A Ladder to the Sky(91)
Staring at my reflection now, however, I wondered whether I would ever have the opportunity to turn someone’s advances down again. My hair was turning grey and my blue eyes, which had once shone so bright, had grown dull. Worst of all, however, was my skin, which appeared grey and was tinged with red capillaries, probably from the excess of alcohol. I glanced down at my hands, which had spent so much of their lives typing away at a keyboard before me. My recollection of them was as smooth collaborators with just the hint of a blue vein running from the wrist to the middle finger, but now, the skin was tight and my fingers appeared bony, the nails pockmarked, with large semicircles spreading outwards from the cuticles, like slowly exploding planets. I was growing old, it was clear, and not gracefully.
There was only so long that I could stay and observe the ruins and eventually I turned my attention away, washed my hands and made my way back outside to my seat, re-reading Theo Field’s letter, several times in fact. Outside the flattery and the oleaginous remarks, there remained the central idea that he wanted to write about me. Only a thesis, yes, but he mentioned that he had ambitions towards literary biography and, indeed, towards publishing a book. And that delicious morsel he had thrown in, mentioning that his father worked at Random House! Of course, the na?f had wanted to impress me with his credentials, and it had worked, for I could surely use his family connections to my advantage in due course. A critical study would undoubtedly revive my drooping reputation and perhaps there would be something in the boy and his questions that would reignite my creative spark. And then a novel. The path back to glory was so wonderfully simple.
After Daniel’s death, there had, quite naturally, been an out-pouring of sympathy towards me within the publishing industry, but it hadn’t provoked quite the interest in my work that I had hoped. It was something that my editor had the gall to bring up when he rejected the book I wrote immediately after the accident.
‘Considering everything that you’ve been through, Maurice,’ he told me that day as we sat in his office, ‘there’s nothing I’d like more than to publish a new novel by you. And certainly, from a publicity standpoint – well, I hope you don’t take this the wrong way but there is an enormous amount of goodwill out there towards you and the media would fall over itself to interview you. But it has to be with the right book and this … well, I hate to say it but this just isn’t it. It’s well written, of course, but the story …’
I could feel the fury building inside me as I recalled that afternoon, the suppression of my pitiless ambition, and returned to Theo’s letter one final time, smiling to myself as I read it.
I opened my laptop and began to type, taking great care with my reply. Indeed, it could be said that I worked harder on this one sentence than I had on anything in years, both in terms of the words that I used and the words that I didn’t.
Dear Theo [ I wrote],
I would be happy to meet you on Tuesday 8 May at 3 p.m. in the Queen’s Head, Denman Street.
Yours,
Maurice Swift
As I went to bed that night, I tried not to think about my aspiring biographer or my lost son, but they both lingered in my thoughts, two sides of a single coin that could be thrown in the air and land on either side, and I found my emotions torn between excitement and grief, that terrible agony within my soul that lingered regardless of whether I was awake or asleep, sober or drunk, writing or not writing. And thinking of Daniel, I asked myself whether he would approve of what I was about to do but insisted to myself that he would, despite his irritating and adolescent belief in moral absolutes. For he had loved me and I had been a good if imperfect father, almost to the end. What else would he want for me than that I be happy? Otherwise, what had it all been for?
2. The Queen’s Head, Denman Street
The Queen’s Head has always been my favourite of my weekly pubs. I like the dark wood panelling, the ornate chandelier, the mirrors that have reflected the lives of its patrons for so long. It was the perfect place for Theo and me to have our first encounter and, eight days after receiving his letter and having received a positive reply to my own, I sat within its walls, eagerly anticipating the start of the next stage of my writing life.
I left home early that day, wanting to steady myself with a couple of drinks before he arrived. I’d spent much of the last week thinking about the book I would soon begin and felt a sense of excitement that I’d only experienced twice before in my life. The first was on that afternoon in Rome many years earlier when that fool, Erich Ackermann, had begun to tell me the story of his one-sided love affair with the unfortunate Oskar G?tt. I knew that there was a story there, if only I could figure out how to drag it from his terrified memory. Ultimately, it hadn’t proved that difficult. All I had to do was smile, stretch back in my seat a few times so he could catch a glimpse of my flat, muscular stomach, and the ridiculous old queer was putty in my hands. Not my finest moment, I know, but it hardly compares in malevolence to the things that he had done.
The second occasion was on that rainy afternoon in Norwich when, out of sheer boredom, I switched on Edith’s computer and opened the file marked ‘BOOK 2’ and began to read the document contained within, sensing immediately that she’d written something extraordinary. It was a novel worthy of me, I knew, not of her. She didn’t care for glory or immortality, which is just as well, as neither was to be her destiny. I remember the horror I felt when she suggested that we stay in Norwich after the publication of her second novel rather than returning to London and re-entering the literary world there. It seemed bizarre to me that she would even suggest such a thing. A strange woman, in retrospect. Still, one shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I suppose. She had many fine qualities, but ambition wasn’t one of them.