My Other Life (26 page)

"But why shouldn't she? Life is short, and passionate people should have what they want. It makes the world go round, and no one is hurt."

I felt that was true, but she said it with no passion at all.

That day, walking to Kensington Gore from the Albert Memorial, she said, "I don't live far from here. You could see me home."

She took me by a circuitous route, to show me where Stephen Crane had lived off Gloucester Road.

"His common-law wife had been a prostitute, but you know that," she said.

I said yes, but the true answer was no.

"She owned a brothel called the Hotel de Dream in Jacksonville, Florida," Lady Max said. "It's perfect, isn't it? But you're much better than Crane."

She walked briskly—in different shoes—and wore a long black coat and a velvet hat, and she kept slightly ahead of me. Then her white house loomed, looking less white than when I had first seen it, and there were patches of yellow water stains near some decayed gutters and broken downspouts.

At the front gate she said, "Won't you come in?"

It was a winter afternoon, blackening into early dusk.

"I should be moving along. I have to be home by six."

She did not hear my excuses. She batted at some trailing leafless wires of clematis and said, "This has all got to be cut back."

I was still hanging back. She lit a cigarette.

"See me to the door," she said. "Don't worry. I'm not going to eat you."

Fixed to the door was a big brass knocker, very tarnished, of a turtle with a tiny head. You banged its shell.

"I'm not worried," I said. It was impossible not to sound worried when uttering this sentence.

"I have the feeling there is something you want—in your life, in your writing," she said.

She released the cigarette smoke from her mouth, but with so little force that blue trails of it encircled her head.

"What is it?"

I was restless and a bit fearful standing with her in this vast creamy portico of blistered paint. She had exhausted me with her talk, though she was still bright, as though she had drawn off all my energy. I was looking into the little square at the Boltons. I seriously wondered whether there was anything I wanted. My life seemed whole and orderly; there was no emptiness anywhere in it, and so little yearning.

"I've always gotten everything I've wanted."

"That makes two of us," Lady Max said.

I smiled. What more was there to say?

"That is what I'm asking you," she said. "What is it you want now?"

"Very little," I said, surprised that I had said it.

"Then it must be something crucial," Lady Max said.

"I wish my writing was more visible. I work hard doing reviews and they're buried in the back of the paper. My books are reviewed in these roundups, three or four at a time. I'd like a
solus
review. I'm very happy, really. But I'm indoors all the time. That's why I like these outings of ours, I suppose. I don't have any friends."

She said, "That's the proof you're a real writer. How could you write so much or so well and still maintain your friendships?"

It was what I had often said to rationalize my empty afternoons. I liked Lady Max better for defending me this way.

"But you consider me your friend?"

"Sure."

"Then you have plenty of well-wishers," she said, "and you will have everything you want."

What could I say to this? I stammered and tried to begin, but she cut me off.

"It's time for you to go home," she said, as though making the decision for me.

I kissed her cheek.

"I get a kiss," she said, stating it to the darkness behind me.

But I couldn't tell whether this was gratitude or mockery, and I realized even then that I did not know her.

Sometimes it is only when you turn your back on it that the world gives you what you want.

I woke up angry and in a very short time I came to hate Lady Max's promises. I had been content until she made them. Then I disliked myself for hoping. Was it that she had made me want something that I felt was unattainable and did not really deserve? No, it was just a matter of
Don't ask.
I detested the suspense. What you want should be your secret, not spoken aloud. Revealing it had made me feel lonely.

Trying hard not to think about it, I avoided seeing Lady Max. That made life easier. She called three times, and she was sharp and insistent, and I was just dumb and unwilling. It was not only a question of my pride. I had work to do. I turned my back on Lady Max and London. This woman and the world seemed like much the same thing.

I wrote all day at my desk, until the boys returned home. I bought the
Standard
when the Fishmonger's Arms opened. I sat and drank and read, and after a pint or two I went home and made dinner for Alison and the boys. There were whole days when no one spoke to me—days of great serenity and isolation—and I wondered whether I felt this was because I had become a Londoner or that I was a true alien.

But one evening the barman in the Fish said, "Terrible about Jerry," assuming that I knew.

***

He had not known me, but I knew Jerry Scully. I went to Jerry's funeral out of curiosity, because I had never seen a cremation in London. And also I wanted to test my anonymity. My going to this service on a weekday morning in London was a form of open espionage.

I had not liked him much. He sat under the dartboard that no one used and often grunted at the television. He was a carpenter, a "chippy," he called himself, a Derry Catholic who could whip himself into a fury in seconds merely by someone's mention of British troops, or by the sight of a British soldier on the six o'clock news. Watching Jerry, or listening to his talk, I understood the ambushes, the girls who were tarred and feathered for dating British soldiers, the heartless bombings, the fathers shot in front of their children—Jerry approved, Jerry was violent. Now and then I would hear an English person say, "What sort of monster put these bombs in places where they'll kill innocent people?" and I smiled because I knew. It was Jerry.

I happened to be sitting near him once when Prince Charles appeared on the screen. Jerry began to spit. "Fucking bastard," he said with real feeling, as though he had been wounded. I often overheard him, and most of his talk was blaming. In Jerry's eyes, Jerry was Ireland.

But, really, Jerry Scully was a Londoner. He was paid in cash for his carpentry, he also drew the dole, he lived alone, his nose dripped, he was nearsighted and wore old wire-rimmed National Health specs, and when he was not drunk he was tremulous and uncertain, his eyes goggling in thick lenses.

He shouted when he was drunk, and lately he had complained of a sore throat. He was someone for whom drink was a remedy as well as a sickness. Drink made him ill, and then it made him well. He drank more and his sore throat developed a painful lump that no amount of drinking could ease. He found swallowing difficult, though he still shouted hoarsely at the television set in the Fish. The doctor gave him tablets for his throat, and when these had no effect Jerry saw another doctor, who diagnosed throat cancer, and at last a specialist who told him there was nothing that could be done. He stopped going to the Fish. It seemed a very short time later that the barman said, "Terrible about Jerry."

According to his wishes, he was cremated at the cemetery in Earlsfield, on the number 19 bus route, and all the stalwarts from the pub showed up, looking pale and shaky in the thin February light. Some of them looked downright ruined, as though they too were suffering a fatal illness. They had that fearful and unsteady—almost senile—look of dry drunks in the daytime before the public houses opened, and they looked lost here on Trinity Road, so far from the Fish.

There were wreaths of flowers on the steps of the red-brick crematorium—bouquets wrapped in cellophane, and flower baskets, all with messages to Jerry. One was from Mick, the landlord of the Fish. The strangest flower arrangement was a tankard of beer, two feet high, marigolds representing lager, daisies as froth. The men smiled at it, but not because it was clever. One said, "Jerry wouldn't touch that." Jerry drank Guinness.

Filing into the chapel, I heard a wheezing man in front of me say, "These days I get home pissed and want kinky but me missus won't play."

A small organ was gasping a ponderous hymn. We were handed booklets indicating the details of the crematorium service, and a short eulogy was given by a man who, in this glorified furnace, was more a stoker than a priest. He spoke of the immortality of Jerry's soul and the frailty of the human flesh—the brevity of our time on earth and our vanity in thinking that earthly successes mattered. Hearing this, I had a sense of Jerry's being precious and indestructible, and that he had carried the secret of his soul around with him all these years. We prayed for Jerry and ourselves, and afterwards Mick opened the Fish early so that we could have a drink. The drinks were free, so opening the pub at ten-thirty was legal.

Lying on the bar of the Fish that day was the early edition of the
Evening Standard,
the one that all the gamblers bought for the horse races, and in the gossip column, "Londoner's Diary," was a photograph of my face and a short paragraph with the headline "American Author Content to Live in London," as though it were news.

It was a comment on a quotation from my book review of the Henry James letters—though I had no idea that it had been published. I had said in an aside that I regarded London as "the most habitable big city in the world," and the fact that I lived here was proof that I meant it. The diary item mentioned that I was not one of those Anglophile American professors in stiff, matching Burberrys who spent the summer swanking in Belgravia. No, I was a hard-working refugee writing my head off in Clapham. The photograph, printed small and smudgily, flattered me.

I read this three times while the others (who did not know me and would not pay any attention to this section of the
Standard)
reminisced about Jerry. I could not say why I felt there was a close connection between this gratuitous little paragraph about me and dead Jerry Scully—perhaps it had been the preacher's speaking about the vanity of earthly success. I was aware of being absurdly pleased.

And there was more. Reading the diary item, I was reminded that I had not seen the review I had written. I went next door to Patel's and bought the
New Statesman.
My name was printed large on the cover of the magazine, as large as the name of the prime minister (the subject of another article), and my piece was the lead for the week, the most prominent book review I had written.

I often had the feeling that only two people cared about any book review—only two people read it—the reviewer and the reviewed: the person who wrote the piece and the person who wrote the book. It was public correspondence, a letter from one to the other that no one else read. Sometimes—certainly in London—there was a reply, when the reviewed turned reviewer, answering back. But this was Henry James: did anyone else care?

From time to time Musprat called to say he had seen a piece of mine, but he would use the occasion to tell me he had writer's block. No one else commented. But the day after the
New Statesman
appeared, Alison said, "Several people at work today mentioned your review."

It was a scholarly book. My review had not been brilliant. And I doubted whether they had actually read the review. But they had seen my name. The point was that I was now visible. Before this I had been buried in the back pages.

Heavage called me that same week and offered me a new book by Walter Van Bellamy. Had he remembered that I had met Bellamy at Lady Max's? It was
Alarm and Despondency,
Bellamy's first public mention of being treated for depression. It had to be a favorable review, but a thoughtful one, ruminative, discursive. There was nothing crooked about book reviewing, but often a good book was helped on its way, and the reviewer—in helping—rode along with it.

"I think you'll do it rather well," Heavage said. "I can give you fifteen hundred words."

Space was money—the more column inches the larger the check. This was another lead review, and (because of Bellamy, not me) when it appeared it was widely read and quoted. It seemed I was now publicly associated with him.

I was asked to be on the radio to discuss Bellamy's book, on the program
Kaleidoscope,
which was hosted by a small yellow-eyed man in a stained cardigan who had a powerful, growly voice and who belittled Bellamy's work while seeming to praise it. He then asked me leading questions about the book and after a few minutes thanked me out loud, saying my full name, and after a burst of music—it was "I like New York in June"—he said, "And now another curiously different American." He began discussing the new Woody Allen movie. For this I was paid twenty pounds.

Never mind the fee—"money for jam," as Musprat used to say—the fact was that I had begun to exist in London. In my first years in London my agent had arranged for me to see a producer at
Kaleidoscope
—the idea was that I might become a regular contributor—and I had been rebuffed. It was important for me to have at last appeared on the program, because I now saw its triviality.

Was triviality the key to success? After the program, many people mentioned that they had heard me, among them Walter Van Bellamy.

"Dear boy"—he was in a good mood—"I heard you on the wireless."

He invited me to tea at the Charing Cross Hotel. I wondered whether it might be another of his batty ideas, and I also suspected that he might not come. But there he was, big and wild-haired, standing in the lobby, ten minutes early.

"This was once very grand," he said, frowning at the wan cushions of the chairs in the lobby as the Spanish waiter set out the tea things. He was silent a moment. "More and more I find this city insupportable."

I was smiling. "I've just started to like it here."

"Tell me why." He fixed his eyes on me like a headmaster and stared until I spoke.