So this was networking. I could feel Julian thrill with the thought of that beside me on the sofa. On nights like these are important contacts made. Before he had to leave—earlier than the rest of us, for his family—Ivy was dropping big hints his way; interest in his as yet unbegun work, for an anthology she was preparing in Texas on Shakespeare’s abusive fathers.
I am not a Renaissance person, but I’ve read all sorts of things. We came into the early hours talking about the Sitwells. Ivy staggered off to fetch a copy of her last book from her still packed luggage, to show me the cover painting. A young Edith as a captivatingly scarlet woman beside her father.
Stephen began to make noises that it was time to leave. Already Ivy had dropped off once or twice, but she was narcoleptic and we’d been sure—as she’d exhorted us earlier, over coffee—not to mistake her lapses for heavy-handed hints. Still, Stephen felt we oughtn’t overstay.
On the pavement outside, beneath the castle still full of condemned men, Ivy told us about the new season at Stratford. Stephen pointed out a hotel’s single yellow light; told us that in that very room Dickens and Wilkie Collins had written a ghost story together; some fevered, fond collaboration, on just such a night.
It took some doing to shut Ivy up, get her back indoors and the door locked, to get ourselves free. Stephen was still of a mind to be gentle with her; not so when she returned to Texas a month later, having let the shower run a full week inn the empty, ancient house, while she trotted about Scotland Peering at gravestones. The house was wrecked.
It was that kind of term; friendships struck up, spectacular as the last fag I lit for my long walk home across town, and damped suddenly down; all trust and bravado lost.
It was a cloying mist that night, coming through bone cold, blue. I said to Stephen, before he turned off towards his swish little place down on the quay, that I thought Julian was very pretty.
The following Sunday evening we were drinking gin in Stephen’s flat, shouting between rooms as he braised various things for dinner—I could hear the carrots screaming and spitting in a dish of boiling honey—and I was reading Susan Sontag by his french windows, way above the river.
Once I called him out to watch a woman sitting on a bench by the river, spiting the cold and taking off her socks and shoes very methodically, putting them in her shopping bag. I had to smoke out on the balcony; the flat’s distinctly minimalist lines were also supremely health-conscious ones. I took an ashtray decorated with scribbles by Cocteau outside and so missed the young family’s arrival. Julian came in with heaps of brightly coloured bedding; cheerful and scarlet he deposited his son on Stephen’s bed for the evening and ushered me in so he could explain to us all that they had spent the day walking, out in the hills.
His wife was even younger; some four years younger than me, she was called Elsa and was small, brown, beaming. Yes, she added, they’d been to their church in the country, had lunch with the vicar, and went for a good hard walk afterwards.
Elsa wrote novels; managing three each year, even though she was a full-time mother and wife. We boys looked shamefaced over our starters. She explained that she handwrote several drafts in neat exercise books. Her works were often autobiographical. Playfully Stephen muttered something about intentionality, textuality; at least something ending in -ality, as most comments did in those heady months of high theory and its intrigues.
I helped dish up dessert. ‘I think Elsa’s a decadent, really,’ Stephen hissed. ‘Don’t be put off by all the talk of church.’
‘They’re whiter than white!’
‘She’s a decadent eager to burst out; just listen to her!’
‘What does that mean?’
He’d made a kind of plum pudding thing; cloying and spiced.
‘I think she’s just dying for our Julian to have a man on the side. I think she finds it quite an exciting idea.’
‘Oh, right. Yeah.’
I picked up dishes to carry, desultorily. But I was piqued.
When I was doing literary theory research, as I was then, I could never quite get into it. My work was on my contemporaries; other theorists and what they say about other theorists. I was writing about the Subject; subjectivity’s awful wrangle with itself in the context of postmodernity. I would treat the library as a shopping mall; I took a trolley now and then between its shelves and my cavalier research consisted of grabbing books whose covers, titles, reputations preceded them or made me fancy them on the spot. My work was chancy and promiscuous and I spent my time picking up choice cuts of quotation; various notable names writing on the subject of the subject, of the body, of identity; all jeopardised now, all their integrity gone. An exciting time to be writing about such things, as my colleagues—their work more absorbing, hierarchised, historical—commented to me. I often worked at home. Sat on the 1940s settee in a rented house by the canal. There I was shanghaied into watching morning television, smoking too many cigarettes.
I bumped into Julian in the corridor and he invited me to dinner, suggesting also that I might like to work with him, in our department, in the small room kept quiet for postgraduates, to be company in these darkening afternoons on the slope down to Christmas. Because of course, one could go mad reading tersely academic discourse in complete solitude. Couldn’t we hold each other’s hands?
He did a full day, nine to five, since he
