Some time later . . .
I don’t think I need to be specific. Start counting years and all you are measuring is loss. Time passes – let’s leave it at that. Mankind cannot bear too much specificity.
Some time, anyway, has gone by since I wrote those words – ‘Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law’.
I can no longer write them with equanimity. ‘Vanessa Ableman, my wife’, ditto.
These are the specificities of loss I cannot bear.
Otherwise not much has changed. Bookshops continue to go into liquidation, the word ‘library’ has passed out of common usage, immoderate opinion continues to pass itself off as art, chefs still take precedence over writers, less remains less. But I, amazingly – as long as I don’t count the years – am in fine fettle. In my profession you need, as I have said, a degree of luck. And that’s what came my way: a fuckload of good luck.
That’s a phrase it’s difficult for someone with my acute northern vowel dysfunctionality to say.
A focklord of god look? A fackloud of gerd luke? A ferklod of gud lock?
Which could be why I had to wait so long for it.
Mine now, however you account for it, it is. I am even endorsed by G. G. Freville, the son of E. E. who one day simply ran out of puff and retired. ‘The rest is silence,’ he is – I think apocryphally – reported to have said, knowing that no author would want those words on his book jacket.
But G. G. is proving to be, if you will forgive the pun, an able replacement. ‘Guido Cretino,’ he was kind enough to say for me recently, ‘can make a stone weep.’
Yes, Guido Cretino. All above board. I am now Guy Ableman writing as Guido Cretino. It is not uncommon to do this when you want to show that you can drop a register but don’t want all trace of your earlier, more highfalutin writing self to disappear altogether. Though, between ourselves, all trace of it has.
Whether I am indeed, as Guido Cretino, able to make a stone weep, isn’t for me to say. But women do approach me after readings with their eyes rubbed raw. ‘I feel you’ve penetrated my soul,’ they say. ‘I couldn’t believe, as I was listening to you, that you were not a woman.’
I smile and bow my head and say that in another life – who knows? – maybe I was a woman. Sometimes I take their wrists, rather as a doctor might. The wrist is a safe place to touch a strange woman. Not that these women think of me as a stranger. My words leap all barriers between us. I know them better than their husbands know them, therefore, they reasonably assume, they know me better than my wife knows me.
Wife? What wife?
Nor is it only the women I reach. Men too – the very men who yesterday would not join me, satyr to satyr, in dancing with their goat feet the Antic Hay – today nod their heads and blink the moisture from their eyes. My mistake was to try calling up the monkey from their basement. Andy Weedon had it right: ‘Dad’ is the word that turns men on. Write ‘paternity’ and they get a hard-on. Write ‘visiting rights’ and they turn to jelly. Make ’em laugh, make ’em cry? Not any more. Make ’em cry, and then make ’em cry some more. Heartbreak, it would seem, crosses the gender divide. And, I suspect, the age divide as well. If I am not mistaken my audiences are getting younger. Soon I will be giving toddlers what they want. Even Sally Comfort writes to me, asking me to sign my latest for her nieces. So though I have still not yet blown into the silver portals of her ear or up her ring-guarded nostrils, it isn’t out of the question that I will.
How I manage to connect so well with everybody I can’t explain. But then I can’t explain anything.
How it is, for example, that I have readers when there are no readers. That’s what luck does: it calls black white, it makes a nonsense of the actual state of things, it excepts you from the general, and only what is general is true. So, although there is no reason for reading groups or Oxfam or the bookshops whose assistants were once unable to spell my name to love me – me – any more than they ever did, they do. Luck blinds, is all one can say.
I travel the world, anyway, saying what I always said, but now to crowded rooms and warm applause. I won’t pretend I can have any woman I want – because the particular women I do want I most definitely cannot have, and the rest are usually in tears or blowing their noses when I meet them – but I do all right for a man not in the bloom of youth who used to walk the streets of London talking to himself and pulling his hair out. I am still envious of other writers’ success, but this time the success I am most envious of is my own.
And I am not a little contemptuous of that success, no matter that it’s mine. Where was it before? I ask. Where was it when I needed it far more, and deserved it no less? If you’re a writer through and through you don’t turn cheerful overnight just because the fates have finally decreed in your favour. Taste success when you have known failure and the memory of failure grows more bitter with every new laurel you win. Success is arbitrary and wayward; only failure is the real measure of things.
But I am not accused of ingratitude or acerbity. I smile and am smiled back at. I sign and sign. Suddenly, those are the two words they can’t get enough of. Guido Cretino. I can do no wrong. When I expostulate the case against me and my shameful capitulation – though I abhor the expostulatory as much as I ever did – they applaud my words. And of course they don’t believe it when I tweet against the crime novel, the detective novel, the crossover novel, the children’s novel, the zombie novel, the graphic novel, the schmaltz novel, the debut novel (with one exception), iPads, Primark, Morrisons, Lidl (I purposely don’t name the supermarkets which stock me: why rock the boat?), three-for-two, and Sandy Ferber’s instant bus-queue fiction, now selling in its millions. Ladies and gentlemen, I say to them – ladies, gentlemen and children – you will clap me to an early grave.
They laugh at that, knowing that if mine were to be an early grave I’d have been in it long ago.
Like Poppy Eisenhower, my mother-in-law.