Текст книги "What a cave up!"

Автор книги: Джонатан Коу

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 30 страниц)

The train was on the point of stopping. Just before she got to the door of the carriage, I said: ‘How long did you say you were staying with your sister?’

She turned, still smiling. ‘A couple of days. Why?’

‘Travelling rather light, aren’t you?’

I had suddenly noticed that she had no luggage; just a small black handbag.

‘Oh – she keeps a set of things for me. It’s lovely – almost like a second home.’

She pushed open the carriage door and left me with a final image of her delighted grin, her waving hand: an image which was to fade slowly into blankness over the eight long years which passed before my next, and final, glimpse of Alice Hastings.

2

… necessary brilliance … necessary bravado …

Almost. Very close, now. Very close.

∗

My spirits continued to rise as the journey progressed. The books I’d brought with me lay unopened on the table, and I abandoned myself instead to dreamy contemplation of the scenery. As we left Derby, the redbricked factories and warehouses backing on to the railway line gave way to rich green countryside: Friesians grazed on hilly pasturelands dotted only with handsome sandstone farmhouses or the occasional village, a few rows of grey slate terraces nestled warmly in a valley. Later, immense heaps of coal began to appear beside the track as Chesterfield announced the beginning of mining country, its skyline dominated at first by cranes and pit shafts and then, incongruously, a crooked church spire which jerked me into nostalgia, taking me back fifteen years or more to the opening credits of a silly comedy series about clergymen which I had enjoyed on television as a teenager. I was sunk deep in the memory of this as we passed through tunnels and long rocky cuttings. The line was planted so thickly with trees that Sheffield itself took me completely by surprise, my first sight of it being a row of terraced houses silhouetted against a sky of Mediterranean blue, and perched on the edge of a ridge, impossibly high: on a clifftop, almost. All at once a spectacular townscape lay before me: the steelworks and factory chimneys beside the railway line were shrunk to insignificance beside the sheerness of the hillsides on which the city had been boldly raised, with phalanxes of tower blocks climbing steeply to their summit. Nothing had prepared me for such sudden, austere beauty.

‘Austere beauty’: why did I use that phrase, though? Was it really the city I was describing, or was it the face of Alice which imposed itself on the sombre dignity of these buildings and made them glamorous to my moonstruck eyes? Certainly it was Alice I was thinking of when Joan loomed out of the waiting crowd at the station, her welcoming smile and eager, waving arms striking despondency into my heart in an instant. She had put on weight, and she was not wearing make-up, and she looked very plain and ungainly. (These were not praiseworthy observations, I know: but I might as well be honest about them.) She gave me a bruising hug and a wet kiss on the cheek, and then led me to the car park.

‘Let’s not go home right away,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you a bit of the city first.’

I’m a Midlander by birth and a Southerner by adoption. Never having lived in the North of England, I’ve always regarded it from a distance, with a mixture of fear and fascination. It seemed extraordinary, for instance, that I could have been on a train for less than two and a half hours, and disembarked to find myself in a city which felt so palpably and bracingly different from London. I’m not sure whether this difference lay in the architecture, or in the faces of the people surrounding me, or the clothes which they wore, or even in the knowledge that only a few miles away stretched vast and lovely tracts of moorland: but perhaps it went deeper than any of these things, and derived from something fundamental in the very spirit of the place. Joan told me Sheffield’s nickname – ‘the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire’ – and sang the praises of David Blunkett who at this time led the city’s Labour Council. Coming from London, where opposition to Mrs Thatcher was virulent but fatally dispersed and fragmented, I was immediately filled with envy at the thought of a community which could so closely unite itself around a common cause.

‘It’s nothing like that in the South,’ I said. ‘Half the socialists I know have defected to the SDP.’

Joan laughed. ‘They were routed in the local elections here last month. Even the Liberals only picked up a few seats.’ A few minutes later we were driving past the cathedral, and she said: ‘I went to a memorial service in there recently, for the people who died on HMS Sheffield.’

‘They were all from around here, were they?’

‘No, not at all. But the local sea cadets were affiliated to the ship, and the crew were always coming to visit children’s centres and things like that. We were all devastated when it went down. The “Shiny Sheff”, people used to call it. The service was packed: they were turning hundreds away at the door. There was a queue stretching down to York Street.’

‘I suppose there must be a lot of anger about the war.’

‘Not everybody’s angry,’ said Joan. ‘Not everybody even opposes it. But that wasn’t the point. I don’t know how to describe it, really, but … it was as if we’d all lost relatives on that ship.’ She smiled at me. ‘This is a very warm city, you see. You can’t help but love it, for that very reason.’

Already I felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

∗

Joan lived in a small, dark-bricked terraced house not far from the university. There were three bedrooms, two of which she rented out to students in order to help with her mortgage payments. This came as a surprise to me: I’d been expecting that she and I would be alone together for the length of my stay, but it turned out that she was proposing to sleep downstairs while I took over her bedroom. Of course I couldn’t allow that to happen, so I found myself facing the prospect of five nights spent on a settee in the living room, to be rudely awoken every morning by the arrival of Joan and her lodgers as they passed through into the kitchen to get their breakfasts.

Both of these lodgers, in fact, were from the polytechnic rather than the university. There was Graham, who was on some sort of film-making course, and a very shy and uncommunicative art student called Phoebe. It soon became obvious that they would not be easy to avoid: Joan presided over a regimented household, and there was a large notice pinned up in the kitchen which set out, in three different coloured inks, the rotas for shopping, washing up and cooking the evening meal. It seemed that I was to be the guest of something closely approximating to a family unit – and, to make matters worse, that there had been much advance discussion of my visit. I had the sense that Joan had been giving me a huge build-up, that by singing the praises of this exotic envoy from literary London she had been trying to stir the others into a state of enthusiasm which they seemed oddly reluctant to share.

These things started to become clear as the four of us sat down to supper together on that first Tuesday evening. It was Joan’s turn to cook. We had stuffed avocado with puréed carrot and brown rice, followed by rhubarb crumble. The dining room was small and could almost have been cosy if a little more effort had been made in that direction: instead we ate in the glare of a naked bulb, and beneath the reproachful scrutiny of a number of posters – all of them Graham’s, I was to discover – advertising political causes and foreign-language films (of which Godard’s Tout Va Bien was the only one I recognized). For a while I was more or less excluded from the conversation, which centred on topics of shared interest such as Joan’s latest cases and the impending end-of-year assessments at the college. I had to content myself, if that’s the word, with munching away at Joan’s wholesome food and refilling the wineglasses.

‘I’m sorry, Michael,’ said Joan finally. ‘A lot of this won’t mean anything to you. I was thinking perhaps you’d like to come with me on some of my calls tomorrow, and get a sense of what I do. It might be useful to you one day: give you something to write about.’

‘Sure,’ I said, trying to sound eager and making a poor job of it.

‘Then again,’ she said, clearly dampened by my response, ‘you’ve probably got some work you want to do. I’d hate to come between you and your Muse.’

‘What’s this then – another book?’ asked Graham, helping himself to more rice.

‘Sort of.’

‘Graham’s been reading your first,’ said Joan. ‘Haven’t you?’

‘I started it.’ He took an enormous mouthful and swilled it down with some wine. ‘Couldn’t get beyond the first couple of chapters, though.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said; but pride wouldn’t allow me to leave it at that. ‘Do you mind if I ask why?’

‘Well, I don’t really understand why people write novels any more, to be honest. I mean it’s a total irrelevance, the whole thing. Has been ever since the cinema was invented. Oh sure, there are a few people who are still doing interesting things with the form – Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman crowd – but any serious modern artist who wants to use narrative ought to be working in film. That’s my general objection. And more specifically, the problem with the English novel is that there’s no tradition of political engagement. I mean, it’s all just a lot of pissing about within the limits set down by bourgeois morality, as far as I can see. There’s no radicalism. So there’s really only one or two novelists in this country that I’ve got any time for, these days. And I’m afraid you don’t seem to be one of them.’

There was a shocked silence. At least, Joan was visibly shocked, and Phoebe was certainly silent. As for myself, I had heard too many speeches like this in my student days to be much put out by it.

‘Who would they be, then?’ I asked.

‘Well, for instance …’

Graham mentioned a name, and I smiled: a pleased, private little smile, because it was exactly the name I had been expecting. The ball was very much back in my court now, for this was the same writer whose latest work had fallen into my hands for review. And yes, I had found the word. The word which I had known was out there, all along, just waiting to be matched to its subject.

This was a writer, I should explain, some ten years older than myself, whose three slender novels had been ludicrously overpraised in the national press. Because he made his characters talk in crudely notated dialects and live in conditions of unconvincing squalor, he was hailed as a social realist; because he sometimes played elementary tricks with narrative, in feeble imitation of Sterne and Diderot, he was hailed as an experimental pioneer; and because he made a regular habit of writing letters to the newspapers, criticizing government policy in terms which had always struck me as suggesting a rather timid Leftism, he was hailed as a political radical. More annoying than any of this, however, was his reputation for humour. He had been repeatedly credited with a playful irony, a satiric lightness of touch, which seemed to me to be entirely lacking from his work, characterized as it was by lumbering sarcasm and the occasional abject attempt to jog the reader’s elbow with well-signposted jokes. It was this aspect of his style for which I had reserved my final scorn. ‘It has become a matter of routine,’ I had written, ‘to praise Mr – for his deft combination of wit and political commitment; and even to suggest that here, at last, we have a moral ironist worthy of these ruthless times. We stand badly in need of novels, after all, which show an understanding of the ideological hijack which has taken place so recently in this country, which can see its consequences in human terms and show that the appropriate response lies not merely in sorrow and anger but in mad, incredulous laughter. For many people, it seems, it is only a matter of time before–writes just such a novel: but this reader remains unconvinced. Whatever his other qualifications for the task, I suspect, finally, that he lacks the necessary –’

And this was where my invention had failed me for so long. What was it that he lacked, exactly? The word that I was looking for had something to do with style, something to do with tone. It wasn’t that he lacked compassion, or intelligence, or technique, or ambition: what he lacked was … it was an instinct, somehow, for putting these things together, but in a nimble, a fleet-footed way. It was a sort of daring, but there also had to be an element of diffidence, because this quality, whatever it was, would only appear truly natural and spontaneous if it was entirely without self-regard. The word was there, and I was only inches away from it. He lacked the necessary brilliance, the necessary bravado, the necessary …

… brio.

Yes, that was it. Brio. Precisely. It seemed so obvious, already, that I couldn’t understand why it had taken me so long to get there. At once an almost mystical sense of its rightness flooded over me: not only was I sure that it put a perfect end to the review, but I also knew, as if by some telepathic process, that it described the single quality which he, in his most secret heart of hearts, would yearn to be credited with. I had invaded, penetrated, wormed my way inside him: when the review appeared, on Friday morning, I would wound him; wound him deeply. I had a vision of hallucinogenic intensity, born half from imagination and half from the distant memory of a nameless, black and white, probably American film: a man in a busy, windswept city in the early morning, buying a newspaper from a street-corner vendor, taking it to a coffee bar and thumbing impatiently to a particular page; devouring a sandwich at the counter, and then the movement of his jaws getting slower and slower as he reads, until he screws the newspaper up in disgust, throws it into a bin and storms out of the bar, the anger and disappointment drawn lividly on his face. I knew – as soon as I’d thought of the word, I knew it for a certainty – that this was the scene, in exaggerated form, which would be played out on Friday morning, when he went out to buy the newspaper, or picked it up off his doormat, or as soon as his agent telephoned him with news of my crushing performance. It shames me, now, to think how happy the knowledge made me; or rather, to think how ready I was to mistake for happiness the poisoned stream of satisfaction which welled up inside me.

All I said to Graham was: ‘I thought it might be him.’

‘Not your cup of tea, I suppose,’ he said; and managed to make even this sound like another in my litany of inadequacies.

‘He has his moments,’ I conceded, and then added casually: ‘I’ve just reviewed his latest, in fact.’ I turned to Joan. ‘That phone call I had to make just before dinner. I was dictating it to one of the copy-takers.’

Joan blushed with pride, and said to her lodgers: ‘Just think – someone makes a phone call from my little sitting room, the words travel all the way down the lines to London, and a few days later, it’s in all the papers.’

‘The wonders of modern science,’ said Graham, and began stacking the plates.

∗

The next day, a wet and misty Wednesday, was not a great success. I decided to take Joan up on her invitation and accompany her on some of her visits, but it was a dispiriting experience. The bulk of her work appeared to involve turning up uninvited at family homes in order to conduct furtive interviews with the children while their parents stared on balefully, or beat ungracious retreats to the kitchen to make cups of tea which never got drunk. At first I actually went with her to sit in on these encounters, but my presence was so obviously unwelcome that I gave up on that after the first couple of visits and spent the rest of the day sitting in Joan’s car, reading through the pile of old magazines and newspapers which cluttered her back seat and waiting tiredly for her to emerge from the doorway of some council house or tower block.

For lunch we went to a pub in the centre of town. Joan had a vegetable pasty and I had steak and kidney pie, which caused her to tut reprovingly. That evening, it was Graham’s turn to cook. The dish he prepared for us may or may not have had a name: it seemed to consist mainly of lentils and walnuts burned down to a black crust, scraped off the bottom of a large saucepan, and served with a dollop of wholemeal pasta ribbons which had the texture of rubber bands. We ate, for the most part, in absorbed silence.

‘You ought to show Michael some of your work, tomorrow,’ said Joan to Graham at one point. ‘He might have some interesting comments to make.’

‘I should like that,’ I said.

∗

Graham sat me down on his bed and switched on the large, unwieldy television which dominated one corner of his bedroom. It took nearly a minute to warm up.

‘1970s vintage,’ he explained. ‘Pretty much on its last legs.’

Yesterday’s mist had cleared and the morning was turning out bright but muggy. Not that much of the sunshine would come our way: Graham’s room was permanently in shadow, with a tiny, lace-curtained window which looked out over Joan’s back yard and the back yards of other houses in the next street. We were alone in the house, it was half past ten and we were both on to our second cups of strong, sugary tea.

‘Have you got one of these yourself?’ Graham asked, kneeling down to slot a VHS tape into the video machine.

‘Can’t afford it on what I earn,’ I said. ‘I’m waiting for the prices to come down. They say they’re going to tumble.’

‘You don’t think I own this, do you? Nobody’s buying the things – you do it on the rental. Ten quid a month is all this costs me, down at Rumbelows.’

I sipped my tea and said spitefully: ‘When I was a student we used to spend our money on books.’

‘Don’t give me that.’ Graham gestured at the rows of tapes which lined his dresser and window-sill. ‘These are my books. This is the medium of the future, as far as film-making’s concerned. Nearly all our work at college is done on video now. Three hours of tape, there is, on one of these little beauties. Do you know how much three hours’ worth of sixteen mill would cost you?’

‘I see your point.’

‘Not too hot on the practicalities, you literary types, are you? It’s all ivory tower with you.’

I ignored this.

‘Does it have a freeze frame, your video?’

‘Sure. It’s a bit shaky, but it does the job. Why, what do you want one of those for?’

‘Oh, you know – It’s nice to have … all the gadgets.’

The screen flickered into action just as Graham finished closing the curtains and seating himself beside me on the bed.

‘Here we go, then. This is my end-of-year assignment. See what you think.’

It was a less painful experience than I had anticipated. Graham’s film was only about ten minutes long, and proved to be an efficient if unsubtle piece of polemic about the Falklands conflict, called ‘Mrs Thatcher’s War’. The title was double-edged, because he had somehow managed to find a pensioner called Mrs Thatcher who lived in Sheffield, and shots of warships steaming into battle and extracts from the Prime Minister’s speeches were juxtaposed with scenes from the life of her less eminent namesake: making trips to the shops, preparing frugal meals, watching news bulletins on the television and so on. In a disjointed voice-over commentary, the old woman spoke of the difficulties of getting by on her pension and wondered what had become of all the money she had paid in taxes throughout her working life: this was usually the cue for a rapid cut to some brutal and expensive-looking piece of military hardware. The film ended with the Prime Minister’s famous speech to the Scottish Conservative Party, in which she described the war as a battle between good and evil and declared that ‘It must be finished’, followed by a lingering shot of the other Mrs Thatcher carrying a heavy bag of groceries up a steep, forbidding street. Then the screen faded to black and two captions appeared: ‘Mrs Emily Thatcher supports herself on a weekly income of £43.37’; ‘The cost of the Falklands War has already been estimated at £700,000,000.’

Graham turned off the tape.

‘So – what did you think? Come on, your honest opinion.’

‘I liked it. It was good.’

‘Look, just try to forget that Southern middle-class politeness kick for a minute. Give it to me straight.’

‘I told you, it was good. Powerful, and direct, and … truthful. It tells the truth about something.’

‘Ah, but does it, though? You see, film’s such a tightly structured medium, that even in a short piece of work like this, all sorts of decisions have to be made. How long a shot’s going to last, how a shot’s going to be framed, which shots are going to come before it, which ones are going to come after. Now doesn’t that whole process become suspect when you’re dealing with something that advertises itself explicitly as a political film? Doesn’t it make the role of the film-maker himself intensely problematic, prompting the question – not “Is this the truth?” but “Whose truth is it anyway?” ’

‘You’re absolutely right, of course. Do you think you could show me how this freeze frame business works?’

‘Sure.’ Graham picked up the remote control, rewound the tape a few minutes and then pressed Play. ‘So my point is that the whole thing is deeply manipulative, not just of the audience, but of its subject. Mrs Thatcher invaded the Falklands and I invaded this woman’s life – both of us on the same pretext, that we had their best interests at heart.’ He pressed Pause and the old woman froze into jittery stillness, in the act of opening a can of soup. ‘In a way the only really honest thing for me to do would be to expose the mechanics of my involvement: to have the camera pan round and suddenly rest on me, the director, sitting in the room with her. Perhaps that’s what Godard would have done.’

‘Can’t you get rid of those lines across the screen?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes you can. You just have to keep pressing the button and eventually they go away.’

He pressed the pause button some more times.

‘It’s a bit blurred, isn’t it?’

‘The technology’ll improve. Anyway, would it have been anything more than an empty self-referential gesture, that’s what I have to ask myself. Because I know exactly what you’re going to say next: you’re going to say that any attempt to foreground issues of authorship would just be a throwback to formalism, a futile strategy to shift emphasis from the signified to the signifier which can’t do anything to alter the basic fact that, at the end of the day, all truth is ideological.’

‘Do all the machines have this feature,’ I asked, ‘or do you have to go to the more expensive end of the market?’

‘They’ve all got them,’ he said. ‘It’s their main selling point. Quite a radical development, when you think about it: for the first time in history, control over cinematic time is being given to the audience and taken out of the film-maker’s hands. You could argue that it’s the first real move towards the democratization of the viewing process. Though of course’ – he switched off the tape and stood up to draw the curtains – ‘it’d be naïve to suggest that that’s why people were buying them. At college we call it the WP button.’

‘WP?’

‘Wankers’ paradise. All your favourite movie stars in the buff, you see. No more of those tantalizing scenes when some gorgeous actress drops them for a couple of seconds and then disappears out of the frame: now you can stare at her for as long as you like. For an eternity, in theory. Or at least until the tape wears out.’

I looked past him, gazing sightlessly at the window. ‘That would certainly … have its uses,’ I said.

‘Anyway, it’s been nice having this chat,’ said Graham. ‘It’s always helpful, getting a bit of objective criticism from someone.’

There was a short pause and then I snapped out of my reverie, suddenly hearing him again. ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I found it very interesting.’

‘Well look, I’m just going into town. Can I get you anything?’

∗

I was alone in the house for the first time. There is a sort of quietness I associate with such moments: more than absolute, it insinuates, takes root, and keeps watch. The opposite of a dead silence, it quivers with possibility. It is alive with the sound of nothing happening. You don’t get silence like this in London: not silence that you can listen to, savour, swathe yourself in. I found that I was walking around the house on tiptoe, and that the occasional noises of footsteps outside in the street or cars chugging past seemed highly intrusive. I tried to settle down and read the newspaper but could only manage it for a minute or two. With Graham’s departure the house had changed its character completely – had taken on a magical aspect, like a forbidden temple which I had somehow managed to infiltrate, and I was seized with the impulse to explore.

I made my way up the staircase, turned right on the landing, and stepped into Joan’s bedroom. It was a bright, cheerful room which faced on to the main road. There was a double bed, neatly made, with a pink duvet and several pale blue cushions arranged against the pillows. In the middle of these sat a figure I recognized from one of memory’s most distant corners: a battered yellow teddy bear called Barnabas, her bedtime companion since infancy. I noticed that his eyes didn’t match any more: one was black and the other was blue. It must have come off quite recently, and a brief, affecting image flickered across my mind – Joan sitting at the end of the bed, a needle and thread in her hand, sewing the button on, patiently restoring eyesight to this worn childhood relic. I didn’t touch him. I glanced at the neatly stacked bookshelves, the family photographs, the desk with its gift stationery and Liberty print lamp. In the corner there were more functional-looking ring binders and a cardboard box full of notes and papers. Nothing on her bedside table besides a half-empty glass of water, a box of tissues and a magazine, the cover of which boasted a picture of two green bomber jets in mid-flight, with the caption ‘The Mark I Hurricane – Britain’s wartime triumph’. I smiled and picked it up. This was the Sunday newspaper magazine published a couple of months ago with my juvenile story in it. I wondered whether Joan had simply never got around to putting it away, or if it was there for a reason, to be marvelled at and pored over every night before going to sleep. I wouldn’t have been surprised.

If this was the case, anyway, who was I to make fun of her: I had read and re-read the thing often enough myself, and even now I couldn’t resist sitting down on the bed, opening the magazine at the familiar page and immersing myself once again in the warm waters of that shallow glory.

Michael Owen [read the introduction] was born in Birmingham in 1952 and has recently received great acclaim for his novels Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch.

Michael was only eight years old when he created his first fictional character, a Victorian detective who went by the exotic name of Jason Rudd. He was the subject of numerous adventures, the longest and most exciting being The Castle of Mystery, of which we present the opening pages here. Sadly this is not the first in the series – an earlier case, involving a character called Thomas Watson mentioned in this extract, has been lost – but Michael assures us that it provides a good introduction to the world of Rudd and his assistant Richard Marple, which he describes as ‘Holmes and Watson revisited, with a healthy dash of surrealism’.

THE CASTLE OF MYSTERY

Chapter One

Jason Rudd, a distinguished detective of the 19th Century sat at a wooden carved table, opposite his companion Richard Marple, who had accompanied him on many of his adventures.

Jason was middle-sized and had light hair. He was more or less the bravest of the two, but Richard was extremely courageous too. Richard had dark hair and was very tall, but Jason had the brains. He could not do without Richard.

You see, Richard could perform athletic feats, and Jason couldn’t. They were about the most formidable combination in Britain.

At this moment however they were engaged in a game of Chess. The board was old and dirty, despite Jason’s efforts to polish it. Jason moved his knight and smiled.

‘Check’, he said.

But Richard moved his bishop and took Jason’s knight.

‘Bother’!

Jason sat extremely still hardly breathing. He always did this when he was thinking. He moved his queen.

‘Checkmate’!

‘You’ve won, well done’.

The two shook hands then sat down.

‘I’m getting exceptionally bored’, pronounced Jason. ‘I want something to think about. I mean, chess is alright but I’d like something like that Thomas Watson business, which reminds me, how is Thomas?’

‘Not too good I’m afraid. His arm is yet to heal’.

‘Is he in danger of dying, or worse?’

‘He is in danger of dying’.

‘He is? That is bad. We must see him. What about tomorrow or the next day?’

‘Tomorrow would be convenient’.

‘Then shall we make a day of it?’

‘Certainly, if my wife approves. Er, what is the time please?’

‘Five minutes past ten’.

‘Then I had better be going’.

‘Alright,’ said Jason, ‘Shall I see you out?’

‘No thank you’.

Jason watched Richard get his coat. He heard the door open then close.

Richard walked out. He was half-way home when a man stepped out of the dark and blocked Richard’s way.

‘I’m Edward Whiter’, he said.

He had an American accent, a beard and yellow teeth.

‘Are you Richard Marple?’

‘I am’.

‘I would wish to see you and Mr Jason Rudd together now’.

‘For what reason?’

‘I want to talk to you. It is about a very frightening business and I wish you would help me’.

‘Then when do you want us to start this?’

‘Tomorrow’.

‘I am sorry but that is impossible’

‘You must do it’.

‘Why?’

‘Because we don’t want our people to believe in it’.

‘Believe in what?’

Edward lowered his voice and whispered ‘The curse’.

‘The curse? What curse?’

‘The curse of Hacrio Castle’.