Tales from the Tower, Volume 2 Page 5

  He just wishes he didn’t have to keep reminding himself of the fact.

  {5}

  How did she expect him to react? She must have thought it through, because she has spent hours mentally composing emails and deciding not to send them. Except for the one that had the hint. She would never expect him to meet her at the airport, any more than she would meet him if he had been away for a few weeks. It’s a long time since they have been at that stage of their romance. But she sent the email anyway, just to flag the fact that he should expect a change. So if not this, what had he expected? She hasn’t been away all that long. She is hardly likely to have put on four stone, and she couldn’t have lost it because she doesn’t have it to lose.

  The kettle boils but she doesn’t get up to make coffee. The most likely thing is that he paid no attention to the email at all. He might have registered the day and the time that she was arriving – he must have, because he has bought the flowers and that irritating bottle – but ignored the bit at the end, or regarded it as a joke.

  And what did she expect? Hello, darling. Have you done something to your hair? (Pause, to pour her a glass of tepid, overpriced, melon-flavoured soda pop.) How was New York?

  She hasn’t changed her hair. What she has done is stop changing it. He has always known the truth about this – she has never lied to him about it. Not only did she take the trouble to tell him about it at the first decent opportunity, but she has reminded him regularly, over the years.

  So why didn’t she warn him? Why didn’t she actually send any of those carefully composed emails?

  She knows why she didn’t. She was leaving herself room to change her mind. And she still could do that. She hates colouring it herself and always gets it done by a professional, but she keeps a couple of bottles in the bathroom for emergencies. She could go up there now and colour it again and tell him it was all a joke. By tomorrow they could both pretend it never happened.

  He could, perhaps. She couldn’t. She has been working towards this moment for years, now. And the irony of it is that it was he who set her on the path in the first place.

  {6}

  He lights a cigarette and turns away from the pub. There are other pubs, of course, thousands of them in London, but none so dangerous to him as his local.

  Fifteen years. Can it really be fifteen years since that night in another pub? The one in Camden, after the launch?

  No, it was not love at first sight, despite the electric charge. She was tipsy when the conversation began and almost legless by the time it wound up. She touched him more and more often, to emphasise the earnest nature of whatever it was she was saying, and leaned in closer and closer as the evening progressed and her balance deteriorated.

  ‘You need my help,’ she said, about once every ten minutes. ‘Poetry needs to be rescued from obscurity. It will be my good work capital G capital W. It will salve my conscience and save my soul.’ She was a freelance publicist, she told him, and worked for most of the major publishers. Ran some of their big, blockbuster campaigns. ‘I know everybody,’ she went on. ‘Anybody who is everybody.’ She laughed at herself. ‘I’ve had a bit too much, haven’t I? I’m off duty, that’s why. Here, you finish this.’

  He took the glass from her and, making sure that she saw him, drank from the very spot her lipstick had stained. Their eyes met.

  ‘You need my help,’ she said. ‘Poetry needs to be rescued.’

  His publisher materialised and pressed a fresh glass into her hand. She really was somebody important, then. His publisher did not readily buy rounds.

  ‘Give me your card,’ she said.

  Slowly, and with great care, he tore a three-inch by two-inch rectangle from an empty cigarette packet and wrote his name and phone number on it. She read it, smiling, and handed it back.

  ‘And your mobile,’ she said.

  He didn’t take it. ‘I don’t have a mobile.’

  ‘Better get one, then,’ she said.

  Then her friend came along and, in a practised manner, took the new glass of wine out of her hand and steered her out of the door. She was still clutching his homemade card, but he didn’t hold out much hope that it would survive. He didn’t expect ever to see her again.

  But the next day, when he was still asleep, the phone rang. It wasn’t her, but the call came because of her. It was a researcher for a local radio station who wanted to set up a short interview about his book with the presenter of the evening arts round-up. They did it over the phone that afternoon, and the presenter was young and glib and sounded as if he had just moved from a job advertising cheap lager. His questions were idiotic – verging on humiliating.

  ‘So who reads poetry these days? The spotty young bloke in the corner with the glasses, isn’t it? I mean, what’s the point of it really, when we have movies and computer games and stuff? What is it saying that all those other things can’t?’

  It’s hard to talk about the soul to gobshites like that. He survived somehow, but the interview wrecked his head and it took him a long time to recover his equilibrium. He swore he’d never do it again, but the next offer was more interesting: a small, serious production company making a documentary for BBC Radio 4 about Irish writers in London. He did well. The documentary used a lot of his comments and observations, and soon after that he was approached by a different company, for Radio 4 again, to take part in a morning panel discussion program.

  No, she couldn’t have told him about her hair on that first, noisy, bladdered occasion. It didn’t fit. The next one then? That dreadful party with all those media people? Surely not. When they went to dinner then, a week later? Their first proper date. He remembered now, or it might be that he imagined a memory. He must have remarked on her hair, or perhaps he leaned across to pick something out of it. Like what? A leaf? A bit of a twig? Or perhaps he was standing behind her, helping her into her coat, and the soft, gleaming mass of it was under his nose, and he said, ‘It’s such a lovely colour.’

  And she said, ‘It’s out of a bottle. I’ve been going grey since I was twenty-four.’

  {7}

  Reading his poetry and getting to know him had made her re-evaluate her life. He wrestled with things she never thought about, with the nature of the human race and our relationships with each other, with the earth, with the stars. There had always been men in her life, but she fell for him in a way that was entirely new. Her analyst told her that he represented her animus, her soul’s guide, and that she was attracted to him because he embodied what she wanted to become.

  ‘A poet?’ she said. The idea made her laugh, and she left the session full of scepticism. But over the days and weeks that followed, and in subsequent analysis sessions, she came to see that there was some kind of truth in the suggestion. She still had no desire to be a poet, but she began to think in a new way about the work she did and the validity and integrity of it, and her confidence in what she did began to develop cracks. Through them she glimpsed different possibilities about what she might do. Or, more importantly, what she might be.

  Her commitment to her work began to slide. She saw the slick and glitzy people around her in a new light; judged them against him, or against her animus perhaps, and found them lacking. Not in glamour or wit or wealth or power. What they lacked was depth.

  She began to crave a different kind of life. She sought out his company more and more, and before long they became lovers, and the talks they had went on long into the small hours and made the work she did in publicity feel shallow and mundane. She began to examine the books she represented for their content and not just for their saleability. She was amazed at how much rubbish she had sold in the past, and how repugnant some of the people were whom she had represented. And she saw, as well, how her life and her work had become one and the same thing. All her office hours were taken up with phone calls and meetings. All her meals were meetings as well; a clockwork succession of cafés and restaurants, with a launch or a publisher’s party thrown in here and there. Mo
st of the time she had left in the evenings and weekends was given over to catching up on emails and reading the books of the next authors she was going to be paid to represent. But she realised now that she got no pleasure from reading anymore. Or at least, she got no more pleasure than a professional gambler might get from picking up a newly dealt hand of cards and working out how best to play it. The actual content of the book, its essential nature, was irrelevant.

  And then there were the authors themselves. She remembers how it was when she started out in business; the thrill she got from meeting these people and dropping their names. She doesn’t remember when that changed and she began to view her charges with cynicism. With rare exceptions, these people she once believed to be so fabulous and talented turned out to be neurotics with monstrous egos. She had a huge range of tools in her social kitbox, but the one she used most often with the authors was flattery. A bit of flattery never went amiss on the other side of the fence, either, with the media people who had the power to make or break, but she needed different kinds of tools there as well. She bribed researchers to take little fish on to their shows, with promises of bigger fish to come. She tempted tabloids and chat shows with sordid little details weaselled out of her authors late at night in pubs. And she networked. She got her hair coloured and styled, she painted her face and went out on the town. No one in the business had a nose to equal hers when it came to sniffing out the right parties to be seen at or the latest little out-of-the-way pub where the People Who Mattered could be found.

  She was liked, she knows that, despite the disdain with which both seekers and purveyors of publicity view her caste. She was liked because she knew how to be liked and never allowed her personal opinion of others to get in the way of that. It was a deliberate act, a carefully measured blend of servility, competence and frivolity. It never surprised her that her work diary was always full or that she was invited to every party in town.

  Until she met the poet, and then she was suddenly flummoxed.

  {8}

  It surprised him to learn that she dyed her hair, but what surprised him even more was the slow realisation that they were all at it. He didn’t watch much TV, but when he did turn it on he saw that almost every commercial break had an ad for one hair colour product or another. They were as familiar to him as the ads for cars and booze and burgers, so he must have known they were there. It just hadn’t registered that if these things were worth that amount of expensive advertising, there must be a massive market for them.

  When he discovered this, he thought back over his previous relationships. He didn’t remember ever seeing any of those advertised colourants in a bathroom cabinet, but did that mean none of his previous partners had used them? He didn’t know, because he now saw the stuff in the window of every hairdresser’s shop he passed. How could you tell, if you weren’t let in on the secret? Were there giveaway signs that he had never learned to read?

  And why should it matter, anyway? It was the person who counted and not the colour of their hair. He had proved that to himself, and to her, when they became lovers. He had proved it doubly when he committed himself to the relationship and moved in with her. He didn’t forget about it – she wouldn’t let him forget – but it had never seemed important.

  So why does it matter now? The image of her standing in the kitchen doorway revisits him, and it brings with it a sharp echo of the original shock. He loves her and it shouldn’t change anything, but it does.

  He has only just opened a new packet of cigarettes, but he goes into a shop to buy more. Wherever his feet carry him, it will be a long night. He buys two packets and a spare lighter, and he keeps his eyes down on the sweets counter so he won’t be tempted to look at the shelves of bottles behind the assistant’s head. He adds a chocolate bar to the tally, even though he detests the stuff, because it will be such a long night that he may need it.

  She rescued his career from the brink of extinction. Everything he has become he owes to her. She turned his life around.

  He didn’t always like what it entailed, but he had been too long ignored to turn down the chance of a bit of attention. He hated the day of media training she arranged for him (and paid for), but he made good use of it nonetheless. The woman who was giving it took him through his ‘back story’, beginning with what he knew of his birth and anything he remembered from his childhood. She was thrilled to discover that he had been brought up on a farm in Tipperary, even when he disillusioned her with the information that it was not a miserable peasant’s croft but a large, two-storey farmhouse with a courtyard of cut-stone outbuildings, one hundred and eighty-three acres of prime pasture and a similar amount of lovely old native woodland. She picked out a few of the most interesting things and taught him how to introduce them into interviews, whether or not they were relevant to the question being asked. Like the big family running wild in the woods, or being rounded up to help with the shearing and the hay. Or the long walk every day to the village school. The boarding school bits didn’t interest her so much, even though he had a string of hilarious anecdotes, but she loved the polio outbreak that hit two of his siblings but left him and the others mysteriously untouched. And she picked up on his father’s knowledge of horses and the people who came to him for advice.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ she said, ‘how many people know about horses, and even people who don’t are often fascinated by all the paraphernalia around them. Like ships. Horse and ships. Can’t go wrong.’

  Later, talking to someone from the press or the radio, he followed her advice, and even introduced a few funny stories to spice things up, like the time when he was first allowed to drive the Land Rover when he was twelve, and managed to overturn it in a ditch. But he told no one about another, more unsettling thing that her probing had exposed – a memory of the huge house and the silence in it. Of course, it was never really silent, except in the dead of night. There were seven children with only eleven years between them and they were boisterous and given to endless gangings-up and squabbling like all large families. Nonetheless there was a silence in the house that underlay all the noise, like a single, strong background colour, and it was the silence between his parents, who never spoke to each other at all.

  He remembers his father asking them, Where’s your mother? or, What’s your mother up to? He asked them that because she didn’t tell him where she was going or how long she would be. He never told her, either, but she didn’t ask. She either knew, or didn’t care. She kept his dinner warm for him, and there were always one or two kettles on the range, at the boil or close to it. Everyone knew how to make tea and coffee.

  The memory of this silence disturbed him terribly when it came. He mistrusted its sudden emergence and suspected that he must have manufactured it to serve some obscure neurotic purpose of his own. But when he phoned his older sister she confirmed it. Their parents had their own precisely delineated areas of operation and they hardly ever spoke to each other, right up to the time their father died.

  It hurt him, this rediscovery of parental disharmony. But over the next few days, he scrutinised the memories more closely and came to realise that the silence was not, as he had leaped to conclude, full of anger and petulance. It was not a refusal to communicate but a demonstration of perfect communication. They didn’t need words to understand each other.

  He wrote several poems about it, and in the process came to understand that neither extreme of interpretation was entirely accurate, and that the truth probably lay somewhere in between. One of the poems was good, and it led into a series about his mother and father, which became part of the first collection he published after he moved into the house in Islington. He knows that they are not bad poems, but in retrospect he wishes he had held some of them back for a bit longer and worked on them some more. Or, even better, retired them to the filing cabinet along with the slim folder of family letters.

  But his publisher, for the first time ever, had been pressing him for a new book. It was amazing what a bi
t of publicity could do. He didn’t fool himself into believing that he had become a household name or anything like it, but he had entered a new realm where he was known to the people who mattered, and the small population of lost souls who still bought poetry. Turtle Shore had been slated in Australia, where the Aboriginal sequence was condemned as inaccurate and exploitative, but in the rest of the English-speaking world it had been well received. It was reviewed just about everywhere that poetry could be reviewed, and although some of the interpretations made him cringe, almost all of the critics were positive. It was reprinted, then shortlisted for the Whitbread poetry section and reprinted twice more, and although it didn’t win the Whitbread it did pick up two other prizes, both of them smaller and less wellknown, but both more prestigious in poetry circles.

  He continued to be invited onto discussion panels and arts programs now that his name had risen up those im- portant lists in important hands, and he continued to experience the enormous pleasure of finding that his books were in the shops. And not only Turtle. On the strength of its success his earlier works had all been reissued in new covers that echoed Turtle’s design and thus gave him his own jacket style. Then letters began to arrive via his publisher, asking him to speak at conferences and to visit writers’ groups and schools. She got a designer to set up a website for him, and through that came emails with more offers. He co-tutored a week-long course in Wales on writing poetry, and two weekend ones in Ireland. His publisher sold the US rights to a small press in Boston. He applied for residencies and bursaries as usual. The difference was that now he often got them.

  For the first time in his life he was making money. Not serious money, not even a realistic living where Islington was concerned, but he paid his share of the household expenses at least, and it made him feel less like a kept man.

  {9}

  After she has made the coffee she discovers there is no milk. He hasn’t used it since the doctor warned him about his cholesterol levels, and he has forgotten to buy any for her. She finds double cream in the freezer and chisels off a chunk with a carving knife. A large chunk. She puts it in a cup and microwaves it until it bubbles, then she adds coffee to it, and sugar, for comfort. And because of that, of course, guilt interferes with her enjoyment of it.