My Other Life (29 page)

That night, after putting the boys to bed, Alison was chatty. "Everyone's talking about you these days. They ask me, 'Are you any relation to the writer?' That sort of question." She smiled. "I'm not sure I like it."

I was opening my mail in front of the fire.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"Nothing. Look at this—two publishers have written to ask about my new novel. It's not even finished and they're competing for it. And here's something from the
Observer.
They want to know if I can go to China."

Alison was looking puzzled. "Aren't you glad?"

"Of course."

"Then why do you look so haunted?"

Again I thought: Most writers are balder and smaller than you
expect.
I was entering the members' reading room of the London Library, passing among the men scribbling, some seated at tables, others hunched in leather chairs. There were women writing too, but they seemed altogether more efficient, tidier, less conspicuous. It was a warm room, but with an odor of leather and old bindings, and quiet except for the rattle of pages being turned and the hiss and ping of antique radiators.

With his back to the room, Ian Musprat faced a windowpane that was so black, so stippled with raindrops, it looked liquefied—like a tall, trembling sheet of water which diffused the yellow street lamps of St. James's Square. He clutched his head with bitten fingers. Peering over his shoulder, I could see his open notebook page — crossed-out lines and doodles and,
A distant toilet flushing is like the sound of a human voice, a sigh becoming water and collapsing with a call into a pipe—always a little sad,
and the scattered words and phrases
Humptulips
and
distemper
and
How terribly reassuring.

They were the makings of a poem—I could tell from the way the lines were set out, not reaching the right-hand margin of the page.

Seeing this small, untidy man writing made me respect him, even like him again. Writing made him seem admirable and civilized. This was what he was made for, and I was impressed by his bravery. His posture gave him a look of concentration and struggle, and in his very plainness was an aura of strength. There was also something in his silence, and the way he wrote with the notebook on his lap, that gave him the appearance of a conspirator. He was so engrossed he did not notice me.

At his elbow was a plump volume, its spine printed
Mythologiques— Vol. 3— The Origin of Table Manners.

Only when I stood blocking his light did he look up at me, with the scowling face of a hamster waking from a nap in its nest, and he said, "God, I'm sick of doing this."

"How about a cup of tea?"

"There's a poxy tea shop in Duke Street."

He tripped on the ruck of a carpet leaving the reading room and shouted loudly, "Knickers!" No one stopped writing, though one man looked over the top of his newspaper.

"How long have you been a member of this library?" he asked me on the stairs, under a portrait of T. S. Eliot.

"Since Lady Max insisted I join."

He said nothing in reply.

"What are you writing?" I asked him.

"A desperate piece of crap about hermeneutics."

"Could you elaborate?"

"It's actually an attack on Lévi-Strauss."

"The American blue jeans?"

"The French structuralist," he said. And he smiled. "But that's nice. I'm using that."

In the tea shop I said, "I want to ask you about Lady Max."

Musprat did not reply. He stared at the floor and then blew his nose with a stiff and wrinkled handkerchief that he held balled up in his hand. He then frowned at the thing and said, "I'm disgusting," and stuffed it into his pocket.

Stirring his styrofoam cup of tea with a wooden stick, he said, "I sort of hate her. Sometimes I'd like to punch her in the face." He sucked the tea from the wooden stirrer and said, "Sorry. I know you're a big fan."

"I'm not a fan at all."

He sipped his tea, then faced me with a little more confidence. "You write short stories. Want an idea for one?"

He began to gnaw his wooden stirrer.

"You meet someone early in your career, when you are weak and she is strong. She is bloody rude to you. Time passes. You get a little recognition, and you meet this person again. This time she is very pleasant. She doesn't remember that she was rude. She actually believes she was part of your success. Yet her rudeness is all you remember—the only thing."

He had reduced his wooden stirrer to a mass of wet splinters. He lifted the plastic cup in his thin, anxious fingers.

"The first time Lady Max met me, she more or less mocked me. I knew she didn't fancy me at all. Anyway, why should she? I'm a pig. After I won the Hawthornden, she remembered my name and tried to be nice to me."

"And that's why you want to punch her in the face?"

"No. I think I envy her, actually. I'd like to have her money. I'd like to have a house in the Boltons. I'd like to go around saying, 'I never wear knickers.' That's her war cry, you know."

Having finished the tea, he began chewing the top edge of the Styrofoam cup.

"Her mother's a marchioness. Only a marquis or a marchioness can be addressed as 'the most honorable,'" he said. And he made a face at me. "I'm surprised you don't know that. That's the sort of thing that Americans tend to know."

"Musprat, you are such a dick."

"I hate it when people call me by my last name. It reminds me of school."

"What if Lady Max had fancied you?"

Now he smiled, he was strengthened, as though I had played the wrong card. He looked timidly triumphant. He said, "I should have thought you could tell me a thing or two about that."

That was another thing about the English. They could be so pompous and wordy when they felt they were in the right.

"I haven't touched her, Ian."

"I don't want to know about it," Musprat said, and made it sound like a teasing accusation. "But it's easy to talk about her, because she makes no secret of her life."

"Meaning?"

"She's been to bed with everyone," he said. "Didn't you know that?"

"I guessed," I said. Yet I had not wanted to think about it. "Heavage?" I asked.

"She had a fairly public thing with him," Musprat said. "Most editors have had a leg over her. Most writers in the news. Writing's a sort of aphrodisiac to her. She's very old-fashioned in that way."

"She mentioned Kenneth Tynan."

"They used to show up at parties wearing each other's clothes."

"Do you know a movie producer named Slack?"

"No, but Lady Max does."

I named the men at the dinner party—Marwood the novelist, the South African named Lasch.

"I suppose so. She's fairly rapacious. I know you're shocked and all that, but looking in from the outside, I must say I find it bores me rigid."

In his offhand way, blowing his nose, chewing shreds from his plastic cup, he named others, as though listing people involved in a conspiracy. They included journalists who must have put my name in "Londoner's Diary," publishers who sent me invitations to book launches, museum directors, and the editor of the travel magazine who asked me to write the piece about Brighton. And Walter Van Bellamy. I had thought she'd pulled a few strings, but it was more than that—she had manipulated all the attention that I had been receiving lately. She had tipped a wink to these old lovers, perhaps collecting on a debt from them.

"I'm not shocked," I said. But I was.

I decided to avoid the germ-laden commuters and walked home. It was only when I took a London bus or train in the rush hour that I caught a cold. It was an easy one-hour walk through St. James's Park, past the palace, and through Victoria and Chelsea, then across the river and uphill to Clapham.

Walking along, I thought again about Musprat. He seemed almost virtuous in his detachment and his mockery, and his ragged clothes gave him a look of sincerity, like a mendicant monk. His detachment had given him a perspective. He looked on, he was touched by forgivable envy. His strength was that he had not been lured into Lady Max's orbit.

Putting these questions to him about Lady Max, I understood Musprat better—and that had been the case in my talk to Bellamy, too. Lady Max was the key. She had shown me London, and because it was her London, and seen through her eyes, the city was distorted for me. Yet seeing Lady Max through the eyes of others had helped me to understand London better. And of course she had helped me. The more visible I became, the clearer I could see London, because she had given me access.

The price for this was a sense of woe and a feeling of obligation. What to do about her?

***

She phoned me again several more times. She did not give her name or say hello. She plunged in—"Well?"—and waited impatiently until I thought of something to say, and when I did, my evasiveness seemed to rouse her, as though she liked the challenge of what she took to be my lack of interest. She did not know it was fear.

"I'm afraid I'm not very gregarious."

Even then I did not say her name—still didn't know what to call her.

"We'll see about that." And she hung up.

She regarded me as an interesting problem. But as before, she worked obliquely. From other quarters came more invitations to parties, more offers of writing assignments. A television producer asked me whether I was interested in writing a play for television. Another literary editor inquired about the possibility of my reviewing for him. These were substantial offers, involving contracts and terms, with a promise of serious money.

As with Musprat, knowing these people helped me to know Lady Max better. I could place her now, I understood her society and what she needed, and that was a London knack, being able to put a person in his context. It was not a high-rise city but it was dense, and it sprawled all over the slopes of its river valley. Londoners fitted in, but each was a tight fit.

She phoned me once more, asking whether I was free for dinner that very night.

"No. I have another dinner"—and I did, with Alison, and one of her friends from work.

"Where will you be going?"

I named the restaurant.

She said, "I'd love to join you." She could not have been more blunt.

"And my wife?"

"I don't cope with wives ordinarily, but we do have something in common, she and I."

I could not imagine what that might be, and said so.

"You, dear boy," Lady Max said, but there was a contemptuous edge in her voice.

I resisted, feeling foolish, and out of cowardice canceled the dinner, fearful that Lady Max would show up and make a scene.

After that, I seemed to see her everywhere in London. It was a city of shadows, of memories and suggestions. It was a city of lowered voices, and at this dark and rainy time of year, with all its shining lights and the mirrors of its winter streets, a city of reflections.

It was also a city of look-alikes—people dressed similarly, a familiar hat, that identical coat, the same umbrella. There were London clothes, there was even a London walk. Londoners didn't saunter, they walked with purpose—rarely making eye contact, their faces fixed, chin up—as though going into battle, knowing it was another futile charge. Those people marching down Oxford Street were Londoners, the stragglers were foreign.

In those crowds I often saw Lady Max, her drawn-back hair, her white face, her cloaks and capes, and I believed she was watching me. Anonymity was a valuable asset here, but now I was afraid I had lost mine. Lady Max had shown me the city—its secret places; but now that I had begun to inhabit her London, it seemed that I was exposed. I felt she might turn up anywhere, at any time.

It was easy enough to stay home. Life in London had given me a taste for privacy. Londoners valued their isolation—they liked to be, as Musprat said of himself, in one of his own invented words, "un get-at-able." You could never get lost here the way you could in New York City, but you could hide and not be found.

I loved the seclusion of my house, and my absorption in my novel made me happy. Except for the ring of the telephone (but. it was never she these days, she had stopped calling), I worked without interruption or anxiety. What other cold northern city was so protective that it allowed you to be able to write, undisturbed, of the Honduran jungle? It was the effect of all that winter darkness. Yet even at the end of February there was a suggestion of spring, the first flowers of the year—snowdrops, camellias, some early crocuses, even in the little rectangles of London back gardens the sense of rural England, the residue of the old fertile land—old roots and shrubs, old bulbs and tubers blossoming in the mud.

Then came a sound like a pistol shot, just as sudden, the same shock; the worst, most dreaded noise in London, a loud rapping at your door. It was she again.

London taxis with their engines idling make an unmistakable rattle and clack, an impatient shivering of metal that accompanies the paying of the fare. The door slams, the window is banged shut, still shaking as the cab drives off. All this I was dimly aware of as I sat
upstairs at the back of the house, writing my novel, growing doubtful of its title.

It was an afternoon of white winter light, the flowers in the back gardens showing some small, brilliant tongues of color.

That was when the rapping came, and the doorbell a moment later, and only then did I connect this uninvited visitor to the sound of the taxi.

"Aren't you going to ask me in?"

Nightmare was the right word: it was a mixture of the familiar and the strange. Only in bad dreams did you meet someone you knew in the oddest place—your mother in a locker room; or it might be a total stranger, or someone you feared, in the seclusion of your home.

I wanted her to go away. But she had a slender claim on me, so how could I be rude?

Inside the house, looking at pictures, touching furniture, she said, "This is not at all what I had expected."

Already she was sneering, as though anticipating rejection.