My follow-up novel to The Good Woman was The Good Daughter. There was no stopping me now. I had The Good Mother ready to go. And even before I began on that I was mulling over The Good Son-in-Law. Though how I was going to keep sex out of that one, I didn’t know.
It was as I walking home from the launch party for The Good Daughter that I saw the tramp Vanessa had called Ernest Hemingway keel over, like a shot bear, in the middle of the road. I couldn’t tell if he’d been hit by a vehicle or had just lost his footing. At this time of the night in Soho there was no saying what had caused what. Minicabs and limousines and rickshaws were double-parked, picking up and spilling out. Hen nights, stag nights, monkey nights. People lay in pools of their own vomit, waiting for the paramedics. You couldn’t tell, from looking at what anyone was wearing, what the season was. In Soho it had become a perpetual late summer, shirts open to the navel, legs bare to the femur, no matter what the temperature. The restaurants were all full, booked out, though no one was eating in the restaurant that they really wanted to eat in.
(That he really wanted to eat in? Forget it.)
Smokers lounged outside, laughing and coughing, inspecting their mobile phones with that air of urgent wonder that would have made a Martian suppose they had never seen such things until tonight. Everyone had a message waiting, and whoever didn’t, sent himself one. In restaurant queues the latest of Sandy Ferber’s two-minute Unbooks helped while away the waiting.
No one noticed anything any more, there were no witnesses to any crime, because people did not raise their faces from their screens. How they any longer fell in love was a mystery to me. Eyes used to have to meet in long lingering amazement. But who had time to raise their eyes or be amazed? Perhaps they fell in love, at a remove, through their electronic devices. IthinkIloveyou.com. I felt self-conscious carrying an actual book. It was a first edition of The Good Daughter, still hot from the printer’s, signed by everyone at my publishers, even Flora, though I might not have mentioned that I never did leave S&C – couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it to the memory of Merton, couldn’t do it to Margaret Travers, his no less faithful secretary, who I felt needed me to stay for continuity’s sake, and into the dark interior of whose crackling unbelted raincoat I couldn’t bear no longer to slip my arms, and anyway, with books as verdant and unapocalyptic as I was writing, there was nowhere else to go. Slumdog Press? I was too popular.
Verdant or otherwise, was I the only person in Soho, I wondered, carrying a book qua book? Ought I to have hidden it inside my jacket? I was the only person in Soho wearing a jacket, too. Or down my trousers?
It was as I was thinking about where or whether to conceal it that I saw Ernest Hemingway go over. It must have been a heavy fall, however it happened, because his notebook had come apart and leaves from it were being scattered by the careless feet of pedestrians. It was only paper. The streets of Soho were full of paper.
People are good, whether they are readers who respect the page or they are not. My new humanitarian philosophy: keep people away from art and judgement, where they are as lost souls, and they are, behaviourally speaking, wonderfully good. Was that another title for me? People Are Good – and no sooner did the tramp fall than passers-by rushed to see how he was and to assist him to his feet. ‘I’m trained in first aid,’ I heard one woman say, ‘tell me where it hurts.’ Shame she didn’t ask me. But on Hemingway it was a wasted, thankless piece of kindness; he did not raise his sightless eyes to her or to anyone else, and would not, frankly, have been very pleasant to make physical contact with.
We are all good in our own way. Some looked after the man, I went after his papers. Assuming this was the same book he’d been working on since Vanessa and I first encountered him, and possibly for years before that, it was a magnum opus, the labour of many hundreds of weeks. In which case every page was precious. And who else but I gave a damn about them? I chased down as many as I could, standing on them before bending to pick them up, the way I imagined the acolytes of the Sibylline oracle would have run after the leaves of her prophecy when they blew from the mouth of her cave. The Cumaean Sibyl had ‘sung the fates’ on the leaves of oak trees and when they scattered they scattered. What she had prophesied was lost. What did she care?
Ernest Hemingway, too, seemed not to care. Let his leaves blow where they chose.
But I cared.
It was my intention to return the pages I had retrieved, whether he wanted them or not, but I was word-deranged – a man who could not walk by a discarded cigarette packet without pausing to read it – and I could not resist stealing a look at what he had been writing all these years. Not a vulgar, competitor’s curiosity, I hope, not a thief ’s or a scoffer’s, but the respectful wondering of a fellow worker with words. How good was he? What did he know that the rest of us, who lived lives so much more compromised and comfortable, who preferred not to let our testicles hang out of the holes in our trousers, who lacked his austere, friendless dedication – what did he understand that we did not?
I quickly saw that for all their density not one of the scattered leaves of his notebook was different from any other. What he had to say, he went on saying, for page after page. And what he had to say was forceful, incontestable, not to say beautiful, in its clairvoyance:
O
OOOOO
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OOO
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OOO
OOOO
OOOOO
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