Fictional Lives (6 page)

‘What I have also felt—and feel today more strongly than ever—is a great desire to visit, in my lifetime, as many of those other continents and climates as I can. Oh God, Andrew, you must think I am crazy—but I want to travel, travel, travel!’

To this Andrew replied: ‘No, I don’t think you are crazy, but I do think you are wrong. I’ll agree that England is my conscious reality, as America is yours. But beyond that I won’t go. For I believe that outside of England everything is a dream; or must be considered, for the sake of order and sanity, a dream. (Just as a Frenchman must consider everything outside France a dream; and an Italian etc, etc.) One
has
to live in one’s own reality, and not be tempted by dreams. Or to use your image, one has to stay in the crust that has formed one, and which one helps to form. Because pools (and concepts
such as “total beings”) are too vast, too deep; they are disturbed by treacherous currents; and one can drown in them.

‘Having said which—of course I
am
tempted by dreams, I
should
like to swim—and maybe, one day, I will take you up on your offer of showing me round the States.’

It was soon after he had written this that Andrew became aware of the danger he was in; and abruptly leaving the cottage where he had lived uninterruptedly for the last seventeen years, took the furnished flat in London.

Lucinda, in her next letter, wrote: ‘Seriously, why don’t you come?’ She also wrote, ‘Do you realize we have a rather strange relationship? I feel I know you better than anyone I have ever met in my life.’

A month later: ‘I know this sounds stupid, but—I think I am in love with you.’

For three weeks Andrew didn’t reply. Then, on the morning of 23 September, he could contain himself no longer; and in a state of excitement sent a telegram which read: ‘I think I am with you too.’

But it wasn’t till that afternoon, as he stood in his flat in Queensgate, looking out of the window at the pale autumnal sky, that he told himself—having calmed down now—that what he had said in his telegram was true….

He spent the next month attempting to find some solution to his problem. That there was a solution he didn’t doubt. There had to be. He might be in love with this mysterious Californian; she might be in love with him. But nothing could come of such a love. For if it did, it would involve one or other of them leaving their own country, and settling abroad. Which was out of the question for him; and which he could neither approve of for her, nor wish upon anyone he loved. So—

At the end of October he wrote: ‘You realize our correspondence must come to an end; that the situation is impossible.’

Lucinda’s reply was: ‘Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no reason
for our
correspondence
to end. I don’t see why we can’t have an affair by mail.’

‘Because sooner or later we shall be tempted to meet—or rather will succumb to the temptation to meet.’

‘Well? It might be a good thing. We might hate each other if we actually met. And if you really are afraid of coming here, I can always come to England.’

‘You can’t. Because then you would be a foreigner.’

‘I was only proposing to
visit
you. Not move in, sight unseen. However, if everything were okay when we met, and if you really couldn’t face the idea of living with a foreigner (
I
wouldn’t mind living anywhere if I loved someone, I think), we could spend six months here, six months there. That way we would both be at home for half the year, and the other half would have to be the price to be paid for—well, happiness, or whatever you like to call it.’

‘I think it would be too high a price. It would ruin both of us.’

‘Oh Andrew—do you really think we are so very awful here?’

‘No, of course I don’t. But as I think I’ve said before, aside from the moral (and therefore, ultimately, physical?) danger of living abroad, of trying to live with, through one’s “total being” (sorry to keep throwing that phrase in your face; but by total being what I think you mean is the whole world, and the whole world
is
too big, at least for me; I can only cope with that little segment of it that is called England), I have always considered that one’s own country is like one’s own body. (
Is
one’s own body.) And if this is so, one must not only respect all parts of that body, and try to prevent any one part of it from dictating to, controlling, or abusing the other parts (for if you don’t those other parts will become infected and diseased, and will eventually destroy you), but one must also, I believe (though Christians may not approve, and I may sound
unfortunately 
like some self-help manual), if one is ever to care for something and someone else—or even live in peace with something or someone eke—first care for, and live in peace with, one’s own body. What you are proposing is that we should both desert our own bodies for six months of the year. Which is treason. I can understand how people wish to desert their own bodies for a couple of weeks a year. But for six months? No, no, and no again! In more practical terms, I couldn’t bear to miss a spring here. Or a summer or an autumn. Or a winter. To see how the trees change colour, the birds migrate, the flowers bud, bloom, fade, die—and then bud again. To see how people change from day to day, how their expressions, their moods, their clothes alter with the weather, to see how they cope with crises, with national disasters, or national triumphs—with personal tragedies and personal joys. And above all I couldn’t bear to think that I wasn’t attempting, every single day of my life, and in my tiny, insignificant way—either by writing something, talking to a friend, merely giving someone a direction in the street—to make myself, though it may sound revoltingly priggish,
better.
And by making myself better, making my country better. Improving, if you like, if but minutely, the reality in which I live. There! I’ve never said so much to anyone, and I blush to so expose myself. But that is, essentially, what I believe, what I work for, what I want. And I could not, or cannot, consider renouncing any of it. It would, again, not be
like
renouncing my life—it
would
be renouncing my life.’

Crossly, Lucinda fired back: ‘In one of your books you say “I distrust people who claim to be citizens of the world, and to love all mankind. They tend to be people who are at home nowhere, not even with themselves, and to like no one in particular—least of all themselves.” And I’m with you there. But you go to the opposite extreme. Caring for yourself first might be healthy and good; to care
only
for yourself strikes
me as being as unhealthy and bad as hating yourself. For by your own token, if you do care for your own little part of the world to the exclusion of all else—those other parts might well become infected and diseased, and destroy you.

‘One last point. By writing you say you want to improve yourself/your country. But why
not
widen your scope, and take on the whole world? For aside from the fact that it
isn’t
too big, and that—if you’ll excuse the misquote—“no island is an island”, you wouldn’t at all be renouncing life; you would be living more intensely, more fully. And your books would be correspondingly more intense, more full.’

To this Andrew could give but one reply; and he gave it, in a single sheet of paper. ‘You may well be right. But I am afraid, I am afraid—and the answer must still be no.’

And there, for the next few months, the matter rested. No further word passed between the English writer and the American girl. What Lucinda did with herself Andrew had no idea; what he did was spend two or three days a week in London, meeting as many new people as he could, and the rest of the time in his cottage. He worked. He read. He listened to music. He had friends come to stay with him; he went to stay with friends. Yet through all this period, and though he did get to know several new people whom he liked—becoming particularly fond of an austere reserved woman who was a Labour councillor in Manchester—he could not forget his unknown mistress, as he had come to think of her. In fact, as the weeks went by, from being in love with her he became obsessed with her. He imagined that she was the most beautiful—in every sense of the word—girl in the world. He imagined that she would be the guide to Hell he had been searching for; the one person who would both allow him to see all the sights, and keep him safe. He imagined that she would be the exception to his rule; that she would be the one person who could live in a foreign country, and be loved, without bringing destruction
upon her lover. He imagined even that with her by his side he
would
be able to take on the entire world,
would
be able to cope with it; and would, as a result, and as she had suggested, be able to write a book that really summed the whole thing up; that would, possibly, be an infinitesimally small step in improving the whole sorry business; and would, in any case, be better than anything he had done so far. He thought of her by day, when he worked; he thought of her at night, as he lay in bed. And the more he thought of her the more wonderful she became in his imagination, until she had almost ceased to be a real human being at all. She had become a vision, an ideal, a goddess. She no longer, in his mind, ate, or slept, laughed or talked; she simply hovered above him leading him on, blinding him with her light.

He fought against such nonsense, telling himself that she was just a perfectly ordinary girl who probably had bad breath, a moral squint, and an emotional hunch-back, to whom he would hardly be able to talk if they did meet, and with whom he had nothing at all in common; and telling his friends about his postal affair as it were just a huge joke. But while, when he did tell himself these things, and laughed with his friends, he succeeded in demolishing the image of Lucinda Grey for five minutes, after those five minutes had passed he realized his obsession had grown still greater. He re-read her letters constantly, trying to convince himself that there was nothing special about them, that they didn’t suggest anything special about their writer, and that they were no more than the reasonably intelligent outpourings of some literary groupie, and he looked repeatedly at photographs of Jill, reminding himself that theirs had been a real love—that of two adults who could give themselves to each other without fear that their gift would be mishandled or abused—and repeating to himself that he had only become involved with Lucinda because he was lonely, and loneliness was not to be confused with love.

But it was all no use…. Finally, at the end of March, he could fight no longer. All right, he told himself, he was mad. All right, he was likely to be disillusioned. All right, he was playing with fire. Nevertheless, he
was
in love; and he was going to do something about it. Something practical, such as—

He was never to know what—if he hadn’t, the day after making this resolution, received a phone call from an old friend—he would have done. Though he suspected, even then, it would have been nothing. Because he still didn’t want to go to the States himself, he didn’t want Lucinda to come to England in case she should prove less than ideal, and he could see no other alternative. But he
did,
one late March evening, receive a phone call from an old friend; and that changed everything.

The name of this friend was Fraser; and he was not only an old friend, and a good friend (his oldest, and best; though they didn’t see each other very often, and hadn’t been in touch at all for over nine months) but was also a person who played a particular part in the life of Andrew Stairs.

He was a tall, dark, impeccably dressed man with the sort of clipped British voice that many foreigners thought was the typical British voice, but which many Englishmen—or anyway Andrew, and most of their mutual friends—realized was the voice of an unhappy, at times nearly unbalanced man (it was too clipped; and almost imperceptibly hesitant); and just as Andrew ‘Stayed in England’ so Fraser ‘Travelled’.

‘Looking for love,’ he would invariably say, when asked why he spent most of his adult life travelling through jungles, icy wastes, or the slums of big and foreign cities; and also invariably add, with an ironic laugh, ‘donchyeknow.’ But there again, while the laugh and the expression might have fooled most foreigners and some Englishmen, it did not fool Fraser’s friends; who knew that what he had said was the literal truth. The antithesis of Andrew, he searched the earth looking for
the ideal companion with whom he could go, and stay forever, home. So far—aged forty-four, with three marriages, innumerable affairs, and five books about his travels behind him—he hadn’t found his ideal; and was more and more prepared to admit it was likely he never would. But he hadn’t yet abandoned hope; and knew that until he did—which would come either with his death, or be the cause of his death—he was bound, or doomed, to go on searching.

The particularity of his friendship with Andrew was due not to their diametrically opposed life-styles (that indeed was the explanation of why they were friendly at all; each admired, and envied—though also, if without rancour, pitied and despised—the other’s chosen way), nor even to his sincere profession that Andrew’s books were among the few modern works he unreservedly liked (a profession that Andrew, with equal sincerity, made with regard to Fraser’s books). No, what made it so special was this: Fraser provided Andrew with background material for his novels. If the stay at home novelist had, as his outsider, a literal foreigner (which he did in half his books), and if, for example, he decided that this character were to be Indian, then he would wait till Fraser was in England, invite him to the cottage for a few days, and spend hours—sometimes as many as seven at a stretch—listening as that clipped desperate voice described not just in great detail, but in memorable, and evocative detail, the light, the atmosphere, the smell of the city, or even the village, from which the fictional man or woman came. He would tell Andrew what it was like to buy stamps in a post-office; what the noise-scape of the chosen place was like; what the precise colour of the sky was at dawn. And the—to Andrew—miraculous thing was (which was part of the reason why he admired the man’s books), so totally could Fraser lose himself in these details, so entirely could he
become
the thing he was describing, that he not only saw, heard, smelled all the things he told of from an Indian point
of view—there was no suggestion of the English observer abroad—but also told of them as no Indian that Andrew had ever met had been able to. Possibly because those Indians had been too familiar with their native sights and sounds to be completely aware of them; or possibly because Fraser knew himself better—in Andrew’s opinion—than anyone else in the world. In India, that is, he knew himself as an Indian. Just as in Mongolia, he knew himself as a Mongolian. There was, in fact, only one part of himself that Fraser did not know; only one country he could not describe. That country was England; and it was his lack of insight with regard to England alone that made his self-knowledge less than total. (And explained also, to Andrew’s way of thinking, the desperation in his voice.)