Zoo Time (44 page)

It was only then I realised it was all over between us.

So between whom and me wasn’t it over?

It was one thing to have no wife and no wife’s mother, but I had no publisher or agent, either. My earlier complaint – that I had no readers – shrank before these new privations. But then you can’t complain about having no readers when you aren’t writing anything for them to read.

As for the agent, Francis had introduced me to his replacement, who was not – that was something – Heidi Corrigan aged twelve, or Heidi anything else for that matter. Carter, he was called. Carter Strobe. A bulky, intense man who looked you deep in the eyes and ceremented himself in tight Ozwald Boateng suits with scarlet linings, buttoning every button, knotting his tie at his throat like a hangman’s noose, as though to contain what would otherwise fly everywhere – not just flesh but enthusiasm, his love for writing and for writers so exceeding reasonable bounds that there was no knowing where it might end up once it was released. I should have been grateful to have him as an agent. I
was
grateful. All of us who had inherited him as an agent were grateful. But the inordinacy of his pride in having us as clients cancelled out any feeling of being special. If we were all that good, were any of us any good at all?

Because he kept a tight rein on language, too, he was hard to understand. The first time he introduced himself I took him to be saying ‘The art of Rome was insightful’, and wondered how to reply. ‘Yes, the art of Rome was indeed unsurpassably insightful,’ I tried, ‘unless the art of Athens could be said to have surpassed it.’

He looked deeper still into my eyes, then laughed wildly. He introduced himself again, just in case there’d been some mistake – ‘Carter Strobe, delighted’ – but kept the laughter resounding in his chest to show that if I had been deliberately joking, he had got, and would go on getting until eternity, my joke.

He got me altogether, that was what he wanted me to know. He always had got me. He even reeled off a sentence from each of my first two novels.

‘Those were your plays,’ he said.

I stared at him. ‘My plays? I’ve never written a play.’

He laughed again, a basso profundo laugh from far in and deep down. Clearly he found me a riot. ‘
Days
. Those were the days.’

I knew what was coming. Those were those days but these are these days. Things had changed and we too had to change to keep up with them. Quite how much information of a personal no less than a professional nature Francis had passed on to him I didn’t know, but he was aware that
Terminus
had hit the buffers and that I had come to something of a halt.

We were in Francis’s old office which Carter had not yet had time to refurbish, hence, I supposed, there being none of my books on show. ‘It’s never been my philosophy to tell a writer what he should write,’ he said.

‘No,’ I agreed, hoping he hadn’t said that it had never been his philosophy to bill writers who were white.

‘But Francis said you were overhauling your oeuvre.’

Those words I didn’t even try to comprehend. I smiled instead.

‘So let me just mention what I think you could address better than any novelist I know . . .’ Whereupon he leaned very close to me and, as though he supposed I heard through my eyes, boomed the word ‘Less’ into them.

‘Less?’

‘Luss.’

‘Luss?’

‘Loss.
Loss
.’

‘Ah, loss.’

‘You look downcast. I haven’t offended you?’

‘Offended me? No. It’s just that loss is not my subject.’

‘But it is. You write about it magnificently. It’s only because you’ve done so much else that readers don’t even know it’s there.’

‘Not just the readers,’ I said. ‘
I
don’t even know it’s there.’

He roared with laughter again – I wasn’t only lossier than I knew, I was funnier than I knew – then looked down in surprise at his suit, as though he had just found another button to fasten, and fastened it. ‘Some writers just tear you apart,’ he said. ‘For me you’re one of those writers.’

I thanked him. ‘But luss is not me,’ I said, hoping to make him laugh again.

He put his hand to his throat. It was, I decided, a physical metaphor for putting his hand to mine. ‘But you do,’ he said. ‘That monkey. Beadle. Unbearable. I feel I know him. I feel he’s me.’

‘Beagle.’

‘Beagle, yes. Heartbreaking.’

‘What’s heartbreaking about Beagle?’

‘What isn’t? When he beats his chest at the end and bellows, Christ . . .’

‘But he’s bellowing for more, not less.’

‘Loss.’

‘Loss, luss, less . . . It’s not me. I do amplitude and accretion. I do booty, lilacs out of the dead ground, the spoils of the sexual war. I do crudity, Carter. I wallow in filth. I do zoo.’

I could tell what he was thinking. I didn’t look that amplitudinous right now, a man with no wife, no mother-in-law, no book, no publisher and no readers. Or that filthy. And anyway, filth was over.

But he rejected the idea that it had to be one thing or another. You could be greedy and heartbreaking. He offered to show me a novel that was both regretful and ample. He’d just sold it for an unspeakable sum of money. First-time novelist. Twelve hundred pages, a tearaway wild child of a novel, about the agonising demise of every member of a family going back five hundred years. Innovative, in the formal, print-job, typeface sense, a book that looked like no other book, with pages set out like gravestones, doctors’ prognoses, real bloodstains, death certificates, line drawings of cemeteries and sepulchres, the endpapers impregnated with the smell of death, you name it, but the feeling in it, Guy, the sadness, the fucking heartbreak . . . he put his fists to his chest like Beagle and ground away at himself. When he took his fists away, I wondered, would there be two deep gouges in his jacket going all the way through to his breastbone?

‘What’s it called?’ I asked, making a mental note never to read it.

‘
The Big Boys Book of Loss
,’ he said.

‘Meaning it’s a big book or it’s a book for big boys?’

‘Both, both!’

This was a first-time author who had thought of everything.

‘Young readers are going to love it,’ he told me.

‘The young are into loss?’

‘Big time. Loss, heartbreak – they can’t get enough. But with a bit of formal innovation. They like a book to feel different in their hands.’

‘And in their nostrils . . .’

‘Exactly. Let me show you . . .’

I thanked him for the recommendation but refused a copy. ‘It’s too big for me to store and too heavy for me to carry,’ I said.

He shrugged. I was the writer.

He kissed me when we parted, took me into his tight embrace and held me fast. Now I knew what it was like to be those things in him he didn’t dare release, so many particles of appreciative matter with the potentiality for wholesale destruction.

But it was nice to be kissed by somebody.

I went home and thought about burning myself in my bed. Heartbreak! Loss! What would Archie Clayburgh have said?
Visceral, boy, think visceral.
Loss wasn’t visceral.

And then, out of the blue, a distraught phone call from Francis. ‘It’s Poppy,’ he said, his voice reverberating as though from the furthest corners of space.

I thought the receiver would melt in my hand. Please don’t let it be a brain tumour, I prayed. Better a heart attack – sudden, quick, painless – while lying in the garden in the sun, with Francis by her side, reading her Kindle.

It was neither, more’s the pity. The good news was that she was still alive. The bad news was that she was still alive.

In imagining the smaller irony of her succumbing to the brain tumour Vanessa had given her, I missed the greater irony of its being the dementia Vanessa had given her. A daughter’s curse.

I thought it was unheard of for dementia to seize someone still in her sixties. It was commoner than I thought, Francis told me, especially among women. And anyway, Poppy was a little older than either of us had believed.

Really?

But it was too late now to castigate her for deceiving us.

He couldn’t cope, that was why he’d called me. He couldn’t cope with any of it, neither the sadness nor the practicalities. And he just needed to hear himself say it: I can’t cope. After which, maybe he would be able to.

She’d been deteriorating for some time, but the illness had accelerated and she was beyond his care. For a terrible moment I wondered if he wanted me to take her. Irony was piled upon irony, so why not one more? But that wasn’t what was on his mind. Vanessa neither, though it was surely Vanessa’s duty. ‘Have you called her?’ I asked. As yet, he hadn’t. Did he want me to? No, no, he didn’t. Vanessa, he feared, would make things even worse. ‘You know what they were like,’ he said. ‘They fought so savagely.’

‘Did Poppy tell you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it isn’t true. They didn’t fight.’

‘Well, Poppy thought they did.’

I wondered if that was part of the condition. Dementia made the worst of everything, didn’t it? Dementia left out the nice parts.

We continued the conversation three days later at the Soho club where no one wanted to be but where he and Poppy had first met. His idea, not mine. He wanted to dare sentimentality to do its worst. Which was why, presumably, he began by attacking me. ‘So what were these nice parts?’ he wanted to know.

‘Between Poppy and Vanessa? Where do I start? They were like sisters, Francis.’

‘Have you forgotten Vanessa’s book? Being like sisters was precisely what she said was wrong.’

‘Sure, in the book.’

‘In life, Guy.’

I swatted away the word. ‘Life!’

‘Well, life is where it hurts.’

‘But it was only Vee’s film that hurt Poppy. In “life”, as you call it, they strutted their stuff together, they were forces, and you couldn’t tell which of them energised the other.’

He suddenly turned angry with me. ‘You were simply besotted with the idea of them both,’ he said. ‘You were so busy making fucking literature out of them you didn’t see what was in front of your face. Let me tell you something about yourself, Guy – you fancy that you are hardbitten and cynical but in fact you’re a baby. You idealised those women, you idealised them out of existence.’

What could I answer? That it was not my fault that Vanessa was squatting in the dirt with Aborigines and that Poppy had dementia?

I bowed my head. ‘I’m sorry about her,’ I said, not looking at him. ‘I’m more than sorry, I’m broken-hearted. Shall I go and see her?’

I imagined sitting by her bed and stroking her hand. ‘Of course there are monkeys,’ I’d have told her. ‘There are always monkeys if you know where to look.’

Francis was dismissive of my offer. ‘You wouldn’t be able to bear it. You’re not man enough.’

I bowed my head still more. Maybe I should have dropped to my knees and bowed my head until it touched Francis’s feet. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, but sometimes you don’t have to know.

After a long silence, Francis asked me how I was getting on with Carter Strobe but didn’t listen to my answer. His eyes filled with tears. His couple of years with Poppy, he confided, had been the best of his life. The worst of mine, I confided in return. I meant coincidentally. Nothing, strictly, to do with him and Poppy. Not entirely true, but true enough.

He let me into a secret. Poppy had read everything I’d written.

‘With your encouragement and instruction, I bet.’

‘No. Before we’d even met. She read every word. Devoured you.’

I wiped a bead of perspiration from my forehead.

‘And here’s something else,’ he said. ‘She reviewed you on Amazon.’

‘Poppy?’

‘Poppy.’

‘It was Poppy who compared me favourably to Apuleius?’

‘I don’t know about that. That one was probably Vanessa.’

‘Vanessa did it too?’

‘The pair of them. They sat and cooked the reviews up between them. They did it for years, apparently.’

My mouth must have fallen open. At least it should have fallen open, and stayed that way for all eternity. Vanessa and Poppy, their heads together, over me! And never breathing a word. Never looking for a thank you, and now never likely to get one.

So there you are, I wanted to say when I regained control of my face and could just about trust myself with words again, they
were
like sisters. But I could see that I would be no less than ever open to the charge of idealising them – idealising and sentimentalising them in the act of sentimentalising myself.

You never know what’s going to finish you off. I had to leave the restaurant. Me, me, me? Yes, all right. But there was only me I had to feel with.