A Ladder to the Sky(81)
‘That must be …’ Mrs Lane searched for the right word. ‘You must have loved your wife very much,’ she said. ‘To swear off all other women after her death. Particularly when you’re so … so …’
‘So what?’ he asked, smiling a little.
‘Well you’re a … you’re not an unattractive man, Mr Swift. Obviously, I don’t mean anything by that. I’m a happily married woman.’
‘You’ve gone quite red,’ he said.
‘It’s the heat.’
Maurice smiled again.
‘But don’t you get lonely?’ she asked, leaning forward.
‘No. Why, do you?’
Mrs Lane’s expression changed suddenly and her cheeks flushed even more. ‘I mean … no,’ she said. ‘I have … there’s so much to keep me occupied, what with … And Mr Lane has his business and—’
‘People seem to think that a life is worthless unless it’s shared with someone,’ said Maurice with a sigh. ‘But why must that be the case? I’ve been married, I know what the experience is like, and while there were certainly times when it was pleasurable there were just as many times when I wished that I was alone, not answerable to anyone, not needing to account for my every movement throughout the day. When Edith died, I promised myself that I would never get involved with anyone again. I don’t much like women, if I’m honest. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not some tragic misogynist. I don’t much like men either. I’m an equal-opportunities hater, so to speak. And as for sex, well, it never really interested me, not even when I was young. I could never quite see the point of it, if I’m honest. And, you’ll forgive me for sounding immodest, but I know that I’m good-looking. Throughout my life, both men and women have made their interest in me obvious. But I can’t control any of that. It was simply the way I was born. Ultimately, it means nothing. I could have a heart of stone for all they know. I could be a psychopath or a sociopath. Not all monsters look like the Elephant Man, and not everyone who looks like the Elephant Man is a monster. So I don’t really think about sex that often, although, strangely enough, it’s very present in my work. Have you read any of my novels, Mrs Lane?’
The principal stared at him, barely registering that he had asked her a question, and swallowed hard, looking down at the notebook before her and smoothing its pages with trembling hands.
‘I read your most recent one,’ she said. ‘When I realized who Daniel’s father was I went to Barnes &—’
‘The Broken Ones.’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that novel doesn’t have very much sex in it at all,’ admitted Maurice. ‘But then, if you’ve read it, you know that. Anyway,’ he smiled, slapping his hands down on his knees so loudly that he made her jump, ‘I shouldn’t keep talking about myself like this. It sounds as if it’s me who needs the services of a counsellor and not my son.’
Mrs Lane said nothing, and he took pleasure from seeing how uncomfortable he had made her. It was reassuring to know that he still had this sort of power over people.
‘So is that everything?’ he asked, standing up. ‘Or was there something else you wanted to discuss with me?’
‘No,’ said Mrs Lane, remaining seated. ‘No, that was it. You may leave.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, laughing a little at the manner of his dismissal.
‘I’ll email you details of a psychologist that the school recommends,’ she said as he turned away. ‘And you and Mr and Mrs Dell can liaise on that. I think you’ll find them very accommodating. Believe me, if Daniel had to hit a girl, then Jupiter was probably the best one to hit.’
When he opened the door he smiled when he saw a small, seven-year-old boy sitting on a chair outside, his legs swinging in the air, his hands pressed together as if in prayer.
‘Am I in trouble?’ asked Daniel, looking up. Not for the first time, it struck Maurice how beautiful he was.
A fresh collection of manuscripts had arrived at home from the Storī office and Maurice piled them up on the coffee table. There looked to be about twenty in total, the usual amount selected for his evaluation, whittled down by the interns from the three hundred or so that arrived unsolicited every month. Having got past those merciless gatekeepers, each one should, in theory, have something to recommend it and, as he was judicious in his reading, it typically took him the best part of a week to get through them, pulling out the wittiest and most perceptive dialogue, the most ingenious plot lines and arresting images, and entering each one into a file on his computer. He’d pick four or five to publish too, of course, but send letters to the rejected authors, signed by a fictitious employee, apologizing that, due to time constraints and the pressures of writing a new novel, Mr Swift had not personally had an opportunity to read their submission – it was important that he should make this clear in case of any future problems – but that the editorial team at Storī had considered their work and decided it was not quite right for them at this time. Generally, he assumed, the writers would be so pleased to have received even an acknowledgement of their writing that their disappointment would be salved and they would set the piece aside for ever, believing that it just wasn’t good enough.
The pile arrived four times a year and there was often very little in it worth stealing, but once in a while he came across a moment of brilliance that justified his decision to set up the magazine in the first place. His fourth novel, for example, The Breach, had been constructed around two different ideas that he’d discovered in stories by an American and a Chinese-American writer. Combining them into one, and using a central character that he created himself as the link between the pair, he’d managed to build a novel that had been highly praised upon publication and sold even more copies than The Tribesman, which of course was always going to do well after it was shortlisted for The Prize. His most recent book, The Broken Ones, published three years earlier, in 2008, had found its origin in a story written by a nineteen-year-old Viennese student that recounted a couple’s visit to Paris on the eve of their twentieth wedding anniversary, where an unexpected infidelity took place in a restaurant. (He had changed the setting to Israel, the wedding anniversary to a birthday, the restaurant to a museum, and when combined with a comic character he purloined from the work of a young British writer, the book had once again been a commercial and critical hit.) He’d been putting off starting a new book for a while now as he hadn’t found the right idea yet, and had been rather looking forward to receiving this group of submissions, hoping that there might be something in there that would be worth appropriating as his own.