The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(22)

In Madrid, by contrast, my publishers had put me in a hotel suite that consisted of four small dark paneled rooms. They had sent me an opulent, unwieldy, scented bouquet, great wheels of flowers with woody stems. The concierge brought me heavy vases of a grayish glass, slippery in my hands, and I edged them freighted with blooms onto every polished surface; I stumbled from room to room, coffinned against the brown paneling, forlorn, strange, under a pall of pollen, like a person trying to break out from her own funeral. And in Berlin, the desk clerk had handed me a key with the words “I hope your nerves are strong.”

* * *

THE WEEK BEFORE the engagement, my health was not good. There was a continuous airy shimmer in my field of vision, just to the left of my head, as if an angel were trying to appear. My appetite failed, and my dreams took me to strange waterfronts and ships’ bridges, on queasy currents and strange washes of the tide. As a biographer I was more than usually inefficient; in untangling my subject’s accursed genealogy I mixed up Aunt Virginie with the one who married the Mexican, and spent a whole hour with a churning stomach, thinking that all my dates were wrong and believing that my whole Chapter Two would have to be reworked. The day before I was due to travel east I simply gave up on the whole enterprise, and lay on my bed with my eyes shut tight. I felt not so much a melancholy, as a kind of general insufficiency. I seemed to be pining for those three short early novels, and their brittle personnel. I felt a wish to be fictionalized.

My journey was uneventful. Mr. Simister, the secretary, met me at the station. How shall I know you? he had said on the telephone. Do you look like the photograph on your book jackets? Authors, I find, seldom do. He giggled after saying this, as if it were edgy wit of a high order. I had considered: a short pause on the line had made him ask, Still there? I am the same, I said. They are not a bad likeness, only I am older now, of course, thinner in the face, my hair is much shorter and a different color, and I seldom smile in quite that way. I see, he said.

“Mr. Simister,” I asked, “how shall I know you?”

* * *

I KNEW HIM by his harassed frown, and the copy of my first novel, A Spoiler at Noonday, which he held across his heart. He was buttoned into an overcoat; we were in June, and it had turned wintry. I had expected him to hiccup, like his typewriter.

“I think we shall have a wet one of it,” he said, as he led me to his car. It took me a little time to work my way through this syntactical oddity. Meanwhile he creaked and ratcheted car seats, tossed a soiled evening newspaper onto the dog blanket in the back, and vaguely flapped his hand over the passenger seat as if to remove lint and dog hairs by a magic pass. “Don’t your members go out in the rain?” I said, grasping his meaning at last.

“Never know, never know,” he replied, slamming the door and shutting me in. My head turned back, automatically, the way I had come. As, these days, my head tends to do.

We drove for a mile or so, toward the city center. It was five-thirty, rush hour. My impression was of an arterial road, lined by sick saplings, and lorries and tankers rumbling toward the docks. There was a huge, green roundabout, of which Mr. Simister took the fifth exit, and reassured me, “Not far now.”

“Oh, good,” I said. I had to say something.

“Are you not a good traveler?” Mr. Simister said anxiously.

“I’ve been ill,” I said. “This last week.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He did look sorry; perhaps he thought I would be sick on his dog blanket.

I turned away deliberately and watched the city. On this wide, straight, busy stretch, there were no real shops, just the steel-shuttered windows of small businesses. On their upper floors at smeary windows were pasted Day-Glo banners that said TAXI TAXI TAXI. It struck me as an area of free enterprise: freelance debt collectors, massage parlors, body shops and money launderers, dealers in seedy accommodation let twice and thrice, bucket shops for flights to Miami or Bangkok, and netted yards where inbred terriers snarl and cars are given a swift respray before finding a happy new owner. “Here we are.” Mr. Simister pulled up. “Like me to come in?”

“No need,” I said. I looked around me. I was miles from anywhere, traffic snarling by. It was raining now, just as Mr. Simister had said it would. “Half past six?” I asked.

“Six-thirty,” he said. “Nice time for a wash and brushup. Oh, by the way, we’re renamed now, Book Group. What do you think? Falling rolls, you see, members dead.”

“Dead? Are they?”

“Oh yes. Get in the younger end. You’re sure you wouldn’t like a hand with that bag?”

* * *

ECCLES HOUSE WAS not precisely as the photograph had suggested. Set back from the road, it seemed to grow out of a parking lot, a jumble of vehicles double-parked and crowding to the edge of the pavement. It had once been a residence of some dignity, but what I had taken to be stucco was in fact some patent substance newly glued to the front wall: it was grayish-white and crinkled, like a split-open brain, or nougat chewed by a giant.

I stood on the steps and watched Mr. Simister edge into the traffic. The rain fell harder. On the opposite side of the road there was a carpet hangar, with the legend ROOM-SIZED REMNANTS painted on a banner on its fa?ade. A depressed-looking boy zipped into his waterproofs was padlocking it for the night. I looked up and down the road. I wondered what provision they had made for me to eat. Normally, on evenings like this, I would make some excuse—a phone call expected, a nervous stomach—and turn down the offer of “a bit of dinner.” I never want to prolong the time I spend with my hosts. I am not, in fact, a nervous woman, and the business of speaking to a hundred people or so causes me no qualms, but it is the small talk afterward that wears me down, and the twinkling jocularity, the “book-chat” that grates like a creaking hinge.