Three Brothers (15 page)

“Who is it?”

“Harry Hanway. Our deputy editor.”

“He’s my brother.”

“Oh is he? Your brother is doing very well. He is about to marry the proprietor’s daughter.”

It was Daniel’s turn to be surprised. “Is that so?” He had not forgotten meeting Hilda Nugent with Harry in the Camden park, four or five years before.

“And she’s the only child. If you know what I mean.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together.

“Graham Maland?” Clive Rentoul was saying in an incredulous tone. “A marginal figure. A Little Englander. He’s not a serious writer.”

“The serious writers,” Denis Davis said, “are Joe Heller and Saul Bellow. Maybe Mailer. They’re the heavyweights. Saul is superb. And Jerry of course.”

“Jerry Lewis?” Crossley asked him in what she thought was an ironic manner.

“Jerry Salinger. Raise high the roofbeam, carpenters. Great steal from Sappho.” Daniel had no idea what he was talking about; he suspected that Denis Davis had none, either. “The Americans are the future. I want to say—”

“Oh,” Rentoul said. “What do you
want
to say?”

“Have you ever thought of reviewing?” Damian Etheridge asked Daniel. “I’m always looking for new talent for the book pages.”

“I would be happy to try. I don’t know if I would be any good at it—”

“Nothing to it. I’ll send you some new novels. Have a go at them.”

“You’re very pleased with yourself, aren’t you?” Virginia Crossley was leaning towards Damian Etheridge.

“I don’t think so, Virginia.”

“Why are you giving novels to someone you have just met? Excuse me, I think you should show a little more respect for fiction.”

“Respect?”

The others sensed the beginning of an argument, and looked uneasily towards Virginia and Damian. “And you review five or six at a time. As if they were tins of baked beans.”

“There are just so many of them.”

“I waved a flag,” Denis Davis said to her, “when I read your piece in the
Standard
.”

This seemed to mollify her. “The one about new fiction?”

“When you said that in history you can make things up, but in fiction you have to tell the truth.”

She laughed at her own remark, as if she were hearing it for the first time. “Well, that is the case.” It occurred to Daniel that her apparent shyness was actually slyness—and that she had a high opinion of herself. Her voice had a slight rasp, a metallic quality that was oddly intimidating. “At least,” she added, “I take fiction seriously.” She looked at Damian Etheridge.

“I bet you take everything seriously,” he said.

“And what is wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” A few minutes later he whispered to Daniel, “That’s what’s wrong with her books.”

“Wrong?”

“They’re very heavy. Teenage suicides. Back-street abortions.” She heard the word “abortions” and glared at him. “As I was saying,” he added in a louder voice. “The French nouveau roman is doing very well here. In critical circles.”

Daniel could hear Rentoul’s voice in conversation with someone else. “You
must
have come across totalism. It comes
out of situationism. Have you read Derrida, by the way? You simply
must
.”

“I’ve tried. I don’t understand a word of it. I prefer Heidegger.”

“Oh that’s very old hat. All that
Dasein
business. A real German bore.”

“I’ve just turned in,” Davis was saying, “a piece on Jimmy Baldwin.” Daniel had never heard the phrase “turned in” before, but he assumed it was of common currency.

They carried on drinking into the late afternoon, their voices getting louder and their conversation more animated. They were arguing about the books pages of the various newspapers and periodicals—which had the best contributors, which chose the most interesting books. Clive Rentoul was complaining about the favourable treatment given by the
Observer
to the poetry of Sylvia Plath, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes whom he denounced as the “Cambridge versifiers.” Wilkin had nothing to say in their defence, of course, but he objected to Rentoul’s description.

It was time to attend the party at Connaught & Douglas. The offices of the publishing house were in New Bond Street. So they crammed into a taxi, excited by their sudden physical proximity, and made their way through central London. In this company it seemed to Daniel to become an unfamiliar city, brighter and more colourful than the one he had known as a youth. It had become a place of promise as well as of pleasure. When they arrived at their destination they all clambered out of the cab, leaving Daniel to pay the fare.

The party was held in the board room and chairman’s office of the company, taking up the first floor of a late-eighteenth-century house. Wilkin immediately went up to a tall, doleful man who did not seem particularly friendly towards him. Wilkin beckoned Daniel over. “This is Max Sitwell,” he said. “Max works on the
Sunday Times
.”

“Daniel Hanway.”

“Are you a poet, too?”

“Far from it. I teach.”

“At Cambridge?” Daniel nodded. “I was at Cambridge. Caius. A million years ago. I hated it.”

“I don’t think,” Daniel replied, “that it has changed much.”

“Oh look,” Wilkin said, “there’s Graham.” He went over to a portly young man, wearing large horn-rimmed spectacles, whom Daniel recognised to be Graham Maland. With a nod to the doleful man Daniel joined the two of them. Clive Rentoul came over, too. “I loved the last novel,” Wilkin was saying to Maland. “Superb.”

“My favourite character,” Rentoul said, apparently laughing at the memory, “was the taxidermist. Hilarious.”

Daniel noticed that their appreciation of Maland’s work had risen very quickly. Maland seemed embarrassed by their compliments, as if he suspected them of not being quite real. “That’s very kind of you,” he said. “How about you, Paul? Are you publishing another volume?”

“Not yet. Not yet. I’m waiting for the right time.”

Maland quickly turned away and introduced himself to Daniel Hanway. Daniel was now quite drunk, and he was amused at the self-composure with which he greeted the famous young novelist. In other circumstances he might have searched for something to talk about. “I wouldn’t necessarily believe,” he confided in Maland, “everything that they say.” Later he would not remember using those words.

“I don’t.” Maland smiled. “I don’t believe any of it.”

Daniel felt relieved and reassured by this answer, as if a whole complex of problems had been resolved. He joined another group that included Damian Etheridge. “I do think that Benny Hill is the true successor to Puck,” someone was saying.

“Do you? What an interesting point. But surely he is Falstaff? And Hancock is Hamlet.”

“Perfect.”

He then found himself in a group around a television journalist who had just published his memoirs. He was a man in late middle age but he was glossy, perfectly preserved, with a shine on his skin and a shine on his suit. Daniel noticed that the others gazed towards him, as if some source of enchantment was to be found in the glowing cheeks and forehead. He did not appear on television. Television appeared on him. Despite his modest stature he was larger and more capacious than those around him. But then it seemed to Daniel that some kind of bright liquid was flowing down his face and falling onto the ground. He was beginning to dissolve.

Daniel overheard conversations. “Oh the
Spectator
. Terrible circulation. Shadow of its former self under Lawson. Gale has just appointed some teenage literary editor. Ridiculous. Think of all the perfectly good literary journalists there are.”

“The opera was so—so Shakespearean.”

“Tremendous fun.”

“There was a dog in it.”

“I thought the dog was
marvellous
.”

Then Daniel dropped his glass.

He found himself leaning against a wall on the pavement outside; he was smoking a cigarette which (had he known it) he had begged from a passer-by. He was swaying, with half-opened eyes, and was in danger of toppling forward into the street. Then someone put an arm around his shoulder. “Are you all right, Danny boy?” It was Sparkler.

That’s the way to do it

S
AM
H
ANWAY
had become Asher Ruppta’s “odd-job boy,” as Ruppta called him, expected to perform various tasks from visiting the bank to sorting out the diverse files created by the business. He spent much of the time with Julie Armitage in a small back office, where every morning he would find an offering of food on his desk—a ginger biscuit, a packet of nuts, a sausage roll, a pork pie, a bar of Bounty. He felt like a pet rabbit. Soon Julie would be stroking him.

He was often asked to collect the rent from Asher Ruppta’s various properties. Julie Armitage used to commiserate with him, for what she considered to be an unenviable task, but in fact Sam felt no awkwardness or embarrassment as he went from door to door with his rent book. He looked forward to the opportunity of talking to people, of learning about their problems, of hearing their complaints. He took an almost aesthetic interest in speculating about the truthfulness of those whom he interviewed. He would speak to them in a slow and steady voice; he was infinitely patient with them, but he was determined. He could wear down the most spirited or most volatile of the tenants with his politeness. He had an air of remoteness about him, also, as if he were not quite sure what
he was doing in any particular place. He looked as if he might ascend into the sky at any moment. His eyes were pale, lending his face an air of placidity and calmness.

He also liked talking to Asher Ruppta: Ruppta would sometimes break off from business and, stretched out in his chair with his hands behind his head, he would tell Sam about his childhood on the island of the Celebes Sea. He would tell him stories of creatures of shifting shape that lived in swamps or marshes, of ghost birds that could be heard but never seen, of spirits that waited for the living in the shadow of barns or old buildings. His face then seemed to Sam to be set in a more cruel and ferocious look than the pliancy and passivity of his customary expression. On Ruppta’s island each dwelling had its own familiar soul, to whom offerings were made at dawn.

One evening Ruppta told Sam the story of the boy who became a tree. It began when his palms started to itch; he scratched and scratched, but the itching would not stop. Then the tips of his fingers began to tingle, and he began to tap them relentlessly on the crude wooden table in his small house. He woke one morning to find two fingers of his right hand covered in warts or growths, so strong and tough that they looked as if they were made of horn. He could not cut them with a knife, and when he tried to tear them away from his flesh the pain stopped him. After two or three weeks, the fingers of both hands were covered with these strange growths. The local doctor was baffled by the symptoms; he gave the boy some ointment, made from hyena fat, but it had no effect. Then the boy’s mother took him to the wise woman of the district. She took one look at his warts, and then turned away. Already the woody warts had covered the skin up to his wrists; they were of mottled texture, and dark brown in hue. They resembled the bark of a tree. The wise woman told the boy’s mother that there was nothing to be done, but that he
would not die. It was a disease, she said, that came from the forest. There had been stories of it over many generations. It had no name.

It was at this time that the boy began to sense a heaviness in his legs. There were small bulbous lumps swelling on the soles of his feet, and his toes were beginning to sprout the same dark wart-like growths. The layers of wood had also become thicker and harder upon his hands, and soon began to move upwards along his arms. One morning he saw some ants crawling among the layers; it seems that they had found something sweet to eat.

The growths had soon covered his feet, and were moving up his legs; he noticed that twigs and small branches were growing where his toes had once been. When he tried to walk, there was a soft scraping across the floor. Patches of green mould formed on the bark along his arms and, if he scraped them, pieces of the wood would become detached and fall away. He called out, day and night, “
Pahintuin! Pahintuin!
” Make it stop! Make it stop!

By now the bark had come up to his chest, and wooden growths had reached the back of his neck. He felt them moving onto his scalp and into his hair. Then he felt flecks of wood within his eyelashes. He sensed that there were little pieces of wood underneath the skin of his face. He was now helpless. He lay upon the ground outside his little house, where his mother fed him. He could no longer move, since the tendrils coming from his body had fastened themselves into the earth.

Eventually the people of the village could bear it no longer. He was an abomination. Against the protestations of his mother, and of his younger brother, they dragged the boy into the forest and left him there among the trees. He did not die. He seemed to find some nourishment within himself, and the frequent rains quenched his thirst. Eventually the bark
covered his eyes, and his limbs were entirely engulfed in its mantle. It is also possible that certain roots slowly penetrated his skull and somehow changed the nature of his brain. His mouth was the last human trace of him, but that turned into what looked like a knot of wood. The boy now resembled a fallen tree of gnarled or rotting bark, a haven for small insects. The birds alighted upon it, and pecked at grubs or larvae.

The boy’s mother visited the forest every day, and sat beside what was now no more than a fallen log. She stroked the green moss that had grown across its bark, and passed her hands slowly over the rotting wood. It smelled now of vegetable decay. She was sure, sometimes, that she felt a sensation of warmth. How did Asher Ruppta know this? He was the boy’s younger brother.

“The Byrnes are very troubling to me,” Ruppta said to Sam one morning. “They are never paying their rents. They must be taught a lesson.”

Sam visited Mrs. Byrne on the following day. “I need the housing benefit for him.” She nodded towards the closed door of the bedroom. She offered two or three pound notes. “For the sake of the children, sir. Look at them. Can’t you see their poor pale faces?”