The Back of His Head (31 page)

So
that
was what all the fuss was about, this time around: I mean the sense of possession about the house that I've mentioned, the subtle paranoia with which the Master allowed his dwelling to be gripped. I have to confess to a slight disappointment at the end of the process—the novel was pleasant enough to read but scarcely warranted the upheaval its genesis seemed to cause, in my mind at any rate. Nice to see you setting your work
here
and not
there
, one of his sixtyish Brendas said at the launch, no doubt fortified by the free wine. But, Madam,
everything
I write is set here, he replied.
Your
problem is, you've only just fucking noticed.

Then, though, he started to write
Kerr
. It took a while to gestate and, painfully and a few years later, to emerge, by which time I was well into my third decade and on my way to setting up what came to be known as the Raymond Thomas Lawrence Memorial Trust.
In his ear all the time
, was Marjorie's description of my behaviour in those days.
Why can't you leave him alone, can't you see he's pregnant again?
And indeed I hadn't: which goes to show, alas, just how far I'd drifted from the world of words at that stage, and how firmly Mammon now held me in his grip.

I'm thinking of the future, I told her. I'm setting up a trust, I'm thinking of his legacy.

As soon as she spoke, though, it started to come back to me again, all of it: that forest sound, the smell of it, and of the sea beyond. I began to think once more about writing, I began to think again about
him
. What was going on? Something big, something important this time: the jab at Orwell had been just a prelude, it seemed, a passing moment before he turned to what—evidently—he'd been meaning to write all his life. Of this, when I began to look about me again, I became more and more certain—
at last, this was it
. For one thing, there was his sudden remoteness, the way he seemed to have been swallowed up into himself. There was that, and then there was the return of
fear
in my life—

I remember a moment, not long after Marjorie told me he was expecting again, when I suddenly realised he was gazing at me, across a room that had others in it, that he'd been staring at me and staring at me for some time while the others talked: and I looked back at him at that moment and my bowels turned to water. Lord, dear Lord, some part of me had been caught—
I was in what he was writing
—

I knew what was happening. I was a condemned man.

It was a curious time, I remember, in these heady days and weeks when chaos came again. There was a
brouhaha
involving Raymond and Marjorie in that period as well: she who, not long after our conversation above,
buggered off at last
, as she put it, having
had a gutsful of playing musical beds with bloody Phyllis Button
. As well as Marjorie and Phyllis in their customary push-and-pull there were other women coming and going about the place at this time as Raymond practised his
droit de seigneur
among the wives of the local
literati
—a grace note of any new project of his, along with those moments when I'd catch him poring over what looked to be one of Eric Butt's
Auto Trader
magazines but which I knew was
Mein Kampf
, concealed behind it and always a sign that the humour was upon him and anything could be about to happen.

So Marjorie left for the UK at this time to have another taste of Europe and a life unmediated by Raymond Thomas Lawrence.
Could feel him here
, she wrote on a postcard of Ludwig II's Neuschwanstein:
tomorrow, Dachau
. Robert was gone from us as well, to a six-month writing residency at a provincial polytechnical college in the far north, something that had astonished us all when it was announced. As for Julian, at this stage he'd come into our lives as I've mentioned but was yet to find his full role amongst the followers of the Master. In fact I met him at the other end of one of those filing cabinets full of the old man's papers we were lugging off to the research library it turned out he worked at:
would you like to meet my uncle?
he remembers me asking him.

In that time, in other words, that very uncle and I were much alone in the house together. Each late afternoon the gardening ladies and the household staff would leave the two of us to our extraordinary nights together at No. 23, as my uncle wrote and wrote and I found myelf more and more engulfed by the new world he was creating.

It had happened before, as I've indicated, but not quite like this. That salty, Mediterranean smell, for a start, washing over me when I woke in the night. The first time it happened I sat up in my bed, propped on my elbows, and drew the smell of it into myself. I opened the bedroom window: but, no, it didn't come from outside. It was somewhere inside the house. I drew it in, and when I did it disappeared as if it had become part of me. On other nights the smell came back, though: I'd breathe it in again and think of the vast cedar forests in
Frighten Me
and
Flatland
. I was in them once more, and through to their far side, and down to the sea.

Sometimes I heard him, too. The first was when he was at the desk in his bedroom, which he used now and then: voices, behind its door, and, when I crept out into the little hallway, a soft light from under it. Phyllis Button, I thought, in there for the usual show-and-tell—but no, neither the familiar bassoon of her voice nor the timpani of her smoker's cough. This was something smaller, lighter, less: a flute, perhaps. The old man was trying out voices, that was it, he was speaking in character like an actor—he used to do that, sometimes, when he didn't have a human around to suck into his vortex. A child's voice. That's what it sounded like, I remember. A child.

A night or two more spent hovering outside his door like this, before another thought came up, abruptly, unpleasantly, unasked for.
He actually had someone in there with him, another Julia
.

Another muse, another favourite.

Marjorie was gone, I'd been dismissed from him twice over—we'd been too old anyway, the pair of us, and we'd been replaced, that was the truth or part of it. Was it not? He'd got someone else—
what was he doing to her in there? Who was she?
I found myself remembering the worst of it, the knife at the throat, the finger in the spine: and then, overwhelmingly, from a completely different direction, jealousy, that moment from all those years ago coming back, when he'd introduced me to the adolescent Marjorie and the feast of her bronze sausage curls, the spritz of her freckles, her toothy, sad grin.

It overwhelmed me, the nostalgia for all that was lost, to him, to her, to me. Until relatively recently I'd still been his, after all: Marjorie, too, till the moment she boarded the plane and left the country—he'd drunk himself senseless that night, I remember that. And now—inevitably, I knew that—now, it seemed he had someone else.
Another darling
—

Except that, apparently, he didn't. A new woman? Val asked when I brought the possibility up with her, out in the garden. I used
woman
and not
girl
for obvious reasons, and edged into the topic cautiously, from something quite different. Mr Lawrence? she asked. I don't think so. Nora Butt would've told me, she never misses anything like that. Or Dot, she's in the house almost every day. Then she looked across at me. Isn't he a bit old for that sort of thing now? she asked.

No new woman, then, and, presumably, no new girl-Julia, either—I asked Dot myself and even, awkwardly, Mrs Butt, and they knew nothing of it, either of them, not a thing at all. Surely he's too busy writing to bother with company, Dot told me. I can't keep up with what he's producing, he's on a tear. That phrase surprised me, especially from her, but it gave me a sense of how he was at the time. I keep hearing things, I said. Around the house. Oh, but it's always been like that when he's writing, she said. The place gets haunted!

Yes, the plot seemed to be unfolding, all right: except that the more he wrote the more hidden he seemed to become, and the more hidden he became the more I found myself shirking my supposed duties and listening outside doors and into phone conversations, questioning Val and Dot again and even (sometimes) Edna Butt, and loitering past windows in order to peer into them: at nothing, always, but increasingly with the sense of being on the very edge of a discovery of the utmost importance. He did this to people, he turned people into stalkers.

I can't remember at what stage of all this I decided who this new presence might be, but I do remember that at some point I read
Flatland
once again, and once again was jolted hard by that extraordinary experience, at the shock of that brutal ending and the surprise of finding that reading it yet again hadn't diminished its impact. Again, the wonder at what kind of a man could
write
that.

It was soon after this—I know this is true—it was soon after this that I woke from a dream about the boy, the youth in that novel. I was being beaten with the leather stick, on the back and on the neck, but the noise came from somewhere else. I was awake and it was coming from another part of the house. I was awake, and it was gone. I sat there in the bed, twelve years old again, thirteen, my legs tucked up under me, pyjamas clinging to sweat, heart thudding in ears and neck. I listened to myself slowly thumping my way back down to something more nearly normal, and that was the only sound I could hear as I sat there, that
bump-bump-bump
in my chest and in my ears. The crying had gone. Had it been there at all? Who was it? What was happening?

Kerr
, the novel that did most to edge him towards the prize, that was the general consensus. He'd never had universal admiration before, but this time, and at last, he got it. Even he was pleased, and how could he not be?
Perfect
, a couple of reviewers said, and
as near to perfection as it gets
, said another.
A grand work
, said someone else, and
A great and true novel
, somebody after that—
God, true!
Raymond gasped, when I told him this. Another reviewer was of the opinion that
the act of reviewing diminishes this work. It is beyond criticism
. This was the time the muttering about the Nobel began in earnest. Definitely a contender, it was said, definitely a contender.

More euphoria, too, once
Kerr
arrived in the United States—to our astonishment since, as I've said, it writes that entire country out of history but for its debris, some of which goes into the making of Kerr's raft. The latter business was all based on his own experience, he told us, when he was trying to get away from Algeria after the ceasefire and before the election, and hit on the mad conceit of escaping north alone and by sea.
There was all this Yank garbage still bobbing around after the war
, he told me.
I used 75-gallon drop-tanks from Mustang fighters, I floated the raft on those
.

D-model aircraft of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, Julian told me, used late in the Mediterranean theatre: the parachute Raymond turned into a sail would've come from a similar source, apparently, and the food he survived on throughout his journey was sure to have been U.S. war surplus, all of it—Hershey bars, Spam, canned corned beef, tins of Nescafé which he lost overboard almost as soon as he set out. There was a pocket can-opener he picked up in a bazaar in Algiers before he left and which looked like a spoon: used in the middle of the ocean, Raymond told me, to dig out a purulent tooth.

In other words, exactly like Kerr in the novel: Kerr and the youth he takes with him in this fictional version and whose early loss overboard in a Mediterranean squall is the central, wrenching event of the novel: Kerr is alone after that.

But for the Yanks I couldn't have made the raft, my uncle told me. And look how I repaid them, I booted them off the planet!

He was a Kabyle, this boy, he said after
Kerr
came out. With blue eyes!—the Vandals came through North Africa fifteen hundred years ago on the way to Carthage, he told me: did you know that? Left all these blue-eyed babies behind them, he said—anyway, the Arabs treat them like dirt. Who? I asked him. The Kabyles? Everyone, he said. The metros kicked the Pieds-Noirs and the Pieds-Noirs kicked the Arabs, the coastal Arabs. Then the coastal Arabs kicked the shit out of the Kabyles. They'd hang round the military camps, the Kabyle kids, the poilu'd give 'em food and fags and let 'em play with guns—crazy, just fucking crazy. Not the adults. They wouldn't let the adults near the military camps. Anyway, this little bastard, he helped build the raft.

In the book? I asked. Yes, I know he did.

No—he looked away, out of the window, I remember, when he said this. No, he said. I mean he helped
me
build the raft.
My
raft. He found the drop-tanks for me. And the parachute. He helped me build the raft and then he came out on the fucking thing. With me. Out to sea. Same as in the book.

I sat there, thinking the obvious thought. And did you lose him overboard, too? I asked, after half a minute. Like Kerr?

A long silence, as he sat there in a slice of sunlight and looking out above the trees.

I lost him, he said.

We sat there, uncle and nephew. I didn't dare ask what the young Amazigh had meant to him. I thought of the Amazigh youth in
Flatland
, and the terrible end he came to. The same boy, of course, the same boy. Wasn't he? Was that right? And if so, then what did that mean? How did this work?

After the success of
Kerr
I thought he was done with, this Anir, done with and out of our lives, I thought he was drowned at last and at one with the sublime. Certainly Raymond himself seemed finished, as if ready for something else or perhaps for nothing very much at all. He wrote a collection of stories next—this was
The Long Run
—which I thought (in truth) a little uneven: two of the stories were brilliant, but the others were—well—less so. The collection received respectful responses from reviewers who obviously had no idea what to make of them and so were furtively polite and deferential in the way of critics confronted with a writer thought to have
made it
. One of these was Geneva herself, I recall: ‘beautifully crafted', ‘challenging subject matter', and so on—Geneva, at full trot.