Mark, awkwardly, launched into the delicate business of paying his way. Carrie, somewhat unhelpfully, allowed him to flounder. Finally she said, ‘We have rather awful food, actually. It doesn’t cost much anyway. I should think if you gave us a pound a day that would do.’
Mark, reflecting upon Diana’s housekeeping bills, said, ‘I don’t think that’s nearly enough.’
‘Oh well, two, then.’
They went through into the kitchen. Bread was produced, and cheese and fruit. They sat opposite each other, in an uneasy domesticity. Mark commented on the table covering. ‘I haven’t seen a piece of real old-fashioned oilcloth since I was about six.’
‘It’s always been here,’ said Carrie. ‘Ought we to have something else?’
‘No. It’s splendid. Like … Like – well – everything here.’ That, he thought, sounded absurdly gushing. He glanced furtively at Carrie, who looked quite blank.
There was a silence, with which Mark decided not to interfere. Carrie, at last, said politely, ‘Have you written lots of books?’
‘Three. Well, two proper ones and one that’s an edition of someone’s letters. Somerset Maugham’s. Not so many but …’ Mark looked modestly down at the oilcloth, ‘… but people have been fairly kind about them, which is more or less what has led to my taking on this.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t read very much.’
Mark tried to look at the same time sympathetic and understanding and imply that who cared, anyway. Mr Weatherby had hinted something of Carrie’s less than adequate upbringing when hinting rather more positively of Hermione’s life-style: ‘… Rather intermittent schooling … Done awfully well to set herself up as she has … Not really what you could call a chip off the old block.’
‘In fact,’ Carrie amended, ‘I don’t really read at all.’
Mark cleared his throat. None of the things that he normally said or felt like saying in response to this and similar statements rose to the lips. A long time ago when he and Diana were courting, they had had an embittered argument about Diana’s response, or rather lack of response, to the Russian novelists. Diana, in fact, read a lot but that particular taste of his he had not been able to transmit. He had said, in a fit of annoyance in a pub in Charlotte Street, ‘If you want to go through life as a person who’s never read The Possessed then that’s your problem.’ Diana, quite justifiably as he now considered, had got up and walked out and he had had to pursue her into Tottenham Court Road and embark on a reconciliation outside Goodge Street station.
‘Jean Plaidy,’ offered Carrie. ‘I did read two books by her. And that man who’s a vet somewhere. I don’t expect those are much good, are they?’
‘Well …’ said Mark. He helped himself, briskly, to some more cheese. Carrie’s arm, which was very lightly furred with pale gilt hairs, lay on the oilcloth close to his hand. He had, again, that unsteadying and baffling feeling he had had in the attic the week before. Rubbish, he told himself. For Christ’s sake, Lamming.
‘I’ve never really read any of the sort of books you write. Books about real people’s lives. I should think it must be awfully difficult to do.’
‘It is,’ said Mark fervently.
‘I mean, everyone seems different to different people. So you’ve got to sort out what they were really like.’
‘That’s just it!’ cried Mark excitedly.
Carrie’s involvement, at this point, seemed to flag. She got up and wandered to the sink, stared at the pin-board for a moment, scribbled something on a sheet of paper stuck there and then asked Mark if he wanted some coffee. When he declined she sat down again.
‘Who are the people who do what you do well, then? Write biographies.’
‘Um … Let’s see … There’s Bernard Crick on Orwell. Highly thought of. Holroyd on Lytton Strachey. Several people like that. Then there are the exhaustive American academics – Walter Jackson Bate on Johnson, Ellmann on Joyce, Edel on Henry James.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard of any of them.’
‘Not even Henry James?’ enquired Mark, after a moment.
‘No,’ said Carrie.
Again, Mark experienced none of the feelings that such an announcement would normally have provoked. No advancing tide of boredom; no urge to bring the conversation to a close as soon as decently possible. So she hadn’t heard of Henry James. So what? Nor have lots of people. Nor have most people.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘to combine involvement and scepticism. I mean, that is, to be involved with your subject and at the same time be able to stand back and receive information with absolute detachment. Evidence.’
‘I see,’ said Carrie politely.
‘I’m an admirer of your grandfather’s, as it happens – or I wouldn’t be doing this. But this won’t be a hagiography, in any sense at all.’
‘A what?’
‘I’ll show him warts and all. And he had warts all right’ – Mark laughed – ‘I’ve come across a good deal of conflicting evidence already. About his row with Shaw and about the publication of the Essays and, well, about the marriage.’ His tone became, now, a little concerned. And more diffident. ‘It does look as though, well, he and your grandmother didn’t always … um, get on.’
‘Oh,’ said Carrie. ‘I don’t know anything about that. Maybe Ma would.’
‘I’m very anxious, of course, to meet your mother at some point.’
Carrie gazed, blankly. ‘I thought you said the sort of books you wrote only had that sort of thing in them if it was to do with what the person they’re about was writing.’
Mark, for a moment, struggled with this. ‘Oh, I see what you mean. The life as relevant to the works. Oh, absolutely. Don’t get me wrong. There’s no way in which I shall be prurient about the marriage, but the trouble is that it is relevant to the kind of man he was. And I have to write about that. I have to try to arrive at some kind of truth. In so far as that is possible.’
‘I see,’ said Carrie again. She was sitting, Mark realised, with the resigned expectancy of a child waiting to be told that it may leave the table. He pushed his chair back: ‘Well, I’m sure you’re busy, and I must get down to work.’
Carrie shot to her feet: ‘See you later, then.’
Mark went through the green baize door. He unpacked his overnight bag, opened a window in the room, and climbed the ladder to the attic. He did some further sorting out of the contents of the trunks, and then, according to a scheme he had already worked out, selected various items, which he carried down to his room.
There, he sat at the window in the afternoon sunshine. He opened up his card-index and his notebooks and set about the task of transcription and description. He read from a bundle of loose-leaf manuscript what was evidently an early draft of the ‘Essay on Fiction’, with many crossings-out and additions, and doodles in the margin: ink blots that had been turned into spidery creatures and that rear-view of a bun-like seated cat that was a favourite of Strong’s and one of those small idiosyncratic touches that somehow made the man more real than any photograph or written word. ‘The novelist,’ he read, ‘recounts as much of what happened as is appropriate or pertinent. He leaves out what is either unnecessary (to the plot and to the theme) or what would distract. In other words, the silences of the novel are not lies but rejection of extraneous matter. Only those conversations are reported which are relevant; only those actions that have some bearing on what is going on. The characters, presumably, have a whole other life as well, off the pages of the book; they eat and sleep and talk to people who never feature.’
He raised his eyes from the page and saw Carrie walk across the gravelled circle in front of the house. From behind the hedge which screened off the stable-yard Bill appeared, carrying a bale of black plastic; the two of them stood talking and Mark, at the window, sat watching. He noted Carrie’s short blue boots with yellow tops, and Bill’s green sweater with a hole in the elbow. He saw Carrie laugh, which gave him a feeling of exclusion, and saw Bill, for
an instant, lay a hand on her arm, perhaps to emphasise a point he was making, perhaps for some other reason. Bill glanced up in Mark’s direction and so, after a moment, did Carrie; undoubtedly they were talking about him. Mark’s feeling of exclusion intensified.
With a frown he turned back to Strong: ‘The biographer does something entirely different. He is aware of the existence of a “true” account of what happened to his subject; everything conspires to conceal this from him. His job is to pursue this so-called “truth” – which is itself unattainable. His lies and silences are therefore his areas of failure, the points at which he is obliged either to speculate or simply to omit. All he can produce is an account which is dependent upon the energy with which he has pursued his researches and the manner in which he has chosen to interpret what he has learned. He is, of course, in his fashion, a historian, and we all know that history can give no final truth.’
‘You know something?’ said Bill. ‘The guy at Hammonds fancies you. His face fell something awful when he saw it was me this time. He said, “Oh, it’s – er – your partner who usually collects the order.” ’
Carrie blushed. ‘Don’t be silly.’
Bill patted her on the arm. ‘There you go again. Ticklish as a sixteen-year-old. I never knew a girl so lacking in feminine guile. What you need, duckie, is the love of a good man. What’s happened to him down the road, by the way? Steven whatsit.’ The reference was to a new neighbour, a journalist who had bought a nearby cottage as a weekend place and had spent much time and money at Dean Close stocking up his garden.
‘He came in on Saturday,’ said Carrie, ‘and bought an acer and some bedding plants.’
‘Ah,’ said Bill. ‘Bedding plants, eh? I told you he had his eye on you.’
Carrie giggled. ‘And he had a girl with him. She was really nice. She works in television.’
‘Come now,’ said Bill. ‘You can deal with the competition.’
This kind of exchange was an amiable feature of their relationship, though Carrie sometimes wondered why she was not allowed to tease Bill in the same way about his encounters, which were a matter for a great deal more intensity and usually engendered long muttered telephone calls during which Carrie had tactfully to leave the kitchen.
Bill, now, had turned and was looking up at the house. ‘That guttering needs renewing, you know. You’d better get the builders round before any of the guys from your grandfather’s admiration club come down again. You haven’t finished moving those petunia seedlings, have you? I’ll be getting on with that.’
He departed, and Carrie stood for a moment looking with a frown at the shabby façade of the house. Her feelings about it were very similar to her feelings about her grandfather: respectful without any emotional commitment or, indeed, a great deal of interest. Indeed, the resemblance went even further: both were edifices which for reasons that always faintly puzzled her had public significance and of which she was a somewhat unwilling custodian. The question of the literary executorship had been a tricky one. When the problem had arisen, with the death of Strong’s old friend, she had been summoned by Mr Weatherby to his office and the matter had been discussed. Hermione, clearly, would not do: ‘Your mother’s, er, itinerant life-style … certain resistance to answering letters … need for someone with, um well, a basic sound judgement.’
‘She wouldn’t want to, anyway,’ said Carrie.
Mr Weatherby sighed. A sigh of relief, not of frustration. ‘As I rather imagined. In which case we have to think further.’ There was a pause. Mr Weatherby, whom Carrie had known since she was about eight and had never seen in anything but his dark suit, discreetly patterned tie, seated behind the big desk in his office, contemplated Carrie. Carrie, who was wearing a tweed jacket, Marks and Spencer’s blouse and the only skirt she had which she kept specially for visiting Mr Weatherby, gazed back. She said, ‘Have I got basic sound judgement?’
Mr Weatherby cleared his throat. After a moment he said, ‘Frankly, yes.’
‘I’ll do it if you like. The trouble would be me not being the sort of person who knows about books.’
Mr Weatherby looked down at the desk and realigned some already tidy papers. ‘Well … The task of a literary executor, as I’ve already said, requires capacities of judgement rather than – what shall we say – vast erudition. I myself, representing the firm as co-executor, am not … well, I like to think I read as much as the next man, but not, shall we say, excessively. And it is appropriate and indeed usual practice for executorship to be taken on by a member of the family where possible.’
‘O.K., then,’ said Carrie.
She hoped, when she thought about the matter, that her grandfather would have felt that this was all right. Since she could barely remember him anyway there was no recollected relationship on which to base any speculations. Her only memories were trivial: once, aged about seven, she had come out of the lavatory at Dean Close still pulling up her knickers, and had bumped into Strong on the landing – a moment of painful embarrassment. Another time she had been taken for a walk by him in the nearby woods and had been surprised to realise that adults, also, suffer from not being able to think of anything to say. They had walked in silence, mainly; the only remembered point of communication had been when she asked him the name of a flower. ‘That,’ he had said, ‘is a foxglove.’ The name, to one raised amid prickly pears and tamarisk and oleanders, had been entrancing.
So, when decisions of one kind or another were required of her, she apologised to his spirit and acted to the best of her abilities and according to the guidance of Mr Weatherby. Though she would have been quite prepared to go against this if it seemed to her necessary. She had read with great care his letter recommending that Mark be allowed access to all papers and had reflected on it for several days. She had considered visiting the public library and asking for his previous books (listed for her by Mr Weatherby – her question to Mark had in fact been formal politeness rather than a search for information); but what, she asked herself, would be the point of this? She was in no position to come to any conclusion about their merits. It was more sensible to be guided by what Mr Weatherby called ‘my discreet enquires as to Mr Lamming’s literary standing’. Which, apparently, was considered excellent.
She thought about Mark as she went into the kitchen to telephone the builders. It might be a bit awkward having him staying at Dean Close so much, but she couldn’t see what else was to be done, and in any case presumably he wasn’t going to want to spend much or any time with her, or with her and Bill, since obviously they weren’t his kind of person. He’d have to eat with them, and that would be that. They wouldn’t be likely to bother each other.
She was therefore rather surprised when, that evening, Mark did not return to his papers immediately after the meal but continued to sit on in the kitchen. He had insisted on doing the washing-up. Bill, who was going over to see his friend, grinned: ‘Well, I’ll leave you two to amuse each other, then.’ Carrie threw him a look of appeal; he put on his anorak and went out, whistling.
‘What do you usually do in the evening?’ said Mark, after a moment.
‘Well … If it’s fine I often go out and do some work till it’s dark,’ – they both glanced at the window; it was pouring with rain – ‘otherwise I do office stuff. Orders and whatnot.’
‘Ah,’ said Mark. ‘Perhaps I could add things up for you?’
‘Actually I’ve got a calculator. Thanks very much, though.’
‘I suppose you and Bill have known one another for a long time?’
‘Oh yes, ages.’
‘I see. Lucky that you both are … well, have the same interests.’
‘It wouldn’t really work otherwise,’ said Carrie.
Mark gazed out of the window. ‘What wouldn’t?’
‘Well, running the Garden Centre together.’
‘No. Quite.’
Silence. The telephone rang. Carrie leaped at it, held out the receiver to Mark. ‘It’s your wife.’
r /> ‘You’re not alone,’ said Diana.
‘No.’
‘The lass?’
‘Yes.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine.’
‘Hard day’s work?’
‘So so.’
‘All right,’ said Diana, ‘don’t chat, then. Listen, I’ve had a thought. Early closing tomorrow. Why don’t I hop on a train and come down? Then I could come back with you the next day.’
She stood in the hall and watched the shadowy heads of the yellow climbing rose bounce on the other side of the fan-light. ‘Mark? Are you still there?’ That inhabited silence of a telephone into which the other does not speak; behind it the scrape of a chair on a stone floor.
‘Yes. Um. Well.’
‘It’s a double bed, didn’t you say?’
‘Mm.’
‘Well, then …’
‘Look,’ said Mark. ‘Why don’t I call you back a bit later?’
‘You need to sound out?’
‘Up to a point.’
‘O.K., then. ’Bye.’
She hesitated, for perhaps three seconds, then whisked into the kitchen. There, she set about cooking in advance a meal for the following Sunday evening, to be put into the freezer. At the same time, she made a shopping list and two telephone calls and she thought. Thoughts, of course, cannot be set down like conversations, being processes that defy description, areas that demand from the novelist not silence but transcription. Diana had never read Strong’s essay on fiction; if she had she would have known that he, addressing himself to this subject, had compared the novelist’s attempt to extract coherence from formlessness to a cook’s translation of an individually meaningless assortment of flour, eggs, sugar and so forth into the recognisable entity of cake or pudding. Strong, of course, had never in his life laid hands on mixing bowl or rolling pin; the homeliness of the example appealed to him – he liked juxtapositions of intellectual rhetoric and bluff English common sense. He had spoken of thought as the individual’s attempt to impose order upon chaos – ‘the churning waters of the mind from which flash, from time to time, clear bright messages in words … That flickering erratic progress which, every now and then, we wrench into a deliberate sequence: we work out a problem, make a decision, pursue a memory.’