Loving Monsters (27 page)

Absolutely not, Jayjay.

*

Liar! Hypocrite! But how to explain? How can I tell him that these days his biographer is prey to a sound like that of surf on a far-distant shore. It has made him impatient with narratives where nothing seems to weigh much more than anything else, all scurrying along with the sole purpose of getting a tale told, of moving someone from Eltham to Suez to Cairo to Alexandria to (eventually, if I have the patience) aged eighty at the foot of a hill in Tuscany. It is true: I lack the patience to hear out the full ‘And then …’ of his life, its long-ago busyness and its rehearsal of scenes whose exact sequence no longer matters. My own life shoulders it aside (and what greater failing could a biographer admit to?) It is a part of having passed an arbitrary age – maybe forty-five, maybe fifty – that no matter how languorously the sun sprawls on to a Tuscan hillside, no matter how glitteringly the bees burst from their hives to swerve into immediate invisibility, there lies behind it all that familiar mortal shore in far-off Asia. Here in Italy it is sheer chance that I happen never to have followed a friend’s coffin to Montecchio cemetery. For all the winters endured here, for all the memories of mud and snow and gales, this place has managed to retain something about it of a perpetual
summer holiday, certainly with shafts of melancholy but miraculously preserved from the grind of a normal reduced existence. The two kilometres of forest that separate my house from its nearest neighbour represent more than mere distance; in some way they form a
cordon
sanitaire.
But none of it is proof against the sound I can always hear at the back of my mind as if borne on the wind from far over the planet’s haunch: that Asian beach of coral chips being washed by the constant sea, the unresting chafe of pebbles. There, I have indeed walked behind a coffin. I have helped whitewash graves for All Souls’ Day, tearing mats of greenery off inscriptions in the cement, watching how the wiry roots pull away clots of mortar rotted by the sea wind. Year by year the names blur and fade even as memories of their once living owners remain sharp, as though photographed in the intense glare of tropic light, walking and laughing in my own past, forever handing me a glass, hauling in a fish or laying a hand on my arm, brown on white.

However, for a biographer to tell his subject that his life story is becoming a bore is not easy. Apart from the likelihood of giving offence it leaves the writer still more isolated in his peculiar fastidiousness, apparently unsatisfied by ingredients that the majority would find interesting, even gripping. I mean to say, here is Jayjay being swallowed up by the Second World War in a theatre full of misfits and weird political cross-currents. The divided loyalties, the remoteness from Europe and Hitler’s blitz, the unwarlike aspect of Cairo and Alexandria with their well-stocked shops and frenetic night-life: surely all these would constitute a raconteur’s dream of endless episodes and reminiscence? (That time the Brigadier was left standing in only his underwear to greet King Peter of Yugoslavia … The consignment of London Rubber Industries’ condoms, Other Ranks, For the Use Of, that was inadvertently dispatched to SOE’s typing pool as carbons …) Plus, of course, the flashlit derring-do of Stuka attacks and desert warfare. The biographer acknowledges the appeal of all this, adding only that he seems to have seen or read it all before somewhere. It is
only feasible to repeat it if we know something about the narrator that damages his account, or undercuts it, or sets it at one remove from the filmic. Otherwise we run the risk of writing the sort of book that wins literary prizes and later gets given the middlebrow Hollywood treatment. With some temerity I put this to Jayjay, not bluntly but more as a suggestion that might bear thinking about before he embarks on the next episode of his saga. He is less offended than surprised. Like most people he thinks unconstrued events are enough in themselves. He has never encountered anyone so hard to please. Surely his job is to relate the facts and mine to give them a writerly gloss, the literary depth and so on? I reply that out of a silk purse one could no doubt cobble together a silken sow, but I am not in the stuffed toy business. Real depth requires real information.

The fact is I can’t wait for him to get serious, to spill some beans,
any
beans. I am now more than ever certain that at some time during his war there was an episode that took him by the scruff and gave him the sort of shaking from which there is never a complete recovery. His airily putting himself down as an impostor is surely a legacy of this. Did he not just say he was brought up to fight? And did he not immediately add some reflections on cowardice? Perhaps like me he failed in some awful fashion. I do hope so. I yearn for him to get into uniform, to hurry through these preliminaries for battle. However, it is unfortunately not a biographer’s task to hustle him but to pounce the moment I think he is becoming slippery. So after delivering a stern reminder that his narrative stands in urgent need of complication I shut up.

On that note we part for a while, quite amicably and with no suggestion of finality, though with the feeling of an impasse that somehow needs to be overcome. There is too much eggy youth about his tale so far, and the sound of that distant coral-chip strand too insistent in my own ears. I find myself thinking about curling tongs. Often these days I walk out of the house in the early morning to stand as on the rim of a vast bowl of landscape at whose bottom lie dark pools of mist. I watch as the overtaking
light leans around the mountain’s shoulder to spill across the forest tops below. Sometimes a sense of quite unearned fortune grows in pace with this light that has rolled all the way from Japan to pour into a Tuscan valley. At the end of a rotten sad century there is the apprehension of having unjustly escaped. Surely such fortune must be paid for? Maybe a bitter band is even now making its way silently up the track towards the house, intent on its bitterness. Shortly I shall find myself incredulously digging a shallow pit as the men lounge around smoking. Without warning the first
roncola
blade will thud into my back and a gout of blood hit the spade handle. The methodical thudding will go on, accompanied by grunts of effort. Then my eyes are put out with a pocket-knife still greasy from cutting salami for yesterday’s lunch. Sudden darkness will turn on its head and become still blacker, heavier, suffocating as they refill the pit and stamp down the soil. The same sun will go rolling blithely onward to the Americas and beyond to greet Japan again. This fantasy comes less from guilt than from incomprehension. So many hundreds of millions have made far grimmer ends this century, why not I? In the banal lottery of earthly existence atrocity is visited on some and fortune on others, irrespective of virtue or deserts. Both are reprisals for having drawn breath.

I stand on the particular grass beneath which I shall probably never lie (or else may soon be lying as the billhooks are wiped, the knife folded, an eyeball kicked with disgust into the irises that fringe the terrace edge). At this moment it so happens there are no bodies between my footsoles and the tilted slab of rock that underlies the shallow soil like muscle. There is probably nothing of flesh and blood beyond the odd mole. But there so easily could be: more nourishment for this landscape whose bucolic tenderness, now revealed by a risen sun, is testament to millennia of spilt blood. On certain days it is all too plain that Tuscany’s rich patina was achieved by force, by whips and priests and landowners. It is merely the casual irony of a later age that we itinerant leisured folk can praise the scenery from our terraces and feel that in some way
we can possess it or consume it, and all without reflecting that today it is our own elbows at which Death stands. We need only turn our heads a little to glimpse him; so we go on staring rigidly ahead, busily admiring ourselves for being able to admire the painterly effects of olive and cypress and the lavender light that slants across these aromatic hills.

I can’t fault him for being less edgy than his biographer, after all. Nor can I blame him if now and again I tire of a certain prosaic quality in his narrative. It is only the thought that he is being evasive that exasperates me, but I can’t think what would change that now. He is ill, I am in no doubt about it. For the first time I wonder if we can ever make a book out of this. I have gained a friend, but I may yet have to file our relationship ignominiously as ‘Bits of a Biog.’.

There is still much in Jayjay that I envy. He is thoughtful, although I’m not sure he ever drifts very far from the world, being satisfyingly tied to it by sensualities of all sorts as well as taking an easy pleasure in being who he is. That is how I should like to be, too (I think as I stare out of the window over the Val di Chiana’s panorama). That is how I should like to be if I were a stronger personality. I have this fatal weakness for floating away, even as I sound brisk and occasionally forceful. I can imagine people who have met me over a dinner table reflecting later that although the words I spoke came over as individual enough at the time, the
person who spoke them now seems smoky, insubstantial. Whereas anyone meeting Jayjay over dinner would carry away the clear impression of a solid and ever-present persona, not one that would slink off, leaving its owner vacantly crumbling bread until jerked to his senses to blurt ‘I’m so sorry – I must have missed that.’

Yes, I am a little jealous of the man whose life I have stupidly trapped myself into writing. He came well disguised but I can now see he is another incarnation of that figure whom I have been meeting throughout my life, the person who knows what he is doing. In my days of youthful travel I would run into people of my own age waiting in an Indian bus terminal at midnight or urging me in the small hours to do a bunk with them from a fleapit hotel in Recife because expected funds hadn’t arrived. These characters always seemed to have a next step to take and to know why they were taking it. I lacked this inner plan. Adrift in a continent, I could never see why any particular destination might be preferable to any other even though I generally liked it well enough once I had got there. And the same uncertainty or rootless docility has dogged me through the years to the point where I can acknowledge it as mine. When one has passed fifty one can disown
nothing.

But I do regret it. Much of the time, if not most, I regret it. Apart from anything else, who but a weak and indecisive person would have allowed himself to drift into a late cohabitation and then let both that and his only child drift away like one of those small clumps of thistledown that float in through an open window, eddy around a few inches above the kitchen floor for a while and float out again? Inconceivable that Jayjay would have let such a thing happen. And nor is it because I don’t care enough. I do.
Amo
et fleo
(or I should say: I believe I have loved, I have watched myself weep). It is mainly that I have so little conviction of the weight of love and tears. The moments in my life when I have been most content are those when I was not in love and still less shedding tears. If I have to visualise them, an image comes to me that originated perhaps on that distant Asian coast, or maybe in
this very house until four or five years ago when I finally put electricity in. It is of sitting at a table before an open window. Outside it is night, and an oil lamp on the table lights up the page of a book or a half-scribbled letter. What I can hear is the soft buzzing of the lamp: a hollow sigh of hot gases rushing up the chimney, together with the faint hiss of oil burning on the broad wick. It is the sound that defines silence. Beyond the lamp, out in the night’s velvety warmth, there may also come the spongy lolling of wavelets on a level beach or else the machine-like chirr of crickets. Yet the lamp, while not making these in any way inaudible, somehow enfolds them in its hush. From its hot little heart it radiates silence, and out and out that silence spreads until it pervades the universe. At that moment my lamp is both at the centre of the universe and filling it. The very sky asprawl with starfields has something to do with that flame, as if the constellations were rustling up through the glass tube to spread out and set in an instant in deep interstellar cold. Thus my little lamp creates the firmament around it even as it shrinks it, and all in this clear, resonating silence. Time dissolves, and love and tears shrivel to join the seared midges and insect detritus falling slowly on to the golden page. They fall and fall in company with
Why
me?
Why
here?‚
and only that vast speck of resounding flame is steady. This happens, and brings balm. But I don’t think it happens to Jayjay, and why should it? He has too much else. Well. Even these days I still light my oil lamp from time to time. I may tell myself I’m economising on electricity but the truth is I like its smell and sound. Also, I think better by lamplight.

The dinner table I mentioned earlier was quite real. It was no mere figure for my inability to fill a seat as memorably as Jayjay always would his at any festive gathering. It was one night last winter when I went down the hill to supper with friends I have known for twenty years, all of them locals: a farmer and his wife, the farmer’s two old parents, an engineer at a pasta factory down the road together with his wife and daughter, a nursery gardener, a self-employed builder. The quantities of food were extravagant:
cuisine not haute but sturdy, and produced with a lot of care. Jayjay was not there but it was just the sort of commonplace gathering in someone’s beamed kitchen at which he would have been in his element. Everyone lapsed into dialect with the first plate of
crostini.
Blasphemies peppered the air. The wood-fired oven threw out a cheery warmth, the cat dozed atop the extinguished television set. On the sooty walls were cheap framed pictures from Castiglion Fiorentino’s Friday market: Padre Pio with his celebrated stigmata, an all-purpose snow-and-pines scene that looked like Canada, a basket of puppies with roses bound over the handle. There was also a yellowed newspaper cutting with a barely discernible photograph of Fausto Coppi, the champion cyclist between the late thirties and early fifties, a boyhood hero of the farmer’s father.

The conversation rambled reassuringly to cover completely predictable topics. Local gossip; politics; sugarbeet; vines and olives; somebody’s operation; a boy who (
pig-Madonna!
)
needed to stop wanking, get off his backside and do a decent day’s work (
Madonna
ugly-wolf!
);
a recipe for
baldino
;
a woman who dyed her hair; amiable obscene jokes; much laughter; compliments to the chef … And without warning I saw heads. I saw how all our heads around the table were in some truthful way
exactly
the same heads that had talked around a similar table on this spot two hundred and fifty years ago or two thousand five hundred – Etruscans, whatever. Different names, different language, fairly similar food, but not different thoughts. The same heads having the same thoughts passed through them. Not for the first time I saw how our much prized individualities are a fiction. There is only this succession of heads in which the same thoughts take up residence, roost for a while and then pass on through the next generation in their long, aimless, repetitive narration. There will always be heads to host the same thoughts as ours long after our own are full of roots, just as there were before this current batch of ‘us’ was born. Who is this dim storyteller who exists outside us and goes on putting ancient jokes into generation after generation of skulls, filling them with the same banalities?

Once again I suspect Jayjay is untroubled by such moments. He would assuredly not have been the one sitting in silence, fiddling abstractedly with a chunk of bread. Had he been silent at all it would have been because he was trying to work out why
baldino
should look like a sort of chocolate flan, given that it is basically just chestnut flour, water and fried rosemary baked together. More likely he would have been in the middle of one of his tales of foreign parts and other times, so marvellous to people who have scarcely ever left this valley and one of the reasons why he is a perennially popular host. To the end of my life I shall be able to hear his voice: never loud, but the sort for which others fall silent on account of a certain charm and urbanity that contrasts in a piquant manner with the often risqué things he says. That odd mixture of travelled grandee and earthy Chianino is somehow irresistible. ‘So this Major Sansom fellow, who was in the Cairo Military Police in those war years, ordered an investigation and they discovered that the household was an efficient nest of spies because every single member of it, regardless of age or sex, was on the game.
Ddio
lupino!,
even the cat’s
culo
looked like a zucchino flower…’

And yes, for this too I am jealous of the man, even though a sour and aloof little voice tells me that it’s all a bit
easy,
somehow.

*

Then one day everything changes. There are no premonitions as I bump down the track through basking Red Admirals. It is one of those hot summer mornings when lavender bushes are still being pummelled by clouds of Blues and Skippers, among which scarce Swallowtails float loftily in their blond finery. The richness of summer is coming to a head. Within a week or two the nectar flow will dry up and the remaining wild flowers turn to hay. The bees will be obliged to make the long aerial trudge down to the irrigated rape fields far below. On this morning, though, Jayjay’s garden is almost blowsy with the freight of summer sap. Maybe something in this sheer fecundity is enough to make my host aware of a thinness in the account of his life so far. Maybe my
dissatisfaction has had its effect. Maybe, too, the state of his health has at last prompted him to gather his nerve. For what he is about to tell me contains elements of both confession and explanation without fully being either. He is also divulging a secret he has been keeping for so long that deciding to keep it no longer amounts to recklessness. Over sixty years a secret must surely transcend itself to become as much a part of its keeper as a pair of spectacles that brings the world into private focus; or else a habit one cannot shake, like always giving a little cough before speaking.

Whatever the reason, the scene that confronts me (outwardly the same as ever, with us sitting on his terrace with my notebook and the remains of mid-morning coffee on the table) is profoundly different today as Jayjay gazes into the blue air over Sant’ Egidio as if into a lens through which he might see his whole life refracted.

– Empty. It’s empty, isn’t it? There’s something missing from my life as I’ve narrated it. –

Not much about the heart, perhaps? Plus the odd inconsistency. Little skatings. Is this where you confess to Rosicrucianism, Jayjay? A previous life in Babylon or on one of the planets of Aldebaran? (But I’m thinking
At
last!
Here
it
comes!
and ready myself for a tale of military disaster, of treason, cowardice, massacre or interrogation. That’s the real reason why he chose me to write him: he sniffed out my own lapse through hints I’ve let fall in my books. We are uneasy comrades-in-arms, he and I.)

–
Et
in
Babylonē
ego
… Not quite that, no. I thought I could slide around having to mention this, as I’ve done for so many years, but I find I can’t. The longer I go on talking about my life while omitting its centre of gravity the more hollow it feels, the more like a direct lie. Well, I can’t bear that. Did you ever read Berlioz’s memoirs? –

(
Berlioz
…
?
?
And yet after all I must have had some unconscious inkling for after a moment’s double take it hits me with an inner thud like a long-awaited letter dropping on to the doormat.
Visions of war thin away as my thesis crumbles. For Jayjay, ignominy had taken an entirely different shape.)

Not
Estelle
?

– Exactly. The boyhood passion that lasted him a lifetime, out-living mockery, two marriages and countless lovers. Only in my case not Estelle, but Philip. You remember Michael, the boy at school whose politics I admired? His younger brother. He was two years younger than me. It was the beginning of the autumn term and I was looking at the new timetables on the school notice board and there he was, just arrived, although I didn’t know then that he was Michael’s brother. It felt exactly like an electric shock, one severe enough to cause radical damage to the heart. Have you ever had that? Have you ever been, as the French say,
foudroyé
?
It’s as if you had suddenly caught sight of a huge object moving across the sky which nobody else has noticed. You alone are thunderstruck, the rest of the world just goes blithely on with business as usual. And how could I have known, there in the middle of a mob of my schoolfellows all pushing and shoving around a notice board, that at barely sixteen I had just received the equivalent of a death sentence?

– At once, such
love
. As though gold dust were seeping through my blood. Everything I was or ever could become handed over on the spot to a perfect stranger, unconditionally. It depended on nothing, neither on recognition nor reciprocation. It was beyond all logic. It was even beyond rebuff, though I never risked that. Just a passion that could only grow and not diminish, fed by a casual word here and there whenever we bumped into each other by chance, although never is chance so painstakingly engineered as by a desperate lover. That was the secret of the whole Michael business. I know I told you I was fascinated by him but I wasn’t really, although he did impress me. Nor was I ever very interested in his politics, certainly not to the extent I made out and half believed myself. Michael was just an excuse. I cultivated him as a way of cementing a link with Philip. I’m not sure either of them ever guessed. –

What was their name?

A strange, closed look comes over Jayjay’s face, like that of a man who stands on a shore watching the ocean that has recently drowned his entire family.