The Back of His Head (34 page)

Out there, I told him. In the garden.

He stared at me briefly: hard, blue, cold. Oh, rot, he said. You've been reading too many of my books.

I couldn't believe it. His tone was hard to judge—impossible. He'd done this sort of thing before:
so many people in the same body
, somebody once said of him.

But he's your
muse
, isn't he, I asked him. The boy?

My muse? he said, and then:
muse!—Jesus
. I've pretty much beaten the shit out of my
him
, if you want to know the truth. You know how these things go. You don't need muses for long once you're up and running.

I remember him turning away from me when he said that. Then he turned back: he's
dead
, he said, as if
that
was
that
. He's dead and he's buried! I
stared
at him when he said that to me, and was to recall it again and again.

He went on speaking as he bustled around the bedroom, talking of other things, speaking of the world. Then he looked up at me: I'm not ready for this fucking speech, he said. What speech? I asked him.

Again, that halt and stare.
What speech
? he said. The keynote speech I'm giving at the conference tomorrow, for Christ's sake!

Conference? I didn't know what he was talking about. Then I remembered—oh, the
conference
.

He was still staring at me.
You
arranged the bloody thing, he said. He shook his head. I'm going to have to finish it on the plane—in the fucking taxi at the other end, probably, the rate I'm going.

The next day he said to me,
you've been behaving very strangely lately
. I was driving him to the terminal.
I'm
behaving strangely? I asked. Yes, he said. Very odd. The others have been talking about it, Dot and so on. And you're not keeping up with your job. Not to put too fine a point on it. You're forgetting things.

What, lavatory not clean enough for you?—me, getting hot under the collar: but he was quite right, of course, I
had
set up the conference for him, months ago, I remembered that now. I'd agreed to their terms, I'd arranged the plane tickets, I'd done everything—and then, it seemed, forgotten the lot. Other things as well, too, apparently, which he itemised as we drove on. I couldn't wait to get him to the airport and myself away from him, he had so much to say.

Later, I sat in the Residence again with not a soul about and the darkness closing in. To this day I don't know what was going on back then, how much of it was mine and how much of it his. He seemed so suddenly
solid
, so real in himself, as if everything that had bewitched and bedevilled him these last several months of writing had been shrugged off him and onto me. Now he was gone, all that faded away. The wind was the wind again, the birds in the trees just birds in the trees. The surge of the bushes was sound and movement, no more than that: the world began to resume again the business of simply being the world. I felt released from something—from the need to
read
everything around me, from the persistent
nag-nag-nag
of meaning.

The old man had just told me to go to Austin, Texas. At the terminal we'd checked his luggage in and then he'd said it, just like that, as if it made complete sense, as if it was the logical next step for us both. You're getting into bad habits working from the house, he told me. It's getting oppressive. If you're going to be my executor you might as well actually
do
the job. All of it. There's going to be more and more of this. Just a couple of the libraries over there, the Ransom Center, that's one of them, they tell me they're keen.

Off you go, he told me. I'm too busy writing. Get it done.

I was utterly surprised—astonished. For one thing, he'd never mentioned the literary executor position before. Suddenly I was listening to him again. It was my first overseas trip alone, and my first venture as something more than just his
bumboy
. So this is what he'd been planning for me, amidst all this chaos! I sat in the darkness of my bedroom, staring out of the window, aware that everything around me was becoming stable again, steady, known, ordinary: and caught quite, quite off my guard.

The critical reaction to this new novel, I remember, was extraordinary. He was a recent Nobel laureate, after all—and local reviewers in particular, by and large, simply pretended that
Other-people
hadn't happened. They looked the other way, embarrassed and confused—even Geneva's reliable supply of anodyne clichés dried up. There were whisperings, but no more: he often wrote like an angel, it was murmured about—something never in dispute—but he'd got to the stage where, sadly, he'd begun to recycle himself. Happens to so many successful writers: even Hemingway. Raymond was repeating himself as farce.

My
, though, didn't the critics overseas know what to make of it when their turn came!
That was then, this is now
, was the kindest thing that was said.
Back to His Old Habits
was a headline to a review in one of the British papers,
Forgotten War?—Forget It
a headline in another. Inevitably there was worse:
an unsavoury theme of his earliest fiction, now forty years old, suddenly returns, like an obsession long suppressed
, according to a reviewer in the
NYRB
:
More young people are being made to suffer
. Another critic was more precise.
What are we supposed to think of what has been done to this boy Anir before the exceptionally disturbing scene in which he is buried, still quite possibly alive? How is this literature?
A disgrace to the Nobel tradition, seemed to be the general consensus. This was about the time of his Manneken-Pis moment, you have to remember, and
Other-people
was—as you might say—of a piece with
it.

All this was taken further in long articles on either side of the Atlantic. Then it developed into something rather more significant, after an angry piece by a young Indian intellectual in London who gathered Raymond's work in with that of a number of Western writers. ‘Stealing Out of Africa: The New Neo-Colonialism' was the title of her piece, her argument simply that these writers had taken for their own ends the experiences of the colonised.
Having none they're aware of themselves
, she states at one point of her essay,
all they want is the feel of ‘the authentic' on their very own page. Every moment they purport to demonstrate their compassion for the non-white underdog, they are in fact taking something from him or from her. They reach out from their own privilege and into Africa, the Pacific, the slums of South America and of South Asia, and, with every word they write, the reality of immiserated poverty and suffering disappears under their ink while the writer walks off with the prizes and awards.
That
is the real atrocity here, and a new form of an old, pernicious evil
. I could feel her anger burning across Raymond and his generation like a hot wind, that withered every word they had written.

Evening, now, at the Residence: I'm doing my chores—the dining table is simply covered in papers.

Geneva is in town at last, evidently, and Marjorie has met her—this news via a text from Semple, written in his customary good taste: MARJ FKG GVA! Something's up, something's up, I know that. Julian has asked me to be here tonight but has refused to say why:
just be there
, he told me. They're up to something, the two of them, but why haven't they told me, if so? Where is Geneva staying? What's going on, what's happening?

Following our last and quite extraordinarily unsatisfactory meeting at the Residence I watched the three of them talking together in the light of Marjorie's headlamps down in front of the garage. Nothing blew back up to me in the surge of the trees. It was obvious, though, that they were plotting something and that it didn't involve me: I could sense the urgency in them. Inevitably, as I sit here now in front of this sprawl of documents, I think of my callow youth and the Master's banishment of me back then.
They
are out there
plotting
, and
I
am in here, no more than a mere factotum—still, in effect, Raymond's abject
bumboy
, all these years after his death.

Instead, the objects of the house press in at me. The carved dresser, for example, to my left as I sit here, the honey-coloured buffet I once liked to think an Henri II original. The voluptuous sculpture of its panels still stops me—that
trompe l'oeil
effect by which something is both true and untrue at the same time, the mind holding both sides of the proposition and so living in two worlds at once, and neither. Clouds, cherubs, leaves, the usual things, but carved, by some lost minor master, into a magical life that's always bewitched me and drawn me into itself. That moment of
liquefaction:
I could always become as much lost in the sideboard's buttery folds and turns as in a book or a symphony.

But not tonight, it seems. Tonight, it's just the work in it I'm aware of, the skill and the labour that made the illusion. Ash, the wood of the panels, according to Eric Butt, and therefore very difficult to carve because of the length of its grain. Ever since he told me this I've been aware of the
thisness
of the thing, its materiality, the way it's put together, the way it sits sturdily on the floor and contains objects. Tonight, I've been trying to trick it back to its magic, closing my eyes and then suddenly opening them again, as if I might catch it returned to its Platonic state—there: I try again, and fail again, and again it goes on being simply a handsome, carved work of some considerable age. Early nineteenth-century, most probably, when (apparently) there was a vogue for northern Italian and southern French work in the style of the first half of sixteenth-century Paris, all of it of the very highest quality.

Things are changing in my world. I've been aware of this for a while now. Oh, how my uncle would have hated the very thought of it, since (he said) it was the sort of thing that only ever happened in books.
Who d'you think you are, Jane Austen's Emma?
—I can hear his voice now, in my mind.
People don't fucking change, there's no narrative curve in life—what, d'you think we're all sitting here on a narrative arc, whizzing along in space? Beginning middle and end? People don't get self-knowledge, they just get worse
—and so on. The usual misanthropic business: except that, for me, for some time now, the world really has begun to seem in different ways, taking me along with it.

That voice of his, for example. It's in my mind, it's imagined and not
out there
anymore. This house. It's around me now, and the sea wind is blowing and whistling in the usual way and making its customary draughts around my ankles: the panes are all darkness and reflection. The usual
mise-en-scène
, in other words—but nothing else, no
frisson
, no lurch of fear: nor, as I say, has there been such for a while. The house no longer looms around and about me when I come in at night, there's no longer that sense I've always had that I'm being enclosed, and entering a mystery—that I'm
entering the forest
. Instead, it feels little more than the Chicken Coop, say, on the rare occasions the Butts are out for the evening and I open its unmemorious door to the vegetal smell of the cooked.

In other words, the Residence seems to have lost its animal capacity to scare the daylights out of me as soon as I'm inside it. A couple of nights ago I turned off every switch in the house and sat alone here in the darkness: I went into the Blue Room and stood still, waiting for the fear to come, waiting to be deliciously engulfed once more. I called my father's name, once, twice, and felt again the small terror of doing so, a little, but I knew he wasn't really there: and that was new, knowing that, and the first time I felt he might really and truly have gone away at last. I stood by the northern wall, close to it, right above the place where the boy is buried, and I thought about that business, too. There've been times when I've almost seen him, lying down there in his rough, hurried grave: almost. This time, though, hardly anything. No: nothing, nothing at all.

On the way out, I try for that precious, sublime
squawk
in the hallway floor once more—and it's just a sound, a woody little creak, just itself.

The painting, then?—here it is, above the stone fireplace, across the table from me now. What an extraordinary thing it still manages to be!
As silly as a wet hen
, Raymond used to call Phylllis behind her back in later years, when the fire had gone out between them and they suddenly found themselves foolish, fond old friends instead. Turning him around to paint his soul was evidence of that silliness—or, alternatively, of an adjacent genius: of some special thing in her, that she could get the effect I've described to you whereby a man begins to steal away from the viewer out of a storm of dots and splashes and improbable tones of grass and earth and sky, to melt away and yet always be just about to turn back to you in every moment, just about to tell you over his shoulder
absolutely everything that he means
. Organic man in person, there and not there, there
because
he's not there, another trick-of-the-eye—
how did she do it?
so many visitors to the Residence have asked me as I've taken them around the place:
it's nothing and something at the same time, nothing and everything
—