Coasting (36 page)

“You know the one about Grimsby trawler that got lost in fog?”

“No.”

“He were fishing off Dogger Bank. Then fog comes down. His Decca’s on the blink. He’s not looking after his course. He drifts for three days before fog comes up. Skipper looks out of wheelhouse, shakes his head. ‘Where we at?’ says Mate. ‘Search me,’ says Skip, ‘we could be any bloody where. There’s a hell of a lot of bloody water out there, and not a bloody ship in sight.’ ‘Hang on,’ says Mate, ‘There’s only one place I know like that. We’re in luck. We’re in Hull. In bloody Fish Dock!’ ”

They had torn down the terraces of back-to-backs around the Hessle Road with their warrens of communicating yards and lean- to privies. In their place were smart semidetached houses standing in their own gardens. Even here though, some of the culture of The Fishing still clung. The houses were painted up as spruce as ships, with varnished bulkheads and newly scrubbed decks. “There isn’t a sailor in the world who can resist a paintbrush,” Jimmy Johnstone said, and these council semis were sailors’ houses, garnished and trim enough to put in bottles.

“You’ll be hard put to find a bad egg among them,” Johnstone said fondly of his ex-constituents. “It’s the danger of The Fishing that does that. It’s the same as miners—wherever you get danger, real danger, you won’t get bad eggs.”
Among the jaunty salesmen in the lobby of the Royal Station Hotel, I looked out for Philip Larkin and eventually found his long, pale face, like a fugitive white barn owl caught in unaccustomed daylight. He was evidently prepared for all eventualities this evening. Although the temperature outside was in the sixties, he wore a winter overcoat and knotted scarf, and carried a furled brolly. He was beaming shyly, shortsightedly, and not quite in my direction. I planted myself in the center of the beam.

“Ah, there you are. It was the hat that threw me.”

“I always wear a hat now I’m going bald.”

Larkin’s own large skull was as hairless as a cheese.

“Yes, I used to go in for hats once too. I never found they did any
permanent
good.”

At the bar, he asked for a gin-and-tonic. “Would you mind making that a double gin? Since I’ve gone so deaf, I don’t seem to be able to
see
single gins anymore.”

As we sat down he said, “I’m a great deal deafer than I was when I last saw you,” but the tone in which this was said, and the expression which accompanied it, suggested that a marked improvement in his health had taken place.

Larkin was wired for sound, with a conspicuous pink appliance lodged in each ear. His hearing aids, his thick glasses, the doughy rolls of smooth white flesh on which his chin rested in repose all had the accentuated reality of theatrical props. It was as if he took a melancholy, ironic satisfaction in advertising to the world just how far his worst fears about himself had already been confirmed. He was only sixty, but he insisted, lugubriously, on making you see him as one of his own Old Fools:

Larkin didn’t ignore it. He dwelt on it with a strange and solemn humor. His prosthetic appendages were of a piece with the words of his poems: they told the plain, miserable truth—and dared you both to laugh and not to laugh.

“We won’t get much of a meal here,” Larkin said. “They used to serve quite a decent dinner, but I gather that they’ve gone completely down the drain.”

“Well, don’t let’s eat here then,” I said firmly, dreading a Larkinesque dinner in which every course would prove that things were getting worse and worse.

“Oh, there’s nowhere else much, is there?”

“I passed a Lebanese restaurant on the way. That looked all right.”

“A
Lebanese
restaurant? In
Hull?
Good heavens.”

Larkin spoke in a reedy plainsong. The one-note musical drive of his voice was, I suspected, a relic of the technique he must once have used to cure a childhood stammer.

“What sort of food would one get in a Lebanese restaurant? Would it be … 
mushy?”

Fiercely defending my decision to escape the Royal Station Hotel, I said, “No—you can get kebabs and salads and things like that.”

“But I
like
mushy food. It’s the only food I really enjoy now.”

“Oh. Well, there’ll be hummus and tabbouleh and taramasalata—they’re all extremely mushy.”

“Oh,” Larkin said, suddenly skittish. “Then let’s go Lebanese.”

He drove us to the restaurant as if the one-mile drive were a hazardous adventure and Hull a city as foreign as Beirut itself. Arms braced rigid against the steering wheel, searching myopically for landmarks through the windscreen, Larkin squeezed cautiously down on the accelerator, allowing his car just enough petrol to get under way, then lifted his foot off, leaving the car to coast, more and more slowly, until, when it had almost reached a complete standstill, he repeated the procedure. It occurred to me that this curious and unrelaxing style might be some kind of fuel-economy
technique that Larkin had read up in a motoring magazine.

I said: “I think it’s on—what is it? Lowgate?”

“Lowgate? Where’s Lowgate?”

“I think you turn right here …”

“This is
very
rare for me,” Larkin said. “I don’t see much of Hull nowadays. I’ve managed to reduce my life to a triangle. There’s the house on Newland Park—far too big for me. Then there’s the library, of course. Then there’s a shop I go to on that block in Cottingham Road. That’s about it, really.”

The triangle he described was roughly equilateral, with each side measuring about two hundred yards. He appeared to be inspecting this account of his existence and vetting it for accuracy.

“There is the station and the train to Oxford,” he admitted.

“Do you spend much time in Oxford now?”

“No, not as much as I’d like.”

We drifted to a stop beside the restaurant. Larkin got out, locked the car and said, “Oh, dear. This is no good. I’m on a yellow line.”

“It’s long after six o’clock. Yellow lines only apply in the daytime.”

“I don’t want to be towed away.”

“You won’t be. It’s perfectly legal. Look at all the other cars—”

Larkin scanned the street. “In my experience, what other people get away with is a pretty ropey guide to what one can get away with oneself.” He laughed, a snuffling honk. “Still, I suppose one has to live dangerously sometimes.”

He made a happy pantomime of being foxed by the menu, investigating words like “falafel” as if they were bombs that I’d called him in to dispose of. “How do you say it?” he demanded loudly. “Like ‘kerfuffle’? Ferluffle?” An oval bat of pita arrived on his plate.

“What on
earth
is that?”

“It’s unleavened bread—”

The snuffling laughter started up again. “Bread? It doesn’t look anything like bread to me.”

But he tucked into the hummus. “This is rather good. It tastes like … Farex.”

For a moment I saw how his kitchen might look in the house on Newland Park, its shelves lined with tins of baby food. Did Larkin live on minced chicken and apple puree and green-vegetable goo? Or was this all part of an elaborate charade on the theme of second childhood, played out in fish-faced deadpan? I wasn’t sure whether I was Larkin’s confidant or his stooge.

He had been kind to me when I was a student at Hull. I had discovered within a couple of weeks of my arrival that Philip Larkin, who was, as far as I was concerned, the university’s only ornament, had worked out a thousand ways of escape from undergraduates who wanted to talk poetry to him. I wanted to talk poetry to him, and like everyone else I was politely rebuffed. I got myself elected to the council of the students’ union and invented a Library Committee, whose only member was myself. The function of the Library Committee was to meet the University Librarian once a month (“Couldn’t you make that once a term?”) and discuss things like opening hours, fines and longer loans. On my first entry to his office, disguised as a Library Committee, Larkin had taken out his handkerchief and waved it, saying, “White flag.” The formal business of each meeting was summarily dispatched by Larkin. (“Stay open an hour later? In the
winter
term? Oh, I couldn’t do that. All my girls would get raped on their way home.”) The conditions of his treaty with me were strict: poetry was out, but we could talk about novels and jazz. I treasured these visits, past the security arrangements of his two secretaries; they were the only tutorials for which I was punctual, and Larkin himself seemed to exact some gloomy enjoyment out of discovering how little I had actually read. My role as stooge then consisted of having attributed to me an encyclopedic, but quite useless, knowledge of the works of Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jean Genet and Thomas Wolfe. (“Of course, I suppose
The Afternoon Men
would seem a bit flat to you after
Naked Lunch
.”)

He had been forty then—my age now; he had seemed to me to belong to a world as august and remote as Tennyson’s.
Had I seen the word “shy” written of Larkin, I would have thought it mad; his withdrawnness was a grand quality, not a product of unhappy embarrassment and reticence. Now he was just shy, funny, sad, but still as hard to gauge.

Watching him over the hummus, I’d been dogged by the last four lines of “Dockery and Son”—the lines that you can frighten yourself with in the dark:

It seemed to me that Larkin’s way of nailing the unbearable truth and saying it out loud in poems had perhaps become intolerable to him—that his “drought” might stem from being unable to face what his next poem might unfold. I quoted the lines back to him.

“Oh, I wrote that a long time ago. No, I wouldn’t say that now. No boredom left for me, I’m afraid. It’s fear all the way.” He meant every word, and laughed, challenging me to find it funny too. One had to be brave to laugh with Larkin.

“I suppose there must be some people …” he looked at the knot of lounging waiters in the almost-empty restaurant, refugees from another stricken city; “I suppose there must be some people who think life is first fun, then contentment. Wouldn’t wash in a poem, though, would it? ‘Life is first fun, then contentment.’ Doesn’t sound at all right to me.”

“There’s some fun, though.”

“Yes.
Some
fun.”

“Old Dick Francis books?”

“Mmm. And people who make you laugh. Do you have people who really make you laugh? It’s much the most important thing.”

“Yes, one or two. Who makes you laugh?”

“Kingsley,” Larkin said. “Kingsley
always
makes me laugh.”

“I only know Amis to nod to,” I said.

“Kingsley made me laugh at Oxford and he still makes me laugh now. That’s something, isn’t it? I always look forward to seeing Kingsley.”

“And Sidney Bechet?”

“I don’t seem to be able to listen to records much, now I’ve gone so bloody deaf.”

This seemed the hardest of Larkin’s afflictions. When I’d last seen him, fun had meant Jazz. In “For Sidney Bechet” he had written, “On me your voice falls as they say love should,/Like an enormous yes.”

I said, “I’d been hoping you could pin down a record I lost years ago. It was a woman singer, black, doing one of those songs which advertised restaurants. I thought probably Memphis, maybe New Orleans. All I can remember is the refrain: ‘Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut Street.’ ”

“ ‘Between …’?”

“ ‘Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth on Chestnut Street.’ The tune’s vivid, but I’ve lost the words and the name of the singer.”

“What date?”

“Middling ’30s, I think: 1933 or ’4?”

“Oh, no,” Larkin said, “The ’30s are long after my time.”

We had reached the bitter coffee stage, and the waiters had started to flick unnecessarily over tablecloths with rolled napkins. We were the last diners.

“Did
Jill
and
A Girl in Winter
come as hard as the poems have done? Couldn’t you commission yourself to write another novel?”

“I’d
adore
to write a novel. I
love
novels. I’ve started novels. Five of them, I think. Five lost novels. No, it’s not the writing that’s so difficult with novels, it’s the plots. Keeping them up. I don’t know. Kingsley always seems to manage to find stories in his life; I’m afraid that mine’s not the sort that easily lends itself to stories. That’s probably it.”

It had rained hard sometime while we were eating, and the streets dazzled. Larkin said, “I’ll drive you to your boat.”

“There’s no need, I can walk.” I was frightened that Larkin,
with his apparently shaky grasp of the city in which he’d lived for a quarter of a century, would get hopelessly lost on his way home from the Fish Dock.

“But I want to see your boat. I’ve been looking forward to it all evening.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes—I
have
to see your boat.”

He drove, at a snail’s pace, across streets as flat as mirrors. At the dock gates, he worried about getting locked in.

“You’re quite safe. They’re rusted permanently open now.”

We rolled and wallowed over the uneven paving stones, past disused sheds and vegetable piles of fishing junk. Rabbits bolted for cover ahead of the glaring car. The enormous empty dock was lit by a meager line of tall sodium lamps, and
Gosfield Maid
, with only the tops of her masts showing, was moored in a pool of primrose light.

“Here.”

Larkin locked up his car again. He approached the edge of the wharf, carefully watching to see where each fresh footstep went. He positioned himself a dizzy two feet short of the brink and leaned forward, blinking through his specs.

“That’s
it?”

“That’s it.”

“Extraordinary. And”—he was beginning to honk—
“this
is how you live now? In that?”