Up in the Tower, Blue and Antonia, wearing white bathrobes and white slippers, moved swiftly past me – off to the spa for ‘treatments’ (non-invasive treatments – massage, pedicure). So I entered and made myself comfortable in the sitting room and waited for Christopher to stir. I noticed the extra bed, provided for Antonia, my god-daughter, whom I still thought of as a child, despite the recent memory of her driving us all out to an Indian restaurant in DC. She was sixteen but this is America.
Distant scouring and expectorating. As James Joyce put it: Hoik!…Phthook!
‘I’m here,’ I called out. ‘But don’t mind me.’
A pause, and then he called back, ‘I may be some time.’
At length he appeared, in underpants and shirt; his calves, his thighs, had a whittled-down look; he clenched and reclenched his brow, trying to focus. Then he bent over the trolley and the mobile oven sent up by room service: coffee; a cautious bowl of porridge; a strip of bacon, a poached egg with hash browns; more coffee, sealed with a cigarette.
It was half an hour before noon on Christopher’s day off.
‘I’m feeling almost human,’ he said wonderingly. ‘I might even have a Scotch…’
Apart from the fact that he mixed his Johnnie Walker Black Label with Coca-Cola, as opposed to chilled Perrier water (no ice), this would have been the old pattern, the status quo ante, how it was before. And the normal pattern was a minimum of two American-sized whiskies starting at noon or a little earlier. Now they were English-sized whiskies, pub doubles, ‘just a dirty glass’, as he used to say…
Even when his intake was preternatural, even when lunch might last all day and dinner all night (and the interval between post-lunch wine and pre-dinner cocktails would be marked, not quite as often as not, by a hurried cup of tea), he never went to sleep unless he had produced ‘at least a thousand words of printable copy’ – without fail.
One evening in London in what must have been the spring of 1984, having varied his usual whiskies with the negronis I passed his way, Christopher was taken by me and Julia (who was pregnant with our first son, and therefore very continent) to a dancing party that might have qualified as a ball. The waiters were offering shot glasses of vodka, and Christopher and I went obediently from tray to tray. During the buffet dinner we both had about nineteen glasses of wine – nor, when they came, did we neglect the liqueurs, the Calvadoses, the Benedictines…
The expectant couple got home at about two. Three hours later, as I tried to balance on the Medusa’s raft of the bed, I heard Christopher let himself in. At about nine, during a spell of weary wakefulness, I heard Christopher let himself out, while a taxi rattled in the street – his destination, I knew, was a TV studio (where he assertively applied himself in the demanding company of Germaine Greer and Norman Mailer, and made a point of taunting Norman about his obsession with sodomy and homosexuality).*5
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked me in the kitchen as he fixed himself a midday Johnnie Black.
‘Truly dreadful. It’s so bad I can’t even smoke.’
He smiled with affectionate sadism and said, ‘Mm. I don’t get hangovers. Can’t see the point of them.’
‘The point of them, I suppose, is to make you vow you’ll never drink again. Or at least to make you hold off for long enough to stay alive.’
‘Try hair of the dog, Little Keith. Have a negroni. It’s the best thing.’
‘…Christ. Look at you. Sea breezes. You know, Hitch, you’ve got a naval constitution. Rum, bum, and baccy, and you fucking thrive on it. This morning. Did you get any sleep between when you got back and when you went out again?’
‘No. I wrote a piece.’
‘You wrote a piece?’
It took me a full minute to assimilate this. Then I got myself a beer and said,
‘You know who you remind me of as a writer type? Anthony Burgess.’ Christopher knew about my lunch with Burgess in Monaco, which made me seriously ill for three whole days and nights (and at six o’clock Burgess ordered a gin and tonic – as if to start all over again). ‘And after that I bet I know what Burgess did. He went home and wrote a symphony and did all the housework and got back to his novel in progress. To you and him, it’s just fuel.’
Blue had truth on her side. He’s an ox.
Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?
We left the Lone Star and crossed the road and entered the mall. ‘Over 30 Restaurants to Choose From,’ said the sign. We chose Tex-Mex.
‘Do you do this, Hitch?’ I said. ‘I think all men do it when they’re turning sixty. I keep looking back on my uh – on how it went with women.’
‘Oh yeah. Beginning at the beginning. And all the missed chances…’
‘Missed chances are very bad. Still, I have to say I look back with broad satisfaction. Larkin must’ve looked back with horror. And what’s the reason? Poets can pull.’
‘Mm, remember Fleischer in Humboldt’s Gift? He bangs on the girls’ door and says, Let me in. I’m a poet and I have a big cock. Announcing his twin attractions.’
‘Fleischer was overegging it. If you’re a poet you don’t need a big cock. You can look like Nosferatu and still pull. Poets get girls…A girl told me that. Not a poet.’
‘Which girl?’
‘Phoebe Phelps.’
‘Ah. How is dear Phoebe? I’m sure no poets ever pulled her.’
‘Well, definitely not when she was an escort girl. Poets can’t afford escort girls. Or anything else. That’s part of their spell.’
‘Is it? I assumed poets got girls because they’re supposed to be sensitive.’
‘Not according to Phoebe. It’s simpler than that.
