She hasn’t slept. She often doesn’t when her head is full of a new programme. She will get up in the middle of the night, pad softly to her study so as to cause no disturbance, and start making notes. But this time she lies for hours in bed before deciding it is distasteful, not to say disloyal – marginally disloyal – to have such thoughts in such a place with a man she respects – respects, notice – beside her. So she goes down to the kitchen to make tea, tea being the most calming substance she knows, and relives the encounter.
It isn’t only that she can see him. She can smell him. In the past she has left men whose smell she can’t abide. When things go wrong between a man and a woman, she believes, the first sign of it is the smell. You needn’t especially have loved the smell at first. You might simply not have noticed it. But then you do and that’s that. An affair going off stinks to high heaven. What’s new to her is noticing and liking the smell of a man at the outset.
At the outset! This is why she hasn’t slept. She has let futurity in. At the very least she has opened the window to it.
On the strength of what? A smell she cannot describe. An aureole of zesty hair. A dry, sarcastic mouth. Maybe kind, maybe not, half-closed eyes. A rugby-player’s shoulders. And a foreknowledge of his wordsmithery – not to be confused with any inkling – that was so heated with anticipation that she marvelled at the way he spoke before he had a chance to say three words. She laughs at herself. He says ‘Come in,’ and her heart stops beating. How will she be when he makes his first speech explaining why, though he is flattered by her offer, and notwithstanding the radio talks he’s given, he is not a media personality, and certainly not a television presenter, it being a matter of artistic faith to him to have no presence beyond his work, to make no utterances that are not the utterances of art, for it is only art that speaks the words he wishes to be known by, in short to respect the sibylline silence of creation, which he is confident that she, as an intelligent and well-read woman, will surely have listened to with awe herself in those moments when what’s visionary and half-glimpsed asserts its ancient primacy over the gross actuality of a liquid-crystal display …?
How will she be? Well, she now knows the answer to that. Somewhat insulted. ‘Gross actuality’ is not a fair description of what she does. No matter. She will deal with that. She will make space for the sibylline silences of a man unable to stop talking. Thereafter, ask her how she is and she will close her eyes. Unslept, is how she is.
The house is all hers after nine o’clock. Over breakfast she takes out his card. It was a mystery why he’d ever given it to her. Writers don’t have cards, he told her. She knew that. She’d never yet met a writer who had a card. It went against – well, whatever it went against. It’s actually my wife’s, he’d added with a queer little laugh.
‘Selena Pallister, Painter’
She’d kept her maiden name but shared a phone. My wife’s. Was that a warning or a come-on? She wants to ring him to apologise for being peremptory about his suggestion to include Dickens in the mix. She has never much liked Dickens and wonders whether that explained her reluctance. Maybe they can work out a way of doing it after all. In fact there was no conceivable way without changing the entire premise of her series. Dickens had not travelled to escape a country he loathed and that had rejected him. But she can’t think of any other convincing reason for making the call, and it’s a call she has to make. It is as though she had scaled a remote peak and forgotten to plant a flag to show she’d been there. If she is to stake any sort of claim to the territory, no matter how gestural, she must plant that flag. She lets another hour go before ringing him. His wife’s voice – peremptory and even ill-tempered – is on the answering machine. We are not available, it says.
We.
She drives a fast car not because speed excites her but because she can afford a fast car and has no children to ferry to school, so she might as well. More than that, she has always claimed for herself the freedom and esteem men enjoy, and a fast car that people gawp at in the street is one way of accessing those advantages. Comme des garçons. Otherwise, she affects an indifference to what she drives and pretends she doesn’t remember the make. ‘I think it’s Italian.’ She might want the freedom of being a man, but she also wants freedom from the objects that captivate men’s minds.
Driving to work, tired and preoccupied, she passes an accident. It looks serious. More than one police car, more than one ambulance. Normally the sirens would make her heart race and she would come off the main road as soon as she could. At the very least slow down. Today the flashing lights don’t touch her. She is somewhere else. Has steel entered her soul?
She has a meeting with the series commissioner.
‘So he’s interested?’
‘He says he wants to think about it, but I’m confident he’ll agree.’
‘Which one is he veering towards? Ibsen in Sorrento is too obvious, I assume. Lawrence in Taos, I’ll bet.’
‘As it happens, no. And you’re right about Ibsen. “Done that to death,” he said. Joyce in Trieste looks the most likely. Or just maybe Byron in Missolonghi. I fancy he might think of himself as Byronic. Whereas Joyce was weedy and half-blind.’
‘And D. H. Lawrence tubercular.’
‘Well more than that. He says Lawrence’s genius alarms him. He says he has only to read two words of Lawrence to want to be him. Whereas he knows that if Lawrence were to have read two words of his he’d have hated them both. For which reason – not to paraphrase – he loathes the fucker.’
‘That could make a good programme.’
‘That’s what I told him but he said he wouldn’t give the fucker the satisfaction.’
‘He does know Lawrence is dead?’
‘Yes, but not dead enough.’
‘Ah well. Too much affinity, I suppose. Sex-obsessed, angry Northerners.’
‘I suspect he’d reject that way of categorising him. The writer he says he does feel closest to is Dickens. Bad husband, great writer. Often the way. Said he’d quite fancy doing Dickens in America. Our subject’s exile, I reminded him, and Dickens in America is not a story of exile. “All art is exile,” he said.’
‘I suppose he has a point.’
‘He does, and I’ve a feeling he’s made it many times before, but we’re not the Culture Show. And anyway, I prefer Lawrence to Dickens even if he doesn’t. I have a soft spot for those angry Northerners you speak of.’ (As for the sex-obsessed, she had nothing to say.)
‘And you’re confident that whoever he goes for you’ll be able to work with him?’
‘Oh, yes. Why shouldn’t I be?’
‘He has a reputation for being difficult.’
‘Writers are difficult. That’s why they’re writers.’
‘That sounds like a point you’ve made before.’
‘I’ve worked with enough of them.’
And she had. Difficult writers were her speciality. Pigs, prigs, pricks, pedants – they were all thrown her way.
‘I still think it might be worth steering him on to Lawrence. It’ll make a better programme if he doesn’t get on with Lawrence, especially if you do.’
She doesn’t answer. She is thinking about Lawrence’s notorious public brawls with his wife. The last time she made a programme with a Northern genius he brought his wife along on the shoot, demanded she be part of the action, and bickered with her endlessly. Before the filming was through, the bickering had become the story.
The Northern genius never forgave her for exposing his marriage on television.
‘No, you did that,’ she told him. ‘My job as a director is to let the tale unfold.’
A Lawrentian sort of thing to say.
She is wearing a black suit with a faint stripe and not-too-high black patent shoes. More daggers than rapiers. On the way out, her head down, her narrow face harbouring shadows, she passes a senior producer who once propositioned her at a Corporation party. He has been awkward with her since, though she has never held a proposition against any man. He takes her in at a glance and suppresses a shudder. He’s amazed he ever had the courage to try it on. She looks like an assassin, he thinks.