The place, recently established (Mark thought he remembered a delicatessen on the same site only a matter of months earlier), strove after an effect that was not immediately apparent. There was a long mahogany bar, gloomily lit, behind which a dapper but sullen-faced waiter polished glasses. There was a juke-box (silent, to Mark’s relief), dark red flooring and walls, frondy plants in ugly china pots and alcoves in which glistening wooden pews for two confronted one another. It wasn’t until he had been sitting on an uncomfortable barstool for a few minutes feeling as if he had been there for a very long time that he caught sight of a framed reproduction of the Edward Hopper painting of a thirties saloon in night-time New York, with solitary drinkers, and recognised the intention. At that point Paul Stamp arrived. Mark bought two more expensive glasses of wine and agreed to do a piece on twenties and thirties travel writing.
‘How’s Strong going?’
‘He progresses,’ said Mark.
‘You must come across all sorts of interesting people, as they say, in the process.’
‘Some more than others.’
‘He was a great lecher, was he not?’
‘Not spectacularly so,’ said Mark. ‘Outstripped by many.’ He didn’t particularly want to talk about Strong, he found, despite professional compunction. Nor did he particularly want to be in this place; the atmosphere sought after was all too effective: he now felt depressed and as though it might be about two o’clock in the morning.
‘We’ll do a piece on him when the time comes,’ said Stamp. ‘Tie it in with the reviews.’
‘Good.’
They exchanged book talk for a while; Mark experienced his usual combination of boredom and spasmodic uplift. Books were what you lived for and by, and everything pertaining to them induced a responsive twitch, but conversations of this kind were curiously deadening. Stamp discoursed upon the background to a new series on contemporary poets and speculated about a palace revolution in a leading publishing house. Mark watched a girl who had planted herself further down the bar; she had a white face and much black hair and looked to be contemplating suicide, slumped over an empty glass with a dead cigarette in her hand. Probably she was waiting for her washing load to be done at the launderette next door.
‘Ever talked to Edward Curwen?’
‘No,’ said Mark. Curwen, a young man at the time, was a historian who had had the temerity to attack Strong’s Disraeli when it came out in 1934.
‘Didn’t he have some sort of public row with your chap?’
‘Very much so. Why – do you know him?’
‘He lives in the village where we have our weekend place. Doddery but gregarious. I said something about your forthcoming work the other day and there was a certain display of malice at the mention of Strong’s name. You might be interested.’
‘I might,’ said Mark. He made a note of the address.
Stamp got to his feet. ‘Well – good seeing you. I’ll look forward to the travel piece.’ He left, canted slightly sideways by a briefcase filled with review books destined for the nearby business which conveniently rerouted unread books from the shelves of literary editors to the shelves of public libraries, where they presumably remained unread. Mark, after a few moments’ further melancholy contemplation of the wine bar (the black-haired girl had left and was replaced by a couple holding hands in strained silence) went to the British Library where he sat for three hours amid the gentle flutter of paper and the muted footfalls of fellow readers. He had once attempted to estimate the number of hours he had spent in the place and the resulting figure dispirited him. They seemed like a section of a lifetime spent at the coal-face, and while one could hardly complain of uncongenial working conditions there was still a sense of incarceration. When he was a small boy his mother had disapproved of reading in the morning on the grounds that you should be out in the fresh air; she seemed, now, to have had a point.
Diana, arriving late at the gallery, found her employer wrecking the confidence of a young man with a portfolio of lithographs. Suzanne was going through the pictures poker-faced and without uttering, devoting the same three seconds to each one while the young man attempted occasional phrases of expiation. She closed the portfolio, handed it back with her version of a smile, and briskly interrupted him to say that she didn’t feel she could do anything to help just at the moment. The young man left and Suzanne raised her eyes with a look of patient suffering. ‘Poor things. They never learn. Did you have a lovely weekend, darling?’
‘The weather was O.K.’
Suzanne, moving towards her office, stopped and shot a quizzical glance across the magnolia wastes of the gallery’s pile carpet. ‘Mark being difficult?’
‘Not specially,’ said Diana evasively. She had once, in a moment of irritation, confided in Suzanne about some of the areas in which she found Mark unbiddable. Difficult was Suzanne’s word, not hers, and she had subsequently regretted the confidences, which gave Suzanne a subtle vantage point.
‘Mark,’ said Suzanne, ‘is terribly clever of course and basically a very sweet person but he is vague and frightfully wrapped up in his work, which isn’t always fair on you.’
‘Mmn.’ Diana, non-committal, hung up her jacket.
‘Intellectuals are wonderful people to have a relationship with but wearing, and believe me I know.’ Suzanne sighed, portentously. ‘Anyway, all I’m saying, my dear, is that you need to be firm when the occasion demands. I suppose he’s absolutely immersed in this book about what’s-his-name?’
‘Pretty immersed, yes.’
‘I once had a thing with a writer when I was awfully young and what one did feel was that these people are only half in touch with reality. I’m not saying that Mark’s like that but he is just a bit other-worldly at times, bless him. Have you fixed up about going abroad yet?’
‘I’m working on it.’
‘France is the thing now,’ said Suzanne. ‘Everyone’s started going there again since Greece and Portugal got so horrid. I’m going to have a week in the Jura in September. Anyway, let me know as soon as you have dates so that I can get Peggy or someone in to help hold the fort.’ She went into her office and Diana set about drafting the catalogue for a forthcoming exhibition. From time to time her thoughts returned to Dean Close. She found it uncomfortable and rather boring there. The girl and her gay chum weren’t exactly on one’s wavelength and the bed was excruciating. Cooking in that grotty kitchen would soon lose its appeal. She had no particular desire to go there ever again but Mark would be to and fro for months to come, apparently. And there was something puzzling about it all, something she couldn’t put a finger on.
Diana scowled, listing Abstract Suites and Mood Pieces and Studies in Blue and Grey.
Carrie, examining some tiresomely unprosperous geranium cuttings, did not hear the telephone ringing in the yard. She couldn’t stand geraniums – they were a commercial necessity – and she always had an uncomfortable feeling that they knew this and therefore got Botrytis or Phytophthora in protest. Bill appeared at the entrance to the greenhouse. ‘It’s your mum.’
‘Here?’ Carrie, aghast, swung round.
‘No, no, you dope – on the blower. From France. Chuntering on about some letter. Hurry up.’
Hermione’s phone calls were infrequent and usually meant trouble. Either she was coming to London and required Carrie’s presence for a meal or she had had another row with the lawyers and wanted to let off steam or there had been a tiff with whoever she was living with and she needed to complain about how appallingly she had been treated. Her current consort was called Sid; he was twenty years younger than she was, described himself as a painter and had an aggressively well-developed Cockney accent. She had brought him down to Dean Close on a day visit six months ago. He had put his feet up on the sofa in Strong’s study, dropped cigarette ends in the greenhouse seedling beds, and got tipsy on a bottle of brandy Hermione had foraged from the old pantry. Even Bill’s extensive tolerance had snapped. Accordingly, Carrie picke
d up the receiver with a sinking heart; whatever this was it wouldn’t be agreeable.
She said, ‘Hello …’ and Hermione, unavoidably audible, sprang into instant discourse. She wanted to know who the hell this guy Mark Lamming was.
Carrie shrank. She explained about Mark.
‘I should have been told,’ said Hermione. ‘If he’s going to write this book I’m going to be in it, aren’t I? I should have been asked if I agreed. Who on earth said it was O.K. for him to do it and what’s he been doing rooting around in Daddy’s stuff at Dean Close?’
Carrie explained further.
‘Why are you this literary whatever and not me?’
‘Mr Weatherby and I thought you wouldn’t want to be,’ said Carrie. ‘We thought you’d think it was a nuisance.’ It was always simplest, in the end, to be perfectly straightforward with Hermione; her own responses were so irrational and unpredictable that anything else became unnecessarily tortuous and probably wouldn’t get you any further.
‘Well, it would have been,’ said Hermione. ‘And I’m frightfully busy. Sid and I are doing up this heavenly old farmhouse near Sarlat. Except that Weatherby as usual is being absolutely foul about money.’
‘How did you know about Mark Lamming?’ Carrie enquired, cautiously.
‘I’ve had this letter from him, haven’t I? About this radio programme. He wants me to talk about Daddy. He says he can have someone come down here and record me. It would be more amusing if it was for television but I suppose I’ll do it anyway. He says something about possibly coming himself. What’s he like? Is he amusing?’
Carrie said Mark was very nice.
Hermione snorted. ‘Whatever that means. You don’t change, darling. Like getting blood out of a stone. How are all the flowers and how’s thingummy?’
Carrie said that the flowers and Bill were fine.
‘Well, I can’t go on for ever – this is costing a packet and I’m broke, as usual. Sid thinks we should sue Weatherby if he goes on digging his toes in about the bloody Trust. He knows a frightfully clever lawyer in the East End who can deal with other lawyers. If this Mark whatsit comes down here, you’d better come with him.’
‘I can’t,’ said Carrie in a panic. ‘Not possibly.’
‘Don’t be silly. I don’t see why I should be expected to cope with him on my own, especially if he isn’t particularly amusing.’
Hermione rang off. Carrie went back to the greenhouse where the geraniums looked suddenly more resilient, as though defying her. She wondered uneasily exactly what Mark had said in his letter.
Hermione’s prompt response was not the only one produced by Mark’s latest round of correspondence. Edward Curwen, the elderly historian, telephoned to say that he would be very pleased to have a chat about Gilbert Strong and as it happened he was making a trip up to town that very week. Mark arranged to meet him for lunch. He turned out to be sprightly, white-haired and sharp-tongued. After his second glass of wine he said, ‘He was a bit of a shit, between you and me.’
‘In what sense?’
‘Devious. Tricky. Not as straightforward as one would expect from a man of letters – hah! – isn’t that the expression?’ The old man, eighty-three by all accounts, glinted at Mark with very blue eyes. Mark observed that such characteristics were not unknown in literary circles.
‘He was referring to himself as an historian in those days, mind. He liked to call Disraeli a history, not a biography. You’ve read the famous row we had in the TLS?’
‘Of course.’
‘Ah,’ – Curwen leaned forward cosily – ‘but that’s only the half of it. There’s something that didn’t get in there. Want to know what?’
‘I’d love to,’ said Mark.
Curwen held out his glass for replenishment. ‘He tried to buy me off, that’s what. Called halt. Couldn’t take any more. What d’you make of that, eh?’
‘It’s very interesting.’
‘I went for him, you remember, for trivialising history, for going in for fine writing instead of fine interpretation. Boudoir stuff. I was considered an insolent young pup – there was he, a solid fellow, chum of Wells and Galsworthy and God knows who, and there was I, a lecturer in history at Manchester no one had ever heard of. Lèse-majesté. But it got sympathy. The red light was on for that kind of historical biography. And people like a slanging match so the TLS let the correspondence run on and old Strong had to keep on defending himself. No good just making Olympian noises. He had to come down and slog it out in the ring, and he didn’t like it. That was when he got in touch with me privately and suggested we had a drink one evening.’
Mark refilled their glasses.
‘Thanks. Very nice too.’ The old man took a swig; little pink horns of wine-stain remained at each corner of his mouth. The great advantage of the living, Mark reflected, is that they can see to it that they have the last word. The silence – the no doubt infuriated silence – of Gilbert Strong was overwhelming.
‘Took me to his club. All meant to intimidate, see. Said he wondered if it wasn’t time we agreed to disagree and leave it at that. Boring the readership etcetera. I said I thought our discussion was seminal and highly pertinent to the state of historical biography and I’d got plenty still to say. Made noises of deference but I wasn’t really feeling them – I could sense he was rattled and wanted to get shot of the whole thing. And I’d been getting a good deal of support; I didn’t see what harm he could do me. And then he came out with it. There was a Cambridge fellowship going and I was in for it. He must have heard this. As it happened, he said, he had a couple of close friends in the college. At that point I got the message.’
‘Further intimidation?’ said Mark.
‘More than that,’ Curwen went on, smugly. ‘Bribery. If I laid off, he said – all put in a roundabout way, you understand, but clear enough to me – if I laid off he’d have a word with his pals about what a good chap I was basically, over-enthusiasm no bad thing in a young man and so forth, and my chances would shoot up. Alternatively, he implied …’
‘I see,’ said Mark. ‘So of course you said you’d have nothing to do with it.’
Those very blue eyes glinted again (was there somewhere, somehow a whiff of unreliability, like the hint of a blocked drain?). The old man hawked noisily and finished his wine.
‘Naturally. I blasted off another letter to the TLS a few days later. His response was feeble. It’s all there, you’ve seen it.’
‘Yes, indeed. What sort of date would this have been – your meeting with Strong? The correspondence, if I remember rightly, runs from around April to June of 1934.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Curwen, a trifle snappishly. ‘It was fifty years ago, dear boy.’
‘Quite. And, er … the fellowship?’
‘I got it. His pals were less influential than he thought, evidently. Or they weren’t prepared to meddle. Or he didn’t ask them to.’ The old man gazed across the table at Mark, with a kind of smug triumph.
They talked of other things. As they parted Curwen said, ‘Going to put this in your book?’
Mark spoke of enormous quantities of material, difficulties of assimilation, not yet seeing the wood for the trees. He added, ‘By the way, Strong’s club … It would have been the …’
‘Garrick,’ said Curwen promptly. He gave Mark a sideways look. ‘Au revoir then, dear boy. Nice to talk to you.’
Mark made for home. The Garrick at least was correct. As for the rest … Well. Ho, hum. If Curwen hadn’t got this fellowship the case would have been stronger. As it was, there were two interpretations to that, even on his own account. A mischievous old man, clearly. But not necessarily an untruthful one. Another item for the ‘Lies and silences’ file.
He walked across the park, feeling in need of air and exercise. This made him think of a passage in Strong’s diary about taking a woman friend out on the Serpentine and as he stood on the bridge the man seemed to materialise, tweeded and hatted, leaning back from the oars,
the girl at the other end of the boat, hazier but only too conceivable. It sometimes seemed to Mark impossible that the historic past was extinguished, gone; surely it must simply be somewhere else, shunted into another plane of existence, still peopled and active and available if only one could reach it. Despite such evidence as yellowing letters, disintegrating books, and the decease of almost everyone to do with his researches, he found himself disbelieving in organic decay. Somewhere, Strong was still prowling around in that light green knickerbocker suit, or sitting at his desk writing with the scratchy nib pen, or laughing on the Serpentine with a woman.
He leaned on the parapet, watching a gang of French teenagers with a wailing transistor. Tomorrow he would be going to Dean Close. Tomorrow he would see Carrie.
‘I’ve had a letter from your mother. She seems only too happy to say something about your grandfather for the radio programme. So I shall have to get going on that as quickly as possible.’
Carrie, reading a catalogue from some new rose people in Suffolk, said, ‘Mmn.’
‘In fact, I’m thinking of going down there myself.’
Carrie looked up from the catalogue and said in a rush, ‘Yes, that’s a good idea; Ma likes visitors. Yes, I’m sure you should.’
‘I don’t,’ said Mark, looking fixedly out of the window, ‘fancy tackling your mother on my own. What I had in mind was you coming along too.’
‘I can’t,’ said Carrie. ‘Not possibly.’
Bill walked into the kitchen. ‘Can’t what?’
‘Come to France for a few days and visit her mother,’ said Mark.
‘Why not?’ said Bill.
‘The alpines,’ cried Carrie wildly. ‘My clematis. The fertiliser people. The soft cuttings.’
‘No problem. Ron’s got a couple of weeks’ holiday. He’ll pop over and lend a hand.’
‘Good,’ said Mark easily. ‘Maybe next week then. We’ll drive down.’