6

He began to see birds and animals everywhere; he became increasingly conscious of the encroachments of the brute creation. He heard the shuddering cries of owls at night, in the heart of the city. Sometimes he seemed to smell a warm, rank, feral breath on the air. Once, passing the tall dank Victorian houses that border Sefton Park, he glanced through an open gate and saw a fox standing on the gravel drive not ten yards away; it looked back at him for several moments before moving off into thickets of laurel. A woman sitting next to him on the bus, with whom he discussed the matter, told him that the week before she had seen not one but two foxes, emerging side by side from a gutted house in Toxteth. It was on the bus route – she had seen them from the upper deck of a number five. A council employee, a road-sweeper with whom Benson fell into talk, told him he had seen stoats and weasels in quiet streets; and once, on a grass verge, an adder. Rats too were on the increase; one day Benson counted four feasting companionably in an alley among ripped black rubbish bags. Later, when the April weeds were rampant in the enclosure behind the house, he saw a kestrel swoop down at a sparrow and narrowly miss, not more than three or four feet from the house wall.

Predators were coming in then. Benson could picture them, exploiting the growing areas of waste, breeding in the choked parks and in the neglected tracts of Liverpool’s dockland, among the miles of ruinous wharves and warehouses, questing through the vales of the suburbs, penetrating to the inner city where amidst the rubble the small mammals they preyed on would be multiplying too …

When he looked at himself in the mirror for signs of kinship he saw a mournful, obsessive animal there, an ageing specimen of homo bloccatus, rather handsome, with pale insomniac eyes slanting slightly downward under dishevelled eyebrows, the small triangle of scar tissue showing whitely below the left cheekbone.

By that time he had given up all pretence of working. He continued to compile notes and to offer advice of a professional nature to his Fictioneers. Most of his time was spent walking around the city, waiting for something to happen. He tried to notice things, to involve himself in things, so that he would be ready, so that he would not be taken by surprise. The sense of change was in everything. The lake in the park glimmered with it, the sky was swollen with it, he heard it in the outcries of gulls over the Mersey, in the shouts of the men selling evening papers at street corners. Sometimes a painful, only just bearable tension mounted in him at the thought of this looming, possibly violent transformation. He grew frightened that it might be his own final breakdown that was impending. Once, in the stress of this, he overcame his chronic irresolution and made an attempt to phone Alma Corrigan, whose face he often saw before him. He was in Smithdown Road at the time, slightly drunk. He tried six phone boxes before his resolve failed and found them all vandalised in one way or another, smashed, jammed, wrenched out. When he had recovered from the frustration he was obliged to recognise that this too was a sign.

Often he was still wandering about late at night and in dangerous parts of the city – dangerous for any pedestrian, let alone an ageing man of sedentary occupation. His fear of assault and injury, the knowledge that he would not be so quick or so strong as those that might attack him, that however purposeful he sought to appear he was visibly not securely at home in these streets or anywhere else for that matter – all this engendered a vein of violent fantasy. A fearsome gang of young thugs ringed him round, jeering, preparing to put the boot in, not knowing how adept he was in all branches of the martial arts, not knowing he had studied under oriental masters. They rushed at him in a body, cowardly brutes, ten against one. With marvellous economy of movement he strewed them all over the pavement. I did not seek this confrontation … Fear, the lonely rhythm of his walking, set up an amazing vindictiveness in him, a capacity for inflicting grievous bodily harm he had not known he possessed. One – two – three – Tac! Hammerblow on the bridge of a nose, double kidney-chop. That’ll teach you. Dextrous, deadly, spin round again and a knee to that bastard’s groin, one is kneeling vomiting, another groans and snivels with a broken arm, a third irreparably ruptured, ruined for life. Thought you had easy game, eh?

With time, however, this savage sequence grew refined. The sublimation of art came to rescue Benson. He found a phrase full of snarling menace: banana split. Now when the gang surrounded him he fixed the ringleader with a cold eye. I don’t think you know with whom you have to deal. Jeers from the thugs at his meticulous grammar. Level glance, slight smile. Think again, chump. You’ve heard, I suppose, of the … banana split? At these words they would cower back, skulk away into the protective colouring of the darkness, leaving him free to pursue his unhurried way.

Thus, in spite of impotence, in the midst of affliction, a belief in the primacy and power of the word still remained to Benson, in fantasy at least.

Words lingered in his mind, snatches of song, things said to him or overheard; he could not decide their exact significance but felt sure they fitted into some close, intricate pattern. Athena, patroness of weaving … Then there was the odd remark made one Tuesday afternoon in parting by Carter, senior citizen, archetypal fictioneer. Carter’s novel, which was entitled Can Spring Be Far Behind?, was running at over 600 pages now, with the central relationship still unresolved. His was the opposite problem to that of poor Hogan, who could not get started.

Carter sat facing him across the desk, grizzled, square-headed, argumentative, in a paisley cravat and a ginger overcoat, which he had declined to take off. Benson was looking in a glazed way through the latest chapter. The silence was lengthening.

Sheila appeared to be musing softly in this flushed and fervent moment between their embraces. Albert urged himself to take the initiative. Knowing her value and her vulnerability, he did not want her to think he was claiming sexual favours in return for doing the plastering job on her ceiling but it was a case of nothing venture nothing win and it was not as if he was breaking new ground as he had been vouchsafed more than kisses on previous visits. To go away with less would be backsliding. He slid his hand along her back under the silk blouse, his fingers coursing and caressing along the warm flesh until they touched the stretched elastic of her unsprung brassière.

Unsprung? Benson looked up vaguely. To spring a brassière? Was that really the mot juste? And there was the rather ludicrous echo, no doubt quite unconscious: to go away with less would be backsliding; so he stayed and slid a hand along her back. Worth mentioning? Probably not. He wondered if Carter ever re-read his work. He said, “Albert is a bit ponderous, isn’t he? Cranking himself up to get a hand under her blouse. When you think how often he’s been there before.” His mind lurched sickeningly over the vast savannah of Carter’s novel. “Quite a few times,” he said.

“Well,” Carter said. “He is a ponderous character. He always ponders everything.”

“That is not what I meant,” Benson said. “Then there is this habit of alliteration which seems to be growing on you. ‘Flushed and fervent’, ‘coursing and caressing’, that type of thing. It’s a good occasional device but it shouldn’t be over-used or it gives too much appearance of rhetoric. I like ‘knowing her value and her vulnerability’, because the words describe two distinct strands of feeling in Albert. But, as I say, I should use it sparingly or you’ll end by irritating the reader.” Benson summoned a smile. “You already risk that by the sheer length of your book,” he said.

“I think this chapter takes things forward a bit,” Carter said in the accents of Liverpool, which to Benson’s ear seemed always to fall somewhere between complaint and aggression.

“Well, it gets Albert down from his ladder. He had been up there quite a long time, hadn’t he, plastering Sheila’s ceiling? I suppose that is forward motion of a kind. But it is very repetitive, isn’t it? I mean, last time he came he fixed the washers on her taps. And it ends up with this sex scene again.”

“It is cyclic, yes,” Carter said. “But then, so is life.”

Silence, after this brief exchange, returned to the room. Benson turned the pages in slow desperation. He felt paralysis threatening him. “That won’t do,” he said, seizing on a phrase. ‘Twin orbs?’

He paused again, however, working his jaw in the slight, mildly convulsive way habitual to him at difficult moments. He hated to deal a blow in this sensitive literary area, even to Carter, who never admitted faults. “It isn’t quite apt,” he said at last. “It doesn’t do the trick, it doesn’t convey anything to the reader. It has an archaic ring to it.” A joke might be in order: jolly Carter along a bit, take the sting out of the criticism. “In this day and age,” he said, “we can be more direct. This is 1988, we’ve had eight years of it, we can call a cow a cow.” He essayed a puff of laughter. “Not a dairy quadruped, you know.”

“Margaret Thatcher is a woman of character,” Carter said. “She’s got guts. She is making this country great again.”

“Tits would be too colloquial, I’ll grant you that,” Benson said hastily. “What’s wrong with breasts?” He had forgotten that Carter was a Tory voter. The last thing he wanted was a political argument. “The word ‘twin’ is redundant, really, isn’t it?” he said. “Everyone knows women have two of them, as indeed do men. I mean, you wouldn’t say twin testicles, would you? And as for orbs …”

Without looking, he knew the kind of patient obstinacy that would have formed on his client’s broad, big-chinned face. Carter never took kindly to criticism. “Redundancy is dangerous, Harold,” he continued after a moment. “So is euphemism. One might call them the twin demons that besmirch a person’s prose style. You have somehow managed to pack them both into a phrase of two words. We live in a world where language is used to cloak the most appalling realities. You should see some of the things in my scrapbooks. It is our duty as writers not to aid this process.”

Benson raised his head and assumed a smiling expression. In the midst of his words he had felt the onset of a familiar pain: that proud use of the collective ‘we’ – like a thumb pressed on the wound of his dumbness. Below this immediate distress lay a sense of mourning for his ruined world and self so profound that it needed no particular form of words to be released; it was ready to resonate, to gong out in his mind, at the slightest stroke of memory or association. “Not by one jot or tittle,” he said.

Carter had not replied and there was no indication on his face that he was about to. Gesture was needed to fill the gap, raise the temperature, inject some brio into the conversation. Benson hoisted his shoulders, raised both hands palms upwards and caused them to shake in a small frenzy of remonstrance. “What’s wrong with breasts?” he said. “Sheila has got breasts, not orbs, okay? If anatomy is destiny, as Freud said, let’s at least try to get it right.”

Part of the problem was that in Carter’s novel they were never fully exposed, though Albert persevered; they were always encased in some integument, delicate but definite. This constriction must be important to Carter since he had not allowed Sheila to unhook herself as yet. Retreating from the implications of this, he said, “I’ll just check the rest of the chapter. Be with you in a minute.”

He ran his eye down to the last paragraph. Albert had departed, unsatisfied as always. Sheila was alone in her bedroom. With the mirrors revealing her breasts she cupped and raised them as he had done, sensing for herself the majesty of their varying contours and gyrations round the central points …

The real question, of course, did not concern anatomy at all. Carter was approaching seventy, a sturdy, practical man, a retired builder, admirer of Thatcherism and the free market economy and the Spirit of the Falklands. That such a man should take to fiction in late career was strange enough but how had it come about that he had gone astray among his own inventions, lost himself in the trackless interior of his own novel, a strangely static world of odd jobs about the house, tea-breaks, unconsummated love and lingerie in blushing disarray, pantie-girdles, cami-knickers, gossamer bra cups, sliding shoulder straps, frictive nylon surfaces? There was deep mystery here, especially since the novel had not begun in that way at all, but as a story of dockland and family life in the Liverpool of the 1950s. Now hero and heroine had gone off the rails somehow; in chapter after chapter dogged Albert was stripping shy Sheila to her undies and then for one reason or another going no further.

Carter had changed too, in a rather worrying way. His prose had got more and more muffled and meandering, increasingly clotted with strange, obsolete poeticisms. Then there were the clothes: the black felt hat, the knee-length, ginger-coloured overcoat with the Edwardian collar trimming in nylon fur. He had been reading literary theory too, it seemed: as his style deteriorated his ability to score points increased.

“I see you’ve got the phrase ‘dizzy orbs’ on the next page,” Benson remarked, looking up from his reading.

Carter made some reply, rendered indistinct by the fact that he was wiping his nose as he spoke.

“What did you say?” Not for the first time Benson wondered why Carter kept on coming to see him. Authorial vanity presumably. It was an outing for him too, of course. More to the point, he thought suddenly, why do I go on? Hogan due tomorrow, and after him Anthea Best-Cummings in her black leathers, smelling of machine oil from her powerful motorbike, laden with poems full of expletives and references to menstruation. It wasn’t the money even when he could get it. It’s because I daren’t move. He noticed that Carter was smiling. “I didn’t quite catch that,” he said.

“Transferred epithet,” Carter said. “Albert felt himself getting dizzy at the sight of them. It’s called a transferred epithet.”

His smile was triumphant and shy. He was back at school, in the rare position of being able to tell teacher something. Benson felt a sudden rush of affection and a sort of sorrow for Carter, for his heavy shoulders and rough face, the incongruous flamboyance of his clothes, the hopeless ineptness of his prose, above all for his entrapment, in the evening of his days, in these treacherous marshes of fiction. “The sooner it is brought back home to roost the better,” he said. “You’ve been coming to see me for about a year now, haven’t you, Harold?”

“Fourteen months.”

“And your novel – you had been working on that for some years previously, hadn’t you?”

“I commenced it eight years ago. After my wife passed away. I had to do something. I’m well into it now, of course.”

“You are, yes. Well, I’ll tell you my opinion. I think the book is hanging fire at the moment. Worse than that, it is stagnating. You have got into the marshlands. Now there is one clear and obvious way to take it forward. Albert and Sheila must be precipitated into something. And as far as I can see there are only two choices open: either they must tear themselves apart for ever or they must get much more serious on the sofa.” He paused, then said, “Not to put too fine a point on it, these two must finish things or they must fuck.”

“They can’t, not just at present.” Carter spoke in a tone of calm authority.

“Why can’t they?”

“Albert respects her too much, for one thing. Besides, he is lacking in confidence. She has been married before and he is afraid of not coming up to scratch. Also, he feels unworthy of her. But he is very good with his hands and he hopes she will be touched by these odd jobs about the house he is doing for her. Like a knight of old, that is his way of serving her. She has been married to this bastard of a husband, she has been badly hurt and feels that she can never trust a man again. She cannot give of herself. What she is doing is protecting herself all the time but Albert doesn’t understand this and it makes him feel more unworthy than ever.” He brooded for some moments. Then he said, “It is what you might call an impasse.”

“But why all the groping on the sofa?”

“I thought you would have tumbled to that,” Carter said, with some return of the triumphant look. “It is symbolical. Albert is groping for his identity. This is a quest novel, really. Sheila is questing for her self-respect after this disastrous marriage. She is trying to keep her options open.”

“And her legs closed. I see, yes.” Benson was dismayed slightly to have been caught out at this symbolic level – one on which he himself habitually moved. “Well, I am looking forward to the next chapter,” he said.

It was the signal for departure. Carter began gathering his papers together. “Relationships can be complicated,” he said, on what sounded like a confessional note.

“They can, yes.” Benson watched Albert and Sheila being shuffled together and stowed away in the bag Carter now used for the purpose. This was capacious and poison green in colour like the grass that grows over bogland. Carter always brought the whole manuscript in case there was dispute or some need to refer back. In the course of time, like some prodigious cuckoo, it had outgrown the briefcase which had been its previous home.

“I’m getting into it now,” he said on his way to the door. “I am getting inside the characters.”

“You must know Albert pretty well by this time.”

It was now that Carter came out with the remark that made him a sort of forerunner, part of Athena’s weft, though Benson did not realise this at the time. “Yes indeed,” he said, with the pleasurable alertness of an author discussing his work, “but it is Sheila mainly. I am getting close to Sheila, very close. Between you and me,” he said, standing on the top step, glancing in the direction of Hardman Street, where double-deckers were passing, “these days sometimes I feel I am Sheila.”

Lingering there, holding his virulent bag, he seemed disposed to further, deeper confidences, as if his enlargement into the street had dispelled some reticence. Benson, however, felt he had heard enough. “I don’t like to seem pressing, Harold, you know that, but you owe me now for three consultations and I—”

At these words purpose and motion returned to Carter. “It’s all in hand,” he said briskly. “I’ll be in touch.” With that he was down the steps and away.

Benson went slowly back through the office into his sitting room, where silence awaited him like a deputation. He settled into an armchair and looked around him, allowing the last echoes of Carter’s passage to die away. The room was shabby; the walls needed painting and the plaster moulding was chipped and discoloured; but the proportions pleased and soothed him, the high ceiling, the tall sash windows, the arched recesses with the stucco rosettes picked out in white and blue. He had taken down and placed under the bed a large picture of playful kittens and another of Flemish peasants misbehaving at a wedding feast, and this had left the walls bare. A white owl had gone frantic with fear in this bare room and stunned itself …

As he sat there he fell into that state of mind familiar to sleepless people, a sort of wondering, half-apprehensive reverie. Not difficult to believe, no. That panic of the bird found the right setting here, amidst these rational proportions. Elegance, restraint, the virtues of the period. Founded on fear strong enough to burst the heart. That fear the black people must have felt, taken from their forest homes, thrust into the open, exposed to the wide sky, the terrible surf. The terrible surf. He had read the phrase somewhere and it haunted him. Fear and fever-stench, the stinking hold of the ship, misery so great, so prolonged, that the timbers must have groaned with it, the rigging shrieked. Far-fetched? These elegant houses built in the 1780s, at the height of that fear and fever, heyday of Liverpool’s Atlantic trade.

He looked at the things in the room, and experienced again the sensation of shipwreck, as if he had been washed ashore and beached here, amidst other random offerings of the tides, a litter of chairs and sideboard and table and rug, fixed there, immovable, as if half-sunk in sand. Here and there were personal possessions, the few things he had salvaged: a carved and painted chess set bought for a song in Spain; a silver-plated tea-caddy that had belonged to his mother; shelves of books, his own work among them. In pride of place, on the mantelpiece, was the much-treasured, slightly lopsided bowl made by his daughter in some remote school pottery class – she was in her thirties now, married, living in Plymouth; he did not see her very often and he never spoke of his miseries to her because love made him reticent – he confided only in strangers.

Also on view, neatly stacked, were the products of his industry, the notebooks, scrapbooks, the files. The sight of this accumulation depressed him. Since Carter had first dawned on his sight, bearing Albert and Sheila in the shiny black briefcase that had then been their home, he had done absolutely nothing of significance. He had not stood still exactly; there had been movement, but all of it downward: he drank more, slept less, was closer to mania. Other than that, what was there? Occasional lectures; a few articles and reviews ground out with loathing and pain; some readings to literary groups – very numerous these on Merseyside, would-be writers sprouting vigorously amidst the decline of practically everything else. Like apple trees, he thought vaguely – he had read somewhere that dying apple trees have a season of abundant blossoming.

The readings, in particular, had been an ordeal. He had given them up long ago. To recollect them now made him wince and exclaim aloud. He had heard his voice grow ever more hollow and unreal as he read extracts from his work, feelings, landscapes, conversations, remoter than those in dreams. How distant now the excitement that had possessed him. How he craved for that unrest again. He had lived on here in Greville Street, while craving turned to sickness, while the city wasted with him, or so it seemed: with his invincible passion for image, Benson saw his own plight as emblematic of this stricken place, with its traditional occupations eroded or gone, its growing host of unemployed, its boarded shops and decaying buildings, its miles of disused warehouses and docks.

And all the while, perversely, his affection for the beleaguered city grew. He could hardly have found a place that suited him better. He thought it beautiful. He loved the light that lay over it, the sense of luminous distances. He was moved by the endurance of the people, the warmth of the manners, the spirit of desperate comedy that informed everything, perennial optimism in which there was always a knowledge of defeat, joy clashing with distrust to make all occasions seem improvised, all plans provisional. He had been nowhere else where imagination so infused the life of every day – they were all fictioneers in this city. He was drawn to the ramshackle, myth-laden present of the place as he was to its violent and tragic past. He had no thoughts of leaving.

Meanwhile Carter in page after page of spidery writing had pursued his saga of desire, partial undress and postponed consummation among the working folk of Liverpool. He had abandoned realism long ago – Sheila’s underwear was expensive and titillating beyond the dreams of whoredom. Compensation, after his wife’s death, for all the years of her flannel bloomers? Grief can take strange forms. Is he, through Sheila, keeping his wife alive? Mildred, her name. Idea for a novel there. A character, losing his wife late in life, tries to preserve her in memory by writing the story of their life together. In the process he gets snared between reality and illusion. Is this what she was truly like? What did it really mean, the way she looked that day, the thing she said? Things have to be reinterpreted, disturbing facts emerge …

Yes. But in that case, if it were to preserve Mildred, Carter would want his book to go on for ever, or at least until he died himself. Is that why Sheila and Albert can never consummate their love? The true consummation is death. And Sheila’s panties, etc., all that frippery and froth, cami-knickery and gorgeous gussetry, simply the plumes and panoply of death, the pastels all one metaphoric sable. Eros and Thanatos inextricably embraced. Idea for a novel there …