Zoo Time (37 page)
Authors: Howard Jacobson
Were they listening? ‘Fundamentally,’ I said, ‘he is a hero in the French mode –’
‘Meaning he philosophises as he screws?’
‘Exactly that. It has always seemed to me that the unexamined screw is not worth having. But also in the extent of his destructiveness. I see him, essentially, as an impious disturbance.’
I glanced to see if Ernest Hemingway had picked up the reference, but he had left the table and was wandering off, in defiance of horns and the shouts of hell-bent cyclists, in the middle of the road.
‘What does he disturb?’ Ken Querrey asked.
‘The tramp?’
‘Your hero.’
Kate Querrey wound herself tightly in her cardigans, in anticipation of my reply.
‘The sexual decencies, for a start. Not only is he having an affair with his brother’s wife, he is sleeping with her mother.’
It was shocking to me, but I could imagine that where the Querreys had been this was normative not to say exemplary behaviour.
‘Didn’t I once read a review of your work,’ Kate Querrey asked, ‘saying you couldn’t decide whether you were Mrs Gaskell or Rabelais?’
Meaning she had decided for me. And it wasn’t Rabelais.
‘I think it was Charlotte Brontë or Apuleius,’ I said. ‘And I don’t think it said I couldn’t decide between the two, I think it said I was a happy synthesis. But this book is different. This time there’s no happy anything. Everything gets blown sky-high.’
Everything?
Well, I wasn’t going to mention Wilmslow. Or explain that by sky-high I meant as far as Alderley Edge.
‘It sounds,’ Ken Querrey said, tapping his chin with his finger, ‘as though what you’re writing is a dystopian novel.’
‘More apocalyptic,’ I said.
‘Ah.’
They fell silent again.
‘Is apocalyptic a problem?’
‘Only,’ Kate Querrey answered for him, ‘in that we have a number of those on our list already.’
‘So I’ve missed the apocalypse,’ I laughed.
It was evident that neither could understand why I had laughed.
‘We aren’t saying we definitely don’t want to look at it,’ Kate Querrey said. Down, down into the valley of her ginger breasts I peered. ‘It might turn out that apocalyptic novels are all anyone is going to want to read over the next few years.’
‘Assuming,’ I unwisely added, ‘that over the next few years there’s going to be anyone here to read them.’ I laughed again – ‘Not that I’m trying to rush you.’
We let it go at that. I apologised for ambushing them. Especially on my agent’s very doorstep. He wouldn’t be very impressed, I laughed. How many times was that I’d laughed in the last ten minutes? They said they didn’t feel at all ambushed. If anything they were flattered that a writer as successful as I was would even consider having them as his publishers one day. One day . . .
Indeed that was twice in a single afternoon they’d been flattered in this way by me. I wondered when the other time was. Well, when they said me they didn’t mean me exactly. But Francis had told them, though it wasn’t for public consumption – and I could count on their discretion – that Vanessa was my wife.
My ear, already hanging by a thread, so much skin had I pulled off it, throbbed and roared.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘You’ve been discussing Vanessa.’
Ken Querrey patted his briefcase. ‘In here,’ he said.
Vanessa victrix
.
Kate Querrey’s single eye ransacked my soul.
Twenty minutes and three strong black coffees later I was taking the lift to the seventh floor and pressing Francis’s bell. It used to rouse me, doing this, wondering what new offers Francis had to excite me with this time, but those days were over. Now all I wondered was whether I’d get there early enough to find Francis still alive. If someone was going to kill him I wanted it to be me.
There was no response, which I took to be a sign of Francis’s guilt. He was rearranging his features. Or rearranging my titles to prove I was still important to him. Ultimately a receptionist answered. A receptionist! How long was it since Francis had been able to afford a receptionist? I announced myself and waited. After a bout of unconvincing coughing – to give Francis more time to rearrange my titles? – she buzzed me in.
There, sitting behind the reception desk, wearing headphones and with her lipstick smudged (I could have imagined that), was Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law.
THREE
36
Some time later . . .
I don’t think I need to be specific. Start counting years and all you are measuring is loss. Time passes – let’s leave it at that. Mankind cannot bear too much specificity.
Some time, anyway, has gone by since I wrote those words – ‘Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law’.
I can no longer write them with equanimity. ‘Vanessa Ableman, my wife’, ditto.
These are the specificities of loss
I
cannot bear.
Otherwise not much has changed. Bookshops continue to go into liquidation, the word ‘library’ has passed out of common usage, immoderate opinion continues to pass itself off as art, chefs still take precedence over writers, less remains less. But I, amazingly – as long as I don’t count the years – am in fine fettle. In my profession you need, as I have said, a degree of luck. And that’s what came my way: a fuckload of good luck.
That’s a phrase it’s difficult for someone with my acute northern vowel dysfunctionality to say.
A focklord of god look? A fackloud of gerd luke? A ferklod of gud lock?
Which could be why I had to wait so long for it.
Mine now, however you account for it, it is. I am even endorsed by G. G. Freville, the son of E. E. who one day simply ran out of puff and retired. ‘The rest is silence,’ he is – I think apocryphally – reported to have said, knowing that no author would want those words on his book jacket.
But G. G. is proving to be, if you will forgive the pun, an able replacement. ‘Guido Cretino,’ he was kind enough to say for me recently, ‘can make a stone weep.’
Yes, Guido Cretino. All above board. I am now
Guy Ableman writing as Guido Cretino
. It is not uncommon to do this when you want to show that you can drop a register but don’t want all trace of your earlier, more highfalutin writing self to disappear altogether. Though, between ourselves, all trace of it has.
Whether I am indeed, as Guido Cretino, able to make a stone weep, isn’t for me to say. But women do approach me after readings with their eyes rubbed raw. ‘I feel you’ve penetrated my soul,’ they say. ‘I couldn’t believe, as I was listening to you, that you were not a woman.’
I smile and bow my head and say that in another life – who knows? – maybe I was a woman. Sometimes I take their wrists, rather as a doctor might. The wrist is a safe place to touch a strange woman. Not that these women think of me as a stranger. My words leap all barriers between us. I know them better than their husbands know them, therefore, they reasonably assume, they know me better than my wife knows me.
Wife? What wife?
Nor is it only the women I reach. Men too – the very men who yesterday would not join me, satyr to satyr, in dancing with their goat feet the Antic Hay – today nod their heads and blink the moisture from their eyes. My mistake was to try calling up the monkey from their basement. Andy Weedon had it right: ‘Dad’ is the word that turns men on. Write ‘paternity’ and they get a hard-on. Write ‘visiting rights’ and they turn to jelly. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry? Not any more. Make ’em cry, and then make ’em cry some more. Heartbreak, it would seem, crosses the gender divide. And, I suspect, the age divide as well. If I am not mistaken my audiences are getting younger. Soon I will be giving toddlers what they want. Even Sally Comfort writes to me, asking me to sign my latest for her nieces. So though I have still not yet blown into the silver portals of her ear or up her ring-guarded nostrils, it isn’t out of the question that I will.
How I manage to connect so well with everybody I can’t explain. But then I can’t explain anything.
How it is, for example, that I have readers when there are no readers. That’s what luck does: it calls black white, it makes a nonsense of the actual state of things, it excepts you from the general, and only what is general is true. So, although there is no reason for reading groups or Oxfam or the bookshops whose assistants were once unable to spell my name to love me –
me
– any more than they ever did, they do. Luck blinds, is all one can say.
I travel the world, anyway, saying what I always said, but now to crowded rooms and warm applause. I won’t pretend I can have any woman I want – because the particular women I do want I most definitely cannot have, and the rest are usually in tears or blowing their noses when I meet them – but I do all right for a man not in the bloom of youth who used to walk the streets of London talking to himself and pulling his hair out. I am still envious of other writers’ success, but this time the success I am most envious of is my own.
And I am not a little contemptuous of that success, no matter that it’s mine. Where was it before? I ask. Where was it when I needed it far more, and deserved it no less? If you’re a writer through and through you don’t turn cheerful overnight just because the fates have finally decreed in your favour. Taste success when you have known failure and the memory of failure grows more bitter with every new laurel you win. Success is arbitrary and wayward; only failure is the real measure of things.
But I am not accused of ingratitude or acerbity. I smile and am smiled back at. I sign and sign. Suddenly, those are the two words they can’t get enough of.
Guido Cretino.
I can do no wrong. When I expostulate the case against me and my shameful capitulation – though I abhor the expostulatory as much as I ever did – they applaud my words. And of course they don’t believe it when I tweet against the crime novel, the detective novel, the crossover novel, the children’s novel, the zombie novel, the graphic novel, the schmaltz novel, the debut novel (with one exception), iPads, Primark, Morrisons, Lidl (I purposely don’t name the supermarkets which stock me: why rock the boat?), three-for-two, and Sandy Ferber’s instant bus-queue fiction, now selling in its millions. Ladies and gentlemen, I say to them – ladies, gentlemen and children – you will clap me to an early grave.
They laugh at that, knowing that if mine were to be an early grave I’d have been in it long ago.
Like Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law.
37
I will not dwell on Vanessa’s novel. Not because I begrudge her but because she would not allow that I could ever do it justice. And all considering, she is surely right.
‘Just don’t ever think of reviewing me,’ she had said.
This, though, I can say: despite encouraging notices, it did not score any great success until it was made into a film. That the film was produced and directed by Dirk de Wolff will surprise no one who understands the way a good narrative works. Why would I have brought him onstage in Monkey Mia had I not had further use for him? There were many people Vanessa and I met in Australia about whom I have said nothing. I don’t say I invented de Wolff, only that his turning up in Shark Bay lends his reappearance a premonitory inevitability. An astute reader – whether of books or life – must have known he was there only because he was coming back.
I recall with sad fondness, anyway – also of the premonitory sort – the exhilaration with which Vee and I read the billboards on the Underground:
ARE THERE MONKEYS IN MONKEY MIA?
directed by
Dirk de Wolff
and in smaller letters, but still large enough to read:
Based upon the novel
by
Vanessa Eisenhower
‘Darling, how wonderful,’ I said, the first time we went down onto the platform at Ladbroke Grove Tube to stare at a poster.
She glimmered at me from on high and trembled like a galleon. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
I was being a fantastic husband. Had been from the moment I saw there was no point trying to be anything else. Once your wife’s name is up in lights you might as well enjoy it.
We kissed passionately. We could have made a baby there and then. By preference a girl, so we could have called her Mia. Mia Ableman. The little monkey. Or maybe Mia Eisenhower, now that Eisenhower was the name to conjure with.
‘You don’t mind?’ Vanessa, all sweetness, had asked me, once there was no longer any concealing that her book was finished, that an agent – my agent! – had read it, that it would soon be published, and that she was now Eisenhower, not Ableman.