Unravelling Oliver(28)

Once Eugene was out of the way, I settled down into a routine, although in 1993 this was disturbed by Moya, who had moved in next door. She and her dull husband befriended us straight away. I flatter myself that Moya was impressed by my celebrity. She was apparently something of a celebrity herself, having appeared in a television soap opera, but I had no idea who she was.

From very early on she flirted openly. There I would be at my desk in my study on a winter afternoon, painstakingly parsing every sentence, honing it to perfection. I would look up momentarily and Moya would be out in her garden, putting washing on the line, wearing nothing but a pink diaphanous gown and a pair of high heels. She must have been frozen. She would catch me looking, and scurry inside, feigning embarrassment, but Moya is a truly awful actress and it was painfully obvious that she intended to seduce me. I’m not terribly surprised. Her husband was such a nondescript nonentity that I cannot think of a single interesting thing he ever said or did. Occasionally I would see him in the garden, gardening.

In the summer months, Moya made an almighty display of herself, sunbathing nude on an extended sunlounger positioned perfectly to face my rear window. The view was rather nice, I admit it.

When we began our affair, she would write messages on large pieces of paper for me, and hold them up to her side window for me to see in a kind of semaphoric billet-doux. I was rather touched at the time. It seemed very sweet. We even managed to continue our arrangement while working abroad, most notably in New York, when she was to be in the Broadway version of Solarand. That ended in a huge bloody mess when Moya was fired and then almost caught me in the arms of the cute little actress who replaced her. You would swear that Moya was the wronged wife the way she went on about it, but I managed to talk her down and, after a while, we resumed our liaison.

Towards the end, the whole affair became stale and I redecorated the study again, reappointing the furniture so that my desk faced away from the windows. She was not happy about that. But I had my wife to consider, and I did not want Alice to be unnecessarily hurt.

At the very start I used a typewriter, but Alice often remarked on how little ‘clacking’ she could hear, so when word processors came on stream I used those, and now I have a turbo-charged state-of-the-art computer that allows me to work silently and stealthily. Of course, there is now a world of available distraction on the Internet and one could spend days on end looking at curiosities such as Victorian pornography or titanium drill bits, if one was so inclined. There is social networking too, Facebook and Twitter, which must be a curse to other writers, but suited me perfectly when I had time to waste.

However, when I was creating the Prince of Solarand series, the Internet the way we know it now had not been introduced, and there were far fewer distractions with which to fill my day. I would disappear into the study at 9.30 a.m., after breakfast, locking the door behind me. Peace and quiet and solitude. I would take up my Irish Times and begin with the Simplex crossword, moving on to the Crosaire. Then I would read the news, devouring every inch of the Irish Times, the Guardian and the Telegraph. I kept myself politically informed of the machinations of both the left and right wing, which gave me a rounded picture of what was going on, useful for punditry. (I am afraid that, as informed as I was, I did not see the economic crash coming. I lost at least a hundred thousand euro in poor investments – stupid bloody accountant – and I’m sure the Bulgarian properties are worth nothing, but I risked very little comparatively speaking.)

I would emerge at 11 a.m. for tea and biscuits and listen to the current affairs show on the radio for about half an hour. Then I returned to the study and attended to correspondence. Usually requests for media interviews and public readings; invites to literary festivals; letters from Ph.D. students using my opus as a basis for their theses:

Dear Mr Dax,

I have found a great deal of allegorical evidence in your work which would suggest that your children’s stories are loosely based on the Nazi persecution of the Jews prior to and during the Second World War and wondered if I might trouble you for an interview …



I, and my complete works, have been the subject of no less than eighteen academic theses, and several publications have sought to deconstruct the stories. I have been deliberately unhelpful to these students, but they have persisted in finding all sorts of hidden codes and meanings in my work.

Alice often suggested that I should engage a secretary. ‘You have no time to deal with all that!’ she said.

After lunch, I would read for an hour or two, the classics mostly, although latterly I had taken an interest in the Old Testament of the Bible. I now have an extensive library. I once overheard Alice say to Moya, ‘I don’t know where he gets the time to read all of those books!’ Where did I find the time, indeed?

At one stage, out of boredom, I had some gym equipment installed there to keep myself in shape. ‘You’re so right,’ Alice said, ‘you need to have some distraction during the day!’

At 4 p.m., I would begin the actual work: one word at a time, using several different dictionaries and thesauri, laying out the sentences again and again, reworking each section several times until I came up with just the right construction. I allowed myself just one hour a day at this work. I had to make it last.

‘You must be shattered!’ Alice would say when I emerged from my laboratory, and I would agree and smile indulgently at her. Alice worked damn hard at her illustrations, and so I would sometimes cook for her and she would be grateful.