We had a final exchange on the steps. He said, ‘Promise me one thing, Serena.’
He was trying to take my hands. I felt sorry for him but I stepped back. It wasn’t the moment to be holding hands.
‘Promise me you’ll think about this. Please. Just this. If I can change my mind, so can you.’
‘I’m awfully tired, Max.’
He seemed to be getting a hold of himself. He took a deep breath. ‘Listen. It’s possible that you’re making a very serious mistake with Tom Haley.’
‘Walk that way and you’ll pick up a cab on the Camden Road.’
He was standing on a lower step, looking up at me, imploring and accusing me as I closed the door. I hesitated behind it, and then, even though I heard his retreating steps, I fixed the security chain before going back to bed.
17
O
ne Brighton weekend in December, Tom asked me to read
From the Somerset Levels
. I took it into the bedroom and went through it carefully. I noted various minor alterations but, by the time I’d finished, my opinion was unchanged. I dreaded the conversation he was waiting to have because I knew I wouldn’t be able to pretend. That afternoon we went for a walk on the Downs. I spoke of the novel’s indifference to the fate of the father and little girl, of the assured depravity of its minor characters, the desolation of the crushed urban masses, the raw squalor of rural poverty, the air of general hopelessness, the cruel and joyless narrative, the depressing effect on the reader.
Tom’s eyes shone. I couldn’t have said anything kinder. ‘Exactly!’ he kept saying. ‘That’s it. That’s right. You’ve got it!’
I’d picked up a few typos and repetitions for which he was disproportionately grateful. Over the following week or so he completed another draft of light revisions – and he was done. He asked me if I would go with him when he delivered it to his editor and I told him it would be an honour. He came up to London on the morning of Christmas Eve, the beginning of my three-day break. We met at Tottenham Court Road Tube station and walked together to Bedford Square.
He gave me the package to carry to bring him luck. One hundred and thirty-six pages, he told me proudly, of double-spaced typing on old-fashioned foolscap. As we walked along I kept thinking of the little girl in the final scene, dying in agony on the wet floor of a burned-out cellar. If I was really to do my duty I should have posted the whole thing in its envelope down the nearest drain. But I was excited for him and held the grim chronicle securely against my chest as I would my – our – baby.
I’d wanted to spend Christmas with Tom holed up in the Brighton flat, but I’d received a summons home and was due to take the train up that afternoon. I hadn’t been back in many months. My mother was firm on the phone and even the Bishop had taken a view. I wasn’t enough of a rebel to refuse, though I felt ashamed when I explained myself to Tom. In my early twenties the last threads of childhood still bound me. He, however, a free adult in his late twenties, was sympathetic to my parents’ view. Of course they needed to see me, of course I should go. It was my grown-up duty to spend Christmas with them. He himself would be with his family in Sevenoaks on the twenty-fifth, and he was determined to get his sister Laura out of the Bristol hostel and unite her with her children around the festive table, and try to keep her off the drink.
So I hauled his package towards Bloomsbury, conscious that we only had a few hours together, and then we’d be apart for over a week, for I’d be going straight back to work on the twenty-seventh. As we walked he told me his latest news. He had just heard back from Ian Hamilton at the
New Review
. Tom had recast the climax of ‘Probable Adultery’ as I’d suggested in my notes and submitted it along with his talking-ape story. Hamilton had written to say that ‘Probable Adultery’ was not for him, he had no patience for the ins and outs of the ‘logic stuff’ and he doubted that ‘anyone but a Senior Wrangler would’. On the other hand, he thought the garrulous monkey was ‘not bad’. Tom wasn’t sure if that was
an acceptance. He was going to meet Hamilton in the New Year and find out.
We were shown into Tom Maschler’s grand office or library on the first floor of a Georgian mansion overlooking the square. When the publisher came in, almost at a run, I was the one who handed over the novel. He tossed it on the desk behind him, kissed me wetly on both cheeks and pumped Tom’s hand, congratulated him, guided him towards a chair and began to interrogate him, barely waiting for an answer to one question before starting the next. What was he living on, when were we getting married, had he read Russell Hoban, did he realise that the elusive Pynchon had sat in that same chair the day before, did he know Martin, son of Kingsley, would we like to meet Madhur Jaffrey? Maschler reminded me of an Italian tennis coach who once came to our school and in an afternoon of impatient jovial instruction rebuilt my backhand. The publisher was lean and brown, hungry for information, and pleasantly agitated, as though perpetually suspended on the edge of a joke, or a revolutionary new idea that might come to him through a chance remark.
I was grateful to be ignored and wandered up to the far end of the room and stood looking at the wintry trees in Bedford Square. I heard Tom, my Tom, say that he lived by his teaching, that he hadn’t yet read
One Hundred Years of Solitude
or Jonathan Miller’s book on McLuhan but intended to, and that no, he had no clear idea of his next novel. He skipped the question about marriage, agreed that Roth was a genius and
Portnoy’s Complaint
a masterpiece, and that the English translations of Neruda’s sonnets were exceptional. Tom, like me, knew no Spanish and was in no position to judge. Neither of us had read Roth’s novel at that point. His answers were guarded, even pedestrian, and I sympathised – we were the innocent country cousins, overwhelmed by the range and speed of Maschler’s references, and it seemed only right after ten minutes that we should be dismissed.
We were too dull. He came with us to the top of the stairs. As he said goodbye he said he might have taken us to lunch at his favourite Greek place in Charlotte Street, but he didn’t believe in lunch. We found ourselves back on the pavement, a little dazed, and as we walked on spent a good while discussing whether the meeting had ‘gone well’. Tom thought on balance it had, and I agreed, though I actually thought it hadn’t.
But it didn’t matter, the novel, the terrible novel, was delivered, we were about to part, it was Christmas, and we ought to be celebrating. We wandered south, into Trafalgar Square, passing on the way the National Portrait Gallery and, like a couple of thirty years’ standing, we reminisced about our first meeting there – did we both think it was going to be a one-night affair, could we have guessed what would follow? Then we doubled back and went to Sheekey’s and managed to get in without a booking. I was wary of drinking. I had to go home and pack, get to Liverpool Street for a five o’clock train, and prepare to throw off my role as secret agent of the State and become a dutiful daughter, the one who was sleekly rising through the ranks of the Department of Health and Social Security.
But well ahead of the Dover sole, an ice bucket arrived followed by a bottle of champagne, and down it went, and before the next one came Tom reached across the table for my hand and told me he had a secret to confess and though he didn’t want to trouble me with it just before we separated, he wouldn’t sleep unless he told me. It was this. He didn’t have an idea, not even a scrap of an idea, for another novel and he doubted that he ever would.
From the Somerset Levels –
we referred to it as ‘the Levels’ – was a fluke, he had blundered into it by accident when he thought he was writing a short story about something else. And the other day, walking past Brighton Pavilion, an inconsequential line of Spenser had come to mind –
Put in porphyry and marble do appear –
Spenser in Rome, reflecting on its past. But perhaps it needn’t
only be Rome. Tom found himself beginning to map out an article about poetry’s relation to the city, the city through the centuries. Academic writing was supposed to be behind him, there had been times when his thesis had driven him to despair. But nostalgia was creeping in – nostalgia for the quiet integrity of scholarship, its exacting protocols, and above all, for the loveliness of Spenser’s verse. He knew it so well, the warmth beneath its formality – this was a world he could inhabit. The idea for the article was original and bold, it was exciting, it crossed the boundaries of disparate disciplines. Geology, town planning, archaeology. There was an editor of a specialist journal who would be delighted to have something from him. Two days before, Tom had found himself wondering about a teaching job he had heard was going at Bristol university. The MA in international relations had been a diversion. Perhaps fiction was too. His future lay in teaching and academic research. How fraudulent he had felt at Bedford Square just now, how constrained during the conversation. It was a real possibility that he would never write another novel again, or even a story. How could he admit such a thing to Maschler, the most respected publisher of fiction in town?
Or to me. I disengaged my hand. This was my first free Monday in months but I was back at work for the Sweet Tooth cause. I told Tom it was a well-known fact that writers felt emptied out at the end of their labours. As if I knew a thing about it, I told him that there was nothing incompatible about writing the occasional scholarly essay and writing novels. I cast about for an example of a celebrated writer who did just that, but couldn’t think of one. The second bottle arrived and I embarked on a celebration of Tom’s work. It was the unusual psychological slant of his stories, their strange intimacy in combination with his worldly essays on the East German uprising and the Great Train Robbery, it was that
breadth
of interest that marked him out, and was the reason why the Foundation was so proud to
have an association with him, why the name of T.H. Haley was conjured in literary circles, and why two of its most important figures, Hamilton and Maschler, wanted him to write for them.
Tom was watching me throughout this performance with his little smile – it sometimes infuriated me – of tolerant scepticism.
‘You told me you couldn’t write
and
teach. Would you be happy on an assistant lecturer’s salary? Eight hundred pounds a year? That’s assuming you get a job.’
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought of that.’
‘The other night you told me you might write an article for
Index on Censorship
about the Romanian security service. What’s it called?’
‘The DSS. But it’s really about poetry.’
‘I thought it was about torture.’
‘Incidentally.’
‘You said it might even become a short story.’
He brightened a little. ‘It might. I’m meeting my poet friend Traian again next week. I can’t do anything without his say-so.’
I said, ‘No reason why you shouldn’t write the Spenser essay too. You have all this freedom and that’s what the Foundation wants for you. You can do anything you like.’
After that he seemed to lose interest and wanted to change the subject. So we talked about the things that everybody was talking about – the government’s energy-conserving three-day week, due to start on New Year’s Eve, yesterday’s doubling of the price of oil, the several explosions round town in pubs and shops, ‘Christmas presents’ from the Provisional IRA. We discussed why people seemed strangely happy conserving energy, doing things by candlelight, as though adversity had restored purpose to existence. At least, it was easy enough to think so as we finished the second bottle.
It was almost four when we said our goodbyes outside
Leicester Square Tube station. We embraced and kissed, caressed by a warming breeze wafting up the subway steps. Then he set off on a mind-clearing walk to Victoria station while I headed to Camden to pack my clothes and meagre Christmas presents, blearily aware there was no chance of making my train and that I would be late for Christmas Eve dinner, an occasion to which my mother gave selfless days of preparation. She wouldn’t be pleased.
I took the six thirty, got in just before nine, and walked from the station, crossing the river then following by a clear half-moon the semi-rural path along it, past dark boats tethered to the bank, inhaling air icy and pure, blown in across East Anglia from Siberia. The taste of it reminded me of my adolescence, its boredom and longing, and all our little rebellions tamed or undone by the desire to please certain teachers with dazzling essays. Oh, the elated disappointment of an A minus, as keen as a cold wind from the north! The path curved below the rugger pitches of the boys’ school, and the spire, my father’s spire, creamily lit, rose up across the expanse. I cut away from the river to cross the pitches, passed the changing rooms that used to smell to me of all that was sourly fascinating about boys, and got into the cathedral close by an old oak door that never used to be locked. It pleased me that it was unlocked now, still squeaked on its hinge. It took me by surprise, this walk across an ancient past. Four or five years – nothing at all. But no one over thirty could understand this peculiarly weighted and condensed time, from late teens to early twenties, a stretch of life that needed a name, from school leaver to salaried professional, with a university and affairs and death and choices in between. I had forgotten how recent my childhood was, how long and inescapable it once seemed. How grown-up and how unchanged I was.
I don’t know why my heart beat harder as I went towards the house. As I came closer I slowed. I’d forgotten just how immense it was and it amazed me now that I could ever
have taken this pale-red brick Queen Anne palace for granted. I advanced between the bare forms of cut-back rose shrubs and box hedging rising from beds framed by massive slabs of York paving. I rang, or pulled, the bell and to my astonishment the door opened almost immediately and there was the Bishop, with a grey jacket on over his purple clerical shirt and dog collar. He would be conducting a midnight service later. He must have been crossing the hall when I rang, for answering the door was something that would never occur to him. He was a big man, with a vague and kindly face, and a boyish though entirely white forelock that he was always brushing aside. People used to say that he resembled a benign tabby cat. As he processed in stately manner through his fifties, his gut had swelled, which seemed to suit his slow self-absorbed air. My sister and I used to mock him behind his back and sometimes were even bitter, not because we disliked him – far from it – but because we could never get his attention, or never for long. To him our lives were distant foolish things. He didn’t know that sometimes Lucy and I fought over him in our teens. We longed to have him for ourselves, if only for ten minutes in his study, and we each suspected the other was the more favoured. Her tangle with drugs, pregnancy and the law had permitted her many such privileged minutes. When I’d heard about them on the phone, despite all my concern for her, I felt a twinge of the old jealousy. When would it be my turn?