— She talked about her daughter. And then there was the photograph, Mum. She gave me the photograph.
— Yes, dear.
It was ready in my pocket. It showed a two-year-old girl in a dark flower dress, smocked at the chest, with short puffed sleeves and pink trim. She had fine blonde hair. Her smile was demure: pleased, but quietly pleased.
My mother snatched it from my hand.
— Lamorna says I’m her father. What do you think, Mum?
She held the photograph at various distances from her eyes. She held it at arm’s length, her free hand steadying her glasses. She brought it closer. Without looking up she said,
— Definitely.
Lamorna was still some months away. As I sat at my desk in the palacio (the building had about it the air of immobility that precedes decay), I had a different consanguineous absence on my mind. On my mind? In my mind. Somewhere at the back of it.
… There were many reasons why my mother loved living in Spain, not least of them being that you could, in most pharmacies, buy speed over the counter. After a while the stuff she liked was declared prescription-only; so she had to put on ten layers of clothing and go to the hospital and pretend to be suffering from obesity (a routine business in winter, but not so easy during the African heat of July and August). She regarded the drug mainly as a labour-saving device. You could always tell when Mum had scored because the house suddenly became the scene of large-scale cleansings and reorderings. You would see her going from room to room, singing, with a sofa under one arm and a sideboard under the other. And just this one time, during the summer, I found her doing a major ablution, with her usual thoroughness but with none of her usual zest. I think I asked her if she’d run out. She reminded me that my aunt Miggy was expected for a short stay. And, of course, my mother would want the house to be looking at its best for her sister. We said no more.
My aunt’s visit set me thinking, if that is quite the word I want, about the unassimilably dismal event of the previous December. Can you think about something you can’t assimilate? I don’t think you can. Or I don’t think you do.
Typically in that era I would spend Christmas Eve buying all my Christmas presents and then drive around London in the white Mini (which started at least 50 per cent of the time), picking up my sister, my brother and perhaps my brother’s girlfriend and then heading for the big house north of Barnet, the car full of presents, bottles, crisp bags, beercans and joint-ends, and feeling like a vampire racing against the sunset in his packed coffin to get to the castle before dusk. Christmas was a dark time in England, the lights going out everywhere from 24 December to what felt like late January, so that the whole world was as black as Aberdeen.
The house on Hadley Common was a citadel of riotous solvency — not just at Christmas but every weekend. There was a great sense of in-depth back-up, a cellar, a barrel of malt whisky, a walk-in larder: proof against snowstorm or shutdown. I think it was that Christmas morning that all four Amises, with breakfast trays on their laps, watched Journey to the Centre of the Earth — then the visit to the pub, then the day-long, the week-long lunch. And with Kingsley the hub of all humour and high spirits, like an engine of comedy … I felt so secure in that house — and, clearly, so insecure elsewhere — that I always experienced a caress of apprehension as I climbed into the car on Sunday night, any Sunday night, and headed back to the motorway and Monday, to the flat or the flatlet, the street, the job, the tramp dread, the outside world. An apprehension much magnified after this endless Christmas, a swathe of Sundays, Sundays squared and cubed. And, more than this, the outside world now had someone missing from it. On the night of 27 December 1973, my cousin Lucy Partington disappeared.
We had dined late, in the Spanish style, and I was in the kitchen with my mother and my aunt. They were over by the draining-board, preparing a hot drink, while I remained at the table, deep in an unpleasant, unconstructive and above all familiar dental reverie; a recent explosion in the top deck had made the right-hand side of my nasal cleft tender to the touch — and so of course I kept touching it, feeling it, testing it … I woke up when I realised that the two sisters, for the first time in my presence, were talking about Lucy. Now, I have a deep background of love for my aunt: she and her four children — particularly the elder pair, Marian and David — were indispensable figures in my childhood and early youth, and Lucy herself was always pressingly vivid to me. So my heart was fully engaged. But not my imagination.
After all, this wasn’t the first time I had been close to an absence. When I was six my two-year-old sister fell from the garden table and landed head-first on the stone floor. For a day and a night her life was in danger.* Quite unready, quite unscheduled to face this or any other contiguous death, I felt enveloped by a sinister secret, a sinister privacy and quiet. I had this sense of exclusion, of approaching colourlessness and silence, a second time, in puberty, when after a long separation I began to suspect that I would never see my father again … But these two experiences had given me no understanding of the weight and depth of the present calamity. Understanding, or a glimpse of it, was still a great distance away, not in place but in time. It happened in the countryside beyond Ronda, a few miles from where we sat that evening, when my three-year-old son went into the garden to ‘explore’, accompanied by my mother-in-law’s dog. Fifteen minutes later the dog returned, alone; and it was perhaps another hour before the child was found. What struck me, after a very short while, was the way the feeling of apparently maximal nausea and panic continued to escalate. But that was 1987, and this was 1974.
My aunt was leaning against the counter, with her hot drink, holding it close with joined hands. And she said in a steady and unemphatic voice that not a minute passed without her thinking of Lucy and wondering where she was … I cowered inwardly away from this — at the depth of my incomprehension of it. I ducked my head. I was turning twenty-five but how very young I was, how really terribly young. And how long it lasts, youth, that time of constant imposture, when you have to pretend to understand everything while understanding nothing at all. You understand nothing about time. I ducked my head and I thought: poor Miggy! What a terrible thing. She still thinks about Lucy every minute, and it’s been … nine months.
Nine months?
* This ditty, like others (‘As I was going to St Paul’s / A lady grabbed me by the elbow’), dealt in unmet expectations.
* This seems to have been Graves’s usual response to friendly mockery. In post-First World War Oxford somebody made a joke about his height: ‘This encouraged me to a ragging pretence of physical violence; but I immediately stopped when I caught the look on his face. I had surprised his morbid horror of being touched’ (Good-bye to All That, 1929). Not Rob, this time, but T. E. Lawrence. I shouldn’t have worried about busting in on Robert Graves. He did the same thing to Thomas Hardy, and was just as generously received.
* Kingsley did not thaw to Le Boulou when I told him, years later, that Nabokov wrote a novel in a hotel room there: The Defence (1930).
* It was a bad thing to be miffy. Being miffy meant that you were the kind of person who, when pouring a cup of tea, habitually put the Milk In First. M: And that’s common [working-class], is it? R: Yeah. M: Why? R: I’m not sure. It just is. M: … What happens when you put the milk in second and the tea’s too strong and there’s not enough room in the cup to make it milky? R: Then you get up and pour some of it down the sink and go back and try again.
† One of the meanings of ‘gentle’ is that risible word posh (port out, starboard home?). Macbeth, Duncan: ‘This castle hath a pleasant seat; the air / Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself / Unto our gentle senses.’ Our posh senses. Posh reader …
‡ An eight-month sentence for a domino effect of drunk-driving offences. It could happen to anyone, more or less; but it happened to Rob.
* The Norwegian translator of The Information was not long ago given ten bob and a sash for his work on that book, but that’s the closest I??
?ve come to a prize since 1974. Kingsley won only two: the Maugham, and then the Booker, in his mid-sixties. I conclude that our novels are not good at creating a consensus, and conclude further that in some ways this is a virtue. The secret reason for the media’s interest in the Booker Prize is as follows: it demystifies and declasses the writer. Writers become something you can bet on, and when lottery-night comes round you can watch them on TV being reduced to what Yiddish calls schwitzers — stealthily perspiring into their tuxes, their dimity. My father said the only sayable thing about literary prizes: they’re obviously all right if you win them.
* I saw a couple of bullfights in my teens and went on to read Death in the Afternoon plus a few more books on the subject, including Kenneth Tynan’s Bull Fever (renamed ‘Bull Shit’ by Clive James). At first I was not immune to the powerful and immediate affect of the spectacle, but the excitement soon lapsed into something far stranger: a kind of brutalised vacancy. Once, in Barcelona, after an hour of messy kills, we saw a matador gored and tossed startlingly high in the air — and the whole family fiercely cheered. Hemingway argued that the bullfight was not a sport but a ritual, a tragedy, in fact, because the bull can never win. What, then, is the bull’s tragic flaw? That he’s a bull? (Besides, in both the traditional and the modern bullfight it is the horses that suffer most and longest.) In 1974 I went to another bullfight, there in Ronda (the ‘cradle’ of Spanish bullfighting), and witnessed the ritual in its decadent form, the goaded bulls underbred and cowering beneath their pre-blunted horns. I also glimpsed something of the other side of it: Hemingway’s hero, Antonio Ordonez, now retired, was perhaps Ronda’s premier personage, and I frequently saw him around town — though never in the Antonio Ordonez, one of my favourite bars despite all its Ernestiana. He was embarrassingly handsome and charismatic, and he glowed, as if under a spotlight and an omelette of makeup. On fiesta days he would take the reins of a coach and pair with his glamorous wife and his glamorous daughters (the town’s top two vamps). Ordonez’s inner glow came from reverence-assimilation. A man of proven courage — a bullkiller who went in over the horns, not around them — but, withal, one of the classical artists of the ring. He was treated like a war hero who also combined the attributes of a Pavarotti and a Pele.
* Venga means ‘come on’. I think my mother was searching for fuera, which means ‘go away’.
† This word means what you think it means. But here it has no greater force than ‘man’ or ‘dude’ or ‘guy’.
* I didn’t find this at all shocking. In my house, back in South Wales, you could have a cigarette on Christmas Day at the age of five.
† As an undergraduate Tina was already famous (and this at a time when no one was famous): fringe playwright, journalist, looker, prodigy. To get to her room in college I would have to step over waiting TV crews, interviewers, profilists.
* I well remember the smile of sadistic satisfaction that came over John Updike’s face as we talked about this during an interview held in the canteen of Massachusetts General Hospital. Updike had fathered four children when (as he has said) he was pretty much a child himself. He enjoyed hearing what it was like, humping infants around at thirty-five: spongey knees, mortified spines — all this baffling news about the body and time.
* Sally recovered fully and quickly from her fractured skull. A year later she would have another confrontation with death. She was staying with her paternal grandparents in Berkhamsted. One morning, soon after my grandfather left for work, my grandmother had a stroke and fell down dead. On his return, ten or eleven hours later, he found Sally unharmed, but strangely dressed, and strangely daubed — with her grandmother’s makeup. As it filtered down to my brother and me, the story was that Sally had ‘opened the front door to him’. But that couldn’t be right. Still, I wonder how my grandfather survived that homecoming.
Letter from School
Durham O.K. now.*
55 Marine Parade,
Brighton, Sussex.
30/11/67
Dearest Dad and Jane,
I have more or less finished the exams, which, to me, were an immense disappointment. I had a complete break-down last week — a mild glandular fever: head-ache, fiendish sore throat, sweating, temperature 104! I lay in bed groaning and dribbling into my pillow for 3 days. Anyway I didn’t feel quite with-it during the exams, and I felt that I was completely inequipped to do the paper, which in fact was quite within my capabilities. The goblin [Mr Ardagh] noticed this and, having read my papers, said that although not disastrous, they were well below my norm. Mrs Gibbs [the goblin’s mother], who supervised my illness as it were, has procured a certificate which the goblin has despatched with my papers. I got a horrible feeling of inadequacy and had that awful feeling of exam hysteria, of tearing up my first few attempted answers and ending up sobbing softly after 20 minutes. I’m sorry if I’ve buggered up my chances at Oxford — let’s hope not anyway.
Equally disturbing is the trend of affairs concerning Rottingdean. I went for an interview today. The chap said I wouldn’t be teaching any English or History. Just Maths (NEW Maths too) to the 8 and 9 yr olds and, of course, cricket and rugger every afternoon. It’s pretty obvious that they just want some duffer; how’s this supposed to benefit me. Apart from not being good for me, it’s not going to be good for me, if you know what I mean. Part time means full-time but part-wage (5 gns); I’ll be there from 9—7. I fail to recognise this as a formula for the stew of Eng. Lit, however much I might like that stew. What’s our game? I can’t convince myself that this is what you had in mind … I’ll have no time to read because I’ll be too busy having a nasty time. Where lies the profit? I’ve been dreading and fearing this thing for months, conceding in moments of euphoria that at least it’ll be quite fun doing a Shakespeare play. I really can’t tolerate the idea of making a fool of myself on the rugger pitch every day. Since I can’t accept that this idea is calculated as a purge of recent sins and failures because there haven’t been any, what do we think we’re playing at. It’s not even academic for Christ’s sake. And I beg you not to come to the general conclusion that somehow, considering all, one way or the other, it might well end up doing me some kind of good. I’ll need something more tangible than that. I didn’t fail ALL my ‘A’ levels you know — I picked up one or two. I say, without any bitterness,* that you arranged all this without once consulting me — unless you count asking me whether I would be prepared to insinuate myself into the general state of affairs that you had delineated. In retrospect it seems incomprehensible to me: are you sure I haven’t committed some heinous crime which I’ve forgotten and for which this is a grim protracted punishment? I repeat that I’m quite unembittered by this — I just don’t know how you mean.
You’re probably anxiously awaiting a suggestion that I should be furnished with a Park Lane penthouse and a £500 allowance. No, dammit, I think that would be unreasonable. But why shouldn’t I get a completely ordinary job, in which the rewards that courage brings would be closed to me, and stay on in Brighton, and have lots of lessons with the goblin? It would save you lots of money (can’t be wrong) and would allow me to get on with my reading at a far more spanking pace. Since the teaching bit has turned out to be spectacularly non-academic, why not try something unspectacularly academic. Let’s please not think we have to go through with it because its [sic] gone this far.
Anyway the goblin agrees that Rotters is out + is ringing around but if there are no developments that we think make it worth-while, have I your permission to throw it?
Sorry if this seems querulous/petulant/spoilt etc. Love
Mart x x x
P.S. Dad. I didn’t know you like your poetry to contain passion.… much passion.
P.P.S. (Could you reply as soon as possible).
* This refers to Durham University, where I was to be interviewed for a place.
* What is making me so very, very bitter here is the fact that I didn’t fail any of my A levels, not this time. I got English (gr
ade A), History (B) and Logic (D).
Bus Stop: 1994
While rooting around among my papers I recently unearthed another letter, from my cousin David Partington — preserved by some miracle, because I do not keep letters and have kept none of my father’s.
The letter is undated. But my cousin refers to the effect of parenthood on my new book, which he names. The boys were born in 1984 and 1986, and the new book was Einstein’s Monsters: 1987. Julian Barnes has said that novelists don’t write ‘about’ their themes and subjects but ‘around’ them, and this is very much my sense of it. The book consisted of five short stories around nuclear weapons and an introductory essay that was very definitely about them. Of course, the mid-to-late Eighties was one of the warmer phases of the Cold War: the time of the Reagan build-up, or spend-up; ‘the evil empire’; Star Wars (‘the force is with us’). Gorbachev had yet to show his hand, and it was hereabouts that Reagan accused the Russian language of having no word for détente.
This is from the polemical introduction, entitled ‘Thinkability’:
When I told [my father] that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, ‘Ah. I suppose you’re … “against them”, are you?’ Épater les bien-pensants is his rule … I am reliably ruder to my father on the subject of nuclear weapons than on any other, ruder than I have been since my teenage years. I usually end by saying something like, ‘Well, we’ll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one.’ He usually ends by saying something like, ‘Think of it. Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal. The grants to poets could service a nuclear submarine for a year. The money spent on a single performance of Rosenkavalier might buy us an extra neutron warhead. If we closed down all the hospitals in London we could …’ The satire is accurate in a way, for I am merely going on about nuclear weapons; I don’t know what to do about them.