Conversations With Mr. Prain (8 page)

“I must say, though, that it intrigues me how old-fashioned you are in your fictional style, considering … well, how you are. I thought of Proust once or twice. To be frank I leave the vetting of manuscripts to my editors, and they only give me things that have some problem or some special interest, so I may be gaining an unbalanced picture. But you are much more classical than I expected.”

“It’s quite good,” came the echo in my head. “Quite good.” “Proust?” Forget about the photo, I thought. He is now going to discuss my writing. Then I can go.

“How am I classical?” I asked.

This appeared to Mr. Prain a very strange question. “How are you?”

“Yes.”

“You relish style, structure, and words. You believe in the power of words.” The puffball of tension he had held within him had exploded. I was in my proper place again.

“Don’t all writers?”

“No.”

I waited for him to say something else. He did not. He looked at his nails. “Is that all you’re going to say about my work then?” I asked.

“For now, yes.” Then he smiled a little tentatively and added, “If you don’t mind.”

I looked away, confused. So this was not the time to exit. I could not go until he had returned my typescripts and said all he had to say. I could not. I shifted back in my chair, and as I did so I noticed a tiny sense of relief, a minute sigh, as if a part of me did not mind staying, as if it did not want our conversation to end. But I did not want him to think I was willingly surrendering to him and his plans for the day. “You have a nerve,” I said coolly, “to bring out that photo, and then to say only this.”

“For the moment. I have your typescripts elsewhere, and it’s better we wait till I have looked again at my notes. Wouldn’t you prefer I show you the house?”

“No, actually,” I said. “But if that’s what you want, then so be it.” About time I was stroppy, I thought.

A timorous smile on his lips. A flash of insecurity. I stared at him. I studied him, trying to fathom what was
in his mind. I made him into a learned monk, a fifteenth-century friar in Italy. He would philosophise about politics, theologise about art, shun sex, think of it constantly. He would be a secret practitioner of alchemy. He was a man who might, because of the whim of a prince, become a court official, or else be burnt at the stake. The image covered him for a moment, and then was drawn away, and I saw him again sitting as he was in his leather chair. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him. I knew then that he felt that, despite certain anxieties, this was all going very well, and our conversation was taking the path he intended. But I withdrew. I gazed down at the floor momentarily embarrassed by the fact that we had been looking at one another. The air in the room seemed stale. I wanted to thrust open the window. He continued to fix me with a stare that I felt upon my skin like a draught.

And then Monique was there. Enter Monique, centre stage, with grace, with hesitation, with charm. “Excuse me,” she said. “Would you like fresh tea?”

“Would you?” he asked.

“No thank you,” I said. I summoned politeness and forbearance and put a mild expression on my face. I sat forward. I must be more assertive, I decided. This is becoming strange. “All right, then show me the house now, and that gallery with the photographs.”

“Certainly,” he replied, formally.

Mr. Prain and I rose, and moved away from the tea table, but, as he passed Monique, she bowed her head
towards him and whispered something. His forehead wrinkled. His dark eyes flashed, concentrating, like those of a rodent.

A conspiracy. I knew. Collusion. Aiding and abetting. Murmured French. What better tongue for intrigue? I wondered if they were lovers, but decided I had got it back to front. Lovers can appear like conspirators because they have their own language, their own purposes and codes. Conspirators therefore remind one of lovers. This is what I decided, looking at them.

Like the reader of a bad novel, who laments the time it takes to get to the end and cannot put the book down because the barbed bait of the promise of answers drags the reader on through the plot after one bite, so I, uncomfortable as I was, remained where I was.

The brief discussion we had about my work, following so quickly on the revelation of the photograph, put me in a vulnerable and morose mood.

Dismissive, pompous, supercilious, conniving snob, I thought, sullenly. The adjectives I could have fun with here, in order to pinpoint precisely why he was so vexatious! He was nothing but a hubristic, Machiavellian, cunning, starchy, bumptious turkey cock! No, that would sound too much. A controlling, hoity-toity know-it-all. That was not quite right either. I wanted to sum him up. If I could define him perfectly, that would make him safer. Yes, I did like words.

I really did not understand what was happening between us. I had believed that he had invited me to his house to discuss my work, and instead we appeared to be playing a game of wits. I did not know what the rules were, or to what end this would lead. He had misled me into thinking he was interested in my typescripts, when he had other, ignoble, motives for inviting me to tea. Literature
and the publishing industry was just something we could talk about in safety, intellectually, but our conversation was a mask.

Mr. Prain showed me the house. We went downstairs to the main hall and began from there, to the library, the ballroom, the dining room, the kitchen and the salon. There was the old Tudor part from the sixteenth century, and then newer parts which expanded sideways and upwards, with curious connections, corridors and staircases, and a secret passageway between the kitchen and the “study” where we had just been sitting, at which point I had a peculiar feeling of
déjà vu
. There were vestibules, large rooms, small rooms, furniture, carpets, paintings, ornaments, with everything perfectly displayed inside this architectural mishmash. A mirror. A vase. A tapestry. Precision.

Because they were generally spacious and sparsely furnished, the other rooms of the house made the room in which we had been sitting seem even more cluttered by comparison. This was the sort of house that was featured in glossy magazines: a photo spread in
Hello!
or
OK
in which an overly made-up lady in designer clothes would pose resplendently by a gold-framed portrait, or beside her wealthy husband, or hold a pug dog in front of a Louis Quatorze cabinet.

The tour of the house was a moratorium, and an escape. Gradually I felt myself relax, and release the tension in the muscles of my neck. I could be passive and listen as he recited the history of the building and his ancestors. He too
could relax into a monologue he had repeated so many times before, for other guests. But in fact, deep down, I suspected now that he was no calmer than I. He had a way of suddenly glancing this way and that as if he expected someone to leap out; though I suppose he was simply observing, inspecting me in this environment where I clearly did not belong. He had an
intention
, nevertheless, that seemed to cause him some anxiety. He was designing things so that he would be successful in some matter of importance, which related to the photograph. And that matter might be sex, I thought, though, if so, he was going about things by the most bizarrely circuitous route anyone could imagine.

We were walking along the hallway of the top storey when we passed a small corridor with stairs at the end. I pointed it out and asked where the steps led up to.

“Oh just my bedroom,” he said, plainly. “There’s nothing interesting in there.” I felt him hesitate. Clearly, it was not good form to show a female guest his bedroom. But then he said, “Well, there is a rather good view. It’s built into part of the old attic, and there are windows facing two directions: north and south. You might enjoy seeing that.” Enjoy? Without demurring further he walked along the corridor, up the few steps, and opened the door. I trailed obediently behind, reflecting on the fact that this tour was supposed to be enjoyable for me.

His bedroom was so tidy it almost seemed unused, as bedrooms do when exhibited to the public—those bare bedrooms of stately homes—except that it had an
en suite
bathroom that was clearly the place where he performed his ablutions. Beyond the open door I could see a shelf with his shaving things (badger shaving brush, hand razor) beside a huge mirror.

The bedroom was quite dark, being wooden-panelled, and strangely shaped, with the ceiling sloping down at both sides. It was dominated by an antique four-poster bed with a heavy green counterpane. A leaded window provided a view to the back of the house—where the gardener was still tinkering with the lawnmower—and the woods, which I could now see stretched for several acres before merging into a shallow valley that adjoined farmland. Another similar window faced the front, where we looked down to the sweeping driveway, gardens bathed in sun, and the ostentatious wrought-iron gates of Walton Hall, with their giant pineapple-topped stone pillars on either side. Beyond these gates was the road, and then more woods, oblong fields ripe with wheat and barley which swayed in the breezes as if being stroked with invisible combs, meadows dotted with sheep and cows, cottages and farms, lanes, hedgerows, a distant village, a disused railway embankment running towards the horizon, and a sky like a vast blue sheet.

“What a beautiful day,” I said.

“We’re not scared,” came the echo in my head, from the children’s book,
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
, by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury. It’s a beautiful day, and they’re not scared, but when they find a bear in a deep,
dark cave they are absolutely terrified and run as fast as they can back home, lock the door and climb into bed.

Uh-uh, Mr. Prain’s house. A big, rich house. We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!

“It’s really nice to be in the countryside,” I said, trying not to sound either too regretful or effusive. It was beautiful, this rural England. In London, it sometimes felt that the city was all there was in this land, sprawling out its tentacles via the tube map. Here it felt as if London was far, far away. Here there were different birds: robins, starlings, yellowhammers, bluetits, chaffinches. I wanted to lean on the windowsill and absorb the scene, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, to take it back with me to the traffic and buildings. If only we could have been out walking down those lanes, to a canal, rather than stuck inside. I wished I could inhale the country air, the smell of herbs, flowers, fields, hay. I looked at it all before me. It might as well have been a painting in a gallery.

And then, as I felt this rush of longing, I was aware of him standing next to me, also looking at the scene, but not with my intensity. It was all too familiar to him. It was the usual view from his bedroom window in summer. It did not move him. He was more aware of me. I sensed he was aware of me as I was under my dress; fusing the image of the photograph with the woman he had beside him.

But this moment passed. The mask was donned again with perfect decorum. He began to tell me about the area,
about nearby Towcester and Banbury. He said that we were, in fact, in the Midlands, in “the shire of Northampton”; that the Roman name for Towcester was Lactodurum; that an internecine battle was fought in AD 556 between Cynric and Ceawlin and the Britons; that Banbury was under the bishop of Dorchester from the eighth to the eleventh centuries and then under the bishop of Lincoln; that Banbury Castle was constructed in 1125 but was penetrated by Parliamentarians during the Civil War and thereafter despoiled and torn down; that the famous Banbury cross was destroyed by fanatical Puritans in 1602, but the Victorians erected a new one in 1859.

“Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross,” came a chorus of children in my head, “to see a fine lady upon a white horse. With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes.”

He was saying that Banbury used to be an important market centre for horses.

I watched his lips moving, the close shave of his chin, and the fine wrinkles he had under his eyes, before making sure I stared fixedly out of the window.

So these minutes wore on, as he was rehearsing his lesson about the history and the geography of the area, and I was mute. And yet in my mind, behind us, on the bed, we were lying there naked, both naked. We were kneeling, and running our fingers over each other’s skin, licking fingers, thumbs, biting earlobes, tentatively, and then at once aggressively, feeling our way around each other’s body: my body, a trifle less nubile than it had
been when I posed for Denis Johns; Mr. Prain’s body, pale, lithe and strong.

It was as if the line of the nursery rhyme had unlocked an erotic peepshow. Cockhorse. Rocking horse, hobby-horse, back and forth, rhythmic riding. Riding. Cock of the walk. Cocky cockalorum. Ride a cock. Cock up.

Stop it. Stop it, I said to myself. I could not stop it. Unbridled sexual passion was happening on the bed behind us while we were staring out of the window, as he recited the history of Banbury. It felt as if the air between us had become tactile, a cushion which pressed against my left arm, shoulder, hip. Word associations and visualisations turned upon each other in a terrible convolution. I felt like I had suddenly, accidentally, opened hardcore porn on the internet when looking through innocent pictures of the English countryside. I wanted him to stop speaking so that we could hurry out of the room, and quit the imagined encounter of the couple on the bed. They kept catching my attention, quickening my heartbeat. The more I tried to listen to his historical resumé, the more I found his words sinking into a background buzz. I was stuck on the porn site. I couldn’t get out.

In the end it became excruciating, and I was forced to suppress a kind of gasp. My eyes watered with the strain, and I felt myself quiver in the attempt to keep silent and still. I felt all at once flushed in the face, and my breathing came far too fast. If he had been some distance away, he may not have noticed what was taking place, but he was near, very near, and, with his keen perception of my every movement,
he immediately recognised the signs of something being stifled. He stopped speaking.