The Back of His Head (11 page)

Now, suddenly, I'm back in the teaching room: all eyes are on me. Cosmo, it seems, has just introduced me—
who better to talk to us about this wonderful writer than his nephew and literary executor?
—and there is a silence that is mine alone. Time to perform once more!
Peter will be opening the refurbished writing school building next month
, Cosmo adds eagerly, as I reach the lectern.

A flutter of applause: not much to it, no real enthusiasm. Things are not as once they were, I'm aware of that, I'm well aware. I try to reach for common ground. The words come easily enough, since they've been said so many times before:
When I was seven or eight years younger than the youngest of you now, I first met Raymond Thomas Lawrence, and I've never left him since, and he has never left me. Sometimes I've hated him, really hated him, sometimes he treated me badly, really badly, and sometimes he was the most wonderful uncle a nephew could ever dream of having
—

And so on. Over the years, the Raymond I fashion for people on occasions like this has changed. At first I used to speak in open adulation, giving them the artist as Childe Harold, a self-doubting hero pushing against the boundaries of the tiny culture he'd been born into and breaking every one of its rules: each of his books was a clear step on a predetermined path to greatness. I always concluded with the opening scene from
Kerr
, where the protagonist's long, mad, meandering journey on his home-made raft has brought him to Ibiza, which heaves-to over the horizon and then seems to lift out of the dazzle and glitter of the morning, out of the sea itself, slowly turning and turning in the glittering distance before and above and beyond Kerr's raft: at which point it becomes something else, something mysterious, something out of this world: something even from the heavens—

An extraordinary piece of writing, set in a flash-forward at the start of the novel and one of the many sublime moments in the Master's later work: the magnificence of it makes my voice break with emotion whenever I read that opening page aloud, even after so many years.

In the early days Semple—cruelly—accused me of speaking, when I addressed public meetings on occasions like this, in
the first person hysterical
. But my emotion was always genuine and often surprised me in the way it seemed to well up and engulf me as I read aloud. Where did it come from, was it real, was this even me who was reading—were the words in fact reading
me
? Was that it? At these times, the power of the written word shocked me, the way the text could take me over as I began to speak it. My audiences were moved by how moved I was, by what they saw as the purity of my soul but was actually the purity of Raymond's or whomsoever's spirit it was—one of his earthbound angels, perhaps—that took us over on these occasions, writer, reader, audience, all. Some of them wept as I read.

And then they didn't. I don't mean they stopped just like that, in the midst of a particular outpouring, but that after a while, over a year or two, I became aware that audiences' responses were changing. I felt it as a change in myself, a tendency (I found) to listen more and more to my own voice as I read. Did I really believe the things that voice was saying, did I really feel the emotion I could hear? At the same time, the status of the public Raymond changed. He left us, in the way with which we're all too familiar—terribly, yes, but—inevitably—in a way that revived much interest in him, albeit interest of this new and unexpected kind. Its grace note was the appearance of the little string dolls I've mentioned, which just seemed to pop up out of nowhere around that time. Out of the culture itself, I suppose, as it tried in its collective way to make sense of what it was that had just happened.

At last someone spat it out:
He died for us
—sprayed anonymously on a wall beneath a shorthand Raymond one sometimes began to find in public places, particularly near the University and the site of the writing school: just a few strokes rendering spectacles and beard above a pair of boots. Then, after a while, a sophistication: a scribble drawn at either side of these, suggesting arms outspread. Now he really
was
dying for us: and now, in my public appearances, I put on an imaginary black armband, so to speak, and introduced a new, plangent
leitmotif
to what I said: I made their transformation of him my own.

As I spoke, he began to change from the questing, larger-than-life figure I knew so well—Don Quixote, Childe Harold, Napoleon himself—to a victim cut down in his moment of triumph. He'd spent his career making enemies, treading on toes, pushing people away—who better to know
that
than I?—and, as I've made plain, there'd been at least as many negative responses to his elevation as there'd been positive, as well as those who openly revelled in the news of his illness when it came. Suddenly, from the nature of his death, all this vanished. Raymond belonged to the ages. How much I made of that!

Today, though—and this is the first time I've felt this—today it feels as if he doesn't quite belong anywhere at all. There's a mood change in the room, something which is new again in turn and which I am slowly picking up as I talk. I'm sure I'm not wrong. The wry self-deprecations get no response at all, the practised little jokes fall flat, the emotion as I read—from
Kerr
again, with as much fullness of feeling as ever—reaches out to dead air and fails. Near the back, a youth even seems to have his eyes closed, with anything but a rapt look about the rest of him. Another, unforgivably, is at work on his wretched phone, pressing away at it throughout, his brows a knot.

Eventually, I come to my peroration. It proceeds. It ends, magnificently as always. I wait.

Nothing happens. Not anger, not outright rejection, but worse—nothing very much at all. In fact it seems that they
can't be arsed
—

Now Cosmo stands up.

‘Questions!' he says brightly, grinding his palms, the one against the other. ‘Questions?'

Again, nothing.

We wait. Then, at last, a lass near the front:

‘How d'you get stuff published?'

This interests them: there's a stir. The texting youth stops and looks up. Publication!

‘Well!' I smile at them. ‘First you have to write something!' Not a dog stirs. Did I sound condescending?—unreadable, this group. No, unwritten, that's it.
Unwritten
. I scramble to recover. ‘I'm sure Cosmo and the team have discussed this—'

And it's at this point that the door simply
flings
open: Robert Semple—he's standing there in his fedora, looking in, looking at us! The class turns as one and gazes, lost to me in a second.

He gazes, confidently quartering the room. Now he steps in and presses the door shut behind him.

Someone has just asked me a question. ‘King Carl Gustaf,' I reply, as I watch Semple stepping awkwardly between legs and feet. ‘The King of Sweden. Although the actual Prize was presented by the chairman of the panel.' And: ‘Yes?' to another questioner.

Now Semple has paused to bend over a young student: I can hear his robust, sibilant whisper:
yes-yes?
She nods back up at him:
yes, yes
. I try to ignore them. Another child-woman is putting a question to me, flatly and without eye contact.

‘Why should we read him today? Lawrence?'

Semple has found a seat now, near the back, between two young women who also seem to know him well.

The questioner is one of the little-string-Raymond-wearers. I point at the tiny thing on her blouse. ‘Well, let's start by
me
asking
you
a question. Why do you wear that? What does it mean to you?'

She stares down herself as if she's forgotten the thing is on her, almost as if she's astonished to see she has a body. She looks up and past me.

‘Nothing,' she says. ‘I just wear it.'

‘You just wear it?'

‘I found mine.' This is the student next to her. She looks down and gives her mini-Raymond a little flick. ‘I didn't realise it was him, then someone told me.'

‘Does it mean anything to you?'

‘It's sort of like what you were saying.' This is the first young woman again. ‘Just now—you know, you were talking about, you know?'

‘I found it on the ground, and I'm like, y'know, what the fuck—?'

‘You can get them crucified.' This from the back. ‘You know, on a cross, an actual cross—'

‘Yeah, but have you, like,
seen
one?' This from about midway in the class. ‘Like, you know, actually
seen
one?'

Cosmo intervenes. ‘What's your favourite Lawrence novel?' he says to the class, encouragingly.

A pause.

‘They're fucking
long
.' The first woman again. ‘I tried a couple but I was like, you know, fuck it—'

‘I haven't even started him!' This blasphemy from a cheery youth to the left brings a dreary titter. ‘I got one for
Christmas
, but—y'know?'

Semple stirs and straightens: his brown hat seems to elevate at least six inches as he sits up. ‘
I
haven't read them all and
I'm
on the fucking Trust!' he says. A great belch of laughter from the class. ‘Not sure I've read
any
of them right through!' Another great belch, and the hat settles contentedly back down. There are several seconds before the laughter dies away: I could wring his neck.

‘Thank you, Robert!' Cosmo. ‘In your usual form! Right! Let's have a show of hands. Who's read
one
Raymond Lawrence?'

A few hands go up.

‘
Two
to
four
?'

Fewer.

‘More? No'—here he points at me—‘
You
don't qualify, Peter, you've got an unfair start—'

Lifeless, soundtrack laughter. I realise that, among the creative writing students at least, no one in the room has read all of Raymond—and, astonishingly, some cheerfully admit to having read none of him whatsoever, none at all!

‘Oh, dear,' says Cosmo. ‘Some work to do here. He
is
demanding, I have to admit, Raymond Lawrence does take it out of you. A great figure in our pantheon, for sure, but—well!' He claps his hands together meaninglessly, cocks his wrist for his watch, claps some more. ‘Thank you, Peter, for your fascinating account!'

Again, a dispiriting sputter of applause. Semple's hat begins to levitate: Cosmo's big, soft, pink, teacherly hands start popping against each other again. ‘Time for our second visitor!' he cries.

Semple is up, and stepping his way carefully to the front, leaning, touching, murmuring, as he makes his way familiarly through the class. Everything here is known to him: he is in his medium, the peculiar little snowglobe of university life.

I suddenly realise. He's going to read poetry—no one has warned me: I make my way to a rear seat and shut my eyes. Ah, God.

Robert's performance never varies. One moment he's joshing amid the motley, the next he's approaching the lectern and the business of riffling through his papers as if suddenly called upon by Hera herself. Always a long, studied pause, once he's at the lectern, as his fingers flutter the pages this way and that and he mimes the crisis of decision: and then, always, the sacramental moment as he smuggles a headband from his hip pocket—the only time his hat ever leaves his body, this, baring thick, implausible, metallic hair: slowly, reverentially, he places the band about his own head, low at the temples, and pauses, before settling down to read—

Oh, how Raymond lacerated him for this vanity when he first heard tell of it!
You pretentious little turd!
he told him.
Who d'you think you are, Napoleon at Notre Dame?
—and so on, and sometimes worse than this, too: but to no effect, since Semple goes on crowning himself in public readings to this day and has even spawned younger imitators amongst his creative writing progeny who do much the same. For he, too, like so many others, attempts to teach that which, according to Raymond, cannot be taught: his coterie call themselves
the Cuffers
, after one of his earlier collections, titled—lamentably—
Cuffing Myself
. The public readings of our small, charming but shabby city are full of solemn boys and girls who announce their translation from this world to another with much the same flim-flam of self-coronation as he does.

I open my eyes: the Napoleonic moment is over. We are in the sanctum.

‘Lady Blue,' the poet begins, in the piping, spectral voice he seems always to reserve for these moments. He coughs into his hand, a little, shrill, unmanned cough, suitable for higher things. He begins to read—

And the phone in my pocket starts up!

Dear God, dear
God
, how embarrassing—I hate the thing at the best of times and use it only for purposes of the Trust: and now here it is, singing out its desolate little grace note. An involuntary shout of laughter from the class and then I'm up and stepping unevenly between legs and feet and fumbling in my pocket—Semple left at the lectern palms to face and his headband forlorn and disempowered, popped up slightly from its usual grip on his brow.

At the door I turn back and mouth
sorry
to him: and step outside, into the corridor and then the bright, leafy, eye-squinting quadrangle, the phone pressed to the side of my head.

This voice in my ear, its strange mixture of sounds—I know it, I know this woman, but it takes a few seconds for my mind to catch up with itself.

‘—tried your office but, no,' it's saying into my head. ‘Then I found this number and I thought you wouldn't mind—'

Geneva. Geneva Trott is on my phone.

‘—important new development I'm sure you'll be interested in,' her voice is telling me. ‘And of course the other Trust members as well—'

Geneva Trott is speaking to me
—