‘Phoebe? Then she had hidden depths.’
‘She was secretly…She read poets in secret. Or she read one poet.’
Christopher had with him a proof of Larkin’s Letters to Monica (which he would review in the Atlantic in May; I had already reviewed Letters to Monica in the Guardian). My notebook records that Christopher decided on lentil soup and a BLT. It also records the following: Hitch much quieter today (prospect of the synchrotron?). Making a visible effort not to seem too preoccupied. Like with Saul – found I was talking more.
I tapped the cover of Letters to Monica. ‘How’re you finding it?’
He shrugged and said, ‘I was expecting yet another layer of trex and mire. But so far it’s not quite as dank as I’d feared.’
‘It’s pretty dank.’
Having ordered, they went out for a smoke. I said,
‘The incidental stuff. Like their summer holidays. Sark. Mallaig. Poolewe. Who goes for a holiday on a crag in the North Sea? “Did you get my card from Pocklington?” ’
‘I’ve been to Pocklington.’
‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Pocklington…But you like all that Middle England stuff that gives me the horrors.*6 And by Middle England I mean anywhere that’s not in central London. Rustic towns, country houses, weekend cottages.’
‘What could be more agreeable? You go for a long walk in the rain and then you drink yourself senseless in front of the fire.’
‘…No, I’m touched by it – by the fact that you’re touched by bourgeois yokels and their habitat. In Hitch-22, the rabbits on the lawn and all that. There is a kind of hick beauty there. And Larkin was its poet.’
‘And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes…’
‘The guildhalls, the carved choirs…’
‘I just think it will happen, soon.’
Two things were and would remain undiscussed. First, I wasn’t going to tell Hitch about Phoebe and the Larkin complication (inactive for a while but quietly reignited by Letters to Monica); you think you keep no secrets from your closest friend, but no one tells anyone everything. Second, neither of us was likely to bring up the fact that Larkin died of oesophageal cancer at the age of sixty-three. And, for us, sixty-three was in plain sight – visible to the naked eye.
‘With Monica,’ I said when we were back at the table. ‘…Okay, here’s a question for you. Who’s your worst-ever girlfriend?’
‘Mine? Worst in what sense?’
‘You know, the least attractive and the most boring…Or put it this way. The least attractive, the most boring, the most embarrassing in company, the most garrulous, the most self-important, and the worst fuck. Because that’s Monica.’
He said, ‘You think? Maybe she was the best fuck. Look at the others.’
‘No. Keep reading. Later on he says, I can’t tell whether you’re feeling anything. You don’t seem to like anything more than anything else…That’s not what you’d write to your best fuck. So go on – make a mental composite. Now. Imagine you went out with her, not for a week, not for six months, but for thirty-five years. Oh yeah, and this is a chick who votes Conservative. Confident and proud, she writes, of “my conservatism”.’
‘Christ.’ For the first time he looked really shaken. ‘My conservatism.’
‘Such was Monica. I last saw her in the uh, the early eighties. He brought her to dinner at Dad’s. And I tell you, brother, I tell you, she was a real…’
‘And so were all the others. Well I say all. All three or four of them.’
‘He was a genteel poltroon – that’s what I’ve come to think. Fastidious, prissy. He lacked courage, in all departments except poetry. Especially in the sack.’
‘Is it…Do you need courage in the sack?’
‘Have you come to the billet-doux where he says all sex is a form of male bullying – male “cruelty”? Bending someone else to your will, he says.’
‘I don’t think so. I’m on page…forty. I’ve skimmed ahead a bit. All those highminded excuses about his low sex drive.’
‘Well it’ll give you a twinge, this paragraph. There’s no actual duress, but you can’t help going through some of the same motions. You know – put your legs there. Flip over, darling. Now spin round…Decades ago I was in bed with Lily, uh, after the act, and she said, “Right. I’ll show you what it’s like being a girl.” She’s really strong, Lily, and she had me do the splits and hooked my feet round the back of my neck. All the time rutting breathily up against me. And it was certainly very forceful. And enlightening. And incredibly funny. I think I actually shat myself laughing…It’s one of my most cherished memories.’
‘He didn’t have any cherished memories. Where’s that bit?…Nothing will be worth looking back on, I know that for certain. For certain! There will be nothing but remorse and regret for opportunities missed. And he wrote that aged thirty-four.’
‘Terrifying. I like looking back on my lovelife, and I’m sure you do too. But not everyone does. Maybe most people don’t. The sexually unlucky, the sexually lonely. There’s infinite misery in that.’
‘How would you know? I mean, outside the crucible of your imagination. You’ve never been sexually lonely.’
‘Oh yes I have. And a little goes a long way. And it was a lot, not a little. There was a whole year just before we became friends when I couldn’t pull anyone. And you can feel all the yearning turn into bitterness. It’s so corrosive, and so fast-acting. Your balance, your whole equilibrium…Tina got me out of that. When she was nineteen Tina rode into town and rescued me from Larkinland. If she hadn’t I might still be there. Scowling at women and telling dirty jokes with a sick glint in my eye.’
‘And if Tina hadn’t intervened, you’d never have written about Stalin and Hitler.’
I said, ‘Oi, that’s a leap, isn’t it? How d’you figure that?’
‘What’s that line in one of Julian’s early novels? How we are in the sack governs how we
