Victory

Was I momentarily dismayed? I can’t think why I would have been, but memory persists in noting a split second’s shadow falling before the appropriate response rose to my lips.

He told me the full story a couple of weeks later when I had a meeting in the city and decided to make a night of it.

I dropped off my things at his house, and we walked to our usual restaurant under the sycamores, the darkness and quiet of the neighbourhood with its ornate old brownstones and occasional modern apartment buildings reminding us both of the London we’d grown up in, though with that wilder atmosphere of even the most genteel New York neighbourhoods; the pervasive sense of more reckless lives being lived under more unpredictable conditions. We’d agreed early on in our friendship that this quality was what gave this city its edge over London, and was one of the reasons why we preferred to live there.

‘My treat this time,’ Marco said as we entered. ‘I’m in the mood for a celebration.’

The place was packed, with a good roar of happy voices blasting out through the door. The maître d’ greeted us warmly and led us to a corner table. Busboys hurried over, eagerly plying us with ice-water and crostini as if we’d crossed deserts to get there and were in urgent need of resuscitation. A waitress, new since we’d last visited, asked if we’d like to hear about the evening’s special cocktails.

‘We’d love to hear about them,’ Marco said with his quick, raffish friendliness. The two had some jokey back-and-forth about the absurd ingredients of some of the drinks and Marco talked me into getting an artisanal gin decoction with pickle brine and smashed strawberries. He ordered two bottles of wine, to be opened right away, whipping out a pair of reading glasses to examine the menu and tucking them back in an inside pocket the instant he was done.

He was evidently his old self again. The Brexit vote had happened while he was in London, and he described how he’d taken advantage of the collapsing pound to go on a spree at Selfridges where he’d picked up some new outfits, including the dandyish rust-coloured cashmere jacket he was wearing. (I don’t mean to portray him as an opportunist, just to convey the unguarded tone we relaxed into when it was only the two of us.)

‘Look …’ He opened the jacket to show me a silk lining patterned with bright fishing lures.

‘I love Ted Baker.’ She ran her thumb over the fabric with quick, easy familiarity. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

We ordered our food and got straight into the details of his London trip. I’m always interested in the minutiae of such stories and I pushed Marco to remember everything he could. He seemed to enjoy being pushed, even when the details didn’t reflect well on him. Most people use self-deprecation as a clever way to look good, but the stories Marco told against himself seemed genuinely intended to make him look bad, and I had some respect for that.

The idea that had come to him that night in our guest room arose from our conversation earlier in the day. It had to do with Julia’s university boyfriend – the apparent cause of her change of heart in Marco’s bedroom.

‘He may be now. Yes, I think that was his subject. Don’t tell me he’s become famous …’

‘Yeah, but he was banned from our house after praising someone he shouldn’t have. Some postmodernist, no doubt …’

Marco laughed – the embattled lives of the men and women of our parents’ generation, with their lofty principles constantly requiring indignant defence, was a source of amusement to us both.

‘Yes, an actual letter! Remember those? I’d totally forgotten about it till that night at your house. I was lying in bed scrabbling through the past for the zillionth time in search of any scrap of evidence that might help prove my version of events—’

‘Oh, I did. He’s dead. He must have been in his forties when I worked with him, so – a drag but not totally surprising. Anyway, the boyfriend’s name popped into my head and for some reason I seemed to be seeing it handwritten in ink on cartridge paper, and I remembered this letter he’d written me. Julia had told him about our affair, and he wanted to meet.’

‘To discuss the situation, see what sort of person I was, what my intentions were.’

‘It didn’t happen. I don’t think I even answered him. I imagine I dismissed him in my mind as a chump who didn’t merit the effort of a reply from someone as busy and grand and generally superior as myself. No doubt I was further puffed up by the fact that I was shagging his girlfriend. That’s the way I was in those days – very arrogant, very contemptuous. I also took it for granted I was going to be massively famous one day and that biographers were going to be beating a path to my door, so I kept every scrap that had anything to do with my life or career. Every press cutting, every contract; everything short of bus tickets, basically, and probably some of those too. And certainly every letter. I stopped after I moved here, but I’d packed it all up in my parents’ attic when I left London, and no one’s touched it since.’

A busboy cleared our appetisers and the waitress appeared with our main courses – mine was a pasta dish with chorizo and clams in a bright orange sea-urchin sauce.

She gave a laugh with a flirty ripple to it that seemed genuine enough, even allowing for the transactional aspect of these exchanges. Marco gazed after her for a moment as she left; not leering, but with an impassive reflexiveness, as if he were unaware of it. There was nothing of the ageing roué about him, except, in some lights, a slight antique colouration in his teeth, which were also crowded and uneven, like mine: little crooked monuments to 1970s English dentistry.

He brought up a picture of the letter on his phone. It was written in a neat, legible hand on unlined writing paper, with the date in small roman numerals at the top. I scrolled through it.

Dear Marco (if I may),

I believe you know who I am. I hope you will forgive this intrusion, but I am trying to settle a matter of great importance concerning the future: my own but also that of our mutual friend Julia Gault, and perhaps yourself too. As you know, Julia and I have been together for several years and have been planning to get married after I finish my doctorate. I don’t need to tell you that Julia is enormously attracted to you and has possibly fallen a little in love with you. Obviously this has been painful for me to discover. It is painful to acknowledge too. But I accept that these things happen, and I ask you to believe that my greatest concern here is for Julia’s happiness, not my own. I want only what is best for her, and since she is in a state of some confusion about her own feelings at the moment, I feel I should try to bring some clarity to the situation myself. To that end I would like to ask you to give me an hour or so of your time.

I realise I have no right to question you about your ‘intentions’, and that anyway Julia is free to do as she pleases, regardless of what those intentions may be. But it would be enormously helpful to me to meet you in person, and sound you out on this delicate matter. I assure you I bear you no hostility: quite the reverse. I have long admired your work in television, and I am more than prepared to accept Julia’s high opinion of you, expressed to me in a long and very honest conversation we had yesterday, in which she described you as an exceptional human being: ‘exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented’.

I do hope this request will not sound too strange to you, and that you will consider granting it. I would be greatly honoured.

Yours,

Gerald Woolley

‘I know. Even better than I remembered!’ “Exceptionally decent as well as exceptionally talented.” How extremely helpful is that?’

I was referring to the letter’s honesty and candour, not its practical utility, but I let that pass.

‘I mean, I know victims sometimes send weirdly affectionate messages to their attackers,’ Marco continued. ‘The Ghomeshi case fell apart because of that. But this is her talking to a third party, not me. And look at the date. That’s after the Belfast programme was aired, meaning after that night in the hotel. “Exceptionally decent” – i.e. not some fucking caveman. You can imagine how relieved I was to find this!’

He’d brought the letter to the Messenger in person as soon as he unearthed it, taxiing across London to their offices near the Embankment. The elaborate security in the lobby made it impossible to surprise Sauer as he’d have liked. Reception had to call up with his name. An assistant had to come down to verify that Marco was who he said he was. A photo of him had to be taken and printed onto a pass. But none of this diminished the pleasure of confronting his nemesis.

‘Bland. Early forties, I’d say. A bit overweight. Gingery hair and eyebrows. Puffy face without a lot going on in it. He started out in that ridiculous flowery mode of his, telling me what a pleasant surprise it was to meet me in person. He even complimented me on a programme of mine he claimed to’ve seen as a student. I shoved the letter at him. You should have seen him as he read it. He was trying to look unimpressed, but these giveaway signs were twitching all over him. He was swallowing, darting his little tongue out to wet his lips, drumming his fingers on the desk … When he was finished he cleared his throat and sort of tucked his chin into his neck, looking at me with this weird expression that I think was supposed to be gently reproving, as if he’d caught me trying to pull a fast one. He started questioning the authenticity of the letter, arguing that I could have written it myself, or that Gerald Woolley might be somehow in cahoots with me after all these years.

‘I didn’t bother arguing back – just told him he could think what he liked and that if he still wanted to go ahead and publish the piece, that was his call but he could expect a robust reaction from me. He’d gone bright pink in the cheeks by this point. “I’ll show it to Legal, if it’ll make you more comfortable,” he says, still trying to sound like he doesn’t believe it’ll make any difference. I told him I wasn’t going to leave the original but that he could make a copy if he wanted. He said in that case he wouldn’t bother, since he was only offering for my sake. I got up to leave, basically calling his bluff. I’d just turned my back when I heard him say in this strangled voice: “All right. We’ll make a copy.” So that’s what we did. I didn’t hear from him after that. In fact, I haven’t heard a word from him since. He’s apparently too much of a prick to let me know they’ve pulled the piece. But they have.’

‘Yeah. She called me at my parents’ house a couple of days later – Sauer must have told her about my visit. I recognised her voice immediately even though she sounded like she’d been through the wringer a few times, which no doubt she has.’

He paused, looking a bit blank suddenly, as if he’d lost his thread. Or possibly he was just exhausted.

‘Oh, I don’t remember exactly. Something about me being vindictive, wrecking her one chance at getting back in the game, I don’t know. She wasn’t very coherent.’

‘I guess she hadn’t considered it from my point of view. Maybe Sauer never told her I was putting up a fight. Though he did get her to change that one line. Well, who knows? Anyway, that’s how I learned they’d pulled the piece.’

‘Was she … was her point just that you’d stopped her getting published, or was it still about the – you know – the accusation itself?’

He looked nettled for a moment, but then nodded sombrely as though to acknowledge an obligation to satisfy my curiosity. I was his appointed auditor, after all.

‘I mean, nothing new. She said what she’d written was true and that she had a right to publish it, and I told her it wasn’t and she didn’t. That’s basically all.’ He closed his lips, breathing in through his nose, his fierce features expressing the affronted dignity that I’d come to recognise as his way of showing pain.

After a moment, he added: ‘But I guess hearing her say it, hearing her actual voice in my ear telling me I’d made her do something she didn’t want to do, was different from reading it in Sauer’s email.’

‘Something like that.’ He smiled drily. ‘She hung up on me before we could get too deeply into it.’

The waitress came to refill our glasses, and he paused, observing her with his coolly appraising eye as she poured and withdrew.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t get satisfaction from the thought of Julia being upset, however much she maligned me. That I can promise you.’

‘On the other hand,’ he said, ‘defeating Sauer after the shit he put me through – that was pure joy!’

I raised my glass. I wasn’t certain I’d extracted every significant nuance of his conversation with Julia, but I felt I’d pushed him as far as I could without spoiling the atmosphere.

We finished the bottle and Marco ordered crème brûlées and Gorgonzola with Vin Santo and then some grappa. I’d drunk more than I wanted, but I was experiencing a resurgence of that irrational negative reaction I’d felt when he first told me the news, and I thought alcohol might help suppress it. I didn’t understand this lurking animus. He’d been wrongly accused. He’d defended himself; fought back single-handed against a national newspaper, and won. Why would I begrudge him his feeling of triumph? It wasn’t as if I had any reason to doubt his version of events. And I didn’t doubt it. There just seemed to be some resistance on my part to actual rejoicing. Had I internalised the campus outlook, I wondered, with its endless, tedious refinements of anxiety over power and privilege? I suspected this must be the case: these virtuous attitudes have a way of insinuating themselves even as you resist them, as if the very act of resistance creates the pathways they need to establish themselves in your psyche.

Back at his house he smoked a cigar in his partitioned living room with its mismatched charity-shop furniture and odd remnants of ornate wood panelling. (He’d bought the building, a former Single Room Occupancy with warrens of tiny rooms on every floor, long before gentrification had spread to the neighbourhood, and was defiant about not restoring it to its pre-SRO condition, or in any other way tarting it up.)

I made my excuses as soon as I politely could, and staggered upstairs where I had the sparsely furnished top floor to myself. Passing his bedroom on the second floor I noticed several pairs of scuffed leather ankle boots, all stylishly pointed at the toe as if to address an idea of locomotion inseparable from that of impalement, lined up in pairs against the wall, and a sort of cheap amusement passed through me, the hostility of which I preferred not to examine too closely. I was feeling surfeited, bloated – not just with food and drink but teeming, incoherent thoughts. My head started spinning as soon as I got into bed. The ceiling tilted ominously. A vivid sense of the viscous orange sauce on my pasta came back and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up our celebratory dinner. I held it down, just, overcome by the still stronger urge to sleep.

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