AS I SAID, all seemed well between us last September when Jane was in Sundershall, which made her behaviour on my return to London the more mysterious. She seemed uninterested in talking to me; even stranger, she stopped fighting those elements of my temperament that she had recently been resisting. She said nothing about my dirty dressing gown, my slovenly side of the bedroom, the Ph.D., the BAG. Over the next two months she seemed to shrink inside herself. She began to grow impatient with my drifting and apparently leisurely ways, and at breakfast would announce coldly, “I will be incommunicado until lunchtime,” sticking her chin out and up as she did so. I would hear her start practising while I was still enjoying my morning coffee and cigarette (I am my father’s son). It used to be that Jane, smelling my first cigarette of the day, occasionally cried out, “Fee fie fo fum, I smell the fug of an Englishman,” which I loved to hear, and came into the kitchen to kiss me. I would be sitting in the paisley dressing gown, a scarf round my neck for warmth, and reading some or other edifying book. And then she would slick her lips with lipstick and munch them together, and rush out of the flat to Trinity, tossing “I love you, darling” behind her. But in the last few months of our marriage I seemed only to anger her, and she marched off every morning to the piano. Sometimes I walked to the edge of our tiny sitting room and, standing behind her, watched the knitting wings of her thin back, and turned away.
Jane and I didn’t separate until last Christmas, but I date the real end of our marriage from September—from the moment I left London to visit my afflicted father. Why was Jane so pleased to have me out of the flat and two hundred miles away in the north of England? It’s true that just before my mother called to tell me about Father’s heart attack, I revealed to Jane for the first time the existence of the BAG, and mentioned that I was becoming increasingly interested in it. I told her that I felt correspondingly fainthearted about the Ph.D. I didn’t tell her that I had been working on the BAG almost exclusively for the last nine months; I merely said that it was “absorbing all my thought.” I hoped for sympathy. What I got was a kind of fear. Jane looked truly terrified! She watched me as if I were threatening her.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked her. “You look very alarmed. I just said that this project has been absorbing my mind. It’s a mental distraction, that’s all. It hasn’t got in the way of the Ph.D., which I will certainly finish by the end of this year.
“Tom, is there any way, any way at all that you could combine the Book, what did you call it?”
“The Book Against God, or some title like that,” I said shyly.
“Well, is there any way you could combine this Book Against God with your work on the Ph.D.?” Jane continued to look alarmed.
“But you’re treating this as if I have been working for months and months on the Book Against God! It’s just a mental distraction, I’m telling you. It’s something that I can see getting in the way of the Ph.D. in the months to come. A potential risk, that’s all. And to answer your question, no,
there’s no chance of combining them, even if I wanted to. The Ph.D. is very very focused and the other is very very broad.”
“But you just said to me that you were feeling fainthearted about the Ph.D. You said that. That was the word you used.”
“Yes, a figure of speech. I don’t really feel fainthearted at all. It’s just that sometimes it’s a bit hard for me to concentrate on it, and this last month—well, for the whole bloody month they’ve been taking up the road outside, as you know, and it’s quite hard to apply myself when they get going with the drills and everything. The windows almost rattle! And then I get easily distracted by thinking about this new Book Against God. And I haven’t felt very well in the last week, as you also know. Bad headaches. Very bad indeed, actually. But I really have been working quite hard on the Ph.D.”
“I’m sorry about the headaches. Tom, you’ve been working on the Ph.D. for how long now?”
“Well, six years I suppose.”
“Seven in fact, I think.”
“Seven, all right. Yes, seven.”
“And we’ve known each other for nearly five of those years. And your promises have come and gone like the seasons. Your Ph.D. has already seen Mrs. Thatcher off, and it’ll probably see Mrs. Thatcher’s successor off, too. For all I know you’ll still be at it when a Labour government gets in.”
“When universal socialism is declared in our land and the lamb lies down with the lion,” I murmured.
“I’m glad you find it funny. But if you can’t finish the Ph.D., if you know that you will never finish it, then for God’s sake get rid of it, and do something with your life. With our life. You know, darling, it’s not, it’s not … very manly
to have you sitting round all day in your pajamas. I’m sorry.
I thought that a very low blow. But I was silent.
“I’m sorry, but that is how I feel,” she continued. “That is how you make me feel.”
Despite appearances, all this was said quite lightly, and I didn’t trouble myself too much. By taking a light tone, I forced Jane to moderate her gravity. And then two days later I was called by my mother, and events in Sundershall took precedence. I wish now that I had attended to that strange look of pure panic that consumed Jane’s face when I told her about the BAG. Pure panic! In that fear lay everything that was to come. I suppose she felt she had suddenly been given powers of prophecy; she could see that the BAG was not going to go away. And in all likelihood, she didn’t believe me when I said that I had not been working on it. Obviously, she couldn’t have known about the “four notebooks,” but she probably had a good idea of what I had been up to. I know this now, but chose not to know it then.
When I think of the last few months of our marriage, I see Jane in my mind’s eye, always angry with me, and always practising the piano. I haven’t denied that I was difficult to live with, not least because my need to work on the Ph.D. (or BAG) meant that I was always at home filling the place with cigarette smoke. But this happy life had worked as long as Jane went out to Trinity. My understanding was that she practised there precisely so that we wouldn’t be together all day in Islington. Suddenly, however, she deliberately stopped practising at Trinity, and began to insist on playing the piano at home. After my return from Sundershall, Jane somehow transformed herself into someone who went out only to teach—three afternoons a week. I suppose that while
I was in the north she had got used to staying at home and playing the Steinway baby grand that filled our sitting room. And once I had returned, she was not going to adjust her regime. She wanted to stay at home.
A strange exchange seemed to take place in our marriage. She would not say anything about my dirtiness, my dressing gown (which she once tried to throw out of our bathroom window), my unchanged clothes, the beard clouding my face, the anarchy of books by my bedside, and the indirection of my reading. But in return, she just ignored me, and instead practised and practised on that damn piano until the sound of those nodding felt hammers drove me out of the house. And I should say that it was a certain kind of practising that was making it impossible for me to work. Complicated music I can shut out of my mind; it means little to me. Certainly, I understood Jane’s need for hard work last September and October; she was practising for an important concert with a well-known string ensemble, and she was very anxious about it. But she seemed to be repeating what sounded like a rather easy passage on the piano, playing it once, twice, three times, then again and again for what must have been an hour, with such fearless will and fierce commitment that to hear it almost made me weep with frustration at my own weakness. “Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a sin,” goes a Russian saying. But what about four hundred and forty times? Will it not seem a sin then? I felt that Jane’s endless repetitions at the piano were a way of punishing me for my lack of application, for my inability precisely to repeat and repeat and repeat, to “stick at it.”
When it comes to music, my powers of “neutralizing” are ineffective. I discovered the neutralizing technique while flying to Rome on our honeymoon. I’m a nervous and infrequent
flier, especially jittery when the plane meets air turbulence. But this time I was walking back to my seat from the lavatory when the plane violently dropped and I tripped and fell halfway to the floor. As I stood up and continued to my seat, I realized that I was not nervous. This was surely, I reflected (becoming “philosophical,” as Jane would have it), because I had been turbulent at the same time as the plane and had cancelled out the plane’s turbulence by equalling it. Of course, there’s no need actually to fall on the floor: once seated, as the plane continued to shake and dip, I experimented by gently rocking in my flimsy seat from side to side, and I found I was unaware that the plane was moving at all, because I was rocking with it.
I’ve expanded this “neutralizing” principle elsewhere: I smoke a cigarette in smoky rooms, if I can; I eat food if I have indigestion. A real success was scored with my insomnia—until recently, while I have been writing the last stages of this account. Instead of trying to think sleepy or lulling thoughts, I deliberately set my mind ablaze with random nagging contemplations. Now, the logical response to Jane’s piano playing would have been to “neutralize” it by making music of my own, perhaps by humming something. But I have a terrible voice, and can’t keep a tune anyway, and unlike smoking, thinking, eating, or moving, singing does not feel like a natural activity to me. So I lay on the bed and tried to read, as the music sounded around me, and I tried not to let my feelings blacken. And then I took my books and went out, to find a library or quiet café.