‘But he doesn’t listen to his dad. He says he listens to a “higher father”.’
‘Great…Darling, it hurts me to say this, but you should’ve gone on calling it the axis of hatred. You were wrong to change it to the axis of evil. It might’ve helped you get used to the idea. Of being hated. Your trouble is that you keep expecting to be loved. Even in Iraq you expect it. Poor you. You keep expecting to be loved.’
Taking it personally
‘He’s steely enough, but Hitch could never be a politician. He’d have to give up smoking…I asked,’ she said. ‘There’s a smoking car in second class – near the back. You might rock down there for a while.’
‘That’s kind in you, El. That’s good in you.’
‘But you’re going to quit, right?’
‘I hope to, yes.’
‘You hope to. I told you what Eliza said. She said, Daddy’s going to die, and you’ll get married again, and I’ll have a stepfather. She looked wretched. That’s what’s going to happen next.’ Elena yawned and shuddered. ‘Nap time. Bye.’
He kissed her and then with his book under his arm he picked up two miniatures of whisky as he headed south.
Where were the suicides?
Ah, here they were at last, the suicides. In the perpetual anguish and filth of the front line, during the gaps between the thunderbolts and the earthquakes, you could hear the wounded pleading for it, for oblivion; and in the field hospitals, under lamps black with airborne vermin, they hollered for it at the top of their voices (there was a French soldier who stabbed himself to death with a kitchen fork, clubbing down on the shaft with his fist). Martin drank a toast. Human beings, staked out on the soil of the Mort Homme, I honour you…
In the Middle East ‘a cigarette’ was a unit of time (about ten minutes), as in, Q: How long will he be gone? A (shrugging): Three cigarettes. Anyway, three cigarettes later Martin closed the book and, as he often did (with writers both living and dead), drafted a mental thankyou note to its author. The ‘Crap Historians’ segment of The Crap Generation would’ve made the following case: crap-generation historians were crap because they thought emotionlessness was a virtue. And Martin believed that you couldn’t write history without emotion (however restrained and controlled). You had to take history personally. It produced you and it formed you. How else were you going to take it?
The book about the Battle of Verdun was old-school: it was beautifully emotional and therefore cathartic; terror and pity decisively deepened its prose. Dear Professor, he was murmuring to himself. And then he remembered something: in London, almost thirty years earlier, not for very long and with little success, he had paid court to the daughter, yes, she was the daughter – the daughter of the memorialist of Verdun…
Respected Professor, I am by now sympathetically aware that a father can be easily hurt by revelations about a daughter’s lovelife, and I want to assure you, Sir, that she was a very good girl – in this case. She eventually allowed me to discompose her upper clothing; and that was all. Oh, we fooled around, Professor, but that was as far as she’d go. For my part, I was the perfect gentleman. A good pal of mine tried it on with her too, and when we later compared notes over a few drinks it turned out that his inroads were no less limited than mine. And I can say that her behaviour, Sir, was highly untypical of the mid-1970s, a time when young women would succumb even if they really didn’t want to (that’s generational ideology for you). With her patrician good looks and her authoritative bearing, she struck me as supremely well-equipped to negotiate the new freedoms, the new powers, that society was proposing to offer her (unlike my unfortunate sister, who was destroyed by these same freedoms and powers). I hope and trust that she remains healthy and happy. I congratulate you on your daughter, as I do on your fine book, which…
Yes, too many early deaths just now, I’m afraid, too many, too many for me, the poet Ian Hamilton at sixty-three, my teenhood friend Robinson at fifty-one, and my little sister Myfanwy at forty-six, each of them a horseholder, wrenched and jerked and tugged and racked by the horses of their own apocalypse.
The train dived underwater as the white cliffs neared.
True life
Elena’s nap had been a clear success: he could tell by the warmed way she stretched her arms upwards to receive him.
‘What’s the matter? You look red-eyed.’
‘You won’t believe who I was moping about,’ he said. ‘That poor sod John Braine.’
‘Why?’
‘You asked what happened to him. He ended up in a bedsit with one spoon, one knife, and one fork. His last Christmas dinner was in a soup kitchen…That was the setting for his smirk novel.’
Braine’s smirk novel, Martin had decided in the smoking section of the Eurostar, wasn’t a smirk novel. It was a wank novel, a roman de…
‘What’s French for wank? W-a-n-q-u-e I suppose.’
‘No.’ And she told him.
‘Feminine! How nice. Well then. A roman de branlette. A wank novel. Because there was no ravishing young mistress.’ Martin had of course interviewed John Braine (for the New Statesman in 1975). And Braine looked like a guard in a prison or borstal, with a wide, full, strangely slack mouth, and his grey northern face coated with a thin Soviet sweat of difficulty. ‘Not that bad a bloke, really. A funny sort of innocent. After a glass or two, though…Braine was just a crap drunk.’*9
‘He was probably pissed when he wrote his wank novel. It couldn’t be true.’
‘Mm. And his first novel was such a sensation. Unbelievably.’ Indeed, you wondered what kind of shape the British imagination could have been in during the mid-1950s, to get itself ‘captured’ by Room at the Top. ‘The paperback sold a million copies. They made a film of it. Starring Laurence Harvey
