Love (17 page)

But the park was an arena for moonlight and bright as a day without colours. The silver-plated trees cast barely visible shadows on the grass and each blade and daisy, each bud and blossom, shone with an individual, clear, distinct brilliance. The south side of the park was far more luxuriantly wooded than the north and the girl and her man stepped off the path and walked through the moist undergrowth between the bleached trunks of trees, in and out of the stippled light, until they glimpsed before them the serene white pillars of the miniature temple. All was calm, all was bright. The pale light magically rendered Joanne’s gaudy dress as a brief tunic of vague, leopard-like blotches and a few twigs and leaves caught in her hair. She looked very young but also very knowing. He was in a mood to be easily attracted by any young woman but anyone would have thought she promised all manner of possibilities as she moved through the dappled wood. She could have been an illusion, a trick of the moon and the perfumed air of midsummer’s night, and, indeed, in this aspect of a flowering siren, she was the artificial creation of his habitually romantic imagination. He knew quite well she was a wayward schoolgirl but there are times and places when and where it is a necessary enrichment to trust appearances; and, besides, the knowledge of the tough flesh under the veneer of moonshine was consoling for, whatever she was in reality, she was, one way and another, real.

Annabel was falling asleep, now, slipping into a deep sleep which was a prelude to a coma which was a prelude to nothing and she felt her exterior fading as her outlines ceased to define her. Lee was free to lie down in the grass beside the temple with an amorous girl on the far side of the Gothic north, and when it was late enough for her father to be sleeping in his bed, she took him home with her. They went down into the city through the amoral gates which neither permitted nor denied access, as though the gates themselves negated a moral problem by declaring it improperly phrased. Joanne listened at her bedroom door for her father’s snoring while Lee took off his clothes. Her walls were covered with pictures of pop singers and a sash or two from beauty contests hung over the bed; her orange-box furniture was trimmed with frills of mauve tulle but the dirty underwear she kicked hastily beneath the bed proved she was a slut at heart.

But she was a sensitive slut and, now she had got him where she wanted him, she was overcome with belated reticence. She tentatively approached the bed with the hazy movements of a nude walking under water, shaking out the filmy hair that settled on her shoulders in a prickling mass; she always enjoyed smuggling a boyfriend into the house under her father’s nose and there was the added temptation of forbidden fruit about this one – her teacher! a married man! – but all at once she was shy of him, because she had inscribed his name again and again at the back of her exercise book for the sheer pleasure of writing it down, had even tried out ‘Joanne Collins’ on the flyleaf of her civics textbook, then speedily erased it. And she knew enough to know that not by one word or gesture must she reveal she had such a young, foolish crush on him. So she covered her face with her hands and smiled between her fingers in almost an embarrassed way.

Even though all Lee wanted was a little comfort, he felt his heart begin to melt, an experience to which he was no longer accustomed. He held out his arms to her.

She ran her finger over the tattoo on his breast but she did not mention it; three in the bed was one too many for
her and she switched off the light so as not to see how he wore his heart on the outside, nor the name on it. In the palpable darkness, all turned out very simple and satisfactory; they were pleased with one another, even though, in the helplessness of sleep, he clung on to her like a drowning man and she had not guessed he would be so desperate for love. That made her uneasy.

She woke him early; he must be out of the house before her father woke and she should finish some neglected homework. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ thought Lee. ‘I’ve knocked off one of my fifth form.’ He probed his conscience for the first twinge of guilt, as one investigates with the tongue a tooth one suspects to be on the point of aching but, try as he would, he could feel no regret. This puzzled him; he was so used to the bulky apparatus of sin and guilt and had forgotten these concepts had never entered his mind until he met Annabel. He arranged to see Joanne in the evening.

‘What about your screwy wife, though?’ she said with a certain reserve.

‘I shouldn’t bother your head about her, ducks,’ said Lee carelessly. ‘After all, she chucked me out, didn’t she.’

He had left Annabel in such apparent strength of mind. He had not deserted her for she had rejected him. And, if one should do right because it is right, why should she have been forced to simulate a life-likeness that did not satisfy her? But now she lay in her ultimate, shocking transformation; now she was a painted doll, bluish at the extremities, nobody’s responsibility. Lee returned to the house only to retrieve a little money and a few clothes. He found her in the bedroom. Buzz crouched at the end of the bed, at the feet of the bedizened corpse.

‘I think you should stand with your foot on her neck,’ said Buzz. ‘Then I would take your picture with your arms crossed and, you understand, your foot on her neck. Like, in a victorious pose.’

Flies already clustered round her eyes. Buzz had chopped down the boards over the windows but the smell of gas pervaded everything and she was plainly far beyond
recovery. Lee struck out at his brother, who crashed from the bed on to the floor. Then they began to squabble drearily as to which of them was most to blame, for nothing but death is irreparable.

LOVE
WAS WRITTEN
in 1969 and the people in it, not quite the children of Marx and Coca-Cola, more the children of Nescafé and the Welfare State, are the pure, perfect products of those days of social mobility and sexual licence. Originally I’d intended to write a little about the novel and how I feel about it after nearly twenty years, how I feel about what seems to me now its almost sinister feat of male impersonation, its icy treatment of the mad girl and its penetrating aroma of unhappiness. And the ornate formalism of the style, that has something to do with where I first got the idea for
Love
, from Benjamin Constant’s early-nineteenth-century novel of sensibility,
Adolphe
; I was seized with the desire to write a kind of modern-day, demotic version of
Adolphe
, although I doubt anybody could spot the resemblance after I’d macerated the whole thing in triple-distilled essence of English provincial life.

Then I thought that perhaps the best way of discussing the novel would really be to write a bit more of it. I’ve changed a lot since 1969, and so has the world; I’m more benign, the world is far bleaker, and the people in
Love
would now be edging nervously up to the middle age they thought could never happen, they thought the world would end first.

I can’t resurrect Annabel, of course; even the women’s movement would have been no help to her and alternative psychiatry would have only made things, if possible, worse. The novel ends so emphatically, on such an irrefutable statement, that there is something a little tasteless about taking her husband and brother-in-law and the lovers and doctors out of the text that is Annabel’s coffin and resurrecting them.
But good taste is not a significant attribute of this novel, anyway.

Bit parts first.

Although
the philosophy lecturer’s wife
appears only in a cameo role, I feel I did not fully do her justice in the days when I thought that mothers had only themselves to blame. I did not understand why she was so furious. I do, now.

She became a radical feminist in the early seventies and now lives on a remote farm in Wales with three other women, two beautiful
AID
children (neither of them hers) and a flock of goats. She knows Lee Collins’s second wife, Rosie, and also Joanne Davis, q.v., from Greenham Common, but she thinks of her life as a heterosexual as a bad dream from which she is now awake and, besides, Lee was only one of many unsuccessful solutions to her discontent and she never could remember his name unless she looked it up first.

Her husband obtained custody of their three children; she did not contest him. He gained his soul at the price of promotion and publications. He remains in the same job, even in the same flat, but his children rise up and call him blessed and though they are now almost grown he still runs a ‘Single Fathers’ workshop at the Community Centre of which the coordinator is Rosie Collins.

Lee, incorrectly, suspects them of conducting a sedate and reticent affair. It is worse than that. They have discussed it and decided not to. But it is worse than
that
, even, for the philosophy lecturer’s seventeen-year-old son is sleeping with the Collinses’ fifteen-year-old daughter on the very bed under the reproduction of the blue-period Picasso harlequin, now somewhat faded. (There is an admirable consistency to provincial life.) Rosie took her to the family planning clinic, but does not tell Lee, as she believes he is capable of homicide where his daughters are concerned.

The peroxided psychiatrist
left the
NHS
for private practice shortly after the events described in this novel, though not before prescribing Lee, after Annabel’s suicide, tranquillizers of such strength in such quantities that he became a virtual zombie.

She is now on the board of directors of a consortium that
runs a chain of extremely expensive detoxification centres for very rich junkies. She is also a director of three pharmaceutical companies, hosts a radio phone-in on neurosis and is author of a nonfiction bestseller,
How to Succeed Even Though You Are a Woman
. She is a passionate advocate of hormone-replacement therapy. She drives a Porsche, rather fast.

Joanne Davis
had too much brute sense of self-preservation to have anything more to do with Lee after she found out what had happened. While he was absent on compassionate leave, she removed herself from school and ran away from home to London.

A man she met on the train got her a job as a hostess in a near-beer club in Soho. From there she graduated successfully to stripping and made a modest killing as a model in the early days of soft porn magazines in the seventies, putting sufficient by to take out a mortgage on a flat in one of the mansion blocks along the Finchley Road and make the down payment on a sports car. This comfortable life came to an abrupt end when she became pregnant as the result of a cash transaction with a minor Saudi princeling.

After her abortion, she felt that if her life was indeed worth more than that of the child she had been carrying, she could no longer continue to take off her clothes for money but must find some other work. No job that did not involve her sexuality offered enough income to keep up the repayments on her smart flat and car; flat and car went. She was soon radicalized.

After much encouragement from new friends she made when she was living in squats, she talked herself onto a course at a polytechnic and has for some years been a social worker for the London borough of Lambeth, specializing in the care of the elderly.

She is a favourite with her clients, who call her Blondie, but she doesn’t have much time for men under sixty-five years old except for her adored baby son, conceived in a fit of absence of mind after a demonstration in support of the miners’ strike in the summer of 1984. She and her baby live in a communal house in Tulse Hill. She stood unsuccessfully
as a Labour candidate in the last local elections. She lost to the Alliance but has been promised a safe ward next time.

She knows Rosie Collins from Greenham Common but the name Collins isn’t unusual enough to jog her memory and she never has any reason to think of Lee; why should she? Nor the time, as a matter of fact.

Carolyn
. . . is now a
TV
presenter with one of the commercial channels. After her first marriage, to a television journalist, came unstuck, she married a young barrister who was just beginning to make a name for himself; he has now done so. They have a house in Kentish Town, cottages in Suffolk and the Dordogne, and a full-time nanny for their daughter, Emma. Carolyn’s son by her first marriage, Gareth, is at boarding school. She recently joined the
SDP
.

At first I thought there could be no positive future for
Buzz
but prison, either for dealing or for committing grievous bodily harm. That is because the essence of naturalist fiction is plausibility; in order to create the willing suspension of disbelief, the writer is forced to allot his or her characters lives that are the most plausible, not the most like life, which, since it is not the product of the human imagination, holds infinite surprises. It would be plausible, and morally satisfying, to dispatch Buzz to prison for some years, though God help the other inmates; but real life goes something like this:

In 1969, Buzz was still waiting for his historic moment; which is why he is the least resolved character in the novel. You might have taken him for a wilting floweroid if you had met him then but, in fact, he was simply waiting for punk to happen, and if he could have contrived to get through the next four or five years without death or addiction, he would become rich and famous.

He added a third z (Buzzz) and managed a few early punk bands with some flair but he had always enjoyed throwing parties almost more than anything and found his metier when he imparted the very quality of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ that characterized his most successful thrashes to the clubs he managed in London and, from 1977, New York, where he has also dabbled in real estate with some success.