Zoo Time (46 page)

What if their goodness, I asked myself, now that one was dying and another was as far away as it was possible to go, extended way beyond their concern for me and Francis? What if, for example, they’d returned to Knutsford as often as they had, and without asking me along, because . . . well, because Poppy, like Michael Ezra, had a son, which is another way of saying that Vanessa had a brother, living in a home . . . well, for the mentally disabled? What if lovingkindness explained their absences (as it would explain their being in Cheshire in the first place), and a deep underlying sadness explained the fractiousness which had latterly marred their relations with each other, never mind with me? Did he lie there, year after year, with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, wondering where the monkeys were, in a terrible pre-enactment of his mother’s dementia? Was that what Poppy was unable to forgive when she saw Vanessa’s film? Not the charge that she had been a sexual competitor, not me, nothing to do with me at all? But the implicit blame?

Now I was on the what-if roundabout I couldn’t, or didn’t want to, get off. What if, after a long and harrowing illness, the son and brother had died, maybe in the arms of his mother or his sister, and the women had been left to mourn a life that had never adequately been lived, which somehow, with more love, they might have made a little better, a life, what is more, that called into question their own genetic soundness? Did Poppy castigate herself for Robert – let’s call him Robert – did she wonder what unsoundness in her had misflowered into this ghastly family anomaly? Had Robert been the reason, in fact, and never mind her nude posing with a cello, for the break-up of her marriage to Mr Eisenhower? And what if Vanessa was unable to forgive herself the shame she felt at having an imperfect brother? They had never once mentioned Robert to me. Aha! That denoted shame, surely. And perhaps a fear that I would run a mile if I knew what tainted blood coursed through the veins of the women I adored. Was that why Vanessa let me get away with my courtship of her mother – assuming she ever knew a thing about it – because she couldn’t begrudge her an attention which for a brief hour would allay the fears she had about herself ? Was I – no better than a fattened black spider made comfortable in this intricate web of consideration; no better than Beagle sitting self-satisfied in his cage, allowing troops of girl gorillas to pick fleas from his fur while he stared in admiration at his own blazing erection – the only one in our little clan thinking of no one but himself ?

And so I had my subject.
The good woman
.

In the good old days (to use good in an entirely different sense) when Francis and I used to go out drinking together, before the last few readers had dwindled into no readers, we would while away the hours thinking up titles of books that would be sure-fire best-sellers by virtue of a single word. ‘Anything with the word wife or daughter in it,’ Francis once suggested. We exhausted every possibility then changed the game to titles that would never sell even
with
the word wife or daughter in them. I won with
The Fudgepacker’s Daughter
.

But I had done with pyrrhic victories. And when I called on Carter Strobe and offered him, as though it were a floral tribute to his agenting, the title
The Good Woman
, I knew from the way he enfolded me in his Ozwald Boateng suit that I was onto a winner.

I had alternatives in my back pocket, just in case, but he was so pleased with
The Good Woman
that – with some nostalgic regret, I have to say – I left
The Monkey and the Mother-in-Law
and
The Spider-Monkey’s Wife
where they were. No more monkeying for me.

I thought Carter was going to rub noses with me when I followed the title up with a rough outline. Or at the very least tell me that he loved me. He held me by the ears. ‘This is the one I’ve been waiting for,’ he said, though I hadn’t known he’d been waiting for anything. ‘I’m weeping and I haven’t even read it,’ he said.

I told him I was weeping and I hadn’t even written it.

But that was the easy part. You start at the beginning and you go on to the end. Previously I had done it the other way round, giving away what was going to happen at the outset so that readers shouldn’t be distracted into suspense. Now you know where we’re going to end up you can forget about it and concentrate on the sentences, was what, in effect, I was telling them. Roll me around your tongues. Savour me. Reading should be like sex. The end is written in the beginning, so just lie back and enjoy the journey. Who knows, maybe this was no better a strategy than Vanessa’s ‘Gentle reader, get fucked!’ I was done with it, anyway. The past was the past. Alone, distressed and sentimental, I sold my soul to story.

I had to cheat a bit to get the Holocaust in, but a dream sequence will always make a chump of chronology. Otherwise it was Sierra Leone, the Balkans, Afghanistan, I’m uncertain myself where I sent them, the two women passing themselves off as sisters, fleeing from hellhole to hellhole on the back of a plot so flimsy – but then what plot isn’t flimsy? – that I blushed as I constructed it. How they survived what they saw and what they were subjected to; how they made the selfless choices they did, each one sacrificing herself to ensure the safety of the other, as they journeyed from horror to horror in pursuit of the sweet but simple-minded boy (the illegitimate child of Pauline, passed off as hers by Valerie, after they had both been raped on the same day by the same Biafran soldier); how they watched in helpless horror as Somali pirates stole him from a pleasure cruiser anchored off Shark Bay, and there and then vowed that they would ransack the universe to find him, I can only ascribe to courage. Not theirs, mine. Because it takes tremendous courage – far more than is ever credited – to write what I was writing.

Goodness, of course, sustained them. The goodness of their devotion to each other, the goodness of their love for the boy, and the goodness they brought to the troubled people they travelled among. That it wasn’t always possible for the reader to know which woman was which – which the Good Woman of the title – I account a master stroke, though I got the idea originally from Dirk de Wolff who had merged them cinematically. Such goodness transcends individuality – that was my point. It doesn’t pertain to a particular woman, young or old – it is the distinguishing feature of
woman
.

As it happens, I had always believed that, anyway. I simply hadn’t thought it necessary to spell it out. Where I got such idealism from I can’t be sure: it certainly didn’t come to me in my own mother’s milk. Perhaps I learned it from watching women shopping in the boutique, dressing and undressing, looking at themselves in mirrors, uncertain what suited them, troubled by their appearances, having to think twice about the expense. It made me sorry for them. Not easy being them, I thought. From which it followed that I saw their lives as one long trial, balancing beauty and elegance with all the other calls on their sense of duty. In even the most flibbertigibbety of customers I thought I could detect an underlying heroical sorrow, the struggle to remain a good wife when loucher longings beckoned, to make ends meet, to find time for the tedium of children or relatives long past any usefulness or sense.

No loucher longings this time. No sex, except by intimation – on pain of death no
squish-squish
– and no jokes. Writers of pornography obey a single golden rule when it comes to laughter: there is not to be any. A single laugh and the trance is broken. Well,
The Good Woman
was the pornography of the sentimental, and the same rule applied.

So no seriousness, either. The age of serious sex was over.

I say it took tremendous courage to write it, but that’s an exaggeration. In fact it took none. These were coward’s words and I am ashamed to say they came easily to me. I turned on the tap of tears and tears flowed. Once you let idealisation out of the cage, there is no getting it back in again. There are some, of course, who find such idealisation, when it is unloosed indiscriminately on particular women, the deepest of all insults to woman in general – misogyny in its most underhand and deviously destructive form – but they were never going to be my readers. As for historical background it’s a cinch. Skim a couple of books by academics no one’s heard of and invent the rest. Topography the same. When you’ve described one arid mountain range you’ve described them all. Ditto desert. I had watched the desert bloom with wild flowers driving up to Broome with Poppy and Vanessa. And as they had marvelled, I marvelled. Occasionally, in defiance of their captors, one of them would dismount a camel or an elephant or a blood-bespattered jeep to pluck a desert pea (I would, of course, check the genus appropriate to the terrain) and croon. ‘See how beautiful,’ she would say to the Somali pirate who had been a fisherman before toxic waste was dumped in the waters that had been his livelihood, and she knew he saw. Beauty spoke in every language. She would lie with him before he finally released her to a warship belonging to the Indian navy.

International politics for the men, wonderment for the women.

As for the poor and downtrodden whose lives my two women touched as they travelled, they were the poor and downtrodden of Wilmslow and Ladbroke Grove without the iPads. There isn’t anything, I found, that I didn’t know already. The Afghan tribesmen looked like Michael Ezra before he’d shaved off his moustache, the well-meaning but ineffective consular Englishmen were Quinton and Francis, the idealists were Merton Flak, the Muslim fanatics were Jeffrey (where’s the difference?), and the Somali pirate with a feel for beauty was me. This was all just watercolour background anyway. I reserved the richness of oils for little Robert, modelled on half the simpleton novelists I knew, but with particular reference to the lashless Andy Weedon, and of course for Valerie and Pauline, who were painted with a thick impasto of sympathy, an intense luminousness of admiration and devotion that no one but I possessed.

‘How do you know us so well?’ the Chipping Norton, Chipping Camden and Chipping Sodbury women’s reading groups asked me. It struck them as uncanny that I could understand women as I did. By way of an answer I unmanned myself facially for them. I thought of Vanessa and her mother and my eyes watered. That was how I understood – by letting go of all that stood between me and woman, which wasn’t, to be truthful, very much. Secretly, I marvelled that they should think we were so different. Was there really an entity called ‘woman’ to understand? Was she truly of a different species to man? Before Archie Clayburgh got to me, before I had progressed to the Olympia Press, I had loved reading about Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit and Maggie Tulliver. Girls, now I come to think of it, were all I read about. That they were girls and I was a boy never once occurred to me at the time, nor would it have mattered if it had. We were sensitives in the shit together, that was all. I turned the pages and immersed myself in slightly prettier versions of me. Not that much prettier either, in Jane Eyre’s case. And certainly no more emotionally fraught. Novels told the story of our common pain, girls and boys, men and women. On the surface, de Sade’s indefatigable embuggerers, like Henry Miller’s down-and-out lickers and fuckers, might have seemed worlds away from the easily bruised charity girls at Lowood Institution where that bastard Mr Brocklehurst unfairly branded Jane a liar, but dig a little deeper and they weren’t. One way or another they all found life hard-going. I wouldn’t be surprised if the embuggerers found it even harder than the charity girls.

If women readers were unable or unwilling to enter the damaged souls of men as enthusiastically as I had entered the damaged souls of women, that was their affair, but they were imaginatively the poorer for it. As for the understanding they believed they found in me now I was Guido Cretino, it was no more than a deliberate toning down of the language of self in favour of a demonstrative lavishing of tenderness on others. I don’t underestimate that quality. Tenderness is a fine thing. But it is not understanding – you can be tender and a fool, you can be tender and grasp nothing – though in the age of the dying of the word compassion will pass as understanding. More than that, it will be preferred to understanding which, as often as not, is too cruel for people to bear.

‘Go, go,’ said Eliot’s bird, ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ It didn’t have to be a bird that said it. I’d have gone for something furrier. But all that mattered was that it was non-human. It takes another species to see us for what we are.

So was that all they had ever wanted, those who had once identified only with my dead characters – a bit more rosy undiscerning goo-goo? Did they read in order to be spared from seeing what was true? Did they read to be lied to?

Everyman, I will go with thee and blind thine eyes.

What I was writing now a monkey with enough time on his hands could have written. I mean no disrespect to my new book-mad, serial readers. Without them there’s no knowing what I would have done. They saved me from losses too keen to bear. They shored me up. It’s possible they lied to me every bit as much as I lied to them. No matter. I kiss the feet of every one of them. But the truth is the truth: what I was writing now a monkey with
no
time on his hands could have written.

And do you know what I suspect? Buried deep inside those readers to whom I am eternally grateful, in a place too remote and inaccessible for their conscious minds to penetrate, was the half-belief that a monkey
had
written it. Or if not a half-belief, then a half-wish. A velleity on the side of apes. Not my kind of monkey-wish, not a longing for the serious and single-minded libidinousness with which Beagle surveyed his burning putz – though there was little in the way of burning putz envy left in me now – but a secret, unexcavated suspiciousness of the artist who knew what he was doing and dedicated his life to doing it, who was not a selector of random words which occasionally came together to make a terrible sense, who ran down language with a will and with a purpose and wouldn’t let it go until it had yielded meaning –
his
meaning,
her
meaning.