The Back of His Head (5 page)

This fellow had even got himself up
as Raymond
, if you please, as if that would somehow make him different from himself!—well, got himself up as best he could, I should say, given that he was taller, younger, and heavier. But the sharp beard was there, and the rimless glasses, and the hair pulled back from the brow, though less sparsely so: and, most telling touch of all, a pair of calf boots exactly like the ones Raymond used to wear in those days.
He's pinched me boots!
Raymond cried when he first saw the man, and, then,
he's pinched me!

Which flattered the impersonation, to tell the truth, but excited the impersonator himself no end as he stood pinned against the police car with his arm held up his back and a twelve-inch steel torch shining in his face. Like a demented younger brother, someone said when the matter went through the courts. The first of many such, someone else suggested, and
that
certainly turned out to be true.

This Raymond Thomas Lawrence (name changed by deed of poll, of course) turned out to be a summer gadfly, a harmless idiot who was in and out of our lives for some time until he was finally put away. There were worse problems than Raymond II, as we called him—
Raymond III's on duty
, I can remember our secretary Dot Round calling out, or
Raymond IV
, whenever she spotted one of his many successors peering lugubriously in at one or other of the Residence's windows, looking for—what? Not much: there were worse problems than these sad, would-be replicas.

What were any of them looking for, though, these crumbs of dust clinging to the shoes of history—the strange, lonely people we'd see down on the road, looking up, or being chased off the property by the dogs: or the groups of people we began to notice early on, standing by the garage and staring up at the house in twos and threes and sometimes more, and just looking, looking, as if there really was something to see in the woodwork of the Residence and the damp grey slate of its roof, something they might take away with them in order to redeem their shabby, fallen lives?

It's the same with our visitors, our tour parties: I watch them feeling the fabric, touching the walls, and their long, long contemplation of the Master's portrait. What is it, what do they want, what are they trying to find or find out? What is it they think they're taking away with them when they steal the ashtrays, the books, the wax fruit and the toilet rolls?

The Visitor Book yields me little as I go through it looking for clues to the thief of the ashtray. Naturally, I seek a pattern, a name that occurs again and again, a recurrent address to follow up: or, absent that (and, indeed, there was nothing), perhaps a recurrent form of handwriting, a suggestion of the forgery of different names by a single, persistent visitor—and, yes, under that heading there
does
in fact seem to be something. But is it really there? I peer at the signatures and the comments beside them. The latter, of course, are nearly always appallingly banal and commonplace.
Very moving. I had a real sense of being close to something here
. Or (particularly gormless),
I'm stunned
. And, time and again, the ubiquitous and lamentable
awesome
: what
can
it mean, what can it be
supposed
to mean now its
real
meaning has been dislodged?

Some of the comments, regrettably, are worse than this.
Bored shitless not worth money. Get a new fucking fridge
. Or (shades of Daisy Ashford),
Open the shitter to visiters
. And, even below that level—alas, but, it seems, inevitably, even in a higher venture like ours—shameful entries always and unoriginally obsessed with sex, race and excrement.
Ray wrote shit. Nobel Prize for Fucking
. Or (mystifyingly),
Donald Duck is a Jew
. Naturally, Raymond being Raymond, he liked this last kind of entries best, but I can assure you that, as soon as he left us, I inked them out, every shameful one of them.

The Visitor Book is an enormous thing, by the way, not unlike some ancient elephant folios I once saw in the British Museum library, and it was being kept long before the Residence was opened up to the
polloi
and, for private visitors, even longer than that. Overwhelming the lamentable rubbish I've just quoted, there are, on its earliest pages, the entries I treasure most, the acknowledgements of Raymond's growing status in his late middle years, when the hope of his eventual triumph had started to become a possibility and, then, something slightly more. As far as the Prize was concerned, for ten full years he had been considered
papabile
, nominated annually (I made sure of that, through the local branch of PEN and elsewhere) and with increasing rumours of shortlistings that were never quite more than that, since, of course, the Nobel committee doesn't actually announce shortlists. But the rumours were part of a rising tide, a growing clamour that, as it began to engulf me, was by far and away the most exciting thing I'd ever experienced in my life.

The acknowledgements from local writers were one thing, overdue though meaning nothing to Raymond, who kept few friends among his fellow artists in our tiny literary fishpond and, to tell the truth, seemed to set out to make as many lifelong enemies as he could. Acknowledgements from overseas were something else, though, and here they are in front of me, in the book's earlier pages—from Tom Keneally, who on his visit (I remember) regaled us long into the night with his yarns and his Gough Whitlam impersonations, from Raymond's favourite novelist, Walker Percy, from Robert Creeley, who sat at Raymond's dining table as he went through the verse of the eager young poetasters gathered at his feet, from the great Seamus Heaney—he who some said had been robbed of the Prize the year Raymond was awarded it. And so many more notables, all of them making their pilgrimage to Cannon Rise and leaving their traces in this very Visitor Book. ‘
Oh! The view!' ‘My first taste of roast lamb and kumura
' (sic). ‘
I have to leave all this?—horresco referens
'. And so on.

Bliss it was, you might say, in that dawn to be alive. And, then, finally, when it came at last,
the moment itself
, the quickening realisation that the impossible was about to become possible, then probable, that the phone call in the middle of the night was actually the phone call we'd waited for night after night, year after year, the call of calls: and Raymond, standing with the receiver to his ear, his face unreadable, no emotion showing at all as he looked out across the lights of the city and listened to the voice of the secretary of the Swedish Academy.

Finally, the receiver cradled, the pause after he turned to me, and his words—he couldn't resist them:

Well, George, we knocked the bastard off
—

You can imagine what happened next, the tumult and the shouting, the tremendous sense of living in the moment, as if time itself had been annihilated or suspended, the sense of being at the very centre of history at last. For us, the entire world had stopped to applaud! Suddenly, Raymond's face seemed to be everywhere we looked, smiling back at us in triumph, the phone seemed never to stop ringing, the mailbox all but burst with cards and letters. We travelled to Sweden with him for the ceremony, the four of us presently on the Trust—I was his private secretary by this stage, so accompanied him, naturally, and Marjorie, I recall, re-mortgaged her house to pay for her ticket. Julian, I know, sold his car, and how Semple got himself there I don't know, but there he was in the end along with the rest of us.

Hurried, hectic, wrenching it was: but, looking back, I can't imagine how Raymond would have managed if we hadn't made the effort to get there. He was a seasoned traveller, of course, but the constant media attention and the repeated interviews wore him out.
They keep asking the same fucking questions and I keep giving the same fucking answers!
—I can remember him saying this to me, and that his performances became increasingly just that, performances, his public accounts full of wilder and wilder inventions.

At one stage he made his claim to have actually taken part in the Algerian wars of independence, and didn't
that
attract the attention of the media world! So cantankerous did he become with all the questioning the day of the ceremony was a nightmare—he threatened, finally, to go home uncrowned, something Marjorie cajoled him out of the way you talk a spoilt child to bed. The dress requirements were the main issue: in the end he agreed to a haircut and beard-trim
or
a tie, but not both. The tie won out, so that he remains embalmed in the imagery of the moment looking like a wild colonial Santa Claus, his head a mass of curling locks and bristles and everything short of actual twigs and birds' nests.

We waited for his acceptance speech just as anxiously as we'd waited for the triumph of the tie. What would he say?—we'd gathered together before the trip and drafted a few ideas for him, which he read out loudly and satirically as we handed them to him one by one. Yes, that's right, he said.
Mankind will prevail. Our fate hunts each of us down. Life itself is whole enough to tell us what we need
—what the hell's that supposed to mean? In the end he wrote the speech himself and we had no idea what he intended to come out with, and, knowing he was capable of doing absolutely anything, feared the worst. And what he produced was simply wonderful, what one member of the committee said was the best Nobel acceptance speech he could remember: so simple, so moving, so direct. These days it'd all be on YouTube, of course, and we could relive and relive again the magic of that moment: now much of it is gone, alas, the way everything belonging to that time seems lost to us now, in that
dark backward and abysm
, that vast
Then
before today's transient, unpleasing, light-headed
Now
.

Such an innocent age, when first we felt our way into what engulfs us in the present day! I can remember the time we bought a golfball typewriter for Dot Round, Raymond's typist, to replace the old Imperial she'd typed the Master's work on for so long, and how we gathered around to marvel at the wonder that had come among us—the tiny lettered ball, punching the paper as she battered the keyboard as if it had a mind of its own.
What now?
we all wondered,
what next
?—unaware as we were of being caught (as Raymond was to explain in his Nobel lecture) in the middle of an
epistemic change
, a once-in-three-centuries rupture in the very way the world thinks and believes, and not realising that our amazing new electric typewriter would soon become as outmoded as the ducking stool.

These words are not mine, by the way, since, as I say, it was Raymond, even from within the event, who first explained what it was that was happening around us—now,
there's
a touch of genius for you. Goodbye print, is what he told us. Hullo cyberspace. We had no idea what he meant at the time, of course. We had no idea how much of what is good and great in our heritage we would have to
defend
—he no less than us, of course, he no less than us.

The Lord giveth, however, and the Lord taketh away. It was in Stockholm that I first thought he had something wrong with him, Raymond, I mean, when I watched him moving from the lectern after making his acceptance speech at the banquet—he was over to one side, a little, and seemed to be putting his right foot down in a different way as he walked. I mentioned it to Semple, and immediately wished I hadn't. By the time we'd got ourselves back home it was no longer a suspicion but a fact: the old man had received his comeuppance at last, he was being punished for his past sins, both public (details all pretty well known) and also, according to Robert, private. There was nothing I could do to stop the whispered public embroidering of the story of Raymond's triumph to the effect that he had been struck down in his pomp, as if the prize itself had brought the illness with it as in some medieval allegory.

The rumours became monstrous—Raymond was dying of meningitis, Raymond was dying of AIDS, he was dying of syphilis contracted during his misspent
Wanderjahr
in North Africa years before: he had weeks to live. In the end it was a relief, almost, when he told us what his doctor had just told him. Parkinson's. Seems I'll be going around interviewing people, he said, which was classy, we all thought, given the circumstances: very stylish indeed. But at least we knew he would be with us for a good while more, though in quite what state, at that stage, we simply didn't know.

I had it out with Semple after that, I really did.
Now
are you satisfied? I demanded. He really
is
sick, he really
is
being punished?
You
told
me
, is what he replied.
You
started it off! Anyway, he said, everyone knows he's a prick, he's got up everyone's nose who's ever met him! He might well be
difficult
, I told him. I've never pretended my father was perfect.
Uncle
, he said. Ray's your
uncle
. Father too, I reminded him. Adoptive father—now, what about this other stuff that's going around? What other stuff, he said, and I thought he looked furtive when I went on the front foot to him like that. You know very well what other stuff, I told him. Oh,
that
, he said. Well, it's true, isn't it?
You
remember the things he used to get up to, don't pretend it didn't happen to you. It happened to everyone, all of us.
I've no idea what you're talking about
, I told him.
And if there's any more of this we'll sue
—

I still find it hard to forgive him, to forgive Robert—to forgive all those who simply had to drag down a man like that in his finest hour. He'd been a public figure for some years, and inevitably there were stories that had been doing the rounds in that time. Some of these had something to them: after all, Raymond had been in and out of enough bedroom windows actually to have been spotted at some of them. And, yes, he was a difficult man, I'm sure
that's
becoming clear to you by now, he was a
very
difficult man indeed. He was an artist, and he was difficult
because
he was an artist: and an artist because difficult. The two things were one.