Inside Story (9780593318300)

was indeed Inez, and she had started as she meant to continue; but I sensed that she lacked the stamina to detain me for very long. And she soon quietened in my arms, only giving the occasional weak quack (just meant to keep me there)…The younger son, Gus, had had childhood asthma, and every other night for two or three years I administered the dose with the electric nebuliser, sessions in a blacked-out room that went on for an hour and sometimes twice that, with the threadily wheezing boy on my lap. So this was nothing; and in those days I was seldom bored or daunted by the company of my own thoughts – nor was I now, even on September 12. With Elena, the act of full disclosure always brought a measure of relief: the difficulty, the confused order of things, was now under competent supervision…As I lay there holding Inez my mind even felt free enough to indulge a hard-wearing memory from the time of my earlier marriage: repeatedly circumnavigating the little roundabout at the end of the street in twilight, holding hands with Gus (also, then, a two-year-old), who was trying out his first pair of real shoes, proper shoes of the kind someone older and taller might wear; every couple of yards he stopped and smiled upwards with eye-closing exultation and pride.

Inez’s swaddled body gave a pulse (a silent hiccup), and went still.

‘This is bullshit,’ Elena was already saying as he re-entered the kitchen. She had loaded the dishwasher and was drying her hands with a tea towel. ‘It’s all lies. No. It’s nearly all lies.’

There was a certain shaky levity in her voice that put him on his guard. ‘Tell me what to believe. Let’s go through it, and you tell me what I’m supposed to believe.’

She sat. ‘If we must…Then the whole story came out, writes Phoebe. “Story” is correct. It all went back to the Christmas of 1948 and a place called “Mariners Cottage” quotation marks near a town called Ainsham. Have I spelt that correctly? Has she? A-i-n-s-h-a-m.’

‘Almost. It’s Eynsham with an E-y. And Marriner’s Cottage is double-r with an apostrophe. I checked. Otherwise accurate. She could’ve got all this from the biography, but if she’d done that you’d think she’d spell the names right.’

‘Not necessarily. Not if she’s really clever. Kingsley and Hilly were going through a very rocky patch. He was in love with a student of his called Verna David. Ring a bell? Does it?’

‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe an ex-student by that time. Still. And yes I know. A grave abuse of trust. But you were more or less allowed to, in 1948.’

‘Not just in 1948. All my professors made passes at me and all my friends,’ said Elena. ‘Thirty years later.’

‘…I knew Verna.’ His early years were full of Verna, and her husband too (and they were both warm and welcome presences). ‘Verna was bright and very pretty. It was a big thing, but she somehow never fell out with Mum. Verna came to Kingsley’s memorial service. I introduced you. Remember?’

‘No. On the day before Christmas Eve your parents had a blazing row and he went off with a suitcase to Verna David. So there was your mother left alone for the “holiday”, left alone with the baby in a wasteland of village idiots. The baby was Nicolas, right? How old?’

‘Four months. And in those days, Elena, right through to New Year’s Day the world just curled up and died. You’d get the creeps if it happened now – no open shops, no lit lights. At Christmas England just curled up and blacked out.’

Elena was studying the envelope. His name – no stamp, no postmark. ‘Did she hand-deliver this?…You know, maybe she is really clever.’

‘How d’you mean?’

‘She knows as well as I do how credulous you are.’

‘Oi.’

‘Now you listen. How impressionable you are. How easily swayed.’

‘Oi.’

‘How obsessive. You are. Especially when something like this happens – a world event. That you think only you are really registering. If I’d been her I would have struck today. To get you while you’re in shock. All wobbly and doomed.

‘New para. Ah here we are. All alone with the baby over Christmas. In a hayrick somewhere. Having been dumped by her husband. So, not surprisingly, your mother decided to retaliate. Good for her! exclamation mark. She sent a telegram to the poet from Hell.

‘Yeah,’ said Elena. ‘Your Phoebe picked the right day for it. The day after.’

^*1 A technical point. Poetry and fiction are silent. As J. S. Mill put it, the literary voice is not ‘heard’; it is ‘overheard’; it is a soliloquy addressed to no audience; it has no designs on anyone…All opinion journalism, including literary journalism (and most literary criticism), is an argument that seeks to persuade; coming ex cathedra (from the pulpit), it is pedagogic, it is ‘interested’, and it demands the loan of your ears…This rather exalted distinction is not so much purist as idealist in tendency; it doesn’t apply to those who sit down with the express intention of producing a Bestseller, or a Masterpiece.

^*2 Later that week I compared notes with a much younger novelist, and I asked her, I asked Zadie, ‘Do you feel the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write?’ And she said, ‘Yes. Yes, at first I did. But then your fighting spirit gets going…’ This was true, and there was much to fight against: the opposition of forces and goals could hardly be plainer, could it – a matter of ‘everything I love’ versus ‘everything I hate’ (as Salman wrote in the New York Times). I could fight in the pages of the Guardian; but what could anyone fight for in (or with) fiction?…Christopher, incidentally, wrote about September 11 on September 11, September 12, September 13, September 20, October 8, October 15, October 22, and November 29, and went on writing about it in Hitch-22 (2008) and Arguably (2010) and elsewhere.

^*3 ‘I know what