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The material, as Marcy Meriwether called it—making it for some reason sound, to my ear, like the leftovers from a post-mortem—arrived today, by special delivery, all the way from the far sunny side of America. Such a fuss attached to its coming! A clatter of hoofs and a fanfare on the post-horn would not have been out of place. The courier, who bore himself like a Balkan war criminal, with a shaved head and dressed all in shiny black and wearing what looked like commando boots laced halfway up his shins, was not content to ring the bell but immediately set to pounding on the door with his fist. He refused to hand over the big padded envelope to Lydia, insisting that it could only be received by the named recipient, in person. Even when I ventured down from my attic roost, summoned exasperatedly by Lydia, he demanded that I produce photographic identification of myself. I thought this supererogatory at the least, but he was not to be moved—obviously his notion of himself and his duties is crazily deluded—and in the end I fetched my passport, which he pored over for fully half a minute, breathing hard down his nostrils, then for the other half scanned my face with a doubting eye. So cowed was I by his unwarranted truculence that I think my hand shook as I signed my name to the form on his clipboard. I suppose I shall have to get used to this kind of thing, I mean special deliveries and dealing with thugs, if I am going to be a film star.
I tried to open the envelope by tearing at it with my nails but it was sealed into an impenetrable plastic sheath, and I had to take it into the kitchen and put it on the table and go at it with the breadknife, while Lydia looked on in amusement. When I got it open at last a sheaf of papers gushed out of it and spilled across the tabletop. There were newspaper cuttings and offprints of magazine essays and lengthy book reviews in small print by people I have vaguely heard of, with striking and often difficult names—Deleuze, Baudrillard, Irigaray and, for some reason my favourite, Paul de Man—all of them considering and for the most part taking violent issue with the work and opinions of Axel Vander.
So he was a literary figure, this Vander, a critic and a teacher and, it is clear, a gleeful stirrer-up of controversies. Hardly an obvious subject for a major motion picture, I would have thought. I have spent the morning at my desk wading through what his opponents and detractors had to say of him—he seems to have had few friends—but I did not succeed in making much headway. Vander’s is the kind of arcane and coded specialism—the word
In the evening Marcy Meriwether called yet again—I imagine the telephone, from years of usage, grafted into her hand, like Orpheus’s lyre—to make sure that
To take my mind off these unsettlingly exciting matters I have been doodling in the margin here, making a small calculation. That first tryst with Mrs Gray, under the aegis of the ironing board, took place one week before her birthday, which fell, and still falls, if she is living still, on the last day of April. That means that our whatever-to- call-it—affair? infatuation? reckless frolic?—endured in all for just short of five months, or one hundred and fifty-four days and nights, to be exact. Or, no, there were only one hundred and fifty-three nights, since by the night of the last day she was gone from me for ever. Not, for that matter, that we had any nights together, not a single one or even part of one, for where would we, could we, have spent it? It is true I daydreamed of the Grays all going away together to stay somewhere overnight and of Mrs Gray sneaking back and letting me into the house and leading me upstairs to her bedroom and keeping me passionately engaged there until rosy-fingered dawn came creeping under the window-blind to rouse us. It was the kind of fantasy with which I beguiled many a vacant interval away from my darling. A fantasy, of course, for aside from the nice difficulty Mrs Gray would have had in getting free of her family there was the question of what my mother would have said when she discovered my bed unslept in, not to mention Mr Gray and what he would have done should he have got suspicious and hurried home and walked in on his wife and her under-age lover energetically defiling the marriage bed. Or what if they all came back together, Mr Gray and Billy and Billy’s sister, and found us at it? I pictured them standing in the bedroom doorway in a lurid wedge of light from the landing, Mr Gray in the middle with Billy on one side and Kitty on the other, all three clutching tightly to each other’s hands and gazing in slack-jawed stupefaction at the guilty lovers, surprised in their stew of shame, untangling themselves hastily from what would be their last lubricious embrace.
At the start, the back seat of the Grays’ old station wagon—it was the colour of elephant-hide, I can see it clear—or even the front seat on those occasions when my desire would brook no delay, was a commodious enough bower of bliss for a daemon lover and her lad. I do not say it was comfortable, but what is comfort to a boy when his blood is up? It was on that last day of April that we next met, although I did not know it was her birthday until she told me. Had I been more observant and less impatient to get going on the main business I might have noticed how quiet she was, how thoughtful, how gently sad, even, in contrast to her briskness and gaiety that other, first, time when we had lain down together. Then she told me what day it was, and said she was feeling her age, and gave a great sigh. ‘Thirty-five,’ she said, ‘—think of that!’
The station wagon was parked up the same woodland track where we had stopped that other evening, and she lay asprawl on the back seat, head and shoulders propped awkwardly against a folded picnic-blanket, with her dress pulled up to her armpits and me lying over her, spent for the moment, my left hand paddling in the sopping hot hollow between her thighs. The evening sun was weakly shining but it was raining, too, and big drops from the overhanging trees were plopping in tinny-sounding syncopation on the metal roof above us. She lit a cigarette—she favoured Sweet Afton, in their nice custard-coloured packet—and when I asked her for one she widened her eyes in feigned shock and said certainly not, and then blew smoke in my face and laughed.
She was not a native of our town—have I said that?—and neither was her husband. They had come from somewhere else, when they were married first and before Billy was born, and Mr Gray had leased a premises on the corner of the Haymarket and set up his spectacle shop there. The circumstances of her other, ordinary, life, her life away from the two of us and what we were to and in each other, composed a subject I found by turns boring and sorely painful, and when she spoke of them, as she often did, I would give an impatient sigh and attempt to steer her on to other things, to steer her
The town where the Grays had come from—I cannot remember where it was, if I ever bothered to ask—was much bigger and grander than ours, or so she insisted. She liked to tease me by describing its broad streets and fine shops and wealthy suburbs; the people, too, she said, were worldly and polished, not like the people here, where she felt trapped and bitterly discontent. Trapped? Discontent? When she had me? She saw my look and leaned forwards and took my face between her hands and drew me to her and kissed me, breathing laughter and smoke into my mouth. ‘I never got a better birthday present,’ she whispered huskily. ‘My lovely boy!’
Her lovely boy. I do think she thought of me, or made herself think of me, as somehow a sort of long-lost son, a prodigal delightfully returned, feral from his sojourn among the swine and in need of her womanly, indeed matronly, attentions to soothe and civilise him. She indulged me, of course, indulged me beyond an adolescent’s maddest imaginings, but she kept a monitoring eye on me, too. She made me promise to bathe more often and more thoroughly and to brush my teeth regularly. I was to wear a clean pair of socks every day, and to ask my mother, though without rousing her suspicions, to buy me some presentable underwear. One afternoon at Cotter’s place she produced a suede folder tied in the middle with a leather thong and unwrapped it and laid it out on the mattress to reveal a gleaming set of barber’s implements, pairs of scissors and a straight razor and tortoise-shell combs and gleaming silver shears with a superimposed double set of tiny and very sharp teeth. The thing was a sort of older sibling of the manicure set Billy had given me for Christmas. She had once done a hairdressing course, she told me, and at home she cut everyone’s hair, even her own. Despite my whines of complaint—how was I to
