69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (13 page)

Over coffee the conversation moved on to Napoleon’s
How to Make War.
Having talked about Suffolk, which was heavily fortified with Martello towers at a time when the British Government feared that Bonaparte would attempt to invade their dominion, Alan’s thoughts had turned naturally enough to the little corporal who’d transformed himself into a dictator. My companion possessed a recent English translation of Napoleon’s military maxims and he considered it to be the greatest manual on the art of seduction never written. Later when I skimmed the book I quickly saw how Alan had applied its lessons not only to the earthy relationship he enjoyed with me, but also in his dealings with other women. What Alan had discovered – or to put it more accurately, rediscovered – was that theory was not the practice of seduction. Indeed, those whose experience in the art of seduction was limited to the realm of theory did not even make good theoreticians. It is not enough to theorise the art of seduction, this art must be practised. However, for the practice to be effective it must be historically informed. To reduce Alan’s rich insights to a few words, the rake must constantly reforge the passage between the theory and practice of seduction. Ultimately, the seducer must be seduced by their art, so that the senses may become theoreticians. Strangely enough, Alan always insisted that it was the smells he gave off before bathing that proved he was not only a master strategist but also a cunning tactician.

Between leaving the Jewel In The Crown and arriving at Union Grove, I asked Alan what he’d read about Grampian stone circles apart from
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
and
The Stone Circle: Gordon’s Early History.
Once we’d carted Dudley up to his flat, Alan showed me
A Guide to the Stone Circles of Britain, Ireland and Brittany
by Aubrey Burl and
The Modern Antiquarian
by Julian Cope. Alan said he was working on a bibliography of books about stone circles in north-east Scotland and would provide me with a copy once he’d made a few additions.
⁹
That night he restricted himself to being scathing about Julian Cope’s contribution to deforestation. It wasn’t difficult to see why Alan disliked the faded pop singer’s hippie mysticism and obsession with the Mother Goddess. The book was filled with snapshots of Cope and his family standing by stones in leopardskin dresses and other inappropriate gear, the pages were luridly coloured and the author’s drug-addled brain appeared incapable of producing coherent thought. Worst of all, Cope included a chapter entitled ‘Fifty-Nine Stone Circles in Aberdeenshire’ and not only were several of the sites he mentioned actually located in Banffshire, he rated Dunnideer above Bennachie simply because this poxy hill reminded him of Glastonbury Tor! All things considered,
The Modern Antiquarian
was a dog’s dinner of a book.

Alan read me numerous examples of Cope’s inept prose, chuckling along as he did so. Growing bored, I exposed and then fingered my cunt. Eventually Alan pushed his prick into my dripping wet hole. He evidently had great experience in fucking. I never knew anyone to fuck with such scientific deliberation. He made every stroke tell to the uttermost. He would slowly draw out his prick until the tip of the glans only rested between the lips, and then with equal deliberation drive it slowly back, making its ridge press firmly against the upper creases of my vagina as it passed into my cunt. Then when the whole length was enclosed, and my belly seemed full of it, he would gently work it about from side to side causing the big round head to rub deliciously on the sensitive mouth of my womb.

On reaching orgasm, we both groaned with excess of pleasure and my cunt tingled round his palpitating tool as the life flood darted from the opposite sources of delight in reciprocating streams of unctuous spunk. Alan lay back to recover his breath and rest himself after his exertion, but when he saw me wiping my wet receiver with my handkerchief, he asked me to perform the same kind office for him. I willingly complied, and kneeling at his side, took his soft and moistened prick into my hands and tenderly wiped it all round, then stooping forward, I pressed my lips on its flowing tip. This position elevated my anus, and Alan proceeded at once to avail himself of it. Throwing my dress over my back, he moved me towards him until my naked bum was almost opposite his face, then spreading my thighs, he opened the lips of my quim with his fingers, played about the clitoris, and having moistened his finger in my cunt, pushed it into my arsehole. I rather enjoyed this display of my anal charms. So while I fondled Alan’s prick and moulded his balls, he played with the crannies and fissures of my backside.

Then getting me to straddle directly over him, Alan made me stoop until my cunt rested on his mouth. All the lustful feelings of my nature became excited as I felt his warm breath blowing aside the hairs of my sex, and his pliant tongue winding around my clitoris, playing between my nymphae and exploring the secret passage inside. But when he went on to the nether entrance, and I felt the titillation of his tongue amid its sensitive creases, the sluices of pleasure burst open and I became conscious of that melting sensation that told me I had come once again.

Soon after my second orgasm I fell asleep on the sofa. At some point Alan led me semi-conscious through to the bedroom where I was undressed and ushered beneath the sheets. That night I dreamt that I was back in Budapest. Dudley took me to a gypsy bar called The Blue Elephant. Inside the air was thick with smoke. There were guys sitting around broken tables on broken chairs. Some of them were singing, others were playing chess. The place wasn’t crowded. There weren’t many women although the two bar staff were female. Dudley ordered Cselenye. Cherry brandy. His Hungarian accent was very good. I stared vacantly at some stained wall tiling and a huge poster of a holiday resort I couldn’t identify. I didn’t particularly care for Cselenye but I guess the regulars did since it was a staple of the sparsely stocked bar. Alan was standing outside on the street. When we left the bar he assaulted his dummy, overcame all resistance and left Dudley lying in a pool of vomit.

Alan took me to the airport and we caught a plane to London. We weaved through passport control without a hitch but got held up by Dudley as we went through customs. The dummy had assumed a military bearing and took great exception to the books stuffed into Alan’s suitcase. A copy of Compton MacKenzie’s
Whisky Galore
was held aloft and loud demands were made as to why it had not been declared. Alan explained that he’d only used the book as a counterweight to his interests in the east, that MacKenzie was a beacon from the past whose Highland and Island romps provided a perfect counterpoint to contemporary East-Coast writers like Duncan McLean. Of course, MacKenzie’s narratives were sentimental and rambling but they had a certain chutzpah. Alan said he’d long puzzled over why the Western Isles had remained bastions of Bible-bashing fundamentalism while in Orkney and Shetland people had become more easy-going about religious observance. MacKenzie had given Alan the key to this enigma. The rivalry between Catholic and Protestant islands fuelled the religious impulse in the west.

As Alan stood and argued with the dummy over the rights and wrongs of failing to declare
Whisky Galore
, visions were flashing through my mind. It was not so much I as Alan who was back in Budapest. He was wandering through Gozsdu udvar, a series of linked courtyards running between Dob utca and Király utca. The architecture was decaying but these courtyards gave an authentic taste of the old Jewish quarter. At ground level the buildings were still in use as shops and workshops but the apartments above were deserted, their windows smashed. The occupied premises were shuttered against the twilight and rain was falling. Alan was walking in slow motion through the smell of decaying plaster. He was examining old bricks, peering through barred windows. The dummy emerged dressed in a black flight jacket from the night watchman’s office, a guard dog straining on the lead he held in his plastic hand. Alan unbuttoned the fly of his black Levi’s and pissed on the hound’s snout. When the urine hit the dog it dissolved. I was back at customs and Alan countered the dummy’s claim that MacKenzie was an anti-modernist by pointing out that the author had been an early enthusiast of the gramophone. Dudley confiscated Alan’s books but let us go.

The dream ended with images of Dudley’s body bobbing about lifelessly in the Danube. Alan was lurking in the shadows and when I tried to escape from him the streets transformed themselves into a stone labyrinth. Alan chased me through winding alleyways and whenever I succeeded in running far ahead, I’d be confronted by the water with Dudley bobbing in the churning foam.

EIGHT

I DON
’
T
remember when I woke up, how many cups of coffee I drank at breakfast or whether Alan and I made love before we rose. However, I do know that Alan drove me out to the university and waited for me in the canteen while I had a tutorial. At first my professor was angry with me for skipping classes but through an astute use of the conversations I’d had with Alan about literature, I managed to convince him that I hadn’t been wasting my time. I imagined the professor laying a hand on my leg and running it up under my skirt. Daydreams of this type helped pass the time, although my tutor was actually far too staid to even consider being unfaithful to his wife. Eventually I escaped from my professor’s office and Alan drove me to the Donside Tesco superstore. With Dudley seated mutely between us, we had a fry-up in the café. We trailed around the store and Alan grabbed a bag of donuts.

Having disposed of my tutorial as a topic of conversation in the car, our verbal exchanges in Tesco were devoted to other subjects. I suggested that we should visit all the supermarkets in Aberdeen and treat these excursions in much the same way as our trips to stone circles. Alan insisted that it would be difficult to have sex in those stores that lacked customer toilets. I told him that he was missing my point, which was poetic, he had to imagine himself living 3000 years from now and pretend he was visiting ruins. My companion complained this was an impossibility since the logistics of supermarket construction meant the buildings would not survive for this length of time. Such an over-literal response was uncalled for and I eventually persuaded Alan that after leaving Tesco we should travel on to Norco in Kittybrewster. In the meantime, as we queued to pay for the donuts, we talked of books.

Alan insisted that if I was to continue reading the contemporary literature he was rapidly discarding, I should give
The Biography of Thomas Lang: A Novel
by Jonathan Buckley some serious consideration. This text, Alan added slyly, cried out to be described as a work of literature. Taking the form of a series of letters, the novel demonstrated – in a manner not entirely dissimilar to some of the essays in Derrida’s
Writing and Difference
or certain works by Wyndham Lewis such as
Enemy of the Stars
– that in order to approach truth, one must simultaneously appear to veer away from it. It should go without saying that language is a tricky thing and that honesty has always hidden itself in lies. Alan praised Buckley for abandoning 19th-century notions of literary depth and said that like many famous modernists and post-modernists, this author’s prose was the return at a higher level of pre-modern forms.

Buckley’s book is only a novel if one accepts the contradiction of giving this title to a prose work whose central subject eludes it, and not only because the Thomas Lang of the title is dead. As I have already said, the book takes the form of a series of letters, the majority of them being between Michael Dessauer and Christopher Lang. The former is the would-be biographer of a concert pianist called Thomas Lang, the latter the dead man’s brother. From the start the book is dialectical in structure, but this is a dialectic of lack. Michael Dessauer is quite unable to make a harmonious whole out of the contradictory testimony he gathers about his subject. Indeed, even the reliability of this material is brought into question since at one point Christopher Lang admits to pranking his correspondent by fabricating letters in his brother’s hand.

At times Buckley’s game of hide and seek with the reader becomes tiresome and Alan insisted the novelist clearly intended to exhaust his audience. Viz expedients such as providing descriptions of a series of banal photographs allegedly taken by Thomas Lang. These prosaic transcriptions so self-consciously recalled techniques deployed in the French
nouveau roman
that Alan didn’t hesitate to cite them as absolutely his favourite sequence in the book. Alan was predisposed to seek out the unoriginal in any work and I strongly suspected it was the fact that he could compare various literary biographies unfavourably with Buckley’s novel that led him to praise
Thomas Lang
as a book. Alan’s most immediate targets in regard to this were
The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography
by A. J. A. Symons and
Frank Harris
by Hugh Kingsmill.

Baron Corvo, aka Frederick Rolfe, was a Grub Street hack and shameless paedophile. Although Rolfe received praise from the likes of D. H. Lawrence, book sales long eluded him. Alan liked the first seven chapters of Symons’ biography of Corvo, which provided a series of contradictory portraits from different pens. Corvo the brilliant but unrecognised novelist, Rolfe the impostor and con man who’d falsely assumed an aristocratic title, Corvo the dissolute pederast and pander, Rolfe the high-minded inventor and convert to the Catholic faith. After a brilliant opening section Symons attempted to resolve the contradictions he’d so breathlessly delineated. To Alan this was worse than simply tedious, it was a capitulation to the bourgeois notion of a centred subject. His problems with Hugh Kingsmill’s
Frank Harris
were of the same order. Alan loved the early parts of the book where Kingsmill relied on Harris’ unreliable and often quite contradictory accounts of his life. He particularly relished the account of Harris travelling home to Europe from America, both westwards across the Pacific and eastwards over the Atlantic, so that he might meet himself in Paris. But once Harris had achieved fame and there were reliable sources for the life of this liar, braggart, charlatan and
bon viveur
, Alan found the sense of certainty that crept into Kingsmill’s account mind-numbingly boring.