The Living proof

T H E LIVING P R O O F

By the same author T h e Prince of West End Avenue Kraven Images T h e Bacon Fancier Clerical Errors

THE LIVING P R O O F Alan Isler

JONATHAN CAPE LONDON

Published by Jonathan Cape 2005 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 Copyright © Alan Isler 2005 Alan Isler has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Jonathan Cape Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London s w i v 2 S A Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney, New South Wales 2061, Australia Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited Endulini, 5 A Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009 www. randomliouse. co. uk A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library I S B N O-224-07378-8

Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests; the manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham pic

For Gill Coleridge and Dan Franklin — and, as ever, for Ellen

ONE

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ROF SHOT IN P O R N O E M P O R I U M ! Thus the titillating headline in the Evening Post, black letters screaming, filling the

front page. Stan Kops, the unlikeliest of candidates, had become a N e w York story. It had taken a bullet in the chest to do it, but Kops had (with a single blow, so to speak) achieved a local, albeit fleeting, name recognition that his biographies had hitherto never quite achieved for him. Go figure, as they once said in his native Brooklyn. We use the word 'genius' indiscriminately nowadays, applying it not only to a Leonardo, say, or a Shakespeare, a Wittgen- or an Einstein, but also to a favoured chef or stand-up comic. T h e term has become debased; it has lost its lustre and is, in Fowler's memorable simile, like a once-shiny copper coin that has passed through too many hands and too many trouser pockets. B u t for all that, I am tempted to use it of Stan Kops. Here is a man who, in my view, is a Genius of Mediocrity, a giant among the dwarves in that populous arena. Perhaps Tristram Shandy's father had it right, after all: there is a kind of'magick bias' that given names impress upon an infant's disposition, determining his future character and conduct. Kops's given name is Stan, and it appears thus on the title-page of his books and at the head or foot of his articles and journalistic pieces. In other words, Stan is not a diminutive used familiarly by intimates; it is not a shortened form of the once-patrician

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Stanton, the extravagantly Joycean Stanislaus or even the merely expected Stanley. T h e only other Stan I can think of is one half of the team of Laurel and Hardy, and I'm not sure about him. Stan is a name of appalling dullness; its shoulders invite the cloak that Pope holds momentarily suspended in his Dunciad. I first met Kops more than three decades ago. He was a newly appointed Assistant Professor in the English Department of Mosholu College, then the 'blue-ribbon' campus of the University of the City of N e w York, or U C N Y I was a Writer in Residence with a two-year contract. My first novel, Lying Low, had been published in England the year before to w a r m reviews and poor sales. A member of Mosholu s Personnel and Budget Committee, a reader of the TLS if not of the novel, had put my name forward as a possible candidate for a pitifully endowed creativewriting slot. T h e chairman of the English Department sent me via my publishers an exploratory letter, wondering if I were interested in the position and whether I thought myself qualified to teach 'on the college level'. My curriculum vitae included a BA and an MA from Leeds, a half-dozen short stories in n o w defunct magazines, and a review of a novel by Kingsley Amis in the Reviewer's Review that demonstrated my ability to cut and thrust. N o t much, I admit, but Mosholu got me cheap. A n d for me, it was an opportunity to visit America. Besides, I was glad of the job. Circumstances threw us together in those two years. We were both new to the campus, both feeling our way. Unlike me, though, Kops hoped to establish a career there — before, that is, he 'got the call' from more august institutions, from Harvard, say, or Princeton, orYale. As quickly as he could, he intended to 'increase his visibility on the academic horizon'. It behoved him, therefore, to hustle, and husde he did, early earning the disapproval of his peers. There was a seeming smarminess to his dealings with senior members of the department and with the college's

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administration, an obsequiousness that signalled humility, but nevertheless hinted at pride. He treated department meetings as if they were graduate seminars, a means of demonstrating his enthusiasm, intelligence and (modestly implied) academic superiority. N o t yet tenured, he thrust his slowly increasing number of minor publications, his (solicited) invitations to address learned bodies and his first-published scholarly exercise to appear between hard covers, ' T h e Valley of the Shadow: " O n the G a m e " in Thackeray and Holman Hunt', up the noses of his similarly untenured but less prolific colleagues. It was a war out there, and here was a fighter prepared to storm the ramparts. Actually, I got on rather well with him. I posed him no threat, you see; I was in no sense a competitor. A two-year stint, and I would be off. As it happens, I think a large part of his problem was his appearance — his mien and manner, so to say — about which he could do nothing at all, poor fellow. It's odd h o w such things may be misconstrued. 'There is no art to read the mind's construction in the face.' I k n o w a chap whose facial muscles at rest produce a smile, his eyes squinting in seeming good humour, no matter that he might be quite cast down. E v e n his most dolorous utterances are lightened by his apparent good cheer. Such people are well liked. It lifts one's spirits to be in their company. B u t Stan's facial muscles, now — they setde his face into an expression of unwholesome slyness, of well-oiled sneakiness.What produces this effect? It's hard to say. He is hirsute, a bearded little fellow. T h e dense black hair on his head and face in those years gave him the appearance of a miniature, if well-groomed, Neanderthal or a Silenus. His lips are fleshy, and they part to reveal large square teeth, one of the two front ones set at a slightly rakish angle to its neighbour. W h e n he speaks to you, his eyes narrow behind the thick lenses of his glasses, lending a conspiratorial air to his words. Then, too, perhaps in an effort to shake off the lingua franca of his humble Brooklyn origins, he

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couches his most ordinary utterances into a species of 'academicese', an utterly unnatural, convoluted argot much favoured by certain learned journals — at least, he did so in those days in public or social circumstances, if not always w h e n tete-a-tete. Apart from this he has a neat, trim body, which he maintains, as I was to learn, from fanatical bouts of starvation dieting. A n d worst of all, he stands too close, invading one's space. In brief, he is, largely through no real fault of his own, easy to dislike. A n d Stan knew he was disliked; what he didn't know was why. He revealed his misgivings to me one afternoon in Cosmo's Coffee Shop, in those days a cynosure for Upper West Side intellectuals and eccentrics and hence a place in which to see and be seen. In its dim recesses sat the movers and shakers of American thought, contributors to Partisan Review, Marxist philosophers, old-world Zionists, ageing Columbia professors and their bewitching Barnard admirers, even the odd poet or two — Morningside M a x , for example, the local angry beatnik, w h o occasionally raised his voice and declaimed his verses in falsetto to Cosmo's clientele. Stan knew the place from his graduate student days. On Thursday afternoons our class schedules coincided, and since we both lived on the Upper West Side, Stan would often give me a lift back to Manhattan. On one such occasion, he suggested we stop off for coffee, and so he introduced me to Cosmo's. 'You might see Diana Trilling over there,' he said, pointing to an empty booth.'Or Philip R a h v or Hannah Arendt or N o r m a n Rifkin. Look, in that corner you can usually find Salo Baron, the historian, and a bunch of guys from U T S . ' He noted my puzzlement. 'Union Theological Seminary.' 'Have you actually ever seen any of those people here?' I asked. 'Well, no. N o t exactly. Once, w h e n I was coming in, N o r m a n

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Rifkin was going out. But, hey, everyone knows they all come here.' T h e coffee at Cosmo's was quite decent for that far-off time. No variations, of course, other than a choice of with or without milk or cream. No decaffeinated, no espresso, no latte, no cappuccino, and so on, none of the comical variety that such enterprises as Starbucks have taught us to expect. B u t compared to what was then generally available in N e w York coffee shops, Cosmo's coffee was in a class of its own: rich, with a heady aroma, almost Viennese — in that last, like C o s m o himself, a genial Austrian refugee, fat, curly-locked, faintly puzzled, a lookalike, for those of you old enough to remember, of S. Z. 'Cuddles' Sakall, a staple bit-player in Hollywood movies of the Forties. Stan brooded over his coffee for a while, stirring, stirring. Abruptly, he looked up at me, his eyes narrowing slyly behind his thick lenses. 'You in analysis, B o b ? ' ' T h e name's Robin,' I said icily. ' N o t B o b or B o b b y or Robby, but Robin.' It was at this moment, I think, that I joined the ever-swelling ranks of those w h o disliked Stan. I have often noted how so seemingly insignificant a detail can alter for ever the way one views a particular person. When, on the slopes at Davos once, I saw that my then beloved's nose had turned bright red and that a translucent liquid droplet hung from it, trembling, only to be snatched away by the sharp wind and blown — splat! — onto my glove, I turned my head discreedy away and pointed with my other gloved hand as if in amusement to a skier further down the slope. My idea was to spare us both embarrassment and allow her time to find a hanky. Antonia was a young woman of undoubted intelligence and beauty. We were, I think, in love. In fact, I had planned to ask her at the end of this brief winter holiday to marry me; she probably expected to be asked. As it was, I said nothing and we returned to London, all ostensibly still well. But from that untoward moment in Switzerland

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on, our relationship cooled.We grew increasingly distant; we parted. B u t not before she asked me, Davos-like droplets trembling on her lower lids, what had gone wrong. ('We were so happy, Robin.') Well, I could scarcely tell her, could I? ('When, on the slopes of Davos once . . .' H o w utterly pretentious! H o w appallingly misleading! I was not at the time exacdy down on my uppers, but I was certainly quite incapable — economically, that is — of living the sort of life such a phrase implies. Antonia and I were in Davos not because we stood on that rung of the English social ladder occupied by people w h o took 'brief winter holidays' in such stylish places, but because she had, miraculously won first prize in a contest promoting winter-sports gear. T h e entry form had fallen out of a women's magazine she was reading in the salon while waiting for Doris to work her subtle magic on her hair. Ever superstitious, Antonia regarded the form's sudden appearance as a sign, like a Tarot card turned over not by chance, never by chance, but by some fatal and monitory power. E v e n my casual introduction of Antonia's name is deceptive. What was it you imagined? Some daughter of the aristocracy perhaps? Her surname was Forechild; her father, BasilVoshtchilo, had been a non-commissioned officer in the Free Polish forces in Britain during the war, w h o chose in 1945 to settle here and anglicise his name, w h o rose to the rank of foreman in the tooland-dye factory where he spent his post-war years, and w h o collaborated with his wife, the former Enid Gossen, in producing seven children, the first of them Antonia.) 'Touchy, touchy' Stan said. ' D i d I break some recondite British taboo or something? Sorry, okay? B u t are you? In analysis, I mean? Look, I'm not trying to pry. A simple yes or no.' ' I ' m scarcely disembarked from the bloody banana boat. There hasn't been time yet to acquire a decent N e w York neurosis.'

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'I've been going for years.' 'And you're a better man for it?' 'What matters is why I've been going.' Stan took a sip of his coffee and looked at me pleadingly over the rim of his cup. I refused to rise to his bait. 'People don't like me, R o b i n . That's h o w it's been since high school, which is w h e n I first noticed. M a y b e it goes back before. B u t you must have become aware of it at the college, especially in department meetings. Am I right? I can feel the hostility in the room w h e n I speak, the silent mockery, the knowing smiles: nudge-nudge "Were he goes again."Why is that, R o b i n , why? Envy? Yes, I've even considered the possibility of envy' I remained silent and busied myself with my coffee cup. ' M y parents weren't too keen on me, either. They preferred my brother, fucking Jerome, the big-ass lawyer, the money man.' Still I thought it prudent to be silent. 'Has anyone said anything to you about me, R o b i n ? ' 'Oh, for God's sake!' 'Are you one of them, R o b i n ? Have you gone over? Am I talking to the enemy?' Well, I mumbled the appropriate assurances, more embarrassed than I thought possible for me, and received for my kindness an invitation to dinner for that Saturday night. 'Alas, alas, I've tickets to the Met for Saturday' 'What's on?' Stan's eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'Cost fan tuttel T h e answer was ready to hand. Luckily for verisimilitude, I had tried, albeit in vain, to get tickets for that very performance. 'Okay, sure. Well, the Saturday after, then. Hope's dying to meet you.' I was doomed. •

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Well, much of what I have said about Stan here (my tone, at any rate) is probably coloured by anachronistic envy. I have told y o u the truth about him, of course — the truth, that is, as I then saw it. B u t it is only fair to admit that I am not neutral. He was to have Saskia and I was not. Still, Saskia belongs in the future. At the moment all he had was Hope.

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T H E GLARING FULL-PAGE HEADLINE that first drew my attention to the Evening Post turned out to be little more than a stoppress item. W h e n one turned to the story within, it occupied only six lines — whatever Stan, bleeding badly and in shock, had managed to tell the first cop at the scene.'Stan Kops,Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, U C N Y , was shot in the chest, perhaps randomly, by an unknown assailant in the doorway of the Bide-a-Wee Adult Bookshop and Massage Parlor, ioth Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets. He was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital and is expected to survive.' I was in N e w York on the first leg of a seven-city book tour that was to end in Los Angeles. My novel The Freshening Wind had just been published in America, where the critical response, I am happy to say, matched that in England. At the end of the tour, I expected to spend a fortnight with old friends in Malibu. In short, there was no time between my reading-and-booksigning engagement in N e w York and my departure for Chicago to find out more about Stan and his condition. Nevertheless, I phoned M y r o n Teitelbaum, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature w h o m I remembered from my days at Mosholu, to learn what I could. Myron, untenured w h e n I first knew him, had by now advanced to the chairmanship of the English Department. We exchanged pleasantries, and then I asked him what news he had of Stan.

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'Stan w h o ? ' 'Stan Kops. Haven't you seen the Evening Post?' 'If you mean by that, have I read the Evening Post, I'm proud to say I have not. Has Stan written an article for them?'A chuckle. 'It was only a matter of time.' I told him that Stan had been shot. ' N o kidding! Oh, w o w ! W h o was it? A student?' I told him what I knew. 'A "porno emporium"! You're putting me on, right? Hey, I'll be a monkey's gonads! Y o u kidding me? Give me a break, sweetheart. Oh, w o w ! ' Teitelbaum abruptly reined himself in. 'That's awful, terrible! Such a thing shouldn't happen to anyone. Will he be all right?' ' T h e Post says he's expected to survive.' 'Thank God! He was taken to Roosevelt?' 'Yes, according to the Post! 'You know Entwistle commissioned him to write his biography?' Y e s , I know' ' G o d knows why. Maybe not even God.' 'Listen, I'll phone back in a day or two. By then I imagine you'll know something. Okay?' 'Sure, sure, honey. A sex shop? H o o , boy! Hey, wow!'

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IN THAT FAR-OFF TIME, Stan had an apartment on West 84th Street, just east of Broadway. I arrived punctually, having already learned that in America punctuality when invited to dinner is a virtue. T h e door to the apartment was opened as if by magic, and I found myself looking down a long corridor at what I took to be one end of a brighdy lit living-room. I heard the cheerful sounds of a Hofmeister flute concerto. A voice rose towards me

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from hip level. 'Hi, I'm Jake.' I looked down and saw a child in neatly pressed cords and a T-shirt that asked the question 'Nietzsche or Nurture?' 'Hi, Jake.' ' A n d you are . . . ?' he said suspiciously. ' I ' m R o b i n , a friend of your daddy's.' 'That's okay, you can come in.' He made a clumsy, welcoming sweep with his hand, as perhaps he had been taught in his drama 'enrichment' class. 'Mom's still fixing herself up and Dad's gone to get some more club soda, but Aunt Phyllis is ready. D a d said she's your date for the evening.' 'For pity's sake, J a k e ! ' A thin woman with a sallow complexion and bright-red hps rose with a scowl and evident reluctance from a corner seat, putting aside a crossword puzzle and a pencil. She was wearing a floor-length skirt of orange velvet and a shaggy top of multicoloured wool, an exotic outfit that made her look like a tropical bird. 'Hi, I'm Phyllis R o t h , Hope's sister? Pay no attention to Jake.' There was little doubt that we had conceived an instant dislike for one another. 'Delighted. I'm R o b i n Sinclair.' I put out my hand, which she looked at with mingled surprise and suspicion before deciding to accept it. I tried a note of self-deprecation. 'I seem to have arrived a bit too early' ' N o p e , you're right on time. Stan said the English always arrive at least half an hour late, so he told you seven-thirty and the others eight to eight-thirty. Backfired, I guess.' She managed a sneer-like smile and spoke to my chin. 'So, would you like something to drink?' She gestured at a sideboard that bore the requisite paraphernalia. 'Whisky please.' ' O n the rocks?' ' N o , neat.'

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'Christ, you'd best pour it yourself then. I'll only mess up if there's no ice in the glass. Too little, too much?' I poured myself a stiff drink. 'Something for you?' 'I'll go see what's keeping Hope.' She fled from the room as if fearing pursuit. 'So what d'you teach, R o b i n ? ' T h e child reappeared before me. Perhaps he attended enrichment classes in social small talk. 'Creative writing.' 'But,' he asked earnestly, 'can you really teach someone to be creative?' ' H o w old are you, Jake?' 'Eight, going on nine.' 'You're old enough to be told the truth,' I said, 'but it must be our secret.' A n d I lowered my head to his level and whispered in his ear. ' N o , you can't teach someone to be creative. I'm a fraud. B u t never mind. If you keep my secret, no one will ever know.' We were interrupted by the arrival of mine hostess, flustered, breathless and preceded by the tinkling of numerous silver bracelets on her pudgy wrists. She was as fat as her sister was thin, perhaps fatter, but one could not rightly tell since she was swathed in a species of muu-muu, one that she had perhaps crafted herself since it appeared to be made of the self-same material and colours - stripes of purple and grey-blue with an interstitial gold thread — to be found on the bedspread in the apartment I was sub-letting over on 87th Street. Despite her double chins, she was a pretty woman, and she moved on tiny, slippered feet with real grace. 'Oh, Professor Sinclair! Or may I call you R o b i n ? I'm 50-0-0 sorry not to have been here w h e n you arrived! What can I say? Sorry, sorry. I've read your book. Wow, it's really something. Has Jake been looking after you? Where's Phyllis hiding, for God's sake? Don't worry, she'll be out in a moment. T h e two of you'll get along just fine, I know.

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Where's Stan got to? He's told me a lot about you, R o b i n . I've quite a thing for England, honest. Stan and I went there on our honeymoon. Ooh, I can hear his key in the lock. Stan! Stan! 'Is that you? Where've you been, for Pete's sake? Robin's already here.' Stan appeared, beaming, perspiring, dressed in jeans and a lumberjack's shirt — not yet, you see, in the costume of the host — and clutching a brown-paper bag to his chest with one hand while dangling a bag of ice cubes from the other. 'Hey, give me a moment, R o b i n , okay? I'll be right with you.' A n d he disappeared, making first, I suppose, for the kitchen. T h e silence was interrupted by a buzz from downstairs. 'Jake!' called Hope. 'You're on door duty, honey.' Jake eventually ushered in M y r o n Teitelbaum, still young and untenured, and his wife, R h o d a . In those days, M y r o n still had hair on his head, an abundance of it, strawberry blond and worn in the manner of Harpo Marx, and he sported a shaggy moustache. He was almost ready to begin his personal enquiry into his own sexual nature, his scandalous flirtation with homosexuality, ultimately to emerge from a closet he had not really known he was in. A n d he was to emerge with such flamboyance that he came to be known as the Lord of the Flies. At the moment, however, his only acknowledgement of the times through which we were passing was a bright-yellow scarf tied gaily around his neck and a dangling necklace of love-beads from which depended a crux ansata. R h o d a , for her part, was thin, drab and nervous. T h e y had been sweethearts in college and one another's first sexual encounter: marriage had appeared to them to be the only possible outcome of their daring. 'Drinks?' said H o p e eagerly. 'Myron?' 'Bloody Mary, please.' 'Okay. Jake knows what that is. H o w about you, R h o d a ? ' ' M e ? Oh, hey, sure. What's that drink I drink, sweetie?'

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M y r o n rolled his eyes to the ceiling. 'Jesus, what don't you drink? Whatever s on offer's fine.' 'Now, cut that out, hon! I'll have an itsy-bitsy gin and tonic, Jakey' Stan appeared suddenly, jovial, clad in the still approved academic style, grey herringbone tweed jacket, grey slacks, pseudoR A F tie on a white button-down shirt. It was a relief of a sort. Phyllis clung to his arm, gazing at his face. We stood for a while chatting, dipping, munching, sipping. Phyllis contrived to keep her back turned to me. R h o d a , w h o had not moved far from the sideboard that held the liquor, the better to refresh her glass, suddenly raised her voice and gestured with her drink, sloshing a little of it onto the parquet floor. 'What a great apartment! I told M y r o n we shoulda rented in Manhattan. Fuck N e w Jersey!' 'Dinner is served,' said H o p e wistfully. T h e table bore name tags in italic script.We sat in our appointed places. A bed of lettuce awaited each of us, on top of which sat an ice-cream scoop's worth of chopped liver. Jake appeared at his mother's ear. He spoke in a painfully loud whisper. 'There's a man in the closet in my room. I think he may be dangerous.' 'Don't be silly, dear. Oh, my, look at the clock, Jake! It's time to say good night to everybody Y o u can read for half an hour before lights out.' H o p e got up. We all wished Jake a hearty good night. Good riddance would have been more appropriate. I never could abide children w h o mingle with adults as if with their equals. Hope excused herself. She had to see to something in the kitchen. 'Meanwhile, start, everyone. Won't be a sec' She was rather more than a sec. We had long finished our (.hopped liver before she returned. By then, R h o d a had already personally accounted for more than half a bottle of the miserable

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plonk on offer. T h e conversation had limped along. Phyllis, seated to my right, asked me wearily how I was settling into America, but even as I began my standard reply she was already turning to Myron, sitting opposite her, and asking him whether he had seen the new show at the Modern. For her, conversation evidently meant asking questions. Hope, w h o had missed her first course, began to collect our plates. 'Oh, for God's sake, Stan, you nutty professor, you! Y o u forgot to light the candlesV T h e candles were fitted into the necks of straw-covered Chianti bottles. Stan rose to light them, leaning forward across the table. 'Oh, Christ!' said R h o d a , clumsily covering her mouth to mask a hiccup.'Not religious rites and rituals! Give me a break!' ' T h e Sabbath, Rhoda,' said her exasperated husband. 'Jesus, show some respect. You're in a Jewish household. We haven't all forgotten our roots.' 'Hey, nothing like that,' said Stan. ' T h e Sabbath was out at nightfall. N o t that it makes any difference here. I leave religion to my relatives, G o d bless 'em.' He grinned, meaningfully. We were to understand that the seeming paradox was deliberate, a free sample of his wit. ' T h e candles are merely decorative. H o p e thinks they're romantic' 'I'll drink to that,' said R h o d a , turning to me. 'Pour me another, tiger.' T h e course that followed was chicken soup, each bowl containing a giant matzo ball. Rhoda ignored this course, concentrating on the newly opened bottle of acidulous wine that stood before her. Her husband, cutting into his matzo ball, splashed the front of her frock and she had to run unsteadily to the bathroom before fatty globules ruined for ever the best of her formal wardrobe. 'Stan and I love London,' H o p e said to me across the table. Democratically, she looked about her and made everyone a recipient of her announcement.

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'Oh, sure, well, w h o doesn't?' said M y r o n jovially. 'We're in the English Department, remember?' 'We went there on our honeymoon,' H o p e went on. 'You'll never guess where we stayed. Stan is such a romantic' ' W h o would like a little more soup?' said Stan. ' N o one cares about where we stayed, Hope, honey. T i m e for the next course. Sweetie, let's pay attention here, shall w e ? ' 'We stayed at the Stanhope Hotel on Stanhope Close.' She looked round the table as if daring anyone to contradict her.' Stan-Hope, get it? We had a great time. We'd love to go back. D ' y o u know the Stanhope, R o b i n ? ' To my shame, I did know it. It was the sort of place that begins life as a seedy hotel, four or five once lower-middle-class houses knocked together. I had stayed there at perhaps the same time as the newly-wed Kopses. A recent but seemingly pointless MA in my pocket, I had descended from Leeds to London intent upon writing a novel. Stanhope Close is in Kilburn, west of the Edgware R o a d . T h e Stanhope was the best I could then afford. Nowadays it has surrendered itself to Arab terrorists, drug addicts and prostitutes. T h e police know it and wisely, I think, avoid it. I was spared a response when Jake, in pyjamas, appeared at the door. ' M o m m y Mommy, there's a lady throwing up in the bathroom. She woke me up.' 'Silly. You've had a bad dream, Jake,' said Hope. ' C ' m o n , I'll take you back to bed.' 'It might be Rhoda,' said Teitelbaum, half-rising. 'Perhaps I should take a look.' 'I'll take a look,' said Hope. 'I'm up anyway' She disappeared with Jake, and from the back of the apartment we heard a muttered colloquy. At length she returned, all smiles. 'Poor Rhoda's not feeling very well, I'm sorry to say. She's lying down in our bedroom for a bit.' Meanwhile, Stan had taken over control of the conversation,

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telling us anecdote after anecdote, the fruit of his researches, lingering on the Pre-Raphaelites: 'When the white goat died of heat prostration, and there was no other goat of that colour to be found anywhere in the Holy Land — or so his rascally servants told him — Holman Hunt actually had a goat of ordinary, unspecified hue painted white and, in best British fashion, he carried on.' A n d so Stan continued through the main course, Belgian brisket, roast potatoes and tsimtnes, a horrid concoction of carrots sweetened with honey and brown sugar. Our eyes were beginning to film over. Only Phyllis seemed eager to have him go on. She made all the requisite responses of ooh! and aah!, of chuckle and gasp. At one point, she even reached over and grasped his forearm, as if seeking some sort of physical charge. H o p e smiled on, her eyes brimming with tears. M y r o n came to our rescue. 'Hwcet!' he thundered. There was instant silence. ' L o , we have heard of the Spear-Danes,' I said. 'Very good, Robin,' said Myron. 'But I'm alluding to my wife.' He gestured to R h o d a , w h o stood supporting herself by the door frame. Her natural pallor was now tinged with green. 'Take me home, Myron,' she whimpered. 'I want to go home, I feel real bad.' In Stan's eyes, as he stared at the sagging R h o d a , I saw — but only for the briefest of moments — the flicker of a murderous hatred. 'I think perhaps we'd best be going,' said Myron, 'what with R h o d a being ill and all.' He glanced at his watch. 'Wow, it's late!' 'It is late,' I said. 'It's been a truly memorable evening, but I should be on my way' 'But we haven't had dessert and coffee yet,' wailed Hope. 'I've made a pavlova.' ' H o w about a rain check?' said Myron. 'You have it,' said Stan through gritted teeth.

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'I'll stay and help with the dishes,' said Phyllis. 'Mommy,' said Jake in his pyjamas, standing disconsolate in the doorway,'that bad man's back in my closet. He's got a tommyhook.' 'Tomahawk, for pity's sake!' said Stan bitterly. 'Tomahawk, not tommy-hook! What's the matter with you?' Jake began to cry. 'Oh, Jakey!' said H o p e with a peculiar laugh. 'You've had a bad dream is all. C o m e on, silly-billy, I'll take you back to bed.' She turned to her guests, a crazed look in her eye. We shuffled about awkwardly. 'Stan will see you off. Let's do this again soon, okay? You know how it is with kids. Terrific seeing you all.'And, stifling a sob of her own, Hope turned from us, took Jake by the hand and, fat woman though she was, ran lightly from the room. 'Oh, shit!' said Stan.

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I TRIED T O GET IN T O U C H WITH STAN once I returned to N e w

York from the West Coast. No luck. He lived now in Westchester, in Scarsdale, with Saskia Tarnopol, w h o was wife number two. Yes, this is the Saskia I spoke of. Saskia runs her own literary agency, Talent Unlimited, Ltd, which has no doubt in recent years proved convenient to Stan. I could not get past the answerphone: 'Hi, we can't come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, we'll try to get back to you as soon as we can.'The voice was Saskia's, deep, smoky and m e m orable. It roused in me an instant longing. Saskia and I had met at a party in London years and years ago, w h e n with a newly earned degree in psychology from Boston University she was spending a year abroad. I was immediately attracted to her and tried to dazzle her with a practised display

17

of charm and wit. But she was passionately in love at the time with an L S E student from Ghana, a tall black man with a m o n ocle and a brilliant grin, and I didn't stand a chance. She kept a smile rigidly on her face for me, while her eyes darted about the room following her lover as he moved smoothly from group to group. Of course, all that was well before Stan first gazed at her with wild surmise and Hope's case became hopeless. Nevertheless, she had remained in my memory an ideal of womankind, a kind of Dulcinea to my D o n Quixote, a figure transformed by my yearning into character after character in my fiction. I left my message on the answerphone, pointing out that I had only three more days in N e w York before returning to London. I could be reached at my hotel. M y r o n had filled me in. Stan had sustained a wound from a bullet that had shattered the lowest of his left ribs, making a nasty exit wound in his back, but miraculously hitting no vital organ. He had bled a lot, but was by no means high on the list of those requiring emergency attention at Roosevelt Hospital. 'That guy doesn't miss a trick,' M y r o n chortled. 'The report in the Times the day after included a full bibliography, a list of Stan's academic honours, a plug for the Entwistle biography he's in the middle of, and even a word or two about his plucky little wife, Saskia Tarnopol, w h o , we're told, "runs a successful literary agency". I'm reading now, get this: " M y dad's a N e w Yorker through and through," said Jacob Kops, the biographer's son, a lawyer in the firm of Kelly, T i m k o and Lyons, the well-known Wall Street attorneys. "He's wandered these streets all his life. This won't stop him." Never mind Stan fled the city as soon as he could afford to. Never mind he summers in Tuscany and Mallorca. N o , this guy is your edit N e w Yorker, pastrami and rye and moo-goo-gai-pan are in his blood.' ' D o we know what he was doing in the porno shop?'

18

'Oh, sure. He stepped in because it'd begun to rain, he didn't want to get wet, chuckle-chuckle.' ' D o the police know why he was shot?' ' "Mistaken identity," it says here. " T h e assailant fled." Which means they don't know diddly-squat.' 'I've phoned Scarsdale. All I get is the machine.' 'They're not there, sweetie. Stan's convalescing on his brother's farm in Connecticut. Horses, and shit like that. It's an unlisted number. N o t bad for a kid from Brooklyn, eh?' I was reminded of Freud's cruel remark upon hearing of the death of Jakob Adler in Glasgow. 'For a boy from the shtetl to die in Glasgow is already a career in itself

•

*

•

T H E SITE OF STAN'S PASSION, a ' p o r n o e m p o r i u m ' , put m e

inevitably in mind of his attempt to write pornography, what he had spoken of as a pot-boiler, something to bring in a litde extra cash, his 84th Street rent and young Jake's school fees having gone up in the same month. He'd tossed it off during the Easter break, he told me, a thriller about an attempt to smuggle Cuban cigars into the United States, an entertainment, really, in the classic manner of Eric Ambler or Graham Greene, but given its unique resonance by its emphasis on'steamy s e x ' . ' A n ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own,' said Stan modestly. He dropped the manuscript on my desk. ' B e my guest,' he said, beaming. 'Enjoy!' That evening, I riffled through the pages of The Cuban Caper and began reading at random. She lay on her beach blanket and watched him emerge from the ocean, a sea god, naked, the sparkling water drops sliding lovingly down his muscular flesh and falling reluctantly from him. She had never before seen such male magnificence, a torso so finely

19

proportioned, legs so superbly balanced. And as for his excitement, it stood out before him like a sword, pointing impudently at her. ' E n garde!' she thought. He lay beside her on his back, his huge excitement pointing now to the brilliant stars and to the bright moon that sailed inquisitively above them. Her fear left her, and with it her modesty. She turned towards him, feasting her eyes on his muscular arms, his narrow hips, his strong, hairy thighs. His eyes were closed, he said not a word, and yet his obtrusive male appendage throbbed. In no time she removed her polka-dotted bikini, flinging its two parts away from her, mindless of where they landed. 'Take me,' she cried, 'take me now!' He moaned gently. However, but for his pulsating excitement, he lay still. She reached out towards him, her fingers tickling the length of his shaft, then her hand encircling its throbbing knob. She moved on. Now one hand grasped his excitement at its root, while with the nails of the other she carefully scratched his large egg-shaped treasures in their leathern pouch. With the tip of her tongue, she licked the highly sensitive zone abutting the underneath of the knob before allowing her lips to surround it. She was tasting not merely man, she thought, but the Masculine Principle, the very source of life itself. He groaned as if in pain. In order to speak, she let his excitement escape her eager mouth. 'I want you! I need you!' she cried out, her lust in full possession of her, his splendid body blinding her to all decorum, her own excitement yearning towards him, awash in its hot, gummy fluids. He did not move towards her, but merely raised his knees, revealing to her admiring gaze his buttocks, miraculously not flattened by his weight, but firmly rounded, smooth and hairless. Unable to contain herself any longer, she climbed on top to ride him, gasping as the full length of his hot sword penetrated and

20

filled her lubricious scabbard. Bouncing upon him with an everincreasing tempo, screaming her joyous lust to the virgin moon and its starry votaries, she received her full measure of delight not once, not twice, but thrice, until his juddering excitement shot its great gouts of pleasure into her, spasm upon spasm, filling her up, and she fell forward exhausted onto his broad chest, his sea-curled hair tickling her nostrils archly. I preserved a few passages of his appalling writing, although I no longer remember quite why. After all, more than thirty years have passed. Perhaps I kept them for their extraordinary mingling of raunchiness and prudery: his excitement, indeed! Perhaps I kept them because I thought them examples of inadvertent self-revelation, insights into Stan's o w n sexual preferences, proclivities and hang-ups. Whatever the case, I now believe that Stan might have managed to make a living as a pornographer. A n d certainly this sample of his writing invites speculation about his presence in the 'porno emporium'. •

•

•

Q U I T E APART FROM HIS PETTY JEALOUSY and his decades-old

disdain for Kops, Teitelbaum's amazement that Cyril Entwistle should have commissioned Stan to write his biography was not unreasonable.Why should Entwistle, the Grand Old M a n of British art - a lifelong maverick and iconoclast w h o had in the midst of scandal resigned his membership of the R o y a l Academy in 1963 and in subsequent years twice refused a knighthood; an artist whose lifelong shenanigans had brought him again and again to the attention of a general public otherwise indifferent to art; a controversial, now elderly figure w h o in the television age has become a talking head, one certain to express his outrage outrageously, the darling of TV producers; a racist of the old-fashioned

21

British sort w h o democratically apportion their dislike of all 'wogs' of whatever hue, home-grown or foreign, equally and generously — why should Entwisde, in brief, have commissioned this boy from Brooklyn to write his biography? W h y should he have granted him hours of taped private interviews, access to all his papers, the hundreds of paintings and drawings still stored in Dibblethwaite, whatever Stan might require? Perhaps Entwistle might one day tell us. Meanwhile, we can only wonder. For my part, I think the roots of Stan's commission are to be found in Entwisde's ultimate vanity. Stan's initial 'area of specialisation', as American academics put it, was Victorian literature. His P h D dissertation was called 'Tennyson's Idolatrous Idylls'. Biographical detail soon became his approach to the interpretation of literature. By chance, his study of Thackeray's Vanity Fair introduced him to the life and work of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Holman Hunt, which in turn led to the essay I've earlier mentioned. He had found his true metier. There appeared in astonishingly rapid succession his lives of Millais, Copley, Sargent, Hogarth and Turner. These works achieved for Stan, and again I am tempted by the American cliche, a certain 'visibility on the academic horizon'. Certainly, they earned him his Distinguished Professorship. B u t they also achieved a modest commercial success. Entwistle, in my view, wanted to see himself enrolled among the acknowledged greats of British art. Given Stan's track record, a Kops biography was the route to take. For Stan it may yet prove the primrose path to the everlasting bonfire. •

•

•

I FIRST MET C Y R I L ENTWISTLE IN 1954. Well,'met' is going some.

He handed me the prize for sixth-form Latin poetry in the minor (read: minimal) public school we had both attended, he more

22

than a baker's dozen of years before me. He had been a sizar, as Cronyn Hall overweeningly named scholarship boys, but he had already achieved more fame than any other living 'old boy', his controversial painting 'Susannah and the Elders' having w o n the prestigious Christie Award of £$oo, no small amount in those years. I can't say I paid much attention to him then, my mind being filled with thoughts of my own excellence, of Fiona, plumpbreasted sister of my school chum Piers Whitby, and of Sir Cedric Smyth-Turdant ('the Turd', as I called him), my most recent stepfather - both, along with my mother, in the audience. B u t I remember a fellow inappropriately dressed in a pepper-and-salt tweed suit, tieless, a pale face, straw-blond hair, w h o had said to me, sotto voce, as he handed me my scroll, 'Fuck 'em all!' This last was a proposition that, with regard to those of the female persuasion, Entwistle strove all his life to put into effect. Standing under the marquee at the garden fete that followed the prize-giving and looking past Fiona, for fear I might be caught staring at her breasts, I actually saw Entwistle pulling my mother by the arm behind the pavilion at the far end of the cricket field. T h e dismay that such a sight might be expected to have engendered in me was mitigated by the expression I observed on the Turd's face. He had been chatting up the headmaster's willowy wife when, in mid-sentence, he squinted towards the pavilion, turned bright red, and became so agitated that his teacup shook itself free from its saucer and fell to the grass, splashing not only his elegantly creased flannel trousers, but also the white sandals and exposed toes of the headmaster's wife. •

•

•

H E R B E R T SINCLAIR, MY SAINTED FATHER, married my mother,

Nancy Stuffins, one week short of his fiftieth birthday, w h e n she was merely nineteen. What could her parents have been thinking

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of? Possibly of the fact that Herbert was principal librarian of Harrogate public library and hence possessed, in addition to a regular income, a certain cachet, while her father, my grandfather, owned a fish-and-chip shop in the Station R o a d . W h y should N a n c y have agreed to the union? In part because she hated helping out behind the counter, hated the stench of fried fish that permeated not only the shop but the family quarters above it. B u t in part she wished to rise above her station. She had met my father at a the dansant at the R o y a l Baths. T h e y had twirled into a waltz and a foxtrot. He had treated her to tea and crumpets and her choice from the pastry array. Nancy was impressed. He asked if she might possibly wish to see him again, perhaps go to another the dansant or to the pictures, or even to a 'spiffing luncheon' at the Imperial? Perhaps, she said, giggling inwardly. What a funny-looking old fellow he was, squat, almost bald, in celluloid collar, black jacket and grey striped trousers! Still, here was an opportunity for something other than the fish-and-chip shop. In the one photograph I have of him, he is wearing — ridiculous on him — a bowler hat. Soon enough, his intentions being honourable, he asked if he might meet her parents; he was 'desirous of asking for her hand in marriage'. He easily won over Cissie and Bill Stuffins, w h o were my grandparents and his contemporaries. Nancy, a dutiful daughter w h o had, besides, her own plans, easily succumbed to her parents' advice. Herbert was a nice enough old boy. He would see her right. W h y not? A n d so she said yes, and so they were married. Within three years, having submitted without objection or interest to his infrequent sexual advances, she became pregnant, a condition that resulted in me. And two years beyond that, he died of an aneurism. Nancy was a widow, although, in view of the financial upheavals that attended the outbreak of the Second World War, a surprisingly well-off one. My father, the chief librarian, had invested wisely. In the end, he had seen my mother right.

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A n d so we come to father number two, W i n g Commander Laurance Pastern, an R A F hero convalescing at the Majestic, a hotel turned over to the rehabilitation of war-wounded officers. A piece of shrapnel had neatly removed the lower half of W i n g Commander Pastern's left ear and somewhat deafened him. He would soon return to his Lancaster, but meanwhile he had had the opportunity to meet my mother, w h o , doing her bit for Blighty, had organised a tombola on the grounds of the Majestic. In the hectic conditions of war, they were married within a week. It was W i n g Commander Pastern w h o introduced my mother to the joys of sex. He also introduced her to an accent that she regarded as pleasingly 'posh', one that she adopted on all occasions for which her native Yorkshire vowels and speech rhythms seemed inappropriate.Thereafter, she never looked back. But, alas, the wing commander disappeared over the R u h r in 1944, and my poor mother was once more a widow. What next? Well, a succession of near-fathers, none of w h o m lived up to the sexual prowess of the w i n g commander. In 1 9 5 2 , however, she met the Turd, a barrister at Gray's Inn, then on the brink of taking silk and acquiring a knighthood. He proved himself a satisfactory substitute for the w i n g c o m mander, now a memory, and became husband number three. I hated the man, w h o m I thought of as kin to Dickens's v i l lainous Mr Murdstone. It was no accident, it seemed to me, that the two shared a rhyming syllable. E v e n today I remember him with loathing. In any case, the sudden intrusion of C y r i l Entwistle into my mother's life caused a breach with the Turd that was to end in divorce. Mumsy, as she liked me to call her, was besotted w i t h Entwistle. He was four years her junior, and, in the slang of a much later era, he turned her on. Indeed, she was incandescent. Accordingly, she moved to Dibblethwaite, from w h i c h he had ejected his previous inamorata, leaving the Turd in L o n d o n

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to sort out the mess. For a short but w o r r y i n g while, the Turd contemplated suing Entwistle for alienation of affection; soon enough, however, his o w n entanglement with the headmaster's wife cooled his enthusiasm for legal recourse. M e a n w h i l e , M u m s y was in ecstasy. Dibblethwaite was the Promised Land. She even planted a herb garden. B u t it was panting human sex, not the fecundity of the soil, that for her transformed a dull village into paradise. For as long as it lasted, M u m s y became loamy womanhood, das Ding an sich, the abstract come to life. Hers is the nude body whose solid flesh in the paintings of this period is tinged in blues and greens and umber, recumbent upon a bed, upon an oriental carpet, draped across pillows, seated in a w i n g chair, her legs always slightly parted, her bush upright and glistening, an impenetrable expression on her face as she gazes at the viewer. To see one's mother thus p u b licly revealed is for a young fellow — h o w shall I put it? — unsettling. Y o u perhaps k n o w the Entwistle in the National Portrait Gallery, the one in which M u m s y lies on a daybed, supporting herself on one elbow, her body turned towards the viewer, her left leg raised, creating a triangle, while in the foreground Entwistle himself may be seen, in profile, starkers, a self-portrait from head to mid-thigh, his member huge and pendulous. It is, arguably, his most well-known painting. I m e n tion it because of the mirror above M u m s y s left shoulder, in which may be seen the muted reflection of a head peering around a half-open door, a head that is mine. On the back of the canvas is the title Entwistle originally gave to this painting, 'A Guilty Thing Surprised'. Actually, I got on rather well with him. He liked, he said, the cut of my jib. I remember that he painted white cricket stumps against the door of the shed where he stored his work, and he would bowl me over after over, happy to bowl me out ('Owzat! Owzat!'), happy to catch me out ('Owzat! Owzat!'), happy to

26

leap about and race after the ball. He had enormous energy in those years. And, of course, I remember the advice he gave me before I went up to university. 'The trick is to get 'em to take off their own knickers, both literally and metaphorically. Y o u have to approach 'em with feigned indifference and with a feigned assumption that you're going to succeed. "That's all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." ' This was not the sort of useful advice that I might have expected to receive from my own father, had he lived. What was at once irritating and strangely attractive in Entwistle was his total lack of concern about what anyone else might think. He barged on through, confident he would carry the day. I continued to see him over the years, usually by accident, sometimes by design, long after he had sent Mumsy weeping back to London and to her years-long quest for a suitable surrogate, for equal he had none. In her old age she still spoke of her time with 'frisky C y r i l ' as the zenith of her life, patting the trembling, mottled hand of her beagle-eyed last husband the while, 'There, there, Charley. Never mind.'

•

*

•

SHOULD I TELL STAN ANY OF THIS? While he surely knows the names of all Entwistle's models, there is no reason that he should associate Lady Nancy Smyth-Turdant with R o b i n Sinclair, and even if he discovered that she was once Nancy Sinclair, it would be something of a stretch for him to suppose that she was my mother. T h e wonder is that Entwistle has not given him my name as one worthy of an interview. Still, I don't doubt that the wily old bastard had his reasons. H o w many other possible leads has he quiedy denied Stan? H o w total is the access he has granted him? Actually, I'm not certain that I am worthy of an interview.

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Yes, ascertainable facts are facts. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce papers, school and university records, and so on, conform to the truths I've recorded here. T h e painting in the National Portrait Gallery, for example, has the title on its verso that I say it has. B u t is that dim reflection in the mirror really me? It's hard to say. I've always supposed it was, but, to be honest, I have no memory of coming upon my mother and Entwistle in flagrante, whether purposefully or by chance. C a n I have wiped it out? I do not know what I know. Non nosco ergo sum. T h e best I can offer Stan is unreliable gossip. Besides, is his an enterprise in which I wish to engage? Do I really want to help him? •

•

•

W I T H I N THREE YEARS OF MY R E T U R N T O L O N D O N after my stint

at Mosholu I was back in N e w York again, this time delivering a lecture at the U C N Y Graduate Center. T h e Center was sponsoring a conference on the birth of the English novel. Frankly, I was surprised and a trifle flattered to have received an invitation, but since U C N Y undertook to pay all my expenses and offered a decent honorarium, I immediately accepted. T h e Center's midtown building was aswarm with scholars, an international array. I was to offer a twentieth-century novelist's take on the eighteenth-century novel of my choice. I had attended a few lectures by J . R . R . Watts while at university, and with those of my notes on Fielding that had survived, my memory of Tom Jones (the film, the one with Albert Finney and Susannah York) and a quick run-through of Fielding's elaborate chapter titles in my old paperback edition, I had cobbled together a fifty-minute talk on the novel. Well, I was not a scholar, and besides, I was to talk as a novelist. As I recall, my remarks were not without merit.

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Nevertheless, I was somewhat cowed at the thought of an audience of specialists, people for w h o m Tom Jones was not merely the subject of arcane research and publication in learned journals, but also the content of ordinary and casual discourse. What I feared most was the question-and-answer period that was to follow. In the event, my fears were groundless. Hardly anyone turned up to hear me. At the very hour I delivered my lecture, J . R . R . Watts, the great man himself, was giving a standing-room-only talk on Clarissa, in which he argued that Richardson's own sexual needs and psychological oddities fuelled the narrative, the epistolary form here acting as a masking or distancing device. Should the serious scholar attend Watts or Sinclair? A no-brainer, as we say nowadays. Stan introduced me. In fairness to him, he made a good j o b of it, puffing up my as-yet-modest accomplishments into something resembling a lively career-in-the-making and expressing his personal eagerness to hear what fresh, non-academic insights I was about to offer on one of the great works of English fiction. As such introductions go, his was relatively restrained, and yet in that almost empty lecture hall it seemed wildly overblown. I saw Hope in the front row centre. She smiled sweeny at me and gave an unobtrusive litde wave of encouragement. Apart from her, though, there were scattered in that vast space perhaps a dozen others, two of w h o m in the middle distance were engaged in some whispered dispute. As I recall, I began with a self-deprecating allusion to 'We few, we happy few, we band of brothers', and received for my pains only a snicker from an usher leaning against the wall of the righthand aisle. Unnerved, I dashed through my lecture, barely lifting my eyes from the pages on the lectern before me, and finished in just under thirty-five minutes. Stan behind me and Hope before me led a scattering of applause that echoed hollowly and swiftly died

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away. Stan asked for questions and, w h e n none was forthcoming, gamely offered one of his own. He wanted to know whether the elaborate Invocation that begins B o o k X I I I of Tom Jones had in any way inspired the ethnically oriented question, 'Hey, Muse, where the fuck you at?' that opens Chapter 13 of my own recendy published 'American' novel Times Squared. Of course, nothing had been further from my mind, but here was a gratuitous plug for the book, which had just been published on that side of the Atlantic. 'Absolutely' I said. ' T h e number thirteen, which has no w h o l e numbered square root, gives the game away. B u t it takes a very astute and careful reader to notice this tip of the hat, so to speak, to Henry Fielding. There are other parallels and allusions, of course, none of them essential to the enjoyment of the novel, but all in their small way contributing to the texture of the whole.' There were no other questions, and so Stan mercifully brought the evening to a close, some of my audience already making for the exit, and thanked me heartily for a stimulating address. Now, H o p e alone clapped. H o p e had booked a table for us at Le B o n Ton on East 54th Street, a trendy restaurant that at the time was well beyond our private means. Here waiters unfurled our napkins for us, snapped them crisply in the air and draped them on our laps. Here, while we sipped our pre-dinner cocktails and contemplated the menu, slices of crusty baguettes generously smeared with a delicious tapenade were placed before us and the sommelier hovered in the near distance, his chain of office hanging on his chest, anxious to advise. ' G o o d Lord, Stan, there was no need for this,' I said. He had asked me by phone not long after my arrival whether I had anyone I'd like to have j o i n us for dinner. I had thought i m m e diately of Kate and, after a minimal exercise in soul searching, a

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mini-psychomachia, I had tried to make contact. Alas, like Poe's Lenore, she was already lost to me. 'Forget it,' said Stan. ' U C N Y ' s picking up the tab.' I apologised to both of them for my poor performance. 'What a bore it must have been for you both. Loyalty, thy name is Hope. Still, Stan, it was a bad idea putting me on opposite J . R . R . Watts. Christ, how was I supposed to compete?' Hope said she had enjoyed my remarks; she thought I was a very witty fellow. A n d those who'd gone to listen to J . R . R . Watts had missed something very worthwhile. Stan said, ' H e y c'mon. I've heard worse.' He seemed genuinely happy. 'You did okay. Besides, w h o gives a shit? I had nothing to do with the programming. T h e important thing is, you're here for a few days, all expenses paid, right?' I learned that Stan had (cunningly?) found his way on to the university committee that oversaw this annual conference. Every committee member had the right to nominate an invitee of his choice, without regard to the panel of invitees over which the committee deliberated. Most committee members ignored this privilege. Stan had chosen me. ' G o with the flow,' he said. 'Sit back and relax. Enjoy' Between courses of a superb meal, Hope found it necessary to visit the loo. Stan winked at me. 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine.' 'Sorry?' 'Hope and I would really like to go back to Blighty again. An invitation might really boost my visibility on the academic horizon. K n o w of anything over there? A word in the right ear? I'd really appreciate it.' I was aghast. 'Stan, I know no one w h o matters. A n d anyone I do know is either without influence or would be uninfluenced by me.' H o p e was on her way back from the loo.

3i

'Hey, that's okay Let's just say you owe me one, guy Some day you'll be able to pay up.' 'All right, I owe you one.' Was n o w the moment to pay up?

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TWO

HEN I MET SASKIA F O R THE SECOND TIME, she was once

W

more in London, but now in the company of Stan Kops,

w h o had left H o p e in tears and in need of a lawyer. 'It never worked,' he told me. 'It never could have worked. We inhabit different worlds.'The lovers had taken advantage of the Christmas hols and bargain fares from British Airways. Things were 'getting serious' in N e w York and it was good to get away 'Look, I respect Hope, she's a wonderful woman, the mother of my son, for God's sake, but Jesus, R o b i n , I've got a life to live.' It was now 1 9 7 5 ; Stan had passed his fortieth year. 'I reached for the brass ring, old buddy, and, Christ, I caught it.' So there was Stan, the master of the cliche, pouring them out, one after the other. It was clear that he was much moved. T h e cliche, after all, is an easy and reliable means of translating real and complex emotions into recognisable terms. T h e particularity or individuality of one's own condition might become blurred in its use, but the genuine emotion itself comes, via the cliche, conveniendy packaged. T h e truth is that a cliche, painful to the stylist, often encompasses the truth. What Stan wanted was approval or, at the very least, understanding. I determined to offer him neither. It was not I, after all, w h o had caught the brass ring. He had got in touch with my publishers, w h o had got in touch with my agent, w h o had got in touch with me. I took the number

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where he might be reached and phoned him. He had moved well beyond the Stanhope Hotel and its purlieus, and not, I think, out of clumsy deference to the doomed romantic ardour of a discarded wife. His Millais and his Copley had by now been published to positive reviews in the United States; the Millais had done well here in Britain. As an academic he was flying high. He was able to put up at a halfway decent hotel in Bloomsbury 'less than a stone's throw from the B M ' . I suggested that we take lunch at one of my clubs - would the R e f o r m suit? Oh, the R e f o r m would suit admirably. A n d then he told me about Saskia and poor, abandoned Hope and asked whether he and I might perhaps meet, former colleagues, old chums, an hour before Saskia joined us, since we had much to catch up on. Saskia would be happily occupied by Harrods and the boutiques of Beauchamp Place. I had alerted the porter, w h o brought Stan to me in the morning room. R e l u c t a n d y I put down a copy of the Spectator, in which my recent, slashing review of a vile novel by an American academic had been granted pride of place, a review whose wit I was once more savouring, and rose to greet him. 'Stan, old chap!' ' R o b i n ! ' N o t one of the great exchanges of modern history, I dare say, but it served. Stan looked about him in the morning room and liked what he saw: the massive fireplace with its sleep-inducing fire, the surrounding shelves of books, the leather armchairs, the table piled with the day's newspapers and the current magazines and j o u r nals, the tall windows giving on to Pall Mall, the contrast between the rain-lashed gloom without and the warm lights within. From this club Phileas Fogg had set off on his around-the-world tour, and to this club within eighty days he had returned. A h , for Stan, what bliss! His area of special competence, after all, was the nineteenth century and so he knew all about the R e f o r m Acts. T h e Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Stan's Holman Hunt among them, had championed reform. A n d the many portraits in oil that

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graced the walls of the saloon were all prime personages in Stan's doctoral and post-doctoral studies. 'Let's not fool around,' said Stan. 'I'd like to join?' 'Tell me,' I said, 'is Saskia by any chance Saskia Tarnopol, the psychologist?' 'Well, yes and no,' said Stan, a bit put out. 'She did do therapy for a year or two, built up a respectable clientele, but now she's a literary agent, an independent. D ' y o u know her?' 'I met her years ago at a party over here. I doubt she remembers.' 'She never said.' At that time, of course, Stan and H o p e were still in a marriage that, if wobbly, nevertheless held together like jelly. Their history as a couple was a long one. T h e y had both gone to Brooklyn College, she a year behind him. They had both been English majors, she graduating Phi Beta Kappa at a time when the distinction meant something. They had both pursued graduate studies at Columbia University, she with a Woodrow Wilson fellowship. They had married soon after H o p e received her M A , her thesis,'Swift and the Cloacal Imagination', winning the prestigious Skorneck Prize and being published in a special issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies. All this Stan told me, that day at the R e f o r m , with a modesty that forbade him, he implied, from mentioning his o w n early academic distinctions. 'But she fell behind,' he said. 'She couldn't keep up. Okay, there was Jake. A n d Jake needed looking after. T h e kid needed a fulltime mother. I'm not denigrating her maternal accomplishment. He's a wonderful kid — not such a kid any more: hey, he's taller than I am. In his sophomore year at Yale. B u t let's not blame her. She did a great job. Look, I'm grateful. B u t before you knew it, we were on different planets — intellectually, I mean. H o w far can you travel on a prehistoric M A , for Pete's sake?' Stan looked about him.'I'm not kidding about membership,' he said.'How can I join?'

35

'But where does Saskia come into all this?' ' A h , Saskia,' he said. 'Yes, well.' Stan searched the ceiling as if on the lookout for passing motsjustes. ' Y o u remember Phyllis R o t h , Hope's kid sister? We had y o u over to dinner once w h e n she was there? H o p e thought the two of y o u might hit it off?' What I remembered was that the sister quite evidendy had the hots for Stan, upon whose every measured word she had hung as if she were witnessing the composition of Holy Writ. 'Were you fucking Phyllis?' I asked. Stan's conflict was evident in his face. Should he register dismay at my use of such a vulgarism in one of the hallowed halls of history, or should he lay honest claim to being something of a lad? He batted the ball straight down the middle, sighing a roguish sigh and winking. 'Gentlemen don't tell,' he said. 'I was younger then. It was an effort to keep her off me.' ' S o you did fuck her?'What on earth did w o m e n find attractive in this hairy little monkey? Tsk-tsk, Stan implied, merely shaking his head at me and raising his hands, palms forward, to shoulder height. His lips, he was telling me, were sealed. He would try a diversion. 'I take it Lord Palmerston was a member?' 'What?' ' T h e Third Viscount? H e n r y J o h n Temple? D o n Pacifico? "Send-in-a-gunboat" Palmerston? He served as Foreign Secretary in the W h i g administrations of Grey and Melbourne? C o m e on, R o b i n . He must have joined the R e f o r m . Listen, you've got to get me a membership.' Well, I had read Stan's so-called novel and knew beyond doubt that if there had been hanky-panky, then Phyllis must have been fucking him. My guess was that Phyllis wouldn't take it lying down (so to speak). B u t it was time to move on. 'You were telling me about Saskia, Stan.'

36

'Yes, Saskia. Okay. Phyllis and Saskia were roomies.They'd met at Smith, where Phyllis had a full scholarship. Both made summa cum and Phi Beta Kappa. T h e y kept in touch. Eventually, they had this pad in the Village, on Christopher Street. By then Saskia's agency was beginning to take off. She'd already signed on M a x Pardoe and Louise Janeway, and she was angling for Nazeem Jabril, w h o m she finally got. B u t Phyllis thought I might benefit from Saskia's special psychological training. It seems comical now, but Phyllis thought I needed to loosen up. I was too uptight, too unwilling to go with the flow' 'So you betrayed Phyllis as well as Hope, and fucked Saskia?' ' N o t so simple, Robin.' Stan squinted, looking about him for any w h o might be tuned in to our conversation. T h e closest member snored gently before the fire. Stan looked at me, as if measuring my competence to take in what he was about to tell me. 'Phyllis and Saskia were lovers,' he whispered. 'They wanted to share me. I tried it for a while. Well, what the heck! B u t ultimately I'm not that kind of guy. I like watching, but I don't like being watched. Meanwhile, I'd fallen for Saskia. I gave them an ultimatum, and hey, here we are.' Stan's

snort of triumph was

unmannerly. ' A n d pat she

comes,' he went on cheerfully, for Saskia was bearing down upon us. hike the catastrophe in the old play? At least as apt, it seemed to me, was ho, where she comes with portly pace. A n d indeed Saskia had put on a pound or two since last we'd met. Some might have called her plump. 'Sweetie!' said Stan, the two of us rising to our feet. He made the introductions. ' R o b i n says he met you some years ago at a party over here.' 'I don't think so.' 'The Hieatts, in Chelsea? Aubrey and Leila? She was something in television?' I said.

37

'Don't k n o w 'em.' 'Sir Aubrey Hieatt?' 'Nope.' She stood with her back to Stan and made wild facial gestures at me. ' A h , well,' I said. ' M y mistake.' An increase in years and embonpoint had only added to her attractiveness, had softened what I remembered as a stark beauty. H e r raven hair had a deliberate streak of white in it. H e r hps were full and pale and tree of lipstick. H o w could she have linked herself to Stan? I took the opportunity to ask her precisely that as soon as Stan, following my directions to what he called 'the little boys' room', left us alone. 'There's more to Stan than meets the eye,' she said. 'Oh? What, exacdy?' She frowned. 'He's already made the transition from academic to commercial publishing. His Millais and Copley both did great. T h e Copley in particular has sold well; it's been picked up by three book clubs and it made the final cut for the National B o o k Award. Okay, so Kerr's Boss Tweed actually w o n it, but Tweed's only of local interest. T h e Copley's coming out over here in the spring, and already the vibes are good, I kid you not. Stan needs career guidance, which is something I can provide. He's on his way to becoming a world-class biographer; he's going to enjoy universal name recognition, the works. R i g h t now he's into J o h n Singer Sargent. Sargent'11 be the big one. T h i n k of Sargent, R o b i n . Think of his appeal. An American, born in Italy, settled in England, exhibited around the world? Something for everyone. Y o u heard it here.' ' S o your relationship has largely to do with business?' T h e tip of her tongue moistened her lips. She smiled, and winked at me. 'Largely, but not entirely. Stan has other talents, about which I must remain modesdy stumml

38

My face must have revealed my scepticism. It may also have revealed my despair. 'I told you, don't sell him short.' She grinned. ' N o pun intended.' I changed tack. ' W h y was it so important to deny we had met?' 'I saw Terence this morning.' 'Terence being . . . ?' 'Terence Addo?' 'Ah, the student from Ghana, or I miss my guess.' For some reason, whenever I talk to Americans I seem to trawl my memory in search of phrases long since out of use. 'He's something important at the embassy n o w ' She spoke as if basking in his glory. 'Talk about black Adonis!' 'And?' 'And Stan wouldn't understand about Terence. N o t yet, anyway' 'About this morning's little infidelity, you mean? I see, I see. Y o u plan in time to train him in complaisance.' 'Oh, for God's sake grow up,' she said contemptuously. She was right, of course. My priggishness, I realised, could only have been motivated by envy. N o t of Terence Addo, I hasten to add, he of the brilliant smile and the foppish monocle, with w h o m I had merely shaken hands all those years ago, a casual recipient of his smooth social ease; but, shamefully, of Stan Kops, the Aposde of Dullness, w h o had also somehow caught her attention. Stan, for pity's sake! He must be pumping pheromones into the circumambient air with the vigour of the advertisement for cigarettes I once saw in Times Square, the one of a giant head that blew perfect circles of smoke (or was it steam?) above the heads of passers-by. Certainly, his attractiveness to females could not be explained by his appearance. A n d since I mention N e w York, it is appropriate to evoke a N e w York question: what was 7, chopped liver?

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'Your secret is safe with me,' I said, speaking these timehallowed words with what I hoped was weary amusement. 'If B o x and C o x is what you want, w h o am I to object? B u t pat he comes,' I went on, seeing Stan approaching. Yes, yes, I know: these had been Stan's words. My theft of his quotation may be seen as a private j o k e or as fodder for Freudian analysis — take your pick. I got to my feet. 'Let's go in to lunch, shall we?' Two days later Saskia phoned me, getting my number from Timothy Hughes, my agent, w h o m , I discovered, she knew. O n e agent's betrayal is another agent's professional courtesy. Timothy, after all, might have acted on my behalf as a go-between and preserved my privacy. Saskia's breath travelled along the line like a sultry promise. 'Stan's at the Tate and then he's going on to the B M , the R e a d i n g R o o m . He's doing work on his Sargent. He'll be hours.' So I was not chopped liver, after all! On the instant I forgave Timothy his wayward breach of confidentiality.

*

•

•

I SAW SASKIA AND STAN ONCE MORE before they left for N e w

York. It was not — as Stan himself might put it in his memoirs — an encounter in which the harmonious vibrations of friendship emanating from the two of them were able to overcome the jarring dissonances I chose incomprehensibly to emit. In fact, I had not intended to see Stan at all. I had already had quite enough of him. Eager for a re-encounter with the lubricious Saskia, still throbbing, so to speak, from our relatively recent, as it were, gymnastic couplings, I had invited her to a cream tea at Binky's in the Old Brompton R o a d , a teashop first made p o p ular by the late Princess Diana, then still a Sloane Ranger, and conveniently just around the corner from my Bolton Gardens

40

flat. Saskia was punctual. I saw her paying off her taxi even as I approached Binky's. She was glorious, dazzling, and in a long mink coat with matching earmuffs. T h e passionate embrace she gave me, the long, lingering kiss, right there in broad dayhght and in a pubhc thoroughfare - a common enough occurrence nowadays among the young (and, among the young, perhaps even then), but not at all common for members of my generation — promised so seeming fair that I was on the point of suggesting that we skip tea and go direcdy to my flat, where I could offer champagne already chilled and a bed waiting to be warmed. She took my hand in hers; she hcked her plump and rubious lips; she spoke. 'I told Stan to j o i n us here, I hope that's okay?' Thus were my hopes and my nascent erection dashed. I had thought that I might w o o her away from Stan. She was free, after all, as was I. Stan still faced the messy business of divorce. He was in any case at that stage at which many a man throws in the towel, returns to his wife, relieved at once in c o n science and pocket. Our recent time together, hers and mine, had been so splendid (inadequate word!) that I had fed my thoughts with hopes of permanence, a fantasy of our life together. Like Stan, I too had by now passed my fortieth year, and yet I longed for her with all the painful ache of an adolescent w h o has a crush on some unobtainable girl. She seemed in awfully good spirits. Sitting across from me in a w i n d o w seat, she chattered away cheerfully, something about t h e V & A and the Great B e d of Ware, winking lewdly the while. I managed to pay scant attention to her words, having long since learned how to interject appropriate smiles, nods, and so on, taking my cue from the speaker's facial expressions, and instead I looked her over closely. She was, I now saw, a trifle too plump; embonpoint was getting the better of her. A n d those were undoubtedly crow's-feet emerging from the outer corners of her eyes. As I focused on her abundant hair and its roots, I began to

4i

suspect that the sexy white streak, alone of all her crowning glory, had, artfully, not been subjected to the colourist's art. B u t none of these . . . what should I call them, defects? Very well, then, defects. N o n e of these defects had presented themselves to me during our energetic afternoon of sexual abandon. Ungallant, yes, but the simple truth, as I then saw it. Well, a further truth is, I was grumpy, not to say miserable. My hopes for that day and for the future had been destroyed, my amour-propre trounced. I was in no m o o d to be charitable, that much is undoubtedly true. Alas, it was Shirley Graham all over again, Shirley the entrepreneuse, she of the big tits, the outrageous wink and the g y m slip she would lift for a price. Shirley went to the local grammar school on the far side of Sodding-Stanmore, a fair distance on foot from Cronyn Hall, but within easy enough reach by bicycle. Besides, Shirley came to us, setting up shop in the copse just beyond the playing fields. T h e pupils at Cronyn were strictly forbidden to mingle with hoi polloi - so designated by our headmaster, w h o taught us Greek and who, apart from their attitude towards slavery, had little good to say for Athenian democracy: no minghng, then, with the riff-raff of the grammar school, except for a traditional end-of-term cricket match, in my day still called, believe it or not, Gown versus Town. T h e social changes that overcame Britain at the end of the war, changes clearly signalled by the national rejection of the grand old warrior Churchill, had passed Cronyn by. Indeed, the brutal fact of a Labour government had probably stiffened and augmented Cronyn's resolve to remain a place apart, the breeding ground of the nation's leaders once the nation itself had returned to its senses. T h e pupils of C r o n y n Hall may have had little to do with the boys of Sodding-Stanmore Grammar School; the girls were

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another matter, and none more so than Shirley Graham. Garson Major, for w h o m I fagged, assured me that for one guinea Shirley offered a manual frottage that was beyond praise; that for five guineas — well beyond his current means, alas, but not beyond those of Piggott-Wemys in the fifth form — she would 'actually put it in her mouth and lick it'. For most of us, h o w ever, the price-list was as follows: for threepence she would lift her skirt and reveal her knickers, for sixpence she would pull d o w n her knickers and reveal what w e , as students of Latin, knew to be her pubes, her mons veneris; for one shilling she would allow her customer to feel, for two clocked minutes, her private parts. What I wanted was what a shilling would buy. I found her in the copse. In fact, she already had a customer, Garson Minor, w h o for a threepenny bit stood gazing at her knickers. 'That's your lot, Garson Minor,' I said. 'Hop it. Make way for the fourth form.' 'He's got another minute,' said Shirley. 'Wait your effing turn.' Garson M i n o r smiled slimily, never taking his eyes from her knickers. I counted off a minute. 'One, Piccadilly, two Piccadilly . . .' Garson M i n o r left, reluctantly. 'I want a bob's worth,' I said. 'I want a feel.' 'That'll be half a crown,' said Shirley. 'Fuck that,' I said. 'It costs a bob.' 'Oh, yes?' she said. 'Well, the price has gone up. It's half a crown for you.' 'But why?' I said. 'It's not fair.' She lay back, her skirt still around her waist, where she had lifted it for Garson Minor's benefit. 'Life's not fair,' she said, expressing a wisdom beyond her years. 'Well, I'll not pay it.' ' H o w about two bob?' 'Why up the price for me?' " C o s I don't like you.' She spoke the words with the

43

intonation and in the rhythm of a character in a popular w i r e less programme, ITMA, I think. I, supposing this a kind of fbreplay responded in kind: 'Why not, litde girl?' She was supposed to say, " C o s you've got a big red conk.' 'Piggy Piggott-Wemys says you're a faggot.' 'But I'm not,' I said, appalled. 'If I were, w h y would I want to feel a girl's twat?' " C o s you're a perv,' she said. 'Pervs'll do anything. Can't take a chance. Two bob's my best offer.' It was then that I noticed her knickers weren't clean. 'Never mind,' I said. 'There's those'll do it for nothing.' 'Fat chance,' she said, 'not for a bumboy' I would gladly have beaten Piggy to a pulp for his calumny, were it not that he was in the fifth form and, besides, rather stronger than I. Meanwhile, it was apparent that in the present Saskia had asked a question. Her rising inflection had penetrated my inattention. She would expect a reply. T h e waitress saved me. She arrived bearing a meaningless smile and a pad and pencil. 'Shall we wait for Stan, or should we go ahead?' I said. 'Let's wait.' 'We'll wait,' I told the waitress. 'There's no more anchovy paste or Knaresborough buns,' she said with a heavy sigh. 'Ah, well,' I said, 'Binky will think of something.' ' Y o u okay?' said Saskia. 'You look a bit peeky' 'Tip-top,' I said. 'What d'you suppose has held Stan up?' 'Research,' she said. ' N o question. He finds it hard to drag himself away. Also, he won't take a cab. He said he'd take the tube to Earls Court and walk from there. He's a teensy bit stingy.' She giggled, as if this were an endearing characteristic.

44

I saw an opening. 'Oh, he's well known for it. I can recall — well, this is years ago, during my stint at Mosholu — a few of us, along with our co-viviants, went out to dinner in Chinatown. In Stan's case, the co-viviant was Hope, w h o m I trust you won't mind me mentioning. She had the reputation of knowing the best, by which was meant the most "authentic", Chinese restaurants .We found ourselves in a place called the Perfumed Pagoda in Mott Street. Authenticity in the Perfumed Pagoda revealed itself in the dim, bare-bulbed interior, the small grey Formica tables, the knots of working-class Chinese scattered about, chopsticks twirling as they buried their noses in small bowls, the clatter and shouts from the kitchen, and the pervasive aroma of bad eggs, or possibly sulphur.' 'Oh, God,' said Saskia, laughing, 'how like Hope!' 'More like Hope pleasing Stan, in my opinion. If the Perfumed Pagoda was anything, it was cheap. E v e n so, w h e n it came time to pay the bill, which most of us wanted to divide equally among the menfolk, Stan baulked. He had not had a bottle of beer, he said, and Hope hadn't had a starter course. In fairness, his share of the bill should be less than ours. A n d then he took off a shoe, pulled down his sock and retrieved a small green paper square from under his heel, which he unfolded before us and which proved to be a fifty-dollar bill. "In case of muggers," H o p e explained, blushing with embarrassment.' Saskia's response was not what I expected. 'Aw, that's cute,' she said, and smoothly she shifted the subject. ' W h o was your "co-viviant"?' 'A graduate student in French literature from Columbia,' I said. 'I called her Ooh-la-la because she began almost every utterance with those music-hall French syllables. I introduced her to the others as Ooh-la-la."ln these surroundings," I told them,"that sounds less hke a French expletive than a Chinese dish." That pissed her off, and she spent the rest of the evening ignoring me and cosying up to Stan. Of all people.'

45

'Ah,' said Saskia, smiling smugly, 'magical, magical Stan.' 'Actually, the Perfumed Pagoda was just about the end of our affair. A good thing, too. I had grown weary of that rapid series of "ooh-la-las" as she approached orgasm. I much prefer your strangulated cry.' 'Yes, well,' she said neutrally. ' O f course, I'm not Stan,' I said, stupidly, petulantly, knowing that I should shut up but unable to do so. ' I ' m not so wonderfully relaxed, so receptive. N o , I'm too inexcusably inclined to activity.' She glared at me, full of scorn, her nostrils crinkling, as if recoiling from a bad smell. What provoked me to say such things? No wonder I have never been able to sustain a 'relationship', as it is nowadays depressingly called, beyond the stage of the 'affair'. There lurks within me, I honestly believe, an imp of the perverse, a spoiler, eager and able to screw up my life. A n d what I had just told Saskia about Kate, my graduate-student lover, was not exactly plump with truth, either. For a start, Kate Paxton was earning her MA not in French literature but in French history, with a focus on the Napoleonic era. W h y on earth should I have found it necessary to 'modify' that simple fact? As for 'Oo-la-la, Kate might have said it a few times, usually breathily in post-coital languor, but it was never habitual. What she did say w h e n in the throes was 'Ca marche!' again and again with ever-increasing speed, climaxing orgasmicalfy with a triumphant' Yes? Perhaps she switched to English at that point to avoid an unwanted pun. B u t with 'Ca marche! Ca marche! Ca marche!' urging me on, I entered the fray with all the aggressive bravado of a warrior, a Brigadier Gerard, a hero of the Grande Armee. Somehow, I couldn't take her seriously. She was as earnest a scholar as a lover, which, given the known tendencies of those w h o devote their lives to academe, should not have surprised

46

me. We would lie on our backs, side by side on the sybaritic couch, all passion spent, my hand resting on the damp fur of her crotch, hers playing languidly with my malleable cock, and she would talk about her MA thesis. I had to suppress an hysterical desire to giggle. Her topic had to do with the fateful Battle of Marengo in 1799. It was her belief that Napoleon hesitated almost disastrously long before ordering, on the day before the battle, the elimination of the Austrian bridgehead on the Bormida River. O n e could be forgiven for thinking: so what? B u t then, one is not a scholar. Before Kate, Marengo was of interest to me only as the background to Puccini's Tosca. At any rate, on one such post-bonking occasion, the bedroom darkening with the onset of evening, she told me that try as she might she could not come up with a usable title for the now almost-completed thesis. 'You're a writer, Robin,' she said, tickling my scrotum. 'Can't you come up with something?' I chose not to make a rueful j o k e out of the double entendre she had just innocendy, so to speak, handed me and made a poor one instead out of her thesis. 'A title? Well, yes. H o w about "Was Napoleon Chicken at Marengo?'" She produced a pseudo-laugh and scratched my balls a teensy bit too roughly. 'That's not especially funny, R o b i n . My thesis matters to me. T h e title's important.' 'Okay, try this: "Across the R i v e r and into the Crise"! She snatched her hand from me. In the gathering gloom I could sense rather than see, first her dismay, then her anger. B u t the Imp of the Perverse had me in thrall.'Perhaps "Nappy Caught Napping".' She said not a word, but abruptly left the bed, hastily pulled on her clothes and ran from the room. ' H o w about "Napp's Last Jape"?' I called after her. T h e front door slammed, leaving me in miserable darkness. That was not quite the end of things, however. I made my

47

apologies, sent flowers, waylaid her in the stacks, handed her a loaded water pistol, butt first, and tied a folded handkerchief over my eyes. She squirted me, laughing, and all was forgiven. We grew, if anything, closer than before. It was a delight to be in her company. She was tall and quite strong, her body hard, a natural athlete delighting in swimming, tennis, skiing, hiking — all those activities, in short, that induced in me a desire for a nap. I was, happily, taller than she, by no means overweight, but admittedly a trifle soft. 'You're Pooh,' she would say, poking me in the belly, 'you're my Pooh Bear.' Her large eyes were remarkable, true green, but varying in hue and intensity, depending on m o o d and context. T h e y could flash brilliantly in anger or delight, shimmer palely with tears, become clouded, dull and metallic in misery, always a different green. I loved to trace the hollow of her cheek and the line of her j a w with my finger, astonished by their simple beauty. Despite her love of the outdoors, her skin was pale, as befitted a scholar doomed to the library stacks, the classroom, her desk and (in that far-off time) her typewriter, but across the bridge of her nose and beneath her eyes was a scattering of freckles, pale themselves, which only intensified her beauty. I believe I still have - I know I still have — a gift she gave me along with herself on Valentine's Day, the only Valentine's Day we were together. It was a small, brightred, heart-shaped tin, and in it was a l o c k ' — if that is the word - of her pubic hair, neady tied with a thin pink ribbon. I was overwhelmed by a complex of emotions at the time, and even now, forty years on, I find myself much moved by the memory. 'There's Stan,' I said, as indeed it was. Stan to the rescue! He stood peering at us through the teashop window, an idiotic gaptoothed grin on his face, over his shoulder a dark-green book bag of a sort much favoured at that time by Ivy League undergraduates.

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Once Stan was seated, I signalled our waitress. 'Two cream teas,' I said, indicating my guests. W h e n asked, they chose the same leaf, or rather Saskia chose and Stan concurred. 'I'll just have a Perrier,' I said. (How the habits of childhood persist! Refusing to eat was the way I used to punish Mumsy.) 'I've been reading Trelawny on Sargent,' Stan said. 'What a load of cobblers!' 'Cobblers, Stan?' I said, as if astonished. 'It's cockney rhyming slang. I thought you'd know it,' said Stan triumphantly. 'Cobblers' awls, balls?' 'Oh, I know it, Stan, I know it.' My pomposity was absurd. 'But it's rather " l o w " , don't you think? I had thought of you, a Professor of English, as a guardian of the language. You know what Defoe had to say about slang, don't you?' ' "A frenzy of the tongue, a vomit of the brain"?' Sometimes, Stan could surprise one. He reached into his book bag and took out a bright-red baseball cap, the kind that is now ubiquitous, but was then only beginning to appear in Great Britain. He put in on his head. 'What d'you think of it?' It sported the logo of the London Underground, under which were the words MIND THE GAP. ' G o t it on Oxford Street.' 'Terrific, Stan,' said Saskia warmly. 'Looks great on you.' ' T h e trouble is, Stan,' I said, my voice oozing patient kindness, 'people might wonder, looking at your head, whether the gap is between your ears. I rather think that's the point of the joke.' Stan's j a w dropped. His eyes looked from Saskia to me with a beagle's misery. Saskia was furious. She got to her feet. 'Take me back to our hotel, Stan. I don't feel well.' Christ, I'd done it again! I suppose I thought of myself as Hyperion to a satyr. L o o k here upon this picture, and on this.

49

She was supposed to see the differences between Stan and me, my obvious superiority to him, physically, intellectually, the works. She saw the differences all right, and while hairy Stan might be the satyr, he was welcome. A n d as for Hyperion, if that was my chosen role, then I was, in her view, more than a little o'erparted. Stan took off his cap. 'Maybe I can give it to Jake?' 'Stan!' said Saskia. He stood and ruefully held out his hand to me. 'Look, it's been great. B u t Saskia, well, you know . . . Sorry to leave like this. Let's keep in touch.' As they moved towards the door, I heard Saskia clearly. ' N o , Stan, forget it. No underground. We're gonna take a taxi.' •

•

•

STILL, W H O IS THE 'REAL' STAN KOPS? What if the bullet wound he sustained in the porno emporium had resulted in his death. A n d what if, almost unimaginably, some misguided biographer, enough time having passed since the obligatory obituaries, interment and memorials, was setting about the Stan Kops story. He would, in the course of things, want to interview all those still living w h o knew him, myself included. B u t each of us has his own experience of the man, each his o w n refashioned m e m o ries. Besides, each of us has a self-image he wishes to project and protect. H o w we see ourselves determines how we choose to see others. What a hotch-potch of misinformation, what a confusion of varied viewpoints, the hapless biographer would garner from us! In any case, the biographer himself is not a tabula rasa. He will pick and choose from the rubbish tip he has accumulated those cast-off wares he deems significant, selecting whatever accords with his own slant on things. N o r will he hesitate to burnish

50

the odd item here, repair and reshape the odd item there, until he has an array that not only pleases him, but justifies his undertaking. Still, his Stan Kops would not be mine or Saskia's or Teitelbaum's or anyone else's. All biographers exploit their subjects to some extent by reinventing them. T h e past cannot be undone; nor, for that matter, can it be completely known. I'm not talking now only of the grand events over which serious historians pore, but also of those vivid memories of the past, the memories of quite ordinary events, those that fill the minds of plain and undistinguished people. Where, we should wonder, lies the truth?

*

•

*

IN 1975 NEITHER STAN N O R ENTWISTLE had any knowledge of

one another - or so I then thought. T h e British Art Institute in the Strand was showing an Entwisde retrospective to which, during the lazy part of our afternoon together, I had directed Saskia. B u t she assured me that Stan wasn't interested in contemporary art and, in an effort to be of service to him, she had time only to pursue Sargent and those within his ambience. T h e anticipatory irony is obvious. A further irony is the fact that hard upon my contretemps with Saskia, on the upcoming long Christmas weekend, in fact, I was to be a guest at Dibblethwaite, where Entwisde was to introduce to me his most recent conquest. Dibblethwaite lies between the R i v e r s U r e and Swale, a little closer to Thirsk than to R i p o n . Once in the West Riding, it is now in North Yorkshire, an administrative change that has had no noticeable effect on the village whatsoever. There is nothing picturesque about Dibblethwaite, unless you have a taste for the bleak moorland upon which it is situated. It boasts a pub, once the D u k e Humphrey, but by 1975 the R a t and Carrot, that served

5i

excellent ale and foul food and took its m o o d from mine host, Albert Doggett, a grim man with a catarrhal laugh. T h e village also had a grocer's-cum-stationer's and post office; a bakery specialising in pre-packaged bread, sausage rolls and lemon-curd roly-poly; a laundromat equipped with two washers and three driers; a few workmen's cottages; an abandoned church, St Swithin's, already a Gothic ruin utterly without romantic charm, its small cemetery a wilderness through which in the wind a toppling stone or two becomes visible, and its nearby empty vicarage, whose last incumbent retired in 1938. One might call it a bedroom community in so far as it empties out during the day, were it not that the word 'community' seems inapropos and the phrase itself,'bedroom community', suggests would-be gentry, people w h o are, perhaps, 'something in the city'. B u t the few men here are mostly local farm labourers, and their wives take the early morning bus into R i p o n , where they have jobs in Tesco's or clean other people's houses. If they may be said to come together as a community at all, it is at a sing-along in the R a t and Carrot. Here in Dibblethwaite in 1920 was C y r i l Entwistle born, and here in Dibblethwaite he has spent most of his life. He served in the army from 1940 to 1946, and latterly he spends summer months in a renovated farmhouse in St-Bonnet-du-Gard, the birthplace of Claire Bienseant, w h o alone of his many w o m e n inveigled him into marriage. But we are in 1 9 7 5 , and Claire is almost two decades into the future. T h e lady of the moment is Frances Gilbert, Franny, an amateur watercolourist, w h o had emerged from Church End, N 3 , with the endorsement of the Finchley Watercolour Society. Entwisde was besotted by her. 'It's the hint of the N e a r East,' he explained to me over a pint of bitter at the R a t and Carrot. ' N o t e the barest hint of fluff on her upper hp w h e n the light is right, the perfumed humidity rising from her golden skin, the thick curled hair of her armpits,

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so richly bedewed, the sporran that masks her twat — well, you can't note that, I won't let you.' Entwisde laughs in selfdeprecation.'Christ Almighty I get carried away, I really do. She's a Jewess, you know, fascinated by the uncircumcised prick. Well, of course.' Franny had expectations of country hfe hitherto unrecorded in Dibblethwaite. She saw Entwistle as a member of the squirearchy. He and she had standards to uphold. He had picked me up at the station in R i p o n in a Land R o v e r . Franny, he explained, was visiting the irredeemably poor, after which she was to help C o o k prepare our lunch. Entwisde was dressed in country tweeds, a flat cap, a jacket of subdued Harris tweed, a Tattersall waistcoat, a cream shirt, a knit tie, ecru jodhpurs and polished boots. He carried a riding crop. 'You don't look like you,' I said. 'And

bloody

good,

too.

I've

responsibilities

here

in

Dibblethwaite. Noblesse oblige. N o , Franny's opened my eyes. T h e plebs expect a certain style from the more fortunate. It eliminates doubt. They know we'll fight in their corner.' 'I'll be damned, you've developed a social conscience.' 'It's all Franny. Before Franny, I never gave a toss for the d o w n trodden. Fuck 'em, if you'd asked me. What are bootstraps for? No one was interested in helping me.' Entwistle signalled with a circular motion from our empty glasses to the fawning p u b lican, w h o coughed shmily ' I ' m eager to meet Franny' 'Well, you would be.' This was indeed a new Entwisde. T h e Entwisde I had long known, and w h o m I had after a fashion long admired, was what in the jargon of 1 9 7 5 would have been called an M C P , or male chauvinist pig. My own mother, after all, had, years before, been a victim of his egoistical and intemperate sexual indulgences. He

53

had been utterly oblivious to anything that might even m o d esdy be called a social contract. He was an autocrat. People, but especially women, were there to serve him. His life was conducted on the principle sic volo, sic jubeo — my will is my c o m mand — and there was never any suggestion that what he wanted might be questioned by others. There was, perversely, a kind of innocence in his assumptions, a childish self-centredness that made him attractive even to those he used and discarded. B u t here, seemingly, was an Entwistle w h o had softened to the song of a Siren, an Entwistle who, like Hercules, had met his Omphale and perhaps lost his heroic machismo. Mumsy had excused his wicked ways by reference to his 'appalling' childhood, his 'impossible' upbringing.'Poor wee chap, it's a miracle he survived, let alone got on.' His father, Giles Entwistle, had departed the family smallholding in 1 9 1 5 , eager to fight the Kaiser. To do so, he joined the R o y a l Yorkshire Fusiliers. He was at that time, by all accounts, a likeable lad of seventeen, not especially bright — 'gormless' was the local term for him — but clean-shaven and easygoing. U p o n his return to Dibblethwaite, early in 1 9 1 9 , he sported a walrus moustache and was understood to be 'batty', that is, not quite sane. His experiences in the trenches had wrought in him a terrible change. He sat idly in his mother's kitchen, glaring at her, chewing the ends of his moustache, as likely to toss the food she put before him onto the flagstone floor as to eat it. A widow, Jane Entwistle soon learned to fear her son and his rages and tiptoed around him. T h e village, which had lost half a dozen of its young men to mud and gas and exploding shells, longed to welcome home a warrior-hero. In Giles Entwistle they were disappointed. In the early days of his return, he accepted the pints of bitter they cheerfully bought him, but he offered nothing in return, not so much as a friendly word. He sat in the inglenook at the D u k e

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Humphrey, chuckling at some evil j o k e he heard within his head, bending over his pint, covering it with an arm, looking about him as if he feared someone would snatch it from him. A n d when the drinks were no longer offered, his malevolent chuckle remained, now joined to a terrible gesture as he glared about him, his forefinger slashing his throat. A n d then came the day at harvest home, the sun declining, all able-bodied villagers wearily following the wain, w h e n he crossed the stubble fields pulling after him Lucy Todger, a lass of fourteen, w h o m he'd promised to show a fairy ring he'd found in Losely Copse. Lucy's girlish giggles soon turned to screams when he threw her roughly to the ground, forced her legs apart and raped her. Then, when the m o o n rose, he raped her again. A n d before he released her, he forced her to 'lick him clean', she being a filthy slut. W h e n Lucy's pregnancy became apparent to her mother, Gracie Todger had a tearful word with Jane Entwisde. Jane, trembling the while, had a word with her son. She had caught him, miraculously, at a moment of near-sanity. He expressed no remorse for his deeds, but agreed to marry Lucy, the Lord having urged all those w h o trusted in H i m to be fruitful and multiply. He was not so sane as to be without his horrid chuckle. B u t he was at least convinced that he was going about the Lord's work. Lucy delivered herself of C y r i l on 18 J u n e 1 9 2 0 . For her mother, Lucy's marriage to a madman and a brute was preferable to her bringing forth a bastard, shaming the Todgers for ever and a day. For Lucy, her mother and Jane Entwistle had doomed her to life with a heartless monster. E v e n before C y r i l was born, Giles found occasion to batter Lucy, either because he was drunk and she was available for his fists or because he was sober and she needed to be taught a lesson. In her eighth month of pregnancy, he actually kicked her viciously in the stomach, an assault whose vileness even penetrated his fogged-in

55

madness and caused him to run for the doctor. Wonderful, w o n derful, no apparent damage. A n d here came C y r i l , a beautiful baby boy. ' W h o can imagine what his upbringing was like in such a household?' said Mumsy, biting a trembling hp. ' B a d enough that he had to trudge four miles to school every morning, over the moors to Kirkley no matter the weather, in winter knee-deep in snow, leaving and returning in the dark, the wind endlessly howling whatever the season, either in slashing rain and no wellies or through a fog so thick an axe couldn't cleave it, tumbling over gorse and scree, his poor knees scraped raw and bloody; bad enough that he was lucky — lucky, R o b i n ! — to have a crust of stale bread thinly smeared with rancid dripping and a botde of cold weak tea to take with him to sustain him through the day. N o , far worse was the horror of a home in which a drunken brute of a father beat his mummy half-senseless and took off his belt to his son, w h o ran screaming in terror out of the house, crouching in a shed until his mummy came for him, the brute now snoring before the kitchen stove. Poor, poor Cyril! A n d this is where it all took place, R o b i n . ' M u m s y gestured at the bright and comfortable room in which we sat. 'It doesn't bear thinking about.' She paused and sniffed, looking at me sideways as if considering whether to go on, whether the rest of her narrative was something a mother might suitably speak of to her son. 'And w h e n at length the monster died, cut down by G o d Himself, I shouldn't wonder, vomiting up his life and that day's intake of bitter into the gents at the Duke Humphrey, he died improvident. C y r i l was only eleven at the time, and his mummy no more than twenty-six. What could she do, poor woman, almost toothless, old well before her time, unlettered, unskilled, to put food on the table for herself and her son? What w o m e n in like circumstances have always done.' M u m s y sighed. 'Don't blame her, R o b i n . We do not have the right. She lifted her skirts

56

for any passing tramp or tinker, behind the hayrick, in a ditch, upon a bed of leaves in Losely Copse; yes, even there where the brute had first taken her by force.' Fearful that she had said too much, Mumsy got to her feet. 'Yet, "like bright metal on a sullen ground",' she said, quoting the Bard's Prince Hal not directly, but the Bard as quoted by Sybil Truscott, a favourite novelist, 'my darhng Cyril emerged from that ghastly squalor. A genius of sensibility, of hand and of eye, was born on a dunghill. I'll put the kettle on for tea.' I knew, of course, that Mumsy liked to embroider her narratives with lurid details and turns of phrase inspired by her reading and rereading, not only of Sybil Truscott, but of the Brontes, Mrs Gaskell,Wilkie Collins, the young Maugham, Hugh Walpole and J o h n Galsworthy. I made allowances. A n d yet I had always supposed that at least in its essentials her account of Entwistle's origins and early years was accurate. Where had she learned of it, if not from him? His must have been a nostalgie de la boue. It was a considerable surprise, therefore, w h e n Franny offered me a version that was significantly different. We left the R a t and Carrot, Entwistle touching his cap with his riding crop as a gesture of curt farewell to the landlord, w h o returned a suggestive wink, a thumbs-up sign, and a clotted cough. 'Berk,' said Entwisde. ' T h e fucker's your compleat berk. Offers a fair pint, though. Only goes to show, there's good in every man.' He chuckled. ' C ' m o n , young R o b i n , let's have you.' I heaved my weekend gear into the back of the Land R o v e r , its canvas roof rolled back despite the cold, and got in beside Entwisde. 'Tally ho!' he said, perhaps not even joking. He took the road north out of the village, turned into a rutted track and thence onto the moors, over which we bounced and jounced for about three-quarters of a mile. 'Get some of that bloody city smoke out of your fucking lungs, this will,' he said.

57

T h e sun, which had shone brighdy that morning in R i p o n and which had still managed to skitter in and out of gathering clouds w h e n we reached the R a t and Carrot in Dibblethwaite, had now disappeared entirely. T h e sky was savagely raked by huge, bruised clouds, black and blue, and the wind blew howling across the wilderness. Here and there patches of snow remained from an earher storm. I raised my scarf to cover my ears. B e l o w us, perhaps 500 yards away, was the house with its promise of warmth and comfort, a point of light in the gathering gloom. Christmas in the country, the Englishman's Dickensian dream, touted by tabloid and broadsheet alike, was as subdy appealing as the earthier temptations of Circe or Acrasia, and as damning. Where was the moly that might have spared me its sorcery? Memory, subject to sentiment, was helpless before this annual appeal. Christmas in the country was bound to be appalling, as I always rediscovered, if not here, then elsewhere. ' W h y don't you walk to the house, lad, eh? Do you good, work up an appetite.' Entwistle stopped the Land R o v e r with a jolt that threw me towards the windscreen. 'Gives Franny and me time for a quick snog before you get there.' I got out, of course. 'Toodle-fucking-oo!' he said cheerfully and honked his horn. He departed, I thought, like Toad making for Toad Hall. Franny was a stunner, to use the old-fashioned expression. H o w on earth had Entwistle pulled it off — again! — and this time with a woman at least twenty years his junior? He was fifty-five years old, G o d save the mark! — more, he was fifty-six, if what Franny later told me was true — young by my standards today, no doubt, but then creakingly old, shamefully old, to someone fifteen years his junior, someone whose own mother he had bonked and rebonked years and years ago! I looked from Franny to Entwistle, from him to her, and felt something of what Iago

must have

felt

when

contemplating

the

Desdemona playing the beast with the two backs.

58

M o o r and

'Franny, my poppet, this is R o b i n , the well-known ne'er-dowell, my common-law stepson, you might say' Franny took my outstretched hand and, pulling me towards her, kissed me softly on each cheek. 'Welcome, Robin.' I inhaled her perfumed warmth. I might have stood there for ever had not Entwistle pulled her from me, laying a possessive arm around her shoulders. I murmured something or other in reply, my delight in being there, how cold it was outside, the possibility of being snowed in for Christmas, feehng like a character in an Agatha Christie novel — a glutinous dribble of incoherent nonsense to which she was kind enough to smile. 'Grub's ready' said Entwistle, sniffing the air.'Roast lamb, roast potatoes, mushy peas, mint sauce, about what you'd expect. So if you need to piss before sitting down, you know where to find the pissoir, eh, lad?' I turned instinctively towards the downstairs loo. 'Don't forget to wash your hands,' said Entwistle, chuckling. His hand, still draped around Franny s neck, reached down and tweaked a nipple. I actually blushed. T h e wretched chap was alluding to a moment, yonks before, when Mumsy, embarrassed but doggedly fulfilling her role in loco patris, had explained to the lateadolescent me how important it was, hygienically speaking, to wash one's hands after, as she put it, 'making w e e - w e e ' . When, on that occasion, I had emerged from the loo, Entwisde told me — and I remember his exact words — 'You'll have washed your hands, I'll bet, muggins. Fuck that. Wash 'em w h e n you've been holding someone else's cock, not your own.' A n d his chuckle was the same then as now. What had never occurred to me before was the fact that Entwistle's home was nothing like a labourer's cottage. It was much grander than that, much larger, without regard to its outlying buildings, the studio in w h i c h he worked, the

59

hangar-like shed in which he kept his paintings, and the garage, which, if necessary, could house four cars below and two chauffeurs above. Mumsy, years ago, had sought to improve the crude interior of the main house, achieving wonders with the introduction of gas and electricity. Others since had added their mites. B u t it took Franny to introduce country kitsch, the seeming authenticity depicted in the advertisements of Laura Ashley and R a l p h Lauren and in the pages of Country Living. Subdued tones, paisley and leather, w o o d e n hutches and fringed lamps, whatnots and hooves encased in silver were everywhere. N o t Entwisde s oils but Franny's delicate watercolours decorated the walls, some of them quite attractive in a chocolateb o x y sort of way: misty scenes of sheep on the moors, the spires of York Minster, the odd Cistercian ruin, that sort of thing. T h e transformation of the interior was persuasive testimony to Entwistle's current enchantment. He w o u l d never so have indulged Mumsy, or any of the others. T h e interior, in short, made a statement, but not the statement, I suspect, that either of the lovers intended. Overlaying this mise-en-scene were the habitual garish Christmas decorations. In the bay window stood a tinselled Tannenbaum, introduced to this country as a Christmas necessity, I am told, by Victoria's beloved Albert and now indispensable. Beneath it were brightly wrapped presents, introduced to us by Hollywood, whose moguls knew nothing of Boxing Day. Tasteful clumps of holly and ivy abounded. From the four corners of the ceiling, swags of multicoloured paper-chains met at the central chandelier, from which depended — yes, you've guessed it — a large sprig of misdetoe. On the piano, new to me, an exquisite baby grand inscribed W. H. Barnes, deliberately British, an instrument that must be Franny s, since Entwistle I knew to be as unmusical as Shakespeare's Hotspur, was a sheaf of Christmas carols, 'I saw three ships' on top. T h e mantel shelf had Christmas cards pinned

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to it. As for Franny herself, she wore designer jeans and a cream silk blouse that gave her erotic definition. Lunch was would-be jolly, but quite decent.'Cook', I learned, was Phoebe Doggett, wife of Albert, proprietor of the R a t and Carrot. 'We're lucky to have her,' said Franny, 'especially for such occasions.' 'She means for traditional grub,' explained Entwistle. 'If it's Continental cuisine you're after, well, Franny's your only hope around here.' Unbearably, he blew a kiss at her across the table. 'What about your tmite farcie, eh? Or your agnello marinato alia griglia? Or your Esterhdzy rostelyosV 'Well, tomorrow it'll be Mrs Doggett and goose and Christmas pud and the rest,' said Franny equably. ' M o r e s the pity,' said Entwistle. 'Still, we've got to show the flag. G o t a few people coming down tomorrow. No relatives of Franny, here. A couple from Leeds, absolutely oozing dosh. He's commissioned a portrait of his wife, who's a horrid old puffyfaced cunt. Sorry, Franny. W h y he wants to preserve her, I'll never know. Mine not to reason why, though. T h e n there's Geoffrey Wilkinson. You may've heard of him, used to be religious editor of the T L S ? He'll want some carols, I expect. Sorry about that. For you, though, we have a treat: Alice Gresham, w h o writes for the Yorkshire Review of Books and who's a great fan of your novels.' T h e rest of the day slipped past quickly, helped on its way by the mid-afternoon onset of darkness, the total darkness that the country — and, it seems to me, especially a Yorkshire moor — affords, and by Entwistle hauling Franny off to bed at about eight. 'Brought something to read, have you? If not, there's plenty about. Help yourself. C o m e along, Franny' 'Help yourself to the larder, too, if you suffer a pang,' Franny told me, bounding from her seat and tousling Entwisde s hair with the kind of proud pleasure a loving mother reserves for her

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cheeky son. 'We're not being very polite to R o b i n , Cyril. It's Christmas Eve, after all.' 'Fuck that,' said Entwisde amiably. ' I ' m knackered.' Franny gestured to me her happy helplessness. ' G o o d night, then,' I said. 'I'll probably turn in soon myself.' I was kept awake for hours by the sounds of sexual combat that made their way through the thick wall that separated our bedrooms, by the cries, the roars, the thumps, the laughter, the groans, the squeals, the crashing crescendos and exhausted sighs. I wanted to weep. In the morning, Entwistle, leering, said he hoped they hadn't disturbed me last night. ' N o t at all,' I said, tight-hpped.' Went right off to sleep. Country air.' 'Country matters, more like,' said Entwistle allusively. Christmas Day was either jolly good fun or a staggering bore, depending on how you v i e w would-be traditional celebrations and would-be good cheer. Where I stand on the matter, I think you know. Mrs Doggett prepared a perfecdy satisfactory Christmas dinner; hilarity was achieved through drink. We put on funny hats and pulled Christmas crackers; we interrupted a game of charades to watch the Queen on the telly attempting to buck her subjects up, both here and abroad. A n d every lady present, including a blushing, sweating, flustered Mrs Doggett, was kissed beneath the mistletoe by at least one of the sozzled gentlemen. Geoffrey 'Call Me Geoff, D o ' Wilkinson sang in a fluty voice and a cappella a fluent rendition oVAdeste fideles'; and this turn was followed by Franny plonking out a honky-tonk accompaniment to Entwistle s dysphonic 'Knees Up Mother B r o w n ' . Mrs Doggett, w h o had stood quietly, respectfully and a weeny bit tipsily in the doorway during Wilkinson's summoning of the faithful, not only joined her voice to Entwisde's in dysphonia,

62

but had the temerity, through beckoning motions, to suggest that the rest of us have a go too. Her suggestion was taken up only by Florrie Bostwick, the Leeds personage's wife, whose portrait Entwistle was about to undertake. She sang 'Knees Up Mother B r o w n ' with movements and gestures all too appropriate to that hoary pub favourite and with a smile that suggested that she well knew how to keep out the breeze. Alice Gresham clearly thought herself superior to the c o m pany in which she found herself and maintained a pained smile throughout her visit. She had been driven to Dibblethwaite by the Bostwicks, w h o were important backers of the Yorkshire Review of Books and hence, as her editor had made clear, not to be offended. Besides, there was now no way out of this godforsaken spot for her without them. Please G o d , let it not snow. Having to defer to them did not mean, of course, that she had to be kind to me. Far from it. My first novel had some merit, she allowed, showed some promise. B u t thereafter I had succumbed to the blandishments of the Establishment, of which by now I was a member. My success spoke for itself. N o t nice, you'll agree. Still, I forgave her. ' M y wallet tells another story,' I said, thinking, in my cups, that I had been quite witty. She was a pretty woman, if somewhat wan and juiceless when put beside Franny, and I kissed her beneath the misdetoe. I kissed them both. W h e n Mrs Doggett left, bubbhng over with thanks to all present for the generous Christmas boxes she had received (i.e., the cash discreetly folded into cards of the season), the pumped-up energy of our celebration evaporated. Derek Bostwick, w h o had his eye on a Tory seat recendy become available in Odey, began a tearful toast in which he mentioned how fortunate we were to hve in a country where, etc., etc., and at a time when, etc., etc., but most particularly because good friends, etc., etc., and

63

that was w h y he wanted to toast our genial host and charming hostess, etc., etc., upholders of all that was best of a splendid cultural heritage, etc., etc., and especially to acknowledge what an honour it was to spend this essentially spiritual occasion in the home of the nation's greatest living artist and his devastatingly beautiful companion — but here he was overcome, sobs making it impossible for him to continue. T h e slack was taken up by cries of'Hear, hear' from Geoffrey Wilkinson and Alice Gresham, followed by a general 'Franny and Cyril!' from all. B u t Christmas Day in Dibblethwaite was obviously over. Well and good. B u t what matters is what Franny told me on B o x i n g Day and what she then showed me to corroborate her story. Lunch on B o x i n g Day was modest: leek and potato soup, sliced ham, pickled onion, cheese, crusty bread. Franny suggested the three of us take a hike on the moors. We had been spared a snowstorm. In fact, the sun was shining. Entwisde said he wanted to use what light remained to work in his studio. Franny and I, therefore, set off alone. I no longer remember what prompted us to talk of Entwisde s early years. B u t I, pretending sympathy for the man as a means of approaching Franny, told her what I knew of his childhood. We had paused in our hiking exertions to admire a moorland gibbet, a reproduction of the original, as an attached board informed us, that had stood in this place, or very near it, from 1689 to 1 8 3 0 and from which many an evildoer had been dispatched to his ultimate fate. Actually, what I admired was not the gibbet, but the flush that the cold air and brisk walk had brought to Franny s cheeks. D a m n Entwistle! We turned back. My version of Entwistle s origins, or rather Mumsy's version, Franny told me, was far off the mark, was, in fact, a 'pile of tosh'. It was not M u m s y s fault. Entwistle loved to shape and reshape his past, altering it with an artist's eye to its essential meaning.

64

'You know he keeps a diary, has done for years and years?' I grunted neutrally. ' H e keeps it in three-ring binders, so he can always slip pages in and out. Only last week he showed me a page he was adding to 1967: "Dinner with E. Gombrich and K. Popper, the Athenaeum. Overdid the brandy a bit, got sloshed. G u m m o and Poppy in fine fettle." All made up, every bit of it, including his witty obiter dicta at table.' 'But w h y on earth does he do it?' 'I asked him that. " F o r posterity," he said. " G i v e the buggers something to think about." He's added and altered all sorts of things. I'm not sure he always knows any more what the truth is. To the extent that the truth is knowable,' she added philosophically. ' D i d he tell you I'm Jewish?' 'Yes, as a matter of fact.' 'As a matter of fact, I'm not. It's not that I'd mind being a J e w if I were one, it's merely that I'm not, if you see what I mean. B u t he's made it up, and sometimes I think he believes it. It's convenient for him to have me Jewish. Lord knows why. A n d it was, at least at one time, convenient for him to have had a shellshocked brute for a father and an abused whore for a mother — convenient as truth for him or for your mum, or perhaps for both. Perhaps it was a truth that made things better in bed. Besides, I'm not suggesting C y r i l didn't have a miserable childhood, poor litde chap. No doubt he had. B u t then, so had we all.' ' H o w d'you k n o w the story he gave you is any closer to his actual hfe than the one he gave my mother?' She grinned. 'Well, of course, I don't. B u t I've found a few bits of evidence that are at least persuasive. I'll show you w h e n we get back.' Franny s C y r i l was the son of Captain Giles Walter Entwisde, V C , and Lucy Violet Entwistle, nee Todger, both sole offspring of country parsons, his of Lumley Parsonage, near Knaresborough,

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hers vicar of St Swithin's in Dibblethwaite; hence he was born into the genteel outer fringes of the middle class and its vaunted respectability. Cunt and fuck and bugger, and so on, which figure so importantly in Cyril's active vocabulary, must have been utterly absent from his parents'.This is not to argue for their sainthness, let alone their prudishness; it is merely to recognise the social constraints of another time. We may suppose that the captain, w h o was, after all, a military man and w h o must have heard such words not only in the plebeian trenches but also in the officers' mess, never allowed them to sully lips reserved for Lucy. (What 'we may suppose', of course, may itself be utterly false. W h o knows how they may have titillated one another en route to and atop the marital bed?) What Franny had found in the cupboard under the stairs was a riding-boots box full of memorabilia having to do, or so it was reasonable to suppose, with Entwistle's parents. It was a trove of documents, photographs, newspaper clippings, bundles of letters, and so forth. Back from our walk, she put this box between us on the couch and began picking through its contents. Here were clippings from The Times and the Yorkshire Evening Post of 17 M a y 1 9 1 8 announcing the marriage of Captain Giles Entwisde, F R C S , M C , of the R o y a l Yorkshire Fusiliers, to Lucy Todger of Dibblethwaite, at St Swithin's, Dibblethwaite, West R i d i n g , the bride's father, the Reverend Timothy Todger, officiating. T h e e x i gencies of war had allowed the waiving of the banns. Captain Entwisde, we learned, was in England on a three-day leave granted him to receive the Military Cross from K i n g George V. He had been something of a hero during the German offensive of 9 - 1 1 April 1 9 1 8 , going out repeatedly into the batdefield to rescue and treat wounded soldiers. He returned to the Front on the day following his wedding, joining his battalion at the Somme batdefield near Mametz. Of the 620 men w h o took part in the British counter-offensive of 25—6 May, only 103 returned alive;

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Captain Entwistle was not among them. For his heroic deeds at the Somme he received a posthumous Victoria Cross. In the early morning hours of 23 February 1 9 1 9 , the young w i d o w was delivered of a son, Giles Cyril. T h e announcement of this birth appeared in the Yorkshire Evening Post and the Church Times. T h e letters, bound with a satin ribbon, were, Franny said, love letters, and she wouldn't let me see them. A flat leather box in a velvet envelope contained the Military Cross with R i b b o n and the Victoria Cross. A m o n g the photographs were a formal portrait of Captain Entwistle in full military fig and another of the young couple on the steps of St Swithin's, a vicar on either side, each vicar accompanied by his beaming wife. T h e bride's head was turned to the groom; she looked up at him with joyous adoration. It was raining. 'I'd better put this stuff away' said Franny. 'I wasn't prying when I found it, honest, just looking for my mac. B u t I've never told C y r i l about it. I don't think he'd be pleased.' 'So he was born in 1 9 1 9 , not in 1920?' 'Hard to say. He keeps his passport and birth certificate under lock and key' Franny grinned. 'What if all this stuff isn't really about his parents? What if it's fake? I wouldn't put it past him.' 'It shouldn't be too hard to find out.' 'Then I would be prying. There's nothing here inconsistent with what he's told me. I knew his father had died in the war and had never seen him. For some reason he's never mentioned his father's decorations.You'd have thought he'd be proud. Most boys would be. He and his mum lived with her parents at the vicarage for a short while, until the old folk died of the flu. B a d luck, that. Begins to sound a bit Dickensian, doesn't it? What were the unhappy young w i d o w and her luckless babe to do? Were they bound for the poorhouse? Actually, they were rescued by Captain Entwistle s family, w h o bought them this place and provided a small annuity. That act of kindness not only

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assuaged consciences, but kept unwanted relatives at a discreet distance. So while there wasn't much money about in Cyril's childhood, the larder was never empty. He did have to slog across the moors to school in Kirkley every morning — that part of what your m u m told you is true. Still, many kids had to do the like. This was well before school buses. A n d besides, before he knew it, he was off to Cronyn Hall on a scholarship.' Cyril's juggling with his origins began to seem to me like the manifestation of an ego swollen to monstrous proportions. A woman had opened her legs, groaned once or twice, and out had popped C y r d Entwistle, genius. B u t what sort of mother would be suitable for such an honour? What sort of father? He may even have toyed with the idea of a virgin birth. 'But doesn't it bother you, knowing he's a fraud?' This was a bit of daring on my part — and, no doubt, a bit of petulance, too. It was also a bit of a mistake. 'Fraud? He's the most authentic man I've ever met. He's also, in case you've forgotten, the greatest British artist of the twentieth century. There's more truth in one of his brush strokes than in all of H o l y Writ, let alone your fucking novels. G o d , w h y should I give a shit about his past? What I've got is C y r i l in the here and now, and here and now he's all I want.' She got up angrily, clutching the box to her bosom. ' H e told me you were a wally W h y he bothers with you, I don't know. Sentiment, I suppose.' I had now been rejected in swift succession by two w o m e n w h o had sparked my interest. Well, Saskia had produced rather more than a spark. In any case, a little introspection seemed called for. It was not so much Franny I had wanted, I came to realise, but what Entwistle had from this beautiful woman: uncritical admiration and adoration. That was the true source of my envy, the lovers' uncomplicated acceptance of one another, their easy

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passion. It was into that happy condition that I had wished to plug — the electro-sexual image is by no means amiss — when I spent my Christmas holidays with C y r i l and Franny. I hope none of this seems maudlin, but it is true that my relationships with w o m e n have usually been short-hved and unsatisfactory. They start in bliss and spiral into disappointment. It is, I think, the curse of being a novelist. All too soon I begin to v i e w the woman of the moment as a character in one of my fictions, a creature whose personality and motivations may be manipulated at my will, and around w h o m I can weave scenes, sending out plot tendrils into the as yet unknown, testing, rejecting, triumphing. I can't seem to stop myself. B u t of course she is not a creature of fiction w h o may be shaped to my heart's desire. Nature and nurture have already shaped her; she has had thoughts and experiences of which I know nothing. Before she entered my life and my head, I am bound to admit, she was already fully formed. A n d w h e n the creature of my imagination and the real woman come into conflict, there is no happy way to reconcile them. At the very least, she or I, or both of us, feel betrayed. Well, that is not quite the case with Kate. Kate was real enough. No bifurcation there, none at all. Kate was . . . well, yes. B u t let's move on, all right? Moving on was what I supposed I was doing when I married Lizzie Broadbent, and that within a year of my return from Mosholu College and N e w York. Times Squared, the only one of my novels set in the N e w World, had just been published. I was being interviewed five by Keith Rumbelow, the B B C ' s 'Cheery Chappie', in a segment of that long-since defunct but then very popular morning show All Things Bright. At eight o'clock in the morning I'm not much good at jolly banter.The Cheery Chappie must have found it hard going.

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Lizzie, at that time, was a scriptwriter for the five-minute Metropolitan Roundup, aired at eleven fifty-five on weekdays, immediately before the 'serious' news began. She had come into the studio, as she told me later, in the hope of meeting me. She was a great fan of mine. After R u m b e l o w had cheerily thanked me, wished me well and sent me off, Lizzie took me to her tiny cubicle and plied me with coffee and biscuits. Then, searching frantically through the heaping chaos of papers and other detritus on her desk, she extracted a copy of Times Squared and held it to her diminutive bosom. Would I sign it for her? Of course I would, my pleasure entirely. 'To Lizzie Broadbent of the B B C , a friend in high places, affectionately, R o b i n Sinclair.' She actually blushed with delight. I asked her to lunch. She was a pretty young woman. I suppose I felt flattered. B u t Lizzie, for all her initial gushing, sighing and fluttering eyelashes, was a 'tough cookie' — to use a phrase I had just brought back, along with several pairs of jeans, from America. She was ambitious and no doubt supposed me a useful man to fall in love with. Scriptwriter for the Metropolitan Roundup was only the first rung on the ladder. She must have thought that I would open up all literary London to her. If so, the Christmas party that year at Hemings, Jefferson and Hughes, my literary agents, could only have strengthened that misapprehension. Timothy Hughes had recently agreed to take me on as a client. We had shared rooms at university. ' C o m e to the party, old man, do,' said Timothy.'It's a bit of a bun fight and the wine's wretched, but it's time to see and be seen. B r i n g a friend.' Lizzie was delighted to find herself in the midst of authors, publishers, editors and reviewers, the cream, curds and w h e y of the profession, names, some of them, to juggle with. It was fascinating to observe the skill with w h i c h she worked the room — 'networking', we call it nowadays — a diminutive five foot six in a black cocktail dress that clung to her sinuous shape, her eyes

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sparkling, certainly the most vivacious and possibly the most attractive woman there. Some actual good came of the party, too. Lizzie reached the next rung on the ladder, as one example. Jeremy Titmarsh, then a sub-editor of the Independent Weekend, w h o had been staring at her in mute, open-mouthed wonder, suddenly found his voice. Would she be interested in doing the prose accompaniment to a photographic essay planned for the magazine some time in the N e w Year? She would be? Oh, splendid! A n d he gave her his card. Lizzie, I'm bound to say, gave me full credit for this apparent career advancement, kissing me long and passionately beneath the misdetoe, entertaining those in the vicinity, until one w a g gish reveller cried, 'Oy, oy, let the poor bugger breathe!' She also gave me the key to her flat, an attic floor in a grand old redbrick semi-detached in Heath Drive, just off the Finchley R o a d - a great boon, since I had been living since my return in grotty digs in Flenser's Yard, part of a grim Kennington warren tucked away behind the Oval. I had some money saved from my N e w York adventure and some more from the publishers of Times Squared, so I was not skint. A n d Timothy thought there was a good chance he could sell the book in the States, given its setting. B u t at this point in my life, my second book out and this one too receiving high praise from the reviewers and suffering poor sales in the shops, I had seen before me nothing better than a series of dreary bedsits. If Lizzie thought she had reason to be grateful to me for taking her to the Christmas party, I was grateful to Timothy for suggesting I bring a friend. Lizzie was a natural gymnast, a jogger avant la lettre, a young woman w h o devoted time and attention to daily exercise well before the current commonplace mania. Making love to her was a totally new experience. I had never before clasped a female body that was at once so hard, so satiny, so nimble. Her legs and her arms were astonishingly strong. Her bedside reading was the

7i

Kama Sutra. She had certain favourite positions, all requiring a degree of agility: the position of the Wife of Indra, the fourth position of the Perfumed Garden, Kama's W h e e l of the AnangaR a n g a , and the Tao's Butterflies in Flight. She tried to arrange our love-making in such a way that there would be no room for error, no miscues, no clumsiness or unseemly accident. A n d she succeeded, largely because she was so agile and was able to translate my 'mistakes' into pleasing variations of our sexual ballet. I was enchanted, enraptured. Like Huck Finn, I should have ht out for the territory. We slipped into marriage, however, swiftly, easily and, it seemed to me, naturally. Neither of us was encumbered. Lizzie's parents had retired to Sarasota, Florida, where her father played golf and her mother mah-jong. T h e y were still deeply in love with one another, but had little interest in their daughter. Having bought her her flat and settled a small annuity on her once she came down from Cambridge, they had supposed they had done their duty. We could rely on them to stay where they were. Her maid of honour was Felicity something, a friend from Roedean; my best man was Timothy Hughes. We were married in St John's, Church R o w , Hampstead, on a blustery spring day, the ladies on the church steps holding down their broad-brimmed hats for the camera. It was a small wedding. Apart from Felicity and Timothy, Lizzie had invited a few friends from Cambridge, a few from the Beeb. An uncle gave the bride away. Uncle Herbert was her mother's brother. He lived in Dorking, a florid man with psoriasis and an ailing wife. He stayed long enough to be p h o tographed after the wedding and then stole silently away. T h e groom, not the gregarious sort, had invited, apart from Timothy, another boon companion of his university days, Gary Thornton, w h o was well on the way to having a poisoned liver. Mumsy wept throughout the ceremony and beyond, not because she felt she was losing a son, but because she had to endure the sight of

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Lady Cynthia preening herself on Cyril's arm. C y r i l had sprung for lunch for the wedding party an unmemorable meal at the Parrot's B e a k in Flask Walk. Everyone strove to be cheerful. Timothy had prepared a witty best man's speech, but he was constantly interrupted, usually at key moments, by Gary, already several sheets to the wind. Lady Cynthia, w h o had kept Gary company drink for drink, assured me that marriage was the happiest condition of man, and (hie!) of woman too, and were it not (hie!) that she was already married to Lord Barnet, she would certainly marry Cyril Entwistle. Overhearing this encomium of marriage, Mumsy wept inconsolably. At the end of this special day, bride and groom flung themselves on the nuptial couch, wondering why they had bothered. T h e Kama Sutra played no part in this wedding night. We postponed our honeymoon because my wife thought this a bad time to be away. A slot was opening up on The Week in Review, a prestigious programme featuring Piers Litvak, an 'intellectual' journalist, then the darling of the Left. T h e J e w s were still the underdog and therefore had not yet earned the disapproval of the B B C . Lizzie's principal rival for the position was Wendy Martin, a stalwart, w h o wrote the script for the popular children's programme Higgledy-Piggledy. My new wife did her thing. That is to say, she asked Sally Sessions, the renowned cellist, for an interview. Sally happened to be Litvak s wife, but no matter. Sally granted the interview; Lizzie wrote the piece, and then persuaded Jeremy Titmarsh to publish it in the Independent Weekend. It was in fact a good piece, informative, revelatory, human and exremely well written. Lizzie got the job, becoming as well a close friend of Sally Sessions. O u r social circle was growing. On the other hand, our honeymoon seemed increasingly poindess. Lizzie was a micro-manager. She needed to know in advance what she would be doing every moment of every day; she

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needed, moreover, to know what the future held, and how she might shape it. Since I was her husband, she needed to know, too, what I might be doing at every moment of the day and what I might be doing in the future. B e y o n d this, she needed to bring our separate schedules into alignment, which usually meant that my schedule had in some way to accommodate hers, a smooth segue not unlike her accommodations in bed. I found much of this intolerable. I am not, I think, a slob, but I abhor regimentation. I found ways to undermine Lizzie's plans. I missed meetings with my publisher, I found I had to be elsewhere during one or another of her dinners, I spent days not writing according to my scheduled time-slots. I abandoned novel after novel. I drove poor Lizzie wild. Meanwhile, I think she had discovered she had not married a literary dynamo. She loved me, I suppose, and therefore she forgave me. B u t I was becoming a drag on her ambition. We began to have fierce arguments, usually over nothing. W h y did I have no gumption? Didn't I want to w i n the Booker? T h e Whitbread? She for her part was climbing the ladder rung by rung. Sally Sessions had put her in touch with the editor of This England, w h o wanted her to write a monthly column on 'the passing scene', whatever that might be; Matthew Stamp, w h o edited Biography, had read her piece on Sally Sessions, and wanted to hire her for a regular column, 'Lizzie's People'. Lizzie was taking off, a comet streaking across the sky. What were we to do, Lizzie and I? T h e solution descended ex machina, a call from a venerable Edinburgh journal inviting her to consider the post of Editor. H o w could she turn it down? 'Will you come with me to Scotland?' 'No.' 'Shall I turn the offer down, R o b i n ? ' ' N o , of course not.' 'What then?'

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'Let's call it quits, Lizzie. It's been grand, but we've not found ourselves a place among the great lovers of the western world. What say we gently part.' 'I love you, Robin.' ' A n d I love you, Lizzie.' ' N o regrets?' ' N o n e . Let's have a farewell dinner at the Parrot's Beak.' 'Let's.' I had better quit this introspective interlude. Y o u will have recognised the irony. I am turning myself into a creature of my fiction. As a coda, though, to my account of that visit to Dibblethwaite, Christmas, 1 9 7 5 , 1 should note that by the summer of the following year 'all that Franny wanted' had become Itzhak Goldhagen, the renowned flautist — or as Franny doubtless put it, 'the greatest British flautist of the twentieth century' — with w h o m she ran off to Cetona in Tuscany, leaving Entwistle uncharacteristically devastated.

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THREE

I

HAVE BEEN, I FEAR, A TRIFLE DISINGENUOUS about certain

matters, leaving you to suppose, for example, that I had nothing

to do with Entwistle's choice of Stan as his 'official' biographer. Stan, in fact, was my suggestion. Yes, it's true. Actually, at first Entwistle had asked me to write the biography. Me! It beggars belief. 'Keep it in the family,' he said. 'Filial piety, that sort of thing. I've always thought of you as the son I never had. I'm getting on, son. H o w about it?' This was perhaps two years ago, or a little less. He had come up to London to see his dentist, w h o had just given him grave news. E v e r y one of his remaining upper teeth must out, and soon. R o t was poisoning his system. N o r was there bone density enough to allow for implants; he would have to wear uppers. ' N o t a dicky-bird beyond this room, Robin.' He was at my flat in Bolton Gardens, where he planned to spend the night, before returning to Dibblethwaite in the morning. I suppose that 'Dr Malcolm-fucking-McIver, the cunt' — as Entwistle invariably called him, mincing the 'Malcolm', strongly music-hall-Scottishing the 'Mclver', and giving loving emphasis to the 'cunt' — had reminded him rudely of his mortality, his days of crusty bread, Harrogate toffee and Angus steak already over. He sat before the fire, still in his fleece-lined overcoat and deerstalker hat, dry-washing his hands towards the flames. H o w frail he looked, how old! A n d indeed he was old, over eighty now.

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'Biography's not what I do,' I said. 'It's a special skill.' 'You're a writer, for fuck's sake. It'll be a doddle. Besides, I'm here — at least for the time being — to tell you all you need to know. C o m e on, R o b i n , don't be a wanker.' He looked towards the cabinet in which he knew I housed my liquor. 'A brandy would go down a treat.' I had, in a quarter of a century, moved to wanker from wally, but it was a lateral move. I poured him a stiff measure of brandy and handed it over. 'Consider, Cyril,' I said. 'You're an artist of the first magnitude, as important to the history of British art as are, say, Hogarth and Turner. You can't let just anybody write your biography. Let me think about this for a litde while.There's plenty of life in you yet. Let's not be hasty.' Entwisde chewed on that, almost visibly. My argument might have merit. He was perhaps rather too important to relinquish the telling of his life to a mere novelist. Family values were all very well, but I was not even 'family', not really. There was a ring at the door. I had ordered a chicken dinner from a French rotisserie just off the Old Brompton R o a d and a blue-chinned, helmeted motorcyclist stood ready to hand it over. Entwistle s rapacious old age manifested itself at table. He sat hunched over his plate as if his portion were threatened by some outsider. He clawed at his chicken like a cormorant. He slurped down the mashed potatoes he'd inundated in gravy. ' N o t a bread eater?' he asked me, swiping the roll from my plate, splitting it in two and slathering each half in butter. ' N o t bad, this,' he said. 'What's for afters?'There was in the question and in his m o m e n tary beagle-like expression a fear that there might be no 'afters' at all — that I, like the world at large, might have let him down. 'Your favourite,' I said. 'What do you say to Marks & Sparks s Sticky Toffee Pudding? I need only pop it in the microwave.' 'You're a good bugger, Robin,' he said. 'You take after your mum. With cream?'

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'With cream.' Entwistle had always been a rather reluctant eater, nothing like the trencherman he now was. 'Eat what I can while I've still got my fucking teeth, eh?' Watching his distasteful behaviour at table, I was the recipient of what may have seemed like heaven-sent, but was in fact diabolical, inspiration. 'You know, Cyril, you ought to approach Stan Kops with the idea. He's the biographer for you.' Entwisde claimed never to have heard of him. 'Is that Cops, as in "and R o b b e r s " or Copse as in "a stand of trees"?' I spelled the name for him. 'Sounds like a sodding J e w to me.' 'He's an American, undoubtedly Jewish, but so what? He's also the foremost biographer of British artists, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Y o u might want to look at his work.' 'Fuck me, a J e w ! ' E v e r since the departure from his life of Franny, the nonJewish Jewess, his anti-Semitism had been growing. Never mind his Holocaust series of paintings, the occasion of his resignation from the R o y a l Academy (about which I really ought to tell you), and which today hangs in the Entwistle Gallery of the Tabakman Museum in Tel Aviv; never mind the Worthy Gentile Medal he had happily accepted from the President of Israel. Franny s betrayal had scratched into life a gene perhaps dormant in his ancestry since the Massacre at York. 'If you do approach him,' I said,'don't mention my name, all right? I'd rather stay uninvolved.' Actually, there was no danger of this. Whatever Entwisde undertook, he supposed it his own creation. H o w could a unique genius such as his be subject to outside influences? B u t what was / up to? Well, perhaps I wanted to strike a blow for Mumsy, dead n o w these six years, for Entwistle had ended their affair with his customary casual callousness. I cannot forget

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even now her tears, her despair: 'You're the only reason I don't kill myself, darling R o b i n . What else have I to live for?' B u t that was Mumsy crying out de profundis. She had continued to adore the man, no matter her other entanglements, for the rest of her life, and she, without question, would not have wanted him harmed. Stan, of course, would have found my motivation in the pages of Freud. Oedipus, he would j o t down in his notes, and he would shape my life to his Procrustean bed.While I'm almost sure I wished neither Stan nor Entwistle any good, I am equally sure I wished only Entwistle harm. Two more unlikely bedfellows it is hard to imagine. I believe that there is a tenth Muse, and her name is Mischief. She dwells in the Cave of Spleen. It was she, I suspect, w h o inspired me. At any rate, I was now to pay for my self-indulgence. I returned to my N e w York hotel after an agreeable farewell dinner with my American publicist to find an alarming red light blinking on my bedside telephone. There, on the hotel's 'Exclusive CallCache', was Entwistle's angry voice wanting to know where the fuck I was and demanding that I return his call toot-sweet, if, it went on with heavy sarcasm, I could spare a moment of my sybaritic time. 'Christ Almighty, R o b i n , what the fuck's going on?' I tried him first in France, where I supposed him to be. No luck. 'Hard cheese, whoever you are! Claire and I might be in any number of places over here, depending on the hour. B u t then, depending on the day, we might be in grim and gloomy Yorkshire, G o d help us.You might try us there. Personally, I don't much care.' Accordingly, I tried him in Dibblethwaite, and lo, there he was. He had read in the Guardian an article condemning, in standard anti-American fashion, the gun culture in the United States, an article in which the outraged journalist mentioned a recent

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atrocity, the casual, unprovoked gunning down in N e w York of the writer Stan Kops, 'best k n o w n over here for his controversial Freudian biographies of Hogarth and Turner'. 'If a man of letters is not safe in a book shop [sic]! the journalist went on to ask, ' w h o is?' Entwisde was in a tizzy. Had I heard anything about Kops's condition? 'Is the fucker still alive? No one over here can find him. He's disappeared. Christ Almighty, R o b i n , that little cunt's got all kinds of documents of mine — copies, yes, but still, I ask you, papers, letters, sketches, photos. W h o knows where they are now, for fuck's sake? I need to know, R o b i n . First, I need to know, is the bleeding sod still above ground?' I reassured him as best I could, telling him what I knew. Stan was alive. T h e bullet had, miraculously, missed vital organs. He was out of hospital and convalescing in a family home in Connecticut. There was absolutely no need for Entwistle to panic. ' G o and see him, R o b i n . Make sure my papers are safe. He's "convalescing", is he? Fucking shirker! He's got a book to finish. H o w long's he going to sodding convalesce? Find out for me, all right?' 'I can't, Cyril. Sorry. I'm flying back to London tomorrow morning. I can't even reach him by phone. No one I know has his number.' 'Stay on a few more days.' He did not trouble to disguise his wheedling tone, even managing something of an old man's tremolo. 'You'll find the fucker, R o b i n , no problem. If not for me, do it for Mumsy. I'm not sure, but he might have some of the letters she wrote to me. I'll leave it to your imagination what sort of thing's in 'em. Be a good son, now, eh?' He paused for a split second, changing his tone to peremptory. 'Claire sends her fucking love.' Before he hung up, though, I had just time enough to hear Claire's throaty chuckle: 'Ah, quel salaud! Sans "feu-quine", alorsF

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In fact, upon reflection I did have a route to the convalescing Stan: Hope. She still lived in 84th Street, now renamed Edgar Allan Poe Street, someone remembering that Poe had lived there for a short while, and her telephone number was unchanged. She didn't seem particularly surprised to hear from me, although she professed herself delighted by my call. 'Hey, guess what? My reading group have just finished discussing your To the Wendy House. Boy, could we have used you here! That was some tough novel. T h e group thought Hegel; I thought Foucault.' 'What a pity!' I said. 'It would have been fun to attend.' 'I've read all your books,' she said, 'except the new one. I'm waiting for the paperback, okay? I don't suppose you'd sign 'em for me, the ones I've got, I mean?' ' M y pleasure,' I said, as if modestly amused. 'I don't suppose you're free tomorrow? I'd love to take you to lunch.' N o t only was she free, she'd be there with bells on. I told her where I was staying. 'They do a pretty good lunch,' I said. A n d in fact they do. 'Shall we say one o'clock?' I had not seen H o p e in more than thirty years. It would be ungallant to point out that the passage of so many years had left their mark. Of course they had. And, of course, on me too. H o p e said not a word about my thinning grey hair, nor yet about my tiny paunch. To be fair, she looked much better than she had as a young woman, much, much better. For a start, she was slim, genuinely slim, not like a dieter w h o had reached her goal and was now expecting to plump up again, unaccustomed and uncomfortable with her n e w size. And, for a woman in her sixties, she was attractive, well turned out, in the manner of Parisian women, who, one would have thought, possessed exclusive rights to the pattern. It was inspiriting to be sitting opposite her. On the other hand, she had brought along my books in a plastic carrier bag advertising B e n Gurion Airport.

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It was, I told her, a great pleasure to see her again, but to be candid I had an ulterior motive. ' N o problem,' she said cheerfully. I had to get in touch with Stan, I said, not for my o w n sake, but for C y r i l Entwistle's. Stan was writing Entwistle s biography (Hope, smiling, nodded her awareness), and Entwistle, not surprisingly, was concerned about Stan's physical and mental condition. N o w , we knew Stan was staying with his brother Jerome in Connecticut, but we had neither address nor telephone number. C o u l d Hope help? ' T h e poor son of a bitch,' said H o p e cheerfully. 'Christ, what it must be doing to Stan to be staying with Jerome! He hates him. Jerome is everything the academic despises. Jerome is a lawyer, a highly successful lawyer. He makes a mint; he has spent his life making a mint. Well, okay. B u t their father had no trouble expressing his delight in Jerome and his sorrow in Stan. Stan must have had an aberrant gene. Scholarship? H o w many bucks can be made out of scholarship? Stan was a nebbish. What was the matter with him? Jerome was the darling, the kid w h o made it big. So okay. B u t Stan himself eventually made it big, a name more easily recognised than Jerome's. 'Jerome has always loved his kid brother. He's always been intensely proud of him, sorta like a Catholic whose kid brother becomes a priest. K n o w what I mean?' She took a sip of wine. 'Hmmm. I wouldn't want to carry that analogy too far. Jerome's stricdy kosher, a pillar of his synagogue. But anyway, old man Kops died before Stan was a personality, the parental pickle business going down the tubes, his widow moving in with Jerome. Luckily all around, she's dead too now. But still . . . Meanwhile, Stan never got to prove himself. His father took a picture of a schmuck with him to the grave.' Hope chuckled, and speared a shrimp from her cocktail. 'You got a pen handy? Here's Jerome's telephone number in Connecticut.' She took out a battered address book.

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'Have you ever considered why all Stan's subjects have trouble with their fathers? Because Stan had trouble with his. L o o k at the biographies. Each of his subjects is reshaped on Stan's own custom-designed template, " O n e Size Fits A l l " . My o w n view, of course, is biased, but I think old man Kops had it right: Stan is a schmuck. T h e best thing he ever did for me was to move out. Believe me, post-Stan — we're talking more than twentyfive years now — my life is much improved.' Her voice took on momentarily a spark of anger. 'I was a much better scholar than he was, much better, the schmuck.' Then, as if laughing at herself, she took on a N e w York adenoidal accent, imitating Brando: 'I coulda bin a contenda.' She sighed. 'So he got rid of a wife and got himself an agent for free. A real bargain. In the end, his father would've been proud.' Her eyes misted over and she seemed to gaze quite through me. 'But I gotta tell you, R o b i n , when he was good, he was very, very good.' 'Oh? In what way was he good?' 'Hrrrmm?' 'I said, in what way was he good?' She actually blushed. 'I can't tell you that! Besides, it's none of your business!'

*

*

*

'STAN?'

' N o , this is his brother, Jerry.' 'Ah, Mr Kops. I'm R o b i n Sinclair, an old, old friend of your brother's. I wonder if I might have a word with him, please.' 'I'll see if I can find him. Hold on, okay?' B u t it was Saskia w h o , after a considerable interval, came to the phone. ' R o b i n ? You've heard what happened to Stan, of course?'

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'Absolutely appalling. H o w is he, poor old chap?' 'Bearing up, I guess you'd say. T h e flesh is healing, sure, but the spirit, well, we'll have to see. You'll understand if he can't come to the phone, right? Thanks for calling, though. I'll be sure and tell him.' 'Actually Saskia, I'm also phoning on behalf of C y r i l Entwistle. He's read about what happened to Stan, and quite naturally he's concerned. He's asked me to find out what I can about Stan's condition — how his health, to put it bluntly, might affect their collaboration on the biography. He's also worried by the thought that documents of his, letters, photographs, and so on, might fall into (no pun intended) unauthorised hands. What should I tell him?' T h e only sound from the other end was that of Saskia breathing. 'Saskia?' ' D o you know Entwistle, R o b i n ? ' Just what I'd hoped to avoid! ' O u r paths have crossed from time to time, social circles overlapping, that sort of thing.' ' A n d yet he knows you well enough to ask a personal favour?' 'Entwisde isn't shy. He rather thinks the rest of us are here specifically to grant him personal favours.' 'Just a second, okay?' She had put her hand over the receiver. Stan must have been there all along. I heard a background m u m bling. A n d then, ' D ' y o u think you could come on out here — to Jerry's place in the country, I mean, R o b i n — even if only for a short visit? Stan would really like that, really he would. He thinks it'd cheer him up. He's always been fond of you, you know that.' Well, well, well. Stan (or Saskia) evidently thought I might prove useful. 'It's not going to be possible. I leave for London the day after tomorrow' A h , but it was a pity, though, a lost opportunity to see Saskia. C o u l d I extend my stay again?

Her hand once more went over the receiver; in the background I heard the mumble of three distinct voices. 'Jerry says he'll be happy to send his chauffeur for you. You'll come and go as you please, stay for an hour, stay for a week. Seriously though, Bill will either take you back to your hotel or to Kennedy in time for your flight, whichever you prefer.' Well, w h y not? A n d Stan incapacitated? T h e gods, perhaps, were smiling on me. Jerome Kops's 'place in the country' occupied forty acres of manicured farmland about fifteen miles north of Darien. Once through the main gates one might have been in Pemberley for here if anywhere was Nature methodis'd, every prospect meant to please - either the extravagant work of some demented, latter-day Capability B r o w n or the cliche-driven excesses of a Disney landscape architect O D - i n g on England. T h e house itself was a massive pile built in the manner of Beverly Hills Tudor, its forecourt paved, a veritable piazza, its centrepiece a fountain atop which a cheerful naiad cavorted. T h e limousine pulled up at the front door, which was opened to me by a woman I took to be Stan's sister-in-law, a plump, grey-haired female in a floral dress. I was wrong. She was followed, before I could open my mouth, by Saskia. 'That's all right, Mrs H, I'll look after Mr Sinclair. Bill will carry the luggage up to the Paul R e v e r e R o o m , if you'll lead him there, won't you, Bill? Thanks a heap.' Behind me stood the chauffeur, my bags in hand. ' R o b i n ! ' She flung her arms around me and kissed the air at my cheek. ' C o m e on in!' I was enveloped in her perfume, an invisible cloud of Frenzy!, recognisable to me only because Mumsy, dying, lay soaked in it, an open bottle having fallen from her slack fingers. Saskia took me by the arm and led me into a huge entrance hall, three storeys high, a balcony running around its inner perimeter at the second level. Light poured in from

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above through massive skylights. As we walked across the gleaming floor, I received a hasty impression of w o o d panelling, paintings, sconces, mirrors, an ornate sideboard, an elegant grandfather clock, vases filled with flowers. 'It's really good of you to come, R o b i n . It'll mean so much to Stan. These last few weeks have been hell, you've got no idea.' Saskia was still a handsome woman, but, like one of Milton's Fallen Angels, her brightness was eclipsed. That is to say, past sixty now, she no longer held herself quite so gracefully erect as once she had, and, of course, cruel T i m e had tramped his relentless passage across her face. For all that, I thought it a pleasure to be once more in her company. I would have taken her away from here at once, had I thought she would let me. She led me into what I took to be the living-room, spacious, airy, with french windows opening onto a flagstoned patio and sun-dappled lawns beyond; the room was so pretentiously appointed it might have been awaiting a visit from Cecil Beaton. Still, I was immediately drawn to the portrait of a lady that hung above the mantelpiece. T h e lady sat leaning into a wing-backed chair, her hips thrust forward, her legs straight out before her and crossed at the ankles. She wore a simple silk dress of a floral pattern in muted colours. A book lay open across her lap. With her right hand she toyed with a strand of pearls around her neck. She stared beneath heavy-lidded eyes not at the viewer but quite through him, a look of unutterable boredom on her face. As a painting, it was magnificent; it was also, unmistakably, the work of Cyril Entwisde. I pulled my arm, perhaps rudely, from Saskia's grasp and went to stand before the portrait. 'That's Polly, Jerome's wife,' said Saskia. 'Jerry commissioned that portrait thirty years ago, which was just about Polly's age at the time. It was a crazy idea. She had to go over to England for six months to sit for it. Entwistle refused to come here, no matter what Jerry offered him.'

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'She's very beautiful.' 'She's also very dead,' said Saskia, a tad spitefully, I thought. 'Cancer, two years ago. It was no sooner diagnosed than it was over. She was lucky in a way, I guess. Poor Jerry was devastated. He's only now getting over it.' 'Did Stan ever meet Entwistle at the time of the portrait?' ' N o , not until Entwistle approached him with the idea of doing the biography. It's quite a coincidence, isn't it?' What a sly old bastard Entwistle is! A l l that nonsense about never having heard the name Kops, wondering how it was spelled! What was he up to? Perhaps he has spent so long shaping reality into art that he plucks up any ordinary fact as if it were a lump of clay waiting to be prodded and smoothed into meaning. Perhaps, despairing of the truth, he prefers the accommodating lie. I had not forgotten what Franny told me about his diaries. 'Where is Stan?' 'He's been having a pre-luncheon nap in the solarium. He's still pretty weak. Jerome's gone to get him. Look, R o b i n , I know you'll be shocked w h e n you see him, anyone would be. B u t please, please, try not to let your shock show, okay?' A n d even as she spoke, a tall, florid man, but unmistakably a Kops, clad in a navy-blue blazer, a cream shirt and a colourful silk neckerchief pushed a gleaming wheelchair into the room; in the wheelchair sat a much-diminished and peevish Stan, a chequered coverlet over his knees. Poor Stan looked all the worse for the contrast with his brother, w h o exuded health and whose Kopsian features had somehow arranged themselves into good looks. No wonder Stan hated him. 'Jerry' said Saskia, 'this is R o b i n Sinclair, an old friend. R o b i n , this is Jerome Kops, Stan's big brother.' 'Welcome, welcome. Glad you could come.' Jerome seemed to mean it. He shook hands with me warmly.

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'You'll forgive me for not getting up,' said Stan sarcastically, the grin on his wan face collapsing into a grimace. 'I had no idea . . .' I began. 'Oh, it's not as bad as it looks,' said Stan. 'I can walk. It's just that Saskia here, bless her, is trying to wean me of my painkillers, revealing thereby a sadistic streak hitherto quiescent. It hurts me to move, of course, but what the heck, eh? As long as Saskia's happy' 'Please, Stan, I'm only following Dr Ostriker's instructions.' 'Ah, yes, the saintly doctor. Has he seen fit to renew my prescription for Dormidol, by the way?' He turned to me. ' M y sleeping pills. Forgive the poor invalid, R o b i n . T h e focus of my world's shifted. If I'm not allowed to eliminate the pain, I want to sleep through it, or at least to try.' 'I had Bill J o y c e pick up the Dormidol this morning,' said Jerome. 'Too kind, too kind,' said Stan dismissively. T h e housekeeper appeared at the door. ' C o o k says lunch in twenty minutes, sir,' she said to Jerome. 'Thanks, Mrs H. I hope you've got a good appetite, Robin.' He moved the wheelchair forward a couple of inches.'Meanwhile, I'll leave you guys to get reacquainted.' He followed the housekeeper out of the room. 'I've been in constant touch with M y r o n Teitelbaum' — not so much a lie as a fiblet — 'ever since I saw the headline in the paper and discovered you'd been shot.' ' O f course, Myron, yes, the Old Queen of Mosholu, long may she reign, G o d bless her,' sneered Stan. 'One muddled article on the Ancren Riwle and one slim, derivative volume on The Legende of Good Women, and behold, Her Majesty, w h o is also her very own Disraeli, is j u m p e d up to the Empress of the English Department. What Mosholu needs now, short of disbanding, is a Juvenal.'

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'Teitelbaum blackballed Stan at the Century Club,' offered Saskia, as if in explanation. ' H o w can you possibly know that?' I said. 'I know,' said Saskia. Stan waved his hand in the manner of an unconcerned apiarist sending a tiresome wasp on its way. 'Well, the Lotos Club, Mark Twain's club, was happy to accept me, "honoured", the secretary said.' He lowered his pale face and examined me with red-rimmed eyes. 'We have reciprocal arrangements with the R e f o r m in London. W h e n I'm there, the Reform's my club, too.' 'Oh, good,' I said. 'And the Groucho,' he added malevolently. T h e housekeeper appeared once more at the door. 'Lunch is served, Mrs Kops.' 'Thank you, Mrs H.' Lunch was a desultory affair, with Jerome and Saskia, embarrassed as they clearly were by Stan's determined grumpiness in the presence of a visitor, striving in vain to cheer him up — Jerome heartily with anecdotes of childhood that served to illustrate his own wilful ignorance and Stan's precocious 'smarts'; Saskia brightly, with tales of their last visit to England, and particularly of a drive through Somerset and Devon and their delight in discovering Porlock. 'Hardly "discovering", sweetheart,' said Stan viciously. 'It was there all along. What she means is,' he explained, as if she were a toddler whose vocal experiments must be translated to a stranger, 'we came upon Porlock by chance' He turned to her. 'As I remember the happy occasion, my poor darling, you hadn't a clue as to what Porlock signified. A h , well.' Into the painful silence that followed, Jerome gallantly galloped, a foolish knight errant astride a weak and sickly Rosinante. 'So, R o b i n , is this your first visit to the States?'

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'For God's sake, Jerry! Try to stay awake!' Stan spat his scorn. ' R o b i n and I met at Mosholu thirty years ago, remember? Mosholu? In the Bronx? Besides, he's a novelist. He's over here all the time peddling his books.' He contrived not only to mock his brother, but to suggest that there was something frivolous about writing novels and something brown-paper-wrapperish about promoting their sale. Stan had been wheeled to the head of the table, where he sat as if presiding, for me a flashback to that tedious dinner in West 84th Street all those years ago. B u t today's Stan was very different from his former avatar, not merely in point of years or current lack of vigour. Then, he had sought conviviality, Gemutlichkeit; n o w he deliberately provoked discord. All that remained of the old Stan, so far as I could see, was his assurance of his o w n superiority. Then, he had sought to mask it behind a see-through veil; now, he was blatant in its assertion. He sat at the head of the table, his chin lowered into his chest, glancing up at us, one after another, with angry, suspicious eyes, raising his chin only to deliver one of his atrabilious zingers. Whence such bitterness? I wondered. Had the bullet piercing his body in the Porno E m p o r i u m been smeared with wormwood? He was at the peak of his scholarly career. Had he concluded that the Pulitzer Prize people, the National B o o k Award people, the MacArthur 'Genius' Award people were in cahoots against him, out of envy perhaps? Or were the black dogs of his dyspepsia kennelled closer to home? He ate very little, despite Saskia's pleadings, breaking a roll into small pieces and picking at them throughout the meal. A n d yet the table groaned under its offerings, a cornucopia of what in N e w York is known as 'kosher-style' food — which is to say, no mingling of meat and dairy dishes, but composed of those delicatessen offerings supposed especially appealing to the descendants of East European J e w s . As for me, I was avid for such food,

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which I enjoyed second only to sushi, freely acknowledging that I lie English efforts at Jewish delicatessen were no match for the American, especially for the N e w York variety, which, I discovered, was the source of Jerome's Connecticut feast. Here was every imaginable variety of smoked fish, each on huge platters, tubs of fish salads, salmon, white fish and tuna, tubs of cream cheese, plain, scallion and vegetable, baskets of breadstuffs, bagels, rye, sourdough, pumpernickel, butter, sweet and salted, and bowls of various salads, besides pickles, onions, beets and cucumbers. Accompanying the meal was a superb Chateau Lanrazac 1956 and following it rogelach, or gewickelte biscuits, and coffee. 'I associate this foul food with C y r i l Entwistle,' said Stan mysteriously, 'but that is a tale for another time.' At last Entwistle had been mentioned. ' C y r i l has asked me to convey his very best wishes for a full recovery,' I said, my formality a sure sign not only that I was lying, but that I was sure I was known to be lying. 'I should have mentioned that sooner.' 'It's Cyril, is it, R o b i n ? T h e two of you cosily on a first-name basis?' 'Our circles have crossed from time to time over the years,' I said hastily. 'But I don't know him well. No one would describe our relationship as cosy' 'And yet he asked you to find me.' ' H e knows Timothy. My agent in England.' 'Ah, well,' said Stan sarcastically, 'if he knows Timothy . . . It so happens, I know Timothy too.' He chose not to elaborate. Mrs H appeared again, as she had appeared on and off throughout the meal, enquiring whether everything was to our satisfaction, whether we wished to withdraw for coffee, whether, if so, we wanted 'plain or decaffeinated', whether any of us would prefer espresso, or even, heaven help us, tea. Jerome had begun his customary placatory response ('Thank

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you, Mrs H. Everything's fine. A wonderful meal') w h e n Stan cut across his words. 'Jesus, Hroshovsky, w h y not give it a rest? Don't call us, for pity's sake, we'll call you.' T h e poor woman stiffened, a flush suffusing her withered cheeks. H e r lower lip trembled. Jerome gestured to her, his brow tracing a beagle's sadness. Wordlessly, he begged her to forgive his brother: he's a poor, sick man. He's not responsible for what he says. I'll make it up to you, guaranteed. Trust me, do. She forced a smile to her lips. Later I learned that Mrs Hroshovsky had been born Bridie O'Toole and that since the death of the saintly Brian (ne Baruch) Hroshovsky, a dealer in threads and patches, she preferred to be k n o w n as Mrs H, which she regarded as ethnically neutral. A n d that is surely w h y Stan perversely opted for the totality of the ungainly name. Stan returned immediately to the subject. 'What your uncosy friend C y r i l wants to know, and let's not be coy, good R o b i n , is whether so slight an inconvenience as a bullet in my vitals will delay his biography, or, heaven forfend, cast its completion into doubt.' 'Well, of course, that's a reasonable concern.' 'Tell him he needn't w o r r y ' said Saskia loyally. 'Stan always finishes what he begins,' said Jerome. 'That was apparent even in childhood.' Stan waved his brother's comments aside as not worth addressing, utterly valueless. He turned to his wife. 'You drew up the contract, sweetie, but did you really understand it? I've got that prick Entwistle by the short and hairies. Let the fucker sue. He'll have to wait until I'm ready to go on. Which I am, just about. Tell him to look at the contract. He'll find it all in the contract.' •

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Following this angst-ridden meal, Saskia wheeled Stan off for another nap. In fact, he did look rather tired, like a conductor who has flung himself about too wildly at the end of some tempestuous, climactic movement. Jerome asked me whether I would like to j o i n him on a walk around the grounds, an offer I declined, claiming a lingering jedag. What I wanted was a private word with Saskia — preparation, if possible, for the uncivil interview I imagined Stan was preparing for me. As it turned out, she didn't reappear, and so I enjoyed a nap of my own, sunk into a deep, soft, leather chair before the Entwisde portrait of the late Polly Kops. Mrs H awoke me, coughing discreetly somewhere behind me and, w h e n she saw me stir, moving into view. ' M r Stan Kops would like to see you, sir. He's in the study.' 'Ah,' I said, still swathed somewhat in delicious slumber. 'I think he means now, sir.' Her voice, it seemed to me, trembled a litde. 'What time is it?' I struggled to my feet. 'A little after four. Will I show you to the study?' She led me out of the room, across the vast hallway and up to a panelled door, upon which she knocked. ' C o m e in,' said Saskia. She was curled fetchingly on the sofa, her heels against her now almost plump rump, a notepad in one hand, a pencil poised for action in the other. On the carpet before her were ranged three blue lidless cardboard file boxes. Stan sat dwarfed behind the monstrous desk, his elbows on its surface, his hands clasped beneath his chin. He was wearing glasses and they reflected the light, making his expression impenetrable. I was back in Cronyn Hall and in the headmaster's study awaiting a caning. 'Ah, there you are, Robin,' said Saskia, as if I had turned up by chance, but was nevertheless welcome. ' C o m e on in. A n d thank you, Mrs H.'

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M r s H turned to go. 'Hold it,' said Stan. 'Is there any ice in that bucket over there?' ' N o , sir. I ordinarily fill it at five-thirty.' 'Well, let's five dangerously, shall we, Hroshovsky? Fill it an hour early, okay?' ' O f course, sir.' 'And check on the Dr Pepper while you're at it.' Mrs H crossed over to the bar and knelt before its refrigerator unit, peering within. ' H e y R o b i n , sit down, w h y doncha?' said Saskia brightly. She indicated a chair that stood at an angle before the massive desk. If Stan and Saskia formed the base of an isosceles triangle, I would be its apex. Instead, I sat at the other end of her sofa. Mrs H rattled ice cubes into the bucket and returned it to the bar. 'There's half a dozen cans of Dr Pepper here, sir.' 'Fine, fine,' said Stan waving his hand impatiently. 'Thank you,' said Saskia, a sour smile on her face. Mrs H left us, closing the door soundlessly behind her. 'Well, well, well,' said Stan to me. 'Three holes in the ground,' said Saskia cheerfully, as if anxious to lighten the mood. 'So you know C y r i l Entwisde, but only sort of, right? I mean, your paths crossed from time to time, is that it? Y o u got close enough to call him Cyril, but only in a casual, British sort of way?' Stan spoke as if on the point of laughter, but laughter carefully restrained out of politeness. It was obvious to the meanest understanding that he was setting me up, but I saw no way of retreating from what I myself had implied. 'Yes, yes, I suppose you could put it like that.' 'So, of course, as an adolescent, you had no idea he was shtupping your mother? " M u m s y " , that's what you called her, right?' He managed a particularly ugly emphasis to the word shtupping and made the word Mumsy seem idiotic in the extreme.

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'What on earth are you talking about?' Stan did not even bother to reply, but merely waved his hand at the fde boxes. 'Let's have a drink, w h y don't w e ? ' said Saskia, springing to her feet. 'A single malt for you, R o b i n ? Glen McTochiss all right? G and T for me. A n d for you, Stan darling?' ' D r Pepper, for Christ's sake.You know that. I'm on Dormidol. You wanna do me in?' Saskia responded as if to a joke. That is, she laughed. 'Better luck next time, huh?' ' S o is there some reason you've been holding out on me, R o b i n ? I mean, we're old friends, right?' His eyes were invisible behind the flat light reflected by his glasses. 'Here you go, Robin,' said Saskia, handing me my drink. 'So Mumsy was Lady Smyth-Turdant? Lady, no less.Well, well, well. She was some looker. I've seen the paintings, of course. No offence, Saskia, but I wouldn't mind a piece of that action m y s e l f He took the proffered glass of Dr Pepper.'Thanks, sweetie. Three cubes, right?' I got to my feet, affronted, scarcely believing I'd heard what I'd heard. 'I think perhaps it's time for me to go.' 'Sit down, R o b i n . My apologies. Look, I'm grovelling, okay. Wow! What got into me? But hey, old buddy, it's C y r i l you should be mad at, not me. Hey, friends, okay?' T h e poor sick bastard reached across that huge desk, offering his hand. It was slack and damp and trembly, but I shook it nevertheless and sat down. It was fascinating to observe once more how Stan's speech seesawed from formal, educated, pseudo-Brahmin American to N e w York demotic. 'I've got a problem with C y r i l Entwistle,' said Stan.'Well, that's not quite it. What I've got is a whole mess of problems.' He looked at me, his glasses reflecting deadness. 'Tell me, do you

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trust this guy? I mean, "What is truth?" quoth jesting Entwistle. T h e guy hasn't a clue. Look, he's got these diaries and stuff, and letters from names, I mean big names. Saskia, sweetie, show him that Carrington letter.' Saskia rummaged in one of the file boxes. 'Dora Carrington?' said Stan. 'She had the hots for Lytton Strachey? Crazy, right? I mean the guy was as queer as Pope Joan. Okay, here's a letter she wrote to Entwistle in 1936.' Saskia handed me a sheet of paper. ' T h e original's in pencil,' said Stan, 'which maybe you can't tell from the X e r o x . B u t without taking it to an expert, it sure looks like her handwriting to me.' I looked at the letter. 'See, she advises C y r i l to try for the Cambridge School of Art. She says that the Slade School, her own Alma Mater, would only cripple his creativity. In fact, she's already "shafted a paper dart" to E. P. Spurgeon, w h o "vetted" likely candidates.' 'In fact, he did go to C S A . ' 'Yes, I know. She also says she'd love to rob the cradle, but her old school chum, N a n k y - P o o (read " N a n c y " , or " M u m s y " ) , would never forgive her.' 'Well?' 'Mumsy and Carrington were never in school together. T h e letter, as you can see, is clearly dated 12 May 1936.' 'And?' 'Dora Carrington took her own life in 1 9 3 2 . ' Obviously another document of Cyril's designed to restructure the past. What was the function of this one? A comfortable way of explaining his failure to be admitted to the Slade? Mere deviltry? 'Are you able to follow this, R o b i n ? ' Stan's voice dripped sarcasm. ' A m I going too fast? Shall I go over it again?' 'Sorry. I don't k n o w what to say. Surely there's a simple

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explanation. Perhaps Carrington simply erred. Thirty-six might have been on her mind for some entirely different reason, not a year but the size of a bustier, something of that sort.' 'Oh, sure, great, brilliant. A n d that remark about "robbing the cradle", huh? If we're talking 1 9 3 2 or sooner, Entwistle is twelve or younger. Maybe the guy could get it meaningfully up by then — hey, he'd have my respect — but he's not ready yet for the C S A , let alone the Slade. Besides, Carrington's not the only oddity. T h e files are full of them. There's the B a c o n entry. C ' m o n , for Chrissakes, Saskia, let's see a bit of enthusiasm here. N o , not in that box, in that one. Yes, no, yes!' Saskia handed me another Xeroxed copy 'Okay, so this is a diary entry. N o t e the date, Christmas Eve, 1950. R e a d it, R o b i n . R e a d it aloud.' 'Dinner with F. B . , Voltare's, Conduit Street. F. amorous, kneeing me under table. / drunk enough to enjoy it. T o o k the Calamari Imbottiti. So-so.Vino rosso, a Cetonese, 1 9 4 5 , superbo, 4 fiasci. Forget what F. took, something bubbling and grossly red. Told me he planned a series of RC cardls. Fuck that, I said, go to the top, popes, paint popes, shove it to 'em. F. put his hand on my knee and started working his way northwards, so I stood up. Your treat, I said, Happy Xmas, and skived off.' 'Oh, well read, R o b i n . There's something about that English accent, right, Saskia? A n d F. B. is . . .' 'Francis Bacon, of course. B u t they were friends once, especially in the decade after the war.' ' T h e problem here is,' said Stan, milking the moment, 'Bacon spent Christmas 1950 in South Africa visiting his very o w n mumsy' He smiled pityingly. ' T h e greater problem is that since he knows and has known in varying degrees of intimacy just about everyone w h o is anyone in the world of art, its patrons and hangers-on, everyone not excluding 10 D o w n i n g Street, where he records enjoying a dinner with Churchill that never

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took place, and B u c k House, where he assured a worried E. R. of the nation's fundamental loyalty - his precise words in his diary entry claim that "Queenie all but peed herself in relief" — w h y should he need to falsify the record?' ' W h y indeed.' 'For God's sake, "Queenie all but peed herself in relief"!' 'Peeing is relieving,' I said. Saskia sniggered. 'In short, you claim to know nothing? You've known him since you were an adolescent, all the while Lady Nancy was spreading her legs for oil paint and putz, you should excuse the expression, and you haven't a clue, right? My brother, Jerome, another shmuck, he brings you all the way out here, treats you like the English gendeman you pretend to be, and you've got nothing to offer?' His voice was rising, and with it he himself rose behind the huge desk, sliding his fists forward on its surface. He no longer sounded like the distinguished academic, the suave lecturer before learned bodies, the revered habitue of the Lotos Club. 'Stan! Please! C a l m down! You'll kill yourself!' said Saskia, rushing to him. His eyes bulged, a vein throbbed at his temple. 'I'm getting a trifle weary of these insults to my mother,' I said. 'You know nothing about her. What if I turned on yours, hinted at her sexual proclivities, wondered whether your father could satisfy her demands?' ' H o w dare you, you lousy Limey bastard!' Stan screamed. ' M y mother was a saint!' He collapsed suddenly into the chair. 'All right, all right,' he said feebly, a man exhausted. 'You've got a point. I had no business bad-mouthing Mumsy, I admit it, I'm sorry. We're not young men any more. We know what goes on in the world. Give him another drink, Saskia.' Saskia hastened to comply. Stan leaned back, his eyes closed, one hand cupped at his temple. I felt indignation still welling

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within me. Saskia handed me another McTochiss, whispering in my ear, 'Please don't excite him. He'll have another relapse.' B u t relapse into what she didn't say. Was I observing the 'real' Stan Kops at last, the elderly adolescent, petulant, angry, rebellious, a lifetime's repressed resentment cast aside like a mask that had served its usefulness? Or was this a condition of his convalescence, a passing phase, attributable not only to his recent traumata and the weakness that followed them, but also to his medication? To be honest, I didn't much care; I was rather enjoying my anger. 'You've no light to throw, then, on these discrepancies, nothing at all to tell me?' 'You're the biographer, you've got the documents, the letters, the taped interviews, all your notes, your well-honed Freudian perspectives. What can you expect me to tell you?' Stan took a handkerchief from his pocket, an actual handkerchief, an item hardly ever seen in this age of disposable paper products, and blew his nose noisily into it before examining his deposit and sighing in disappointment, whether with his snot or with me was unclear. 'But Robin,' said Saskia sweetly, 'surely you must have come across the odd example or two of Entwisde s freewheeling attitude towards facts, the poetic licence, you might say, he takes with his past?' ' N o w that you ask me . . .' 'Yes?' said Stan, suddenly alert and sitting upright. 'Yes?' said Saskia, w h o picked up her pad and pencil and smiled encouragingly at me. 'It's probably nothing, a misunderstanding on my part, but I've come across conflicting stories about his paternity. His father was either a rough farm labourer w h o returned from his experiences in the trenches in the Great War a violent depressive, probably shell-shocked, undoubtedly bonkers, raped a fourteen-year-old

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girl, w h o m he impregnated and then married. He died in 1 9 3 1 , evidendy of alcoholism. C y r i l Entwistle thus grew up in misery and poverty, as much a victim of the carnage as any surviving combatant.' Stan looked across at his wife and raised one eyebrow, a hint of a smile on his brooding, pouting hps; she responded with the slightest shake of her head. I went on, though, undeterred. ' O r his father was a war hero, an officer, Captain Giles Walter Entwistle,VC, w h o married Lucy Todger in May of 1 9 1 8 , both of them children of country clergy. He returned to the Front the day after the nuptials and was killed in gallant action a few days after that. C y r i l was born in late February 1 9 1 9 . In this version, he never knew his father, but was raised, nevertheless, in modesdy middle-class circumstances. And, oh, yes, he's therefore a year older than is generally supposed.' Saskia put down her pad and pencil, shook her head once more and offered to refill my glass; Stan, looking sideways at me, raised his hands in a pitying gesture. 'That's a load of bumf,' he said. (Stan never lost an opportunity to reveal and re-reveal his mastery of British slang.) 'One or the other version has to be true,' I said. ' I ' m inclined to believe the second. T h e family home is far from being a labourer's cottage. B u t C y r i l has always been close-mouthed about his youth. Perhaps, as someone who's become a public figure, he wants to establish areas of privacy wherever he can. Anyway, it was not a matter I felt I could quiz him on.' Saskia handed me a refilled glass of McTochiss, a calming, mellow single-malt whose mildly smoky flavour appealed to my palate, and put a n e w can of Dr Pepper on the desk in front of her husband. He looked from it to her, and waited. Saskia sighed, opened the can and poured it for him. He waved her back to her seat. This insight into the relationship between them rather pleased me - thanks, I suspect, to the benign effects of McTochiss — not because of Stan's unspeakable rudeness, but because of

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what it suggested about my own fine-tuned sensitivity to nuance. I was becoming happily squiffy. Stan settled back in his chair, steepling his fingers, his spectacles raised to his forehead and his eyes focused vaguely on the ceding. He was in lecture mode. 'Giles Entwistle was with the British forces in South Africa during the B o e r War. In i o o i , w h e n he was sixteen and serving not as an infantryman but as a drummer boy, shrapnel from an exploding shell on Spion K o p tore three fingers from his left hand. No more drumming for him, and he was shipped home in glory. Y o u with me so far?' Stan paused, leaned forward to sip his Dr Pepper, and then resumed his narrative posture. ' N o t surprisingly, he was deemed unfit for service in the First World War, which he spent conducting the orchestra, so to speak, in the flea-ridden pit of the R e g e n c y Music Hall in Scarborough. Lucy Todger had a short and undistinguished career singing ribald songs in music halls all over Yorkshire. They met in Scarborough in 1 9 1 9 , she was twentythree, he was thirty-four. He was apparently wowed by her saucy rendition of " K e e p it up, Mr Worthing, keep it up!" They were married in January 1920; C y r i l was born, rather prematurely one might think, six months later. So a cloud of a rather different sort might hang over his paternity.' Stan waved a hand airily at the three boxes bulging with files. 'It's all in there.' I saw no reason w h y the version he offered should be any closer to the truth than mine, and I said so, not belligerently but pacifically, as one presenting a resolution for friendly debate. T h e warmth of good feeling the McTochiss had engendered within me now spread out to embrace not merely Saskia, but Stan as well. 'You see no reason!' screamed Stan, standing up, waving a fist, his face motded. Saskia rushed to his side. 'For God's sake, R o b i n , don't excite him. He's a sick man.' She managed to push him back into his

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chair, where he sat for a few minutes breathing deeply, his arms hanging limply over the armrests. 'I'd better go,' I said. 'I'm doing no good here.' ' N o t so fast,' said Stan, rallying, shaking off Saskia's comforting hand. ' I ' m fine, I'm fine, leave me the fuck alone, Saskia. Go back and sit down!' Meekly she obeyed. ' Y o u see no reason, R o b i n , ' Stan said scornfully, 'because y o u possess no reason. What I have are the facts, not rumours. I don't k n o w yet w h y Entwistle created this mystery about his origins, w h y he's trying to hide behind what your g o o d buddy

Myron

Teitelbaum

would

dub

the

Cloud

of

U n k n o w i n g , although I ' m getting there, I ' m getting there.' Here he actually smiled his square-toothed, gap-toothed smile, a sickly version since his lips lacked blood. ' T h e serious b i o g rapher depends upon facts; on facts he builds his case. T h e narrative line asserts itself, patterns emerge, moments in the life that are suited to psychological interpretation make themselves k n o w n , the lineaments of the man are fleshed out, chiaroscuro is replaced by subtle tints and shadings. U n l i k e the novelist, the biographer pursues not a simulacrum of the truth, but Truth i t s e l f It was evident to me that he was quoting himself, an excerpt from a speech he must have given many times before. 'Most subjects of biography have, usually unconsciously, rearranged the events, their understanding of the events and their reaction to the events of their own pasts into some sort of coherent narrative pattern. Entwistle differs from most in that he deliberately set about reinventing his past, even allowing different versions of it to coexist. It's the biographer's unhappy task to dismande these personal reconfigurations of a life, even though he cannot thereafter put the pieces together again in anything like so artistically pleasing a shape.

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' I ' m not quite finished yet with Entwistle perel said Stan. He nodded at the boxes, behind which Saskia now sat crouched in dejection. In 1 9 2 1 , according to Stan, Giles had moved his small family to Dibblethwaite, Lucy's 'home town', and there sunk their pitiable savings into a ninety-nine-year leasehold, the house that Cyril was to live in all his life. T h e newlyweds were in luck; they bought the house on the cheap from a recent widow, who, while never having lived there herself, wanted to prevent her hated stepson and his wife from acquiring it. Entwisde's mother had died of pneumonia in the wicked winter of 1944. He saw his father for the last time in 1946. C y r i l was newly demobbed; he hadn't been back in England for nearly three years. Giles turned up at Liverpool docks to meet him. Father and son grunted, briefly shook hands and eyed one another warily. 'I imagine you can find your o w n way back to Dibblethwaite,' said Giles gruffly. 'I've got things to do here.' He turned to go and then turned back. 'You don't happen to have an extra fiver, do you?' C y r i l handed one over, and that was that. Thereafter, Entwistle received the odd postcard from his father, at first from Canada, whither he had emigrated, and thereafter from America. ' H e ended up in San Francisco, playing onehanded piano at McTeague's, a favourite haunt of the Beats, and died in 1957 at the age of seventy-two, falling off a moving tramcar and smashing his head on the kerb.' It was hard to bear the look of smug satisfaction Stan bore on his face. He was a card player w h o held aces and trumps. ' A n d this narrative, what we might call the Kops Version, is based firmly on the facts?' Stan nodded. 'And these facts are derived from those boxes and from files you perhaps have elsewhere, and from documents you were able to consult, if not copy?' 'Exacdy.'

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' A n d perhaps, too, from conversations you had with C y r i l himself?' 'What's your point?' Stan's m o o d was changing. ' H o w can you be sure that the documents upon which you base your narrative of Cyril's parentage and early years are any more reliable than the Carrington document you showed me before, or the biographical impossibilities you spoke of?' 'Because I'm a trained scholar,' hissed Stan, rising to his feet once more. 'Because, thanks to years of patient research, I am able with ease to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is a skill the true biographer acquires. You wouldn't know about that.' 'Even so, old man, even so . . . T h e most skilled of counterfeiters might err occasionally, through overconfidence, carelessness, ignorance or even a perverse desire to be found out. B u t if he is truly skilled, most of his counterfeits would be difficult, if not impossible, to detect.' Stan gestured angrily with a clenched fist and inadvertendy sent an empty can of Dr Pepper flying towards Saskia, w h o put out a hand and caught it. 'Owzat!' I said, eager to reduce the tension. B u t , in my McTochiss-induced, mild argumentativeness I was not quite ready to let go. 'Entwistle is one of the greatest artists of the last century, and like all the greatest, he's unique, his w o r k immediately recognisable. B u t for him to copy a Picasso, say, or a B a c o n with such fidelity that the artist himself would have difficulty telling them apart, or to paint an original in the manner of Picasso or Bacon, of whatever period, so that the experts would be confounded — that's child's play. C o p y i n g the handwriting of Dora Carrington would be a breeze, no trouble at all; capturing her style, that might trip him up, although even there he's pretty good: I've heard him do a persuasive skit from the Goon Show that he'd made up entirely himself; he even managed the voices. All I ' m suggesting is that the documents

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upon which you rely, the sources of your facts, might not be — well, reliable.' Stan was purple, 'I know what is reliable and what is not! H o w dare you impugn my abdity? I've traced every detad of what I've told you about Giles Entwistle, every detad. I've been to Scarborough, to London, Ontario, to San Francisco, I've scoured the records, public and private. If Giles Entwistle farted, I know about it. So back off, shmuck!' A n d then petulandy: 'I thought you were my friend.' 'I think you'd better go,' said Saskia in evident distress. 'He's still in recovery.' 'She's right for once, the bitch,' shrieked Stan. 'Get the fuck out of here!' I left the room as quickly as I could, but not before I heard Stan ask Saskia, ' D o we have anything on the Goon Show?

*

•

*

STAN DID N O T APPEAR AT D I N N E R - for me, perhaps for aU of

us, a blessing rather than a deprivation. I had had quite enough of him and marvelled at Saskia's patience, a patience I attributed to a form of masochism. Perhaps I had misinterpreted the clues to Stan's sexuality that I had found all those years ago in his appalling pornographic novel, attributing to him the passivity of his protagonist. Or perhaps he had developed new tastes with the passing of the years, possibly under Saskia's tutelage, arriving at last with her at the kind of relationship that was of particular interest to Krafft-Ebing. At any rate, Mrs H took him a light repast to his room. He planned to take his D o r m i d o l early in order to be up betimes the following m o r n i n g . ' I f you don't mind, sir, he'd like to have a few words with you before Mr J o y c e drives you to the airport, a tete-a-tete at eight o'clock, he said — and n o w I quote him — "a friendly pot of coffee in

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the study". Or tea, if you'd prefer. That's me talking now, sir, the tea.' She had found me standing once more before the portrait of Polly Kops. It fascinated me, not merely as a superb example of Entwisde s brushwork, his subtle application of colour, the suggestion of a perishable moment captured for ever, and the obvious beauty of its subject, but mostly for its psychological acuity, PoUy Kops's gaze of cool and utterly superior indifference. 'She was very beautiful, wasn't she, sir?' 'She was. D i d you know her?' 'Oh, no. I came here after she died. Mr Kops was blown away by her death, seriously depressed, on happy piUs, getting regular visits from a grief counseUor, as I think they call it. Still and aU, he needed someone to run this monster of a house. That's me. I'm here, really, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Jake Kops, Mr Stan Kops's son. He'd done some legal work for my late husband, suing the City, you know. N e w York City. A h , it never came to anything, as you can imagine. These things never do. Still, it was on contingency, never cost us a penny. My darling man and Mrs Polly died at about the same time. Young Jake thought he could do his uncle and me a favour at one swell foop, as they say, and here I am.' 'Ah, yes. I see, I see.' 'Well, I'm not sure you do, meaning no disrespect. Mr Jerome Kops is my employer, not my master, a fact that he, bless him, understands. B u t there are those here at the moment that don't understand, I mention no names.' It was then that she told me she preferred to be known as Mrs H rather than Mrs Hroshovsky. 'It's not that I mind my married name. W h y should I, even if it is a bit of a mouthful? B u t it doesn't slip easdy off the English-speaking tongue, and that's a fact. Himself wanted to change it to Harris, my darling man, but he thought he should await the death of his father,

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which, as bad luck would have it, occurred a week and two days after his own. I've got quite used to being called Mrs H by now, I'm comfortable with it.' We stood side by side for a moment or two, silendy staring at the portrait, and then she delivered Stan's message. 'Fine, I'll see him at eight o'clock, at least I will if someone knocks me up at seven.' 'I'd see to it myself, sir. A n d as for tonight's dinner' — she consulted a watch depending on a fob from her bosom — 'you should pop up to the dining-room in exactly twelve minutes.' I liked Mrs H, and not only because she was a victim of the bitchiness of her employer's brother. I liked her because she supposed, or dattered me to suppose she supposed, that I could, at my age, 'pop up' anywhere at all. B u t her parting words bound me to her with hoops of steel: 'I'll see to it you've a bottle of McTochiss in your room, sir, and a modicum of ice cubes, just in case you're in need of a wee dram, or of a nightcap, as we caU it here.' We sat at one end of the vast dining-room table, Saskia, Jerome Kops and I. Stan, I think, hung over the meal like the spirit of Parnell in Joyce's ' I v y Day in the Committee R o o m ' , unnamed but present, but he did not cow us. In the absence of Stan, Jerome was a witty dinner companion, as was Saskia. T h e y got on weU together, that was apparent, so much so that I began to feel a tride superfluous. T h e y spoke in a kind of shorthand, but strove out of politeness to include me. Still, Stan made his presence known from time to time. Jerome and Saskia agreed that C y r i l Entwistle was giving Stan 'a hard time'. Entwistle had ostensibly given his biographer whatever he wanted, documents, photographs, interviews, audio and visual tapes, diaries, lists of names, people w h o had k n o w n him over the years, models, agents, friends, and so on. But poor Stan had had to check, double-check,

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and in some cases triple-check, almost every seeming fact. It was as if Entwistle wished deliberately to obscure the truth. Stan was an experienced biographer. Never before had he needed utterly to doubt most of his primary sources. Entwistle was playing some sort of a game, but what was it? B u t for the most part we talked of what people talk of at dinner: the theatre, the cynical offerings of museums, the weaknesses of the Met's current // Trovatore, the strengths of recent translations of the Iliad, restaurants good and bad — in short, the chitchat of privdeged city dwellers removed temporarily to rural Connecticut. It was at once familiar and comfortable. We lingered over espressos and brandies, Jerome smoking a bootlegged Havana cigar from which Saskia enjoyed an occasional puff. Conversation slowed down. From Jerome emerged a sudden snore that shook us all into unwanted wakefulness. A n d so, as the great diarist says, to bed. My o w n room was opposite Jerome's. Stan and Saskia occupied a room at the far end of the corridor. We said good night in the hall. At about 2 a.m., my bladder, being what it now is, sent me to the loo. I returned half-asleep to my room, but in time to see Jerome's door quietly closing. T h e air pushed out by the closing door was perfumed. I did not identify that perfume until I was once more dat on my back hoping for the return of slumber: it was Frenzy! I wanted to weep.

•

•

*

I KNOCKED ON THE STUDY D O O R at precisely eight o'clock. T h e

headmaster was in a jovial mood, rather too jovial for my taste at that hour of the morning. Still, I was not in for a twigging, let alone a caning. It was to be, as promised,'a friendly pot of coffee', the delightful aroma of which greeted me upon entering, a farewell 'tete-a-tete', as if, troublesome though I had been all term,

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Headmaster had received a healthy cheque in favour of the Venerable Bede Chapel Fund from my father and I was to be sent off on my hols, all my sins forgiven. Stan was not behind the huge desk, but sunk almost to kewpie-doll proportions in a mammoth leather armchair. He gestured to the chair's twin, set at a reciprocal angle to his own. Between us was a low table upon which sat a sdver tray carrying a sdver coffee pot and its sdver accompaniments for sugar and mdk and, beyond the tray delicate cups and saucers, plates, spoons, knives, cloth napkins and a dish of miniature Danish pastries. Mrs H had done us proud. ' R o b i n , let me say right away that I owe y o u an apology. N o , no, not a word.' He held up his hands to deflect a response I had not thought to make. 'It was wrong of me to draw you into that little contretemps.' Again the gesture. 'I can only hope you'll take into account post-traumatic shock syndrome and the weird effects of medication. Shall I be M u m ? ' He was revealing his command of English idiom again, grinning idiotically and holding with shaking hand the coffee pot over the cup near me. 'Please,' I said, eager for coffee, not for confessional. He poured, somewhat unsteaddy, but in the event accurately. 'Will you forgive me?' I made an il n'y a pas de quoi sort of gesture. ' M y dear chap, you've ready been in the wars. No need for apologies.' I sipped the coffee. Exquisite. 'Whatever you think of him, you know, M y r o n was truly concerned about you.' In for a penny, eh? 'As were your colleagues. No one knew where to find you.' ' T h e paparazzi,' he said. 'I'm a nine-days' wonder, guy. O n c e the interest diminishes, I'll be in touch. Y o u can pass that on to Myron, if you like. B u t I gotta tell you, the old queen would've liked nothing better than my death. I kid you not. It must burn him up that I survived.' These words were accompanied by the sickly grin that n o w characterised him. 'Here I am, though, R o b i n , here I am.' He punched the air feebly.

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N o t a kewpie doll, then, but what the Germans cad a Stehaufmannchen, a grotesque toy figure with a weighted base that, w h e n pushed over, immediately rights itself. ' T h e press caUed it a "porno emporium".What on earth were you doing there?' I asked the question with a we're-all-grown-upshere chuckle. Still, this was my opportunity. I mean, what was he doing there? 'Chance, mere chance. It had started to rain, and I knew enough to get out of it. That's ad. H e y it coulda been a riding stable.' 'In that part of the city?' ' W h y not? They're everywhere.' Again the sickly grin that passed nowadays for good humour, however self-deprecating. 'Still, that was pretty far west, wouldn't you say? I've got no problem with it, but others might wonder.' A slight narrowing of the eyes, the merest hint of exasperation: 'Christ! I park in a garage on ioth and 49th, I'm coming in from Westchester. I was on my way to the N e w York Public Library, where I'm a Fellow. I've got my own carrel, Jesus! So it begins to piss, wouldn't you know it. I'm unprepared for rain; in Scarsdale the sun was shining. B u t that's how it is, and not just for me. Y o u remember that British Prime Minister, the one w h o waved his fist at the heavens? " G o d , how like you!" T h e one w h o did for Edward V I I I , was it? Baldwin? So I stand in a doorway, minding my o w n business. This Hispanic fucker, he pushes me into the store, waving a gun. " Y o u very nice man, you keep quiet, no one cause trouble, no one get hurt, si?" Inside, there's this fat black woman, you know, one of those waddling, stereopygous females, a customer. She's got this box of dimpled condoms in one hand and a Church of Christ Resurrected plastic bag in the other. She says, "What the fuck you want, motherfuck?" He grabs her by the arm and holds his pistol to her head. "I don't want no fuckin' trouble," he says.

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'I don't know what comes over me. I hit the guy in the stomach. "Man, you shouldna done that, man!" he gasps, and he shoots me. Then he runs off. That's all I know. I'm lying on the door bleeding, not feeling much in the way of pain. My head's in the lap of this black woman, Joleen Clay, a physiotherapist, she says, who's down on the ground with me. She's weeping. " Y o u one sweet motherfucker," she says again and again. " Y o u one sweet motherfucker." T h e y teU me the Mayor's gonna give me a medal. Mention that to Myron, w h y doncha. H e ' d fry. A n y questions?' 'Stan, you leave me speechless. You were incredibly brave.' ' D u m b is what I was,' he said modestly. He took a miniature Danish from the selection, pidled off a corner and nibbled it thoughtfudy. Y o u r friend Entwistle is doing what he can to c o m plicate my life. What he evidendy wants is a biography that shows him to have been not merely a genius as a painter, but an adround good feUow, w h o overcame ad sorts of obstacles and, dthough a bit of a lad, nevertheless remained a man of honour. He wants us to know that he knew everyone worth knowing in the second half of the last century. He probably did, but not always in the way he wants it known. I'm to make it clear that he has a prick that has risen, and can yet rise, to every challenge. 'What he's going to get from me is the truth as I see it, the truth wrested from the facts, the facts themselves determined by my own sifting of the materials he's thrown at me and by my research outside his control. Y o u must teU him from me, R o b i n , that his obfuscations wiU not succeed, that I wdl arrive at the truth, and that I will arrive at it on time. He knows that he has no control over the final manuscript, even if he gets to see it before the publisher. 'Let him know that I expect to see him again, as arranged, two months from now, either in France or in England, depending

in

on which of his homes he's then occupying. If I'm not yet well enough, which heaven forfend, then Saskia will appear as my surrogate, empowered to act on my behalf. To allay his fears, I see no reason to suppose that the schedule we initially agreed upon should be altered. I expect to meet my date. C a n you remember all that, R o b i n ? ' I assured him that I could. A crunch on the gravel outside and a glance through the w i n d o w indicated that Bill J o y c e had arrived with the car that was to take me to Kennedy Airport. It was time to go. 'You'll probably want to say goodbye to Jerome and Saskia. Y o u ' l l doubtless find them together in the breakfast room. Meanwhile, old friend, farewell.' He did not stand, but held out his hand. I took it. But I wanted to say goodbye to Mrs H, too.

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FOUR

W

ITH THE ADVENT OF WAR, Entwistle went off to be a soldier with a volume of Siegfried Sassoon stuffed into one

pocket of his uniform and an album of George Grosz's work stuffed into his kit bag. With or without the advice of Carrington, but inspired by the drawings of M a x Beerbohm, he had begun studies at the Cambridge School of Art. Hitler and other remote figures put an end to aU that. He served first in North Africa, one of Monty's Desert Rats, and survived a buUet intended for him — 'my sodding name emblazoned on it, old chum' — by the merest chance, just short of El Alamein. Sitting in an ammunition supply lorry beside the driver, Corporal Alteras, w h o , exhausted, was dropping off from time to time and veering dangerously out of the line through the endless sand that the driver in the supply truck before him was foUowing, Entwistle offered relief: 'I can drive this fucking bugger, Manny. Y o u close your eyes for a bit, old son, my pleasure.'They changed places, Manny Alteras sinking deep into slumber almost immediately, and, no more than ten minutes later, poor Manny received the buUet intended for Entwisde, at that spot between the eyes where the nose begins its descent. Wed, what can one say? Throughout the N o r t h African campaign Entwistle sketched whatever came before his eyes, whenever he had the opportunity, mosdy in pencd or charcoal, but sometimes, when possible, in ink wash and watercolour. T h e watercolour tints he made

ii3

himself, producing them somehow from the meagre desert dora and that depleted land's plump insects, which he squeezed, boiled, scraped, doing whatever was necessary; the ink he stole from H Q . T h e paper he acquired first in Alexandria, later in Bizerte, putative home of Dirty Gertie. B u t Manny had an uncle in Cairo, and Uncle Simon had the means of getting paper to Entwistle, even in wartime. These

sketches, a vast

collection, are

to

be

found in

Dibblethwaite, but a canny selection of them appeared in print in 1 9 4 7 , in the artist's first bid for national fame, Desert Rats. What is apparent, even to the uneducated eye, is that with Desert Rats Entwisde proved himself a serious claimant of the public's attention. He became a member of the R o y a l Academy. After N o r t h Africa, he found himself reassigned, now to the post-D-Day inexorable advance across Europe. T h e army, to its credit, somehow recognised that it had a propaganda asset in Entwistle. Subject to military scrutiny, it promoted his drawings for H o m e Front consumption, a Great Britain in which his style — if not yet his name — swiftly became recognisable and his contribution

to

the War Effort was

already being noted in

Westminster for post-war acclaim. He was n o w Sergeant Entwistle. Meanwhile, his sketch books multiplied, his work grew stronger, more mature. In Fleurus, a few miles north-east of Charleroi in Belgium, he even received a commission for a portrait, his first, ' M . et M m e Hubert L'Hont, 1 9 4 4 ' , the M a y o r and his wife, a painting that stdl hangs in the tnairie, where I have seen it. It is a wonderfully sly depiction of two smug members of la petite bourgeoisie, w h o had not only survived the upheavals of total war, but had survived them plumply, his self-satisfaction manifesting itself in an id-repressed grin and a Flanders poppy in his lapel, hers in a snitched-up nose that reveals her cheerful rabbit's teeth and her unnaturady rosy cheeks. M a x B e e r b o h m perhaps had shown the way, but Daumier and Grosz were the

strongest influences. (Yes, yes, I know: the most recent, serious, academic critics of Entwistle's work have consistently cited ' M . et M m e Hubert L'Hont, 1 9 4 4 ' , as influenced primarily by Hogarth, which comfortably places the artist in a nationady acceptable 'tradition'. They do not shake me from my o w n conviction, however.) Entwisde has many tales to tell of his wartime European experiences, some terrifying, some hilarious. He told me a few, in the earliest days of our acquaintance, mostly the funny ones. In a kindly way, he was preparing me for National Service. He told a story wed, possessing a natural sense of comic timing, and often he had me laughing so hard I feared I would never catch my breath again. T h e sad tales, the ones best for winter, were passed on to me by Mumsy at any season, ever eager to w i n from me approval of her man of men. ' T h e things he did! T h e things he saw! T h e things he suffered! Oh, R o b i n ! ' W h a t poor M u m s y never k n e w (or never admitted to herself), and what I only learned at length, was that Entwistle was a fabulist, not to say a liar. I have no idea which of the stories he told me and M u m s y are true or only partly true, or not true at all. I have no idea of the gap, if any, between what Entwistle believed to be true and what he invented. I have no idea whether any or ad of the incidents he attributed to himself either never happened or happened, but to some other person or persons. It may be that Stan's meticulous biography will clear such matters up, but I doubt it. Of one thing I am certain, however. He was present at the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, and what he saw there had a profound effect upon him. I know this not only because of Mumsy, who, fearful that I might have been awakened by Entwistle s screams in the night and, through foolish adolescent misunderstanding, might have attributed the terror and pain of his nightmares to the ecstasies of healthy sex, told

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me what she knew of his experience, of the shock to the system engendered by sights and smeds and sounds that Dante's infernal vision could not encompass, and before which one could only stand mute or, to save one's sanity, avert one's gaze. 'You cannot imagine the look in his eyes,' said Mumsy. ' N o one can imagine what he'd seen, and felt. N o t I, not you, my darling. " H o l d me, Nance," he'd say. "AU I did was look into HeU. I didn't live there, I wasn't a victim, I didn't suffer. For God's sake, Nance, hold me!" It's awful, R o b i n . He's bathed in sweat, which, under different circumstances, I'd rather like. B u t not this sweat, cold and stinky, ugh! Never mind though, that's my cross. Happdy, the old methods stdl work.' Mumsy, bless her, genuinely concerned about her son's burgeoning sexuality, lacked a certain discretion. 'We make love, and after that he sleeps like a baby' 'I kdled one of them, Nance, one of those Nazi fuckers, the only German I kdled in the entire war. We broke into a shed at the rear of the camp. It looked like a gardening shed, and it was. In that corner of Hed were gardening tools, a mower, rakes, hoes, hedge clippers, bottles of chemicals to destroy weeds, packets of bulbs, ad neatly set out. B u t there were also three SS men. One was in a corner sitting in his own shit and piss, his hands over his head, pushing it down; he was shaking in terror, blond stubble, eyes closed. Another was on his knees, his hands palm to palm, like Christopher fucking R o b i n , mumbling, "Lieber Gott, lieber Gott, lieber Gott!' T h e third was a sergeant, at first on his feet, but w h e n he saw our expressions, fading to his knees, his hands up in surrender. He spoke to us in English: " L o o k here, my dear chaps, they were only J e w s , most of them." What I hated was his look of codusion, an assumption that we would understand. A n d w h e n he suspected we didn't, he played a game, this murderer, Nance, this beautiful blond, blue-eyed sergeant, this fucking Aryan. He stretched his arms forward on the ground like some sodding w o g making salaam and dipped his head to

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the earth. I went bonkers, Nance, I lost control. He was mocking us, this murderer. I ran at him as if I were centre-forward for Arsenal taking a penalty kick. I was aiming for the upper left corner of the goal. His neck held his head in place, but the fucker was thrown back, a rag dod, knocking over the praying mantis, w h o kept at it on his side: "Lieber Gott, lieber Gott, lieber Gott." I'd kdled him, though, this joker, this murderer. Only, he's murdered sleep, Nance. He's murdered sleep.' B u t even without M u m s y as witness, the traumatic effects of Entwistle's late war experience are clear. I mean, of course, his magnificent eight-panel painting,'The Eighth Day: Destruction', a series on the relationship of the J e w s and Germany from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust, the cause of his scandalously public resignation from the R o y a l Academy. He worked on 'Destruction' for almost ten years, finishing that extraordinary undertaking in February 1 9 6 2 . These were Mumsy's years, the years in which he painted her again and again, at first ecstaticafly at last furiously. B u t 'Destruction' possessed him, exhausted him; he strove to abandon it, despaired of his talents, his abdity to fulfd his vision, bedowed his frustrations to the heavens. One day he appeared in the kitchen haggard, red-eyed, tearful, terrified. 'Oh, Nance, Nance, what have I done? What have I done, Nance?' What he had done was to hurl pots of paint at three completed and two aU-but-completed canvases. Mumsy took him by the hand back to his studio, where she supervised his tearful (but successful) clean-up of the damage. She was good at bucking people up was Mumsy. 'Destruction' occupies its own room in theTabakman Museum in Tel Aviv, Entwistle's outright gift to the State of Israel, less perhaps a matter of sympathetic largesse to a persecuted and nearly annihdated people — at least, so said some cynics in stagy asides - than one of dl-considered pique.This judgement is grossly unfair. Certainly, there was pique. In 1963 Entwistle had submitted

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all eight canvases to the R o y a l Academy for exhibition. It was a fud year after the application of his final brushstroke. During that year he had visited the paintings almost dady in the outbudding he had emptied and whose interior wads he had freshly whitewashed to accommodate them, walking from canvas to canvas, fiddling with his braces or scratching his crotch. He was immensely proud of what he had achieved, the execution of so complex a narrative, his mastery of colour, form and feeling; he was less confident of his historical accuracy, going so far as to invite Sir Trevor Ridley, R e g i u s Professor of M o d e r n German History at Oxford, to look them over. He had never had anything but scorn for academics — 'Fucking sophists, every one of the buggers. Talk about making the worse appear the better case! Wait tid they turn their beady eyes on your books, Robin.' He had a point, I'm bound to admit. (And yet he invited the academic Kops to be his biographer! Yes, let's not forget that.) At any rate, the offer to Sir Trevor of a weekend in Dibblethwaite emphaticady reveals Entwistle's insecurity. T h e RA accepted only 'Day 4' o f ' T h e Eighth Day: Destruction', offering no explanation for the choice, other than 'the unfortunate but unavoidable fact' that space constraints prevented the exhibiting of ad eight. In that ruling there may have been a modicum of truth. Entwisde, after ad, would have required a gadery to himself. But to choose 'Day 4' was to rufde no feathers. It was relatively bland, however brilliantiy its characters were drawn, the artistic luminaries, the 'stars', ofWeimar Germany, engaged in a Dance of Death. T h e world did not yet really want to know about the Holocaust, the subject o f ' D a y 8'.The RA had a duty to its public. Hence Entwisde s pique. Pique is to put it mddly. Fury is a better word. B u t I don't think we can in decency ignore his sincerity. This had its roots in his artistic integrity. But, more than that, it had to do with his experience at the liberation of B e r g e n Belsen, his shock at discovering, whde stid young, the possible

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consequences of man's inhumanity to man. He could not shake it from his head. It invested his dreams, his nightmares, at least until the catharsis which the final panel of his work engendered. It scratched open in him, however short-lived, a species of fedow feeling, of compassion. B u t the letter he wrote to the President of the R o y a l Academy, sending copies to The Times and the Yorkshire Evening Post, has become famous, at least in those circles where art-historical detads matter. Dear Sir, My resignation is final, which is w h y I have made it generaUy known. I am proud to say that I am no longer a R o y a l Academician. Y o u have chosen to show only the 4th day of Destruction, one painting out of eight, each necessary to the meaning of the others, the eighth being the obvious culmination and obvious meaning of the work. For shame! Your choice of one painting, in defiance of my wishes, and your intention to show it in isolation, against my expressed purpose & earnest desire that you should not do so, leaves me with no alternative but to withdraw it. I will take great care that you never have another picture of mine as long as I am alive. If my misery was your intention, I congratulate you on your success. I want my pictures back, ad of them, including Day 4. It gives me a horrible feeling to think of you showing it. Do you understand? I am resigning my membership in the R o y a l Academy. Yours truly, C y r d Entwisde, former R A Please excuse pencd. 119

Entwistle possesses an innate egotism linked to a sense of himself as the hero of his own epic. These combine to foster in him a reliance on his own emotions as a source of painterly raw material. In this view, I suppose, the painting of 'Destruction' was inevitable, less a matter of compassion than of self-expression. B u t after Belsen, compassion there was, compassion for the victim, for the underdog. A n d since in 1945 it was apparent that Germany's victims were, overwhelmingly, J e w s , of w h o m the survivors stid lived for the most part in camps, now dubbed refugee camps, unwanted even by the victorious, 'civdised' nations, Entwistle became phdo-Semitic. There was, of course, a measure of paternalism in his phdo-Semitism, a whiff of noblesse oblige, of I and they. Such compassion cannot last; it depends upon the status quo. In the case of the J e w s it could not survive the 1967 war. T h e y were clearly no longer victims, no longer worthy of compassion; they had become arrogant or, more accurately, 'uppity'. As Entwistle himself put it, grinning, 'I rather liked the buggers once, even felt sorry for 'em, but n o w I've turned the other cheek.' (Lucidly for the Tabakman Museum, ' T h e Eighth Day: Destruction' had already graced the wads of its dedicated gaflery for three years by the time of Israel's stunning victory.) B u t even if Entwistle's phdo-Semitism had survived 1967, it could not have survived Franny's betrayal of him. She was, I believe, his 'one true love', to use the maudlin, vapid romantic expression, which is nevertheless appropriate, as I think, in this case; the only person before w h o m he consciously let down his guard — unlike before poor Mumsy, w h o had to discover his v u l nerabdity for herself and whose sacrificial exertions of comfort received scant thanks. W h y he should have felt this way about Franny has always been a mystery to me. But about such matters the outsider is often at a loss. Certainly he was devastated by her departure,

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weeping into his beer day in and day out at the R a t and Carrot, unable to paint for the better part of a year, a bit of an embarrassment to the regulars. She, obviously, had felt rather differendy about him. She liked a libidinous tumble as much as any healthy young female of the first Joy of Sex generation, and, like many a groupie, she especially enjoyed a tumble with any of 'the greatest Wlioevers of the twentieth century', relative differences in age being no object. Entwistle thought he'd found a partner for life. 'Poor lamb,' said M u m s y w h e n she heard. I also used to wonder w h y he designated Franny a J e w ; Franny, whose every indection, every gesture, marked her clearly as C of E — by birth and upbringing, if not by inclination. B u t I think I now understand, or have at least a glimmering. Probably, he started using J e w as a term of endearment, or relish, one of his frequent Shakespearian adusions, this time to Costard's ' M y sweet ounce of man's flesh [this he would have changed to "woman's desh"], my incony J e w ! ' B u t subconsciously, I suspect, he was attempting to mould their relationship, to shape it somewhat closer to his heart's desire. Franny was an utterly independent young woman, blessed by the generation, the class and the culture into which she was born. If she enjoyed basking in redected glory, she did so only in the way her fedows happdy tanned themselves beneath a Mediterranean sun. Like them, she was content to forsake the sun at St Tropez for the sun at Acapulco, if that was where the action had moved. For Entwistle, meanwhde, J e w had meant victim, one in need of succour, of loving care, a grateful recipient of protection, a bird with a broken w i n g requiring healing, a damsel saved by her knight from the flaming breath and the ripping claws of the dragon. To cad Franny a J e w was to place her in happy subservience to the liberator of Bergen-Belsen. Am I being too fanciful? Probably. T h e simple explanation is perhaps to be found in Dutch art of the seventeenth century.

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We sat in the R a t and Carrot, Entwistle and I, on that Christmas weekend in which I was to meet Franny, laying down a liquid foundation on which to budd strength for the annual high jinks that welcome the Christ Child anew. 'Wait tid you see her,' he said, smacking his lips lasciviously. ' Y o u know that painting in the Rijksmuseum, " T h e Jewess at the L o o m " ? ' 'Piet vande Kieft?' 'Oh, very good, Robin.Yes, Piet vande Kieft.The fact is, Franny looks just like her, could be her fucking double.' I must say that w h e n I saw Franny, I found no resemblance in her whatsoever to the Jewess in vande Kieft s charming portrait. B u t then, I don't have an artist's eye. It is obvious that had Franny accepted whatever role Entwistle was fashioning for her, their relationship would in any case have been doomed. What he loved was what she was, not the impossible she of his fantasy. B u t in his imagination what she was was a Jew, however defined, and, as it turned out, that J e w betrayed him by running off to, by spreading her legs for, by buttering the ego of an undoubted Jew, Itzhak Goldhagen, the cellist from Hed. From that moment forward Entwistle became an anti-Semite, contemporary only in that he masked his racism as anti-Zionism. There are new victims out there now, the Palestinians in particular, whose plight he champions. As for me, I hold no particular brief in this issue. A man must have his prejudices. That is part of what it means to be a man. I even have a few myself: Florida, for example. One should show discrimination even in one's peeves. B u t anti-Semitism is such a tired prejudice, it seems to me, one that has by now descended all the way to the Third World, where it enjoys great popularity. W h y it should be re-emerging in Europe so soon after Europe's most recent tearful cries of mea culpa, I cannot imagine — unless we suppose, as some have conjectured, that anti-Semitism is a disease ever present in the Christian body politic, a bacidus that

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lies dormant for a while only to break out again in a mutated and more virulent form. As with many diseases in medicine's storied past, the only cure seems to be a blood-letting. In ad other respects, Entwistle is an original, and something of a dandy. Here, he is like a man w h o has plucked a second-hand suit from a rack in the vidage square on market day, synthetic, id-smeding and poorly cut: one size fits ad. With the passage of time he has become ever more virulent. A few weeks ago, a talking head on the B B C ' s Spotlight, he said he was merely adapting to current circumstances the words of B e n Hecht, a Jewish-American dramatist and screenwriter, anent the British army in Palestine during the Mandate: 'I have a little holiday in my heart every time I hear of an Israeli soldier kdled in the West Bank or Gaza.' T h e programme's host, Nigel Flyting, chuckled knowingly. Thus Entwisde, in his eighties and no intellectual (a class he has spent a lifetime deriding), joins the intedectual mainstream in Britain, a voice to reckon with alongside poets and journalists and academicians, w h o have said much the same. As a sort of coda here, I should perhaps mention that C y r i l quietly renewed his membership of the R o y a l Academy in 1 9 8 3 , twenty years after his flamboyant resignation. 'Giving the blighters another chance,' he said to me. 'Very decent of you.' He gave me the reverse V-sign. ' N o b o d y likes a clever dick, Robin.' I suppose that by then his indignation of 1963 may have seemed to him not only twenty years out of date, but also misguided. If he had been at fault, it was nevertheless a fault traceable to the J e w s . B u t I don't doubt he also supposed that he was generously giving the R o y a l Academy, as he said,'another chance'. •

•

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•

I WAS NO M O R E THAN HALFWAY T H R O U G H MY UNPACKING w h e n

the phone rang. It was Entwistle. 'You're back then?' 'Evidently.' 'You saw the J e w ? ' 'What J e w ? ' 'Don't fuck with me, Robin.' 'Yes, I saw him.' 'Dear boy! Do come to dinner.' Entwistle was wheedling. 'Claire is preparing a cassoulet.' 'Thanks, but no thanks. I've just got off the bloody plane. Yorkshire's a bit beyond my capabilities at the moment.' ' A h , but we're not in Yorkshire, you cheeky bugger. We're in Notting Hid. Y o u k n o w Bunter, don't you? Lord Billy Pego? N o ? A h . Wed, he bought a place here in Lansdowne R i s e for Bettina, you know, Bettina Currie, Bunter's extra-marital significant other? Fabulous tits, R o b i n , huge. Wonder is she can stand up. Anyway, they're using our place in S t - B o n n e t - d u Gard for a fortnight's slap and tickle. We're looking after Lansdowne R i s e while they're away. Claire wanted to do a little shopping in town and see the Moliere at the National, L'Ecole des maris, and other odds and bobs she can't find much of in Dibblethwaite. Do come over, R o b i n , old son. No one can better Claire's cassoulet.' True enough. Besides, I'd have to go out to eat anyway. There was nothing in the fridge but an empty jar of mustard, a carton of curdled milk and a wedge of cheese that was not meant to be blue. Claire is a smad, bird-like woman with a sharp nose and heavy eyes. Nevertheless, she is in middle age quite attractive, perhaps more so than in her youth. She has the perennial cheerfulness and brisk manner of a ward sister, une infirmiere-major, which she once was. ' T h e best thing about her is that she keeps Master

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Willie hopping.'Tilthy pig!' she said, delighted. He evokes in her fondness and exasperation in roughly equal measure. T h e cassoulet was superb, as were the crepes Suzette that followed. Claire placed brandy glasses and a bottle of cognac between us, gave each of us a cup of espresso and left us alone. 'In case you think she's being discreet,' said Entwistle, 'she's not. Can You Top This? is on the tedy. Claire wouldn't miss it if I dropped down dead in front of her. Fucking c o w ' B u t this last remark was made with evident affection. I delivered Stan's message to him, but he seemed to have lost interest in biography and biographer. His eyes had acquired an unseeing look; the spirit seemed to have deserted the desh. 'How's Mumsy?' he said suddenly, reaching across the table and clutching my forearm. ' H o w is she?' I patted his hand, masking my alarm. 'She's been dead for almost ten years now, C y r d . Y o u know that.' He released my arm and sighed. A tear trickled down one cheek. 'I loved her, you know, my Nancy. She was the best of them.' A pity you never told her, I thought. ' W h y did she run off? W h y did she leave me, R o b i n ? ' He was rewriting the past even as we sat there. 'Because you chucked her out, you sod.' 'What? What?' He shook his head as if to clear it; he had visibly re-entered the here and now. 'Ted me about that fucker Kops, R o b i n , old son. Will he live? W i d he finish the bloody book?' He sipped his espresso, pvdled a face, put down his cup and poured a brandy for each of us. I repeated Stan's message. ' W h y did you pretend never to have heard the name Kops w h e n I first mentioned it to you?' 'Did I do that?' He grinned that engaging grin I had first seen half a century before, the day he handed me the Latin poetry prize and bonked Mumsy behind the cricket pavdion.

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'You'll have to forgive an old man, R o b i n . My memory, you know.' He gave two sharp pulls at his earlobe, as if he were a bus conductor signalling the driver to move on. 'I saw your portrait of Polly Kops, Cyril. I think it's one of your very best, superb, the equal even of the one of M u m s y as Salome, the one at the Walker in Liverpool.' 'Polly Kops! Christ, yes! I used to call her Collywobbles. She reminded me of Lady Macbeth. You know, "I have given suck." By Christ, Collywobbles could give suck, none better.' He gazed for a moment at distant pleasures. 'She wasn't Jewish, you know, not a bit of it, although she was married to one, a fucker with a four-inch prick, according to her - that is, when bande, as Claire might put it. What was his name? Something to do with Churchdl, right?' 'Jerome.' 'Jerr-oh-oh-ome.' Entwistle did what he could for comic effect. 'I met him once. Once was more than enough. That was in Dibblethwaite when we agreed a contract. He wanted me to go to America, money no object. I wanted to keep CoUywobbles in Yorkshire. He had more money than God; I thought it reasonable to soak him. What the fuck, he's probably wed ahead by now. They're smart, these J e w s . I mean, he was a "corporate lawyer", I think they cad it, raking it in, unimaginable sums, and yet he had a soft heart for the workers, was a pro bono star. Fought the good fight for Southern blacks, for R e d Indians — no, no, wait a sec, for "Native Americans". Codywobbles said he couldn't even wipe his arse without commenting on working conditions in the toilet-paper trade.' 'Wed, Stan's his brother.' 'What d'you think? D ' y o u think Stan's got as many inches as Jerr-oh-oh-ome? You bear a heavy responsibility, R o b i n . You picked this eunuch to write a biography of a man whose shagging credentials could give Casanova pause.'

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'You're not helping much, C y r i l . T h e poor bastard has to fight for every fact, every detail one would have thought inalterable in the record books. You deliberately muddy the waters. What's the point?' ' H e was paid enough. Let him work for it, the stupid git.' 'That's ridiculous. You picked him, for God's sake.' 'So you say' He is an old man, a great man, a man it is a privilege to know, but I have no patience with such nonsense. He was behaving like a patient w h o won't tell his doctor his symptoms because it's the doctor's j o b to find out. 'I myself k n o w three different versions of your paternity. One M u m s y told me when you and she were first a number; another Franny told me years ago, buttressing her story with documents and photos she'd found under the stairs at Dibblethwaite; a third Stan told me the other day in Connecticut. T h e y can't all be true, and they can't be reconciled.' 'Oh, aye?' said Entwistle, opting for aYorkshire accent so thick it survives only in the pantomime. ' A h ' d be boogered.' 'Look, Cyril, I'm not much interested in Stan, w h y should I care? B u t your interest should be obvious. It's your life, after ad. Don't you want the truth to be told, however much it might be slanted to your advantage?' 'Can you hear yourself, you twit? "However much it might be slanted"? H o w can you slant the truth? Your own definition kicks you in the arse. If the truth is what you seem to think it is, something either is or is not. It can't be slanted. Wed, sod that. Is not the truth the truth? Falstaff lied magnificently. Shakespeare knew. T h e truth is what we say it is, what we say the artists of this world, whether we work in pigment or words. Where am I likelier to find the truth, in a government White Paper or in one of your novels? Look for truth in metaphor, in symbol, in the figurative rather than the literal. T h e literal is for accountants.'

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' T h e n I fail to see w h y you sought out a biographer. What you evidently want is an epic poet.' 'Yes, well, you may remember you were my first choice, not exactly an epic poet, of course, but these are modern times.' He cleared his throat noisily and spat into his napkin. T h e n he grinned. 'Claire hates it when I do that.' ' W h o can blame her?' 'I've not forgotten you w o n the Latin poetry prize, you know. I dare say you could easdy whip up something - in English, of course, and in prose — that suggests the dignity of Virgil leavened with the wit of Ovid. Piece of cake, surely. Y o u could give your M u m s y the role of Dido if you liked, and you could have me carrying my pater, Anchises-like, out of bomb-blasted London.' 'Very droll, Cyril, very droll.' 'Christ, I've got to piss!' Entwistle heaved himself to his feet and half-ran, half-tottered out of the room. I looked about me. Lord Pego, or more probably Bettina, 'his extra-marital significant other', went in for what are caded 'suites', in this case a dining-room suite of blond w o o d designed in innocuous modern dudness, two chairs per side and a carver at either end, with a sideboard and wall sconces to match. T h e wads themselves were painted, unexpectedly, a dark hunter's green, perhaps the choice of the house's previous owner. Hanging ad around the wads were posters in various frames and of an eclecticism to suggest that they were ad bought as a j o b lot, probably

in

the

Portobello

R o a d . A poster for

the

London

Underground urging the day tripper to make his way to the clean country air of Golders Green sat cheek by j o w l with another from the Or San Michele in Florence advertising a M i r o exhibition; a poster for an R S C Pericles hung between a poster for Marmite and another for a M a n R a y exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou, and so on. If the dining-room was a

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reasonable guide to the decor of the rest of the house, it was hard to understand h o w Entwistle could bear to be in it. 'Couldn't make it to the loo. Had to piss in the kitchen sink. Claire hates it when I do that too.' Entwistle was back and chuckling. He had caught a piece of his shirt in his trouser zipper, and it stood up at a jaunty angle. I had been looking at a poster for Madame Tussaud's and had been unable to mask my sneer. 'Bunter's put in a water bed upstairs and affixed a mirror to the ceding.' Obviously I was supposed to understand from this information the special attraction to Entwistle of Lord Pego's dismal home-away-from-home. Whether Entwistle could still get it up in his eighties, or even wanted to, was a subject I did not care to dwed on.Viagra has thwarted Nature. N o r did I want to think about the images that the ceding-mirror might reflect. It's not that I believe the old to be beyond the itch in the desh; I am old myself. It is simply a matter of aesthetics: sexual congress between the elderly or in which the elderly are involved is, short of perverse curiosity, unpleasant to contemplate. I rejected the images Entwistle seemed determined to press upon me. 'Which of the three versions of your paternity is the truth, Cyrd? We're not talking theory now, we're talking fact. Never mind Stan. This is me. Your father and mother met; your father and mother produced you. Was your father the offspring of the clerical middle class and its values? Or of the working class? Or what? A n d what about your mother? What was she?' ' D ' y o u have w a x in your ears, R o b i n , some sort of foul, sticky build-up? It's all true, ad of it. You should think of the different versions as preliminary sketches, ways into the final work. A n y of them might have shown the way. Ultimately, one is chosen. What's chosen is what counts.' 'But for me, C y r d , just for me. Forget the biography. Certain

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things occurred in your past, you k n o w what they are. Let's put metaphor aside for the moment. Y o u k n o w about your father, I mean in the ordinary sense of knowing. Can't you give me a hint? We're practicady kin. I would say I deserve a little bit more than you're willing to offer Stan Kops.' ' I ' m dreadfidly tired, R o b i n . A n d I ' m in for it tonight again: more rumpy-pumpy. Like Nelson's England, Claire expects. Look, I'm going to have to chuck you out. What say we talk about these things at some other time? Okay? Pains me to say it, but I'm totady knackered, and that's the truth.' ' T h e truth, C y r d ? I thought we put the truth aside in favour of metaphor.' 'Don't fuck with me, R o b i n , don't fuck with me.' What could I say?

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M Y R O N TEITELBAUM STOPPED OFF IN L O N D O N on his way to

Liverpool and the annual meeting of the R o y a l Mediaeval Society. We met for lunch at Sel et Poivre in Beauchamp Place. Although I had spoken to him over the phone from time to time and with untoward frequency fodowing Stan's encounter with a budet, I had not seen him in many years. I might not have recognised him, were it not that he had arrived at the bistro before me and stood up, grinning, to greet me as I entered, a glass of sparkling water raised as if in toast. What little hair he had left had been shaved, leaving a gleaming skud on a lank, vulpine face, his nose — either in seeming or in fact — somewhat longer than I remembered it. His teeth had enjoyed the benefit of a dental cosmetician, white, gleaming, regular, devoid of their once characteristic stain and malocclusion. As old as I, if not older, he was nonetheless lithe, lightly tanned and quite evidently fit. It would be easy to dislike him. A heavy gold ring depended from each earlobe;

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a heavy gold crux ansata hung from a leather cord around his neck. 'But enough about you,' he said, once we had shaken hands and were seated. 'Let's talk about me.' He flashed his teeth to make it clear that he was only joking, even if not altogether so. 'Shad I choose a wine? Have you read the menu?' 'I'm ad yours, honey' he said, winking outrageously, determined to shake me up. I beckoned to the waiter and ordered the Picodon a l'Huile d'Olive for starters, to be fodowed by Saumon a ['Unilateral Sel et Poivre. It's as wed to stick with the tried and true. T h e wine, as I recad, was a Puligny-Montrachet Pucedes '86, one of the few remaining in the bistro's cedar. 'How's Henry?' I asked. ' N o t with you on this boondoggle?' ' " B o o n d o g g l e " , wow, the Limey speaks fluent American! Henry, you say? Henry? W h o dat? Jeez, where've you been?You're maybe ten years outta date. Henry's history, sweetie.' 'Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know' 'Don't be sorry. I sure as hed ain't. Henry was cloying, Henry was overwhelming, Henry wanted to swadow me whole. I'm talking metaphoricady now, guy; I've no complaints about the literal.' Teitelbaum sighed nostalgicady. 'He had these great pecs and lats, and he had these buns you could die for, historical pun very much intended. B u t he wanted permanence, he wanted to settle down, he wanted we should try and adopt some kid, y'know, be a family. It was to puke, as you Brits might put it. Life's too short. So I had to let him go.' T h e waiter arrived with our Picodon, the sommelier with the Pucedes. I spurned the cork and sipped the wine. Superb. 'You giving a paper in Liverpool?' T h e Picodon ad but melted on the tongue. 'And chairing a panel discussion. This is the third year the Society's got a Queer Studies section. It's easdy the most popular,

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academically speaking.' He took a forkful of the Picodon. 'This is great. What kinda cheese is it?' 'Goat.' 'Caprid, of course! Conducive to lustful thoughts. Why, you devil, you! Feeling horny, boychik? Want to butt horns?' Teitelbaum leered and took a sip of wine. 'What's your paper on?' 'Oh, the usual rubbish. Ideology unmediated by intedigent enquiry. It's called " B e o w u l f and Wiglaf: T h e Sword and the Stones". As you've no doubt concluded, it wrote itself We moved on to the Saumon. 'And the panel discussion?' 'Worse and worse. It's on Chaucer's "Knight's Tale".Yes, you've guessed it, Chaucer was one of us. In the closet, though, his being an unenlightened age. All he could do was send out signals — homotopoi, so to speak — for those in the know. Palomon and Arcite? Clearly nominal puns."Pal o ' m i n e " , which is obvious, and "Arse-ite", a "cadipygian enthusiast". I ted you, R o b i n , it's almost enough to make one lose one's faith in buggery. On the other hand, lover boy, I'm over here ad expenses paid.' 'That being so, perhaps you'd care to pick up the bid.' He touched his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss at me. 'Kein Problem! ' H o w are things with Stan?' 'What's with you, R o b i n ? You got the hots for him? Stan's fine. His biography of Entwistle's about done. Final revisions, last-minute fact-checks, indices, bibliography, acknowledgements, dedication, that kinda crap. Fuck Stan. W h o gives a fuck?' 'I meant his health.' 'Never better. He's got a personal trainer. T h e sumbitch's a personality now. He was on Wady Wachtel the other week. I repeat' — and he did, burping loudly but neatly into his napkin - 'who gives a fuck?'

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'And Saskia?' 'I thought you'd never ask. She's got an injunction against him, G o d bless her. He beat the shit outta her once too often.' 'I don't believe it.' ' N o ? Dream on then, honey, dream on. R e m e m b e r w h o we're talking about. Scandal never hurt sales. She's got the house in Westchester, he's crashed on a grad student's pad on the Upper West Side, a Polish-American princess related, so the story goes, to the current Pope. Meanwhde, Stan's and Saskia's lawyers are squaring off. Whatever happens, Stan's biography is ad but guaranteed a nihil obstat'. 'Espresso?' I ordered two espressos. 'But what about you, R o b i n ? What've you been up to, boychik?' ' N o good,' I said. •

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IT WAS INEVITABLE THAT M Y R O N ' S REPORT should stir in me

memories of my o w n graduate student, Kate, not merely because of his reference to that particular rung on the academic ladder, but also because of his reported break-up with Henry and his reasons for it, real or rationalised. I remember Henry quite vividly, although I saw him only once: just before the end of my t w o year stint at Mosholu, w h e n the departmental poet (Charles Wigglesworth, was it?) threw a farewed party for me. Kate was there, of course, but ordy because neither Charles nor any of the others knew we had parted. I don't know w h y she didn't stay away. As it was, she drank too much cheap wine too quickly and threw herself upon my replacement, a would-be dramatist flush with the success of a recent reading by an off-off-Broadway dramatic group, soon defunct. I showed my indifference by chatting up H o p e Kops, w h o had contributed a cheesecake, a

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concoction for which she was locally famous, to the party. Stan spent most of the evening in secret conclave with the department chairman. Henry was a charmer, a southerner with easy grace. His training was in classical ballet, but he had recently signed on as the only white member of a modern-dance group in Harlem.'Whynch'all come on down and see what we ad can do?' His every gesture was a poem, his movements duid. M y r o n was clearly infatuated with him. He fodowed Henry around the room, looming, lurking. On the couch he sat beside him, his heavy hand caressing Henry's back, pressing up and down, as if assuring himself of each spinal segment. Henry winced, and tried in vain to squirm free. Stdl, I put Myron's clumsiness down to the novelty of his sexual orientation and supposed that he and Henry would find a c o m fortable middle ground. What had gone wrong between Kate and me? Her family, probably. Or what her famdy signified. Something like that, I imagine. After thirty years or so, it's hard to be sure, hard not to suspect that I've merely fashioned an acceptable mask for my fody. For I am persuaded that folly it was. Our love affair had reached such a pitch we were beginning to think of ways we might stay together. W h y should she not continue her graduate studies in England, after ad, where she would be within easy reach of the continent? On the other hand, w h y should I not seek to extend my brief tenure at Mosholu, or find some other, simdar employment in the N e w York City area? We hugged one another gleefudy. T h e dark cloud that had begun to hover and grow above us as the time of our separation grew nigh and nigher dissipated of a sudden and the sun shone from a clear sky. Whatever we were to do next year, we would spend the coming summer together 'over there', which is to say, over here; we would rent a car and tour the country from Land's End to J o h n o' Groats.

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As I remember that giddy morning, we were in Central Park by the statue of K i n g Jagiello. Kate leaped from the low parapet that surrounds the statue's plinth and into my waiting arms, her legs around my hips, her arms around my neck, her central warmth penetrating the shirt above my waist. Thus we clung to one another, our tongues engaged in a wild dance, back and forth from mouth to mouth. Bliss was it on that day to be alive, and to be young . . . We raced hand in hand past Turtle Pond and brooding Belvedere Castle, across Central Park West, down 87th Street, burst into my rented apartment, dinging our clothes from us as we went, threw ourselves upon the bed and made savage love, and then made measured love, and then in due course made languid love. It was no dream. I lay broad waking. 'Robin,' she whispered in my ear, 'my R o b i n ' , and she held me by the quick. A n d is that how it was? That's how I have remembered it over the years. A h , but have I also shaped it? W h e n the adusions come thick and fast, I'm inclined to doubt my memory. T h e truth, surely, need not be gussied up in borrowed fiction. And what of my remembered sexual prowess? Was I ever that peppy? At a time of diminishing strength, to say nothing of infrequent opportunity, it's pleasant to think so. Eke lullaby my loving boye, My little R o b y n take thy rest, Since age is colde, and nothing coye, Keep close thy coyne, for so is best . . . Quotations again. Caveat lector! I run such sequences as these with Kate again and again in my head, as if they were captured on film, whirring through the sprockets, flickering before the inner eye, scenes of my life redivwus, always avadable to a private viewing, adowing me to grieve once more at grievances foregone . . .

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Enough, for Christ's sake! I can hear Myron's cynical voice: 'Shakespeare now, boychik? Sweetheart, give it a rest.' What undermines my faith is, ironically, the completeness of my vision. I actually see the two of us in passionate embrace before the Jagiello statue, I see us racing across Central Park, I see us in bed doing what we did to and for one another. If I fast-forward just a short distance, I even see myself, naked in the kitchen, opening a bottle of plonk, pouring some of its acidulous contents into the empty j a m jars that served me as wine glasses, carrying the drinks into the bedroom, where, on the saturated, tangled sheets, Kate, in a position of total abandon, softly sang,'O del mio amato ben. I see now, in other words, not merely Kate, w h o m I certainly saw at the time, but also me, w h o m I could not possibly have seen, since the observing eyes that created my memories were in my head looking out, incapable, without a mirror, of seeing the self. Fifty per cent of memory, at least with regard Kate, is thus rendered unreliable. T h e day came w h e n she told me she'd ready like me to meet her 'folks'. She couldn't wait to show me off, especiady to B e a and Angela, her cousins, w h o claimed that bluestockings were mere also-rans in the 'abiding-relationship stakes'. We'd drive out to Scarsdale, to 'the famdy home' — the famdy home, G o d save the mark! — on Saturday morning, arriving in time for lunch. There I would meet her parents, w h o m she was sure I'd adore, and her baby brother, Rodney, w h o was completing his sophomore year at B r o w n , but w h o would be home for the weekend. Oh, and I'd meet Lula, of course, w h o had been with the famdy for ever and ever and w h o had practicady brought R o d n e y and her up. That, she assured me, would be a painless and, she was prepared to bet, even pleasant introduction to the very heart of her famdy. On the Sunday it was M o m and Dad's turn to host the annual family get-together, Paxton and ad-but-Paxton relatives from near and far. I'd get to meet everyone. T h e main event

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was a dinner and dance at the Westchester Polo and Racquet Club, lots of fun. Did I have a summer-weight tuxedo with me here in the States? No problem. There was plenty of time to rent one. I'd be the handsomest penguin there. This was a Kate I scarcely recognised. B u t since I was besotted with her and since her eyes sparkled with such anticipatory joy, I rashly and in an evil hour agreed to go. It is decades now since that weekend in Scarsdale and environs; it is decades since last I saw Kate. After our smash-up, she took her MA and, as I later learned, dropped out of academic life, moving first to Venice, California, where she opened a 'homemade ice-cream parlour', Gelato M i o , on the Boardwalk, and then, in the late Sixties, moving to the Mojave Desert, a founding member of a Zoroastrian, free-love cult. What price the Battle of Marengo now, eh? There. Obviously the residual (or, to be honest, the selfcondemnatory) bitterness still shows — and after so very many years. B u t what was it about that weekend that I had found so insufferable? Her famdy certainly greeted me warmly enough, although I was perhaps not precisely the sort of fedow her parents would have picked out for her. Stdl, if I had no American pedigree, I had, as the son of Lady Smyth-Turdant, a seeming British sort to offer in mitigation. T h e y were, in fact, the ideal American family of the previous decade, the Fifties: WASP, g o o d looking and wealthy.The parents loved one another and, of course, their chddren; the children, one male, one female, both perfect, loved and respected their parents. A n d they were ad looked after by Lula, the family retainer: black, buxom, smothering and loyal. They wanted for nothing. It was as if they had been created on the H o d y w o o d assembly line in the era of B i n g Crosby and White Christmas and had once more been summoned from Central Casting, regulars w h o knew their roles without prompting.There were no ugly complications,

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either within the family unit or without it in the greater America beyond their doors. N o t a hint of poverty, of racism, of the smouldering issues that were already beginning to tear their society apart. On that weekend the sun shone, both literally and figuratively, upon their household. Of course, I k n o w now and I suspect I knew then that their life together was a self-induced illusion, one in which they ad coduded, a rainbow-coloured bubble indated by comforting lies and wdled ignorance. T h e y had to pud together, though, to sustain it. As individuals they must surely have suffered, must have been assaded by the same doubts, the same terrors, those things that go bump in the night, as trouble the rest of us. N o t one of them dared prick this bubble of idusion, lest the famdy go pop; and it must have required a concerted effort to keep the bubble aloft. What if Mom's boredom in bed were to be spoken out loud, her masturbation, her fantasies of rape by some muscular masked stranger? What if Dad's subtle peculations from trusting clients were to become known? What if the parents of the underage girl for whose abortion brother R o d n e y had been forced to empty his bank account were to approach the police? Of course, I've made these examples up. I k n o w nothing about the dark corners of this family's life. I'm merely certain that there are dark corners. E v e n as we drove to Westchester, Kate was rehearsing her role. In her excited, almost manic conversation she was transforming herself from passionate lover and cynical scholar into dutiful daughter and wryly concerned older sister. ' M o m could organise this family event whde standing on one foot. She probably has. B u t I'd like to lend a hand if she'd let me. N o t that I have her flair.' 'Won't the club secretary, or w h o e v e r takes care of these carryings-on, do the necessary?' ' R o b i n , your such a naif! she said, chuckling delightedly.

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'Someone has to decide upon the menu; someone has to decide w h o sits with w h o m . A n d what about the dower arrangements, and the dance band, and the recitation of the R o d of Honour, Paxtons w h o have, wed, died since last year? Who's gonna read that list, huh? Who's gonna make the Paxton toast? "To the memory of J o h n and Abigad Paxton, w h o crossed the Atlantic aboard the Godspeed in 1 6 9 2 , and to their living descendants here assembled, etc., etc." A n d a whole bunch of other stuff.' 'Ah, wed, yes, of course. I should have guessed.' ' R o d had a bit of luck, at least from the family's point of view. He caded me last night. Hey, good news! He drew a number in the draft lottery that virtuady guarantees he'd not be called up for military service. Wed, sure, R o d would rather have served, I know. B u t I'm his sister and I'm glad he's safe.' ' O f course.' 'He'd've made a great officer, though. He'd've looked great in uniform, so handsome, and he'd ready've cared for his men. He says he's sorry the way things've turned out, but w h y quarrel with fate. If his country caded, he'd proudly answer.' ' O f course he would.' My lovely Kate had almost disappeared. After lunch she took me to the attic, where I was subjected to ad sorts of Paxton memorabilia, photographs, grade-school reports, the crib that had accommodated first Kate and then Rodney, a rattle, the caustic scribbled comments of M m e T r o y e s , the French teacher of Kate's infancy, a sled, a trunk that contained Grandpa Paxton's uniform and First World War treasures, clnldren's ice skates, Rodney's model aeroplanes, Mom's w e d ding dress, and on and on. After lunch M o m suggested that Kate drive me around, let me get a taste of hometown America. Dad, on the other hand, thought that I might like to j o i n R o d n e y and him on the golf course, show what I was made of. B u t M o m and Kate overrode

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that, assuring D a d there would be time enough in the future w h e n I could show them what an Englishman could do. We toured the neighbourhood. Kate pointed out the infants' school, where her bridiance was first evident; the ice-cream parlour to which her first, spotty-faced date had taken her; the town library where Miss Briand had turned her on to French history; the Litde League basebad diamond where litde R o d n e y had demonstrated his prowess. I reached what was for me a new level of boredom. That night, Kate visited me in my room. She was dressed, in that air-conditioned home, in a dannel nightie Cotton Mather himself might have approved of. For me, it was a turn-on, a heady come-on to violation. I wanted desperately to fuck her. Under this roof in particular, the spurting of my bubbling seed into her was a desperate need. As she bent over to kiss me good night, I thrust my hand beneath her nightie and caught her by the quim. M u c h good it did me. She leaped back. ' N o t here, my darling,' she said. ' B e patient. Soon w e ' d be back in N e w York.' N o doubt. I simply could not face the meeting of more Paxtons, hundreds of them, on the Sunday night. Fuck 'em. I was already overwhelmed. T h e truth is, I could scarcely breathe. What I felt was panic. It seemed to me I would drown in an ocean of Paxtons, sink without trace, or that they would absorb me into their substance so that no trace of the me-ness of me would remain. I said not a word to anyone, Kate included, but, like a coward, I ran away, I drove back to N e w York. T h e r e had been no such thing as a family home in my life. Instead, there had been a series of homes, as I followed my mother from husband to lover to husband to lover, a series of postal addresses, none more personal than, say, my d o r m at C r o n y n Hall or my student digs in Leeds. As a consequence, there was no actual attic in w h i c h were stored the relics of

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my family's past. T h e only attic was in my head, where items, strewn hither and thither, gathered transforming dust or decayed with time. What I learned in Scarsdale was that I preferred living as I did. T h e Paxtons swiftly cloyed the appetite. Of course, if I had been the least bit more mature, I might have known that the ultimate Kate was not the Westchester Kate and that I might have played a role in her transformation. Of ad sad words, etc. I've already told you what became of Kate. R o d n e y joined the People's Temple and perished in Guyana.The parents divorced, M o m establishing an abused women's clinic in Scarsdale, Dad leaving Westchester for Marbeda and the extraterritorial fedation that his N e w York executive secretary was happy to provide. As for Lula, she returned to Harlem and opened a Black Studies bookshop on 125th Street. A n d I — wed, I of course returned to England, alone. There was as yet no Saskia in my life. B u t it was already clear to me that I could be satisfied only with the non-binding, rootless hedonism that the beautiful and as-yet-unimagined Saskia, that not impossible she, could provide.

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I GOT IN T O U C H W I T H T I M O T H Y as soon as I reasonably could.

T h e International Association of Literary Agents, should such an organisation actuady exist, would surely have passed on to him all the spicy detads of the Kops debacle. I wanted to k n o w every rumourous detad. Stan, the hero of the porn emporium, the famous, soon-to-be-published biographer of C y r d Entwistle, R A , was a wife-beater! T h e effect on sales could only be good, alas. I was agog. Timothy claimed to k n o w nothing. Business, not gossip, was

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what kept his agency in the black. He would get back to me. He did hope that I was not asking out of vulgar curiosity. I assured him that I had long known Stan and Saskia, his wife, that my concern was genuine, 'a close friend for many years', and that delicacy alone forbade me from approaching either of them directly. Wed, he would see what he could do. What Timothy learned directly contradicted Myron's account. Yes, they had suffered a marital contretemps, yes, they had separated for a short whde, but it was Saskia w h o had attacked Stan, Saskia w h o had given him a black eye, Saskia w h o had kicked him in the bads, Saskia w h o had driven him to the Emergency R o o m at the Westchester Presbyterian Hospital. 'The poor chap had barely recovered from a gunshot wound.' 'Wed, I'm damned!' 'That's as may be,' said Timothy fastidiously. ' N o t carried away by rough sex, you don't suppose?' 'At their age? Don't be disgusting, Robin.' A h , the cruelty of even the not-quite-young! 'But now they're together again?' 'So I'm told. Just like Gable and Lombard.' Timothy was a Friend of Old Fdm, or FOOF, treasurer of the branch at Parson's Green. 'Wed, if you hear anything more . . .' B u t Timothy's report was hardly more credible than Myron's. *

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I DROVE UP TO DIBBLETHWAITE AT THE WEEKEND. Cyril had

phoned, urging the visit. He had something he wanted to show me, he said. 'Never mind what, you nosy sod. Just come. Claire says she'd make a gooseberry tart for you.' A n d he'd hung up. In the event, it was a tarte Tatin, Claire having promised

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nothing whatsoever and gooseberries in any case not being in season, but her tarte Tatin was not to be dismissed lightly, its pastry buttery and sweet, but with slightest tang of salt, its apples tart and its dark muscovado transformed into thick and gritty, semi-liquid glory. I accepted a second piece at least as large as my first. On the other hand, C y r d seemed to be off his feed. He'd eaten little and had utterly ignored the tarte Tatin. I thought him a tride gaunt and glinty-eyed, not on sparkling form. B u t the two of us had drunk McTochiss before the meal, rather more than was sensible, and C y r d had accounted on his own for two bottles of Pape Clement 2 0 0 1 , Claire and I sharing a bottle between us. ' O n a diet, C y r d ? ' 'Cholesterol problems, poor old fedow,' said Claire, reaching over and clasping Cyril's horny hand. 'High blood pressure, qui sait quoP. Wed, he's old, you know. We're getting on, Darby and Joan, not young like you.' She smded, pleadingly. Claire, of course, is much younger than I. C y r d frowned deeply, grunting. 'Fuck that. Eat what I want. N o t hungry, that's ad.' Claire semaphored with her eyebrows and with pursed and twitching lips: we would discuss Cyrd's health later, w h e n he was elsewhere. After breakfast the fodowing morning C y r d took me to one of the barns in which he stored his canvases. T h e brisk air of the outdoors, having blown through gills and across freshets, scree and moors, was redolent of heather, of cotton grass, of wild dowers, of health; it helped clear the dud ache in my head. I was no longer able to debauch at night on whisky and wine and awake unscathed the next day. We tramped across a yard stdl cluttered with the whimsical statuary C y r d had budt years ago,

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soldering together the bits and pieces of abandoned mechanical devices. L o w on the horizon, small clouds sped across the sky. A kestrel hovering high above our heads swooped suddenly to a distant rocky outcrop and rose on the instant, a writhing creature, perhaps a grass snake, in its talons. I can remember when this barn was secured by a simple lock and chain. That was in Murray's day, w h e n wickets had been chalked on the doors and C y r d had bowled me countless overs. No more. T h e barn's exterior is now a skin covering a w i n dowless, fortified chamber, its temperature and humidity controded and constant. T h e doors themselves have been replaced by a single steel slab that opens and closes on oiled roders according to commands punched into a hand-held remote-control device that C y r d removed from his corduroy jacket. I might have been participating in a James B o n d movie, were it not that Q (certainly not 007) had momentardy forgotten his code. 'It's Murray's birthday' he said. 'Oh, Christ, I've forgotten it.' ' W h y that?' 'I've told you before, she was the best of 'em. My way of remembering her, you see, the times we'd had, that sort of thing.' I gave him her birth date, which with trembling finger he poked into the remote control. T h e door slid open to the terrifying noise of savage snarling and barking, the unmistakable sound of some vicious brute of a dog. ' N o t to worry, it's just a ruse, a recording.' A n d in fact the sound ceased w h e n he turned on the lights. T h e space was a white box, brilliantly iduminated. To the left and the right were cubbies, two tiers high, each of them wide enough to accommodate a single canvas on a stretcher. Before us, however, hanging on the display wad, was the portrait C y r d had summoned me to Dibblethwaite to see. It was of Pody Kops. It was almost identical to the one I had seen hanging in the Connecticut home of Stan's brother, Jerome, the sitter's husband.

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It differed only in that Polly, but for her string of pearls, was totally naked. T h e book was gone from her lap. B u t the background, the angle of the light, the subtle tints, the pose, the expression of aloof indifference, all were otherwise the same. A n d yet it was a painting deliberately designed to evoke an erotic response. It was impossible not to feel a frisson of desire, in which were compounded not only a rueful awareness of the sitter's indifference, but also, more importantly, the knowledge that she was long since dead. 'You look at her, and what d'you see? An aristocrat, right? Even naked she's clothed in this fucking aura of noblesse. Too good for the rest of us.' C y r d approached the painting, peered closely at her bushy crotch, brought his hps together as if to kiss it, and gently blew into the air a piece of fluff that had adhered there. He grinned at me. 'Wondering what I was doing, were you? Pygmalion and Galatea going through your head? At any rate, I thought you'd like to take a look at her since you've seen the other one.' There was a padded bench placed for viewing, perhaps a dozen feet before the portrait. C y r d sat on it and gestured to me to join him. We stared, two old men (one rather older and less limber than the other), at Cyrd's magnificently naked maja, mute in adoration. I thought that I would willingly give ad I had to possess it. 'Has Jerome Kops seen this? Has Stan?' ' N o t bloody likely' We stared at the portrait for a while longer in sdence. 'She chewed gum incessantly, you know, happy to let you see it move around in her mouth. Her voice was a reedy, highpitched whine, painful to the ear, to my ear anyway. A n d her accent was pure N e w York: the B r o n x or Brooklyn, I imagine. Just like in the films: fidl of dese, dems and dohs. If a genuine thought had ever passed through her head, 7 saw no evidence

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of it.' Cyril slowly shook his head, still awed by the wonder of her. He told me that her parents had run a hotdog stand at a baseball stadium in N e w York, one in which Jerome Kops was a part-owner or investor, or something, perhaps a legal counsel. That was h o w Pody and Jerome had met. 'Her name wasn't Pody then, by the way. It was Bernice, Bernice B u n c e or Ponce, or some such thing. She was only fifteen then, and she already had a local reputation. He married her when she was seventeen, her parents probably happy to get her off their hands, especiady to a rich man, even if he was a J e w ' B u t the accents and obsessions of Cyril Entwistle were beginning to creep into this account. I looked from the painting to him, from him to the painting, and back again. He was playing with his remote-control device, holding it at trembling arm's length before him and squinting, rather as if he were taking aim, readying himself to shoot off a round. 'Is this ad true, Cyril?' I asked him. 'Ad? I know not what you cad ad.' He was playing Falstaff again, a clear warning. 'I can only attest to what I saw and heard. A n d did and had done. Y o u can have my word on that.' He turned, taking aim at me now, then dropped his arm, grinning mischievously. ' W h y should I lie? It's ad in my fucking diary. We can look it up if you like. As for the rest of it, it's what she told me. You're as free as I was to believe or disbelieve her.' 'Your fucking diary?' 'Oh, very good, R o b i n . Y e s , w h y not? Just like Leporedo's catalogue. I really like it, I bloody wed do. " M y Fucking Diary"Yes. I was educated by "Walter", you know, My Secret Life, every bleeding volume, eleven in ad. Considered very daring in my boyhood. Our housemaster in Crony 11 Hall had a copy, Mr QuintusT. S. Fanshawe, M A , Cantab., known as 'the Quim'. He'd invite a select few to his digs for tea and buttered toast and a

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few pages of the Life. It was the Quim's oft-expressed belief that his boys would better withstand the manifold sins of the desh if we knew precisely what they were. Was Fanshawe stid there in your day?' ' Y o u were telling me about Pody Kops.' 'I used to cad her Polycarp, after the martyred Bishop of Smyrna. He burned in zeal and was burned alive for it. In Pody Kops the dames of lust never abated. She was the only genuine nympho I ever met. W h e n she itched, she scratched. It hardly mattered to her with what — her fingers, a Cumberland sausage, a stiff prick if one was handy. 'Polycarp? Y o u told me once you caded her Codywobbles.' 'Did I? I probably did.' 'Wed, which was it?' He shook his head as if despairing of me.'While I was painting that there' — he aimed a thumb at the portrait — 'shagged out from servicing her night and morning, she wanked herself off during one afternoon session with the handle of my four-inch brush. Her favourite dildo was a champagne bottle, a Louis R o e d e r e r "Cristal", never mind what year. O n e stood by her bedside even in England, even here in Dibblethwaite. She didn't care where she was or w h o m she was with, if she felt the urge she satisfied it, and she made little attempt at concealment. 'She preferred my English banger, she said, to Jerome's American wienie, but that was a matter of taste — yes, that's what she said, the stupid berk, not able to recognise a double entendre if it nipped her in the twat. Size scarcely mattered. So long as the prick was stiff, only the first four inches counted. T h e rest was just for show. And besides, no man could satisfy her, and repeatedly, as could a bottle of Louis Roederer "Cristal". 'You're a novelist, R o b i n . Y o u can perhaps imagine what that arsehole Jerome's life was like. Their social life was necessardy curtailed. A simple dinner with family, his proud parents, his

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brother Stan and Hope, with old friends of his, codege chums, with business acquaintances, with a partner n e w to the firm and the n e w partner's wife — any of these could turn in a trice into a fucking nightmare. On one occasion, she took the left hand of the new partner, w h o sat immediately to her right, and moved it under the table and past the table leg to her cunt. I mean, the poor pidock didn't k n o w what the fuck to do — not that anything complicated was required of him. 'Jerome consulted specialists, sexologists, psychiatrists, doctors of all sorts, purveyors of holistic solutions, nutritionists, whatever the medically sane and near-sane had on offer. In ad this, Pody was compliant, going without demur from office to office. H o w many she had it off with, it's impossible to say. Jerome learned that she had almost certainly been sexuady abused as a small chdd, perhaps by her father, and would benefit from the opportunity to dig deep into her past; he learned that she might emerge cured from a lobotomy or a clitoridectomy; he learned that she should curb her intake of chocolate and should increase her intake of manganese, boron and vanadium. In short, he learned shit.' ' D ' y o u think Stan might have had it off with her?'The question was no more than vde curiosity. In any case, h o w could C y r d possibly know the answer? 'Must have, old cock. She took whatever was avadable, especiady since Jerome had trouble keeping it up. At any rate, that's what she told me about Jerome. Look, she's bound to have tried it on Stan; she wasn't easy to resist.' Lucky Stan. Saskia's cadousness towards the dead Pody was perhaps now a little easier to understand. Had Hope, too, known what was going on? Had she excused Stan at the time because she knew h o w much he despised his brother and so supposed that his infidelity was no more than revenge? Because she would swadow anything rather than lose her husband? Because she had trained herself not to see whatever might distress her?

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'This place will see me out, see Claire out, too.' Cyril gestured around him, meaning not merely the barn in which we sat, but the house, the other outbuildings and the grounds as wed. 'The famdy tree is suffering blight. It ends with me. After she fads off the twig, ad this goes to the county. T h e place is to become a sort of museum, you know, dedicated to my life and work. Yorkshire bred me, it can preserve me. It seems the best thing to do. What d'you think, R o b i n ? ' 'I think it's a splendid idea, although there's time enough for such gloomy thoughts. L o o k at you, you spry old bugger, you've got years yet.' 'You reckon?' Actuady, I was struck by how old and decrepit he looked, as if his body and his years had suddenly been yanked into alignment. He, like his beloved Falstaff, might have been forced to bow before the C h i e f Justice's accusations: Have you not a moist eye, a dry hand, a yellow cheek? Is not your voice broken, your wind short, and every part about you blasted with antiquity? 'Wed, wed, let's not get maudlin. I thought, though, that you might like to have that painting, the nude Pody over there. After ad, you know a Kops or two. A n d besides, you went ad the way out to Connecticut for me.' That was when I said the stupidest thing I've ever said in my life. 'Oh, I couldn't possibly, C y r d . It must be worth a fortune.' T h e words just burbled forth, inborn politeness. I already saw the portrait above the mantel shelf in Bolton Gardens, myself posed before it: Yes, it is an Entwistle. I know some of the principals involved. It makes an interesting story. What I expected from C y r d , I suppose, was reciprocal politeness: Of course you can, old man. My pleasure entirely. What I got was rather different. C y r d pushed himself to his feet and indicated the steel door behind me. T h e viewing was over. He looked at me shrewdly. 'I suppose you're right, it would've been a bit fucking extravagant.

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N o t to worry, I'll write you down for something or other — if I can manage it before the arrival of the fed sergeant, that is.' Inwardly, I screamed. 'So, R o b i n , what you think of him?'The question, casuady asked, scarcely masked Claire's edginess. I was sitting at the kitchen table, a large wedge of yesterday's tarte Tatin and a steaming cup of tea before me; Claire stood facing me with her back to the sink, hugging herself as if she were cold, and every now and then turning to glance out of the window at the studio, whither C y r d had betaken himself. ('Can't ad hang about doing nothing,' C y r d had growled at me. ' Y o u lot could be indolent for England.' A n d he had slogged off, muttering.) 'Truculent as ever, I suppose. It's good to know that he's stid painting, though. What's he working on now?' She ignored my question. ' T h e tremors, you must have seen them.' 'Wed, yes, but I thought that at his age . . .' 'His age, bah! That's not it at ad. You've known him for most of your life. W h e n has he ever looked so sad? It is not even that he is sad, not ad of the time. Mon dieu, R o b i n ! His face is turning to marble; his eyes look as if they're covered in lacquer. Y o u must have noticed.' In retrospect, I realised that I had noticed, even if I hadn't processed, the changes in him. Even so, these changes were not so severe as Claire's near-panic implied. I dare say someone meeting Cyril for the first time might not see that there was anything amiss. ' H o w long has this been going on?' ' W h o knows? N o t long. I myself began to notice only in the last few months, little by little. For a fortnight now I've had to button his shirts for him.' Her eyes, I saw, were red-rimmed. She used the heels of her hands hastdy to wipe away the welling tears.

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'Parkinson's?' 'Yes, Parkinson's. What else could it be? I k n o w it. He knows it. B u t the silly old fool won't admit it. He thinks that if he ignores it, it will go away quietly, like some unwanted but well-mannered guest. A h , I could murder him!' She laughed, a trifle hysterically, at the absurdity of her expression. ' H e won't see his doctor. He's finished with doctors, he says. " F u c k 'em all," he says. " L e t M o t h e r Nature take her course," he says, and, because he is my C y r i l , ma bete brute, mon blagueur, he adds with total irrelevance, " M y spirits are nimble." N e v e r mind that they have medicines for him. N o , fuck 'em all.' A sob broke from her. 'I'd have a word with my own doctor and then I'd talk to Cyril. Meanwhde, try not to worry too much, Claire. It may not be so bad as you think. I promise to see what I can do.' T h e look of scorn she shot me was a teding reproof. She knew empty words w h e n she heard them. 'Wed, at least he now knows that he won't live for ever. He's beginning to think about his legacy. A n d he has in mind one final work, son coup de mattre. " T h e Four Last Things", he cads T

it. He know s exactly what he wants to do. To me he talks about it day and night. R i g h t now he can still hold his brush steady; the tremors seem to subside when he concentrates his effort, even on picking up a glass of water. B u t wid that change? No one can say. That's w h y it's so important that this biographer, this Kops fedow, get his story right. C y r d , of all people, is beginning to fret about how posterity wid perceive him.' 'But his work's his heritage. Christ, he's our greatest living artist, and he knows it. No one questions his place in the pantheon.' 'He's got a crazy idea that his life, too, must be a work of art. He seems to think that " T h e Four Last Things" wid link Works and Life into what he cads a "seamless garment", the "Higher

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Truth". B u t if he can't paint? So this idiot Kops holds Cyril's heart in his hands.' 'There are drugs he can take. They may be helpful. At worst, they may retard the march of the disease.' ' A h , yes,' she said bitterly 'drugs: L-dopa, Sinemet, Atamet, others, new ones emerging every day. B u t first the doctor. No doctor, no drugs. Betise! Stupid!' She glanced out of the window. 'Enough, here he comes. My God, how he shufdes!'

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FIVE

I

HEARD THAT YOU AND STAN HAD A BIT OF A DUST-UP. It's

good to see that the two of you are a team again.' A show

of polite concern masking blatant hypocrisy. 'What the hed are you talking about?' ' R u m o u r has it that Stan got a tride rough with you. A black eye, was it, resulting in a mini-separation? That's the rumour.' 'Well, the rumour's got it wrong.' Saskia picked up her glass and swadowed in a single, savage gulp four ounces of a m a g nificent Poincare-Cadet 1999. She glared at me, twirling the stem of the empty glass back and forth between forefinger and thumb. We were lunching in the Admiralty restaurant at Somerset House. She and Stan were in England to tie up a few loose ends in his Entwistle biography. Stan was this day in Yorkshire, determined to get some truthful answers out of C y r d ; Saskia, whose guest I was, intended to pump me on Mumsy's years with the Great Man. 'There's another rumour going the rounds,' I said carefudy. 'According to this one, you are the spouse abuser. You beat him up, chasing him out of the house and into the comforting arms of a grad student.' She

opened her mouth wide in

evident surprise, and

then grinned saucdy. ' N o w that rumour I like, except for the grad student bit. I beat him up! Wow, great!'

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'It goes, I hope, without saying that I believed none of it. B u t I thought it my duty to let you know what's being said.' 'Oh, sure. Right.' 'At first I suspected that Stan's publishers, either here or in the States, were leaking the stories as a species of pre-publication hype. B u t my spies assure me that that's not so. Still, smoke must have a source, even if it's not in fire. What actually happened?' She put down her glass and watched as the waiter lovingly refilled it. 'Try sipping it,' I said. 'Watch. Like this.' A n d I took a modest sip from my o w n glass, letting the wine pool on my tongue before swallowing it. 'Magnificent.' 'You really are a shit, R o b i n . N o t just a shit, you're a pompous shit, an asshole.' 'Mixed metaphor aside, perhaps I am, but sip your wine anyway' 'Fuck you.' ' S o what actually happened between you and Stan?' My interest, of course, was not idle. I hoped to win her to my side. ' D ' y o u really expect me to tell you? We're a couple, Stan and I, a couple. Any idea what that is? W h y should I spill intimate details of our marriage into your ears? That's called betrayal.' I was discreet enough not to mention her betrayal of Stan more than twenty years before, minimally with the dashing diplomat from Ghana and, as I could personally attest, with me. Speak, Memory, as Nabokov put it. 'And yet you expect me to "betray" my own mother. Y o u want me to tell you, gratis, and ultimately for Stan's benefit, the intimate details of my mother's most passionate and, to her, most meaningful love affair.' Saskia nibbled at her Salade Nigoise a I'Amiral. I had a point. Perhaps Stan's work was more important than squeamishness in the service of marital loyalty. 'Let me think, okay?' She thought throughout lunch, including her final indulgence,

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Clafoutis aux Figues. Saskia in late (some might say very late) middle age was putting on weight, especially around the hips. She sat nowadays, comfortably it seemed, on a capacious bum. 'Okay,' she said. 'Quid pro quo?' 'You first.' She was going to a matinee at the National Theatre. We walked briefly along the Strand, turned the corner and took Waterloo B r i d g e to the South Bank. It was a bright day, almost cloudless, but the w i n d whipped across the bridge and made our eyes tear. Saskia, out of breath, wanted to pause, ostensibly to admire the view. T h e Thames at high tide roiled an olive-green; gulls swooped and darted in the wake of small craft and tourist boats. On one side of the river, behind us and beyond Westminster B r i d g e , the golden pseudo-Gothic Houses of Parliament; in front of us, in full v i e w and brilliant in the sunshine, the dome of St Paul's, stark white, edged with grey and pierced with black. T h e new Millennium B r i d g e was a silver knife slicing over the water. 'This would be a great place to live if it weren't for the British,' said Saskia. 'So tell me what happened.' 'What happened is that Stan found Jerome and me in what lawyers call "compromising circumstances".' I remembered the night in Connecticut w h e n my nostrils caught a whiff of Saskia's scent wafting from the closing door of Jerome's bedroom. I suffered again the familiar pang of j e a l ousy. 'You have to understand. T h e bullet that passed through Stan did more than drill his body, it shattered his libido too. It isn't that he can't get it up, necessarily; it's that he couldn't care less if it's up or down. Sex is of no interest to him any more. My own desire is, for him, merely an irritant, a mosquito buzzing

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in his ear, preventing sleep. Jerome and I have similar needs, physical, not emotional. We indulged them, that's all.' 'And Stan caught you at it?' 'What a wonderful way you have with words, R o b i n . Well, you're a novelist, after all.' I ignored her sarcasm. We descended the stairs at the end of the bridge and began to walk along the southern embankment. W h a t happened?' 'Stan had been the kick-off speaker at an event at the University of Houston, a panel discussion by biographers on the vicissitudes of their craft. He was supposed to leave Houston on the Thursday morning; instead, he left on Wednesday afternoon. " I ' m home," he said, walking into the bedroom with a bouquet of flowers in his hand. 'Jerome was on top, pumping away. I've never known a prick to turn so rapidly to jello. A n d Christ, all I wanted was for him to finish what he'd started, Stan or no Stan. I was that close, believe me.' ' M y sources tell me Jerome is useless. In the sack, that is.' 'What sources?' 'Confidentially, C y r i l told me what Polly'd said.' 'That's a crock. Of Polly, I wouldn't wanna speak ill. I mean, she's dead. Y o u k n o w yourself C y r i l isn't to be trusted. I'm here to tell you that Jerome is twice the size of Stan. N o t only that, once up, he stays up. A g e cannot wither it.' 'Evidently Stan could. Go on: Stan walks in on you . . .' ' " I ' m home." Hoo-boy! I see him right away. I ' m looking at his face, wishing it would disappear until I'm through. I'm so close, Jesus! A n d then Jerome catches on. Stan's voice, I guess. Anyway, he pulls the sheets over his head, he can't look, he's devastated. So what happens? Stan backs out of the room like a gentleman. He backs all the way to the stairs, which he doesn't k n o w any more are stairs, and he tumbles down them. Jerome

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and I hear the noise and we rush buck-naked to the staircase. There at the foot is Stan, totally out of it, on his back. He's still got this bouquet of red roses in his hand. I mean, it broke me up. We got dressed as best we could. Jerome helped me get him into the car. Christ, what if the old wounds had opened up again? I drove him to hospital. Thank G o d , no problem. He was only a bit bruised and concussed. That's the story. So, okay, once I knew he was fine, I spent a couple of weeks with my sister in San Francisco. That's it. Your turn.' We had walked past the National Theatre; we turned back. 'Would you like some coffee? An ice cream?' 'You're ducking, R o b i n . It's your turn.' ' N o t at all. You haven't finished. What happened when Stan came to? Recriminations? A tearful reconciliation?' 'Bugger all happened, as you might put it. He remembered nothing, or claimed to remember nothing, other than falling down the stairs. Once I returned from San Francisco, we picked up where we left off. Which is to say, we sleep together. Yawn.' We turned off the southern embankment and hurried towards the National Theatre. I showed her my watch. It was almost curtain time. 'What about our interview? You bastard, you were deliberately holding out. W h e n can we set up another date?' She was digging around frantically in her handbag as we walked, whether for her theatre ticket or for pen and paper, I couldn't say. 'Don't have my diary with me,' I lied, patting my jacket pockets in a show of frustration. 'Call me. We'll work something out.' I held her by the shoulders and kissed her chastely on each cheek, and she turned from me, furious, making for the emptying foyer. 'Thanks for lunch,' I called after her.

•

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*

CYRIL PHONED ME THE FOLLOWING EVENING. He wanted me to

know that Stan had been prying into his, Cyril's, affair with Mumsy. Stan seemed to think the Mumsy years of considerable importance to the interpretation of the artist's life, the more so since for all his probing he had not come up with much. 'He'll get sweet Fanny Adams from me,' said Cyril gruffly and in a tone of righteous indignation. 'Never mind what the stupid git has to say about yours truly. I'm here to defend myself; she's not.' No one would guess from his words that he had solicited the biography. His was an adversarial stance. 'Can't have that bugger's smelly fingers tickling her sacred memory. Told him her son's still alive. Any questions he might have about Mumsy should be directed to you. You're the proper repository of her honour.' Cyril coughed gluily into the phone, then hawked and spat, one hoped into his handkerchief. In the pause that followed I could imagine him examining his sputum. W h e n Cyril, like a politician, projects greatness of soul and uses words like 'sacred' and 'honour', you can be sure that he is masking some ignoble purpose. He would get to it anon. Meanwhile, he had obviously expected some sort of appreciative response from me. 'You still there, R o b i n ? ' 'Still here, Cyril.' 'Thought perhaps you'd died.' Phlegm fluttered in his cackle. He coughed again, hawked again, spat again, paused again.'You're bound to hear from him, then. Forewarned is forearmed, eh?' A n d then he got to the point. 'I wrote quite a number of letters to Mumsy in the days of our Great Passion. People wrote letters in those days. Didn't have a fucking phone here then. Now, w o m e n tend to hang on to things like that, mementoes, love letters, dried flowers, all that shit. Mumsy probably did. You don't happen to have them, do you, R o b i n — the letters? I mean, when poor Mumsy finally fell off the twig, you must have sorted her papers and so on. Did you find my letters? If so, they shouldn't

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be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. I'd burn 'em, if I were you. Or send them on to me to dispose of. After all, they are mine, I wrote 'em. B u t whatever you do, you wouldn't want that foul J e w to see them, would you?' I did not tell him whether or not I had his letters to Mumsy. What I did tell him was that I had no intention whatsoever of talking about my mother to Stan Kops. In some ways, Cyril and Mumsy were ideal for one another. C y r i l is, and always has been, utterly self-centred, a man w h o demands of others total commitment to and total absorption in his world, his talk, his work. He falls short of absolute solipsism only to the extent that he needs others to cater to his comforts, his needs and his whims; especially, he needs women, who, in a quasi-mystical way, participate in the Eternal Feminine, a p o w erful goetic force, the source of all inspiration and creativity, into which he has been able to tap by means of sexual intercourse. One could argue, and no doubt some critics have, that he has paid homage throughout his career to this belief, a homage made evident in his loving concentration on female flesh, especially in his many nudes, flesh that he renders almost palpable. (The Canadian art historian Antoine Levi-Laclos, reviewing the recent loan exhibition in Montreal, 'Entwistle 1965—1975', for La Vie Canadienne Culturelle, commented that many of the paintings should be accompanied by a sign reading Ne pas toucher.) Mumsy, before being swept off her feet and onto her back by Cyril behind the cricket pavilion at Cronyn Hall, had never had total subservience demanded of her. There on the grass, Cyril's bobbing head obscuring from time to time the sunlight flickering through the trees, his hot breath on her cheek, she experienced not merely a welcome orgasm, but an unexpected epiphany. Before, she had always supposed she did more or less what she wanted and was, circumstances permitting, more or less in charge

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of her own destiny. Mumsy was not much of a thinker and certainly could not have entered into a debate with Isaiah Berlin, but she would have said, like most Englishwomen of her generation, that she considered herself free. N o w she saw that true freedom lay in the surrender of self, that fulfilment lay in sacrifice, that happiness lay in service, the only certain Triumph of the Will: Mumsy had found her Fiihrer. Actually, I did not witness much of their fife together. I suppose I must have resented somewhat Cyril's usurpation of my place at the centre of Mumsy s focus. That would be natural, even in an adolescent w h o at the same time sought his independence. B u t I was no Prince Hamlet, and the pair resembled Gertrude and Claudius only in their gross sexual appetite for one another. I rather liked C y r i l in those years, as I think I've said. If ever in my mind's eye I saw the bloat king paddling with his fingers in her neck, I have forgotten, and even at the time would probably have suppressed such an image. Whether mine is the reflection in the mirror above my naked mother in the once-scandalous double-portrait hanging in the National Portrait Gallery, I am no longer as certain as once I was. Still, I can easily see that Stan, if he were writing my biography, could, as I've hinted more than once, lay his Freudian template over my life without any trouble. T h e truth is much simpler. I went away to university, and after university to London, the umbilical cord already hygienically severed. In Dibblethwaite I was, in Mumsy s years and after, a visitor; I never thought of it as home. T h e letters provide some sort of insight into a troubled relationship. (Yes, of course I have the letters.) Once Mumsy was settled in Dibblethwaite, she had relatively easy access by bus via R i p o n to Harrogate. Her parents, the grandparents w h o m I hardly knew, were getting on, were in fact retired from the fishand-chippery that had sustained them and were living out their lives in a small terraced house behind the station. C y r i l evidently

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thought it good that she visit them on and off. Perhaps her absences afforded him the opportunity to plug into variations on the Eternal Feminine that were on offer in other convenient vessels.When they were apart, they exchanged letters. Only Cyril knows whether Mumsy's letters to him are still extant. T h e early letters offer firm declarations of love: 'You are the greatest joy of my life,' for example.'This morning, Master Willie in a fearful rage, I took your smalls from the laundry basket and sniffed them, longing for you.' ' N o w that I k n o w what true loneliness is, perhaps I'll paint it.'Apart from his schooldays at Cronyn Hall, his brief stay in Cambridge and his army years abroad, C y r i l had seldom been away from the moors. He was what the Americans call a hick or a rube. Mumsy's urbane elegance, the title she had earned through marriage to a knighted barrister, her acquired 'posh' accent, these evidently excited him: 'Your high heels, your silk blouses, and the red fox you drape around your shoulders, with its beady little eyes, its sharp snout and full tail, give me a sexual itch. Y o u have only to pronounce " C y r i l " and Master Willie stands and salutes.' He could also be cruel, lashing out for no other reason, perhaps, than his momentary mood: 'I don't think you could ever arouse me physically were it not for the spiritual dimension. For a start, your breasts are too big for my taste. A German whore in Hamburg once taught me the ideal dimensions: "Eine Handvoll und nicht mehr; was ubrig ist ist ordinar!' Go ask one of your linguist friends what it means.' 'I make a better shepherd's pie than you. Yours makes me sick.' Once my grandfather died and Mumsy's visits to Harrogate were prompted by her desolate mother's needs, and no longer by Cyril's convenience, he became vicious. 'What I want is some healthy girl, healthy in body and spirit, w h o can be a comfort to me & give me all the things that you in your selfish absence seem unwilling to give. Your dad is dead, for Christ's sake. Your

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m u m should be told to make the best of it.' B u t he had by then already met Lady Cynthia, youngest daughter of a baronetcy that traced its ancestry to the gratitude of Henry IV. In one of the letters to Mumsy, he quotes a letter of Lady Cynthia to him: 'I am tremendously anxious for you to have what you need and want. I am so much more anxious for that than that I should have any of my personal wants.' T h e n C y r i l tells Mumsy that she has obviously made her choice: her mother rather than Cyril. He wishes her well. T h e letter is enough to prompt my mother's immediate return to Dibblethwaite, ignoring her own mother's ostentatious misery. B u t in Dibblethwaite, of course, Lady Cynthia was already in residence. All Mumsy could do was flee in tearful despair to London.

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T H E R E WAS A MESSAGE FROM STAN on the answerphone. I have

long been a dedicated practitioner of screening. N e x t to the invention of the telephone itself, the most useful advance in telephonic communications, I am convinced, has been the answerphone. I never pick up the receiver any more until I know who's calling. Having learned from both Saskia and Cyril what Stan was currently after, I chose not to answer. ' R o b i n , old buddy, how's it goin'? Saskia tells me you're looking great. Been workin' out?' So far, mere hail-fellow, all-but-wellmet bonhomie. Then, a drop in voice to between-the-two-ofus confidential: 'You know why I'm here in M e r r y Olde, of course. Final touches to the Entwistle, a few questions in need of answers, a few puzzles in need of solving. Saskia will have clued you in.The fact is, you're an untapped resource.'A chortle. 'Seriously though, I really need to talk to you. You could be a great help on the years Entwistle spent with your mother. That's where the record is weakest, you know. There are all kinds of

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things you could help me with, old friend. Give me a call, okay? Let's meet. Let's do dinner. My treat.' He left me a telephone number. His second call was a trifle briefer. T h e tone now was petulant, abrupt, the voice of someone unfairly put upon. ' R o b i n , Stan again. Things are getting a mite hairy. We've only got a few more days over here. I really need to talk to you. Give me a call, okay?' He left his number again. I phoned mid-morning the following day, at an hour I felt sure the two of them would be out, he plying the research trade, she on cultural pursuits or busy meeting local clients and colleagues. This time it was I w h o left the message, on the hotel's voicemail. 'Stan, I'd be delighted to meet you, and, of course, see once more the always lovely Saskia. But I must tell you in advance that I refuse unequivocally and absolutely to discuss my mother with you. Your book must manage without me. I'm sorry if this disappoints you, but I'm quite adamant.' O u r machines continued speaking to one another: 'Stan again. You're making a big mistake, R o b i n , trust me. Without your input, all I've got is Entwistle's v i e w of the period - bound to be biased; the comments of Lord Peter Turdant of Chippenham, the son of Sir Cedric Smyth-Turdant, w h o m your mother was married to w h e n she ran off with Entwistle. R e m e m b e r him? Lord Peter gave me access to his father's papers: not much there in praise of Mumsy. W h o else? Oh, yeah, Lord Peter's mother, Lady Smyth-Turdant, w h o once was married to your headmaster at Cronyn Hall. Jeez, you Brits enjoy musical chairs. A n d finally, the Lady Harriet Blakeny. She's the daughter of Lady Cynthia, w h o took Mumsy's place, in case you're w o n dering. There's nothing much available of a documentary sort, either in letters, diaries or memoirs.These people are the enemy, R o b i n . Don't you want to offer a counter-attack? Call me. We're leaving tomorrow'

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'I can only repeat, Stan: I won't talk to you about my mother. It's obvious you're scraping the barrel's bottom.What can Harriet Blakeny know? D i d you know, by the way, that Fat Harriet is the model for Mimsy H o g g in Dan Talbot's The Bloated Belle of Bloomsbury? Have a good trip.' O u r machines continued their conversation: 'Stan here. F Y I , the Lady Blakeny was kind enough to show me an unpublished manuscript of her mother's, a piece intended for some women's magazine, I believe she said: "Mucking Out with Mellors: Illicit Passion in R u r a l Yorkshire". Lady Cynthia doesn't devote much space to Lady Smyth-Turdant, but what she has to say, old buddy, is scathing. Let me at least send you a copy of what I've written about Entwisde and your mother. Maybe you'll want to comment on it, maybe not. W h o knows? W h y not give it a try?' 'Send the passage along. As you say, w h o knows? Bon voyage and love to Saskia.' Ironically, Entwistle's years with Lady Smyth-Turdant, the artist's Nancy, were among his most prolific. It was in those years that he painted, among so many masterpieces, 'Nude with Pestle' (1952), 'Out of Station Road' (1954), and 'Despondent Lovers' (1955). It was also in those years that he completed what many consider his finest work, the eight-panel painting, ' The Eighth Day: Destruction' (1952—62). To these and others we will recur in due time. The affair started passionately enough, albeit selfishly, with Nancy abandoning her husband and her son from a previous marriage in a delirious pursuit of lustful pleasures. From the start their relationship was stormy. In time, Nancy became 'petulant', 'bitter', 'strident', 'jealous', 'spiteful'. Perhaps something of the direction their relationship was taking may be observed in 'Despondent Lovers' (see fig. 27). The artist and Nancy lie side by side, naked, on a bed, its clothes tangled from recent activity

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and suggesting unrest. Beyond the open window a bolt of lightning illuminates dark storm clouds; the ominously red curtains fluttering on each side of the window hint at Hell, a motif picked up by the libretto of D o n Giovanni scattered on the floor. On the sheet nearest to us, we can just make out the words: ' C h i l'anima mi lacera? C h i m'agita le viscere?' ('Who lacerates my soul? Wlio torments my body?') A violin with snapped strings that pins this page to the floor symbolises the absence of harmony. More like corpses than like living people, these 'lovers'lie together, each with a hand listlessly covering the crotch of the other, as if, like Adam and Eve, they were ashamed of their nakedness. They gaze away from one another, expressionless, each sunk in his or her own thoughts. Today, looking back over the years with Nancy, Entwistle characterises the affair as 'exciting', 'volatile', 'stimulating', 'exhausting'. Gallantly, he accepts part-blame for their many arguments, some 'quite' acrimonious, and for their gradual estrangement. Ruefully, he admits that he's 'not an easy person to live with'. Others who knew something of their domestic interrelationship think otherwise. 'She drove him to distraction. He couldn't stand her complaints, her constant whining, her disdain for the moors and dales he loved.' 'Nancy was an utter bitch. I don't know how he put up with her for so long.' 'He'd paint furiously for fifteen, sometimes sixteen, hours a day, just to be in the studio, away from the house and her sharp tongue.' Nothing he could do would satisfy her. That he generously and lovingly took her son, Robin Sinclair, under his wing, gave the boy a home, meant nothing to her.' But what led at length to their rupture were less her ugly moods than her many and steadily increasing absences from Dibblethwaite, Nancy ostensibly tending to the needs of her elderly parents in Harrogate. What Entwistle desperately needed was a loving woman, a faithful woman, one who knew not only how to provide him

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with all domestic comforts, hut also how to cater to the demands of genius. Fortunately, at the moment when the artist's spirit was at its lowest ebb, Lady Cynthia appeared in his life . . . But we are getting ahead of ourselves. It is worth observing first what we can of the woman born Nancy Stuffins in 1912 to Cissie and Bill Stuffins in the tiny bedroom above their fish-andchip shop on the Station Road in Harrogate, Yorkshire, with only a midwife in attendance, the anxious father, we may suppose, serving his customers below. What baggage did this woman bring with her to the home of Cyril Entwistle, this older woman who must have overwhelmed the younger man even as a mother overwhelms her son? How did she become this particular woman, and how and with what results did this particular woman's past shatter the calm of Entwistle's present? The shop still stands on Station Road, although today it is a scruffy-looking 'takeaway', The Star of India, Rama Kamath, Prop. But it is perhaps not too fanciful to believe that one can still smell, rising above the aromas of curried spices, the unmistakable stench of fried fish and chips. A n d thus Stan burbles on, much like Phaethon, wanting the manage of unruly jades. A n d thus he cruelly, maliciously, gratuitously and scurrilously undertakes to blacken the reputation of a woman he never knew, content to build his portrait on the uncorroborated hints and petty spites of others. A n d when they fail him, he exercises his flaccid imagination. My grandfather, 'we may suppose', was handing out packets of fish and chips while above his head his wife, Cissie, screaming in her agony, brought forth my mother, a breech birth, into this world. If we sniff along with Stan — G o d save the mark! — we can still catch the 'stench' of fried food half a century old. W h e n my mother left Cyril alone, she was 'ostensibly tending to the needs of her elderly parents'. Stan's sophisticated readers, however, are invited

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to consider that she may instead have been bonking some other, unnamed person on the sly. Mumsy, G o d knows, was no angel, but she deserves better than to be lacerated by the likes of Stan. As a wife, she no doubt left much to be desired — complaisant, agreeable, c o m forting, but interested before everything else in her sexual needs. Fidelity, at least after the death of Herbert Sinclair, my father, was not high in the catalogue of her personal virtues. As a mother, she surely did not rank among the best. B u t I never doubted that she did her best, even as I never doubted that she cared for me and loved me to the limit of her ability. Certainly she never 'abandoned' me, as if I were an infant in swaddling clothes left in a basket on the church steps. I was, at the time that C y r i l to her delight first ravished her, on the brink of becoming a university student. A n d C y r i l did not take me under his wing, other than to give me valuable advice on h o w to deal successfully with the opposite sex; he did not give me a home, either, although I never felt other than welcome at Dibblethwaite. I think he rather enjoyed me in those years. He wasn't merely putting on an act in an effort to please Mumsy. I think he enjoyed encountering in me his own i n n o cent self before he set off for war. B u t what upsets me most in Stan's account is h o w he treats the relationship between C y r i l and Mumsy. To put it simply, she adored him. In all things she deferred to him. O n e cannot k n o w — certainly, Stan cannot k n o w — the intimate details of so passionate a love affair, but nothing M u m s y ever did was done in defiance of C y r i l . She bit her hp and soldiered on. To him, at least, she remained totally faithful. She never c o m plained, she never whined. She accepted his strictures; she bowed her head and smiled in agreement. I was sometimes angered by her willing subservience. 'He's not G o d Almighty, Mumsy'

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'In a way he is, R o b i n darling. Like G o d , he's a creator; among men, he's a genius. I'm lucky he loves me.' Was C y r i l capable of love? Is he now? Or is what passes for love in him merely need? I e-mailed Stan to tell him I was returning his manuscript. I added that I had sent a copy of it to my solicitors (untrue) and advised him not to continue with his plan to traduce my mother in print. There would probably be, of course, no case for Stan to answer. W h o cared any more about the honour of N a n c y Stuffins, other than her son? Stan was probably quite safe. W h o was there living w h o could contradict his assertions? I might be indignant, but what evidence of interest to the court could I produce? Obviously none. Still, publishers are not keen on court cases. At best, my threat might limit Stan to those assertions he could prove independently of particular witnesses. At worst, to Stan's chagrin, my suit might long delay publication. Perhaps my threat might prompt him to a rewrite.

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T I M O T H Y WAS N O T ENCOURAGING. 'I don't think there's much you can do, old chap. Neither here in Britain nor over there in N e w York — where, according to you, the book's due to appear first — is it possible to sue, claiming libel (or, for that matter, slander) on behalf of a dead person, to wit, in this case, your sainted mother. Kops has a free hand.' 'But much of what he says is not true. I can attest to it.' 'Attest away. This is, as we are assured ad nauseam, a free country. Attack him in the press, by all means. B u t if you do, be sure he can't sue you for libel.' Timothy and I were downing a late-morning bitter in the

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R e d Lion, an American hangout, but for us today conveniently located, mere yards away from Charles Street, W1, where he was to meet a client at the Chesterfield and I was to address a Commonwealth group at the English-Speaking Union. 'I could an if I would a tale unfold,' said Timothy, who, like me, had read English literature at our university. 'I met your bete noire, your Stan Kops, quite by chance, shortly after he and your a peu pres stepfather had agreed terms for a biography' 'You never told me you knew him.Timothy.' I tried to squeeze sorrow, disappointment and a modicum of anger into my words. What I felt was annoyance. 'It never seemed important or in any way relevant. After all, he's not my client, and he's not writing your biography. But, if you're up to it, mine is a tale I should by rights be able to dine out on, at least among that limited lot w h o might be interested, viz. you.' 'Let's dine out, then,' I said. 'I'll call you.'

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IT WAS A TALE OF HUMILIATION. Timothy had met Stan on the late-morning T G V from Paris-Charles-de-Gaulle to Avignon. T h e journey takes a little over two and a half hours, a c o m fortable segment of travel time, neither too long nor too short, time for a decent snooze or for its equivalent, a copy of the TLS. It also affords time for a traveller, if he is so inclined, to sink reassuringly into himself. That had been Timothy's hope when he booked his ticket. All reserved places were taken; his was one of the last bookable seats available. It was, after all, i August, in France D - D a y for les vacances. A n d so across the table from him in the window seat 'a deux' was a short, energetic 'simian sort of chap'. He reminded Timothy of the blackand-white colobus monkey he had come across once w h e n on holiday in Kenya. I could see his point. Stan's thick beard and

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facial hair had in advancing age become stark white; the hair that covered his cranium, however, remained as deep black as ever. Put thick-lensed glasses on a colobus monkey, grant it some wrinkles on what little facial skin is visible, allow it plump, bloodred lips that open to reveal the teeth of the Wife of Bath and lo, you have Stan the Man. His brochures, maps and travel guides were spread out and filled the small table. 'Parlez-vous anglais, monsieur?' said the colobus monkey in an utterly appalling accent. Timothy, w h o speaks French fluently, toyed with the idea of replying in a hailstorm of that language. Instead, he sighed and admitted he was English. 'That's great!' said Stan and offered his hand, which Timothy politely took. It soon transpired that they were both bound for St-Bonnetdu-Gard, and when Stan said that he was to be met by car at the Avignon T G V station, Timothy perked up and revealed his linguistic acumen:'I say, could I possibly bum a ride?' Of course, Timothy told me, once he had placed himself in Stan's debt — ('Hey, no problem!') — he was doomed to listen to the chap burbling his native woodnotes wild for the rest of the journey. Stan had never been in Provence before. He was looking forward to a week's holiday. Tomorrow he would return to Avignon to meet his wife, Saskia, w h o was driving down from Paris, and then the two of them would explore the region by car. Today, however, he was to meet in person the man whose biography he was about to write. Did Timothy know the Mas du Coutre Courbe? 'Sorry?' 'Look, I've got it written down. T h e Mas du Coutre Corbe.' 'Ah, yes, but the natives call it simply the Mas Bienseant.' 'Why?' 'Well, it belongs to Claire Bienseant, to your hostess, I mean.' The farm was indeed Claire's, her inheritance, and so it bore the family name. B u t Claire, w h o now spent eleven months of the year with Cyril in Yorkshire, rented the farmhouse out by the

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week or month to tourists, even as she rented out her four acres to a local vineyard, and she believed that the sexier name would attract the punters. Cyril was by now rich as Croesus, but Claire is French and a farmer's daughter, and she thought it wicked to leave the house unoccupied during most of the year when it could instead turn an honest franc (euro now, actually, but old phrases die hard) or two. She loves the house and has over the years transformed it from the simple utilitarian place it had been in her childhood to a non-native's dream of Provence. Cyril always grumbles at his annual August upheaval, but he is evidently quite happy once there. He likes to invite the village girls in for a swim in the pool, their bikini-clad figures stirring memories.The paintings that hang in the Mas Bienseant are quite unlike his work from any of his exhibited periods: vivid, Turner-like blazes of colour, the closest he has ever come to the abstract. Timothy knew Cyril and Claire quite independently of me. He had been spending his summer holidays in St-Bonnet-duGard for years, renting, along with his friend (an Australian known to me only as Sammy), a narrow, sun-drenched house near the epicene in the village. I've never quite understood their relationship. If they are lovers, they have been content to live and grow old on opposite sides of the world from one another, cramming a year's companionship into a single month. Perhaps they enjoy the intensity. At any rate, there is a small Englishspeaking summer colony in the village, Cyril, Timothy, Sammy and the diminutive, bandy-legged and ever cheerful Basil Mudge, once a famous jockey, a Liverpudlian, w h o now spends much of every August sitting in the shade and dictating his memoirs into a tape recorder. T h e men get on well together, as disparate Englishmen often do in foreign lands. I myself have in the past spent a pleasant evening with them in the village restaurant and bar getting delightfully sozzled. Stan, aboard the T G V , bubbled with enthusiasm. He showed

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Timothy his brochures, maps, routes, lists of 'must-see' sights. He asked questions but would not wait for replies. He spoke eagerly of the Palais des Papes in Avignon, of the weekly spice market in medieval Uzes, of the Pont du Gard, of Nimes and of the Camargue. He spoke knowledgeably of local wines and olive groves. St-Bonnetdu-Gard had a moulin a huile, had it not? But he and Saskia also planned to wander off the beaten track, tap into the real Provence. This was Stan at the height of his powers, ebullient, happy, exercising his research skills even in the matter of a week's holiday. He had yet to meet Cyril Entwistle, and, of course, he had yet to be shot. What seemed most to excite Stan, Timothy told me, was his upcoming visit to Mas Bienseant. He regretted that Saskia could not be with him, but Cyril's invitation seemed to have assumed that he would be on his own. He and Saskia had decided not to make an issue of it, to leave well alone. After all, there would doubtless be other opportunities. T h e book was not even begun. Meanwhile, he had the quaintnesses and comforts of a genuine French farmhouse ahead of him, his formal introduction to Provence. He had evidently researched the foods of the region and spoke eagerly of Anchoiade, Soupe au Pistou, Daube Provencale, Le Gratin dAbricots aux Amandes. Timothy claimed that at this point he was understanding Stan's pronunciation without difficulty and was beginning to fear for its effect on his own flawless accent. B u t he also said that Stan's evocation of crusty peasant bread dipped in the region's aromatic olive oil, of local cheese crumbling at the touch of the fork, of a glass of Lirac or Tavel, its ruby winking in the sunlight, engendered in him a reciprocal eagerness. Only as an afterthought, it seemed, did Stan mention his anticipatory pleasure at meeting the subject of his next book. This would be a brief visit; he was staying only overnight — 'time enough for lunch and dinner today and maybe for a fresh croissant and coffee in the morning' — but he hoped that by the time

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he left he would have laid the firm foundation not merely of a collaboration but also of a friendship. Timothy and Stan exited the arrivals platform at Avignon T G V station, Stan pulling behind him a large suitcase on wheels and dragging along a stuffed and deep tote bag, one shoulder bowed beneath the strap of a mammoth rucksack. Beyond the platform were scenes of welcome and greetings, laughter, tears and hearty shouts. Timothy looked about him. Some fellow stood there, bluejowled, morose, a dead ringer for Marlon Brando at his fattest, but with a Hitlerian moustache. This fellow held up a placard with one hand and scratched his balls with the other. The placard read: PROF. S. C O R P S E M A S BIENSEANT

'I think he means you,' said Timothy. l

]e m'appelle Professeur Kops' explained Stan to the placard-holder.

'Hein?' Timothy explained further. l

Ah, ben sur. Remoulins Taxi a voire service! A n d he went on in

rapid regional French. 'Did you follow that?' said Timothy. 'It was kinda fast.' Stan looked a trifle crestfallen. 'He said we should hang on here, he'd be right back. He has a hamper to pick up, quelque chose pour Madame. It came with us on our train, apparently. Oh, and he said we may call him Marcel.' 'I figured.' Stan made a neat grouping of his luggage. Marcel waddled off, according to Timothy, as if he were fearful of dropping the toothbrush he must have inserted up his arse. T h e taxi was an ancient blue Renault, badly dented, scratched and rusted. ' Quelque chose pour Madame' turned out to be a

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refrigerator trunk, metallic, its lid secured by three wide leather belts. Marcel waddled, splay-footed, puffing and cursing, bearing the trunk before him, suffering it to bounce on his rotundity. It looked heavy. Timothy and Stan followed him out of the station and into the blaze of the early-afternoon sun, Stan still struggling with his gear. Timothy says that he was tempted to point out to Stan the wagons available for the passengers' use, but something held him back. He himself was travelling light, a small nylon satchel swinging easily in his hand, but, soul of politeness that he ordinarily is, he made no effort to assist Stan. Stan has that effect on people. Marcel lowered his burden to the ground beside the Renault, put his pudgy hands into the small of his back, stretched, tottering backwards, and uttered a martyr's sigh. By this time Timothy and Stan had caught up with him. Stan dropped his bags. He was a mess, awash in sweat. It fell in rivulets down his face to his beard and thence in heavy droplets to his chest. He blinked against the salt water in his eyes. He had sweated through the jacket of his once-natty tan suit, producing unseemly creases where the strap of the shoulder bag had bitten into it, dark semicircles beneath his arms and a dark patch in the middle of his back. His shirt was drenched. 'It's a bit warm, isn't it?' said Timothy coolly. 'I love it!' said Stan with unexpected good humour. 'British understatement, I mean. I'm fucking melting.' Marcel contemplated the Renault's boot, contemplated the trunk, scratched his balls again, then his head. 'Merde, alors!' he said. He unlocked the boot. Its filthy, stuffed interior held a spare tyre, a jerry can of petrol, automotive tools, a drum of tomato paste, an open sack of empty beer bottles, various oily rags and a scattering of pornographic photographs, all jumbled chaotically together. He shook his head and closed the boot again. T h e car, meanwhile, had stood in the sun, locked, its windows

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closed, a species of oven. Marcel shrugged, unlocked his door and thence a rear door, lifted the trunk from the ground and pushed it onto the rear seat. Then he opened the other rear door, smiled oilily, and made a welcoming gesture appropriate to a concierge at a provincial brothel towards a favoured regular. 'M'sieur le professeur?' Stan took off his jacket and folded himself into the enclosed heat, squeezed against the trunk. Marcel piled the tote and shoulder bags on Stan's lap and closed the door; then he ran around to the other side, slung the suitcase on top of the trunk and closed that door. 'M'sieur?' he said to Timothy, opening the front-seat passenger door for him. Timothy wound down his window before getting in. He told me that the interior stank of sweaty socks (or possibly foul cheese) and garlic. Both front seats were well back, Marcel's in order to accommodate his girth, the other perhaps out of a misplaced sense of symmetry; it was behind Timothy that Stan sat cramped, his knees necessarily up, which pushed his bags against his chin. 'EnfinF said Marcel. 'Allez-y, hein?' Behind Timothy, Stan was squirming, desperately trying to open his window. 'Lafenitre?' was all he could manage. Marcel shrugged, waving his hand dismissively. 'Elle est complement foutue, cassee, vous comprenez? Une espece de merde, pour ainsi dire. Rien d'importance] He turned on the engine, slipped out of his parking space, talking rapidly all the while. 'Did you get all that?' Timothy asked. ' T h e window's on the blink, right?' Stan was breathing heavily, like a sprinter at the end of his run. 'Right. But he says not to worry. Once we get moving, there'll be plenty of fresh air back there. A n d in any case, St-Bonnetdu-Gard is only twenty kilometres away' ' I ' m dying of thirst back here.' 'I can ask him to stop somewhere, if you like.' 'Christ, no. Let's just get there.' •

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Marcel had assumed the role of tour guide, pointing out the wonders of the Gard as they bumped and jounced through, pausing in his spiel at intervals calibrated to allow Timothy time for translation. 'Behold the summit,' Timothy translated as they arrived at last on the cobbled streets of St-Bonnet-du-Gard. 'There you see the magnificent fortified chapel of this ancient village. N o t e h o w its architects have brilliantly adapted the methods of a R o m a n aqueduct. One can see this perfectly in the columns to the east, thanks to the crushed bricks, which the R o m a n s used to achieve waterproof joints. Superb, Professor Corpse, is that not so?' 'Tell him, great,' said Stan between clenched teeth, his eyes closed. 'We leave our route at the present moment only to grant you a closer look. Meanwhile, please pay attention to the beautiful fountain, here at the edge of the road, erected in 1806. Note especially its splendid ornament, a bust of Napoleon the First!' Stan's thick glasses were completely fogged. T h e sweat that ran from beneath them made it seem he was weeping. Perhaps he was. 'A mere two kilometres away as a bird makes its flight is the world-famous Pont du Gard, the aqueduct built by the R o m a n s in the first century. If the gentleman wishes, we make a small detour and — behold! — we are there.' All Stan could do was groan. Timothy explained that the professor was exhausted by his long journey from America and was eager to reach his destination. 'Comme vous voulez, Messieurs] said Marcel grumpily and honked his horn at nothing in particular. 'Ce/a m'est egaU. T h e Renault pulled up in the forecourt of Mas Bienseant with a jerk and a shudder, whereupon the engine died. 'Merde!' said Marcel. T h e farmhouse was large and quite beautiful, its simple

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central portion built in the seventeenth century, its additions built in the eighteenth and nineteenth, each without regard to the others or to the original, alike only in their use of the local stone, but the whole producing a wonderful harmony All the front windows were shuttered against the white-hot sun. Off to the side, behind neatly trimmed, thick hedges, one could hear the sound of a body diving into water, the locus of the swimming pool that Claire had caused to be installed five or six years before. Timothy and Marcel got out of the car immediately. Stan had to wait for Marcel to open his door and lift the bags from him. Once out, he stood as one dazed, swaying slightly as wet as if it were he w h o had dived into the pool. T h e front door of the farmhouse was already open and now from its cool interior scurried a short, bandy-legged old fellow wearing dark glasses and a baseball cap, w h o was smiling with brilliant false teeth. 'Ay-oop, our Tim,' he said,'tha's not due afore tomorrer.' A n d he held out a welcoming hand that Timothy warmly shook, patting the old chap on his head the while. 'Ay-oop, yourself, Basil. It's good to see you. Actually, it's Sammy who's due in tomorrow. He's just spent a month in Sitges, lucky bastard, ostensibly tracing his supposed Catalan ancestry. It's my j o b to get some food and drink into the house, air the rooms, and in general prepare the way for His Majesty's arrival.' Claire now emerged from the house, hurrying forward, followed at a discreet distance by Clothilde, w h o looked after the Entwistles when they were in residence and, living with her feckless husband, Emile, in a converted barn a hundred yards from the main house, kept a proprietorial eye on the property w h e n they were not. Claire, too, went straight to Timothy. 'Timothy, mon cher! Quelle surprise totalement heureuse!' T h e y embraced, and then, as if one embrace could scarcely suffice, embraced again. 'You'll stay to lunch?' Timothy smiled, nodded and turned to Clothilde. 'Ah, la plus belle Clothilde. Sois tranquille

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monpauvre cceurl'And the elderly Clothilde, already rosy-cheeked, actually blushed. By now Marcel had emptied the Renault of the refrigerator trunk and Stan's heavy luggage, all of which he had arranged in a neat pile. He now stood beside this arrangement, his arms raised and fingers splayed as if in benison. All this while Stan had stood there, swaying and dripping. Timothy suddenly became aware of a lapse in manners. 'Madame, permit me to introduce your guest, Professor Stan Kops.' Stan, unable for the moment actually to move, stayed where he was, but said dully those words he had perhaps rehearsed and intended to deliver in a sprightly manner: 'Enchante, Madame, de faire votre connaissance! 'Here is an old friend,' said Claire, 'Basil Mudge, w h o m you may know as triple winner of the Triple Crown, a spectacular jockey, friend to royalty, eh, Basil, mon vieuxT 'Fabulous,' said Stan listlessly. 'Ay-oop, Stan.' ' A n d here, of course, is Clothilde, my oldest friend.' Clothilde essayed a clumsy curtsy. 'Enchante, je vous assure' said Stan woodenly, dripping. Two things now happened simultaneously. First, Cyril emerged from behind the hedge in whites and a beachcomber's straw hat, preceded by a very young woman, bronzed and clad in a bikini. He stroked, then patted her inviting rump. 'Ah, quelle honteF she giggled, delighted. 'J'ai perdu, si non mon honneur, alors mon innocence. Gran'pere, gran'pere, comme vous etes mediant!' Second, Marcel approached Stan, babbling in a lingo incomprehensible to him. ' H e wants to be paid,' said Timothy, accepting his role as translator. 'But,' spluttered Stan, 'I thought I was a guest o f . . .' 'Marcel says that he is only charging you for the journey from Avignon to here, the standard amount; he's also charging you

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for me, the additional passenger; and for the trunk, which he had to retrieve, carry and deliver. He is not charging you for his invaluable information about the locality, information that you cut short, he says, alleging tiredness.You will no doubt agree that he is being fair.' ' H o w much?' said Stan, obviously aghast. 'He's written out an invoice. Here it is.' 'Don't quibble, for God's sake,' shouted Cyril. 'Pay the poor bugger. He's a working man. He didn't drive you here for the fun of it.' Stan, cowed and embarrassed, paid up. B u t Claire, at least, noticed his physical condition. 'Would you like a swim before lunch? A bath or shower? I'm sure you'd like to change.' 'Yes, please,' said Stan and walked towards the farmhouse, his legs spread wide, the gait of a man w h o has pissed in his trousers. Such was his evident misery that Basil and Timothy, unasked, carried his bags for him, trailing after. Clothilde and Marcel, meanwhile, took the trunk between them and hauled it indoors. 'And put some juldy in it!' C y r i l shouted after them. ' I ' m starving.' 'You horrid man,' said Claire. 'You haven't even greeted the poor sod.' 'Language, language,' chuckled Cyril. 'I hate to think what low company you've been keeping.' Lunch was taken on a flagstone terrace beneath a portico or trellis covered with vines. It formed a cool arbour that overlooked vineyards and cultivated farmland bursting with colour beneath the afternoon sun. By the time Stan, bathed and in a change of clothing, found his way to the terrace, led there by the voices and the laughter, the chatter in French, everyone was seated around an ancient farm table, long and thin, scrubbed almost white over the years. Clothilde evidently ate with the

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family and their friends. T h e unshaven fellow in the striped shirt of a matelot, a greasy red kerchief knotted around his neck and an expression rendered quizzical by a drooping eye, turned out to be Clothilde's Emile. T h e bikini-clad nymph had added a man's shirt to her costume and was seated next to Cyril. A n d Marcel, too, whose car had failed to restart and was now awaiting the arrival of a mechanic from Remoulins, had evidently been invited to lunch. Before each place was a bowl of some deepred liquid upon which floated a dollop of sour cream. W h e n Stan appeared, all conversation and laughter ceased. 'Ah, here you are at last, Professor Kops. Feeling better, I hope,' said Claire. ' D o please call me Stan, Madame. No formalities. I hope to get to know you quite well, after all.' He looked about him. ' H o w delightful!' 'Sit down,' said Cyril. 'Over there, at the head of the table, a place reserved for distinguished visitors.' Since Emile sat to one side of him and Marcel to the other, Stan must have known he was at the foot — below the salt, as it were. Basil M u d g e was the first to reach for his soup spoon. 'What's this when it's at 'ome?' ' C o l d beet soup,' said Claire. 'Borscht,' said Stan, betrayed by the need to teach others, which ran through his soul like the word 'Brighton' on a stick of rock. 'Hold on there, Basil,' said Cyril. 'Perhaps our guest would like to say some sort of Hebrew grace before we eat.' Stan was flabbergasted. 'I . . . no, I . . . Grace, no, I ' m not religious.'What little of his face was visible between the black hair above and the white hair below had turned scarlet. 'A lapsed Jew, eh?' said Cyril jovially. 'Well, perhaps we can manage something of the Christian sort. Basil, how about you?'

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'Gerraway ye mingy booger!' 'Timothy, then?' 'Stop it at once,' said Claire sharply 'You're embarrassing everyone.' 'O temporal O mores!' Cyril spoke with such booming solemnity, raising his hands and his eyes to the canopy above him, that first the nymph and then the others, even Stan, began to laugh. T h e tension, at any rate, was broken. T h e y fell to with a will, spoons rattling in bowls, slurps l

resounding below the salt. Pas mal, fa,' said Clothilde to her husband, Ve potage juif He had finished his and had licked his spoon. He was torn between not giving his wife an inch and not insulting his employers. 'C'est frais, au moins^ he said sulkily and lit a Gauloise. Stan had understood enough of this exchange to feel it necessary to offer a correction. ' C e n'est pas un potage juif, Madame. C'est un potage russe ou polonais.' Clothilde looked at him blankly.'Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?' she asked Emile. 'As-tu compris?' Emile merely shrugged. 'Never mind,' said Stan. Claire and Clothilde got up to collect the soup plates and carry them into the kitchen. Cyril thought this a suitable moment to address his biographer. 'There's no point in talking about the book on this visit.You'll be gone tomorrow in the ack emma. Marcel here's unlikely to be able to return you to Avignon. We'll have to make other arrangements. A bus, perhaps. Claire will have a schedule.' 'A bus will be fine.' 'Well, I hope you didn't expect me to drive you.' ' N o , no, of course not.' 'I'll see you, then, once we're back in Dibblethwaite.You can put up at the R a t and Carrot. Mine host is a personal friend. He'll see you right.'

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'Actually, I'll not be free before the spring semester, w h e n I'm on a term's sabbatical. I'm unlikely to be in England before January.' 'Is that in our agreement?' 'It's covered by it, yes.' 'Fucking solicitors. Who're they working for? Buggered if I know' 'Actually,' said Stan pacifically, ' I ' m represented by my agent, w h o happens also to be my wife.' 'Oh, aye? A family business, is i t ? ' A n d C y r i l rubbed together his thumb and first two fingers. 'There's no need for us to be out of touch. We can c o m m u nicate by e-mail, by fax, even by telephone.' Emile placed the damp stub of his Gauloise, still smoking, on a small dish before him. T h e gentle breeze carried the smoke directly into Stan's face. He leaned back; the smoke followed him. He waved a hand in front of his face. Emile grinned at him, his quizzical eye drooping. 'La fumee vous derange, M'sieur?' 'That's okay,' said Stan feebly. Claire and Clothilde, meanwhile, had laid out in each place a clean plate. N o w they brought in various platters. In came a huge challah, pre-sliced, a dozen bagels, a half-dozen bialies, a tub of butter, various smoked fish, including smoked salmon, herring in sour cream and in wine sauce, chopped herring and chopped whitefish, chopped egg and onion, chopped chicken livers, sliced salt beef, matzoh balls, gherkins, sweet-and-sour cucumber slices, and a lump of chocolate-striated halvah. It was clear, now, what had been stuffed into the refrigerator trunk that accompanied Timothy and Stan to Avignon. 'What we have here,' said Cyril, 'is Jewish food. It's straight from the East E n d of London, totally kosher. Having no fucking idea what Stan's forbidden to eat, we have stuff here we know

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he can eat. A n d as for drink, the local wine's definitely not kosher, Babette here having danced on the grapes with her little piggy toes, avec ses petits orteils du porcelet' Here he made his fingers scurry up and down the arm of the girl in the bikini beside him, causing her to giggle. 'So here's seltzer water, here's kosher Diet C o k e , here's iced tea. Let's dig in. Let's be J e w s for a day' Stan all but sank beneath the table. I now understood his remark in Connecticut about the delicatessen food that appeared on Jerome's table. Timothy was immediately aware of the insult; so, no doubt, were others. It was all but palpable. It was as if Cyril had invited the most distinguished Afro-American to lunch, a man universally admired, and had offered him, ostensibly to play safe, chitterlings, collard greens and watermelon. Of course, had he actually been entertaining an Afro-American, Cyril, the champion of the underdog, would have done no such thing.What was Stan to do? He might have risen to his feet in high dudgeon, announced his immediate departure from France (or, at any rate, from the Mas Bienseant) and marched furiously from the terrace; he might have expressed his anger, his shock at apparent anti-Semitism, at anti-Semitism scarcely muted by a genial tone; he might have said, again before leaving, that he would have his solicitors look into the possibility of breaking an agreement he no longer wished to be a party to. He did none of these things; he was, poor fellow, in a bind. How, in fact, was he to leave? Marcel certainly couldn't take him to Avignon. Stan would have to depend upon these hateful people to find him transport; he would actually have to ask them for help. Either that, or he would have to pack his bags and haul them in all that appalling heat along the dusty roads, like a child running away from home. Of course, in order to carry off any such a gesture with panache, one must possess a certain innate dignity, a certain c o m manding presence. I suspect that poor Stan feared he would only

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cut a comical figure. As well he might. Besides, it would have taken considerable courage to stand up in such circumstances — alone among strangers in a strange land, an Outsider from birth w h o has longed all his life to be let in, a guest at last in the house of a Great Man, whose intent, at least as a possibility, he may have misunderstood — and, like the neurotic N e w York J e w they would surely have seen him as, create a 'scene' among Gentiles. In the event, the pre-bullet Stan was no Abdiel, no seraph he. For Timothy, obviously, this ugly moment had another level of meaning. He caught a glance from Stan, who, when their eyes met, looked swiftly away. This meal must have added a sickening refinement to Stan's embarrassment, he having gone on and on at length aboard the train about his expectations of mouthwatering Provencal food at the Mas Bienseant. He must have imagined the sniggers that would follow when, behind his back, Timothy told his tale. It was Claire w h o rallied to Stan's defence. 'You have offended our guest,' she said sharply to C y r i l in rapid French — and here we must rely on Timothy's always impeccable translation: ' N o t under my roof, you poncy tosser! Apologise to the poor bastard at once.' In the sudden silence, Clothilde, Emile, Marcel and the bikiniclad nymph looked on with fascination. A cigarette dropped from Emile's parted hps and fizzed out in his glass of orange juice. T h e four were privileged onlookers at a scene of high drama. Timothy says he couldn't bear to look at Stan and so concentrated on polishing the lenses of his sunglasses with his napkin. Stan, he thought, probably couldn't have followed the French, but had understood Claire well enough from tone, expression and gesture. C y r i l grinned at his wife like a cheeky schoolboy rebuked by an adult, but w h e n he saw her set lips and angry frown,

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he became suddenly sober and cleared his throat. ' L o o k here, old lad,' he said to Stan, 'no offence, eh? T h o u g h t you'd be pleased.' A n d so he produced, effortlessly, Stan's final humiliation of that humiliating meal. ' N o offence,' said Stan, his red hps parted in a sickly imitation of a smile. ' N o offence in the world.' What had Cyril been up to? In part, of course, he was asserting his comfortable anti-Semitism. It's a funny old world that has J e w s in it. For all Cyril's liberalism, he knew very well that he was white and English and that Stan was a wog. Beyond that, he was surely establishing the relationship between biographer and biographee. He was Tom Piper; he would call the tune. One might think that C y r i l would wish to appear to advantage on this first meeting before his biographer, hopeful of a sympathetic treatment. N o t a bit of it. What C y r i l wanted was to cow his biographer into submission. Once he had achieved that, he could control the material from which the biography would eventually emerge, fashioning his own portrait as the poet Spenser fashioned the R e d Cross Knight. I must say, listening to Timothy's account, I began to regret my part in this debacle. T h e mischief I intended when bringing C y r i l and Stan together was directed wholly at Cyril; Stan was merely to be my instrument in Cyril's discomfiture. T h e dullness of Stan's prose, his fortunately inimitable style, was to fall on the story of Cyril's life. It had seemed like a delicious j o k e at the time. Stan himself had always seemed to me to be a joke. That was foul in me. B u t Cyril, it seems, was playing another of his games and making up the rules as he went along. Or, to put it another way, he was placing his model in a pose that suited his purpose in a particular painting, but ignoring, deliberately or not, the palpable fact that the model was a human being w h o had a fife independent of his depiction on the canvas. While Stan

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thought he was creating a Cyril Entwistle, C y r i l was busily creating a Stan Kops. No contest. After that Jewish-delicatessen luncheon on the terrace, Timothy had gone off with Cyril, Basil and Emile to play a game ofboules. Stan had gone to his room to get his laptop; he wanted to j o t down a few preliminary notes about Mas Bienseant, he said. T h e afternoon waned. In the long Provencal twilight, the cooling air perfumed with lilac, Timothy had said his farewells and begun the short walk to the village. As he approached the farm gate, he saw off to his side in the near distance a figure, almost a silhouette in the gloaming, seated on a bench beneath an apple tree. It was Stan. He held his head in his hands and rocked silently back and forth, his shoulders heaving. Timothy, w h o had been about to shout a greeting, turned away and left as unobtrusively as he could.

*

*

*

STAN ARRIVED U N A N N O U N C E D ON MY DOORSTEP at Bolton

Gardens at nine in the evening. I had supposed him safely back in N e w York, my refusal to help him in his hunt for the 'truth' about Mumsy giving him no reason to alter his plans. A n d yet there he stood, grinning his gap-toothed grin, his tie uncharacteristically loosened, its knot lowered and askew, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. ' H e y old buddy, aincha gonna invite a guy in?' He burped a beery bubble at me - 'Oops, scu-u-use me!' and held out his hand. Of course, I took it. It requires real anger or inbred rudeness to ignore a proffered hand, and even then one must consciously overcome instinct. To my disgust, he segued from handshake to bear hug, squeezing hard and pinning my arms to my side, before releasing and slouching past me into the hall. I closed the front door and pointed him towards the open door of my flat.

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'Nice,' he said, peering about him. 'All alone?' 'Bit late to ask that now. What if I said no?' I was alone, of course, as I tend to be nowadays. He went into what my char calls 'the Lounge' and dropped onto a couch. 'You wouldn't happen to have any bourbon, would you?' He was not yet drunk, I suppose, but he was undoubtedly on his way. 'Have you had anything to eat?' 'Oh, sure, bangers and mash, Spaniards Inn, lunchtime. Great beer.' 'There's not much here, but I can manage scrambled eggs on toast. Interested?' 'You playing M u m s y ? ' he said slyly, sliding forward so that he sprawled on the couch, peering at me through half-closed eyelids. 'If you've come here to question me about my mother, you can leave now.' 'Mum's the word,' he said, and giggled girlishly. ' O k a y let's have the scrambled eggs crap. But first some bourbon. On the rocks. You got any?' I had a bottle of Fighting C o c k , as a matter of fact, a gift from my American publisher. I gave him his drink and scrambled his eggs and toasted his toast. He was refilling his glass w h e n I put his food on the kitchen table. T h e room was not particularly warm, but sweat beaded his forehead. T h e Stan I knew was not much of a drinker. A n d yet he sat at the table washing down each mouthful of food with a slurp of bourbon. T h e n he made his way back to the Lounge and the couch, his glass in one hand, the bottle of bourbon in the other. 'You're not drinking. C ' m o n , be a pal.' He poured himself another and held out the bottle to me. I took it from him and put it down. 'I don't care for bourbon.' 'Drink whatever you like,' he said generously, waving his hand

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towards the drinks cabinet and spilling bourbon from his glass. 'Whoops!' 'I thought you'd be back in N e w York by now.' 'Sent Saskia on ahead. Wanted some time to myself,' he said cheerily. 'Quality time, y ' k n o w ? Fucking togetherness gets to be a pain after a bit.' T h e n his face fell and he swallowed a nascent sob. 'Christ, R o b i n , you're the only friend I've got, the only one!' T h e poor bastard had no friends at all. He reached for the bourbon and refilled his glass. No ice now. 'Would you care for some coffee, Stan?' He peered at me, his eyes grotesquely enlarged by his glasses, and took a stab at a sneering smile. 'Prefer a wide-awake drunk to a sleeping one, old buddy?' 'I'd like a cup. I think I'll make some anyway' H o w was I to get him out of the house while he could still walk? It was too early to point out that it was getting late. I returned with a tray of coffee paraphernalia, including c h o c o late digestives, quite the thoughtful host, to catch him taking a swig of bourbon straight from the bottle. He glanced at the label. '"Fighting C o c k . " Y o u fucking with me?' I put a cup before him and filled it. 'Here's some coffee. Give it a try' 'Sent her back to fucking Jerome, "fucking" being both present participle and ubiquitous adjective. No need to take your pick.' He placed the flat of his hands over his eyes to form a triangle with his mouth. 'Oh, Jesus! Fucking Jerome's always had whatever he wanted, so w h y not my wife too? Fuck her, the bitch! Let 'em get on with it.' 'Stan, don't tell me things that tomorrow you'll regret having said.' 'Caught them at it, Jerome humping her as if he were a kid doing push-ups; her eyes are glazed and she's squealing her

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ecstasy. Pulled him off the slut. He ran out of the room making squeals of his own.' His laugh was a ghastly rattle. 'Hid himself, naked as a jay bird, in the closet, fucking coward. I beat the shit out of her. I mean, her eye wasn't black, but technicoloured, trust me, Cheddar yellow and teal blue predominant. Sent her packing, the bitch. Shoulda left it that way.' Stan tossed his glasses onto the table and rubbed his eyes with his fists, the way a small child tries to rid himself of tears. 'She came crawling back, of course. She'd needed a fuck, she said, and I was unwilling. That's all it was, she said, just a fuck. That was supposed to make it all right. Infidelity as a form of therapy. Let copulation thrive! "Let bygones be bygones," she said. Sure, w h y not?' Stan ignored the coffee, reached for the botde and took another swig. 'I'd made like I was unwilling,' he said. 'The fact is, I can't get it up any more, not since I decided to become a hero and got myself shot. T h e once reliable shtupper won't shtup. Tough, huh? Fighting Cock, for Christ's sake.' He broke down at last and sobbed. I didn't know what to do. T h e impulse to approach and offer sympathy was precisely balanced by the impulse to back off in disgust, producing a kind of stasis. Thus paralysed, I waited him out. Poor Saskia had not so much caused his despair as she had got in its way. In his pitiable weakness he had lashed out at someone physically weaker than himself. A n d she, loyal soul, had denied he'd harmed her. She had shouldered the blame and even imputed to Stan a modicum of gallantry. I felt the balance tipping, disgust for him outweighing sympathy. At last, the sobs ceased. He put his glasses back on and took another swig of bourbon. He had already accounted for more than half a bottle. He sniffed. 'Nothing the matter with it physically; it's all psychological. T h e old cock won't fight. Impr . . . impl . . . impor . . . just can't get it up. Too old for therapy. Take me another twenty years to work through this.'

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'Stan, I don't think you want me to k n o w any of this.' 'You're my friend, Robin.' 'Even so.' ' W h y should Jerome get her?' he sobbed. He speech was thickening and slurring. 'I shrill, I still want her, the shlut.' He lifted his hands and addressed the ceiling. 'Oh, Saskia, sweetheart, oh, Shashkia!' 'There are pills for impotence nowadays. T h e y tell me they're a sure cure.' He snorted.'Another of God's little jokes. Tried 'em. Give me the fucking shits, give me fucking headaches, give me fucking floppy boobs. Burns like fucking hell w h e n I piss, too. At more than ten bucks a pop, not worth it.' He leaned back into the couch. ' I ' m so tired, R o b i n . Gotta close my eyes, gotta sh . . .' A n d he began immediately to snore. I picked up the bottle of bourbon, recapped it and put it back in the cabinet. What now? I turned to look at him, in time to see him jerk violently twice, vomit in copious vile gouts over himself, the couch and the digestives, and fall back into snoring slumber. It seemed to me he was happy.

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SIX

YRIL ENTWISTLE: A LIFE IN OILS was published on both

sides of the Atlantic in time for the Christmas trade, ^ 3 5 in the United Kingdom, $ 5 0 in the United States. T h e price alone, one would think, argued the importance of the publication. In America, Stan was interviewed by Morty Wolitzer on the P B S programme In Town Tonight, a sure sign not only of the seriousness with which this biography was to be regarded over there, but also of the I O U s Saskia was able to call in; here in Great Britain Cyril appeared on the Beeb's Books and Personalities — a clear warning, surely, of the lack of serious attention the local cognoscenti felt the biography deserved — and refused to talk about the book, directing poor old Piers Townsend again and again to the noteworthy grievances of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. ' H o w can we talk about my ephemeral life story when in Palestine men and women are dying in the cause of freedom?' Franklin Pangbourne, the doyen of American art critics, himself the author of the out-of-print Bloomsbury and the Limits of Art and current director of the Oshkosh Museum of Fine Arts, reviewed the book for the New York Times. He quoted R o b e r t Skidelsky, w h o spoke of biography as 'voyeurism embellished with footnotes'. Pangbourne was kind enough to praise incidental felicities in Stan's work — 'One senses a genuine affinity with the nous of the major erotic paintings'; 'Kops paints a vivid picture of the Yorkshire Dales in the middle-class British

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imagination and of their special significance in the unfolding of the north—south dichotomy in British art' — but pointed to the author's 'fatal Cleopatra', a determination to see his subject in the simplest Freudian terms. 'Oedipus, I regret to say, is the pattern Kops imposes on all his biographical subjects — fair enough, I suppose, when the subject, like Hogarth or Copley, cannot answer back, but surely disastrous when he's still alive.' Pangbourne complained that glimpses into the goings-on in the Entwistle bedroom, even if true, were irrelevant to our understanding of the artist and his work. ' W h o is Kops's audience?' Pangbourne wondered. 'What serious student of art is interested in the artist's preferred positions of sexual congress? Is it so very difficult to discern the point at which discretion begins?' Pangbourne set (or, more generously, exemplified) the tone assumed by the greater number of American reviewers. Irving Karpf, Hexter Professor of Art History at U C L A , w h o reviewed the biography for the New York Review of Books, quoted Philip Guedalla: 'Biography like big-game hunting, is one of the recognised forms of sport, and it is unfair as only sport can be.' Karpf linked his book review to a review of an exhibition of art by wartime English artists, Once More Unto the Breach, at the Yale Center for British Art. He took the trouble to telephone Cyril in Yorkshire to learn what he thought of the biography. 'Bugger me,' Cyril allegedly said, 'I haven't read the sodding thing. Is it out, then?' This quoted remark prompted a response from Stan, the first of many, in which he cited, article and codicil, the agreement he had come to with Cyril Entwistle and the publishers. He assured readers of the NYRB that Cyril had not only received a copy of the completed manuscript, but had commented on it — comments to which the biographer had given appropriate consideration.'Cyril Entwistle and I had achieved a singular rapport during the c o m position of this biography. T h e artist, while never intruding upon my understanding of his life or imposing his own view of events,

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clearly participated in the creation of the whole. I have ready for inspection his taped and written responses to the final draft of the book. While I cannot doubt the accuracy of Professor Karpf s account, I cannot understand it. Cyril Entwisde is undoubtedly the greatest British artist of the last century, but, alas, he is getting on. Perhaps forgetfulness has fed his comments.' Of course, it's unlikely that many readers paid much attention to Stan's rebuttal. Unfair? Well, it's a cliche, but no less true for all that: life's unfair. In England the reviews were as pallid as those in America. It is interesting to note a pattern. On both sides of the Atlantic the reviewer kicks off with a quotation that sets the tone of his review. Charles Bullough in the Sunday Times opted for Virginia Woolf: 'Let the biographer print fully, completely, accurately, the known facts without comment; then let him write the life as fiction.' T h e review went on to imply that in Cyril Entwistle: A Life in Oils fiction was more in evidence than fact. Arthur Tichbourne in the Guardian began with Jose Ortega y Gasset: Biography is 'a system in which the contradictions in human life are unified'. Magnus ffynch-Lyons in the London Review of Books dug a little deeper. He quoted Rainer Maria R i l k e in a letter to the Duchess Aurelia Gallarati Scotti: 'For some people their spiritual birthplace coincides with that which one finds mentioned in their passports, and it must confer an unheard of happiness to be identical with external circumstances to such a degree.' T h e tenor of ffynch-Lyons s argument, of course, was that few of the details of Entwistle s life appearing in Stan's biography matched the actuality of the man, certainly not of his spiritual self, whatever that might be. It was left to Tobias Partridge, editor of the venerable Art & Culture Quarterly, but reviewing in the TLS, to pen the definitive judgement on 'a writer w h o understands little about art and even less about felicitous English prose'. Partridge led off with

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Oscar Wilde: 'Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas w h o writes the biography' What distinguishes Partridge from the rest — the 'hireling wolves', as Stan was to refer to his critics in one painfully bitter Letter-to-the-Editor is his vituperative, mocking tone: Kops accords Entwistle the full Freudian treatment, e v i dently unaware that the Oedipal hypotheses of the unholy doctor from Vienna have long since been discredited. Entwistle's pursuit of so many women, many of them older than he, was, we are told — and I don't doubt that Kops keeps a straight face here — 'without any question, pursuit of the mother and the nurturing w o m b from which he had emerged'. Since he could not literally kill his father, he killed him off in misleading stories about his death, in or shortly after the First World War, either (if he wanted to assert pedigree) as an officer and gentleman or (if he wanted to claim origins in a working class out of which he had painfully climbed) as a plebeian brute. A n d at this point, Kops, crowing as if he had o'ershot R o b i n H o o d , reveals with a flourish his own candidate, a one-handed pianist in San Francisco, w h o died in 1 9 5 7 . Without wishing to enter into the sensitive matter of Entwistle's paternity — and I dare say we cannot go far amiss if we respect the evident desire of the living artist for privacy in this regard — I can myself assure the reader that Kops is quite wrong in his attribution. It did not require much in the way of'research', a word to which the author gives almost sacral resonance, for this reviewer to discover that the Entwisde w h o played the piano in a disreputable bar in San Francisco was born in Lancashire, not Yorkshire, and that his given name was George, not Giles.

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Partridge goes on to say that he has known Entwisde for more than forty years and that, while he would not have the temerity to claim friendship, the two of them having been too often professionally at odds, he has the highest regard for his genius. If Entwistle cannot be located in the lineal development of twentieth-century British art, he nevertheless stems from it: exuberant, unique, eccentric and yet undeniably of his time and place. Kops, Partridge argued, was quite evidendy tone deaf to the harmonies of this extraordinary artist. Partridge went on to say that he could not recognise either Entwisde or his work in 'this deplorable biography'. Partridge's review produced a spate of correspondence that the Editor allowed to drag on for six weeks before he called a halt. Most of these letters augmented Partridge's strictures with additional negative comments. To most of these Stan replied, striving to shore up his defences against an onrushing tide. However, he was forced to admit that Partridge was right about the San Francisco Entwistle; he had 'inexcusably' supposed that G. Entwistle was Giles. T h e appropriate adjustment would be made in the next edition, should there be one. It was apparent that Stan's book would soon be stacked on the remainder tables, a stillborn mishap, misconceived and misdelivered. Ironically, there was too much about fine art in it for it to interest even those w h o might ordinarily be drawn to a work whose author had been shot in a 'porno emporium' and whose subject was a world-class fornicator. T h e major book chains were already offering it at a 50 per cent discount. In an effort to save his investment, Stan's British publisher prevailed upon a fellow Old Harrovian with influence at the B B C to get Stan and Cyril together in a segment of Page Proofs, the prize-winning literary programme conducted by the urbane Alistair Ralegh. It proved to be a debacle of monstrous proportions, one that damned the biography and utterly humiliated its author. Cyril had already decided to cut himself loose from Stan.

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T h e set was the familiar one of Page Proofs, the mellow-lighted corner of some imaginary but wealthy bibliophile's library, where well-preserved and ancient volumes filled the shelves. Alistair R a l e g h and his guests sat in deep leather chairs, before them at knee level an exquisite Queen Anne occasional table, upon which were a cut-glass water j u g and three cut-glass tumblers atop a gleaming silver salver, and, of course, a copy of Cyril Entwistle: A Life in Oils. T h e camera moved from R a l e g h , w h o had finished w e l coming his guests, first to C y r i l , w h o sat magnificently erect in his country-gentleman tweeds, his open-necked shirt of tattersall check. It let you register that his hands were trembling and twitching and then moved on, discreetly, to focus on his face, in old age grown noble and craggy, albeit a trifle stiff. T h e camera then shifted to Stan, Timothy's colobus monkey, albeit a monkey nattily dressed in a made-to-measure double-breasted grey flannel suit and sporting a 'power' tie of heavy red silk. He was engulfed by his chair, in which he slouched in a manner that was perhaps intended to suggest ease; his nervousness was betrayed, however, by that sly and oily expression into which his face unavoidably fell. T h e contrast between the two men could not have been greater. Each seemed determined not to acknowledge the presence of the other. I was watching the programme in the basement TV room at the R e f o r m , a glass of McTochiss in hand. I could almost smell the animus between the two; it poisoned the air in that cosy library corner. Still, R a l e g h is a skilled interviewer. He asked Stan a few innocuous questions, which got him talking and allowed him a few well-practised, smiling words expressing his pleasure and pride in having been chosen to write the life story of this great artist. While Stan was talking the camera turned briefly to C y r i l for a reaction shot. It caught the image of a man searching the ceiling as if he were in church and

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desperate to pee, but unable to get up before the vicar finished his sermon. His antics produced a few titters in the studio audience. R a l e g h now turned to Cyril. 'And w h y did you pick Professor Kops, Mr Entwistle?' 'Gerraway, Alistair, tha knows better nor that. Go on, pull t'other.' Cyril, completely at home in a TV studio, winked broadly at the camera. He was speaking in thick Yorkshire dialect, a warning of iimninent mischief. 'You mean, you didn't pick him?' 'What, 'im, lad? Me pick yon gormless tiny twit? Y ' m o o s t think I'm daft.' From the studio audience, first gasps and then laughter, laughter that grew broader as C y r i l brought his right thumb to his nose and his left thumb to his right little finger before waggling all his fingers at poor Stan. T h e reaction shot this time might have served any art student as a model for horrified astonishment. Stan's j a w had dropped, his eyes bulged in their sockets, his right hand was clamped over his heart as if to prevent it from bursting through his ribcage. T h e expression on the face of the fallen woman in Holman Hunt's ' T h e Awakening Conscience' — the painting with which Stan, decades before, had begun his foray into the lives of British painters — an expression so unbearable that the painting's first owner had required the artist to modify it somewhat, was as nothing compared to Stan's. As for Ralegh, the camera showed a man torn between the knowledge that control of his programme was slipping from his grasp and the suspicion that he was a participant in a moment that would guarantee his posthumous fame, a signal moment in television history, as well as, perhaps — w h o knew? — in the history of art. He might find this moment right up there with Martin Bashir's 1995 no-holds-barred interview with Diana,

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Princess of Wales. Gingerly, he felt his way forward. 'If not Professor Kops, then w h o ? ' ' T h e booger w h o wrote the lives of Oswald Mosley and of Aneurin Bevan, the Yorkshire lad, Frederick Cowper? Anyroad, that's the one. Fred K o p s / F r e d Cowper. Easy to make a mistake like that. Some might say it's my own fault. Boogered if I know. N e v e r you mind, though. I'll take the blame.' ' S o you originally intended Frederick C o w p e r to write your biography?' 'Aye.' Once more C y r i l winked at the camera; once more the studio audience laughed in appreciation. 'Cowper's a likelier name than Kops.' Stan could contain himself no longer. He leaped to his feet. 'Liar! Liar! Liar!' he screamed. He might have caught C y r i l by the throat; his hands, stiff and clawed, were ready. B u t R a l e g h got to his feet and stood between them. 'Gentlemen, gentlemen!' 'I've got correspondence!' Stan screamed. 'I've got tapes! I've got notes! He's a fucking liar!' Tynan had used the F-word decades ago, the stuff of legend; 'fuck' had become a staple of British TV. B u t it had never before been used on Page Proofs, other than w h e n a guest was quoting from his or someone else's book It was not so much infra dig as unexpected.The studio audience reacted accordingly:'Oo-ooh!' 'I hope we're capable of civilised discourse,' said R a l e g h pacifically. Cyril sat where he was, smiling in innocence. It was Cyril's smile, perhaps, that set Stan off. 'He's a liar, a fucking liar!' he screamed. 'What's it you want, Entwisde? What's it you've got against me, for Christ's sake?' 'Professor Kops, I . . .' began Ralegh. ' "For Christ's sake", Professor Kops? Whatever can you mean?' said Cyril sweetly. 'Damn you all!' Stan actually stamped his foot, something one

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reads about, but does not expect to see. He turned on his heel and ran from the set. Pandemonium. Momentary blackout. T h e twelve minutes intended for Cyril and Stan reduced to four. Alistair R a l e g h smoothly introduced his next guest, Tariq Shanab, author of Cricklewood, 9—5, a novel of deracination already touted as a serious Booker contender, a writer w h o found himself with eight more minutes to burble on than he had expected. No problem.

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SASKIA PHONED ME THE FOLLOWING AFTERJNTOON from her hotel.

She had come to London with Stan for his B B C interview, but he had refused to let her accompany him to the studio. He was treating her like the kiss of death, she said. A jinx. She sounded tearful. He'd told her to watch him on the TV in their hotel room. 'Did you see it, R o b i n ? ' 'Is he there?' 'No.' 'Yes, I saw it. O T T , rather. Entwistle can be a real bastard when he wants to be. B u t Stan shouldn't have lost his cool like that. He fell right into it. Made a fool of himself, I'd say' 'Christ, whose side are you on, anyway?' 'I recommended Stan to Entwistle. D i d you know that?' 'Oh, great! N o w he tells me.' 'It was a mistake, obviously' 'I warned him against it. I said, "You've never tackled a living subject before. It calls on different skills, ones you won't have the time to develop." This was before I even knew how shitty Entwistle could be. Well, you know Stan. He went into his seasoned scholar riff, nothing the trained researcher isn't capable of. Piece of cake. Stuff like that. Of course, it was the money that

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really tempted him. B i g bucks at last. B u t it wasn't really for the sake of money qua money, not really. It was for what the money signified in his insecure, little-boy mind: success! " L o o k at me, Dad! Y o u never thought I'd make it, right?" He's never gotten past that. It's ironic really, a strict disciple of Freud w h o could be a poster boy for one of the oldest cliches of Adlerian diagnosis, a superiority complex masking an inferiority complex. He growls like a lion because he really believes he's a w o r m . 'So it was up to me to negotiate the contract. "Just sew the fucker up, Saskia. No wriggle room. He can see, but not touch. All rights reserved to me. Go ahead, Saskia." So I did. N o w , of course, it's all my fault.' Her voice had begun to quaver. 'Fuck, fuck, fuck.' 'Where is he now?' 'Jesus, I don't know. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I guess. Landing in Kennedy, maybe.' ' Y o u mean, he ran off and left you here?' 'You could put it like that.' 'Saskia, we must talk. N o t like this on the telephone. Where are you staying? I'll pick you up. We'll go to dinner.' 'I don't think that's such a great idea.' 'It's a fine idea. Tell me where you are.' She told me. Saskia was wearing dark glasses; her cheek was bruised. She kept trying to turn her face from me. ' H e beat you up again, the bastard.' 'It's not as bad as it looks. I bruise easily. He never got his strength back. After he was shot, I mean. N o t that he'd ever hit me before that.' Saskia began to cry. I put my arms around her; she clung to me, sobbing. We were in her room at the Godolphin in Pont Street. W h e n she grew calmer, I led her to her chair and she sat down, a

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dinnnutive figure trying to disappear. I took her dark glasses from her, and once more she turned her head from me. I took her by the chin and made her look at me. Her left eye was almost closed; her lids, her cheeks, these were puffed and discoloured. 'Don't look at me.' ' W h y not? I love you, Saskia.' I'm not good at this. I don't write sentimental scenes; I avoid them in my fiction. B u t I suspect that when we find ourselves, in our actual lives, in circumstances that persuade us that we are actors in a romantic play or film or novel, we respond with the appropriate lines. N o r are we insincere, necessarily. It's just that our fines have been written for us. R o o m service provided us with dinner. There was no need to go out. 'You must leave him, Saskia, you know that.' 'I know.' 'Immediately, I mean.' 'It's not so simple. I owe him. H o w can he forgive me for Jerome? He can't. I don't expect him to. We've been married close to thirty years, R o b i n . He's told me things: his hopes, his fears. Pillow talk. He's made himself vulnerable. Y o u know what he fears most? B e i n g found out. One day the world's gonna discover he's not the great scholar he's supposed to be, he's a fake. No matter what academic honours they've given him, the day's coming. So now he supposes it's here. R i g h t now. T h e world's laughing at him. He wants to die. H o w long will it take before his colleagues hear what Entwistle said? His skin is so thin, it splits open. He bleeds. Trust me, he can't bear the shame. 'He used to be like a monkey, a sex nut; I guess I was spoiled. Then came the bullet, and that was it for him, no more fucking. M o r e shame. All Jerome was doing was easing my need, poor guy. It wasn't a love affair, it was sex. Okay, but I had no right, no right at all. I'm not an animal, for Christ's sake. So he hit

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me. D ' y o u see how it is, R o b i n ? His brother had not only stolen his parents' love, he'd stolen his wife as well.' ' Y o u must leave him, just the same,' I said. 'He's in pain. He's seriously depressed. I must help him through this.' 'Okay, but you must promise me you'll leave him.' ' A n d then what? I don't want to be alone. T h e truth is, at my age I'm not for all markets.' 'Sell here, Saskia. Please. Let's not screw this up. Barkis is willing.' What I wanted was Saskia, not just in the sexual sense, although that too, certainly. M o r e important, I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I loved her. That is how it was. I had grown sentimental and, worse yet, was unashamed of it. I felt as if we had been engaged all our lives, Saskia and I, in a stately dance, a saraband perhaps, exchanging partners, as the dance required, only to come together for the last and stateliest steps of all, the dance's purposed ending. We slept together that night, quite literally. That is, we merely slept together, wrapped chastely in one another's arms. In the morning we made love, chastely again, not wildly, as befits persons of our age. 'You must leave him.' My mantra now. 'I will, darling, I will, I promise. B u t first I must go to him.' I accompanied her to Heathrow and, reluctandy left her there.

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W H E N WAS IT? 1944? 1945? We were still in Harrogate, so the war was not yet over. T h e W i n g Commander had disappeared over the R u h r and poor M u m s y was once more in want of a husband. I, for my part, was desperately in love with Valerie Towse. She was the daughter of our charlady, Evie, and she wore a short-skirted rust-coloured knitted tunic, which, w h e n she

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skipped rope, revealed her sky-blue flannel knickers. A h , those knickers! T h e class sat on the floor around Miss Munday at story time. She read to us from some book or other, perhaps The Wind in the Willows, perhaps the Just So Stories, something of that sort. I sat behind Valerie Towse. On this occasion, I allowed my fingers to walk the short distance across the floor from my crossed knees to the back of her knitted tunic. Little by little I insinuated my fingers beneath the hp of the skirt. In delighted terror, I took the material of her knickers between my finger and thumb and pinched it. Ecstasy! My mini-perversion passed unnoticed, even by Valerie. She played with me whenever Edie brought her round, happily enough, I suppose, but she didn't much care for me. She cared for Michael King, the class bully, or K i n g Michael, as the rest of us were required to call him. W h e n I suggested we look at one another's thingies, she told me she'd already looked at K i n g Michael's and she thought that a girl's thingy was neater. O n e day Valerie found a wounded bird in our garden, a baby robin with a broken leg. She made a splint for it with matchsticks; she fed it with water from an eye dropper and with worms she found wriggling through the compost. She came to see it every day. Against the odds, the bird rallied. It lived in a nest she had made for it out of twigs, a marvel of avian imitation, that was wedged into the armature of the garden roller. One day we had a falling out, I no longer remember about what. I stood at the top of the steps outside the kitchen door, in my hand a lump of coal I had brought with me from the kitchen scuttle. T h e bird in its nest was yards and yards away. I am not and never was a good shot. Valerie was skipping towards the nest. I threw the lump of coal. I hit the bird. I killed it. Valerie picked up the corpse, dropped it, ran away in tears. B u t I ask myself, what was my guilt? Did I want to kill the bird? Certainly not. What I wanted was to bother Valerie, w h o

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had bothered me. Of course, I aimed at the bird. B u t my chances of hitting it, as I well knew, were virtually nil. Surely, my success was the interference of some malign deity. A n d yet, I was aiming at the bird. What shall we say of the indifferent golfer w h o shoots a hole in one? Was it luck? He was, after all, aiming at the hole. I ask these questions because I'm trying to understand what happened on the eighteenth floor of an apartment building on Central Park West in N e w York City. Instead of a lump of coal or a golf ball, the missile was a small statue of an Aztec god, a tourist souvenir Stan and Saskia had picked up on a holiday in M e x i c o . It was a wonderfully smooth object, almost an orb, and made of some substance that looked and felt like marble, cool and pale green. After Stan had caught Saskia in bed with his brother, Jerome, after husband and wife had become reconciled, they had sold their house in Westchester and bought an apartment on Central Park West and 70th Street overlooking the park. It was to this apartment that Stan fled after his humiliation in London; it was to this apartment that Saskia followed him, against all common sense, to offer him comfort. T h e apartment building was of historical interest, one of the oldest and grandest in the city. T h e walls were thick. A n d yet the Kopses' neighbours were able to tell the police of a fight so ferocious that its noise penetrated their own apartment, distressing their dinner guests and causing a priceless M i n g vase to tremble on the etagere. There were screamings, shoutings, thumps and crashes, not the sort of thing they were accustomed to on Central Park West and 70th Street. What I'm trying to understand, what I'm wondering about, is whether Stan knew what he was doing when he picked up the statue of the Aztec god. It must have fitted snugly into his hand, not much bigger than an American softball, its heft just

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right. What we heard later, the fruit of the coroner's inquiry, was that Stan had been depressed of late, clinically depressed. He was under treatment and cheered by Prozac, although medical and psychological testimony revealed that in the depths of depression, de profundis, so to speak, he would not take his medication. He rejoiced in a wife w h o sought his deliverance from his demons, but w h o could not prevail. W h e n he picked up the statue of the Aztec god, when he weighed it in his hand, when he hurled it with all his might across the vast living-room at Saskia's head, did he expect to hit his mark? I cannot believe it. I can't believe that even in his madness he wished her harm. He crushed her skull as surely as if he had taken a mallet to a plover's egg. She died on the instant. What we know about all this is reconstruction, mere probability. Still, it seems that once Stan had seen what he had done to Saskia, he let up a howl that transfixed his neighbours and their dinner guests, putting them all off their dessert. T h e n he opened wide a living-room window and dived to the pavement eighteen floors below, breaking through the awning that protected arriving and departing residents and guests from inclement weather, and narrowly missing the doorman, whose uniform he nevertheless splashed. B u t did he mean to kill her? N o , no, he did not, he could not. He had snapped, that's all.

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M Y R O N TEITELBAUM PHONED ME FROM N E W Y O R K . Had I heard

the news? I had. E v e r since the debacle on Page Proofs, Stan had become a newsworthy figure over here. T h e story of his u x o r i cidal suicide was splashed, if you will pardon the word, all over the newspapers, broadsheet as well as tabloid, on both sides of the Atlantic. In N e w York, that newspaper which had once

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reported to the world in page-filling thick black type ' P R O F SHOT IN P O R N O E M P O R I U M ' now offered ' H E R O P R O F KILLS WIFE,

SELF'. In the New York Times a regular academic contributor to the op-ed page wondered whether the pressure to publish, which universities unconcernedly bring to bear on their faculties, had played a role in 'this most recent and most grievous academic tragedy'. In Great Britain, of course, the story had real value mostly because of its association with Cyril. T h e media clamoured for interviews. Claire succeeded magnificently in staving them off. T h e news had hit her husband badly. 'Surely, you will grant him some peace, a little time for reflection.' Eventually C y r i l issued a statement. 'It is a sad end to a career that many, I am told, would envy.We cannot know the torments that drove Stan Kops to commit two such dreadful acts, and we dare not sit in j u d g e ment. My wife and I offer our sincere condolences to the surviving relatives.' That said, C y r i l and Claire disappeared for a while from public view, although a message from Claire on my answerphone invited me to j o i n them for a long weekend at StBonnet-du-Gard. Meanwhile, though, the story still had legs, even if they were beginning to totter. Thunderer in T h e Times fulminated against the power for evil possessed and all too often wielded by callous reviewers, and offered a brief history of what had resulted from their malice, beginning with the poet Publius Stertinius, w h o threw himself from theTarpeian R o c k when Decidius Saxa mocked his verses, thence to Chatterton, 'the marvellous boy', 'Adonais' and English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, before taking a giant leap into a question mark. 'And what of Stan Kops? A reviewer has a duty to speak honestly about the quality of the book under review. But he has no right to eviscerate its author. Ad librum sed non ad hominem! Thunderer was not a graceful Latinist.

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M y r o n sounded genuinely upset. He had just returned from the Riverbank Memorial Chapels, where, at overlapping hours and in hushed rooms on two different floors, services for husband and wife had gone forward. 'It was like switching TV channels, honey.Totally macabre, like an Orton play. Mourners kept rushing up and down between the fourth and third floors. I'm out of shape; I hardly got time to catch my breath. A n d poor Jerome, I really felt sorry for the guy. Y o u know about Jerome and Saskia, right? He didn't know where his tears were supposed to be shed, up on four with his brother or down on three with his mistress. He spoke in both places.' M y r o n paused.'/ spoke on the fourth floor. As his colleague and oldest friend — yeah, sweetie, you heard right, "oldest friend": well, I mean, the little shit's dead, for Christ's sake. De mortuis, and like that. This was his funeral, remember? C u t me some slack here — I thought it right to say a few words. 'Jake didn't show up. T h e word is, he's eaten up with shame. All he wants to do is hide. His very own daddy a murderer and suicide, w o w ! H o w will that fadge at his white-shoe law firm, eh? Besides, Jake never really forgave his father for abandoning Hope, and he blamed Saskia for the family break-up. 'Speaking of Hope, she was there, too — on four, I mean. Tell me I'm wrong, but I thought her a tad too cheery, granted the occasion and all. Oh, and you remember Phyllis R o t h , Hope's sister? She turned up, too, in both chapels. Jesus, she's gotten oink-oink fat, fatter than Hope ever was, just a fat old broad with a butch haircut and the beginnings of a wiry white moustache. Y o u knew that she'd fucked them both, didn't you, Stan and Saskia? 'I gotta tell you, R o b i n , this morning really freaked me out. Maybe it was the Riverbank. You know, cooled air, subdued lighting, l o w voices, dark clothing, red eyes, blanched faces, mourners everywhere, coffins, yarmulkes, hired rabbis mouthing

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appalling platitudes and turning in relief to incomprehensible Hebrew prayers. Maybe it was the reminder of my own mortality. I never the liked the son of a bitch, you know that. B u t I never wished this on him, not this.' M y r o n choked off a sob, gulped and began to cough. An ironic consequence of Stan's death and the notoriety attendant upon it was a sudden increase in sales of Cyril Entwistle: A Life in Oils, an increase that in America has already required a second printing of 200,000 copies. Over here, Timothy tells me, sales have also been brisk and a second printing is quite likely.

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T H E FOLLOWING YEAR, IN G O O D TIME for the fast-approaching

anniversary of Christ's nativity, the Prime Minister read into the parliamentary record the names of twenty-three new knights and four new life peers. Despite strong partisan assertions to the contrary, many thought it likely that at least sixteen of the new knights and perhaps three of the new peers — whose elevations were now in the bag — had been honoured a wee bit less for their contributions to the nation than for their contributions to the coffers of the governing party. Plus ca change, eh? T h e fourth new baron, a man w h o had never given a penny to any political party and w h o alone of the four might be universally acknowledged to have enriched his nation, not only for the c o m m o n but also for the uncommon man (and, as we are required to say nowadays, woman), was Cyril, no longer the radical w h o had decades before twice refused a knighthood, but a venerable man w h o was aware of his worth. Lord Entwistle of Dibblethwaite. G o o d grief! Up and down the length of this sceptred isle Cyril was known as a 'personality', a man whose controversial opinions, if not

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respected by the moguls of the media, were at least solicited by them. He was himself the common man, so his (deliberate) accent proclaimed him, and the beauty of it was, he was touched by genius, which allowed his refulgence to illuminate our o w n modest lives. T h e ruling party named him less in homage to his certain genius than in submission to the nation's favourites in telly chat. He had become an unassailable figure, like Vera Lynn or Wilfred Pickles, whose contemporary he was. Claire wrote to me, inviting me to attend his 'investiture' in the House of Lords. (She meant, of course, his 'introduction'. B u t she's French and can't be expected to know these subtle distinctions.) It would mean a lot to him if I were there, she said. As I surely knew, he thought of me as a son. I had avoided Cyril since Saskia's death, blaming him for my loss. B u t even I could see that if he was guilty, having approached Stan in the first place and having driven him mad in the last, then so of course was I, the Machiavel w h o had with mischievous intent thought to bring the two of them together. Even so, I blamed him. There was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between fairness and feeling, between acknowledging my own responsibility for Saskia's violent end and excusing Cyril. Besides, the causes of any event, if one possessed the ability to trace them back step by step, would lead ultimately to Eden, or if not to Eden, then to that primordial soup out of which some now believe life on Earth began. Then, of course, there was Stan's timeline of causes to consider, and Saskia's, and Cyril's, and mine. T h e coming together of four such lines produces a folie a quatre that necessarily e x o n erates all, since no one, two or three of the four can take the blame alone. B u t that is to avoid the obvious. What was obvious was that Cyril had with malice aforethought driven Stan up the wall, and that Stan, as a consequence, had — whether deliberately or not — murdered Saskia, his wife.

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On the other hand, I rather liked Claire, w h o , I think, rather liked me. She saw it as her duty not only to attend to Cyril's wants and his health, the two duties not always in tandem, but to restrain him, whenever she could, from the grosser of his eccentricities. Unlike her husband, she was not a bigot, and she spoke with pride of a remote Sephardic ancestor, a disciple of Spinoza and descendant of Montaigne. B u t she was in thrall to Cyril's genius and fiercely protective of his privacy and calm. She was also devastated by the inroads of a disease on him, a disease she recognised, but which he daffed cavalierly and foolishly aside. M o r e than eighty winters had besieged his brow. This former nurse, much younger than her husband, was prepared for what old age would impose upon him. But his had been a vigour that belied his years and a sinewy strength that melted her loins. N o w he could no longer control the tremor of his fingers on her breast or get out of their Land R o v e r without her assistance. All Claire wanted was Cyril's happiness, and she supposed that my presence at his introduction to his lordly peers was necessary to it. Very well, then. For her sake I went. We were an embarrassingly small support group. Apart from me, there were Claire, of course, and her Cousin Bette, w h o m I had once before met and w h o owned a successful restaurant in Avignon, La Grenouille Farcie; what might be designated 'the St-Bonnet-du-Gard crowd', represented today by Timothy, w h o has always been a sucker for ceremony, and Basil Mudge, the former jockey, w h o had missed becoming Sir Basil Mudge by a nose, a friendly government falling on the very day he had announced his retirement. I began to feel a trifle sorry for Cyril. Was our small group — not even a coterie — the best and the most that Claire could summon to bear witness to her husband's elevation? T h e ceremony began. Black R o d and Garter K i n g of Arms

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led the procession into the Chamber, a kitschy Victorian notion of ancient architectural splendour, numerous lords in attendance. T h e y were followed by Cyril, but C y r i l in a wheelchair, pushed along with impressive coordination by his two sponsors. I glanced questioningly at Claire. She nodded, and then shook her head: yes, she implied, this is what she had warned me to expect. Only, she hadn't. We saw them from the rear as they approached the Woolsack; the three of them were wearing the required parliamentary gowns and the weird parliamentary hats. At the Woolsack, C y r i l was supposed to kneel and present his Writ of Summons to the Lord Chancellor. Of course, being in a wheelchair he was spared this requirement and the Lord Chancellor rose from his throne to take the Writ from him. Garter K i n g of Arms, still spry, hopped over and handed the Lord Chancellor Cyril's Letters Patent of Creation. T h e R e a d i n g Clerk then read out the contents of these documents and Cyril, 'solemnly affirming' rather than swearing the Oath of Allegiance, signed the Test R o l l . He was spared the journey to the bench appropriate to his rank and the silly business of rising from it three times, each time doffing his hat and bowing to the Lord Chancellor. Instead, the Lord Chancellor rose once more from his throne and shook hands with Cyril. What cheerful words he uttered were inaudible to us. T h e Chamber mumbled its approval. T h e initial procession then reversed itself, making for the exit. It was then that I got a proper look at Cyril. T h e angle of his head favoured his left side. His tremors were quite evident. He looked older than Methuselah and much frailer. His deterioration had been swift. It was hard for me to maintain my animus. There was a cruel irony, I thought, in conferring the rank of life peer on a man whose fife was clearly almost over, a man w h o wobbled on the very edge of the grave. But we were granted one glorious moment of the familiar

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Cyril before he disappeared beneath our angle of vision. He sneezed, and a thick, yellow-green squirt of snot traced a passage from his left nostril to the corner of his mouth. He lifted his arm and with the sleeve of his ceremonial gown wiped himself clean. T h e n he looked up at us and grinned grotesquely, his new upper teeth having left his gums and fallen onto his lower hp. T h e trembling thumb that he had hefted in sign of victory was now seconded to his mouth. He disappeared from view. I need not have concerned myself about the meagre turnout for Cyril's moment of glory in the House of Lords, though. Claire thanked us for our attendance and excused herself for the rude necessity of leaving, but she had to hasten to j o i n Cyril for the drive to the R o y a l Academy, where a glittering banquet in his honour was in the offing, the Prince ofWales and the Prime Minister being among the guests. Perhaps needless to say, I and the other witnesses to Cyril's assumption of lordship had not been invited. On the other hand . . . There arrived this morning by courier from Dibblethwaite a carefully wrapped package from Lord Entwistle and an accompanying note from his lady. T h e note said simply, ' C y r i l thought you might want this. Best, Claire.' 'This', w h e n unwrapped, turned out to be an exquisite pencil drawing of Saskia, a nude, but a nude of the young Saskia, the beautiful Saskia, as she had looked when I had first seen her at a London party years and years ago. It was a miracle of draughtsmanship, drawn in the manner and in imitation of Ingres, with Saskia in the pose of an unclothed 'Madame d'Haussonville', but with an expression on her face that mischievously hinted at erotic delight. Cyril had signed it. I turned the sheet over. He had written there Miss Saskia Tarnopol, Chelsea, 1968, C. F. T h e initials, I knew, stood for Cyrillus fecit, a private joke: he used them only with reference to the models he'd slept with.

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C y r i l was quite right, of course. I did 'want this'. I more than wanted it; I was overwhelmed at the thought of possessing it. Its possession fed a thousand fantasies, for in possessing her youthful likeness I felt that I had possessed her when, as the poet says, the youthful hue sat on her skin like morning dew. My eyes actually teared. B u t C y r i l was a sly old dog; his good deed was surely intended to punish. H o w had he managed to bed her at a time w h e n she was so very much in love with Terence Addo, the student from Ghana, 'the black Adonis'? H o w is it that she gave no hint that she had met C y r i l years before, w h e n first I had mentioned his name to her in the R e f o r m Club, that time w h e n she and the divorcing Stan were taking a holiday in London from life's complications; or when, many years later, she and I had stood before the portrait of Polly Kops in Connecticut? A n d w h e n was it that C y r i l had understood that Saskia meant something to me? Obviously, his generous gift was intended, minimally, to assert that he had fucked her before me. B u t had he? Was this another of his games with the historical record? Had he simply added her face, taken perhaps from a photograph, to the body of one of his Dibblethwaite models? Were the notes on the drawing's verso merely persiflage? Ordinary politeness required that I now get in touch with C y r i l . Perhaps that was all to the good. In the very act of thanking him I might be able to winkle out an answer or two to some of my questions. Or so I thought. I decided to wait until the weekend before making my duty call. By then I hoped I would have worked out my approach. H o w stupid it all seems now! What hubris to suppose I could enter a game of his choosing with a master player, one w h o made up the rules as he went along! In the event, I was too late. C y r i l had already won the game. T h e phone in Dibblethwaite was answered by Aggie, Claire's daily. Her voice was trembly, but emboldened by her excitement

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at the honour of being the chosen messenger, the necessary conveyor of grim news. His lordship had been taken poorly, proper poorly, in the morning on his way to the loo. Collapsed, he had. By the time she, Aggie, had arrived, bang on eight, her ladyship was sitting in the back of an ambulance with Lord Entwisde stretched out, the ambulance all but ready to leave. T h e y were off to the Leeds R o y a l Infirmary according to the driver. "E was a right old geezer, was 'is lordship. You 'ad to laff.' A g g i e managed a sobbing chuckle. 'Said woonce 'e wanted t'paint my privates. "What!" I said, playing along, like. " Y o u never want me to pose in the nude! Oh, you wicked, wicked old man!" " N o t pose, Aggie," says 'e. "Just want to paint your privates. A n y colour you like, red, yellow, blue." 'E was a scream, 'e was, could-a been on the telly. WeD, 'e was, wontee?' I asked A g g i e to leave a note saying that I'd called, that I'd heard the news and that I would phone again in the evening. T h e n I phoned the Leeds R o y a l Infirmary, but was given no useful information at all. Lord Entwistle had been admitted, was resting comfortably, was not allowed visitors (other than Lady Entwisde, w h o was with him) and must not be disturbed. It was eleven that night before I got through to Claire. She sounded tired, but her voice was calm. C y r i l had suffered a massive stroke, and by this afternoon he had slipped into a coma. There was no reason to hope, and she had none. T h e A g e of Miracles was long since past. He'd had a good life and a long one, after all. There were no grounds for complaint. 'Only' — and here her voice broke momentarily — 'only I'll miss him so.' I made the mumbling sounds one makes when the only language available is the language of platitudes and one hates oneself as an insincere bastard. I offered to j o i n her in Dibblethwaite, to alternate with her in Leeds at Cyril's bedside, to do whatever I could that might be helpful to her. A n d I was ashamed of my relief when she told me to stay in London.

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'There's no point in coming. Cyril certainly wmililn'i know that you're here. I'm not alone. You remember my < ousin, Bette, yes? Well, she's still here with me. And Cyril and I have in.my friends in the vicinity. He's quite well liked around here, you k n o w ' She promised she would keep me informed, bul now si itwas rather tired and would like to rest. A bit peremptory, don't you think? Human relationships are fraught with misunderstandings, nuances of meaning losl or twisted in transmission. This is particularly true on the telephone. What the speaker intends, he does not always convey. Phlegm in the throat, a misplaced auditory comma, a hesitation brought on by awareness of a sneeze-in-the-making, any of these and many others might subtly alter the tenor of a remark.Tin- auditOl is ever on the alert, ever interpreting and ever prone to read into another's speech what perhaps was never there. Still, it was evident that Claire did not want me eithei in Dibblethwaite or in Leeds. Was it possible to take her won Is .it face value? Why, yes, of course it was. But I thought 1 had i aughl the teeniest bit of rebuke in her tone. In her view, Cyril thought of me as a son. N e v e r mind to what extent and in what < ertain circumstances C y r i l felt it convenient so to think ol me I low had I, the son, oflate behaved? At a time when my father's health was crumbling, I had turned my back on him. Wis .ill tin. in Claire's voice, or was it the squealing of my lacerated const ien< i Damned if I know. I had the absurd thought that if Mumsy were still alive, the news from Dibblethwaite would kill her.

*

*

•

T I M O T H Y PHONED ME. H A D I SEEN THE PAPERS? The media, u

we call them nowadays, were full of Cyril, his art and his med ical condition. A B B C reporter stood before the Leeds Royal

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Infirmary, his speech patterns punctuated by (and his head swaying to) the familiar B B C rhythms. It was like a M o n t y Python skit. We were told that the Infirmary did not propose to tell us anything. B a c k in the studio, the anchorwoman nodded wisely. T h e Guardian noted that Lord Entwistle, a champion of the common man throughout the world w h o had long resisted the siren allure of a tide, had at last succumbed. T h e implication was, 'And see what trouble followed.' The Times recalled that the newly minted Lord Entwistle had long been a controversial figure, whose art was at the centre of current feminist debate and whose freely expressed opinions on Israel and on Jewish influence in world affairs had occasioned heated arguments throughout the length and breadth of Great Britain. T h e C h i e f R a b b i , Dr Daniel Leibovici, suggested that prayers be offered in synagogues throughout the land for the recovery of this artist, a Righteous Gentile, w h o had so movingly captured the Jewish experience of the Holocaust that his greatest work was to be seen not in any of our national galleries, but in the Tabakman Museum of Tel Aviv. T h e Archbishop of Canterbury, not to be outgunned in the religious wars, hoped that a place might be found in Westminster Abbey - not soon, one prayed, but on the to-do list, nevertheless, of the Lord's calendar — for the earthly remains of our brother in Christ, Lord C y r i l Entwistle. Meanwhile, prayers for his return to health were our charitable duty. Amen. T h e writers of obituaries were doubtless sharpening their pencils, bringing their files up to date. T h e cultural world was astir. Tobias

Partridge, writing in the

Evening

Standard, waxed

Shakespearian: ' H e is a man who, while embracing in himself the savage contradictions of the last century, still bestrides the narrow art world like a Colossus.' At any rate, Timothy wanted to know whether I was au fait, whether I knew what the rest of mankind knew. B u t Cyril, lying still in a coma at the Leeds R o y a l Infirmary,

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was not the principal reason lot Timothy's call. Timothy had received a query from an American commercial TV network. Was I interested m writing a docudrama about Stan Kops for a popular TV series called Profiles in Murder? I was uniquely qualified for such an undertaking, being a writer by profession and having known Stan personally. This was a serious programme, Timothy assured me, its producer well known to him. Besides which, the money that was on offer might easily surpass the totality of what I had earned in my entire career as a writer of fiction. 'Get real,' was T i m o t h y s advice. Well, I'm interested. It's quite true, after all, that I knew Stan, had known him over many years — besides which, I had also known Saskia, knew Hope, knew Stan's brother and son, as well as many of his colleagues. Timothy might be right that I am uniquely qualified for the task. All I have on my desk at the moment are three false starts on three different novels, miscarriages all. It might be useful to strike out in a different direction, plant my seed, so to speak, in a different womb. B u t to write a biography for a television audience, a biography that presumably would attempt to show the stages in a man's life that led him ineluctably from an unremarkable childhood in Brooklyn to academic honours and thence to the murder of his wife and his subsequent suicide, hoc opus, hie labor est. Perhaps I could shape a Hfe for Stan more appealing than his own. Perhaps not. I promised Timothy that I would call him back soon, and I shall, perhaps this evening, perhaps tomorrow morning. To be honest for just a moment, I admit that I'm tempted.

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