Thanks to that phenomental memory of his, Quaid is able to give after-dinner talks without notes. ‘On this, at least, Plato, Jesus Christ and John Lennon agreed,’ he tells audiences, ‘all you need is love.’ He doesn’t go on to say what he thinks, which is that love isn’t just all you need but all there is. The rest is death. You don’t bring up the subject of death at a cancer-charity dinner in the Dorchester.
The rest. He can never hear that phrase without remembering his attempt to defend the poet Andrew Marvell against Edina Gore’s derision. ‘But thirty thousand to the rest, Miss.’ Much of his subsequent thinking is directed at her.
‘“To His Coy Mistress” isn’t a poem about desire,’ he wrote to her from Oxford. ‘It is a poem about death. But at my back I always hear / Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near. Not sometimes, Miss Gore – always. The time the poet imagines lavishing on the woman’s breasts is time he knows he doesn’t have.’
When he doesn’t hear back he assumes the wingèd chariot must have whisked her away.
Despite believing that his work should do the talking for him, the Once-Wunderkind discusses it frequently at conferences and seminars. He has a good voice and likes the sound of it when he’s in the mood to hear himself. You can break every writerly rule for charity … and an appreciative audience.
Though he believes it becomes him as playwright to be seen in jeans and a dirty black t-shirt, for such an event as this he wears a velvet suit (also stylishly in need of a dry-clean) and Byronic necktie that make him look like a French symbolist poet just come in from a long night walking the streets of Paris. He knows that audiences of women of an age to be charitable want a speaker to take them where they’ve never been. He sheds a decade when he speaks. He is witty and risqué. The husbands don’t much like him. This is a matter of satisfaction to him.
Yes, he’s come a long way from the nervous schoolboy who knew nothing of women other than what he’d read about them in The Oxford Book of English Verse. Ask why he has to keep telling himself that and he will answer that the nervous schoolboy never leaves the grown man altogether. He is every man’s secret.
On the front row next to the honorary life president of the charity is his wife. A waspish observer might remark that she too looks as though she’s come in from a long night walking the streets of Paris. She sits round-shouldered, showing a weary cleavage and looking cold, in a sequinned dress which, like her expression, she has worn for evenings at the Dorchester listening to her husband being brilliant far too often. A number of her sequins have gone missing. Not impossibly she has pulled them off.
Her mouth is twisted into a hellish smile.
The honorary life president leans into her and whispers in her ear. ‘Is your husband always as wickedly funny as this?’ she wants to know.
‘Always,’ his wife says. ‘He is a riot from morning to night.’
‘You are lucky in that case,’ the honorary life president says. ‘Mine hasn’t told a joke or cracked a smile in twenty years.’
‘And mine’s done nothing else,’ his wife says.
Selena. They originally met at a reading he was giving on the stage of the National Theatre. She was there to sketch him for a magazine but couldn’t concentrate on his appearance. If only she’d known how to draw sentences. They spiralled out of him without pause or punctuation, as though from an invisible and inexhaustible source. They ensorcelled her, enveloping her in the smoky perfume of their fluency, evocative of the Northern city he came from – flat, built-up and tarmacked – and yet at the same time airily fanciful, as though promising a life of abstraction everlasting. ‘Just tell me things,’ she said when he took her to his bed. ‘Teach me about English literature. Start with the drama. Who wrote the first ever play? I don’t ask who wrote the best. I know the answer to that.’
How he loved appreciation.
How he needed appreciation.
Who am I, he would ask himself when his confidence would suddenly – unaccountably – drop to dangerously low levels. I am not what I seem to be. I am a lodger in my own mind. I don’t belong there. I am burned-out. I am fraudulent. I confuse sentimentality with feeling. I call this self-criticism but it is self-indulgence, or would be if I had a self. I am never not banal. I am yesterday’s man. I regurgitate clapped-out thoughts.
Not true. When he wrote, words appeared that weren’t other people’s. They weren’t his either, but that didn’t matter. As a book or play took shape, so did he.
The only time this happened outside of writing was when he was in the arms of a woman. He went to her bed as shapeless and as unformed as clay and she blew into his nostrils whereupon, miracle of miracles – MAN. A woman not only made him a person, she woke him up. Made him almost of his time.
Before they both realised they were embracing cadavers.
The morbid fuck.
Charmed by how charmed she was by him, he talked to this new wonderful, willing, willowy woman with a sibilant, silvery name – Selena – as no man ever had before, bestowing centuries of praise on everything about her that had no specific name: her aura, her presence, her indefinable desirability. Though his admiration of her made her blush with its extravagance, she would find it hard, in later years, to remember a single thing he’d actually said. He was no more succinct as a lover than he was as a writer. Explicitness horrified him. It was as though language had the power to release a terrible unseemliness which he was tasked with keeping forever out of sight.
Tasked by whom?
You might as well ask who commanded him to write.
‘What did you actually say to make me feel so sexy?’ Selena would ask years later, still trying to work out why she’d ever fallen for him.
Quaid pulled his Oxford distaste face. ‘Sexy? You know I hate that word. Next you’ll be asking why I fancied you.’
‘Why did you fancy me?’
‘I didn’t. I felt the force of you.’
‘Like being run over on a motorway?’
‘More like being blown over in a gale.’
His vocabulary wasn’t just chaste, it was circumventive. The one adjective she can remember from that first night that spoke with any sensual directness to her was ‘open’.
‘I blush to this day remembering you say it,’ she would tell him.
‘Precisely,’ was his reply. ‘When it comes to desire, the less said the—’
‘—sexier?’
He laughed. He no longer loved her but was reminded why he had.
‘But tell me,’ she went on, ‘I’ve never understood. Why is sexy wrong but open right? What’s implicit about open?’
‘I don’t say sexy is wrong, I say it’s popular, common and borrowed. It doesn’t describe what anyone sees for themselves. Open – well sometimes there is only one word that describes what you do see.’
‘And what part of me was so open that you could find no other word?’
‘All of you.’
They are no longer getting on. ‘Closed’ is the word for them now. She is jealous of the woman she was.
On his way to relieve himself, he sees his visitor of a couple of days before in front of him. He increases his pace to catch up with her and taps her on the shoulder. ‘Well here’s a surprise,’ he says. In the event, it’s too much of a one. It isn’t her. When she turns, she shows him soft, blue, pellucid eyes. The eyes he was expecting to see were a stormy Atlantic grey. The foreheads are different too. This woman has a far lower hairline, a brow less troubled, less commodious, less gracefully arched. Heavens! A commodious brow. Had he noticed that much about her?
Tonight, surprised by this moment of disappointment, he sleeps badly. He doesn’t like to have made a social blunder, however small. Will the stranger think he was making a pass? He is too quick to feel a fool. And then too quick to be annoyed with himself for caring. But mistaking one person for another is surely not sufficient to explain this. Something else is wrong.
I’m lonely, he thinks. In the past, whenever he felt lonely he would go looking for someone to share his loneliness with. Not in a rapacious spirit. More little boy lost. He hasn’t progressed much, but at least now he has work to fall back on. A play a day keeps the doctor away. And he no longer experiences loneliness as a non-specific ache. These days he has to have a woman in mind before he realises how lonely he is without her.
He keeps The Oxford Book of English Verse by his bed. It was once his boast that he knew half of it by heart. Especially the two great ages of love poetry – the early seventeenth century when love was valued as an accomplishment, an expression of character and intellect; and the late nineteenth when it was feared as an illness. He can recite more of the seventeenth century than the nineteenth, but enjoys declaiming ‘The Lady of Shalott’ when he’s feeling feverish. Lancelot Quaid, riding down to Camelot with his armour ringing. ‘I see you more as the Lady,’ Selena says, with an acid laugh. ‘Waiting for the curse to come upon you – as I did.’
To calm his agitation he goes looking for a poem – any poem – whose familiarity will relax him. The book opens where it was opened last, and opened a thousand times before, at Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They Flee From Me’, a poem said to describe the poet’s dangerous liaison with Anne Boleyn in the days before – for her safety and no doubt for his too – she ran from him like a startled deer. It is a poem whose sad recollection of happier, hotter times, when Anne Boleyn all sweetly did him kiss, makes Quaid shiver with the cold of loneliness.
All sweetly, all sweetly – God in his mercy!
A man of Quaid’s sentimental, romantic bent, needs to be all sweetly kissed every day of the week.
He drifts off to sleep at last with Anne Boleyn’s arms about his neck.