We begin with the day after – September 12, 2001.
I was in my rented workplace (kitchen, study, bedroom, bathroom, in a mews off Portobello Road), standing at the sink and attending to a wound. It was on the back of my right hand – just beneath the knuckle of the middle finger; about the size of a thumbnail, it was a wound upon a wound (there was a wound there already – sustained in mid-July). I gazed at it, I listened to it (I sometimes imagined I could hear the faint fizz of traumatised tissue), and I dabbed at it with a ball of cotton wool drenched in disinfectant…That morning, when I awoke in the marital bed, my pillow was haphazardly badged with blood; instantly I thought of three, no four possible outlets (mouth, nose, ears, eyes) until I remembered, with shallow relief. Of course: it was my right hand.
Now I crossed a doorway and activated the answering machine. Using the rewind button I found the message I wanted, which was logged at around eight o’clock that morning. Martin. It’s your old friend Phoebe here. I have something to tell you. Something to pass on to you. It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you. Expect a communication. Goodbye.
It was her vendetta voice: not wholly unamused, but seriously embittered, with authentic grievance in it, something narrow-eyed and white-lipped (seldom the case when she taunted shifty suppliers of office furniture, evasive bookies, and the like). So authentic, indeed, that I felt the urge to consult my conscience about Phoebe Phelps. But before I could consult it, I would first have to find it…Twenty-four years: 1977. I thought for a moment and wondered, Was it that business with Lily? Surely not: that business with Lily was something I got away with. Wasn’t it?
Well, I would find out.
The coffee cup, the ashtray, the open exercise book…He sat slumped at his desk. To repeat, it was September 12, 2001; and for the time being his work in progress (a novel) seemed neither here nor there – nor anywhere else. The way he now saw it, this particular fiction, and for that matter fiction itself (Middlemarch, Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, etc.), was demoted to nonentity – by World War III or whatever it was that announced itself the previous day.
He would soon learn that all the novelists (and all the poets and dramatists) were being asked by the Fourth Estate to write about September 11. Ian had already written about it (and Christopher, of course, had already written about it). Salman and Julian would be writing about it. All of them were asked, and all of them said yes. What else was there to write about? What else was there to do?
Asked that morning by the Guardian to write about September 11, he said yes. And so he turned to a fresh page and scrawled ‘September 11’ at the top of it. He wrote his fiction and his journalism in the same exercise books, so he just turned to a fresh page and began to unearth his parallel self: the one that wrote about reality, in editorial (or op-editorial) mode.*1 He usually made this switch with reluctance, even with some self-pity; but that morning he went about it with numb resignation. Then he just sat there, numbly smoking.
The part of him that produced fiction, he felt, was in any case shutting down for ever. And how did it feel? If you took its pulse, that day, it felt like a very minor addition of grief, to be tacked on to the grief that was due to the thousands of dead (no one yet knew how many thousands – eight, ten?) and most particularly, most essentially, to those who found themselves leaping from the Towers: leaping out into the blue, and dropping seventy, eighty, ninety floors rather than stay for another instant within. They fell at the rate of thirty-two feet per second squared, and, as we later heard with our own ears, exploded like mortar shells when they hit the ground; they were not suicide bombers; these people, they were suicide bombs; and some of them were themselves already on fire…
So no fiction, thank you (he couldn’t be doing with fiction), because fiction was partly a form of play – and reality was now earnest.*2
With his stiffened (and throbbing) right hand he reached out and wrote 1) all over again the world seems bipolar. And, yes, it really did…One day in the very early 1990s Martin made an announcement to Nat and Gus (they were perhaps seven and six). ‘I’m so glad you won’t have to live out your childhood under that shadow. As I did.’ He meant what he said and they peered up at him, all meek and grateful…The shadow he had in mind derived from the Cold War and the equation E=mc2: in other words (in Eric Hobsbawm’s words), the forty-year ‘contest of nightmares’. And that shadow did go, or it receded – to be replaced, yesterday, by another shadow. And what did that shadow derive from?
‘It’s an ideology within a religion,’ said Christopher on the phone. ‘This is fascism with an Islamic face.’*3
In any event one thing was plain enough. The twelve-year hiatus – beginning on November 9, 1989, with the abdication of Communism – the great lull, the vacuum of apparent enemylessness (during which America could cosily devote a year to Monica Lewinsky and another year to O. J. Simpson), came to an end on September 11, 2001. And he already sensed that the new hatred, like the old, was somehow inward looking and self-tormented, and that its goals were unachievable and therefore unappeasable. Planetary agonism had resumed; and all over again the other half of the world (very roughly speaking, but so it felt) was out to kill his kids.
The doorbell sounded.
The doorbell sounded. Which would be a shattering development at any time. He wasn’t expecting anyone (he very seldom expected anyone); and besides London on that Wednesday morning, yes, distant London, an ocean away, had an inert and abject air to it, sparse, silent – in fact sick to its stomach (even the buildings looked squeamish and tense), with few people in the streets, and all of them going where they were going because they had to, not because they wanted to (the idea of pleasure had withdrawn, had gone absent. It was not yet clear that the assailants were in general the armed enemies of pleasure).
When he didn’t expect anyone and the doorbell rang, he crept to the window in the disused bedroom; here you could look down at an angle and see your callers on the doorstep as they stood there erectly blinking and composing themselves…He had often been struck by the fact that people who are monitored in this way tend to diffuse an aura of innocence. Now he thought he knew why: they are at that moment comparatively innocent, innocent compared to their furtive observer. And the woman outside did indeed seem innocent, considering she was Phoebe Phelps.
…And not Phoebe as she would be now, in 2001 (getting on for sixty), but Phoebe as she would’ve been then – in say 1978, or even 1971 (Tycoon Tanya), before he ever knew her. Seen from his vantage, seen from above: the slanted profile, the straight no-nonsense nose, the level chin out-thrust. But it was her shape, her form, her outline that ignited his recognition: she and Phoebe displaced exactly the same volume of air.
He went down and opened the door and said,
‘Hello – I know you. You’re Siobhan’s girl.’ There was an easing, and he continued, ‘Maud. We took you out to tea at Whiteley’s when you were ten.’
‘Yes, that’s me all right. I remember. You had very long hair.’ For a moment she smiled unreservedly; but then the smile was quickly shelved or put aside, and she straightened up. ‘Uh, Mr Amis, sorry to bother, but Aunt Phoebe asked me to pop this round, person to person. She doesn’t trust the post. She says what they don’t lose they steal. Or burn. Or in this case sell.’
‘Sell? Who to?’
‘There was mention of the Daily Mail…’
She held out the envelope and he took delivery – just his name (scornfully dashed off). ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘This’ll be my anthrax.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Anthrax. It’s just hearsay. Last night I talked to a friend who lives in Washington DC, but for now he’s stranded in Washington State. Seattle.’
‘No flights?’
‘No flights. Every non-military plane in America is grounded. And he says anthrax. You know,’ Martin went on (it was a grey morning but harmlessly mild), ‘the first thing they did, yesterday in New York, was test the air for toxins. Chemicals and spores. Anyway it’s just hearsay, but anthrax is meant to be next.’*4
‘This isn’t anthrax. It’s just a letter.’
‘Well, thanks. Thanks for your trouble.’
‘It’s no trouble. My office is just round the corner. But…’ She gave a soft wince. ‘The thing is I’m supposed to wait while you…She expects an answer.’
‘…Oh.’ This was a forcing move, he later realised. He said, ‘Well come on up.’
It was lovely and warm in his flat but it was warm for an unlovely reason. Each September he put the heating on a few days earlier in the month. The flesh thins, the blood thins; the horizons slip their moorings and drift a little nearer; and the creature slowly learns how to cover up and ‘creep into its bedding’ (Saul).
So his kitchen was tepid with the aroma of Cold Old Man – or so he resignedly presumed as he watched Maud slide off her leather jacket and hook it over a chair and blow the fringe clear of her brow. The white shirt, the soon unbuttoned charcoal waistcoat, the mauve skirt – businesswear for another kind of business (she worked for the PR firm called Restless Ambition in All Saints Road). Yes, she was very like Phoebe, very like Phoebe in her movements and address, the light, quiet step, the way she seemed to coast through the air…
He said, ‘I’ll read this next door. How long will I be gone would you say?’
‘Oh no more than ten minutes. Fifteen. But then you’ll have to do your reply.’
‘…I’m sorry – there’s some fresh coffee there.’
‘Ooh, that’d be brilliant.’
‘Take a seat. And here are the papers.’ Headlines were spread out on the kitchen table. TERROR IN AMERICA…A NEW DAY OF INFAMY…ACT OF WAR…BASTARDS! ‘Have you read it? The letter?’
‘I’ve listened to it. A couple of times. There were uh, different versions.’
‘Go on, give me a hint.’
‘Well, the names didn’t mean much to me. But I could see why she was worried about the media getting wind of it.’
He left the room holding the envelope between finger and thumb.
What was he expecting Phoebe to tell him? About the slow-acting but fatal social disease he had unknowingly transmitted, about the college-age triplets he had unknowingly sired…He took out the two stiff sheets and read. And reread. And emerged from his study saying,
‘Maud, Phoebe doesn’t expect an answer. There’s no answer to this. She just wants you to tell her how I took it.’
‘…Your hand.’
‘Oh, Christ.’
The plaster on his knuckle, loosened (again) by the mobility of the joint, now dangled like the tongue of a dog while blood dribbled on to his palm and down his wrist. He woodenly moved to the sink and engaged the cold water, and flapped around with his other hand for the box of Band-Aids. She said,
‘Let me do it…Mm, that looks quite nasty.’
Maud came up and stood close; she scrolled the dressing over his graze, scrolled it tight. Girls’ hands, each finger with its own intelligent life; and his own hands, webbed, quivering, undefined…
He thanked her, and she took half a step back and asked him with a new kind of brightness, ‘Do I remind you of her?’ When he nodded she went on, ‘People say we’re very alike. The figure too, don’t you think? Slim, but…’
‘Vaguely,’ he said – though for a moment he had definitely felt Phoebe draw near (her body weight, her force field with its orbs and planes).
‘What was it you once said? About the wand?’
He turned his head away in a sort of shrug. ‘Now Maud, tell your aunt I won’t be writing back, or not yet anyway. I’ll see what my wife says.’
She smiled now, with relief (and even approval), ‘Oh, Phoebe said you might be one of them. A good husband. She will be disappointed. I’m afraid she slightly revelled in your divorce. Your new wife, she’s very beautiful.’
‘Thanks. And not only that…Apart from sending you here today with her, with her message, is Phoebe more or less all right?’
‘Oh yes. She’s rich suddenly. She sold her business.’
‘What business? Oh never mind.’ He offered his left hand, his good hand, which she took. ‘Give her my…’
‘Well thanks for the coffee. Personally I can’t see the point of vengeance, can you? I mean, who benefits? And it’s so much trouble.’
‘Mm. Mm. But I bet vengeance was great fun in the old days. If you’re the type and in the mood.’
‘I’ll walk myself down. I apologise for that nonsense about the wand. But I promised Phoebe. She just wanted to know. Anyway, again – sorry to bother.’
Before I could see what my wife said about it (everything would be laid before her), I was asked to absorb two lessons, two readjustments, bequeathed by September 11. Both involved a subtraction of innocence.
Lesson number one. They would never look the same – those things up there in the firmament, those A-to-B devices, those people carriers: airbus, skytrain. On my way home that evening, at a traffic light, I saw one of them glinting in over the tower blocks…Already and unalterably associated with mass death, a commercial aircraft did not, perhaps, have that much innocence to lose; but only now did it look like a weapon.
Lesson number two. Planes would never look the way they used to, and neither (strange to say) would children.
Or my children. Who did not look the same. At the evening meal that Wednesday night in the house on Regent’s Park Road all five of them were present: Bobbie (twenty-four), Nat (sixteen), Gus (fifteen), little Eliza (four), and tiny Inez (two).
In the L-shaped kitchen/dining room on the ground floor I gave everyone drinks (Eliza ordering milk), laid the table – six places plus a high chair – and did odd jobs for my wife at the stove, and chatted away as convincingly as I could…
My feeling for my daughters and sons: it was more than a change, it was a capsizal. The sensory pleasure they gave me when all of them were gathered had its core in their strength of numbers, the amount of them, all the flesh and bone and brain they added up to; but now it was that same multiformity that made my heart feel loth and cold. Because I knew I couldn’t protect them. Actually you cannot protect your children, but you need to feel you can. And the delusion was quite gone, replaced by a bad-dream sensation, not a nightmare, quite – more like a dream of nudity in a crowded public place…
The connoisseur of vengeance would savour just this – the taste inside our mouths, the mineral sourness of a lost battle, the ancient, the Iron Age taste of death and defeat.
‘Will there be a war?’ asked Nat. Nobody answered.
In the crook of the room there was a miniature TV wedged into a low cupboard (with folding doors). For the last couple of weeks it had often been tuned to the US Open at Flushing Meadows (and only three days ago, on Sunday, Lleyton Hewitt had in the end thrashed Pete Sampras 7–6, 6–1, 6–1). At that moment, I saw, the little set was silently rescreening the clips – the first plane, the second plane…
Inez staggered over there and took the two white panels in her hands ready to slam them shut. ‘No…tennis,’ she said scathingly, as the North Tower (the first to be hit, the second to drop) folded in on itself; and there was New York under its soiled sheepskin of chalk-thick smoke.
‘Okay.’ He took the envelope from his breast pocket. ‘Now you’re going to have to be a good sport about this, Elena, and you’re going to have to be wise, too. I know you’re a good sport and I know you’re wise. I need your guidance. Your counsel.’
This was 2001, so his wife was even younger than she would be in St-Malo.
She said, ‘…Go on then.’
He remembered a piece of advice in a novel of Kingsley’s. What it amounted to was this: In conversations with women, never even mention another woman’s name – unless it’s to report her (very painful) death. Yes, but that was in the second of the two forthrightly misogynistic novels he wrote after Elizabeth Jane Howard walked out on him (‘I’m a bolter,’ Jane once levelly told her stepson). To be honest Martin thought that Kingsley’s advice had its applications; but he wasn’t worried about Elena, so advanced and evolved (almost a generation on), and he said with perhaps a touch of complacence,
‘Elena, when it comes to ex-girlfriends, I know there are three or four you take a dim view of, but there are some you broadly tolerate. And some you even like. Isn’t that the way of it? You like some and dislike others?’
‘No. You hate them all.’
‘Do you?’ he asked and laughed quietly (at the instant rout of all his expectations). ‘You’ve heard me speak of Phoebe Phelps…’
‘The sex one.’
‘Roughly speaking.’ Although now he came to think of it, she was, on balance, more like the no-sex one. ‘It’s from her.’
Elena said, ‘The one that didn’t want to get married or have kids. Would you call that a real love affair? Phoebe?’
Man and wife were still at the table. Bobbie, who shared a flat with her (half) brother, had been put in a taxi, and the four others, all supposedly asleep, were in the four bedrooms just beneath his attic study. He poured more wine…Unlike Julian (who wrote a whole novel about it), and unlike Hitch (who had found himself increasingly prey to it), Martin did not suffer from retrospective sexual jealousy; and nor did Elena. They were not inquisitive about each other’s anterior lovelives. He was aware of certain male preponderances (certain weights on the fabric of her personal spacetime), and very much alive to any suspected ill-usage; but he was not inquisitive, and asked few questions. And Elena was the same.
‘A real love affair?’ Well, we never exchanged the three words, Elena (he said to himself). As you and I so often have and do. You know the three words: first person singular, verb, second person singular. ‘Not in the strictest sense.’
‘So just a detour.’
‘As you might say. A dalliance, a digression.’
‘Mm. How long did it last?’
‘Five years.’
‘Five years.’ She went still. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Yes you did. I told you at least twice. 1976 to 1980. On and off.’ Almost entirely on. He waited. ‘Now – the matter at hand, if you would, Elena. Here. Read, recite, as Allah instructed the Prophet. Jesus, listen to him.’ He was referring to one of the talking heads on Newsnight. ‘He’s saying it’s all our fault. And serve us fucking well right.’
‘Quite a few of them are saying that. As Hitch said they would.’
‘Mm, that lot think Osama did it for the Palestinians…Now proceed, dread queen.’
She sat back and straightened the stiff sheets out in front of her. ‘Ready? Dear Martin. I’m going to tell you something that…’ Her eyes focused, then dilated. ‘My God, what truly hideous handwriting.’
‘She thought so too. It mortified her.’
‘There’s no consistency to it. It’s like one of those blackmail letters that’s patched together from different strips of print…Something really ghastly must have happened to her when she was very young.’
Indeed, Elena. Starting when she was six, an old priest called Father Gabriel bribed her into bed three times a week for eight years…He, Martin, had never told this story to anyone, ever, not even Hitch. All afternoon he had considered telling Elena – for its explanatory power; but as ever he found its violence unmanageably and unusably exorbitant, like nuclear fission. It was just too big.*5 Elena said,
‘So. Dear Martin, I’m going to tell you something I think you ought to know. Now I’m sure you remember a certain day in 1977 – November 1 – because by the standards of the “literary world” in quotes it had its moments. Let me jog your memory! exclamation mark.’ Elena visibly honed her attention. Just after lunch your old flame Lily rang up in hysterics and you chose to rush off and join her for the night. I prepared dinner for Kingsley…For Kingsley? What’s all this?’
‘See, I was doing a spell of Dadsitting so Jane could have a holiday.*6 Greece. Phoebe consented to come over for the weekend. Lily, Lily was organising a literary festival up north. Some old poet chucked or got sick or actually dropped dead at the last minute, and she had a big gap
in her programme. Saturday night. She was desperate. And I couldn’t say no, could I.’
‘Yes you could. Very rash not to, I’d’ve thought. Very rash indeed. Are you nuts? I prepared dinner for your father, and that was fine, but then he…invaigled me into drinking a glass of Parfait Amour. Can’t spell inveigled. What’s Parfait Amour?’
‘That’s significant. See, alcohol didn’t agree with Phoebe and she very rarely touched it. But she had a weakness for Parfait Amour.’
‘What’s Parfait Amour?’
‘Parfait Amour is a disgustingly sugary liqueur. It’s the same colour as that notepaper and it smells like cheap ponce. Eliza might fancy a dab of it behind her ears. And it’s Mum’s favourite drink too. By far. One glass of that and her whole personality changed. I mean Phoebe’s did.’
‘Her whole personality changed. You mean she became less of a slag.’
He said, ‘Very good, Elena. No. She became more of a slag. She became something of a slag. And she wasn’t a slag.’ He thought for a moment. ‘True, she had a tendency to flirt, but that was later on. Phoebe was in many ways rather proper.’
‘Oh was she. Did your father know that drinking made her more of a slag?’
‘Uh, yeah. But it had to be Parfait Amour. He was always fascinated by people who didn’t drink. He asked, and I told him.’
‘That’s why’, Elena continued, ‘I was so ill when you got back from your mission of mercy. Did you tell him that drinking made her ill?’
‘No.’
‘You just told him that it made her more of a slag.’
‘Jesus. I didn’t put it quite like that. I think I just told him it made her, you know, unusually easygoing. More amenable…Now how did Kingsley get hold of a bottle of Parfait Amour? – that’s what I want to know. I’ve never seen it on sale here. He must’ve called one of his vintner friends. He must’ve gone to a fair bit of trouble.’
‘…New para. So as you can imagine I was feeling pleasantly languid, sitting there in front of the fire.’
‘Romantic, isn’t it. The marmalade light, the Parfait Amour…’
‘Your father then made a verbal pass at me that went on for half an hour.’
On the table in front of them the baby monitor politely cleared its throat; and there came the first notes of protest and distress. These opening cries always seemed to tell them how long the visit would need to last. Ten minutes, he thought.
‘You do the next one,’ said Elena as she rose.
He poured himself more wine and remembered.
It was a recent (and temporary) development in Phoebe’s life – the Parfait Amour. She got her first taste of it the year before, in 1976, sitting opposite Hilly and her third husband at an outside table in a restaurant in Andalusia. Hilly asked for a glass, and drank it with every sign of near-unbearable enjoyment. ‘Go on, dear,’ she said. ‘I hate the taste of drink too. But I love Parfait Amour. Mmm.’
Phoebe acceded. And that night, at the hotel, Martin was suddenly in complete possession of a smilingly acquiescent stranger (of sharply reduced IQ). She was somewhat indisposed the next morning, admittedly, but it was a thing of the past by lunchtime…Four nights later it happened again – the damson digestif, her meandering gait along the shadowline of the bullring and up the slope, the dazed and breathy succubus in the Reina Victoria; but this time she spent all the following day groaning and sweating in the darkened bedroom. Nonetheless he found himself unobtrusively buying a litre of Parfait Amour at duty-free in Malaga Airport…*7
After that he inveigled Phoebe into a Parfait Amour only once, and she was so very poorly, for nearly a week, that he reluctantly swore off Parfait Amour – sobered, or so he thought, by the interminable business with the trays and the tomato soups and the lightly buttered toast, and by all the recriminations. But as he poured the Parfait Amour down the kitchen sink he felt pleased and proud in an unfamiliar way. His sense of honour – or of minimal decency – was not quite defunct; it could still twitch and throb…
Martin got up from the dining table and fetched a bottle of Scotch, and then, reckoning he still had a few minutes, went out through the back door for a stoical cigarette. He could hear Elena veering off into another room on her way down.
…As he was getting himself ready to fly to Newcastle (and take a train on to Durham) Phoebe caught up with him in the hall and said,
‘So you’re off are you then.’
‘Phoebe, I can’t possibly not do this. She’s my oldest friend.’
‘I see. I see. You’re going all the way to Hadrian’s Wall for a thankyou fuck.’
‘What?’ She was one step ahead of him. ‘How d’you mean?’
‘Come on. You’ve gone to John o’Groats to save her bacon. You’ll be up on stage seeming chivalrous and clever. There’ll be a dinner. She’s an ex-girlfriend. You’re both in hotels. Beyond any doubt there’ll be a thankyou fuck.’
He said, ‘Lily and I broke up at university. There won’t be a thankyou fuck, I swear. Anyway, thank you for tending to Dad tonight. He trusts you, Phoebe.’
‘…I can’t believe it! You’ve trapped me here just for a thankyou fuck!’
She refused his kiss and he turned and pulled open the door and went down the garden path with his bag.
‘Eliza,’ he now said (he had naturally recognised Eliza’s cry).
‘Eliza,’ said Elena. ‘She just wanted her water refilled and a chat. All fine. You’ll have to do Inez.’ His wife settled. ‘When was this? How old was he?’
‘Uh, Kingsley was in his mid-fifties.’
‘How old was she? How old were you?’
‘I was twenty-eight. Phoebe was thirty-five.’
‘Oh. An old slag. No wonder she didn’t want children,’ said Elena (who was the same age when she had Inez). ‘She didn’t dare…At what point was it? I mean in your eon together?’
‘About eighteen months in.’
‘How attractive was she? Wasn’t she a ginge?’
‘No – dark auburn. At first glance you’d say she was a brunette. Not pale. She had a kind of rusty colouring.’
‘A ginge, in short. Right. Your father then made a verbal pass at me that went on for half an hour. I’ve never known anything like it. It was like a flood of praise, and he was very eloquent, being a poet of course and not just a storyteller.’ Elena gave a comfortable grunt and said, ‘So, a poet’s pass. Not just a novelist’s. As these things go it was pretty painless. No bullying and no whining. I always liked your father – he, for one, knew how to be attentive to a woman. New para. Well I don’t need to tell you how “tolerant” that particular drink makes me, and I have to confess I was quite tempted in a way. He was still fairly slim and handsome, then, and beyond all else by far it would have been a reasonably good way of paying you back for Lily.
‘New para. I can’t remember how he phrased the actual proposition, but I’ll never forget how he rounded it all off. He said, “It’s a faint hope, I realise. But I do want you to feel secure in my admiration.” ’
‘That’s Kingsley, that is. I can hear him saying it. That’s his style.’
‘And was it his style’, asked Elena, ‘to drug, rape, and poison his sons’ girlfriends?’
‘…When he was younger, there was no limit to how reckless he could be with women. Much more reckless than I ever was. Here’s an example. You’ll have to concentrate, Elena.’
‘I’m listening,’ she said and reluctantly raised her eyes from the page.
‘Okay. I’ll be quick. Hilly and Kingsley are asked to dinner by some old friends – call them Joan and John. Now Kingsley’s been having an affair with Joan and nobody knows. And there’s another couple there – Jill and Jim. You’d think Kingsley’d have his hands full, keeping Mum in the dark and giving Joan the odd stroke. But guess what. He goes and makes a pass at Jill.’
‘That’s…that’s ambitious. And Jill’s keen?’
‘Yeah. So he ups and has an affair with Jill. As well as Joan. He goes on about it in the novels – with girls, he says, he was like a frantic adolescent. See, they tended to say yes. He must’ve felt infallible – inerrant. Like the Koran.’
‘Never mind the Koran…In the end I just said, “Look, Kingsley, come on. This is all very well but you’re Martin’s father!” New para.’ Elena’s eyes widened. ‘Then he really shocked me. He said –’
The baby monitor again sounded – not with the preparatory cough but with a convulsive splat of alarm. Immediately followed by the ratcheting wail.
‘Inez. “D’you think I’d be talking to you like this this if I were Martin’s father?” ’
‘Stop! Wait,’ he said as he made for the stairs.
‘Why? You already know what she’s going to say.’
‘I still need to watch your face,’ he called out…But Elena had already settled into it, looking ahead to see how much more there was to go.
It was indeed Inez, and she had started as she meant to continue; but I sensed that she lacked the stamina to detain me for very long. And she soon quietened in my arms, only giving the occasional weak quack (just meant to keep me there)…The younger son, Gus, had had childhood asthma, and every other night for two or three years I administered the dose with the electric nebuliser, sessions in a blacked-out room that went on for an hour and sometimes twice that, with the threadily wheezing boy on my lap. So this was nothing; and in those days I was seldom bored or daunted by the company of my own thoughts – nor was I now, even on September 12. With Elena, the act of full disclosure always brought a measure of relief: the difficulty, the confused order of things, was now under competent supervision…As I lay there holding Inez my mind even felt free enough to indulge a hard-wearing memory from the time of my earlier marriage: repeatedly circumnavigating the little roundabout at the end of the street in twilight, holding hands with Gus (also, then, a two-year-old), who was trying out his first pair of real shoes, proper shoes of the kind someone older and taller might wear; every couple of yards he stopped and smiled upwards with eye-closing exultation and pride.
Inez’s swaddled body gave a pulse (a silent hiccup), and went still.
‘This is bullshit,’ Elena was already saying as he re-entered the kitchen. She had loaded the dishwasher and was drying her hands with a tea towel. ‘It’s all lies. No. It’s nearly all lies.’
There was a certain shaky levity in her voice that put him on his guard. ‘Tell me what to believe. Let’s go through it, and you tell me what I’m supposed to believe.’
She sat. ‘If we must…Then the whole story came out, writes Phoebe. “Story” is correct. It all went back to the Christmas of 1948 and a place called “Mariners Cottage” quotation marks near a town called Ainsham. Have I spelt that correctly? Has she? A-i-n-s-h-a-m.’
‘Almost. It’s Eynsham with an E-y. And Marriner’s Cottage is double-r with an apostrophe. I checked. Otherwise accurate. She could’ve got all this from the biography, but if she’d done that you’d think she’d spell the names right.’
‘Not necessarily. Not if she’s really clever. Kingsley and Hilly were going through a very rocky patch. He was in love with a student of his called Verna David. Ring a bell? Does it?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he said. ‘Maybe an ex-student by that time. Still. And yes I know. A grave abuse of trust. But you were more or less allowed to, in 1948.’
‘Not just in 1948. All my professors made passes at me and all my friends,’ said Elena. ‘Thirty years later.’
‘…I knew Verna.’ His early years were full of Verna, and her husband too (and they were both warm and welcome presences). ‘Verna was bright and very pretty. It was a big thing, but she somehow never fell out with Mum. Verna came to Kingsley’s memorial service. I introduced you. Remember?’
‘No. On the day before Christmas Eve your parents had a blazing row and he went off with a suitcase to Verna David. So there was your mother left alone for the “holiday”, left alone with the baby in a wasteland of village idiots. The baby was Nicolas, right? How old?’
‘Four months. And in those days, Elena, right through to New Year’s Day the world just curled up and died. You’d get the creeps if it happened now – no open shops, no lit lights. At Christmas England just curled up and blacked out.’
Elena was studying the envelope. His name – no stamp, no postmark. ‘Did she hand-deliver this?…You know, maybe she is really clever.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘She knows as well as I do how credulous you are.’
‘Oi.’
‘Now you listen. How impressionable you are. How easily swayed.’
‘Oi.’
‘How obsessive. You are. Especially when something like this happens – a world event. That you think only you are really registering. If I’d been her I would have struck today. To get you while you’re in shock. All wobbly and doomed.
‘New para. Ah here we are. All alone with the baby over Christmas. In a hayrick somewhere. Having been dumped by her husband. So, not surprisingly, your mother decided to retaliate. Good for her! exclamation mark. She sent a telegram to the poet from Hell.
‘Yeah,’ said Elena. ‘Your Phoebe picked the right day for it. The day after.’
*1 A technical point. Poetry and fiction are silent. As J. S. Mill put it, the literary voice is not ‘heard’; it is ‘overheard’; it is a soliloquy addressed to no audience; it has no designs on anyone…All opinion journalism, including literary journalism (and most literary criticism), is an argument that seeks to persuade; coming ex cathedra (from the pulpit), it is pedagogic, it is ‘interested’, and it demands the loan of your ears…This rather exalted distinction is not so much purist as idealist in tendency; it doesn’t apply to those who sit down with the express intention of producing a Bestseller, or a Masterpiece.
*2 Later that week I compared notes with a much younger novelist, and I asked her, I asked Zadie, ‘Do you feel the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write?’ And she said, ‘Yes. Yes, at first I did. But then your fighting spirit gets going…’ This was true, and there was much to fight against: the opposition of forces and goals could hardly be plainer, could it – a matter of ‘everything I love’ versus ‘everything I hate’ (as Salman wrote in the New York Times). I could fight in the pages of the Guardian; but what could anyone fight for in (or with) fiction?…Christopher, incidentally, wrote about September 11 on September 11, September 12, September 13, September 20, October 8, October 15, October 22, and November 29, and went on writing about it in Hitch-22 (2008) and Arguably (2010) and elsewhere.
*3 ‘I know what fascism is,’ I might have answered him, ‘but what’s Islam?’ Everyone had at least heard of Islam, of course, but no non-specialist had heard of Islamism. And over the next weeks the bestseller lists of the First World hurriedly filled up with books on Islam (more than one of them by Bernard Lewis), as we very logically sought illumination about our new enemy. Far from ever wanting to ‘destroy’ Islam (as its leading voices claimed), the West needed to find out what Islam was…In media usage ‘fascism with an Islamic face’ became ‘the unsatisfactory term “Islamofascism” ’ (Hitch-22).
*4 ‘9–11-01. THIS IS NEXT,’ began the note included in the first of the anthrax letters, six days later (September 18): ‘TAKE PENACILIN NOW. / DEATH TO AMERICA. / DEATH TO ISRAEL. / ALLAH IS GREAT’…The anthrax letters killed five people and infected fifteen (and they cost the government $1 billion in cleanup and decontamination). Furthermore, they suffused the heart of every First Worlder with another sepsis of impotence and dread…It eventually turned out that the perpetrator was a man called Bruce Ivins, who worked in the national biodefence labs in Maryland. Ivins had a long history of mental ‘episodes’, suffering from a paranoia of pride as much as persecution (a committed threatener and feuder); he was thoroughly mixed-up all right, but he was neither foreign nor especially religious (‘penacilin’ and ‘Allah is great’ were mere chaff). Unapprehended by the law, Ivins went on a one-man suicide mission in July 2008.
*5 Beyond establishing the bare outlines, I had never really talked about it with Phoebe, either – and wouldn’t do so with any candour until 2017 (at which point she was seventy-five); as I had always subliminally supposed it must, the case history involved an additional and ulterior element of moral horror.
*6 Kingsley, whose third novel was called I Like It Here (1958), was never much of a traveller. In addition he couldn’t fly, he couldn’t drive, he couldn’t take a train or a subway unescorted, and he couldn’t be left alone in a house after dark without the company of close family or very old friends. Hence ‘Dadsitting’: his three children managed it by rotation. The system was institutionalised after Jane left him in December 1980.
*7 In Spain, at least, Parfait Amour enjoys a folkish reputation as an aphrodisiac. Whenever Hilly ordered it her husband was jovially nudged and elbowed by the waiters…That third husband of hers, my beloved and long-serving stepfather, was called Ali and he would later work as a postman. Which sounds promisingly egalitarian. Ali had no money or land or anything like that, but his full name was Alistair Ivor Gilbert Boyd and he was the seventh Baron Kilmarnock…A few months after Jane bolted, Hilly and Ali moved in with Kingsley as housekeepers, and this unlikely arrangement stood firm until his death in 1995.