The thought of being an exception flattered his vanity. So did her otherness, with its weird cinema (the atrium at TFS, the business trips to Prague and Budapest, the courtesy car). So did the evident fact that he had the gravitational weight to attract someone from such a distant system, to draw someone in through so many voids from so very far away.
She’s also got a wound, I think, Jane had said. Martin thought that too; and it made him vulnerable to the fantasies of rescue and redemption – fantasies of honour – that had been part of his imaginative life since the age of five or six. Redeem her how? Through love. He wanted her to love him. If he could achieve it, he knew, then he was ready to take the enormous risk – commit to the outlandish gamble – of loving and honouring Phoebe Phelps.
‘What is honour?’ asks the inglorious Falstaff. ‘He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No.’ Can honour ‘take away the grief of a wound? No.’
Where was that wound? Where was that grief?
*1 Hence all the anxiety about social class. Which is no more than period verisimilitude, like all the smoking.
*2 A couple of years later, I read (or heard) somewhere that there were essentially two types of human being, the organised and the disorganised, and you could tell which was which from their ‘work stations’. So I went on a fact-finding tour of the New Statesman. The desk of Julian Barnes (literary auxiliary and novelist) was bare except for a fountain pen; the desk of James Fenton (parliamentary correspondent and poet) was bare except for a lone paperclip. Christopher’s desk, like my own, was an action sculpture entitled ‘Haystack’. This was somehow very bonding.
*3 There’s no help for it: I find that I can’t, after all, avoid explaining about Little Keith. Little Keith, Keith Whitehead, is an ensemble player in my second novel (1975), and the most programmatically repellent character I have ever tried to create. He is four foot eleven, and fat with it, and very nasty (scowling away under his pizza of acne)…Little Keith Whitehead made me realise how much human sympathy readers bring to fiction, because quite a few of them were saddened by his unpleasant fate. Sorry for Keith? I used to think – Who cares about Keith? But readers do care…Quite a few people called me Little Keith, including girls. To this day Eleni Meleagrou, the first Mrs Hitchens, calls me Leedell Keith.
*4 Red Rosa (1871–1919), imprisoned many times by Kaiser Wilhelm II, was eventually beaten, tortured, and shot dead by a gang of Freikorps (monarchist bitter-enders and proto-Brownshirts). Christopher would sometimes define himself as a Luxemburgist – meaning, I now suppose, a revolutionary who rejects violence (on the whole) and embraces freedom of speech. He never relinquished Luxemburg (similarly and far more controversially, he never relinquished Trotsky). ‘To me, the most brilliant – and the most engaging – of these Marxist intellectuals was Rosa Luxemburg,’ Christopher wrote in June 2011, six months before he died.
*5 In the second half of 1972 I paid regular calls on a gentle and grateful fifty-year-old called Marybeth, who happened to be a proletarian demi-mondaine (‘half-worlder’). Vividly scalene individuals passed through or hid out in Marybeth’s loftlike apartment in Earls Court: burglars, blaggers, madams, molls. One night I spent several hours making myself as unobjectionable as I possibly could to two savage and rancorous young Scots – who were on the run from a celebrated borstal in Newcastle. The half-world, I already knew, was only half sane. The point being, I suppose, that none of this ever came close to putting me off.
*6 From Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010): ‘ “Care to meet the new Leader?” Who could refuse? Within moments, Margaret Thatcher and I were face to face.’ Christopher goes on: ‘I felt obliged to seek controversy and picked a fight with her on a detail of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe policy. She took me up on it. I was (as it chances) right on the small point of fact, and she was wrong. But she maintained her wrongness with such adamantine strength that I eventually conceded the point and even bowed slightly…“No,” she said. “Bow lower.” Smiling agreeably, I bent forward a bit farther. “No, no,” she trilled. “Much lower!”…Stepping around behind me, she…smote me on the rear with the parliamentary order-paper she had been rolling into a cylinder behind her back…As she walked away, she looked over her shoulder and gave an almost imperceptibly slight roll of the hip while mouthing the words: “Naughty boy!” ’…Under Thatcher, as one commentator put it, Britan felt ‘the smack of firm government’. And it is on le vice anglais (and the deliciously tingling bottom) that her erotic allure, such as it was, entirely relied. Christopher was susceptible to it, and so was Kingsley, and so was Philip Larkin.
*7 I was writing a colour-mag feature about the Cannes Film Festival. All the attendees and all the locals looked rich (even the innumerable beggars); and beyond La Croisette, where the sky met the sea, each and every female (child, teen, starlet, young mother, grand-maman, arrière-grand-mère) swam and sunbathed topless – except Phoebe, who loftily retained her racing one-piece.
*8 She bet on the horses, on athletics, cricket, and football, but it was mainly on the dogs (accumulators and reversible forecasts). Phoebe said that now she was in administration (Personnel), and no longer ‘on the floor’ (actually trading), she missed the physical sensation of risk (‘That’s why they call a bet a flutter, Mart’). Her stakes were substantial, twenty quid, thirty, sometimes forty – which was my net weekly wage. The betting shops she ducked into during our Saturday strolls reminded me of the commissaries and common rooms of London prisons (fresh in
