Mantissa (13 page)

“I didn’t mean anything funny. Naturally I’d break my spine on the way down.”

“I was simply trying to find the sort of general framework that might give scope to your talents. As I understand them.” She shrugs, eyes still down, and stubs out her cigarette. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t really care.”

He goes and sits on the side of the bed, turned towards her.

“I can see it has all sorts of possibilities.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

“Seriously. It’s amazing how you open up a whole new world in a few broad brushstrokes.”

She gives him a hesitant, doubting look, then lowers her head again.

“I think you think it’s just silly.”

“Not at all. Very instructive. I feel I know you ten times better now.”

“It was only a brief outline.”

“They’re often the most revealing.”

She gives him another look through the huge blue-smoked lenses.

“I know you could do it, Miles. If you really tried.”

“One or two minor points still puzzle me slightly. May I…?”

“Please.”

“For instance, why
twenty-four
black guerrillas?”

“It seems the right sort of number. Not that I’m an expert, naturally. You’d have to research that.”

“It’s also the number of letters in the Greek alphabet.”

“Is it? I’d forgotten.” He stares at her. She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t quite see the relevance.”

“Perhaps there isn’t any.”

“I don’t see how there could be. Frankly.”

“And have you by any chance thought of a name for this emotionally very complex female character of yours?”

She reaches out and touches his wrist. “I’m so glad you mentioned that. I don’t want you to feel I’m rejecting all your ideas. Actually, Erato might be just the thing. It’s unusual. I think we should retain that.”

“You don’t think it’s pretty farfetched? Naming a contemporary character after a very obscure minor divinity, who never existed in the first place?”

“I think it’s rather charmingly enigmatic.”

“But surely it would appeal only to the point zero zero one percent of our hopeful readership who have even heard her name, let alone know who she was – or rather, wasn’t?”

“Every little bit counts, Miles.”

He leans across her, supporting himself on an arm, bringing their faces much closer. His eyes are reflected in the smoke-blue lenses. She draws back, hitching the robe higher.

“I have one final question.”

“Yes?”

“How long is it since your impudent little Greek bottom was last tanned?”

“Miles!”

“Erato.”

“I thought we were getting on so well.”

“
You
were getting on so well.”

He removes her glasses, and stares at her. The face looks strangely young now, without the glasses; not a day over twenty, and as innocent as something half that age. She lowers her eyes, then murmurs, “You wouldn’t dare. I’d never forgive you.”

“Just try me. Just inspire me with one more helpful literary suggestion.”

She hitches her robe up again, and looks sideways and downwards.

“I’m sure she’d have thought of something better. If she did exist.”

“And don’t you dare start that again.” He forces her face up and around, so that she has to look him in the eyes. “And don’t give me that butter-wouldn’t-melt look over your ineffably classical nose.”

“Miles, you’re hurting me.”

“Good. Now listen. You may be a goddess of a very inferior and fifth-rate kind. You may be quite a good-looking goddess as goddesses go. Or go-go. You are also your father’s child. In plain language, a by-blow of the randiest old goat in all theology. There is not the tiniest shred of modesty in your entire makeup. Your mind is indistinguishable from that of a nineteen twenties vamp. My true error is not to have got you up as Theda Bara.” He shifts the angle of the face a little. “Or Dietrich in
The Blue Angel.
”

“Miles, please… I don’t know what’s come over you.”

“Your astounding chutzpah has come over me.” He taps the classical nose. “I know your game. You are simply trying to spin out an erotic situation beyond all the bounds of artistic decency.”

“Miles, you’re beginning to frighten me.”

“What you’d really like is for me to tear away that robe and leap on top of you again. If you had the strength I bet you’d leap on top of me instead.”

“Now you’re being horrid.”

“And the only reason you are not over my knees and getting the belting of your life is that I know you’d like nothing better.”

“That’s a beastly thing to say.”

He taps her nose again. “The game’s up, my girl. You’ve played it once too often.”

He leans away, then flicks a thumb and finger imperiously at the chair beside the bed. As instantly as before a lightweight summer suit on a hanger appears on it; a shirt, tie, socks, underclothes; a pair of shoes between its front legs. He stands.

“I’m going to get dressed now. And you’re going to listen.” He dons the shirt, then turns to look at her as he buttons it. “You needn’t think I don’t know what’s behind all this. It’s pure pique on your side. You can’t bear to see me come up with a good idea of my own. And what your exceedingly feeble imitation of a bookish young woman failed totally to hide is your astounding ignorance of what contemporary literature is about. I bet you haven’t even cottoned on to what these grey quilted walls really stand for.” He pauses in the buttoning and looks at her. She shakes her head. “I knew you hadn’t. Grey walls, grey cells. Grey matter?” He taps the side of his head. “Does the drachma begin to drop?”

“It’s all… taking place inside your brain?”

“Brilliant.”

She looks around the walls, up at the domed ceiling, then back at him. “I never realized.”

“Now we’re getting somewhere.” He stoops to pull on his underpants. “The amnesia?”

“I… I thought it was just a way of…”

“Of what?”

“Giving yourself an excuse to write a bit of soft –”

“And we see ourselves as a graduate in English. Jesus.” He turns and takes the trousers from the hanger. “You’ll be telling me next you’ve never even heard of Todorov.”

“Of who?”

“You haven’t, have you?”

“I’m afraid not, Miles. I’m sorry.”

He faces her again, holding the trousers out. “How can one possibly discuss theory with you when you haven’t even read the basic texts?”

“Tell me.”

He pulls the trousers on. “Well… in simple layman’s language, the whole delicate symbolism of the amnesia derived from the ambiguous nature, in both its hypostatic and epiphanic
facies,
of the diegetic processus. Especially in terms of the anagnorisis.” He begins tucking in his shirt. “Thus Dr. Delfie.”

“Dr. Delfie?”

“Obviously.”

“Obviously what, Miles?”

“The futility of trying to deal with it causally.”

“I thought she was trying to deal with it sexually.”

He looks up impatiently from tucking in the shirt.

“The sex was just a metaphor, for heaven’s sake. There has to be some kind of objective correlative for the hermeneutical side of it. Even a child could see that.”

“Yes, Miles.”

He does up the zipper. “It’s too late now.” He sits down and begins to pull on his socks.

“I honestly didn’t realize.”

“Of course not. There was an absolutely first-class final couple of pages to come. Two of the best I’d have ever written. If you hadn’t blundered in like a bloody elephant.”

“Miles, I’m not even nine stone.”

He glances up, with a humorlessly long-suffering grimace. “Look, my love, your body’s all right. It’s just your mind. It’s at least three hundred years out of date.”

“There’s no need to be so angry about it.”

“I’m not angry. I’m just pointing out one or two things for your own good.”

“Everyone’s so dreadfully serious these days.”

He wags a finger, and the sock the other fingers are holding, at her. “I’m glad you brought that up. That’s another thing. There may be a place for humor in ordinary life, but there is none whatever for it in serious modern fiction. I don’t mind wasting an occasional hour strictly in private with you exchanging the kind of badinage you seem so fond of. But if I ever let that sort of thing creep into my published texts, my reputation would turn to ashes overnight.” She sits with her eyes cast down under this tirade. He bends to put on his sock, and goes on slightly less harshly. “It’s a question of priorities. I know you were brought up as a pagan, and you can’t help that. Nor I suppose can you help being landed with a much more profound and difficult field for inspiration than you ever bargained for, though I’m bound to say I think it was a grave mistake picking on someone whose only previous experience was with love ditties. The obvious candidate for the modern novel was your sister Melpomene. I can’t think why she wasn’t chosen. But that’s spilt milk.”

She speaks in a very small voice. “May I ask something?”

He stands, and picks up the tie from the back of the chair.

“Of course.”

“I can’t quite understand, if there’s a place for humor in ordinary life, why there can’t also be one in the novel. I thought it was meant to reflect life.”

He leaves the tie hanging untied around his neck, and puts his hands on his hips.

“Oh God. I honestly don’t know where to begin with you.” He bends forward slightly. “The reflective novel is sixty years dead, Erato. What do you think modernism was about? Let alone post-modernism. Even the dumbest students know it’s a
reflexive
medium now, not a reflective one. Do you even know what
that
means?”

She shakes her head, avoiding his eyes. What she pretended in the story of the satyr seems at present to be taking place literally; she looks not a day over seventeen, a high-school student being forced to confess that she has not done her homework. He leans forward, tapping one extended forefinger with the other.

“Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction. First, it has fully accepted that it is only fiction, can only be fiction, will never be anything but fiction, and therefore has no business at all tampering with real life or reality. Right?”

He waits. She nods meekly.

“Second. The natural consequence of this is that writing
about
fiction has become a far more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s one of the best ways you can tell the true novelist nowadays. He’s not going to waste his time over the messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper.”

She looks up. “But –”

“Yes, all right. Obviously he has at some point to write something, just to show how irrelevant and unnecessary the actual writing part of it is. But that’s all.” He starts tying his tie. “I’m putting this in the simplest terms for you. Are you with me so far?”

She nods. He ties his tie.

“Third, and most important. At the creative level there is in any case no connection whatever between author and text. They are two entirely separate things. Nothing, but nothing, is to be inferred or deduced from one to the other, and in either direction. The deconstructivists have proved that beyond a shadow of doubt. The author’s role is purely fortuitous and agential. He has no more significant a status than the bookshop assistant or the librarian who hands the text
qua
object to the reader.”

“Why do writers still put their names on the title page, Miles?” She looks timidly up. “I’m only asking.”

“Because most of them are like you. Quite incredibly behind the times. And hair-raisingly vain. Most of them are still under the positively medieval illusion that they write their own books.”

“I honestly didn’t realize.”

“If you want story, character, suspense, description, all that antiquated nonsense from pre-modernist times, then go to the cinema. Or read comics. You do not come to a serious modern writer. Like me.”

“No, Miles.”

He realizes something has gone wrong with the knot of his tie; and rather irritatedly pulls it apart, then starts the tying again.

“Our one priority now is mode of discourse, function of discourse, status of discourse. Its metaphoricality, its disconnectedness, its totally ateleological self-containedness.”

“Yes, Miles.”

“I know you thought you were half teasing just now, but I consider it symptomatic of your ridiculously outdated views. You really haven’t a hope of inspiring anything worth even doctorate-level analysis when your first thought is always the same: how quickly you can get people’s clothes off and have them hop into bed. It’s absurd. Like thinking bow-and-arrow in the age of the neutron bomb.” He surveys her bent head. “I know you’re a harmless enough creature at heart and I do feel a certain affection for you. Actually you’d have made an excellent geisha girl. But you have got most terribly and hopelessly out of touch. Before you started interfering today the sexual component was absolutely clinical – if I may say so, rather cleverly deprived of all eroticism.” He pulls down the shirt collar, and gives the better knot of the second tying a last little tightening. “Clearly metaphysical in intent, at least to academic readers, who are the only ones who count nowadays. Then in you come, the whole neatly balanced structure’s blown to smithereens, it all has to be flogged to death, sent up, trivialized, adulterated to suit the vulgarest mass-market taste. It’s ruined now. Quite impossible. Is my tie straight?”

“Yes. And I’m terribly sorry.”

He sits again to put on his shoes.

“Look, I’ll be quite candid, Erato. Let’s face it, this isn’t the first time by any means we’ve had this sort of time-wasting trouble together. I’m not denying you can be quite helpful over one or two elementary aspects of the so-called female mind – inasmuch as the fundamental preoccupation of the modern novel still unfortunately has to be mediated through various superficial masks and props, alias men and women. But I don’t think you’ve ever understood the creative mind. You’re like a certain kind of editor. In the end you always want to write the whole damned book yourself. It’s just not on. I mean, if you want to write books, go off and write them yourself. You easily could, there’s a growing audience for a certain kind of women’s novel these days. ‘He rammed his four-letter thing up my four-letter thing’ – that sort of stuff.” He gives his shoelaces a final firm pull. “Read Jong.”