Zoo Time (23 page)

‘When it’s envy that makes you virtuous, Guido, you aren’t being virtuous.’

‘Envy makes it sound a mite mean-spirited, Vee.’

She laughed so loud at that her mother came downstairs to see what the matter was.

21

My Hero

I was asleep in the van when the women returned from the yacht. Vanessa clattered about. She was not considerate around another person’s sleep.

‘What time is it?’ I asked.

‘Two, three.’

‘Had a good time?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Your mother?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Silly?’ Silly was Vanessa’s word for her mother when she’d had a drink.

‘Very silly.’

Too silly to leave Dirk, I wondered. Too silly to keep him at arm’s length? But I put the question slightly differently. ‘She still on the boat?’

‘Of course she isn’t still on the boat. Had I left her on the boat she’d be halfway to India by now.’

‘You didn’t drag her away, I hope.’ Liar.

‘When don’t I have to drag her away?’

There was a sudden hammering on the van. Desperate, as though a person was being attacked by wild animals – dolphins, pelicans, monkeys.

Dirk, I thought. Or Tim, doing Dirk’s dirty business again, come to steal my women back.

Vanessa opened a window. ‘Christ, Mother!’ she shouted. ‘What now?’

‘Come quickly,’ Poppy said. ‘There’s something in my room.’

Dirk, I thought.

‘What do you mean, something?’

‘Do I have to stand out here describing it? A beetle or a spider, I don’t know . . . a giant cockroach.’

‘Tread on it.’

‘It’s too big to tread on.’

‘Then tell them at the hotel.’

‘I can’t find anyone. You’ve got to come, I can’t sleep in there.’

‘Just a minute.’

Vanessa shut the window and pulled the duvet off me. ‘You’ll have to help her,’ she said.

‘If it’s too big for
her
to tread on it’s too big for
me
to tread on.’

‘I can’t leave her out there.’

‘Let her come back in here.’

‘So she can snore, or sit up all night telling us what a good time she’s had? Go and help her. You’re the man.’

I thought of saying, ‘Call Dirk, he’s the man.’ But what would that have achieved?

I threw on a pair of shorts, and remembered to put my feet in flip-flops. The ground writhed with venomous ants and ticks and millipedes out there. Snakes, too, for all I knew. I hoped Poppy in her panic hadn’t mistaken a snake for a beetle.

She was still vibrating from the good time she’d been having. Her hair trembled like a halo of fire. Her dress steamed. There was so much alcoholic vapour coming off her she’d have gone up in flames had I lit a match a hundred yards away. And yet she appeared to be steadier, in mind at least. I wondered if she’d seen more of de Wolff ’s knob and whether that had sobered her up.

She took my arm and led me out of the campsite to her room, trying her key in a couple of wrong doors before she found the right.

‘Silly me,’ she said, echoing Vanessa’s verdict, holding onto me in the dark.

‘Easy,’ I said, being the man.

She turned the light on and stood swaying in front of me. ‘Prepare yourself for this,’ she said.

I was hoping that whatever it was that had frightened her would be gone by now, scuttled out under the door or down the drain in the shower. But it had gone nowhere, whatever it was. It reclined on Poppy’s snow-white pillow, its buggy eyes wide open, its shoulders hunched, its feelers twitching, a disgusting parcel of envenomed black fur like something a gorilla had coughed up.

‘Christ!’ I said. ‘It could be a tarantula.’

‘Don’t kill it,’ she cried.

‘Don’t kill it? It’s him or me, Poppy.’

‘Well, don’t kill it on my pillow, I’ve got to sleep on that.’

I had no idea how I was going to kill it on her pillow or off it. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve anything like a tennis racket or a fishing net?’ I enquired.

She took a moment to think about it. I could tell she wished her head were clearer.
Tennis racket, tennis racket . . . where did I put that thing?
In the end, placing a hand on my shoulder, she balanced on one foot and took her shoe off. It wasn’t the first time she’d leaned on me to take a shoe off, but it was the first time she’d leaned on me to take her shoe off so I could kill with it.

The inside of the shoe was moist from Poppy’s foot. At any other time I’d have put it to my face. It had a platform heel made of coiled rope, like a quoit. I took my cue from that and made a practice throw as though aiming at a spike. A lot hung on this throw. Since Poppy didn’t want the blood and guts on her pillow I had to throw so as to give the spider a glancing rather than a decisive blow, but not so glancing as to let it escape or turn it angry, a blow sufficient to knock it off the bed stunned, ideally unconscious or having lost its memory.

‘Don’t hurt it,’ Poppy said, as I was taking aim.

I imagined hearing her offering her mouth to me and saying, ‘Be gentle. Be gentle with me.’

She was lopsided, one foot in a shoe, one not, like a heron standing on one leg. What is it about a woman standing on one leg that is so beguiling to a man? Even a woman Poppy’s age. No,
especially
a woman Poppy’s age.

‘Give me your other shoe,’ I said, ‘just in case.’

She leaned on me again. Twice in one night, a woman I desired, and had no right to desire, standing on one foot. If only she’d had as many feet as the tarantula.

Shoeless, she was now lowered almost to my height, our eyes level, our mouths on the same plane. We could feel each other’s blood pump.

I threw. Whether I hit I couldn’t tell, but the shoe bounced off the bed and there was nothing on Poppy’s pillow.

There were four, five seconds of silence.

‘Now what?’ Poppy said.

Now we make love on the floor and wait for it to die, I thought. Sex is never better than when something is expiring nearby, and I don’t just mean a marriage.
Lust und Tod
, the Germans call it, and they should know. No doubt the Dutch called it something similar. Odds on, Dirk had made a film of that name. But in truth I’d have been too afraid of the spider coming to and biting us to have risked our rolling on the floor and taking bites out of each other ourselves.

Before I could say anything, Poppy screamed. The spider was up and running, still a bit shaken, but heading for the wardrobe on the other side of the bed.

‘Kill it for Christ’s sake!’ Poppy cried. ‘Kill it before it gets into my clothes. Quick.’

It’s not possible to do quick in flip-flops. But I managed to get round to the other side of the bed before the spider disappeared – where I would have liked to disappear – into the silken, aromatic pleats of Poppy’s dresses. There was a moment in which we eyed each other as rivals, then I stamped on it. I could feel its bulk, broken, sodden, but still resistant, beneath my foot. Killing an insect – no, an arachnid – is harder than it’s cracked up to be. Or it is if you’re squeamish and unarmed. I couldn’t bear to press down harder or to release the pressure; I couldn’t bear to look or not look. I thought I might have to stand there for ever.

‘My hero,’ Poppy said.

‘Not exactly St George and the Dragon.’

‘I wouldn’t have been so afraid of a dragon.’

Nor, I thought, would a dragon have squelched so disgustingly beneath my flip-flop.

‘I’m not sure where we go from here,’ I said, still not wanting to move in case the thing remained horribly alive.

‘I am,’ Poppy said, pouring us both a brandy.

‘I’m shaking,’ I said.

‘So am I,’ she said.

I held out a hand. She took it. We both laughed.

Was I taking advantage of her drunkenness?

Yes. But she was of an age, wasn’t she, to make it clear what she did or didn’t want.

I pulled her to me and kissed her on the mouth. ‘Good brandy,’ I said. I laid my free hand on her hip, fingers pointing downwards, extending my palm to feel as much of her as I could.

She pushed me away, laughing more nervously this time. ‘Go,’ she ordered.

‘I can’t,’ I reminded her, ‘I’m standing on your spider.’

‘You can’t stand there all night.’

‘Can’t I?’

There are moments of trembling collusion in the lives of men and women, when the sacred rules governing decent society reassert themselves only to be broken. Right shows its face for the final time, in order that we can relish wrong.

Zoo time.

‘Do it,’ Poppy’s expression dared me. ‘Do it if you’re man enough.’ So I did it.

TWO

The Mother-in-Law Joke

22

Blocked

Not long after Merton’s suicide, I discovered in the pages of the
Scrivener
– the house journal of the Scrivener’s Society, one of the many authors’ societies to which I subscribed – a yellow circular, a) remembering Merton and lamenting publishing’s great loss, and b) setting out a plan of action for dealing with writers’ constipation. The two were not seen to be connected, though in a profession as susceptible to suggestion as ours, one calamity easily triggered another.

Costiveness had long been known to afflict writers of every sort – though fiction writers in particular as they had the least reason to leave their desks and the most reason to be stressed – but of late it had reached near epidemic proportions. It goes without saying that we weren’t rushing to make it public. On top of all the other stupid questions we were asked whenever we gave an interview – such as what time we started work, where we got our ideas from, could we name a book by any living writer we admired – we didn’t now want to be asked to list our favourite laxatives.

But it was precisely that reticence, according to Thor Enquist, the General Secretary of the Scrivener’s Society, that was the problem. The more reluctant to discuss constipation we were, the more constipated we became. We had, he said, to let go. A cliché which had on me, at least, the very opposite effect to the one intended.

Barely had that letter arrived than
Errata
, the journal of the Jotter’s Club, devoted half an issue to writers’ physical well-being, the greatest modern threat to which, in the age of the computer, was – and it behoved us as writers to call a spade a spade – confinement of the bowels. If members signalled it was their wish, they would convene a conference on the subject in Conway Hall in Holborn.

There followed a list of doctors who, as fellow writers and sufferers, were offering their services to members at a knockdown price. In the meantime, we could all do worse than pay close attention to the enclosed diet and fitness charts. And not to forget walking. The greatest threat to the modern writer was that we had forgotten how to walk.

I hadn’t. Not that it was doing any good. But I liked, after a morning’s work, to mouth-write my way along the Thames at Barnes, and then later, when we moved to Notting Hill, up and down Ladbroke Grove, avoiding any bookshop. I’d do the same around Fitzrovia and Soho after I’d called in on Merton or Francis, or Marylebone after I’d been to see my ophthalmologist. Other than the tramp who looked like Ernest Hemingway, I did more walking around London than any writer I knew. I was a feature of the city. Travel guides pointed me out to tourists. People smiled at me; sometimes they were ex-readers, most of the time they were not – mainly they just wanted to remark on the fact that they’d seen me on Jermyn Street a week ago, and on Wigmore Street yesterday, and now here I was on Savile Row. How amazing was that?

More amazing to me was that wherever I went I saw Ernest Hemingway, either sitting down outside a pub or café, or walking in the middle of the busiest main roads, oblivious to the abuse, writing, writing, writing. His shoes were down to nothing – mere cardboard pulp – and his buttocks were completely out of his trousers. How long before I looked the same? But I excited no companionable curiosity in him. Not once did he notice me. His eyes never left his reporter’s pad and his hand was never still.

What was he writing? A journal of the city? The story of the circumstances that had brought him to this? Behind the beard was a strong face, inside the filthy clothes was a powerful frame; he could have been anybody – an actor fallen from favour, a dramatist who wrote plays too searching for these cardboard-pulpy times, a novelist who used words of too many syllables for his readers. Or maybe he was just one of us, no more tragic or unsuccessful, simply constipated and needing to walk his constipation off.

Though, in that case, why was he so often to be seen sitting down?

Because he was a writer, that was why. He’d begin his day, hoping a long walk would loosen his bowels, but then a sentence would occur to him, and that sentence would beget another, and soon he’d forgotten everything but the words.