lost hair. It always feels as if he is looking at me, just at me: as if there's no one else in this garden room now and no one else behind him on the screen. Just Raymond, just me. Always it is that.

We watch, the visitors and I, through selections of the interview with Bruno and to the final shot of the clip, as he walks down the drive and away, as if he's leaving us forever. And now there comes another moment, here it is again,
the
moment of the viewing: he stops, turns, and faces the Austrians' camera as it approaches. His image grows. For this final shot the cameraman, I remember, sank slowly to his knees like a supplicant, and as a consequence, Raymond seems to loom and fill the screen.
Do not move, Ray!
—Bruno, shouting throughout this sequence.
Do not move!

And there he is—
here
he is, looming, massive, like the Colossus of Rhodes: he looks down at us as the cameraman moves in. Raymond at last: eternal, magnificent, refulgent and supreme, my uncle as I will always remember him, the Master, forever in the superlative—before, now—
turn away now, Ray, turn away slowly, please!
—he turns from us and his back fills the screen as the camera follows. The cameraman stops: the Master begins to recede, he's moving away, here is the moment when he ducks slightly under a branch, where he moves into flecks and smuts and flying wisps and the
push-push-push
of the wind in the shrubs and the trees, moves off and away and is gone.

Dissolve to black.

I squeeze the remote. Murmurs from the visitors as they come back to life.

I look around.

And
that
is the man whose house we're going to look at together today
—

In the Blue Room I begin, of course, with a few words on Raymond's theory of colour, how blue was thought in medieval times to be the colour of evil, the colour of the devil, and how the Master came to feel instead that blue—
this
blue, the blue before their very eyes, sky-blue at its deepest—was something else, the colour in which the abstract could become transformed into the material world. As always I mention Novalis, I mention Rilke, I mention Klein and all the rest.

Then, as always and of course, I wind the touring party around the room and to the Medal and the Citation, starting with the enormous settee—always, gasps of wonderment at its size—and moving them to the
fauteuil
and the complex, fascinating story of its troubled reupholstering. Thence, through the amusing story of the Shoji screen, to an anecdote or two about the posters on the wall and the display of his books in the bookcases and the others he collected. Not too long on these, for here comes the moment when I draw their attention to the Holy Grail itself.

I never need do more than fling my arm towards it: this, after all, is what they have come to see. There's always a moment as they take it in: and then, always, they crowd forward. I always enjoy reciting the Citation aloud to them from memory as they gaze at it: I never get a word wrong. But when they look at the Medal, there is no need for me to say a thing. It speaks for itself, of course. The Nobel Prize for Literature.

Today, the moment is as sacramental as ever. There are several seconds—twenty, thirty—before the spell is broken and they begin to murmur again, and turn away, and ask their questions. How much would the Medal be worth? Is the Citation a fake, too? Why not just put the real Medal there and tell everyone it's a fake? How much would the fake Medal be worth?

Replica, I tell them. It's a replica.

The precipitating incident occurs a few minutes later, in Raymond's bedroom, just after I've shown our visitors the desk under the window that looks north down the garden and out across the city. I'm turning towards the three-quarter bed on which the Master died when I notice a movement, to one side of my vision.

A woman has just put something on the old man's desk.

I am in the midst of things, naturally, and keep on till the end.
And now, the saddest part of this journey through the Master's life, his last place of rest if not his last resting place
. I look at them: nods from one or two: yes, yes, this is definitely where he died. Questions, as always, but, as always, I tell them I'm reluctant to discuss this part of his life and that I'm sure they will understand, given my closeness to him. Instead, we turn to
the magnificent view that gave him both inspiration and consolation throughout his writing career
—and, as we all turn to the window, here's the woman I have just spotted, pressed up against it as she peers out and down to the lawn.

Has she really just put something on the desk?

She has: the paua shell ashtray is back.

I stare at it, as the visitors begin to gaggle out of the room.
Seventy-four years of age
, I reply to someone's question.

She's returned the missing ashtray—the woman at the window has returned the paua shell to the desk—

His nephew and adopted son
, I reply to someone else.
And now his literary executor, yes
.

It's obviously his: an ash-smeared paua shell, not new. I've forgotten how worn it was, how long he'd had it. Now I see the thing, the reality of what it has been returns to me, replacing memory: it becomes a thing once more, a part of the mere, uncreated world, still awaiting the lick of art.

I stare at it. I gaze at the woman.

‘Excuse me,' I say to her as she turns. ‘May I speak to you before you go?'

She stares up at me: dark-skinned, and a heart-shaped face: not at all unattractive: lived in, but not insensitively or unintelligently.

‘Sure,' she says. ‘I just have to check my boy on the lawn.'

I complete the tour quickly: the small bedroom—
my own bedroom for a number of years, when I first came under my uncle's wing
—and then the kitchen and a quick reprise of the Master's idiosyncratic views on time-travel and culinary spaces. Laughter: a few words about
Nineteen-Forty-Eight
—and we're back in the Dining Room and with the opportunity for them to add a few comments besides their names in the Visitor Book before they go, and for me to take from them the admission fee we charge now, in this new season.