Wrote For Luck (2 page)

Half-an-hour later, in the car driving west through the Suffolk back-lanes, past the head-high clumps of cow-parsley and the loosestrife-patterned hedges, he said: ‘I don’t believe for a moment it was Lytton Strachey’s tea-cup.’

‘It could quite easily have been when you come to think about it.’

‘Well, they ought to have kept it locked up in a cupboard then, or given it to a museum, where passing chartered accountants couldn’t get at it.’ Mrs Underwood had not said anything as she consigned the shards of china to the waste-paper basket. In some ways this cut deeper than the sharpest rebuke. Something else struck him and he said:

‘I know what you said to Oenone… to Christabel about the chair giving way, but why exactly did Bunny end up on the grass?’

‘I told you. He asked me, quite conversationally, as if he wanted me to pass the rock-buns, if I would come and “live with him and be his love”. Those were his exact words.’

‘And what did you do?’

‘I told him not to be so silly.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘There was a bit of scuffling. And after that, because I was rather cross and I don’t like people’s fingers digging into my hand, I just gave him a tiny push.’

The road signs, which had hitherto been sporadic and confusing, now suggested that they were somewhere near Colchester. He thought of Bunny’s balding, aftershave-scented head waggling above its necklace of daisies, and then of Mrs Underwood explaining how frightfully she had minded about her father’s diaries. His own father had kept a diary in which he had recorded the price of petrol and the avian traffic of their south-west London back-garden. There had been nothing in it of a personal nature, and no spotty daughters. Whatever pained disappointment he might have felt had been kept to himself.

‘Do you know,’ she said. ‘Somebody told me that she once had an affair with Philip Larkin?’

‘Well I hope they both enjoyed themselves. And that he had a light hand with the crockery.’

He found himself imagining Oenone or Christabel sitting in a restaurant with Philip Larkin. The scene had a tuppence-coloured air of unreality. They were on the motorway now, flanked by a throng of mobile homes and caravans making their way back from the coast. Somewhere in the world, he supposed, lurked an art which you could set against the armies of commerce and bureaucracy to lay them waste, but it could not be found in the Underwoods’ green-girt garden. They set off home through the concrete and steel, past shoals of cars from which pale, incurious faces stared out, a firmament where broken cups were of little account and nobody, whether in jest or earnest, asked anyone to live with them and be their love.

—2013

‘N
ot much of a job is it?’ the barmaid wondered.

‘That depends,’ Sinclair said. ‘You’d be surprised who comes in there sometimes.’

‘Who does? What sort of people?’

Sinclair changed tack. ‘I sold a chair last week cost five hundred pounds.’

It was still early in the pub and no one much was about. In the corner of the front bar the two men who worked in the shipping office were having one of their conversations that Sinclair could never understand, however much he eavesdropped. The smoke from their cigarettes undulated in folds through the stale air. Outside the February slush was turning grey-brown at the edges.

‘Funny hours you work anyway,’ the barmaid said.

‘I come and go,’ Sinclair told her. He moved to one side as a small, white-faced man he didn’t recognise advanced on the bar, wondering what to do. Mr Savage liked him to have a ‘good long lunch-hour’, as he put it, but it was cold out, he didn’t fancy a hot meal in the pub, and he badly wanted to be back in the shop. When the barmaid had finished serving the small man he bought a Scotch egg and a pork pie from one of the glass display cases – curtly, as if to emphasise that the intimacy of a minute ago didn’t really count for anything – took them down to St James’s Square and ate them standing
underneath a tree in the gardens as melting snow dripped down on him from the upper branches. Crossing the broad sweep of the square’s corner on the way back to the shop a skidding cyclist brushed against his coat and he shouted a warning, hoping that the man would shout back, but he was already away in the direction of Regent Street.

Back at the shop Mr Savage was haggling with a customer over a set of carved ivory chessmen. Neither of them looked up as he came in, jangling the shop bell violently. Sinclair went into the room at the back, took off his coat and began to fill the electric kettle at the sink. Another pile of books had arrived on the scratched deal table in his absence and he looked along their spines as he made the coffee.
Ladslove Lyrics. A Coan Anthology. A History of the Boy
. People would sometimes pay as much as fifty pounds for a book of this kind, Sinclair knew. Holding the coffee mugs carefully at arm’s length, he walked back into the shop. Mr Savage stood on his own, staring regretfully at the chess set. Sinclair put the mugs down sharply on the glass counter next to a faded print of the Tower of London and a Victorian miniature of a girl playing a mandolin.

‘Didn’t you sell it?’ he asked.

Mr Savage made an apologetic little bob of his head. ‘Not a serious customer.’ Mr Savage always said this when a deal fell through.

Sinclair shrugged. ‘That stuff won’t sell itself,’ he said reproachfully.

Six months ago, when he’d taken the job, he would have been amazed if anyone had told him he’d end up talking to
Mr Savage like this. The odd thing was that Mr Savage didn’t seem to mind. He reminded Sinclair of a boy he’d known at school, a weak little white-haired kid called Damian who for some reason didn’t care if you threw his bag in the road or ran into him, and even seemed to get a kick out of your hostility.

Outside expensively shod feet pittered up and down the arcade’s marble floor. Another customer came into the shop and started riffling aimlessly through the tray of prints. Mr Savage watched him, taking quick, nervous sips from his coffee cup. There was something worrying him, Sinclair could see. The man who had been looking at the tray of prints eventually paid twenty pounds for a representation of Putney Bridge executed in 1827: about twice what it was worth, Sinclair calculated. Mr Savage smoothed the two ten-pound notes between his fingers of one hand and used the other to stroke his thin, greying hair into place.

‘I was wondering if you had anything special planned for this afternoon, Neville. For the shop, I mean.’

Sinclair thought rapidly. Usually he spent afternoons in the basement storeroom sorting through the unsold stock or effecting minor repairs to items Mr Savage thought needed ‘improving’.

‘That depends, doesn’t it?’

‘Only there were one or two…’ Mr Savage stopped the sentence halfway through and stared awkwardly at the coffee cup he was twisting between his fingers. For a second Sinclair realised that he almost felt sorry for him, having to sell books like
A History of the Boy
for a living to snooty American tourists,
not to mention the rows with Anthea or whatever her name was. But he wasn’t going to help Mr Savage out of his embarrassment. Or not quite yet.

‘And then when my wife gets here—’

‘You want me to go up to Camden Market. I could probably manage it,’ Sinclair said, trying to sound a good deal more aggrieved than he actually felt.

Mr Savage smiled. He put his hand gingerly on Sinclair’s forearm and moved the fingers up and down. ‘Thank you, Neville,’ he said sincerely. ‘I appreciate that.’

For some reason the shop was always quiet after lunch. Outside in the arcade the swirl of midday traffic had given way to occasional solitary women who stared vaguely at Mr Savage through the plate glass and then went away again. The doorbell hadn’t rung for half an hour. In the basement Sinclair applied varnish strenuously to the legs of a ‘gout stool’, which was Mr Savage’s usual description of any small chair made before the year 1900. As soon as Anthea got there he knew he would have to leave for Camden, maybe even before. It was always worse in the shop immediately after she had arrived. Sometimes he wondered what the effect of having him there had on the two of them, whether they liked having him as an audience or whether they were as disconcerted as he was. You could never tell with people like the Savages.

Anthea came at ten past three. Sinclair gave her a couple of minutes, then left in a hurry, shouldering his way through the empty air with a ‘Bye’ flung in the direction of the till. Looking back through the window he could see the Savages
turning towards each other and the little ‘o’ of Mrs Savage’s mouth as she started speaking again. Along Piccadilly the wind had got up and he hunched his jacket over his chest as he made for the tube. A woman swerved slightly to avoid his onward rush and Sinclair glared at her. The tube was almost empty. Glancing over the advertisements for foreign holidays and mobile phones, Sinclair found himself thinking about the shop and what someone like Mr Savage did with his spare time. Films, maybe? TV? That set him on the other familiar train of thought, back to the hostel and the big TV screen they had there and the old man, McKechnie, falling asleep in his chair while the others watched films and drank cans of stout into the small hours.

At Camden Town it had started to rain and there were tiny streaks of water slanting across the windows of Jellaby’s shop. Two of the panes had been replaced by squares of brown paper criss-crossed with Sellotape, Sinclair noticed. He found Mr Jellaby in the front, hands in pockets, surrounded by piles of old magazines. ‘Bloody kids,’ he said as Sinclair came in, gesturing sharply at the window. Sinclair stared at the topmost magazine, which was a 1969 copy of the
National Geographic
. ‘Kids do that?’ he asked, knowing that talking to Mr Jellaby was preferable to the icy silence of not talking to him.

‘Who else?’ Mr Jellaby wondered, less crossly. He was a small, fantastically dirty man in his fifties. Sinclair had never once seen anyone else in his shop, not even one of the dossers from the market trying to part-exchange books.’ What you got then?’Mr Jellaby went on. Sinclair gave him the brown envelope that Mr Savage always left in the little aperture
under the till. He was tired now, he realised. What he really fancied was a nap in the Savages’ basement. Perhaps he’d get one later, unless Anthea was still poking around there. ‘Stay here a bit, will you?’ Mr Jellaby said. Sinclair watched him shuffle off towards the back of the shop, where there were a couple of huge porphyry vases and a yellow curtain that blocked off Mr Jellaby’s living quarters. Somewhere in the distance a phone rang and he heard Mr Jellaby talking into it, so softly that his voice barely broke over the noise of the rain. Sinclair sat down in a wrecked armchair next to the nearest pile of magazines. He was so tired that he wanted to sleep, but the thought of Mr Jellaby standing over him, maybe even shaking his shoulder to wake him, made him stand up again and light a cigarette. He’d smoked three-quarters of it by the time Mr Jellaby came back. ‘Fags is it?’ he said. ‘Want a cup of tea or something?’ Sinclair shook his head. One day he’d really get talking to Mr Jellaby, he thought, really draw him out, but not now, not in the empty shop with the water running down the window, hemmed in by the piles of magazines. He wedged the Jiffy bag Mr Jellaby had given him under one arm and stubbed the cigarette out on the sole of his boot. ‘That’s right,’ Mr Jellaby said approvingly. ‘Saves on the bloody mess too.’

There were magazines in the Jiffy bag, Sinclair knew. Much worse than anything Mr Savage sold in the shop. Once he’d taken one out on the tube and looked at it, and then put it away because he realised everyone was looking at him. Coming back along Piccadilly he had the queer feeling that the people who passed him knew what he was carrying. This
made him quicken his step and he took the last few yards down the arcade at a run, so that the shop windows were a blur of light and colour and he nearly fell over a can that someone had left in a doorway. In the shop Mr and Mrs Savage were standing on each side of the counter making extravagant gestures at each other – weird hailings and flourishes like a page of semaphore instructions Sinclair had once seen in a book. From the look on their faces they’d been at it ever since he’d left. He came into the room with a deliberate nonchalance, just to show Anthea that he wasn’t afraid of her or anything, and stood carelessly by the till until they stopped bickering. In the end there was a silence and he looked at them – Mrs Savage red and furious, Mr Savage sad but somehow stubbornly refusing to give way. ‘Been enjoying yourselves?’ he asked. He knew it would only annoy Mrs Savage more, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Mrs Savage sucked in her breath. ‘And as for him,’ she said, picking up an old grievance, ‘I don’t know how you can bear to look at him, I just don’t.’ Sinclair ignored her. Looking at Mr Savage’s pasty, put-upon face, he thought suddenly of Damian, the kid at school, remembered pushing his elbow into his face once and the glance Damian gave him: half woeful, half expectant. Suddenly he became aware that the three of them were doing a kind of dance, he and Mr Savage crossing and re-crossing the room to avoid the sweeps of Mrs Savage’s arm. Mr Savage began to say, ‘I think, Neville…’ but something in Sinclair broke and he pushed the Jiffy bag urgently towards him. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘these are for you.’ Together they watched the glistening pages drop out of the
bag’s gaping neck, tumble to the floor and split apart, a piece of frozen time made up of cheap, shiny paper, Mrs Savage’s tiny scream, the memory of the elbow ramming home, that for some reason he would always remember.

—1999

T
owards dawn what might have been a child’s cry rose from behind the eighth-open door that divided the two rooms of their ‘family suite’ – lost and indistinct but somehow eldritch, faintly inhuman in its register – and she raised herself up on one elbow, eyes straining through the murk, waiting for the flurry of purposeful movement, the small head framed in the oblong of stark light, caught irresolutely between door and jamb. But the cry faded away, leaving her stranded and inert, with only the sound of Jamie breathing heavily into his pillow and the patter of the travelling alarm clock to break the silence. It was 5am, but not, Claire thought, quite as cold as it might have been. Still oppressed by the various neuroses she had taken to bed with her six hours before, she got up and twitched open the curtain to reveal the Holiday Inn forecourt in all its neon-tinted glory, like a sci-fi film set dropped arbitrarily onto the Oxfordshire verdure.

Even at 5am there were people about, goading cars noisily out of their parking bays, smoking cigarettes down by the breeze-blocked foyer. Why did people have to get up at five on a Sunday morning, she wondered, much less smoke cigarettes against the dawn? There was a copy of the book lying on the upturned suitcase, the pages separated into quarter-inch clumps by a line of book-marks and Post-it notes, left there expressly to intoxicate, even now, before daylight
in an Oxford hotel room, quite irresistible. Waking an hour later to visit the bathroom, Jamie found her perched with it on the lavatory seat, altogether lost in this newly minted despatch from the tumbling world of her imagination. ‘You don’t have to have it by heart, you know,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re only supposed to read from it.’ There were real cries coming from the farther room, emphatically human. ‘Your public awaits,’ Jamie said.

At breakfast, while the children exclaimed over plates of food which they did not in the end eat, they reviewed the engagements that lay before them.

‘You won’t want the kids with you in the tent, I mean,’ Jamie said. On the hotel forecourt, beyond the window, the cigarette smokers had given way to wary Asian taxi-drivers. ‘So they’d better come to Merton with me.’

A bright new blob of colour had suddenly emerged into the mosaic of the day. ‘Why exactly is it you have to go to Merton anyway?’

‘There’s that conference coming up in the autumn at Leicester, and Roger thought…’

Claire could never remember whether Roger was the one cheated out of his professorship by a conniving vice-chancellor or the one whose wife had left him, or which in Jamie’s scale of values would be the deeper hurt. She applied herself to the tomatoes on her plate while Jamie’s voice, lost for a second or two against the buzz and clamour of the meal, came haltingly back into focus.

‘…And then you could get down to meet us at the restaurant at 12.30.’

The children’s antennae, indifferent to talk of Roger, conferences at Leicester or what Mummy might be doing in a tent, were finely tuned to the mention of restaurants. ‘Who’s going to be there?’ Lucy wondered. ‘Daddy’s friends Hugo and Anna.’ As she said the words she delved into her bag again and felt the book’s spine resting against her thumb.

There was a silence. ‘But we saw them last time we came here,’ Jack said. ‘And Tom’s weird.’

It was true, Claire acknowledged to herself, pushing the uneaten tomatoes to the edge of her plate. They had seen Hugo and Anna last time they came here. And Tom was weird. But friendships, Jamie’s friendships, took no account of repetition or incremental oddity.

‘Well, it will be nice to see them again,’ she found herself saying, to no one in particular. ‘And now Mummy has to go.’

‘If they’ve got that new thing about the Norman succession in the shop you might get it for me,’ Jamie said. He was paler than usual, Claire noted, and massaging his forehead in a way that portended trouble.

‘I’ll see if it’s there. Are you starting a headache?’

‘It’s OK… The TV series was hopeless, but I’ve heard him lecture. Oh, and good luck.’

She smiled gratefully at him and then finally was gone, by Asian taxi-driver down the grey expanse of the Woodstock Road, then on foot through streets laden with memories, from which, rather to her surprise, she found that she quailed: a shop from which she had walked, quite unthinkingly, without paying for a copy of Keith Thomas’s
Man and the Natural World
, a pedestrian crossing where she had once watched an old man
fall dead from his bicycle, a seminar room jutting out over the High Street where, 20 years ago she now remembered, she had first set eyes on the tall, abstracted figure that was Jamie’s younger self.

In the tent her voice seemed to fly away from her, go soaring off into the wide space beneath the canvas awning and hung there, with occasional downward swoops to menace the up-turned heads of the crowd. The audience did not seem put out by this dislocation. In the front row a goggle-eyed old lady stared at her so blindly that she might have been unconscious. At her side a grey-haired man in a cagoule took notes. Their questions were horribly familiar. Did Claire know that the town of Uttoxeter was very much not as she had described it? Was writing a novel difficult? What advice would she give to anyone so engaged? Afterwards she wrote ‘With best wishes from Claire Jackson’ on the title page of each of the five books held out for her inspection, gave her email address to the intent-looking woman who proposed to send her ‘a manuscript written by my friend who sadly couldn’t be here’ and strode out again into the college quadrangle, simultaneously exalted and cast down. The manuscript would lie unread on the dining-room table for a month and then be courteously returned, Claire knew. She had reached the door of the restaurant in Little Clarendon Street – gentrified now, and free of the student hordes – before she remembered Hugo and Anna, but there they were, a pair of smaller heads between them, ranged around the further side of a table that also harboured James and her own children: Hugo, who had written, ten years ago, a
book called
The Saxon Hegemony
, and Anna, who laboured in a branch of intellectual copyright so abstruse that Claire had never been able to work out exactly what she did. Moving into the restaurant’s dark interior, where Italianate waiters swam and glided, Claire was able to establish that Jamie, though paler still, was enjoying himself, and to suspect that some incidental trauma had disturbed the early stages of the meal. Seating herself between the children, she attended to the rush of whispered confidences.

‘Mummy. Anna said the soup was horrible and she told the man to take it away.’

‘Mummy. Tom’s weirder than ever.’

On the pretext of examining the menu Claire took a look at Tom who, with Anna’s arm protectively, or even janitorially, around his shoulders, was staring at a plate of pasta that someone – presumably not the chef – had cut into myriad tiny fragments. He scowled guilelessly back. Claire had never known how to deal with children like Tom. Either you conciliated them and they took advantage, or you stood no nonsense and suffered pangs of conscience in return. A sentence from one of Jamie’s typescript piles, dumped on the bedside table a week ago, was coursing through her head: one may regard the relation between an Angevin suzerain and his subject as a metaphor for the relation between imagination and its orchestrator. ‘We were so sorry not to get to your reading,’ Anna said, in that high, cracking voice which always made her sound as if she was on the edge of hysteria, ‘but it was Emily’s eurythmy class and then Sunday morning after that is Hugo’s quiet time, when he…’

Whatever Hugo did – prune aspidistras or embroider antimacassars – ran away into a thicket of infant clamour and descending cutlery. She was a dark, intense girl with a long nose who had once confided to Claire that Tom was possibly not her child, and then forgotten it, leaving their conversations stuck in semi-intimacy, the planks beneath them sharply exposed, revealing dark, jagged rocks in the depths below. ‘Did it, I mean, did it go OK?’ Claire smiled appealingly at the waiter who seemed least offended by whatever humiliations had been piled upon him in the preceding half-hour and ordered an omelette, checked that her own children had not gone hungry (this had happened before) and realigned herself to the adult duologue going on at the end of the table.

Usually Jamie and Hugo discussed academic preferment, an extraordinary kind of three-dimensional chess, in which every move seemed to be cancelled out by developments on another plane. Just now, though, they were talking about what sounded like medieval kingship. Claire was pretty sure that she heard the words ‘Plantagenet paradigm’. For a moment or so the half-chapter she had read in the tent at Christchurch, about sweet Izzy the public relations executive, her two-timing boyfriend and their too-small house in Wandsworth – not unlike her own too-small house in Wandsworth if it came to that – burned trails of shame through her memory, only for the sight of Hugo, gesturing lavishly with a fork to clinch some point or other, to make her feel better. ‘Of course,’ Hugo was saying, ‘those Chairs at the new universities are a dollar a dozen, but I don’t… it doesn’t…’ Jamie, though paler than ever, was vigorously nodding his head. Fifteen
years ago, as ageing postgraduates, they had collaborated on an article about the Viking cult of the Spread Eagle for the
English Historical Review:
yellowing off-prints of this work occasionally surfaced amidst the debris of the study.

Outside, rain was falling against the plate-glass window in tiny, pointillist swirls, like the ornamentation in a drawing by Aubrey Beardsley. ‘Mummy,’ Lucy demanded out of the blue. ‘Are we going home today?’ ‘No darling, tomorrow. But you can go in the swimming pool if you like.’ The children in her book, she now realised, bore no relation to her own: had she wanted to convey their complex idiosyncrasies into print she could not have done so. Did Hugo and Jamie feel the same about the no less flesh and blood Norsemen who had tugged their victims’ ribs out of their chests on spear-points? It was hard to tell. Above her head, the conversation had become general. ‘That’s right,’ Anna was saying, in the languid tones that meant she was seriously cross. ‘Building right over the back of the meadow by the side of the college sports ground, I mean. And it’s not as if…’ Tom, meanwhile, was doodling with a biro on one of the paper napkins: ominous tessellations and triangles, punctuated every so often with a sightless face. By degrees, and after some spirited querying, by Anna, of the bill they debouched into the street. Here the rain had stopped; on the far side a man in a pair of red-checked trousers, a tourist escaped from one of the coach parties, was taking down an umbrella stamped with the legend
Dominus Illuminata Mea
. It was then that ‘it’, whatever it was – and afterwards Claire was unable to log the precise clash of temperaments that had caused it – happened, that Tom, who had been balancing
on the foot-high wall demarcating the margin of a car park, pirouetted there suddenly for a moment and then crashed down into a heap, banging his jaw on the tarmac and bleeding copiously over Anna’s white shirt-front as she scooped him up. ‘Oh Tom, poor Tom,’ Claire said, pulling tissues out of her bag and dabbing at the blood beneath the grave stares of the children. ‘I’m sorry,’ Hugo said, directing his words to a piece of masonry far above his head. ‘I just can’t put up with this… With all this…’ He made a vague gesture with his hand, that somehow encompassed the rain, the silent, bleeding child and, Claire felt, the rest of them as they stood embarrassedly on the street corner. ‘Look,’ Hugo said to Anna. ‘You’ll just have to take him home. I can’t…’ They watched him plod slowly away in the direction of the University Parks, bandaging his head with a long scarf as he went, not looking back.

Later, as the dusk fell across North Oxford, they returned to the Holiday Inn. The Asian taxi-drivers had disappeared. In their place a brood of dropsical women with suitcases talked melancholically into mobile phones. ‘These aren’t… they’re not… Hugo’s best years, you know,’ Jamie said by way of explanation, as they eased open the door of the family suite. ‘I mean, you should have known him when…’ He stopped and began to press his finger-tips tentatively against his forehead. Together they began the ritual search for the packets of aspirin and ibuprofen hoarded against such emergencies. ‘Are you OK?’ Claire asked. ‘I’ll be all right,’ Jamie said gloomily, ‘as long as I can lie perfectly still.’ They left him supine on the bed and went down to the swimming pool and drank mugs of hot chocolate in a deserted canteen that looked out
onto a yard filled with lines of green refuse bins.
Dominus Illuminata Mea
, Claire thought. Later still, when the children were asleep, she came down to the pool again, empty now in the flaring after-hours light, and swam on unappeasably, in a succession of brisk, purposeful lengths, her mind bent for some reason which she could not fathom on the memory of Hugo’s squat, receding figure, the tide of bungalows reaching out to embrace the college sports ground in their bland, domesticating arc.

—2005