The Back of His Head (4 page)

And now we sit for a moment, each of us, and think just how spiffing the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Residence really did look in the high summer of 2001–2, when an Austrian crew of astonishing seriousness came over and filmed Raymond pottering about among the lacecaps and the agapanthus. He refused to wear his partial upper denture for the actual interview and consequently looks like Klaus Kinski in
Nosferatu
, with just the two eyeteeth poking down on either side of his mouth. A section of this documentary opens the standard tour of the Raymond Lawrence Residence, which begins downstairs in the garden room with a closed-circuit showing after the signing of the Visitor Book, and then proceeds upstairs via the elevator: when the elevator is working, that is.

‘Oh, and the elevator,' I remind them. ‘Still not working.'

‘It needs replacing,' Julian says. ‘To tell the truth—doesn't it? Isn't that what's wrong? The whole bloody shooting-box? It's Apollo 11 technology, it's another age, it doesn't work anymore—'

A pause. They look at each other, Marjorie at Semple, Semple at Julian, Julian at Marjorie.

Suddenly Semple slams forward in his seat.

‘Fuck it,' he says. ‘Let's just close the place down.'

He holds the pose, looking around at us one by one, then pushes back truculently and waits with his arms folded. Julian looks at me, and I look at Marjorie. This time Marjorie looks at Semple.

‘We can't close it down,' Marjorie says. ‘Can we—?'

‘Got a better suggestion—?'

‘Well, we just
can't
—'

‘For Christ's sake!' Semple slumps forward, his palms on the tabletop again. ‘It's like what Jules just said, it's another age—it's not
now
we need to think of, it's ten years' time—twenty.' He looks around. ‘Kids don't read
books
anymore, they don't read
anything
—what's Raymond fucking Lawrence mean to them? The youngest people that come through the Residence are fifty-something. Readers are dying and illiterate cretins are being born—'

An awful silence in the room.

‘I mean, let's stop kidding ourselves.' He looks around, but not at any one of us in particular. ‘Let's stop
trying
so hard. It's the old, old story and it's caught up with us at last, so let's just face it.'

A slight pause: Marjorie looks at Julian, then at Semple. ‘I'm afraid I'm not quite sure what exactly you're talking about, Robert, dear,' she creaks at him. She looks at me. ‘Any idea?'

‘He means we're past our use-by date.' Julian. ‘That's what you mean, isn't it—?'

‘We're irrelevant.' Semple's voice is so quiet it's disconcerting: I don't think I can handle him sincere. ‘We've got the population of, I dunno, Boston?—a city, I mean, we're the size of a city—'

‘We're a city-state—'

‘No we're
not
a city-state, we're not even good enough for
that
—Athens was a city-state, Singapore's a city-state,
we're
not
anything
. For Christ's sake,
listen
to me, I'm trying to say something important—'

‘
Listen
to you!—we've been doing nothing
but
listen to you all evening, for God's sake—'

‘Order—order—'

‘Oh, order yourself, Peter—'

‘We're so fucking small, we're smeared across the country like Vegemite, we just haven't got the resources, we never have, and we tell ourselves it's not like that anymore, we tell ourselves Ray took us out into the world and we've come of age—it's not true, it's all bullshit, it's just pretending. This
place
is just pretending—' He taps the tabletop with a fingernail. ‘If it wasn't, we wouldn't be talking about closing it down—'

‘
You're
the one talking about closing it down—'

‘We wouldn't have to grovel for support all the time, we wouldn't be talking about money all the time, we'd be lying around talking about art, we'd be endowed by some big corporation, we could have guttering with goldleaf on it and a helicopter pad out the back—we could even have writers in residence, the way we're actually supposed to but we don't, because—guess what, we've got no money to pay them—'

‘Robert!' This is Marjorie: she's sitting back in her chair with her eyes fixed on him and a tiny smile. ‘You're being sincere!—I quite like you like this, I can almost see what all those teenage trollops see in you—'

Suddenly, Julian leans into the discussion. He shifts about and begins to speak to the surface of the dining table.

‘With great reluctance—'

‘Here we go,' Semple sits up.

‘Shut up, Robert.' Marjorie is looking straight at Julian.

‘—I'm moving towards your position, Marjorie.'

‘It was my position first—'

‘Shut
up
, Robert—'

Julian flicks a look at me. ‘Sorry, Peter,' he says. ‘I've given it a lot of thought. We know some of the furniture's worth thousands, and the books.' He sits back and folds his arms. ‘I move that the Trust affirm the principle of selling property items to fund upkeep.'

A stunned pause. I stare at him. I couldn't be more shocked, I really couldn't.

‘Seconded.' Semple. ‘Well done, Jules.' He slaps his palms together a couple of times.

‘Come on, Peter, you have to hold a vote now—'

‘Wait on.' My mind is racing. ‘I don't think it's proper to the item.'

‘Bullshit. You're making that up.'

‘What item
are
we discussing, anyway?'

‘Ah—one. Security. I don't think it relates to security.'

‘No, we're on Item 2, aren't we? Upkeep?'

‘That's no longer Item 2, it's Item 3, I think.'

‘Then we're on Item 2, money—?'

‘We're still on Item 1, security.'

‘He's stalling.'

‘I'd like us to discuss this,' Julian says solemnly. He's not looking at me. ‘It's where we've been heading for years—well, at least five years. We should face up to it and sort it out.' Now he looks at me. ‘I'm not particularly in favour of it, Peter, don't worry, I just think we ought to thrash it out.'

A pause. We all sit there, breathing hard at one other. I stare at him. How could he? How could he
do
this to me?
Julian
, of all people?

In due course, it comes to its end, this latest meeting of the Raymond Lawrence Memorial Trust, with its customary sense of dissipation, its bickering and repetition, its sheer inartistic
ennui
. Each meeting wears me out, each meeting leaves me with the sense of having been the only adult in the room. I watch the others descend the concrete steps and depart through the trees to their cars. They feel so far from me, so little a part of Raymond and what it was that he stood for: yet again I wonder just
what was he playing at
when he appointed them? And now they want to sell him up, to wrap up everything he was and everything he believed in and give it away.

Oh, don't be so melodramatic, Marjorie told me when I said as much just now, towards the end of the meeting. It's the only way to keep the old place going! So it is, I told her: but will it still be the old place once we've done it? And where will
he
be then, what will we have made of him?

That, of course, is the point. But do they understand that?

Outside, I wait at the foot of the ten concrete steps that reach down from the front door of the Residence, and listen to the other three of the Trust disperse in the night. Their cars are down by the garage: a car door slams.
Come on
, I can hear Semple calling.
Shake it up
. Then:
What's that
?

I'm spellbound, trying to catch what they're saying. Is it about me? There's a slight wind, off the sea, enough to stir the leaves. Hard to tell. Once, standing here in the dark after a meeting, I heard Marjorie say,
No, he sleeps in the Residence
, and the quack-rattle-and-bark of their laughter. Now, here it is again—has she said it again? No: Semple instead:
Well done
, he's saying. Then:
bang
, from another car door, and a moment later an engine starts up.

I creep forward, the smell of pine resin and eucalyptus gum in my nostrils, to look through the foliage as the Trust members reverse down the drive
en convoi
, the sweep of headlights creating a ripple of movement in the bushes and the trees around the driveway. I can see Julian waiting down there for the silly red MG or whatever it is that Semple affects: a pause, as he works his wheel this way and that, and then off he goes, blaring down Cannon Rise. Now Marjorie's Mazda Familia moves away behind it.

Well done
—it stays with me, up the steps and through the doorway and as I close and bolt the door. The thought of what they want nags at me as I check the house and turn out its lights.

Marjorie's line about my staying the night here at the Residence has its own unintended irony since, unknown to them—to anyone—I frequently do just that, and intend to do so again tonight. Never on Raymond's bed, naturally, but (almost as great a desecration) on the long sofa in the Blue Room. I know I'm taking a liberty, but I do it simply for that moment when I wake into the room each morning as it slowly illumines. Especially at dawn in midsummer, the slow flush of daylight turns it into a
sanctum sanctorum
and an annunciation of
his
presence: a confirmation that, in some form at least, he is still here, still with us.

More than that, there is a moment, just once a year, when the first light strikes
exactly on the Medal itself
, and holds it, and seems to linger there: but, then, of course, it slowly moves away, having made its statement—having held me as well, having utterly held me in its moment. Just the two of us. The meaning of him, and of his life. And I, his child and servant: in truth, his creation.

Now, I turn the last light off. I know the house blindfold. Through the little hall—
there
, the tight floorboard creak that is always two steps in: I tread it and stand, reassured, in the doorway of the Room, looking for the familiar shapes in the dark, smelling that familiar blue smell. Inviting him: is he here?

Raymond
, I call to him.

Usually it scares me when I do this, as if I'm listening to someone else who's inside me and who shouldn't be there, who shouldn't be.

Raymond?

There've been moments when I've done this and really felt frightened but knew he was there somewhere and turning away from me, always turning away: once, I called his name in the dark and a moment later heard the floorboard creak behind me as he moved off, creeping from me, stealing off into darkness.

Raymond?

Raymond
—

Tonight, though, nothing: I know there's nothing there. The Residence sits around me, inert, harmless, unthreateningly in the present tense, devoid of purpose, oblivious of danger.

I wake to Wednesday and the morning when, as the executor of Raymond's estate, I catch up with correspondence. As ever and yet once more, and so many years after the Master has left us:
still
people asking us for money!

As soon as he began to publish, he told me, they began to write: not often and not many of them, but enough to be rather more than simply irritating. Then, as he became known, then famous, then notorious, the number doubled, then doubled again, then doubled again after that. From once or twice a day the petitions became four and six and eight and then a dozen and sometimes more than a score. Once the Award was announced—well, after a week, we counted nearly seven hundred requests coming in, all of them grovelling for money, demanding money,
crying out
for money.

Often these petitioners rang instead of writing, and sometimes—the Lord help us—they even came to the door! I'd like to be able to say that when they did, they brought out my better side and I began to see in them the pity of the human condition—man's eternal struggle to survive the dust into which he is born. But in fact I thought them rubbish, trash, common folk on the make, people too stupid and uninteresting ever to transcend their inevitable immiseration—or, sometimes, simply too cunning for their own good. One of these idiots, I remember, expected us to invest in a revolutionary new engine of his own devising which, he claimed, ran on
honey
.

Cattle, all of them, but all of them convinced, nevertheless, it seemed, that other people's good fortune should by rights be theirs. I was struck by the simplicity of their assumption:
you have money, it should be mine, send it to me now
. As if the letter from the Nobel committee had somehow got itself misdirected from its proper destination: their own horrid, smelly little letterboxes.

For these people I devised a standard response as soon as I took over the Master's affairs, many years ago now:

Dear Sir/Madam,

The members of the Raymond Lawrence Trust were moved to read of the unfortunate situation in which you claim to spend your life, but not so much so that we feel obliged to do anything about it. If Raymond Lawrence's work does in fact mean something to you, we recommend that you return to it for further consolation and guidance, and particularly to what he has to say about charity. In other words, what Anir is told in
Flatland
is what we tell you, namely that you should regard your misfortune as your fortune, since to do so would free you to discover all the many possibilities the world offers to people who genuinely wish to transcend their heredity.

Yours, etc.

It is important, you will note, never to use their actual name.

Those who rang (or climbed the ten hard steps to the Residence front door, or rattled the knocker here at the building we call the Chicken Coop, up behind and above the Residence) received a shorter shrift, no matter whether the person they met was me (abrupt, cold, contemptuous, brief), Raymond (who always affected to be the gardener) or (by far the most terrifying prospect) Edna Butt, our housekeeper, who would send these people on their way with a fierce bollocking and sound advice from the Book of Proverbs:
Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise! Whoever is slothful will not roast his game!
Of course, these terrible admonitions were no more than the words with which I'd overhear her berating her husband Eric from time to time, along with the occasional uplifting verse to set him on his way again once corrected to mow the Residence lawns and clean its windows, to hew its wood and draw its water.

I mention all this because, as I say, today is the day I always reserve to the business of dealing with the Trust's latest influx from the preterite. Aside from the rubbish just mentioned are the rather more reputable requests we receive regularly from academics across the world soliciting permission to quote from the Master's work or to have access to the various Lawrence collections that are around the country, in the United States and elsewhere—the Raymond Lawrence industry, as you might say. Do I wish to speak about Raymond at a literary conference to the north? Well, since they suggest a fee as well as travel and accommodation expenses, yes, I do. Have I remembered my appointment at 2:00 this afternoon to speak at the local university's creative writing school? Yes, indeed I have. Am I available for a symposium on Raymond Lawrence and music?—more ticklish, this one, and requiring further information. Might a certain young scholar, new to Lawrence studies, quote from certain passages of
Bisque
and
Kerr
? Well, yes, she may, as long as she uses not a word more than is prescribed.

Fair dealing, I like to remind the scholarly world, cuts both ways:
fair
means
fair
. We had our fingers burned early on—this was long ago, when Raymond was still with us—by someone who didn't understand this rule and simply went ahead with an unauthorised biography of sorts, something we first knew about only when it appeared, bristling with mistakes as it turned out to be. Her name? Geneva Trott—
Dr
Geneva Trott, I should say: a name still anathema to the Trust. An English academic in a university to the north who simply walked in and helped herself to the great man's life! Just like that!

Aside from infuriating matters such as these, there are those to do with finance—never-ending and insoluble, as you've already seen—as well as what one might call
safeguarding the Master's name in perpetuity
: the general housekeeping of a literary trust, the chores which, in truth and alas, draw my attention every day of the week in my ongoing role as Keeper of the Flame.

First, though, the business just mentioned, the standard letter to the money-grubbers. Each of them gets the same reply as the first, all those years ago, with the single alteration that it is my name that farewells them now and not Raymond's (although I long ago perfected his signature, three large capitals followed by a dismissive squiggle and a savage, Napoleonic underscore: thus, many people who treasure letters from him do not realise that in fact they treasure letters from me).

From time to time the others on the Trust wonder why I bother to answer these requests at all, given the recent diminution in their volume that I've mentioned. Predictably, Semple joshes me about it:
don't take away his greatest pleasure
, he tells the other two,
don't stop him shitting on people
. I'm happy to admit there's something to this: after all, the Master always said the parts of me he valued most were the parts others valued least and the same as those he liked most in himself. We're joined at the hip, he told me one day. Down in the dirt together! And there's something to that, I'm forced to admit, there's definitely something to that.

At the same time, as I've been saying, these importunities from the great unwashed are diminishing in number, and, despite what I've just told you about them, there is a part of me that sees in that fading-away of attention exactly what I see in the sagging guttering and the exposed bargeboards down the side of the Residence, and which remembers those days (recently,
an entire fortnight
) when no one calls to tour the Residence, no one at all.

I'm talking about the passage of time, and—I can hardly bear even to think it—the slow decay of a culture's memory of its greatest writer and its finest moment. I mean the decay of the
things
in the old man's life, the evidences of his everyday existence, his
desiderata
. His books, for example—
his
books, I mean, the ones that he himself wrote—stacked in bookcases in every room of the Residence and stored elsewhere as well. The other day I found myself pulling one of them out of a shelf as I passed it and catching the undeniable, unanticipated whiff of
mildew
from the pages that I opened, and seeing the foxing near the gutter of each I turned, and the pale damp-stains gathering on them like liver marks on the backs of elderly hands. These are what appear as books begin to age. They're what happen when books remain unopened for a long time. They happen when books remain
unread
—

In other words, however distasteful they are to deal with, these grovelling emails and letters represent at least some kind of ongoing link with the world, some kind of attention, a sort of continuing belief. To tell the truth I've become aware that, on some days, they are almost my only reminder that Raymond ever existed in the first place, and as a result I have found myself (somewhat to my surprise) dwelling on one or two of them a little more than usual and wondering, for a moment, about the individuals who actually wrote them.

Here, for example, in today's intake of two: a woman who claims to have a child with
spina bifida
. I put from thought Semple's shocking joke on this topic, but find myself thinking of something that is, possibly, even worse: that terrible scene in
Frighten Me
, one of Raymond's early novels, where a sick child is abandoned and beaten to death: there is a strong implication that it is eaten as well—
she
, I should say: it's a little girl, and for all one can tell from reading it, she ends up as the protagonist's dinner. But the reader has no idea whether she actually does or doesn't, or (as with everything else in much of that early fiction) what to make of such horror. Or, indeed, what the author himself wishes us to make of it: we simply
submit to the destructive element
, so to speak.

Curious, though, this particular letter's invitation to my soul. Its author has written before and has been rebuffed by means of my standard letter—but now here she is again, restating her case to me. A single mother, down on her luck, with this terrible reminder every day of what fate inflicts so indifferently upon the innocent. Slightly to my surprise, I find myself trying to imagine her, this woman, trying to make her come to life the way one finds a character in a book come creeping into one's reading mind dressed in borrowed flesh and blood and clothes, in that extraordinary conspiracy of separate human imaginaries that fiction (and
only
fiction, as vividly as this) can bring about. I try to make her come to life for me, I try to make her become
real
.

All the same, and in the same moment, I can feel something else as I imagine her, that pulling-away from what this woman must really be. Fiction, Raymond used to tell me, doesn't take you any nearer to anything that has actually happened. Instead, it makes things up. It doesn't recreate anything that has actually been, he told me, it doesn't bring anything back to life. It replaces it, makes it redundant, confirms its death. An obsession of the Master's, this, particularly as he got older and, to be truthful, a little less reliable: art's incapacity to be real, to allow access to the living, breathing world—to change things.
To be consequential:
his words. To make things happen.

All this was at odds with what I'd learned from him when young. Wasn't that the point of art, to redeem reality, wasn't that one of the things he'd been given the Prize for? But he seemed to change, alas, in the years after he won it, and as his illness bit into him. He took his growing obsessions—paranoia, even—too far towards the end of his life, as you will recall. Would that he had stopped where Phyllis Button stopped, pressing and smearing the paint onto the canvas with her fingers—even, later and extraordinarily, using some of her own bodily excrements in a final, desperate effort to make art
real
. Instead, Raymond tried at the end to reach
through
the canvas, so to speak, to what was behind it—in effect, to this lonely woman and her child, to life itself, although in his own peculiar and driven way.

Strangely, disconcertingly, I find myself asking his latter-day questions: who
is
she, what is this life of hers actually like, what is its value, what will she make of it? What can
any
of them
do
, these beggars whom Art leaves behind on its path to Stockholm?

And I find I just can't manage it. I simply can't imagine her. She doesn't belong to the literary world I've always lived in, the world that's made, and still fills, my imagination. It is a world that feeds on humanity—I, of all people, know this, as you will see—and it seems to give back to it by drawing it and teaching it.
But does it really?
Does it
really
do what the citations for the great prizes assure us that it does? Is it
really
about anything at all apart from itself? And, if not, are the great prizes and awards in fact and therefore—meaningless?

These are the questions my uncle has left behind for me, and which frustrated him most, and led him down the strange, lamentable path that he took, in the end, to his terrible death.

She's gone now, this imaginary woman who has written to me this second time. She fluttered briefly in my mind a few moments ago, but she's gone. I choose the standard form onscreen and begin to print it. Here it comes, here it comes, chugging slowly out to me:
Dear Sir/Madam
—

Long before the beggars started to fade a little in number, Raymond's celebrity entered its second stage. Its historical moment came when I spotted a figure one night from the Chicken Coop, a man skulking around the rear of the Residence below. The police were called, an arrest was made, charges were brought: but instead of the occasional would-be-burglar we've had from time to time, this, it turned out, was (so to speak) the first swallow of summer, a genuine lunatic besotted with the idea of Raymond as much as with what Raymond had written, but besotted most of all with the notion that
he himself
had won the Prize.
Fame is the spur
, was Raymond's response, which got somewhere near the heart of the matter: it was as if his celebrity had become a substance, a thing you could touch and take away with you, something you could steal in order to make your life a little better.