Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (32 page)

There's no doubt that the legal and liberalist arguments for Chindamo's staying here have been made. A good prison system must rehabilitate; a just society allows the criminal to pay his debt; Chindamo is a citizen of the EU and free to move within it; his staying violates no one's rights. All reasonable and true, but an objection still remains: such reasoning doesn't stop another killing on another day, and is cruelly deaf to the blood that crieth from the ground. A liberal conscience is a fine thing, but a liberal conscience isn't all we're made of.

It's hard to believe that what really matters to Philip Lawrence's widow is the country in which the boy who widowed her will spend the rest of his life. At the heart of this is the question of whether Learco Chindamo should have any life left to spend. ‘Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord, ‘I will repay.' ‘Then repay!' saith we back. Chindamo was fifteen when he knifed to death a headmaster trying to break up a fight. A boy but not that much of a boy. You know, at fifteen, what a knife can do, which is why you choose to carry one. If he is released next year he will have spent twelve years in prison. Not much, twelve years. An eye for an eye was the recommendation of that vengeance-bearing Lord from whom the Jews, the Christians and the Muslims learned justice. No more than an eye for an eye, and no less. Twelve years for a life is not an eye for an eye. Twelve years for a life is the nail of a little finger for an eye.

Already we're wondering how little time in jail the killers of Rhys Jones will get. And how little that will deter the next ones.

Mrs Lawrence feels that someone has broken his promise to her. Someone has. We were all promised when we plumped for a more civilised society and abolished the death penalty that soft sentencing would not be the consequence. Play about with tariffs and you play about with the value of the life the killer took. It is not querulous of Mrs Lawrence to ask, ‘What about our rights?' A profound disordering of things takes place when we feel that the dead, and those who must go on living in the icy shadow of the dead, are not given justice, for justice is all the dead ask at any time, and when the dead are the murdered dead their unanswered cries are terrible, not only for those who loved them, but for us all. Any unrequited crime unsettles us. An unrequited murder deranges us.

This is why the Furies in Aeschylus' great trilogy,
the Oresteia
, are never stilled. With every humane advance a liberal society appears to make, there is an answering retrogression. Take the concept of redemption – a noble idea, but profoundly unjust. For by what presumptuous logic of the soul do we grant a person who has knowingly taken another person's life the right to redeem his own? Perhaps this, more than any other issue, divides us. To some, the criminal's willingness to own and expiate his crime is the proof that good exists. The God of redemption is civilisation's answer to the God of vengeance. But to others, redemption is a spiritual impertinence and a travesty of justice. ‘Only the overweening spirit takes on itself to dole out forgiveness,' D. H. Lawrence wrote. ‘But justice is a sacred human right. The overweening spirit pretends to perch above justice. But I am a man, not a spirit, and men . . . can only live at length by being just, can only die in peace if they have justice.'

That liberal society to which we all aspire demeans us when it disavows the force of human feeling which its liberalism cannot contain. The popular press will seize on the distress of Mrs Lawrence and the parents of Rhys Jones, and in the process whip the old gods into fury; but we make a grave mistake if we consign this to the ‘gutter' and call it mischief. The old gods speak for sacred necessities and will be heard.

‘A Gentle Vacancy of Spirit'

 

Discovered a new pleasure: lying on the beach reading writers describing lying on the beach. It's awkward reading on the beach if you're not sufficiently flexuous to get the right degree of shoulderly twist to read the words, or the right degree of cranial lift to turn the page, and if you don't have the bodily or astronomical savvy to work out how to get the sun on the book but not on you. But that's the joy of reading about someone who manages it no better. Reading is never more satisfying than when you feel allied with a writer in discomfort. So lying in agony on a beach with a book that excels at evoking the agonies of lying on a beach is the most perfect reading experience of all.

Simon Gray got me through the holiday from which I've just returned, or least he got me through the beach part of it. I'd been saving
The Last Cigarette
, the third volume of his
Smoking Diaries
, to take away with me, knowing that his masterfully comic dyspepsia would be just the tonic in the heat. But I hadn't realised that he too would be on holiday in it some of the time, so that I would be able to lie there, so to speak, and let him fulminate for both of us.

‘Listen to this,' I say to my wife, who is lying next to me. Though she has a back injury, and no more wants to be exposed to the sun we've just paid thousands of pounds to lie in than I do, she still manages to find a graceful way of curling up and reading. Women, of course, have more adaptable bodies than men. Something, presumably, to do with childbirth. Come the hour, they have to be able to bend themselves into positions impossible for a man. Not that we're here to have a baby. We're just here to escape the sun. And read. Which sometimes means reading to each other.

‘Listen to this,' I say, interrupting her and Philip Roth. I am not entirely happy, I have to confess, about her lying there with Philip Roth. The one consolation is that he doesn't find life funny any more, so at least I don't have to listen to her laughing. It's not quite a rule between us but it's understood that I would rather she didn't laugh at another man's prose – laughter in a woman denoting erotic appreciation – particularly when she's in the prone or semi-prone position. For some reason we make an exception of Simon Gray. This is not because I don't find him masculinely threatening – he is, actually – but because he is not a marriage-breaking writer, as Roth most definitely is. I can only explain that by saying that Simon Gray doesn't raise the ire of either sex against the other. On the stage sometimes, maybe, in earlier days, but in his diaries, no.

The passage I want to read aloud to my wife, who has already read
The Last Cigarette
but doesn't mind hearing it again, describes the diarist lying on a plastic bed on a cement beach in Greece, surrounded by bodies he doesn't find attractive (‘little strips of material between their legs'), listening to voices he loathes (‘voices you could grate cheese on'), a cigarette jammed into his mouth, ‘the sun pouring through my straw hat like a molten headache'.

A wonderful image, a molten headache, partly because it enacts the condition of becoming molten which is continuous – the sun continuing to pour, the hat continuing to provide no adequate protection, the head continuing to melt. So you can go on reading and rereading the sentence, the ache getting worse with every read. Indeed, when my wife wonders why I haven't interrupted her with another favourite phrase or paragraph for at least fifteen minutes I have to tell her that I'm still on the molten headache which is beginning to pour like liquefying gold out of my own skull now.

That is partly the actual sun's fault as well as Simon Gray's. It has crept under the umbrella while I've been busy laughing but I can't work out which side it's coming in from. There are diamond-shaped patches of intense light on my arms and chest, caused partly by gaps in the material of the umbrella. I could climb off my bed to fix them, and at the same time work out where the sun is, but it's so hot out there that if I quit the shade for more than ten seconds I will grow a melanoma. There is also, to be considered, the difficulty of rising from a sunbed at all at my age. How to get the leverage? Apply too much force to the bed and it sinks into the sand, grab hold of the umbrella pole with your weight and you'll topple it – and that's a melanoma each in the time it takes you to put it up again – which leaves only your wife's shoulder to reach out and press down on, and she won't appreciate that given her injury and the intense absorption of her concentration on Philip Roth's
Exit Ghost
, which has patently reached a crisis, that's if there's anything in late Philip Roth that isn't crisis.

It's crisis time for Simon Gray, too. Best friends dead and dying, his own tobacco health no great shakes, the body reluctant and unwieldy – for which, as I try covering up the triangles of killer light, first with what's left of a sandwich I've been eating, then with
The Last Cigarette
itself (a manoeuvre that involves balancing it on my ankles and bending double to read the words), I have considerable fellow feeling. ‘Not exactly serenity, more a gentle vacancy of spirit,' Gray writes, describing that ‘suspended mood when you know there's much to worry about but you can't remember what it is'. All we have to look forward to now – a gentle vacancy of spirit, which is a great thought because it admits its impossibility, or at least its fleetingness, in the utterance.

But no, there is something gentler about this volume of Gray's diaries. No dilution of the rage, no minimising of despair, and certainly no false comfort – but a great suffusion of warmth, especially in the man-to-man, eyeball-to-eyeball descriptions of his friends Alan Bates, Ian MacKillop, Harold Pinter. Astute portraits these, but infinitely touching, too, in their acknowledgement of love. You have to be of an age to write like this. It's not only the wit but the time-dyed tenderness a younger man could never manage. I console myself with that thought as I lie dying in the sun.

What Are They Saying?

 

Made a Polish waitress cry last week. I must stop doing that. This time the ostensible cause was teapots. My tea arrived as a perforated bag floating corpse-like on its back in a cup of brown soupy-looking liquid, which is not how I like it, and when I asked what had happened to the teapot she told me there'd been an incident. ‘Incident or accident?' I asked. I suppose I didn't need to know, since knowing wasn't going to get me a teapot, but if you're having a conversation, you're having a conversation. It is a species of impoliteness to go on speaking to a person when you aren't certain what they're saying.

Her eyes filled like my teacup. I didn't see what I had said or done to occasion that. I hadn't been aggressive. I had even essayed a smile. It is comic, after all, in a serious restaurant, to be served tea which you would no more think of drinking than you would an open sewer. ‘All usualised teaposies incriminated in unaccountable Nietzschean engineering catastrophe,' she said, before scurrying away with her apron to her face. Now I know she couldn't possibly have said that, but it was what I heard. So whose fault is that?

Suddenly I can't understand what anyone's saying. I don't mean intellectually, I mean I can't distinguish the words people are using. Can't harmonise the sounds with any I already know. I've had my ears tested. They're not perfect – I've been using them too long for them to be perfect – but taking one thing with a bugger, the ear specialist told me, they're not too bag.

It's not only in restaurants that I have this problem. Shops the same, telephones, television, movies. Especially movies. I've been going to a lot of movies recently in company with a person who's close to me and happens to be a member of BAFTA. At this time of the year she has to see every movie made since the BAFTAs of the year before. I make no attempt to influence her judgement. I just go along when I'm allowed and try my best to hear what's being said.

Usually I'm lost within the first ten minutes of the movie starting.
The Bourne Ultimatum
had me floundering in five and with
American Gangster
I didn't make it past the credits.
No Country for Old Men
(overrated, in my opinion: violence stylised for intellectuals) had a mumbly beginning and got more mumbly from there, whereas
There Will Be Blood
was unintelligible initially before clearing itself up in line with Daniel Day-Lewis's marvellously mad theatricality – and there is that to be said for the theatre: you can hear it. Even Sidney Lumet's
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
had me baffled for long stretches, which doesn't alter the fact that its failure to pick up a nomination is a scandal. Too Shakespearean, I can only suppose, in the playing out of its ineluctable morality. Too hot. Coen Brothers cold is the temperature of the hour. We like our existentialism ironic just now, perhaps as a relief from the childish ardour of our politics.

I have no doubt that subject matter has a lot to do with what I can and cannot hear. The majority of this year's most successful films are about killers, hitmen, gangland members and other assorted scumbags, and I have never penetrated what gangland members say to one another in the movies. It's a matter of the conspiratorial pitch of their voices, partly. But also of what in my polytechnic days we used to call their aims and objectives. Not everyone is interested in the whys and wherefores of rubbing people out; and if the vocabulary of skulduggery doesn't grab you, you don't listen. Let Marianne Dashwood lose her heart to Mr Willoughby and I follow every syllable of every palpitation. For love and its trials I am all ears. But the minute there's a criminal plot in the hatching I go to sleep. Even
The Sopranos
, to which I am a late and obsessive convert, is far more engrossing when Tony commits adultery or buys his wife a bracelet (the two are usually connected) than when he beats someone to a pulp.