He can’t fully explain why he’s been thinking about her as much as he has. She doesn’t fit his usual category of chimera woman. She doesn’t flit, faerie-like, through his imagination. He likes women who are unfinished in some way so that he can complete them, but this woman gives off a forbidding self-sufficiency – slender, elegant, carefully styled (nothing left to chance), in the prime of her early middle age, with stormy eyes and that commodious brow, conscious of her power to persuade. ‘No, please don’t involve your agent at this stage,’ she had asked him. Implored him? No. Too confident to implore. But not frightened to play the supplicant. He liked the way she said ‘please’ with challenging eyes, as though she meant to baffle him. Who was asking what from whom? Otherwise, attentive, sleek, like those thrushes in a Ted Hughes poem he’d read at school. Yes, she reminded him of a bird. Terrifying? That was to go too far too soon. But she eyed him, as a bird might. What did she see, he’d been wondering. Danger or prey?
He cares too much what women see.
If women stopped seeing him, he wonders, would he exist?
Scrub that. It’s a false piece of wondering. It’s as though he’s rehearsing shedding the man in him to see how he would feel without it.
But scrub that, too.
He is always being asked why he writes. One day, he says to be invisible. Another, he says to allay shame. His best answer is: to be someone else. Above all, he tells groups of would-be writers, I urge you to reject the cliché that we write in order to find ourselves. If we did we’d be horrified and never write a word again. Good writers write like summer snakes, to slough their skins.
Secretly, he suspects he writes to get his own back on Miss Gore who planted a seed of doubt slap bang in the garden of his tentative maleness in the hope that only doubt would grow there. He writes to fool her into thinking she was wrong.
Looking at the words on his latest unevolving manuscript he isn’t sure he’s succeeded. Leaving it to the genius of words worked fine when he was super-young. You have to be relaxed and flexible to do that. You have to be confident that words will find their way through you. You need there to be no hairs on your chin. Forty-whatever-he-is is not exactly decrepit. One interviewer recently called him ‘boyish’. But the passages through which art flows are not as unclogged as they were. His concentration, too, is fogging over. Something’s scratching at his brain with the promise of a diversion. It’s like the end of term. Vacation. A boy on holiday doesn’t have to be a man. He’s feeling provisional, the sure sign of which is that he’s toying with writing the sort of fables he composed at school. How the elephant forgot. How the hyena lost its sense of humour. How the man lost his balls.
In the garden of his productive maleness the tree of doubt has grown so many leaves it blots out the sun.
Sun or no sun, he is tired of the view.