Mark, who had been regretting that reference ever since, grunted.
‘Though she must have a certain amount of natural nous of some kind or she wouldn’t be running this place.’
‘Mmn,’ said Mark.
‘But stylish she is not. One labours a bit, keeping up a conversation.’
Silence. Darkness. Outside the window, the rustle of a car on the road, then more silence. Within, the instinctive perceptions of those who know one another through and through.
‘Don’t you find?’ said Diana, an edge to her voice.
‘A bit, I suppose.’
They lay without speaking. Mark, who felt a mixture of apprehension and mysterious satisfaction and did not wish to talk, pretended to fall asleep. Diana dwelt upon a small, disquieting seed of speculation. Both found the mattress excruciating but decided to say no more about it.
Diana recounted her experiences to Suzanne Handley-Cox.
‘Dorset,’ pronounced Suzanne, ‘is very pretty. I’m always meaning to find time to go there. And it’s the place Hardy is all about, isn’t it?’
‘Right,’ said Diana, from the top of a step-ladder. They were engaged in hanging the Japanese girl’s silk-screen prints for the new exhibition.
‘I simply adored that film Tess. Move it a fraction left, darling. O.K. – that’s fine.’
Diana had not seen the film because Mark considered cinematic renderings of great books an abuse, after a bad experience with Pride and Prejudice many years ago. So she passed this over and went on. ‘And I can’t tell you the amount of stuff there is there that Mark will have to look at. He’ll be going up and down for months to come.’
‘Poor old Mark,’ said Suzanne. After a moment she enquired, ‘And what’s this girl like?’
Diana climbed down from the step-ladder and contemplated the row of prints. ‘Fairly ordinary, really.’
‘Just as well,’ said Suzanne. ‘Not of course that Mark’s the type that strays, bless him.’ She sighed. ‘You’re so lucky, my dear.’
Suzanne’s marital history remained unrevealed to the Lammings, even after five years’ association with her. It was rumoured that she had had two husbands; Mark’s view was that she had probably eaten them.
Diana shot her a look. ‘When Mark’s on a book he’s completely involved in that. He hardly even notices me.’
‘Is that man who made that film Tess the one that gets into trouble over little girls?’ said Suzanne. ‘Polsky or something.’
‘Polanski. Yes.’
‘You’re so clever – you always know about everything. Incidentally, if Ivan comes in at any point today I’m not here.’
‘Right,’ said Diana. Suzanne’s trains of thought, if you could call them that, were familiar to her. In this case the connection would be Russian-sounding names, rather than cinema or dubious sexual inclinations. Ivan was, in fact, a young sculptor from Birmingham whom the gallery had once or twice exhibited and who continued to press his luck.
‘Anyway,’ continued Suzanne, ‘I envy you having this foothold in Dorset. I yearn for the country, at this time of year. I’ll leave you to finish off, darling; I’ve got to do some phoning.’ She retired into her office, from whence Diana heard, at once, the fruity but chilling voice that had blighted the career of many a young artist.
Diana continued to put finishing touches to the display of prints. She then sat down at her desk to type up the descriptive labels and the price list. This she was able to do while keeping a surreptitious eye on three people who wandered into the gallery, and disconcerting a woman who wanted some pottery for a wedding present and had been under the impression that the piece in the window was priced at eight pounds rather than the eighty shown on the not-quite-visible sticker. Meanwhile she was concentrating upon other matters.
Principally upon how she was to nail Mark down to a specific week, and ideally to a specific destination, for a holiday later in the summer. Mark detested holidays; Diana had the atavistic English taste for foreign travel. The budget, she had reckoned, would stretch to a packaged fortnight somewhere. The time and the money and the organisation were not the problem; such things are simple compared with the slipperiness of people. People, Diana had long realised, are what you are up against in life, especially those nearest and dearest to you. The material world had never seemed to her a problem: heat and cold and blown fuses and recalcitrant cars and even shortage of cash were all things she could deal with. People were another matter. They are inconsistent and unreliable and apt to shoot off in unexpected directions.
She liked, for instance, to know where Mark was at any given time. At a desk in a specific library, or making a specific visit, or sitting at home. Which was where he should be now. She picked up the phone and dialled. There was no reply. Unsettled, she returned to the price list.
Theoretically the biographer, unlike the novelist, should not suffer from writer’s block. He knows, after all, what the plot is; he has not got to make it up. In practice, of course, he is equally subject to crises of inspiration or onsets of lassitude. Which was what had happened to Mark today; he had tried to read and he had tried to write and was aware that he was unable to do either with any degree of efficiency. He tidied his desk, answered a couple of letters, sat down once more at his planned task for the day and gave it up as a bad job. He decided, on the spur of the moment, to go off and look at the house in north London in which Strong had had lodgings when first he came to the capital as a young man. Mark knew the name of the street, but it was in an area unfamiliar to him. He checked the notes filed under his ‘Housing’ subject entry, and set off.
To drive from south-west to north-east London is not just to spend a lot of time sitting in traffic-jams but also, for a certain kind of person, to pass through a system of references and allusions that ought to be more dizzying than it actually is. Mark, during the next hour and a quarter, found himself reflecting – in quick succession – upon Roman Britain, Whistler, Daniel Defoe, Harrison Ainsworth, Virginia Woolf, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and various other matters, all of these prompted by fleeting glimpses of the silvery glitter of the river, the dome of St Paul’s, a railway station or street name. The city, indeed, seemed to exist not just on an obvious, physical and visual plane but in a secondary and more mysterious way as a card-index system to an inexhaustible set of topics which in turn spawned other topics. The river always made him think of the Romans, because of some oddly luminous book on Roman London, author and title long since forgotten but whose insights lay around still in the head. But then it made him think of Whistler also; you took your pick. And then Tavistock Square and St Pancras station … And all these references coexist in the landscape even though separated from one another by decades and centuries; the mind has no problem in latching on to each in turn, switching obediently from one level to another, providing without effort the appropriate furnishings by way of costume and language and action. The head should be spinning, and yet it isn’t; it accepts quite calmly the promptings of what is seen and what is known.
A West Indian conductor, laconically manning the platform of the bus ahead, and whose set of references must be assumed to be utterly different, set Mark thinking further about this. They were passing Liberty’s at the time; art nouveau presumably meant nothing to the conductor (an advantage, Mark considered). What we see and what we know about what we see not only liberates the imagination but furnishes also a kind of strait-jacket; associations are also inescapable. The bus lurched across Oxford Circus in the direction of the BBC and Mark instantly forgot it, off on another tack.
A more practical one, in this instance. A programme was being planned in which the survivors of various bookish figures of the twenties and thirties – friends and relatives – were interviewed on their memories of these people. Mark had been acting in an advisory capacity to the programme producer; he had been wondering who should be asked to speak about Strong. His thoughts homed suddenly on Carrie. Would she want to? Would she like it? He could p
ut it to her, at any rate.
He found the street for which he was looking, which was composed of late nineteenth-century double-fronted houses, many of them in the process of what estate agents politely refer to as ‘reclamation’. Cement mixers and heaps of sand were much in evidence. Façades yawned windowless. Others had their brickwork picked out in the exuberant colours that indicate West Indian occupation. Mark parked the car and wandered in search of number seventy-two, in which Strong had briefly lodged as an ambitious and slightly brash young man from the provinces seeking a niche in cultural life. He had described it in the memoirs as ‘A neighbourhood of tired respectability, in which the aspidistra flourishes alongside the bicycle and the Church of England’. Religion, indeed, in the form of a landlady who insisted on grace being said at breakfast, had caused him to move after a few months to more liberal-minded surroundings in Chelsea. Strong’s agnosticism had been an early intellectual development.
So the undistinguished Victorian villa in front of which Mark eventually found himself was never going to qualify for a blue plaque. All the same, there was the usual frisson of interest in reflecting that Strong once walked (no, bounded probably, in his early twenties) up those steps, and passed through the door with its garish panels of stained glass. Mark contemplated the house for a minute or two and decided to explore the neighbourhood a little.
There was a church at one end of the street (attended, no doubt, by that officious landlady of Strong’s) and a row of shops at the other. The church, though uncompromisingly plain, looked on the whole the more interesting destination. It turned out to be locked. Mark wandered round into the churchyard and patrolled the graves. There was not a lot to engage the attention here, either, except for a nauseous marble cherub which would have entertained Diana.
It was warm. Mark sat down on the grass and removed his jacket. A woman stared at him from the window of one of the neighbouring houses. As well she might, he thought; no able-bodied man should be sitting in a peculiarly prosaic north London graveyard in the middle of a Friday morning. Embarrassed, he took his notepad out of his pocket and made some unnecessary jottings. Neither the house nor the neighbourhood, so far as he could see, would merit more than a mention in the book.
So what was he doing here? Well, leaving no stone unturned, as Diana would say. Something might have caught his eye which would have provided some insight, linked up in some way with another aspect or stage of Strong. Nothing had, but never mind. And at least one was in the open air for once, instead of behind a desk. He thought, not for the first time, that this obsessive shadowing of another man’s life was one of the more bizarre ways to spend one’s own. Strong, of course – trust him – had had a word or two to say on this theme: ‘Biography is one of the oldest and the most widespread of literary forms; a person decides, for a variety of reasons, to recount the life of another person. Note, please, the qualifying phrase, for the resulting efforts will be themselves qualified by those reasons. Consider, in this light, the following works; Asser’s Life of Alfred, the Gospels, Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, Morley’s Life of Gladstone.’
And Lamming’s Life of Strong, or whatever in the fullness of time it would be called. A far cry, both in intention and in execution, from any of the above. A good read, one hoped, enlightening both about the man, his times and his works. Price fifteen pounds or thereabouts. And four years of Mark Lamming’s life.
‘Would you know him if you met him?’ Diana had once asked. ‘If he appeared, walking towards you in the street.’ And Mark had replied, after consideration, that yes, he was pretty sure he would. ‘And how would you describe him, as a person?’ she continued. Well, he had said, um, let’s see now … Aggressive, opinionated, lusty, emotional, hard-working, inquisitive. ‘Describe me,’ said Diana. ‘Beautiful,’ he offered, promptly. She watched him through narrowed eyes: ‘And?’ ‘Efficient. Vivacious. Energetic. Occasionally dogmatic.’ ‘No, I’m not,’ snapped Diana. ‘That’s just you never admitting you’re wrong.’ ‘I don’t imagine Strong considered himself aggressive and opinionated,’ said Mark, amiably, ‘but collective evidence suggests it.’ ‘You think people know less about themselves than other people do?’ ‘On the whole, yes.’ ‘You,’ said Diana sweetly, ‘think you’re tolerant. But you’re not. You have an irrational prejudice against journalists, dons and waiters.’ ‘Rubbish!’ exclaimed Mark. ‘Some of my best friends are …’ ‘Waiters?’ Mark glared. ‘Anyway, all prejudices could be described as irrational, I should have thought.’ ‘And you’re sometimes pedantic, too.’
Let’s describe, he said to himself now, sitting in the May sunshine on this patch of frayed London grass, Carrie. Just for an exercise, as it were. Well … Elusive, somehow. No, not elusive – reserved. Honest. Yes, definitely honest. Direct. Innocent? A word debased by overuse – but yes, innocent. Not exactly pretty but quite extraordinarily … Well, you want to keep on looking at her. That nice curly gingery hair, the way she sits down with her legs curled up underneath her, her eyes, her voice, the way she says ‘Sorry’ all the time, the guilelessness of her (anyone else would have pretended they’d heard of Henry James), the way she scowls when she’s adding things up, the way she …
He got up abruptly and headed for the car. Enough time had been spent on this trip. He could still get in an afternoon’s work back at home and in any case, while it was in his mind, he really ought to give them a ring at Dean Close, just to check arrangements for going down there next week.
Diana, dialling Mark again, got this time the engaged signal. Satisfied, she did not try again. There he was, anyway, where he ought to be.
‘It’s Mark.’
‘Oh,’ said Carrie. ‘Hello.’
‘You sound out of breath.’
‘I was outside.’
‘Oh dear – I’m sorry – you were busy.’
‘Well,’ said Carrie, ‘sort of. Yes.’
‘I only wanted to say, if it’s all right with you I’ll be down again on Tuesday. Through till Friday. Is that O.K.?’
‘Yes. Actually you said that before you went.’
‘Did I?’ said Mark. ‘How stupid – I’d quite forgotten.’
There was a pause. ‘Well,’ said Carrie. ‘I’d better …’
‘Did I by any chance leave a blue pen on the kitchen table?’
Carrie stared round the room. ‘No. At least I can’t see it anywhere.’
‘Never mind. I mustn’t keep you. Gorgeous day here. A waste, one feels, in London. What are you doing?’
‘Potting up begonias,’ said Carrie, puzzled.
Mark was silent for a moment. Better not ask what a begonia was. ‘I’m looking forward to getting down to Dean Close again very much.’
‘Oh. Good.’
‘And seeing you.’
‘What?’ said Carrie.
‘I said “And seeing you”.’
‘Oh. Sorry. I didn’t hear properly.’
‘Anyway … I won’t keep you.’
‘No,’ said Carrie. ‘Goodbye, then.’
‘Goodbye,’ said Mark. ‘It’s nice hearing you,’ he added, but the line was already dead.
5
Mark’s life now divided itself between London and Dean Close. There were London days, which were much as London days had ever been, and Dean Close days, which were something entirely different. There, he existed in a curious state that was a marriage of energy, exaltation and anxiety. He became acclimatised to the hair mattress and the crudities of the cooking; he achieved some kind of relationship with Bill, based on breezy comments about items on the news (the radio was seldom off, in the Dean Close kitchen) and jokes about Mark’s mechanical ineptitude. Bill fixed the rattle in Mark’s car engine (an embarrassingly simple matter, apparently). During the day Mark worked in his room and in the evenings – the long light evenings of early summer – he drifted outside to where Bill and Carrie were usually still engaged in mysterious jobs in the greenhouses or out on the nursery beds, where the new stock was grow
n. He asked if there wasn’t something he could do to help. Bill and Carrie looked at him doubtfully. ‘Something simple and untechnical,’ he added, with humility. He was allowed to hump hoses and cans of water around; at least it was a way of staying within Carrie’s orbit.
He observed visitors with suspicion. There was a man from the village, some fellow who worked on the Guardian and had bought a weekend cottage there, who dropped in twice and stood chatting to Carrie for half an hour or so. Her giggle kept reaching Mark through the open kitchen window or across the garden wall and he was driven eventually into Strong’s study out of earshot and sight. He prowled up and down the bookcases, reading titles without registering them and bewildered by the ferocity of his feelings. Diana, ringing up, said, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Nothing,’ he muttered. ‘What do you mean “What’s the matter?” ’ ‘You don’t fool me,’ said Diana. ‘Why don’t you come home? That place doesn’t seem to be agreeing with you.’
On the London days he continued to work according to the old system, pursuing various lines of enquiry in libraries and collections. He telephoned an acquaintance, a woman who shared his trade and was working on a book about Sybil Forrest, a minor poet of the twenties with whom Strong had had a brief amorous skirmish.
‘My chap,’ he said, ‘appears to have dined with your lady on – let’s see – 27 January 1928.’
‘Is this a statement of fact or are you seeking confirmation?’
‘There’s that letter in the Bodleian.’
‘I’ve seen it. In point of fact they subsequently spent a weekend together in Aberystwyth three weeks later. Carnal, I assume.’
There was a pause. ‘That I can’t accept,’ said Mark. ‘Strong had better taste than to go to Aberystwyth in February. Or any other time, probably. Where do you get that from?’
‘The diary.’
‘Oh, come now,’ said Mark. ‘The reference is entirely ambiguous. She never names Strong. It could have been anyone.’