In this
village there were so many who did terrible things and never seemed to give it
a second thought. In London I had never known anybody who had ever done
anything that you would call really bad. Poets, painters, actors, critics, the
worst you could say was that one of them might have written an occasional
overly waspish review or that another opted for the easy syllogism when a few
extra minutes’ deliberation might have brought out a more profound and winning
argument. But how they suffered, my former friends, for even these minor
transgressions! The agonies of doubt and self-loathing, the suicide attempts,
the grabbing at drink or psychiatrists or other men’s wives, in order to ease
the terrible mental pain. None of them had ever crushed a cat’s spine for a
living, nonetheless they twisted and toiled and sweated in their beds at night,
raked by remorse and guilt. Yet in this village, and one can only assume in all
these villages about, there were Sams and his kindred whose day’s work might
involve the tearing up of hedgerows or the barbed wiring of ancient footpaths,
the spreading of hormones or the jabbing of antibiotics. Then there were those
such as Miles Godmanchester who was a senior employee at Daventry Life Sciences
which had taken over the stately home on the bend of the road north of
Lyttleton Strachey. At this animal Lubyanka all kinds of experiments were
carried out on poor trapped beasts, the vast, vast, majority of these
experiments pointless and all of them cruel beyond belief. Surplus rabbits are
burnt alive in that place. Yet Miles Godmanchester clearly enjoyed his work, was
popular and well-liked, nobody ignored him in the pub, nobody said when he came
in, ‘Hello Miles, had a good day stabbing cats?’ At night in bed, I imagined,
he woke for a second, smiled and turned over with a happy, contented sigh.
The Million Pound Poet
said, ‘No, of course you don’t want to come on tour with me right this minute,
you need all your time to be here because you’re writing again, aren’t you?’
I don’t
understand how he could have known that.
Emmanuel Porlock went
after it was dark, leaving me disturbed and unable to work.
On the
doorstep as we were saying our goodbyes he took a cheap Nokia, pay as you go,
mobile phone from his pocket and held it out to me on the palm of his hand.
‘You
see this?’ he said. ‘Do you know what this is? It’s a telephone, yes it is. But
it’s not connected with wires or anything, it’s a mobile telephone that I can
phone people up with anywhere in the world, walking about or driving in my car
or anywhere.’
‘Yes,’
I replied feeling confused, ‘a mobile phone, nearly everybody’s got one.’
‘Oh I
don’t think so,’ he said, climbed into his green Landrover and drove off at
speed without turning on his lights.
I sat at my desk for the
next two days unable to write a word. My mind filled with Emmanuel and Bev and
Martika. Bev I cast as WPC Lauren Haggeston, a character on a television police
show that I watched regularly and which was called
The Job.
Some days,
if you wished to, it was possible to watch two hours of
The Job
since UK
Gold, a re-runs channel, would transmit two thirty-minute episodes from a
couple of years back in the mornings, then ITV would show a brand-new, one-hour
episode in the evening. Recently the producers of
The Job
had culled a
lot of the crumpled real police-looking actors in favour of much prettier ones,
WPC Lauren Haggeston was one of the new intake, being extremely thin but still
with large breasts. I was interested to observe that the actress who played WPC
Lauren Haggeston had actually appeared three years previously in the same show
but on that occasion she was playing a crack dealer with a boyfriend in the
Ukrainian mafia. This happened a lot on
The Job:
actors who were cast in
the leading roles as police men and police women had almost always turned up
earlier as criminals. I sometimes wondered whether the producers were making
some subtle point about the moral duality of the police who must always carry a
whiff of corruption about them; but I suppose it was just that the casting
people simply liked to work with those they had already met and had found to be
professional. In my fantasies of a life filled with sex the part of Martika was
played by my dead second wife.
There’s
that old joke: a footballer is told by his manager, ‘Play badly and I’ll pull
you off at half time’, ‘Oh cheers, boss,’ says the footballer, ‘at my last club
we only got a cup of tea and an orange.’ I was pulling myself off and it was
nearly full time.
On the
third day after Emmanuel Porlock the Million Pound Poet’s visit, I was starting
to get back into thinking about maybe getting an idea about starting to work on
my poem, when the telephone rang. It was him, Porlock, though he was one of
those people who never say who they are on the telephone. His first words to me
were, ‘Have you got my hat?’ No greeting, nothing, very impolite really.
‘Who is
this, please?’
‘Have
you got my hat?’
‘Hello,
Emmanuel,’ I said.
‘Have
you got my hat?’ he repeated. ‘The hat I was wearing when I came to see you,
the grey hat, the Mau Mau hat.’
‘The
Mau Mau hat?’
‘Yes,’
exasperated. ‘It’s a make of hat. Mau Mau, the name’s on the front. I was
wearing it when I came to your house and now I can’t find it. I remember I had
it on when I was driving to your house but I don’t remember if I was wearing it
on the way back.’
I tried
to recall whether he’d been wearing it on the doorstep when he’d shown me his
mobile phone in the dark. ‘Well, I can’t remember but I’ll have a look for it.’
‘Yes,
you do that now,’ and he rang off. We had only been in the living room and the
hall so I turned up all the cushions but it wasn’t there. I looked behind the
couch and the TV but it wasn’t there either. It wasn’t anywhere in my house.
Fifteen minutes later and the phone rang again.
‘Did
you find it?’
‘No I’m
afraid not, I—’
‘Shit,
fuck, I’ve got to have a Mau Mau hat. I can’t function without a Mau Mau hat.
You’ll have to go up to London to get me another one. There’s nothing else for
it. There’s a retro hat shop in Berwick Street Market that might just have one.
‘I’m
not sure I can drop everything and … go up to London … my poem …
He
started shouting, ‘I fucking lost it at your house! You’re responsible. You’ve
got it somewhere or you’ve thrown it out, or you’ve given it to the boy scouts
and you can’t remember because your fucking mind is going …’ There was a
pause when I thought he was considering that he had gone too far. Then, ‘You’re
not wearing it, are you?’
‘Of
course I’m not wearing it.’
‘Alright
then. I’ll ring you the day after tomorrow to find out how you got on in
London.’ And he put the phone down.
When he’d said he knew I
was writing poetry again it gave me an electric shock as if I was being worked
over with a defibrillator by an untrained shop assistant in a mall.
‘How
could you know that?’ I asked.
‘Oh you’ve
a certain look about you, you know, like a lovely single girl who’s getting
shagged regularly, after not getting it for a long time. So how does it feel
after all this time to be doing it again? Quite a relief, I should think. I’m
sure, if you’re anything like me, your entire sense of yourself must be tied up
with your writing. I mean what are you, Hillary Wheat, without it? Another
roly-poly old man in an out-of-date suit. It must have been terribly painful to
be blocked out for all those years. I wonder if there’s a muse of the writers’
block, a sort of anti-muse who descends and uninspires the struggling artist. I
mean if there are muses why aren’t there un-muses? That would be quite a thing,
wouldn’t it? I bet you thought when you found you couldn’t write that there are
loads of other things you could do, mountain climb or do voluntary service in
Kenya or learn yoga but you don’t do anything, do you? It’s simply thirty years
down the gurgler really, isn’t it?’
I said
a trifle snippily, which made me feel immediately guilty, ‘You seem to know a
lot about it … being unable to write, that is.’
‘Guesswork,
empathy only, I’m glad to say. No, I’ve always been particularly fecund in the
writing department. Can’t bloody stop that’s more my problem.’
‘Well,
that is nice,’ I said. ‘For me it’s still painfully slow, only the themes are
sketched in, the detailed work is still to come … and I don’t … there doesn’t
feel like there is much time. I don’t know … how much time I have left to
finish it.’
He
laughed so much he spat clafoutie across the room. ‘Oh fuck off, Hillary. You
are one very chipper old man. Don’t try and play the “look at me, I’m a sad old
man approaching death” card just yet.’
True.
You might have thought that I would at least get on with the villagers of my
own age, reminiscing about the war and such and such but I seemed to inflame my
contemporaries even more than I annoyed the younger set. My major crime with
the senior crowd was that there was nothing wrong with me. While they aged and
shrank and stiffened up and died around me, while remorseless diseases left
them crapping in plastic bags and rolling around on ignominious little electric
carts, I stayed more or less the same. Fit and healthy and spry; slightly
greyer, that is all. I sometimes wondered if somehow the suspension of my output
had frozen me at the age I was when I left London. I wondered if when I started
writing again I would truly start to age and become subject to all the terrible
infirmities. It was a price I would happily pay.
It occurs to me that you
might have the idea that my poem, my opus, was no good. This had been my worry
too, was it just a longer drawn out version of the delusions I had had before?
There was only one person I still knew whose opinion I could trust: Paul
Caspari, my old publisher, father of the late Blink. Though now ninety years
old he was still functional. Like me he had been in a kind of suspension and it
was the death of his son that had liberated him, giving him again a seat on the
board of Caspari and Millipede, now independent once more after being bought
and sold a hundred times, back in the building they had occupied thirty years
ago, with the same name after a hundred aliases and the same letterhead after
fifty corporate re-designs. What had been the point of all that upset if it only
brought them back to the same place? What was the point of driving me mad?
After I
sent him such fragments as existed of my poem, plus my plans for the rest, he
replied in a letter almost by return of post.
Dear Hillary,
How marvellous to hear from you after all this time and to learn
that you have begun to write seriously again. My pleasure at this news turned
to extreme excitement when I read the opening stanzas and projected plan of
your great poem. I do not want to prevaricate in any way: I think you are
working on a masterpiece. You will, with this completed poem, claim your place
at the forefront of twentieth century poetry. Indeed, you will stake a claim to
be regarded as one of the greats of the twenty-first century also. Janus-like
your work looks back to our great tradition and also forward with the yet
untried face of the future of poetry in English. I do not know if I would
immediately have recognised the work as yours as you seem to cloak your
individual personality behind a new voice. This voice you are employing strikes
me as absolutely right: so far from mediating between the poet and his
experience, it serves instead as a way of lifting that experience to a new
power. By means of it each item of sensuously registered and remembered
experience becomes, whilst keeping its singular integrity, a sign and
manifestation of an energy abroad in the waking world.
How we need this energy and vision now!
I have always thought of you as one of the most under-rated poets of
recent times: how wonderful to have this opinion vindicated in what will be far
and away your most important contribution to literature.
If I can help in any way with comments or discussions I should be
honoured to be asked. I do not intend to get in touch with you in the near
future as I do not want to distract you for a moment from your great
enterprise, but I hope you will have the time to let me have any new verses as
you complete them.
We would certainly be happy and honoured to publish your piece,
perhaps also a re-issue of your older pieces . .
That would have to wait
though. The day after my phone conversation with the Million Pound Poet I rode
my Honda Melody to the railway station at Banbury and parked it in the
motorcycle bay, squeezing it between a 900cc Triumph Speed Triple and a 200mph
Yamaha Yakabuza. I went up to the ticket booth and said to the man behind the
plexiglass, as I would have said a long time ago, on the last occasion when I
went up to town, ‘I’d like a first class return to London, please.’
Without
expression he printed out the ticket in a machine and slid it under the window
at me. ‘That’ll be one hundred and seventy-five pounds, please,’ he said.
‘How
much?’ I gasped.