The Back of His Head (35 page)

Ah, yes, true, true, and I can see all of this as I sit here looking at Phyllis's painting yet again. All of this, and yet none of it. I can't tell you what the difference is—and this isn't the first moment I've been aware of the change, to tell the truth: I've been stealing back to the dining room for weeks now, and staring at the picture, and turning away, and coming back to it once more—but I know something has melted away from me, not just here but in the house, in my life, in everything.
The magical portal has been closed
—a dramatic phrase, I know, over-dramatic. Silly, even, even self-indulgent: but that is what it has felt like.

It feels (yes, yes—this is it) as if I have come to the end, at last, of a long entanglement that began when Raymond turned his back on me all those years ago with eggbeater in hand, and I am simply a civilian once more. No, no, before that: back to the time when I first glimpsed him, Satan over the rubbish fire, back to that moment, back to the very first of him. Yes, that's what's been happening to me, I'm sure of that now. Once again I am that ordinary boy of my mother bred, before the fact of my delicious, illicit uncle was first poured into my ears. Raymond, and all he stood for. My Mephistophelean uncle.

Later, at least an hour later, I'm woken in my dining chair by a
slam
down on the driveway. I stand and move to the front door, but Julian's through it and upon me before I'm there, with Semple head-down behind him: the Stetson seems almost to bounce its way up the concrete steps unaided as he climbs.

Julian thumps the door shut. They stand there, the pair of them, breathing hard at me.

‘Fuck me dead.' Semple, his back against the door.

Julian has a plastic bag with him: he tips it out on the dining table. Audiotapes clatter and slide onto my documents. Five of them—six.

‘Mission accomplished.'

‘You stole them?'

‘Borrowed them.' He's still breathing hard. ‘From Marjorie's.'

‘She's staying with
Marjorie
? You broke in?'

‘No. Robert has a key.'

I look across at Semple. A key?

He shrugs. ‘Years ago.' He lifts a cloth supermarket bag to the table and eases out two of Julian's ancient, mossy Panasonics: they clump onto the tabletop. ‘How long've we got?'

‘A few hours.' Julian. ‘She's taken her to the Hungry Wok.'

‘Geneva? Marjorie has? Does she know you've—?'

Julian shakes his head. ‘We didn't let her in on the plot.'

‘She's made one of her own.' Semple. He's staring at the tapes up close, one by one, as if that's the way to get into them. ‘A plot. With Geneva.'

‘Oh, for goodness' sake, Robert.' Julian plugs one of the Panasonics into a wall socket. ‘He thinks it's romantic.'

‘They'll be at it till dawn. Practising Sapphic alternatives.'

‘That's just ridiculous. Look, we've got two or three hours to listen to these and get 'em back—'

I catch Julian's eye.

‘Can I talk to you offstage for a moment?'

He follows me into the kitchen and its smell of the domestic past: I close the door behind us.

‘They're not as old as the one we used back at my place,' he says. ‘The tape decks. We should—'

‘He shouldn't be here.'

‘Who?'

‘Robert. What if he finds the thing we're looking for? On the tapes? What if he—'

Julian, mouthbreathing up at me. ‘I never thought of that. When we were putting it all together. Him and me. I just thought he'd—'

‘Why's he—?'

‘Well. He had the key. She gave it to him years ago, apparently. He insisted on coming, I could've done it alone. He seemed to think it was a commando raid or something—he kept going back into her house, I had to wait for him—'

‘Well, how can we get rid of him now? Without hurting his feelings?'

He gazes at the door. ‘I never thought—you know, when we were—planning it, him and me. I just assumed—' He looks away. ‘All that talk. I didn't feel so brave when I was there. In Marjorie's house. Behind her back.' He looks at me again. ‘This is falling apart.'

‘We need to listen to the tapes, we need to know what it is she's got over us. Geneva—'

‘The secret. Right.' He puts his hand on the doorknob. A pause. ‘Tell me again what we're looking for?'

I find I'm staring down, at our feet splayed on the ancient, trodden green and red of the kitchen linoleum.

‘The boy. We're trying to find whether the boy is mentioned.'

‘The boy under the Blue Room?'

A pause.

‘I thought we were looking for the other thing,' he says.

‘What other thing?'

‘The violence. Or what we burnt—remember?'

‘
Shh
—we don't want
that
to get out.'

He's looking down, too, as if the answer is somewhere at our feet.

‘No,' Julian says. ‘No, quite.'

‘I mean, Robert would—'

‘—oh, of
course
he would—'

‘If he heard it, I mean.'

‘You're right.' He opens the door. ‘Quite right.'

‘If that's what it turns out to be—'

‘On the tape. Right.'

‘I mean, there seem to be all sorts of things that might—'

‘Shh—
shh
—'

Back in the dining room, though, Semple is gone: the Panasonics sit side by side on the tabletop.

‘Where is he—where're the tapes?'

Robert's voice, distant: ‘I'm having a slash—'

A clatter, from the toilet.

‘Shit.' His voice, through half-open doors. ‘Shit shit shit—'

‘What've you done?' Julian is in the hallway now.

I can hear Semple saying something from the other side of the door, and then the flat, wooden thump of the seat against the cistern.

Now Julian's voice again: ‘Oh, you silly prick—'

I follow him into the hallway: he's peering into the little lavatory. ‘What's happened?'

Here's Semple, on his hands and knees beyond Julian's legs: he's bent over and fishing around in the loo. ‘Bugger,' he's saying. ‘Bugger and shit—'

‘What were you doing with them in here, anyway?'

‘I had them in my hands, I was going to put one in the deck and then I thought I'd duck in for a quick slash first—'

It slowly settles itself into a sentence: Semple, unbelievably, has
dropped the tapes in the toilet bowl
—

‘How many?'

He's peering in. ‘Five. No, six—'

‘You brought them
all
in? You've dropped them
all
down the loo?'

He's standing now: his sleeves are wet. Two of the tapes sit in a puddle on his palm.

‘Well, where are the others—?'

Julian is down now, on his knees and fumbling a hand in the bowl. ‘They're round the bend a bit.' His voice squeezes up to us. ‘The other three, I can feel them.' A slight grunt. ‘Here we go—'

‘You mean after all the trouble you've gone to—'

‘Oh, fuck up, Norman. Just forget it—d'you think I came in here just to drop the fucking things in?'

He presses between us roughly and away. I follow him into the dining room.

‘Peter's right.' Julian, calling from the toilet. ‘We
have
gone to a lot of trouble—'

‘Well, that's bad luck, then, isn't it?' Semple dumps the two wet cassettes onto the dining table. ‘It's done now.'

‘Any chance of drying them off, Julian?'

‘I don't think so. I'll get some toilet paper. There's still at least two more tapes stuck down here.'

‘What
is
this secret, anyway,' Semple asks. ‘This thing we're looking for—?'

I look out, at the pretty glitter of the city lights. ‘There's no secret,' I tell him.

‘You said there's
always
a secret. A writer always has to have a secret otherwise he can't write, that's what—'

Julian appears. ‘For goodness' sake!' he says. ‘
Another
toilet roll's gone!'

‘
Another
toilet roll?'

And at this exact moment, like an actor who's fumbled her cue, Marjorie sails in through the front door: wrong player, wrong scene, wrong lines—even, conceivably, the wrong play:

She stops short and stares at us.

‘Toilet roll?' she demands. ‘Has someone pooed themselves?'

We stare at her. She can't possibly be here—but, on the other hand, and undeniably, she is.

‘Where's Geneva?'

‘I left her at my place. Ringing the police.'

‘The
police
?'

‘Well, why not? She wants her tapes back.'

‘Robert's just dropped them down the loo.'

‘I should've known. What a
stupid
bloody idea—she's got a dozen more of them, anyway—'

‘What did you have to ring the
police
for?'

‘
Really
? A dozen more? Tapes? Geneva has?'

‘Of course she has—she wasn't born yesterday, she only brought half of them down with her—less, there's about twenty all told, she says. She's heard them all, she knows everything.'

Of
course
she does. And of
course
she hasn't shown her hand, not all of it, anyway. We've got nowhere, we've got nothing—

‘What does she know?'

‘D'
you
know?'

‘What?'

‘Has she told you? What she knows?'

Now Marjorie's phone, though, starting up in one of her bags: which, which?—the third, she fumbles it out of the third.

‘D'you think
she
knows now?' I whisper to Julian.

‘Where?' says Marjorie, with the phone flat on her ear.

‘D'you think they both know? Julian whispers back. ‘The women?' Behind him, Semple slips out into the little hallway.

‘What?' Marjorie.

‘They've
both
got power over us now,' Julian whispers back.

‘Where?' Marjorie, to the phone.

Two doors away, the toilet flushes.

‘Has he just had a pee?' Julian turns away. ‘There's still two tapes down there—'

Marjorie snaps her phone off. I've never seen her look so grim.

She stares at us. ‘Which one of you was it?'

We stare back, Julian and I, two men frozen in front of an angry woman.

‘Not me,' I tell her. ‘I wasn't—'

‘Which one of us what?'

‘Which one of you shat on my living room carpet?'

‘
What?
'

‘Geneva says someone's shat on my living-room carpet—'

‘Not me.'

‘Robert, where's Robert gone—?'

‘He's in the loo again—'

I watch them rattle off into the hallway, Julian first. It's becoming clearer, the thing that Robert's up to.

Marjorie, shrieking at him in the lavatory.

Julian tumbles back into the room. ‘I wondered why he went back in,' he tells me. ‘At Marjorie's. I can't believe it—he says he wanted it look to like kids had done it—breaking in—'

Marjorie, furiously in behind him. ‘She's
not
a dreadful woman at all,' she's shouting back at Robert. ‘As it happens I rather like her.' She stops and stares at me as if I've just come in. ‘No, not quite
like
,' she tells me. ‘It's too soon for that. I'm not sure what I feel.' A curious little smile as she's saying this: to herself, and almost fondly, as if she's only just begun to understand something. She opens her mouth, to say more:

And here, exactly at this point, and suddenly, loudly, shockingly, a sharp
rap-rap
on the front door.

We all come to a stop.

‘Christ, what's
this
now?' Julian.

‘And harassing an old man into his grave—' Robert, following in from the hall. He stops short. ‘What?' he says.

‘Just remember,' Marjorie says, firmly. ‘No one was as bad as Raymond. Let's be quite clear about that. But I'll tell you one thing he could do better than anyone else, he could organise a decent plot.'

Rap-rap
, on the other side of the door.

‘That's true,' Julian says. ‘We've been hopeless.' He looks across at me. ‘What do we do now? Who's this going to be? Does anyone know?'

Rap-rap-rap
—

A presence, on the other side: voices, a mutter, not clear. A stirring of shoes: boots, maybe.

Again, a sharp double rap.

I look at Julian. He looks at Marjorie. Marjorie looks at Semple.

Semple looks at me.

I look at Julian again, and then at Marjorie.

Now Marjorie looks at me.

Rap-rap-rap-rap
—

The sound of fate.

‘Well, go on, open it. Someone open it.'

I start across the room.

‘It's only Ray,' one of them calls out, and we all pretend to laugh at that.

The Blue Room, when it came, took me completely by surprise, I remember that—it shocked me, it jolted me to the core. I'd been overseas a month, astonishing myself by how well I performed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin—so much so that I tried a couple of other libraries elsewhere in the States before I slipped over to England and the Continent for a week. There, I found the Master well known in unexpected places—at Aarhus and Liège, for example, where he was thought exotic, and in France, where (for obvious reasons) feelings about him were rather more ambivalent.

So
that
stage in our shared life had well and truly begun, in those last years before Stockholm—and there was I, back home and barely out of the taxi from the airport and swinging my suitcase onto my bed when I saw something through the window, in the bright, breezy afternoon light of the summer garden. I'd expected Raymond to meet me at the gate, or at the door at least, and to be eager to find out more of what I'd done for him. Instead, a fresh puzzle, from this man of puzzles.

What's happening outside? I called to Edna Butt, whom I'd passed in the front room, where she was busy with vases.

She came in, cut flowers in her arms. Haven't you heard? she asked. We're getting an extension to the house, a big new living room—this bedroom of yours'll have to be smaller, they told me that. And the window's going to be moved!—I think that's what Mr Lawrence told me, she said.

He'd decided all this sometime before, apparently. She sounded pleased as she mentioned it, and sly.

I was flabbergasted.
Decided sometime before, and didn't tell me?
Money wasn't the issue, certainly not in those days: nor was the proposed diminution of the Residence's second bedroom. What worried me was the unexpectedness of this plot development, as it might be described. It couldn't have made me feel more excluded, more pushed to the margins—utterly irrelevant, once again. I was fairly rattled. What had been going on while I was away?

Later, I stood in the garden beyond and below that suddenly doomed window of mine with the sun on my neck and the breeze in my hair, and looked at what had been done while I was gone. Not much, to tell the truth: some of the lawn had been dug up and some hadn't, all this inside an oblong area marked out with stakes, a shape perhaps fifteen foot wide and projecting a good twenty from my side of the house—taking in the mature
robinia frisia
that had long been the bright lemon-yellow spring-and-summer glory of that part of the garden. Some of its upper branches were already sawn and on the ground.

It was with this particular detail that I first confronted my uncle, when confront him I did. Oh, you're back, he said—as offhandedly as that. Yes, it's coming down. Unless you want it growing up through the floor of the Blue Room? The
what
room? I asked. The crowning touch to the house, he said, and rolled out a large piece of paper on the dining room table. Look! He rapped the thing with his knuckles. The Blue Room!

It took me a second to see that they were his own plans, not an architect's but dashed off in pencil on the back of a torn-off square of wallpaper and with barely a ruler used on it—not the slightest sign an architect or a draughtsman had been near them. The drawing had some detail, all the same, and was covered with scribbles, some in my uncle's writing and some in someone else's. Across the top, in heroic fist:
THE BLUE ROOM
.

Hold on, I told him. Where are the proper plans, what about a permit?
These
are the proper plans, he said. And fuck the permit. But you can't expect a builder to work from
these
, I told him. A builder already is, he said. They put those sight lines in, they take the tree down tomorrow. Then—he flapped the paper in my face—
this
bastard gets built. It'll be up in a month. Now the other two've pissed off you'll have to paint it for me, you and what's-his-name. The librarian.

Me?
I said—I was aghast. I couldn't believe all this was happening!

It was, though, and it did: the Blue Room was built, and in almost exactly the time he'd told me—by Eric Butt and his unexpected brother Alan, who, it transpired, had been builders in prior incarnations. Together, they woke us each early morning with their hammering and sawing—by this time I'd decamped to a room in the recently built Chicken Coop, where I've stayed—and the spare, distant implication of their talk. The
robinia
came down, heartbreakingly, and its stump disappeared under the boards of the new floor along with perhaps two hundred square feet of lawn and that mound of soil I saw on my first afternoon back from overseas.

And, thus, the Blue Room.

I stood in it once it was done, on its echoing bare boards and between the unpainted wooden panels of its walls—none of it new, as it happens, something the old man insisted on throughout: used kauri floorboards, the walls in recycled pine and the massive French doors salvaged from a local nunnery recently lost to the wrecker's ball (Raymond delighted in
that
detail, of course). Why nothing new, why so much rubbish? I shouted, as we stood watching Alan Butt banging brown old nails out of used wood and straightening them one by one. Because
men dispossess one another
, Raymond shouted back over the noise: and I knew where
that
quotation came from, without a doubt I knew.

They'd done a splendid job, though, the Butt Boys, as Raymond insisted on calling them, and I have to say that when it was done the new addition completely transformed the house for the better. Against the nostalgic bloom of our freshly painted walls was contrived, bit by bit, an extraordinary, distinctive elegance: the Steinway in the corner, the long
canapé
settee, the
fauteuil
, the carefully placed lamps—not a single thing absolutely matching anything else yet everything unified in a series of happy accidents that took the form of cushions whose colours caught one another in a certain way and in turn picked up a fleck or pattern in carpet or curtains, perhaps, or a tint in one of the paintings—extraordinarily satisfying, once one picked up the rhythm of it, and looking, all of it, as if it had always been there. Satisfying, and, even, at times, sublime.

I couldn't believe so much magic could be found in so little, and I always thought of the house as the Residence from that point on, even though it wasn't officially so till later. Looking back, though, it seems as if he was anticipating what was to come next: the call to Stockholm, I mean. Seen now, it seems inevitable.

It's too long ago now, though, for me to remember exactly when, in all this racket of shouting and hammering and sawing, I began to think there might be something more to the Blue Room than first I'd thought. That mound of earth I saw in my first minutes back from overseas—those upturned grassy clods within the larger oblong of boards and strings that was the Blue Room
in ovo
—that was the thing I began to think about as the actuality of it disappeared under the timber, bit by bit. The glimpse I gave you a page or two back was all
I
saw of it, too, but, perhaps because of that, the thing began to change into something else in my mind as soon as it went from sight. I was well aware of what was happening, but the thought seemed to have its own life in me. It grew.

For one thing, the mound so obviously echoed the last of
Flatland
and then of
Other-people
. In those books, Hamilton digs the youth a grave in the shadow of a curiously flat-topped mountain of the Ouled Naïl range. There's much nonsense in the former novel to the effect that he's come across the body ten days gone and as if it's just happened to be there as part of the roadkill of war, but the latter makes very plain who it is who's really finished the youth off and how: the details are shocking. In both books, the last vision of the lad's face, before it's closed up forever beneath the red, inorganic soil of the Hodna, is agonising, wrenching, and—oh, God—the part that most undid me when I first read it as a boy. Those blue, unexpected Vandal eyes, not quite closed, still looking, and the cicatrice, drawn livid at his neck: the final, final statement. Even as a man, knowing what the scene intends—the art in it, its higher purpose—I find the words unbearable to read, unbearable to think of.

I read
Other-people
yet again. Much that he'd written was demanding—I've made
that
clear enough—but I kept coming back to this novel and its ending. Where I'd used to finish each week with the sherry and the radiogram, now, each night, locked in my bedroom up in the Chicken Coop, I'd turn my back on the daily this-and-that and return to the single, same text. At one stage, late at night, I even went down into the garden and stood outside the nearly completed Blue Room, amongst the scaffolding and the planks, as near as I could get to that secret mound of earth, and read aloud to myself in the sea wind, with a torch on the page, that penultimate scene. It was as if I was trying to bend the words towards a final reality, to a fusion that might unlock—everything, might unlock it all, all of it, at last. Whatever
it
was,
whatever
it was. The
something
that was down there. And yet a part of me has always known.

After too much of this, I confided in Julian. We sat there in his studio, with a fan heater labouring on the floor and moths beating the night against his panes.

His face was unreadable as I began. Lord, but it sounded rubbish when I gave it a voice like that!—I was embarrassed at myself, but I kept going. By now I trusted him enough to do that.

Cicatrice?
he asked, when I got to that point, and when I explained it I saw his hand go up to his neck.
Really?
—he
did
that to you?
Raymond?
Well, I think he'd have
liked
to, I told him. On your neck? he asked. With a knife? Really?
Yes
, I told him—something I'd never admitted to anyone. But he didn't mean it, I said. Raymond. I don't think he meant it—it was as if he was writing on me, that's how he made it sound. With the tip of the knife. He did it to the boy instead. I mean Anir. At the end of
Flatland
. And
Other-people
. You remember the burial scene—?

Oh, is it
him
who gets buried then? Julian looked a little puzzled. I'd always thought it was that other chap, he said. The older one—doesn't he get buried at the end? Oh, I don't think so, I told him, and he shifted on his stool a little. No?—I'm going to have to read it again, he said. I was sure it was the older boy. Isn't that him who gets buried at the end? I think you're thinking of a minor character, I told him—reminded him.

We were drinking his homemade elderberry wine, I remember, and that must have loosened our tongues a little—his, certainly, because he was more direct with me than I can remember him being before. And mine, too, since I found myself at one point of the evening confessing my midnight trip to the foundations of Raymond's new room with book and torch in hand. I remember him gazing at me as I told him about this, gazing at me and saying nothing. He was a good listener, as I've mentioned. I found myself telling him more, and more and more—in the end, everything, until it was late in the evening and the moths were gone from the window and small rain was just beginning to splatter on the glass.

So that when I was done, and he sat there for half a minute with his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him like a vicar, I was fairly apprehensive. What was it he was going to say?

You need to get away from him
. I couldn't believe it. He rubbed his face with his palms, massaged his face. Uncle Raymond, he said. You need to get away from him.

Amazing how clear he was—shocking, shocking. I sat there, on that reclaimed barstool of his.

Right
away, it turned out he meant. You've never got away from him, he said. Last month was your first trip overseas and you're
thirty
. Not quite, I told him—I rest my case, he said.
Nearly
thirty, and your first time overseas. I was hoping you'd come back with a better take on him, on Ray, but it's like he's sucked you back in again.

I stared at him. But he's pushing me away, I said, I can't get near him since I got back. From before that, he's pushing me away—

Julian
slapped
his hands together when I said that.
That's
how he holds on to you! he said. Push and pull! Oh, he's a great man, and a great writer, I believe all that—but I've told you before, he's a fucking monster! He manipulates everyone like that!

I was astonished—Julian, saying
that
word? There was more, though: I'd never heard him say so much about Raymond. A
monster
? I demanded, when he was done.
There
you go again, he said, shifting about, across from me on the other recycled barstool. Rushing in to defend him!—you can't wait, can you?

And so on: all of it quite right, too. I'd had more than a glimpse of myself from North America and Europe a month before, a whiff of a different scenario, and I knew in large part, as I sat there, that what he said was true.

Quite right, but (I'd realised this while I was away, too) there was always that magical world. I knew I couldn't stop believing in it. That was the thing. I tried to explain it to him, to Julian, I mean, and he listened as carefully as ever. And, as ever, how very silly it all sounded when I said it aloud to somebody else like that!
D'you understand, d'you understand?
I kept asking him along the way, I remember, and
I'm trying, I'm trying
, he'd reply. Then:
say that bit again, would you? Under the house? What's going on under there?

That was the detail that got to him in the end, and marked what lay between us. He went silent when I tried to explain it, went silent and looked away. Then:
you've caught his madness
. It was a shock, but I trusted him.
He's a great man
, he said,
but not a little potty. It's part of the greatness but it rubs off on people. And it's rubbed off on you. You just have to remember—sometimes a mound of earth is just a mound of earth
—