Diana came padding from the bathroom with a towel round her. ‘Suzanne wants us to go round for a drink next Thursday to meet this Japanese girl we’re going to exhibit.’
‘Presumably you mean her works, rather than the girl. That you intend to exhibit. I’m afraid, though, I’ll be at Dean Close then. I’m going down for three days next week.’
‘Three days! I thought it was so uncomfortable.’
‘It is. At least the bed is. But what else can I do? This stuff has got to be gone through.’
‘Couldn’t you bring it back here? In batches.’
‘I don’t think she’d be very keen on that,’ said Mark after a moment’s hesitation.
‘Or get it photocopied?’
Mark pulled a face. ‘Far too expensive. There’s so much.’
‘And how long will it take? Going through it all?’
He sighed. ‘I don’t know.’
In fact, six to eight months, he reckoned, depending on how often and for how long he went down. There would have to be some arrangement about food. He would have to get her to let him pay her something. The alternative would be to go along to the pub in the village, which had the usual kind of pub thing, but he didn’t fancy the idea of that and it seemed positively unfriendly. She had said, in her vague and slightly off-hand way, admittedly, that it would be quite O.K. for him to have something with her and Bill at lunch-time and in the evenings. She had also said, previously and that also without absolute conviction, or so he decided to think, that she supposed it might be simpler if he took some of the stuff away with him.
Diana, now, was dressed. She wore a cream linen skirt and a green silk shirt and was putting into a carrier bag the dress into which she would change for the private view. She went down to the kitchen and Mark got up. By the time he too came down she was ready to leave; this, in fact, was the usual pattern of their mornings when Mark was going to the library. On some days he worked at home.
‘I’ll see you at the gallery, then. Six o’clock.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ’Bye, darling.’
She went. The front door banged and as soon as she was gone he had a vision of her, quite extraordinarily vivid, walking down the street with her quick impatient strides, a vision so forceful that he had to rush to the window and there indeed she was, at exactly the point he had imagined, by the lamp-post on the corner, slowing down to cross the road. He went back to the kitchen to finish his coffee, a little embarrassed by his own impulse but thinking that such certainties of prediction were one of the rewards of intimacy with a person. He did not always know precisely what Diana was likely to say or how she might respond to something, but her physical appearance was like some natural law: unwavering and immutable.
Interestingly, Strong was becoming somewhat like this. One of the oddities of intimacy with Strong, though, was that Mark could never pin any particular age on him. One’s friends and relations, after all, were rooted in their familiar appearance of now, today, even if one had known them for long enough to retain images of their younger selves. But Strong he knew over a lifetime and all of him at once: there was schoolboy Strong, writing those creaking letters to his mother, and the young Strong, living it up in the early 1900s, and ebullient Strong as a man about town in his thirties, and Strong at fifty beginning to pontificate and Strong the sage, surveying the world from behind the Niagara Fall of his beard. The man had mutated from a cherubic creature in billowing white dress seated on his mother’s knee to the well-known whiskered face that gazed from the Cecil Beaton photograph. It was all very confusing; these figures reared up on top of one another so that he could never see any of them in isolation. Twenty-five-year-old Strong sheltered the sage, and Mark could not split them apart. He contemplated Strong all the time with the wisdom of foresight; it struck him at wild moments that a revealing new approach to biography would be to take a chap whose fate you did not know and move onwards year by year, as innocent as in life itself. ‘Ignorant of our ends,’ Strong had written somewhere, ‘we endure our present. I may be knocked down by a bus tomorrow, which distresses me a great deal less than the fact that my tooth aches today.’ Mark, possessed of knowledge that Strong did not have, could read these words with a certain furtive superiority, knowing that the man would die in his bed aged eighty, complaining that the tea he had been brought lacked sugar. On a day of rain and wind, when the first daffodils were out in the garden at Dean Close and Mark was seventeen and had never heard of Gilbert Strong.
When Strong was fifty-five and beginning to pontificate, encouraged by the acclaim for Disraeli, he had published the Memoir, whose opening words were ‘I am, I believe, a reasonably honest man.’ One of the more disturbing processes of Mark’s growing intimacy with Strong had been the gradual erosion of his faith in the memoir. The alternative versions that he had now read or been related of various events or relationships recounted in it had made him realise that that limpid, slightly self-mocking document was as unreliable as … well, as unreliable as most testimony by anyone about anything. He had become aware – uncomfortably aware – of the unreliability of one’s own testimony; sometimes he listened to his own edited or amended accounts of things, as related to Diana or to friends. He remembered, as a small boy, being exhorted to tell the truth; at that point one had been given the impression that this was a perfectly simple matter – you did not say that things had happened which had not, neither did you say that things which had not happened had. What was not explained was the wealth of complexity surrounding this basic maxim. It made you wonder how children ever learned to cope; in a sense, of course, they didn’t – they merely grew up.
The memoir, then, was no longer the same document as the one he had read first some two years ago; it was coloured now by the wisdoms of his knowledge of Strong. For instance, Strong’s picture of his first marriage as of such basic solidity as to be unshaken by his occasional weaknesses for other women was not endorsed by the recollections of others. For them, Mrs Strong was much put-upon and Strong distinctly callous; but then, unsettlingly, there were one or two who described her as drab and obstinate and Strong as patient under fairly unendurable circumstances. It was rather like friendship; that unclouded vision of a person only partly known vanishes behind the turbulence of the whole being.
He left the house and set off for the tube station. The Lammings, mainly because of Mark’s choice of a financially insecure career, lived in an even smaller and even more uncentral house than those of most of the people they knew. It was the existence of a very small income from money inherited from an aunt that made things possible; there was always that to fall back on if absolutely nothing else was coming in from advances, royalties, reviewing, the odd lecture and so forth, plus Diana’s earnings from the gallery. Mark had contemplated, in his last year at Cambridge, an academic career. He could probably, he reckoned, achieve it; he was not regarded as an outstanding student but an extremely able one and lesser men than he got research grants and subsequent lectureships. There would be competition, but the odds were that he would be up to it. Indeed, if the aunt had not died just then and provided that disproportionately significant little economic cushion he would probably have become an academic, willy-nilly. But he would prefer – oh, he knew that he would infinitely prefer – to be that old-fashioned and indeed barely surviving figure, a man of letters. He wanted to live by writing, to live by literature, indeed. He knew, even at that stage, what he wanted to write: not the novels that so many of his friends had up their sleeves, but substantial books about other books. Biographies. Criticism. Essays, if such a word might be uttered nowadays. But not from the confines of an Eng. Lit. department. From the market place, fair and square, as was done in more spacious times.
‘It’s going to be hard going,’ said Diana, shrewdly, at twenty-six. ‘But it’s stylish. If you’re going to be poor it’s not a bad thing to be poor doing.’ She was not, then, employed by Suzanne Handley-Cox but this line of thinking was one, Mark subsequently noted, fav
oured in a rather different sense at the gallery, where the line was that artists expect, after all, to be disadvantaged as the price of doing what they want to do, thus making it all right to require very large commissions for selling their work.
It had been hard going. Grub Street, he had realised during his first few years, is still alive and well. He had gone whoring after literary editors and written copiously on almost anything. He had even been a television critic for a while – he who detested that medium. He had been writer in residence at anything that would have him – libraries, polytechnics, universities. His nerve, from time to time, had wavered; he had cast an envious eye at the cosy nursery world of the institutional salary with index-linked pension scheme. So, presumably, had Diana. But Diana, despite her taste for a way of life that included at least a bare minimum of cultural comforts by way of theatres, concerts, travel and nice clothes, was possessed of an interesting tenacity. If Mark had set out to live by books, then live by books was what he should do. When his resolution faltered, it was Diana’s that kept him going.
And initial small successes had been followed by larger ones, culminating in the Wilkie Collins biography which had had a highly satisfactory reception and got him an Arts Council bursary, which had made one year at least free from a financial crisis, and the favours of literary editors. People knew his name; Diana, especially, appreciated this. Things were not too bad at all, in fact as good as could ever have been expected. What disconcerted was the rapid dash of time and the hardening thereby of certain circumstances: Mark, catching sight of himself in mirrors, was always taken aback by that receding hairline; and the decision whether or not to have a baby, postponed year after year, had become, tacitly, a condition of childlessness that would not, now, be altered. Or, rather, not altered deliberately.
His destination, today, was the London Library. He was at that stage in the total assimilation of Strong and all that pertained to him which necessitated scanning innumerable minor works of minor contemporaries of Strong’s in order to complete the picture of the period. The major stuff he already knew, of course, but the book was planned not just as a discussion of Strong’s life and work but of these in relation to their setting, and the truthful account of a time includes that which perishes as well as that which survives. Indeed, reading some of these almost forgotten names, the foundering of reputations seemed to Mark a very haphazard business. Several of these people read just as well as early De la Mare, say, and a darn sight better than Galsworthy, and compared not at all badly with Strong himself.
At five-thirty he packed up and set off on foot for the gallery, which lay on the outer edges of the West End gallery circuit. The private view, when he arrived, was in full swing. Diana was circulating briskly with a tray of glasses and greeted him with a quick kiss and a look of approval; presumably she had been thinking he might yet chicken out. Suzanne Handley-Cox was standing at the door to her office with an expression of alert aggression, like a traffic-warden about to strike. The exhibitor was the wife of a young poet and the room was stiff with his cronies, all drinking more than the gallery budgeted for on these occasions. Several of them were already well away and furthermore it was abundantly clear that they were not the kind of people who were going to buy pictures, nor indeed were in any position to do so. There was an atmosphere of genial impecuniousness, which presumably accounted for Suzanne’s grim expression just as much as the dwindling row of wine bottles.
Diana, whisking past, hissed, ‘Go and break up the guy in the thermal vest and Rosburg.’
David Rosburg, an influential art critic, if you thought about such people in such terms, was cornered between a large piece of sculpture (not part of the exhibition) and a young man dressed in check sponge-bag trousers and a thermal vest worn over a T-shirt. Mark said, ‘Who is he?’
‘One of these damn poets.’
Mark joined the group, of which the sculpture, a glowering bronze head, seemed an integral part. He had nothing against poets; he had written a bit of poetry himself in his time, though his assessment of its quality had prevented him from ever trying to get any published. That was the trouble with an education in literary criticism; it induced a chilling candour about your own efforts. The two of them were maintaining a spasmodic conversation about the exhibition, into which Mark helpfully insinuated himself, which had the effect of drying it up altogether. Rosburg explained to the poet that Mark was writing the official biography of er, Gosse; Mark set this right as briefly as possible while staring furtively at the poet’s upper half, fascinated by the concept of the vest on top of the T-shirt, which seemed to imply either great sartorial originality or desperation of some kind. The poet remained basically silent, except for occasional sounds of acquiescence; Rosburg, finishing his glass and beaming a glance over Mark’s shoulder in search of further supplies, launched suddenly into an attack on a fellow critic’s account of another exhibition. Mark, listening just sufficiently to be able to interpose reasonably anodyne comments at appropriate moments, continued to ponder the poet, who continued to stand there. It was interesting, he thought, how the interpretation of appearances was a skill – or mechanism – acquired as unconsciously and undeliberately as children acquire language. You simply, over the years, adjust the eye and the expectations in tune with what they are offered. You learn your own society without really setting out to, which is one of the reasons it is so extraordinarily difficult to penetrate others. This chap, for instance, with his gear and his rather butch appearance (crewcut, last shave yesterday) would be one of these performance poets or whatever they call themselves, based in the north somewhere, with a cheery contempt for this kind of scene. Diana, at that moment, hove within reach bearing a tray of filled glasses towards which Rosburg canted himself, still talking; someone stepped sharply backwards into Diana’s path, the tray wavered and in distressingly slow motion tipped sideways, the glasses avalanching to the floor quite silently amid the remorseless clatter of conversation. Diana, grim-faced, sped in search of clearing-up equipment; Rosburg, twittering, began to pick up such glasses as had survived.
The poet said, ‘Hadn’t one better help?’
‘No,’ said Mark. ‘It’s the kind of thing my wife prefers to see to herself.’ He turned his back on the commotion. ‘You … write?’
‘Not in the sense you probably mean. I’m doing research in early Elizabethan verse. For a PhD.’ He smiled kindly. ‘I’m really here under false pretences. Fiona’s a sort of cousin of mine, and said come along, anyone can.’
‘Ah,’ said Mark. After a moment he asked, ‘Where do you come from?’
‘Brighton,’ said the not-poet, now evidently puzzled.
Mark sighed. The other thing one learns, or at any rate should bear in mind, is that nothing is ever quite as it seems. There was a flurry around them now as Diana returned with dustpan, brush and cloths. He took the opportunity to move out into the room. A man in a leather coat and peaked cap was pushing his way around selling copies of a poetry magazine from a large canvas shoulder-bag of the kind that postmen carry. He did indeed look vaguely official, as though he might have strayed in from the street, which was perhaps why it took Suzanne Handley-Cox some while to cotton on to what he was up to. When she did her expression became even more aggressive; clearly she considered that if any business was being done around here it should be done by her. Eventually she forged her way across the room towards him and invited him to leave the bag by the coat-stand on the grounds that it was causing an obstruction. Indeed, it was hardly possible to move in the room now. Diana, passing Mark, muttered indignantly, ‘Top limit of forty, Suzanne said, and look at them!’
But the cohesive force of any gathering has its point of disintegration, arrived at tonight some fifteen minutes or so after Suzanne had pointedly removed the last of the bottles from the side-table. The gallery emptied, as though the street had acquired some power of suction. Mark, Diana and Suzanne were left alone. Suzanne said merely, ‘Christ …’ and disappeared into the
little pantry next to her office.
Mark said gloomily, ‘Do we have to wash up?’
Suzanne re-emerged, a plum-coloured apron in some rather expensive-looking material tied round her middle. ‘I say it every time, and I’ll say it again, that’s the last private view I’m doing.’ She cast an eye on Mark. ‘You were a tower of strength, my dear.’
Mark inclined his head graciously.
‘Go,’ said Suzanne. ‘Simply go. Leave all this. I have the most fearful headache. I’m too savage for anyone to be with.’
‘Right,’ said Mark with alacrity, at the same moment as Diana began to say that they couldn’t possibly. Suzanne simply waved a hand with a gesture that implied suffering stoically endured and disappeared again into the pantry. The Lammings gathered their coats and went out into the city.
They headed for the tube, having both separately considered suggesting a taxi and resisted the extravagance. In the train, while subterranean London flicked past, Diana told Mark the names of various people she had spoken to or recognised at the party. Mark said, ‘That chap you said was one of the damn poets wasn’t.’