TEN YEARS AGO AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, when I was a student there, Professor Syme called me “the Great Pretender.” What did he mean by that? I think I was a pretty good philosophy student at London—rather idle, very plausible for sure, picking at odd tufts of learning. Asked to read Plato, I would spend instead a few days with Plotinus. That’s my way of doing things. It was not deception so much as a disdain for the bridle. I liked to be free. I like to be free! Syme predicted that I would win top marks or fail badly in my finals exams. I won top marks, and then had the pleasure of frustrating expectations by not staying on to do a doctorate.
But once out of university I was afflicted by a real eagerness to study. I sat at home, reading and reading. Well, not at home, actually, but at Uncle Karl’s house in Chelsea. And Karl is not my real uncle, either, but was my father’s best friend, a refugee from Germany who came as a mere boy to England in 1939, and met Father in the early 1950s, when Karl became a student at Durham University. Father took the young Karl under his wing. Later, Karl made money, a lot of it, in the 1960s and ’70s, as an art dealer. He has a house in a street behind Sloane Square. After university, I lived with Karl for three happy and decidedly childlike years, in an enormous bedroom whose walls were covered with outrageous contemporary paintings. It was an easy existence, during which I sat and read a great deal, spoiled only by the odd necessary job when money ran out and by
the unannounced entrance of uniformed deliverymen, who came to take one ugly painting off the wall and replace it with another. But there was a quality of desperation in the way I consumed books at Uncle Karl’s, beginning each in the hope that this was the one which would tell me how to live, how to think; as soon as I realized that it would not, my reading of it began to slow, precisely as if my heartbeat were slowing from its initial race. More often than not, I put it aside.
Eventually, partly at the urging of my parents, I decided to go back to university and begin a Ph.D. dissertation. I worked quite hard at first; but then I lost interest and hope, and in the last two years the BAG has become more important to me. The problem is that I started reading books that were utterly beyond the scope of my academic work—the early Church Fathers, the Psalms (again and again), certain Buddhist and Islamic texts. And then I couldn’t stop reading these “irrelevant” books.
It was while I was most blocked on the Ph.D. that I met Jane, five years ago now, and began to develop some of my bad habits—the irresponsibility, the lying when it was not necessary, not replying to bills, and so on. I was twenty-six, she was six years older. I won’t deny that I’m irresponsible—though not actually as irresponsible as I probably seem. For instance, while we were married Jane and I always argued a great deal about my failure to pay bills on time, and yet they were always paid in the end. In my teens I read somewhere that Erik Satie never opened any bills. Now, I am cowardly, so I was unable to go as far as Satie. But I thought that a little of the Satie style would be a good thing. Again, I can’t entirely divorce this quality of my temperament from my secularism. If one believes that one has only seventy years or
so on this earth and no afterlife, one cannot spend one’s time observing all the proprieties and rules. My God, if I were scrupulous about paying bills, balancing my cheque book, cleaning the lavatory, answering letters and telephone messages, changing my clothes, bathing, and the rest, I would spend my entire life rolling the rock of diligence up a hill of someone else’s making.
No, life is always a struggle for freedom. Whenever I sign a cheque for some idiot company or other, I feel a little like a man in an electric chair or in a hospital bed, streaming with wires and connections and linkages. All these smothering tentacles: the gas company, the electric people, the landlord, the tax man, the credit-card officials, all of these needy babies pressing down on me and demanding that I turn my life into one long liegedom. So I leave bills unopened, and it gives me a small thrill to come upon them on the kitchen table, and to know that although inside the envelopes lie all these hysterical flashing demands, from the outside they are as calm as chess players. Then, having done nothing, I watch the second wave, the repeat requests, arrive a couple of weeks later, and enjoy placing the second wave on top of the first wave of bills on the table. Once I have resisted this, I am primed for the third wave, exactly ten days later. These requests are not from the original companies but from collection agencies—the bailiffs—and come in special envelopes. This is the moment at which I sign my cheque like a good little bourgeois, and enclose it with a pugilistic note, a bit of a challenge: “P.S.: Since I have finally paid up, you can call off your thugs.”
Obviously, this is less of a problem than it was, because I have fewer bills to pay in the Finchley Road bedsit. But it was always coming between me and Jane when we were together.
The Ph.D. is clearly to blame. It forced me into an unnatural and weak position with my wife. Her husband had no income, no power, and no status. All he did was sit at home trying to finish the unfinishable. The more I look at it, the more I see the Ph.D. as the reason for everything bad in my life.
Often, I think, Jane enjoyed my spirit of rebellion—though she has never been a secularist like me—and used to laugh with me at some of the scrapes we got into. That’s what has made understanding her so difficult: for the first two years of our marriage she seemed to cherish my irresponsibility. She herself is exceedingly law-abiding. So I think she enjoyed living with me, with this younger man who was obviously a creative and blithely lawless presence. I think she almost encouraged me not to pay bills and so on. I have a memory of her standing at the doorway and laughing wildly while I answered one of those telemarketing calls on the phone. “Am I speaking to Mr. Bunting?” She knew what I would always say in response to that question: “I’m afraid you’re not. I am house-sitting for Mr. Bunting, and he’s in Hong Kong for a month. Perhaps you’ll call back when he returns?”
It’s true that Jane began to get angrier with me about my financial irresponsibility. Last year, about six months before my father had his first heart attack, we argued about my credit-card payments. Someone from Visa had started phoning me. Day after day the phone went, and it was always the same man. So on the fourth or fifth day I performed a trick I had used before, and which Jane had previously enjoyed. As soon as I heard him speak, I said, “Hello?” He replied: “Yes, hello, is that Mr. Bunting?” And again, with more puzzlement, I said, “Hello?” as if I couldn’t hear anyone on
the line. And again, he said, “Hel-lo, Mr. Bunting.” Then, for verisimilitude, I kept the receiver near my mouth and shouted to Jane, “Jane, what is wrong with this bloody phone, I can’t hear a thing. Someone has phoned and I can’t make out a word he is saying! This is the third time today. We have to get it fixed.” And then I put the phone down. Jane, of course, came to me and asked what was wrong with the phone. I told her that I had simply been using my old trick to get someone who was “after me” off my back. But Jane reminded me that we were married, and that if someone was after me then that person was also after her, and that if we ever had a child that person would also be after our child. That was what being a family was. Her sarcasm was rising like floodwater. To calm her, I explained that it was nothing more serious than the Visa people chasing a late payment.
“But you told me that you had paid the bill,” said Jane.
“Did I? I find that extremely unlikely.”
“You looked into my eyes last week and told me that you had paid the bill and posted it in … I think you said in Gower Street.”
“Ah, no no, it wasn’t the Visa bill I was referring to. No.”
“What was it?”
“Another bill.”
“The lie you are telling me to cover up the first lie is more repellent to me than the original one. Just so you know.” Jane seemed almost to be shivering with disgust.
Now, there are liars who will tell you that they were pleased to be forced to confession, that as soon as they began to tell the truth it bubbled up wantonly from their mouths. I am not one of those liars. Caught, I tell another lie to hide the first. I surrender a lie with great unwillingness and feel instantly nostalgic, once it has gone, for the
old comfort it offered me. But I also know the value of a tactical surrender.
“Okay, I hadn’t paid the Visa bill.”
“And you lied to me when you said that you had.”
“No, I don’t think I did lie. I’m sure I imagined when I spoke to you that I had indeed paid and posted the bill.”
“Oh, Tommy.” Jane looked at me with amazement. “Tell the truth! Don’t you understand that I care much more about your lying to me than about your lying to the credit-card company?”
What surprised me was not Jane’s anger but her distress. And, frankly, although practically I understand the distinction between lying to one’s wife and lying to a corporation, philosophically the difference seems slight. Surely both lies were so tiny, so opportunistic, that they hardly merited examination, let alone rebuke? The problem is that Jane has no sense of proportion. It’s a curious aspect of lying—looking at the phenomenon philosophically—that for most people the size of a lie has no relation to its perceived potency. People like Jane cannot distinguish between small lies and large lies; for them, the act of lying is always itself an enormity, and comes in only one size. God did the same in Eden. After all, Adam’s sin was actually very small, but God inflated its consequences ridiculously. Jane treats every lie as if it were asparagus, which, whether I eat one spear or ten, makes my urine smell with exactly the same pungency.