The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim (27 page)

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘I’ll have one too.’

As she fetched the bottle of Laphroaig and poured the golden liquid into two glasses, I kept glancing across at her and noticing that she really was in good shape, for a woman of fifty. She and Caroline made me feel ashamed of myself. When I got home, I would have to start going to the gym. And improving my diet. At the moment I seemed to live off nothing but crisps, biscuits, chocolate and, of course, panini. No wonder I had no muscle tone and a spare tyre. I was a disgrace.

‘Cheers,’ she said, coming towards me with the drinks. We clinked glasses, and drank, and then there was a long moment of expectancy, both of us standing there, in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for something to happen. It was my first opportunity to make a decisive move. I missed it.

Sensing this, Alison turned away, with an air of mild disappointment, and noticed that the wall-mounted telephone was blinking at her.

‘One message,’ she said. ‘I wonder if that’s Philip.’

Of course it would be Philip! It would be Philip calling from the airport, to say that his flight had landed fifteen minutes ago, he was just waiting for his luggage to come round on the carousel, and he would be home within the half hour. Phoning to say that he had missed her like crazy and was counting the minutes.

She pressed the button and we both listened to the message.

‘
Hello, darling
,’ said her husband’s voice. ‘
Look, I’m really sorry about this, but the chaps in Thailand are playing silly buggers and now I’m going to have to hop across to Bangkok to see them. With any luck I can get a direct flight from there and it should only set me back a couple of days so I should be back with you on Friday. Does that sound OK? Really sorry, sweetheart. I’ll bring you back something nice and try to make it up to you. All right? Take care, darling. See you Friday.’

After that, the message ran on for a few seconds. Philip wasn’t speaking any more, though. In fact, it was hard to know why he hadn’t hung up more promptly, unless he was particularly anxious that there should be no chance of his wife failing to notice the ambient noise of the airport in the background, and the sing-song voice of the announcer over the PA system, saying:
‘Welcome to Singapore. Passengers in transit are respectfully reminded that it is forbidden to smoke anywhere inside the terminal building. We thank you for your cooperation and wish you a pleasant onward journey
.’

18

And so the only remaining obstacle had been removed at last.

There was a beautiful logic, I suppose, to what happened next, as if we had both always known that it would happen one day; as if it were predetermined. Even so, I’m surprised to find that I can’t remember it in any detail. You always expect the defining, most precious experiences in your life to be stamped indelibly on the memory; and yet for some reason, these often seem to be the first ones to fade and blur. So I’m afraid that I couldn’t tell you much about the next few hours, even if I wanted to. I forget, for instance, the look that Alison gave me just before putting down her glass and kissing me on the mouth for the first time. (Yes, it was left to her to make that move, in the end.) I forget precisely how it felt when she took me by the hand and led me towards the staircase. I forget the sway of her back and the curve of her body as I followed her up the stairs. I forget how the initial coldness of the unused bedroom turned to warmth as she took me in her arms and clasped me against her. I forget how it felt, after so many long, long years, to have another human body in blissful, loving contact with mine: clothes intervening at first, but soon discarded. I forget, now, the texture of her skin, the faint, familiar smell – the smell of homecoming – when my lips touched the back of her neck, the softness of her breasts as I cupped and then kissed them tenderly. I forget the hours that followed, the slow, inevitable rhythms of our lovemaking, how we ebbed and flowed between love and sleep, love and sleep. How we finally woke up in each other’s arms, incredulous to find ourselves together, finally – together and inseparable – in the blue light of a wintry Edinburgh dawn. I forget it all. I forget it all.

As for what followed …

But listen – you know the end of this story, now. Or at least, now that it’s finished, now that Alison and I are together, and happy, now that the whole nightmare of what came before is over and done with, then the story has served its purpose. No need to carry on spilling words on to paper. If we all lived in a state of perfect happiness – no conflicts, no tensions, no neuroses, anxieties, unresolved issues, monstrous personal or political injustices, none of that rubbish – then all the people who run to stories for consolation all the time – they wouldn’t need to do that any more, would they? They wouldn’t need art at all. Which is why I don’t need it, and neither do you, from this point on: you don’t need to read about the plans Alison and I made that morning, you don’t need to hear any of the boring practical details about her separation and divorce, or how we moved into a house in Morningside together a few months later, or how long it took me to get used to having two teenage stepsons, how wary and mistrustful they were of me at first until we took them on our first holiday as a family, to Corsica, and somehow there it all got resolved, the resentment and bad feeling seemed to evaporate under the Mediterranean sun, and …

Well. As I say, you don’t need to know any of that. None of it is true, in any case.

19

No, none of it is true, but do you know what, I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of this writing business. In fact I might even follow in Caroline’s footsteps, and make another attempt to get that Watford writers’ group started up. I reckon some bits of that last chapter were every bit as good as her effort about our holiday in Ireland. Did you like the way that when I was describing the sexy bits, I started every sentence with ‘I forget’? That’s good writing, that is. It took me quite a while to come up with that idea.

And I did enjoy it, I must say. I never knew that making things up could be so satisfying. I did enjoy my little fantasy about Alison, and our night of passion, and our subsequent life together. For a while there it almost felt that I was back in her house, back in her bedroom, that it was really happening, instead of the awful, miserable, fucking predictable truth, which was this:

That I stood there like a block of marble while she did her best to come on to me.

That she eventually gave up, and went upstairs, with the words, ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m wasting my time here, but just in case, Max, I’m going to leave my bedroom door open.’

That I finished my glass of whisky and about ten minutes later went into the hallway where I’d left my suitcase.

That I realized I didn’t know which bedroom I was supposed to be sleeping in, so I went into the sitting room and sat down on the L-shaped sofa and stayed there for a long while with my head in my hands.

That I finally decided I might as well crash out on the sofa and flipped open my suitcase to look for my sponge bag but found myself taking out my father’s blue ring binder instead.

That I glanced through the poems but as usual couldn’t understand a word of them.

That I stared for some time at the title page of the second section.
The Rising Sun: A Memoir.
Knowing that I wasn’t going to like what I found in there.

That I heard the sounds of Alison padding about upstairs, getting ready for bed.

That I waited for the sounds to stop, and then drank some more whisky, and then waited another ten or fifteen minutes, and then went upstairs to use the bathroom, and then listened outside her open bedroom door, listened to her soft, regular, sleepy breathing which I could hear quite clearly in the almost-silence of the house, and then tiptoed back downstairs and picked up the ring binder again and stared at the title page again.

That the last thing I can remember is hearing a car drive by in the snow-dusted street outside, breaking the stillness of the night.

And that I then started to read.

Air

The Rising Sun

June 1987

Last week I was obliged to visit the Strand, in central London, to complete the final paperwork for my departure to Australia; and now, in a few days’ time, I shall be leaving this country at last – perhaps never to return. In the meantime, my trip to London has stirred up some very potent memories, which I feel compelled to set down on paper before I leave.

It did not take as long as I’d expected to complete the formalities at Australia House. After which, finding myself with most of an afternoon to spare, I decided to take a walk into the City. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. I had brought my camera with me – my trusted Kodak Retina Reflex IV, bought in the 1960s, which has never taken a bad picture yet – and wanted to make a permanent record of those places which had once been so familiar to me – if any trace of them still remained.

As I made my way in blazing sunshine down Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, through the long shadow cast by St Paul’s Cathedral and along Cheapside until I could glimpse the massive portico of the Bank of England itself, I realized that it was almost thirty years since I had last walked these streets. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. Everything had changed, in the meantime. Everything. The old City of London, which had been the centre of my universe for a few intense, troubling months towards the fag-end of the 1950s, had witnessed a revolution which even in those far-off days had been considered long overdue. A revolution in architecture, in fashion and now, finally – or so one read in the newspapers – in working practices. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there – the Guildhall and the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange and St Mary-le-Bow – but wedged in amongst them were dozens of new tower blocks, some dating from the benighted 1960s, others only a couple of years old, vaulting, sleek and glittery, like the decade we were now enjoying. The men (there were still not very many women) all wore suits, but these suits seemed sharper and more aggressive than I remembered, and there was not a single bowler hat to be seen. As for the working practices … Well, nearly all of the trading was done on screens now, if reports were to be believed. The face-to-face meetings, the chummy handshakes on the Stock Exchange floor, were consigned to the past. No more deals adumbrated over port and cigars at the Gresham Club; no more business gossip swapped in well-bred undertones at the George and Vulture. Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days – cellophane-wrapped sandwiches brought in at silly prices by outside caterers – never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. What role could I have possibly have played, as an ignorant twenty-one-year-old, in this frantic and impatient new world?

Yes, I had been only twenty-one when I first came to London. Some time in the last few weeks of 1958, it was. I had not been to university, and for two years had tucked myself away in the tedious anonymity of a filing clerk’s job in Lichfield, but some dormant mutinous impulse – my youthful horror, I suppose, at the thought of being stifled in this way for ever – had finally propelled me away from the safety of my home town and my parents’ house and sent me to London – to seek my fortune, as the cliché would have it. Or, if not my fortune, something even more elusive and intangible – my vocation, my destiny. For I had, without telling my family (nor would I have told my friends, if I had any), started writing. Writing! Such presumption would not have been tolerated, if my parents had known about it. My father would have mocked me mercilessly – especially when he discovered that my instincts inclined me towards poetry: and not just poetry, but, worse still, ‘modern’ poetry – that apparently formless, apparently meaningless cultural aberration that was hated above all other things by the middle-brow lower classes. Lichfield, the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, was certainly no place for an aspiring poet in the 1950s; whereas, if rumours were to be believed, London was awash with poets. I envisaged long, wine-fuelled conversations with fellow-poets in the bedsitting rooms of South London suburbs; heady evenings spent in Soho pubs listening to poetry readings in an atmosphere thick with Bohemianism and cigarette smoke. I imagined a life for myself in which I could make the momentous declaration ‘I am a poet’ without attracting incredulity or ridicule.

I have a long story to set down, so I must move it forward. Easily enough, I found a room in a shared house near Highgate Cemetery, and – through the classified advertisements in the
London Evening News
– a temporary job as messenger boy for the stockbroking firm of Walter, Davis & Warren. Their offices were in Telegraph Street, and a large part of my job involved carrying mail by hand to and from the central clearing point for Stock Exchange Member firms in Blossoms Inn: a system which allowed for all settlement transfers and cheques to be delivered within the same day. (Such a thing would not be necessary now, of course, with faxes and electronic transfers.) I was allowed one hour for lunch, between 1 and 2 p.m., and most days I would take it at Hill’s, an old-fashioned City restaurant near Liverpool Street Station, where – if you didn’t mind the green-tiled walls that made it look somewhat like a public lavatory – you could dine on steak and kidney pudding, mashed potatoes and apple crumble for something in the region of half a crown.

Dining alone is a problematic activity. I had no friends in the City, or indeed anywhere in London, and no one to talk to over lunch. Most days, therefore, I would take a book with me – usually a slim volume of contemporary verse, more than likely borrowed from the library in Highgate. The restaurant would be crowded, and at a table for six you might find yourself sharing with five strangers. One day, early in January 1959, I looked up from my book – it was Eliot’s
Four Quartets
– and found a bearded man of about my own age staring at me intently. His fork was poised over a plate of liver and onions but instead of eating, he fixed his eyes on me and declaimed, in a loud and perfectly modulated voice:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

The other diners at our table looked across at both of us in some puzzlement. One of them may even have tutted. To speak to a stranger, in such a loud voice, in a public place, and to make use of such peculiar phraseology, was no doubt considered a grave breach of City protocol. For my own part, I was dumbstruck.

‘Tell me, do you consider Mr Eliot to be a genius,’ my new acquaintance continued, in an insolent tone, ‘or a fraud and a humbug of the first water?’

‘I … I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘Or at least … Well –’ (more boldly, now) ‘– that is to say, in my view – for what my view is worth – I consider him … the greatest living poet. In the English language, that is.’

‘Good. I’m pleased to find myself sitting opposite a man of taste and refinement.’

The man held out his hand, and I shook it. Then he introduced himself: his name was Roger Anstruther. We talked a little more about Eliot, then – touching also, I seem to remember, upon the work of Auden and Frost – but what I remember best about that first conversation was not its substance, but the strange sort of electric thrill which went through me in the presence of this singular and overbearing man. His hair had a slightly reddish tint, his beard was thick but closely trimmed, and although the sobriety of his suit marked him out unmistakeably as a working denizen of the Square Mile, a yellow handkerchief with pale-blue polka dots protruded from his top pocket in a manner that suggested some idiosyncratic sense of personal style – if not actual foppishness.

Abruptly at a quarter to two he rose to his feet and looked at his watch.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘They are playing Fauré at the Wigmore Hall tonight. The E minor quartet among other works. I have booked two tickets for the front row, where I intend to lose myself in delicious mists of French introspection. Here is the other ticket. We shall meet at The Cock and Lion a few doors along the street, at seven o’clock. If you get there first, mine will be a large gin and tonic, with ice. Goodbye.’

He shook my hand again, draped a long, black cashmere overcoat upon his shoulders, and was gone with a flourish. I gazed after him in shocked silence. But when the shock had receded, my predominant emotion was a throbbing, delirious happiness.

Roger Anstruther was, it goes without saying, completely unlike any other man I had ever met in my short, circumscribed life.

Music was his passion and, although he did not perform, his knowledge of the classical repertoire, from the baroque period to the present day, was flawless and comprehensive. But he could also discourse, with absolute authority, on any other branch of the arts. Architecture, painting, drama, the novel – there seemed to be nothing he hadn’t read, seen, heard and thought about. And yet he was only one year older than me. How had he acquired so much knowledge, and experience – and
confidence
, of course – in such a short span of time? The discrepancies between us (magnified as they were by Roger’s grandiloquent, teacherly, sometimes arrogant, sometimes downright bullying manner) could only make me feel more insular, provincial and poorly educated than I had felt before.

So, at any rate, began what I consider to have been my real education. From now on, Roger and I would go out together almost every night. Orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall; experimental theatre in Soho and Bloomsbury; the National Gallery; Kenwood House; poetry readings in windowless basements or the upstairs rooms of shabby Hampstead pubs. And when we could find nothing of that sort to interest us, we would simply walk – walk through the mazy, empty backstreets of London, long into the night, while he pointed out strange architectural features, quirky buildings, forgotten landmarks with some recondite fragment of London history attached to them. Once again, his knowledge seemed inexhaustible. He was enthusiastic, opinionated, fascinating, indefatigable and infuriating, in equal measure. He could be frivolous and loveable; he could also be impatient and cruel. He dominated me completely. It was a relationship which (at first) suited both of our needs perfectly.

Many of our evenings together started directly after work, in a pub called The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, close to Smithfield Market. I would usually get there first, shortly after five o’clock, and buy Roger his gin and tonic while waiting for him to arrive. I had discovered that he worked on the Stock Exchange floor, but not in as exalted a capacity as I might have imagined. He was what used to be known as a ‘Blue Button’ – someone at the very lowest level of the trading hierarchy. Essentially he was, like me, an errand boy, although he was certainly closer to the centre of things than I would ever be. The men who actually traded in shares on the Exchange floor were known as jobbers: they were not allowed to deal directly with members of the public, so they took their orders from the brokers, many of whom had little offices (or ‘boxes’) on the periphery of the floor. The Blue Buttons were intermediaries between the brokers and the jobbers: they carried messages, relayed instructions, and were generally required, during trading hours, to do whatever their jobber instructed them to do, however trivial or eccentric. I couldn’t help thinking that for someone of Roger’s praeternatural intelligence (as I thought of it) and lofty ambition, this job was rather on the demeaning side.

‘Well, I won’t be at it for long,’ he told me one evening, as we sat over our drinks in The Rising Sun, a fug building up inside while flurries of snow continued to swirl along Cloth Fair in the January wind. ‘My disillusionment with the world of high finance is more or less complete.’

These were grand words, you might think, for a man of twenty-two. But this was the tone in which Roger always expressed himself.

‘I always knew that the Stock Market would be a frightful place,’ he continued. ‘But I’d also noticed that the people who worked there – while they invariably seemed to be dreadful bores – never gave the impression of being short of money. Of course, for a lot of them, it’s all inherited from Mummy and Daddy. Most of the brokers have been to Eton – and half the jobbers as well – and we all know that kind of education doesn’t come cheap. But still, they’re making a show of opening the place up to grammar school boys like me, and I reckoned that if I at least got a sense of how large amounts of cash tend to be traded back and forth, then surely some of it would come my way eventually. But I think I was being naive. And besides, I don’t have the temperament for it. I don’t love money enough to want to spend my whole life thinking about it. That’s where I differ from Crispin, you see.’

Crispin Lambert was, I knew, the name of the jobber for whom (or with whom, as Roger preferred to phrase it) he had been assigned to work.

‘How do you get on with him?’ I asked.

‘Oh, well enough,’ he said. ‘He’s decent, I suppose, by the wretched standards of this place. But he’s just a typical product of the system, really. Charm personified, on the surface. If you ever meet him, you’ll think he’s the friendliest fellow you’ve ever set eyes upon. But that’s just a mask for his fundamental ruthlessness. He loves money more than anything else, and he wants money, and he’ll use any means at his disposal to get it. That’s what I mean when I say these people are all such bores. For me, money is a means to an end. I’d use it to travel. To see the world in style. I’d like to be able to afford good seats at the opera. I’d like to be able to own a Picasso or two. But for Crispin and his ilk, money
is
the end. Their aspirations stop there. Well, I’m sorry, but to me that’s just a tedious view of the world. Shallow. Superficial. Nothing to it. I mean, what actually goes on inside the heads of people like that? Where’s their inner life?’