‘Well, getting, uh securing the interest of a poet – that makes women feel interesting. But I think it’s simpler than that. Correct me if I’m wrong, Dr Larkin, but poets don’t get much in the way of rewards, do they. Compared to dramatists and even novelists.’
‘That at least is incontrovertible.’
‘And women sense it. Poets don’t get much, so women make sure poets get women. God bless them.’ Phoebe clutched her bag and gazed about her. ‘Ah, Christopher’s here. He’s a definite Christopher, isn’t he – not a Chris. Now Dr Larkin, I can’t hog you all night. There’s a press of admirers dying to give you a pinch and a punch.’
She meant the two young men and the one old lady who were hovering disconnectedly nearby.
‘Now you won’t vanish, will you,’ said Larkin, ‘without bidding me farewell?’
‘Oh I promise.’
—————
That particular poet took the late train back to Hull, while Martin, his girlfriend, and his father had a noisy dinner in a local tratt with Bob and Liddie (wife number four) plus Hitch and Eleni. Also present were a couple of young academics from San Francisco, who became increasingly entranced by the sheer bulk of what Phoebe was putting away; they fell silent after she ordered a second veal chop and a further hamper of bread; and when at last she got nimbly to her feet (after two custard pies and two fruit salads), they stared at one another and shook their heads…
Then there was Kingsley to be driven home and dropped off in Hampstead. The house was still lit, at twelve-fifteen; and something told Martin that the white sheen from the sitting room – it had a coldly watchful look in the warm summer night – would be reproduced in Jane’s waiting face…Now Kingsley climbed heavily from the car, heavily aware that he would not be going straight to bed.
Unlike his middle child. In fact it started on the moonlit landing, in Hereford Mansions; as he followed Phoebe up the stairs, giving himself a shadowy eye-level view of the enormous bra of her underpants, he reached up and she went still and widened the set of her legs, saying,
‘Give me your hand.’
And even as the reptilian glaze came down on him, he was thinking, no, this isn’t quite right, something is not as it should be.*1 But it will do beautifully for now…
Later – but not very much later – she said, ‘That was quick.’
‘I know. I’m sorry. I just lost concentration…It won’t happen again.’
There was a silence – a silence he urgently wanted to break. He said,
‘Uh Phoebe, did you manage to say goodbye to the old boy?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said (unhuffily and even with some enthusiasm). ‘We had a whole other chat. And we got on to death I’m afraid. I told him I was just as messed up about it as he was. I even told him about the lav.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did. And I asked him if he felt the same way.’
‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘And did he? Does he?’
Phoebe’s fear of death, or her type of death awareness, somehow extended to her morning visits to the bathroom. These visits were always preceded by a hectic demand for absolute sequestration (even at her place, with its remote second toilet, she sent him out to buy a paper). I thought only blokes were like that, he once said – because in his experience girls just went in there, without locking or even closing the door, and just came out again as if nothing had happened. Yet Phoebe argued the other way. You’d expect a bloke to need a shit now and then. But not girls. How’re you meant to think of yourself as even halfway pretty, she said, when you’re responsible for that, that swamp of hot muck? Every day? No wonder I’m neurotic about it.
‘And was he? Is he the same way?’
‘No. He said he regards it as “communing with nature”. Which I thought was slightly nuts too. Still, he doesn’t see it as a visit to hell.
‘On one thing we saw absolutely eye to eye. The kiddies. I said, I take a lot of pride in my figure. It’s my one great blessing. And I won’t stand for some grasping little bleeder ruining my midriff and my tits, which he kept trying not to stare at, and God knows what else. And on that he was with me all the way…
‘I was planning to give him a flash before I went off. There was hardly anybody there by then, so I thought I’d drop my compact and then bend right over to pick it up. Then he’d be able to structure a wank around it when he got back up north. I mean, with him that’s the point of it all, isn’t it? Wanks. There’s no boring bit before and after with wanks, not like fucks. And wanks are free.
‘It seemed so lame. But I couldn’t think what else to do. So I did it. And stayed down an extra minute fiddling with my boot buttons. Then I straightened up with a silly-me smile…And I think I did scare him, because he had a frail look on his face, like an old woman. He is an old woman. And he said, You oughtn’t to be allowed.’
‘Oughtn’t. That’s very him.’
She said, ‘Martin. Earlier on. It was as if you came as quickly as you could.’
‘…I’m sorry, Phoebe. It won’t happen again.’
Not long after, when she went quiet and then still, I carefully got out of bed and groped my way to the balcony and had a shivery smoke, saying to myself, Christ. Even the sex has suddenly got something wrong with it…
Knowing and accepting that ‘the moronic fraternity of sleep’ (Nabokov) would be closed to me that night, I went inside and turned on the table lamp and ran my eye over Phoebe’s sparse bookshelves. A paperback bestseller called The Usurers, Jane
