15
L
ate October brought the annual rite of putting back the clocks, tightening the lid of darkness over our afternoons, lowering the nation’s mood further. November began with another cold snap and it rained most days. Everyone was speaking of ‘the crisis’. Government presses were printing petrol rationing coupons. There had been nothing like this since the last war. The general sense was that we were heading for something nasty but hard to foresee, impossible to avoid. There was a suspicion that the ‘social fabric’ was about to unravel, though no one really knew what this would entail. But I was happy and busy, I had a lover at last, and I was trying not to brood about Tony. My anger at him gave way to, or at least blended with, guilt for condemning him so harshly. It was wrong to lose sight of that distant idyll, our Edwardian summer in Suffolk. Now I was with Tom, I felt protected, I could afford to think nostalgically rather than tragically of our time together. Tony may have betrayed his country but he’d given me my start in life.
I revived my newspaper habit. It was the opinion pages that drew me, the complaints and laments, known in the trade, so I’d learned, as why-oh-why pieces. As in, why-oh-why did university intellectuals cheer on the carnage wrought by the Provisional IRA and romanticise the Angry Brigade
and the Red Army Faction? Our empire and our victory in the Second World War haunted and accused us, but why-oh-why must we stagnate among the ruins of our former greatness? Crime rates were soaring, everyday courtesies declining, the streets filthy, our economy and morale broken, our living standards below those of communist East Germany, and we stood divided, truculent and irrelevant. Insurrectionary trouble-makers were dismantling our democratic traditions, popular television was hysterically silly, colour TV sets cost too much and everyone agreed there was no hope, the country was finished, our moment in history had passed. Why-oh-why?
I also followed the woeful daily narrative. By the middle of the month oil imports were right down, the Coal Board had offered the miners 16.5 per cent but, seizing the opportunity granted by OPEC, they were holding out for 35 per cent and were starting their overtime ban. Children were sent home because there was no heating in their schools, street lights were turned off to save energy, there was wild talk of everyone working a three-day week because of electricity shortages. The government announced the fifth state of emergency. Some said pay off the miners, some said down with bullies and blackmailers. I followed all this, I discovered I had a taste for economics. I knew the figures and I knew my way round the crisis. But I didn’t care. I was absorbed by Spade and Helium, I was trying to forget Volt and my heart belonged to Sweet Tooth, my private portion of it. This meant travelling ex officio at the weekends to Brighton, where Tom had a two-room flat at the top of a thin white house near the station. Clifton Street resembled a row of iced Christmas cakes, the air was clean, we had privacy, the bed was of modern pine, the mattress silent and firm. Within weeks I came to think of this place as home.
The bedroom was just a little larger than the bed. There wasn’t enough space to open the wardrobe door by more than nine inches or so. You had to reach inside and feel for
your clothes. I sometimes woke in the early morning to the sound of Tom’s typewriter through the wall. The room he worked in also served as kitchen and sitting room and felt more spacious. It had been opened up to the rafters by the ambitious builder who was Tom’s landlord. That uneven tapping of the keys and the cawing of gulls – I woke to these sounds and, keeping my eyes closed, I’d luxuriate in the transformation in my existence. How lonely I’d been in Camden, especially after Shirley had left. What a pleasure it was, to arrive at seven on a Friday at the end of an arduous week and walk the few hundred yards up the hill under streetlight, smelling the sea and feeling that Brighton was as remote from London as Nice or Naples, knowing that Tom would have a bottle of white wine in the miniature fridge and wine glasses ready on the kitchen table. Our weekends were simple. We made love, we read, we walked on the seafront and sometimes on the Downs, and we ate in restaurants – usually in the Lanes. And Tom wrote.
He worked on an Olivetti portable on a green baize card table pushed into a corner. He would get up in the night or at dawn and work through until nine or so, when he would come back to bed, make love to me, then sleep until midday while I went out for a coffee and a croissant near the Open Market. Croissants were a novelty in England then and they made my corner of Brighton seem all the more exotic. I would read the paper cover to cover, minus the sport, then shop for our fry-up brunch.
Tom’s Foundation money was coming through – how else could we afford to eat at Wheeler’s and fill the fridge with Chablis? During that November and December he was doing the last of his teaching and working on two stories. He’d met in London a poet and editor, Ian Hamilton, who was starting up a literary magazine, the
New Review
, and wanted Tom to submit fiction for one of the early issues. He had read all of Tom’s published stuff and had told him over drinks in Soho that it was ‘quite good’ or ‘not bad’ – high praise from this quarter, apparently.
In the self-congratulatory way of new lovers, we had developed by now a number of smug routines, catch phrases and fetishes, and our Saturday evening pattern was well established. We often made love in the early evening – our ‘main meal of the day’. The early morning ‘cuddle’ did not really count. In a mood of elation and post-coital clarity, we’d dress for an evening out and before leaving the flat we’d sink most of a bottle of Chablis. We would drink nothing else at home though neither of us knew a thing about wine. Chablis was a joke choice because, apparently, James Bond liked it. Tom would play music on his new hi-fi, usually bebop, to me no more than an arrhythmic stream of random notes, but it sounded sophisticated and glamorously urban. Then we would step out into the icy sea breeze and saunter down the hill to the Lanes, usually to Wheeler’s fish restaurant. Tom had semi-drunkenly over-tipped the waiters there often enough, so we were popular and were shown with some flourish to ‘our’ table, well positioned to one side for us to observe and mock the other diners. I suppose we were unbearable. We made a thing of telling the waiters to bring us as a starter ‘the usual’ – two glasses of champagne and a dozen oysters. I’m not sure we really liked them, but we liked the idea of them, the oval arrangement of barnacled ancient life among the parsley and halved lemons and, glinting opulently in the candlelight, the bed of ice, the silver dish, the polished cruet of chilli sauce.
When we weren’t talking about ourselves, we had all of politics – the domestic crisis, the Middle East, Vietnam. Logically, we should have been more ambivalent about a war to contain communism, but we took the orthodox view of our generation. The struggle was murderously cruel and clearly a failure. We also followed that soap opera of over-reaching power and folly, Watergate, though Tom, like most men I knew, was so well up on the cast, the dates, every historical turn in the narrative and minor constitutional implication that he found me a useless companion in outrage. We should also
have had all of literature. He showed me the poems he loved, and there was no problem with that – I loved them too. But he couldn’t interest me in the novels of John Hawkes, Barry Hannah or William Gaddis, and he failed with my heroines, Margaret Drabble, Fay Weldon and, my latest flame, Jennifer Johnston. I thought his lot were too dry, he thought mine were wet, though he was prepared to give Elizabeth Bowen the benefit of the doubt. During that time, we managed to agree on only one short novel, which he had in a bound proof, William Kotzwinkle’s
Swimmer in the Secret Sea
. He thought it was beautifully formed, I thought it was wise and sad.
Since he didn’t like talking about his work before it was finished, I felt it was reasonable and dutiful to take a peek when he was out one Saturday afternoon researching in the library. I kept the door open so I could hear him coming up the stairs. One story, completed in a first draft by the end of November, was narrated by a talking ape prone to anxious reflections about his lover, a writer struggling with her second novel. She has been praised for her first. Is she capable of another just as good? She is beginning to doubt it. The indignant ape hovers at her back, hurt by the way she neglects him for her labours. Only on the last page did I discover that the story I was reading was actually the one the woman was writing. The ape doesn’t exist, it’s a spectre, the creature of her fretful imagination.
No
. And no again. Not that. Beyond the strained and ludicrous matter of cross-species sex, I instinctively distrusted this kind of fictional trick. I wanted to feel the ground beneath my feet. There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
If the first was disappointing, the second piece amazed me before I started reading. It was over a hundred and forty
pages long, with last week’s date written in longhand below the last sentence. The first draft of a short novel, and he’d kept it a secret from me. I was about to start reading when I was startled by the door to the outside landing slamming shut, pushed by a draught through the leaky windows. I got up and propped the door open with a coil of oily rope that Tom had once used to haul single-handedly the wardrobe up the stairs. Then I turned on the light that hung from the rafters and settled down to my guilty speed-reading.
From the Somerset Levels
described a journey a man makes with his nine-year-old daughter across a ruined landscape of burned-out villages and small towns, where rats, cholera and bubonic plague are constant dangers, where the water is polluted and neighbours fight to the death for an ancient can of juice, where the locals consider themselves lucky to be invited to a celebration dinner at which a dog and a couple of scrawny cats will be roasted over a bonfire. The desolation is even greater when father and daughter reach London. Among the decaying skyscrapers and rusting vehicles and uninhabitable terraced streets where rats and feral dogs teem, warlords and their thugs, faces done up in streaks of primary colours, terrorise the impoverished citizenry. Electricity is a distant memory. All that functions, though barely, is government itself. A ministerial tower block rises over a vast plain of cracked and weedy concrete. On their way to stand in line outside a government office, father and daughter cross the plain at dawn, passing over
vegetables, rotten and trodden down, cardboard boxes flattened into beds, the remains of fires and the carcasses of roasted pigeons, rusted tin, vomit, worn tyres, chemical green puddles, human and animal excrement. An old dream of horizontal lines converging on the thrusting steel and glass perpendicular was now beyond recall
.
This plaza, where much of the central section of the novel takes place, is a giant microcosm of a sad new world. In the middle is a disused fountain, the air above it is
grey with flies. Men and boys came there daily to squat on the wide concrete rim and defecate
. These figures
perch like featherless birds
. Later in the day the place teems like an ant colony, the air is thick with smoke, the noise is deafening, people spread their pathetic goods on coloured blankets, the father haggles for an ancient used bar of soap, though fresh water will be hard to find. Everything for sale on the plain was made long ago, by processes no longer understood. Later, the man (annoyingly, we are never told his name) meets up with an old friend who is lucky enough to have a room. She’s a collector. On the table there is a telephone,
its wire severed at four inches and, beyond that, propped against the wall, a cathode ray tube. The television’s wooden casing, the glass screen and control buttons had long ago been ripped away and now bunches of bright wires coiled against the dull metal
. She cares for such objects because, she tells him, they’re
the products of human inventiveness and design. And not caring for objects is one step away from not caring for people
. But he thinks her curating impulses are pointless.
Without a telephone system, telephones are worthless junk
.
Industrial civilisation and all its systems and culture are fading from recall. Man is tracking back through time to a brutal past where constant competition for scarce resources allows little kindness or invention. The old days will not be back.
Everything has changed so much that I can hardly believe it was us who were there
, the woman tells him of the past they once shared.
This was where we were always heading
, one shoeless philosophical character says to the father. It’s made clear elsewhere that civilisation’s collapse began with the injustices, conflicts and contradictions of the twentieth century.
The reader doesn’t find out where the man and the little girl are headed until the final pages. They have been searching for his wife, the girl’s mother. There are no systems of communication or bureaucracy to help them. The only photograph they have is of her as a child. They rely on word of mouth,
and after many false trails, they are bound to fail, especially when they begin to succumb to bubonic plague. Father and daughter die in one another’s arms in the rank cellar of the ruined headquarters of a once-famous bank.
It had taken me an hour and a quarter to read to the end. I replaced the pages by the typewriter, taking care to spread them as untidily as I’d found them, shifted the rope and closed the door. I sat at the kitchen table trying to think through my confusion. I could easily rehearse the objections of Peter Nutting and colleagues. Here were the doomed dystopia we did not want, the modish apocalypse that indicted and rejected all we had ever devised or built or loved, that relished in the entire project collapsing into the dirt. Here were the luxury and privilege of the well-fed man scoffing at all hopes of progress for the rest. T.H. Haley owed nothing to a world that nurtured him kindly, liberally educated him for free, sent him to no wars, brought him to manhood without scary rituals or famine or fear of vengeful gods, embraced him with a handsome pension in his twenties and placed no limits on his freedom of expression. This was an easy nihilism that never doubted that all we had made was rotten, never thought to pose alternatives, never derived hope from friendship, love, free markets, industry, technology, trade and all the arts and sciences.