The Back of His Head (13 page)

And there was Mrs Round, too, Mrs A. Round, but I never found out what her first name was because they only ever called her Dot. Dot Round, what a name—she'd been typing up his writing for a hundred years by the time I got there, Mr Lawrence's, and she turned up every afternoon and she typed his stuff up that he writes out in longhand. She reckoned she was the only one could read it. He'd sit down there in the sunroom with this funny little desk thing across his knees and he'd write, it was years since I'd seen someone doing that, you know, writing with a fountain pen? When I ask him for a look at it he says to me, what did you expect, a quill? It's a Parker 51, he says, it's over fifty years old, that pen. That must be worth a bit, I told him, but he never said anything when I said that. He just made sure he took it back off me! And then he went on writing with it—bright blue ink, I remember that—though Val told me he was just going through the motions more and more those days, they reckoned what he was writing wasn't up to much, they just let him write.

And old Dot, she'd turn up each day and type it out for him at the dining table in the front room, page after page of this bullshit. She'd got this old electric typewriter, it used to go like a bloody machinegun—that's what I called her, Machinegun Round, but she didn't seem to like it much when I did that. Dot, she'd say to me, call me Dot. Didn't do her much good in the end, but I'll tell you about that some other time, too. I've got that much to tell you and most of it you won't believe. Oh, yes, and Mr Semple, he told me they were all Catholics, see, I mean everyone at Raymond Lawrence Incorporated, and I said how d'you know that, and he says well, Thom, they've always got colds, that's how you tell whether people are Catholics or Protestants, the Micks have always got a slightly runny nose. And, you know what, it took me a couple of weeks to realise he was pulling my tit?

Right, where are we now on the guided tour?—the Blue Room. Right. At least forty-five minutes it's taken us to get to this end room and he's still going strong, Either-Or, in this big actory voice. But then, that's what he is anyway, a big act. I told him at the end,
you should sell tickets
, and he looks at me like I'm a fly on a fruitcake and he says to me, but we're open for the public good, Mr Ham, that's the point. He used to say it like he was Noddy talking to his dinner,
Hullo Mr Ham, hullo Mr Salad
. This is before he starts calling me Gradus. Anyway:
The Blue Room
, he says in this special voice, like I'm colour-blind, know what I mean, can't see what the bloody colour is when I'm standing there staring at it?
This was added on to the Residence as the Master's fame was beginning to bring him the material rewards he cared for least. Here we find the most treasured
—and off he goes again.

I can't remember it all—what he said, you know—but I can remember what I thought when he was saying it, I thought, we're all onstage now. It was like a play, all for show, everything too neat, like in a museum, and Mr Orr, he's going through the story of Mr Lawrence's life in pictures and I'm thinking,
for God's sake, open a window!
Because it was that muggy in there I couldn't hardly breathe. And of course the main part of the show was up on the wall in amongst the posters and the pictures of the old boy, it was the medal he got in Stockholm, Mr Lawrence, all framed up on the wall and another frame underneath with the citation thing that goes with the medal. Of course it's not the real thing, I found that out later, the real one's in a bank and this is a fake—you wouldn't put a twenty-four carat gold medal up on the wall and then call the public in, would you? But the citation's the real one, apparently, no tricks there, it's bolted to the wall. And the medal looks like a medal, you could have fooled me it was the real thing, I don't know why he tells people it's not. Fakes always look real to me, anyway, I mean, what's the difference if they both look exactly the same? Which one's which?

Well, I'm taking all this in because it's the best part of the tour, and I'm standing there staring at the medal and I'm thinking, how much'd that be worth? And Mr Orr, he stops talking. He hasn't stopped doing his routine since we come up the steps and in the front door, hardly, and now, all of a sudden—boom! I take a look at him and he's just standing there looking up at the medal, and I can't tell you what his face was like, it was that weird. Well, he almost looked nice, that's how different he was, he almost looked like a nice person for a minute, he looked like he wasn't bullshitting and he wasn't putting anyone down—almost like he liked himself after all, just a little bit? Can't describe it. I haven't seen it on him again. He's just staring and staring at the medal, and then he says, very low,
oh, he's a great man. He is a great man
. And I don't know whether he's saying this to me or to himself, because he's not looking at me and I can't hardly hear him, so I don't say anything. To tell you the truth it's all a bit up-close-and-personal for me and I don't really like that, I like to keep things, you know, floating along, how's-your-day sort of thing, know what I mean? So I turn away very slow, and I make out I'm interested in other things, up on the walls and that, and I creep out a bit and into the little hallway the bedrooms go off and I sort of tiptoe back into the dining room after that, back where we started, and I'm standing there wondering, what do I do next? Do I just fuck off there and then, or do I wait for Mr Orr to finish his prayers?—I didn't even know whether I'd got the job or not at that stage.

And then, just like that, there's this loud click downstairs, and this really deep buzz starts up under my feet, you know,
bzzzzz
, and I can feel it in the floorboards, it's really giving them a shake. It's coming up through my feet and after a few seconds this weird thing starts happening—this ever happened to you, Patrick? It's like it's going through the floorboards and up my left leg, and I'm thinking, oh, no, oh bloody
no!
—it starts giving me a silly! The weirdest thing, me standing there watching the elevator platform starting to go down—it leaves this big square hole in the floor by the door when it does that—and I'm getting a hard-on from the vibration!
It's
going down
bzzzzz
and
I'm
going up! And then it stops—the buzzing, I mean, not the hard-on—and you can hear a bit of shuffling down there in the downstairs room, and then it starts up again,
bzzzzz
—and in a few seconds this head comes up through the trapdoor then his shoulders then his body and it's like Old Nick himself, in front of me and coming up out of Hell—I couldn't move!

Then the noise stops—and there he is. He's sitting there, the old man, in a wheelchair on the elevator platform, this little old geezer with a white beard and hair and no rims on his glasses and a bit red in the face—there he is, large as life in front of me—
small
as, I should say, he was small, he was a little bloke, he wasn't that big but I always remember him bigger than he was. There he is in front of me, Mr Raymond Thomas Lawrence, Nobel Prize winner for writing things. And he sits there staring up at me in his wheelchair—I can hear Either-Or behind me all the time this is happening, he's coming back from the Blue Room—he sits there staring at me and staring at me, the old man, like he can see everything, he can see through the front of my jeans. And he says to Mr Orr,
who the hell's this fucking prick
? And then he looks back at me and he does this strange, strange thing, Patrick, he looks me straight in the eye and he fixes me with a wink. He looks straight at me and he winks, and he
fixes me
—

What was I doing in Raymond's world, anyway, why was I living with my uncle in the first place? I know I left him looking very dramatic and forbidding as he turned away from me over that autumn garden fire the time I first glimpsed him, the image of my late father caught in the family album and, hence, his very image in my small young mind. Later, I worked it out: at that point, he was almost the exact age my father would have been when there was that business with the tractor. When he was killed, I mean.

Pater renati
: the family resemblance was remarkable, but the
emotional
impact of things unconsciously recalled and discharged into my very limbs was far greater than that. Seeing him again—in effect, seeing my father coming out of a past I could barely remember—turned me to jelly. It took me several weeks to tremble my way up Cannon Rise again. Those were my first moments of adult life, I suppose, the first times I felt emotions pushing and pulling me at the same time, my body doing something while the rest of me was trying to get away.
The great hee-haw
, Raymond used to call it, not especially helpfully, and at other times he'd say
remember Jacob
. I toiled up his hill, full of apprehension, and leaned against my bike again, under the little red cliff that marked his lower boundary, and could hardly move.

And on this second visit to Raymond's house I found a completely different man. That is how it seemed to me. This time he spotted me first:
Back again?
he called out.
Casing the joint?
Just the voice at first and from behind: he'd been following me up the road from Tony Martin's store down the bottom, with a loaf and a carton of eggs held against his jersey.
Or d'you want to buy the place? Might be a bit beyond your pocket
. I could smell his sweat as he caught up to me.
Come on in, though, come in
, he said, as if an interest in real estate really was what had brought me there. All this lost, of course, on my unlick'd eleven-year-old self.

And, for the next half hour or so, he bewildered me even more, as he took me around the place.

As he did so he assumed the role of a real-estate-agent-cum-tour-guide, pointing out the view at the same time as he showed me his work-desk (
of course, I do my best work downstairs, with the doors open to the garden
). He pulled out the sliding wooden tray in the kitchen to slice his loaf, and demonstrated the gas range, the like of which I'd never seen before in my life—I've never turned that range on in the years since without associating its initial, edgy burst of flame with that first day with him in what was to become the Residence, and, for me, quite soon, a completely new life.
Boof!

There was no elevator in those early days, of course, but he took me down to the garden room under the house via the front steps and the garden itself:
here's
where it happens, he told me.
Here's
where it
really
happens. In that chair there, on that little wooden lap desk thing—it's called
un bureau d'écritoire
—and with paper and a pen! That's how you write books. Forget typewriters, he said. They're the invention of the devil!

And so on: quite a performance for a bookish young lad to take in, I can tell you: it gave me goosebumps.

Isn't it extraordinary, by the way, that I insistently remember the Blue Room as being present when I think back to those times, long before it was actually built more than twenty years later—that I remember it in every detail down to the sofa and the Steinway baby grand, remember him actually taking me through it? A fact that surely casts doubt over every single thing I'm telling you here, I realise that, I really do understand that.

In due course, the tour was done. He stood with me in the kitchen, looking down at me as I stared at the trodden green-and-red linoleum, and at his shoes.

Make me an offer
, he said.
Go on
.

I think you might be my uncle
, I replied.

I've never known what to make of his reaction to this.
Yes, yes, yes
, he said, and turned back towards the room we'd just left.
Now, guess what's special about that piano?

Had he already worked our relationship out, and, if so, how? Not from appearance, since I look little like either parent, as it happens. Was he dismissing a potty intruder, a juvenile would-be Raymond Thomas Lawrence IV? Or had my offer in fact taken him by surprise, and was he playing for time?

Whichever the answer, he always behaved as if my appearance in his life was completely to be expected. As far I could tell, the only surprise was my surname, which had changed with my mother's funeral-baked marriage:
Orr!
he said.
How wonderful! I collect parts of speech!
Prepositions (properly, in my case, a
prepositional conjunction
, as he pointed out) joined things up, and thus were the most important parts of any sentence that really was trying to communicate something.
They control relationship!
he said.
Try to imagine writing anything even slightly complex without them. They're the parts of speech most susceptible to sociolinguistic change, and when you're gaga and you start to forget everything, they're the last parts of speech to go, did you know that? Prepositions? The cockroaches of language, they'll survive everything!

This sort of thing later on, when I was more nearly up to it and had registered that his secretary was
Mrs A. Round
and his cleaner
Mrs During
, and later, when they came along, three of the gardening ladies
Mrs Upton, Mrs Underwood
and
Mrs Overton
and his housekeeper and handyman, hired later,
Mr and Mrs Butt. I'd never employ a verb
, I remember him saying a few years after that, at some drunken
soirée
or other.
They always run off with my objects
. (
What d'you expect
, he demanded when Geneva's unofficial biography came out in due course:
Trott? A bloody verb!
)

A hundred little Raymond moments. The two of us at that piano he tried to deflect me towards on my first time inside his house—the piano I remember, impossibly, as being at the far end of the Blue Room: its propped-up lid, the grave depth of its French-polished finish, the solemnity of its keyboard, the horror of the scales he taught me, the lumbering first rites of the music lesson: eventually I got as far as
Für Elise
: but do so many of us get so very much further? Then the chessboard, with its large, frankly carved wooden pieces, redolent of North Africa and with which, eventually, I became able to play him at the reasonably sophisticated level of Armageddon and lose nevertheless. The art lessons, mainly from books—at this stage Phyllis had yet to paint her series of portraits of him, but he had one or two good local pieces whose depths he tried to explain to my fuddled, uncomprehending schoolboy-brain.

Throughout all this, language—
his
language, his peculiar, made-up version that's always stayed with me in bits and pieces, often with embarrassing results once I took them to school with me.
Acreptic
—for how many years did I use this word to describe something that was
dried up
, before someone asked me what on earth I was talking about?
Slorpent
was another (tired, sleepy), as well as
sloash
(tea),
shrinky
(underfed),
borgent
(overwhelming),
cranidumb
(a small head),
mentulous
(well-hung),
arker
(penis), and
tendacious
(insistently untrue). There were so many more, too, whose meanings I've forgotten—
fleculent, fuscative, casulous, argile
, more. And then his peculiar little phrases:
bombing Dresden
(for serious matters on the lavatory) mystified me until I read some history, but at least
research outlet
was reasonably self-explanatory—he used this phrase only among academics.

Then there was the first time he broke wind in front of me. I'd been coming to his house regularly each weekend until, after about a year, my mother found out. I told him she had done so, and his response was simply to let fly!

I stood there overwhelmed with embarrassment—lost, I can assure you, with no idea at all of what to do in response. Come on! he called out from the kitchen, where he was making a
bestila
. Your turn next! And he wouldn't let me go home until I'd answered with a pathetic, redfaced, humiliated little toot. Hardly worth waiting for, he told me. I wouldn't even put a match to that. The
posterior trumpet
, he said. That's what Pope called it—no, Pope the
writer
, you silly little prick, not John Paul the fucking Second! Popes don't fart—no, hold on—Pope Zephyrius, he
must
have—

And so on. That's how he got me, bit by bit, in the rippling, unfolding
thisness
of him. I've represented the moment he transfixed me in his gaze, and, afterwards, I experienced the work of
that
often enough to know that there,
there
lay his ultimate power over me, his power over everyone. But, for me, to tell the truth, it could almost as easily be added up from the thousand little things that glued me to him after that. He was a man, after all, but then he was also something else that was different from and larger than that, something I still don't fully understand—but which survives him, whatever it is, and as if he has in fact not gone from me at all. It is that in him which stalks his house at night. Yes, I know how mad that sounds. It frightens me, too.

Geneva's voice, dying away from me as I stand here in the smaller quadrangle, outside the English Department. How strange it is to think of
him
, after hearing
her
—we've never met, this woman and I, but I've read her details on her university's website, the dreadful biography made much of amid the endless list of articles about Raymond's work—Raymond Lawrence and the gender trap, Raymond Lawrence and Rainer Maria Rilke, Raymond Lawrence and the Holocaust. More is less. I've gazed at the image of the woman who has produced this rot, at the harmless lemon of her face, her large, unloved bosom and the brave flutter of gauze at her neck.

That such a woman should stand in judgement of such a man
—

Little enough anyone anywhere has written over the years comes near him, as far as I've read, but there's not a sign in
this
woman's writing that she understands anything of him at all. I mean the essence of him, the thing that made him different. His strangeness, his mystery, his genius, his madness. She makes him sound like Anthony Powell.

Bright today, the weather, but cool: the gingko's yellow-green leaves surge above my head. She's rattled me, Geneva, she's rattled me not just by ringing—she's never rung us before—but by what she's had to say.
Audiotapes
. I'll have to call a meeting, of course, of course I will, but, really, I've simply no idea what to make of this sniper shot she's just fired into our midst.
A number of audiotapes
. Her unexpected voice, raw like broken eggs, telling me this from several hundred miles away.
A person of interest
. Geneva Trott, dragging
there
into
here, then
into
now
, where it never belongs.

Ah, God, the present tense
, I remember Raymond saying once—more than once:
how I hate it!
He didn't have to explain.
That's why we write things down
, he said.
The present is so fucking unsatisfactory. That's why we write fiction
. I remember him gesturing about himself.
This is never going to mean anything, is it?—not on its own, not without a little help?

I feel it now, what he meant back then. Here am I, pushing at the letters on my phone, tapping and deleting and starting again,
tap-tap-tap-tap-tap
in a travesty of normal, traditional communication:
mrgncy mtg rsdnce
—I can't type capitals on this thing, I can't even do numbers quickly: it takes so long just to say
7:00pm
. But—
there
: sent at last, to Marjorie and Julian only, at this point, in case Semple is still performing to Cosmo's class a few feet away from me now. Have I sent it, though, or have I saved it?—and how do I find out? How have we got to such a pass as this? Is this how to live in the present?

You can't plot the present, that's the trouble
, my uncle used to say.
You're only safe when it gets away from now and you can start lying, that's when it all starts to add up. That's when it gets real, when the bullshit starts. The bullshit makes it true
.

Back in the car I find I'm trembling slightly, a weakness just above each elbow, nothing much but
a sure sign I need to read something
(Raymond's voice in my ear again) after the deep unsatisfactoriness, the outright
unwrittenness
of the morning.

A curious little episode, by the way, as I drive home from the university, and something that comes about, surely, because of my thinking the various thoughts I've just shared with you. I look in my rear-view mirror—and there, right behind, me is a 1948 Dodge exactly like Raymond's, its bodywork the very same dark damson blue! I'm so shocked I almost swerve off the road. When I look away and look back it's still there—real enough, it seems: and for a few seconds I genuinely do believe it's the old man himself here in the present and after me again, irrational though it might be to think so.